It’s been quite the week in Chateau Steelypips, and I’m not all that sad to see the end of this one. The stressful bits were at least balanced by a bit of news I can’t share yet, and also some good results on the writing front. It didn’t exactly go viral, but people who know the subject said very nice things about my write-up of the Nobel, and that makes me happy.
Anyway, here’s the usual roundup of stuff I wrote recently; since I was away last week, I skipped the round-up of that, but I’ll tack those two onto this week’s collection:
Me on Substack:
— Re-Reading Bricks: A look back at the first four books of the Wheel of Time series. that I’ve been re-reading for comfort.
— The Age of Pop Decoupling: Tom Breihan’s Number Ones column has reached the era where I stop recognizing the songs.
— Spin Glasses and Lazy Journalism: A complaint about the Nobel Prize pairing Giorgio Parisi’s work on condensed matter with other work on climate modeling, thus ensuring that the coverage will be completely dominated by the climate part that’s easier to write about.
— The Not-Breakthrough We Needed: SteelyKid doesn’t have Covid.
— Talking About Planning Talks: Some thinking-out-loud regarding talks to promote my next book.
— Gifts The Keep On Giving: Some kind of rambling thoughts about gifted and talented programs in schools.
Me Elsewhere:
— What’s A Spin Glass And Why Does It Matter? The Nobel Prize In Physics 2021: My attempt to do a reasonably deep dive into Parisi’s Nobel-winning work, in a way that’s still readable for non-scientists.
— I don’t usually put tweets here, but this offhand swipe at John von Neumann kicked off a surprisingly rich discussion, which was pretty enjoyable:
Go figure.
Links Dump:
— Spin-glass theory for pedestrians: This is an actual physics journal article, so not for the faint of heart, but it was really helpful in clarifying things for my write-up at Forbes.
— Walking America, part 2: Binghamton, Johnson City, and Endicott: It’s been more than 30 years since I lived in Broome County, and I never lived in these cities, but I spent a good deal of time there with family and friends, so was interested to see Chris Arnade’s take on what it’s like now.
— The Case for More Energy: Matt Yglesias making a big optimistic push for not just replacing but massively expanding our energy production. I may say more about this at a later time, but I like this sort of thinking and wish there were more of it.
— Yale and the Education of Governing Elites: I’m not that interested in the particulars of this one program, but the comment about elite schools training future leaders while pretending that’s not what they do struck a chord; again, I may come back to this.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I had a free afternoon last week after we wrapped up recording the thing I was there to do, so I got some Indian take out and had a picnic lunch then walked around the Ellanor Lawrence park in Chantilly, where I took a picture of this bridge.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
SteelyKid has been on an 80’s pop culture kick for a while, and I recommended this video as a particularly spectacular example of the batshit coked-up style of the era. It really is amazing.
(One of the many small things that keep me from every having any street cred is that I have a deep and totally non-ironic fondness for the musical works of Jim Steinman, in all their loopy grandeur.)
And that’s a slightly bigger bunch of stuff than usual. Here are the traditional buttons:
And the comments will be open.