I’m not much of a baseball fan, but as a New York resident and Williams alumn, it seems I’m contractually obligated to say something about the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He was a fixture in New York sports for as long as I’ve been aware of them, and his impact on baseball and… Continue reading George Steinbrenner 1930-2010
Month: July 2010
Links for 2010-07-14
Can I build an ansible to communicate across the cosmos? “In this week’s Ask a Physicist, we answer a question that’s on everyone’s mind: Can we use quantum entanglement to make a mockery of the speed of light, and create intergalactic communications devices like Le Guin’s “ansible”?” (tags: science physics quantum sf education blogs io9)… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-14
Presentation Style: Indoctrination or Selection?
we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good– our students are, by and large, very good public speakers. One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the students end up sounding just… Continue reading Presentation Style: Indoctrination or Selection?
What People Think “Outreach” Is
Yesterday’s poll about “outreach” activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the “CHECK THIS BOX” count,… Continue reading What People Think “Outreach” Is
Dog Physics in Alabama?
It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football… Continue reading Dog Physics in Alabama?
Links for 2010-07-13
Scientists vs. Engineers – The Scientist – Magazine of the Life Sciences “In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of the arts… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-13
Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can’t read because it doesn’t display properly in Firefox, but I’m sure is very interesting. Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday’s visit to Pub Dog had… Continue reading Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
World Cup Wrap-Up
I missed the first 15 minutes of yesterday’s World Cup final because it was inordinately difficult to find a tv showing the game at BWI airport. There are tvs all over the place, but they’re all locked into playing a pre-recorded loop of CNN programs, without even a news ticker that could give score updates.… Continue reading World Cup Wrap-Up
Links for 2010-07-11
LaserFest | Videos of Lasers in Art & Entertainment A collection of videos showing the use of lasers in art, movies, and television. (tags: lasers science physics video television movies outreach art) Home – emergentuniverse.org A small but well-designed site dedicated to giving the public an interdisciplinary look at the science of emergent phenomena, including… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-11