Condensed concepts

This past Monday, May 8, was a public holiday in Queensland, marking Labor Day. I don't know why we don't celebrate it on May 1, but...

 I really liked reading Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi . She is an amazing writer. I recently reread some of it for an extended family bo...

Best wishes for the New Year! Over the holidays my son introduced me to the humorous wonders of Philomena Cunk. Here is a short sample.

 I am on the lookout for good video resources about science that I can recommend to others, particularly non-scientists. By chance, I recent...

 A signature effect associated with superfluidity in liquid helium is that it can climb up the walls of a container and empty the container....

 One of the many great things about The Economist magazine is that they run "Briefing" articles that give brief readable introduc...

Perfect crystals are elastic. When a stress is applied and then removed the crystal will bounce back to its original shape. However, in real...

I am looking forward to reading Andrew Zangwill's book,  A Mind Over Matter: Philip Anderson and the Physics of the Very Many , that sh...

In his beautiful book, Lucifer's Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry, Frank Close gives several nice examples of symmetry breaking that ma...

As part of a TV documentary, Why are we here ? produced by Ard Louis and David Malone there is a nice series of interviews where emergence ...

Dimitri Mendeleev , who proposed the periodic table of the elements, purely from phenomenology and without quantum mechanics! He even succe...

At the weekly condensed matter theory cake meeting today we watched a video of a KITP blackboard talk given by Piers Coleman in 2015. Super...

I am on the lookout for good videos that meet roughly the following criteria: -available free online -on condensed matter or chemistry -a...

I watched the first episode of  The Forces of Nature  narrated by Brian Cox, The Universe in a Snowflake . [Unfortunately, I don't thin...

Sometimes when I speak about science to church groups I show the old (1977) video Powers of Ten which nicely illustrates the immense scale o...

Amongst his one page guides John Wilkins [my postdoc supervisor] has Guidelines for giving a truly terrible talk "Strict adherence t...

John Oliver has an impressive ability to combine humour with cutting political and social commentary, and thorough and substantial backgroun...

A wonderful thing about the web is that now there is so much material online. A pioneer in putting all their seminars and colloquia online i...

For someone to put the main points to a popular song! Yesterday I heard an interesting talk "Truths we must tell ourselves if we are ...

In Australia this week is Mental Health Week. 10 October is World Mental Health day. I have been told that some of my posts and talks about...