I am now so old that I have lost track, and am both embarrassed and happy to have discovered that this birthday is actually one less than I’ve been saying for the last few weeks.
Statuses
My Nature review of When Einstein Walked with Gödel, by Jim Holt
The Planck 2018 results papers are available! (Direct from ESA today and on the arXiv tomorrow.)
Was pleased to find my toddler’s day-care group dancing to The Band’s “Rag Mama Rag” for yesterday’s Fathers’ Day celebrations! (I hadn’t realized that was actually their biggest UK hit… back in 1969.)
LaTeX equations in Apple’s Keynote FTW!
(It would be even better if the equations could also appear as inline text, but this is still pretty great.)
Just to be precise, the uncle with whom Trump “talked about nuclear” in preparation for the Korea summit has been dead since 1985.
Neil Turok discussing Hawking & Mandela — they shared a love of tea and a sense of humour — at the start of his 2018 Peter Lindsay Memorial Lecture “Quantum Universe” here at Imperial College.
This seems like an extreme reaction to GDPR: what data is The Baltimore Sun keeping that breaks the new privacy rules?
Wow, both Wussy (@wussymusic — the best band in America?) and @Superchunk in London the same week! (Too bad neither is doing an all-ages acoustic show. Not sure I can make it to both!…)
“Austerity has had nothing to do with economics.… It’s about… abandoning vulnerable people.”
“We are making cuts that I think Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of.”
In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything – The New York Times
Oh yeah, this is why we didn’t want to give him credit for that whole “Korean Peace” thing.
www.nytimes.com: Trump Cancels Meeting With Kim, Citing ‘Open Hostility’
Planck continues to rack up the awards: High-Frequency Instrument PI J-L Puget has won the 2018 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.
The Planck Satellite team has won the 2018 Gruber Cosmology Prize!
Mallorca Triathlon 2018
Hayakawa et al, Sunspot Drawings by Japanese Official Astronomers in 1749-1750 — better figures than most papers on the arXiv! https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08614
Sri Lankan hoppers for brunch courtesy Weligama at The Pear Tree Café, Battersea Park.
Academic friends: when you post about a paper on the arXiv, please link to the web page for the abstract, not the pdf download.
The illusion of time: “Andrew Jaffe probes Carlo Rovelli’s study arguing that physics deconstructs our sense of time.”
I saw Facebook’s “Protecting Your Information” top-post today, which I think means that Cambridge Analytica didn’t use my data to overhype their lame data science and amoral political consulting.
This morning, my 2 1/2-year old daughter asked me about telescopes. Beaming.
The U.K. Is Doing Just Fine, Thanks – The Wall Street Journal
“For a country supposedly crawling out of the ruins of the Brexit vote, the U.K. has been having a strikingly good year so far.”
But, um, Brexit hasn’t happened yet.
Yes, John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous
“There are few people more likely to lead the country into war…”
Yikes: I remember Bolton’s terrifying talking head from the bad old Bush days (let’s use this as a reminder not to valorize Bush merely because he wasn’t as bad as Trump).
In Brexit Give-and-Take, Britain Gives and the E.U. Takes
“They need us more than we need them”?
Lucky enough to be invited to his house for dinner a while back, where he showed off his Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him by Obama in 2009.
Giant redwood, Armstrong State Reserve
Staring Down from Tilden Park
Over the SF Bay
Just heard that the University of Chicago will be shutting down the historic and beautiful Yerkes Observatory later this year. Sad, but probably realistic. (And an opportunity for a very rich amateur astronomer?)
Golden Gate Bridge
“Fish & Reptiles — Fins & Fangs” in Yucca Valley, CA. Pet shop or restaurant?
