I was hoping for a nice, relaxing week following last week’s meeting-fest that culminated in the Board of Trustees meeting on the weekend. Alas, this was not to be, and this week wound up even more draining, albeit for very different reasons. Still, I got a bunch of stuff written.
Me on Substack:
— Bicycling and Quantum Measurement: An analogy between the experience of riding my bike and how projective measurement works, including the Quantum Zeno Effect.
— On the Teaching of (Lab) Writing: I’ve come around to thinking that a lot of what we think of as bad student writing is in fact just a lack of understanding of the topic they’re supposed to write about.
— Cycles and Predictions: A text version of my presentation for New Scientist, on the influences of timekeeping on intellectual history.
— Walking in San Francisco: Photos and commentary from a hike down the Embarcadero with my DSLR.
Me Elsewhere:
This part at least genuinely was slow; I didn’t write anything that came out in non-Substack form this week.
Links Dump:
— "Accept Cookies" Pop-Ups Aren't the Worst Part of Europe's Data Privacy Law by Jeff Maurer: The annoyance goes far deeper.
— Let's use unspent Covid funds to make great next generation vaccines by Matt Yglesias: This is a no-brainer, so of course it won’t happen.
— The elusive truth of Farm Hall by Ryan Dahn: More detail on the famous transcripts of secret recordings of captured scientists from the German atomic bomb program.
— Ridley (2009-21) by Seb Falk: I am a total sucker for memorial posts about dead pets, and this is beautiful.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
Both kids got new phones this week. SteelyKid’s was a replacement of a three-year-old Moto g, The Pip’s is his first phone. Charlie the pupper is now the only small mammal in Chateau Steelypips without mobile data, and he’s jealous.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
In honor of the stupid hot weather we’re getting today (hot enough that they pre-emptively canceled all the rec baseball games scheduled for today…). Several years back, WEQX played this enough times for it to get really stuck in my head, but I had a miserable time finding a digital version of it. The album seemed to be available only as an import CD, like it was 1995 or something.
Anyway, it’s a great tune that should’ve sold a billion copies.
This week will hopefully shade slightly more toward normal, though at the end of the week, Kate is supposed to be heading off to Wiscon, leaving me solo with the sillyheads. If you want to see how this leads to my complete unraveling, here’s a button:
And if you have thoughts on obscure and highly catchy British pop songs from the mid 2010’s, the comments will be open.