It was not a great night for helpless mammals in Chateau Steelypips last night. SteelyKid was a little colicky, and the Queen of Niskayuna has developed some problem with her paw necessitating a vet visit today, which led to some late-night whining. Kate ended up spending several hours soothing SteelyKid, while I wound up going downstairs to comfort the dog, and falling asleep on the couch for a couple hours.<\/p>\n
The resulting mental fog is not really conducive to posting Deep Thoughts today, so instead you get a few funny anecdotes from last week’s conference.<\/p>\n
The first is more of a vignette: in the course of the discussion on Democracy and Ethics in Science<\/a>, Lee Smolin spent a lot of time defending his view of “Science as an Ethical Community” (video<\/a>, microblogging<\/a>), and at one point wanted to de-emphasize the concept of peer review as a means of keeping crazy people out of science (which Harry Collins was quite keen on). “My ‘peer review’ is whatever these guys have put in place on the arxiv<\/a>,” he said, waving toward Paul Ginsparg and Simeon Warner, who run it. “That’s good enough for me.”<\/p>\n Across the room, Ginsparg said “Oh, Jesus,” and put his head in his hands.<\/p>\n (UPDATE<\/strong>: Paul Ginsparg emails to say that he was not the person who said that. I type corrected. I thought it was him, but all I really know is somebody over there said “Oh, Jesus” (maybe it was Jacques) and when I looked, Ginsparg had his head in his hands.)<\/p>\n Second anecdote: In the course of his talk, Eric Weinstein pointed out the existence of a math paper<\/a> containing a statement that some condition in differential geometry holds “if and only if Mike’s dog really ate his frog.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This turns out to be a hold-over from an incident in which one of the authors was going through draft after draft of a paper with his advisor, getting only the vaguest of criticisms. Suspecting that something was up, he stuck a whole mess of rhyming nonsense into the middle of the paper– “my dog ate a frog on a log in a bog…” ending with “Raoul, are you even reading this?”<\/p>\n A few days later, he asked about the latest draft, and got exactly the same vague comments as before. At which point, he realized he was getting a polite blow-off because his advisor was too busy to give detailed comments, and did something else until his advisor had time to actually read the paper carefully.<\/p>\n Weinstein noted at the time that this paper was the sole Google result for the phrase “Mike’s dog really.” As you can see, thanks to this meeting, that’s no longer the case<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, also dealing with the power of Google, I had breakfast one morning with Paul Ginsparg (who was staying in the same hotel I was), who mentioned that the night before, he and Jacques Distler<\/a> had been discussing how students learn the stuff that’s general knowledge in the field, and brought up the example of the “soft pion theorem,” which is apparently an important result that appears on page 60 of some 80-page paper written years ago. Ginsparg said he wondered how students would learn about the soft pion theorem, coming from outside the community where it’s common knowledge.<\/p>\n “I’ll write a blog post about it<\/a>,” said Distler (according to Ginsparg), “and tomorrow it will be on the first page of Google results.”<\/p>\n “Jacques being Jacques,” Ginsparg said, “I got an email at seven this morning saying ‘I rest my case<\/a>.'”<\/p>\n And that’s all I’ve got for today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was not a great night for helpless mammals in Chateau Steelypips last night. SteelyKid was a little colicky, and the Queen of Niskayuna has developed some problem with her paw necessitating a vet visit today, which led to some late-night whining. Kate ended up spending several hours soothing SteelyKid, while I wound up going… Continue reading Science21: Funny Anecdotes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}