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Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman to Wreck My Productivity

As has been mentioned numerous other places, ESPN is backing a new Bill Simmons project, which basically sounds like a pop-culture blog network kind of thing, headlined by Simmons and Chuck Klosterman....

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Musical Poll: Sisters

I got home very late last night after my talk in New Paltz, the cold that I’ve been developing for the last week has hit full strength, and I’m giving an exam this morning. So here’s something...

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Science Poll: Get Real

If you look at the schedule of events for DAMOP next week, you will see that there is a movie showing scheduled for Tuesday night: Real Genius. This seems like an excellent excuse to run a poll: Real...

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Poll: Incredibly Important Cultural Question

Prompted by this and this, among other things, one of the critical questions of the modern age: Harry Potter is a: Magic is a classical phenomenon, no matter what you may have heard, so you can choose...

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An Incomplete List of Pop-Culture References in How to Teach Relativity to...

I’ve been going through the manuscript for the book making up a list of glossary words (a frighteningly long list), and also noting miscellaneous pop-cultural references– quotes, direct mentions,...

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Attention, Hollywood

Fred Clark has an idea for you: Start with the housekeeping staff at a Manhattan hotel. They’ve just learned that their next contract includes no raise, but doubles the employee share of the cost of...

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Christmas Physics: How Strong Is One Grinch?

And what happened then? Well, in Who-ville they say That the Grinch’s small heart Grew three sizes that day. And then the true meaning Of Christmas came through And the Grinch found the strength Of...

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Syncretic Pre-Schooler Blogging

We send SteelyKid to preschool at the Jewish Community Center in Schenectady, because when we looked at day care programs back in the day, they had the one we liked best. This is a mixed blessing in a...

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The Crappy Science of Comic-Book Movies

I go back and forth about the whole question of scientific accuracy in tv shows and movies. On the one hand, I think that complaining “Explosions don’t make noise in space!” is one of the worst forms...

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Hobbits and Prime Ministers: The Physics of Doors

Over at Tor.com, Kate has begun a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Hobbit, and has some thoughts on Chapter 1. It’s full of interesting commentary about characters and literary technique, but let’s...

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Neil de Grasse Tyson Is John Harrison

Over at Galileo’s Pendulum, Matthew Francis expresses an opinion that’s sure to get him in trouble with the Inquisition and placed under house arrest: Carl Sagan’s Cosmos isn’t all that: However, even...

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Wanted: The Hoosiers of Science

I’ve been revising a chapter on collaboration in science for the book-in-progress, making an analogy to team sports. And it occurred to me as I was trying to find a way to procrastinate, that while...

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Favorite Quantum Physics in Science Fiction?

I’m doing a bit of work on an idea for physics outreach, which would involve tying a discussion of modern physics to science fiction stories. I have Opinions about this sort of thing, of course, but I...

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Nostalgia and the Next Generation

“Daddy, I wanna play with the robot dog!” “It’s not a dog, honey, it’s an Imperial walker. An AT-AT. A fearsome armored assault transport used to overwhelm the Rebel defenses in the battle of Hoth.”...

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Uncertain Dots, Episode 8

In which Rhett and I talk about Cosmos. What, you thought there would be another topic? We have contractual obligations, you know… Okay, there were some other topics like Battlestar Galactica (both...

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The Sound of Simulated Bombs

So, last week I idly wondered about the canonical falling-bomb whistle. The was originally intended to be a very short post just asking the question, but I got caught up in thinking about it, and it...

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Superheros are Anti-Science

I’m not really a comic-book guy, but I’ve watched a bunch of comic-book movies recently. Kate was really fired up for the new Captain America movie, so I finally got around to watching the first one as...

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Space Travel, Einstein, and GPS

Below you’ll find the slides from my Physics Day presentations at Space Center Houston, embedded via SlideShare. I was doing the TED-style minimal text thing, so they’re probably not all that...

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Particle Physics in Western Mass.

That’s “Mass” as in Massachusetts, not the stuff associated with the Higgs field… specifically, North Adams, MA, where I’ll be this Saturday night, October 25th, at the Secret Science Club screening of...

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Uncertain Dots 25: The Lightning Round

I got the time for the regular hangout wrong, and then we had some weird computer difficulties, so we only had ten minutes for Uncertain Dots this week. Which was enough time for me to say disparaging...

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