1、Is cosmology about to become boring?

Steinn Sigurðsson在这篇博文中讨论了李惕碚老师等人的新文章Improved CMB Map from WMAP Data 。

他注意到在李老师等人的文章中，四极矩和八级矩不再有WMAP组所说的调准效应，所以他说宇宙学也许因此变得没有意思了。但他没有注意到，在李老师等人的工作中，四极矩彻底消失了，这是另一种奇怪的现象。如果李老师等人的结果是正确的，我们还需要理解这个现象。

2、Romantic Science

Sean Carroll看来也是一个文青。在这篇博文中，他指出西方的浪漫时期（1770-1830），诗歌比科学更为特出，出现了济慈，雪莱，拜伦，柯勒律治，布莱克，华兹华斯，歌德，席勒，普希金，等人。那个时期，诗人和科学家对彼此的工作都感兴趣。Sean Carroll写道

The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.

But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:

This is the patent age of new inventions

For killing bodies, and for saving souls,

All propagated with the best intentions;

Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals

Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,

Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,

Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,

Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.