Blown Away is the sixth Frank Corso novel from G. M. Ford, featuring the exploits of an intrepid investigative reporter and true-crime author with a knack for getting involved in spectuacularly bloody crimes. As the sixth book in a mystery series, you pretty much know what you’re going to get. At least, it looks that… Continue reading G. M. Ford, Blown Away [Library of Babel]
Month: June 2007
There Is Life After Fifty
Steinn links to a post by the “Incoherent Ponderer” that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It’s an analysis of “Ph.D. Pedigree”, spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there’s a hiring bias in favor of “big name” Ph.D. programs. The analysis in this… Continue reading There Is Life After Fifty
Physics News Backlog
Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here’s a collection of recent stuff: My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which is… Continue reading Physics News Backlog
TED Global
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from the TED Global conference on Technology, Enetertainment, and Design as they apply to Africa. He’s live-blogging the talks by people ranging from Ethiopian paleontologist Zeray Alemseged to some mononymic Irish singer. This is one of those things where reading Ethan’s blog makes me feel like a schmuck. I mean, he’s… Continue reading TED Global
Alive, Dead, or Bloody Furious?
The LOLcat phenomenon has reached the world of physics, with this Schrödinger cat picture, which is pretty good. I’m also amused by Serge’s poem from Making Light: Roses are red, Violets are blue. Is Schrödinger’s Cat dead? That remains up to you. I may need to get out more.
Learn. Japanese. Fast?
So, as previously mentioned in this space, Kate and I will be spending a few weeks in Japan in August/ September. Out of a combination of politeness and self-interest, it would be good if we knew at least a smattering of Japanese before going there. Back in ’98, I did the book-and-tape thing, and learned… Continue reading Learn. Japanese. Fast?
“And Jesus Sent Him to Scotland Where He Lived in a Loch for Oh, So Many Years…”
Via Charles Kuffner, a story about new footage of the Loch Ness Monster. It’s a dinosaur from the Bible… I tried to watch the video with the CNN story, but their annoying player took forever to load and the kept glitching up. So I fired up YouTube, and found this Scottish news broadcast. On the… Continue reading “And Jesus Sent Him to Scotland Where He Lived in a Loch for Oh, So Many Years…”
The Other Einstein
Whatever you may think of his own books (and, really, don’t bother to tell me what you think of his books), this New York Review of Books article by Lee Smolin on a great whack of Einstein biographies is well worth a read. I don’t really have anything to say other than that, so here’s… Continue reading The Other Einstein
Science Is Not Zero-Sum
Matt Yglesias spent a while on Friday taking shots at Newt Gingrich, and made a dumb argument in the process: I’m consistently baffled by the invocation of China and India in this context; I’d love for somebody to write up a model for me in which the optimal level of US investment in math and… Continue reading Science Is Not Zero-Sum
Theorists Messing With My Head
Just when I’m finally starting to get a bit of a handle on what’s going on in particle physics (or at least map out the areas of my ignorance), along comes Howard Georgi with “Unparticle Physics”: I discuss some simple aspects of the low-energy physics of a nontrivial scale invariant sector of an effective field… Continue reading Theorists Messing With My Head