Chad Orzel › Comments

"Happy new year! While we're thinking about years, why don't we think about one of the first guys to explore the physical reason behind the year?" - Chad Orzel

A handy reference for interstellar tourism. - Chad Orzel

"If you’ve been to a science fiction convention you have likely encountered The Wall of Books. You go into a panel on, say, “Using Historical Plumbing in Outer Space Settings” hoping to pick up some useful reference data. There are five people sitting on the panel–or rather, there are four people and one Wall of Books. One presumes there’s a person behind the Wall of Books, but the wall is so high and so impenetrable that one cannot be sure. And you know from the Wall of Books that the panelist isn’t really there to talk about Thomas Crapper or the use of logs in sewer systems–she’s there to display her books in the hopes that people will buy them." - Chad Orzel

"To me, the idea that you should expend billions or trillions of dollars to accelerate a starship, only to decelerate it again, is pure lunacy. 90% of the ship's mass is support structures--either power or life support systems. The key to viable interstellar transport, in my view, is simple: if you've got it all in motion, keep it in motion and re-use it. The only thing you want to decelerate at your destination is your cargo." - Chad Orzel

Mark your calendar, Triple Cities folks. - Chad Orzel

"IT seems so distant, 1999. Bill Clinton had survived impeachment, his popularity hardly dented, Sept. 11 was just another date and music fans were enjoying a young singer named Britney Spears. But there was a particular unease in the air. The so-called Y2K problem, the inability of computers to read dates beyond 1999 threatened to turn Jan. 1, 2000 into a nightmare. The issue had first been noticed by programmers in the 1950s, but had been ignored. As the turn of the century loomed, though, it seemed that humankind faced a litany of horrors. " - Chad Orzel

"Science journalists: depending on who you ask, they are either the unsung heroes of science outreach, or the villains of the piece with blood on their hands. Much of this debate hinges on qualifying exactly who counts as a science journalist in the first place. This is a semantic argument but an important one - where you draw the line affects how you perceive the successes and the failures of those on either side of it. In response to criticisms, I have noted many people in the field diverting responsibility to others. The distilled version of this defence is that science journalism is work that's done by people who cover science beats for major news organisations. This excludes, for example, reporting about health (often regarded and billed as a separate speciality) or reporting that deals with scientific issues but is penned by interloping journalists from different beats. " - Chad Orzel

"Indeed, even if we restrict ourselves to hypothesizing that women are simply better at everything, then the theory of comparative advantage could still lead us to gender disparities in different professions: You’re best off doing what you do best and paying somebody else to do the other stuff, even if you are also better than them at the other stuff. Any time that you spend doing the other stuff is time that you could have spent making lots of money off of what you do best. So, if women were (on average) better than men at task A and task B, but they were (on average) best at task A, then most women should specialize in A and leave task B to men. This will result in a shortage of women in field B despite the fact that they are better at it than men, and it will be rooted in genetics. So, are they absolutely certain that they want people to speculate on innate cognitive differences that manifest in the workplace?" - Chad Orzel

"It’s not that I didn’t expect much out of him — I did, and do — but I didn’t expect it overnight, or contrary to the political realities in which the man has to work. To be sure, I get exasperated that he’s not doing all the things I want him to do when I want him to do them, and there are lots of things I wish he’d do differently, including stop being so goddamned conciliatory to a political right which so clearly wants to stab him through the eyeballs and then rush to Fox News (where the news crawl will say “OBAMA: Was he asking to be stabbed?”), to bleat about how they’re the victims in this whole unseemly stabbing incident. As much as I recognize a strategy there on the part of the administration, I think there’s only so long you act in good faith with people who have no intention of offering the same courtesy, ever. But I don’t confuse my exasperation with a sober assessment of what the man’s getting done in the environment in which he has to work." - Chad Orzel

"Grace is snoozing away in Anne’s arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we’ve had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy’s the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip." - Chad Orzel

"The semiotics of the ad [showing pink telescopes and microscopes] having been discussed well elsewhere, I'd like to take a look at the practical flip-side of the discussion. If you're buying microscopes or telescopes for yourself or your children, how important is magnification?" - Chad Orzel

"The more I study the history of aether physics, the more I feel that modern physicists underappreciate both the huge influence the theory had on the development of physics and how it indirectly spurred many positive scientific discoveries, even though it is an incorrect theory. The “aether”, for those not familiar with it, was a hypothetical substance theorized in the early 1800s to be the medium in which light waves propagate, just as water waves travel through water and sound waves travel through air. Many papers were written speculating on the nature of the aether before Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) argued convincingly that the aether was unnecessary." - Chad Orzel

"For some of us there may be no such thing as a bad detective novel, but there are none as good as Raymond Chandler’s. Even if you are unfamiliar with Chandler and have not read his Philip Marlowe novels, such is the shadow he cast that you will recognise his universe: a dark corrupt world where men are weak-hearted tough guys, women are available vixens and Hollywood dreams are dashed by ugly reality, while a wisecracking, chain-smoking detective hero stands up for what’s right. ‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country’, says Marlowe in a crisis: ‘What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and left the room.’" - Chad Orzel

"[T]he statistical authority, the creators and guardians of the game's official record, sit elsewhere at the scorer's table, huddled around a laptop. Every point, rebound, block, foul, steal, turnover and assist are recorded by Stat Crew, a standard software program used from coast to coast. It is on this record that boxscores are built, and no matter if the stats are individual or team-based, standard or tempo-free, here is their genesis and basis. Player accomplishments and admonishments are entered, one at a time, by an uncredited and anonymous army of work-study students, graduate assistants and SID's. And for one evening, I joined that group." - Chad Orzel

"Richard Feynman started taking art lessons at the age of 44, and continued drawing for the rest of his life. These include portraits of his close friends, wife and daughter and professional models that posed for him at his friend’s studio. Feynman was also an avid supporter of topless bars, which he used to frequent a lot while he was at Caltech, which also explains why he loved drawing nude models." - Chad Orzel

"In the last decade in high energy physics one could notice a trend towards more phenomenology. While I welcome this for obvious reasons, here as in any aspect of life one can desire too much of a good thing. I've read quite a few of papers where the word "phenomenology" was used merely as decoration, and in other cases "phenomenological" is essentially an excuse for inconsistency. Such fashion trends in the community and their side-effects however aren't really surprising. What is surprising though is that the demand for "predictions" has been picked up by the public and has been used sometimes inappropriately as a measure for scientific quality. Thus I thought it would be worth clarifying what a scientific prediction is and isn't." - Chad Orzel

"Recently, Time named the 00s the worst decade ever. This is clearly ridiculous when you consider their comparison set includes decades featuring things like "The Atmosphere is Made of Pure Sulfur" and "Romans Fed My Hippie Flesh to a Fucking Lion." But what if we narrow the criteria to the last 100 years, instead: 1910-2009. How would the 00s stack up? Would the 20s kick its goofy ass? Could it travel back in time like Marty McFly and give the 50s a massive wedgie? We'll see, as we count down the top 10 decades of the century, in ascending order:" - Chad Orzel

"Only when the MLA is in town will you find listings such as "Hot English dork here, looking to play with another hot English dork." And we guess that most of the time, Craigslist hook-up personals (seeking kink no less) aren't illustrated by the cover of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers." - Chad Orzel

Creepiest. Disney song cover. EVER! - Chad Orzel

Kind of a surreal extended get-offa-my-lawn rant, only vaguely related to the questions being asked. - Chad Orzel

"[T]he last two weeks in a nutshell:" - Chad Orzel

"[T]he last two weeks in a nutshell:" - Chad Orzel

"What happens when your kids won't give you a turn on the Wii? Simple. You take their LEGO bricks and their slinky and do some physics." - Chad Orzel

"What happens when your kids won't give you a turn on the Wii? Simple. You take their LEGO bricks and their slinky and do some physics." - Chad Orzel

"I want to address all of the criticisms that Obama should have returned to the White House rather than staying in Hawaii after the attempted bombing. While the readers of this blog know that I am very critical of him, I can’t fault him on this one. If you were a black guy with close family in Africa and a Muslim name, would YOU get on an airplane while the TSA is on the alert for Nigerian Muslims?" - Chad Orzel

"I want to address all of the criticisms that Obama should have returned to the White House rather than staying in Hawaii after the attempted bombing. While the readers of this blog know that I am very critical of him, I can’t fault him on this one. If you were a black guy with close family in Africa and a Muslim name, would YOU get on an airplane while the TSA is on the alert for Nigerian Muslims?" - Chad Orzel

"I’m writing a mystery novel I’m calling “The Attraction of Darkness.” The central thread of it is that there are four physicists, two men and two women, who collaborate and discover what dark matter is. For this, they ought to get the Nobel Prize. But the rules are that at most three people can share it. One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not. I’m hanging a lot of sex and music and philosophy on it." - Chad Orzel

"I’m writing a mystery novel I’m calling “The Attraction of Darkness.” The central thread of it is that there are four physicists, two men and two women, who collaborate and discover what dark matter is. For this, they ought to get the Nobel Prize. But the rules are that at most three people can share it. One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not. I’m hanging a lot of sex and music and philosophy on it." - Chad Orzel

"The "Peter principle" undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall - including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence." - Chad Orzel

"The "Peter principle" undoubtedly appeals to the cynic in all of us. It is also quite possibly true, if subsequent academic studies are to be believed. The longer a person stays at a particular level in an organisation, the more most measures of their performance fall - including subjective evaluations and the frequency and size of pay rises and bonuses. It is a finding entirely consistent with the idea that people eventually become bogged down by their own incompetence." - Chad Orzel

"The year that is now ending began with some areas of science in ruins. One section of the Large Hadron Collider looked like a train wreck with several-ton magnets lying about smashed after an electrical connection between them vaporized only nine days off a showy inauguration. The Hubble Space Telescope was limping about in orbit with only one of its cameras working. But here is the scorecard at the end of the year: in December, the newly refurbished collider produced a million proton collisions, including 50,000 at the record energy of 1.2 trillion electron volts per proton, before going silent for the holidays. CERN is on track to run it next year at three times that energy. The Hubble telescope, after one last astronaut servicing visit, reached to within spitting distance of the Big Bang and recorded images of the most distant galaxies yet observed, which existed some 600 million or 700 million years after the putative beginning of time" - Chad Orzel

"The year that is now ending began with some areas of science in ruins. One section of the Large Hadron Collider looked like a train wreck with several-ton magnets lying about smashed after an electrical connection between them vaporized only nine days off a showy inauguration. The Hubble Space Telescope was limping about in orbit with only one of its cameras working. But here is the... more... - Chad Orzel

"Methodists, for example, rely on John Wesley's "quadrilateral" of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. The American evangelicals appealing to a "high view of scripture" don't necessarily oppose such a scheme, but they would insist that one leg of Wesley's four-legged stool was more important than the others. Scripture, they argue, is the trump card. And the claims of scripture supercede the claims of tradition, reason and experience when those claims are in conflict. This is the precise point at which my attempts to achieve disagreement with my evangelical brothers and sisters inevitably fails. Because at this point I want to say that if your reading of scripture conflicts with reason and experience, then you're reading it wrong. But I can't seem to phrase this in such a way that this is what they hear. What they hear, instead [...] is me suggesting that reason or experience, rather than scripture, should be the trump card and the tallest leg on this off-kilter stool." - Chad Orzel

An invaluable resource for solar system tourists. - Chad Orzel

"I have a theory as to why the airline industry puts up with all this. It's because they know that they can't afford to increase either the number of their flights or the size of their fleets to meet any future increase in demand -- or even, really, the current demand -- and so they secretly welcome anything anybody who isn't them does that serves to reduce the number of potential passengers." - Chad Orzel

"At least where I live, and I bet for almost everyone with health insurance, it's very difficult to avoid making several trips to the pharmacy to have various prescriptions filled. If you take (say) four pills a day, and will forever (or until death parts you from them), and you have prescriptions for a month's worth of each, it would be very nice to be able to go to the drugstore and pick them all up each month at once. However, if it so happens that one or another of these was first filled on a different day from the others, it can only be refilled on the thirtieth day after that. The insurance company will not allow you to reset the refill day, because that would mean their paying for a month's worth of new pills when you still have old ones, and incurring a cost. Tsk!" - Chad Orzel