UPDATE: The really amazing media coverage of this is: http://www.theonion.com/articles/scientists-create-microscopic-mona-lisa,33423/ The Onion! I’m very impressed. My friend Jennifer Curtis at Georgia Tech has a paper out featuring a clever nanolithography technique, in which heating an atomic force microscope tip generates a temperature gradient that guides chemical reactions at a surface. Controlling the position and temperature … Continue reading The Mini Lisa
A quiz question for local readers: Where on the University of Oregon campus did I take this photo? Like most people, I tend not to notice things above me. S. (age 4) pointed out these beautiful abstract bicycles as we were wandering through campus. Who knows what other ceiling-situated art there is? Continue reading Up!
A few people have asked what the title of this blog means. In a lull between activities during the camp for post-tenth graders that I’m working with this week, one of the students asked me to tell them a story. So I told them the Indian folktale of the eighteenth elephant, which goes like this: … Continue reading The Eighteenth Elephant
One of the motivations for improving STEM education that I’ve briefly noted before (e.g. here and here) is the expectation of lots of future jobs requiring STEM skills. This is important, though I think it’s less important than conveying an appreciation of nature that a scientific perspective brings, and imparting skills that allow thinking “scientifically” … Continue reading “China needs workers…”
I try to avoid simply linking to some other post or article without adding commentary of my own. But I’ll do this now, for this essay on Scientific American’s blog: The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life, By Radhika Nagpal http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/21/the-awesomest-7-year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-faculty-life/ It’s on a topic … Continue reading Advice (“The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc”)
Inspired by a conversation yesterday, I’m posting a list of popular science books (i.e. science for the non-scientist reader) that I particularly like. Disclaimer: I don’t read lots of popular science — most of my non-fiction reading consists of travel writing. The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament … Continue reading Favorite Popular Science Books
I’m involved in a lot of different outreach activities, but I added a new one to the list today that’s a bit stranger than the others: working at the physics booth at the Oregon Country Fair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Country_Fair). The OCF is the yearly giant hippie gathering outside Eugene that’s full of art, music, performance, crafts, and … Continue reading Physics + Hippies = ?
A few random things for my talk Monday, July 8, for the parents of incoming UO students — mainly put here just to have a place to which to point people for references. (If you were at the talk and have further questions, feel free to email: raghu [at] uoregon [dot] edu .) How to … Continue reading On classes (part 2)
This coming Monday I’ll give a presentation to parents of incoming freshmen, part of the university’s new student orientation program. I’ve done this before, even though I’m a bit unclear on what the goal of the event is. Nonetheless, I again agreed, largely because I think there’s generally a lack of dialogue between the public … Continue reading On classes
During the summer my and Eric Corwin‘s weekly group meetings (our groups meet together) depart from our usual format of presentations of our own research and brief summaries of journal articles to instead tackle some broader topic. Last year, for example, we covered a good chunk of Introduction to Modeling for Biosciences by Barnes and Chu, … Continue reading Microcontrollers
The Eighteenth Elephant 