-
Scooped
·
This week I had one of those disheartening experiences that happens every now and then in science: a collaborator and I discovered that something we had been working on has already been done. The competing paper had been out for about a year, but we missed it (even more embarassingly, I knew about the paper,…
-
Update
·
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…
-
Apocalypse or synchronicity?
·
End of the world or age of Aquarius?
-
Space-age rapping
Also in honor of Sputnik, the best lyric of the year: “Driving herself crazy/ like that astronaut lady“, from the Common/Lily Allen collaboration, “Drivin’ Me Wild” (deconstructed by the Guardian here).
-
Is this still the Space Age?
·
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the dawn of the Space Age, measured from the launch of Sputnik. Google has a good celebratory logo in its honor: Now that we’re supposedly in the Information Age, does that mean the Space Age is over? I do spend most of my day on the internet — but…
-
Summer Break
Well, Summer break is over, the days are surprisingly short already, the sky is rarely clear, and the students are back. Warm-weather highlights ranged from the intellectual pleasures of my visits to Portugal and Chicago, to the rather more visceral ones of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at the Roundhouse, The Hold Steady at Shepherds Bush,…
-
How to Be a Good Graduate Student
·
Sean Carroll over in Cosmic Variance has some excellent “Unsolicited Advice” on “How to be a Good Graduate Student”. Some of it is more appropriate for American grad students with their longer periods and higher courseloads (and of course they’re called “graduate students” rather than “postgraduate students” as they are here in the UK), but,…
-
Yom Kippur
Saturday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Jews are meant to fast (among other prohibitions), and spend the day in Temple, communally asking forgiveness for our sins. I’m a secular, atheist Jew. So why do I feel guilty for all of my meals yesterday? It’s not Pascal’s Wager; it’s not a lurking agnosticism.…
-
Me, the MP, Planck and Paris
If I’ve got any longtime readers, they may recall that I spent a week paired with Anne Snelgrove MP in the UK Parliament a couple of years ago, as part of a program connecting scienctists with Members of Parliament (described here and here). This week, Anne kept up her side of the bargain and visited…
-
Reasonable Demands for the Caped Crusader
Most of us male academics acknowledge that it’s hard being a female in the male-dominated world of physics, with our own academic sort of testosterone and structural prejudices. Imagine what it’s like as a superhero: [Via Bedazzled, which also points to a campy Batgirl trailer (not to mention an unrelated weird clip of Astrud Gilberto…