Too busy for much blogging for the next few weeks. In the meantime:

First, my grad students: Goodbye to one just finishing, hello to my new one, congratulations to the one who just transferred to official PhD-student status, and, finally, to the one staying on as a postdoc! I’m excited that I’m able to still work with all of them on various projects, all concentrating on understanding the state of the Universe at its very earliest moments.

Second, to the undergrads: I hope that my teaching is going better than last year.

Third, the new record from my homestate boy, Bruce Springsteen, is better than you might expect from a still-left-wing pro-Union old-fashioned rock’n’roller. And “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” sounds like it could have been written and performed by Stephen Merritt and his Magnetic Fields (this is intended as a huge compliment!).

Next time, an update on the odd combination of Philip Glass’s versions of Leonard Cohen’s poems. And maybe that 16-solar-mass Black Hole (technical paper here). Conversely, I am unlikely to usefully comment on race relations as seen through the eyes James Watson or Sasha Frere-Jones. But the rest of the blogosphere has those well in hand.