News
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).
23/4/2025 13:21 When to use “cat -n” instead of “wc -l”: This is a great article because it’s short, clear, and immediately useful. Plus, although I’ve been working in the Linux terminal for decades, I learned about two handy commands that I wasn’t aware of.
22/4/2025 10:41 Naval Academy Censors Ryan Holiday’s Lecture on Censorship
20/4/2025 14:39 Emmy Noether: Emmy Noether’s life and the importance of her eponymous theorem in the history of physics, based on my book Einstein’s Tutor. (In Dutch.)
15/4/2025 10:36 In Its Purest Form: About Lolita on its 70th anniversary.
9/4/2025 19:07 Hidden Genius: A review of Einstein’s Tutor in American Scientist: “Complex ideas from mathematics and science are presented using intuitive and conceptual examples, and he makes few assumptions about his reader’s prior mathematical knowledge. Some of the most elegant science communication in the book unfolds as Phillips walks us through what symmetry means in Noether’s theorem.”
21/3/2025 13:34 Register to watch my interview at the Edison Electric Institute: On Thursday, March 27th, at 11:00 am EDT (3:00 pm UTC) I’ll be in DC having a chat about my book Einstein’s Tutor. It will be webcast, but to see it you’ll have to follow the link and register.
11/3/2025 8:49 Solar Energy, Criticized by Trump, Claims Big U.S. Gain in 2024: The Trump administration continues to falsely claim that solar power can’t do what it is doing.
05/03/2025 08:03 Japanese Translation of Einstein’s Tutor: Today my publisher signed a contract with Misuzu Shobo of Tokyo to distribute a Japanese edition of my book about Emmy Noether and her eponymous theorem. Other translations on the way are Simplified Chinese, Polish, and Russian.
