Over at Quantum Progress there was a recent series of guest posts about a social-justice-in-physics curriculum used by high school teacher Moses Rifkin. I sort of glanced at it, said “Huh, that’s sort of interesting,” and moved on, but this got picked up by some right-wing sites, and exploded. To the point where the awful… Continue reading Real-World Physics and Objectively Pro-Injustice “News”
Problems with the Pipeline
Via Curt Rice (or, more precisely, somebody on Twitter who posted a link to that, but I didn’t note who) there’s a new study in Frontiers in Psychology of the STEM “pipeline”, looking at the history of gender disparities in STEM degrees. You can spin this one of two ways, the optimistic one being “Women… Continue reading Problems with the Pipeline
Winter Thermodynamics: Foggy Glasses
We’re having a brutal cold snap at the moment, and while today’s early-morning dog walk was considerably warmer than yesterday’s, it was still 0F/-18C out, which is way colder than I like. When I came back in the house after the walk, my glasses instantly fogged up. But I had to take some stuff outside… Continue reading Winter Thermodynamics: Foggy Glasses
How Fast Is SteelyKid’s Nerf Gun?
SteelyKid is spending a couple of days this week at “Nerf Camp” at the school where she does taekwondo. This basically consists of a bunch of hyped-up kids in a big room doing martial activities– taekwondo class, board breaking, and “Nerf war” where they build an obstacle course and then shoot each other with dart… Continue reading How Fast Is SteelyKid’s Nerf Gun?
Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now
The final bit of meta-blogging I’ll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can’t see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise,… Continue reading Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now
What Survives from 2013’s Blogging?
Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I’ve occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency– that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they’ve had less time to integrate up… Continue reading What Survives from 2013’s Blogging?
Top Blogging Actually Done in 2014
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each… Continue reading Top Blogging Actually Done in 2014
The Golden Age of Blogging Was 2010
When I was writing up the state of blogging post last weekend, I thought about pulling together a Top Ten Posts thing, but didn’t have time. also, Google analytics moved a bunch of stuff since the last time I used it, so I had a hard time locating the right options. Having tracked it down,… Continue reading The Golden Age of Blogging Was 2010
Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light
Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it’s a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light: — Light Is… Continue reading Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light
Science Story: Not a Bath House
(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn’t sure I’d get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn’t end up using a few of my original ideas. So I’ll do a few… Continue reading Science Story: Not a Bath House