I was pleasantly surprised at how well the What does Science Online Want to Be? post was received– I kind of expected that to cause more anger than it did. It did prompt a lot of discussion, most of it during the dinner hour in Chateau Steelypips, so it was really hard for me to […]
Month: October 2013
Old Thesis Club: The Hyperfine Structure and Zeeman Effect for Mercury Resonance Line 2536.52A by Leo Wilson Scott, 1932
Having spent a bunch of time talking about heavy stuff in the science blogging community, let’s unwind a bit and kick the week off with a look back at an old Master’s thesis. This one is from 1932, and is almost certainly a draft copy, because it’s extremely cheaply bound in cardboard with the title […]
What Does Science Online Want to Be?
The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic’s harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the “What is to be done now?” phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I’ve also seen the edges of more […]
SteelyKid, Life Scientist
It’s been a rough week, so here’s some cute-kid stuff. The “featured image” above is a giant picture from SteelyKid’s after-school day care, where they’re talking about bodies and bones. It’s a tracing of her outline, filled in with her drawings of bones, joints, a grinning skull, a brain, blood vessels, a spine, and what […]
Optics Question: How Did the Photographer Do That?
Yes, that’s another TED@NYC picture as the “featured image,” but don’t run away! It’s a post about science, I swear! The photo up above is from the Flickr set (which, by the way, has been edited significantly since yesterday…), and I like it a good deal. Mostly because, as the joking caption suggests, that photo […]
Blogging Used to Be Punk Rock, Man
There’s a sense in which the saddest true statement I’ve read about the unpleasant events of the past week is this: Blog editor at Scientific American is a position of great power, with the ability to make or break careers. I’m not disputing the truth of this. It’s absolutely true that the position has enormous […]
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
Let me say these things, because they are important. Bora was wrong. Scientific American was wrong. Ofek was wrong, Wrong, WRONG. If you follow science blogs beyond this one, you have no doubt run across the gigantic debacle that erupted this past weekend; if not the first few paragraphs of this Slate piece give a […]
Old Thesis Club: Secondary Emission of Electrons from Molybdenum, by H.A. Smith, 1928
As noted in a previous post on Monte Carlo simulation in 1960, we recently came into possession of a large box of old Master’s theses. The bulk of these are from the 50’s and 60’s, but there are some going back much farther. As I pass these every day I’m in the office, I thought […]
Quantum Viruses?
The Twitter conversation that prompted yesterday’s post about composite objects was apparently prompted by a comment somebody made about how a virus left alone would see its quantum wavefunction spread out on a time scale of minutes. This led to wondering about whether a virus could really be considered a particle that would move as […]
Life Scientists vs. Test Takers
Back in July, Physics Today ran an article on Reinventing physics for life-sciences majors (I couldn’t find an un-paywalled version, but this arxiv preprint seems to be close to it). As I’ve had some bad experiences with that class, I flagged it as something to read, but only got around to it last night. The […]