180/366: Delay

I spent Tuesday flying to Champaign, Illinois, which was probably a big mistake. I should’ve booked a Southwest flight to Midway Airport in Chicago, and rented a car to drive down to Champaign, but I decided that might be annoying on the way home, so opted to fly the whole way. Which meant a United…

179/366: I Am Number Six

Sunday was a beautiful day in Niskayuna, so after going to campus to deal with some paperwork, I went off to a park to take some pictures. There’s a town park down on River Road that sits on a high and scenic bluff above the Mohawk, so I figured I’d give that a look. And,…

178/366: Domes

I’m going to stop posting pictures of the Nott Memorial, really I am. But I got the idea a week or two ago of trying to see if there’s an angle where the observatory dome and the Nott dome look the same size, so I keep poking at that. And, in fact, there is such…

As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year’s writers, so we’re doing it again: The Schrödinger Sessions…

A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here: It’s a bit under an…

177/366: Landmark Interior

I’ve included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I’m a little hesitant to do another. But here’s an angle on it that doesn’t show up as much: We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid’s RC helicopter, which turned into…

176/366: Scale Invariance

Again, random and artsy, but this tree in the garden behind the Reamer Campus Center at Union struck me as interesting: Is sort of looks like one of those pictures you sometimes see of oblong leaves where most of the surface has been eaten away, just leaving the delicate vein structure in place. (This kind…

175/366: Microdrifts

Random artsy shot of the moment: The wild see-sawing of the temperature has continued this week, so we got a little bit of snow, then it all melted, then more snow, then more melting, etc. This is from a couple of days ago, when it was cold, and I liked the way the light dusting…

It’s been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I’ve been doing at Forbes, so here’s the latest eclectic collection: — Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific…

March Appearances

I’ve been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I’ll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here: 1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I’ll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on…