Science : Journalism :: Science Fiction : Punditry

[I've been boring myself with this one all week, now it's your turn. On the plus side, it should be out of my head now.]

Even though I've been committing some half-assed versions of it lately, I'm not a big fan of science journalism. Or maybe that's not quite correct: I like the stuff in here when I read it, and the various popular science magazines can be OK for fields I'm unfamiliar with, even if one of them was once so foolish as to include my photo once (the last time I saw my name in print, I think). My occasional viewing of the NYT science section has revealed a general readability and even Will Saletan can occasionally be trenchant as he parrots it. And I like fantasizing about science too. No the problem is less what's written, and more the readers. I don't mind opening eyes and instilling a desire for greater understanding (again, I've enjoyed popularly styled reports recently in areas I was totally ignorant), and I'm all for inquiry, but it annoys me when dumb people read a breezy piece, with their own agendas on their backs like monkeys, and think they have it down. It annoys me even more when those people are influential.

I think it's John McG's fault that this came across my attention. According to the poster,

[a cited USA Today article] also contains some worthwhile comments on the danger of politicizing science, as well as in pretending that science can resolve contentious policy debates.

Yes, you have to beware of people using their credentials to forward political (or market) agendas, but science isn't something that bears the weight of opinion as obviously as everyone seems to think. Just because theories can be developed and institutionalized to a degree, it's rare that this stuff sifts through peer review for very long. It may take an extra convincing argument to sway the establishment, but at the end, science is interpretation of facts and measurements, while politics is interpretation of opinions. Ideally, opinions are grounded in facts, but they sure don't have to be.

Facts enrich opinions more than opinions enrich facts. You do have to be wary of the latter, whatever the source. Still, I wish I had more sources of science policy opinion.* When scientists write editorials they tend to be either dreadful (and USA Today and Volokh are right that the opinion is often more funding) or bombastic (which is more fun since there are a lot of earnest deniers out there, but I'm still glad I skipped Stephen Jay Gould deriding The Bell Curve at novel length). In the opposite case, when professional opinion writers get their hands on scientific points, it's nothing short of a train wreck. It's the worse with conservative pundits, because conservatism, by definition, is a set of opinions that's been reinforced for a while. The liberation from a justifying set of facts for those opinions may be a newer development in the movement. Certainly they're more crass than I remember as a kid.

[Is this what happened to economics? I had just finished mocking supply side theorists last night when it occurred to me that Milton Friedman shouldn't really be called a lightweight. I don't know if he can be blamed for skyrocketing the national debt in flush times, favoring short-term speculation over real investment, or a suspiciously self-serving policy of enriching the already rich, but whatever we have now also seems a far cry from Friedman's monetarism. Need to read more on that. Consider it an invitation to comment.] Even if they've got some intellectual bits distantly behind them, the cheerleaders of poorly fortified opinions generally (and wrongly) imagine themselves the first in line to reap the promised rewards of their insincerity. Cushy and undeserved jobs aside, I don't know if your average conservative hack is really of the ownership class, and less so their readers.

But what the fuck, they've no doubt mangled Thomas Jefferson and Sun Tzu just as badly as anyone else. Frustratingly, other fields have crept into their purview as well, ones that I actually know stuff about. Jonah Goldberg, no deep thinker he, and a frequent complainer about scientists' inability to accept simple rhetorical "truths", has opined that those clever can-do scientists are going to save us from an oil crunch, fersure. Evidently, everyone is as eager as he is to keep him in his pampered, dull sinecure. (If you need a goat on the liberal side of things, witness the slavering over stem cells.)

To add insult to insult, the opinion hacks are doing their damndest to ruin my beloved science speculation too. Glenn Reynolds (of AG Android fame, and also doing his damndest to delve the shallows) has made time blathering about the hypothetical technological singularity as though he'll be the first to be uploaded. As though we need to listen to a computerized pundit for all eternity. Roy Edroso makes me sad when he picks on these people, but just because goobers latch onto it, it doesn't mean that speculation can't be instructive too. Some people read that stuff and it inspires them to become scientists, or merely to look down new avenues of thought. Others find it justification for their own mediocrity. Sharpen up your facts to defend against them.

Keifus

*For the record, m'man Archaeopteryx actually does it pretty well.

Co-Existentialist Angst

My mid-life crisis involved a first marriage and buying a house

After many years of contented singledom, I re-encountered my first love about 18 months ago. Four months later we were married—a first for both. So far, it’s pretty damned good. We’re revoltingly lovey-dovey, combine passion with a steady background appreciation of each other, have survived a home renovation, and even work together. I thoroughly enjoy his company, and still get a thrill when he walks through a room. Frankly, it’s embarrassing to feel such a surfeit of emotion. I’m happy.

But. My life used to quite fearless, and now I feel it—that dread of a future parting. My morning newspaper has the notices of people celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries on the same page as the obituaries. I stare at the pictures of aged couples, and feel angry that it’s unlikely we’ll hit a golden wedding anniversary (we’d be in our mid-nineties). I now read the obits obsessively, keeping track of whether the person who died was married and, if so, was the surviving spouse male or female? I feel a weird happiness when I see spouses who have died within a few days of each other. It’s what I hope for, too, now that I’m sharing my life so profoundly.

But. I used to totally disapprove of infidelity, and scorn my married friends who stayed together after one or both of them had strayed. I thought they were weak; both for stepping out and for not doing their level best to destroy their cheating spouse. And now I know that I could tolerate it, under a wide variety of circumstances, although it wouldn’t make me happy.

But. My single friends seem to think I’ve won some kind of jackpot. Maybe I have, but it’s not the one they seem to want. They attach an almost magical significance to being married, some of them going so far as to say that they feel like losers because they aren’t. This comes more from women than men, but even the guys feel this pressure. I never felt that way—based on my parents and many of my friends, marriage looked like a great opportunity for unhappiness. The jackpot I won is finding someone that I don't just tolerate, but totally enjoy. It is in finding another human being that I am willing to change for, in order to accomodate our mutual happiness. It's not about the white dress and the diamond, or some societal judgement on those who live, for whatever reason, a single life (which is no way the same thing as a solitary life).

But. I’ve turned into a bit of a Wife. I make the dental appointments (because I’m scared plaque will migrate into his arteries and stop his heart), I do most of the laundry (because I notice that it needs doing and I don’t like asking), and I’m the one who handles the bill payments and does most of the picking up around the house because it hits my mess tolerance level before it hits his. Sometimes, I feel like I’m on the verge of nagging, as the boundaries are nowhere as clear as they were when I lived with a room-mate.

But. I’m agnostic, held back from atheism only because I can’t prove there isn’t a god. And, now that I'm married, I really wish I did believe in an afterlife; one where my love and I could be united for eternity, or share endless turns on the wheel of reincarnation, instead of my conviction that the biochemical network that is "me" dissipates upon death, and my slow dissolution into component atoms will occur.

But. All the buts don’t matter. This mystery of love that survives amidst the practical concerns of daily life is wondrous, forming an existence that is purely celebratory.

With thanks to Urquhart for sparking the thought chain

Wikifray blog and forum: a critique

If you include its earlier incarnation as Wag the Slate, wikifray has been in operation for about one year. Ender built it, and the rest of us came and participated and wrote and recruited people. I'm sure many of you share my feeling that it's been rewarding to participate in it, and to watch it grow.

It began as a collaborative project which Schad openly disdained for many months while others among us worked to make it viable. He later became supportive of it when he hit upon the idea of using it to launch his own venture (which began as a partnership with Ender, and continues now with Schad as the sole proprietor). Though I had certain misgivings, I was nevertheless excited about taking wikifray in a new direction, and from early April, I offered what support and assistance I could. As you may have noticed, I'm a keener about this sort of thing, and I was very committed to wikifray.

The nuponuq forum was implemented in late April, and we switched over from blog comments to forum comments on April 30th. There was an immediate drop in posts and responses to posts. This was to be expected at the beginning, while people got used to the new environment, but I don't believe participation has come back to the quality it was prior to the change. If this diminished activity is due to the summer slowdown, you’d expect it to show in the number of posts, but not necessarily in the responses, or in the depth and quality of conversation. Summer or not, there are still a good number of people on the forum on a daily basis, but they’re not interacting the way they did on wikifray, where posts often engendered long and interesting discussions. In fact, this last while, the writing on wikifray has been better than ever, yet forum response has been thin and restrained. On the chart below, note that in terms of total number of posts, activity on the forum has increased over activity on wikifray, but check comments on your posts over the period before the changeover, and compare them to forum comments on your posts. Has the quality or frequency of the response changed? What about your posting - has it changed? (It's improved, right?)

Participation on the forum has a different feel. The ambiance seems to have changed with the loss of the egalitarian structure that wikifray enjoyed. As we were trying to attract quality writers to wikifray, we made the effort to create a welcoming environment. Schad’s behaviour, both before and after his project, has been inconsistent with this. He of all of us seemed most at home in the hostile environment of BOTF. That's not a problem per se—it’s just Schad—but it’s bad for business, and the business that it's bad for is something in which I once had a stake. And how did I lose that? I withdrew when I realized that Schad’s views on certain issues were so in opposition to mine that I could not participate as active support for his project any longer. I asked him to delete Write, Bitch from his server. He did that, and he also removed me from the admin forum on nuponuq. This was not unexpected, but it effectively curtailed my involvement in wikifray, as wikifray has become subordinate to the forum, and everyone who was active in wikifray development as an admin has moved over to nuponuq development, with Schad as the person in charge. Given our collaborative beginnings, this is a disappointment.

The following week, Ender, who's role had been up in the air before I dropped out, made an official announcement on the forum that he was no longer a partner in Schad’s venture. Schad responded with a gracious acknowledgement of Ender's work sourcing and adapting the bSpeak software for the nuponuq forum. He also thanked catnapping and skitch and John for their efforts. Although I’d put many hours in, both here and on other parts of Schad’s project, he left me off the list of people who'd contributed. This was not only bad form, it was plainly dishonest.

I was out, however. I had thought I'd stay involved in wikifray, but wikifray was now married to nuponuq; the two are interwoven, and Schad is the guy in charge. What has he done that warrants this status? He’s supplied server space, vision, and a willingness to benefit from other people's efforts. Ender and skitch have done most of the work on the forum software. Schad owns the software and the servers that host it, but really—the cost of the bSpeak software is negligible, and server space can be had anywhere.

Even though Schad had snubbed me when it came time to acknowledge contributors, I didn’t want to respond in a punitive manner. I put forum comment links on the new blog (shared with KarenOh), and I continued to participate on the forum. I treated him no differently than I had before. For his part, Schad took to being a jerk toward me. Disagreement is one thing, but he rarely offered argument. In keeping with his usual style, he’d berate me with insults to my intellect and mental health. Still, not a biggie, except in what it bodes for the future of this place, when the project is (hopefully) successful, and people are really invested in the community. I've been on forums with mean-spirited proprietors, and they are not creative and inviting spaces.

Quoting Geoff: “If your site offers a more comfortable medium for old-time Fraysters, then I welcome its presence on the net. I'm somewhat critical of it - based on what I've seen, you guys seem dangerously close to building a monument to everything that was unappealing about BotF.”

That’s not what wikifray was, and if that’s what this is turning into, I want no part of it.

It annoys me when people offer criticism without providing suggestions toward remedy, so here’s what I think needs to happen:

• Restore the egalitarian structure. The wikifray forum ought to belong to and be governed by the members of wikifray. Schad needs to withdraw as a wikifray admin, and abstain from moderation and admin activity on the wikifray forum. Wikifray admins can moderate the wikifray forum.
• Restore blog comments so that people can respond to posts on the blog if they wish to.

I see no problem with the following:

• Wikifray members continuing to send their comments from their own blogs to the wikifray forum
• Schad hosting the wikifray forum on his server
• Schad taking posts and comments from the forum to publish in his magazine
• Schad taking revenue from ads on the forum
• Schad running the other forums as he sees fit.

Wikifray members: your thoughts, please.

————————————————————————————

Posts and comments on wikifray:

....date........posts...posters...comments...avg c/p

Nov 5 – Dec 4....44.......10.........301......6.84

Dec 5 – Jan 4....43........9.........271......6.3

Jan 5 – Feb 4....58.......15.........504......8.68

Feb 5 – Mar 4....57.......16.........515......9.03

Mar 5 – Apr 4....51.......15.........434......8.5

Apr 5 – May 4....62.......14.........350......5.64*

May 5 – Jun 4....33.......11...........(n/a)

Jun 5 – Jul 4....47.......14...........(forum)**

Jul 5 – Aug 4....28.......13...........(forum)**

* prorated from data before Apr 30
** Jun 7 - Aug 13: 1873 forum comments

Wikifray Book Club

Two lovers walk into a cafe. The woman leaves, presumably to use the bathroom. The man hears nothing from her for three years. He feels as if he'd lost an organ, and just as he's come to a kind of truce with himself, he answers the phone. It's her. She invites him to a party...


It's short and brilliant. Let's read it, and then chat. The hardcover is out, or you can pre-oder the paperback on amazon.

Do it. You know you want to.

Tribalism

Poll.

Shooter with Mark Wahlberg: DVD Review

Wahlberg plays Bobby Lee Swagger an ex-Marine marksman living in exile who Danny Glover [the bad guy] coaxes into helping prevent an assassination attempt on the president's life. Ultimately Swagger is double crossed and accused of the assassination attempt.

My favorite quote from the movie..."You don't understand how serious this is. They killed my dog."


It is considered a thriller and I thought it was awesome. Wahlberg ain't hard to look at either. Some of the ladies might find it offensive because of all the killing but I didn't because 1) that is what Swagger does and 2) they killed his dog...dammit!

If I'm stepping on Switter's toes with this movie review...good! AND if he calls Markie Mark gay I'm gonna go ellen on him and no doubt catch (h)ellen for doing it!!

Shooter: official site

NBC's Age Of Love Finale Sweeps Me Off My Feet!

What a night! A veritable roller coaster ride of emotional kidnapping. I haven't been that psychologically exhausted since this year's Daytime Emmy Awards, when Oprah accidentally thanked herself, and she hadn't even won anything!

I.e., I certainly didn't see that coming from a mile away, namely, that he'd choose the 25-year old over the 48-year old in this sex-charged game of sociological hacky sack. !!!SURPRISE ALERT!!!

What a ride! I laughed. I cried. The dog threw up over there in the corner that one time. It was like falling in love all over again, but with a semi-imaginary person on my TV.

Yet through all the tears, all the ups and downs, all the magic of editing, all the cat fights and hair pulling and pissing contests and fuck teases, some even on the show, I managed, in spite of myself no less, to learn a thing or 3 along the way. Here are but a few

-A lot of professional tennis players are dorky and retarded.

-Australia is a country surrounded on all sides by water, a "fun fact" he pointed out during his brief "Down Under For Dummies" history lesson for the ladies.

-A lot of single women will say anything not to sound vapid and stupid, and yet they still manage to sound that way.

-A lot of professional tennis players have never been to college, and some don't even have much of a high school education. And it really comes through with perfect clarity.

-It's not that women hate each other; it's that some women are insecure and they hate themselves, which they then project onto other women.

-When you play Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" backwards, it sounds like Freddie Mercury is saying, "Some of us smoke marijuana." Which is tantamount to saying that when you play Pat Boone covering "Something In The Way She Moves" backwards, it sounds like Pat's saying, "This version could kill a rabid elephant on steroids," when you really think about it.

-It's not that men are complete assholes; it's that some men are better at hiding that fact than others.

-Youth may indeed be wasted on the young, but sometimes the experience of age is squandered on the older.

-A lot of professional tennis players have to have their own name tattooed onto there palm so that they spell it correctly when they have to sign those giant Publisher's Clearinghouse-esque checks.

-Mark Consuelos has an almost eerie and inexplicably creepy grasp of the obvious.

-Never under any circumstances should you ever try to remove the sticky "Security Device Enclosed" thingie from your brand spankin' new Eight Is Enough, Season 4 DVD while stoned.

Publishers don't have clearinghouses; they have slush piles; and those aren't so much slush piles as they are interns' desks.

-Money might not buy you love, but it sure does, on occasion, bring you at least some semblance of it. And sometimes that's just going to have to be enough for now.

They'll go out on 3 dates, she'll realize he's just another boring doofus who's bad in bed, and they'll never see each other again. Or am I projecting?

Coming next week: FOX's Hell's Kitchen, A Real Barn-Burner!

300, A DVD Review

The utterly gay porn that is 300 makes Colin Farrell's turn in Oliver Stone's testicle spectacle Alexander look like a strung out drag queen on glue by comparison.

(Seriously. I"m beginning to wonder why Ollie didn't go all Harry Potter up in that joint and just call it Alexander The Great And The Relentlessly Visible Scrotum. It would've given it some zing at the box office and skewered its audience even more gay. Get with the program! They're the ones with the ca$h, stupid!)

They may or may not have overdone that whole worship of beauty bit. But I'm here to tell you that Cindy Crawford would've been pitched into the drink right along with all the other Spartan carnival geeks faster than you can de-cleft a palette, what with that birth defect she calls a mole. And I won't even mention the fact that you could've driven a chariot or 2 between Lauren Hutton's front teeth.

But just in terms of a general history of Sparta at the time: Wouldn't that job have been a total drag, being the dude who stands at the edge of the cliff when all the new proud parents marched their infants in front of him to make sure their precious angel's prettiness passed muster? He's got this chart, maybe some graphs, even a pointer and some charred pigeon intestines or something. And one by one each baby gets the thumbs up or down. I can hear him now:

"Hmm... His left forefinger is 1/10000000000th of a cubit shorter than the right one. Sorry."
[toss]
"That nose is perfect. Unfortunately the same thing can't be said for her earlobes. One piercing and they're just gonna hang there like a half-eaten muscadine. Too bad. What a face!"
[heave]
"Very pretty. But I can see clearly that he's gonna battle split ends for the rest of his life. Do you really want to put him through that Hades?"
[throw]

Did I happen to mention that the folks doing the tossing (Wink!) all look like Giselle Bundchen and Johnny Depp? Oh, sure: They're technically retarded with single digit IQs. But Jesus splattering-on-rocks Christ. Look at them!

I mean, what's that guy say to his wife after work each day? "Pretty good day today at The Bottomless Chasm Of Death And Despair, dear. Almost 10 percent lived." Then again, I often wonder if we wouldn't be better off if we tried to live up to that percentage. Sure would cut down on all that annoying classist overhead. If you know what I mean. Add the fact that we'd never run out of supermodels, and this plan starts to look even better off paper.

The End

Other than that? Extremely enjoyable movie, very well made, and not too historically inaccurate. I give it 2 penises up. Way up.

1 God, 23 Korean Missionaries

23 Korean missionaries were recently captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Two of them have been executed, including the pastor who led the group (mainly women) into their fatal adventure. It’s hard not to wonder “What the hell were you thinking? That God would protect you?”
And it’s equally hard not to feel an immense sorrow that this group of naively well-intentioned souls may all meet their premature deaths on such a futile mission.

I used to coach Korean students though the application process for the Ivy League Schools. They lived in Vancouver's wealthiest enclaves, in grotesquely overbuilt houses that cast shadows on resentful neighbours. They had the most expensive computer gear and Prada pencil cases. They spent four to five hours a day studying with an assortment of tutors. They joined school sporting teams that didn’t require much athletic affinity, such as golf, ping pong, and bowling. They all played classical musical instruments. Most of them told me that they didn’t enjoy the sports or music. They did it so that their university applications would look good. Ditto for the near-mandatory volunteering in local senior centres and hospitals.

These young people were scheduled from the moment they woke up to the moment they collapsed. Video games were their only down-time, usually sneaked in when they were supposed to be studying. Few of them had friends, because there simply wasn’t time for friendship in the schedules created by their parents. Trying to get my students to write the creative essays that the applications called for was like pulling teeth with a spoon. The term “automaton” regularly crossed my mind during our interactions. 90% of them would list some luxury car as their "dream" (one of the regular questions on almost all the application forms).

The only area where there was any spark of life was when they talked about church and God. Most of them belonged to a Pentecostal church, which is a fairly wacky and mystical variant of Christianity. Here is where they experienced mystery and freedom, albeit with some pretty stringent riders, in terms of what God wanted them to do. The weekly church outings were their escape into a life beyond the relentless drudgery of studying for the degree that their parents had chosen for them.

I’m an agnostic (and would call myself an atheist if I didn’t think that it is equally a matter of faith to absolutely say that there is no higher power as it is to say that God exists—neither can be proven). But I was happy that my students had at least one outlet for joy and pleasure in their school-stunted lives. Anyone of them would have leapt at the chance to go to Afghanistan on a mission. Their faith in their pastor and their God would have been absolute. For their sake, and for those young Koreans who must have been very much like them, I hope against my own beliefs that there is indeed a heaven for the two who have already been slain and a wondrous miracle for the rest of them.