Gummy Bear In Potassium Chlorate
Somewhere, someone is weaponizing gummi bears.
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Doctor Obvious Goes to a Frat Party
Uncertain Principles: One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?
So, for all the splashy headlines, I really don’t see a lot here to be distressed about. A third of our students are coasting, but a third of our students have always been coasting, and will always be coasting. And if you think about it, around a third of all the people we interact with are probably coasting. That’s the way the world works, and academia is not exempt.
Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part II)
(Thoughts from Science Online 2011) (Part I)
I attended the “Death to Obfuscation” workshop on Friday, headed by Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer, and which is nicely summarized by the post Carl prepared when he wasn’t sure the snowstorm would let him get to the conference. Several of the points would come up again and again in the assorted “Be Better at Blogging” sessions I attended, such as not using jargon in your posts. It’s not that jargon is evil, per se, but it (like language in general) is a barrier to understanding if you aren’t familiar with it, and jargon is one of those things that’s not familiar to a wide audience. There was also a lot of discussion about writing as story-telling and the need to grab the audience from the beginning of the piece, because they can go elsewhere, and how a good hook is to make the story personal in some way. All good advice, but it left me with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, and I think I know what that was.
The advice was all coming from professional writers who blog (mostly, as far as I can tell) in the life sciences, and I wonder if the same dynamic is there for the science blogger and more specifically, a physical science blogger. It’s all well and good to try and reach a broad audience, but you don’t have to do that — it’s perfectly fine to write to a smaller audience who must know a little bit of background to appreciate your posts, if that’s what you want to do. And getting personal may be a great strategy for a medical story — Mary had a serious case of fluffy bunny syndrome — but I just don’t see it being universal. I can’t really write a story like
Deep inside Bob, a W boson was wreaking havoc, causing a quark to flip from up to down and he winced as he silently emitted a neutrino, right there at the wedding reception, which would have been most embarrassing had anyone noticed, owing to the longstanding stigma of neutrinos being left-handed. But fortune smiled on Bob, for a jar of Carbon tetrachloride and a gamma coincidence detector were mysteriously absent from the wedding registry, so nobody had brought them as gifts.
OK, maybe I could write that. But not all the time.
To get back to the narrative, hearing a few of the professional-bio-journalism-y tidbits over and over again seemed less insightful after a while. But that’s a minor nit in the overall scheme of things. Part of it was the sessions I chose to attend.
——
There was a session on Science and Scientists in Fiction, and a major topic in that discussion was whether it was more important to get the science right, or to portray scientists as scientists really are, and avoid the stereotypes (if it came down to a choice). One of the moderators was Blake Stacey, and he used the Star Trek example of the baryon sweep he had blogged about, and I concurred that his instinct was correct. Short version:
– The name is OK from a physics and logic standpoint, because while all neutrons and protons are baryons, not all baryons are just neutrons or protons. So all of the dweebs who sneered at the name can piss off.
– The name is also correct from a physicist/engineer/technician standpoint, because nobody is going to repetitively use the long, technically accurate phrase exotic metastable baryon sweep (or whatever) — it’s going to get shortened down, whether to baryon sweep or some other nickname, because we use jargon all the time. So this is geeks acting like geeks.
I don’t recall any general agreement on which was worse, since it depends on the context. I suspect that as the nit-pickiness of the detail gets smaller it’s more forgivable, since fewer science-types will notice the error. But we’re generally disappointed when scientists are portrayed as the nerdy white-coat-wearing stereotype.
I’ll continue in part III.
So This Virgin Was Explaining Sex to Me …
Horrible Article On Becoming A Physicist
This person by the name of “Timothy Sexton” (BA in English) somehow thought that he could write an article titled “How to Become a Physicist and What to Expect when You Become One“. Now, before we examine his article, tell me something. What are the chances that someone who has never obtained a degree in physics, and has never worked in physics, would know well enough what one needs to do to become a physics, and then know what to expect when one becomes a physicist?
Does Not Apply to One-Hit Wonders
Discography of your favorite band
The record where they all wore matching costumes
Bend Me, Shape Me, Any Way You Want To
Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire
Story about Vi Hart, whose math videos I linked to recently.
Not Clear on the Concept
Got this from the hotel at which I recently stayed:
By completing this survey, you may be contacted by the hotel to help improve the quality of service provided. We sincerely thank you for sharing your opinions as we continue to do our best to make each stay enjoyable.
So, so you send me spam and if I help you out, my reward is that you’re going to bug me more? Could be worse, though. They could be telling me it’ll take 5 freaking business days to remove me from their email list.
Thtuck! Thtuck!
You either need to learn about the concepts of thermodynamics, or you can watch A Christmas Story
Boy’s Tongue Stuck to Frozen Pole After ‘Christmas Story’ Dare
You’ve seen this scene before — every Christmas.
An 8-year-old Oklahoma boy got his tongue stuck on a frozen stop sign pole after his brother dared him to lick it.
No mention of an escalation from a double-dog to a triple-dog dare, however.
Blogging: You're Doing it Wrong! (Part 1)
The title is firmly tongue-in-cheek (which does not impair my typing nearly as much as chewing gum does); the theme at ScienceOnline 2011 was quite the opposite of that, except … well, I’ll get to that. Eventually.
This was a very different kind of conference than I am used to attending. Despite costing about 1/4 to 1/3 of what I am used to seeing as a registration fee, there was an awesome amount of stuff in the swag bag we got at check-in, including a couple of books, and that doesn’t include the other book we got at the mixer on Friday night, which was held in a bar that had been rented out for the evening, with free drinks (at least for beer and wine). Not in the exhibition hall with a ticket for one free drink. The books at the giveaway were all wrapped in brown paper to mask their identity (though the authors were not, and several did short readings from their books), but I scored Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering after after a skull in the stars pointed out that, as a textbook, it was the biggest book there. It retails at more than half of the registration fee. So, score. And then then there was more swag at the conference, too; some were items that couldn’t be put in a swag bag, like t-shirts (so you could pick your size). Even the ID badges were better than I’d seen. Big, and with a 2-D scan code of your URL on it.
Dinner on Friday was novel, too. You signed up for a slot at one of several restaurants, which nicely solves the dinner diffusion problem, and each group had one or two of the authors present. I sorted on food type rather than author, and ended up at the Italian place. The waiter had an unorthodox approach; after I ordered my entrée he told me that everyone else had ordered a salad as well. Wow! Using peer pressure to move salad. I think we all had a pretty good time, up until we had to pay. We split the check, and did so according to who drank and who didn’t so we make the nondrinkers subsidize the drinkers, but despite the gratuity being included we still came up short. “Everyone pay $x” should work, but we had to get seven people to kick in an extra buck and even then, we were a nickel short. Not exactly dine-and-dash, and I hope that it’s not worth extradition so I hope its safe for me to admit it.
The varied backgrounds made things very interesting as well. Lots of biologists, writers, others in the publishing business, librarians (who all seemed to know the librarian at the Naval Observatory and her predecessor, and agree that they are both awesome) and Brian Malow, a science comedian who wanted some tips on physics to improve the accuracy of his jokes, and also traded some comedic information once I mentioned that I draw the occasional science cartoon.
Then there was the gender breakdown. I hesitate to expand on this, lest I stick my foot in my mouth, but I’ll be blunt: there aren’t many women attending the conferences I usually go to. And I had previously not been in any conference discussions that included being told that her conference nickname (to be worn on a t-shirt) could be “The Other Penis Lady.” Believe it or not, that had never happened to me before.
The “talks” themselves were not the traditional presentations of talking for 90% of the allotted time and then taking a question or two at the end. Generally the panel gave short presentations and then solicited input and discussion from the audience and in most cases spent less than half of the time on their prepared talks. One went a little over, but the presenter was basically begging for more audience input, and only one filled up as much as 75% of the time showing slides. It underscored the feeling of “nobody is really an expert at this” and that everybody could make a contribution.
Technology was a new experience, too. For all of the cutting-edge technology that gets discussed at an atomic clock talk, nobody live blogs, tweets or streams video of it. At this conference there was the background clacking of keyboards and most of it seemed to be on twitter (is that technically live blogging or is it just real-time tweeting?) I was having trouble enough taking a few notes and still listen to what was being discussed, because I’m way out of practice at that sort of thing.
I’ll have more of substance soon (I hope). Depends on how much time I can embezzle in the next few days.
Who Could it Hurt?
I’ve got a post or two I could write up from what I experienced at ScienceOnline 2011, but for now, a link that was mentioned in one of the discussions.
Maria from Skepchick mentioned what’s the harm, which is a collection of incidents of people being harmed by uncritically accepting “alternative” medicine or antiscience. These beliefs are not benign. Logic is not usually effective in convincing someone who has made an illogical choice; I suppose e.g. a good rebuttal to the argument that such-and-such traditional mimbo-jumbo has been used for hundreds of years is that the dramatic lengthening of our lifespan has only occurred with the advent and adoption of modern medicine, and ask why that didn’t happen because of homeopathic acupuncture* (or whatever), but in case that doesn’t work, you can find actual instances of people being harmed by a particular practice.
Not all information is created equal. Some of it is correct. Some of it is incorrect. Some of it is carefully balanced. Some of it is heavily biased. Some of it is just plain crazy.
It is vital in the midst of this deluge that each of us be able to sort through all of this, keeping the useful information and discarding the rest. This requires the skill of critical thinking. Unfortunately, this is a skill that is often neglected in schools.
This site is designed to make a point about the danger of not thinking critically. Namely that you can easily be injured or killed by neglecting this important skill. We have collected the stories of over 670,000 people who have been injured or killed as a result of someone not thinking critically.
*which I practice. I have diluted it down to zero needles inserted into my back.