Science Is A Verb Now T-shirt from Questionable Content

I’d be totes hawt in this, too. ^_^

Started chatting with my classes today! Love this program.

Does it seem to anyone else that the only psychology/sociology studies that get reported in newspapers are the ones with the very worst methodology and the least-founded conclusions?

Because I sure feel that way.

If you are able to read the actual paper, cited at the bottom of the article, you’ll find that:

…the selection takes place in a laboratory where undergraduate women look at facial images of men on computers. Well, at least that’s what the studies consist of, the ones which we are told explain mate selection preferences. Then the researchers decide that the faces some number of women pick when ovulating are CLEARLY the faces of dominant males who engage in male-on-male competition! Something to do with large jaws, I guess.

And then all this is written into a story about how women on the pill are wrecking human evolution because they are less likely to pick men with the faces the researchers think demonstrate male dominance.

(Thanks to Echidne for the summary.)

I’m sure there are plenty of interesting conclusions that can be drawn from the research cited. Sweeping generalizations about the pill and human evolution are not one of them.

Yesterday, I had a great experience! This week’s Friday colloquium here at UoL was by Ferenc Pavlics, the man who designed the lunar rover. It was pretty sweet. Also, Hungarian accents are cool.

I know you’re jealous.

So I took my quantum midterm last night. And I think I did really good! Which is sort of bizarre, in the grand scheme of things. Or at least not something to which I’m accustomed. I could get used to it, though! :)

Have I mentioned that taking this quantum class is making me enjoy the subject? Have I mentioned how amazing and fascinating I find it that the entire theory of quantum mechanics can be derived from a single experimental observation?

Whee!

Also, I got the results from my qualifier back. I passed the Mechanics and Quantum portions of it. I have 3 remaining attempts to pass the other 3/5ths of the test. Easy peasy! ^_^

Author’s Note: this piece was originally written for my other blog on Saturday, November 8th, 2008. I feel this venue is slightly more content-appropriate, so I’m re-posting it. And I should note that I’m fully aware that the closing paragraphs are cheesy. Deal. ^_^

This weekend, I attended the 2008 Quadrennial Congress of Sigma Pi Sigma held at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois (for all intents and purposes, a suburb of Chicago). Sigma Pi Sigma is an honor society for physicists and scientists. It works closely with the Society of Physics Students (SPS) – a chapter-based organization with many goals all related to the betterment of science, students, and society. Every four years, they hold a congress which is attended by representatives (students and their advisors) from SPS chapters across the country to discuss various themes and ideas, as well as to vote on recommendations for the next four years’ activities. The theme this year was “Scientific Citizenship: Connecting Physics & Society.”

I was inspired. I have never seen such a wonderful representation of individuals from different walks of life in physics. No, the percentages were not ideal. But for a science field which currently “boasts” only 21% of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, only 4% awarded to African-Americans, and only 4% awarded to Hispanic-Americans, it was a vast improvement (I promise these statistics had citations during the conference, but I was unable to locate them quickly and I wanted to get this post done. I will keep trying to find them [Gary White of Sigma Pi Sigma left a comment on my original post with (PDF Warning) this link to the statistics source for me. Thank you, Gary!]). More encouraging yet, these students were not just any physics students, but the physics and science leaders of tomorrow (not to toot my own horn or anything ^_~).

The reason I think we (meaning everyone, not just scientists) should care about this at all is summed best in two little words we’ve heard a lot lately – hope and change. When the theme for this congress was chosen in 2006, the organizers had no idea how historic the year 2008 would be. They had no idea how significant would be the concept of citizenship as scientists. But it has become so significant. At the welcome reception on Thursday night, a retired Vice President for The American Institute of Physics, James Stith, kicked off the conference by referencing our geographic proximity to the historic speech given in Chicago only two days previously – and at his words whoops of enthusiasm, pure and unadulterated, erupted from eager young throats throughout the room.

At the congress, we heard about how Einstein was a vocal anti-racist. We heard a talk about minority underrepresentation and how to combat it. Reference was made, over and over, to how our President-Elect, Barack Obama, has provided us with the opportunity to bring true science, citizen science, beneficial science back into the mainstream – some of the presenters, those who had interacted with Congress and the government, had even spoken with him personally, and assured us that he believes deeply in the value of science, and knows that our education system must be improved in order to facilitate this. They talked about how our President-Elect marks a moment in history in which we have the opportunity and the obligation to become better citizens, to become more active in our communities. They called on all the young people in the room (hundreds of us) to recapture the notion of the citizen-scientist, and to take advantage of this marvelous opportunity.

For too long, there has been this notion of the aloof scientist, reclusive and reserved from mundane life and thoughts. Our closing speech came from 1988 Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman. He said to us, “Scientists have never lived in ivory towers, isolated from society,” and that we work only with the blessing of non-scientists. This image of the hermit-scientist seeps into the minds of young scientists until they believe that a true, dedicated scientist cannot bother with worldly concerns – and eventually pass this notion on to the students who succeed them. But this notion is foolish, in so many ways. Some of the greatest scientists in history (Einstein and Bohr, among them) were actively involved in their communities and in politics – many of them had no choice, living in Nazi Germany. Similarly, many of today’s scientists do not fit this mold. Many of my own professors contribute so much to the local community (the wife of one of my professors is the chatelaine of the local SCA group, for example), and sometimes let their strong political feelings slip out in the classroom (you should hear my professor for Introduction to Atmospheric Physics talk about the global warming issue. He got quite worked up and said that anyone who refuses to belive in the greenhouse effect is “an idiot.” This is entirely true, of course, since “greenhouse effect” is just the popular name for certain properties of electromagnetic radiation reflection/absorption/scattering that do exist – it’s only the amount, long-term effects, and causes of changes in its strength that are in question). Finally, the notion of the ivory-tower scientist is foolish because, as scientists, we are the guardians of science for the future. Even if there really were some monolithic culture opposing societal awareness/intellectualism/education, it would be no less than a crime to ignore our responsibility to preserve knowledge – and a belief in its value – for the next generation.

There has been no greater opportunity in recent years to rekindle the belief in the value of learning, science, education, and discovery than that which we have delivered into our hands. The message of change is catching on. Science is ready for a change. We’ll back it up, lend our support. We have to. Society, now, can go nowhere without science – technology is much too integrated a part of our lives. Dr. Lederman said to us, “…there must be a major increase in the capability of ordinary people to cope with the technological and scientific culture that is shaping their lives.” We must all acquire “A Science Way of Thinking.”

One of our speakers was Dr. Aziza Baccouche. She is a blind multiracial woman, a physicist by training, currently working as a science media producer and a correspondent for Evening Exchange on Howard University Television and occasionally for CNN. She talked about how she went to her teacher as a student to ask if she’d really be able to pursue physics – something she’d discovered herself to be very passionate about. Her teacher replied, “Yes, you can.“

Our auditorium erupted in cheers. Scientists can be citizen-scientists. Citizens can be scientific citizens. We can make a difference.

Yes, we can.

Today I am substitute-teaching the recitation classes for a professor who has jury duty. A recitation class is one that is adjoined to a lecture course, where students can come and ask questions about homework and have a teacher work through some of the problems on the board.

The course is an intermediary mechanics course, so in that sense I’m looking forward to it. On the other hand, I volunteered to substitute without taking into consideration that I have two midterm exams this week. Whoops!

Update: No one showed up to the first recitation section. Since the professor told his students he’d be out of the office, this does not surprise me. In the second section there were 8 students (out of a possible 20-25), but they didn’t have any homework questions. One guy asked me what it’s like being a physics major, and one guy wanted some generic energy conservation review. We did an energy conservation and a momentum conservation just for the helluvit. Altogether it wasn’t bad, but it was sort of a let-down for me. Such is life! And especially teaching. :)

Because it’s not really a blog without random personal information! This past Saturday, my partner and I welcomed two new family members into our household.

Abby, a 4 yo. calico.

Guinness, a 4 mo. lab mix.

Abby is a complete sweetheart. She’s very social, which I didn’t expect from adopting an adult shelter cat. It seems obvious to us that whoever left her at the Humane Society loved her very much. Our guess is that they could no longer afford to care for her and hoped the shelter would be able to find a loving home. We’re so happy to have her with us (even if her diesel-engine purr sometimes wakes me up at night ^_^).

Guinness is…a puppy. Holy cow, such a bundle of energy! His housetraining is coming along pretty well, but it will be a while before he gets the hang of it. Trying to figure out how to keep him from antagonizing the cat is also a bit of a trick. How do you reward a non-behavior? Needs more research! :)

Classical mechanics is my favorite subject, full stop. During orientation week as a first year undergraduate, I sat up on my bunk and calculated all of the basic moments of inertia (rod through center, rod through end, disc, hoop, sphere, etc.). For fun. It’s a sickness, I know. But they work out so perfectly! It’s a beautiful thing.

The point I’m trying to make is that it takes some work to make me not have fun in a mechanics course. My new mechanics course is definitely not fun. Class time consists largely of slow, ponderous derivations of equations. We rarely talk about the motivation behind the mathematical meanderings we make, leaving my brain caught in an endless loop of, “And why would we do that, again?” Then, once the seemingly-random maths coalesce into something reasonably simple and we put a box around it, I switch to, “Okay, and what good is this? In what circumstances is it useful?” The answer rarely comes without a verbal prompt from me. Example problems, for the simple purpose of demonstrating the use of a new formulation, are few and far between.

I am also, I’ll admit, a bit bored, since I feel like I’ve already done most of this as an undergraduate. Eventually we will come to material I haven’t seen, but it’s Week Six of a fourteen-week semester and I’m still reviewing material from my junior year of undergrad.

My mathematical physics course is better, but more boring. When I nodded along as the teacher asked if some differential equations review would be helpful, I wasn’t expected five weeks of said review. Seriously. I just needed a quick overview because of summer break. I’m a physics major. Differential equations are my lifeblood. And now we’re on Sturm-Liouville problems. Which are probably one of the most common type of diff eqs in physics. Bored again.

Quantum is, on the other hand, amazing! High speed pace, thorough-but-concise derivations, and well-defined problems. I love it. My fear and bitterness created by a combination of poor teaching and the snark of Griffiths (the author of the industry-standard undergraduate quantum mechanics book) is being washed away by the simple and clear explanations my new professor is so fond of. I knew quantum wasn’t supposed to be that opaque!

With that, I leave you with the three review problems assigned in my mechanics course over the first few days. Still haven’t gotten solutions back…

Problem 1:
This is a static equilibrium problem. The stars are supposed to represent hinges – I forgot to put one where beam 2 meets the wall, so use your imagination. For this problem, we were asked to find the forces on beams 1 and 2 in terms of the given quantities: L1, L2, L3, M1, M2, and M3.

Problem 2:
For this projectile motion problem, we were asked to find L, the distance up the hill that a projectile would fall for a given initial velocity, theta and alpha. The nice thing about this problem was that you could check your answer by taking theta to zero and seeing if it matched the standard range equation.

Problem 3:
For this problem, the cart on the ramp is constrained to stay on the ramp, but its along-the-ramp motion is frictionless (I imagined it sitting on frictionless tracks). The ramp is rotating around the shown axis, which makes the problem rather more interesting than usual. We were asked to find L, the distance down the ramp, as a function of time, in terms of alpha and W_o (I think you might also need to say the cart has mass m). We were given the hint that the solution would be one of the hyperbolic trigonometric functions. I did it completely wrong because I forgot about Coriolis forces and such. Oh well.

So, there. If you get bored, here are some intermediate mechanics problems for you. If we ever get our homework back I’ll try to post solutions.

Since I am blogging under my full name here, with full disclosure of where I go to school, I have been thinking recently about telling my advisor about the blog. Ultimately, I do want as many people to know about this place as possible. At this point, though, I hesitate for two reasons.

One, I’m a bit embarrassed by my attempted anti-matter explanation, which is flawed at best and rather incorrect at worst. There is a part of me that wants to hold off until that post is more deeply buried under many other, better posts. I’m vain; so sue me. :)

Two, I’m learning that UoL has lots of rules about lots of things. I don’t want to find out that I’m somehow owned by or beholden to UoL for writing un-anonymously (nonymously?) about the university, especially if I write things that are critical of the institution at some point in the future.

Those seem pretty tame, written out like that. The embarrassment is the biggest one, for me, of course. I’m not even sure why I’m posting about this, unless it’s in the hopes that any latent readers out there will pipe up and tell me to go for it. It feels like a big step for me, even though it won’t really change anything in the grand scheme of things.

Just a heads up, I guess.