Month: July 2013

I’ll be delivering a lecture by videoconference to three campuses this morning, using video, PowerPoint (very sparingly), a visualiser, audio, controlling lights and sound… And every time I come in to a lecture theatre, at least one of the two radio mics is not plugged in the right way, and therefore not charged. I’d hoped…

The textbook I prescribed for one of my courses, unknown to me, is releasing a second edition in a couple of weeks. This means that the second edition is not yet available for the semester, which started last week, and the first edition is mainly out of circulation too. I scanned and posted the single…

We think that our faces and bodies show our emotions, but there seems to be some evidence that it also goes the other way – we feel what our faces are showing. If we smile, we start to feel happy. Yesterday, riding from the Gold Coast to Brisbane, my allergies were causing my eyes to…

Playing Skyrim this morning, I realised: inside my head, somewhere, there are thousands of floor plans for buildings that have never existed in the world. The houses and caves of the Thief games, the wastelands of Fallout 3, the varied architectures of the Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim – didn’t play the first…

Good piece from Douglas Murray in The Spectator about seeking balance and not getting carried away by one’s own rhetoric: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8839081/call-off-the-faith-wars/

Bit of a physics discussion on Facebook, around the differences between quantum and relativity, and how we’d combine them. Someone noted that our current theories, particularly in the particle world, tend to keep creating new kinds of fields and particles, and getting more complicated. They compared that to geocentric astronomy just before Copernicus, where accounting…

(Suzie asked for the basic tips, and I thought I might as well share them more broadly) Conceptually, you’re trying to locate yourself on three ‘maps’1: the empirical, theoretical and methodological maps. Empirical: what is already known about my topic? What have been the results of prior studies? Theoretical: what theoretical framework is appropriate to…

Via Chris Bigum, this is well worth a read: http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/margaret-wertheim-the-limits-of-physics/ Unlike most of the rest of the internets, the comments are generally worth reading too.

(with apologies to Pat Benatar)(and those who hate puns)(and those who care about grammar) This ‘literacy test’ was used in 1964 – the year I was born – to try to disqualify black voters from voting in Louisiana. I think I can do most of the questions. But in order to be allowed to vote,…