ArXiv Filtering

While of course I endorse as diverse a reading of the preprint archives as is possible, we all know that there’s simply too much that goes on there for every paper to get even the most cursory of glances, let alone a proper viewing. My strategy has been to reduce the daily postings to a [...]

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Returning to Edinburgh

A profitable visit to MPE and a pleasant time in Munich behind me, I have an exciting week of idea refinement ahead. Of course it is nice to be back in Edinburgh, and the city was doing its best today to look bright in the fewer hours of daylight. One snapshot from the journey home [...]

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The blogosphere deflates

Shocking news this morning that influential cosmology bloggers Cosmic Variance are shacking up with the Discover Magazine coterie, for reasons that simmer down to economies of scale. In the spirit of hyperbole, it seems sensible to link to Nick Carr’s recent post on the death of the blogosphere (h/t Sullivan), as well as Sullivan’s own [...]

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Statistics of triangulated point distributions

So this morning was unusual not in my having an interesting idea, but in pursuing it. This idea, not likely to be wholly or even partly original—I don’t want to search through journal articles only to disappoint myself just yet, & wouldn’t know where to look anyway—is about the clustering of points.

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Correspondances

While spell-checking this word during the writing of that last post, I happened across the poem by Baudelaire, which seems apt, and if not, at least very nice. First the French:
Correspondances
La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des [...]

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Cognitive art

This is a good term that I haven’t heard before. It arises in an actual letter to Nature (access may be restricted) from K. R. Jolls:
Graphic artists who collaborate with scientists have often been shaped by the other of C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures‘. Although well-intentioned, many artists’ understanding of basic science is inadequate for [...]

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Boyer Lectures

From an email I just sent to S. O. Killmier:
Was just listening to the first of this year’s Boyer Lectures. They have Rupert Murdoch doing them this year, so he brings his own peculiar brand of Australian nationalism to the table. Mostly this first lecture was just an overview, so there wasn’t much detail, and [...]

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