Blog Entry

I will be offering a “lifelong learning” course based on my twentieth-century physics history book, but I think the material lends itself to other courses as well.

I promise not to keep posting about PZ Myers, who went from a little bit snooty when bashing Science Blog to downright nasty in bashing his fellow Science Blogs-ers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum.

But if you are a Science Blogs reader who has gotten tired of the infighting over there, I have a much more civil alternative to suggest.

PZ Myers sometimes gets a bit snooty over at his well-read Pharyngula Blog. For instance, in a recent posting, he dismisses Science Blog with this description: “it’s a site that simply reprints press releases. Send ’em anything, and they’ll spit it back up on the web for you.”

I beg to differ. And if I’m lucky PZ, in the spirit of open-mindedness, will deem this posting worthy of a link on his pages.

Jupiter has been hit again and has the scar to prove it. Though occurring on the anniversary of the 1994 impact of first fragment of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, this new impact event is apparently not of the same scale of the multi-day event known as the “Great Comet Crash.” Still, it raises some interesting questions about what we should expect in the future.

With so many people misrepresenting what physicists say here on Science Blog and elsewhere on the net, I decided to reproduce a news release I got from the Center for the History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. Its title: “Online Archive of Legendary Physicists in Their Own Words.”

Shorter versions of this review have appeared in several major metropolitan newspapers. This is the review that appears on my Science Shelf on-line book review archive.

An essay in the 13 June issue of New Scientist suggests that people who study engineering in college are more likely to become terrorists or extremists.

Review of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
by Richard Wrangham
(Basic Books, 312 pages, $26.95, June, 2009)
Reviewed by Dr. Fred Bortz

I just e-mailed the “Bookonomic Stimulus Edition” of the Science Shelf Newsletter to subscribers.

It includes pointers to numerous new titles, including the one reviewed below. You might call that book “Goodbye Gaia; Hello Monster-Mom,” but author Peter Ward prefers The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?

My high school classmate Alan Entenberg, who is a physics professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has invited me to give two presentations there on Tuesday 4/28/09 based on my book Physics: Decade by Decade. As of yesterday, the lecture hall was still TBD, but it will likely be in the Imaging Center. Contact Alan or me if you would like to attend. Read on for details.