-
I thought that was my job
“Physics Elevated to an Art Form” — Oakley‘s new tag line.
-
Ineluctable modality of the visible
·
Today, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day that Joyce’s Ulysses takes place in 1904.
-
Alternative crackpots
·
The New Statesman, a lefty British politics magazine (which just underwent a snazzy revamp), published a column by Ziauddin Sardar, an otherwise perceptive writer, entitled “When Knowledge is not the answer.” Without putting too fine a point on it, it is the stupidest essay I have read in a long time. He is responding to…
-
Sacred Music
·
Last night I went to hear Alejandro Escovedo at St James Church in London. As an atheist/Jew, I’ve never really gotten used to churches (and this really is a church, not a performance space), can’t help but want to be respectful of the sanctity of the space. Escovedo brought along his string quintet, and the…
-
Front Page Probability
In a bid to combine numeracy with sports coverage, The Observer presents the Poisson distribution as a headline on its front page today. Supposedly, it has something to do with predicting the number of goals a team will score in the World Cup. The Poisson distribution is P(n) = λn e-λ/n! This gives the probability,…
-
Also…
·
Wine: California beats the French (again). Meanwhile, wine seems to be taking over the net, with podcasts and a a spate of sites for reviewing, ranking and cataloguing your wine, some with all sorts of new Web 2.0 goodies. (More commentary when and if I get to around to actually using them.) Song: go read…
-
Spending pounds and bending light (two ways)
I spent the early part of the week in Sheffield at the first meeting of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics Group. There were talks on the search for the Dark Matter, gravitational waves, neutrino astrophysics, gamma-ray astrophsyics, and, of course, cosmology. All of this sometimes goes by the name “non-accelerator particle physics”: trying to…
-
Bruce on the Beeb
·
BBC4 let us spend a night with my New Jersey homeboy, Bruce Springsteen. Selections from The Seeger Sessions, recorded with a BBC audience at St Luke’s in London, gave us middle-aged Bruce as protest singer, rocking up some folky standards. This may indeed be what the world needs now, but with its whitebread, bespectacled audience,…
-
Workers of the World, &c.
·
University lecturers’ Unions in the UK (i.e., the equivalent of “college professors” in the USA) are engaged in “action short of a strike” — they are boycotting exams. This is especially damaging in the UK system, in which many final grades are given solely on the basis of exam performance. (Lecturers here at Imperial aren’t…