There are basic facts about the living world that we learn when very young. One is that mammals and birds are warm-blooded. More technically, mammals and birds fall into the category of endotherms, organisms that use internally-generated heat to maintain some preferred body temperature, and I always supposed that the omission of other creatures from … Continue reading Some Like it Hot: Plant Edition
Once again, highlights of the books I read in the past year, including a tale told by a beech marten, memoirs by people much older than me, and a recurring theme of work. (Previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, …, 2015.) Memoirs I live in Eugene, Oregon, nicknamed “Track Town USA” and the birthplace of Nike, … Continue reading The Year in Books, 2025, in which I learned about work
On a Sunday evening in March, nine months ago, I sat on an airport floor in Los Angeles staring at my laptop, attending an online meeting of the University of Oregon’s faculty union, facing the possibility of going on strike the next day. In August, I wrote emails trying to persuade the university administration not … Continue reading Remembering the year when I almost went on strike
About two years ago, I read a string of books that were all published in 1965. It was a fun exercise and I found some wonderful books I might not have otherwise read (described in this post). Why not repeat this for a different year? I picked 1937. In part, I wanted something more distant … Continue reading Reading Like It’s 1937
Does homework matter, in a college gen-ed science course? I’ve been thinking more about this question over the past year or two, as AI tools are able to quickly and correctly answer nearly all questions I could pose to students (see this 2024 post, for example, or the examples below). I often teach general-education courses … Continue reading Some data on homework and its correlations
Last term, I taught The Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, a course for non-science-majors at the University of Oregon. I’ve taught this course several times and I wrote a blog post about it in 2021 (link). Here are some thoughts on this Spring’s iteration. Enrollment for this course fluctuates between about 50 and 150 … Continue reading Course Recap: Physics of Solar and Renewable Energies, Spring 2025
How does public funding for science work in the United States? How much money is there? Who gets it, and how? How much does a graduate student cost? Even normally, science funding is a rich topic worth exploring, and now, as the president is attempting to radically change the structure of science in the U.S. … Continue reading An Informal Overview of US Science Funding
How many out-of-state (non-Oregon-resident) students are there at the University of Oregon (UO)? This is an easy question to answer: about 9000, or about 45% of the total undergraduate student population. (Source; select “Class level”.) This is high but not unusual for similar public universities; as I plotted a few years ago, we have company … Continue reading Are we missing 400 students?
Last quarter, I taught for the first time the first term of the introductory undergraduate physics sequence, the standard “physics with calculus”:” class that exists in some form at nearly every university. Usually I teach courses for non-science majors (on renewable energy, for example) or graduate courses (on biophysics, for example), so this was a … Continue reading The most important, and the most pointless, course I’ve taught
About a recent paper on biological light emission. Do you emit light? The naive answer is no. None of us light up a room as we enter, other than perhaps metaphorically. The intermediate level answer, familiar to undergraduate physics majors, is yes — not by virtue of being alive but because of fundamental thermodynamics: everything … Continue reading The Bright Side of Life (Literally)
The Eighteenth Elephant 