Swans on Tea

I read this bit on McDonald’s Theory recently:

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Two thoughts came to mind.

First, this is a variation on the restaurant choice aspect of the dinner diffusion problem, wherein people don’t want to be the one caught making a decision about where to go to dinner at a conference.

The other thing is that, when the author ties this in to the broader decision-making process, it’s partly the blank page syndrome — tasks are more daunting when an empty page is staring at you, and it’s better to just get started, somewhere — anywhere — even if you have to completely revise the work, because you’ve gotten the ball rolling.

But the hesitancy to float ideas in front of colleagues is somewhat foreign to me, and I wonder if that’s simply due to my little corner of science, or if that’s broader. Scientists are used to people trying to shoot down their ideas because that’s how peer review works, so there is a distance between the person and the idea, or there is supposed to be. It’s a bad dynamic to have someone who won’t accept criticism of their ideas and/or gets personally invested in them. Pursuing wrong ideas is a waste of time and resources, so you’d prefer to know the problems with an idea as early on as you can. So not taking the criticism personally makes it easier to bring ideas up. If someone finds a flaw, you fix it and move forward, or if it’s fatal, you discard the idea and move on to something else. (Of course, it’s possible I’ve just lucked into the right situations all these years)

Something I ran across last week was the so-called periodic elements of star wars ep. IV, V, and VI

It’s very pretty, and a lot of effort obviously went into the graphic presentation of it. However, that’s apparently where the effort stopped. What’s wrong with it?

It’s not periodic.

The periodic table has such power because of the similarity of properties and the trends one can identify — it was gaps in the layout that helped identify some of the elements. Those properties are completely missing on this table — any you might glean have got to be there purely by accident.

A truly periodic table might, for example, put all the Jedi into a column. All the droids into another. The pilot identifiers (Red/Gold/Rogue), too — they shouldn’t be in a row.

There are other tables out there like this — where the creators seemingly mistake “periodic” for “collection” or something like that. It is a table, and if you happen to have around a hundred names or so to put on it, you might think it would be clever to geek it up in this way. But when you actually want to represent it as or call it a periodic table, what you’ve shown is you weren’t paying attention in chemistry class.

Why the Scientist Stereotype Is Bad for Everyone, Especially Kids

To many – too many – science is something like North Korea. Not only is it impossible to read or understand anything that comes out of that place, there are so many cultural differences that it’s barely worth trying. It’s easier just to let them get on with their lives while you get on with yours; as long as they don’t take our jobs or attack our way of life, we’ll leave them in peace.

That’s very frustrating to scientists, who often bemoan the lack of public interest in what science has to say. They’re right to be frustrated: all our futures are dependent on proper engagement with science. So, how to solve this problem?

One thing to which I object is the charge that we did this to ourselves:

[T]he problem doesn’t lie with the science. It lies with the scientists. Or rather the myth the scientists have created around themselves.

The author makes several good points in the article, but never backs this one up. Which would have been nice, because I don’t see it as being true.

My darling 2 year old wearing my head cam, and playing hide and seek

A 2 year-old’s pattern seems to be “look in last hiding place first”, indicating a single-item information buffer.

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.

Services are alleged to be private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that mourners make a donation to their favorite super PAC.

On Networking: A rant.

Ok, then! I am told to go up to the people I am interested in meeting, and INTRODUCE MYSELF! We all have name tags! I’m sure it’ll be fine! And I’ll just go up and say who I work for and drop some pithy comment that they will think is totally cool and in line with current perspectives on the field. Then I will smoothly invite them to my poster.

Except it doesn’t go like that at all. You go up to the person you want to meet at a conference or seminar? They WILL be talking to someone else. You can hover and looking annoying or weird, or try to butt in without interrupting and look annoying and weird. They will give you a sideways look to inquire WHY you are interrupting, and inform you with that look that you are annoying and weird.

I have no answers for this. When I was in grad school, I went to a conference or two with my prof, and he was really bad at introducing me/us to people he knew. He was just starting out, so I couldn’t drop his name when I was at a conference alone — few people knew him. So I really developed no contacts in grad school. I, too, felt the awkwardness of trying to introduce myself (and try not to forget that now that I’m in a more senior situation). My best progress was made at conferences where I gave a talk, because there were a few people who would come up to me afterwards to discuss details, and you have an excuse to talk to others who spoke in the same session, because they are now quite likely to know who you are and should be working in similar fields if you are speaking in the same session.

In my current job, there was a deliberate attempt to have me give talks at conferences when I first started, to give me exposure, and so that people would identify me as being with our group. That’s part of a much better atmosphere of having colleagues who introduce me to people they know.

There’s also part of networking where the people come to you — lab visits and seminars/colloquia, where you can have your professor make the introductions. Once you’ve done that, the second meeting (perhaps at a conference) is easier, since you can mention that you’ve already met and remind them of the circumstances. Even if they don’t remember, you’ve still gotten yourself into a conversation.

“Teratogenic Effects of Pure Evil in Ursus Teddius Domesticus.”

Winning entry in the Mad Science Fair by Dr. Allison von Lonsdale of the Institute for Dangerous Research.
…
1. A sample of Pure Evil was obtained from the ruins o f an exploded toaster in the south of England.

2. Pure Evil was administered, via drinking water, to pregnant laboratory teddy bears for the duration of their pregnancy (4 months).

3. Dosage varied from 0 parts per million (ppm) to 1000ppm, titrating upwards by steps of 100pm.

4. Offspring were euthanized and mounted for display.

Did you get the Time Bandits reference?

Drunk People Like To Have Sex At Holiday Parties, Says Science

[S]everal doctors report that people like to get drunk at office holiday parties and have casual sex.

The hell you say.

The Social Graph is Neither

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
…
We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?

This is a matter of getting the premise wrong. This is the idea:

A Star is Made

“I think the most general claim here,” Ericsson says of his work, “is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn’t spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

So the mistaken premise is that since world-class practitioners put in a lot of work at their craft, putting in a lot of work will make you world-class. As the logician reminds us, universal affirmatives can only be partially converted. The idea behind the 10,000 hour “rule” is that it gets you to your best, i.e. it’s a local maximum.

rands in repose: Managing Nerds

Another default opening position for the nerd is bitterness — the curmudgeon. Your triage: Why can’t he be a team player? There are chronically negative nerds out there, but in my experience with nerd management, it’s more often the case the nerd is bitter because they’ve seen this situation before four times and it’s played out exactly the same way. Each time:

Whenever management feels they’re out of touch, we all get shuttled off to an offsite where we spend two days talking too much and not acting enough.

Nerds aren’t typically bitter; they’re just well informed. Snark from nerds is a leading indicator that I’m wasting their time and when I find it, I ask questions until I understand the inefficiency so I can change it or explain it.

Is speculation in multiverses as immoral as speculation in subprime mortgages?

Perhaps Anti-Tyson is a little harsh, but soon after I see a great discussion by Neil deGrasse Tyson on science being driven by passion and curiosity, I read some blather from someone who’s basically pissed off that a physicist wrote something other than a physics textbook. Speculating on the metaphysical implications of science isn’t my particular cup of tea, but it’s not up to me to tell others that they can’t engage in it — as long as they don’t think they’re doing science. One never knows what speculation might spark an actual scientific advance, or when one might recognize that there is an actual falsifiable scientific principle embedded in one of those thoughts. (Leo Szilard is said to have come up with the idea of the fission chain reaction by seeing a traffic light change. Who the hell knows where inspiration comes from?)

I think it’s worth noting that John Horgan is the author of The End of Science, which I believe is the book (and concept) that Tyson was blasting in the interview as being shortsighted.

Is theorizing about parallel universes as immoral as betting on derivatives based on subprime mortgages? I wouldn’t go that far. Nor do I think all scientists should be seeking cures for cancer, more efficient solar cells or other potential boons to humanity. But scientists should, at the very least, investigate the world in which we live rather than worlds that exist—as far as we will ever know—only in their imaginations.

Now, I haven’t read the book, and I can’t say for sure how it is presented. If it’s being misrepresented as actual physics, then Greene is in error. But that doesn’t seem to be the complaint. Horgan knows its speculation, because he identifies it as such. His objection appears to be that a physicist was doing something that’s not physics! How dare he do that! If a physicist wants to write a book about metaphysics, or poetry, or whatever, who the hell is John Horgan to tell him/her otherwise, or to say what we do with our (free) time?