Why did I only just learn about Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date”?? (Thanks, of course, to Andrew Hickey’s 500 Songs podcast episode on “For What It’s Worth”.)
Statuses
Parliament seems to understand that the processes leading to the proposed cuts to particle physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics — and the cuts themselves — are unacceptable.
The Random Universe reviewed in Nature:
“The sun and the stars and the edge of the Universe are inaccessible, but no more so than the interior lives of other people,” writes astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe in his intriguing book about epistemology, probability and cosmology.
Appearance: 12 Last Songs, Saturday, 14 March 2026 at Battersea Arts Centre: A live exhibition and performance “about work and how we spend time. Making a living. Finding your passion. Watching the clock.” It starts at noon with a midwife and ends at midnight with an astronomer (me!).
My kid took The Random Universe into school for International Book Day.
Maybe this Green victory will convince Labour that there is no point in pandering to the pro-Brexit anti-immigration right (who weren’t going to vote for them anyway)?
Officials targeted what they thought was a drug cartel drone, but turned out to be a party balloon.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
UK government threatening savage cuts to astronomy and particle physics: to pay for fluctuations in costs to participate and run large shared facilities, a very small part of UK science is being targeted for massive cuts, especially to funding for early career researchers.
Great description of a big air snowboarder ignoring style and going for pure power: “CERN mentality”
Crusty.
The other problem with teaching at 5pm is that I spend the whole afternoon beforehand thinking about my lecture.
I’m on my colleague Brian Keating’s Into the Impossible podcast discussing The Random Universe. Please listen! (Apple Podcasts; YouTube; Spotify)
5pm Fridays is not the best time to lecture.
If you’ve read — and learned from — The Random Universe, please consider leaving a rating or a review at the site of your choice.
First undergraduate cosmology lecture in about 13 years. Too many slides today, but looking forward to 25 lectures of good old-fashioned chalk-and-talk.
Holiday buns. Finally perfected with the third batch of the season. (6/12)
Our first sourdough…
We want to make sourdough. Should I buy starter, or try to make my own?
Thrilling to see The Random Universe in the real world.
Listening to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs on the Richmond origins of The Yardbirds while riding the 65 London bus through Richmond.
Podcast appearance: listen to me talk about The Random Universe (the book, and the Universe itself) on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape. We cover epistemology, probability, quantum mechanics, cosmology and more. Sean and I were cosmology grad students at the same time, and it was a pleasure and an honour to spend time with him online.
The Random Universe is out! Buy it or borrow it, read it and review it!
The Random Universe isn’t out until tomorrow (November 11), but the Kindle edition is on sale in both the US and in the UK. (And if you look very carefully, you’ll see that it has broken into the top 100 UK cosmology bestsellers…)
Apparently I am the subject of an unauthorised biopic.
I made a thing.
Surprised that Taylor needs to promote her latest with an A4 poster at the Imperial College elevators (lifts).
Last year was a sabbatical, so today I’ve got my first proper teaching in a full year and a half — a two-hour lecture to start my Information Theory course.
Feeling a bit nervous!
R.I.P. George Smoot, experimental cosmologist, Nobel prize winner and one of the discoverers of primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, a colleague and mentor back when I was a postdoc in Berkeley, always curious and enthusiastic.
macOS Tahoe/Safari complaint: in sidebar showing Tab Groups, current group shows tab list as if the disclosure triangle clicked.
Bad enough. But worse: old group in the sidebar stays open even when I click to a new one!
This seems so wrong that there must be a setting — but I couldn’t find it.