I hardly ever write public entries on LiveJournal now. When I first got on tenure track, I played it careful. Also, Facebook has taken over a lot of my online socializing. Sometimes I vent in a friends-only entry. Let's see if I have much to say in public now ( Read more... )

A rare public entry. At least my mysterious reader Monika in Poland might be pleased! But not really much to say about astronomy here. More contemplating life as it is passing ( Read more... )

I have many things I should be doing, and want to be doing--job applications, astrophysics research analyzing particular star systems, my own idiosyncratic discrete models of quantum mechanics, finding a good sushi place to take a date--but for a while I've been musing about certain topics in history and anthropology, and I feel inspired this ( Read more... )

The work day is all candy and ice cream when I'm working on my own research projects! Just have to find a new grant or teaching position ( Read more... )

So my nth postdoc is over--I'm rewriting my statement of teaching philosophy and sending out CVs. Meanwhile, I'm excited to get some time to work on my own research. (While still tinkering with the postdoc project as well.) I've been feeling pretty good this weekend. I have both some more speculative physics ideas to work on, and also the X-ray ( Read more... )

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I used to be much more of a booster of Artificial Intelligence than I am now. Growing up, I was into Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter's and Dennett's "The Mind's I", and other similar books. In grad school, I used to get into debates online with Mikhail Zeleny, this Russian grad student, kind of a crank, who believed that AI was impossible. He was ( Read more... )

I continue to be surprised when it's expressed, as in this recent book by Matt Bai--that liberals and the left in the U.S. are out of ideas, or do not have the intellectual power or subtlety of conservatives ( Read more... )

I seem to be thinking a lot about politics these days--I'm not certain why.

With the Republicans scrambling to find a Conservative True Believer to succeed Bush, I've been thinking more about Reagan and his relation to George W. Bush. It's almost as if W. were Reagan returned both as tragedy and farce. He's certainly made Reagan, in retrospect, ( Read more... )

Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan, the great science popularizer. Bloggers around the world are posting entries in honor of Sagan today. Nick Sagan, son of Carl Sagan, makes an announcement in his blog. Official organizer Joel Schlosberg announces day of blog posts.


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