Month: October 2020

The country had been brutal for a very long time, from the beginning actually. And now the rhetoric began to mirror reality.

—well-known humorist and actor Wallace Shawn.

Warning: not funny.

R.I.P. James “The Amazing” Randi, a hero from my youth as a magician and my adulthood as a scientist. (h/t @telescoper)

I voted. In San Francisco, from London, via fax (because that’s somehow more secure?) Well, via a web-to-fax service. Surely there’s a better way?

Whatever it takes.

(Surprisingly?) nervous about running my first online @ImperialPhysics undergraduate tutorial in 8 minutes…

New book (first in ~15 years) from statistics/design master Edward Tufte — Seeing With Fresh Eyes: Meaning, Space, Data, Truth! (Astronomers: includes an example from Kepler exoplanet/exomoon analyses.)

The 2020 Physics Nobel goes to Roger Penrose “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of… relativity”, and Reinhard Genzel & Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”