Two Cultures
drorzel | May 8, 2007We had our annual undergraduate research symposium this past weekend, which included presentations from students doing work in all different disciplines. We have enough physics and astronomy majors these days that I spent most of the day Friday listening to them talk, but I did have a break in the morning when I saw a few engineering talks, and it's always nice to see work in other fields.
At lunchtime, there were two things I wanted to do: see the dance performances (which included a couple of physics students), and have lunch at the student-run organic food cafe, which I really enjoy, but…
drorzel | March 29, 2007One final Steve Gimbel note. Toward the end of his anti-lab post, he writes:
If you want to see a science professor get angry, just tell them that they teach all those labs to get out of teaching real courses. You'll see faces get flush, veins pop out of heads and necks, and receive a high decibel screed about not understanding how time intensive it is to prepare labs and grade lab reports. They are incredibly touchy about this issue. Maybe it's because it's true, maybe it isn't; but either way, it does mean that there are fewer science classes taught.
This is, I hope, the dumbest thing I'll…
drorzel | November 29, 2006Two quick links from yesterday's Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday:
1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There's a bit of discussion of whether this is a good idea or not, but the main effect on my end is to make me grateful that I'm not a humanities professor.
From talking to colleagues on the other side of campus, there's a whole bunch of stuff that they have to put up with that we don't in the sciences. It's rare to find a literature…
drorzel | October 17, 2006For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It's a time-limited email link, so look quickly.)
As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it's aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty good advice even for science types ("Remember that people who show up to hear you want to believe that you're smart, interesting, and a good speaker"; "Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Then stop"; and "Prepare yourself in advance for questions.") to horror-show glimpses of how the…
drorzel | August 7, 2006Via Making Light, Chris Clarke at Creek Running North has some sharp words in response to the alleged Deep Thoughts on his Starbucks cup:
When Einstein explained his theory of relativity, he couldn't express it in the precise, scientific writing of physics. He had to use poetry. Poetry: the connection of words, images, and the relationships that gives [sic] them meaning. Quantum physics changed the world. No longer can we view the world in separate, mechanical ways, but we must accept the reality of interconnection, unity, and togetherness. Life is poetry.
This pearl of wisdom is attributed…
drorzel | June 7, 2006My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.
Students in all majors are also required to take five "Writing Across the Curriculum" classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of…
drorzel | May 10, 2006Prompted in part by Rob Knop's post on meeting with humanists, an observation about the nature of academia attributed to our late Dean of the Faculty, a former Classics professor:
The key difference between disciplines in terms of administrative business on campus is that scientists tend to do their research work (experiments, calculations, simulations) in on-campus labs and offices, while humanities faculty do their research work (reading, writing, and thinking) at home. This means that humanists only come to campus in order to teach classes and socialize with colleagues, while scientists…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows that we do in the sciences:
She did a run-through, and then we sat down together and reworked the first three pages to set up the project more clearly and helpfully for her listeners, and then we designed a handout to help her audience situate her…
drorzel | April 18, 2006Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems.
There are some sample poems on that site, which give you an idea of the flavor of the thing (I don't think he read any of those specific poems, but they're fairly representative). They aren't so much poems about physics principles as they are poems about the history of physics-- lots of imaginary letters from one famous 20th Century physicist…
drorzel | February 20, 2006(It's Presidents' Day, so remember to vote!)
Razib over at Gene Expression offers some thoughts on the algebra issue, in which he suggests some historical perspective: The ancient Greeks were not unintelligent, so the fact that many of us (rightly I believe) take symbolic algebra for granted as a necessary feature of our cognitive landscape is something to reflect upon. Maths that we assume to be fundamental elements of our mental toolkits would have been beyond the very conception of the most brilliant minds of our species over one thousand years ago.
I'm not really happy with this, because…
drorzel | December 30, 2005Scott Eric Kaufman of Acephalous is blogging the MLA. (I'm sure he's not the only one, he's just the only one I'm reading...)
As I understand it, the Modern Language Association meeting is pretty much the be-all end-all of humanities meetings. It's sort of fascinating to read about, coming off as sort of a cross between DAMOP and Worldcon (look, a Dealer's Room! People getting a little punchy!).
Of course, most of the things that make it fascinating to me are the areas where it diverges from my experience of professional meetings-- the cattle-call interviewing and the people reading pre-…