various happenings

holy molé! check this out!

hmm. just watched catch me if you can with squibb. Check fraud by itself is not interesting, but there's enough depth to the characters to make it a fun movie. I wonder how much of it is true?

I know I haven't mentioned it in a while, but the wiki is still going strong. Check the RecentChanges to see what's been going on. In particular there are some nice campus updates from JennyJoReinhart, and AlexStorer has created something really great: BerkeleyGuides, with nascient guides to San Diego, Houston, and Chicago. Moreover, there is a growing database of SummerPrograms. I hope all of you who are out doing something like an REU, or have done them in the past, will add to it.

(no subject)

James D. Patterson, professor emeritus of Florida Institute of Technology, has written An Open Letter to the Next Generation (see also physicstoday) in which he describes some of the pitfalls of the profession of Physics. A lot of what he says (for instance, about politics, respect, efficiency, and activity) is applicable to any profession, but other points are specific to Physics and are phenomena I've seen in myself any many others, like the nagging suspicion that Theory and Particle Physics are somehow the "most noble" fields. I think the most interesting thing that he says is "Scientific papers are almost always more complete and understandable than their digested versions in books. ... Textbooks are often abbreviated second− or third−hand distortions of the facts, and they usually do not convey the flavor of scientific research."

By the way, another blog I find quite interesting is languagelog.