Physics Jobs - Part 2 (Demand)

As in my first article, the main reference for this discussion is a set of statistical reports produced by the American Institute of Physics. I recommend you read them (use the links on the left side to get the summary and full reports) and form your own conclusions, but I hope my comments here will give you some idea of what to pay attention to.

The first lesson one must get from those studies is that, at present, only about one third of all PhD physicists are employed in academia. This may be hard for a student to believe, since you may never have met a physicist working outside of a university in your entire life, but it is one of the cold hard facts you need to appreciate if your goal is to get a job as a faculty member. Nonetheless, since recent blogs have emphasized tenured faculty positions and because my only experience is as an academic (post doc, a dozen or so years as research faculty, about a decade teaching), that is what I will write about.


A word about non-academic jobs:

Some quick remarks on the other two thirds of the jobs you might find. The one advantage that a US citizen with a physics PhD has in any job search is that there are quite a few jobs that require citizenship as one element in getting the relevant security clearance. This is not just for "weapons" work, because anything (particularly aircraft) that might have a military use requires national security in addition to the usual industrial security issues. You get paid more in industry, but might have to change companies if yours loses out on a contract. You might have to move to the company that won the contract, and at least one friend was forced down the entrepreneurial road and became a private contractor.

A key bit of advice is that there is little value in taking a post doc if you plan to go into industry. They usually could care less. The sooner you get out of the ivory tower the better. However, a post doc can be a key step if you want to work in a government research lab.

Academic jobs:

I think the most important lesson is that the majority of students will be employed at an institution below (in the sense of R1, PhD, MS only, BS only, CC) the one they got their degree at. This means the work environment and professional expectations will sometimes be (very) different from what you observe as a graduate student, assuming you were paying attention to what a faculty job entails at your institution. Those will be described in part three.

The graph I made of AIP data is important enough to repeat here. Its relevance to the demand side was driven home yesterday when I ran into a retired faculty member from Wannabe Flagship University. I knew he was from the right generation, so when he mentioned how many years he had been there, I got the crucial detail for this discussion: He got his PhD in 1964 (right on the leading edge of the big peak), went directly to Wannabe Flagship (no post doc), and retired 39 years later in 2003.


That's right: Many in that huge pulse of people who got a PhD between 1960 and 1970 and got hired into a faculty job did not retire until after 2000. That would be one of the explanations for Chad's comment that the job search situation was pretty good when he got out circa 2001. At that time, fully 17% of physics faculty were over the age of 65! [See paper by Czujko linked in Note 3 below.]

But it is not quite as bad as a snake eating an elephant, even if it seemed that way to my generation. There were people hired into faculty jobs from my generation, and some of the more recent openings have been filled with "senior" hires from industry or research labs (that is, from my generation). The hiring pulse circa 1965 has been damped out somewhat, but you can still see a pronounced minimum in demographic data for physics departments. (See the paper by Neuschatz and McFarling, linked from Note 2, for some examples.)

The main thing to take away from that graph is that the current supply of PhD physicists is about 1200 per year and (probably) slowly increasing. Other data indicate that about half of these are foreign students, which might be relevant for some jobs in academia but probably not for the ones at top research universities, which get a large fraction of their faculty from overseas. [Details are in part 3 of this series.] You should assume that everyone is your competition. If in doubt, look at the faculty at your school and where they got their PhD degrees.

Data on Faculty positions:

There are a lot more faculty positions than you might think if your view is limited to the 146 or so institutions classified as Doctoral Research by the National Academy of Sciences. Those are the "PhD" category in the table below, which make up a bit more than half of the tenure-track faculty. If, as is most likely, you attend one of the universities that are classified as "very high" research (what used to be R1) in the Carnegie scheme, you might be ignoring the majority of possible academic jobs.

This table was constructed from the AIP data circa 2004 as described in Footnote 1 at the bottom of this page. All faculty refers to the total of tenured, tenure track, and temporary faculty reported by the university. Temporary faculty could be full time instructors (usually at 4-year schools) or they could be semi-permanent researchers supported by external or internal funds (in PhD programs). These numbers do not include full-time post docs or part-time adjunct instructors, which fall in a different category, but probably include multi-year research positions (glorified post docs) that run for a fixed contract period greater than one year.

Dept type	all Faculty	d/dt	t-t Faculty	d/dt
PhD	5400	+50	4430	+5
MS only	900	+10	730	-3
BS only	2700	+20	2130	+1
2 year CC			1640	-28?

The time rate of change has units of people per year. The striking detail, no surprise to us old timers, is that the total number of faculty is increasing but the number of tenure-track faculty is roughly constant. Universities are shifting resources from permanent positions to temporary ones. The rational reason for this is it gives them flexibility to deal with shifting student demand, federal research support, and student enrollment (when the baby-boom echo comes to an end). The economic reason is that they are cheaper, particularly when we consider part-time faculty at the CC level.

These are all full-time PhD positions, with one exception. The number listed for 2-year schools (community colleges) is the number of tenured faculty, but only 640 of these have a PhD degree. It happens that the data for 2-year schools also tell us the number of part-time adjunct instructors and how many of those have a PhD. The table below (explained in Footnote 2) shows only PhD faculty but includes the 330 part-time CC instructors with a PhD in the "all Faculty" column.

Dept type	all Faculty	d/dt	t-t Faculty	d/dt
PhD	5400	+50	4430	+5
other 4 year	3600	+30	2860	-2
2 year CC	970	?	640	+1?

This snapshot (and the derivative) suggests that there are about 7900 PhD's employed as full time, tenured or tenure-track faculty at colleges or universities. Keeping those positions filled as people retire, die, or leave the country is what generates job openings for newly minted PhDs. There is zero or negative growth in terms of tenurable faculty positions being added to physics departments.

Annual Job Openings

This is much more speculative, but based on pretty consistent trends identified in the AIP studies. See Footnote 3 for an explanation of the numbers shown here, and take this with a big grain of salt. Once you construct estimates from estimates the values get really fuzzy, but the main trends were real as of the period (circa 2003) when these studies were done.

Dept type	openings	US PhD hires
PhD	180	120
other 4 year	200	180
2 year CC	75	70?
Total	455	370?
PhD degrees		1250?

One thing jumps out of the first column: There are more openings in the BS and MS departments (what I incorrectly call "other 4 year" schools) than in the PhD departments, even though the PhD departments have 50% more faculty! Turnover is very low in major PhD programs. (See my example up top of the guy who retired after 39 years. Working for 39 years is easier to pull off if you have a 1/1 teaching load and a modest research program, if any, than if you have a 3/3 or 4/4 load at a 4-year school.) But there are other factors at work.

In the time period of the study, about 1/3 of the faculty hired in PhD departments (but only about 10% for the others) earned their PhD overseas. I used this fact to generate the estimates in the second column, which would be the number hired who earned their PhD in the U.S. (Note that these could be foreign students who earned their degree in the U.S., not just US citizens.) That significantly skews the available jobs away from the top schools.

In addition, almost a third (about 55) of the US PhD hires into universities and maybe 55 or so of the others can be expected to be "senior" hires (persons who got their PhD more than 5 years before being hired). This would reduce the bottom line to 260 (+/- ??) openings for persons who earned a PhD in the US in the past five years.

The market reality:

There are estimated to be about 1300 persons earning a PhD this year, maybe more, maybe less. I'll use 1200 under the assumption that some foreign students (who make up about half of this total) are planning to seek jobs back home. For comparison, there were 200 fewer graduates (under 1100) and probably more job openings when Chad got out.

So, comparing 260 openings to 1200 job seekers, the odds of getting some kind of tenure-track academic job are about 1 in 5 during the first few years after getting your PhD. In the longer run, if you become one of the "senior hires", the odds increase to about 30%, maybe more. Since national surveys show that about 1/3 of all physics PhD jobs are in academia, including research faculty jobs, those odds seem plausible.

However, most of those are not at a research university like the one where you earned (or are working on) your PhD. Comparing 60 to 1200 tells a different story for that part of the market. The odds of a recent PhD getting a job at a research university are only about 1 in 20. The fourth installment of this series, along with info in part 3 will address some of the things you need to pay attention to if you have this as your goal. You need a clear plan to put yourself in the top 5% after 2 or 4 years in a post doc, and be prepared to win the grants and reputation that will earn you tenure. (Getting the job is not the end of the battle!)

On the other hand, if you are an American with an interest in teaching and running a modest research program with undergraduate students, the odds might be as good as 40% (240 openings, 600 candidates) that you can find that job. I will have additional comments about seeking those kinds of jobs in the final installment of this series.

Side comment:
The long odds against getting a t-t job at a research institution are why I started this section by mentioning that most PhD students who enter academia will end up "below" (in the hierarchy of colleges) where they earned their degree. This is inevitable, and can be understood with a simple "Fermi question" analysis. How many PhD's will your major professor produce? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Only one is needed to "replace" him or her, so all the rest are fighting for that job.



Footnotes:

Note 1.

The AIP faculty workforce reports give the total number of FTE faculty, including t-t, temporary, and research positions (but excluding post docs). The 1994 and 2004 numbers are the source of the derivative calculated over a ten year period.

Dept type	1994	1998	2000	2002	2004
PhD	4900	5000	5000	5100	5400
MS only	800	850	775	900	900
BS only	2500	2500	2600	2800	2700
total	8200	8350	8375	8800	9000

References:

• Workforce 2004
• Workforce 2002
• Workforce 2000
• Workforce 1998

The reports also give the percentage who are in temporary positions (not tabulated here, but you can see them in Table 2 of the reports linked above). From these one can calculate the following for the years 1998 to 2004. I use the two end points to get a 6-year average derivative in my tables, but you can see that these are very noisy data. The derivatives are consistent with zero.

Dept type	1998	2000	2002	2004
PhD	4400	4450	4386	4428
MS only	748	651	729	729
BS only	2125	2106	2184	2133
total	7273	7207	7299	7290

The 2-year data (community colleges) are much cruder. They come from two reports, one about the 2001-2002 statistics and another about 1995-1996 statistics. In 2001-2002, there were 2560 faculty (1640 full time, 920 part time) teaching physics on 1072 campuses, with 39% (or 640) of the full timers and and 36% (or 330) of the part timers holding a PhD degree. In 1995-1996, there were 2592 faculty (1810 full time, 782 part time) teaching physics on 1052 campuses, with about 35% (or 634) of the full timers holding a PhD. In both cases, a few percent of the full time are not "tenure track", while the 1996 report stated that a significant fraction of the PhDs (corresponding to 200 of 633) were in related fields such as engineering or chemistry. I cannot tell from the methodology of the 2002 report if they corrected for the 94% response rate in their final numbers, as I did when quoting the 1996 data. If not, the number of t-t faculty in 2002 increases to 1745 and the derivate drops from -28 to -11, but I doubt if this is the case.

Note 2.

See the two papers referenced above concerning the 2-year college data

• 2001-2002 Report
• 1995-1996 Report

and the discussion of the data above. The increase in PhD faculty from 633 to 640 over 6 years gives a tiny (and, I am sure, statistically insignificant) positive derivative. The other results are directly from the table described in Note 1.

Internal check: This gives a total of 9970 PhD's in academia, compared to the total of 10047 (5801 teaching, 4246 research) given in the Neuschatz and McFarling "Career Outcomes for PhD Physicists ..." paper. This minor undercount is plausible given that both numbers are derived from estimates (the latter extrapolating a longitudinal study of 1850 physicists to a population of 33,729). The "teaching" number is plausible if half of the t-t faculty at PhD institutions reported their job as research rather than teaching, which is what the authors said was likely the case.

Note 3.

The estimate of foreign fraction of new faculty is based on the Czujko paper on Enrollments and Faculty in Physics, which summarizes the fraction of new faculty who got a degree overseas (34% for PhD departments in 2000, 12% in BS departments). Similar data tables can be found in the workforce papers referenced above. [double check] The 50% value for the fraction of new PhD students who are foreign comes from the 2004 AIP Enrollment and Degrees report (54% of 2004 PhD grads were foreign students, up from 45% in 2000).

The Czujko paper is also the source for the statistical data on the fraction of new hires who earned a PhD in the US more than 5 years ago (31% in PhD departments, 28% in BS departments) and within the past 5 years (35% in PhD departments, 60% in BS departments) that is used in the discussion after this table about the hiring odds for relatively recent PhD graduates.

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Physics Jobs - Part 1 (Supply History)

Any discussion of the physics job market has to start with the facts, and the most basic facts are those of supply and demand. When I started grad school in the mid 70s, I was told by my major professor that "there are no jobs". Although this was a bit of an exaggeration, there were only a few tenure track jobs spread over thousands of recent PhD's. My university, which had hired several new faculty every year in the 1960s, only hired one new person during my time in grad school - and he came from overseas to replace someone who left his t-t position for a national lab.

It is not even close to being that bad right now. (More info on demand is in part 2 of this series.) Indeed, I would say the situation is pretty good for people currently in grad school, but the situation still has echoes of that past. I want to start with what you can learn from history about the supply of PhD physicists looking for academic jobs. Fluctuations in that supply, which look like the damped response of an oscillator hit with an impulse, likely reflect the hiring patterns in academia. Until equilibrium returns, job openings due to retirements will come in clusters about 30 to 40 years after a previous cluster was hired. (Filling new positions takes only a tiny fraction of the annual PhD production.)

How did we get where we are today? The following is my analysis of the data.

The figure below was assembled from information given in two figures (fig. 7 and fig. 9) produced by the AIP as part of regular reports on the job situation in physics. (I created my own version of these figures because web links are notoriously unstable, these figures from a 2004 report will be replaced in a few years, and so I could annotate them with some trend lines to make discussion easier.) I strongly recommend that graduate students look over those reports, since they contain far more information than I can write about it a few blog updates.

My figure shows the PhD production in the U.S. from 1900 through 2004 (actual numbers, from fig. 7) and an AIP projection of PhD production from 2005 to 2010 (from fig. 9). The error band on the projection is the light colored band. I won't say much about those projections (they will soon be replaced by real data), but they might be important to students considering the odds of getting certain kinds of jobs. I'll discuss the history reflected in these data in roughly 20 year increments. (Until I sat down to write this, I had not noticed that some underlying trends seem to change on a two-decade time scale.) Click this picture to enlarge it.



The first 20 years, from 1900 to 1920, show a fairly flat rate of PhD production. The start of research and graduate education was modest, producing a roughly constant number (20 to 30) PhD's per year from a small number of departments. Old articles in Physics Today reported that most of these students went into industry, which was a fairly easy transition because the academic research itself was mostly funded by the industries that hired the PhD students.

Things changed in 1920, when we start to see a steady increase in production. The slope (about 6.5 additional grads per year) corresponds to a large percentage growth rate, because the starting level was so small. PhD production more than doubled each decade. Even more interesting to me is that the Great Depression (starting in 1929) does not show up at all. I do not know what drove this growth, although demand for engineers (despite the Depression, this was a period that saw much civil construction) would require more physics faculty and hence more PhD programs across the country.

What does disrupt graduate education is World War II. Anyone who doubts what a big deal that war was need only look at these data. I have put a "line to misguide the eye" across the period from 1940 to 1960 to show that the missing war-time degrees were completed after the war. On average (following my line), the slope increases (to 20 extra grads per year) but the percentage growth rate slows somewhat.

Side comment:
The senior faculty during my time in grad school, including my major professor, came from this group. Many of them left undergrad or grad school to work on the research side of the war effort: radar, aerodynamics, nuclear weapons, computing, and code breaking. (My thesis adviser worked at Bletchley Park "breaking the Enigma" and I knew a person who watched the Hiroshima bomb go off from the observation plane.) Chemistry students also played major roles in these programs. A few PhD theses that were completed during that time were classified. After the war, they returned to college with skills not found in a typical undergrad or grad student today, and experience working in large research groups. They knew how to operate a large, federally-funded research enterprise when the 60s rolled around. They had no ties to industry.

Then comes Sputnik. I put a red arrow at 1957 to indicate that important event. Sputnik resulted in massive amounts of money in support of science and math education and research, from K to PhD. The increased funding for graduate fellowships, coupled with job demand from colleges and NASA, was a boon for physics and the graph reflects that change. Back then, and even in my time, you could save money (not borrow it) on a grad assistant salary if you did not have a family to support. Everyone got a job. Many faculty were hired directly from grad school, without even a post doc. Average was more than good enough, until about 1968 or so, and PhD production almost tripled in that decade. The peak at 1970 is the result.

It was the perfect storm. A decade of lush spending came to an end circa 1968. The NSF budget was cut to pay for Vietnam and to punish the colleges for harboring anti-war protesters. (Nixon was not known as a lover of intellectuals.) The end of the baby boom was in sight (high school grads crested around 1971), so universities did not need to add faculty because student growth was ending and enrollments would soon decline. NASA started to cancel projects and stretch out others, and no longer needed to hire physicists.

Side comment:
Have you ever seen a Saturn moon rocket when touring the Kennedy Space Center, or Huntsville, or the Smithsonian? Those are not models. They are actual Saturn rockets built to go to the moon. The Command Module and LEM at Kennedy are the real thing. Missions were canceled on the fly, after the rockets were built, because Nixon could not afford to launch them and fight a war and increase social welfare spending ... so they were just turned into museum pieces.

It was ugly. I know some really bitter people who got out in 1969 or 1970. Top notch thesis work meant nothing, while a few years earlier you could get a tenured job based on average work. The spike is really sharp because some people rushed their work to completion in hopes of grabbing the last job in 1970, while others simply dropped what they were doing and walked away. Why work two more years and graduate in 1972, if you knew there were no jobs? [One remarkable detail in the historical data is that the number of first year physics graduate students dropped just 1 year before the number of PhD's plummeted. The fraction completing a PhD after 6 years or so went from 40%, if you started in 1964, to 25%, if starting in 1970. See this figure from the AIP grad student report.]

People who went to grad school in the 70s knew (or eventually learned) what you were getting into. I knew some people who lingered and then left ABD, not bothering to write a dissertation when the reality sunk in. However, by 1980 there were a lot fewer people looking for PhD-based jobs. There were plenty of post docs, because the odds of turning one into an academic job were really bad. There were tech jobs to be had, particularly if you were a US citizen (and thus could get a security clearance), although no physics faculty had any clue about them. Faculty were now fully disconnected from industry, except in some areas of condensed matter research.

So the period from 1960 to 1980 was feast and famine. What happened from 1980 to 2000? Why a big peak in 1994? Part of the story is the discovery of quarks in 1974 and the death of the SSC circa 1993. The second peak you see is in 1994, right after the SSC was killed. This was also a time period when rumored demand for retirement replacements did not appear. (Universities shifted open positions from physics to new areas; biophysics is now hotter than nuclear physics and positions planned for the SSC went unfilled.) I think you are seeing a peak as people quickly wrap up their thesis so they can move on, and a drop as people quit. The fact that the AIP data also show a large (200 person) peak in the number of MS degrees exiting PhD institutions (solid yellow curve) in 1994 backs up this opinion. There is no peak from masters institutions. Those are PhD students who saw no point in finishing. I'll bet you would see the same thing in 1970 if those data went back far enough.

The other thing that happened from 1980 to 2000 was an increase in the fraction of foreign students in US universities. Faculty research programs had been built on huge numbers of graduate students and post docs, and there were also labs to be taught. American students would not take those jobs, so foreign students were recruited to take their place. (A graph of PhD's granted to US citizens would look very different from the one shown above.) This, along with immigration of PhD faculty from overseas, complicates the supply side of the academic job picture.

I have put a pair of red "lines to misguide the eye" in this area, reflecting two possible models for the supply situation. One tracks what a nuclear experimentalist would term the "background" below the peaks, while the higher one tries to split the difference and average the production over that period. The top line would be something like a long-term average of actual production, while the bottom line might be the level that could really be sustained. I find it interesting that the line from 1940 to 1960 roughly meets that bottom line around 1980, and that the top line meets the production curve around 1966 (when the faculty market started to saturate) and 1976 (when those who started just before the crash finally graduated). The bottom line might be a sustainable production rate, with the bottom line being the minimum graduation rate under any circumstances.

Demand will be taken up next, followed by issues related to preparing PhD students for the kinds of jobs that are likely to be available.

One consequence of the training and research experience of the current faculty is that major professors at a top R1 school with a 1/1 teaching load are (partially) training students for the only job they know about, which is not likely to be the one the student will take. This was a huge problem in the 1970s, and my impression from the blogs I follow (much like the impression on Usenet a decade earlier) is that it remains a problem today.

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Mendacity from Chertoff?

The following statement was made by Michael Chertoff in video shown on the Situation Room on CNN (video seen on the afternoon of 12 July 2007):

"We don't currently have specific [ahem], credible information about a particular threat against the homeland [ah] in the near future."

This is a classic example of a carefully constructed, pre-spun statement that offers little but plausible deniability to Chertoff. The reporter doing the interview failed to ask Chertoff why he chose his words to not exclude the possibility that the truth is:

"We currently have specific, credible information about an attack within the US a few months from now."


Recited in a calm, soothing voice, Chertoff's handlers expect that most Americans will hear "There are no credible threats against the United States" rather than what those words actually mean to someone who understands logic and its use in rhetoric.

All that Chertoff has excluded is a very narrow group of possible situations. In addition to the version above, his statement leaves open the possibility that

"We have specific, credible information about an attack on American interests overseas in the near future."

or

"We have specific information about a particular threat against the homeland in the near future whose credibility is in question."

Like the Rice mendacity quaver, Chertoff might give away the truth when he pauses at two points in his statement where the qualifiers "specific" and "in the near future" are inserted.

Any of these would lead to a very different reaction in the media, yet the person interviewing him for CNN did not ask any followup question about why he chose his words to avoid excluding these possibilities. My guess is that he was backed into a corner by his earlier remarks and needed a way out that would not help our enemies realize we know what they are up to, and that he did a better job of fooling CNN and the public than he did of fooling Al' Qaeda.

Update:
Proof that he fooled the AP, and through them some American citizens. CNN carries an AP report that "he [Chertoff] and others continue to say they know of no specific, credible information pointing to an attack here." As you can see above, that is not what Chertoff said. What Chertoff said could mean that he knows of specific credible information pointing to an attach here in six months.

If he was forced to obfuscate a mistaken leak, at least Chertoff stayed within the bounds of proper handling of highly classified information, unlike the persons who have allowed Al' Qaeda to rebuild in Pakistan after the US military put them out of business at the end of 2001, the ones who also gave the enemy in Iraq three months warning of our impending "surge" and exposed our anti-proliferation assets in the middle east.

Let's pray that they handle this better than Katrina or "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US".

Presidential Update:

The President added another (rather transparent) example of the half-truth form of mendacity in his press conference today. When pressed about the National Counterterrorism Center's observation that "Al Qaeda better positioned to strike the West", Bush said that Al Qaeda is weaker now than if we had done nothing.

Right but not relevant. They are weaker now than if we had done nothing on 12 September 2001, but his own intelligence agencies are telling him that they are stronger now than if we had continued to fight Al Qaeda in 2003 instead of diverting our resources to Iraq and creating the ultimate recruiting and training tool for bin Laden. As above, we can already see reporters saying the administration is claiming we are safer now than 6 years ago when the real question is whether we are safer than we were 5 years ago, or even 2 years ago.

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Bicycle Power

Enough ranting; back to physics. Today I feel a Cocktail Party Physics-style inspiration from watching the Tour de France. (I love that it is on live every morning with the sprint finish just before lunch. Can get some reading done while it is on in the background, then work on my fall classes in the afternoon.) Towards the bottom of this article, I will give a simple example showing the power required to race up a mountain.

Bicycle racing is about the physics concepts of power and torque. Because these same concepts are important to the design of hybrid cars and in motor racing, I will mention those also.

The quick version is that torque translates into force and is responsible for acceleration (short sprints at the finish) while power is responsible for sustained top speed (whether on the level in a time trial or when climbing).

Physics

This is a bit of an oversimplification because torque and power are not independent of each other: both involve force in their definition. Power is the rate of doing work (work in units of Joules divided by time in units of seconds gives power in units of Watts), and is defined as Work / time, or Force * velocity, or Torque * angular velocity. [Because force is more intuitive than torque to most people, I will use the force version in my examples.] You have to have power in reserve if you want to accelerate while already at high speed (sprints in bicycle racing), but power and force (or torque) can be considered separately in many situations.

(Factoid useful for automobile engines: Power in horsepower = Torque in foot-pounds at an angular velocity of 5252 rpm. Torque and power curves always cross there.)

Two engines (or people) producing the same power can produce a large force, doing a lot of work, in a long time (at a slow speed) ... or a small force, doing a small amount of work, in a short time (at a high speed). Power is about quickness, not brute strength, which is why many sports emphasize "power lifting" training (lifting a given weight 10 or more reps at a time) rather than working on a single lift of a heavier weight. The person who can lift a larger weight than another person in the same time (such as the time needed to sustain a block in football) is more powerful.

Since sport is all about getting there first, power is what usually wins a competition. However, what often matters more is the power to weight ratio, since a heavier person (or car) needs more power to (say) climb a hill at a particular speed.

Tradeoffs

The reason we treat power and force separately (and report both when talking about automobile engines) is that there are physiological and mechanical reasons that the upper limits on power and torque (or force) can vary independently of one another.

Automobiles with a push-rod V-8 have huge amounts of low-end (low rpm) torque. Diesel engines even more so. When you want to pull a trailer or accelerate from a stop light, you need that "grunt" of a large force at a low speed. Hybrid cars get this from the electric motor, which also produces a high torque at low speed. The key design concept of a hybrid is to use the electric motor for torquey things like getting moving, and design the gasoline engine to keep it moving at constant highway speed (where power matters more than torque) as efficiently as possible. Dividing the two functions between two physically separate devices makes the engineering design problem much simpler.

A DOHC (double overhead cam) engine, common on imports and smaller cars as well as high-end race cars, produces the maximum torque at quite high rpm. [My Miata has a torque peak at 5500 rpm.] If you want to get a large starting force from this kind of motor, you need to wind it up (and eat up the clutch) in a way that most people won't do. In my not-so-humble opinion, manufacturers have put bigger motors in "small" cars so that people who don't know how that motor works can get the torque needed to pull into traffic. This comes at the expense of highway mileage because the more powerful motor is less efficient. [My ancient Miata, with its 1.6L engine, got 34 mpg at sustained highway speeds of 77 mph on my last trip. Its top speed of 115 mph is plenty, so it does not need more power.] Again, a hybrid can have a DOHC engine designed only to cruise at 80 mph (100 mph if you are Al Gore) on the highway, letting the electric part deal with acceleration.

Human physiology has similar variability.

Two bike racers with the same mass will exert exactly the same force and do exactly the same work to ride up and over a mountain pass. Same m means same m*g*sin(theta) [force to move against gravity on a slope of angle theta] and same m*g*h [work done to lift you over the pass]. The winner does it faster, which requires more power ... not more force and certainly not more work (or more calories burned). You just have to be able to burn those calories faster, to do the required work faster.

Sprinting, like during the finish of the last few races, is about acceleration. Getting a jump on someone, to increase your speed to a level you can't sustain very long, just long enough to win the race. Competitive riders can get to over 60 mph on a level road, but only for several hundred meters. There is power involved here also, but not sustained power. It is about producing a large force for a short time, and only for a short time. These riders usually cannot climb mountains because they produce extreme amounts of power only in short bursts.

Power still plays a role in sprints, because your top speed occurs when the power you can produce is equal to the power being drained away by friction and air drag. More power translates into a higher top speed, the critical factor in winning an individual event like a time trial. It is also why the finish of a bike race looks a lot like NASCAR, with riders drafting someone until the last moment and then using a "slingshot" move to pass. The most powerful sprinter can only sustain top speed for a few hundred meters, so they time that move to get to the finish line just when they can't do it any more.

Example from today's finish:

I used a stopwatch to time the racers over the last kilometer of Stage 4. They took about 49.5 s, which translates into 20.2 m/s or 45.2 mph. That is the average speed. Since data shown during the previous kilometer indicated the leaders riding at about 34 mph when they started that stretch, the winner (Thor Hushovd of Norway) and the man who almost caught him at the line were probably going in excess of 50 mph as they approached the finish.

I'd really like to know what the computer on his bike said his speed was over the last few hundred meters.

The power demands are huge. The force of air drag increases roughly as the square of the velocity, so the power required increases as the cube of the velocity. You need eight times the power to go twice as fast.

(Side note: This dependence on the cube of the velocity explains why "restrictor plate" NASCAR cars cannot catch up with the draft when coming out of the pits. You asymptotically approach terminal velocity, so it takes more than a lap to pick up those last few mph. You also see this in qualifying, where the second lap on a superspeedway is always faster than the first.)

Example relevant to mountain climbing in the Tour:

The steepness of a road is given in %, which is the slope (rise over run). Thus an 8% grade corresponds to a rise of 8 m in 100 m (horizontal distance), or 100.3 m along the road (the hypotenuse of the triangle). If a bicyclist wants to climb that hill at a constant speed of 15.0 mph (24.1 kph), he has to do the work required to raise his mass (and his bike) 8 m in the time it takes to go 100.3 m at 6.7056 m/s. That work is m*g*h, and it must be done in 14.96 s. The work depends on the mass of the rider, of course.

It is too early to know who will be "King of the Mountain", but some past contenders have masses that range from 61 kg (134 lb) to 73 kg (161 lb). I will use 65 kg as my example, and assume the only other mass involved is the bike (6.8 kg minimum mass). They will also carry some water on longer climbs, because the rules forbid getting any water from a team car during a climb, but nothing extra on short climbs. That value gives us work = (71.8 kg)*(9.807 m/s^2)*(8 m) = 5.63 kJ in 15 s. That is a power output of 376.5 Watts = 0.505 horsepower. Additional power is required to overcome the drag due to the air, the work you need to do when riding that speed on level ground. Thus this is a lower limit on the power needed to climb at that speed.

Note: 1 hp = 746 W, which many top riders can develop for a period of time.

Also note that 1 food Calorie is 4.19 kJ, so they are burning over 5 Calories per minute just overcoming gravity on one of those climbs.

Some bike racing details for wannabe fans:

First, no mention of bike racing would be complete without mentioning the Oscar(R) nominated film, The Triplets of Belleville. Nominated for best animated feature and best original song, it tells a wonderfully strange story of the wildly improbably rescue of a young man who is kidnapped while in a bike race. That said ...

Mountain climbing starts this weekend with Stage 7 on Saturday. The page I linked to defaults to the route, but you can also view the "profile" of the route (showing the elevation changes) and the "passes", which gives the length and grade of each major climb.

Climbs were classified from easiest (4) to hardest (1) before anyone thought someone would be crazy enough to race over ones that are harder than the hardest. (Classification of whitewater rapids uses an open-ended scale with 1 as easiest to avoid this problem.) The H category (haute or high) has since been added to indicate climbs that are basically impossible for normal human beings. Difficulty is a combination of steepness and length, so it is possible for a very long 6% climb (such as the ones out of Val d'Isere on Tuesday's Stage 9) to be rated H while a short climb at 8% (like near the start of Stage 17) would be only a 3.

The really interesting climbs are on days with an H category (or two) in the route. Those include Stage 9 (linked above) on Tuesday, July 17, with two big climbs, Stage 14 on Sunday, 22 July, with two (one is at the finish so a climber will win that stage), Stage 15, with one on 23 July, and Stage 16, on 25 July, with two (again, one at the finish). Stages 14 and 16 may determine who wins the overall title.

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Xanax and Politician's Kids

What is it about being the 24 year old child of a politician and getting caught with Xanax? First Noelle Bush, now Al Gore III.

You can be excused for not knowing about the connection, because the media rarely remember what was in that newspaper it sent to the recycling bin a few years ago. That is what I am here for. Besides, the bit about speeding in a Prius seems to have drawn their attention away from prescription drug abuse.

Of course, its not like my old buddy the Drug Czar wants to go ballistic on prescription drugs, or even meth. He is still fighting the Evil Weed of his Youth rather than the current menace of suburbia.

For those who don't remember, Noelle Bush, daughter of Jeb! Bush, was arrested for prescription fraud while trying to get some Xanax. This was in 2002, when she was 24. Oddly enough, Al III was also 24 when he was found to have quite a mix of drugs in his possession when stopped for speeding. Those two should put politics aside and hang out together. They probably have a lot in common, growing up in high-stress political families.

No guess as to how this will affect my fantasy politics 2008 ticket of Gore/Clinton and Cheney/Bush. Probably not at all, since all four of those have enough glass windows to be cautious about throwing stones.

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More of Middle America

Success! Got a good shot of the sort of highway sign I noticed on the first leg of the trip.

Now I just have to get some info from highway department and turn it into a physics problem. The approximately 2 foot wide base makes it ideal for a torque problem, and treating the two trusses and the sign as if each was a uniform object is probably not a bad approximation.

The shortage of "W" stickers continues, with a new twist. I saw the first example of a "coverup" - an oval sticker in the style of the "W'04" ones, except this says "GOP". Looks like the perfect way for a disgruntled Republican to show they line up with Hagel (and now Lugar) rather than Cheney and Bush. Still rare, however.

I also saw a regular "W" sticker and, more interestingly, one that read "May God Bless W" printed in a flag pattern. The latter was in a car with Florida plates driven by white haired folks who, apparently, think that their God would bless someone who ships people off to be tortured after even less of a trial than Pontius Pilate gave His Son. The United States is, truly, a land for everyone.

Puzzling over the mindset of the half of the Republican Party that still thinks things are going as planned in Iraq kept me awake for another hundred miles, but I prefer roadside delights like that pictured below to break up the monotony.

The sculpture is huge, by the way, and would not come cheap.

Then there are the things you don't want to see. Stopped traffic:

For an hour, parked on the freeway.

It did, however, turn out to be an interesting break from the road that contained an interesting lesson in chemistry and physics. Got a chance to talk to a wide variety of people who were on the highway, a truly interstate group. Among them was the driver of the truck you see in front of me. He filled us in on what he had heard over the radio about the wreck. Later I asked him about his load, since his tanker truck had an amusing warning sign suggesting a corrosive liquid.

He said the truck was carrying Maleic Anhydride, used in everything from making epoxy type resins to food products. (Google, in addition to confirming my memory of how to spell the name, confirms that it is used to make artificial sweeteners as well as epoxy hardeners and oil additives.) It was being transported in the liquid state at 150 deg F. It is solid at room temperature, so he needed to keep his truck running to avoid a very nasty problem. Although it reacts to become Maleic Acid when it encounters water, a spill is more likely to result in a white solid when it cools and hits the ground. One web link gives the MSDS info on it, and shows the "corrosive" symbol I saw on the truck. I'm glad I don't have an iPhone, where I would have known that info while parked behind it!

Bet you never guessed that a pretty truck like that would be carrying a hot chemical.

Anyway, the accident had occurred hours earlier. Reportedly the driver had either fallen asleep or had a heart attack, although there was also another vehicle involved. In any case, a truck hauling a double trailer (like the one in the parade picture) had run off the road, dumping his load in the ditch. You can't see any of that in the picture below, but you can see part of the response team.

Traffic had to wait while the back hoe was used to right the truck, because it had to swing across the only lane available for traffic. At the same time, a "bobcat" was being used to clean up the load from the ditch.

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Side Trip Notes

Some odds and ends picked up on the side trip.

It is a good thing that Paris Hilton did not get caught driving under the influence in a northern Michigan county. The following is from the "Court Reports" published on 28 June in a weekly paper. Operating while visibly impaired or intoxicated (two examples), first offense: 93 days in jail, $1100 fine, 12 months probation. Operating while visibly intoxicated, second offence: 365 days in jail, $1375 fine, 18 months probation. Paris Hilton's "harsh" 45 day sentence (23 served) for violating probation with a second DUI offense, after getting nothing but probation for the first, looks pretty lame compared to what they dish out in the north woods.

If you plan now, you can catch the Baby Food Festival on July 17. Just don't drink and drive afterwards.

It is easy to forget that there is really nothing quite like a small town 4th of July parade. Before we get to the sublime part, it is worth noting that the group of active duty, Marines (veterans of Iraq) deferred to the Vietnam Veterans, telling them to lead the parade. I was struck by the observation that the vets of my generation's war are now a lot older than WW II vets were when I was a kid. And that they got more sustained applause than the Marines.

Now on to the small town parade:

After all, what is a parade without a beautiful big semi, with two trailers.

Or without a float promoting a bowling alley.

One of the great places in the world to visit, Mackinac Island, will be featured on the CBS Morning News on 23 August. Their weatherman was up there in June to film segments that will be cut into the live program in August. This visit made the top of the front page, with a color photo, in said local weekly.

• The name Mackinac is from the French and is pronounced mackinaw, like the British term for a jacket that originated in that area. Pronounce it any other way and you are marked as a clueless tourist.
  
• The Island has no motorized vehicles other than an ambulance, a fire vehicle, and a truck that washes the streets before dawn. Everything else is bicycles and horses, included horse-drawn delivery wagons and taxis. It is eerily quiet at night.
  
• They do allow snowmobiles in the winter. Access in winter is either by plane or across an ice road from the mainland.
  
• A featured food item is fudge. The odors on main street (horses and fudge) are totally unique.
  
• The Island was used as the set for "Somewhere in Time", which contained the absurd premise that you can drive there from Chicago. Special approval was required to have a car on Mackinac Island for those scenes.
  

The Discovery Channel program Dirty Jobs spent some time in that area. One set of jobs was on Mackinac Island, where he shoveled horse manure and collected garbage. Another set was spent working on the Mackinac Bridge, changing light bulbs and painting 500 ft above the water. These will probably air next season.

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Side Trip

Took a bit of a side trip yesterday to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to see "The Thinker" at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park. If the name seems familiar to you, it is because he built a local grocery store into a major regional chain.



This casting of The Thinker (made in 1904) is on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts while they do some renovation. Seeing it outside is remarkable, but there was much more. For example, there are two others by Rodin that are part of the permanent exhibit. If you get close, this place (northeast of downtown) is well worth a visit. Afterwards, you can go up to Muskegon and ride one of the top wooden roller coasters in the world or hit the Lake Michigan beaches.

This photo shows the outside setting in context.


The Thinker is contemplating a wonderful Koi pond with a waterfall that hides road noise from just over the berm. Click the picture to view the full size original and look on the left side.

The gardens, besides being in full bloom, had a traveling exhibit featuring "the chocolate tree" scattered through the grounds and in the various indoor greenhouse spaces. (The main sponsor, Dove, gave out complimentary chocolates.) No photos of that, however.

I also cannot show you any photos of the sculptures of Sophie Ryder, which were in two of the indoor museum spaces. No photos were allowed of her wonderfully strange rabbit headed people. This picture shows part of a display banner by the entrance.




The signature piece of the outdoor display is a recreation of a horse sculpture designed and modeled by DaVinci but never cast full size. This one and the one in Italy were commissioned by Fred Meijer.



You do have to see it to believe it, although the people in this photo do help put it in scale.



Personally, I think this sculpture of a giant trowel, perfectly set in a field of native grasses ready to be turned into a garden, best captures the whole concept of blending a large collection of sculptures into a large horticulture garden.




There must be a mile of trails, some leading into garden "rooms" containing themed groups of art.




I'll let a group of them go without commentary, except to say that I included this next one ("Listening to History") because it reminds me of how The Little Professor seems to be so tied to her book collection.




This is not a Calder, but it really belongs here because of the large Calder stabile that is on the city hall plaza downtown.



Hard to believe this collection was assembled by a grocer, isn't it?

There is more than art and gardens. There is a large children's art and activity area near the entrance. It includes some hands-on sculptures, art activities, a tree house, and a recreation of the Great Lakes basin complete with plastic boats.


That is the mitten of Michigan, with Lake Michigan on the left, Lake Superior at top left, and Lakes Huron (top right) and Erie (bottom right). It even has Niagara Falls out of the picture to the right.

Finally, some more sculptures:







This last one is "Torso of Summer", which seems appropriate for the season.

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Did Scooter call Dick's Bluff?

So the President had to rush back to Washington from a fishing vacation with Putin to commute Scooter Libby's prison sentence?

What (or who) could make him decide to leave the press corps behind and make this sudden announcement?

My best guess: Scooter told his former boss that he would tell the whole truth about a wide variety of things (perhaps including statements the V.P. has made under oath, and not limited to the outing of a covert CIA agent) that would lead to Cheney's immediate impeachment and trial if he had to spend one night in prison. No more fall guy. (The RNC can help him cover his fines easily, but they can't serve time for him.) One phone call to the fishing boat and W was off to Washington to sign what he was told to sign and authorize a press release written by his handlers. (He certainly did not write it while fishing with Putin.)

Either that or Bush thinks he is the L.A. County Sheriff.

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Question for Mac People

My wife has become assimilated. First an iPod, now a Mac.

After decades in the PC world, the question is:
what Mac-specific software is out there (particularly for photo management) that she would not know about?

Feel free to post any other suggestions about tools that work well with the Mac. For example, we have a wireless router for our stuff, but it does not seem to play well with the Mac. AirPort?

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Observing Middle America

One can see almost anything while driving across the country, but one thing I had trouble seeing these days is a "W" sticker. I only saw one sticker in two days on the Interstate. This is a major change in one year, particularly since the route I take goes by two major army installations.

This suggests that even the 25% who still support W are not so sure they want their neighbors to know that they do.

English Only irony continues:
I saw a "Yo Soy el Army" bumper sticker. Interesting that the Republican Presidential candidates are not exactly playing the 'support our troops' game on this one.

I also proved that a physicist can see physics problems anywhere. I saw a really nice "statics" problem in a cantilevered highway sign in Kentucky, which used a box truss rather than a pole for the vertical part. Perfect.

Forgot this one:
Indiana has a new specialty license plate. I have to wonder if they know it translates into Arabic as "We Trust in Allah".

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Cray computers

I think I owe Rebecca, whose dream computer is the Cray 1, a photo of its first descendant:



Even built it myself! Of course it actually is just a cardboard model of a Cray X-MP that was also a calendar.

When I saw one of those on a desk, I just had to track down the source and make one myself.

Like Rebecca, I loved Cray's computers. His CDC6500 design was my second computer, and I knew it inside and out. Its RISC design made it easy to program, since I could easily keep the state of the machine in my head. Wrote some cool stuff for it, including a macro package that turned the assembler into a FORTRAN in-line compiler and a multi-tasking operating system that beat M$'s (much later) original DOS by a mile. Although the 6500 was wildly out of date by then, I count it as my first supercomputer.

My first computer was some Honeywell model that the school system let my physics teacher use in the off hours. I slammed some code to do a trivial numerical integral (using a Riemann sum) of the potential energy of a beaded chain. It was really doing a calculator sum, but calculators did not exist until a few years later. Used it to show that the potential energy of a free-hanging curve (a catenary) was less than that of other (distorted) shapes held in place by pins. Looking back, that was so cool for its time that it probably would have won some science fairs if I had bothered to enter it. Little does Mr. P know where that experience took me.

Over the years, I used a CDC7600, a Cray 1 (which was sort of the evolved 8600, sort of not), an X-MP, and a Cray 2 (which was sort of the 9600, the plausible reason I give for HAL being in the 9000 series). The immersion in liquid coolant made the Cray 2 rather unique and particularly photogenic. The ETA-10 (the successor to the CDC Star, the ultimate CISC architecture) was immersed in liquid Nitrogen for cooling, which was extremely cool (literally) but could not be seen.

Rebecca, if you want to design an emulator for the Cray 1, I found a copy of the Hardware Reference Manual on the web. Page 3-25 shows the hack he did on the multiply unit to save money at the cost of some minor computational flaws, some of which are documented at that point in the manual.

Seymour Cray was a genius. We lost a lot when he was killed in an accident on a freeway when his Jeep Grand Cherokee overturned.

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Doubly Tagged?

It would seem that two people circulating in a similar part of the blogosphere (first Twice Tenured, but it was Rebecca's that I noticed first) have sequentially ! tagged me with the latest meme. Amusing. I'd already seen this meme elsewhere, but had not given it much thought.

The Rules:

• I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

Hmmmm. Both of my taggers skipped that last rule!

Names of those tagged are inside the full article.

Where to begin with the eight random facts? Well, since a computer scientist in the applied math world got my attention ...

• I took a year of PhD-level Numerical Analysis as an undergrad math major. If I had not grown bored of math (in a junior class, not that one) and gotten recruited into physics, I probably would have gone to grad school in Applied Math. I still owe Dr. G for getting me into this physics career that I love so much.
• But I still have a very nice PDE solver. Old School stuff: partial pivot plus various bells and whistles. On cards. Somewhere.
• I have oatmeal for breakfast every morning, even in the summer.
• I scored all sorts of goals in intramural soccer despite never playing it until I was in grad school, but am pathetic at basketball, which I "played" my whole life.
• Not too many people take quantum mechanics as a senior just to fill out their schedule, but I did, the same year I took grad applied math. My QM prof recruited me into physics, but it was the sophomore QM prof that actually hooked me on it.
• I always play a game of Free Cell while the computer finishes booting up Windoze.
• I once turned down a tenure-track faculty job, and still have no regrets about that decision.
• I personally know (on a first name basis) the Drug Czar.

Now, who to tag.

I should tag The Little Professor, for using xyzzy in a post last week. That was a flash from the past. Would it violate the spirit of the meme to mention that I know how to get a perfect score by leaving the magazines somewhere and then not doing something? And that we figured out how to get (actually keep) that last point by disassembling the computer program? Plugh!

Next up:
The Thomas (who comments here and there but has not posted anything new in months), Astroprof, Sherman Dorn, Dean Dad (eight facts from his blog vacation?), Profgrrrrl (where I'd like to hear some unexpected things about Thailand), and Chad, over at Uncertain Principles, should consider themsleves tagged, along with anyone else who wants to play.

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Rated G?

No contest with profgrrrrl's PG, Dr. Crazy's R, or Jennifer's NC-17 over at Cocktail Party Physics.

I guess pointing out random obscene political activities does not register on their counter. Pretty unsophisticated program, but what do you expect?

OK, I did not expect it would give No Quarter an NC-17 because Larry uses the word "torture" 11 times and (are you ready for this?) Dick (as in Dick Cheney) 10 times!

ROTFLMAO. [I wonder if the program knows what that means? And if this article will raise my rating to a PG?] I guess kids can't be allowed to watch the evening news this year.

But the really funny aspect of this is the following:
You would never guess that I have a softball team shirt with the initials of Dung Tongue The Great on it.

Do I still need to include that when I reply to Rebecca's tag? If I need it.

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Great Moments in Student Notes

Unlike some other bloggers, I have never written about notes sent by students - but the logic in this one is priceless.

Handwritten and left in my mailbox sometime after I last checked it, which was more than three hours after the final exam ended. That makes it after the course officially ended.

Background:
Although Student was technically "in my class", I doubt if most of the students in the class would have recognized Student. Student had been absent for the last three weeks of a six week class and had arrived late or been absent for about half of the first three weeks. Student did not take the final exam.

Student writes (editted excerpts only):

I gave up because I didn't think I could pass your class. .... If I fail this class, I won't be able to graduate.

Right. So why did you give up and guarantee that you wouldn't graduate?

For that matter, why didn't you try actually taking the class: Attending every day on time, reading the book before class, and doing the homework? You know, act like a student? After a week or so of that, you might find out that you could pass the class. (If you read my earlier comment on the end/start of summer, you would know that everyone who took the final exam passed that class. Getting 90+ % on the HW was a big part of that for most of them.)

But I am not complaining, just venting to entertain my few readers.

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Softball with Chris Matthews

Where to begin? With free campaign ads.

Once again we see a show containing a variety of free campaign ads shown by NBC under the pretense that their presence on the web makes them news. (At least they acknowledged the obvious, that Fred Thompson's slickly produced evasion of any discussion of health care was a pre-campaign campaign spot.) I hope this does not mean that the networks are going to pick winners and run their spots for free, like they did when they endorsed the assertions of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans, yet that is what I saw tonight.

One thing about this campaign is already obvious to me. Only one candidate has raised enough money to run an ad that he actually pays for on one of the various cable channels that I watch. Mitt Romney. I have seen several of his paid ads over the past month or two, and none by any other candidate. The others are getting theirs run for free.

Then there is the question of the Vice President's branch of government.

Lots more softballs pitched on that one.

It is fine with me if the Vice President asserts that all of his actions have been performed within his single Constitutional duty: serving as the President of the Senate. That means that he was not a member of the executive branch when he participated in all of those meetings, which means he and (more importantly) no one else at those meetings has a right of executive privilege if asked questions about them. Those meetings are just like any other one where a member of Congress is present, with no expectation of executive privacy.

It also suggests to me that the President Pro-tempore of the Senate has the same authority granted to the President of the Senate by the President of the United States whenever the President of the Senate (the Vice President) is absent. That would include classifying and declassifying documents for any political purpose, even if it were to harm national security like the V.P. and his minions did by outing every covert agent who had ever worked with Valerie Plame on the single most important issue of our time: nuclear proliferation. However, I would suggest the President Pro-tempore focus on rendition and torture at the behest of some members of our government.

But if he wants to claim that any of his discussions are subject to executive privilege, as one might suspect due to his office being in the White House and Executive Office Building, then he must be bound by all of the laws that apply to any other person acting in the government at the behest of the President. Or be impeached for failing to do so.

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Pootwattle on Names

Pootwattle appears to be addressing the familiar observation that most scientists think giving something a name is akin to understanding it. Or not.



Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:

The hermeneutic of the image invests itself in the writing of the proper-name effect.

Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:

Pootwattle's useful restatement of the relationship between the hermeneutic of the image and the writing of the proper-name effect addresses an important subject but forgets to mail it, if I may permit myself a slight witticism.

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Newton's Principia

The Smithsonian magazine had a little blurb about the Principia in "This Month in History" for July 2007. It is the 320th anniversary of the invention of my student's favorite two classes: calculus and calc-based physics.

Made me think, gee, its seems like almost twenty years ago.

Actually, it was 20 years ago that I got a chance to read the original book.

You see, I'm so old that I remember when MTV had music videos. I remember when the "Washington meeting" of the APS, the April meeting attended by everyone except condensed matter physicists, was always held in Washington, DC. (Now it appears in more centrally-located cultural centers, such as Jacksonville, FL.) So much for being able to see a major Picasso exhibit on a lunch break. But I digress.

On a whim, I wandered over to the Library of Congress during a gap in talks I thought would be interesting. I knew that 1987 was the 300th anniversary of the book, and wondered if I could see one of the originals. It turns out that the answer was "yes". What a great experience, a connection to the origins of physics.

My most striking impression was that the pages of the book did not look that old. I have paperback books that look older. (The same was true of the Gutenberg Bible on display in the lobby.) That really made me appreciate the value of rag paper over the wood pulp we use today. We are quite correct to worry about whether digital media can be read 100 years from now, but it can't be as bad as many of our books.

Most libraries have a facsimile copy of the book (on pulp paper, so it already looks 320 years old) and/or a copy of the Cotes translation. It is worth reading to see how clearly Newton presented the main ideas of physics, and how convoluted his geometrical proofs of the calculus were. In particular, pay attention to how he invented the "vis insita" to give a name to the force Aristotle said was needed to keep things moving. His method of removing Aristotelian thinking was to define it as distinct from an "impressed force". Worth thinking about when we deal with all of those counterintuitive ideas about motion that our students bring to the classroom.

Modern textbooks take different approaches to this conceptual problem. Newton offers one that is not used much today.

PS - My understanding is that physicists don't drink enough at the hotel bar to make us desirable guests for conferences in the big Washington hotels.

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Study Skills Classes

I came late to the party when Dean Dad blogged about study skills courses, although my late comment did show up as the only one on his IHE clone of that blog.

I added one other followup to the main blog, but there were several points I figured I should use my own blog to comment on. (pardon the dangling participle)


Ivory commented that there would not be a "Work 101" class to prep them for their careers, which overlooks the significance of college (and college success classes) in the development of those skills. Even if our "workforce" and "transfer" classes don't get them all the way there, the more we manage to teach them about the need to take personal responsibility for their own learning, the better off they will be.

Ivory also mentioned the FITF (first in the family) issue as one that drove the adoption of a study skills class at hir [*] college, but added "But this assumes a lack of initiative in that group that I'm not comfortable with that." I don't think it assumes that at all. It assumes a lack of experience and family lore about how college differs from high school. My blog about what kids need to hear at orientation, particularly items 3 and 4, touches on some of those things. These kids have lots of initiative. They don't understand the culture, and no one has told them it is different from high school.

[*] hir is not a typo, it is a clever him/her blending borrowed from ProfGrrrrl.

BTW, I'm not picking on Ivory. Several of the Anonymous comments made similar points; Ivory was just the first. I shared some of those questions about a skills class until I read Zucker's article in the "Notices of the American Mathematical Society" about the lack of study skills in new students at John's Hopkins, including ones who are taking Calc III as freshmen. If kids with 1500+ SAT scores have a problem, why should we expect ones with 600 or 700 (total) to know how college works?

Random observation: My father, a college grad, told me that college was going to be different from high school. That it would be harder, and I would have to do homework. (He was wrong. I did not have to do any homework to speak of until I took a grad-level math class my Sophomore year. I'm not counting writing computer programs, because that was fun.) College had gotten easier, and my HS, english classes in particular, had prepared me really well. So had the CC where I took my first year of calculus while in high school.

Back to the comments.

I once shared the views of some of the posters about a study skills class. Until I learned about ours through a program I participated in. Our class includes how the college works, including advising ... not to mention the mere existence of the catalog and what is in it. (They get one at orientation, but do they know they should read it? And is it written at the grade level of a typical high school grad, which might be 9th grade or so based on our exit exam?) It covers careers, and how to use our resources to learn the difference between construction and engineering, and between accounting and bookkeeping. I think there is even a unit specifically on the different ways you study for math and history.

One comment mentioned the competence of the teachers, who were often counselors. Ours were originally taught by a few of our best counselors and faculty who teach "prep" classes. Those early classes were extremely effective. (Classes with really good teachers often have that characteristic.) With expanded enrollment, they are taught by many counselors, faculty from the "prep" courses and regular college classes, and even by adjuncts. There is a master syllabus, but one can't help wondering if it would still work as well as it did at the start. To me, the most promising thing in the reports about the study (and the study, CCRC Brief number 36, itself) is the statistical evidence that these course work. The signal persists when important confounding variables are tested.

Another comment mentioned that it probably does not hurt to have an easy class that they like going to every day. I won't discount that. Get them on campus for that class, and maybe they will go to math or english that day also.

Dr. Crazy mentioned teaching a linked course, which is something our college is trying. It helps the students in two ways. It locks in a convenient schedule, and it forms a community of learners that can start to study together. Not only does it help them to know that the faculty care about their success, it helps when other students care about how each other are doing.

I really like the idea of a skills class for Seniors, mentioned by Intelligent Evolver. Engineering schools have a "senior design" class whose purpose is to begin the transition to being an engineer. That class is doubly valuable if they did not have an internship. Who tells a physics undergrad that grad school will be really different? It is probably worse in other fields, because at least some physics majors participate in an REU program.

I'll close with a few remarks that were already posted in DD's blog.

Walker commented "Is it that the students gained more because someone “cared” as I am beginning to see." Very likely. These students discover someone cares, so they assume the rest of us do ... and become students who contact us in advance if they have to leave early or miss a class.

The second anonymous said: "many students just want to try and fake their way through the class." They do this because it worked for them in high school. See the link above to what needs to be in orientation: You had to attend every day in HS, and your teachers had to pass you. The opposite is true in college.

The complaints from The Myth about non-students not reading the book, etc, fall in this same category.

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Irony in Politics

Flashback to the third Republican debate on June 5th.

One of the topics was whether English should be the official language of the United States. Not surprisingly, none of the candidates opposed it, although Sen. McCain did note that doing so might violate one of our treaties with the Navajo in his state.

Others had complained about "press 1 for English". My wife commented that you would think Republicans would respect the free market at work.

The irony?

The debate ended at 9 pm. I clicked over to ABC and what was on? The "NCLR ALMA Awards", featuring subversives such as Eva Longoria, Cameron Diaz, Emilio Estevez, and Prince. The program was put on by the National Council of La Raza. But that was not the ironic part. That came at the first advertising break, featuring the lead sponsor.

Chevrolet. The ad (apart from the logo, Chevrolet Subete) was in English, featuring hard working hispanic contractors with their Chevy pickup. I could only imagine what Tom Tancredo would be thinking if he had seen that. Certainly not "What is good for General Motors is good for the country".

Then came the second break, featuring another major sponsor in the lead ad.

That ad was entirely in Spanish, with English subtitles, featuring lots of hard working middle-aged hispanics. The offender was none other than AARP.

We were howling at that one. Would any of the Republican candidates for President have the guts to tell AARP that they should not have run that ad?

Soon after the AARP ad was a Me Encanta advertisement for McDonalds. And what's good for McDonalds .... ?

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Visiting Alumni

Remembered this while posting a comment to Chad's blog celebrating the graduation of some of his students despite all the negative waves on the internet.

I had a great drop-in visit from an alumnus last week.

I'm wandering aimlessly in the halls when I see a familiar face, who has dropped by looking for me and Dr. Calc Three to tell us he had graduated with his degree in Computer Engineering from Wannabe Flagship U and has a job starting in August.

Now I already knew he had graduated (in good time, I might add) from my spies, but the job was excellent news. Cool job for starting out, and in a major city near his home turf. They are getting a good one.

You see, he was a kid who survived the inner city long enough to join the Marines. How he got to Ishkabibble CC, over 1000 miles from his home, is one of the mysteries of life. He came to us via Iraq, and became part of one of my strongest classes. The Marines-only study group he was in contributed a lot that year, because the only thing that works harder than a Marine is a group of several Marines. Combine that with his natural problem-solving skills, some good math classes, and learning all I could teach him, and he had a huge head start over the slacker HS kids who started at Wannabe Flagship.

The leadership and work ethic of vets is common around my CC, and I think it helps focus the minds of the others in my class as well. They are adults who know for sure that this is not Grade 13.

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Summer ends as summer begins

Finished off my last grading until August rolls around. I love that I could finish up this summer class before Summer itself begins.

They did very well, but the best part of this class was that one of them may be alive because of what he learned in the class.


This is a class where one topic is momentum, and I put a lot of emphasis into the physics of collisions and how seat belts work to reduce the impact on your body by increasing the time it takes for your body to stop. He was wearing his seat belt when he was in a very high speed crash, and his comment to me suggested that he did not always wear it. His crash was bad enough that he was injured by the seatbelt. He thought that was a bad thing until I explained to him that those bruises and sprained ribs mean he experienced 40 to 50 G's, and that 80+ will kill most people. Not much margin there.

For the rest, the nice part was that my cheerleading worked. "Only positive waves, Moriarty". Everyone who took the final exam got at least a C, which is a lot more than some of them expected after the first exam!

And for those who track "grading music":

• Temptations (greatest hits CD)
  
• Beatles (excerpts from "Love")
• excerpts from "Xauxa" by a Peruvian group, Kuyayky
• Santana (greatest hits CD)
• Beach Boys "Surfin Safari"

Had to end with a summer song!

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Pootwattle on College Reorganization

More from Pootwattle, who some claim is a random academic sentence generator at the University of Chicago.




Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:

The divisibility of pedagogical institutions provides a context for the renunciation of binary opposition.

Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:

Pootwattle's thoughtful reevaluation of the relationship between the divisibility of pedagogical institutions and the renunciation of binary opposition is a crucial contribution to the field.

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Formula One

I became a Formula 1 fan way back when Michael Schumacher was at Benetton, in the sad year when Senna was killed due to a mechanical failure of a Williams car. I was seriously wondering if I would find it as interesting this year with Michael gone, even with the obvious talent of Alonzo.

Now the question is: Why is Lewis Hamilton better on tracks he has never seen?


I think the answer is two-fold. Despite his great talent, there has to be a learning curve involved in running that kind of car in competition rather than just on test tracks, so it could just be a coincidence that his first two poles and first two victories have come on tracks he did not see until he arrived in North America. However, I think the answer is that his talent shows when he gets on a new track. He might be held back a bit on a track he previously raced with a less capable car, remembering a racing line that is less suited for an F-1 car.

The remaining questions are:

Did McLaren realize just what a talent they had coming up, while they were grooming him for Formula 1?

Can he carry this new knowledge with him to France and on to a championship?

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Un-Conventional Wisdom?

Originally conceived back in April, composed last week, polished off on Sunday, June 17.

The Conventional Wisdom is that moving the primaries earlier in the year, what Meet the Press refers to as Tsunami Tuesday on February 5, will result in the Presidential nomination being locked up less than halfway between now and the election next November. This was articulated in an April 16, 2007, Comment in The New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg, but similar thoughts are behind most of the ranting on the evening cable "news" shows.

I think they are wrong. They are arguing from a false premise.


In the past, the nomination was locked up by the fourth round or so because of attrition. People who won an early round (such as Iowa or New Hampshire) and then slipped in a later round (such as South Carolina) ran into trouble fund raising or lost "momentum", and the bottom half of the pack never even made it into the ones that became definitive. That is less likely to happen this time because there won't be time for that to happen.

What happens if there are 9 or 10 names on each ballot when February rolls around? Someone will win here, someone else will win there, and yet another will win over there. Its not like the leader in nationwide polls will take all of the delegates. It will play out state by state. I predict that February will bring us a hung convention (probably a pair of them) like the nation has not seen since 1960.

Want to know what might happen? Read "The Making of the President, 1960", the book that made me into a political junkie.

People arguing that Gore needs to decide now, or forget it, are idiots. His best chance is to sit it out and wait for the party to turn to him. Unlike others who might have best used this strategy (such as Fred Thompson, whose strength is that his politics are poorly unknown), he is a proven Presidential candidate. Rove's attack dogs already took their best shot at him, and even then had to win it in the courts.

He will be paired up with whichever Dem comes out with the least negatives. One might lead to a nostalgic Gore-Clinton bumper sticker, where 20% of the voters would think that Bill was back on the ticket.

On the Republican side, Bloomberg should keep quiet about a third party and work for a spot on a post-Iraq unity ticket with Hagel, unless Romney goes that way. There will be a lot of blood spilled before the Republicans are done, and that convention could be as crazy as the 1960 Democratic one was.

Why did I say post-Iraq? Because I am convinced that Bush's surge-and-run past has one more cycle in it, leaving McCain (and the other pro-W-war candidates) as screwed as McCain was when Rove got done with him in South Carolina.

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Pootwattle on Knowledge

Check out the random academic sentence generator from Pootwattle at the University of Chicago. The uplink to their analysis of the (bad) bad sentence of the week should be required reading for people who write like I sometimes do. More importantly, the "Tell me how it works" link takes you to a good explanation of how bad writing happens.



Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:

The reintegration of factual knowledge is often found in juxtaposition with, if not in direct opposition to, the historicization of process.

Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:

Pootwattle's loosely organized musing on the relationship between the reintegration of factual knowledge and the historicization of process is unconvincing.

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Today in Cuba

The NBC Today show is in Havana, Cuba, today.

A few thoughts:

1) When they cut away to New York, I wondered why they did not have their other crew in Little Havana. That would have been interesting!

2) What is Fox thinking right now? General Electric (through its NBC Entertainment division) is a Traitor to the US? My brother is working for a traitor!

3) If they had been in Little Havana as well as Havana, could they have arranged an interview with Castro's in-laws in Florida and then turned it into a surprise "meeting" with their family in Cuba? That would be some "must see TV".

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