Links for 2009-12-18

Tags
Categories

More like this

Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed "Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance. Here are 4…
Confessions of a Community College Dean: College Prep "In some circles, 'college' is an undifferentiated term for a place that other people go to get the kinds of jobs that other people get. It's probably some kind of racket, though the exact workings are hard to detail. In some circles, 'college…
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe Zombie Feynman! (tags: comics science society physics silly) Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Mistake of the Week: "But even he says so, and he's an X!" "Given any exotic mixture of belief and group affiliation,…
nanoscale views: Reviewing- why, how, and how often? "well written, thorough, timely referee reports almost always improve the quality of scientific papers" (tags: academia science physics articles writing) Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Long-dreaded politics post "[A]fter seven years of…

I have a general-thread kind of question. Would anyone be able to recommend any current science books which would be a good Christmas gift for someone? I was thinking about something that would serve as kind of an introduction to the things the LHC might be looking for, and so was thinking of Oerter's "The Theory Of Almost Everything" which is sort of an intro to the standard model, but that book is like two or three years old and I don't know if something more appropriate or explicitly LHC-centric might be out by now. (Also it's cheap now so I was wondering if I could find something to pair it with.) I should note the person I'm thinking of giving this gift to has like a master's in earth sciences so it's safe to give something math-heavy.

Well, I've got a couple of boxes full of author copies of a really good book on quantum mechanics...

If you're looking for something more particle-centric, Oerter's book is excellent. As nothing significant has changed since its publication, go with that.

Chad, thanks.

I don't think the dog conversations book would be appropriate in this particular case but I'll definitely try to remember it in future... :)