Cute Kids: Your Hugo Discussion Alternative

Left: The Pip with a screwdriver and his "fixing goggles." Right: SteelyKid inside the awesome house she built.

I was thinking about writing something about the 2015 Hugo Award nominations train wreck, but you know what? Life’s too short. So here’s a couple of cute-kid photos from this morning’s trip to the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology over in Troy. They have these awesome construction toys, consisting of wooden rods with holes… Continue reading Cute Kids: Your Hugo Discussion Alternative

Ethel Stevens, 1915-2015

A couple of years ago, we got a nasty shock when my 98-year-old great-aunt died unexpectedly. It’s happened again, with her sister Ethel (known to a lot of the family as “Auntie Sis,” because she had the same first name as her mother, my great-grandmother), who died in her sleep last Sunday night. She would’ve… Continue reading Ethel Stevens, 1915-2015

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Course Report: Brief History of Timekeeping

Student projects from my SRS (L to R): Measuring the flow of powdered eggshell in a "sand timer," a homemade water wheel clock, and a pendulum to measure the effect of thermal expansion.

A few years ago, I taught one of our “SRS” classes, which are supposed to introduce students to research at the college level– I blogged about it while the course was in progress. I taught it again in the recently-concluded Winter term, but didn’t blog much about it because I was mostly doing the same… Continue reading Course Report: Brief History of Timekeeping

STEM Is Not an Alien Menace

Everybody and their extended families has been sharing around the Fareed Zakaria piece on liberal education. This, as you might imagine, is relevant to my interests. So I wrote up a response over at Forbes. The basic argument of the response is the same thing I’ve been relentlessly flogging around here for a few years:… Continue reading STEM Is Not an Alien Menace

“Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science”

That’s the title of the talk I gave yesterday at Vanderbilt, and here are the slides: Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science from Chad Orzel The central idea is the same as in past versions of the talk– stealing Robert Krulwich’s joke contrasting the publication styles of Newton and Galileo to… Continue reading “Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science”

“Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs” at Vanderbilt, Thursday 3/26/15

I mentioned last week that I’m giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it: It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone. After all, two of… Continue reading “Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs” at Vanderbilt, Thursday 3/26/15

How Does Angular Momentum Emerge?

Yesterday’s post about VPython simulation of the famous bicycle wheel demo showed that you can get the precession and nutation from a simulation that only includes forces. But this is still kind of mysterious, from the standpoint of basic physics intuition. Specifically, it’s sort of hard to see how any of this produces a force… Continue reading How Does Angular Momentum Emerge?

The Emergence of Angular Momentum

The third of the great physics principles introduced in our introductory mechanics courses is the conservation of angular momentum, or the Angular Momentum Principle in the language of the Matter and Interactions curriculum we use. This tends to be one of the hardest topics to introduce, in no small part because it’s the last thing… Continue reading The Emergence of Angular Momentum