Author Archives: Clifford

Hamiltonian Support

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In the continued public discussion of the treatment of Yau’s reputation by the New Yorker article (by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber), to which I earlier referred (see here, and see the post about Yau’s response here), there has been a recent significant development. I don’t mean the press conference of last week, held by Yau’s entourage (…did anyone see that? I could not log on… there is archived video avaialble here. I still can’t view it…reports are welcome).

No, I’m talking about the public letter attributed to Richard Hamilton, the mathematician at Columbia University […] Click to continue reading this post →

The War Continues

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This is the Bush Administration’s war on science, I mean. There’s lots we don’t hear about, I’m sure, but there has been a new discussion ignited by an article in Nature yesterday. I found this article on Associated Press by Randolph E. Schmidt. Seems that there was a report being prepared at NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospherica Administration) about hurricanes:
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Explaining Cosmic Rays

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Well, before disappearing into a long session of thinking about some funny behaviour my strings are up to (more later) I’d like to do a quick report on the departmental colloquium that I went to just now. We had Gary Zank, the Director of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the UC system (he’s based out of UCR) give us a talk entitled: “Particle Acceleration in Cosmic Plasmas”, and it was quite fascinating (and very well presented).

It is all about the physics of cosmic rays […] Click to continue reading this post →

There’s Still Life in the Old Dog

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Did you catch Clinton on the Daily Show last week? It was nice. Good humoured. Nice to hear him chat about his initiatives, and nice to hear him still with enough footwork to avoid the “will Hilary run?” questions artfully.

But did you catch him on the weekend, interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday? I did not, since I’ve largely given up on TV news and related programs. The signal to noise ratio is just terrible. But this was good! The news is running all around the web. Apparently he was full of fire in response to questions about the hunt for Bin Laden and others on his watch. Here’s part of a transcript […] Click to continue reading this post →

Well, That’s a Novel Approach

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When the President of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Kevin Nobloch, spoke to an audience at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies earlier this year (July) on the subject of Global Warming, he very much emphasized the initiative of individual states as a means by which progress can be made while the Federal Government spins its tires, and does all that it does to suppress supporting scientific information. He did a very good job of talking about the spectrum of effects that global warming has on individual states, and the spectrum of activities that individual states can […] Click to continue reading this post →

Flying Clams

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There’s a lovely new book (or it sounds that way) out on Darwin. It’s a biography by David Quammen, called “The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution”. There was a very nice radio piece on it on NPR’s Morning Edition, on the segment by Robert Krulwich, with an interview with the author. I recommend it, as it is a very pleasant conversation that does not dumb everything down, for a change. From the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Yau Fights Back?

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Well… yikes! Remember my article on the New Yorker piece on the Fields Medal, the Poincare Conjecture, and the mathematicians Perelman and Yau? Remember that I said:

I cannot comment upon whether the hero of the story (Grigory Perelman) is as heroic as painted, or whether the villian of the piece (Shing-Tung Yau) is really as villainous. The anecdotes that are used to do the painting may well be able to be supplemented by other anecdotes that tell another story, as is sometimes the case. I simply don’t know.

Well, it seems that Yau is quite sure that it is not going to stop there. There was a letter sent to the New Yorker and the authors of the article (apparently) on his behalf by legal counsel. It is discussed and can be found on a web page under Yau’s name. The page is in the form of a press release, and I quote: […] Click to continue reading this post →