I was on the road last week, and am now of an age where going away for the weekend turns my brain to mush for several days, so this is kind of a bimodal mix of stuff. Kind of heavy topics in the first week, total fluff in the second.
Me on Substack:
— Does Every Science Get “Big”?: Prompted by the reappearance of the question of whether particle physics costs too much, some speculation about whether other sciences are on their trajectory.
— The Academicization of Everything: Several of the worst practices of the social-justice-oriented politics that get shorthanded as “woke” seem very directly related to bad habits of academia.
— Academia: Blame the Lawyers: Academic institutions are undeniably less freewheeling than a few decades ago, and the reason is simple: lawyers and the reisk-averse mindset they engender.
— On Fatherhood: I spent Father’s Day on planes and in airports, and as a result got a little maudlin after I got home.
— Quick Post-SciFoo Thoughts: A few notes on the “unconference” that had me traveling last weekend.
— This Week in Airplane Reads: Short comments on the five novels I read on the trip.
— Stranger Thoughts: Some comments and observations on the first half of the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Me Elsewhere:
Doesn’t exactly count, but A Brief History of Timekeeping made Physics Today’s list of “Summer reads for physics fanatics” with some other very fine books, which was nice.
Links Dump:
— “Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users” on SSRN: Actual research on the practical effect of YouTube recommendations.
— Eternal Matter Waves from the Institute of Physics: News story about a continuously loading Bose-Einstein Condensate, something people have been proposing schemes to do for decades.
— How to Solve the Student-Disengagement Crisis at the Chronicle of Higher Education: This week in “The most important lesson of the current crisis is that I was right about everything I was banging on about before the current crisis.”
— Asteroid Samples May ‘Rewrite the Chemistry of the Solar System’ by Kenneth Chang: Nice story about the samples returned by Hayabusa in 2020.
— The Battle Over Gender Therapy by Emily Bazelon: This was hugely contentious among culture warriors, but as is often the case, when I finally read it, it didn’t seem all that outrageous.
— Not your typical shop class: New CTE program requires lessons in social skills by Olivia Sanchez: I’d really like to see some more concrete examples of how these programs to explicitly teach “soft skills” work, because I’m a little skeptical.
— The Open Secret of Google Search by Charlie Warzel: I’m a little curious about what people are searching for; I really haven’t had horrible problems with the (relatively few) Google searches I do.
— How OXO Conquered the American Kitchen by Dan Kois: A look at our most ubiquitous supplier of kitchen gadgets.
— Walking the World: Hanoi (part 1) by Chris Arnade: Pretty self-explanatory, really.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
This should be the last baseball pic for a while, as it’s from the final game of The Pip’s spring season. He just struck out the batter in green to end the inning, and stared at the kid long enough afterwards that one of the coaches asked “Do you know him?” (He didn’t, it was just him imitating pro baseball players…)
He did a decent job from the mound for the game, striking out a couple and giving up three runs, and at the plate had a strikeout, a walk, and what we’ll call an RBI single because they were the home team, and thus get a generous interpretation of the bad/dropped throw to first. The other team had really strong pitching, though, so they struggled to put up runs, and ended up losing. Had they won, they would’ve played for the league championship last night, so I wasn’t that sad— we got to have a fairly normal Friday night instead.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
I need to do another round of new-music purchases, but until I get around to that, I’m shuffle-playing old songs, and this came up while I was writing the above. I got dumped around the time this album (Black Love) came out, so I listened to this record a lot; the albums right before and right after it are better, but the best songs from it are great. And this is just a stupendous 90’s alt-rock video.
That’s a bunch of stuff, all right. I was toying with doing a weightier blog post yesterday, but then the Supreme Court weighed in encouraging me to get off the Internet for the rest of the day, so I did. If you want to learn what I was thinking about doing, here’s a button you can click to get it emailed to you once I write it:
And as always the comments will be open should you want to marvel at Greg Dulli’s mid-90’s vibe: