After a little bit of a silence blogging is back in style in Rigoland.

While reading Smolin's book I stumbled upon the passage in which he talks about how physics students are discouraged by the lack of interesting subjects early on and how at his school they had quantum physics as a freshman class. Smolin makes a good point that most of what is taught in our freshman classes is usually what students have seen in high school and it seems very boring. It is boring on two accounts: The subjects are never "cool" ones such as black holes ...

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Interesting read from the Times Online. It seems that computers are going to be reading the news for bank and hedge fund managers so that they can spend their times on other more important matters. At this rate, we will end up with computers doing all our work which reminds me of the following joke.

A very wealthy US businessman is visiting the south of Bolivia when he sees a native farmer just sitting under the sun taking a nap while his field is completely empty and not being cropped.

"Why don't you get to work and plant in ...

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I don't know how is it that I didn't find Cosmic Variance earlier. It is one gem of a blog. No, it is not just geeky science stuff, though it is run by five theoretical physicists so, you know...

Anyways, today I found this. It does bring about a very good point: for some reason people seem to think that learning basic science and math is relatively unimportant but that everyone -- or at least everyone who we call educated -- must know basic history, literature and other humanities. Our appreciation of math and science needs to be elevated to ...

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Interesting read from the NYT.

Several highlights:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the ...

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While waiting for Nathan to come over I stumbled upon this blog. Very interesting stuff. In particular, this interview with Economics Nobel Laureate Prof. Gary Becker caught my eye. The whole thing is a worthwhile read, however this is most remarkable:

What's your proposal exactly?

I think you have to legalize drugs. That will eliminate most of these costs, the incarceration costs, the judiciary costs, the police costs. You'll be able to reallocate the police to better activities, reduce the effects on neighborhoods, and so on. Critics would say you'll get a big increase in drug consumption ...

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Is simply brilliant. I have watched many interviews and read several of his writings though not his latest book. Most of them have always been on the same caliber as the interview with Prof. Weinberg I blogged about sometime ago. However, this Q&A; which follows this talk seems a tad more notable than most of the other remarkable things I've heard this man say. His responses are very rational, well thought-out and adequately delivered. But I was amazed at how unintelligent the crowd seemed to be. Just because Prof. Dawkins said something doesn't mean he said something great ...

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The seller's name should remain undisclosed. However, if you think of online booksellers named similarly to rivers in Brazil you are on the right track.

Over the summer I was buying a book for $15. As I was checking out I noticed that there was an offer to get an $25 discount by signing up for a credit card and putting an order for over a certain amount on it (let's say $50). So, I went ahead and found another book I wanted making my order well over $50 and got the credit card. Figured it was a ...

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Amidst all the media attention and all the bashing string theory has been getting lately this is a refreshing view of the current landscape of theoretical physics. A.J usually writes pretty interesting stuff on his blog and interestingly enough his textbook recommendations come up as the third result on a google search for 'undergraduate arrogance'!

Let my own ignorance and undergraduate arrogance speak, though: I do think that string theory gets a bit too much attention (and funding?) and other approaches to quantum gravity and unification do not. Many a time have I read about it being very difficult ...

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There are days left until the midterm election and what's everyone talking about? Former presidential candidates making bad jokes, pastors buying meth from gay escorts, presidents making bad jokes and inept talk show hosts bashing people with Parkinson disease. Are all these matters of national policy?

It has always amazed me how much people care about little or irrelevant things when it comes to their politicians' and how little they care about the policies those politicians pursue. Somehow it is more important to us to belabor the point about Kerry's bad joke being ok because it was intended ...

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TradeSports is a brilliant idea. I had thought about making a site of this nature as a startup idea and even tried a very naive implementation of it for my cis422 project (which failed miserably, btw). This was right after I read about Nassim Taleb (thanks to Prof. Hsu's blog). Taleb proposes that being an 'expert' isn't (perhaps shouldn't be) worth that much because even experts get dominated by statistics when it comes to making predictions and do no better and even worse than non-experts. (this is a good talk on the subject). After having listened/read ...

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Lecture

• Make all lecture notes available and discourage note-taking in class.
• Have lecture twice a week on UH + an informal optional session.
• Treat lecture like a discussion section during which the formalism is developed by the class. That is, I'm merely leading in the sense of determining what should be done next, not the usual instructor talks and writes derivations on the chalkboard.
• Make clear what to read before each lecture (kinda like English classes are treated).
• Encourage coming with questions. Even better, require questions.
• 5 minute quiz at the beginning of each or every other lecture (to get ...

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Thanks Zack, for pointing me to the excellent essay.

Horgan has many good points. Especially the one about diminished returns. Even if we experimentally detected extra dimensions or could verify what dark matter is, does it really matter all that much? To us who like this stuff, sure. Will it change the world the way QM did? Not so sure. But, I guess you never know. I still believe, though, that there are enough problems scientists care about to keep us busy discovering stuff for a few decades at least.

Secondly, I agree with the 'technological evangelists' that science is ...

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