I’m going down to Augusta Georgia, looking for a soul to steal to give a timekeeping talk as part of the Augusta State Savannah River Scholars Program. (I imagine if you are in the area and would be inclined to go you already know about it). I looked up the program, and found that my affiliation is (currently) listed as the Naval Research Laboratory. Sigh. At least it gives me a chance to bust the chops of a former navy shipmate who invited me to give the talk; I know that he (as I did) used to call up the Naval Observatory’s Master Clock voice announce to get the official time so that one would do evening colors at the right time when standing watch.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
Mr. President, We Must Not Have a Marshmallow Gap
Interesting Physics Paper
The Cutting-Edge Physics of a Crumpled Paper Ball
“Crush a piece of typing paper into the size of a golf ball, and suddenly it becomes a very stiff object. The thing to realize is that it’s 90 percent air, and it’s not that you designed architectural motifs to make it stiff. It did it itself,” said physicist Narayan Menon of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It became a rigid object. This is what we are trying to figure out: What is the architecture inside that creates this stiffness?”
SevenUpping, Episode IV
Tying up the last few sessions I’m going to write about…
Understanding Audiences
Part of this seemed geared toward the journalism side of the house, since there was a fair amount of discussion on demographics and statistics, but some of it applied to the bloggers among the crowd. One of the main points was that comments don’t really tell you much about your audience — many people simply like to lurk and read, and have nothing to add or question. So commenters, as with volunteer surveys, do not give you a good sample; it’s not unusual for the commenters to be the people who are simply having a strong reaction to what was posted. And you may not even be getting a fair sample of the extrema, since there’s an adage from word-of-mouth-land that people who are happy with a service or product tell one or two people, but if you are angry you tell everyone (something for customer service folk to keep in mind).
However, if you do want people to comment, you have to make sure that there aren’t barriers. Many people find the requirement to register before you can comment as off-putting and a sign that you really aren’t interested. More applicable to commercial sites, I would think.
I Can Haz Context
Some important tidbits from this session. There was a focus on how annoying it can be to tune into a news broadcast, where you have no idea what’s going on, because the focus is on bringing you the latest details, and not giving you the background. Blogs aren’t going to bring breaking news, so it’s imperative to include material that gives background and context to whatever it is you are writing about. Depth is what we bloggers (and journalists) can give, so we need to take advantage of that.
Once again, there was a large swath of discussion pertaining to commercial sites and page views — the best way to get people to click through to supporting “explainer” links where you’ve gone into more depth. The consensus was that link at the beginning (A kind of “you must read this if you don’t understand X” link) or at the end, because readers are less likely to interrupt their reading to go to those links. (I really can’t corroborate this)
This is a Physics Wand, not a Magic Wand
You May Want to Bear Right
Slimming Down for Bikini Season
Who, What, Why: Is the Earth getting lighter?
Using some back-of-the-envelope-style calculations, Dr Smith, with help from physicist and Cambridge University colleague Dave Ansell, drew up a balance sheet of what’s coming in, and what’s going out. All figures are estimated.
One questionable part of the analysis:
“Nasa has calculated that the Earth is gaining about 160 tonnes a year because the temperature of the Earth is going up. If we are adding energy to the system, the mass must go up,” says Dr Smith.
…
[T]he Earth’s core is like a giant nuclear reactor that is gradually losing energy over time, and that loss in energy translates into a loss of mass.But this is a tiny amount – he estimates no more than 16 tonnes a year.
The energy from decay should be included with the global warming — in order to count this as lost mass, the energy has to radiate away from the earth, or else the mass doesn’t change. Which means it’s all part of the global warming energy balance. But since it’s in the round-off error, whether they broke this out as a separate line item or not has little effect on the overall answer.
SevenUpping, Episode III
One of the sessions that I really enjoyed at ScienceOnline 2012 was It’s Good to be the King, which was a discussion cast in the context of some Mel Brooks clips, which I thought was a clever way to shape the discussion.
The first clip was from Young Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein meets Igor at the train station, and they go through the name pronunciation scene (FrankenSTEIN vs FRANKenstein, and EEgor vs EYEgor), and the upshot of this was that you get to choose your own identity in the blogohedron. How you blog and what you blog about is up to you. You can even be Frau Blücher, if what you want to do is elicit whinnying with everything you post.
Next up was a scene from Robin Hood: Men in Tights that involved some fumbling about with the language and ending with an allusion to the many incarnations of the movie. The idea that wordplay is good in posts and it’s okay to do something that’s been done before if you give it your own slant. Other items discussed were the use of pop-culture references and punny post titles (Gee, I should give that a try)
Blazing Saddles was next, with the scene where Bart says that it’s “getting pretty damn dull around here.” Obviously, you don’t want to fall into a blogging rut, for both your sake and that of your audience.
This was followed by Dracula, Dead and Loving It (which I have not seen, so I was not familiar with the scene) where one character drives a stake into the vampire and gallons of blood gush out with each blow. The premise here was that Mel Brooks liked to repeat a joke well past its peak, but with the over-repetition it would (usually) become funny again. The lesson was that you shouldn’t be afraid to re-blog content, if you have a new take on it.
Spaceballs followed, with the scene where president Skroob gets teleported with his head on backwards, and asks “Why didn’t somebody tell me my ass was so big?” The topic here was criticism, and how to solicit it. You need, and should want, honest feedback on your writing, and unsolicited feedback is usually not of the constructive sort, so you may have to specifically ask for it from select individuals.
The last segment was “It’s good to be the king” from History of the World, Part I. Don’t get too comfortable being the king — don’t get set in your ways, and remember that the content is really the king.
Are We Really That Surprised?
U.S. State Science Standards Are “Mediocre to Awful”
“A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).
Do the Cam Cam