Friday late night link fest

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,

“To talk of many things:”

Science

1. A philandering string theorist is caught by his wife with another woman. “But darling,” he pleads, “I can explain everything!” — Sean while writing about String theory, and how it is not dead yet!
2. An interview with Walter Isaacson, the author of the most recent biography of Einstein;
3. I just can’t skip “coffee can prevent …” type research results;
4. Tonal intervals in music and the underlying physics of the vocal anatomy;
5. Sexual orientation and the performance of mental tasks;
6. A must-read review of the book Cognitive foundations of muscial pitch;
7. Chet on why primary texts in science are not the best way to learn it–I would tend to agree after my attempts at reading Gibbs — most of the time, I guess the difficulty relates to the change in notations, terminology and the way the field itself has developed — in that sense, like all books, scientific classics are also products of their time;
8. Chad at Uncertain Principle discusses whether you should plunge right away into data aquisition, or, automate the process; and, Janne, in the first comment to the post, discusses the analogy (which popped into my head when I read the post) of doing by hand or writing a script of computer programmers; like Chad, I too take the script route only when it becomes too much of a pain doing things by hand;
9. Bora’s Linnaeus birthday post and a real celebratory post!
10. Dawkins on the many aspects of time (via, who else?)

Literary

1. Kalevala–The Finnish National Epic (via);
2. News of a new Sister Pelagia novel (with a link to a 30 page excerpt);
3. Favourite fonts of some writers; via;

Economics

1. A B-squared podcast of an interview (mp3) with the author of More sex is safer sex: The unconventional wisdom of economics, Steven E Landsburg;
2. YouNotSneaky calculates the jerk factor needed for opposing immigration; via;
3. What are the goods whose price should not be forbiddingly high, asks Thoma, and gives a list too in answer.

Fun

1. Here is a video of (a rather youngish) Govinda and Kimi Katkar as superman and spidergirl respectively (via B-squared). I loved the vyuung…vyuung sound effects! Makes me long for Hindi movies at IISc gym!