I am not a baseball fan– I suck at the game, and it’s boring as hell on tv– but I can’t help noticing occasional bits of baseball news. such as, for example, yesterday’s announcement of the Hall of Fame voting, which prompts the post title. Eight writers did not vote for Cal Ripken to get… Continue reading Baseball Writers Are Morons
Month: January 2007
Regrettable Physics Update
In the last week, The IoP’s Physics Web has posted two news updates that fall into the category of “regrettable physics,” here defined as “the sort of work that makes Daniel Davies say mean things about physicists.” I’m talking here about the application of physics concepts to fields where they’re neither immediately relevant nor particularly… Continue reading Regrettable Physics Update
Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid [Library of Babel]
Noted travel writer Bill Bryson has a real gift for making entertaining anecdotes out of basically nothing. His travel books are frequently hilarious, but if you think carefully about what actually happens in the books, there’s very little there. His gift as a writer is to inflate mundane experiences– waiting on line at a train… Continue reading Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid [Library of Babel]
Blame Where Blame Is Due
A lot of people have commented on this New York Times article on science budgets, mostly echoing the author’s lament about the negative effects of operating at 2006 funding levels. I really don’t have much to add to that, but it’s worth reminding people where the blame for this belongs: Last year, Congress passed just… Continue reading Blame Where Blame Is Due
Annals of Wishful Thinking
Over at Page 3.14, Katherine highlights a Psychology Today article about the different approaches young men and women have to dating. It’s more or less what you expect, but for one eye-popping sentence (emphasis added): [New Mexico psychology professor Geoffrey] Miller believes boys actually overestimate their mate value during adolescence, and none more so than… Continue reading Annals of Wishful Thinking
Richard Dawkins Kicks Puppies!
Well, that’s what I hear…
Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies
Paul Davies’s forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled “Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life,” so you know that he’s not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the “Goldilocks Enigma,” and what others refer to as “fine-tuning”– basically, how do you account for… Continue reading Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies
AAS Meeting
The American Astronomical Society is meeting in Seattle this week, which means a banner week for astronomy news: lots of press releases, and a bunch of live reports. If you’re into space stuff, you should have plenty to read and talk about in the next few days.
1,000
Movable Type tells me that this is the 1,000th post to this blog since the move. This comes just short of the one-year anniversary of the move (the first posts are dated earlier, but the official launch was on January 11th, so that’s when I’ll do a full year-in-review. For comparison, the total number of… Continue reading 1,000
American Sports Round-Up
A busy sporting weekend for Chateau Steelypips: First, there were two NFL wild card games on Saturday, as a sort of appetizer for the real action on Sunday. The Colts borrowed a defense from somewhere, and despite Peyton Manning deciding to play like his little brother for the first half or so, Indianapolis moved on… Continue reading American Sports Round-Up