For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way, […]
Month: April 2012
Links for 2012-04-25
Taking in a concert doubleheader with Creed and Nickelback, the world’s most hated bands – Grantland The moment you tell people you’re seeing Creed and Nickelback in concert — on the same night, at roughly the same time, in two different venues — it suddenly becomes a stunt. Just describing the premise seems schlocky; it’s […]
Ten Years Before the Blog: 2003-2004
The schedule called for this to appear last Friday, but as I was just back from a funeral, yeah, not so much. I had already gone through and bookmarked a whole slew of old posts, though, so here’s a recap of the 2003-2004 blogademic year (starting and ending in late June). This year saw a […]
Physics Day Poll: Favorite Physicist?
Over in Twitter-land, there’s a bunch of talk about how this is National Physics Day. I don’t know how I missed that, what with all the media coverage and all. I have too much other stuff to do to generate any detailed physics content today, so we’ll settle for an informal poll to mark the […]
Links for 2012-04-24
Fire – Flint & Steel – Some Clarifications “I started a fire with flint and steel.” Often heard, at least in some circles. But, what does this really mean? Well, there are two very different processes that might be being talked about: Traditional Flint and Steel: Striking a hardened piece of carbon steel with a […]
Gender Issues Start Sooner Than You Think
Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald: As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets – and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly […]
Links for 2012-04-23
How do I get my students to prepare before coming to a flipped class? – Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog A whole lot of words about the virtues of Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching, followed by a one-paragraph response to the question in the title. Don’t blink or you might miss […]
Links for 2012-04-21
Dark Matter: Now You See It, Now You Don’t | Of Particular Significance Both claims that I’m about to describe use novel techniques, and their analyses have not been repeated by anyone else. At this point you should understand that both are tentative, and (based on the history of radical claims) the odds are against […]
People Don’t Always Suck
Reading Ethan Zuckerman’s recap of the awful things people said to Xeni Jardin during a recent “twttier bomb” fiasco, it would be very easy to slide into “People suck” mode. Particularly since a large part of my day yesterday was spent in New York traffic. So here’s a quick antidote, also from yesterday: When I […]
Mildred Wedel, 1914-2012
Yesterday was the funeral for my great-aunt Mildred, known within the family as “Auntie” (first syllable “ont” not “ant”), who fell and bumped her head last Friday, and just never woke up. On the one hand, she was 97, so this shouldn’t be too surprising, but a few years ago she moved out of a […]