If anybody doesn’t understand the title of this post, just consider (i) it’s October, (ii) I’m American, (iii) I’m essentially from St. Louis. And I’m ready to go to DeTroit and maul some Tigers. Revenge for 1968!

In all honesty, the game tonight (baseball in case you don’t get it yet) (7th and final game of the National League Championship Series) was a complete nailbiter. I think I popped a blood vessel or two and it took alot of wine to calm me down. Anybody who thinks baseball is dull should have seen the game tonight.

More on the Fall Classic later after I have regained my senses….

via my friend Marla (who recently wrote the only astronomy article I’ve ever seen in the Nation) comes this SFGate caption describing a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the antenae galaxies, the Brad and Angelina of colliding galaxies:

Is that a red giant or are you just happy to see me? A new Hubble image gives the sharpest view yet of the two Antennae galaxies, which are shown here basically having unprotected sex. The merging galaxies smash together, causing billions of stars to be born, mostly in clusters.

This must be more of those San Francisco values speaking.

The more detailed, PG-rated version of the caption can be found at the Hubble Site.

After almost six years of living under the worst president in U.S. history, and facing, on a daily basis, the ignorance and bigotry that arises in part from the pact that Republicans have made with the religious right, it is easy to blame all our ills on the excuses for leaders who run this country.

However, I’m reminded today that disgusting retrograde policies are not solely the domain of the Republicans. As reported in The Washington Post;

The federal government has refused to pay death benefits to the spouse of former congressman Gerry E. Studds (D-Mass.), the first openly gay member of Congress.

Studds married Dean Hara in 2004 after same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. But Hara will not be eligible to receive any portion of Studds’s estimated $114,337 annual pension …

And why won’t this man’s life partner be able to receive benefits?

because the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act bars the federal government from recognizing Studds’s marriage.

[…]

Under federal law, pensions can be denied only to lawmakers’ same-sex partners and to people convicted of espionage or treason, Graves said.

That’s right - thanks to the Clinton administration, this basic right of partnership can be denied only if the person involved is a spy, a traitor or, that equally heinous threat to the American way of life, gay!

So if I interpret this correctly, a member of Congress could be shot dead by police while stabbing a baby, and his opposite-sex partner would be eligible for the pension, but if he dies while on a quiet walk, his same sex partner isn’t eligible. Ain’t it great?

It should make us all sick.

In comments, JMG3Y asks, “Where should a smart science-oriented high school student with a breadth of interests go to college?” This deserves a much more careful answer, but time is precious, so consider this a rough draft of an answer, which people are welcome to amplify in the comments. (Past installments here and here. At some future date there will be an installment on “How to be a good graduate student.”)

In reality, colleges and universities are very different from each other, and each should be considered separately. Also in reality, any such institution is huge and multifaceted, and two people can have wildly divergent experiences at the same place. Furthermore, sticking again to reality, this is a question that depends mostly on the individual student, and for which there is no right answer. Being all that as it may, for purposes of exposition let’s lump the possibilities into four categories:

1. Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Swarthmore or Amherst.
2. Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
3. Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
4. Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.

These are fuzzy and incomplete categories, of course, but hopefully the ideas will come across clearly enough.

At an LAC or STS, you will be forced to learn a lot, like it or not. I’m a big fan of LAC’s; the professors are typically talented and dedicated to teaching, and students get invaluable up-close-and-personal time with the faculty. But for people who want to go to grad school, they face something of a disadvantage because the these schools typically won’t have graduate programs. That means (1) you can’t take any grad classes, and (2) you can’t buttonhole grad students about advice for the next step. I went to one, and received a great education, but keenly felt those disadvantages.

The STS’s are also great (I work at one now). Your fellow students will be interested in similar things, and the coursework will challenge you. There will be plenty of opportunities for research experience, rubbing elbows with grad students and postdocs doing work at the forefront of science. Both MIT and Caltech have a feeling at being at the center of the scientific universe. Of course, they generally won’t give you a broader academic experience, if that’s what you’re after. For me personally, one of the best parts of being an undergraduate was being exposed to ideas in the arts and humanities (and people, both faculty and students, in those areas) that I never would have experienced otherwise.

At an EPU or LSS, it’s generally much easier to slide by without stretching yourself, if that’s your thing; on the other hand, the resources are tremendous, and if you have the initiative to take advantage of them, you can have a great experience.

The best thing about an EPU is the other students. So much so, that at a place like Harvard it’s generally acknowledged that a large fraction of your education comes from extracurricular activities. You’ll meet people, in your field and out, who will be running the world a few years down the line. The professors will be great researchers who may or may not be interested in teaching; there will likely be some opportunities for research and individual contact, but not all that much.

An LSS will also have great resources, in terms of faculty and research opportunities. There might be more close contact with professors than at an EPU, but that’s quite a generalization. Your fellow students will be more of a mixed bag; some will be geniuses and future world-changers, while many will be there to tread water for four years to get a degree. Of all the choices, the education you get at a large state school will depend the most on your own initiative; the school will almost certainly have more to offer than you possibly have time to take advantage of, but nobody will force you to do any of it.

For the particular goal of advancing to grad school, there are certain specialized factors to keep in mind. Having grad students around to ask questions to is certainly helpful. The choice of undergrad advisor is also important, I suppose, but depends much more on individuals than on schools, so I don’t know what to say there. It’s important to get some research experience, but this can often be done off-campus at other places during the summer (see the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates and similar programs). Getting good letters of recommendation is certainly helpful — for that, it’s less important where you are, and more important that people there know you well enough to write sensible letters. When it comes to actually applying to grad schools and making choices, it’s nice to get advice from people who know what they’re talking about; don’t be afraid to ask around.

Perhaps my own perspective on this kind of question is coming through clearly enough: wherever you go, your educational experience can vary wildly depending on how much you put into it. If you stick to what’s required, slide through with just enough work to get whatever GPA you’re aiming for, and spend the rest of your time playing video games, you’ll manage not to get much out of it no matter where you are. If you seek out new and challenging courses and activities, spend your summers doing research or interesting off-campus activities, and make an effort to talk individually to your best professors and hang out with other students who enjoy ideas, it will be an invaluable experience.

If you ask most 40-something professors what they would think of going back to school for four years, to do nothing but take interesting courses and discuss deep ideas with their friends, their eyes would light up with unvarnished pleasure at the prospect. Whatever you’re studying, college is a unique opportunity to stretch your mind; make the most of it.

I have heard variations of this line so many times over the years that I lost count long ago and certainly don’t remember half of them. As familiar as it is, my internal reaction to it is never totally simple. It is clearly often meant as a compliment, I’m glad that I don’t look like your average concept of a physicist [nerdy white guy with funny hair?], and in fact one of the things I like about what I do is that I defy expectations every day just by showing up at work. But there’s of course so many stereotypes (about, depending on what’s said, science, gender, looks, style, age, personality, smarts and their various correlations) in variants of that statement that it’s hard to even know where to start.

But all that aside, I got a new one recently: “You seem too relaxed to be a physicist.” Now, that’s probably just because I took my first real vacation in years, and a proper time on Kaua’i followed by a move to a wonderful city will make anyone seem relaxed — people who know me well would hardly say that “relaxed” is my general demeanor, and I’m sure it won’t last. But I was surprised to hear that it was perceived by someone as the anthesis of being a physicist.

Actually, the one I have been getting most often recently since I acquired my new professorial title is “You look too young to be a professor”. Now, although I am 10 years out of college and older than these young humanities whippersnappers who show up to teach fresh from defending, since the average time that a professor spends on a faculty (or some combination of them) is probably of order four decades and I’ve been here a month, this isn’t too surprising of a comment. Regardless, I still haven’t come up with a witty comeback. Any suggestions?

Liveblogging here from the Fall Meeting of the Illinois and Iowa Sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers. The attendees are mostly high-school physics teachers, some from local colleges. Later tonight I’ll be giving a talk, but I can’t resist telling you about the delightful session we just had — WITHIT, or “What in the Heck is This?”

High-school science teachers live in a very different world than professional researchers. Typically a “department” is only one person, and when it comes to resources one has to be a little creative. So it’s quite common (I’ve just learned), when one first is hired, for the new teacher to be presented with a storeroom full of stuff that their predecessors had acquired one way or another. And this stuff doesn’t always come nicely packaged with detailed instructions and lesson plans.

Sometimes, indeed, it’s hard to figure out what the stuff is! So here at the FM of the IIS of the AAPT, people have been bringing in pieces of apparatus that have been lying around for decades and have become unmoored from their original purposes. They then show the wayward equipment to their assembled colleagues, and ask for help figuring out what the heck this thing is supposed to be. So far we’ve had experiments to measure kinetic energy, X-ray tubes, and an inverse-square-law apparatus.

I see great TV-show possibilities here. (After only one month of living in LA!) Could you imagine the tension as a bedraggled but hopeful physics teacher is told that their gizmo is an original Leonardo?

I’m in DC for a meeting of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. It’s the kind of thing where you spend 2 days in a windowless room listening (and supposedly asking intelligent probing questions) to talks about the scientific merit of various projects. Actually, it can be rather interesting, but the day does get long. Which is why more speakers need to perk up the panel with graphics like this:

This is a photo of the sun. Not taken with the usual medium for viewing the sun (photons), but taken with neutrinos. Partly at night. Through the earth. It was photographed by the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan with 503.8 days and nights of exposure.

This photo is a few years old now, but it always brightens my heart to see it. Kinda makes it all worthwhile…

Harvard University is once again re-thinking its basic curriculum for undergraduates (via PZ). This matters, of course, since Harvard is unanimously recognized as the World’s Greatest University (or at least that’s what they told me when I was there). Opinions differ, as you might expect, about what should be the basic course of study we expect to be mastered by every student obtaining a bachelor’s degree at an accredited college or university. At a place like St. John’s College, every student takes exactly the same classes — and every professor is expected to teach every class, from Physics to Classics. At the other end of the spectrum, some places basically allow students to choose their own course of study, without any specifically required courses.

Most academics feel that what they went through as a student is right for everyone, and in this case I’m no exception. I went to a upright Catholic institution, where the required core curriculum was substantially lengthier than anything you’ll come across in the Ivy League. There were requirements in all the canonical disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences, with some degree of flexibility within each category. I think it’s a good system; undergraduates don’t necessarily know best about what they might like to learn (who does?), and sometimes even things that you don’t enjoy might be good for you.

So here is the curriculum I would insist on if I were the Emperor of Learning. The courses every college undergraduate should take:

• Two semesters of English Literature. (No specific writing requirement, but writing would be emphasized in many of the courses across the board.)
• Three semesters of History, at least one of American history and one of non-American history.
• Some degree of proficiency in a foreign language, as measured by some standardized test.
• Two semesters of Philosophy or Religious Studies.
• Three semesters of Social Sciences, at least one but not all to be in Economics.
• Two semesters of Mathematics, either a year of Calculus or one semester each of Statistics and Algebra/Geometery at a fairly high level.
• Two semesters of Physical Science — Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.
• Two semesters of Biological Science.
• One semester of Fine Arts.

(At Villanova there was no fine arts requirement, and only one year of science was required. But we had to take three semesters of Philosophy and three semesters of Religious Studies.) I don’t think I would require any non-English literature, as reading in translation is fun but not necessarily central. I also wouldn’t require any lab component to the science courses, which I’m sure will cause howls of outrage. I believe firmly in the importance of experiment and that the scientific method is grounded in empirical exploration etc. etc. But I also know from experience that every lab course that I either took myself or served as a TA for, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. They served mostly to turn students off of science forever. Maybe I have simply been unlucky, but lab courses would require some deep re-thinking before I would include them in the required curriculum.

Let’s see, four years of college, two semesters per year, four courses per semester means that a student will take at least 32 courses as an undergraduate (they are welcome to take more courses per semester, of course). The above list comes to 17 courses, at least if they’re lucky enough to test out of the language requirement. Imagine that a typical major (or “concentration,” as they say at the WGU) insists on 10 courses in that discipline; but any given discipline will probably cover two semesters worth of the above requirements, so really only 8 more required courses. That gives a total of 25 required courses, leaving 7 completely free electives. They could be taken within the student’s major, or anywhere else. So everyone gets one course almost every semester just to have fun. (Double majors would likely require students to take extra courses; worse things could happen.)

While I think it’s good to demand that students take a long list of breadth requirements, I would be extremely flexible when it came to the required courses for a major. If I were in charge, every student could design their own major by proposing a program of study of 10 or more courses that somehow hung together to form a sensible story, even if it didn’t fit comfortably within any of the existing academic departments. So you could major in biological physics, or philosophical psychology, or the history of ideas, or German studies, or what have you. A standing committee of the University would judge all such proposals for coherence and rigor, and the successful student would be awarded a B.A. or B.S. in whatever they called their made-up program. (None of this is exactly original, to be sure.)

Different strokes for different folks, of course. Even if I were Emperor, I wouldn’t want the same set of requirements to hold at every university; a great strength of our decentralized system of higher education is that individual schools can serve as laboratories for innovation, which is a feature rather than a bug. At Caltech every undergraduate is required to take a year of calculus-based physics, for example; that probably wouldn’t work for everybody. (They also don’t admit people as English majors, although you’re allowed to switch into “Humanities” if you make that choice once you are here. Not sure what social pressures such people must feel.) But I still believe in the ideal of a broadly-based education in the liberal arts and sciences, where everyone who graduates from college knows something about the theory of evolution, the history of the Roman Empire, the law of supply and demand, and the categorical imperative. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

(for me) … in particular, two, to CV and to CA, specifically my beloved bay area, where I’ve now been for about a month. Although this blog is now embarrasingly populated with Californians, at least we all still travel enough to keep it interesting.

I found the whole job search and transition utterly distracting, not only from blogging here but also from spending my dreamy hours websurfing. But now that I have a new job, which is quite likely at least twice as demanding as my old job, I’m sure I’ll have more time for blogging. =) (Really, so far I haven’t figured out how people find the time to do anything once they become professors, and I’m not even teaching yet!) At the very least, I don’t think I’ll have to search for a job for at least 7 years, which is a very refreshing feeling.

In the case of the other return, to the bay area, so far it’s been wonderful. My stint in the midwest made me seriously crave some topography, so I’m living in one of San Francisco’s hilliest neighborhoods, just a couple of blocks from this lovely corner (top pic), with this view (bottom pic) from my home office/dining room. When you spend a decade thinking you won’t find a job in the city that you want to live in (as many of us in this line of work do, through 5+ years each of grad school and postdocs), it’s pretty fantastic when it actually works out.

More on life as a new professor soon.

No time to blog! Sorry about that. In the meantime, enjoy this video documentation of the brief transitional period between having human professors and having all teaching be done by computers. (Via Cynical-C.)