The New Yorker on truth, beauty, and string theory. Along similar lines, last month’s Wired featured a brief little interview with Lee Smolin, who just published The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. While we’re on the topic, take a look at the introduction to 10 dimensional space I linked about a month ago.
Tag: new yorker
–Here’s the story of a guy that deposits a fake check from a scam company–and comes out $95093.35 better. [via grs]
—Photos from a tornado chaser. Supercells, lightning, twisters, even aurora borealis. It’s all there.
—Scientific American weighs in on expertise and experts. It’s not all genetics:
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert–in chess, music and a host of other subjects–sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in [that] kind of effortful study…?
–And the New Yorker reflects on the arguments about that massive project of non-experts [micro-experts?], Wikipedia.
–Six-and-a-half billion people on this planet. And I’m only one pixel.
–Here’s an interesting essay & audio piece in the New Yorker on Mozart, written by a guy who has spent some time listening to the master’s works–all of them. “A hundred and eighty CDs… reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes.”
–Russia not only has a lock on the club scene, it’s also got the biggest hole in the world. I hope they do something cool with it when the mining peters out, like a waterslide. [via digg]
Update: I ought to have done some fact-checking. The biggest man-made hole in the world, Bingham Canyon, is actually here in the States. That’s 4000 feet of hole-ness outside of Salt Lake City. I still think the Russian one looks cooler, but they are both begging for a water park. Or some trees.
–I’m a sucker for conspiracy theory and revisionist history. The Associated Press reports on a newly-discovered copy of a letter written by Abraham Lincoln, a letter urging governors to support a Constitutional amendment to protect slavery. But then again, as historian Thomas DiLorenzo writes, this isn’t really news. I’m not usually much interested in biography, but I’m looking forward to DiLorenzo’s new book arriving this fall.
Mark Larson 