December 2006

  • Let’s hit it and quit

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    R.I.P. the Godfather of Soul, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business, Mr. Please Please Please: James Brown. (Listen via Alex Ross and WFMU.)

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  • Hijacked for Spam

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    Apologies if you have one of the, um, tens of thousands (or more?) of email addresses that have been spammed by some damned robot pretending to be me (in the guise of coming from the address on the upper right of this page). Not much I can do about it except hope that I’m not…

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  • Newly-minted PhD

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    Congratulations to my student, Anastasia Niarchou, on passing her PhD exam, for her thesis, “Low Power in the CMB and its Implications for the Topology of the Universe” — the same work that was covered last week in New Scientist. Great work, Dr. Niarchou!

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  • God, Man and Katrina

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    I watched Channel 4’s documentary The Trouble with Atheism. I assume my secular fellow travellers in the blogosphere will take it and its presenter, Rod Liddle, to task for its myriad stupidities, misrepresentations and annoyances so I can leave them unremarked (except to point out that, with no offence intended, John Polkinghorne is a good…

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  • The Shape of the Universe

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    The work that I’ve been doing with my student is featured on the cover of this week’s New Scientist. Unfortunately, a subscription is necessary to read the full article online, but if you do manage to find it on the web or the newsstand, you’ll find a much better explanation of the physics than I…

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  • This American Life

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    I was delighted to discover that This American Life, the best radio show in the whole world (ever!), has finally moved into the modern internet with podcasts. In counterintuitive fashion, the latest show is available for downloading for a week, after which you can stream it for free, or purchase the MP3 file. (This must…

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  • How I will spend my winter vacation

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    Maybe we should start a Cosmological Pynchon Book Club… And I’ve also got Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land if I make it through all 1000+ pages of this.

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  • Science, Scientism, the Speed of Light and more.

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    This week, Stephen Hawking was awarded the Copley Medal, and the BBC took the opportunity to broadcast the Today Show direct from the Royal Society, in what seemed to me a fairly amateurish production. Professor Peter Coles reprised his usual and welcome role as an anti-Hawking-hype nay-sayer. Another commentator (sorry, I’ve forgotten whom) made the…

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