Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mundane Space, Spectroscopy, Changing Constants, Rest Energy, Magnetic Sensing, Wiffle Balls, and Revolutions

Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience. — Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC. — How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Books, Entanglement, Optics, Many-Worlds, Two Cultures, and Clocks

A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month: —Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. —The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn’t Allow Faster-Than-Light Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn’t like […]

Division of Labor Is a Good Thing for Science and Skepticism

Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after “soft targets”. This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: ARPES, Optics, Band Gaps, Radiation Pressure, Home Science, and Catastrophe

It’s been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there’s a good bunch of stuff on this list: — How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I’m trying to figure out […]