We spent most of Saturday at a taekwondo tournament– the AAU Adirondack Championship, or some permutation of those words. This was held in the gym over at Hudson Valley Community College, and was fairly big: It was, however, 99% waiting around. They did black-belt sparring in the morning, and said that staging for the colored… Continue reading 157/366: SteelyKid, Badass
Author: Chad Orzel
156/366: Needles on the Roof
Random artsy shot from our back yard. This is the little bit of roof right over our back door. It’s the only bit of roof left on the house that’s asphalt shingle– the main roof was always slate, and we got the bit of shingle above the garage replaced with fake slate not long after… Continue reading 156/366: Needles on the Roof
155/366: Boom!
A few days ago, The Pip came home with a “present” for me and Kate, wrapped up in construction paper. This turned out to be another sheet of paper, which is actually a launch control panel: The layout of the “buttons” is all him, but he got one of his teachers to do the labels.… Continue reading 155/366: Boom!
Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation: Reaching Gender Equality in Physics Faculty
In yesterday’s post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring… Continue reading Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation: Reaching Gender Equality in Physics Faculty
Physics Blogging Round-Up: Gravity, Pigeonholes, Groundhogs, and Weirdness
A long-ish stretch of time, but I was basically offline for a bunch of that because I needed to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. So there are only four physics posts from Forbes to promote this time: — ‘The Expanse’ Is A Rare Sci-Fi Show That Gets Simulated… Continue reading Physics Blogging Round-Up: Gravity, Pigeonholes, Groundhogs, and Weirdness
154/366: Parking Lot Sunset
Early in this photo-a-day thing I tried to get in the habit of bringing the camera with me when I ran errands, to get pictures of random interesting stuff outside of the immediate neighborhood of our house. I fell out of that, though, when it was actually cold, because I didn’t like leaving the camera… Continue reading 154/366: Parking Lot Sunset
153/366: Old School
Here in the US, we’re slowly transitioning to the European system of chip-based credit cards (I got email at work saying that my new card there will actually be chip-and-PIN, wonder of wonders). This is not uniformly distributed yet, though, so about half of the retailers I deal with regularly want the chip, the other… Continue reading 153/366: Old School
Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money
Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit: One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the… Continue reading Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money
152/366: Fun With Motion Blur
This one was a whole bunch of work for one smallish shot… So, in past rounds of “science-y things with my fancy camera,” I looked at the effect of ISO settings and apertures. This time out, I wanted to look at something moving, and the way that it blurs with increasing exposure time. My initial… Continue reading 152/366: Fun With Motion Blur
151/366: Half an Oak
When Kate and I were looking for a house back in late 2002, one of the things that sold us on this place was the back yard. The lot is very deep, unusually so for this part of Niskayuna, so there’s a lot of space in the back yard, and it was pleasantly shaded by… Continue reading 151/366: Half an Oak