Chad Orzel's Blog, page 9

184/366: Odyssey

I seem to have fallen into a thing where I take pictures more frequently than I edit and post them. I blame the kids– SteelyKid got sick on Sunday (her third bout with strep in the last five months), and The Pip has decided to get a jump on Daylight Savings by waking up an hour early every day this week. Those both wiped out a lot of time I otherwise would’ve used for photo processing and blogging.

Anyway, this past Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind tournament for SteelyKid and her team. I obviously have a bunch of photos of this; just as obviously they mostly include other people’s kids, and I’m not willing to post those. But here’s a crowd shot:

The “dance party” phase of the Odyssey of the Mind tournament last weekend.

That should give you some idea of the scale of the event. This was the “dance party” portion, after all the teams had finished competing but before the final results had been tallied.

This was a looooong day– we had to get there at 7:30 for the kids to do their Spontaneous problem at 8:00, then weigh in their structure at 9:15, and then their performance was at 10:15. And the award ceremony wasn’t until 4:00…

The kids did a very nice job with their performance– they flubbed a line or two of their performance, but nothing too bad, and their 13.5-gram balsa wood structure held 55 pounds before breaking, which was pretty impressive. They ended up finishing third in their division for their problem, which is pretty awesome considering this is the first time their school has ever had a team.

SteelyKid kind of hit a wall toward the end of the day, which was probably the strep starting to bite. But the less said about that, the better…

What Should I See At The March Meeting?

I’m going to be at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore next week. This is the largest physics meeting of the year, with an emphasis on condensed matter physics (which is actually the largest single area of study within physics, though media overemphasis on particle physics and astrophysics might lead you to think otherwise). The program for the meeting is, um, kind of intimidating.

So, this post has two purposes:

1) If you’re also going to be at the March Meeting, let me know, and maybe we can arrange some kind of bloggy-people meet-up.

2) More importantly, if you’re in the fields that call the March Meeting home, I’d be very grateful for a guide to the “hot topics,” especially if you can point out some especially good speakers I should make sure to catch.

My own talk is a ten-minute report on last summer’s Schrödinger Sessions workshop, on Wednesday afternoon. Other than that, I have no solid obligations to do anything in particular, but I’m hoping to use this to get some good material for blogging. So, guidance would be much appreciated.

182-183/366: Dunking and Monkeying

Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I’m just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that’s the “featured image” for this post.

182/366: Dunking Dude:

The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.

Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a “nickel carnival” as a fundraiser for… something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate’s helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought the Pip along because it was really a lot of running around in an elementary-school gym. Here, we see him deomnstrating that while he’s just a Little Dude, he’s got his father’s hops.

(That is, like me, he could easily dunk a basketball if allowed to sit on the shoulders of another person…)

183/366: ClimbingKid:

SteelyKid climbing the railing at the Odyssey of the Mind party.

Saturday was the big Odyssey of the Mind competition, about which more later. After the competing was finished, while they were tallying scores, they had a “dance party” which basically involved a DJ playing really loud music in the gym while a few hundred kids ran around screaming. There were a dozen-plus epic games of tag going on through the crowd, involving non-overlapping sets of kids.

At one point, SteelyKid and one of her friends started hanging on the safety railings on the end of the bleachers (having run underneath the bleachers a bunch of times already). Then they demonstrated that they could, in fact, climb up these hand-over-hand, which you can see SteelyKid doing here. When on the ground, the bottom of this particular railing is right around head high for her, so she’s hauled herself a good way up it already.

This is the official halfway point of the photo-a-day project. I feel like I ought to do some summing-up, maybe, but we just reached the end of The Pip’s normal allocation of weekend-morning cartoons, so I need to go deal with that situation…

181/366: Luxury

There’s a sort of Internet tradition of posting photos of hotel-room views when traveling, so here’s a very slightly artsy version of same:

View from my hotel room in Urbana, IL.

The first time I looked out the window, there was a big-ass truck parked directly in front of it. I like this version a little better, though.

Kidding about the accommodations aside, I had a good time visiting the University of Illinois, and my talk there went very well. The travel to and from Champaign was less than enjoyable, but such is the airline industry in the modern US…

180/366: Delay

I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should’ve booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United flight into O’Hare, followed by an American flight to Champaign, both in aircraft that felt like scale models of actual jetliners.

And, of course, there was this:

Snow removal trucks on the runway at O’Hare International Airport.

That’s from the plane as we taxied to the gate in Chicago, in a moderate bit of snow. The amount of snow wouldn’t’ve made much difference in a small airport, but O’Hare is so overcongested that the slightest issue triggers a massive set of cascading failures that ended up with my original flight to Chicago delayed over an hour, my original flight to Champaign canceled outright, and the later flight I was rebooked onto delayed by more than an hour. Charmingly, the last of the official delays was put into the system after we started boarding (I got an email notification on the plane), which I suspect is a sleazy bookkeeping dodge to maintain some “on-time” percentage.

I did finally make it, better than four hours late, having spent a long time sitting in an airport bar, but that’s one of the least pleasant air travel experiences I’ve ever had. And I get to do it in reverse tomorrow, with the Chicago forecast again calling for light snow. Joy.

179/366: I Am Number Six

Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There’s a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I’d give that a look. And, indeed, the view of the river is pretty.

But there are also these:

Apparently, I live near the set of a cult British SF show.

That’s a fat piece of PVC pipe, painted bright green, rising about 7-8′ from the ground. And there are a couple dozen of these dotting the hillside in the park.

I don’t really have a clue what these could be for, but none of the thoughts I do have are particularly good. One is that there’s something buried under the hill that needs ventilation, and given that this is just down the road from GE’s research labs and a DoE-funded nuclear power research lab, I don’t like to think about what they might’ve used as landfill back in the day.

And, of course, the other obvious choice is that I’ve somehow landed in an episode of The Prisoner, because these really do have a cheesy British sci-fi sort of vibe…

178/366: Domes

I’m going to stop posting pictures of the Nott Memorial, really I am. But I got the idea a week or two ago of trying to see if there’s an angle where the observatory dome and the Nott dome look the same size, so I keep poking at that.

And, in fact, there is such an angle from the conference room in the Physics department:

The Union college Observatory dome and the Nott Memorial dome.

This involved a bit of precarious leaning-out to get clear of the window, but it’s close to what I had in mind. There’s another window that might be a slightly better angle, but it’s sealed with plastic against the winter chill, and I didn’t want to undo that.

The Schrödinger Sessions II: More Science for More Science Fiction

As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year’s writers, so we’re doing it again:

The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to phenomena like superposition, entanglement, and quantum information through a series of lectures by JQI scientists and tours of JQI laboratories. We hope this will inform and inspire new stories in print, on screen, and in electronic media, that will in turn inspire a broad audience to learn more about the weird and fascinating science of quantum physics and the transformative technologies it enables.

The workshop will be held at JQI from Thursday, July 28 through Saturday, July 30. Participants will be housed locally, with breakfast and lunch provided at the workshop; evenings will be free to allow participants to explore the Washington, DC area.

Participants will be selected on the basis of an application asking about personal background, interest, and publication history. We will work to ensure the greatest possible diversity of race and gender, as well as type of media (print, television, etc.), with an eye toward reaching the broadest audience. Applications will be accepted on-line from March 1 through March 20, 2015, and acceptance decisions will be made around April 15, 2015.

The online application form is now live, so if this is something you’d be interested in, check it out and send us an application. And please share this with anyone else you know who might be interested.

What To Tell Your Dog About Quantum Physics: The Movie

A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here:

It’s a bit under an hour, which must include the Q&A period at the end. So, if you’ve been wondering what sort of thing I do when I travel to give talks, well, here’s an example. And it’ll give you something to keep you entertained while I travel to Illinois to give another (different) talk tomorrow…

177/366: Landmark Interior

I’ve included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I’m a little hesitant to do another. But here’s an angle on it that doesn’t show up as much:

SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,

We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid’s RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest– most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the art exhbit and the cool tiled floor.