Chad Orzel's Blog, page 5

344-352/366: Wetland Walk

Another in the sadly delayed wrapping-up of my photo-a-day project. These are all pictures from a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park. We took the kids over there one time, but a thunderstorm started coming in before we got very far. While the kids were at my parents’, I decided to go over one afternoon and take a more thorough walk around the place. This ended up going quite a bit longer than I had expected, as I misremembered part of the trail map, but I got some good photos out of it.

344/366: Fake Jungle

Part of the old Lock 19 from the Erie Canal, cosplaying as a ruined Mayan temple.

The park is technically both a nature preserve and a historical preserve, the historical part mostly being a stretch of the old Erie Canal, with the towpath serving as part of the hiking trail network. At one end of the park, there are the remains of an old lock from the canal system; it’s not all as overgrown as this, but I like the way this looks like some sort of Indiana Jones movie set.

345/366: OBSwamp

Dead trees in a swampy bit of the Vischer Ferry preserve,

The park is very flat, mostly down at the level of the river, and includes some swampy bits. Which feature the obligatory skeletal trees poking out of wet patches. I’ve never been certain whether this is technically a defining characteristic of a swamp, but they do look kind of cool.

345/366: BW Bulge

Black and white shot of an interestingly textured tree.

One of the things I thought about doing with this was taking a few days at some point to deliberately shoot stuff in black and white. The timing never worked out for that, but here’s a token nod in that direction, a tree with an interesting bulge in the bark that was very nearly B&W even before I changed the color settings in GIMP.

346/366: Trick of the Light I

Grass on the edge of deep woods.

347/366: Trick of the Light II

Pink flower catching a stray sunbeam in a shady spot.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do with the camera, but had a hard time with, is to capture cool transient light effects. I have dozens and dozens of shots of different scenes where the thing I was trying to capture was a particular effect of the light, and it just doesn’t pop on the screen the way it did in person.

I can’t say with any confidence that I’ve gotten better at this, but it does occasionally work out all right.

348/366: Bugs I

Bumblebee headed into a flower to look for nectar.

349/366: Bugs II

A butterfly striking a dramatic pose.

This was the second-best hike I’ve taken this summer, in terms of getting photos of wildlife– second to taking the kids to Vroman’s Nose and seeing a peregrine falcon. This one got a lot of different critters, including some insects. I’m not sure what these flowers are called, but they were everywhere, and it was neat to see how the bees wriggled their whole bodies inside. And this butterfly– not sure if it’s a monarch or a viceroy– was kind enough to settle on a high tree branch where it made a nice photo against the sky.

(Not pictured: about a billion tiny flying midges, because fuck those annoying little bastards.)

350/366: Tuck

A turtle sunning itself on a log.

Also out in great numbers: turtles sunning themselves on various rocks and logs along the banks of the canal. These generally dove into the water as soon as they noticed me, so walking along the tow path was accompanied by a string of loud “PLOP” noises from either side as turtles made a break for it. I got a few good shots, though, thanks to the telephoto lens.

351/366: Then Again, Too Few to Mention

Egrets in flight at Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve.

I spent several minutes watching this pair of egrets soaring and swooping around each other across a stretch of still water. I’m not sure if they were courting or fighting, but it went on for a good while, and was very cool to watch.

352/366: Action Sequence

Great blue herons in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve.

The other birds of note on this particular day were great blue herons, at least two of which were out and active. I stumbled across the one seen standing here when I think it may have been sleeping– its head was tucked down so I couldn’t see it, and it was so still I wondered whether it was a headless decoy of some sort. Then it heard a noise and picked its head up, and I got a couple of shots before it exploded into the air.

The flying one is actually a different bird, taken earlier in the walk– I have a whole bunch of heron photos– but I felt like playing around in GIMP, and it went nicely with the other two.

Probably two more photo-dump installments to come, these a little more human-centric.

336-343/366: Panoramas and Sillyheads

I’ve got a big backlog of photo-a-day pictures, but finding time to edit and post them is a major challenge. I’ve got nearly all the editing done, now, so I’ll start putting blocks of stuff up when I have time (generally very early in the morning, as I’m awake before everyone else in Chateau Steelypips). Since we’ve long since stopped even pretending that these are date-specific, I’ll just collect together groups by vague themes:

Panorama-rama

At some point this summer I started playing around with stitching together bunches of shots to make panoramic photos. Some of this involves playing with open-source software, but like most free things from German Unix geeks, it’s not all that easy to figure out how it works, and its automatic mode sometimes does utterly bizarre things. Honestly, the most effective way to make these is to upload a batch of picture to Google Photos, and wait an hour or two in hopes that its auto-panorama routine will notice them and do the job for me. Anyway, here’s a bunch of photos stitched together into a smaller number of panoramas (panoramae?):

336/366: Rooftops

Downtown Schenectady from the roof of the parking garage on Broadway.

337/366: Ample Parking

The roof of the parking garage in downtown Schenectady.

I’m currently sentenced to spending two days a week (most weeks, anyway) at the courthouse in downtown Schenectady, serving on a grand jury (pro tip: DON’T DO THIS. If you get summoned for a grand jury, ask to switch to a trial, or move to another state.). The parking is in a garage down the hill from the courthouse, so I took some shots from the roof there. The second one, of the vast empty parking lot, looks to me like it’s waiting for ninjas to attack, or maybe the Agents from The Matrix…

(One of these was stitched in Hugin, the other by Google Photos because Hugin utterly choked on it. Guess which is which.)

338/366: Rugby Field

The rugby field at Union, just below the Nott Memorial.

339/366: Porch View

Panorama from the “porch” outside the Olin Science Center at Union College.

I took the camera over to campus in late August, and was thus obliged to take some shots of the Nott Memorial. I have keys for the observatory, which has a nice “porch” that overlooks campus, so I took advantage of that access to get a good shot from an uncommon angle.

340/366: Wetland

A section of wetland in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve.

On another day, I went for a hike in the Vischer Ferry Nature Preserve over in Clifton Park (which produced a bunch of animal photos coming in a future photo dump), and took this as generally representative of the landscape. Not shown: approximately one billion tiny irritating flying midges.

Random Phone Picture

341/366: Fogged Up

The Starbucks where I do a lot of writing, its windows all fogged up by a rapid change in humidity.

Speaking of things that are damp, we’ve had the usual late-summer wild swings in weather, including a stretch of very pleasant days followed by the sudden return of gross, swampy weather. This is the Starbucks where I do a lot of writing in the mornings before work, and no, that’s not frosted glass. The fog effect, with the early-morning sunlight, was striking enough that I took a photo.

DAAAAAAADDDDD!!!!!

342/366: Dadface

SteelyKid and The Pip doing the faces they make when I deliberately say wrong things.

One of the totally unexpected aspects of parenthood has turned out to be the amount of time I spend pretending to be a complete idiot to entertain the kids. We have a running game where I deliberately say things wrong, so they can correct me. For example, I complimented The Pip on his Aquaman shirt for one of the above, and he said “DAAAAAADDD! It’s a Captain America shirt!”

They might be hamming it up just a tiny bit for the camera, here.

343/366: Scooterheads

SteelyKid and The Pip taking a break on a scooter walk.

On a couple of the pleasant evenings, we got the kids out for scooter walks, generally by showing SteelyKid that an egg was close to hatching in Pokemon Go. This was one of those, when they took a break to sit down on a random couch that somebody had put out by the curb.

That’s all I have time for right now– have to go get the kids up for The Pip’s first day at kindergarten…

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Fast Cars and Spherical Cows

It’s been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it’s the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I’ll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material…

— Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said “That seems fishy…” After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.

— The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics? Thinking Like A Physicist: Some musings about how the trickiest part of learning to be a physicist is getting the mindset, particularly the highly reductionist use of “spherical cow” sorts of approximations.

So, the first of these really pissed off a lot of Car Guys, who left tons of comments, and some angry emails and tweets, pointing to a variety of other cars that supposedly accelerate at large multiples of the acceleration of gravity. I wasn’t especially moved by most of this, in part because they’re not particularly relevant to the question of whether the Tesla result is surprising. It’s true that I didn’t discuss the possibility of aerodynamic down forces that would allow for a larger frictional force, but those aren’t actually important for a normal-ish car like a Tesla. A top fuel dragster is a completely different animal, and I’m not especially surprised that they work differently than an ordinary car.

The other issue I have with the angry reaction is that it really misses the point of the post (which, admittedly, I probably should’ve made more explicit). That is, I don’t actually care whether the Tesla accelerates at 0.98g or 1.1g. My purpose in writing that piece, like most of what I write, really had more to do with the physics mindset than the specific numerical values. I was explaining my reaction and reasoning: when I read the original piece, I was immediately skeptical for reasons that have to do with physics, which sent me off looking for more information that might explain the faster-than-expected time in a way that didn’t require surprising physics, and learned about a timing thing that’s in the right ballpark to account for the apparent discrepancy.

I thought that was an interesting process (obviously, or I wouldn’t’ve been sucked into Googling stuff about car testing), and worth laying out. I’m really not remotely invested in the specific numerical results– if the tires they use turn out to be much stickier than the usual run of things so the acceleration is a little higher than I would expect, well, that’s a nice bit of trivia. It doesn’t really change my thinking about why that was a piece worth writing, which is largely that it illustrates the toy-model-building described in the second post. Thinking like a physicist means that the 0-60mph time isn’t just a random factoid that could take on absolutely any value, it’s something with a physical origin that you can model in a simple way, which leads to an expectation about what the time should be for a relatively ordinary car. And thinking “that’s funny…” does, in fact, lead to something that’s a little funny in the timing, which is also interesting.

But, yeah, I should’ve made that clearer, because, wow, are there people who are deeply invested in the accuracy of those numbers…

Anyway, that’s the story of my recent blogging. Which may become sparse for the next several months, as I’ve gotten myself stuck on a grand jury that sits two days a week, and classes start next Wednesday, so my time is going to be very tight for the immediate future.

314-335/366: Massive Backlog

It’s been over a month since I did a photo-a-day post, largely because I haven’t been taking many pictures for a variety of reasons. I do still mean to get a year’s worth of good photos done, but the “daily” part has completely disintegrated at this point.

As a way of getting somewhat back on track, I’ve edited up the best of the shots I took in the loooong break since the last batch I posted. This spans all the way up to the present, and a few are just cell-phone snaps, but it’s better than nothing. since these aren’t really associated with particular days, I’ll group them thematically instead.

Flora and Fauna:

314/366: Spiderweb

A spiderweb in the back yard of Chateau Steelypips, catching the early-morning light.

315/366: Lit Tree

A low-hanging branch catching the morning sunlight.

The second of these is what I went outside to try to photograph– I liked the light effect of the sun hitting this branch (which has since been pruned away, because it hung down to about mid-chest level on me, and was a major impediment to moving around the back yard). when I went out to get that shot, though, I noticed the spiderweb stretched between it and the tall arbor vitae (it’s just visible in the lower right of the tree picture), which was an even better photo.

316/366: Lilies

Tiger lilies in front of our house.

317/366: Inordinately Fond

Beetle on the lilies in front of Chateau Steelypips.

These flowers are right in front of the bay window on the front of our house, and are really beautiful when they bloom. They also attract all manner of bugs, but that’s not a terrible thing…

318/366: Nest

The bird nest in our front-porch light.

Last year, we had house sparrows nesting in a hole in the outside wall near SteelyKid’s room. We plugged that hole up, so in retaliation, they moved to our front porch light. One of the glass panes broke a while back when I was changing the bulb, and I didn’t bother trying to find a replacement, thinking there wasn’t any problem with leavig it open. Shows what I know…

It stays light enough late enough that we don’t really use this light in the summer, so I think they managed to successfully hatch and raise some chicks in this. At least, I used to hear lots of frantic peeping as I went in and out the front door, and I don’t any more…

When it gets cold, I’ll clean this out, and maybe cover over the gap so they don’t do this again. Which probably means next summer they’ll be nesting inside my car, or something.

319/366: Why?

Wild turkey crossing Balltown Road in Niskayuna, taken through the windshield of my car.

Why did the turkey cross the road? To get into a photo dump post, of course.

Miscellany

320/366: Waves

The wave pool at Six Flags Great Escape.

This is actually a still frame from a short video of the wave pool at Six Flags, that I used for a physics post over at Forbes. The kids could’ve stayed in this all day, and the next time we go there, they probably will.

321/366: Focus

Shots of a couple of toys with different lenses, demonstrating how to make distant background objects look huge.

Another image from a post at Forbes, this one on using long focal lengths to make background objects look huge.

322/366: Physics

The computer apparatus for the spring lab I’m writing up.

323/366: Alignment

The hanging spring for the lab I’m working on, fortuitously aligned with the corner of the wall behind it.

One of the many projects I’m juggling at the moment is to write up a pedagogical paper based on an intro mechanics lab I do with springs. This involves using a computer to record the motion of a mass on a spring, so just in case I need it, I took a photo when I was taking example data.

The second picture just shows the hanging spring, and wouldn’t be interesting except for a chance alignment: without realizing, I managed to line the metal pole holding the whole apparatus up with the corner of a pillar in the wall behind. I probably wouldn’t’ve been able to do this on purpose, but by not paying attention, I was able to create kind of a weird effect with the background.

324/366: Demos

Steve Rolston and Emily Edwards of JQI doing demos at the Schrodinger Sessions workshop.

One of the things keeping me away from the computer was a second round of the Schrodinger Sessions workshop at JQI. I forgot to bring the good camera with me (which tells you something about what my state of mind has been of late), so the only documentation you get is this crappy cell-phone snap of Steve and Emily doing magnetic levitation demos while writers take pictures with their phones…

325/366: Rainbow

SteelyKid’s arm, covered with rainbows that she mostly painted herself.

The kids had a couple of play-dates in there, which included getting crazy with the face paint. SteelyKid did most of these rainbows (on her left arm) herself.

326/366: Glasses

Loops in the power line behind the Schenectady Amtrak station look like glasses.

Credit for this one ought to go to The Pip. We were up on the platform at the Amtrak station, for reasons that will become clear later, and he said “Hey, that wire looks like glasses!”

327/366: Party Prep

White plastic chairs getting ready for SteelyPalooza 2016,

Another big time sink in the last month was SteelyKid’s eighth birthday party, hosted at our house, which required a fair bit of prep. This shot of a scattering of white plastic chairs in front of the play set is your random artsy shot for this batch.

327/366: Hoops

Noon hoops at the Viniar Center.

I actually took this for eventual use in a blog post, but it’s good documentation of one of the things I’ve spent (not nearly enough) time on: playing pick-up hoops at lunchtime.

Sillyheads

328/366: Catch ‘Em All

The kids with bird-type Pokemon.

After a few weeks, I gave into SteelyKid’s pleas, and installed Pokemon GO on my phone. which means I now have to wrestle it out of her hands every time we leave the house, but on the bright side, it makes for some amusing photos.

It also leads to weird wandering in hopes of encountering new critters, which is why we were up on the Amtrak platform (after dinner at the Irish pub across the parking lot) to get photo 326 above.

329/366: PaintedKid

SteelyKid, with face-paint by Kate.

SteelyKid did the rainbows you saw above, but Kate has become a real face-painting master, as you can see here.

330/366: TigerDude

The Pip is a scary tiger.

We’ve also had several birthday parties in there, including one that provided the Little Dude with this tiger mask.

331/366: Bat Kid

This isn’t terrifying at all.

The same party provided SteelyKid a chance to show off her climbing and hanging skills.

332/366: Door Leash

The Pip built a remote door closer, and is very pleased with himself.

At some point, The Pip got the idea to string together some dog leashes and attach them to the handle of his door, letting him pull it closed from halfway down the stairs. This led to an amazingly long time spent “trapping” Kate in his room.

333/366: Behave!

Kate cautioning The Pip not to do whatever mischevious thing he’s planning.

This might be my favorite photo of the whole lot, for the combination of facial expressions.

334/366: Lollipop Swap

SteelyKid in negotiations with her BFF about who gets which lollipop flavors.

This past week was the end of the summer day camp that SteelyKid goes to, which saw the kids receive a remarkable amount of candy. Which was then redistributed through a complex series of negotiations over who liked which flavors best.

335/366: Flying Robot Army

SteelyKid setting up her drone for a test flight.

Finally, here’s SteelyKid with the most awesome of her birthday presents, a radio-controlled quad-copter with a camera, from her Aunt Erin in California. Because who doesn’t want their own personal drone? Historians may well note this as a pivotal step toward SteelyKid’s eventual takeover of the world with the help of an army of flying robots.

——

So, that’s a great big bunch of photos, all right. which still leaves me around 20 behind the photo-a-day pace, but I intend to make an effort to catch back up before the end of the month. I’m going to start carrying the camera with me more regularly, and see what I can come up with from that.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Camera Tricks, College Advice, Hot Fans, and Lots of Quantum

Several weeks of silence here, for a bunch of reasons that mostly boil down to “being crazy busy.” I’ve got a bunch of physics posts over at Forbes during that interval, though:

— The Camera Trick That Justifies The Giant Death Star: I busted out camera lenses and the kids’ toys to show how you might make the Death Star appear as huge as on the Rogue One poster.

— How Quantum Physics Could Protect You Against Embarrassing Email Hacks: Using the DNC email leak as an excuse to talk about quantum cryptography.

— Four Things You Should Expect To Get Out Of College: Some advice for students starting their college careers about what will really matter for long-term success (the time scale of a career, not just a first job).

— How Quantum Sudoku Demonstrate Entanglement: One of the things contributing to “crazy busy” was the second round of the Schrodinger Sessions workshop, at which I heard a clever analogy for entanglement from Howard Wiseman by way of Alan Migdall, and turned it into a blog post.

— Is Your Fan Actually Heating The Air?: We talk about temperature as measuring how fast atoms in a gas are moving. Does that mean that a fan setting air into motion is actually increasing the air temperature?

— Three Tricks Physicists Use To Observe Quantum Behavior: Another post prompted by the Schrodinger Sessions, this one a big-picture look at the general approaches physicists take to doing experimental demonstrations of quantum phenomena.

So, you know, that’s a bunch of stuff, all right.

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Roman Engineering, Water, and Baseball

It’s been a month since the last links dump of posts from Forbes, though, really, I took a couple of weeks off there, so it’s been less than that in terms of active blogging time. But I’ve put up a bunch of stuff in July, so here are some links:

— The Physics Of Ancient Roman Architecture: First of a couple posts inspired by our trip to Rome, this one looking at the basic mechanics of the key structural element of Roman building, the arch.

— What Ancient Roman Buildings Teach Us About Science And Engineering: Second post about Roman construction, in which looking into the question of how they designed their major structures leads to thinking about the artificiality of the distinction between “science” and “engineering.”

— The Microscopic Physics Of Beautiful Fountains: Prompted by taking photos of a bunch of Roman fountains, a look at how microscopic forces create surface tension, which in turn makes most of the cool effects of splashing water.

— Baseball Physics: Real Curves And Dead Balls: A brief sports interlude, prompted by a NIST video about baseball-related research by former director Lyman Briggs.

— How To Stick Atoms And Molecules Together: A follow-on of sorts to the surface-tension-in-fountains post, looking at the origin of some of the microscopic forces that hold liquids together.

— Pools And Beaches: The Fun Physics Of Water Waves: Rounding out the accidental water blogging theme, a look at the physics of water waves prompted by taking SteelyKid and The Pip first to Jones Beach and then to a wave pool at Six Flags Great Escape.

So, anyway, if you’re looking for some uplifting physics content to buoy your spirits during the political conventions, here’s a good reading list to start with.

306-313/366: Strong Island

A delayed photo dump this week, because I was solo-parenting last week while Kate was traveling for work, and then I took the sillyheads down to Long Island to visit my grandmother while Kate was at Readercon. Recovering from all that took a lot of time, plus there was a bunch of computer wrangling in there. But, on the bright side, you get several cute-kid photos in this set…

And here’s a bonus image, which captures something of the flavor of travel with the sillyheads:

Selfie in the car with the kids engrossed in their tablets.

(That was stopped at a light, not actively driving, so don’t waste everyone’s time leaving chiding comments about the dangers of using phones while driving.)

306/366: Beach

Panorama of Jones Beach State Park.

One of the main reasons I wanted to get down to Long Island with the kids was the chance to visit one of my favorite spots, Jones Beach State Park. Robert Moses was a sonofabitch in a lot of ways, but setting the prime beach area on the Atlantic side of Long Island aside for a public park redeems a lot.

This is a panorama stitched together from about five shots, and the panorama-stitching program I have really struggled with these– I have some wider shots, but it comepletely choked on those, I think because of the lack of vertical landmarks. This one worked out reasonably well, though I had to crop out some weirdness at the edges. You can see a larger version on Google Photos.

307/366: Waves

The Pip and SteelyKid taunt the waves from high ground.

I love Jones Beach because I enjoy body-surfing in the waves there. The day we went wasn’t great for that– it was kind of grey and cloudy, and there was a lot of wind-driven chop that made it hard to find good waves for riding, but I had a great time in the water. The kids were a little more dubious about the ocean, but had a great time running up to and then away from the breaking waves. There was a lot of “Ha, ha, you can’t get us!” from the top of this little sand ridge, and shrieking when a few waves topped it.

308/366: Tunnel

The tunnel in the sand that the kids spent a long time constructing.

It wouldn’t be a trip to the beach without building a sand castle. In this case, they didn’t build up but dug down, making a long tunnel that they’d pour water into from a bucket. The goal was to partially fill “ponds” at both ends with water, and there was much cheering when it worked.

309/366: Rats With Wings

Gull taking flight on the boardwalk at Jones Beach.

It wouldn’t be a photo dump post here without at least one bird picture. And the beach is, of course, overrun with seagulls. So here are several shots of a gull taking flight, composited together in GIMP, because it was that kind of morning a few days ago.

310/366: Footprints

Random artsy shot of seagull tracks in the sand.

Here’s your random artsy shot for this set: the complex pattern of footprints left by gulls swarming all over the sand.

311/366: Hot Lava

The kids playing “Lava Walk” at my grandmother’s house.

After a morning at the beach, we spent a bunch of time at my grandmother’s, where the kids amused themselves playing “Lava Walk.” The floor was held to be hot lava, so you weren’t allowed to touch the rug, but had to walk on various books and papers. SteelyKid managed to get all the way across the room and back this way.

312/366: Climber

The kids making their way up the awesome climber at the Long Island Children’s Museum.

Before heading home on Sunday, we went to the Long Island Children’s Museum, which is very convenient to my grandmother’s house. We’d never been there before, but it turns out to be pretty awesome, especially the giant climber they have right inside the entrance, with several levels of carpet-covered wooden platforms making a sort of three-dimensional maze. The Pip was just tall enough to go in, and it was the biggest hit of the whole visit.

313/366: Optics

The kids in front of an array of mirrors at the Long Island Children’s Museum.

The rest of the LICM includes a bunch of very well-done science-museum exhibits, and as an AMO physics person I’m obliged to include at least one photo from the optics section. This was a semicircle of mirrors at slight angles to each other, and the kids greatly enjoyed mugging in front of it.

All in all, a very successful (but exhausting) road trip. The LICM in particular was a great discovery, because it’s a perfect morning activity to burn off some energy before lunch and the long car ride home. We’ll definitely be going back there in the future.

Political Query: Who Should I Give Money To?

A question for the more politically plugged-in folks out there: If I want to donate money this election cycle, who should I be looking at giving it to?

OK, that probably needs some unpacking, but given Internet attention spans, I wanted to get the basic question right up front before a passing Pokemon draws people away…

So, the last couple of presidential elections, I donated to the Obama campaign, but it doesn’t really look like Hilary Clinton desperately needs my money. And I’ve given to the Democratic party more generally (DSCC and DCCC) in the past, but given their track record in recent legislative elections, I’m not convinced that’s money well spent– that is, I’m not sure they’re optimally allocating their resources.

So, I’d sort of like to give my regular political donation (which is of order a few hundred bucks) directly to a candidate for whom it would do some good. There are way more races out there than I can really keep track of, though, thus this appeal.

So: who’s a candidate for the House or Senate either running as a Democrat or who will caucus with the Democrats who’s in a race that’s potentially winnable who would benefit from additional cash? Bonus points for opposing a particularly objectionable incumbent, but I don’t want to just protest vote, I’d like to give money to somebody who has a chance of actually winning.

Note: I’m not committing to blindly donating money to any random candidate people name in comments here, I’m just soliciting names for possible donations. I’ll check out the policy views and the status of the race for anybody whose name comes up, and if there’s somebody particularly appealing, I’ll throw a little money their way. I’d prefer to directly contribute to a candidate rather than some progressive umbrella group just on bang-for-buck grounds, so please don’t give me sales pitches for activist organizations. And if you want to berate me for being excessively liberal, or insufficiently liberal, well, I can’t really stop you from leaving a comment, but I’ll mock you quietly.

Why Physicists Disparage Philosophers, In Three Paragraphs

Periodically, some scientific celebrity from the physical sciences– Neil deGrasse Tyson or Stephen Hawking, say– will say something dismissive about philosophy, and kick off a big rush of articles about how dumb their remarks are, how important philosophy is, and so on. Given that this happens on a regular basis, you might wonder why it is that prominent physicists keep saying snide things about philosophy. But never fear, the New York Times is here to help, with an op-ed by James Blachowicz, an emeritus philosopher from Loyola, grandly titled There Is No Scientific Methods.

It’s actually not that bad as essays about science from philosophers go, until the very end. Blachowicz’s point is that the process of scientific discovery has more in common with other disciplines than generally appreciated. He kicks this off with a reference to a long-ago talk about the writing of poetry, but most of the essay is devoted to a comparison between a Socratic sort of argument defining courage and Kepler’s discovery that Mars has an elliptical orbit.

The specific examples he uses are kind of dry and abstract, but I’m mostly on board with his argument. I would pretty much have to be, having written a whole book arguing that scientific thinking plays an essential role in everyday life. But then we come to the final three paragraphs:

If scientific method is only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry, how is it that the results of science are more reliable than what is provided by these other forms? I think the answer is that science deals with highly quantified variables and that it is the precision of its results that supplies this reliability. But make no mistake: Quantified precision is not to be confused with a superior method of thinking.

I am not a practicing scientist. So who am I to criticize scientists’ understanding of their method?

I would turn this question around. Scientific method is not itself an object of study for scientists, but it is an object of study for philosophers of science. It is not scientists who are trained specifically to provide analyses of scientific method.

I have any number of problems with this, starting with the fact that it feels like he realized he was up against his word limit for the column, and just stopped, like an undergrad whose term paper crossed onto the tenth page in Word. We get a thorough exploration of blind alleys toward a definition of courage, then dismiss all of science with “highly quantified variables”, and off to the faculty club for brandy.

But I think this horrible shruggie of an ending also serves to illustrate what drives (many) physicists (and other scientists) nuts about philosophers. That is, he makes a pretty decent argument by analogy that scientific thinking and philosophical thinking are more similar than not, but then fails to do… anything, really. As a scientist reading along, this positively screams for a “Therefore…” followed by some sort of action item. You’ve made an argument that the scientific method is “only one form of a general method employed in all human inquiry,” great. I’m with you on that. And now, what do we do with that information?

I find this incredibly frustrating, in no small part because (as noted above) I wrote a whole book making a similar argument. And I had a pretty clear take-away message in mind when I did that, namely that the universality of the scientific method shows that science is not, in fact, incomprehensible to non-scientists. We can all think like scientists, and knowing that should give us courage to use those reasoning skills to our advantage.

Now, obviously, I’m a scientist, and thus inclined to favor a conclusion encouraging non-scientists to take some lessons from the study of “highly quantified variables” and apply them to their own activities. But I’d also be happy with a conclusion that ran in the opposite direction– that the commonality on methods should lead scientists to show more respect for their colleagues in other fields of study. That’s also a reasonable argument to make.

But instead, it’s just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And while this is an especially abrupt ending, it’s just an extreme example of a pretty general phenomenon when dealing with philosophers and other scholars in “the humanities.” As a scientist, I often find myself nodding along with the steps of the process to work something out, only to be left waiting for some sort of concrete conclusion about what comes next. There’s a comprehensive failure to build on prior results, or even suggest how someone else might build on them in the future, and as a physicist I find this maddening.

(Of course, the absolute worst part of this tendency is that it carries over into faculty governance. As a result, we have interminable meetings in which people ask questions but aren’t interested in hearing answers, or identify problems but decline to make any policy recommendations toward solving them…)

And there’s an extra bonus scoop of “maddening” when, as in this case, the great big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is followed by an assertion that study of these Important Questions is a matter that must be left to philosophers. Because, clearly, scientists simply aren’t equipped to follow through this kind of analysis and then… not do anything with what they’ve learned thereby.

So, if you wonder why it is that scientists (particularly physicists) tend to roll their eyes and sigh heavily when the subject of philosophy comes up, I think this is an excellent case study. And it’s something to take into account the next time somebody sits down to write (or edit) yet another essay on Why Philosophy Matters To Science. If you want physicists to take philosophy more seriously, you need an “and therefore…” at the end. Or they’re likely to come up with their own more colorful but less helpful suggestions of what you can do with your research.

300-305/366: Peregrination

A while back, I went down to Vroman’s Nose in Middleburgh to go for a hike, and found a sign saying that peregrine falcons are known to nest on the cliffs. Since the peregrine falcon is SteelyKid’s absolute favorite bird, and the subject of her school research project, this seemed like a good location for a family hike, so I took the kids down there yesterday. And even though that was really only one day out of a whole week, I got a bunch of really good photos from it, so it will supply all the material for this week’s photo dump.

300/366: Panorama

Panorama of farmland from the top of Vroman’s Nose.

The view from the top of Vroman’s Nose is pretty amazing, but a little hard to capture with the lenses I have. However, you can stitch together several of these to make a pretty cool panorama…

I took shots for multiple panoramic views, and uploaded the whole batch to a Google Photos album in hopes that they would magically decide to do the stitching for me. The Google gods are fickle, though, so I ended up having to download software to do it myself. This is one of those largely inscrutable written-by-UNIX-geeks packages where I’m really not sure what the hell it’s doing, but it did a nice job with this one (three shots with the 24mm lens), and one even bigger (10 shots at the minimum zoom of the telephoto, 55mm); both of them are in the Google Photos album if you want a higher-resolution look.

301/366: Nervewracking

SteelyKid and The Pip wave from a precarious position.

We had a little drama on the way up, but the kids eventually cheered up. Which was good, on the one hand, but on the bad side led to a lot of this kind of thing: the kids getting way out ahead of me, along the edge of a sheer cliff a couple hundred feet high. This was only a little terrifying, especially since I was solo-parenting this trip (Kate has a stomach bug, and stayed home in bed).

302/366: Expounding

The Pip holds forth atop Vroman’s Nose.

To be fair, SteelyKid showed a good degree of caution about the cliff edges. Her brother, on the other hand, was prone to grand sweeping gestures as he talked about how high up we were, and how wide the valley was, and so on. At least I managed to get him to stop skipping and jumping while we were near the cliffs…

303/366: Sibs

SteelyKid and The Pip looking over Scoharie County from arop Vroman’s Nose.

Scary as it occasionally was, it was worth it for super cute moments like this. Which I wasn’t sure we’d actually get, as The Pip ran into SteelyKid with his walking stick on the way up the trail, giving her a small cut behind her knee that became a huge issue for a while. About fifteen minutes before I took this, I thought she’d be more likely to thrown him off the cliff. Though that would’ve involved walking, which she was loudly insisting she couldn’t do. While stomping off along the cliff edge faster than I could herd The Pip after her…

Fortunately, the whole thing was redeemed by:

304/366: Flight

Peregrine falcon in flight over Vroman’s Nose.

An actual peregrine falcon, “living free and in the wild,” as The Pip informed all the many hikers we passed on our way back down the path to the car. SteelyKid was the first to spot it, flying around and squawking agitatedly at us; I suspect we were directly over the ledge where its nest was located. It made a couple passes at or below the cliff level, then settled on a dead tree branch for a bit before deciding we weren’t actually a threat, and soaring off overhead, then diving behind a rock outcropping.

And, of course, the period of posing let me get this:

305/366: Falcon

Peregrine falcon at Vroman’s Nose.

This is actually a small crop from a much larger photo, because even at max zoom on my telephoto lens (250mm), it wasn’t a huge fraction of the frame. The really 6000×4000 sensor paid off big time, though, because even a small piece of a big frame has plenty of resolution to look awesome.

(Thus, I do not need to blow several hundred dollars on an even-bigger zoom lens. I repeat, I do not need an even-bigger zoom lens.)

(I’m also reasonably certain that this really is a peregrine falcon. But if we misidentified some other type of raptor, for the love of God, don’t tell SteelyKid…)

And despite her grievous injury, the sight of her very favorite bird living free and in the wild cheered SteelyKid up enough that she just about skipped back down the mountain, chattering happily. So, I really couldn’t’ve asked for a better result from a morning hike.