Friday night was a home game for Union’s basketball teams, so I picked SteelyKid and the Pip up a little earlier than usual, and took them to the women’s game (which starts right around the time day care ends and ends right around their usual bedtime). You might wonder what it’s like taking the pair […]
Month: January 2014
Miscellaneous Liberal Education Stuff
The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven’t really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I’m going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post. –A few people, mostly in places that aren’t conducive […]
What I Learned From the Liberal Arts
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a “poetry for physicists” kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of “crisis in […]
On the Checking of Boxes
One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren’t like I was at that age. What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn’t need to be convinced of […]
Physics of Snow Photo Contest
A couple of weeks ago, I got a cool picture of snow hanging off SteelyKid’s playset, and posted a call for people to suggest physics-y ideas about that. I only got one response, probably because nobody really read the Internet over the holidays. Anyway, the next time I’m likely to have the free time to […]
Replacing Gravity
I’m teaching introductory E&M this term, so it’s kind of fun to play around with silly applications of Coulomb’s Law. For example, let’s imagine that gravity suddenly switched off, but we wanted to keep the Earth in its orbit. How much charge would we need to move from the Earth to the Sun for the […]
Another New Term, Another Set of Teaching Experiments
Classes for the Winter term start today, and I’m totally prepared for this. Yep. Uh-huh. Losing a bunch of prep time to snow and ice last week hasn’t thrown anything into disarray. Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I’ve ended up departing from my plan to not do any new preps while I’m stuck being […]
UK/ Ireland in August?
Kate and I will be going to the Worldcon in London this August. This will be my first trip to the UK for anything other than changing planes, so we’re going to take a few days on either end to do touristy stuff. The pre-con plan is to stay based in London, maybe taking a […]
Physics with the Kids at 120 Frames a Second
I got a new camera for Christmas, not because there’s anything wrong with my DSLR, but because I wanted something that could do high-speed video. So I now have a Casio point-and-shoot camera that will record up to 1000 frames per second, woo-hoo! To break it in, I got the kids to help out by […]
Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical
This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as “placebo technoradicalism.” The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the […]