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Episode IV: The Evil Empire strikes back

Episode 1 and episode 3 refer. It turns out that Exxon cares enough to answer. Not to answer in any great detail, so I'm not sure they care enough to read the criticism, but never mind. They say stuff like Our scientists have been involved in climate research and related policy analysis for more than 30 years... participated in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... We fund and partner with many universities on climate modeling and research into lower carbon fuel sources and other climate-related issues. And so on. True enough, but not desperately meaningful, because…

ADF Attorney Dodges and Distorts

Last week, I left a comment at the ADF's blog in response to a post by Jordan Lorence about judicial activism that was apparently written in response to me (go here, scroll down to my first comment). My comment said: Simple yes or no question: was Loving v Virginia correctly decided or was it "judicial activism"? It certainly fits your criteria. There was a long tradition of miscegenation laws going not only back through American history but even back to the English common law. No court had ever struck them down before; indeed, innumerable courts throughout the country had upheld them. The…

Classic Edition: Do the Pigeon Dance

As promised in the previous post, some thoughts on superstition in science. This was originally posted in October 2004, and astute readers may note that my opening comments about sports went horribly awry not long after. I take this as proof of my point: talking about these things only screws them up. Long-time readers of this site may have noticed a lack of sport-related posts in recent weeks, despite the fact that my teams are doing pretty well at the moment. This is not really a coincidence-- I'm as surprised as anyone to see the Giants winning games (though you will note that they lost to…

Bathroom Dispute Halts Chess Championship

That's the headline in The New York Times. I'm not kidding. Game five of the big reunification match for the World Chess Championship was supposed to be today. This was the match that was going to restore harmony to the chess world, after the big split in 1993 when Gary Kasparov refused to defend his title under the auspices of FIDE. (That's pronounced FEE-day, incidentally, and stands for Federation Internationale des Echecs.) FIDE officially stripped him of the title for his trouble, leading to a boxing-like situation where there were multiple world champions. When the appointed time…

Teaching Evaluations and the Problem of Unstated Assumptions

There's a piece in Inside Higher Ed today on yet another study showing that student course evaluations don't correlate with student learning. For a lot of academics, the basic reaction to this is summed up in the Chuck Pearson tweet that sent me to the story: "Haven't we settled this already?" The use of student course evaluations, though, is a perennial argument in academia, not likely to be nailed into a coffin any time soon. It's also a good example of a hard problem made intractable by a large number of assumptions and constraints that are never clearly spelled out. As discussed in…

Course Report: Intro Mechanics Spring 2015

I've been pretty quiet about educational matters of late, for the simple reason that I was too busy teaching to say much. The dust having settled a bit, though, I thought I would put some notes here about what I did this past term, and what worked. I had two sections of the introductory Newtonian mechanics course in the Spring term; this was off the normal sequence for engineering majors (the engineers mostly take this in the Winter term of their first year), but this year we had yet another larger-than-expected engineering class, and needed to open another section. I picked up both of these…

SteelyKid, Space-Babies, and Transformative Music

As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she's very fond of Katy Perry's "Roar," like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song: I've seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty forgettable until I read Jim Henley's Twitter exegesis in which he shows that the song is really about the tryst with an alien that left Swift with a faceless hybrid infant. That is, a blank space-baby. Now I can't get the idiot song out of my head. Anyway, a week or two ago, I actually went…

Calling It For Rebecca Otto

I've spoken to a lot of Minnesota DFLer's (that's what we call Democrats 'round these parts) about today's Primary, especially in relation to the auditor's race. Rebecca Otto, who, full disclosure, I don't know at all but whose husband is a friend and colleague, is the incumbent. Rebecca has really put a shine on the Auditor's office. I understand that the previous auditor, a Republican, pretty much sucked, so that might have made looking good a bit easier for Rebecca, but it can't be true that all of the other auditors across the country also suck, and the various professional associations…

Why you can't ever "know" anything exactly

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." -Werner Heisenberg Looking down at the fundamental nature of matter, down past our cells and organelles, deep into the individual molecules and inside of the atoms that make them up, at long last, you get to things like the fundamental particles that make up all the known matter in the Universe. Things like electrons, photons, and the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, are all, as best as we can tell, fundamental particles. That means we can't break them up into anything smaller; they're not "made…

Some Matter is Strange, but that's okay

"People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend." -Jim Morrison Yes, Jim Morrison, some people are quite strange, too. People Are StrangeBut that's not what I'm talking about. You see, one of the "doomsday" scenarios people are talking about over at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- in addition to black holes -- are out-of-control strangelets. Let's talk about what these things are, what people are afraid of, and whether there really is anything worth fearing.…

Why people believe in bad ideas

There is a must-read article at Edge by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg—it's an attempt to explain why people resist scientific knowledge that takes a psychological view of the phenomenon. The premise is that our brains have in-built simplifications and assumptions about how the world works that often conflict with how it really works—there is, for instance, an intuitive physics and a real physics that are not entirely in agreement, and that we bring our understanding into alignment with reality through education and experience. The naive assumptions of the young brain contribute to…

The Truth About "Judicial Activism"

The Boston Globe had an article written by Dave Denison about judicial activism on Sunday. The results were mixed. On the one hand, Denison does a fine job of illustrating what I have said previously (here and here, among other essays), that claims of "judicial activism" rarely have any objective meaning and are really just a cover for disagreement with the substance of a decision. President Bush darkly warned of those "activist judges" who rule "without regard for the will of the people" in the State of the Union speech, while Pat Buchanan decries the "judicial dictatorship" that we…

Answering Comments, part 2

Russell Husted also left a couple of comments in response to my fisking of Mitt Romney's Wall Street Journal op-ed piece about gay marriage. Russell wrote: Ed, you say "he's right on the general point that marriage predates our constitution and our nation, but he is wrong to imply that there has been anything like a consistent conception of marriage over those millenia and across cultural lines. The definition and limitations of marriage have varied dramatically over the centuries, both within and between different cultures." That's true, of course, just as what is considered proper food to…

Addressing Climate Change is Legacy Building Stuff. YOUR Legacy.

On Tuesday, President Obama will make a speech outlining his administration’s plans to address climate change. The Right Wing has already responded by calling those concerned with climate change “Terrorists.” How have the progressive and left wings responded? Badly. Very badly. Here is a selection, some paraphrased to ensure anonymity (though these are all public), of comments by people that I know are well meaning climate change activists or otherwise concerned about global warming and such. Obama’s speeches and verbal plans make no difference. It’s what he DOES that counts. He’ll say…

What is Dunbar's Number?

The term "Dunbar's Number" refers to a particular hypothesis by primatologist Robin Dunbar. It is a very simple idea with rather complex implications, and it is one of those simple ideas that gets more complicated than ideal as we look into it more and more. Eventually, the idea is required by many who contemplate it to do more work than was ever intended, and in this way seems to fail, though it really doesn't. I personally think Dunbar's number is useful if it is properly understood, so I want you to give it a chance, and to help you do that I'd like to use an analogy. I'm thinking of a…

Sciency Christmas Gifts for the Whole Family

I'd like to call a truce on the War on Christmas. The true meaning of this holiday is, of course, the presents, and pursuant to that I have some suggestions for you in case you are stuck. Dr Who Presents The Doctor Who TARDIS Cookie Jar is a must have because is is a Dr. Who Thing, it is a TARDIS and it is for holding Cookies. This particular cookie jar has light and sound effects. And, if you run out of cookies it is relatively easy for you and your companion to go back in time and get more. This TARDIS does not come with cookies. TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space…

It's fall. Time to start hoarding bird books.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, many of our birds fly away in the fall. Other, very cool birds from even farther north, depending on where you live then arrive. But just about now, where I live, we are at the tail end of the migration out and not quite at the migration in, so this is a good time to take stock of what is important: Which bird books do you want people to give you for Christmas? Before I make any suggestions, I would like to point out that Princeton, an emerging and major player in the Bird Book world, has a facebook page that, if you "like," will automatically enter you in a…

What of quarantine?

Quarantines were briefly discussed in the comments on this thread. A recent study in the journal "Health Affairs" carried out jointly by researchers at Harvard and the CDC determined attitudes about quarantine in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the U.S. One thing to note: remember quarantine is for individuals who have been exposed, but are not showing signs of illness. Those who *are* sick would be put into isolation (likely at a hospital--if there are available beds). Just so no one gets those two confused... U.S. perspective on compulsory quarantine. In the United States, compulsory…

June Pieces Of My Mind #2

Archive finds strike me as a weak kind of empirical discovery. OK, so you've found a piece of writing that had been forgotten. Now you're writing a paper about it. How long will it take before your paper is forgotten? When will it be found again, as an archive meta find? Or conversely: is any piece of extant writing really in a state of forgottenness? On a planet with 7 billion people, is there an important difference between no living person knowing about a piece of extant writing -- and seven specialists knowing about it? As in any strong democracy, you have the right to voter…

Top Secret Ebola serums, how do they work?

One wonderful thing that has come two US citizens being infected Ebola (and successfully treated for the disease) is *education* the general public is getting about this, frankly, 'scary' virus. Im not talking about the bizarre nonsense/missed opportunity posted by Sanjay Gupta and his 'producer' Danielle Dellorto. Of course science bloggers have capitalized on this opportunity to educate people (its kinda what we *do*). But some journalists in main-stream-media, unlike Gupta and Dellorto, have taken a moment to speak to actual scientists working on Ebola/the technology to make the 'secret…

The Arxiv Is Not a Journal

There's been a lot written recently about academic publishing, in the kerfuffle over the "Research Works Act"-- John's roundup should keep you in reading material for a good while. This has led some people to decide to boycott Elsevier, including Aram Harrow of the Quantum Vatican. I'm generally in favor of this, but Aram says one thing that bugs me a bit: Just like the walled gardens of Compuserve and AOL would never grow into the Internet, no commercial publisher will ever be able to match the scope and ease of access of arxiv.org. Nor can they match the price. In 2010, there were about…

Steven Erikson, The Crippled God (Spoilers) [Library of Babel]

OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here's a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole. If you haven't read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you're done. SPOILERS: There's a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn't like it, and set out to fix things. That's kind of the core of the…

The politics edition

I find myself unable to resist the calls to comment on the surprise calling of an UK election. But while here I'll comment on Trump, too. Theresa May seeks snap election to take UK through Brexit Says everyone, including the FT, which adds things like The pound rose on expectations that Mrs May would win a much increased Commons majority, allowing her to sideline implacable Eurosceptics in her Conservative party and ensure a phased Brexit concluding with a UK/EU free-trade deal. Polls predict a heavy defeat for the opposition Labour party, which has been in disarray under the leadership of…

What the Schiavo Case Reminds Us About Conservative Judicial Theory

Judge Birch's bold upbraiding of the President and the Congress over the unconstitutional "Terri's Law", which attempted to tell the courts what sort of decision rules they should apply in a case, has attracted some interesting responses. Stephen Henderson's article on the opinion in the Knight-Ridder newspapers includes some choice quotes. First, a law prof: "This is a judge who, through a political or policy lens, falls pretty squarely in the Scalia/Thomas camp," said law professor and constitutional expert David Garrow, referring to the two most conservative Supreme Court justices. "I…

NRO Loses Mind Over Specter

As I noted yesterday, presumptive Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter has sparked a controversy that has been blown out of all proportion. The editors of the National Review appear to have lost their minds completely over what was, to any sane person, a very innocuous statement. It begins with this big lie: Senator Arlen Specter (R., Penn.), who by virtue of Senate seniority rules is in line to become the chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, fired a shot across the president's bow, warning Bush that he would block any judicial nominees that he deemed too conservative.…

Carnival of the Vanities #87

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside. I thought about coming up with some really clever theme for this week's Carnival. I thought about doing it like a real carnival barker, telling you what mysterious and amazing things await you behind the next door....but frankly, I'm so busy with work right now that I'm going to take the easy way out and just list all the submissions for you in the order they were sent to me. Think of it not as lazy, but as "minimalist". That sounds like a vaguely impressive rationalization. Anyway,…

The Models are Unproven

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: Why should we trust a bunch of contrived computer models that haven't ever had a prediction confirmed ? Talk to me in 100 years. Answer: Of course, given the absence of a few duplicate planets and some really large time machines, how can we hope to test a 100 year temperature projection today? Well, we can't, but does this mean that the models can not be validated without waiting 100 years? I don't thinks so. The climate is a very complex…

Buffalo Tom, LarkFest 2007

One of my favorite underappreciated bands of the mid-90's is the Boston-based three-piece Buffalo Tom. They got a little bit of play with songs like "Sodajerk" and "Treehouse" (both of which have turned up in commercials, and the former apparently figured prominently in an epsidoe of "My So-Called Life"), but they had a string of three terrific albums (Let Me Come Over, Big Red Letter Day, and Sleepy Eyed) that just never got the recognition they deserved. Of course, I say this in part because their characteristic sound-- chiming guitars, rolling drums, slightly cryptic lyrics-- plays to all…

The Lay of the Landscape

Let's say you have a theory, and, let's say it happens to have a whole lot of solutions. Maybe it's the theory you're thinking about, but it doesn't have to be. Nothing of what I'm going to say depends on any details besides this surfeit of solutions. I should begin by saying what it means for a theory to have a lot of solutions. In fact, given any set of equations, one will almost always have many solutions. A polynomial of degree n will generically have n roots, for example. In classical physics, instead of a finite number of solutions, you will almost always have an infinite number. If you…

Fulfilling My Obligation to Say Something

As an avowed Giants fan, I suppose I really ought to say something about the epic meltdown they suffered in the past week, ideally before today's game with the Cowboys. The trouble is, last week was so horrendous that it's hard to say anything coherent... I ought to say something, though, so I'll collect a few random thoughts after the cut: Collapse Item #1: People are all over Tom Coughlin about calling for the pass play that produced the first interception, and really ignited the Tennessee comeback. I don't actually hold that one against Coughlin-- yes, they'd been running the ball well to…

Undergraduate Research: The Catch

So, looking at the SRI studies of undergraduate research and its effects, it seems like the solution to a lot of problems. Involvement in research has been shown to increase student interest in science careers and increase the likelihood of graduate school, regardless of the race and gender of the student or the race and gender of the faculty mentor. While this is undeniably really good news, suggesting that we don't actually need to radically re-invent the way we deal with students in order to change the demographics of science, it's almost too good to be true. There's got to be a catch,…

Marketing Science

Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes: Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare, which is often accompanies by a flow of capital. In science, the money follows topics of research that have mindshare. Similarly people fund companies in areas that generate mindshare for whatever reason. The question I often ask myself, both from my time as a marketer…

Science21 Highlights: Peer to Patent and Government 2.0

(Over the course of this week, I'm going to post a handful of things about talks that struck me as particularly interesting at last week's conference. The order will be chosen based on how much time I think I will have to write them up, given SteelyKid's demands for attention...) On Thursday, the Science in the 21st Century conference featured a lawyer. Well, a law professor, anyway-- Beth Noveck of the NYU Law School gave a talk on Science in Government 2.0 (FriendFeed microblogging). This wasn't as odd as you might think at a Web 2.0 kind of meeting, because she talked about her involvement…

The Problem of Broader Impacts

Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF's "broader impact" requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it's hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky's post is well worth reading, and provides a good deal more detail on the anecdote reported in the article. While Leslie-Pelecky's concern is about whether the outreach programs falling under the "broader impact" section of grants are having the desired effect, I'd like to comment on a different aspect of the article, namely the whole…

Wish you were here!

I'm having a lovely time here at Beyond Belief 2 — you should all be here (and of course, you will be; as they did last year, everything will be available after the meeting on the web.) It's an eclectic mix of all kinds of interesting stuff outside of my usual range: yesterday, we had terrific sessions on the history of the Enlightenment, evolutionary economics, evolution of religion, and some speculation and cosmology. It was vastly entertaining, and lest you think this was a bunch of thugly atheists preaching to the choir, let me reassure you that I disagreed with about a third of what I…

Would Chuck Terhark like a job writing science abstracts?

One of the subjects I mentioned at the Thursday Flock of Dodos discussion was that an obstacle to getting the public excited about science is the state of science writing. It's a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, caution and tentative statements are demanded, adverbs are frowned upon and adjectives are treated with suspicion, and all the passion is wrung out in favor of dry recitations of data. Now that actually has a good purpose: it makes it easy to get to the meat of the article for people who are already familiar with the subject and may not need any pizazz to…

Donors Choice vs. Hobson's Choice

I had planned to participate in the DonorsChoose blogger's challenge, to help raise money "for the kids" and teachers. This effort, in which many Scienceblogs.com bloggers are involved, is a worthy one, as far as I can see. And I have given this careful consideration. But I have decided, instead, to do something different. I am asking you to help me with this. I want to say that I am very much in support of the bloggers challenge, and I urge you to go to your favorite blog and consider donating. I'm remembering back to the 1992 presidential election. That is the year I got…

Effective dishonesty in pharmaceutical research revealed by new study

The file drawer effect works like this: Numerous studies are done and the results are random. But because they are random, a small number have, randomly, strong effects that are interesting and that in isolation support some interesting hypothesis. All the results that fail to confirm the interesting (or fund able) expectation are filed away .... in the file drawer. Only the results that seem to show what the researchers want to show are made public. In areas where research is cheap and often done as part of undergraduate and graduate training, (like certain areas of psychology and…

Olympic Voyeurism: The Naked, the Nearly Naked, The Prideful, and The Annoyed.

Watching (collecting data for the boycott) men's Olympic water polo, it occurred to me that the little tiny bathing suits the men wear were absurd. Why not just skip the bathing suit and get on with it? As I was thinking this, the commentators on the TV were learnin' me something new closely related to these thoughts ... regarding Terry Schroeder's body. Schroeder is the team coach, and I'll tell you about his body below the fold. For some reason this all made me think of the National Anthem. You see, today, part of the Olympic scene is the often forced voyeurism of nationalistic pride re…

An Essay on Simplicity

Granville Sewell has a new post up at Uncommon Descent. It's short, but if you don't want to read it, then rest assured it's just the same post he always writes. Could the four fundamental forces of physics assemble iPhones or nuclear power plants? Absurd! The post is framed in the context of an imaginary discussion between him and an imaginary friend who defends evolution. He plays the role of the bemused clear thinker, while his friend is, of course, dogmatic and unreasonable. I wouldn't bother to address it, except that the title caught my eye. The post is called, “Mathematicians are…

Is the Genesis Creation Story Beautiful?

Update: June 19, 10:56 am: The commenting issues have now been fixed! Yay! So please ignore the first paragraph of the post. The commenting issues around here remain unresolved. In the past I have been told by the overlords that this was being treated as a high-priority problem. If that is so, then I would hate to see how a low-priority problem is treated. It's also been pointed out to me that if you read the blog through an RSS feed, then you will have to resubscribe to the blog. Of course, if you are reading this post then you have already surmised that something was wrong with the…

Food is not medicine: Vitamin D

I dont understand people who view food as medicine. Well, I mean, I guess I do. Theyre terrified of disease X/Y/Z (even if X/Y/Z is treatable/preventable with modern medicine), and they think a component of food helps treat/prevent disease X/Y/Z, so they religiously eat said food. So I guess I mean to say "People who view food as medicine are being silly." Obviously, consuming food and getting proper nutrition is important. If you dont get enough Vitamin C, you get scurvy. Dont get enough iron, you get anemia. Dont get enough folic acid, your child is at risk for birth defects. Dont get…

Viruses are going to save our butts.

Okay, no big shock to any of you-- bacteria are becoming resistant to our antibiotics. One of the many enteric bacteria (cause kids to poop to death), E. coli, is racking up antibiotic resistance genes like theyre McDonalds Beanie Babies. What the hell are we going to do? Phage therapy. Bacteriophage are viruses that eat bacteria... lol... Bring in the gators to eat the snakes. For a long time it was ignored as an option in the US (eh, Soviet medicine). It doesnt help that the Soviet 'science' behind phage therapy is murky-- yeah, they have commercially available phage therapies, but…

Young on Dewey on Being High-Brow

Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young weighs in with a lengthy essay on the subject of promoting atheism. The essay makes some interesting points, and is centered around a 1922 article by John Dewey in The New Republic. Sadly, Jake takes the Matt Nisbet line on this issue. I have already left a lengthy comment over at Jake's blog indicating some points of disagreement with his essay. But there was one item I felt deserved a post of its own. Jake writes: Further, embracing a big-tent approach will not prevent scientific or even atheistic values from taking over. While the majority of the…

The Hold Steady at The Hollow, Albany

This was kind of a dispiriting week in a lot of ways, but as mentioned in yesterday's links dump, Kate and I had tickets for the Hold Steady in Albany last night. And since schools are closed next week, we packed SteelyKid and The Pip off to Grandma and Grandpa's, and went to a rock show. If you're not familiar with the Hold Steady, you're obviously not following me on Twitter, because I've been obsessing about them for a while now-- since 2005 or so. They've been the world's greatest band for about a decade now, and their new record, Teeth Dreams is excellent. I saw them back in 2009, and…

Science Is Not Solitary

There was another round of the "who counts as a scientist?" debate recently, on Twitter and then on the Physics Focus blog. In between those, probably coincidentally (he doesn't mention anything prompting it), Sean Carroll offered a three-step definition of science: Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an "hypothesis." Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see "data" (or "evidence"). Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data. This isn't quite the way I would put it-- I'm an experimentalist where Sean's a theorist, so I…

X-Men: First Class

So, I went to the midnight show of the new X-Men movie yesterday. Short review: Wowee wow wow! What a great movie! Best comic book movie in quite a while, and since there have been several good ones that's really saying something. Longer review below the fold. Only minor spoilers ahead, but if you truly want to know nothing about the film going in then it might be best to stop reading now. The X-Men are a bit of a hole in my comic book education. A while back I worked my way through the first volume of The Essential X-Men, which collected some of the original 1960's comics, but that's…

Enns Explains How to Read the Bible

Any time I am looking for something to blog about, I know the HuffPo religion section will serve up something delicious. In this essay, Peter Enns of the BioLogos Foundation exposes the naivete some people bring to reading the Bible: I've read enough of the New Atheists to see a pattern in their thinking about the Bible, and it is disturbingly similar to what you see in the Southern Baptist Convention or Bob Jones University. Conservative Christians and New Atheists share naïve views of what the Bible “ought” to be, namely the notion that if the Bible is really the “Word of God,” it will…

Geniuses Don't Fail Out

Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it. I think he makes some very good points, but my own main problem with the piece is a different sort of thing. Fundamentally, the article strikes me as a "Fans are slans" argument dressed up ina lot of science-y jargon. And "fans are slans" arguments drive me nuts. The basic argument is laid out in a comment by Bruce…

What Keeps Me Up at Night

One of my pet peeves about physics as perceived by the public and presented in the media is the way that everyone assumes that all physicists are theoretical particle physicists. Matt Springer points out another example of this, in this New Scientist article about the opening panel at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival. The panel asks the question "What keeps you up at night?" and as Matt explains in detail most of the answers are pretty far removed from the concerns of the majority of physicists. But it's a good question even for low-energy experimentalists like myself, as it highlights the…