Links for 2009-08-13

"The conventional thought, based on many accounts given by Einstein in his later years, is that he can't quite remember if he was aware of it, and thus, it didn't play any influential role in his formulation of the principles of relativity. This new paper, in press, reveals a slightly different version of what plausible could have happened, based on two accounts : a translation of Einstein's speech he gave in Kyoto in 1922, and a series of speeches he gave in Chicago a year earlier, and especially at the Francis W. Parker school."

""I have a really weird sense of humor," Ard says. Her tongue-in-cheek products for "nerdy babies" take the parenting obsession with educational products like Baby Genius and Baby Einstein "to its logical extreme," she says. She puts on a hilarious mock coo. "So H is for hydrogen bonding, and you have to know that, baby.""

"Start them off right with my books for the world's teeniest nerds. Forget Pat the Bunny -- your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger's Kitty! Help baby search for subatomic particles and explore the universe."

"At the end of the day, though, it's not DFW I'm mad. It's me. It's not that I don't want to finish Infinite Jest. It's not that I don't enjoy reading Infinite Jest. It's that I don't have time for Infinite Jest. But this is not a book that takes the opportunity cost of the reader seriously. In my other life, I write 15 blog posts a day and a weekly interview column and a twice-monthly food column. I need to read books on the Federal Reserve and papers about obesity and CBO scores. I don't want to be the sort of person who doesn't have the time to read a long and serious and difficult novel. But I am that sort of person."

"[B]y studying the systems that HEP uses to communicate (arXiv, SPIRES, and journals) we see that physicists in HEP are quite savvy about the communication tools they use and the ways those tools work. Researchers understand that work on arXiv is unpublished initially, but will eventually be peer-reviewed, and are willing to cite it during the interim period. They understand that the versions on arXiv are generally updated to match the final journal article, and prefer to use the consistent interface and access provided by arXiv. They understand that the arXiv daily listings are important and heavily read, thus they are willing to go to some lengths to submit papers right at 4:00:01 to get them on the top of the lists."