Swans on Tea

News from Uncertain Principles. Futurebaby is now in the past tense, and is now Steelykid.
Belated congratulations to Chad and Kate, the proud parents. I’m expecting big things for my Silver Warriors (I’m class of 1980), from whatever sports teams she’s on in 15 years.

(Of course this loses meaning if it was [...]

Catching up with my blog reading. Via Physics and Physicists, an ArXiv paper by L. B. Okun, The Einstein Formula: E0=mc^2 “Isn’t the Lord Laughing?” detailing some history of “relativistic mass” and the confusion surrounding the term.
The article traces the way Einstein formulated the relation between energy and mass in his work from 1905 [...]

I was once asked, by someone outside of academia, about academic (dis)honesty, and concurred that accusing a researcher of this kind of misconduct is about as serious as you can get. Using data or results without attribution (plagiarism) or worse, outright fabrication of data, are things the scientific community should not (and generally does [...]