links for 2008-07-29

The Font Sizes of the Planets | Orbiting Frog The Solar System as a Wordle. You can get it on a T-shirt, too. (tags: astronomy planets science silly) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Thoughts on Service “[T]he path of least resistance is lip service to service, with a tacit understanding that we don’t really mean it.” […]

Reader Request: Parenthood

In the Reader Request thread, Mary Kay writes: I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on becoming a father. Both before and after the actual event. I mentioned this to Kate, and she asked whether I thought there was a difference between “fatherhood” and “parenthood.” I’m not that attuned to such things, so it had […]

Reader Request: Graphene

Last week’s Reader Request Thread produced a bunch of good suggestions, some of which I’ll be responding to this week as I put the last touches on the book draft and send it off. We’ll start with a good physics question from Moshe: So, what do you think about graphene? the next big thing, or […]

Paging Humanities Bloggers…

A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science […]

A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford by Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves is probably best known for writing biographies of American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan), so it’s a little strange to see him turn his hand to scientific biography. This is part of Norton’s “Great Discoveries” series (which inexplicably lacks a web page– get with the 21st century, already), though, so incongruous author-subject pairing […]

Not Even Backreaction

Over at bloggingheads, they’ve posted a video conversation between Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Sabine Hossenfelder of Backreaction. They talk about string theory a bit, as you might imagine, but also about a wide range of issues in math and physics, and math- and physics-blogging. Sabine evidently had some difficulty getting a connection […]

links for 2008-07-27

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Blog As you would expect, they have cool pictures. via Steinn. (tags: astronomy space science blogs) Freezing images in an atomic vapor! « Skulls in the Stars An introduction to Electromagnetically Induced Transparency and how to use it to store information. (tags: physics quantum optics experiment science news blogs) Crimes and […]

A Dog’s Life

It was a lovely afternoon at Chateau Steelypips. I sat in the back yard reading a biography of Ernest Rutherford (about which more tomorrow), while Emmy guarded against intrusions of various sorts: squirrels, inferior dogs out for walks, the next-door neighbors’ kids. There comes a time, though, when no matter how nice it may be […]