News
21/6/2025 13:08 Circular, angular, misterioso, Charlotte Zwerin’s film on Thelonious Monk is now on Blu-ray: Charlotte Zwerin’s 1988 documentary, “Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser,” is out on a new Criterion Collection Blu-ray. I used to own a laserdisc of this fascinating, revelatory and disturbing film. The new pressing, a 4k “digital restoration” with “uncompressed monaural soundtrack”, includes a new introduction by the filmmaker and new interviews and essays.
14/6/2025 11:38 Book Review: Einstein’s Tutor by Lee Phillips: My book is reviewed (“fascinating”) in the current edition of Physics Education (paywalled). 
05/06/2025 16:33 The Importance of Free Software to Science: My article in LWN about how free software is necessary for security, reproducibility, document preservation, and the health of science in general.
2/6/2025 11:14 Beware of fast-math: Compiler optimizations that make your programs run faster can wreak all kinds of havoc. Some of the havoc is surprising, potentially affecting other programs running on your computer.
2/6/2025 11:09 After 25 Years, Linux Format Magazine is No More: This is sad for me. Linux Format published my 2019 article introducing the Julia language.
27/5/2025 19:54 How chaotic is chaos? How some AI for Science / SciML papers are overstating accuracy claims: Instructive and fascinating article by Christopher Rackauckas, the main developer of the amazing Julia package DifferentialEquations. The shadowing lemma is the most interesting thing I’ve learned about this week!
25/5/2025 13:13 Keeping the pointer out of the way in dwm: Adding this one line to
dwm.c makes my computer easier to use.
23/5/2025 14:58 AG’s investigation finds FCPS in violation of Virginia Human Rights Act: The Trump administration is moving to protect immigrant families from racial discrimination by the Fairfax County School Board. Although this doesn’t make this administration any less odious, it does remind us that the world is not simple.
23/5/2025 10:34 Tools: Jeremy Keith with some good insights on the nature of large language models as tools.
20/5/2025 8:52 I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here’s what it taught me: This is an important article that should be read by any scientist who is tempted to try to use “AI” in research.
17/5/2025 10:56 How CO2 warms Earth through the greenhouse effect and why CO2 is not ‘saturated’ in Earth’s atmosphere: Clear, detailed, and well-illustrated explanation of the physics of the greenhouse effect; debunks the misinformation about CO₂ saturation.
13/5/2025 9:44 The Height Enigma: Exceptionally clear tutorial about how “height” works in CSS.
6/5/2025 10:21 From a linguist: Do you use the document preparation system LaTeX and want to be sure how to pronounce it correctly? We all do! But it’s not so simple.
4/5/2025 10:30 Designers Do a Double Take at the Lettering on Pope Francis’ Tombstone: This is the only article that I’ve read so far about the Pope’s death. It’s about bad (horrible, in fact) kerning on his tombstone, and is another of the increasingly frequent examples of the dying out of craftsmanship across all domains.
3/5/2025 15:57 Google “engineer” caught submitting paper written by “AI”.: The author, Anurag Awasthi, who is something called an “engineering lead in AI infrastructure” at Google, clearly didn’t read or understand the paper that he claimed to have written.
3/5/2025 15:31 Maine legislator Laurel Libby barred from voting over social media post: The people of Maine are being denied representation by a naked attack on democracy.
2/5/2025 10:40 Einstein’s tutor. The story of Emmy Noether and the invention of modern physics: Mathematician Ricardo Mansilla reviews my book Einstein’s Tutor in Inter Disciplina, a journal published by the National University of Mexico (UNAM). (In Spanish.) “Einstein’s Tutor is an essential book, which pays fitting tribute to one of the most outstanding women in modern science.”
30/4/2025 10:17 Mathematical genius: celebrating the life and work of Emmy Noether: A review of my book Einstein’s Tutor in Physics World. “Phillips paints an especially vivid picture of Noether’s life”.
29/4/2025 13:52 git-recover: This git tool allows you to recover deleted files and changes to files that had been staged but lost before a commit. You have about two weeks to wield the tool before the changes are garbage collected by git from its database.
25/4/2025 18:02 My Interview With Dr. Lee Phillips Regarding His Science Career, Science Writing, and Telling Science Stories: My chat at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, with Dr. Anwar Dunbar (previously released in six parts, now collected together).
