Yesterday’s post on applying intro physics concepts to the question of how fast and how long football players might accelerate generated a bunch of comments, several of them claiming that the model I used didn’t match real data in the form of race clips and the like. One comment in particular linked to a PDF […]
Category: Playing-With-Graphs
The Physics of Sprints and Kickoff Safety
Over at Grantland, Bill Barnwell offers some unorthodox suggestions for replacing the kickoff in NFL games, which has apparently been floated as a way to improve player safety. Appropriately enough, the suggestion apparently came from Giants owner John Mara, which makes perfect sense giving that the Giants haven’t had a decent kick returner since Dave […]
Are Books and Kindles Correlated?
I’m trying not to obsessively check and re-check the Dog Physics Sales Rank Tracker, with limited success. One thing that jumped out at me from the recent data, though, is the big gap between the book and Kindle rankings over the weekend. The book sales rank dropped (indicating increased sales, probably a result of the […]
How Good Is BookScan Anyway?
One of the big stories in genre Internet news was Seanan McGuire’s post last week, about reactions to the early release of some copies of her book, and the hateful garbage thrown her way by people outraged that the ebook didn’t slip out early as well. And let me state right up front that the […]
How to Present Scientific Data
In the same basic vein as last week’s How to Read a Scientific Paper, here’s a kind of online draft of the class I’m going to give Friday on the appropriate ways to present scientific data. “Present” here meaning the more general “display in some form, be it a talk, a poster, a paper, or […]
The Test(ing) of Time: The Surprisingly Good Hourglass
My class this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” with the title “A Brief History of Timekeeping,” looking at the science and technology of timekeeping from prehistory through modern atomic clocks. This is nominally an introduction to “research methods,” though the class operates under a lot of constraints that fully justify the scare quotes, at […]
Scientific Commuting: The Data
A few months back, I did a post about estimating the time required for the different routes I take to work, looking at the question of whether it’s better to take a shorter route with a small number of slow traffic lights, or a longer route with a bunch of stop signs. This was primarily […]
Scientific Commuting: When Does It Make Sense to Take Alternate Routes?
I am an inveterate driver of “back ways” to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the “main” road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they’re not well timed, so […]
Economic Astronomy II: Gender Shares of Jobs
The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields: This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone […]
Economic Astronomy: Gender Gaps in Lifetime Earnings
There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym “STEM”) getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren’t quite the data you would really like to have, and I think […]