the importance of stupidity in scientific research
“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full
“I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.”
For me, it is that I want to be rid of the departmental/institutional/national policies that make it difficult to do science - so that I can do pure research that follows my own mind and desire to immerse myself in the unknown. Which is inherently impossible to do in the system we have set up. A person like me, without credentials, and often even with, cannot have that freedom to attack problems and spend my life/time/energy/mind on solving them. Obviously I would need to learn more to attack these problems, but given that I appear to be stupid in the traditional sense (the sense where you must answer all questions correctly on a test or else you are stupid), it is hard to get to any other space.
biocurious x cambrian genomics
one year later, everything being realized! everything makes so much sense in hindsight.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit
books and music vs. sat scores
what depresses me most about these charts is not the stretched assumptions and “correlation doesn’t mean causation” problem, but rather the fact that most of the literature books are required reading in high school / middle school english classes. why don’t people read things outside of what’s assigned to them? :( or is that they are assigned reading because they gained popularity/meaning first?
http://booksthatmakeyoudumb.virgil.gr
really fascinating databases though, regardless of what conclusions you get from them…if you move past the shock value of the charts, and look at the data yourself.
According to Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist who studies female career trajectories, women are stretched in even more directions than that; she and her collaborators at the Center for Talent Innovation studied the motivations of men and women at work and found that while men’s primary incentives are relatively simple—money and power—women are motivated by seven discrete factors. “It’s not just time for family. Women want meaning and purpose in their work. They value great colleagues. They also like to give back to society in terms of the work they do, some healing of the planet, and they want flexibility, which is not the same as family stuff—it’s so that they can have a life,” said Hewlett. “Women have much more complex goals, but they also do want money and power. They recognize you’re likely to have much more control over your life if you have those.”
uh huh…..
http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/creative-ambition-versus-financially-stable-job
prayers and stuff
and better, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-boston-bombers-were-muslim-it-shouldnt-matter-this-is-why-it-does/275154/
perfecting a girl named mana
http://illusion.scene360.com/art/39433/perfecting-a-girl-named-mana/#.URXoex04uSk
if only i could draw.
holy fracking sheez
let’s talk about mining someday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mining_Act_of_1872
guys, this is interesting and relevant, i swear. sometimes i wish ayn rand was still alive so i could be friends with her, except i would probably really hate her, but at least she’d have a huge brain to pick.
i don’t know what to know anymore
“It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.”
“Fast-forward to 1988: I am raped by an acquaintance the night before my graduation from college. The next morning, before donning cap and gown, I stumble into the University Health Services building to report the crime. I’m advised not to press charges. “They’ll smear you,” I’m told by the female psychologist assigned to my case. I don’t want to be smeared. I’ve got a life to live. Twenty-five years later, while watching CNN lament the effects of the Steubenville rape on two promising lives—the rapists’, not the victim’s—I’ll hold two competing thoughts: nothing has changed; I wish I’d been braver. I decide to Google my rapist’s name, something I’ve never done in the quarter-century since the crime. His promise, I note, has been duly fulfilled. He’s successful. He’s married—to a woman who recently spoke on a “Lean In” panel with Sheryl Sandberg.”
“It’s 1999. I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. I’m thrilled when I hear this: a new job; self-reliance; the gift of time to do the work I’ve been dreaming of since childhood. The book is sold on the basis of a proposal and a first chapter under the title Newswhore, which is the insult often lobbed at us both externally and from within our own ranks—a way of noting, with a combination of shame and black humor, the vulture-like nature of our livelihood, and a means of reclaiming, as I see it, the word “whore,” since I want to write about sexual and gender politics as well. Random House changes the book’s title to Shutterbabe, which a friend came up with. I beg for Shuttergirl instead, to reclaim at least “girl,” as Lena Dunham would so expertly do years later. Or what about Develop Stop Fix? Anything besides a title with the word “babe” in it.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/173743/my-so-called-post-feminist-life-arts-and-letters
