Week in Review

1/15/22

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.

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And the comments will be open.