I’ve got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here’s a cute toddler picture: This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and […]
Month: July 2011
Links for 2011-07-25
nanoscale views: Einstein, thermodynamics, and elegance “Recently, in the course of other writing I’ve been doing, I again came to the topic of what are called Einstein A and B coefficients, and it struck me again that this has to be one of the most elegant, clever physics arguments ever made. It’s also conceptually simple […]
Links for 2011-07-24
Katie Baker on the New York Times wedding section – Grantland “This renewed series will attempt, through a rigorous quantitative method detailed below, to determine the following: Which couple best exemplifies both the unique spirit and impossible standards of everything the New York Times “Weddings/Celebration” section stands for? Back in the day I used a […]
George R. R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons [Library of Babel]
Contrary to Jo Walton’s prediction, I didn’t love this book. In fact, I didn’t even like it very much. Much has been made over the long wait for this latest installment in the Song of Ice and Fire series, building it up to the point where actually reading and reviewing it feels a little like […]
Links for 2011-07-23
Quantum Diaries At the moment anyone who has even a passing interest in particle physics is thinking about the results being presented that European Physical Society High Energy Physics 2011 conference (referred to as simply “EPS”.) It is at EPS that we hear news about the search the Higgs boson, and the news is tantalizing! […]
Spaced Out
The final Space Shuttle landed the other day, leading to much lamentation over the end of the program, all over the Internet. It was absolutely choking my Twitter feeds for a while, which is mostly what I was thinking about when I re-tweeted this snide comment from Robert Lamb (though, to be fair, most of […]
Links for 2011-07-22
If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault – Anil Dash “As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals. In fact, we’ve developed entire disciplines based around this goal over thousands of years. We just ignore most of the lessons that have […]
Thursday Sound Asleep Blogging 072111
SteelyKid’s “no pictures” phase continues, meaning that I have to do things like snapping low-light pictures of her after she falls asleep: I used a really wide aperture lens for this– waking her up with the flash would be the end of the world– and had to process the hell out of it to get […]
Beat the Heat with SCIENCE!
It’s really frickin’ hot in much of the US. Fortunately, we have central air at home, A/C in the car, and convenient local businesses with air conditioning and free wi-fi. The inadequate HVAC systems in the Science and Engineering building on campus aren’t anywhere near being able to cope with this, so I’m working from […]
The Inevitable Death of the Book, Aleph-Nought in a Series
A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the “they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them” vein– it’s great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters […]