The Say of the Week June 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in humor, personal.add a comment
"I find television very educative. When somebody turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book".
G.Marx
(that's what I'm doing tonight with the brand new book I'm reading!)
Finishing touches June 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in books, language, personal, physics, science.add a comment
I am almost through with my never-ending Corfu 2005 proceedings! Writing 30 pages can be easy or exhausting, depending on how demanding the writer is with his or her own intellectual production. I had decided this paper was a good chance to write something interesting, and so the torture is self-inflicted.
I need to be done by this evening, since I have promised my paper to the organizers by then. I will post it here as soon as it is ready.
Got Peter’s book today! June 13, 2006
Posted by dorigo in books, news, personal, physics, science.9 comments
Amazon was nice enough to not let me wait for a month, and I did find Peter Woit's new book, "Not Even Wrong: the failure of string theory and the continuing challenge to unify the laws of physics" in my mailbox today.
The book is thicker than I thought, and it has a hard cover and pleasing graphics. I was really happy to find out it is a book written for the rest of us, rather than a obscure diatriba between the experts of theories of everything. By Jove, the book does not seem to contain a single physics formula! Peter obviously knows the rule: N=N0 exp(-Nf) + B, where N is the number of copies actually sold, N0 is what one could hope to sell if there were no formulas in the text, Nf is the number of formulas the writer unwittingly inserted, and B is the number of accidental purchases 
.
I think I'm going to devour it in a few days. I will have more to say about it very soon.
