Links for 2010-06-28

"A colleague was complaining yesterday about the way that some faculty are treated better than others. Not so much in my department as in certain other departments. Some people, for a variety of reasons, probably do get a better deal (even if not to the extent that he thinks). I won't go into the reasons why, mostly because I think the politics is complicated enough that I can't venture a theory with any great confidence. (My colleague would beg to differ, but I think he's only seeing one dimension of a complicated problem.) However, I said to my colleague that while the problem he notes is real I don't think that the clique in question actually has much power. He thought this was ridiculous, because they are able to get things without being challenged. Is that not power?"

"For organic chemistry, those are occupied by papers that report new compounds of little interest to anyone. But you never know - they might be worth someone else's time eventually. It's unlikely that any of these things will be the hinge on which a mighty question turns, but knowing that they've been made (and how), and knowing what their spectra and properties are could save someone time down the line when they're doing something more useful. These are real bricks in the huge construction of scientific knowledge, and while they're not worth much, it's more than zero. That's the value I assign to the hunks of mud that some people offer instead, or the things that look like real bricks but turn out to be made out of brick, yes, but about one millimeter thick and completely hollow."

"Sometimes a book appears that by the sheer power and radical-ness of its ideas forcibly transforms how we think about and write all future books in that genre. Basically they bring about a literary singularity.

Like Jane Austen's first (published) novel Sense and Sensibility. The more you study the early history of the modern novel, the more amazing it is how much contemporary fiction looks like Jane Austen novels, and how ancient everything that came before her looks.

When Austen arrived, everything changed. She was a Chicxulub-level event. But in a good way. She brought about a literary singularity."

A great collection of low-cost science demos you can do for kids.