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
Month: May 2010
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
Links for 2010-05-04
Online civility: between 10,000 cliques and 2 cultures, where’s the neutral ground? : bioephemera “Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the blogosphere abhors a neutral and nonpartisan blog. For whatever reasons, cultural or historical, participants expect partisanship. They want to know if you’re with them or against them; the dedicated communities at various blogs can… Continue reading Links for 2010-05-04
Into the Universe With Portentous Music (and Stephen Hawking)
While I missed the controversial episode with comments about aliens, I figured I should at least take a look at the Discovery Channel’s Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, so I put it on last night after putting SteelyKid to bed. This was the big two-hour “Story of Everything” episode, starting with the Big Bang… Continue reading Into the Universe With Portentous Music (and Stephen Hawking)
The Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time Is…
Voting has closed on the Laser Smackdown poll, with 772 people recording their opinion on the most amazing of the many things that have been done with lasers in the fifty years since the invention of the first working laser (see the Laserfest web site for more on the history and applications of lasers). The… Continue reading The Most Amazing Laser Application of All Time Is…