links for 2008-06-12

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xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe "What do you want me to do? LEAVE?" (tags: comics internet silly) Researchers create 'self-healing' rubber - physicsworld.com "If the material is snapped in half, the two torn pieces can be made to mend themselves…
Pure Pedantry : PhD Complete Rates "As opposed to completion gaps, I am much more concerned with the fact that about a third of students are not finishing their PhDs. Why is that?" (tags: academia science education gender race social-science) Learning Curves: You Will Be So Screwed When We Get…
Economists Say Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing - New York Times "From 6 p.m. to midnight on weekends -- when the largest numbers of people are in theaters -- violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the study found. Violent crimes…
Survival Blog for Scientists û Blog Archive û Giving your new results away too soon "[W]here do you announce your results first: in the title? In the abstract? In the introduction? Or, in the results paragraph?" All three of those, plus the Conclusion. (tags: academia writing science journals…

Philosophy is the point where the far right end of the spectrum loops back to the far left.

My flatmate in university (who was a violinist, but her mother worked in the department of mathematics at U of T) had a T-shirt that said:

The biologist thinks he is a chemist.
The chemist thinks he is a physicist.
The physicist thinks he is God.
[And then in bigger letters:]
And God thinks she is a mathematician.