Science
drorzel | May 5, 2015I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes:
“HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!”
“Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard.
“But, those poodles..”
“We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?”
“Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.”
“What?”
“I would love to just lie in the sun, but…
drorzel | May 3, 2015So, Kate and I hired a babysitter last night, and went to see the new Avengers movie. You might not have heard of it, it's kind of obscure...
(There will be some mild SPOILERS below; if you're intensely opposed to that sort of thing, don't read the rest of this...)
So, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a big mistake to watch this excellent video about Jackie Chan's style yesterday morning:
(in a sorta-kinda related vein, this Max Gladstone blog post is also very interesting...)
Having watched that video in the morning, and its discussion of how Jackie Chan's fight choreography and…
drorzel | May 2, 2015A month or so back, when I went to Vanderbilt to give a talk, I met Robert Scherrer, the department chair down there, who mentioned he was starting a blog soon. That blog is Cosmic Yarns, and has now been live for a while, but I've been too busy to do a proper link. He's using it to look at the science of science fiction, and has a bunch of nice posts up, including a good explanation of why you don't need to worry about giant ants:
Has this ever happened to you? While you are enjoying a relaxing picnic in the New Mexican desert, your lunch is overrun by ants: not ordinary ants, but 12-foot…
gregladen | April 28, 2015A group of scientists attending a major conference get together in a bar. They talk, but they agree on nothing because they are critical academics. The server comes along to take the beer order and says, "I noticed you all are constantly arguing. What are you arguing about?"
"Sensitivity," one of them says. "It is the number of degrees C the Earth's surface will warm with a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere. Is it 2, 3, 4? ... We cant settle on a number"
The server considers their plight for a moment. Suddenly, she rips several sheets out of her order book and hands one to each of the…
drorzel | April 28, 2015As mentioned over the weekend, I gave a talk last week for UCALL, part of a series on "The Radical Early 20th Century." I talked about how relativity is often perceived as revolutionary, but isn't really, while Einstein's really revolutionary 1905 paper is often overlooked. And, having put the time into thinking about the subject, I turned the basic theme into a new blog post over at Forbes:
Albert Einstein is easily one of the most recognizable people in history, and everybody thinks they know why. He’s the guy who, in 1905, completely revolutionized physics, overthrowing the prior order…
oracknows | April 28, 2015I've written on multiple occasions of what I like to refer to as "antivaccine dog whistles." In politics, the term "dog whistle" refers to things politicians can say to certain groups, usually groups with odious views, that they are with them without actually echoing the views for which the group at which the dog whistle is aimed. The intended target audience gets the message, while those not familiar with the issues either don't get the message or see what is being said as something unobjectionable, even admirable. Think "states' rights" versus civil rights, for example.
It turns out that…
drorzel | April 25, 2015This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society.
If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public…
drorzel | April 23, 2015Neil deGrasse Tyson's TV talk show had its debut Monday night on the National Geographic channel, something that's very relevant to my interests. It airs after I go to bed, though, so I set the DVR to record it, and watched it Tuesday afternoon. Then I was too busy yesterday to write about it...
Anyway, given how regularly I comment on Tyson's other activities, I figured I really ought to say something. Really, though, my main reaction was "What a very odd format..."
If you haven't already seen or read about this, the way it seems to work is that the show is taped in front of a live audience…
drorzel | April 22, 2015It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd's take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid.
Sadly, it's now grey and dreary, but that's spring in New England for you. But if you'd like a small amount of quantum-mechanical sunshine, head on over to Forbes and check it out.
drorzel | April 20, 2015Back when we went to London for Worldcon (and then I went to Sweden for a workshop), I bought a smartphone in Heathrow thinking I could sell it back when I left. That turned out not to work the way we thought, but it's served me well ever since as an e-reader. It can't connect to the local cell network, but I can download stuff via wi-fi, and it's small enough to hold in one hand, and back-lit, which makes it nice for reading in bed and on planes.
The lack of a cell connection, though, means it's just running on its onboard clock, so has gotten out of synch with my US phone. But even that is…
oracknows | April 19, 2015I didn't think I would be writing about this, but, then again, I seem to say that fairly frequently. Be that as it may, on Friday I wrote about a letter sent to Lee Goldman, MD, the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University complaining about Dr. Mehmet Oz's promotion of pseudoscience on his television show, which reaches millions. When I wrote my post, my first reaction was somewhat supportive, but with reservations. However, as I read your comments and thought about it some more, I started having second thoughts. Then, over the weekend, I had a rather…
drorzel | April 17, 2015"Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode."
"It's five or six billion years, with a 'b.'"
"Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun's going to explode."
"Well, a star like our Sun won't really explode. It'll swell up really big, probably swallow the Earth, and then kind of... go out."
"Right, and then it would be dark all the time. So we'd need to build a really big lamp."
"Well, in five or six billion years, maybe we'd just build a new star."
"How would we do that?"
"Well, you know, you just get a really big bunch of hydrogen together."
"Oh,…
oracknows | April 16, 2015Once again, repeat after me: Homeopathy is quackery. In fact, it's what I like to refer to as The One Quackery To Rule Them All. You would think that, in a modern world and given the incredible advancements in our scientific understanding of biology, physiology, chemistry, and physics over the course of the over 200 years since Samuel Hahnemann pulled the concepts behind homeopathy out of his nether regions, it never ceases to depress me that there are large numbers of people who think that homeopathy could ever work. But they do.
A couple of weeks ago, I took notice of a, well, notice from…
drorzel | April 15, 2015One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can't get enough of "spooky action at a distance," but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes quantum physics seem like a completely bizarre theory with no applications.
Which is unfortunate, because quantum physics is essential for all manner of everyday technology. For example, as I try to explain in a new post at Forbes, quantum physics is essential to the cheap alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning.…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let's turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled "National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track" with this calm, measured abstract that won't raise any hackles at all:
National randomized experiments and validation studies were conducted on 873 tenure-track faculty (439 male, 434 female) from biology, engineering, economics, and psychology at…
drorzel | April 14, 2015I've been falling down on the job of informing you about promotional events for Eureka, mostly because the pace of these has slackened. But I'll be on the radio today, on WYPR's "Midday with Dan Rodricks" based in Baltimore (I'll be in the usual studio in Albany for this...). This is scheduled for a full hour, 1-2pm Eastern time.
So, if you're in Charm City, tune in. Or listen via the Internet from basically anywhere.
drorzel | April 13, 2015I continue to read way too much about the ongoing Hugo mess, and will most likely eventually lose my battle not to say anything more about it. In an attempt to redirect that impulse in a productive direction, I wrote a thing for Forbes about some of my favorite treatments of science in SF:
Of course, now that I’m a professional scientist, I end up finding a lot of stories about science to be lacking. Not just in the usual “the laws of physics don’t apply” sense, where science is bent to serve the purpose of the story– I’m generally pretty accepting of that, because sticking too strictly to…
drorzel | April 10, 2015We're into admitted student season, that muddy period when large numbers of anxious high-school seniors visit college campuses all over the nation, often with parents in tow, trying to decide where to spend the next four years. As a result, I'll be spending a good deal of time over the next few weeks talking to high-school students who are interested in physics, trying to convince them to come here.
So, since I'm putting time into that anyway, I typed out a version of the argument in favor of going to a small liberal arts college (Williams, or Union, or some lesser school) to major in science…
drorzel | April 9, 2015This Hugo nomination scandal continues to rage on, and much of what's going on is just a giant sucking vortex of stupid. Standing out from this, though, is the guest post by Bruce Schneier at Making Light, which cuts through the bullshit to get to what's really important, namely using this as an excuse to do some math.
One of the many terrible ideas being floated is to use some analysis of the clustering of ballots to identify "slate voters," and having done that... something. Target their address with orbital lasers, maybe, or just sternly "Tsk tsk" in their general direction. This depends,…
oracknows | April 8, 2015I've spend considerable time documenting the utter pseudoscience, misinformation, and downright idiocy about "chemicals" in food regularly inflicted on the public by the misguided "food activist" named Vani Hari, who is better known by the moniker she chose for herself "The Food Babe." Indeed, in decade-plus that I've been running this blog and the few years before that during which I honed my skeptical skills on Usenet and other discussion forums, rarely have I come across someone so full of the arrogance of ignorance, someone who is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect.…