Links: Spidey suits, and tips on writing papers

Science Daily: Physicists have found a formula for a Spiderman suit.

Chemical & Engineering News: Tips for writing a journal article.

Links: Music of the dunes, grad school advice, value of education at an elite college

Philip Ball: Grainy tunes from sand dunes.

Drek: Advice for Grad Students [Via Brayden King].

Paul Graham: “It doesn’t matter much where a given individual goes to college.“

Physics Nobel

By now, I’m sure you all know that this year’s Physics Nobel has gone to George Smoot and John Mather. The NYTimes report on this year’s Physics Nobel is here.

“What we have found is evidence for the birth of the universe and its evolution,” Dr. Smoot said in a news conference on the results [...]

Woody Allen does deep physics

Via an e-mail from Anant, we get this wonderful gem published in the New Yorker in 2003.

… I approached Miss Kelly’s gravitational field and could feel my strings vibrating. All I knew was that I wanted to wrap my weak-gauge bosons around her gluons, slip through a wormhole, and do some quantum tunnelling. It was [...]

Neuroeconomics

John Cassidy has a wonderful New Yorker essay on what neuroeconomists do, new insights the subject might offer us about our economic behaviour and decisions, how it might make mainstream economics revisit some of its rather restrictive assumptions, and what the detractors of neuroeconomics have to say about its techniques.

Here’s a two paragraph summary of [...]

Sociophysics

After writing this post about economics, physics and econophysics, I was poking around the web, looking for Philip Ball’s articles. Ball is the author of the piece that I linked to in my post, and has written quite enthusiastically about “sociophysics” which seems, to me, to be mostly simulations in which independent entities (particles, [...]

Is Economics the ‘New’ Physics?

For a long time, physicists have had a reputation for boldly venturing into other disciplines. Indeed, in a recent Physics Today article recounting the history of physics since 1931, Spencer Weart specifically mentions the rise of ‘hyphenated physics’ (bio-physics, geo-physics, etc) during this period as a key development.

The natives of the other disciplines, of course, [...]