In Part 1, I described the motivations behind a “Freshman Interest Group” (FIG) seminar I taught last term, called “Modeling Life,” that explored how contemporary science can make sense of biology by way of physical and computational models. I also wrote about several of the topics explored in the class. Here, I’ll describe some of … Continue reading Modeling Life (a freshman seminar) — Part 2
Last term I taught a small freshman seminar called “Modeling Life,” on ways of looking at biology through the lens of physical and computational models. It was part of the university’s “Freshman Interest Group” (FIG) program, in which one creates small seminars that connect two regular courses that each student in the FIG takes. This … Continue reading Modeling Life (a freshman seminar) — Part 1
As of yesterday, the graduate student union here at the University of Oregon is on strike*. (I walked past three separate picket lines on my way to get coffee.) I don’t have anything profound to write about labor issues, but I thought I should post something that’s graduate-student-related! Quite often, the topic of “time to … Continue reading Universality, Scaling, and Time-to-Ph.D.
One of the reasons I went into Physics is the absoluteness of its claims: every proton has an electric charge; every bit of mass generates a gravitational field; and so on. One of the dizzying yet fascinating things about biology is, often, its lack of universality — nearly every statement one can make has some … Continue reading Giant germs, making a mockery of physics
Occasionally, things go exactly as I’d hoped. We’re discussing scaling in my Physics of Life class, starting with things like the scaling of volume and area with size. I mentioned in passing that this issue comes up in advertising, and since students seemed interested, I brought the following to the next class — an interactive … Continue reading How to lie with scaling
For a while I’ve thought I should write up a paper on my biophysics-for-non-science-majors course, just to document what its motivations are and how I’ve approached teaching it, in case it helps spur others to create similar courses. I’ve finally done this; a pre-print is on arXiv here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0666 (“The Physics of Life,” an undergraduate … Continue reading Preprint: “The Physics of Life”
I came across recently (via [1]) a neat interactive graph from the US census bureau illustrating the career paths that STEM majors take: One can click on particular categories of majors, revealing for example that more than half of engineering majors end up doing engineering, but that only about a tenth of physical science majors … Continue reading Branching STEMs
As in each of the past six years, I co-organized a Physics + Human Physiology day camp for 11th graders for a week in July, in which we explored wide swathes of science and also learned a bit about how college works. (It’s part of the SAIL umbrella of camps — see here and here.) … Continue reading The ice cream and the dead people
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
The Eighteenth Elephant 