Uncertain Principles Archive
Physics, Politics, Pop Culture; formerly on ScienceBlogs
Since our recent trip to Vermont, SteelyKid has been obsessed with building blanket forts. These have mostly been in the living room, leading to a bit of angst at the end of the day when we need the blankets back. So i did a little reorganizing in the basement, and dug some sheets out of […]
I’ve been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I’m giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional “What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics” talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna […]
We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament– the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big: It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored […]
Random artsy shot from our back yard. This is the little bit of roof right over our back door. It’s the only bit of roof left on the house that’s asphalt shingle– the main roof was always slate, and we got the bit of shingle above the garage replaced with fake slate not long after […]
A few days ago, The Pip came home with a “present” for me and Kate, wrapped up in construction paper. This turned out to be another sheet of paper, which is actually a launch control panel: The layout of the “buttons” is all him, but he got one of his teachers to do the labels. […]
In yesterday’s post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring […]
A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time: — ‘The Expanse’ Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated […]
Early in this photo-a-day thing I tried to get in the habit of bringing the camera with me when I ran errands, to get pictures of random interesting stuff outside of the immediate neighborhood of our house. I fell out of that, though, when it was actually cold, because I didn’t like leaving the camera […]
Here in the US, we’re slowly transitioning to the European system of chip-based credit cards (I got email at work saying that my new card there will actually be chip-and-PIN, wonder of wonders). This is not uniformly distributed yet, though, so about half of the retailers I deal with regularly want the chip, the other […]
Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit: One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the […]