Discussion of journalistic guidelines for physics articles (mostly), some more tongue-in-cheek than others.
I think you have to start with avoiding the phrases that should be tossed over the event horizon.
Category Archives: Language
Frumtumphing
A Markov text generator, based on Jabberwocky. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
There’s also one based on the Iliad and the US States (welcome to Missourizona, The Show Me the Grand Canyon State) and dinosaurs (Platosaurus, the philosophy lizard)
Trivia, Math and Sports
A Venn diagram of the etymology of baseball team names
San Diego Padres
…
Named after the earlier Pacific Coast League team, which in turn was named for the term for Spanish missionaries in the area. Only team with an entirely non-English name.
His Majesty is Like a Dose of the Clap
Uncertain Principles: Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing
No matter how carefully you set up your analogy, somebody will come along and interpret it in the most stupidly literal way possible, find some tiny point where it fails to correspond perfectly with the actual topic of discussion, and decide that this disagreement is an utterly devastating counter-argument to whatever point you were trying to make.
…
This is incredibly frustrating, because argument by analogy is a tool with a long and distinguished history among intelligent people debating topics in good faith.
Arguing in good faith on the internet has disappeared like a rabbit down its hole.
Aw, crap.
The Cheeseburger of Essay Forms
Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n things, this work is done for you. Its structure is an exoskeleton.
As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them.
Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things is random access. There’s no thread of reasoning you have to follow. You could read the list in any order. And because the points are independent of one another, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship. If you get bored with, or can’t understand, or don’t agree with one point, you don’t have to give up on the article. You can just abandon that one and skip to the next. A list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant.
A Tom of Swifties
All Sorts: A Linguistic Experiment
All Sorts is a collection of collective nouns that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary. If you think that a charismatic collective is far superior to a dullard ‘bunch’ or ‘flock’ then this is the place for you.
It culls them from tweets, grabbing anything that is of the form “a this of thats”
a theory of scientists
a pratfall of clowns
a radiation of physicists
a melting pot of ukrainian nuclear physicists
a rant of bloggers
an array of geeks
I think tensor of geeks is better, but the only way to submit suggestions is to tweet. Alas, I don’t tweet. So I leave it to someone else to fix this, or proffer a test tube of chemists, or a thrust of geologists, or whatnot. (or a what of knots)
Wish You'd Stop Bein' so Good to Me, Cap'n
Chad’s guest post at the X-Change Files
[T]he first thing I want to do is take issue with the question’s phrasing. While it’s commonly believed that scientists lack communication skills, that’s very far from the truth.
It is almost impossible to be a successful scientist without also being a good communicator. Communicating results to other scientists, through conference talks and journal articles, is critical for scientific success. Additionally, most research funding is obtained through applications to granting agencies like the NSF or the NIH, and successful proposal writing is all about communication.
So, it’s simply not true that scientists lack communication skills in any absolute sense.
A Vegetable is only Deception
A fruit — a ‘true fruit’ — is one where all tissues are derived from the plant ovary and this alone. This includes peas. Whereas strawberries, for example, also include some of the flesh from the peg that holds the ovary, disqualifying them from fruit status. The apple gets its carpels involved as well as the ovary, leading to a kinky pome. ‘True berries’ are also ‘true fruits’, but not the other way round. Grapes, currants (red and black), elder- and gooseberries are all proper upstanding berries which will not deceive you or smuggle themselves into your house in pies before stealing your silver while you sleep.
So why call it a fruit when it isn’t? To most of us, knowing the particulars isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things, though this sort of knowledge is possibly useful for the aspiring lawyer-type child, looking for a loophole to not eat their tomatoes and bell peppers after being admonished to eat their vegetables. We’re after the first-order approximation here, not the more detailed solution. I don’t particularly care if it’s not really a fruit, but it’s actually a fruit wrapped inside a mystery, with little enigmas on the outside — I want to throw it into a category and forget it. Is it a fruit or a vegetable? “False dichotomy” is not an acceptable answer for a non-biologist (or even for a pedant who’s off-duty)
Only 5? You Just Made the List, Buddy.
5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole
After careful consideration and consultation with members of the local science writing community (only some of them were drunk), we have selected the five most annoying and ubiquitous clichés we think should be sucked into a black hole, forever banished from all future descriptions of science.
Funny — I just saw “shedding light” in several headlines on my RSS feed before getting to this, and “shedding light on black holes” (ouch!) got me ~41k Google hits.
I’m surprised “quantum leap’ isn’t on the list. Quantum means discrete, not big, i.e. the opposite of quantum is continuum.
I’d also add “all heat and no light” because visible light from a blackbody is heat, and it can certainly be used to warm things up. Radiant energy is radiant energy. The problem here is that out experience is with “hot” things is at around 400K or so, where most of the blackbody radiation is in the infrared. So we equate infrared radiation with heat, and they just aren’t synonymous. You can be burned with focused visible light (ask an ant if you don’t believe me — oh, wait, you can’t: they’ve all been burned up). A microwave oven is another example of radiant energy transfer which doesn’t involve the infrared as the source.
Pass Me the *@#%ing Aspirin
Or acetylsalicylic acid, generic. You can get six hundred tablets of that for the same price as three hundred of a name brand.
Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,” he adds.
Not clear to me how swearing differs from just yelling something random, though.
There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.
Oh, shit.