Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
The day I bought my iPad, as I was taking it out of the box, SteelyKid (then 3) came bopping into my office, spotted it, and declared “I want to play Angry Birds!” It’s a remarkable demonstration of the genius of their product: not only have they created a game that a three-year-old can play, […]
I’m always a little ambivalent about writing up papers that have also been written up in Physics: on the one hand, they make a free PDF of the paper available, which allows me to reproduce figures from the paper in my post, since I’m not breaking a paywall to do it. Which makes it much […]
Kate had to leave at 7am this morning to go to a “retreat” for her office, so I took the kids to Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast. That got us all out the door at the same time, avoiding the freakout from The Pip if he saw Mommy leave without him. Kate will be late getting […]
One of the great things about “Fermi Problems” is that there are multiple ways of attacking them. So, for example, when considering the death ray plot yesterday, I used medical devices as an example system to assess the plausibility of the plot, while Physics Buzz talked total energy. But those aren’t the only ways to […]
One bad thing about SteelyKid’s preschool graduation yesterday was that it drained my phone battery, causing me to miss an interview request from a local TV station looking for somebody to talk about a a couple of local guys arrested for a plot to build a “death ray” from X-ray components. This is pretty far […]
SteelyKid’s preschool “graduation” was today, and in addition to a certificate with her name on it, she got a CD of her class’s favorite songs and a composite picture of her class. I’d include an image, but it wouldn’t reproduce well, and anyway, I try not to post pictures of other people’s kids. What I […]
One of the oddities of writing the book-in-progress is that it involves a lot more history-of-science than I’m used to. which means I’m doing things like checking out 800-page scientific biographies from the college library so I can use them to inform 500 word sections of 4000 word chapters. One of these is Cavendish: The […]
I’ve got a ton of stuff that needs to get done this week, but I don’t want the blog to be completely devoid of new content, so here’s a quasi-poll question for my wise and worldly readers: What scientist is most in need of a good popular biography? By “popular biography,” I mean things like […]
The other big event of the weekend was Commencement at Union. I didn’t make it in time for the academic procession and all that, but I did hear John Lewis’s speech, which was great. More importantly, though, I was there to see our students graduate, and congratulate them in person. As I told my thesis […]
This past weekend was more complicated than it might’ve been. On Friday night, we drove to Whitney Point to my parents’ house, then on Sunday morning very early we drove back to Niskayuna so I could make it to Union’s graduation on Sunday (I arrived just in time to hear Civil Rights icon John Lewis […]