Journalism's 'stories'
I can think of at least four different words newsrooms use to describe the bundles of content they work with: story, piece, article and copy (‘content’ itself isn’t one of them). With a few exceptions…
Character development in DnD
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as playe…
Foundations of reality
I haven’t ever been more interested in anything than physics and epic fantasy. So I thought it might be interesting to think about whether they complement each other. Being a science writer writing a…
White-opia
John Horgan asked 15 people – scientists, social psychologists, philosophers – one question, in a seemingly clever effort to mark the end of 2018: Unless you are too stoned or enlightened to care, yo…
A question for Modi
On December 18, Manmohan Singh took a jibe at Narendra Modi for not holding any press conferences in his term as PM. To get in on the action, 15 people at The Wire (including myself) pitched 15 questi…
Nobel Prizes and traditionalism
James English had a wonderful piece in Public Books recently, discussing how the Nobel Prize for literature: 1. Is a prize that has always struggled to be meaningful, given how its laureates are sho…
Why physical networks aren’t like their on-paper counterparts
At first glance, this tweets appears to state something obvious: https://twitter.com/nature/status/1071217062930980870 Of course the three-dimensional arrangement of links and nodes, and the space t…
On cosmology's scicomm disaster
Jamie Farnes, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, recently had a paper published that claimed the effects of dark matter and dark energy could be explained by replacing them with a fluid-lik…
Using light to cool sound
Laser light has been used to cool atoms down to near absolute zero. The technique is simple, if versatile. (And includes some history involving a little-known Indian physicist.) Laser light is shined…
New binary black-hole mergers
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about how quickly the discovery of black-hole mergers through gravitational waves was becoming run o' the mill. All of the gravitational wave detection a…
Mongolian folk rock
An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can't stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial rev…
Of socks in black-holes and wasted stone tablets
Dennis Overbye, one of the New York Times's star science writers (the other being Carl Zimmer), had a curious piece up November 19 about why "we should leave some mysteries alone" and wh…