Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling: Kaffeeklatsch Thursday 18:00 – 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL) Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel Banksian Saturday 11:00 – 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL) ‘Banksian’ has become a commonplace descriptor in SF… Continue reading My LonCon Schedule
Author: Chad Orzel
Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds
As noted last week, I went to SteelyKid’s day camp on Tuesday to talk about being a college professor. This was a little awkward, because I was scheduled to talk to kids ranging from not-quite-three to six-and-a-bit, and really, what do they care about the daily routine of physics faculty? So, I did a simple… Continue reading Tennis Ball Plus Soccer Ball Equals Blown Minds
The Angst of Being Positive
The surest sign that I’ve become a Real Author is that there are five months yet before Eureka comes out, and I’m already fretting about negative reviews. Negative reviews that haven’t happened yet, but that I know will come, in a particular form. The book, as you probably know from my prior ramblings on this… Continue reading The Angst of Being Positive
What Sort of New Car Should I Buy?
We spent the weekend down in the Boston area, where Kate was doing stuff at Readercon and I was running the kids around the New England Aquarium and the Museum of Science (nominally in the company of a friend form college and his family, and some of Kate’s cousins (respectively), but either SteelyKid or The… Continue reading What Sort of New Car Should I Buy?
Impressive Physics Tricks for Little Kids?
We got an email from the people running SteelyKid’s summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said “Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author.” They said “Great, you’ll be talking to several groups,… Continue reading Impressive Physics Tricks for Little Kids?
Two Assistant Professors of Physics
Text of the ad we’re running for our searches this fall. This will go live on the usual sites at the start of August, but as a sort of experiment in the power of social media, I’m going to share it here first, and see what that gets us. —— We invite applications for two… Continue reading Two Assistant Professors of Physics
Uncertain Dots 18
In which our series of Google hangouts becomes old enough to vote and buy cigarettes– but not drink! Miscellaneous things mentioned in this: — My forthcoming book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I turned in the copyedits and figures a week or so ago, and cashed an advance check today, so it’s definitely going… Continue reading Uncertain Dots 18
Two Cultures of Incompressibility
Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there’s little numerical evidence of a real “crisis,” and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics… Continue reading Two Cultures of Incompressibility
What Scientists Should Learn From Economists
Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach’s article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week… Continue reading What Scientists Should Learn From Economists
Son of Interstellar Laser Communications
I didn’t plan to do a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the optics of sending messages with lasers, but then I starting idly thinking about detection, prompted in part by a bunch of conversations with my summer students about single-photon detectors. which led to scribbling on the back of an envelope, which led to Googling,… Continue reading Son of Interstellar Laser Communications