Return to Once-A-Week Blog Posts

Two months ago—starting March 16 when the coronavirus pandemic closed down in-person classes at Oakland University, where I teach—I began posting to this blog five times a week, Monday to Friday. My hope is that someone out there who was stuck at home found these posts useful. It’s been a grueling pace, and I worry that the quality of the posts has been slipping lately (see, for example, The Barium Enema). Now that the country is opening back up, I’m returning to my traditional schedule: once a week, on Friday mornings.

I’ve quoted some excellent authors during these coronavirus posts, such as Robert Rodieck, James Gleick, Michael Goitein, Mark Denny, Howard Berg, and especially Steven Vogel. It’s been an honor to share their writing with you.

Before I go, let me remind you that the website for Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology is https://sites.google.com/view/hobbieroth/home. There you can find the errata, a mapping that relates blog posts to sections of IPMB (updated this weekend), instructions and game cards for playing Trivial Pursuit IPMB (the perfect game for someone stuck at home because of Covid-19; play it with other students via zoom), and other useful stuff.

One last thing (and it’s a big one). For those of you at institutions of higher education, my understanding is that Springer currently is providing access to IPMB at no cost! Their Covid-19 website states

With the Coronavirus outbreak having an unprecedented impact on education, Springer Nature is launching a global program to support learning and teaching at higher education institutions worldwide. We want to support lecturers, teachers and students during this challenging period and hope that this initiative will go some way to help. Institutions will be able to access more than 500 key textbooks across Springer Nature’s eBook subject collections for free.

IPMB is on their list of books. The Oakland University library has always had an electronic version of IPMB available to OU students, but now it seems that all universities will have access to it. I’m not sure how you go about taking advantage of the offer, but I suggest you go to https://www.springernature.com/gp/librarians/landing/covid19-library-resources and see if you can figure it out.

Stay safe and healthy. See you Friday.