Poisoning the Minds of our Youth

By Evan — — Science

Still going through all the boxes of stuff from childhood. Right now I’m going through college notes, homework, papers, and tests.

I have no idea why I saved this stuff. Maybe I was thinking that if I became a professor at a teaching college, I could reuse some of the homework and exam questions? But ten years later, these papers were all clearly written by Someone Else. Even if for some reason I wanted to throw my career away and jump back into science, I’d have to start all over anyway. Educational value of these N cubic feet of paper? Basically zero.

Still, there some gems in there. One of my favorites is actually an appendix from our frosh lab manuals, A Guide To Technical Report Writing:

One of the most common criticisms of technical reports is that they are not
are not written in a sufficiently brief and concise form. To write succinctly
is often difficult. Writing in a rather loose and informal style is much easier,
but it simply cannot be tolerated in scientific writing today for some very
good reasons. The editor of the Astrophysical Journal wrote
the following paragraph:

The present accelerated growth of this Journal in common with the other
scientific journals, makes it imperative that authors (in their own interest)
exercise utmost restraint and economy in the writing of their papers
and in the selection and presentation of material in the form of tables,
line drawings, and halftones. In spite of the obvious need for such restraint,
the Editor regrets that authors continue to write in the relaxed style common
a century ago; moreover, the temptation to reproduce large masses of IBM
printouts and tracings from automatic recording equipment appears too
great for most authors to resist. The Astrophysical Journal
will enforce stricter standards in the future with respect to these matters.

The present change for publication in the leading physics journals is over $70
per page. Thus, it is important that you learn to write your reports in such a
way that unnecessary words are eliminated and data is reduced to a minimum.
This generally calls for some rewriting.

You don’t say!

Well, one thing is clear: no honest-to-goodness bad writer could possibly string together so many unnecessary passive phrases, nominalizations, repetitive words, and other stylistic blunders — so what is this piece really all about? My theory is that it’s actually a meta-commentary about scientific prose. Like Alan Sokal in the famous Sokal Hoax, the author is trying to raise the community’s awareness of the problem by mocking it at a fundamental level. The piece even goes so far as to advise students to learn the principles of good writing by “read[ing] reports and articles appearing in various engineering and scientific journals, such as The Physical Review.” Such acute, insider wit can only come from someone who has been seething inwardly about this issue for years. (The prim little tone of admonishment is just the icing on the cake.)

Unfortunately, unlike the Sokal affair, nobody ever came forward to admit that A Guide To Technical Report Writing was a joke. Thus, a hapless freshman physics major skimming through their lab notebook might actually have believed that it constituted real advice! So while I appreciate our nameless author’s cri de coeur about the state of scientific writing, I’m not sure it was worth the risk of confusing the students.

Then again, the odds that the students actually read that part of the lab notebook are slim to none. I know I didn’t.

Homework Problem for Next Class: Rewrite the first paragraph of the excerpted piece to say the same thing, using 50% fewer words, thus saving serious $$ when you publish said paragraph in the Astrophysical Journal. Show your work.

Fool Me Once, Can’t Get Fooled Again

By Evan — — Tech

Yesterday, an ominous message appeared in my inbox from one of our key engineers, via our bug tracking system:

Didn’t get my visa. Moving back to Calgary. 🙁

CLOSED / WONTFIX

Oh, crap!

Okay, I realized that it was April 1st and all. And having to pack up and move back to Canada all of a sudden? That sounds fishy too. On the other hand, closing all your bugs WONTFIX, that seems awfully serious. That couldn’t be a joke… could it?

My friend Jay says I shouldn’t have been fooled for a second. “Dude, engineers never voluntarily update their bug states. That was your red flag right there.”

Ten years working in the Valley, and still so naive. Sigh. Live and learn.

Back Off Man, I’m a Scientist

By Evan — — Science

Forget driving. Forget voting. Forget your first real job. Forget moving into your first apartment. Forget true love and true heartbreak. In this country, you know you’ve finally become a real grown-up when your parents finally force you to take away all your boxes of crap.

Oh, I managed to hold them off for a decade, but finally my folks decided that they were redecorating. Which in 20- and 30-something circles is known as “playing the nuclear option.” Fortunately, their timing was pretty good, since I was already on a quest to find my long-lost college diploma. See, my insurance agent told me that he could get me a “Scientist” discount on my car insurance, as long as I could provide proof that I had a Bachelor of Science degree.

Don’t get me wrong — I protested that I wasn’t a working scientist, far from it. I told him that these days I couldn’t do a path integral to save my life. I told him about the thermometers I dropped in undergrad lab, about the spontaneous magnet quench back in grad school — the head grad student gave me the evil eye for that, but that totally wasn’t my fault! I told my agent that I had decided for the good of humanity to stay as far away from the lab as possible. “I do English…y stuff right now,” I told him. “One of the proudest moments in my career was when a software engineer chastised me, saying, ‘I don’t know what your degree is in, English or whatever, but I have a degree in Mathematics.'” (That’s when you know you’ve really made it as a tech writer.)

But my agent said all that didn’t matter, just send him a Xerox of the degree and voila. So thanks to my folks, and the estimated 65 grams of fine particulate dust I inhaled during the arduous search process, I am now saving some serious $$ on my car insurance! Who needs that silly lizard anyway? Does he have a Bachelor’s degree… in SCIENCE?

Anyway, I’m glad to see the ol’ diploma doing some good again. People say college is overrated, and that’s probably true — unless you’re a Scientist like me. After all, another 1,350 years of driving, and this baby just about oughtta pay for itself.

Yes, I Will Link to You, Just See if I Don’t

By Evan — — Culture

Chad Orzel has a complaint about LiveJournal culture:

[P]eople in LiveJournal land have never really grasped the concept of the permanent link. Possibly because the default settings for the software make it fairly difficult to find the correct URL, or maybe because that have that little feature that automatically inserts a link given only a username. Whatever the reason, LiveJournal people tend to just link to the front page of whatever journal they’re pointing to, and it drives me nuts.

…

Why this particular behavior is so prevalent on LiveJournal, I have no idea. Regular blogs long ago got used to the idea of linking directly to archive pages, and while linkrot is still a problem (particularly since both Blogspot and Movable Type are prone to trashing site databases), they’re almost always good for a few weeks or a month. LiveJournal has never gotten the memo, though, and it’s maddening. If I go out of town for two days, I don’t even bother trying to follow links in most LiveJournal posts, because none of them go anywhere useful.

Hear, hear! And while we’re out saying mean things about the linking habits of LJers, allow me to air my pet peeve about LiveJournal culture: what’s with the whole, “May I link to this please?” You just posted a page on the public Internet for Pete’s sake. Linking is what pages on the public Internet are for.

The weirdest aspect of this little cultural tic is that unlike most other blogging systems, LiveJournal already offers built-in security settings, settings that enable you to mark posts as “private” so they’re unreadable and unlinkable for the outside world. Thanks to LiveJournal’s design, no LJ user ever has to post on the icky public Internet if they don’t want to.

Anyway. Asking “May I link to this?” is mousy and lame. Show a little testicular/ovarian fortitude and just link already.

Two Levers Labeled ‘Hope’ and ‘Fear’

By Evan — — Science

Chad Orzel, one of my favorite science bloggers, is trying to answer the question, What should everyone know about science? He suggests these three themes:

  1. Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts
  2. Science is an essential human activity.
  3. Anyone can do science.

While #1 and #3 both seem sound, I think #2 defines science far too broadly. To blockquote:

2) Science is an essential human activity. You’ll often hear people who study art and literature wax rhapsodic about how the arts are the core of what makes us human– Harold Bloom attributes it all to Shakespeare, but you can find similar arguments for every field of art. Great paintings, famous sculptures, great works of music (classical only, mind– none of that noise you kids listen to)– all of these are held to capture the essence of humanity.

You don’t hear that said about science, but you should. Science is essential to our nature, because at its most basic, science consists of looking at the world and saying “Huh. I wonder why that happened?” Science is applied curiosity, and there’s no more human quality than that. (“Bloody-mindedness” is a close second.)

I know #2 sounds good. First, it’s flattering, particularly for those of us who were trained in a scientific field or who simply just like science a lot. Second, it’s a good hard stab at all those nasty tweedy humanities professors who preen about how scientists don’t know anything about literature and art, but who can’t themselves even be bothered to learn the frickin’ Second Law of Thermodynamics. Sheesh!

But — science isn’t “applied curiosity.” Most things with vertebrae have applied curiosity (balanced by applied cowardice).

When I think about the nature of science, I’m reminded of something Brad DeLong said about the The Law of Large Numbers: “This is the principal insight of the science of statistics. It is an important insight. It is a powerful insight. It is also not an obvious insight — that’s what makes it powerful and important.” The Law of Large Numbers (and related insights) are powerful, important, and non-obvious precisely because our minds do not naturally think in these terms. It takes training.

Greek logic is less than 3000 years old. Modern science is about 400 years old. Modern statistical methods are even younger than that. Meanwhile, storytelling has been with us, oh, ever since we had language. Singing possibly longer.

Or another way of putting this is: tell the average citizen, “All studies indicate that wearing a bicycle helmet drastically reduce incidence of head injuries,” and at best you’ll get a vague nod. If you want that same person to actually wear a helmet, you need to tell them something like this: “Dude, I just saw this bike messenger flip over his handlebars, slamming his head into the curb — and the guy simply got up and walked off, with a big old chunk out of his helmet.” Whoa.

Perhaps what makes this confusing is that you can harness science’s power without being all that scientifically inclined. I mean, John Hagee drives a car and flies in airplanes and everything. In fact, science is so powerful that “it works, bitches” despite the fact that it’s so new and so shallowly rooted in our primate skulls. Of the entire spectrum of human behavior — all the appalling things and all the wonderful things too — science might well be one of the least “intrinsic” behaviors we have.

As for what all this says about us as a species, that’s well above my pay grade.

The Evil Overlord Constructs a Literary Conspiracy Theory

By Evan — — Writing

Jennifer Pelland, talented short story writer, tireless chauffeur for various snot-nosed VPXers, and all around Good Egg, finds herself freshly irritated by the literary vs. genre divide:

I emailed a literary review journal based at my alma mater to see if they’d make an exception to the “we don’t review genre fiction” rule for an alum, and was told that no, they only reviewed “literary” fiction.

I meant to chime in with some hopefully soothing words, “Don’t worry, ‘literary’ as that journal defines it is really a genre,” aka the Key Lime Pie Theory of Literary Fiction. But one of Jen’s commenters, apintrix, already had an interesting take on that:

[Pierre] Bourdieu’s theory, in a nutshell, is that part of what has defined the discourse of “literature” or the literary since C19, as well as “high art” more generally, is a resistance to commercial or market pressures– the genius aesthetic, basically. The more your art is separated from the market, the more “pure” and “literary” it is. There’s something to that idea, I think, beyond it being “just another genre”; particularly because one of the central oppositions in the “literary field” is precisely between literary and genre fictions, which Bourdieu might say are “genre” because they cater to particular markets, and are explicitly heteronomous between the field of actual capital and cultural capital.

(The name “Pierre Bourdieu” rang a bell. As it turns out, David Brooks mentions him in Bobos in Paradise, which I’m embarrassed to admit I even read, let alone found amusing in parts, so let’s please just pretend I didn’t say any of that. Good? Good.)

Anyway, as apintrix observes, it’s interesting that “… ‘genre’ fiction appropriates the language of the market and of industry — authors ‘working hard’, being ‘productive’, all this stuff — while in literary fiction you’re more liable to see language like ‘inspiration’ or ‘transcendence’.” That does seem like a fundamental difference, not to mention a fairly new idea. Our ancient literary predecessors were certainly concerned with winning popular acclaim and economic success. If this has changed, I suppose the only fair thing to do is to blame Rousseau.

Ultimately, I think this is related to the argument sketched out in James Miller’s Is Bad Writing Necessary?, which discusses the tension between deliberately opaque writers like Theodor Adorno and deliberately transparent writers like George Orwell. To the Opaques, the fact that the Transparents have more popular acclaim and influence outside the academy “fuels their suspicion that plain talk is politically perfidious — reinforcing, rather than radically challenging, the cultural status quo.”

As quoted in Miller’s original article, Katha Pollitt has a scathing response:

When intellectuals on the left write in a way that excludes “all but the initiated few,” [Pollitt] remarked, what almost inevitably results is “a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authoritarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing, except maybe a bit of harmless cross-dressing, is even expected to happen outside the classroom.”

The parallels between Literary Fiction and Opaque Non-fiction are striking. To what Pollitt said, I can only add that if I were The Man, Evil Overlord and Oppressor of all that is Radical and True, I could think of no better allies than those who exhort their colleagues to remain safe in a self-constructed academic ghetto. After all, shooting radical writers is messy and counterproductive. The optimal strategy is to convince them to endlessly chase their own tails.

California Ballot Proposition Algorithm

By Evan — — News

It’s election time this Tuesday in California, and you know what that means. Yes, once again we have a raft of ideas so bad they couldn’t be shoved through the Legislature shiny new ballot propositions offered for our consideration.

Fortunately, I have painstakingly developed a straightforward algorithm for evaluating ballot propositions. It goes something like this:

Is the proposition related to water infrastructure?
  If yes, do my two friends who are professional water engineers support it?
    If yes, vote YES.
  Else vote NO.
Else vote NO.

A small caveat: Lobbyists are hip to the fact that Californians tend to vote NO on propositions all things being equal, and so sometimes they cleverly craft a proposition such that a NO vote actually implements the opposite of what the voters might think it does. So the algorithm only works if you first unscramble any Bizarro Ballot Propositions such that NO really means NO, not YES. Me am not understanding? You am not understanding? Good!

Anyway, let’s apply the algorithm. Since none of the propositions relate to water engineering, we fall through to NO on each one. What could be simpler?

But wait — we need to check our work. Let’s pretend for a moment that we don’t have access to this powerful algorithm, and actually look at these propositions one-by-one:

  • Prop. 91: Ensures that fuel taxes are spent on automobile infrastructure rather than public transportation infrastructure, thus helping maintain our state’s traditional massive subsidies of unsustainable transportation systems. For what it’s worth, this one was such a stinker that apparently its backers have bailed out. Analysis = NO. Algorithm = NO.
  • Prop. 92: Lowers community college fees from $20 to $15 per unit and fixes a particular minimum percentage of the state budget for community colleges. Frankly, $20/unit is a fantastic deal for two years of college education, and further subsidies are already available to low-income students. I might support an expansion of these subsidies, but not a general fee cap. What’s far more pernicious is that this is yet another proposition that locks in a certain percentage of expenditures to particular interest, making it even more impossible to actually produce a budget. Analysis = NO. Algorithm = NO.
  • Prop. 93: Reduces term limits to 12 years, but allows 12 years service in one house. My cousin grudgingly supports this one, but would rather see a limit like 30 years in the legislature. I’d rather see 30 years, too. I’d vote for that. I’d be even more excited about lifting term limits altogether — all we’ve done with term limits is trade our corrupt legislators for corrupt, stupid legislators. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, Prop. 93 is tinkering around the margins of a dumb idea for no obviously good reason. Pathetic, go away, Analysis = NO. Algorithm = NO.
  • Prop. 94-97: Indian gaming propositions. If Superbowl ads are to be believed, if you vote YES, you’re fucking over Native Americans. And if you vote NO, you’re … fucking over Native Americans. What to do? As it turns out, these propositions are simply how Schwarzenegger is implementing his payback to certain tribes for backing him in the 2006 election. While it’s admirable that Schwarzenegger sees fit to deal so honestly with his political supporters, I see no particular reason that I should bother to help him out here. Analysis = NO, NO, NO, NO. Algorithm = NO, NO, NO, NO.

Uncanny! The algorithm works perfectly. Tune in next election, when we’ll find out whether the algorithm works on English as an Official State Language, or whatever dipshit thing they’re putting up there next time around.

All In

By Evan — — Personal

As any Texas Hold’em pro will tell you, it’s a very bad feeling when you say the magic words “all in”… and your opponent flips over his pocket aces to make four-of-a-kind.

Or at least, so I hear.

four aces versus a royal flush

I wouldn’t know from personal experience, because on this particular instance, I was the guy holding the royal flush.

In any given seven-card hand, the probability of a four of a kind is 0.17%, of a straight flush, .027%. As for the probability of four aces versus a royal flush, this is left as an exercise for the writer, when he is not as sleepy as he is right now.