Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and… Continue reading Uncertain Dots, Academic Blogs
Category: Blogs
Job Posting and Hangout
The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I’m giving an exam on Thursday. So, I’m not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices: 1) A reminder (I think… Continue reading Job Posting and Hangout
Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism
Ashutosh Jogalekar has a response to my post from yesterday complaining about his earlier post on whether multiverses represent a philosophical crisis for physics. I suspect we actually disagree less than that back-and-forth makes it seem– he acknowledges my main point, which was that fundamental theoretical physics is a small subset of physics as a… Continue reading Reductionism Is Not Fundamentalism
Physics Hangout in Need of Better Title
What with the umpteen zillion articles declaring the Death of the Blog, I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something podcast-ish for a while. Rhett Allain from Dot Physics was game, too, and suggested using Google+ to do a video hangout, so here we are talking about our classes this term: The video quality… Continue reading Physics Hangout in Need of Better Title
Programming Note: Book-Related Silence
I got some feedback from my editor about draft chapters of the book-in-progress a while ago, and while it was generally pretty positive, there’s a lot of work to be done. Shortly after that, I realized there was a big and awkward gap in the material I had, which involved a lot of frantic research… Continue reading Programming Note: Book-Related Silence
Miscellaneous Science Online Stuff
I was pleasantly surprised at how well the What does Science Online Want to Be? post was received– I kind of expected that to cause more anger than it did. It did prompt a lot of discussion, most of it during the dinner hour in Chateau Steelypips, so it was really hard for me to… Continue reading Miscellaneous Science Online Stuff
What Does Science Online Want to Be?
The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic’s harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the “What is to be done now?” phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I’ve also seen the edges of more… Continue reading What Does Science Online Want to Be?
Blogging Used to Be Punk Rock, Man
There’s a sense in which the saddest true statement I’ve read about the unpleasant events of the past week is this: Blog editor at Scientific American is a position of great power, with the ability to make or break careers. I’m not disputing the truth of this. It’s absolutely true that the position has enormous… Continue reading Blogging Used to Be Punk Rock, Man
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
Let me say these things, because they are important. Bora was wrong. Scientific American was wrong. Ofek was wrong, Wrong, WRONG. If you follow science blogs beyond this one, you have no doubt run across the gigantic debacle that erupted this past weekend; if not the first few paragraphs of this Slate piece give a… Continue reading Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
On Hooks, and the Awesomeness of the Known
Over the weekend, before the whole Scientific America debacle blew up, Ben Lillie tweeted: Looking for science news pegs that aren't "a paper was published." Good examples? #ScioOcean #scionew — Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) October 12, 2013 This is, of course, a familiar problem to a lot of people who care about the public dissemination of… Continue reading On Hooks, and the Awesomeness of the Known