Sincerest Flattery
Saturday was a low density of states day, and Arab Electric Cooperative was very much uncooperative this morning. So today may be sparse as well given the efforts by the local potential politicians to discourage tool use. And tomorrow may be shy as well since I have to go ride on the medical merry-go-round a while in Huntsville, Nawth Alibam’s shining city on the hill.
I have noted that there are two types of people who read blogs, [1] those who blog and those who do not. And among those who blog and read other blogs, there are those who violently disagree and those who do not. Hence it is hardly unlikely that I read other blogs and occasionally find things that I (a) agree with and (b) disagree with.. In this instance I came across a couple of statements that provoked my attention and cogitation.
First, from Mark Changizi, [Link] on a blot on vision,
“And you have the ability to read not because you’re an especially smart ape (no offense), but because writing has culturally evolved to look like nature, just what your ape visual system is good at processing.”
which put me in mind of eBook readers, primed as it were by the information that Amazon had (slightly) lowered the price of their Kindle. [Link] This seems to support my continual harping on the subject of eBooks of “resolution, resolution, resolution”. Indeed, given the resolution of the Kindle – and most other eBook eReaders, I would opine that the going price should be abou 100$ (Yankee government currency.) When you offer me a 1E+3 pixel-per-inch eReader, then I will serious consider the expenditure of 300$ (YGC) for one. And it has to handle PDF, preferably especially PDF-A, natively, because, quite frankly, I don’t want toilet trash to read on my eReader. I want nerd books so I don’t have to contend with all that mass of paper. At my advanced age carrying around a copy of Gradshteyn and Rhyzik is highly risky of muscle strain if not a fall or a collision with someone or something.
The second comes from Michael White, [Link] who address a subject also of considerable personal interest, the relationship between nerdery and science,
“My guess is that nerds are born, not made. Many, perhaps most working scientists were not nerds. They drifted into their careers more or less by chance, taking a modest interest in science sometime in college, then choosing to do graduate work in a science program just because it seemed more interesting than a career in medicine, law or some other profession.”
I have entertained the same hypotheses. Neither of my parents is a nerd, My siblings are not nerds. So far as I can observe among the relatives who attended family reunions back when we had family reunions, there were no other nerds, and so far as I could tell, few geeks, among my immediate relatives. So if nerdery is genetic, it must be recessive, and possibly, mutational.
I have known some scientists who are not nerds. They are not very good at science although they are often very good at the appearance of science. They do administration, they preen for journalists, they do politics, they do all sorts of things that the general consumerate becomes confused to be science but isn’t. This is part of what is wrong with science today. Too many going into it as a career instead of a calling. Too little science, too much fake scientist.
I suspect these fake scientists, the not-a-nerd scientists, do well in academia. They have better people skills. They get along with other people. They have constructive relationships. Students like them because they are like them. Administrators like them because they exist in the artificial reality of society, not actual reality. And they can publish papers on the nothings they do rather than waiting for some actual finding.
[1] There are always taxonomies of ‘n’ types of people, or other ‘things’. This also is part of being human.
