Professor Office Sex is trying to study the real-time dynamcis of the blogosphere, by manufacturing a “meme” that he’ll then track: While you do that, a script I’ve written will track this meme (via Technorati) across the internet in 10 minute intervals. It will record the number of links to this post, register their authority […]
Month: November 2006
String Phenomenology
There’s a nice article in the New York Times today about applications of the theory of vibrating strings. It turns out to be a lot more practical and useful than you might think, and there are people doing some amazing things with it. What?
The Making of a Graph
One of my current thesis students has been plugging away for a while at the project described in the A Week in the Lab series last year, and he’s recently been getting some pretty good data. I’ve spent a little time analyzing the preliminary results (to determine the best method for him to use on […]
Jay Bilas Survival Pool
I’m worried about Jay Bilas’s job. For those who aren’t college basketball junkies, Jay Bilas is a former Duke player who is currently the best college basketball analyst in the business. He’s smart, well-spoken, funny (listen to him banter with Bill Raftery and Sean McDonough when the three of them work games together), and extremely […]
Baghdad Update: Too Much TV
Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality: —————– Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls. The night before I watched a TV show where a young […]
The New Hyperides
The Times this morning has a nice article on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which turns out to contain more than just important works on early mathematics: An ambitious international project to decipher 1,000-year-old moldy pages is yielding new clues about ancient Greece as seen through the eyes of Hyperides, an important Athenian orator and politician from […]
Jack McDevitt, Odyssey [Library of Babel]
Speaking of weirdly compelling reads (as I was at the end of the previous entry), Jack McDevitt has a new book out in what I think of as the “Archeologists in Spaaaace!!!” series (which starts with The Engines of God, and includes Chindi, Deepsix and Omega). Odyssey doesn’t include any archeologists, but it has a […]
L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Wellspring of Chaos [Library of Babel]
Wellspring of Chaos is the umpteenth book in the Recluce saga by L.E. Modesitt (who, amusingly, turns out to be a Williams alumn), and even more than the Hodgell book, is not something I would ordinarily give a high priority to in catching up on the book log. If you’ve read pretty much any of […]
P.C. Hodgell, To Ride a Rathorn [Library of Babel]
To Ride a Rathorn is the fourth book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series (the previous three are God Stalk, Dark of the Moon and Seeker’s Mask), and as such probably wouldn’t get to the top of the booklog queue– there’s just too much backstory, and the book wouldn’t make any sense to a new reader. […]
Adam Felber, Schrödinger’s Ball [Library of Babel]
I’ve been woefully behind on the booklog for a long, long time now, but we’ll take a lazy post-Thanksgiving Sunday morning to catch up on a few of the more notable books in the backlog. These comments won’t be in any particular order, and, in fact, will start with the most recently read of the […]