Category: Go Ahead, Waste Your Time

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A Curmudgeon's and Improv's Guide to Outliers: Chapter 2

Part three in my continuing pedantic slow-as-molasses walk through Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.

List of posts here: introduction, ch 1, ch 2.

SPOILER ALERT: Dude, I can’t talk about the book without giving away what the book is about, so if you don’t want the book’s main ideas to be spoiled, don’t continue reading.

IDIOT ALERT: I’m in no way qualified in most of the fields Gladwell will touch on, so please, a grain of salt, before you start complaining about my ignorance. Yes I’m an idiot, please tell me why!

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Scienceblogs Upgrade

Scienceblogs is upgrading. This site won’t allow comments from 10pm Pacific Standard Time on Friday, January 9 until…well until the upgrade is complete (possibly Saturday sometime.)
So instead of being frustrated at not being able to comment why don’t you instead go waste your time by:

  • By reading some provocative statements about teaching over at the information processors blog.
  • If you need to procrastinate about preparing a referee report, you might check out Michael Nielsen’s Three myths of scientific peer review
  • The Statistical Mechanic is back, and discussing thermodynamics, probability, and the measurement problem. If you actually want to expand your brain instead of waste your time, this would be a good place to do so.
  • Copco and Iron Gate, will they be demolished in 2020? The county hopes to be involved.
  • Read articles from the perspective of a view not often heard at Secular Right
  • Read a book from the list of free books about the market put together by the Master of the Universe.
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Relatively Right in Front of Your Nose

Special relativity holds a special (*ahem*) place in most physicist’s physicists’ hearts. I myself fondly remember learning special relativity from the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler’s Spacetime Physics obtained from my local county library (this edition seemed a lot less annoying than the later edition I used at Caltech.) One of the fun things I remember calculating when I learned this stuff was what “right in front of your nose” meant in different frames of reference.
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