Passing thoughts
jstemwedel | June 29, 2006Coming up on a long holiday weekend, you all are ready for another internet quiz, right?
I can't help wondering whether the "Birth Order Predictor" quiz is not well-grounded in the sociological facts, or whether there really isn't any such coherent set of sociological facts, or whether I'm just a weirdo.
Because it's hard to imagine this result being any more off base:
You Are Likely an Only Child
At your darkest moments, you feel frustrated.
At work and school, you do best when you're organizing.
When you love someone, you tend to worry about them.
In friendship, you are emotional…
jstemwedel | June 27, 2006Chad thinks it's a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, "bossy" isn't one of the possible results.)
What the quiz says about me after the jump.
Jean-Paul Sartre (100%)
Kant (97%)
John Stuart Mill (83%)
Jeremy Bentham (77%)
Stoics (73%)
Aquinas (63%)
Ayn Rand (59%)
Spinoza (55%)
Prescriptivism (49%)
Nel Noddings (46%)
St. Augustine (46%)
Plato (40%)
Nietzsche (39%)
Aristotle (35%)
David Hume (34%)
Epicureans (34%)
Ockham (27%)
Cynics (20%)
Thomas Hobbes (20…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2006Because I was in Sweden for my younger offspring's birthday, and because my older offspring's birthday is nowhere near the school year, we gave them a joint un-birthday party today. Each was allowed to invite eight friends. Of these, a total of five attended (plus a younger sib), but there was some suspense about what the actual turnout would be due to low RSVP rates. Summer vacation can be like that.
Food is pretty straightforward for the age-range involved (4 to 7): raw veggies and dip, chips and salsa, Smart Dogs in blankets. Younger offspring and I squeezed a bunch of lemons from our…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Sometimes I check the spam folder just in case actual (even important) email from a human being who is not trying to sell me (and the millions of others in that valuable set of email addresses) something I don't need has been snagged by the filter. More rarely, I open the odd spam message from the spam folder. (By the way, could Gmail please stop suggesting Spam recipes while I'm there? It makes the experience even ickier.)
Tonight, I found spam advertising "real, genuine degrees that include Bachelors, Masters, MBA and Doctorate Degrees. They are fully verifiable and certified transcripts…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Ben at The World's Fair asks what kind of scientist Batman is. (Of course, he does this after producing something like reliable testimony that Batman is a scientist to begin with.)
Sandra Porter makes the case that he's a geneticist, but I'm not buying it. There'd be more fruit flies in the Bat Cave. I have a different hunch.
The crime fighting isn't really Batman's raison d'etre. If the villians were really villians, they wouldn't be so darned chatty and inefficient in their "attempts" to "kill" the caped crusader. Batman would have been food for the fish in the Gotham City harbor years…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it's not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We're not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, "…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006In my last post, I mentioned that I was about to start a soccer class. It turns out "class" might not be quite the right designation for it, as there wasn't any formal instruction, discussion of techniques, etc. (Not that I didn't get schooled at various points in the evening.) Instead, we pretty much just played.
It's worth noting that this was not soccer on a big, grassy field. It was indoor soccer -- in a gymnasium with a smaller "field" surface, with sneakers squeaking against the floor and the ball slamming against walls. In lots of ways, this is a completely different game from the…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2006Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:
I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that's how you can tell if you're dreaming, if you touch the clouds and they feel like empty space.
The child hasn't read Descartes yet, but we've got all summer.
jstemwedel | June 13, 2006Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention's heartening attention to matters scientific:
The good news is: science! Thanks largely to DarkSyde's efforts, there was a substantial presence of science bloggers at YearlyKos. A "Science Bloggers Caucus" on Thursday night, which I expected to collect a dozen or so misplaced souls who weren't interested in the gatherings sponsored by some of the big political blogs, instead packed a room to overflowing with over fifty energetic participants from a wide cross-…
jstemwedel | June 10, 2006In honor of the arrival of all the new neighbors here at ScienceBlogs Towers, here's a little getting-acquainted meme.
3 reasons you blog about science:
To make the scientific method less scary to non-scientists.
To examine the ways in which behaving ethically really makes for better scientific knowledge.
Because I find science endlessly fascinating.
Point at which you would stop blogging:
If I ran out of things to say (which is hard for me to imagine).
1 thing you frequently blog besides science:
Academic stuff (pedagogical musings, rants about cheating, etc.)
4 words that describe your…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Ah, the power of the internets! Without them, how would I ever have discovered The Mixilator?
The Mixilator is hosted by The Internet Cocktail Database. It presents you with a form asking you to specify your cocktail variety, hour, strength, level of complexity, and special characteristics. It then returns with a recipe for a cocktail.
But, the recipe that is returned to you is not a pre-existing coctail from the CocktailDB. Oh no, it is much more wonderful than that! The Mixilator randomly generates your cocktail recipe using an algorithm based on the theories set out by David Embury in…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2006Being a fan of the old Tick cartoons, I had to find out which of the Tick's nemeses (nemesises?) I am.
I am cackling with glee to discover:
You think you're a villain, but are you villainous enough? The other villains look down on you and you desperately want their acceptance. In fact, your greatest caper (almost blowing up the Comet Club) was planned simply to make them accept you into the supervillain ranks.
You've got a gimmick, though, that can't be beat and in general you are one of the funniest villains around. Keep up the bad work!
I am The Evil Midnight Bomber what Bombs at Midnight…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2006I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn't me, but I won't divulge any further identifying details.)
Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories -- far too common to merit a blog post -- but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is.
So, our nameless protagonist ordered a piece of computer hardware from some company that offered free ground shipping. Said…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2006Sure, John and GrrlScientist and Orac took the quiz first, but I loves me some Edward Gorey, and who doesn't want to know how they'll meet the reaper?
What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
You will perish of fits. Repeat this to yourself: "Things can work out even if I don't get my way. Things can work out even...."Take this quiz!
Quizilla |
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The fits are what drive me to blog; it's a good bet they're what will finish me off.
jstemwedel | May 28, 2006Commencement: done.
Grading: not quite.
So, as seen at See Jane Compute, it's time for the guilty pleasures meme. (And for those who feel inclined to use the comments to get accusatory about my responses, I'm already acknowledging my guilt!)
Here we go:
Four Guilty Pleasures in Books/Reading:
This is a hard question for someone who has to read a lot for a living and who doesn't actually care much for glossy magazines. The guilt often comes not because what I'm reading is bad, but because I'm supposed to be reading something else.
1. Rolling Stone
2. Amanda Cross mysteries
3. P.D. James…
jstemwedel | May 26, 2006I have a soft spot for commencements. And, as I get on in years, that spot gets even softer.
Part of it, undoubtedly, is because recognizing the hard work and accomplishments of the new graduates is so much more fun than the grading that immediately precedes it. But for me, part of what grabs me is the feeling that what I'm doing -- the notion of education and its larger value that I'm trying to impart -- connects me to a tradition that is hundreds of years old. One visible sign of that connection is the academic regalia that graduates and faculty alike wear to commencement ceremonies. In…
jstemwedel | May 25, 2006Blogging has been light because grading has been heavy. But Chad has a post that started me to thinking. (Danger! Danger!) And, since he has stated his desire to avoid a flamewar at this time, it seems only fair that I do that thinking over here so his space can be unscorched.
The question at hand, initially posed by Scott Aaronson, is whether there might be a shortage of women in science because women are more prone to be "repelled by nerd culture" than men.
What do we mean by "nerd culture" here? This is Scott's characterization of it (along with his preferred strategy of making the…
jstemwedel | May 24, 2006I'm marking another stack of papers (because it's May, and the sun is shining, and apparently I was a real bastard in some previous life).
In these papers, the students were supposed to examine an instance where the interests of scientists and the interests of non-scientists (perhaps various subgroups of non-scientists) might be at odds. The idea is to explain the source of the conflict, connect this to the various values of the different players, and to set out possible strategies for resolving the conflict. It was stressed that giving a fair presentation of each side's view is key.…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2006Dear inventors,
My personal experience (and what I have heard from the many other academics with whom I communicate) suggests a number of inventions that would sell a bazillion units at colleges and universities world-wide. For your convenience, I list the items that would have the biggest demand first. However, it's worth noting that even the items at the bottom of the list would make professorial lives significantly better, and that we would gladly dip into the funds currently allocated for recreational reading and hooch to purchase them.
Self-grading exams. (No, not those scantron…
jstemwedel | May 20, 2006Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM.
It was a good time.
My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on…