Microsoft’s PowerPoint isn’t evil if you learn how to use it. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine I’ve seen more terrible slide presentations in my life than good ones, but that stat isn’t necessarily an indictment of the program–I’ve also encountered a lot more terrible books than terrific ones, and I’ve certainly seen more… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-07
Thursday Baby Blogging 050610
This week, we offer a shot from the forthcoming “Casual Living with SteelyKid and Appa” catalogue: If you look closely, you can see two things: 1) a small scrape by her right eye, from an accident at day care– even SteelyKid is bound by the laws of physics, and gravity is a harsh one, and… Continue reading Thursday Baby Blogging 050610
Through a (Noble) Gas, Darkly
There’s a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment’s early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments. As a result, a couple of members of… Continue reading Through a (Noble) Gas, Darkly
Scaaaary Poll
Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow. Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving a research talk to a… Continue reading Scaaaary Poll
Help Me Guide Teachers
My publisher would like to include a Teacher’s Guide with the paperback edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. which means that, well, I need to put together a Teacher’s Guide for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. The problem is, I’m not exactly sure what should go in that sort of… Continue reading Help Me Guide Teachers
Links for 2010-05-06
Particle Detector Shows Promise, if Nothing Else – NYTimes.com “A new widely anticipated experiment underneath a mountain in Italy designed to detect a sea of dark particles that allegedly constitute a quarter of creation did not see anything during a test run last fall, scientists reported Saturday. But, they said, the clarity with which they… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-06
I Do Not Think “Adiabatic” Means What You Think It Means
Over at the Virtuosi, there’s a nice discussion of the physics of letting air out of tires. Jesse opens the explanation with: Have you ever noticed how when you let air out of a bike tire (or, I suppose, a car tire) it feels rather cold? Today we’re going to explore why that is, and… Continue reading I Do Not Think “Adiabatic” Means What You Think It Means
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
It’s been a couple of weeks since I did an update on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, but that’s been as much laziness as a lack of news. Some developments, mostly relating to foreign lands: The US paperback edition is slated for December release. I’m working on a Teacher’s Guide to go with… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update
Links for 2010-05-05
Being Complementary About Uncertainty : Built on Facts “Complementarity is a very general concept and not easy to define formally, though informally you might say it’s the principle that the wave-like and particle-like aspects of an object can’t be simultaneously observed. More formally you could say that each degree of freedom of a system corresponds… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-05
Non-Dorky Poll: Vote Reporting
As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here’s a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results: Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey If you’d like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that… Continue reading Non-Dorky Poll: Vote Reporting