038/366: Cloudy Conjunction

In yesterday’s crude astrophotography post, I mentioned that the conjunction of Venus and the Moon would be closer this morning, but I took a shot of it yesterday because there’s no telling with the weather here this time of year. When I first went outside this morning, though, the sky was beautiful and clear and […]

014/366: Summer Stars

Today was Rosh Hashanah– happy new year to those who celebrate it– meaning that both SteelyKid’s school and The Pip’s day care were closed. In an effort to maintain my sanity while keeping them entertained, I took them to the local science museum to rampage through hands-on exhibits. We also caught the planetarium show, because […]

002/366: Boids

I spent a while this morning typing on my laptop on the deck, and brought the new camera out with me for occasional procrastination. The shady spot at that hour has a nice view of the bird feeder, and I snapped a few shots of these guys feeding (using a telephoto lens): (I cropped and […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Two Weeks’ Worth

I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes: — What ‘Ant-Man’ Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped […]

Science Talks and Pick-Up Hoops

Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It’s an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields: And that raises and interesting question, since aside […]

Seven Years of SteelyKid

Today is SteelyKid’s seventh birthday, which she’s been counting down to for a good while. It’s a little hard to believe it’s seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy. She’s become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and […]

Back-of-the-Envelope Gravitational Which-Way

There’s a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent– with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background […]

The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day “crash course” on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media– we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one […]