I’m currently a bit less than halfway through Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, which has leaped to the top of the literary inbox because I’ll be hosting a Book Salon at firedoglake next Saturday evening. If you want to see how my limited typing skills work in a live chat setting, be sure to […]
Month: January 2010
All Creatures Great and Small…
… are welcome in the DogPhysics Pet Gallery. Even aquatic ones: We’ve currently got seventeen dogs, six cats, two horses, a lizard, and these fish. If you’ve got a pet, of whatever species, and a copy of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, take a picture of the one with the other, and send […]
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Customer Reviews Edition
Having seen other authors led into destruction by responding to customer reviews on Amazon, I tend to approach the customer reviews of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog with some trepidation. It turns out, though, that they’re really good. And I don’t mean that in a Harriet Kalunser kind of way– the positive reviews […]
Neil Bates Owes Me $160
That’s the bill for the time that I spent on deciphering his supposed falsification of decoherence. I don’t want anyone to fall for his false argument, so here’s the correct explanation of the scenario, to save other people the trouble. The center of his so-called “proof” is this modified Mach-Zehnder Inteferometer: Light enters at the […]
Links for 2010-01-23
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Neglected Books: the list “So, I asked for recommendations for neglected books and authors and had an overwhelming response. I’m going to make the results into a useful reading list, in alphabetical order, with links, and usefully divided. The world is a very big place […]
What a Drag It Is Getting Old
There’s an expert-level debate going on in the comments of Wednesday’s quantum essentials post, and I do have some thoughts on the matter that I will eventually type up (in a top-level post rather than a comment, at this point). It’s Friday, though, and I’m kind of fried. So here’s some wibbling about pop music […]
Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don’t
The NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators report came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity– numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past […]
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Categorization
We’re once again in the “things are in the pipeline, but nothing has been posted recently” mode, which is a good excuse for some Amazon neepery. Since the AP review came out, and was printed in 20-odd papers, the sales rank has climbed back into the four digits, and has spent the last few days […]
Links for 2010-01-22
Creation | Film | Review | The A.V. Club “Creation contains some vivid illustrations of evolutionary theory, and some intriguing consideration of what Darwin had to overcome to achieve greatness–in particular, his fear of disappointing his family. But for the most part, Creation is Biopic 101, earnest and over-explained. It’s the kind of movie in […]
Thursday Baby Blogging 012110
Here we see SteelyKid enjoying our post-day-care ritual: kickin’ back, eatin’ pretzels, and watching Pardon the Interruption: “LeBatard always ruins Odds Makers,” she says. “He’s silly…” There was some screaming and crying a little bit before this was taken, not that you can tell. Pretzels and juice fixed everything. May it always be that simple.