Chad Orzel's Blog, page 21

061/366: BatNinja

I took some shots of nature stuff on this morning’s dog walk, and a few good action shots at the last soccer game of the season. But honestly, the only thing anybody wants to see today is Halloween costumes, so here are the kids:

The Pip as Batman, SteelyKid as a ninja.

Cleverly, they both selected costumes that are predominantly black; we augmented these with glow-stick bracelets and flashlights while actually trick-or-treating, for improved visibility.

Putting these together required a good deal more GIMP work than I anticipated, because the raw shots for the two are at slightly different angles, so when I did the quick copy-and-paste thing, the mantel and bookshelves in the background were tilted at different angles on the different sides of the split frame, and that just made me twitch. So I had to go back and rotate both images slightly to square things up.

Right around one hour of trick-or-treating yielded roughly 2kg of candy. This didn’t remotely exhaust the possibilities in the neighborhood, just the stamina of the kids. With another year of training, I think we can easily break 5kg next year.

060/366: Falling

This is basically the shot I was trying to get yesterday when I ended up settling for an evil squirrel: a leaf in mid-fall.

Falling leaf in late October.

This is, of course, damnably difficult to get, as it’s impossible to guess when a specific leaf will drop, and if you throw them up into the air, they don’t stay airborne long enough to bring the camera up and focus it. And, you know, I could recruit somebody to toss leaves in the air for me, but I’m not sure that would make me feel any less a dumbass than standing in the yard with my camera staring up at the maple over the driveway.

It’s not quite perfect– there’s a lens-flare sort of thing arcing across the middle, because the Sun is just out of the frame to the upper right. But it’s pretty close, and I got it without cheating, so that feels good.

(Of course, later in the day, I was out in the yard with SteelyKid and The Pip, flinging rakefuls of leaves up into the air so they could run around in mini leaf tornados, which would’ve been a cool shot, too…)

Me in the Media: Two New Interviews

I’ve been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:

— I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about “radionics” and “wishing boxes,” a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:

It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a physics professor at Union College in New York and the author of several popular science books, including How To Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog. This sounded about my speed, and I ran a few ideas about physics and radionics past him, particularly “quantum entanglement,” which several people offered as evidence that radionics is possible.

“Entanglement is a very strange phenomenon,” says Orzel. “But it’s a very real thing.”

[…]

“People try to invoke this as a way of justifying ESP sorts of things: ‘Well, maybe electrons in your brain are entangled with electrons somewhere else.’ There’s a couple of problems with it,” Orzel says.

You’ll have to click through to see what the couple of problems are, though…

— A little earlier, Irene Helenowski interviewed me by email. This went live last week, when I was in California, which is my excuse for not posting it until now.

Professor, how is Emmy doing these days?

She’s doing well. She’s getting on in years for a dog– she’s 13– so she’s slowed down a bit. But she’s still pretty spry, and can about pull me off my feet when she really wants to get to something on one of our walks.

You discuss simulating a black hole at CERN. What is the current status on the scientists’ progress with that project?

It’s not so much simulating, as trying to _create_ a black hole. The idea is that if you can pack enough energy into two colliding protons, you can create a situation where they get close enough together, and have enough total energy that they form a tiny black hole.

This is very much a long-shot possibility at the energy of the actually existing LHC– if nothing exotic is going on, there’s no way the LHC energy is enough to make a black hole. There are some exotic theories where gravity gets dramatically stronger at short distances, though, and if one of these turned out to be true, there’s a chance you could get a black hole. This would evaporate through Hawking radiation almost immediately, spraying out a burst of particles that could identify it as a black hole rather than a more typical collision.

There have been some searches for this in data from the first LHC run, and no sign of black holes has been seen. They just recently re-started at a higher energy (by a factor of two, not enough to make mini-black-holes likely), and I’m sure there will be more such searches. Nobody really expects this to pan out, but it would be tremendously exciting if it did.

Again, click through to read the rest.

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And while you’re clicking on things, please consider taking a few minutes to respond to Paige Jarreau’s survey of blog readers. It’s for SCIENCE!, specifically her postdoctoral research on communicating science online.

059/366: Pure Evil

You might look at this and say “Oh, what a cute little squirrel…”

A demon from another dimension, at least according to Emmy.

But Emmy will be very happy to explain, loudly and at length, that this is, in fact, a demonic alien menace, an existential threat to the safety of our house and home.

This wasn’t really what I had in mind for the photo of the day today, but I took a picture of this little guy while I was outside trying to get a different sort of shot that didn’t quite come out the way I wanted. So this is what you get tonight.

College Science Advice Tetralogy

I got off on a bit of a rant the other day about bad defenses of “the humanities,” but there’s a bright side. It finally got me to write my own, over at Forbes, which is basically the last piece of a tetralogy of advice for students:

— Why small colleges are a great place for students majoring in STEM subjects

— What students planning to major in STEM subjects should make sure to do in college

— Why non-STEM majors should nevertheless take science classes in college

— Why STEM majors should take “humanities” classes, and take them seriously

That last one, posted yesterday, is my attempt to mount a defense of “the humanities” while avoiding the failure modes that make most such essays incredibly irritating to me. I tried to keep it as concrete as possible without going into citing specific works (which would inevitably become a giant distraction from the actual point), and talk about ways the skills developed in studying art, literature, history, philosophy, and the rest will help students be more successful in their chosen field.

Kate’s half-seriously suggested that my next book should be an academic manifesto; that’s not going to happen, but at least you have these four posts.

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Also, I’ll tack in a reminder that if you’re reading this blog, Paige Jarreau would like to know some more about how and why you got here for her postdoctoral research on science communication online. There’s a short survey, for SCIENCE!, and she’s offering some giveaways and stuff if you’re into consumerism.

058/366: Rosy-Fingered

I totally spaced on posting this yesterday, because I ended up having to take SteelyKid to the doctor, which blew a gigantic hole in my day. (She’s fine.) But this is a shot of sunrise yesterday morning:

Sunrise on October 28.

This was a very strange sunrise because this is pretty much the only light in the sky we saw all day. Those bits that look sort of blue-ish around the pink clouds aren’t clear sky, they’re more clouds. Ten minutes after this was taken, the entire sky was unrelieved grey, and stayed that way all day. Ten minutes before this was taken, there wasn’t really any hint of an approaching sunrise.

But for a brief, glorious moment, the eastern sky was all lit up with cool sunrise colors. I’m really not sure how or why that happened. Maybe some kind of Pelennor Fields situation just to our east, with dawn taking Evil by surprise, then being snuffed out? I would’ve thought that would make the news, though…

Anyway, it looked cool, so I took a picture. Here it is.

057/366: Last Practice

I did take some DSLR photos today, but the photo of the day is a cell-phone shot from the final soccer practice of the fall for SteelyKid’s second-grade team.

The last rec soccer practice for the fall 2015 season.

SteelyKid is not, in fact, in this photo; she had a belt test for the Elite Team at her taekwondo school tonight, so she was off getting dinner before some hard-core sparring. I was at practice because I signed up to assistant coach this year– I was going to end up going to the practices anyway, and figured I might as well help out. It’s been fun, and definitely increases my respect for the teachers who manage to keep these kids under control for the entire day…

Anyway, it was a nice fall evening, as you can see, and the kids were exceptionally hyper. Then I ran home, showered, and rushed off to taekwondo just in time to catch SteelyKid’s sparring match. And the rather chaotic melee round that followed, which was a new one. Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a bunch of pre-teens try to recreate a Jackie Chan movie…

Another Terrible Defense of “The Humanities”

Somebody in my social media feeds passed along a link to this interview with Berkeley professor Daniel Boyarin about “the humanities,” at NPR’s science-y blog. This is, of course, relevant to my interests, but sadly, but while it’s a short piece, it contains a lot to hate.

For one thing, after the dismissive one-two of “so-called ‘scientific methods'” (Scare quotes! “So-called”! Two great tastes that taste great together!) in the process of trying to re-brand “the humanities” as “the human sciences,” Boyarin offers the following on methodology:

The primary method for the study of humans through the investigation of their cultural products is interpretation. Any discipline, including, obviously, anthropology and history (frequently, as at Berkeley, listed as social sciences) may have significant truck with interpretation as well, and then form part of this formation of “the sciences of the human” that we propose. I would say that the greatest difference, as far as I understand scientific method, is that for us hypotheses emerge from the data as we study and interpret, and are constantly being modified and corrected, while the natural sciences seem to begin with hypotheses that they test.

That’s a misunderstanding of scientific practice that ought to embarrass an undergraduate, let alone a distinguished professor claiming to offer a useful perspective on the grand sweep of human knowledge. Science is all about hypotheses that emerge from the data, and going where the data lead. Nobody just sat down and said “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if electrons had wave nature?” They were led to that idea because it emerged from a long chain of odd experiments. Nobody said “Wouldn’t it be cool if the universe were full of stuff we can’t detect?” The notion of dark matter emerged from careful observations of galaxies.

If I were to spout equivalent nonsense about “the humanities”– “Literary scholarship is about reading dusty old books and identifying the symbolism in them,”– I’d get ripped apart, and deservedly so. There’s no excuse for a scholar of the “human sciences” to be working off the model of science you would use for a fifth-grade science fair.

The other infuriating thing about this is the last three questions, which are really different angles on the same question, which Boyarin dances away from each time, closing with another cheap shot at science:

So what would you say to persuade someone who is skeptical of the value of basic research in the humanities?

Simply that the understanding of humans by humans is as important an endeavor as understanding the physics of distant star systems.

Again, this is exactly the kind of grandly dismissive arrogance that scholars in “the humanities” bristle at when it’s directed their way. If I wrote “Understanding the fundamental laws governing our universe is more important than learning to read poetry in dead languages,” my colleagues on the other side of campus would jump all over me. And rightly so, because I’d be a condescending dick. It’s no less offensive coming the other way.

I wouldn’t be where I am and doing what I do if I didn’t find value in the study of art and literature. But it absolutely drives me nuts when people who do this stuff for a living offer defenses of their field that are just smugly elitist platitudes and soaring vagueness. Again and again, I read these supposedly stirring defenses of “the humanities” and come away with the impression that their principal virtue is teaching you how to sound smart while avoiding answering a direct question. And that’s a skill set we could stand to have a lot less of.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Football, Harmonic Oscillation, Parallel Worlds, Citizen Science, and Optics

I was out of town last week, and doing talk prep leading up to that, so it’s been a little while since my last collection of Forbes links. Here’s the latest from over there:

— Football Physics: The Forces Behind Those Big Hits: A look at force, momentum, and acceleration in tackling.

— The Science Of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: What Is Quantum Harmonic Oscillation? A question on Twitter provides an excuse to use some video of The Pip bouncing on playground equipment to discuss the physics of the harmonic oscillator in both classical and quantum forms.

— The Science Of Alternate Worlds: The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D thing was prompted by some technobabble about how to move to another dimension, which indirectly led to this post about ideas in modern physics that sorta-kinda look like the alternate worlds of science fiction.

— Football Physics: What Fantasy Sports Players Have In Common With Planet Hunters: A look at “citizen science” as a possible analogue of fantasy sports for science.

— Football Physics: Removing The Chains: A look at the physics of GPS with an eye toward improving the spotting of the ball in football.

— Physics Still Hasn’t Solved Some Everyday Mysteries: I got a photo of a “glory” while flying back from California, and was mildly surprised to find the explanation of the effect isn’t completely settled. But maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise.

I’ll also throw in a reminder here that Paige Jarreau is doing a survey of science blog readers, for SCIENCE! (in the form of her postdoctoral research on communication online). If you’ve got a few minutes, please go over there and help her build up a good data set.

Anyway, that’s a bunch of stuff. As usual, some of it is less successful than I’d like, but it was all fun to write, which is the key thing.

056/366: SpeakingKid

SteelyKid’s second-grade class is doing a “Zoom Time” thing where the kids make short presentations to the class about one of their interests. It’s basically an expanded show-and-tell, with fifteen minutes for talking, and five for “questions and compliments.”

She, of course, decided to talk about taekwondo, so I brought her sparring gear in and she suited up:

SteelyKid in sparring gear for her “Zoom Time” presentation. Daddy included for scale.

The highlight of the presentation was when she let the whole class come up and take turns punching her in the chest to demonstrate the effectiveness of the padding. I have a couple of really good shots of that, but I try to avoid posting photos of other people’s kids on the Internet, so you’ll have to settle for this one of her showing off her mouth guard.

In sort-of-related news, the Pip has started doing the “Little Dragons” taekwondo class (for 3-5 year olds), and is supposed to get a uniform today, so you can expect a photo of both kids in martial-arts attire at some point in the near-ish future…

(This picture might be cheating a bit in photo-a-day terms, because it was actually taken by SteelyKid’s teacher using my camera, but the pictures I took all had other kids in them. I like the way the framing and perspective in this shot make it look like I’m coming through a door that’s less than shoulder height on me…)

By the way, the “questions and compliments” period is a great idea– about half of the kids who raised their hands were just offering praise: “This was a great Zoom Time because it made me want to try taekwondo so I could be like you.” I think adult academia could stand to adopt this idea.