Category: Science

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

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

Festive Science

There’s a nice write-up about the World Science Festival in the New York Times today: The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at… Continue reading Festive Science

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, But We Do Have Some

Dave Ng has recently upgraded the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique site, which provides a variety of achievement badges for members to claim and post. I’m not a big one for extra graphics on the blog (they delay the loading of the cute baby pictures), but if you’re… Continue reading We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, But We Do Have Some

Matter and Interactions: Post-Mortem

OK, it’s not really a full post-mortem, because I haven’t graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn’t tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum. On the whole, I continue to… Continue reading Matter and Interactions: Post-Mortem

Unhealthy Obsessions of Academia

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature‘s embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature‘s embargo. So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I’d loooove… Continue reading Unhealthy Obsessions of Academia

A Day at the Races

I’m watching Pardon the Interruption after work, and they’re talking about the Belmont Stakes. They show a clip of horses running, and Emmy pipes up: “I like horses!” She does this when she feels I’m not paying her enough attention. “Horses are okay,” I say. “Okay? Horses are really neat!” She thumps her tail on… Continue reading A Day at the Races