Last week Doug Natelson noted a drop-off in active physics blogs. This had not gone unnoticed hereabouts, though I couldn’t immediately think of what to say about that. Yesterday, though, former ScienceBlogs wrangler Christopher Mims provided a possible answer: Google+ has destroyed blogging completely. I would’ve liked to find a way to tie all this… Continue reading Poll: Blogging
Category: Science
It’s Magnetic Moment Season: Measuring Various g-Factors
Among the articles highlighted in this week’s Physics is one about a new test of QED through a measurement of the g-factor of the electron in silicon ions. This comes on the heels of a measurement of proton spin flips (this includes a free PDF) a couple of weeks ago, and those, in turn, build… Continue reading It’s Magnetic Moment Season: Measuring Various g-Factors
The Test(ing) of Time 2: Freezing Time
A month and a half ago, I reported on a simple experiment to measure the performance of a timer from the teaching labs. I started the timer running at a particualr time, and over the next couple of weeks checked in regularly with the Official US Time display at the NIST website, recording the delay… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time 2: Freezing Time
What Not to Say to a Pop-Science Author
(Note: This was not prompted by any particular comment. Just a slow accumulation of stuff, that turned into a blog post on this morning’s dog walk.) It’s been a couple of years now that I’ve been working on writing and promoting How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so I’ve had a lot of conversations… Continue reading What Not to Say to a Pop-Science Author
Playground Physics: Roller Slide Mystery
We took SteelyKid to the playground at one of the local elementary schools on Sunday morning. this one includes an odd sort of slide, made of dozens of rollers that are 1-2 inches in diameter (they’re all the same size– the range is just because I didn’t measure them carefully). They’re on really good bearings,… Continue reading Playground Physics: Roller Slide Mystery
Great Moments in Deceptive Graphs
This morning, via Twitter, I ran across one of the most spectacular examples of deceptive data presentation that I’ve ever seen. The graph in question is reproduced in this blog post by Bryan Caplan, and comes from this econ paper about benefits of education. The plot looks like this: This is one panel clipped out… Continue reading Great Moments in Deceptive Graphs
This Is All For Science
Today’s Links Dump came late because I was at the meeting of the APS’s Committee on Informing the Public. We apologize for the inconvenience, but I was too busy acquiring this critically important scientific data: What is that, you ask? It’s this:
What’s So Interesting About “Traditional” AMO Physics?
The fourth content area from my whirlwind overview of DAMOP is “traditional” AMO physics. This was the hardest to talk about in my talk, because I know it the least well, but ironically, that makes it really easy to write up here, because I don’t have much to say about it. Where the other areas… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About “Traditional” AMO Physics?
Physics Android Apps?
I’m going to be at an amusement park tomorrow, for a meeting of the APS’s Committee on Informing the Public, which oversees the APS outreach program. Why an amusement park? Because a common outreach-type program is to do a Physics Day at an amusement park and talk about the physics of roller coasters and the… Continue reading Physics Android Apps?
What’s So Interesting About Quantum Phenomena?
Third of the five research categories within DAMOP that I talked about is Quantum Phenomena. This is a little bit of a catch-all, as there are a few different things going on in this area. They are all unified, though, by the fact that they end up making quantum mechanical effects manifest in some way,… Continue reading What’s So Interesting About Quantum Phenomena?