Pop Culture
drorzel | July 27, 2008A question raised in comments to yesterday's rant about humanities types looking down on people who don't know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science:
[I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science and engineering professors.
This is obviously not a question I can answer, but I agree that it would be good to know. So, how about it?
drorzel | July 27, 2008Having admitted that I know noting about fine art, here's an opportunity to prove it...
A week or so ago, I was in the Schenectady library looking for something else, and noticed a book called Categories: On the Beauty of Physics, which is packaged in such a way as to make it difficult to attribute, but appears to be the work of Emiliano Sefusatti, John Morse, and Hilary Thayer Hamann, a science writer, artist, and art expert, respectively. It's subtitled "Essential Physics Concepts and their Companions in Art & Literature," which sounded very Clifford Johnson, so I figured I'd give it a…
drorzel | July 26, 2008I know nothing about art or music.
OK, that's not entirely true-- I know a little bit here and there. I just have no systematic knowledge of art or music (by which I mean fine art and classical music). I don't know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I'm not even sure those are both art terms.
Despite the sterling reputation of the department, I never took an Art History class when I was at Williams, nor did I take any music classes. They weren't specifically required, and I was a physics major-- my schedule was full of math and science classes, and between that and the boozing,…
evolgen | July 22, 2008
Randy Olson left a career as a marine biologist (Titleist!) to become a film maker. His first feature project was Flock of Dodos, a movie I enjoyed. His second film is Sizzle, a movie reviewed by lots of ScienceBloggers a couple weeks ago. The gist: a lot of ScienceBloggers didn't like sizzle. Neither did a reviewer for Nature (doi:10.1038/454279a).
I did not request a review copy of the movie because I don't like to diverge much from the main themes of evolgen: evolutionary genetics, manatees, and the douchebag who writes this blog. But some of the recent discussion surrounding Sizzle has…
drorzel | July 19, 20081) I see that as a SF fan with a blog, I am contractually obligated to say something about Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Enh. It's well-done, but I'm not that much of a Whedon fanboy, and the hapless villain conceit isn't enough to get past the fact that I don't really like musicals.
2) The Watchmen trailer is, indeed, quite pretty, though in the manner of trailers these days, it's edited in such a way that you can't tell what the hell is going on. They've got the look down, though.
3) If you were subpoenaed in Texas, why on Earth would they sequester you in Memphis?
drorzel | July 18, 2008Yesterday, I had an appointment at the local orthopedic associates to get my dislocated thumb looked at. The receptionist escorted me to a curtained-off corner of a big room, where I got to spend ten or fifteen minutes listening to the physician's assistant on call dealing with other patients. One of them, a women distressingly close to my own age, was all but begging for medical clearance to go back to work. The PA refused to provide it, saying that it was out of the question until next week, when she removed the stitches from the surgery the woman had just had a day or two earlier.
In…
drorzel | July 14, 2008The forthcoming Sizzle, Randy Olson's follow-up to the well-received A Flock of Dodos, is a movie that's trying to do three things at the same time: 1) provide some information about global warming, 2) make a point about how scientific information is presented to the public, and 3) experiment with new ways of presenting scientific information to the public. As often happens with movies that are trying to do multiple things, it's not entirely successful at any of them, but it's a worthy attempt.
The film plays as basically a cross between An Inconvenient Truth and a Christopher Guest…
drorzel | July 12, 2008A couple of links about things that have turned up in my email recently:
-- As a follow-on to yesterday's post about grad school, I got an email a little while ago about Graduate Junction, a social networking/ career building site aimed at graduate students. I'm coming up on ten years of being out of their demographic, but it looks kind of cool. If you're a grad student, you might check it out.
-- The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a cartoon contest for the best editorial cartoon about the politicization of science. They've selected a dozen finalists, and now want your vote as to…
drorzel | July 11, 2008Tobias Buckell brought the whole sordid racist rejection letter episode to my attention a couple of days ago. This has apparently decided to become the "Violet Blue" episode for this week, and today, Toby dredges through the sewers of the Asimov's forums to find a few real gems of sexist and racist filth. I hadn't previously been aware that Asimov's hosted forums, and I can't say that this has inspired me to sign up.
Toby does make one important comment, though:
I know this stuff feels tiring, but there are a lot of cool people out there in the blogosphere who are just as annoyed by this.…
drorzel | July 7, 2008John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.
Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…
drorzel | June 27, 2008Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…
drorzel | June 24, 2008I'm deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now.
In the chapter on the Copenhagen Interpretation, I spend some time laying out the basic principles of quantum mechanics, and mention the Schrödinger equation. I noted in passing that the name is taken from "the Austrian physicist and noted cad Erwin Schrödinger." Kate questioned whether this was really appropriate, but I left…
drorzel | June 9, 2008Reading Final Theory last night reminded me of something Patrick Nielsen Hayden said on a con panel once. The question was raised of why thriller-ish science fiction books don't do as well as thrillers with a thin SF gloss-- basically, "Why doesn't Greg Bear sell as many books as Michael Crichton?"
Patrick noted that there's a very different attitude toward the products of science in the two genres. In thrillers, he said, the plot is set in motion by the unleashing of some scientific discovery, and the plot is resolved by destroying or covering up that discovery. In genre science fiction, on…
drorzel | June 9, 2008I've gotten a fair number of free science books in the last few years, from publishers looking for bloggy publicity, but Mark Alpert's Final Theory is the first time that I've been asked to review a novel on ScienceBlogs (I've gotten advance copies of some other novels, but I've specifically requested those). Mark Alpert is an editor at Scientific American, and Final Theory is his debut as a writer of thrillers.
David Swift, a former physics student turned historian of science, gets a call to come to the dying bedside of Hans Kleinman, a former mentor from his physics days, who has been…
drorzel | June 3, 2008The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all.
Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out:
Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…
jstemwedel | May 24, 2008
Yesterday, heading out to lunch with some colleagues, I noticed some of the other people out on the street were ... oddly attired. We saw these folks as we were passing by a cinema, so our first thought was, "Maybe this has something to do with the Speed Racer movie?"
And then we remembered the banners, and last year's Memorial Day weekend in downtown San Jose.
"Egad!" we exclaimed, "It's time for FanimeCon again!" By midday Saturday, the streets will be swarming with people dressed as anime characters.
Of course, that's not the only big happening in San Jose with oddly dressed…
evolgen | May 20, 2008My advisor has recently got me listening to Whad'ya Know. My first reaction: It's like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Only not as funny, not as interesting, and not as good. I've been downloading the podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure whether I'll keep subscribing in iTunes.
I'm only bringing this up because last week's episode contained a very egregious example of someone knowing just enough biology to get themselves in trouble. The sad part was that the person should have known better. Why? She teaches biology at the university level.
What happened? At the midpoint of the…
drorzel | May 16, 2008Matthew Yglesias's first book arrives burdened with one of the longest subtitles in memory ("How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats"), which is a little off-putting. Of course, it also features a back-cover blurb from Ezra Klein calling it "A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." So there's a little in-jokey blog reference to lighten the mood.
I'm not a big reader of political books-- I don't even care for excessively political SF novels-- but I enjoy Matt's blog a good deal, and met him…
drorzel | May 16, 2008Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette offers her Top Ten events at the upcoming World Science Festival in New York City the week after next. The full program is at the festival site, and it looks like there's even something for the stamp collectors. Probably to keep the cool physics-themed events from being overcrowded.
I would be all over this-- NYC is just a few hours away, after all-- were it not directly opposite DAMOP. Which offers its own comprehensive slate of physics programming, albeit with fewer celebrities.
If you're within range of either of these fine events, check…
drorzel | May 14, 2008Having done a whirlwind and somewhat disappointing swing through the Museum of Natural History, I strolled across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to get me some culture. I guessed correctly that it was less likely to be choked with middle-school kids, and I never fail to find something interesting to look at.
Of course, art being art, I always find some crap, too, so let's get that out of the way first. Also, it's easier to blog snidely about art I didn't care for than to explain the wonders of the stuff I did like.
We'll start off easy, though, with the Gustave Courbet…