humanities
drorzel | October 11, 2013I'm sure I've done more than enough wibbling about TED for this week, but the only major physics story at the moment involved the Higgs boson, and I'm thoroughly sick of that. So let's talk about Malcolm Gladwell and journosplaining.
Gladwell has a new book out, David and Goliath that from all reports is pretty much exactly what you expect from a Malcolm Gladwell book. I greatly enjoyed the digested read by John Crace in the Guardian. Among the many bad reviews of this were a trio by my colleague at Union, Christopher Chabris-- first a paywalled review in the Wall Street Journal, then a post…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2013In my career (such as it is), I keep running into a hurdle having to do with the great value placed in the arts/humanities on the novelty of interpretations. Time and again, reviewers will say that my work tackles interesting questions in a methodologically competent manner using solid data – but that my interpretations (humanities people aren't comfortable with calling them “results”) aren't novel enough.
This makes no sense to me. I don't aim to produce a new interpretation. Nor do I wish to retain an old one. I just want to find the most-likely-to-be-correct answer to the question, given…
drorzel | May 10, 2012There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative review of his latest book. Sean Carroll does an admirable job of being the voice of reason, and summarizes most of the important contributions to that point. Some of the more recent entries to cross my RSS reader include two each from 13.7 blog and APS's Physics Buzz.
I…
drorzel | April 27, 20129:30am Thursday, Starbucks
Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits.
11:15am Thursday, Starbucks
Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection.
11:30am Thursday, Union College
Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh.
1:30pm Thursday, Barnes and Noble
Revise material written earlier in the day to split new stuff off into its own subsection. Research some additional points, add a whole bunch of words. Struggle with transition between old stuff and new subsection.
5:…
drorzel | April 4, 2012While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to "an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC":
Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
This made me scratch my head for a couple of reasons. I've seen this quote before, but always attributed to Cicero, which sorta-kinda makes sense. Seeing it moved back in time by a few…
drorzel | March 31, 2012Here are some excerpts from the introductory sections of the very first drafts of some book chapters:
[BLAH, BLAH, BLAHBITTY BLAH]
and
[Introductory blather goes here]
and
Blah, blah, stuff, blather.
There's a good reason for this, based on the basics of scientific writing, namely that the Introduction should give the reader a rough guide to the complete work-- exactly what you're going to say, before you go on and say it. In order to do a good job with the Introduction, you need to have a very solid idea of the shape of the finished product, and exactly what you need to mention up front…
drorzel | March 27, 2012I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I'm a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories:
"You must be really smart."
"I hated that when I took it in high school/ college."
"Can you explain string theory to me?"
It occurs to me that this helps explain why physicists are not generally considered scintillating conversationalists. Because, really, where can you go from any of those starting points?
Anyway, that got me wondering…
drorzel | March 15, 2012There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time:
A lack of confidence in one's abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by others. As graduate students, we often submit our work to advisors, etc. who are established scholars and who determine our progress towards a program milestone. Our awareness of this kind of appraisal, then, can be extremely pronounced as we work towards a deadline. As a result, we begin to doubt our abilities…
drorzel | February 14, 2012As I've said a bazillion times already this term, I'm teaching a class that is about research and writing, with a big final paper due at the end of the term. Because iterative feedback is key to learning to write, they also have to turn in a complete rough draft, which I will mark up and have them revise.
One of the many, many problems with teaching writing is that too many students regard the writing of drafts as pointless busy-work. Others have no real concept of what a rough draft is-- when I've collected drafts in the past, I often get things that would barely qualify as an outline, let…
drorzel | February 10, 2012Prompted by a number of people using the phrase "vast majority" recently, I wonder where the line between "majority" and "vast majority" is. Thus, a poll:
What is the minimum level of support that constitutes a "vast majority"
Assume for the sake of argument that the issue in question is a simple yes-or-no question, with only a small "no response/ don't know" fraction.
If there are other classes of "majority" that you recognize, feel free to define them in the comments. The poll is just about the term "vast," though.
drorzel | September 2, 2011As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile region, and nearly running out of money on multiple occasions before they stumbled on the idea of tobacco as a cash crop (at which point they nearly starved again because all agricultural activity shifted to tobacco, and they needed to force people…
drorzel | July 17, 2011As many a thoughtless person has observed when learning what I do for a living, physics is really hard. But you may have wondered just how much harder is physics than other subjects? Well, now, we have a quantitative answer:
This is a shelf of books at the Burlington, MA Barnes and Noble, clearly showing that while it is possible to learn all about politics and philosophy in thirty seconds, understanding Einstein takes three whole minutes. So, relativity is at least six times more difficult than philosophy.
(This presumably explains why there are so many physicists who dabble in philosophy,…
peconomy | June 24, 2011I am just now recovering from last week's Art of Science Learning conference in San Diego. For something that lasted just one-and-a-half days, there was an almost overwhelming amount of great presentations, great information sharing and exchange, and -- above all -- great people dedicated to moving the idea of the Art of Science Learning forward.
When I first made plans to attend, I did so as an observer. However, soon after the presentations began on the first morning of the conference, I became an active and engaged participant. Each presentation provided me with a deeper understanding of…
drorzel | June 20, 2011While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles-- five in the "Science" category, two under "Environment," and one each under "Mathematics" and "Mind." And that's being kind of generous about the boundaries of science.
This sort of thing is so depressingly common that it's almost hard to be outraged about it any more. Almost. Because, really, your list has room for Herodotus, but not Galileo or Newton? The modern world owes vastly more to the early…
drorzel | June 2, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of George Farrants, a freelance translator (and occasional marathon runner, as seen in the picture). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I work as a freelance translator from Swedish and Norwegian into English. I try to specialise in scientific, medical and technical texts, but I accept texts from many…
drorzel | June 1, 2011One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into the facts and figures in the book, but there's plenty of quantitative evidence for this. The claim of the book is that this created a situation in which many younger physicists were pushed to the margins, and thus began to work on marginal topics like quantum foundations, which thus began be be…
drorzel | May 30, 2011I had intended last Wednesday's post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I'm only getting around to it now.
Anyway, this was a guest lecture for a class on Science Fiction taught by a friend in the English department. To give you an idea of the stuff they covered, here's the "required books" list from the syllabus:
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (VBFSF) Anthology…
drorzel | May 27, 2011Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June.
As you can imagine…
drorzel | May 25, 2011If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics:
And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…
drorzel | May 17, 2011For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of the five stories, so that makes it a little easier...
Also in short fiction news, I have to do a guest lecture on Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" for an English class on science fiction this Friday. Which means I probably ought to find some time to figure out what I'm going to say about…