Like last year, several of us from the Physics Department manned a booth at the Oregon Country Fair, the long-running hippie / arts / music / performance / counterculture festival that occurs each year outside Eugene. I worked there today, which was lots of fun. Though our booth was mostly about energy — lots of … Continue reading “You should do birthday parties!” — Year 2 at the Oregon Country Fair
As mentioned a few weeks ago, a highlight of teaching this term was bringing in an elephant femur and a dog femur, to highlight the lack of simple proportionality between them. (The elephant’s femur is about 10 times as long as the dog’s, and 20 times wider.) Coincidentally, just a few days after this, researchers … Continue reading Next year, I’ll need a bigger cart
I spent the past week at a fascinating conference on teaching at the interface of physics and biology: a mix of biophysics research talks, education talks, and combinations of the two. I presented a poster on my ‘biophysics for non-science majors’ course, which went over well. Perhaps its biggest impact was superficial, though: everyone (including … Continue reading A soft, silky, scientific poster
Several sources have pointed me to this neat web site of spurious correlations, showing graphically how, for example, the age of Miss America correlates with the number of murders by steam, hot vapours and hot objects, or my favorite: Though spurious correlations can be dangerous (and hilarious), it’s often useful to look for correlations in … Continue reading Reading this post? You get an “A”!
My older son’s school (Willagillespie Elementary) had its annual “Math and Science Night” tonight, which is consistently great. This year, I was asked if I would do something for it, and I decided to present some demonstrations and activities about surface tension. Here’s something that I didn’t show, but that I did for my Physics … Continue reading Water magic
On some days, being a physics professor is a real slog — many-hour meetings, struggles with grant funding, endless emails, and near-futile attempts to eke out time for actually thinking about science. But there are other days in which it’s really awesome. Today, for example, I got to cart around an elephant femur. Here it … Continue reading Then we played bones, and I’m yelling domino
How does a department recruit graduate students? Like many physics departments, ours brings accepted prospective students to visit, funneling most of them into two days during which we try to convey information about our research, the university, the area, etc. Faculty in different research areas think of ways to spend an hour or so describing … Continue reading Grabbing graduate students with graphs
How much does a graduate student cost? Short answer: close to $60k per year. Long answer: Several times in the past few weeks, the topic of graduate student cost has come up. The “real” cost of a graduate student in the sciences, i.e. the money that a grant has to provide to support a graduate … Continue reading The $60,000 graduate student
It is inherently challenging to use a model to make predictions beyond the range of data to which the model was fit — making predictions about the future, for example, based on the past and present. Or, as the Danish proverb more elegantly says, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Still, there’s … Continue reading You can use any model you want, as long as it’s linear and has a positive slope
Having nearly completely lost my voice, teaching* today presented a problem. I did a lot of whispering, and cranked my microphone up to eleven. The lack of a voice wasn’t a surprise — I had been sick, and was nearly mute yesterday — so I prepared a few very short videos beforehand in which my … Continue reading Sugar equals awesome
The Eighteenth Elephant 