humanities
drorzel | September 28, 2009It's that time of year again, when the Nobel Prizes are announced-- the official announcements will be made starting next Monday. And, as usual, people are speculating about who will win, on both an amateur and professional basis.
Meanwhile, as we've done in the past, I will offer a valuable prize to anyone who predicts the winners of any of this year's Nobel prizes:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
Rules and conditions are the same as…
drorzel | September 8, 2009Via the Infinite summer roundup, Infinite Detox has a post about the novel's treatment of my favorite supporting character, whose title I have shamelessly stolen:
The problem I have is that from a dramatic standpoint, the wave of Pemulis-bashing that gathers force on p. 774 and crests in endnote 332 isn't convincing to me. For the first 773 pages of the book Wallace presents Pemulis to us as a lovable rogue and prankster -- he has an acerbic wit, he's nobody's fool, he's the Jack Sparrow of differential calculus. He wears a yachting cap, for Christ's sake. What's not to like about this guy?…
drorzel | July 27, 2009Timothy Burke notes a controversy about an NEH program that some philosophers feel tramples their discipline. In talking about a hypothetical program that would do the same for his field of history, Burke suggests something that caught my eye:
f the NEH set up a course development grant called "Time and the Past" aimed at supporting interdisciplinary courses that examined change over time but framed the grant so that ordinary history courses didn't qualify, my first impulse would be to object. Why exclude the discipline that makes that question its central concern?
But hold on a moment. What…
drorzel | July 5, 2009I've been enjoying Tom Levenson's "Diary of a Trade Book" series quite a bit (the latest post is on cover art), so when I say a stack of copies of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist at the bookstore the other day, I snapped one up.
As the title suggests, it's a little like CSI: London 1697, with a good deal of detail about how Newton built a court case against the notorious "coiner" and con man William Chaloner, who earned Newton's personal enmity by not only passing fake coins, but by spreading stories of incompetence and corruption…
drorzel | July 2, 2009There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis. This mostly seems to be due to bad experiences with English Lit classes in high school and/or college, at least based on the long rants they used to uncork on Usenet, back in the day.
I suspect that it is this element of fandom that is responsible for godawful dreck like Mike Resnick's stories making it onto the Hugo Award ballot. Their rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of…
drorzel | June 19, 2009The smart-people blogosphere is all abuzz about questions from the French college entrance exams, with comments from Matt Yglesias, Dana Goldstein, and Kevin Drum, among others. The general tone of the commentary is summed up by Goldstein's question:
Could you ever imagine the SAT or ACT asking students to write an essay on such complex, intellectual topics?
The answer is "Sure. The answers would suck, but you could ask them."
And that's the important thing, here. What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are…
drorzel | May 18, 2009Thoreau offers without qualification some observations about the different approach to books taken by sciences vs. humanities. Specifically, he notes that despite frequent claims that it is the Most Important Book Ever, nobody actually reads Newton's Principia Mathematica
This is totally different from humanities. In humanities, people make a point of reading the original thinkers. They don't just say "Well, philosopher so-and-so influenced lots of other people and got the ideas rolling, so let's read somebody influenced by him and maybe a Cliff's Notes version of the original." They…
drorzel | May 17, 2009This has nothing to do with the substance of Steve Benen's post about conservative preparations for judicial confirmation hearings, but the quote he used from a New York Times article is the proximate cause for this Grammar Nerd Poll:
What is the plural of "memorandum"?
A) "Memorandums"
B) "Memoranda"
C) "More than one memorandum"
D) Some other option I will explain in the comments
Leave your answer in the comments. Bonus nerd points for spotting the egregious grammar error in the text of the post.
(I don't know what the egregious grammar error in the post is, but by the Iron Laws of the…
drorzel | May 5, 2009I'm never quite sure what to make of Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of smart people seem to be favorably impressed by his writing and ideas, but whenever I actually read anything by him, there doesn't seem to be much there.
Take, for example, this New Yorker piece on basketball as a metaphor for innovation. As seems to be his general practice, Gladwell frames the whole thing around an engaging anecdote, about Vivek Ranadivé, a Silicon Valley businessman who coached his daughter's team of twelve-year-old girls in a National Junior Basketball competition:
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and…
drorzel | April 22, 2009We had a talk last night by Alan Lightman of MIT, a theoretical physicist and novelist, best known as the author of Einstein's Dreams. He spoke for about an hour about his own background, and the similarities and differences between the worlds of science and the arts.
One of the differences he mentioned was the way the different disciplines handle names. He claimed that science is deeply concerned with naming things, because naming a thing in some sense defines it-- the word "electron" carries with it a whole host of properties that are shared by all electrons in the universe. In the arts, on…
drorzel | April 21, 2009I tagged Geoffrey Pullum's rant against The Elements of Style for del.icio.us a few days back, because it struck me as interesting, but I didn't have time to say more. In the subsequent days, I've seen a bunch of "Preach it, Brother Pullum!" responses, most recently from revere. I've also received the copyedited manuscript of the book-in-production, so I've been thinking a bit about grammar and style in my own writing.
Most of the pro-Pullum responses I've seen seem to me to be missing the point. Or, rather, they're criticizing the book because it's not very good as an absolute and…
drorzel | March 22, 2009My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don't quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions.
One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge, showing that a majority of Americans are…
drorzel | February 6, 2009Not long after I posted my comments about textbook prices, I went to a panel discussion on teaching, where a social scientist made an interesting observation about the ways different disciplines interact with books.
In the humanities, the whole point of the class is to discuss the books. Nothing useful can be done until and unless the students have had the chance to do the reading. This is why humanities classes tend to let out early on the first day of the term, and have a full class on the last day of the term: the important reading has to be done before class.
In the sciences, on the other…
drorzel | January 25, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…
drorzel | January 19, 2009I think I missed this the first time around, but this weekend, I watched the bloggingheads conversation about quantum mechanics between Sean Carroll and David Albert. In it, David makes an extended argument against the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (starting about 40:00 into the conversation).
The problem is, I can't quite figure out what the problem is supposed to be.
The argument has something to do with a thought experiment in which you take a million particles, prepared in a state such that a measurement of their spin will give an equal probability of measuring "up" or…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition:
Science is the testing of ideas.
That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective tests, try not to fool yourself or anyone else, don't be wedded to your hypothesis, basic things like that. Be dishonest and I doubt there's a definition in the world that some sufficiently clever pseudoscientist can't wriggle out of. Test your ideas and be honest about it. That's…
drorzel | December 21, 2008A minor but extremely annoying language peeve:
The straps that one uses to steer horses are called reins.
The period of time during which some sort of ruler holds authority is a reign.
Thus, when one wishes to reassert control over something that is running unchecked, one would "rein it in." The time during which the unchecked influence is having malign effects might be called a "reign of terror."
It's a subtle and important distinction. It's also not something that spell-check will help you with.
Consider the comments an open thread for confused homonym peeves.