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… Continue reading The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta
Category: In the Media
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: —… Continue reading Uncertain Dots 22
Nordita Workshop for Science Writers: Wrap-Up
I didn’t write a summary of the third day of “Quantum Boot Camp” to go with my Day One and Day Two summaries for a simple reason: I would’ve needed to do that on Saturday, and I spent Saturday in transit back to the US. More than that, though, it was harder to summarize than… Continue reading Nordita Workshop for Science Writers: Wrap-Up
Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, Day Two
The second day of the “Quantum Boot Camp” was much lighter on talks. The only speaker was Ray Laflamme from the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, who gave a nice introduction to quantum technologies. While he did spend a bit of time at the start going through Shor’s algorithm for factoring numbers (following up… Continue reading Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, Day Two
Uncertain Dots 21
Our little hangout thing is now old enough to drink, in episode-years anyway, and to celebrate, we finally figured out how to get live audience feedback during the hangout. Which takes the first couple of minutes of the video, because we’re highly trained professional scientists. Once we got that sorted, we talked about a bunch… Continue reading Uncertain Dots 21
Ten Inessential Papers in Quantum Physics
I should really know better than to click any tweeted link with a huff.to shortened URL, but for some reason, I actually followed one to an article with the limited-reach clickbait title Curious About Quantum Physics? Read These 10 Articles!. Which is only part one, because Huffington Post, so it’s actually five articles. Three of… Continue reading Ten Inessential Papers in Quantum Physics
The Physicists of Journalism
This Alberto Cairo piece on “data journalism” has been kicking around for a while, and it’s taken me a while to pin down what bugs me about it. I think my problem with it ultimately has to do with the first two section headers in which he identifies problems with FiveThirtyEight and Vox: 1. Data… Continue reading The Physicists of Journalism
Two Cultures of Incompressibility
Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there’s little numerical evidence of a real “crisis,” and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics… Continue reading Two Cultures of Incompressibility
Read Science! on Dog Physics
As noted earlier, I was a guest on the Read Science! hangout on G+ earlier today. If you weren’t able to watch it live, the video is available at that link, and I’ll embed it here: There were some feedback problems with the audio for a little while– annoyingly, it only got bad once the… Continue reading Read Science! on Dog Physics
Dog Physics on the Read Science! Hangout Today
Rhett and I haven’t done Uncertain Dots for a couple of weeks due to scheduling issues, but that doesn’t mean I’m neglecting the multimedia side of things. In fact, I’ll be doing a hangout today, as a guest on the Read Science! hangout hosted by Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer. The event page is here.… Continue reading Dog Physics on the Read Science! Hangout Today