Neil deGrasse Tyson’s TV talk show had its debut Monday night on the National Geographic channel, something that’s very relevant to my interests. It airs after I go to bed, though, so I set the DVR to record it, and watched it Tuesday afternoon. Then I was too busy yesterday to write about it… Anyway,… Continue reading Slightly Belated Star Talk TV Thoughts
Author: Chad Orzel
A Quantum of Sunshine
It was nice and sunny this morning when I sat down at Starbucks to do some blogging, so I wrote a new Forbes post about the quantum physics that makes sunshine possible. This also brings in xkcd’s take on the fundamental forces, and even a little bit of SteelyKid. Sadly, it’s now grey and dreary,… Continue reading A Quantum of Sunshine
My Valuable Extra Phone
Back when we went to London for Worldcon (and then I went to Sweden for a workshop), I bought a smartphone in Heathrow thinking I could sell it back when I left. That turned out not to work the way we thought, but it’s served me well ever since as an e-reader. It can’t connect… Continue reading My Valuable Extra Phone
The Real Access Problem with the Hugos
There has been a lot of stuff written in response to the Hugo award nomination mess, most of it stupid. Some of it is stupid to such an impressive degree that it actually makes me feel sympathetic toward people who I know are wrong about everything. One of the few exceptions is the long essay… Continue reading The Real Access Problem with the Hugos
SteelyKid, Galactic Engineer
“Hey, Daddy, did you know that in five or six million years the Sun is going to explode.” “It’s five or six billion years, with a ‘b.’” “Right, in five or six billion years, the Sun’s going to explode.” “Well, a star like our Sun won’t really explode. It’ll swell up really big, probably swallow… Continue reading SteelyKid, Galactic Engineer
A Note to the University of Pretoria
So, the mysterious strings of digits that I wrote about the other day seem to be part of a class assignment from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Students are being asked to go read and comment on blogs, and the random digits are individual student identifiers. This makes sense given the form and… Continue reading A Note to the University of Pretoria
My Quantum Alarm Clock
One of the things I struggle with a bit when it comes to writing about cool modern physics is how much to play up the weirdness. On the one hand, people just can’t get enough of “spooky action at a distance,” but on the other hand, talking too much about that sort of thing makes… Continue reading My Quantum Alarm Clock
Help Me Understand Comment Spam
So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it.… Continue reading Help Me Understand Comment Spam
Yet More Academic Hiring: 2:1 Bias in Favor of Women?
I continue to struggle to avoid saying anything more about the Hugo mess, so let’s turn instead to something totally non-controversial: gender bias in academic hiring. Specifically, this new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science titled “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track” with this… Continue reading Yet More Academic Hiring: 2:1 Bias in Favor of Women?
Discovering Baltimore’s Inner Scientist, Hon
I’ve been falling down on the job of informing you about promotional events for Eureka, mostly because the pace of these has slackened. But I’ll be on the radio today, on WYPR’s “Midday with Dan Rodricks” based in Baltimore (I’ll be in the usual studio in Albany for this…). This is scheduled for a full… Continue reading Discovering Baltimore’s Inner Scientist, Hon