Chad Orzel's Blog, page 10

176/366: Scale Invariance

Again, random and artsy, but this tree in the garden behind the Reamer Campus Center at Union struck me as interesting:

A very symmetric tree, looking a lot like the veins in a leaf.

Is sort of looks like one of those pictures you sometimes see of oblong leaves where most of the surface has been eaten away, just leaving the delicate vein structure in place. (This kind of thing.) At least, that’s what it looked like to me, and why I took a shot of it.

175/366: Microdrifts

Random artsy shot of the moment:

Tiny lines of snow between the “slates” on our roof.

The wild see-sawing of the temperature has continued this week, so we got a little bit of snow, then it all melted, then more snow, then more melting, etc. This is from a couple of days ago, when it was cold, and I liked the way the light dusting of snow we’d gotten had blown into just the gaps between “slates” on the roof over the front window.

“Slates” gets scare quotes because those aren’t really rock, but rubber facsimiles. They’re made out of old tires, I think, and we have them on the lower roof levels in the front because snow sliding off the top of the house was cracking the real slate roof that had been there. They seem to work pretty well; at least, we haven’t had leak problems there since the replacement.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Jocks, Lasers, LIGO, Admissions, Nano-Movies, and Philosophy

It’s been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I’ve been doing at Forbes, so here’s the latest eclectic collection:

— Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular…

— How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a “laser strike.”

— How Gravitational Waves Connect To Quantum Optics: The big news of the month is LIGO’s announcement that they detected gravitational waves; this talks about how LIGO helped inspire the field of cavity optomechanics.

— Four Important Things To Consider When Choosing A College: Some unsolicited advice for high-school seniors who are entering the stressful college decision season.

— How To Make Movies Showing Nanoscale Molecules In Action: The editors changed the title of this one (you can see the original in the URL); it’s about how a new microscopy technique is built out of previous results.

— Why Is Relativity True?: A Twitter exchange with Kevin Drum about his foray into explaining General Relativity stumbled into the really big and probably unresolvable question in the philosophy of physics.

As usual, the reception of these is a mix of about what I expect and “Huh?” I figured the college advice thing would do well (and I’m glad to see it being well received by admissions counselors on social media), but I thought the LIGO/optomechanics post was too technical to get much traffic, and it turned into a smash hit. On the other hand, I thought the relativity post had a lot of potential, and it’s been nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds. Go figure.

I’ll also note that I’ve been getting some complaints via various channels about Forbes’s ad-blocker policy. And, yeah, I find it kind of annoying, too, but that decision is made above my pay grade and I can’t do anything about it. I will pass complaints on as I get them, but it’s not like they’re not aware that (some) people dislike the policy, so…

March Appearances

I’ve been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I’ll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here:

1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I’ll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff:

“Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science”

Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are critically important in an era of funding cuts and global crises that demand scientific solutions. In this talk I’ll offer examples and advice on the use of social media for science communication, drawn from more than a dozen years of communicating science online.

(This is basically the same talk I gave at Vanderbilt last year, updated a little. I tend to re-use titles a zillion times…)

2) A couple of weeks after that, on Wednesday the 16th, I’ll be speaking at the APS March Meeting, reporting on last summer’s workshop for SF writers:

Abstract: P47.00003 : The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction

In July 2015, we held a workshop for 17 science fiction writers working in a variety of media at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. “The Schrödinger Sessions,” funded by an outreach grant from APS, provided a three-day “crash course” on quantum physics and technology, including lectures from JQI scientists and tours of JQI labs. The goal was to better inform and inspire stories making use of quantum physics, as a means of outreach to inspire a broad audience of future scientists. We will report on the contents of the workshop, reactions from the attendees and presenters, and future plans.

This is a contributed talk, so it’ll be super short, but it’s a good excuse to go to the March Meeting, which was a good time the only other time I went. The program is massively intimidating, but I’m sure there’ll be tons of good stuff. If you have suggestions, even if they’re just “Hey, I’m going, too, we should get a beer!” you know where to find me.

Also, stay tuned for an announcement regarding our “future plans” (hint: we’re going to do another workshop…).

And here, I’ll send you on your way with some thematically appropriate music:

174/366: Crushing

As I’ve mentioned a few times, SteelyKid is part of an Odyssey of the Mind team through her school, working on a problem to build a structure from balsa wood and glue that will hold as much weight as possible. They’ve been hard at work the last several weeks, and completed a test structure last night, shown here just prior to testing:

SteelyKid’s OM team’s balsa wood structure, ready for testing.

This ended up supporting about 53 pounds before it collapsed, which means it could’ve held up at least one of the team members. Not too shabby. The kids were very fired up for the crushing process, and justly pleased with themselves for the result.

Of course, now we need to make another one just like it, and hope that it holds as well. A process complicated by the fact that I’ve been the coach assisting with the construction, and I’ll be away next week during both of the team’s practices, giving a talk at the University of Illinois. And the competition is next Saturday…

You Don’t Have to Like New Music

The tagline up at the top of this blog promises “Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture,” but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I’ve been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I’ve been so busy running after the kids that I don’t have much time for pop culture. And also because this is kind of a frustrating pop-culture moment, with a number of media currently dominated by works that just aren’t my thing.

That’s a critical bit of context for my reaction to a recent Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli, which sports the headline “Stop buying old Bob Dylan albums: “Every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians”.” That pull quote in a little more context:

It’s easier to sell them another Beatles box set or a new Dylan bootleg. The industry seems to market old music to old people, so to speak.

Right. In other words, the industry keeps people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago. You go down a dead end with some people, who say to you, Where’s the new Bob Dylan? Where’s the new Beatles? Well, there is no new Bob Dylan. There is no new Beatles. There is no new Thelonious Monk. There’s no new Duke Ellington. These people and their achievements are beyond the reach of anyone, so maybe it is interesting to empty the vaults and study how they got to be who they are. But for most artists, they had something to say in their own times, and that’s really where it belongs. My feeling is that every time somebody buys a reissue, they’re just taking money away from new musicians. They’re thwarting the growth of rock and pop. I understand the grown-ups’ instinct to do that, because it’s easier. It’s a comfortable place. You will be welcome there. But it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things.

And, you know, there’s a lot going on there, essentially all of which makes me want to sigh heavily. I don’t disagree with the core point, but it’s phrased in a way that makes me want to go right over to Amazon and buy a bunch of old box sets in retaliation.

For one thing, there’s something a little ahistorical about the whole “taking money away from new musicians” thing, as if those new artists somehow have a right to have their albums bought. I don’t think the Beatles and Bob Dylan, when they were new artists, were all that concerned that my grandparents weren’t buying and appreciating their records– on the contrary, a lot of those folks took for granted that they were revolutionizing culture, and old people weren’t supposed to get it.

And I’m not sure why that should be any different today. The interview includes the obligatory name-check of Kendrick Lamar, and I kind of doubt he’s losing much sleep over not selling records to the sort of people who buy Bob Dylan reissues instead. In fact, I’m moderately certain he’s actively trying to alienate those folks. They’re not his audience, and that’s just fine. Really, that’s probably how it ought to be.

There’s also the lazy leftist trope of Big Bad Corporations, the notion that the reason people are buying re-issues of old stuff is all a matter of record companies “keep[ing] people in the prison that they put them in 30 years ago.” I find the habit of ascribing magical brainwashing powers to corporate marketing departments incredibly tiresome.

But the thing that bugs me the most is the condescending subtext of the whole thing, which is highlighted in that last sentence. This whole genre of writing is founded on the belief that pop-culture taste is a reflection of character, and that people who don’t share your tastes and interests are, if not Bad People, at least less-good in some manner. They’re lazy, brainwashed, just doing what’s “easier.” So you get the showy disappointment of “it doesn’t enrich life very much to just keep doing the same old things.”

And, you know, fuck right off with that, okay? Yeah, fine, the only music I’ve acquired since the start of the calendar year is a bootleg of Bruce Springsteen playing a 40-year-old album straight through in concert, which probably isn’t doing all that much to enrich my life. But you know what is enriching my life? My kids. I’m not spending money buying albums from new artists because I’m running SteelyKid around to a whole bunch of different activities– taekwondo, Odyssey of the Mind, trips to visit friends– and helping her and The Pip build forts and play games.

In the same way that I’m not buying much new music, I’m also not doing a whole lot to enrich my culinary life– I’m eating at Panera and Applebee’s with depressing regularity. But as much as I sometimes grumble about those– and as nice as it was to get a break from them this past weekend when the kids were away– I’m happy to do it, because going to those restaurants makes my kids happy. And while they’re thoroughly exhausting, I’ll take hanging around with my cute and happy kids over dining alone at exotic restaurants.

And the thing is, I’m smack in the demographic that’s probably supposed to nod along in agreement with this whole piece. While I mostly listen to music in old modes, I generally try to check out new bands in those. For example, here’s one of my favorite songs from 2015:

And now that SteelyKid is developing strong opinions about pop music, I find myself listening to a bunch of Top 40 stuff when I’m in the car with her, and have found plenty of stuff to like even in the relatively disposable pop genre that I used to disparage. I’m more familiar with the work of Taylor Swift than I ever would’ve expected five years ago, and honestly? It’s pretty good.

But while I’m mostly in the “right” group of people, who prefer older modes but are happy to find stuff to appreciate in new artists, there’s an air of condescension to the whole business that really rubs me the wrong way. To be fair, a lot of that is just Salon’s house style, but more and more I find the whole business of finding significance in people’s pop culture tastes incredibly wearying.

Kate’s absolutely nuts about Hamilton, as are a ton of other people in my social circles, and I’ve tried several times to listen to it. I have yet to make it through a full track. Does this mean I’m a bad liberal, or objectively pro-Aaron-Burr? Maybe (I did write a paper about Burr for a school project back in the 80’s…). Mostly, though, it just means I’m pretty ambivalent about hip-hop and actively dislike musicals. So, you know, combining those things into a hip-hop musical just isn’t likely to work for me. And that’s fine, in the same way that Kate’s failure to fully appreciate the genius of Craig Finn’s various projects is just a reflection of her personal tastes, and not a commentary on her as a person.

(She’s actually been subjected to way more Craig Finn/ Hold Steady/ Lifter Puller than I have Hamilton, because I play music more or less constantly at home and in the car, and she doesn’t. She’s way too good to me.)

On a fundamental level, pop culture, like any other form of art, is a diversion, not an obligation. You don’t have to like any particular piece of it, if it doesn’t happen to speak to you. Discovering a new favorite band can be a life-enriching experience, but so can lots of other things. And if somebody prefers to give a greater weight to other experiences, and just listen to comfortable old music, well, everyone has the right to set their own personal priorities, and they don’t need to be made to feel guilty or inadequate for not sharing yours.

173/366: Art Bonanza

The Pip is in pre-school these days, and we have a running joke when I drop him off where I tell him to work hard, and he responds “No, grown-ups do work. You go to work. I’m going to the JCC to play with my friends!”

Of course, his playing does involve a bit of work, in that they do a lot of arts and crafts stuff. And while there was a long period where he wasn’t really into drawing on paper, in recent weeks, he’s gotten very fired up about drawing, and every day we get a few scibbled-on sheets of paper sent home. Put this together with the steady flow of homework from SteelyKid, and the kid-paper shelf in the dining room fills up pretty quickly.

As alluded to yesterday, every so often I go through the shelf, pull out the best pieces, and photograph them before sending them to the recycling bin. This involves a good bit of triage, and to give you a sense of the volume of stuff we’re dealing with, today’s photo of the day is a shot from the middle of this process:

Sorting the Pip’s pre-school artwork.

This is partway through the process, when I’ve already tossed a bunch of stuff, and it’s still a giant pile of art. Some of it is super-cute, some of it is just a few scribbled lines or a few stamps on paper. But as much as he denies that he’s doing work, man, is he a busy Little Dude…

The Pip’s Spec Script

I feel a little bad sometimes that I don’t really give the Pip his due on the blog. Back when SteelyKid was a toddler and pre-schooler, I had a lot more free time in which to transcribe the various conversations I had with her into super-cute blog posts. The Pip is in the same sort of stage now, and tells some amazing stories, but I have much less time, and by the time I do get free to get to the computer, I usually forget about it.

However, while cleaning up and photographing the Giant Shelf of Kid Art, I ran across a book that he made with… One of his preschool teachers, I guess, because it wasn’t me or Kate. It’s all about his current obsession, the Nick Junior cartoon PAW Patrol (which, if you’re not familiar with it, is written up by Drew Magary at Deadspin, who pretty much nails it), and now that I look at it, functions both as a good record of the sort of conversations we have with our cartoon-obsessed Little Dude and a spec script. Yo, Nickelodeon– hire this boy!

So, I present to you The Pip’s spec script for PAW Patrol:

The cover of The Pip’s PAW Patrol book.

Zuma is the one who is orange.

Marshall is the red fire fighter.

Skye is the one who is a helicopter pilot with pink clothes and goggles.

Rocky has a green grabber.

Pages from the Pip’s PAW Patrol story.

Rubble helps to save the day. He moved popcorn.

Chase has a net and is blue.

There was an emergency. The train was blocked in by boulders.

Chase had to wince. Rubble used his shovels.

Rocky put the rocks in his recycling truck.

No job is too big, no pup is too small.

This emergency happened at the big balloon race.

Mayor Goodway’s balloon floated away.

Skye and Marshall helped her.

Ryder is a human. He caught Marshall.

Skye lifted Ryder to the hot air balloon and Ryder helped the Mayor finish.

FIN

So, there you have it. My four-year-old’s bid to work in television.

167-172/366: Another Batch

Another long photo-a-day gap, because the last week was crazy in a bunch of ways. The weather has slewed wildly between winter and spring; Kate had to go to The City to argue a case leaving me solo-parenting the sillyheads; and I’ve been fighting the onset of a rotten cold. That last has involved a bunch of frantic work in anticipation of not being able to do much for a couple of days at some point, and today that caught up to me and I decided it was an official recovery day. Which gave me time to sort and GIMP the various pictures I took.

167/366: Brief Winter

We got a bit of an ice storm one day last week, and I spent a little while trying to get good photos of the thin sparkly layer coating plants in the yard as I waited for the kids to be ready to go to day care. This is about the best I managed:

Our ornamental cherry tree in the freezing rain.

Of course, the freezing rain turned to rain-rain, and by the time I needed to go pick the kids up, the yard looked like this:

Our soggy yard after the freezing rain warmed up.

168/366: Icy Lace

Somewhere between the last two pictures, I was at Panera writing (having dropped SteelyKid at taekwondo, which is in the opposite direction from my usual Starbucks), and noticed that the coating of ice on their awning was melting and sliding off, which looked cool:

A thin layer of ice in the process of sliding off an awning.

169/366: The Brook That Bounds

It was really nice for a few days in there, and I went over to campus to get my mail and walk around with the camera. Here’s a shot of “the brook that bounds through Union’s grounds” cited in the alma mater:

The brook on campus, swollen with snowmelt.

170/366: Skyline

Another shot from the campus photo walk. I wanted to get a shot with the dome of the college observatory next to the dome of the Nott Memorial, but it’s tough to get a good angle for that. I had to go all the way over to the Field House, at which point there were a bunch of other interesting structures to include:

the Union College skyline, as it were.

Left to right, you have Butterfield Hall, the enormous Catholic church across the street from campus, the steam plant, a tree, the observatory dome, and the Nott.

171/366: OBNottShot

True fact: according to an 1876 ordinance, it’s illegal to walk the grounds of Union’s campus without taking at least one photo of the Nott Memorial:

The Nott Memorial, with its own reflection.

(That’s not true. It’s just very photogenic, and thus hard to resist.)

172/366: Return of the Sillyheads

SteelyKid’s school was closed all last week for their winter break, so she and the Pip went to visit my parents for a few days. School re-opened today, so yesterday we drove down to Oneonta, about halfway between there and here, to pick up the kids at a playground, where The Pip showed off his balance:

The Pip climbing on a net bridge thing at Neahwa Park in Oneonta.

And to both balance the sibling scale and provide a bonus photo to make up for doing yet another big batch of these, here’s SteelyKid flying the remote-controlled helicopter she got:

SteelyKid flying her helicopter.

This is Serious Business, as you can tell, especially because the ceilings of Chateau Steelypips are kind of low. We had hoped to try it out in the field house when we stopped to see the last home basketball game of the season, but alas, the baseball team was having an indoor practice. Maybe next weekend.

We’re rapidly closing in on the halfway point of this project. I’ll have to try to think of something cool to do for that…

On Faculty Mentoring

One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty “mentoring.” It’s rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn’t about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that:

Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise.

— Chad Orzel (@orzelc) February 17, 2016

This didn’t generate much response on Twitter (probably because it was early in the morning), but did get some discussion on Facebook. Which led directly to the thinking-things-out-by-typing-on-the-blog post you’re currently reading. Or possibly about to stop reading in favor of something less noodle-y.

Anyway, my comment was prompted by the fact that I have an immediate and visceral negative reaction to the whole idea of formal systems of faculty mentoring, a reaction that I don’t think is all that widely shared. At least, the sheer number of opinion articles and faculty-meeting comments calling for such systems suggest I’m in the minority when I think of this as something I actively Do Not Want.

The kind of thing I’m talking about is a system where new professors are paired up in some way with a more senior faculty mentor, who helps guide them through the adjustment process and ideally up through tenure. I’ve even seen occasional calls for mentoring systems that would guide newly tenured associate professors through to full professor.

And while there are some obvious positive features to that kind of relationship, the whole idea of doing this in a formal way just gives me hives. And always has, both when I was a relatively new assistant professor, and now that I’m a well-established senior member of the faculty. I don’t mean any of this to disparage people who do want this sort of system– this is very much my own idiosyncratic reaction, which is why the original tweet references personality– but having been asked about it, I’m interested in trying to articulate why I have such a negative reaction. Which turns out to be tricky.

It’s not that I was or am especially confident in my ability to navigate academia. I feel like I have a pretty normal level of insecurity and impostor syndrome going on. And it’s not that I’m opposed to getting or giving advice– for the former, I’ve pestered any number of colleagues with questions about this and that over the years, and as to the latter, even a cursory glance over my various academic blog posts will show that I’m not hesitant about offering unsolicited advice to total strangers over the Internet.

I think the reason for my reaction is that the formal, one-to-one nature of “mentoring” as it’s usually described suggests a level of obligation that I’m really uncomfortable with, from both sides. I’m all in favor of getting and giving advice, but I’m not happy about having that advice be binding.

As a junior faculty member, I got advice from a lot of senior colleagues about teaching and research, and a lot of it was really bad, for me. I don’t mean that my colleagues were actively trying to do me harm– what they suggested was all stuff that works well for them— but it just didn’t fit with my interests and personality. To give a fairly innocuous example, one colleague told me that when lecturing, he made an effort to “break the fourth wall,” by moving out away from the chalkboard into the room, among the students. I’m a whole lot larger and louder than he is, though, so when I tried to do that, it was really uncomfortable– students were basically cowering in fear when I got close to their seats. Since then, I’ve mostly stayed back closer to the board, and we’re all happier for it.

(More recently, I’ve started doing much more wandering among desks, but that’s because I’ve gone to more of an “active learning” format where I pose questions and students discuss them and work them out on whiteboards. Which I adopted in part due to interaction with someone very much my junior, who wasn’t even a tenure-track faculty member…)

In an informal advice sort of arrangement, I’m perfectly comfortable mixing and matching advice from lots of different people, taking what works for me and discarding what doesn’t. A more formal one-to-one mentoring system, though, seems like it would carry much more of an obligation to follow the specific advice from your mentor. It would be weird and awkward to explicitly reject advice from a formal mentor, or to go seeking different advice from elsewhere.

From the other side of the tenure divide, I have the same discomfort with the obligation that a formal mentoring system would seem to imply. There’s undoubtedly a bit of impostor syndrome-ing here, in that from inside my head it looks like I’ve just been phenomenally lucky and don’t deserve to be giving anybody advice, but it’s also a reflection of my junior-faculty experience. A lot of what I do in the course of my teaching and research with students is a reflection of my personality, and anybody I’d be mentoring is by definition not me. And I wouldn’t want to feel like I was imposing an obligation on someone else to try to behave like me. I’m happy to offer advice to anyone who asks for it, but always with the caveat “this is what worked for me, do with it what you will.”

Of course, to some degree, this molding of behavior already happens in other educational contexts. At DAMOP a few years back, I was struck by the degree to which the students of someone I knew in grad school sounded exactly like their advisor when giving talks, and on another occasion I noticed that I share a lot of mannerisms and even body language with my former advisors. And I’m fairly certain that at least a couple of my former research students come off sounding a whole lot like me when they give talks about their work. Some of this is self-selection– students are most comfortable with faculty who share some personality traits with them– and some is subtle indoctrination. (Or even not-so-subtle– I’m pretty ruthless about advising students to give research talks in a style I find congenial…) It’s all part of the process.

But I feel uncomfortable extending that process into a faculty appointment, with people who are supposed to be colleagues. To paraphrase a bit from Ethan Zuckerman’s post about mentoring, that feels to me like the appropriate point to start being a peer.

There are a bunch of other things wrapped up in this, as well, some of which I can’t really discuss. But I think my negative reaction is mostly due to the obligation that seems to be implied by a formal mentor relationship. That implied obligation is something that would chafe, for me, from both sides of the relationship.

But, again, I think that’s largely a matter of personality, and I can understand (in an academic sort of way) why others might feel that the benefits of a more formal mentoring relationship trump the aspects that make me uncomfortable. So I’d be reasonably okay with a formal system on an opt-in basis, for those who feel they’d benefit from such a thing. Of course, then you get into the issue of how to avoid stigmatizing people who choose to use a mentor system, which can be a kind of backdoor argument for making it mandatory. But that’s a whole other discussion, and I’ve already wibbled on for long enough.