Sitzfleisch

Freeman Dyson reviews the new biography of Oppenheimer by Ray Monk. I discussed the book already here.NYBooks: ... The subtitle, “A Life Inside the Center,” calls attention to a rarer skill in which Oppenheimer excelled. He had a unique ability to put himself at the places and times at which important things were happening. Four times in his life, he was at the center of important events. In 1926 he was at Göttingen, where his teacher Max Born was...

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Hollywood discovers theoretical physics

Hollywood Reporter: Fox Searchlight has optioned The New York Times feature The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble and has set Film Rites' Steve Zaillian and Garrett Basch to produce.Written by Maxine Swann, the piece ran in the Sunday magazine March 10.Described as a modern take on Lolita, the story follows Paul Frampton, a divorced theoretical particle physicist, who meets Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online...

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David Epstein and self-censorship

David Epstein's new book The Sports Gene is getting a lot of attention. For example, this New Yorker review is quite good, as are these interviews: NPR, Atlantic. Atlantic: ... I lost so much sleep over this. I literally almost backed out of writing this book, because the issues of race and gender got me so nervous. Eventually my agent and one of my colleagues convinced me to just do it, in the best way I could.But I remember being at the 2012 American...

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Science and the Humanities

Steve Pinker: Science Is Not Your Enemy, An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians.New Republic: ... The humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas. By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking...

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Having it All: opt outs want back in

No, you can't actually have it all -- neither as a man nor as a woman. If you want to spend time with your kids (I highly recommend it), that will take time away from your startup, hedge fund, climb up the ladder, investigations into quantum decoherence. You just have to strike a balance that you can deal with.Men are on average more driven by career success and money than women, and similarly women are more, well, maternal than men. It's best...

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Helter Skelter

This is a great interview. I was a kid in the late 60s and early 70s, so dimly aware of and terrified by Manson and Helter Skelter. Apparently Manson told interviewers he was the bastard son of a teenage prostitute (remind you of Don Draper?), but this is not actually true. He also mastered Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People during one of his early stints in prison.Leonard Lopate Show: Jeff Guinn gives an account of...

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Holistic mumbo jumbo

In the previous post Working in the dark, I questioned the validity (predictive power; terminology from psychometrics) of holistic admissions used by elite universities. Below is an example of validity: the football recruiting star system for HS seniors, measuring its ability to predict performance in college (chance of being named to a college All-American team). All players in the dataset below were signed by Division I football programs -- they...

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