10 December, 2008

I Haven't Forgotten You (With a Bit o' Science on Top)

Several of you have emailed me lately, and are probably noticing by now a rather thunderous silence.

This is because I'm being a lazy git.

When I jump online in the evening, I read my email, and think, "I really need to reply to these. But first, must feed blog."

After a couple of hours spelunking the blogosphere and putting together your daily dose of discourse, the siren song of the books I've been reading becomes too loud to ignore, and I scramble offline. About a half hour later, without fail, I think, "D'oh, shit" as it occurs to me that I did not, once again, reply to a single damned email. And by that time, I'm too warm, cozy, and deep in a good book to feel like extracting myself to fire up the computer once more.

And so I beg your patience and indulgence. I'll be catching up on the backlog come Friday at the latest.

Incidentally, if anyone has an opinion on E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, I'd be interested to hear it. It was one of the most enjoyable books I've read in a good long while, but there were times when the science seemed a little questionable. Typos so obvious that even a scientific novice like me could spot them didn't help. This review here parallels my thoughts pretty closely, which might mean I'm not as much of a scientific ignoramus as I like to think.

Still, I feel I learned a great deal, especially about women in the hard sciences that I'd never known existed. And the idea of doing biographies of equations is frankly awesome. More of that, please.

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