Art
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Hole in the Ground
Last year, musician, artist, polymath and all-around sweet guy Jem Finer built a radio telescope in the Parks in Oxford. This year, funded by an award from the PRS Foundation for New Music, he’s looking in the opposite direction: he’s dug a well in the King’s Wood, in Kent (Southeast England) and made it into…
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Sinuous Titanium & Big Iron
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I’m recently back from my vacation in Bilbao. Aside from the usual “getting away from it all”, the first highlight was the amazing pintxos–Basque tapas like squid-and-ink croquettes and piles of jamon iberico. With a full tummy, I could handle Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Bilbao, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Sheathed…
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Majorana in superposition
This morning I found what is undoubtedly one of the weirdest papers ever to appear on the arXiv, “Ettore Majorana: quantum mechanics of destiny“, by O. B. Zaslavskii. On the one hand, it’s a short retelling of the life of Ettore Majorana, a major figure in the development of mid-20th-Century particle physics. On the other,…
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Aliens in London?
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The aliens are taking over London: (Actually, this is a picture of one of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeesten, encamped in London for the summer, courtesy of the ICA.) And this must be the mothership: (And this is the summer’s Serpentine Pavilion, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond of Ove Arup.)
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Ineluctable modality of the visible
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Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day that Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904.
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Cosmology in the Mediterranean
Like fellow-blogger Mark Trodden , I’ve just spent the week at scientific meetings in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples. The first half of the week was for the yearly consortium meeting of the Planck Surveyor satellite. Although still endangered by further delays, we expect the satellite to be launched in early or…
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Blake and Newton
Polymath author Peter Ackroyd was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s “Start the Week”, discussing his new biography of Isaac Newton. Ackroyd contrasted Newton to one of his previous biographical subjects, William Blake, who detested Newton and all that he did: I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans I will not Reason…
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23 Short Films About the Leap Second
Today I was interviewed by Felicity Hickson, a student at London’s Royal College of Art, who is making a film about the leap-second that gave us all an extra second on New Year’s Eve. There have been 23 leap-seconds since 1972, and she’s searching for 23 scientists who will each use their own extra 23…
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