I’m back in Niskayuna, dealing with mountains of end-of-term paperwork. Which means you get a poll to pass the time: The best end-of-term evaluation method is:survey software This poll is brought to you by the number π, the letter q, and the two take-home exams I’m waiting for before I can finish my grading.
Category: Physics
Everything Is Better With Experimental Physicists
In my write-up about the Hidden Dimensions panel, I mentioned in passing that: I also would’ve liked to see an experimental physicist up there, to provide a little more grounding about what the actual problems are, and how you might hope to look for something. But then, I always think there should be more experimental… Continue reading Everything Is Better With Experimental Physicists
Woo! Science Party! Woo!
You might not know this, because I’ve been so shy about mentioning it here, but I’ll be signing How to Teach Physics to Your Dog at 1:30 pm today as part of the Authors Alley program at the World Science Festival Street Fair. It’s true. It looks (at least in the tiny patch of sky… Continue reading Woo! Science Party! Woo!
Exploring Hidden Dimensions at the World Science Festival
Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the… Continue reading Exploring Hidden Dimensions at the World Science Festival
The Limits of Rohirrim Vision
Over at Tor.com, Kate has a Lord of the Rings re-read post about the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, which includes a shout-out to me that I missed because I was driving to NYC: Ãomer is “scarely a mile” away when the standard unfurls and is clearly seen to bear the White Tree, Seven Stars,… Continue reading The Limits of Rohirrim Vision
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Festive Update
We missed the formal presentaion at the World Science Festival stargazing event last night, and it was cloudy enough to prevent actual stargazing, but the giant mock-up of the James Webb Space Telescope is giant and cool even in the dark. More importantly, Neil deGrasse Tyson is awesome. We got there around 9:30, and he… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Festive Update
Required Reading in Science
Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it… Continue reading Required Reading in Science
The Periodic Table Is Not a Crossword Puzzle
A number of SF-related sites have been talking about the “Periodic Table of Women in SF” put together by Sandra McDonald, presumably passed around at Wiscon. James Nicoll has a list of the authors, and SFSignal has a link to the table, which I will reproduce here to save you the annoyance of opening a… Continue reading The Periodic Table Is Not a Crossword Puzzle
Summertime Thermodynamics: Car Windows Open or Closed?
This may be a job for the MythBusters, but I’ll throw this out as a puzzle for interested blog readers. I don’t know the answer to this (though it wouldn’t be all that hard to determine experimentally), I just think it’s sort of interesting. There’s a poll at the bottom of this post, but it… Continue reading Summertime Thermodynamics: Car Windows Open or Closed?
Table-Top X-Ray Lasers
I mentioned in a previous post that one of the cool talks I saw at DAMOP had to do with generation of coherent X-Ray beams using ultra-fast lasers. What’s particualrly cool about this work is that it doesn’t require gigantic accelerators or nuclear explosions to produce a laser-like beam of x-rays– it’s all done with… Continue reading Table-Top X-Ray Lasers