Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me– in a friendly way– about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) “When are you guys going to have another baby?” she would ask, and […]
Category: Culture
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 […]
Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay
I’ve had this piece by Rick Borchelt on “science literacy” and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on “echo chambers” open in tabs for… months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won’t be […]
You Don’t Have to Like New Music
The tagline up at the top of this blog promises “Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture,” but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I’ve been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I’ve been so busy running after the kids that I don’t have much […]
Twitter Is a Cocktail Party That I’m Not Invited To
As I go through my daily routine, I find myself sort of out of phase with a lot of the Internet. My peak online hours are from about six to ten in the morning, Eastern US time. That’s when I get up, have breakfast, and then go to Starbucks to write for a few hours. […]
On Sports Injury Rates, or Today in Why I’m Glad I’m Not a Social Scientist
The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days– the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports […]
A Constructive Response to Professorial Anxiety
Engaging in a bit of tab clearance before I head off to DAMOP tomorrow afternoon, I noticed that I still had How to Teach an Ancient Rape Joke open. This is because while I found it kind of fascinating, it’s not all that directly relevant to what I do, and I didn’t have anything all […]
So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by Jon Ronson
Over the last month or so, it’s been kind of hard to avoid this book, even before it hit stores. Big excerpts in the New York Times and The Guardian generated a good deal of buzz, and arguments on social media. Unsurprisingly, as one of the main elements of the book is a look at […]
Actual Hugo Comments
So, as alluded to over the weekend, the Hugo nominations this year are a train wreck. The short fiction categories are absolutely dominated by works from the “slates” pushed by a particular collection of (mostly) right-wing authors and that prion disease in human disguise “Vox Day.” The primary purpose of the “slates” is to poke […]
“Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs” at Vanderbilt, Thursday 3/26/15
I mentioned last week that I’m giving a talk at Vanderbilt tomorrow, but as they went to the trouble of writing a press release, the least I can do is share it: It’s clear that this year’s Forman lecturer at Vanderbilt University, Chad Orzel, will talk about physics to almost anyone. After all, two of […]