They end up having a really fascinating conversation about public discourse and the role of the media. Forget prime-time TV – set aside an hour to watch it this evening.
I find it interesting that Jon Stewart sees himself as fighting one battle (against TV news’ amplifying echo chamber) while everyone else wants to see him as fighting another (against rampant stupidity, especially on the right wing).
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don’t mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don’t know whether it’s a new thing, but it’s certainly a current thing, in that it doesn’t seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?
–Stephen Colbert
October 21st, 2010 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, media, politics, qotd •
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.’
–Douglas Adams
October 9th, 2010 • 1 Comment » • Tags: culture, qotd •
Facebook’s popularity is based on the reality that human beings are social creatures. Staying connected with people we know is innate to us. But maintaining separate social groups that we don’t want to clash is also innate.
via The Five Stages of Facebook Grief
In some ways, it’s a good thing. Maybe we’d all be a little better off if we could provide a more unified persona to the world. It would be bad if we simply became more private and less authentic, but what if we all just relaxed a little bit about the social norms that cause us to shield big and real parts of ourselves.
It’s interesting to note which groups we want to self-censor for. Our parents’ generation, our workplaces, religious groups. Maybe it’s good for everybody if those groups are forced to confront a more accurate picture of our lives.
Obviously I agree with the latter idea, since my entire online persona is tied back to my real name. My website links to my CV right next to my twitter feed filled with snark. In short, I’ve decided that I won’t apologize for who I am.
As a final thought: the world is headed towards a point where everyone has embarrassing pictures online. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a world where no one does.
July 18th, 2010 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, internet, social, tech •
The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.
– from “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson
February 24th, 2010 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, education, qotd •
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
December 9th, 2009 • 1 Comment » • Tags: culture, economics, leisure, qotd, work •
On AskMe, someone posted about their struggle to find meaning in life after deciding that atheism was for them:
I realize that, without “something behind everything”, it doesn’t matter one iota (speaking from a selfish perspective here) whether I build great things or just sit on my couch and rot, whether I live to be 100 or die tomorrow. It will matter to some, but not to many, and not for long.
I decided to respond:
Surely, you’ve known someone who has changed your life immeasurably for the better. This may be your parents, the guy who pulled you from that burning car, or the teacher who encouranged you to make use of your talents. I bet you wouldn’t say that their contribution meant nothing.
I promise that I’m not getting all hippie on you here, but both the love and hate you express tends to propagate through society, starting with the people you interact with every day. No, really – there has been behavioral research showing that this phenomenon exists.
Furthermore, your life choices, like quitting smoking, or losing weight make it more more likely that your peers will do the same.
As James Fowler puts it (as quoted in the above link):
“Everyone always tells me that this research is so depressing and that it means we don’t have free will. But I think they’re forgetting to look at the flipside. Because of social networks, your actions aren’t just having an impact on what you do, or on what your friends do, but on thousands of other people too. So if I go home and I make an effort to be in a good mood, I’m not just making my wife happy, or my children happy. I’m also making the friends of my children happy. My choices have a ripple effect.”
Now go out and start some ripples.
November 18th, 2009 • Comments Off • Tags: askme, culture, science, society •
Today someone proposed the creation of a sub-reddit where scientists could recommend papers to each other. While it’s a nice thought, I can almost guarantee that it’s going to be a failed effort. There are already sites like Faculty of 1000, which try to use panels of experts to recommend good papers. In my experience, they mostly fail at listing things that I want to read.
The main reason such sites are useless is that we scientists are uber-specialized, so what you think is the greatest paper ever will likely have very litle interest for me. It’s not that I don’t want to read about cool discoveries in other fields, it’s just that I don’t have time to. Until they invent the matrix-esque brain-jack for rapid learning, I have to prioritize my time, and my field and my work will always come first.
There are only two systems I’ve found that work well. The first are recommendation systems based on what you’ve read in the past, and what your colleagues are reading. CiteULike, for example, recommends users that have bookmarked similar papers to you, and perusing through their libraries gives me an excellent source of material. The other quality source of recommendations is FriendFeed, where I can subscribe to the feeds of other bioinformaticians with similar interests, and we can swap links to papers and comments about those papers.
Both of these systems are all about building micro-communities, with a focus that you can’t achieve in larger communities like Reddit. In this way, it’s sort of like a decentralized version of departmental journal clubs, or specialized scientific conferences. Any site that ignores the value of creating this type of community is pretty much doomed to failure from the start.
August 1st, 2009 • 1 Comment » • Tags: community, culture, internet, journals, science •
I’ve been using google documents a lot lately, as I like the convenience of being able to close a document at work, then come back home and pick up right where I left off after dinner. It’s got me thinking about this new fangled idea that our digital lives should live in the cloud, though.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my gmail. I just worry that people have no qualms about entrusting their important data exclusively to third parties anymore. Three illustrative stories:
We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.
It’s an eviction; a mass eviction that happened under our noses and we let it happen.
Think, for a second, about what’s in your email archives: phone numbers and addresses of your friends, instructions for getting that tricky system at work to function correctly, love letters, pictures of your family vacation.
Sure there’s a lot of chaff mixed in, but some of this content is irreplaceable. Ever seen the love letters that your grandfather wrote your grandmother? Sure, we’re exchanging sappy poetry in a different medium now, but shouldn’t your grandkids have the same opportunity?
So stop trusting the cloud to keep this stuff safe for you. Set up Thunderbird to keep a local copy of your email. Use Google Docs Download or gdatacopier to keep copies of your online documents. Don’t ever delete local copies of those pictures after you upload them to Flickr. And for the love of pete, stop using services like Hotmail that give you no way to download your mail. Who’s mail is it, anyway?
—-
Update: Some more discussion over at Friend Feed
January 31st, 2009 • 1 Comment » • Tags: culture, internet, tech •
It’s a cliché that too little American talent goes into science, and that too many people go into banking, and that our education system is said to be failing because of those effects. To some substantial effects it must be true.
I found myself on a business trip to Europe and lucky for me I was sitting in business class. Seated not far from me in business class was a young woman who had graduated from Harvard 14 months before and who was working for a major financial institution and she was traveling to Europe and when people travel for that major financial institution they travel in business class. I like to walk when I’m on a plane, so I wandered. I walked back to coach and on that airplane in coach was a distinguished physicist who I had known when I was president of Harvard who I think probably is close to even money to win a Nobel Prize one day. He was going to a conference like professors of physics do and he was going like professors of physics like him go, which is in coach. And I didn’t say anything to either of them, but I thought to myself there was something odd about the reward structure of our society.
–Lawrence Summers
quoted from here, via adaptive complexity
December 18th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, science •
PLoS Genetics: Taken to School: An Interview with the Honorable Judge John E. Jones, III.
Really interesting interview with the judge from the Dover intelligent design case.
December 14th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, law, religion, science •
Boy, I’d hate to be part of the republican leadership right now, faced with trying to piece together a fractured party. It’s always been an uneasy alliance between the religious right and big business/fiscal conservatives, but this year the cracks have turned into a chasm. The wealthy and well educated could give a rats ass about gay marriage. The poor could care less about tax breaks on capital gains.
I see two ways they can rebuild. The first is that Mike Huckabee or someone similar makes a serious play for the party in 2012. He’s got religious credentials, but is less fiscally conservative, because he believes in that “be my brother’s keeper” stuff. I think it will play to the center well, especially with the economy tanking. People are tired of wars, tired of trickle-down economic bullshit – if he can moderate the ‘values’ message a little to appeal to the middle, he could have a shot.
The other route, combining centrist social values with fiscal conservatism is more likely, in my opinion. Here’s why: The GOP is losing young voters, and the base of their party at a phenomenal rate. In just eight years, they’ve gone from a 48/48 split (Gore/Bush) to a 66/32 split between Obama/McCain. Also consider that Prop 8, banning gay marriage in California, was opposed 66 to 34 by young voters.
It’s just unsustainable to build a party on wedge social issues like gay rights. Change is going to happen eventually, so their party would do well get out ahead of it. (comparisons to the civil rights movement in the 60′s seem apt). Leading this side, think of people in the Mitt Romney mold: Unafraid of gay marriage (at least until he had to run for the current GOP’s nomination), but fiscally conservative and pragmatic. See, religious dogma has a way of hampering a politician’s ability to build coalitions through compromise. They’ll still get a grudging evangelical vote, but can focus on playing to the center instead of to a shrinking (and increasingly out-of-touch) right.
Either way, this election has proven that the real base of power is in the grassroots, in the working class, and in 5 and 10 dollar donations from millions of people. Until the GOP finds a face for the party who can connect viscerally with this part of the electorate, as Obama did, they’ll continue to be an opposition party.
November 5th, 2008 • 2 Comments » • Tags: culture, GOP, politics •
@mward asks for marg recipes. Mine goes a little something like this:
1) Get Tequila out of liquor cabinet.
2) Take a swig of tequila, y’know – just to make sure it’s still good.
3) Search pantry for margarita mix unsuccessfuly. Take another shot – y’know – just to help you think.
4) Try the closet, then the other cabinet (goddamn it, I swear we had some margarita mix somwehere…) After finding none, do another shot – yknow, just to help loosen up those neurons.
5) Search the cabinet again, this time by throwing the contents on the kitchen floor. (fuckin’ mix, gotta be here somewhere…). Swig from the bottle liberally to help numb the frustration.
6) Give up, sit in the middle of floor with the bottle of tequila. Suck on limes and shake table salt into your mouth between pulls.
September 8th, 2008 • 3 Comments » • Tags: culture, humor, liquor, recipe •
A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.
If this statistic is accurate, it’s staggering. It also reinforces what most of us already know: The lottery is a tax on the stupid.
June 13th, 2008 • 1 Comment » • Tags: culture, math •
Clay Shirky thinks we’re at a critical point in our society, where we shift away from a passive television culture and use the cognitive surplus to create a participatory culture. Here’s an excerpt, but definitely read the whole thing.
I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”
I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”
So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”
Shirky estimates that if you took all of Wikipedia as a unit of measure — that is, all 2,354,625 articles, with their billions of edits, behind the scenes discussions, and individual contributors — the US’s two hundred billion hours per year of television watching could produce the equivalent of 2,000 wikipedias. That’s a lot of untapped mental activity. He argues, pretty convincingly, that if you could harness even 1% of that time in participatory ways, you’d come up with some pretty amazing stuff. Wikipedia, Youtube, and the rest of the blogosphere agree.
April 30th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, tech •
For those of us who work in tall buildings, riding in an elevator is boringly routine. We step on, push the button, space out, and then exit when we reach our floor. Occasionally, someone travels only one floor, and we make fun of them after they’re gone (“Guess the stairs are broken again”).
Billions of elevator trips are made every day without incident, but every once in a while, something goes horribly wrong. In 1999, Nicholas White stepped onto an elevator after a smoke break, and ended up spending 41 hours trapped between floors.. You can see his descent into madness via the security cam footage here.
Even more frightening is this 2003 story from Houston, where Hitoshi Nikaidoh got trapped in the doors of a departing elevator and was decapitated. His body plummeted to the bottom of the shaft and the woman in the elevator spent nearly an hour trapped inside with a lifeless head. Thankfully, these events are very rare. Only about 26 people per year die in elevator accidents, and most of these are technicians. To put it in perspective, the same number of people die every 5 hours in automobile accidents.
The New Yorker article about White also explores the unseen side of the elevator industry and examines some of the cultural quirks that surround our daily trips from floor to floor:
Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator.
I know that I find myself subconsciously annoyed when someone doesn’t follow these norms. I also find the cultural differences interesting. In East Asian societies, people are much more likely to shoehorn into elevators, then spill out in clown-car fashion. I wonder whether this is a result of overcrowding in Chinese and Japanese cities, and whether our expanded definition of personal space is due to the relative underpopulation of most of the US.
Anyway, the article is lengthy but well-written and fascinating – check it out when you’ve got some time to kill.
Links via dmd’s post on MetaFilter
April 15th, 2008 • 1 Comment » • Tags: culture, video •
It’s hard to pick just one quote from this piece on TV pundits, politics, and orange juice:
There is no spin possible that turns “asking for orange juice” into an issue of elitism or snobbery: there is, in an infinite sea of alternate realities, not one in which asking for orange juice demonstrates an important negative aspect of character. It is stupid. It is aggressively stupid; it is soul-burrowingly stupid; it is mind-fuckingly stupid. It is the kind of stupid that seeps into the rug so that the entire building stinks of stupid for the next ten years whenever the air conditioning comes on. It is the kind of stupid that wounds all those who come into contact with it. It is a stupid that has been rendered physical: it leaves a scar.
. . .
It is difficult, after all, to do anything but just plain laugh at the political “experts” shoved in front of us, experts so incompetent and up their own esteemed asses, at this point, that they really can’t report on anything more substantial than orange juice stories. They can’t do it — it is not a matter of secret bias, they are just not capable. The top “pundits” of cable television weren’t hired for their smarts on the hard issues, they were hired to make ridiculous, off-the-cuff pronouncements on the petty trivialities of the day. They know no more about the concerns of small town Americans than they know about roping cattle or performing a colonoscopy, and yet they will sit on television, in suits costing more than some of the used cars the rest of us drive, and claim expertise on all three.
Read the whole damn thing, and then demand better.
April 15th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, media, politics •
Ghoti, which is pronounced “fish”
March 9th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, language •
Today I had to look up the origin of the phrase “Turtles all the way down. It’s rather amusing:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
January 16th, 2008 • Comments Off • Tags: culture, science •
