I’m always interested to hear who won the latest Physics Nobel Prize, and today’s announcement was particularly exciting: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Is it surprising? Is it controversial? Apparently yes. I predicted Hopfield in response to a friend’s poll a few … Continue reading The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics — Yes, Physics!
Salary negotiations are currently underway at the University of Oregon (UO) between the faculty union and the administration. If this sounds familiar: graduate student salary negotiations concluded earlier this year. Two weeks ago, the administration emailed a description of its perspective on faculty pay that included some interesting data and graphs, such as the amount … Continue reading Is Our University President Poorly Paid?
How can we make a large class more lively? I tackled this question last term by allowing students to self-partition into different sets, with dramatic, and remarkably encouraging, results. Last term, Spring 2024, I taught a “physics of renewable energy for non-science majors course” [1]. I often teach “general education” classes aimed at non-science-majors, including … Continue reading The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment)
On January 5, 2024, the graduate student union at the University of Oregon (UO) announced that they would go on strike, giving notice that it would begin on January 17. On January 15, the union and the university administration reached a deal, averting in the nick of time a strike and the massive disruption that … Continue reading A strike, averted
You will find this post either shocking or obvious. If it’s obvious, you may nonetheless be shocked that others don’t find it obvious, or by how quickly the situation it describes has gone from shocking to obvious. The topic is AI (artificial intelligence) and teaching, which I will illustrate with an example. Below are a … Continue reading AI and exams in May 2024
Insulin is an abomination. Sure, injecting it saves the lives of millions of diabetics, but that injected protein is unnatural and abhorrent, the product of a genetically modified organism! And it’s not even necessary: Rather than playing God to coax single-celled creatures never designed for insulin production to make the stuff, we could be harvesting … Continue reading Insulin is an abomination: Recent bad news about food
This past term I taught my “Biophysics for non-science majors” course, actually called “The Physics of Life,” for the first time since 2018, and, more notably, for the first time since writing my pop-science book, So Simple a Beginning: How Four Physical Principles Shape Our Living World (blog post; Amazon) — published in 2022 (and … Continue reading Course recap: “The Physics of Life” Winter 2024
Usually when I write about biophysics, it’s with the uplifting message that understanding physics helps us make sense of biology, bringing varied phenomena together under umbrellas of general principles. This is true, and there are countless examples. Brownian motion explains the meandering of neurotransmitters and the patterning of embryonic body segments. Electrical interactions influence the … Continue reading Enhance Your Productivity by Ignoring Biophysics
Several times so far I’ve taught a graduate course on biophysics. Last term I taught it again, but with a twist: it was a combined graduate and undergraduate course. There were two motivations for this. First, biophysics is unfamiliar enough to physics graduate students that upper-division undergraduates aren’t at any significant disadvantage. In fact, I’ve … Continue reading Recap of a Graduate (and Undergraduate!) Biological Physics Course
Here’s this year’s recap of notable books I read, featuring Russians new and old, Scythians (all old), and criminals of various sorts. (Previous years: 2022, 2021, …, 2015.) 1965 vs. 2023 I wrote a few months ago about my excursion into 1965, reading seven books published in that year. I won’t revisit any of these … Continue reading The Year in Books, 2023
The Eighteenth Elephant 