Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat… Continue reading Impostors, Underdogs, and the Status of Science
Author: Chad Orzel
Two Women-in-Science Notes
Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all… Continue reading Two Women-in-Science Notes
Links for 2012-04-05
The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space | Wired Science | Wired.com As anyone that has played the game can tell you, this air looking stuff surrounding an asteroid defines a region in which the angry birds will interact with the rock. If the bird is outside of this region, there will be no force… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-05
Poll: Most Important Part of Physics?
Over in Twitterland, we have a question from WillyB: If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics, which do you think is the most important for the gen. public? This sounds like a job for the Internet! To the polling machine! If you had to pick one topic to cover in Physics,… Continue reading Poll: Most Important Part of Physics?
Assyrian Books and Quote Chasing
While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to “an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC”: Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents;… Continue reading Assyrian Books and Quote Chasing
On Basketball
While in the past, I’ve written a bunch about basketball here, I’ve been unusually silent on the subject this year, confining my commentary to the occasional Links Dump item from Grantland and other sites. This isn’t because the past season was not noteworthy– indeed, it was a rather eventful year for Syracuse basketball, with the… Continue reading On Basketball
Ten Years Before the Blog: Historical Recap
June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I’m not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog: Historical Recap
Links for 2012-04-03
Science teacher: Why kids love science anyway… We grow beans and basil in class, edible stuff from the breath they exhale–at first they resist the idea, as any reasonable creature would, and I don’t give them any particular reason to believe it, but some do anyway. Kids like this. Many of the hypotheses generated in… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-03
A Confusing Light OPERA: How Does a Loose Fiber Optic Cable Cause a Signal Delay?
So, the infamous OPERA result for neutrino speeds seems to be conclusively disproven, traced to a problem with a timing signal. Matt Strassler has a very nice explanation of the test that shows that the whole thing can almost certainly be traced to a timing error that cropped up in 2008. This problem is generally… Continue reading A Confusing Light OPERA: How Does a Loose Fiber Optic Cable Cause a Signal Delay?
Links for 2012-04-02
MacRecipes | Fathom Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many times has… Continue reading Links for 2012-04-02