Category: Science

Dog Physics: Obsessive Update

A few more links that have turned up of people talking about either How to Teach Physics to Your Dog and How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: Andrew Johnston has a review of the UK edition, praising it because “it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex… Continue reading Dog Physics: Obsessive Update

Trickle Down Science

A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including… Continue reading Trickle Down Science

Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”

I’ve been busily working on something new, but I’m beginning to think I’ve been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good-enough-for-this-stage, so I’m setting it aside for a bit, and trying to get caught up with some of the huge number of things that have been slipping. Which includes getting the oil changed… Continue reading Clock Synchronization Done Right: “A 920-Kilometer Optical Fiber Link for Frequency Metrology at the 19th Decimal Place”

Outland It’s Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining

I’m about a week late talking about this, but I’ve mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the… Continue reading Outland It’s Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining

Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing

Somebody on Twitter linked this article about “brogrammers”, which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that’s where it gets weird: As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According… Continue reading Baffling Demographic Math: Women in Computing

Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics

I’ve been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn’t mean I’m not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I’m too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant,… Continue reading Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics

Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?

For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way,… Continue reading Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?