Uncertain Principles

Tenure: Threat, Menace, or Market Failure?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:10:44 -0500

I've been a little too busy to participate, but His Holiness and Eric Weinstein on Twitter have gotten into an interesting exchange about the structure of academia, and the appropriate number of Ph.D.'s in science. As usual, I suspect I'm not fully understanding the majesty of whatever Eric is arguing in favor of, but it's provocative.

At about the same time, the Dean Dad has been on something of an anti-tenure bender, starting here, continuing here, and culminating in a blistering rant about Michael Berube. Dean Dad is in favor of replacing tenure with infinitely renewable five-year contracts, and makes a case that such a scheme would actually be better at protecting "academic freedom." Personally, I'm less enthusiastic about the idea of bringing contract lawyers into the game, but whatever floats your boat.

I'm sufficiently distracted that I don't have any really Deep Thoughts to add to either of these conversations, but it occurs to me that they ought to be made aware of each other. So: Dean Dad, @EricRWeinstein. @EricRWeinstein, Dean Dad. Have fun.

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Book Countdown: T Minus 4 Weeks

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:51:46 -0500

The official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is exactly four weeks from today. So here's a dramatic reading of Chapter 3 to mark the occasion:

I've put this up before, but I edited it to remove the URL, which was apparently a deal-breaker for booksellers. And yes, I will post about something other than the book, Real Soon Now...

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Congratulations to Lauren Uroff and tcmJOE

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:49:00 -0500

During this year's DonorsChoose fundraiser, I promised books as prizes to people who contributed to my challenge. Now that the finished books are ready, it's time to congratulate the winners.

Lauren Uroff wins one copy for giving the largest individual donation of the people who forwarded me receipts (the largest overall contribution was from Hewlett Packard, but we're not giving books away to faceless corporations). The person who posts as tcmJOE was the winner of the random drawing (the person has a real name, but I'm not sure it's public. He also used an email address that may be a spam trap, and hasn't responded to my request for a snail-mail address.). Congratulations to both of them.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," you say, "We were promised a puppet show. Where are the puppets?"

I dropped $50-ish on puppets just yesterday. Once I finish this last batch of grading, the puppet show is the next thing on my to-do list. You'll get your puppets soon, have no fear.

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Links for 2009-11-24

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:25:11 -0500

CHART ATTACK!: 11/20/76 | Popdose

"I keep trying to figure out what this song is really trying to say in its subtext -- but no, I'm pretty sure it's actually about two muskrats courting. I know I said this a few songs ago, but WHY? Why did we need a song about two muskrats on a date? And even more importantly, why were Captain & Tennille the third artists to record the song? Originally titled "Mukstrat Candlelight" -- and let's just pause a second to think about the meeting where the artistic merits of this title were debated -- the song was written and recorded by Willis Alan Ramsey in 1972, then covered by America in 1973 and C&T in 1976. The America version peaked at #67, but C&T made it all the way here to #4. Why?"

(tags: music history culture silly blogs popdose)
New Tevatron Higgs Limits Got Worse, But The 115 GeV Excess Is Growing!

"Rather than feeling let down by the Tevatron, let us instead try and get excited about the chance that there is something going on at lower mass: in fact, the Tevatron is seeing a definite excess of events in Higgs searches geared towards a low Higgs mass: for 115 GeV, there is a just less than 2-sigma upward fluctuation of the data! Is this the first scent of Higgs we get to smell after the LEP2 1.7-sigma result of eight years ago ?"

(tags: physics particles blogs dorigo science experiment)
Things I Don't Like About Writing

"Don't get me wrong, I love writing books, and wouldn't want to stop doing it. You'll have to take this MacBook from my cold dead hands. But the medium of writing is a curious one, and there are some parts about the process which I really dislike."

(tags: writing books literature culture blogs)
Cocktail Party Physics: taster's choice

"So cooking is definitely a science, drawing on chemistry and physics and basic biology/anatomy among other fields, not to mention engineering to come up with innovative preparation techniques. It's become so much of a science, in fact, that the University of Copenhagen is currently advertising for a professorial appointment in culinary chemistry, part of an ongoing effort to establish molecular gastronomy as a serious field of scientific study."

(tags: food science chemistry biology blogs cocktail-party)
African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2

"Saying that U2's rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2's slide towards impending crisis. "Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music," said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. "We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.""

(tags: silly music culture world)
New 'Noveller' Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"Just months after its release, Noveller has become a cultural touchstone, despite countless jibes from critics who claim it has broken no new literary ground and oversimplifies the narrative form. Those who Novel on a daily basis claim to love the challenge of the utility's 140-page minimum, and popular Novellists such as TheRealJayDeeSalinger, no_i_am_not_thomas_pynchon, and aplusk soon boasted hundreds of thousands of followers. "It makes me wonder how I ever kept track of my friends and their symbolic prose examinations of universal human experiences before this," user Joyce Carol Oates said. "I'm like, did we really ever actually go to libraries? Weird, right?""

(tags: silly literature books technology onion)
YouTube - Alton Brown's Must Have Tool for Thanksgiving - Alton Brown Q&A

What do Thanksgiving pictures through the ages have in common?

(tags: food silly youtube video television)

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Dinosaur Baby

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:27:32 -0500

I have a whole slew of grading that I need to do, so here's some baby video to keep you entertained:

While it may not sound that way, this is SteelyKid in a very, very good mood. The high-pitched dinosaur shrieks are happy shrieks. And the silly baby running is very cute.

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Judging a Book's Cover

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:12:39 -0500

The pictures I posted last night aren't really the greatest for seeing the cover of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, so here's a shot of the book jacket spread out on my desk:

This isn't the greatest, either, but it does give you a sense of the key features of the jacket design, which I like a lot:

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Links for 2008-11-23

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:49:44 -0500

Seeing Laser Beams : Built on Facts

"I have to say it's a nice job perk that I can see old science fiction tropes come to life pretty much every day."

(tags: science physics optics blogs built-on-facts lasers)
blarg? » A Note To Maya

"So according to the old joke, a fed-up student asks the physics prof who's going over kinetics in protracted detail, what good is all this? What will I ever use this for? To which the professor, not even looking up from where he's writing on the board, says "This stuff saves lives." The student balks for a second and then gets belligerent, demanding to know how first-year physics saves lives. The professor doesn't even turn around, saying "it keeps idiots like you out of med school." Maya, you can't read this yet, and it might be years before you know what half of it means, but I'm writing it down for the day you do."

(tags: kid-stuff technology computing education history culture hoye)
Casual Fridays: What makes a good writer, and what motivates them? : Cognitive Daily

"We received an astonishing number of responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, which claimed to be able to identify what makes a good writer in just a few minutes. Of course, I wasn't actually very confident that a brief survey could actually identify the factors that make a good writer. But I did have a hunch that there were certain traits that were more likely to be associated with good writing."

(tags: writing cog-daily blogs psychology experiment statistics)
Hair Raiser § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

"Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Pinker duel over balancing scientific rigor with relatable narrative,"

(tags: science journalism magazines seed psychology biology evolution statistics math)
Rubin Museum of Art:Art of the Himalayas

Very cool museum dedicated to the art of the Himalayan region (India, Tibet, Nepal, China, Bhutan, etc.). Had the second-best explanatory text of any art museum I've ever been to.

(tags: culture education art museums new-york)

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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a Real Book!

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:22:12 -0500

Look! How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is a real book:

Emmy says, very seriously, "You will buy a copy, won't you?"

Of course, like everything else in this house, SteelyKid had to grab a copy:

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November Basketball: SU-Cal, UNC-OSU

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:17:57 -0500

Kate and I went to the two games of the "semifinals" of the 2K Sports Classic Supporting Coaches vs. Cancer, Your Name Here for a Prince pre-season "tournament" last night (the scare quotes are because the four teams playing last night were guaranteed to be playing last night, regardless of what happened in the earlier "rounds"). We were in section 329 of Madison Square Garden, which aren't great seats in an absolute sense, but are pretty darn good for a game-day impulse buy. Not that there was any trouble getting seats-- the lower levels were maybe 3/4 full.

The first game saw Syracuse beat Cal by 22 in a virtual home game for the Orange. At one point, the Cal band came out to do a T-shirt toss, and I have rarely seen a group of people that anxious to get the hell off the court at a major sporting event. One of them appeared to huck his shirt directly at Bob Knight, who was calling the game for ESPN.

The second game saw North Carolina outlast Ohio State, in a game that was sloppy and uninteresting most of the way-- hovering in that frustrating 12-15 point range where the outcome probably isn't in doubt, but it's not enough of a blow-out to write it off and go home early. Carolina made it interesting when we did decide to leave, with about a minute to go, and let Ohio State close to within two, needing some clutch free throws to secure the victory (which we watched from the gate closest to the exit, along with fifty other people who had also decided to leave early, but came back for the final plays).

You cant really take too much from November basketball, but some scatered observations are below the fold.

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I Can Haz Books!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:52:37 -0500

It's not often that I regret having a cell phone that is just a phone, but this is one of those occasions-- I stopped by my publisher today to talk about marketing and publicity, and record a video for the web, and got a stack of finished copies of the book, hot off the presses. If I had a cell phone camera, I'd post a picture, but I don't, so you'll have to settle for a plain-text "Woo-hoo!"

On an only vaguely related note, our cultural activities in NYC will include some college hoops, as there's a preseason "tournament" taking place at Madison Square garden tonight. Syracuse vs. Cal, and UNC vs. Ohio State. Not a bad double bill for November basketball.

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Thursday Baby Blogging 111909

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:11:55 -0500

Actually, this ought to be "Wednesday Morning Baby Blogging," as that's when the picture was taken. Kate and I are going to New York City for the weekend, though, and SteelyKid is spending the weekend with Grandma and Grandpa in Scenic Whitney Point. So, you get an early picture, posted late:

This was taken just before we bundled her off to day care Wednesday. Kate's playing the "got your red dog" game-- for some reason, when you pop the pacifier out of SteelyKid's mouth, she finds it hilarious. Provided that you give it back pretty quickly, that is...

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Poll: New York State of Mind

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:03:26 -0500

Kate has a court appearance in New York tomorrow, and we're making a long weekend of it. I'm typing this from my parents' house, where I'm dropping SteelyKid off for some quality time with Grandma and Grandpa, and tomorrow, I'm heading down to The City. I've got some meetings scheduled tomorrow afternoon, and Friday at lunch, and then we're going to kick back and enjoy New York.

Of course, one of the paralyzing things about NYC is the sheer variety of cultural options. There's the AMNH, with lots of geeky exhibits, the Met, where you can spend days and not see everything, and MOMA, for a different sort of art experience. I've looked at the web sites for all of them, and none of the current exhibits looked like can't-miss shows to me. And it's too late in the year for the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters.

So, we'll throw this out to a poll: What should we go see during our free time in The City this weekend?

Please choose only one. We don't promise to abide by the results of the poll, but suggestions are welcome.

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Creepiness Is Contagious

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:41:39 -0500

It's always kind of distressing to find something you agree with being said by people who also espouse views you find nutty, repulsive, or reprehensible. It doesn't make them any less right, but it makes it a little more difficult to be associated with those views.

So, for instance, there's this broadside against ineffective math education, via Arts & Letters Daily. It's got some decent points about the failings of modern math education, which lead to many of our entering students being unable to do algebra. But along the way, you get frothiness like the following:

The educational trends that led to the NCTM's approach to math have a long pedigree. During the 1970s and 1980s, educators in reading, English, and history argued that the traditional curriculum needed to be more "engaging" and "relevant" to an increasingly alienated and unmotivated--or so it was claimed--student body. Some influential educators sought to dismiss the traditional curriculum altogether, viewing it as a white, Christian, heterosexual-male product that unjustly valorized rational, abstract, and categorical thinking over the associative, experience-based, and emotion-laden thinking supposedly more congenial to females and certain minorities.

This veers a little too much in the direction of "we must protect our precious bodily fluids!," and really undercuts the effectiveness of the rest of the argument. This is not to say that there weren't nutty things said by people on the other side of the math-education argument, but any time you start to sound like Jack D. Ripper, you're headed to a Bad Place.

Of course, that's only the lowest-order effect of nuttiness. The next highest order contribution comes when people are able to use the reprehensible views of your associates to construct seemingly devastating counterattacks, such as Malcom Gladwell's response to Steven Pinker (who wrote a fairly devastating review of Gladwell in the New York Times), which consists mostly of pointing out that Pinker's comments about NFL quarterbacks are based on arguments from a creepy racist. Which is superficially very effective-- after all, who wants to be associated with a creepy racist, even twice removed?-- but doesn't really address the substance of the critique. It also neatly dodges the whole "igon value" issue (namely, that Gladwell misuses technical terms in a way that suggests he has no idea what he's talking about), which I'm sure Gladwell is more than happy to pretend never happened, but which is much more central to Pinker's argument than the NFL business.

So, not only do nutty views end up making it difficult for people who generally agree with you to, well, agree with you, but they also provide aid and comfort to those who disagree with you, by giving them an easy rhetorical dodge past people who use your arguments. The moral here is clear: people with creepy political views need to stop agreeing with me about stuff.

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Links for 2009-11-18

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:29:11 -0500

Zeroth Order Approximation: Summary dismissal

"Not every civil court case proceeds to trial. Some are settled "out of court" by the parties involved. Others are settled by the judge in a "summary dismissal" or "summary judgment". The suit is deemed to be unworthy of trial, even without a full hearing. In this way valuable time is saved and litigants are discouraged from bringing frivolous lawsuits. We often do the same thing with ideas. In fact, a great deal of what appears to be debate about ideas actually takes place in a "pre-trial" phase, in which people discuss whether an idea should even be granted a serious hearing. Many - most? - discussions go no further."

(tags: law science politics internet blogs academia culture society)
50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men | The Art of Manliness

"[R]eading experts all agree that boys need to be allowed to pick the books that really interest them. Of course it's okay to make suggestions to your son about things he might like-boys very much value the opinion of other boys and men in making their reading selections. So here are 50 books that many boys and young men will really love. We've included some classics, but we also threw in some more modern and accessible choices-after all, not every boy has the desire or the aptitude to dive into Dickens."

(tags: books education kid-stuff gender society culture)
Csi zoom story « Make My Mood

"See if you can enhance that license plate."

(tags: tv television pictures silly optics)
nanoscale views: Graphene, part I

"Graphene is one of the hottest materials out there right now in condensed matter physics, and I'm trying to figure out what tactic to take in making some blog postings about it. One good place to start is the remarkably fast rise in the popularity of graphene. Why did it catch on so quickly? As far as I can tell, there are several reasons."

(tags: science physics materials graphene blogs natelson condensed-matter)
Men often treat their friends better than women do : Cognitive Daily

"Who's more "sociable," men or women? Common sense says it's women, right? And many research studies back this impression up: Women are more interpersonal, more connected, more interdependent than men. Women are more likely to share intimate information with each other than men. But is that really the whole story? There is also research suggesting that men have larger social networks than women do, and that male-male friendships last longer than female-female ones."

(tags: psychology social-science science society culture gender blogs cog-daily)
Dear Sarah: Keep up the great writing! - Carl Hiaasen - MiamiHerald.com

"Our researchers can find no evidence that Tina Fey belongs to the Taliban. Could you send us the sourcing for that reference?"

(tags: politics stupid books US silly)

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Dorky Poll: How Do You Say That?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:17:06 -0500

As every physics-loving dog knows, the idea that electrons behave like waves was first suggested by Loius Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (the 7^th duc de Broglie) in 1923. The proper pronunciation of his surname is a mystery even to human physicists, though. So, how would you say it?

Even though Louis was a quantum pioneer, please choose only one of the available options.

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