Over at Neurotopia, SciCurious has a fabulous post on the question of who is a scientist. Her discussion really teases out a lot of important nuances, and I think her analysis is spot on.
I’m going to add my two cents simply to connect Sci’s discussion with an issue I’ve pondered before: the boundaries (or lack thereof) between who we are and what we do.
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
Death is not an option: where to put the micro-manager from Hell.
I’m couching the question in terms of the academic milieu, but I suspect people in other types of organizations face a similar kind of choice.
Behind door #1:
Passing thoughts on nature documentaries.
We’ve been watching some episodes of Blue Planet here, marveling at the beautiful cinematography, as well as at how emotionally gripping they can be.
Especially in the Frozen Seas episode, I found myself feeling almost wrung out by the dramatic roller-coaster. This is definitely nature red in tooth and claw (and blood-soaked maw), although as my better half points out, there’s actually rather less on-camera carnage than you might expect from the narration.*
Happy Square Root Day!
It has come to my attention that today’s date (03-03-09) makes this a Square Root Day.
The Free-Ride household will be marking the occasion pretty much the way you’d expect — with an evening meal that includes square roots.
In which the younger Free-Ride offspring opines that Jonathan Coulton rocks.
On our drive to the Monterey Peninsula last night, la familia Free-Ride listened to (most of) the new Jonathan Coulton album JoCo Looks Back. (We skipped a few songs whose subject matter and lyrics were deemed “too mature” for the audience in the back seat.) The Free-Ride offspring had some prior exposure to Jonathan Coulton by way of concert videos on YouTube, but this was their longest duration Coulton jam.
“Do you know him,” the younger offspring asked me.
Dispatch from the sickroom.
Owing to the fact that children are vectors of disease, three out of four members of the Free-Ride household have been feverish, achy, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy for the past few days. (It’s not clear yet whether the progression of this bug will include other dwarves.)
Since I’m still kind of dopey, in lieu of a content-ful post, I’m offering some random musings from the sickbed.
Rescued from the spam-file (kind of).
Left by a self-proclaimed “fitness specialist” and “trainer of personal trainers” (along with all manner of contact information) as a comment on this post:
Isn’t it amazing that someone like Darwin is celebrated for his thoughts. Evolution is bunk! I am not a creationist either. But to evolve an animal had to make a conscious decision. An example: a fish had to decide that land was the next place it was going to make its home. How many fish had to make that decision and how many realized they would have to die before their gills evolved into lungs? Yet there are people who actually believe in evolution. Somebody is not thinking things through.
Way to combat the stereotype that personal trainers aren’t that bright!
Also: dude, break down and buy some ads. Spreading your digits in the comments section of a blog just reeks of desperation.
On my way to ScienceOnline’09
Once again, I’m sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline’09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati.
I’m going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on “Online science for kids (and parents)”. I’ll be highlighting a selection of the good content that’s out there already, and I’m hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create new kid-friendly science content. Our wiki page is here, so you can play along at home and join the discussion virtually.
In case you’re wondering why my posting has been relatively light in the days leading up to this conference, well, I seem to have been channeling Dr. Isis.
In which Ann Landers unintentionally blows my mind.
In a frequently recycled list of proposed New Year’s resolutions, Ann Landers urges:
Vow not to make a promise you don’t think you can keep.
However, she fails to advise a course of action in the case that you think you might not be able to live up to this vow.
(Maybe she was too busy trying to construct a set containing sets that are not members of themselves.)
Please apply.
If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year’s, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to the fact that exploding economic markets have depleted endowments and state budgets and probably baskets of puppies and kitties and bunnies and chicks. There’s some higher-than-average probability that a lot of the people at the Eastern APA this year actually spent most of their time giving and listening to papers. I can’t even guess whether that would be more fun or less fun spending four days in the dance of presenting yourself as the ideal candidate (or, on the search committee side of the dance, of trying to discern from how those you are interviewing present themselves who might in fact be a good fit for your position and a good colleague in your department).
Since I’m not in Philadelphia but in sunny Los Angeles County at the moment, this is mostly idle speculation. However, during one of my infrequent sabbatical visits to my departmental mailbox a couple months ago, I retrieved a letter soliciting my application for a position in a philosophy department not my own.