{"id":2389,"date":"2009-05-28T09:17:53","date_gmt":"2009-05-28T16:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/05\/28\/things-going-on\/"},"modified":"2009-05-28T09:17:53","modified_gmt":"2009-05-28T16:17:53","slug":"things-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/28\/things-going-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Things Going On"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Miscellaneous happenings, including a couple of talks I&#8217;ll be giving &#8212; one on another coast, one in another plane of existence.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>3 Quarks Daily<\/strong> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2009\/05\/3-quarks-daily-announces-4-annual-blog-prizes.html\">announced a series of four annual prizes<\/a>, for blog posts in Science, Arts &amp; Literature, Politics, and Philosophy.  Science is the first one up, and they&#8217;re asking for nominations &#8212; the deadline is soon (June 1)  so head over there and make suggestions.  The final winner will be chosen by a well-known person in the appropriate field; this year&#8217;s Science judge will be Stephen Pinker.  You are of course welcome to suggest your favorite CV post, because we like the attention.  But this would also be a great opportunity to give a boost to that lesser-known blog that you really like and think should get more attention.  (There are <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/links\/\">a lot of good blogs out there<\/a>.)  And if you are someone with a blog, don&#8217;t feel shy about nominating a post of your own &#8212; most readers don&#8217;t keep a mental file of your best posts over the last year.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldsciencefestival.com\/\">World Science Festival<\/a><\/strong> is happening in New York (the U.S.&#8217;s second most interesting city) from June 10 to 14.  I&#8217;ll be there, speaking at two different events.  On Friday June 12 there is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldsciencefestival.com\/2009\/wsf-spotlight\">WSF Spotlight<\/a>, which is an informal forum with short talks and a lot of discussion.  Participants include Kristin Baldwin (cell biologist), Dominic Johnson (political scientist), Christopher McKay (solar system researcher), and Frank Wilczek (not sure what he does for a living).  I believe alcoholic beverages will be available; it&#8217;s that kind of event.  Then on Saturday June 13 I&#8217;ll be on a panel discussing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldsciencefestival.com\/2009\/time-since-einstein\">Time Since Einstein<\/a>, with David Albert, George Ellis, Michael Heller, John Hockenberry, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, and Roger Penrose.  (I predict already that insufficient time will be a popular complaint about the time panel.)  <\/li>\n<li>In <strong>Second Life<\/strong>, I&#8217;m giving a talk tomorrow morning at 10 am Pacific, sponsored by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mica-vw.org\/wiki\/index.php\/Main_Page\">Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics<\/a>.  It will be a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mica-vw.org\/wiki\/index.php\/MICA_Seminars\">colloquium-level talk<\/a> about &#8220;Dark Forces,&#8221; concentrating on building models of interacting dark matter and dark energy.  Second Lifers can beam right there thanks to this elegant and finely-crafted link:  <a href=\"http:\/\/slurl.com\/secondlife\/StellaNova\/76\/200\/32\">http:\/\/slurl.com\/secondlife\/StellaNova\/76\/200\/32<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Max Brockman<\/strong> (son of John, doyen of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.org\/\">Edge<\/a>) has edited a new collection of essays:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edge.org\/3rd_culture\/brockman_next09\/brockman_next09_index.html\"><em>What&#8217;s Next?  Dispatches from the Future of Science<\/em><\/a>.  There&#8217;s an essay by me in there on &#8220;Our Place in an Unnatural Universe.&#8221;  You should buy it, because it would be like reading a set of interesting blog posts, but on paper.  And most of these folks don&#8217;t have blogs!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Miscellaneous happenings, including a couple of talks I&#8217;ll be giving &#8212; one on another coast, one in another plane of existence. 3 Quarks Daily has announced a series of four annual prizes, for blog posts in Science, Arts &amp; Literature, Politics, and Philosophy. Science is the first one up, and they&#8217;re asking for nominations &#8212; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,1,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-miscellany","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}