The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog The Solar System as a Wordle. You can get it on a T-shirt, too. (tags: astronomy planets science silly) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Service “[T]he path of least resistance is lip service to service, with a tacit understanding that we don’t really mean it.”… Continue reading links for 2008-07-29
Month: July 2008
Reader Request: Parenthood
In the Reader Request thread, Mary Kay writes: I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on becoming a father. Both before and after the actual event. I mentioned this to Kate, and she asked whether I thought there was a difference between “fatherhood” and “parenthood.” I’m not that attuned to such things, so it had… Continue reading Reader Request: Parenthood
Reader Request: Graphene
Last week’s Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I’ll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off. We’ll start with a good physics question from Moshe: So, what do you think about graphene? the next big thing, or… Continue reading Reader Request: Graphene
Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it… Continue reading Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science… Continue reading Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it’s a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton’s “Great Discoveries” series (which inexplicably lacks a web page– get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing… Continue reading A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here’s an opportunity to prove it… A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute,… Continue reading Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Not Even Backreaction
Over at bloggingheads, they’ve posted a video conversation between Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Sabine Hossenfelder of Backreaction. They talk about string theory a bit, as you might imagine, but also about a wide range of issues in math and physics, and math- and physics-blogging. Sabine evidently had some difficulty getting a connection… Continue reading Not Even Backreaction
links for 2008-07-27
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Blog As you would expect, they have cool pictures. via Steinn. (tags: astronomy space science blogs) Freezing images in an atomic vapor! « Skulls in the Stars An introduction to Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and how to use it to store information. (tags: physics quantum optics experiment science news blogs) Crimes and… Continue reading links for 2008-07-27
A Dog’s Life
It was a lovely afternoon at Chateau Steelypips. I sat in the back yard reading a biography of Ernest Rutherford (about which more tomorrow), while Emmy guarded against intrusions of various sorts: squirrels, inferior dogs out for walks, the next-door neighbors’ kids. There comes a time, though, when no matter how nice it may be… Continue reading A Dog’s Life