A very busy week here: I did a bunch of events for Admissions (prompting some writing about academia that will be linked below), and gave a talk about timekeeping and relativity at Siena College (the first in-person lecture I’ve done at another institution in a couple of years).
Me on Substack:
— Recent Reading: The Maradaine Series by Marshall Ryan Maresca: Some fun books that I don’t see discussed very much.
— All-Purpose College Advice: The best advice for how to behave at college is also the best advice for how to think about choosing a college.
— The Demographic Dilemmas of Academia: On the one hand, fixing some of academia’s problems seems to require a large expansion, but that’s a bit of a hard sell.
— The Persistence of Errata: Prompted by a confession from John Scalzi, some of the errors that snuck into print in my books.
Me Elsewhere:
— Spooky Tale About Quantum Machinery Takes First Prize: I waffled about whether to put this in “Me Elsewhere” or “Links Dump,” but landed here just to make it slightly more prominent. And I was an active part of judging this competition, if not the writer of the story about it.
— Toasters and the Revolutionary Understanding of Quantum, Rayleigh-Jeans Model of the Blackbody and the Ultraviolet Catastrophe, and How Max Planck Solved the Blackbody Problem, at Wondrium Daily: These are transcripts of pieces of the first lecture of the series I did for The Great Courses.
— Elevator Experiment Inspired Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, at Wondrium Daily: A short promo piece for the Great Courses lecture series; again, I waffled about whether to put this here, but enough of it is quotes from me that it feels close enough to something I did.
Links Dump:
— Physicist Presents “Mind-Blowing” Ideas Rooted in Einstein, by Jonny Lupsha at Wondrium Daily: An interview with me about the Great Courses lectures.
— Thank Einstein for Your GPS—No, Really, by Jonny Lupsha at Wondrium Daily: An interview with the editor I worked with on the Great Courses lectures. This is the last of these.
— I'll Give You 2:1 Odds That We Can Decrease Problem Gambling. Okay, 3:1. No, 4:1. Come On, I Need This. by Jeff Maurer: About the same as my take on the legal gambling explosion. But, you know, funnier.
— What People Got Wrong About the Film Parasite by Rob Henderson: A subtle class thing.
— We need to find ways to do faster clinical research by Matt Yglesias: Yes, please.
— The Pity of the Elites by Jay Caspian Kang: A nice piece on the pathology of admissions essays.
— Academia: Faculty Development and Curricular Change by Timothy Burke: If I tried to write at length about this, it would end up as a 1500-word subtweet, so I’m just going to drop the link here and say it’s good.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
Charlie the pupper thinks his humans spend too much time with computers, and not enough petting him.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
The bar where we do our weekly faculty happy hour was, unusually for them, playing some kind of 90’s alt-rock mix this week, and this was one of the songs. It’s probably a decade or more since I thought about this band, but man that took me back to grad school.
So that’s this week. As always, what gets traffic remains a mystery to me, but such is life on the Internet. Here’s a button:
And if you have thoughts about other 90’s alt-rock deep cuts randomly reappearing, the comments will be open: