Author: Chad Orzel

Recent Pop Music

I bought a bunch of stuff recently, and as is my usual practice, iTunes has been shuffle playing the recent purchases for the last couple of weeks. The albums in question: Janelle Monae, the Arch-Android. Not usually my sort of thing, but I saw a bunch of absolutely rapturous reviews calling it groundbreaking, etc, so… Continue reading Recent Pop Music

Links for 2010-07-18

Physics Education Research Group (UMD) / Scientific Community Labs “Scientiifc community labs (SCL) are designed to give students the experience of participating in a model of a realistic scientific community at an early stage in their scientific training. In traditional labs, students often receive very detailed guidance, allowing them to complete the lab and get… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-18

Published
Categorized as Links Dump

Science v. Religion: Time to Try (Social) Science

There are lots of reasons why Josh Rosenau is one of the few writers blogging about science-and-religion issues that I still read. This morning’s post on what you ought to do to determine effective approaches is an outstanding example: Rather than looking at national polls, which are crude instruments and can miss shifts within small… Continue reading Science v. Religion: Time to Try (Social) Science

Links for 2010-07-17

News: Technologically Illiterate Students – Inside Higher Ed “The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.” Zvacek was careful to make… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-17

Published
Categorized as Links Dump

Two Cultures in Ducking Requirements

Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities: It’s easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to… Continue reading Two Cultures in Ducking Requirements

Links for 2010-07-16

Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » Grading every country’s national anthem, part one “Burundi. Sounds more like a movie soundtrack than a national anthem – a really awesome movie, though, about African cowboys looking out over the savannah as the sun sets over the elephants, and then maybe they fight evil white people from some European… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-16

Published
Categorized as Links Dump

Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?

In the comments following the silly accelerator poll, onymous wrote: [T]he point of the LHC isn’t to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. While it’s true that the ultimate goal of the LHC is to discover… Continue reading Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?