Lots of people are down on physics or physicists these days:
- Cosma Shalizi is down on power-law fits, or, more precisely, annoyed at people who misuse power-law distributions. He’s written a paper about how to use them correctly, and provides a handy list of take-home points on his blog.
- Travis Hime is down on the academic job market, and cities that aren’t San Francisco. I think he’s a little too harsh on academia, but then it’s well established that I’m an optimist with a rosy outlook on these matters. I can’t help with the Bay Area thing.
- Dave Bacon has gotten so down about quantum computing that he’s gotten himself a headache. The post actually works as a pretty good pessimistic assessment of the current state of experimental research into quantum computing– we’ve got a long way to go before people start bitching about the completely useless help files that come with Quantum Excel. It’s also worth a look to see the comments in which various science luminaries try to cheer Dave up.
- Tara Smith is down on science journalism, and Jennifer Ouellette offers a defense of science writers, in which she’s down on scientists who refuse to talk to the media, and then complain about press coverage.
- Sean Carroll is down on elementary school science education, and really, who can blame him?
There’s just no end of negative waves on the Internet these days… Cheer up, will you? My students graduated (the picture on the index page shows my thesis student), and summer is here at last. Granted, that means a new crop of summer research students, but still, yay, summer.
Want something else? Here, have a look at the LOLAstronomy page.