Two and a Half Months in Blog

May, June, and a bunch of July

I usually do time-in-review posts on weekends, but I’ve been trying to stay off the computer to spare my neck, and that cuts against weekend writing. I had my annual physical this morning, though, and having to fast for the blood tests always leaves me in a poor condition for original thought, so this is as good a time to clear up a big backlog as any:

Me on Substack:

— Not Even Hypocritical: One of my pet peeves about politics #discourse is that everyone throws around accusations of hypocrisy, but anyone smart enough to understand them can almost always reason around them, so they accomplish nothing.

— Normalize Not Caring: You don’t actually need to have a passionate opinion about absolutely everything. Really. It’s okay.

— Two Cultures of Disinterest: On the tendency of STEM people to apologize for not-STEM people disliking their subjects.

— Bottleneck Courses: Another attempt to explain why “weed-out” courses loom larger in STEM fields, but are not an actual problem.

— School Isn’t Just Knowledge-Maxing: On an education reform argument that tends to rub me the wrong way.

— True Names and Other Dangers: On blogging under my real name rather than a pseudonym.

— Negativity Bias Goes to Eleven: On having anodyne positivity responded to with weird hostility.

— The Limits of “Everything Is Political”: Sometimes the right thing to do is to agree to disagree at another time.

— Are the Baseballs Okay?: A little bit of physics analysis of a nearly annual claim about MLB doctoring stats.

— Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be: On a group that was one of the world’s biggest bands.

— Video Physics: Eddy Currents: Playing with a high-speed video camera and a cool little intro physics demo.

— Video Physics: Slinky Drop!: A classic of the high-speed video analysis genre.

— Weekend in Bananaland: On a trip to Buffalo to see comedy baseball.

— Video Physics: Spring Drop: A tweak to the previous video analysis scenario, with some fun aspects.

Me Elsewhere:

I don’t think I appeared anywhere else online during this span, other than putting some videos of high-speed stuff up on YouTube.

Links Dump:

— International Year of Quantum Science and Technology: 2025 is just around the corner, how are you planning to celebrate?

— Nuclear Decay Detected in the Recoil of a Levitating Bead by Tracy Northup: A really cool experiment; there’s also a graphic version of the story, which is also pretty cool.

— Sodium as a Green Substitute for Lithium in Batteries, in Physics magazine: A nice discussion of various battery technologies and one possibility for moving to more sustainable materials. (Includes links to related stories about other tech.)

— Shedding Light on the Thorium-229 Nuclear Clock Isomer, by Peter Thirolf. People have been trying for years to find this particular transition between two states in a nucleus, and it’s very impressive that they’ve finally succeeded.

— Exorcising us of the Primer by Andy Matuschak: Some interesting thoughts about a particular fictional model of learning technology, with some lessons to take and other goals that should be abandoned.

Pseudo-Random Photo of the Months:

On the left, The Pip and I at his travel baseball game on Father’s Day 2023, where he did this silly hand-on-my head pose, up on tiptoes to get to my head. On the right, Fathers’ Day 2024, where he’s flat-footed and barely stretching.

My Little Dude is not as little as he used to be. He’s grown more than an inch in the last three months, and is now over 5’6” (do your own metric conversions), with a few months to go before he turns 13.

Pseudo-Random Song of the Months:

A classic, one that never fails to make me happier when it comes up on shuffle play.

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So, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. If you like that, here’s a button:

And if you feel moved to respond to any of it, the comments will be open: