The last week-in-review round-up post I did was back on October 9th; a few days after that, we left for a week-long vacation with friends from college, and things have been disrupted ever since. As it turns out, though, that means that my level of posting has been low enough that this is going to have about the same amount of content as some past single-week roundups…
Me on Substack:
— Liberal Education and Leadership: Some thoughts about what it is that we’re doing in the elite private higher education sector.
— Ann Ryan, 1925-2001: A post about my grandmother, who died a couple of weeks ago.
— Against Demarcation: I think there’s a bit too much time spent on trying to nail down boundaries between areas of knowledge, and personally prefer thinking about the core of those.
— Eliminating Legacies: Some back-of-the-envelope math about how big a difference eliminating legacy preferences in college admissions could be expected to make.
— Doin’ Dune: Some thoughts about Denis Villeneuve’s Very Big Movie, and regarding the conversations other people are having about it.
— Return of the Wag: Charlie the pupper’s made us a little nervous lately, but seems to be doing fine now.
Me Elsewhere:
— Baseball Science: The Ultimate Relief Pitcher?: A little data analysis looking at a fun baseball hypothetical from Freddie de Boer.
Links Dump:
— I Miss Taking Drugs by Freddie de Boer: In a weird way, a lovely piece of writing.
— Academia: Assessment (Cri de Coeur Edition) by Timothy Burke: I have complicated feelings about the question of “assessment” in higher education, so I don’t entirely agree with this, but it’s an interesting version of one of the poles of the argument.
— Academic Laboratories That Outlast Their Founders, by Sam Rodriques: This is interesting in large part because it’s nearly impossible to imagine doing in the field of physics I was trained in.
— An atomic clock measured how general relativity warps time across a millimeter, by Emily Conover: Sure, wait until after my timekeeping book has gone to press to release this…
— Who’s Killing Physics? by Sabine Hossenfelder: A good statement of a position she’s held for a while; I maybe ought to write a response, but it feels kind of pointless.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
Waves on the beach at sunrise on our much-needed vacation. I’ve got a huge number of shots like this, because that’s how photography works.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
In the category of “So Perfectly My Kind of Thing That I’m Mildly Surprised It Got Made,” a song I tend to re-play a couple of times whenever it comes up on shuffle play. I saw these guys live; it’s a good show, and hard to believe a dude who looks like that sings like this.
And, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff. Things are slowly coming back to normal, so I hope to be writing a little more regularly going forward. But then again, it’s really hard to predict… Anyway, here are some buttons:
And the comments will be open.
[reads Sabine's piece, sees no mention of physics outside of astro/particle] 😬