society
drorzel | November 10, 2009I failed to write something on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall yesterday, partly because I think the other six million blog posts on the subject had it pretty well covered. Another factor, though, was the fact that I don't have the sort of crystal-clear recollection of where I was and what I was doing on that night. I can reconstruct where I must've been-- I was a college freshman, so I would've watched it in the tv room on the second floor of Fayerweather-- but I don't clearly recall the event itself. It's all mixed together with the endless discussions of What It All Meant…
drorzel | November 9, 2009I am curious as to what people at other institutions think about "Greek organizations," the slightly confusing catch-all term for fraternities and sororities (very few of whose members are ethnically Greek, and very few of whom know more Greek than a handful of the letters of the alphabet). Thus, a totally scientific poll on the subject:
Fraternities and sororities are:(survey software)
I don't have any particular agenda, here, I'm just curious and it seemed like a reasonable subject for a post.
drorzel | November 6, 2009"It's a question of character, of friendship. Hell, Leo, I ain't afraid to say it, it's a question of ethics." --Giovanni Gaspari
I'm back to lunchtime hoops after a two-week layoff due to teaching responsibilities. And this has reminded me of one of the great character tests that sports provide. Imagine that you're playing basketball, but are too tired to keep running with the fast break in both directions. You can't quit without pissing everybody off, though, and there's no-one you can have sub in for you. What do you do?
What do you do when you're too tired to run the floor in a…
razib | October 31, 2009Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies:
Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population's long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth (material,…
clock | October 30, 2009An awesome experiment in Stockholm, Sweden where students changed stairs in a subway station into a piano:
And? More people started using the stairs than the escalator! It's just more fun!
drorzel | October 25, 2009My panel on "Communicating Science in the 21st Century" was last night at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute. I haven't watched the video yet-- Canadian telecommunications technology hates me, and I'm lucky to get a wireless connection to stay up for more than ten minutes-- but if the video feeds I've seen from other talks are an indication, it should be really good.
The panel wound up being primarily about journalism, which is understable given that the other four participants are all very distinguished journalists. I did my best to uphold the honor of the New Media…
drorzel | October 23, 2009I'm heading to the airport right after my second class today (I'm doing two weeks of our first-year seminar class), to appear at the Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. This promises to be a good event-- I had a great time at the Science in the 21st Century workshop last fall, and they've got a great program lined up for the festival.
I'm most likely going to attend tonight's tv broadcast, and tomorrow's "Quantum Physics in 60 Minutes" lecture (I have a professional interest in seeing how the competition does things), but I'm making the trip in order to appear…
drorzel | October 19, 2009It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…
pontiff | October 9, 2009A physicist at CERN has been arrested for suspicions of ties to Al Qaeda. Don't worry I already checked www.hasthelhcdestoryedtheearth.com and www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com and both assured me that, so far, Al Qaeda has not managed to generate black holes that would consume the planet.
But what a great opportunity to muse along with a New York Times article..
"His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism," said the statement from the center, whose formal name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Like, what…
pontiff | October 9, 2009Barack Obama has been awarded an honorary degree from Arizona State University the Nobel Prize in Peace for "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
I recommend a bag of popcorn, a big soda, and a nice recliner to watch the consternation and just plain craziness that will surely follow this announcement :)
drorzel | October 9, 2009The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize went to Al Gore and the IPCC. The 2008 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel went to Paul Krugman. And now, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Barack Obama.
Really? I mean, really? I like the guy as much as the next person, and it's nice to see somebody in Washington trying "to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." But he really hasn't accomplished anything, yet.
Seriously, the best explanation for this is that they're trying to make American right-wingers' heads explode. That, or they're still trying…
drorzel | October 2, 2009Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today:
Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, "A Serious Man," some details have been changed. He's called Larry Gopnik and he lives in Minnesota, where he teaches physics at a university. When we first meet Larry, in the spring of 1967, his tenure case is pending, his son's bar mitzvah is approaching, and, as in the original, a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, for no apparent reason.…
pontiff | October 1, 2009Via physicsandcake, on some days I wish I was as dorky and as elegant as Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every…
pontiff | September 21, 2009The Netflix prize for movie rankings has been awarded with the winner being BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos. This is very cool, but since it's Monday I think we need a good dose of reality. So here is the first comment on the New York Times Bit blog:
This sounds like an interesting project, but they ought to emphasize acquiring more movies for their online streaming than telling people what to watch. - kt
Good work, BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, but could you work on that tube that delivers my potato chips without me having to get up to go to the kitchen?
drorzel | September 10, 2009A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold.
The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…
pontiff | September 4, 2009Scott Aaronson, Leonid Grinberg, and Louis Wasserman's "Worldview Manager" is now live at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/worldview/home. It seems that I am not in much conflict over quantum computing
So, damnit, I may be wrong, but at least I'm consistent (the hobgoblin of a little mind, mind you.) Via @cgranade and @mattleifer.
clock | August 29, 2009I am feeling mean today. So, here is my first mean post of the day.
About a week ago I read this delicious post about the business of scientific publishing. It is a good read throughout - the title of the post is "Who is killing science on the Web? Publishers or Scientists?" and the answer is interesting. But what stood out for me was this paragraph:
This past February, I was on a panel discussion at the annual NFAIS conference, a popular forum for academic publishers. The conference theme was on digital natives in science. At one point I was asked (rather rudely) by a rep from a major…
drorzel | August 24, 2009I'm suffering through a wretched cold at the moment, which will limit my blogging activity. If you're looking for something to do, though, you might want to check out the Revolutionary Minds blog set up by the Corporate Masters. This is basically a short-form online version of a feature from Seed, in which they ask smart people to discuss Big Questions-- a more limited version of those Edge questions that John Brockman does every year.
The current question is:
The boundaries of science are continually expanding as scientists become increasingly integral to finding solutions for larger social…
grrlscientist | August 23, 2009tags: Why Do People Laugh at Creationists? , atheism, religion, water, streaming video
The only people who are so stupid as to not understand the answer to that question are the creationists themselves.