I'm trying to post on my blog much more often this year than I used to, in fact as close to every week as I can manage. Unfortunately, the post I'm working on at the moment isn't nearly ready for publication, so this week I'm instead going to make a little news post, the first item of which will be the thing that I just told you (about the new blog post coming soon)!
The next item of news is not particularly new; last Friday (the 14th of March) was Pi Day. Pi Day is of course silly for a whole bunch of reasons (the main one being it's based on the completely nonsensical American dating system) so I've decided to introduce readers who may not be familiar with it to the concept of tau (τ). Tau has been proposed as an alternative to pi, and while I am not especially partisan on the matter I have to say I am somewhat sympathetic. Here is the case for tau laid out in the Tau Manifesto and for the sake of fairness a counterargument in the Pi Manifesto.
Finally, the real news comes in the form of the results of the recent BICEP2 measurements of B-mode polarisation in the CMB, easily the biggest news in physics since the Higgs was announced in 2012 and a major breakthrough for early-universe cosmologists. I will be able to do an explanatory post about the news if there's enough demand for one, but otherwise a lot of good explanations can be found around the place ranging from the somewhat simplistic to the slightly more technical. This is a very exciting time for fundamental physics and I expect to see some very interesting papers published in the next couple of years based on insights from this new data.
Finally, it isn't technically news, but if you haven't heard of them already, I strongly urge you to check out Brady Haran's science channels, especially Sixty Symbols (physics) and Numberphile (mathematics); I've subscribed to most of them on YouTube and they are absolutely fantastic.
That's all for this quick post, hopefully I'll have a considerably more in-depth number ready for next week! See you then!
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