I was on the road for part of last week, going to Long Island to record talking-head bits for a TV show, so didn’t write enough to justify a week-in-review post. I made up for that a bit this week, writing kind of a lot…
Me on Substack:
— On Getting Back: As a 50-year-old white guy, they would take away my license to blog if I didn’t write something about Get Back.
— A Brief History of Anonymous Tinkerers: One of the hard things about writing A Brief History of Timekeeping has been that many of the key inventions just sort of… appear, without a known inventor.
— Links Dump: What would’ve been a section of a week-in-review post, had I done one, but ended up its own thing because I needed to close a bunch of tabs.
— Disease vs. Countermeasures: We’re at a really weird place in the pandemic, where I’m less worried about getting sick than about the hassles that would come with quarantine.
— It’s Okay to Do One Thing at a Time: An argument against the tendency to try to achieve liberal education by rolling everything into one giant mush of a program.
— Persevering Is What We Do: One of my least favorite rhetorical tropes bugs me because it ignores a key feature of human nature.
— Good News Doesn’t Stay News: Another complaint about modern media, and the structural disadvantages faced by positive stories.
Me Elsewhere:
— Anything That “Ticks” Can Be A Clock at Forbes: A brief look at some of the fundamental tools human have used to track the passage of time over the last several millennia.
— Clocks Are Models of Time at Forbes: Even the best clocks we have are just providing a convenient approximation of some more fundamental standard of time.
— Timekeeping for Babies: Chris “Quantum Physics for Babies” Ferrie and I had a video conversation about the new book, and he turned it into a baby book:
Links Dump:
— Discovering Dr. Wu by Jada Yuan: A lovely bit of writing about the author’s grandmother, Chien-Shiung Wu, who was a great physicist.
— Climate tech’s newest unicorn makes chemicals from sugar, not fossil fuels by Adele Peters: All the usual caveats about companies hyping their products, but this seems cool.
— Late Stage Covid by Charlie Warzel: Another take on the weirdness of the present moment.
— Yo mama's mama's mama's mama... etc. by Razib Khan: A look at what genetics tells us about human evolution.
— Celebrate: Food, family, ‘hearts filled with love’ make for perfect Polish meal at Christmastime by Karen Bjornland: Nice story in our local paper about families who do versions of the traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner that we always do with my dad’s side of the family. Looking forward to that next weekend…
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
This is the view from the Physics and Astronomy conference room at Union, during a light snow that fell last week. We’re anticipating a heavier snowfall today, which I hope will be enough for me to break out the cross-country skis for the first time.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
I saw this band open for the Hold Steady in 2008 in a tiny little bar not much bigger than the first floor of our house. I say “band” because they seem to be one now, but what I remember was basically one dude with a guitar and a shitload of effects pedals. I was thus pretty surprised when they came out with a stellar album circa 2014, and have followed that with two more. This is the title track from the new one, which is a vibe, as the kids say. (They hate it when I say it, though…)
So that’s a bunch of stuff. Here are the usual buttons:
And the comments will be open.