While I’ve got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, part of Norton’s Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I’m a fan of the series– past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves’s… Continue reading Quantum Man by Lawrence Krauss
Month: May 2011
On the “Hot Hand” in Basketball
A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don’t want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of “hot” shooting– a… Continue reading On the “Hot Hand” in Basketball
Links for 2011-05-09
Experimental physics as preparation for parenthood « Confused at a higher level “Before I became a parent, friends and strangers alike would tell me, “You have no idea how much your life will change with the arrival of a baby.” I’ve found my transition to parenthood has been less disruptive than predicted. I credit that,… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-09
Overthought Reviews of Genre Fiction
One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It’s one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of… Continue reading Overthought Reviews of Genre Fiction
101 Quantum Questions by Kenneth W. Ford
The folks at Harvard University Press were nice enough to send me an advance copy of Ken Ford’s new book, 101 Quantum Questions: What You Need to Know About the World You Can’t See a few months ago. I’ve been too busy working on my own book to read any other physics books, though, so… Continue reading 101 Quantum Questions by Kenneth W. Ford
Links for 2011-05-08
Making Light: Epubbing the Backlist “”So,” I said, “what the heck. Why not try republishing some of our short stories in electronic versions? All the cool kids are doing it….” “Why not” included the fact that we didn’t have electronic text versions of many… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-08
Links for 2011-05-07
Gary Williams: The greatest craze to hit College Park – The Washington Post “As soon as you first saw Williams, coaching AU from 1978 to 1982, you knew he was destined for great things. Or else, for a padded room. He was crazy. Good crazy. You would grab him for a quote as he strutted… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-07
What Counts as “Quantum Physics?”
In comments to yesterday’s post about precision measurements, Bjoern objected to the use of “quantum mechanics” as a term encompassing QED: IMO, one should say “quantum theory” here instead of “quantum mechanics”. After all, what is usually known as quantum mechanics (the stuff one learns in basic courses) is essentially the quantization of classical mechanics,… Continue reading What Counts as “Quantum Physics?”
Gary Williams
Maryland head basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement suddenly yesterday. He was a player at Maryland back in the 60’s, and has been the coach there for 22 years, now. As I didn’t start rooting for the Terps until I went there for graduate school in 1993, he’s the only coach I’ve really seen… Continue reading Gary Williams
Links for 2011-05-06
Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List « Easily Distracted “In selecting works, I’ve decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. […] It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-06