Female Science Professor is revisiting an old topic, namely, the academic novel: I was thinking about the general topic of academic novels because I was looking for some books to read and was looking through the lists in the links above. And then I wondered: Why do I want to read an academic novel during… Continue reading Academic Novels and a Comment Experiment
Author: Chad Orzel
links for 2009-06-16
The dark side of animation "To test their hypothesis, the team recorded two versions of a PowerPoint lecture. The presentations differed only in the presence of animation to incrementally present information. They then showed students either the animated or non-animated lecture and then tested the students recall and comprehension of the lecture. The team found… Continue reading links for 2009-06-16
Finding Rainbows
Google the title phrase, and you’ll find a bunch of New Age twaddle. This is a physics blog, though, so here’s a reliable scientific method for finding the location of a rainbow, such as this one seen over Chateau Steelypips after the thunderstorms that went through earlier this evening (it was much brighter half a… Continue reading Finding Rainbows
Paul Volcker: More Science, Less Finance
The main speaker at yesterday’s Commencement was Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve Chairman (the guy before Alan Greenspan) and current chair of President Obama’s economic advisory council. As you would expect from somebody of his background, the bulk of the speech was about the current economic crisis. The full speech is online, but the… Continue reading Paul Volcker: More Science, Less Finance
Dinner with Martin Perl
Martin Perl, a 1995 Nobel laureate in Physics for the discovery of the tau lepton, was awarded an honorary degree yesterday at commencement. Perl actually has a significant Union connection– he started his career as a chemical engineer, and was working for GE making vacuum tubes when they sent him to take classes in calculus… Continue reading Dinner with Martin Perl
links for 2009-06-15
Flying Flux: The Dullness of Details "Short sentences; active voice; keep the audience in mind; draw clear diagrams; minimize jargon; use paragraphs; spell correctly; conjugate verbs; employ diacritics properly; use metric; resist idiomatic speech; avoid overusing semicolons; write in English. All very helpful tips that I’ve gathered over the years, if you want to totally… Continue reading links for 2009-06-15
Graduation Day
As the faculty started down the steps into the area where the families and friends of the Class of 2009 were seated, somebody in the crowd yelled “Thanks for passing most of our kids!” that may be my new favorite audience comment. Last night, it was looking as though we might need to go to… Continue reading Graduation Day
My Life Is Weird
1) If you search Amazon for my name, you get four results: the book-in-production, two books where I’m mentioned in the acknowledgments, and a fourth book where I am apparently cited as a source for the “assume a spherical cow” joke. 2) Weirdly, I have a fan site, of sorts. I have no idea who’s… Continue reading My Life Is Weird
links for 2009-06-13
slacktivist: TF: Skip verse 10 "Be sure to use the King James Version when you bring up Luke 17:34 — "In that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left" — and then argue that a literal interpretation suggests that precisely 50 percent… Continue reading links for 2009-06-13
Book Promotion Ideas
Tom Levenson has another post up in his ongoing series about the writing and publishing process of his new book, this one about generating publicity. At this point, he’s gone past what I’ve experienced so far, but this is fortuitously timed, as I got a note from my editor yesterday saying that the bound galleys… Continue reading Book Promotion Ideas