John Baez has a new This Weeks Finds in Mathematical Physics up. He links to a reasonably elementary survey article about loop quantum gravity by Abhay Ashtekar, which I’m reading right now.

The bulk of his post is about operads, which aren’t something I know much about. They originally arose in algebraic topology, but have turned out to have applications in abstract algebra. Somehow there is a connection between a particular operad from algebraic topology (the little disks operad) and the deformation theory of associative algebras, but I’m murky on the details.