Category Archives: science-y observation
Land of Confusion
At this point, Judi forwarded me their correspondence, along with a despairing note. She is probably somewhere drinking right now.
You see, like me, she can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as “biased” anything that didn’t support your worldview.
If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn’t just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn’t just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.
But that’s the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don’t believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming. And by Mr. Thompson, who doesn’t believe Henry Johnson did what he did.
Cliff Notes on Youtube
“A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything”
If You Don't Know, I'm not Going to Tell You
Annoy and upset in ten (expensive) moves
Sex
Once you’re having carnal relations with someone it’s a fair assumption that you already approve of each other to a high degree. Don’t let that fool you into believing there is no room left for upset. There is a little known companion volume to the Karma Sutra which lists the 1001 ways you can upset someone in bed. The use of the adjectives ‘small’ or ‘quick’ or ‘disappointing’ are almost guaranteed to cause offence especially when all used together. As quite a lot of sex tends to be small and quick and disappointing the best way to avoid upset is to use the phrase ‘that took me to somewhere I’ve never been before’ without of course being specific about the exact place and whether or not it was worth visiting.
Doctor Obvious, Cleanup on Aisle Six!
Aisle placements affect grocery sales, research shows
Using the cross-category items of chips and soda, the researchers found that stores placing the items facing each other in the same aisle increased weekly sales of those items by more than 9 percent. In contrast, moving the chips and soda one aisle away from each other resulted in a decrease in sales of nearly 1.5 percent.
I think the stores are already aware of this. They make you walk past impulse items to get to things typically on your list. When they rearrange things every so often, you don’t really think that’s for your convenience (regardless of what the sign says), do you?
New and Improved. Now With More Math!
What I Would Do With This: Groceries
I’ve known this for years: the express line isn’t necessarily the fastest lane at the grocery store, or fastest per item, because of the overhead of the transaction (paying, getting change, etc). I knew this even before Apu spilled the beans (Mrs. Simpson, the express line is the fastest line not always. That old man up front, he is starved for attention. He will talk the cashier’s head off.) but now someone has actual data and done a real analysis.
Check is slower than credit which is slower than cash. Students are sometimes surprised that cash is faster than credit. From my observations, the fastest cash transaction will outpace the fastest credit transaction by a wide margin but there is also huge variance in credit transactions. I mean, some people have absolutely no idea what they are doing with that thing. The same can’t really be said of cash.
I’m secretly amazed every time someone behaves like it’s the first time they’ve ever swiped a credit card at a checkout line, and it’s rocket science to figure it out. Hint: you can swipe the card before the clerk finishes scanning them!
When figuring the transaction overhead, there is a huge penalty for a non-tech-savvy shopper paying with credit. Of course, there is a large overlap with the cash paying “Oh, I have exact change. Let me get my coin purse!” customer, often a senior senior citizen. (That’s not age discrimination, it’s profiling)
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.
Driving Cognitive Costs Down
Realizations of Rounded Rectangles
Time for an expert: I asked Professor Jürg Nänni, author of the exemplary Visual Perception, a book detailing our best-to-date scientific understanding of the processes involved in visual cognition. “Could rounded rectangles actually take less effort to see?”
Nänni confirmed my theory: “You are absolutely right. A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our “fovea-eye” is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.”
IT’S PROBABLY ONE REASON WHY ALLCAPS is so frikkin’ annoying, too.
The Right Room for an Argument
In an earlier post I eschewed a rant, because I figured I’d go too far afield from the original premise of teaching kids to argue. Chad’s post, The Loud Bigotry of Blog Conversations reminded me that I had this post tucked away on a shelf.
Chad makes an excellent point about blog discussions, which I think has a more general applicability:
I think the real minimum condition is a belief that both sides of the discussion are being carried on by reasonable people arguing in good faith. That is, the people on both sides are sincere in their statements, know their own minds, and are doing their best to behave in an ethical manner. They’re not taking extreme positions just to provoke people, they’re not cynically saying things that they don’t believe but think will sound good, and they’re not working toward morally repugnant goals (the enslavement or extermination of large groups of people, for example). People on both sides need to accept that their opponents are intelligent people who hold their beliefs for reasons that they find valid.
And I agree with this — there is a kind of intellectually honest argument that sadly doesn’t seem to take place very often. People long ago discovered that they can “win” an argument in more than one way, because there is more than one way of arguing.
In the Teaching Kids article the author gives the Greek labels, logos, ethos, and pathos — logic, character and emotion. Within science, we mostly use logic: show me the data, and that you’ve done a good experiment. Character isn’t too much of an issue, and neither is emotion — neither charm nor an emotional appeal is going to persuade you that my data are a good match to theory. Ethics does come into play here, though but it’s a rather steep function. If you have defrauded the scientific community in the past, you have a tough row to hoe to get back into their good graces. You can’t typically get by by being slightly less sleazy than someone else, though that seems to work in politics.
And where science crosses into politics, you get that sort of behavior. Science doesn’t boil down to popularity — 51% of the people may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, but that does not make it so. But politics does depend on this, so if you are campaigning on the “Moon Cheese Means Energy Independence” platform, convincing people that the moon is made of green cheese, in any way possible, is in your best interest. And thus enter character- and emotion-driven arguments, lacking in logic and facts.
I don’t know if this always puts science and scientists at a disadvantage, but I think it often does. It’s not a fair fight when a moderately well-crafted lie can be used to counter established facts, and those that are monitoring the discussion cannot (or will not) recognize the dishonesty.
Mffle Wffle Hmm?
I was recently eating lunch ‘al desco’. While I was eating-working, a student walked in my office to ask me a question, saw I was eating lunch at my desk, and said “Oh, I’m so sorry for interrupting your lunch. I’ll come back later.”
I was stunned. This has never happened to me before.
I’ve taken to eating at my desk much more in recent times. (Defections of the old lunch crowd left us with less than critical mass, and I can web surf/blog on my lunch break if I’m at my desk) And I get similar treatment as FSP — the assumption that I’m in “may I help you” mode because I’m at my desk.