SteelyKid is one of the biggest fans of Union’s women’s basketball games. Not necessarily the team, just going to the games– she rampages all around the lobby, and as the crowd is generally pretty sparse, everybody is cool with that. The Pip has started coming along this year, and the two of them chase each… Continue reading Basketball at High Altitude
Author: Chad Orzel
On Persistence and the Counting of Things
Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly’s follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer– and they’re both very good at what they do. You should buy their books,… Continue reading On Persistence and the Counting of Things
Small College, Exotic Particles
Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of “Dirac Monopoles”. This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don’t fully understand, so writing it up isn’t a simple matter. The… Continue reading Small College, Exotic Particles
Appearances and So Forth
Since somebody asks nearly every time I mention my TED@NYC appearance back in October, I can now confirm that I will not be speaking at TED this year. Which I found out the same way as everybody else: when the full speaker list for this year’s TED was released today. If you’re curious about the… Continue reading Appearances and So Forth
Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs
Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and… Continue reading Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs
God Save English Professors From Teaching Undergrads
On the bright side, I’m unlikely to read anything more stupid and insulting today than this Inside Higher Ed article arguing that it would be wrong to shrink graduate programs in English, because the higher education market is Special: When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of… Continue reading God Save English Professors From Teaching Undergrads
Job Posting and Hangout
The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I’m giving an exam on Thursday. So, I’m not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices: 1) A reminder (I think… Continue reading Job Posting and Hangout
A Billion’s Not That Much
The local sports-talk radio station is running a bunch of commercials from a tax prep service in which a loud announcer declares that “People who did their own taxes left one billion dollars on the table last year. That’s billion with a ‘b.’” and urges people to “Get your billion back!” by paying for their… Continue reading A Billion’s Not That Much
Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter
I realize people are getting sick of reading me talk about this charged-tape business, which has run to one, two, three, four posts at this point. Truth be told, I’m losing enthusiasm for it myself. So this will be the final post, at least for now… As I mentioned on Twitter, as I type this… Continue reading Sticky Tape: The Final Chapter
Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism
Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem– he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a… Continue reading Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism