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)
It’s February 2025 and this, like some of my other recent posts (here, here), could be a snapshot of a landscape being transformed by the roaring river of artificial intelligence. But it isn’t. Rather, I’ll describe my puzzlement that some parts of the landscape that I’m close to aren’t changing much, and speculate about the … Continue reading Why Don’t Academics Care About Artificial Intelligence?
Last term (Fall 2024) I again taught the computational image analysis course I developed a few years ago (see 2021, 2022). It was again a mixed graduate and undergraduate course, this time with an enrollment of 18: 14 graduate and 4 undergraduate. For a primarily graduate elective course, this is a large number of students; … Continue reading Image Analysis Course Recap, Fall 2024
Once again, highlights of the books I read in the past year, featuring the end (for now) of my education in twentieth-century semi-organized crime, a book on semi-organized twentieth-century chimpanzees, and more. (Previous years: 2023, 2022, …, 2015.) Books by people who passed away in 2024 The best non-fiction book I read this year was James C. … Continue reading The Year in Books, 2024
The Eighteenth Elephant 