September 2006
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Hole in the Ground
Last year, musician, artist, polymath and all-around sweet guy Jem Finer built a radio telescope in the Parks in Oxford. This year, funded by an award from the PRS Foundation for New Music, he’s looking in the opposite direction: he’s dug a well in the King’s Wood, in Kent (Southeast England) and made it into…
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Fixes for Physics?
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Physics-watchers will have found it hard to miss the recent flood [?] of public criticisms of String Theory, the currently favored candidate for a ‘theory of everything’ unifying particle physics and gravity (and therefore providing a fundamental theory of cosmology). The two most prominent have been Peter Woit from Columbia, who has spun off his…
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Sponsor me!
More special pleading: I’ll be running in the Cancer Research UK 10K at Blenheim Palace on 1 October. If you’d like to do a little good (and encourage me), please feel free to donate a few of your dollars, pounds, euros, etc., to the cause, at my sponsorship page.
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Gender Bias by the Supposedly Rational
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The National Academies, America’s “honorific society of distinguished scholars” (the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Society) has just published a report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” (but it will cost you if you want to read the whole thing). The New York Times paraphrases the report:…
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Matter, Dark and Otherwise
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Anyone reading this blog has doubtless heard about the results announced a few weeks ago, observations of the “bullet cluster” claimed (in the title of the paper) to be “A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter.” (The basic idea is recounted better, and with prettier pictures, than I can do here by…
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Political Commandments
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Ronald Reagan often talked about the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican” (attributed to California Republican party chairman Gaylord Parkinson during the 1964 California Gubernatorial election). It certainly served Reagan well (for ill rather than good, despite his bizarre posthumous revalorization). The Labour Party could learn a thing or two.…
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More cosmology prizes
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The Balzan prize, worth 1,000,000 Swiss Francs, was just awarded to Andrew Lange and Paolo de Bernardis for their work as the original Principal Investigators of Boomerang, which, in 2000, produced the first high-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background and allowed a definitive measurement of the curvature of the Universe, in the sense of…
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Job Satisfaction
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Tom Lutz, “The Summer Next Time” – New York Times: On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t…
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Xgau
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As predicted a few months ago, American rock ‘n’ roll critic Robert Christgau has been fired from the rapidly-decaying Village Voice. The Voice was the first of the “Alternative Newsweeklies”, with a strong lefty political stance mixed with arts coverage from the Beats to the hippies and the punks. Nowadays, the Voice is owned by…
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