We’re heading out for a long weekend in NYC before school resumes for the Fall, and even though we’ll be back with a few days to go in the month, I expect those to involve intensive class prep, so it seems sensible to put the monthly recap here. Several weeks from now, you should expect a “September (and a bit) in Review)”…
Me on Substack:
— What’s the Greatest NBA All-Initial Team?: A fun sports history topic with The Pip.
— History of Laser Cooling: Part 1: The rollout of a piece that will be linked below.
— Two Cultures, Both Lacking Dignity: Some specific responses to an outbreak of STEM vs. not-STEM debate on academic social media.
— Affective Polarization and the Two Cultures: A more general post about the STEM vs. not-STEM debate, and liberal arts education more broadly.
— Scene Report: Positive Jam Festival: My weekend with the Hold Steady.
— The Early Days of a Colder Nation: A bit more about the history of laser cooling piece announced above and linked below.
— Affective Polarization Has Broken Me: A bit of venting about the state of political #discourse.
— Defining the Physics Mindset: What physicists value beyond pure ability to do complex mathematics.
— Meh Omens: The new season of Good Omens leans a bit too hard into fan service for me.
— Kelvin and Michelson and Historical Myths: Two great physicists linked by regularly being misquoted.
— Everything Has Popularizers: A response to a claim that science shouldn’t need “popularizers” who specialize in communicating to a wider audience. Every other field has them, why shouldn’t we?
— What Would a Movie to Inspire Future Physicists Look Like?: Some thoughts on how one would go about making a prestige film with the explicit goal of getting young people to want to be physicists.
Me Elsewhere:
— Cold: How physicists learned to manipulate and move particles with laser cooling, at Physics World: First of what is intended to be a three-part series on the history of cold atoms. (Might need a free account to read it, but they do good stuff, so it’s totally worth signing up…)
Links Dump:
— Billiards is a good game, by Norman MacLean: A really lovely reflection about Albert Michelson, mentioned in one of the pieces above but worth calling out on its own.
— What the heck happened in 2012? by Erik Hoel: A better than average case that something changed for the worse around then. Just don’t blame the Maya.
— The Brutal Beauty of Baseball by Jeff Maurer: In praise of (a kind of) meritocracy.
— The Internet Is for Extremism by Jeremiah Johnson: Everything goes to 11, because those are the incentives.
— The Gravitational Pull of Supervising Kids All the Time by Stephanie Murray: I’m glad that our kids are rapidly aging out of the zone where I have to worry intensely about this.
— Why You Have to Care About These 12 Colleges, by Anne Lowrey: Ugh, fine…
— Is it time for tenure to evolve? by Amber Dance: Maybe, but I’m not sure I trust the people whose ideas are highlighted here to do it.
— From Phoenix to Cleveland: why we live where we live and why it’s time to change, by Ethan Zuckerman: A look at why people move where they do that I find more congenial than a lot of higher-profile writing about this stuff.
— I’m a Black Professor. You Don’t Need to Bring That Up. by Tyler Austin Harper: On DEI culture making everything awkward, all the time.
— ‘Room-temperature superconductor’ LK-99 fails replication tests, by Margaret Harris: Another lovely theory brutally cut down by ugly facts.
— Does Humanities Research Still Matter? by Asheesh Kapur Siddique: [Whatever you do, don’t say “Did it ever?”]
— Physicists measure the electron electric dipole moment to unprecedented precision by Stefan Popa: Latest news on one of my favorite sub-sub-fields, with a link to a feature I wrote about it in 2009.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
We’re in a brief period of no kid baseball (other than the Little League World Series on TV…), so I was able to get out hiking with my good camera, at the Sanders Preserve up in Glenville. I really like the way this little waterfall seemed spotlit by the sun through the trees, and I think the shot came out well, which isn’t always the case when I try to capture a lighting effect.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
Actually a small Swedish man, this was the biggest revelation of the Hold Steady’s music festival for me— he was an amazingly charismatic stage presence. This was the set closer, and he hopped down from the stage and walked way out into the crowd singing it, which was a really cool moment. If you’re somewhere where he’s playing, definitely check him out.
As usual, that’s a bunch of stuff. If you like any of that, here’s a button to click to get more (once we get back from vacation):
And if you feel moved to respond to any of it, the comments will be open: