Links for 2010-09-12

In the early years of the 20th century, however, the most important physics journals published in English were the Philosophical Magazine and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Truly important results would appear in those journals first, and Physical Review was a second or third tier journal to which authors relegated their incremental and pedagogical discoveries. A number of authors contributed suggested lecture demonstrations, but none was as productive as Wood, who by my count published 5 demonstrates between 1897 and 1905, with at least one more in the 1920s. The ideas are simple and ingenious, though in one case not without controversy, as we will see. We consider them, with one exception, in order of their publication.

"I am a granola-eating, free-range-chicken-chasing, broccoli-hugging foodie. I recoil from junk food like vampires shun sunlight. You'd think me the ideal audience for Food Rules, Michael Pollan's latest megaseller, which consists of 64 "straightforward, memorable rules for eating wisely." But Food Rules awakened strange feelings in me. As I paged through the book, being advised "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food" (#2), I felt a big finger wagging at me. This was not having the intended effect. Instead, I'm sorry to say, it was awakening my inner Bart Simpson. Somewhere between "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead" (#37) and "Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored" (#47), I became consumed by the notion of breaking all 64 food rules in one day of gloriously irresponsible eating."

"I am always working. If not at the office, then at home. And if not in front of a computer, then sitting on the couch with my nose buried in a book or a journal. And if not there, then riding around my yard on the lawnmower, reading the newspaper, or playing golf with friends.

Like most academics, I live the life of the mind, and wherever I go, my mind is there too: sifting through half-baked ideas; ruminating on the latest developments in my field; wondering if my 7-iron will take that tree out of play.

Unfortunately, my wife, Loren, doesn't buy into this life of the mind thing, at least not completely."