Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom’s commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing. All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and […]
Month: September 2014
Finding Extrasolar Planets with Lasers
On Twitter Sunday morning, the National Society of Black Physicsts account retweeted this: Using Lasers to Lock Down #Exoplanet Hunting #Space http://t.co/0TN4DDo7LF — ✨The Solar System✨ (@The_SolarSystem) September 28, 2014 I recognized the title as a likely reference to the use of optical frequency combs as calibration sources for spectrometry, which is awesome stuff. Unfortunately, […]
Drumming for Fall
The JCC is closed today for Rosh Hashanah– and best wishes for a happy new year to those who celebrate it– so I’m spending the morning with The Pip before Kate comes home to take the afternoon shift while I teach my class. SteelyKid is in school today as usual, so don’t tell her, but […]
Trains of Clocks
My Gen Ed relativity course has mostly been me lecturing about stuff to this point, so on Wednesday I decided to shake things up a bit and convert a chapter of David Mermin’s It’s About Time. The idea was to get students up and moving around a bit, and actually making some measurements of stuff. […]
On Putting Words in Einstein’s Mouth
Modern media being what it is, I should get out in front of this, so: I am guilty of putting words in Einstein’s mouth. I mean, go watch my TED-Ed video on particles and waves, or just look at the image up top– that very clearly shows Einstein saying words that he probably never said. […]
The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta
I get a fair number of books to review, but I’m often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I’ve managed to turn around Roberto Trotta’s The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the […]
Entrance Music
The AV Club had a Q&A last week asking “What would be your entrance music?” As a music fan and a sports junkie this is, of course, a nearly irresistable question, though a lot of other things got in the way before I could get around to typing up an answer. I’ve always kind of […]
The Pleasure of Working Things Through
My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould’s Exo (excerpt at Tor). This is the fourth book in the Jumper series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn’t be worth much of a review, because if you haven’t read the first three, this book won’t make a lick […]
Uncertain Dots 22
After a long absence due to travel (some of which is discussed), Uncertain dots returns! Rhett and I talk about recent travels, how people going into internet-based physics outreach these days would probably do better to make videos than blog, physics in science fiction, celestial navigation, and as always, our current courses. Some links: — […]
Cash and Respect
The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a “social incentive” (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 […]