9:30am Thursday, Starbucks Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits. 11:15am Thursday, Starbucks Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection. 11:30am Thursday, Union College Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh. 1:30pm… Continue reading The Writing Process
Author: Chad Orzel
Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing
Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that’s where it gets weird: As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According… Continue reading Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing
Links for 2012-04-27
Animals Disappointed in your College Performance This ostrich begs to differ with you. Grammar does matter. Boston Review — Claude S. Fischer: The Loneliness Scare Social scientists have more precisely tracked Americans’ isolation and reports of loneliness over the last several decades. The real news, they have discovered, is that there is no such epidemic;… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-27
Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,… Continue reading Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics
Links for 2012-04-26
What Particle Are You? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine I am not a particle! I am a HUMAN BEING!! Studies in Everyday Life: Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist: My Comments on the Limits to Growth This is my response to the recent post by UCSD physicist Tom Murphy, in which he questions an economist… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-26
Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way,… Continue reading Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
Links for 2012-04-25
Taking in a concert doubleheader with Creed and Nickelback, the world’s most hated bands – Grantland The moment you tell people you’re seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert — on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues — it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky; it’s… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-25
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004
The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here’s a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June). This year saw a… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
Over in Twitter-land, there’s a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don’t know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we’ll settle for an informal poll to mark the… Continue reading Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
Links for 2012-04-24
Fire – Flint & Steel – Some Clarifications “I started a fire with flint and steel.” Often heard, at least in some circles. But, what does this really mean? Well, there are two very different processes that might be being talked about: Traditional Flint and Steel: Striking a hardened piece of carbon steel with a… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-24