Physics Blogging Round-Up: Liberal Arts, Baseball, Bouncing Balls, Method, and G-Forces

Another couple of weeks of physics-y posts over at Forbes:

-- Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature: My big defense of "the humanities," explaining why those subjects are worth studying even if you plan to go into a STEM field instead. I'm very happy with how this came out.

-- Baseball Physics: How Batters Beat The Best Computers: In honor of the World Series. "How" here means "look, they do this"-- I don't have a detailed explanation of the mechanics that make it all work.

-- Football Physics (With Bonus Rugby): The Physics Of Bouncing Balls: Mostly about a really cool try in the rugby World Cup final, explaining how an unlikely-looking high bounce makes sense in terms of the physics of energy.

-- 'The Scientific Method' Is A Myth, Long Live The Scientific Method: Why I'm sort of annoyed by regularly occurring essays about how science doesn't really follow the cartoon method you learn in grade school: it's a lie-to-children, like "how a bill becomes a law" or "i before e except after c."

-- No, That Tennis Drop Shot Did Not 'Defy Physics': Lots of people were re-sharing a video of a crazy drop shot in Paris, with clickbait-y headlines about defying physics. But physics is never defied, only exploited.

-- Football Physics: Putting G-Forces In Perspective: Want to know what the shock of an NFL tackle feels like? Here are some simple things you can do to get an intuitive sense of large accelerations.

So, a pretty good batch of stuff, almost entirely free of kid pictures. Plagued, of course, by my usual inability to predict what lots of people will want to read. But, you know, such is blogging.