Nerd Parenting Update

We took a rare long weekend to go to a family party for Memorial Day at my parents’ (Kate and the kids always get the day off, but I usually have to teach; this year, I’m doing a team-taught class, and the other person was willing to cover my Monday spot), thus the lack of […]

Long-Overdue Photo-a-Day Wrap-Up

During my sabbatical last year, I decided to try to do a photo-a-day project, taking and sharing at least one good picture a day of something or another. The strict photo-a-day format fell victim to my general busy-ness and disorganization, but I did eventually complete the whole thing. In the final post of the series, […]

Kid Growth Update

At SteelyKid’s softball game today, the Pip provided an ideal cute-kid photo to use as a springboard to some SCIENCE! Or at least, a graph… Anyway, here’s the Little Dude showing off how tall he’s gotten: OK, really he’s hiding under Kate’s raincoat (after two beautiful sunny days in a row, we’re back to dreary […]

Kid Reading Update

For a long time now, I’ve had a Sunday routine with the kids, where we go to the Schenectady Greenmarket and then to the Open Door (which is right next to the outdoor market, and a couple blocks from the indoor location), then to lunch at Panera, and usually grocery shopping. We have a standing […]

The Inescapable Vagueness of Academic Hiring

Inside Higher Ed ran a piece yesterday from a Ph.D. student pleading for more useful data about job searching: What we need are professional studies, not just anecdotal advice columns, about how hiring committees separate the frogs from the tadpoles. What was the average publication count of tenure-track hires by discipline? How did two Ph.D. […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: April

It’s the first week of May, which means we’re due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April: — Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?: A look at the origins of “ambulance chasing” in high-energy theory, […]

Kid Writing Update

One of the things parents of multiple kids often talk about is how they don’t end up doing the same things with second children that they did with their first. For example, I carried the weekly Appa-for-scale photos on with SteelyKid for a couple of years, but didn’t last anywhere near that long with The […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: March

Another month, another batch of blog posts at Forbes: — In Physics, Infinity Is Easy But Ten Is Hard: Some thoughts on the odd fact that powerful math tricks make it easy to deal uncountably many interacting particles, while a smaller number would be a Really Hard Problem. — New Experiment Explores The Origin Of […]