Rebecca Goldstein’s Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel is another book in the Great Discoveries series of short books by noted authors about important moments in the history of science, and the people behind them. Previous volumes include Everything and More and A Force of Nature, both of which were excellent in their… Continue reading Incompleteness by Rebecca Goldstein
Month: January 2009
links for 2009-01-05
Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: Donald Westlake, R.I.P. With links galore. (tags: books writing mystery) A question of mass? « Physics and cake "The Penrose interpretation of quantum mechanics… …states that the mass of a system affects the system’s ability to maintain quantum coherence. This is the basis for some theories of quantum gravity. Above… Continue reading links for 2009-01-05
Bloggers and Journalists and Editors, Oh My!
The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice. Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring this Bloggingheads… Continue reading Bloggers and Journalists and Editors, Oh My!
Doctor Who? Why?
Fannish regions of the Internet are all abuzz today, with the introduction of Matt Smith as the next actor to play the lead role in Doctor Who. Sadly, this is not the Matt Smith I went to college with (who would’ve been a really unusual choice for the part…)– he’s still comfortably obscure to anyone… Continue reading Doctor Who? Why?
links for 2009-01-04
TheStar.com | Entertainment | Cultural resolutions: bigger, better, closer, stronger "No offence to those of you who buy all your books online, but whenever anyone asks why I invariably prefer to purchase my reading matter in a bricks-and-mortar establishment, I have one simple answer: because I don’t want to live in a world without bookstores."… Continue reading links for 2009-01-04
Data Presentation Nerdery
A couple of smallish items that came up in recent days, that can be grouped together under the general heading of “data presentation oddities.” First, over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy tries out a semi-hemi-demi-log plot for a graph of WPA expenditures. The problem he’s trying to address is the gigantic difference in magnitudes between… Continue reading Data Presentation Nerdery
God of Thunder 1, Satan 0
The world is a very strange place: An intruder received a taste of divine reckoning as he was chased from the Edinburgh flat he was breaking into by a man dressed as the Norse god Thor. The housebreaker leapt from the first-floor window of the building to escape Torvald Alexander who was dressed-up for a… Continue reading God of Thunder 1, Satan 0
links for 2009-01-03
Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin "I’m starting my long-promised series of posts on economic doctrines and policy proposals that have been refuted or rendered obsolete by the financial crisis. […] Number One on the list is a topic I’ve covered plenty of times before (in fact, I was writing… Continue reading links for 2009-01-03
Donald E. Westlake, RIP
Many years ago, when I was a kid growing up, I used to be a regular at the Mary Wilcox Memorial Library in town, and tore through most of their kids’ books before mounting an assault on the adult section. The librarian at the time, Mrs. Sinclair, was a terrific woman who knew pretty much… Continue reading Donald E. Westlake, RIP
2008 in Blogging
Because there’s no better form of procrastinatory blogging than making traffic graphs: That’s how you know it’s Science! Unlike the last couple of years, 2008 did not see any gigantic spikes in traffic, despite a couple of posts that I thought would really have some juice. Shows what I know.