Tornadoes, thunderstorms and heavy rains, floods, and a blizzard. And we’re not even there yet. Some observations on our northbound new year’s travel to see family in Wisconsin, with some photos. This has been a tour of the damage wrought by arctic air combining with the force of the El […]
Yearly Archives: 2015
27 posts
In many ways, this was a remarkable semester. I thought it would be nice to reflect on the last few weeks of it before I settle in for a long winter’s nap… or, at least, a long Christmas nap. The end of this semester saw the wrap of the Honors […]
Recently, snark and sarcasm about my University’s Sportball program led me into the seedy, human-waste-filled undertow of the Social Web. Here are my thoughts on my experience, and on the danger of social twits imbuing a faculty member with more power than they actually possess. Update, Nov. 22, 2015: NOT […]
The following is the underlying text I wrote as the basis for a talk at the TEDxSMU-sponsored event, “Loyd on the Lawn.” It was held at Loyd Residential Commons at SMU, where I was invited to give a short (~10-minute) talk last Sunday night. Enjoy!
Writers are born young. Good writers learn their craft through practice, trial, and error. Failure is the best teacher. Given my view of writing, there is much my own University’s weekly campus paper, the SMU Campus Weekly, can learn from this recent article that claims to assess the “Paleo diet.” […]
Science is a process by which reliable information is obtained by repeated use and assessment. In science, all claims are up for revision; however, absent better information when there is enough reliable information to make a decision it is usually considered wise to do so, even if future revisions (which […]
Photos from our recent trip to Baylor University for the joint meeting of the Texas Sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers, American Physical Society, and Society of Physics Students.
Some photos from a walk near The Old Stone Dam. I hadn’t been to it yet, and it was as lovely as Jodi told it me it would be.
Every year, Jodi and I run a local Halloween-themed 5K race together. Recently, the race became a charity for an organization that tries to help children and their families deal with particular cancers. It’s nice that the race goes to support a good cause; to be honest, I don’t run […]
I haven’t done a week-in-review in quite a while, because I’ve been stupid busy. But I’m tired, I feel like writing, and this seems like a good way to reflect and pass the time. So let’s take a look at the week. This week began with Fall Break at SMU, […]
A social media story crossed my feeds today, and in the spirit of spending a small fraction of my online time addressing issues of science and its opposite, pseudoscience, I thought I’d dissect the claims in the story and look at the evidence behind its claims. Someone on Facebook shared […]
Yesterday, the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to two physicists – Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald – who made leading contributions to the discovery that neutrinos, very difficult-to-detect subatomic particles, can actually change from one kind to another kind spontaneously. This is called “neutrino oscillation” or […]