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To Sir, With Love
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Yesterday I had the privilege and the pleasure of teaching cosmology to some of the A-Level Physics students at the Maria Fidelis Convent School in London, where they are justly proud of their science curriculum. Despite the weird (to me) habit of calling all the adults “Sir” or “Miss” and the very Catholic (but not…
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Karmann Ghia
Spotted on Gloucester Road, London SW7.
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Question for the community: Blogs and Teaching
Any good suggestions for or case studies of using blogs as part of teaching? The obvious possibilities: I could blog all of my notes (although I’m not actually teaching any lecture courses this year). But that’s just using a slightly different medium for an old task (and it’s hard to translate math into html!). Or…
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Big Academia is Watching Me
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Next week, I need to account for my time down to about 15 minutes, as part of Imperial’s TOAST (The Original Academic Staff Time) Survey. This will let the College figure out exactly how we (collectively and anonymously, or so we’re told) spend our time. Which, I presume, lets them figure out how to best…
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Atomic quote
The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible. –Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the…
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Politics ain’t beanbag
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Here in the UK, the Government has been criticised for “climbing down” in its presentation of a new bill to curb smoking in pubs: instead of an outright ban, it will allow smoking in private clubs and in pubs where “food” is not served (where the definition of “food” isn’t quite settled). Whether you think…
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Postmodernists and Scientists, partying together
In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms — from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn‘s description of…
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Teaching
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Regular readers may have noted a slackening of my posting pace over the last couple of weeks. For the first time in life, I’m earning my keep doing what most people think a “University Lecturer” (a.k.a. “College Professor” in the US) gets paid to do: teaching (in fact, most of our professional stature and advancement…
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Ever Fallen in Love with Someone?
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Don’t worry, I’m not getting all personal on you. Rather, this month marks the sad anniversary of the death of John Peel. In his honor, a scary all-star cavalcade has recorded a version of one of his favorite songs: the Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love?” — Robert Plant (ok), Roger Daltrey (hmmm), Elton John (!!!!),…
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Howl at 50; Happy New Year
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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, most famously an angry eulogy for the destruction wrought by McCarthyite fifties America: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded…
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