Two Cultures
drorzel | June 4, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed they have a news report on complaints about the content of required reading for students entering college. This comes from the National Association of Scholars, a group dedicated to complaining that multiculturalism is corrupting our precious bodily fluids pushing aside the shared heritage of Western civilization, so most of it is pretty predictable. I was surprised by one thing in their list of commonly assigned books this year, though:
What are the freshmen reading? Based on the report's analysis of 290 programs (excluding books that are required parts of courses),…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common).
Every so often, somebody…
drorzel | December 14, 2009Like every other media outlet, Slate has a Best Books of 2009 list, in this case featuring one book chosen by each of their 22 editors. Editor in chief Jacob Weisberg chose Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, and writes:
If, like me, you didn't study much science after high school, this absorbing narrative will make you appreciate the gravity of your mistake. At one level, it is simply an enchanting group biography of the great British discoverers Joseph Banks, Humphrey Davy, and William Herschel, and their relationships with the likes of Keats, Coleridge, Byron and the Shelleys. At another,…
drorzel | November 28, 2009The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annual rant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By LOUISA GILDER
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By RICHARD HOLMES
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places By BILL STREEVER
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Strangest…
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.…
drorzel | September 1, 2009It's probably a good thing that I don't have full-text access to Mark Slouka's article in Harper's, with the title "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school." Just the description in this Columbia Journalism Review piece makes me want to hunt down the author and belt him with a Norton anthology:
According to the article itself, the dehumanizing element of the school system (especially universities) is actually its focus on producing businesspeople and "ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy." But "nothing speaks more clearly to…
drorzel | August 22, 2009Via Bora on FriendFeed, a cute little art project from MIT that takes a name, scans the Web for mentions of that name, and produces a color-coded bar categorizing the various mentions of that name. Here's what you get if you put my name in:
You can click on it for a bigger image, that makes the labels easier to read (these are screencaps edited in GIMP, because in true MIT Media Lab fashion, the whol site is a Flash thing with no way to link directly to anything). It's nice, and all, but there's something a little bit funny about it. Something... missing. Let's see if we can't illuminate the…
drorzel | July 6, 2009One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization.
An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences:
According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
sheril | March 18, 2009Last week we told you about the NYAS Two Cultures Conference coming up on May 9, 2009 in celebration of the 50 year anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede lecture. Politicians, academics, writers, and the media will converge to discuss
science and society--including keynote addresses by E.O. Wilson, John
Porter, and Dean Kamen.
Today we're pleased to announce that the website for the event featuring the full schedule is now available here. Tickets are going fast so we encourage readers to take a look at the agenda and register soon. We hope to see you there!
bioephemera | March 11, 2009
As of today, SEED has a new look and a new occasional writer. . . me! ;)
See my little essay on Christopher Reiger's Synesthesia #1 here, on the culture page. Then go explore the rest of the site. . . the new design is pretty sweet. They even have a SCIART tag for pieces like mine.
drorzel | February 6, 2009Not long after I posted my comments about textbook prices, I went to a panel discussion on teaching, where a social scientist made an interesting observation about the ways different disciplines interact with books.
In the humanities, the whole point of the class is to discuss the books. Nothing useful can be done until and unless the students have had the chance to do the reading. This is why humanities classes tend to let out early on the first day of the term, and have a full class on the last day of the term: the important reading has to be done before class.
In the sciences, on the other…
drorzel | December 7, 2008Carl Zimmer sent me a message via Facebook, which made me think I might owe the New York Times an apology for last week's ranting. Publishers Weekly has come out with their list of the best books of the year, and they do even worse than the Times: not one of the 27 books in their "Nonfiction" category are about science-- the closest they come is probably Gladwell's Outliers.
Better yet, in a move that will no doubt delight my colleagues here at ScienceBlogs, they have an entire category on their list for "Religion," but no category for "Science." Fantastic.
I'm not quite as bothered by this…
drorzel | December 5, 2008A few days ago, I complained again about the relative lack of science books in the New York Times "Notable Books of 2008" list. Yesterday, one of the big stories was CNN axing its entire science unit, such as it was, which drew comments from lots of blogs (and more whose links I can't be bothered to track down).
I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, these two are related. I'm not saying one caused the other, but that they're both symptoms of the same thing: the broad lack of respect for science among educated people. (Which I've ranted about before.)
One of the…
drorzel | December 3, 2008Last year, around this time, I posted a rant about the lack of science books in the New York Times's "Notable Books of 2007." While I was out of town last week, they posted this year's list. So, have things improved?
Yes and no. They do, in fact, have two books that are unquestionably science books on the list: THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (which I also reviewed), and THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson.
By my count, they list 52 non-fiction titles, meaning that a whole 3.8…
drorzel | October 14, 2008Via Physics and Physicists, a breathtaking blog at the Washington Post proudly proclaiming the author's ignorance of algebra:
I am told that algebra is everywhere - it's in my iPod, beneath the spreadsheet that calculates my car payments, in every corner of my building. This idea freaks me out because I just can't see it. I sent out a query on my blog last week asking, Who among us in the real world uses algebra? Can you explain how it works?
This is exactly the sort of intellectual innumeracy I have ranted about countless times. The whole concept of the blog (subtitled "A year reliving high…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
drorzel | July 29, 2008Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend's two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now:
My rant was actually anticipated by this post at "It's The Thought That Counts,", which was pointed out to me in comments.
Janet had the first direct response, with a later follow-up speculating about the reasons for the divide. As I said in one of my own comment threads, I think a lot of it has to do with…
drorzel | May 9, 2008Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.
Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:
When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…
drorzel | March 31, 2008Academics of all sorts are highly protective of their scholarly territory. It's an unavoidable consequence of the process of becoming an academic-- I've often joked that getting a Ph.D. requires you to become the World's Leading Expert in something that nobody else cares about. To make it through grad school, no matter what discipline you're in, you need to really like what you're doing, and that produces a tendency to angrily attack anyone who trespasses on "your" turf.
There's an interesting difference, though, in the way that scholars from the humanities and socials sciences approach the…