OK, I’ll admit it, the blog post titles are often more about puns and culture references than about what’s in the text. Worse yet, if you happen to have started reading the blog in the middle of a sequence, WordPress’ structure doesn’t make it easy to find where to get back to.  Here’s my attempt at a general guide to what each post covers.  If a link is marked with a number, you’ll probably get more out of it if you start reading from number 1 of the sequence.  Unnumbered links aren’t so linear so they’re listed in chronological order mostly.

Oh, and you’ll find some titles repeated under different headings.  Not a problem, they all go to the same post.

• General topics
  • Characters (and a link to their first appearance)
    • Sy Noire – hard-boiled physicist with an office on the 12th floor of the Acme Building.  It’s just down the hall from the office of Garrison Keillor’s hard-boiled detective Guy Noire, who seems to have retired when Keillor did.  Narrator for most of the posts since 12 Dec 2016.
    • Vinnie – really bright, missed a lot of schooling but working hard to catch up. Ex-military pilot. He and Sy go way back.
    • Al – coffee shop proprietor and serious science fan, which is why he chose to open up between the Physics and Astronomy buildings on campus.
    • Eddie – student of applied statistics and proprietor of the pizza parlor on the Acme building’s 2nd floor
    • Jeremy – student, though it’s not clear where
    • Jennie – an English exchange student and one of Jeremy’s numerous female friends
    • Cathleen – astronomer and faculty member
    • Anne – traveler through time and entropy
    • Victoria Baird – another traveler, though it’s not clear from where
    • Richard Feder – from Fort Lee, New Jersey. He’s got questions.
    • Teena – Sy’s niece and the most charming member of the cast
    • Old Reliable – the world’s geekiest tablet computer
    • The author – Back when I started this blog I thought I had enough material for 6 months or so.  Three years later I still have topics on the spindle.  It wasn’t easy getting away from lecture mode, which is why the first batch of posts are that way.  The conversations are better, I think.
      Suggestion for teachers — use a post as a script for a mini-play to be followed by “What did you learn while prepping for this?” discussion.
  • Miscellaneous fun stuff
    • The Three Gazillion Waterbears
    • Teena Meets The Eclipses
    • Smoke And A Mirror
    • A Defective Story
    • A Little Summertime Monkey Business
    • Particles and Poetry
    • How Rockets Don’t Work
    • Smack-dab in The Middle
    • There’s A Lot of Not Much in Space
    • Circular Logic
    • Prime Years And Such
    • Buttered Cats – The QM Perspective
    • Hello, World
  • Miscellaneous but not as much fun
    • The Importance of Saving Data
    • Wikipedia Skillz
    • RIP, Dr Hawking
• Math
  • Dimensions
    1. What’s 4-D?
    2. Twirling in 4-Space
    3. Klein’s Thingy
    4. To Infini-D And Beyond
    5. You Ain’t From Around Here, Are You?
    6. Tiny Dimensions
    7. And Now For Some Completely Different Dimensions
    8. Calvin And Hobbes And i
    9. Is Cyber Warfare Imaginary?
  • Logs and Exponentials
    1. Log-rhythmic gymnastics
    2. Powers to The People
    3. A Log by Any Other Name

• Physics
  • Newton and gravity
    • The Direction Newton Avoided Facing
    • Squeezing Past Newton’s Infinity
    • Sir Isaac, The Atom and The Whirlpool
    • LIGO: Gravitational Waves Ain’t Gravity Waves
    • Gravitational Waves Are Something Else
    • Gargh, His Heirs and the AAAD Problem
    • What’s That Funnel About, Really?
    • Gravity and Other Fictitious Forces
    • The Question That Newton Couldn’t Answer
  • Einstein
    • Think Globally, Act Locally. Electrons Do
    • Oh, What An Entangled Wave We Weave
    • Gin And The Art of Quantum Mechanics
    • Is There Stuff Behind The Stats?
    • Gargh, His Heirs and the AAAD Problem
    • Reflections in Einstein’s Bubble
    • The Question That Newton Couldn’t Answer
  • Electricity and Magnetism
    • Electromagnetism
      1. Three off The Plane
      2. They Went Thata-way. But Why?
      3. The Speeds of Light
  •  Entropy
    1. Through The Looking Glass, Darkly
    2. Keep Calm And Stay Close to Home
    3. Enter The Elephant, Stage Right
    4. Two Sharp Dice
    5. At The Turn of A Card
    6. Schrodinger’s Elephant
    7. Rockin’ Round The Elephant
    8. Red Harvest
    9. Rockfall
    10. The Battle of The Entropies
    11. Taming The Elephant
    12. Thoughts of Chair-man Moire
    13. Meanwhile Back at The Office
    14. At the Old Curiosity Shop
  • Quantum mechanics
    • Heisenberg
      1. Don’t Blame Heisenberg
      2. Heisenberg’s Trade-Offs
      3. Heisenberg’s Area
      4. The Universe and Werner H
    • Fundamental concepts
      • Perturbed? You’re Not The Only One
      • Particles and Poetry
      • Location, Location, Location
      • Think Globally, Act Locally. Electrons Do
      • Oh, What An Entangled Wave We Weave
      • Gin And The Art of Quantum Mechanics
      • Is There Stuff Behind The Stats?
      • Gargh, His Heirs and the AAAD Problem
      • Reflections in Einstein’s Bubble
      • Abstract Horses
      • Virtualosity
      • Baseball And The Virtual Particle
      • Curiosity in The Internet Market
    • How do atoms work?
      1. Prelude to A Shell Game
      2. Shells A-poppin
      3. The Music of The Spherical Harmonics
      4. The Shell You Say
      5. To Bond Or Not To Bond, That Is The Question
      6. The Shape of Water
      7. The Mastery of The Pyramids
      8. Three Atop A Crosshatch
  • Light and Relativity
    • Tiny Dimensions
    • Another Slice of π, in A Black Hole Crust
    • Gargh, His Heirs and the AAAD Problem
    • Reflections in Einstein’s Bubble
    • Calvin And Hobbes And i
    • Does A Photon Experience Time?
    • Throwing A Summmertime Curve
    • What’s That Funnel About, Really?
    • You Can’t Get There from Here
    • Light’s Hourglass
    • Superman Flying at Lightspeed? Um .. No
    • Superluminal Superman
    • Frames of Reference
      1. The Force(s) of Geometry
      2. Breathing Space
      3. A Shift in The Flight
      4. Three Ways to Look at Things
      5. Ya Got Potential, Kid, But How Much?
      6. A Matter of Perspective
      7. Scone But Not Forgotten
      8. LIGO and Lambda and Photons, oh my!
      9. Gravity’s Real Rainbow
      10. Three Body Problems
      11. Weight and Wait, Two Aspects of Time
      12. Questions, Meta-questions and Answers
    • Three off The Plane and following posts under Electromagnetism
  • Black holes and Relativity
    1. Another Slice of π, in A Black Hole Crust
    2. Here We LIGO Again
    3. Three Body Problems
    4. Abstract Horses
    5. Virtualosity
    6. Baseball And The Virtual Particle
    7. No-hair Today, Grown Tomorrow
    8. The Thin Edge of Infinity
    9. Perils
       1. The Roche Radius and the Photon Sphere
       2. The Firewall
       3. Paradoxes
    10. Prelude to A Waltz
    11. Gozer, The Stay-Puft Black Hole
    12. Schrodinger’s Elephant and following posts listed under Entropy
    13. Shopping The Old Curiosity
    14. Perspective and space compression
        1. A Perspective on Gravity
        2. Gravity from Another Perspective
• Astronomy
  • Planetary science
    • • Planetary Pastry – Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
        1. A close look at The GRS
        2. The GRS Is A Hurricane Done Inside-out
        3. So How Does It Work?
      • Saturn’s Moon Titan
        • The Basis for Life on Titan, Maybe
        • Titan’s Atmosphere Is A Gas
        • The Titanic Winds of Titan (And Venus)
        • Fifty Shades of Ice
        • Life And Energy on Titan, Maybe
        • A Better Idea for Life on Titan
      • Other planets
        • Hoppin’ Water Molecules (Luna)
        • Plutonic Goofyness
      • Planetary system mechanics
        • A Brief History of Atmospheres
        • Gettin’ Kinky in Space
        • Is There A Lurker in The Solar System?
        • The Solar System Is in Gear
        • The New System’s in Tune
  • Stellar-system science
    • Far Out, Man
    • Water, Water Everywhere, How Come?
    • TRAPPIST-1
      1. The New System’s in Tune
      2. The Luck o’ the (insert nationality here)
      3. How Many Ways Can You Look at The Sky
    • Tabby’s Star
      1. The Weirdest, and Naughtiest, Star in The Galaxy
      2. Tabby’s Star – Weird or Really Weird?
      3. Twinkle, Twinkle, Tabby’s Star
  • LIGO Astronomy
    • • Series 1
        1. LIGO: A New Kind of Astronomy
        2. Would The CIA Want A LIGO?
        3. Gravitational Waves Ain’t Gravity Waves
        4. aLIGO and eLISA – Tuning The Instrument
        5. Three LIGOs Make A Banana Slicer
        6. Gravitational Waves Are Something Else
        7. Michelson, Morley and LIGO
      • Series 2
        1. Here We LIGO Again
        2. Gentle Pressure in The Dark
        3. Breathing Space and following posts listed under Frames of Reference
        4. Prelude to A Waltz and following posts listed under Black Holes
  • Cosmology
    • The Shape of π And The Universe
    • A Summertime Slice of π