Blog Posts
Time Travel Lecture
I gave a fun talk to Eric Vogelstein’s Philosophy of Star Trek class about time travel.
Hug a math professor!
A brief meeting with a math colleague opened both of our eyes about helping our students.
DAMOP, Part 1 - Navigating a conference
Instead of describing the science I’m seeing this week at the DAMOP meeting, I decided to do a couple of meta posts on conferences in general. This first one discusses what happens at a science conference and what to do while you’re there.
Lead in Drinking Water, Part 2 (Ethics)
Before I describe how we measure lead in drinking water, I want to discuss some of the new (to me) meta issues associated with this project. A lot of these things are uncommon for physics research, but will be familiar to folks in biology or medicine. I am a rank amateur on these issues, so consider this an imperfect discussion by someone still finding his way.
Lead in Drinking Water, Part 1 (Background)
One of my major research projects is building an inexpensive handheld device for measuring the amount of lead in drinking water. This is the first of several planned posts on the project. Today, I’d like to introduce the problem we’re trying to solve and talk particularly about lead in Pittsburgh’s drinking water.
Simple eye test without fancy equipment
Most of us are familiar with the refraction exam done by optometrists to determine our eyeglass prescription. Here’s a different method without the fancy equipment. The only tool we need is a tape measure and an object to look at, like a chart or point-source of light like an LED.