It’s a three-day weekend in the US, so I’m taking the kids down to my parents’ for a few days. Which means I’m actually writing this on Friday, and just scheduling it to post on Saturday, but I’ve written a bunch of stuff this week, so wanted to hit the round-up on schedule, not let it slip to next weekend.
Me on Substack:
— “Critical Thinking” and School Re-Openings: A bit of a return to an earlier point, about how a lot of our intractable fights involve good reasoning on both sides, but start from different priorities and values. I put a good deal of effort into this, but as noted toward the end I think I ended up phrasing it too carefully, so it got basically no response.
— Book Review: MAJOR LABELS: A review of Kelefa Sanneh’s book about music history; another pre-write, as it happens.
— Why Does Particle Astrophysics Dominate Pop Science?: A look at some of the structural factors that lead to there being many times as many pop string theory books as pop condensed matter books.
— The Most Important Lesson Of The Pandemic Is That I Was Right About Everything: A bit of an “Old Man Yells at Cloud” grumble about my least favorite framing for pandemic thinkpieces.
Me Elsewhere:
— Why Nobody Really Knows What Time It Is at Forbes: A look at how core principles of physics lead us to the fact that “What time is it?” is not a well-cormed question with a single universal answer. This got picked up by some aggregators, which was nice.
Me in the Near Future: Some upcoming book-publicity events.
— Virtual Interview/ Conversation at Northshire Books, Tuesday, Jan 25 6pm ET: This was supposed to be an in-store event to mark the release date, but it has sensibly moved online. which means I can advertise it more widely… My colleague John Rieffel (from Computer Science) is going to ask questions about A Brief History of Timekeeping and I’ll try to give interesting anwers.
— Virtual Appearance at Gibson’s Books in New Hampshire, Thursday Jan 27 7pm ET: This was always going to be remote, because traveling to Concord in late January can be a little risky. Should be similar to the Northshire event.
— The physics of timekeeping: from Stonehenge to atomic clocks, The Royal Institution, 7.00pm (GMT), Thursday 3 February: A virtual event to mark the UK release date of A Brief History of Timekeeping.
Links Dump:
— You Already Know the Normal Distribution, by Freddie deBoer: A good and brief introduction to the Gaussian, one of the few good things to come out of a very stupid online kerfuffle.
— U.S. Navy Brings Back Navigation By The Stars For Officers by Geoff Brumfiel: Everything old is new again…
— What the world's most accurate clock can tell us about Earth and the cosmos by Issam Ahmed: More cool timekeeping results from Jun Ye’s lab at JILA.
— What to Do When Playing the Word Game Wordle Isn’t Enough? Solve It. by Claire McNear: A fun look at the advanced analytics approach to the game that has everyone tweeting arrays of colored boxes.
— This buttermilk-braised pork shoulder practically cooks itself by Allison Robicelli: I made this this week, and it is tasty.
— Observation of a gravitational Aharonov-Bohm effect by Chris Overstreet et al.: Crazy atom interferometry results from my boss when I was a post-doc.
— Milestone met: Union and Schuler Education Foundation combine to raise $42 million to serve more Pell-eligible students from the Union Communications Office: Cool news from my employer.
— The News: Smart ALEC, Diffident Democrats by Timothy Burke: I don’t disagree with this on a factual level, but I think that like a lot of other pieces in this vein, it does a bit too much to absolve the Democrats, particularly the more “progressive” wing, for some genuinely terrible strategic decisions. This is a super difficult needle to thread, though, which keeps stopping me from writing a full post about it, because if I do a good job it will sink without a trace, and if I do it badly it could be a shitstorm.
— It's With Some Reluctance That I Say That Bill Simmons Got It Right With the Ringer, by Freddie deBoer: Largely because I chuckled aloud at the line “I think I actually host a Ringer podcast and forgot about it, that’s how many podcasts they have.” I find Simmons’s shtick more congenial than deBoer does, and dislike some of the people he likes (and I’m sure I like people he wouldn’t) but I generally agree with his assessment of the strengths of the site.
Pseudo-Random Video of the Week:
The kids asked for pancakes last weekend, and I decided to use this as an opportunity to play with the GoPro and record myself making them.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
An all-timer for me, off a perfect album.
Yeah, that’s a lot. Here are the usual buttons:
And the comments will be open.
Great song and album. Between Hüsker Dü, Sugar, and his solo work, Bob Mould has probably been the most constant presence in my soundtrack since college.
Got Breakfast with Einstein this week! I also started anatomy and physiology lab so it might be a couple months before I can read it :)