Instagram Culture and the Democratization of Pretension

When I was going through the huge collection of photos I have from the Forum in Rome, I kept running across pictures containing two young Asian women (neither of them Kate). This isn’t because I was stalking them, but because they were everywhere, stopping for long periods in front of virtually every significant ruin and […]

290-299/366: Offbeat Rome

Kate and I spent last week in Rome, to attend the wedding of a friend of mine from college, who was marrying an Italian woman. I’ve always wanted to see Rome, so this was a great excuse, and of course I took a lot of pictures– over 1,600 all told. This happens in part because […]

Song of the Day

As of today, I can officially no longer claim to be in my “early 40’s,” so here’s a great song with a thematically appropriate title: (The lyrical content has no particular relevance to my life, I hasten to add…) I’m taking a bit of a social-media hiatus at the moment, but it is very nice […]

Big Media Me: Here and Now

The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded– it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, […]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Mundane Space, Spectroscopy, Changing Constants, Rest Energy, Magnetic Sensing, Wiffle Balls, and Revolutions

Another few weeks of physics blogging at Forbes, collected here for your convenience. — Commercialization Of Space: Three Cheers For The Mundane: Some belated but brief comments on the SpaceApps conference I went to down in NYC. — How Studying Atoms On Earth Helps Us Learn About Other Planets: As a snobby grad student in […]

276-278/366: Fun With Editing

Last in a series of themed collections of pictures. These ones are showcasing my rudimentary GIMP skills, pasting together multiple pictures into composites. 276/366: Sky-Bison for Scale One of the earliest happenings in the three-week period I’m dumping photos from was SteelyKid getting strep throat again. She spent a Friday at home, and I took […]

268-275/366: Miscellaneous Photo Dump

This one, we’ll do sorta-kinda chronologically: 268/366: Niska-Parade One of the big temporal landmarks of the recent stretch without photo-blogging posts was “Niska-Day,” the annual community festival here. This kicks off with a parade, the route for which comes right to the end of our street. Here’s one of the first marching elements, the local […]