I've had a great week for pondering and reading, some of which is reflected in my seminar talk on complex symmetric matrices this Wednesday, and some of which may show up in more detail later. Want to know what a Prony series is? What an Evans function is? What the Correspondence Principle is? Why mixed precision arithmetic is a Good Thing for even simple computations? Okay, maybe you want to know none of these things, but that won't necessarily keep me from telling you.
On the other hand, I made little progress in coding or writing this week. During the breaks when perhaps I should have been writing code, I did some extracurricular blog reading:
- The Geomblog -- This is the one that got me started (from the signature on an e-mail to a list I'm on). I've been reading for a little while. Hooray for mathematical computer scientists! Or computer scientific mathematicians, or whatever.
- Sci-Am Editor's Blog -- The name pretty
much says it all. Wandered here while looking at responses to Paul Krugman's
Okay, We Give Up
post. - Chris Mooney's Blog --
A journalist who actually cares about peer review? See these notes from a talk
on Misguided
Balance
in Scientific Journalism. - Preposterous Universe -- Physicist blogging. (This makes me wish my brother Rick would start a blog -- it would be far more amusing than mine, I think.)
- Pharyngula -- Biologist blogging.
- Eric Sink's Blog --
It's okay that he probably wouldn't hire me (see the
Too Much Education is a Yellow Light
section). He's interesting to read for much the same reason as Joel on Software is interesting to read.
I'm going to read more about Evans functions now.