I tagged this for del.icio.us, but on reflection, it deserves better than to be buried in a links dump. It’s so rare that the New York Times notices physics that doesn’t cost billions of dollars, that Kenneth Chang’s article on glass deserves its own post. Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University… Continue reading The New York Times on Glass
Author: Chad Orzel
Two Cultures Round-Up
Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend’s two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now: My… Continue reading Two Cultures Round-Up
links for 2008-07-29
The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog The Solar System as a Wordle. You can get it on a T-shirt, too. (tags: astronomy planets science silly) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Service “[T]he path of least resistance is lip service to service, with a tacit understanding that we don’t really mean it.”… Continue reading links for 2008-07-29
Reader Request: Parenthood
In the Reader Request thread, Mary Kay writes: I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on becoming a father. Both before and after the actual event. I mentioned this to Kate, and she asked whether I thought there was a difference between “fatherhood” and “parenthood.” I’m not that attuned to such things, so it had… Continue reading Reader Request: Parenthood
Reader Request: Graphene
Last week’s Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I’ll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off. We’ll start with a good physics question from Moshe: So, what do you think about graphene? the next big thing, or… Continue reading Reader Request: Graphene
Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it… Continue reading Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science… Continue reading Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it’s a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton’s “Great Discoveries” series (which inexplicably lacks a web page– get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing… Continue reading A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves
Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here’s an opportunity to prove it… A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute,… Continue reading Categories: On the Beauty of Physics
Not Even Backreaction
Over at bloggingheads, they’ve posted a video conversation between Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Sabine Hossenfelder of Backreaction. They talk about string theory a bit, as you might imagine, but also about a wide range of issues in math and physics, and math- and physics-blogging. Sabine evidently had some difficulty getting a connection… Continue reading Not Even Backreaction