More grim news about Ph.D.s -- Short version: oversupply

Education: The PhD factory

From nature.com

Women in Science

This article by Philip Greenspun is about anyone in science (not just women), and suggests that it is a tougher road than even those who champion it as a career would suspect.

Quote of the day -- Calvin Trillin

"When I'm trying to impress Alice, for instance, I remind her that I have resolutely ignored drinking fashions for twenty-five years, steadily knocking back Scotch whiskey the entire time. They turned to wine; I drank Scotch. They smoked pot; I drank Scotch. They ordered Perrier water; I drank Scotch. They snorted cocaine while naked in a hot tub discussing real estate; I drank Scotch. I like to think that late on some Saturday nights Alice can point to me - slumped in the corner, sodden with scotch - and say, 'There sits a man of principle. Inert.'" 

~ from Uncivil Liberties by Calvin Trillin

via The Atlantic

The Status Game

An interesting thought experiment, or possibly a provocative class exercise:

A stack of card was shuffled face down on a table, and each person was asked to choose a card without looking at it. Then the instructor asked us to get on stage, and raise our cards against our foreheads so that they are facing the rest of the group. Each person was automatically assigned a “status” corresponding to their card. Then the instructor suggested a business situation for us to enact in a way that helps each person guess the number on their forehead correctly. How would we do that? By changing our postures and tone of voice to match our estimated status and how it ranks against the status we see on other people’s forehead. For instance, if I am guessing the card on my head to be a 8, and I meet with a queen, I’d lower my voice and stand in a way that reflect the other person’s status dominance over mine. And if I meet a 5, I’d assume a higher posture and voice and may be give an order or two. If the person suddenly assumed a different posture and voice, it could mean that either she or I have the wrong guess. The goal wasn’t to challenge each other, but to help each other make the right guess.

from Hacking the Status Game

Snap Together Trebuchette

The projects supported by Kickstarter are getting better and better.

Another attempt to embed video + railguns

Experiment with embedding vimeo video

2011/03 Mike Monteiro | F*ck You. Pay Me. from SanFrancisco/CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Review of German Expressionist Art Exhibit

Walking through the German Expressionism exhibit really messed me up. All of them either killed themselves or fell down the stairs drunk to their deaths, and it was only, like, 1926, and you’re all ‘God, you have no fucking idea how much worse things are about to get, you poor people.’ The glorious shitshow of the 20th century has barely started, and you’re already painting elongated haunted torsos with exposed viscera.

Rambling bits that start out as book reviews and then turn into more general ruminations. Good stuff

-- Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews

Understanding Congress’s solution to the federal deficit problem

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

From Philip Greenspun's Weblog

The 'B' Students work for the 'C' students . . . .

America has made the mistake of letting the A student run things. It was A students who briefly took over the business world during the period of derivatives, credit swaps, and collateralized debt obligations. We’re still reeling from the effects. This is why good businessmen have always adhered to the maxim: “A students work for B students.” Or, as a businessman friend of mine put it, “B students work for C students—A students teach.”

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Quote of the day on the budget negotiations

Joel Housman: "Remember when Planned Parenthood & NPR crashed the market, wiped out half our 401Ks and took TARP money? Me neither."

Scientists answer Molyneux's question

It seems important any time scientists solve a question posed by philosophers hundreds of years ago.

Imagine, William Molyneux wrote to the great British thinker, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects -- a sphere and a cube, for example -- only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see.
The puzzle, he continued, is "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?"

For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question," as it was known ever after, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind.

Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch.

Find out the answer here.

via www.physorg.com

Star Trek is coming to Netflix

"Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix, Ds9 in October."

from tekgoblin.com

I'm never leaving the sofa again.

Dilbert Test for Gender Fairness

So I propose a simple test to determine if you, individually, are a victim of gender unfairness. If a genie gave you the chance to magically switch your gender, and become a member of the other sex, would you do it? And let's say the new you would be about the same as now on the scale of attractiveness, intelligence, ethnicity, circumstance, and health. The only real change would be gender. Do you take the offer?

from Dilbert Blog

The Möbius Gear

"After some time staring at and puzzling over this image, I convinced myself that this mechanism is indeed possible and that with right tools, a functional prototype could be built."

There's hope for us as a species yet . . .

via Boing Boing

Makers vs. Managers Schedules from Paul Graham

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Paul Graham

I used to be more of a maker, but now I'm mostly a manager. A balance would be better -- maybe manager during the school year and Maker during the summer someday.

Quote of the day -- Lenin

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. – Lenin

From the Long Now Foundation

Ben Smith First Career NHL Goal/Point! (4/8/11) [HD]

I'd be happy even if he weren't such a good guy, which he is.

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education

A whiny but fairly comprehensive set of observations about pressures that have contributed to a decline in the standards to which most students are held. From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Part 1
Part 2

Japanese Tsunami Stone Markers

“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

From The Long Now Foundation

All Points are Starting Points

Words to live by from Hugh McLeod

Potato

Apparently, this has something to do do with how gravity differs at different places on earth. Also, it has pretty colors.

Arcadia

Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia the Greatest Play of our Age?

McDonald's Hot Coffee Case

In the famous case of the woman suing McDonalds for burning herself on her hot coffee, the actual facts are more than enough to warrant a jury trial.

I like the case because it is a litmus test for people who a) have knee-jerk reactions about these sorts of cases, and b) often don't take the time to do their own research.

El Camino del Rey (Very scary trail)

In the spirit of vertigo, and my prior post about climbing up a radio tower.

Cities with significantly cited papers in psychology (Fig. 3)

http://www.leydesdorff.net/topcity/figure3.htm

How to Make a Mind Map®

http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm

Glory Road

Glory Road is an excellent movie to watch at the beginning of March Madness. However, it's not so good to watch on TNT starting at midnight, because the geometric increase in the number of commercials per hour catches up to me when I'm most tired. Josh Lucas looks like Kevin Costner, except I think he's a better actor.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I celebrated St. Patrick's Day yesterday by watching The Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day. Not very good, but fun enough.

Tsunami video

A three minute clip From Clint Eastwood's movie Hereafter.

Seven Steps to better brainstorming

From McKinsey & Co.

Myth of the Teenage Brain

Q: If there are biological reasons for the challenges adolescents face, why aren't they universal across cultures?

A: Because many of the challenges are actual social rather than biological.

via Scientific American.

Speed Racer

2.5 stars out of 5. Very enjoyable, but like candy -- totally unsatisfying. Uninspiring work from the Matrix guys.

I think this about sums up the Christianity and Homosexuality debate

"I am a Christian who happens as well to be gay ... Those realities, which are unreconcilable to some, are reconciled in me by a loving God." -- Rev. Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor Of Christian Morals

via Andrew Sullivan.

My new favorite movie character archtype description: Manic Pixie Dream Girl

From a series of articles about boring romantic female leads (attacking, defending) in the Atlantic Online.

Fordson tractor stuck in the mud

That's how it's done.

Graphic Novel Biography of Hunter S. Thompson

From BoingBoing.

When Do You Hold The Bus?

The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether or not he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered:

“If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you’ll be so late that you’ll miss the game, so you can’t do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you’ll have a player that’s so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.”

Phil Jackson, the basketball coach who has won the most NBA championships, was once asked about his famously flakey superstar Dennis Rodman: “Since Dennis Rodman is allowed to miss practice, does this mean other star players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen can miss practice too?” Jackson replied:

“Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy.”

You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions, but nonetheless makes a massive positive contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee’s negative attributes and keep them from polluting the overall company culture. That’s fine, but remember: you can only hold the bus for her.


http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/

Rule of Thumb for Teaching in the age of Google

From Unwrapping the Gifted.

Hiding Gold Nobel Prizes in Plain Sight

When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of the German physicists Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The Nazi government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after the jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation who recast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia#History

Science rules.

How Your Coffee Mug Controls Your Feelings (& What You Can Do About It)

via johnnyholland

Space Shuttle Launch: Viewed From an Airplane

Epanalepsis -- or Reasoning with a 4-Year-Old.

THE BOY: I want to be a grownup because grownups can do whatever they want.

ME: You're right—I could go buy ten Snickers bars and eat them all right now. Or go watch the same movie seven times in a row. But I don't want to. The thing about being a grownup is that you don't want to do all the crazy stuff you used to daydream about when you were a kid.

THE BOY: Yeah but grownups can do whatever they want.

From Your Monkey Called

Apple's Three Laws of Developers

A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

— I. Developer

The Day the Movies Died

via GQ. Thanks, Ted, for the link.

Feynman Applies to Work at Microsoft

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2011/02/14/what-would-feynman-do.aspx

Buxton Index

From On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides by E.W. Dijkstra. (Photo of Dijkstra from Wikipedia article)


 A very useful measure is —called after its inventor— the "Buxton Index". John N. Buxton discovered that the most important one-dimensional scale along which persons are institutions to be compared, can be placed is the length of the period of time in the future for which a person or institution plans. This period, measured in years, gives the Buxton Index. For the little shopkeeper around the corner the Buxton Index is three-quarter, for a true Christian it is infinite, we marry with one near fifty, most larger companies have one of about five, most scientist have one between two and ten. (For a scientist it is hard to have a larger one: the future then becomes so hazy, that effective planning becomes an illusion.)

3-D Printing becoming much more sophisticated

http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221&CFID=162367227&CFTOKEN=74435751

Jon Stewart's New Theory: Sarah Palin is a Russian Spy?

From The Daily Show.

Burning Platform Memo from Nokia CEO

There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the smoke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform's edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.

As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a "burning platform," and he needed to make a choice.

He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times - his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a "burning platform" caused a radical change in his behaviour.

We too, are standing on a "burning platform," and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.

via Engadget

AT&T Don't Text While Driving Documentary

NEW E*TRADE Baby -- Solitary

Just a man and his thoughts . . . .

Atlantic Article on the Military Industrial Complex

The article starts with a wonderful quote on the importance of education from James Madison:

"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."


Unfortunately, the rest is very depressing.

It is official -- this is a big storm

From NASA.

This feels like a picture out of The Day After Tomorrow.

The Skin Gun -- A new treatment for burn injuries

I hope this is as wonderful as the video would suggest. I know almost nothing about burn injuries, but what I do know is awful.

Philip Pullman goes to bat for libraries

A wonderful open letter in support of libraries in the face of budget cuts.

Reinhold Niebuhr quote

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. ... Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”

From David Brooks NYTimes editorial

Response to the Chinese Mother post

[A]s Erma Bombeck said, no mother is arrogant because she knows that, regardless of her other accomplishments in life, at any moment she may get a call from the school principal saying that her child rode a motorcycle through the auditorium.

From Why American Mothers are Superior

Essay from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother"

Things a Chinese Mother will not let her children do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.


excerpt from the Wall Street Journal Online.

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft design

31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.

via a University of Maryland Engineering Professor

Janelle Monáe - Tightrope

Tried to embed the video, but it was blocked. It's worth going to her site to watch it.

Partial Solar Eclipse and transit of the International Space Station

via Thierry Legault

Ken Block's Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l'Autodrome, Fr...

I was not aware that cars could be driven this way.

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything

Inception Script Sketch

from an interview with Christopher Nolan by his brother

via In Contention

Galileo's Moon Drawings

Not clear whether he sketched them, or whether they were just illustrations he included in a folio of his other astronomical work.

"In either case, it is rather beautiful. But it didn’t seem that way to many people at the time. It was a shock and an affront to suggest that God’s heavenly objects were not perfect but pocked and roughened with craters and protuberances like some ordinary rock of the earthly realm. This would all come to a head when Galileo visited the pope in 1616 …"

via Tom Christensen

Winter Solstice Eclipse tonight

The full moon will pass through Earth's shadow, changing from gray to a rusty, red color.

Why red? NASA describes it this way:

A quick trip to the Moon provides the answer: Imagine yourself standing on a dusty lunar plain looking up at the sky. Overhead hangs Earth, nightside down, completely hiding the sun behind it. The eclipse is underway. You might expect Earth seen in this way to be utterly dark, but it's not. The rim of the planet is on fire! As you scan your eye around Earth's circumference, you're seeing every sunrise and every sunset in the world, all of them, all at once. This incredible light beams into the heart of Earth's shadow, filling it with a coppery glow and transforming the Moon into a great red orb.

If you're not much for staring at the sky, at least glance up once: early Tuesday morning at 12:17 a.m. That's when the eclipse will be most striking, according to astronomers.

Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais

Why I'm an athiest.

via WSJ

Space Program in One Tufte-Friendly Chart

Click on the image to see the whole thing.

via National Geographic

Facebook Connections

From the Facebook Blog

Prevention may not be a good way to reduce overall health care costs

Paper's conclusion: Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

Machine with Roller Chain - Arthur Ganson

No comment necessary -- this is just great all by itself.

Machine with Concrete - Arthur Ganson

A machine waiting to be used as a metaphor for something.

15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.

I like this because it reminds me how articulate young people can be, and resets the bar where it should be.

Quote of the day -- Anias Nin

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

via The Positivity Blog

How to give bad news after a job interview

Good advice on giving appropriate information in a kind way after an interview.

via Nathan Marz.

Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - ...

Letter from Gandhi to Hitler

While the letter itself is very moving, I'm more interested in the comment that "this particular letter never reaches Hitler due to an intervention by the British government."

via Letters of Note

Paul Graham on Hackers

"Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile."

From Paul Graham's column on tablets.

Rewrite

Another thing we learned was that…
Another thing we learned was…
We also learned that…
We also learned…
We learned…

From 37Signals

Friedman Op-Ed

Interesting column from Thomas Friedman about the loss of American leverage due to our reliance on foreign oil and the ownership of our debt by China.

New York City

Remote control plane flies over Brooklyn and Statue of Liberty.

Contrail Shadow

At first I couldn't figure out how the sun was casting a shadow from the contrail up to the cirrus clouds above it. The angle just seemed wrong. Then I realized that the contrail was above the cirrus clouds, but the clouds were almost transparent so the contrail was clearly visible above it.

3D Video Capture with Kinect

It looks like the beginning of Minority Report where Tom Cruise is drugged up and looking at the 3D image of his son extrapolated from the home movie.

Great post by Seth Godin -- What's the Hard Part?

Don't tell me you have a good heart but don't want to raise money. That's the hard part.

From Seth Godin's blog.

Authors@Google: Garry Kasparov

Safari imitates Just So Stories

From National Geographic photo essay.



From Just So Stories "The Elephant's Child" by Rudyard Kipling.

Bauhaus Chess Set

Chess set made out of pure awesome.

George Michael - Freedom! '90

It's worth watching this video again to see how much of my aesthetic was shaped by the supermodels in ascendency in the 80's. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he song also alludes to the struggles of being a closeted homosexual man, and acted as a catalyst to his effort to end his publishing contract with Sony Music. As if to prove the song's sentiment, Michael refused to appear in the video, directed by David Fincher, and instead recruited supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, and Cindy Crawford to Lip sync. "

Make Guitar Picks from Credit Cards

via Boing Boing.

Quotes of the day: Max Frisch and Niels Bohr via Neil Postman

Taken from The End of Education by Neil Postman:

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it. -- Max Frisch

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr

1 Up

No reason to repost this except that it makes me happy.

Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)

Q: Why do magnets repel each other?
A: I can't tell you.

How Software Companies Die by Orson Scott Card

Running a good software company is like being a beekeeper.

Black Friday Coupon

via BoingBoing

Battle Hymn of the Republic

Essay via The Atlantic on the history of the hymn, including alternate lyrics from the labor movement entitled Solidarity Forever.

The Battle Hymn of the Republic
by Julia Ward Howe

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.


Lyrics to Solidarity Forever:

When the Union's inspiration
Through the worker's blood shall run,
There can be no power greater
Anywhere beneath the sun,
Yet what force on earth is weaker
Than the feeble strength of one?
But the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:
|: Solidarity forever! :|
Solidarity forever!
For the Union makes us strong.
2. Is there aught we hold in common
With the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom
And would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left for us
But to organize and fight?
For the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:

3. It is we who plowed the prairies;
Built the cities where they trade,
Dug the mines and built the workshops;
Endless miles of railroad laid.
Now we stand, outcast and starving,
'Mid the wonders we have made;
But the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:

4. All the world that's owned by idle drones,
Is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations;
Built it skywards, stone by stone.
It is ours, and not to slave in,
But to master and to own,
While the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:
5. They have taken untold millions
That they never toiled to earn.
But without our brain and muscle
Not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power;
Gain our freedom, when we learn
That the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:

6. In our hands is placed a pot
Greater than their hoarded gold;
Greater than the might of armies,
Magnified a thousand fold.
We can bring to birth the new world
From the ashes of the old,
For the Union makes us strong.
Chorus:

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate | Video on TED.com

Michael Sandel: The lost art of democratic debate | Video on TED.com


"If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game."

The McGurk Effect - Horizon Is Seeing Believing?

We are poor little lambs, who have lost our way . . . .

Garry Kasparov: The Last Revolutionary Technology Was The Apple II

Garry Kasparov talks about innovation and other topics. My favorite quote:

Advice to the Obama Administration

“You should stop printing money because that insults my intelligence. Using a lot of money to save something beyond rescue — the inefficient and corrupt banking and investment system — instead of investing in real stimulus was a bad decision, long term, mid term, and maybe even short term.”

Instead Kasparov says to “focus on the roots of the crisis — lack of technological innovation.” He said despite all the economic stimulus, unemployment in the U.S. still remains high, and that only restoring the technological lead of the country would help solve its woes.

via Forbes.

Anniversary of the Bomb

U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy, his wife, and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry cut a cake made in the shape of a mushroom cloud at a reception for Operation Crossroads, November 6, 1946.

via BoingBoing