Filed under: Events by Jeremy on Wednesday, 14th July 2010 at 8:00 am
My grandmother turns one hundred years old today. Every time I visit her I ask her about what it was like to grow up on the frontier in Saskatchewan in the first half of the twentieth century. That was a long time ago.
My favourite story, one I’ll never forget and one I think of often when I’m complaining about the heat or the rain, goes like this. My grandmother, who was seven or eight years old at the time, was asked by her parents to go and check on the cattle which were a few miles away. She got on her horse and, after riding a bit, noticed there was a coyote following her. Knowing that the coyote was hoping for my grandmother to fall of the horse so he could have a quick, easy meal, she got scared and hightailed it back to the farm house. Here’s the good part. She had to lie to her parents about why she came back (she told them she had a stomach ache) because if she told them the truth they would tell her she was being ridiculous and to go back out there. Apparently, being stalked as prey by a coyote didn’t count as a good excuse for an eight year old to not do her chores. Those were different times.
When I look around now at people who are dying without air-conditioning, I like to think about what it would be like if we were all transported back to Paynton, Saskatchewan in 1918. In some ways we’ve come a long way since 1910, the year my grandmother was born, but in other ways, we’ve gone back a long way.
Happy Birthday Grandma. (I’ll tell you in person because I know you don’t use the internet. If only I could get on the parliamentary channel…)
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Tuesday, 13th July 2010 at 7:32 pm
The Atlantic had an article a couple years ago asking “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Did I read it? Nope. Because it smelled like an idea concocted more to raise people’s eyebrows than to raise their intelligence. Is that a good reason to not have read it? Nope. Did the article actually contain something interesting? I have no idea–I didn’t read it.
All that to say that I can think of one way Google is making us smarter. Before Google and the internet, the only thing you had to do to win a playground or barroom argument was to intimidate whomever it was you were arguing with. I don’t even mean physically. You just had to sound confident or right without necessarily being right. Try to do that now. It’ll work for about 15 minutes until someone looks up whatever it is you’re arguning about on their IPhone. You can’t intimidate the internet.
There are people who still try and power their way through arguments but, if you’re keeping track, you’ll notice they’re all above a certain age. It’s a bygone era that left us in about 2002.
Think about how this shifts the balance of social power. People used to be able to get by on sounding smart–now they actually have to be smart. S’probably a good thing
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 12th July 2010 at 9:35 am
Having now been immersed in two different scientific fields (ecology and epidemiology), I find it a little ridiculous when people try and characterize who a scientist is and what as scientist does. The scientists I’ve worked with in both ecology and epidemiology are so different–mostly because they have different priorities and different sets of problems–that I can’t imagine trying to reconcile them into one idea of what a scientist is. And given that ecology and epidemiology are both biological sciences, I can only imagine the differences are only stronger when you leave the realm of biology.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from these attempts to discover who scientists are and what they do. Steven Shapin has a long history of looking into scientific research as a social phenomenon, most famously in the book Leviathan and the Air Pumpwhere he and co-author Simon Schaffer looked at the battle to define what knowledge was between English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and Irish scientist (or what would have been called natural philosopher in the day) Robert Boyle . Whenever I read Shapin I find things I disagree with and little nuggets of great ideas that I had never thought about before. Shapin put out an article a couple days ago in the now web-only Seed magazine called The identity of the modern scientist is, in every possible sense, a work in progress. Here’s a clip:
Scientists, perhaps to a greater degree than any other sector of society, get to define what the world is like. They may not always be the most highly rewarded people in our communities, but they are among the most influential: When reality speaks, it speaks through them, and what we know about the world, we know because we have found grounds to recognize their competence and to trust them or the institutions they represent.
Our understanding of who these men and women are is central to the authority of modern science, and if, as seems to be the case, there are emerging problems with that authority, then a clarification of the scientist’s identity is in order. It’s not so easy, however, to know exactly who the scientist is. Public perception of the scientist probably owes much to the idea of mastering something known as the “scientific method” (even though there is no consensus on what exactly this consists of), but we also define scientists through some notion of integrity — an independent voice speaking truth to power. So any perceived problems concerning scientists’ moral makeup are of great consequence: Scientists without credibility are culturally impotent, and science without credibility is a meaningless enterprise.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Friday, 9th July 2010 at 10:10 am
It’s Friday. It’s hot. Hopefully everyone is at the pool like I’ve been the last three days. In case you’re actually at your computer, I’ve got three things:
Dan Ariely, behaviour economist at Duke, wants you to participate in his new study. Though he describes it as “fun”, it’s more weird than anything else but I still like to participate in these things because, when the results come out (which is apparently in two weeks), I like that there’s a little part of me in the results. Click here to go to the study.
Here’s a description in the Guardian about the fiasco at scienceblogs.com when the site sold PepsiCo (the makers of Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana etc.) the rights to create a blog on the site about nutrition. The issue is a little dry but it really got me thinking. The bottom line is that we don’t trust a word out of corporations mouth but we buy all their stuff. Something doesn’t seem right. More on this next week.
Lastly, the cover feature in the new Maisonneuve asks seven music critics to write about the bands they hate with only one rule: you can’t pick Nickelback. Here’s what they did pick: Animal Collective, Broken Social Scene, Joanna Newsom, Neon Indian, Radiohead, Sonic Youth and Sufjan Stevens. Not what you expected? Unfortunately, you can only read those essays in the print issue but they have an online supplement with a couple more band-blastings in their online supplement. And one of the interns picked Pavement. “Pavement’s music isn’t that good,” he writes. Hoping he’s not an editorial intern with deep and insightful passages like that. You had it coming intern.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Thursday, 8th July 2010 at 8:45 am
Sometimes I wish this country was run more like a tree planting camp: with people who work hard for themselves, helped others out when they need it and party until you’re drinking offsale in top of a boxcar in the train yard in The Pas, Manitoba once a week.
That’s why I may vote NDP in the next election. I may have voted NDP in the past. In my 12 year voting career, I’ve never been passionate enough about a candidate to actually remember who I voted for, but Jack Layton just took a step closer with his tree planting crewboss-like pep talk in the Globe and Mail:
“I think we might be a little quick to the draw to say ‘Oh, it’s too hot, let’s turn on the AC.’ We don’t need to be freezing,” Mr. Layton said. “On days where it’s this hot, Toronto, suck it up.”
Yeah. He just told Canada’s biggest city to suck it up (and I assume it’s also a “that goes for the rest of you too” message). That’s the kind of leadership I want. Of course, in a planting camp when you suck it up people can tell and people appreciate it. Not so for a country. Too bad too.
Filed under: Create by Jeremy on Tuesday, 6th July 2010 at 8:38 am
I found this video over at Brain Pickings which is always a great repository of creative ideas. By minute two of this graffiti-animated abstract recapitulation of evolution I was already exhausted by the work and thought that was put into it by its creator (or in this case, maybe Creator) Blu–and then it went on for eight more minutes. Brain Pickings came up with a simultaneously concise and descriptive two word description of it: Lo-fi Darwinism. Check out the rest of the post here and another great Blu video here.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Monday, 5th July 2010 at 10:56 am
I wanted Ghana to win both because it would help me in my pool and I wanted to see an African team make it as far as possible on their home continent. Although I slept through most of the second half and most of overtime, I woke up for the most exciting–and controversial–part.
As the last seconds ticked off the clock, Ghana had a shot at an essentially open net which saw the ball flying toward goal until a Uruguayan player used both his hands to knock the ball out, preventing a goal but getting himself ejected from the game. Did he cheat?
Bill Easterly, who draws analogies between all current events and development, addressed the issue in a short post:
On one hand: “Suarez realized his team would surely lose if he let the ball go past his hands and lawfully and rationally chose to take the penalty to give his team a chance”
On the other: “intentionally breaking the rule to prevent a loss was unforgivably unsportsmanlike”
Easterly goes on to add that, “If it pays to break the rules, they must be bad rules.”
My opinion is a mixture of all these thoughts. I don’t think it was cheating because both teams have the same rules available to them. If breaking a rule is to your advantage, it’s not cheating to break it BUT the rule should be changed (i.e. an automatic goal). And lastly, even if I don’t think it was cheating, I do think it was hugely unsportsmanlike, though, in the heat of the game, I would probably do the same thing.
Filed under: Ideas by Jeremy on Friday, 2nd July 2010 at 8:00 am
I feel like I’ve been hammering away at the depressing and intense posts. Considering it’s a holiday weekend, I decided to go back and find more lighthearted things that I’ve put aside including a sweet talk from Douglas Adams.
Ancient Whale + Killer Shark = Hypercarnivorous Whale (Wired: Science)–If that headline doesn’t catch your eye, nothing will. “The longest of Leviathan’s teeth measure about 14 inches including the root, more than 40 percent longer than those of today’s sperm whales. And, Lambert notes, the longest tooth of Sue, one of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex specimens yet found, measures only 10.6 inches from root to tip.” And it’s named after Herman Melville who penned Moby Dick.
News from the Moon! (Starts With a Bang!)–”Back when the space race was in its heyday in the late 1960s, it became clear that the United States was going to beat the Soviet Union to landing a man on the Moon. (That’s Neil photographing Buzz, above.) But that didn’t mean the Soviet Union wasn’t going to do something spectacular in their own right.” High resolution photos of the moon find a Soviet moonlander lost for 39 years–and then they shoot lasers at it.
And lastly, a talk by the late Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Last Chance to See–my favourite Adams’ book). Adams was truly a brilliant mind. If you can find a copy of Last Chance to See, read it. And if you like biology and Adams, watch this (h/t richarddawkins.net):
But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from these attempts to discover who scientists are and what they do. Steven Shapin has a long history of looking into scientific research as a social phenomenon, most famously in the book 
Sometimes I wish this country was run more like a tree planting camp: with people who work hard for themselves, helped others out when they need it and party until you’re drinking offsale in top of a boxcar in the train yard in The Pas, Manitoba once a week.
I wanted Ghana to win both because it would help me in my pool and I wanted to see an African team make it as far as possible on their home continent. Although I slept through most of the second half and most of overtime, I woke up for the most exciting–and controversial–part.
