Tomorrow, my spring teaching begins. Again, I am teaching “Introductory Mechanics” (PHYS 1303), our 1st-semester introductory physics course. Inspired by the Marvel Studios movies, the theme this semester is “ASSEMBLE!” Enjoy my little fan art below. Many thanks to my undergraduate teaching assistants, and course veterans: Chase, Lauren, and Andrew!
Education
71 posts
President Trump’s candidate for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, was approved today by the Senate committee that conducted her hearing. During her hearing, a question was asked of Mrs. DeVos by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) about whether or not she would work to keep “junk science” (such as “Intelligent Design” […]
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.” […]
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 […]
This semester, I am conducting what is, for me, an experiment in teaching. The seeds of this experiment were planted last semester, and prior to that by a long line of physics education research. This experiment will place an even greater burden for learning on the student, but I believe that it will […]
I had the pleasure of guest lecturing a few weeks ago in the CFB/PHY 3333 course (despite being on teaching leave this semester – Profs. Scalise and Cotton are mighty persuasive). Here is the lecture audio, if you’re interested: Lecture Audio – Homeopathy (Spring, 2013) We’ve added a new feature […]
Facebook recently added a “Your 2012 Year in Review” feature. It claims to show you the “20 biggest moments” in your life in 2012. It sucks. In no way did it capture anything that was important in my life this year. Why? Well, first and foremost, I don’t post strongly […]
I thought it might be useful to write a short post on what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite lectures in Cultural Formations B/Physics 3333 at SMU: homeopathy. Prof. Randy Scalise and I delivered the lecture yesterday, and the audio is available here (I excerpted it from the recording […]
I doubt that this product contains no genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Humans have been breeding plants according to their useful functions – cold-weather resistance, nutrition, disease-resistance – for thousands of years. It was only when Gregor Mendel illuminated the laws of genetics that we learned how to control this in […]
Preface: Many thanks to Profs. John Cotton, Randy Scalise, Ron Wetherington, and John Wise for their tireless efforts to promote science. Their perspectives on the scientific method, and the issues I outline below, have been a tremendous influence on my thinking and writing about this subject. I also thank Profs. […]