There was a time when I used to watch a lot of movies, but that’s increasingly far away, now. I do try to keep vaguely in touch with pop culture, though, so I continue to read articles and listen to podcasts about movies, in order to have at least some idea of what’s going on.

I didn’t see Black Panther when it was in theaters, because in addition to the “no time to watch movies” thing, I’m generally down on superhero movies. We’re getting a renewed batch of hype for it, though, as we head into movie-awards season, with lots of talk about how it needs to be in consideration for Best Picture and the like. By coincidence, I found myself in need of some relaxation yesterday, so I punched it up from the on-demand movie service of our cable company.

And… it’s a superhero movie. It’s a well-done example of the form, to be sure, but it’s got all the same “this premise is dopey” problems of, well, every other superhero movie. It is at least isolated from the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe (during the main action, anyway), which works to its advantage because trying to fit it into that larger continuity adds a bunch of other problems.

As noted above, I’ve hardly watched any other movies this year, so I can’t meaningfully compare this to much, but I’m just not seeing the awesomeness, here. Admittedly, a lot of the problems I have are things that might be skipped past if I were more charitably disposed toward superhero movies in general, but then again, if this is a revolutionary example that transcends the form to be great art, I’d expect something more. Instead, the characters felt underdeveloped, the political message was delivered ham-handedly, and the story beats were painfully obvious.

I probably should’ve tried to see this months ago, when it was just a hot new release, because it’s perfectly fine spectacle (a few cheesy CGI rhinos aside). Seeing it after months of talk about what an amazing, award-worthy movie it is, though, set some unreasonable expectations that no superhero movie was likely to live up to.

I got into listening to podcasts relatively recently, thanks to a combination of radio and a new dog. Radio, because the local ESPN radio affiliate dropped the Dan Le Batard Show after I got hooked. The show is available as a “best-of” podcast, though, which distills three hours down into one, and I started listening to that at night as I put the kids to bed (they both want an adult in the room until they get to sleep, and like listening to music I don’t particularly enjoy, so I bring earbuds in with me and listen to my own stuff).

The dog part is that once we got Charlie the pupper, I once again needed to spend large stretches of time walking around the neighborhood. Much of this time is in the dark, particularly at this time of year, and once I had started listening to the Le Batard show as a podcast during bedtime, it was natural to extend that to listening during dog walks. And, of course, an hour a day of the Le Batard show wasn’t enough material, so I needed to add others to the rotation, and now I’m subscribed to a couple dozen podcasts via the “Pocket Casts” app on my phone, and they’ve taken over a lot of my in-the-car listening, as well.

I’ve also been doing a bunch of podcast interviews recently, to promote Breakfast With Einstein, which of course has led to toying with the idea of doing one myself. It’s probably not super likely to happen, though, because I’ve found that there’s a very particular Thing I’m looking for when I pick what to listen to.

For one thing, while I’m doing a fair number of podcasts where random authors and actors and other random people of note come on to promote stuff, I’m not all that enthusiastic about the “interview random people” format, because it’s a high-variance business. Sometimes the random interviewee is fun and engaging and produces interesting conversation, but sometimes they fall really flat, and it’s just tedious. (As a guest, I try to be in the former category, but I’m sure I sometimes land in the latter for at least some listeners.) I’m also very definitely not into highly researched and polished radio journalism with slick production– I admire people who have the skills to do that, but the end result usually leaves me cold. I’d rather get that sort of thing in print, where I can consume it in about a quarter the time needed for the audio version.

The shows that work well for me are conversational and banter-heavy, dominated by people who already know each other well and have a comfortable relationship. The best bits of the Le Batard show turn on their recurring cast of weirdos, and I’ve recently gotten into the Tony Kornheiser show (another radio show I used to listen to that dropped off our ESPN radio affiliate). Kornheiser very occasionally has guests, but it’s mostly a rotating cast of regulars, which gives their conversations a very relaxed and enjoyable feel.

Also in the same general vein, topic-wise, I listen to a bunch of podcasts from The Ringer, again because I like their conversational feel. The college-hoops podcast One Shining Podcast is sometimes juvenile as hell, but in a way that reminds me of when I used to bullshit about basketball on Usenet back in the day. Their Rewatchables movie podcast is tons of fun, and I generally enjoy the non-interview episodes of The Big Picture. Ringer impresario Bill Simmons does quite a few interviews, which are often skippable, but most of the people he has on are people he’s friendly with, so there’s usually good comfortable banter even with people I haven’t heard on the show before. I have no particular interest in wagering on sports, but I’ll listen to him debate betting lines with Cousin Sal for surprisingly long time because I enjoy they way they give each other shit.

Their media-and-politics podcast The Press Box is also a highlight, though it’s not available in its own feed, alas (I keep seeing the “new episode” indicator on Channel 33 and being disappointed that it’s one of the other shows packaged in there). They also highlight another feature that I like in these, in that they’re political but not strongly partisan: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are both definitely liberal in a way that I find congenial, but they’re not committed to pushing a particular party line, and if someone on the political left does something ridiculous, they’ll point it out. In a similar vein I like Josh Barro and Ken White on All the President’s Lawyers, who banter back and forth and point out absurdities on all sides, but didn’t care for that show’s parent podcast, “Left, Right, and Center” which offers debate between partisans from both political wings and basically just made me hate everyone involved.

The other big political podcast I listen to is the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, which again is coming from a left-leaning place that I find politically congenial, but isn’t invested in pushing a particular set of arguments. They’re just generally wonky in a way that I find enjoyable, and their back-and-forth joking with each other is great.

That’s probably enough podcasts to get across the point about what I like to listen to, which is light on interviews and long on banter. That’s also why I’m unlikely to start doing a podcast any time soon, because that sort of thing is really difficult to arrange, and I don’t know that there’s anybody local who’d be up for it. Rhett and I made a stab at it some years back with an intermittent series of “Uncertain Dots” recorded Google hangouts, but the long-distance logistics of that were a pain and it fell apart. It’d probably be easier to set up something interview-based, but that’s not what I’d want to listen to, so it wouldn’t feel right to produce that.

(That’s not to say I wouldn’t be willing to give it a shot, if somebody wanted to sponsor an attempt, but there’s a non-trivial energy barrier to overcome there, particularly regarding the logistics of recording and editing something.)

Over at Inside Higher Ed, Matt “The Artist Formerly Known as ‘Dean Dad'” Reed has a piece about why he blogs and what influence it’s had on his career. As someone who’s been blogging from academia even longer than he has (I think, anyway; I don’t recall exactly when he started), I like a lot of what he has to say. I was particularly struck by this question:

Or, put differently, why don’t my administrative colleagues elsewhere do something similar. After all these years, where is everybody?

That really resonated for me, because I can still remember the early days of blogging as a Thing, when there was a lot of talk about how it was going to Change Everything. While I would agree that Everything has unquestionably Changed, it’s not clear that blogs had all that much lasting influence; they certainly never got adopted as widely as many people hoped, and it’s interesting to poke a bit at why that is.

One of the bigger factors is a sort of professionalization of blogging as a form of communication. Way back in 2002 when I started, blogging was very much a thing that people who primarily did something else would pick up as a hobby. That was the glorious thing about it, in my view– what you got from blogs wasn’t stories from writers who dabbled in other things, it was professionals from other areas dabbling in writing.

At some point in the latter part of that decade, things turned a bit. The best writers from the hobby blogger era got book deals and jobs in media, and “run a successful blog” became an accepted stepping-stone on the path to a writing career. You started to see more blogs that were clearly from future journalists specializing in some area, and they kind of crowded out hobby blogs. The quality of the writing almost certainly improved, but there was a certain homogenization of the style, and a kind of loss of authenticity.

Another major factor limiting blogging is that, as the social-media universe got bigger (both with blogs growing and becoming more mainstream, and the beginnings of Twitter and expansion of Facebook), the stakes started to get higher. When I started in 2002, I relied on security through obscurity to protect my academic career: I always wrote under my own name, but trusted that the people I worked with were highly unlikely to stumble across my blog. Near the peak of the blog era, a few years after the launch of ScienceBlogs, academics were advised to blog peseudonymously because if a tenure committee noticed your blog, they might think you were wasting time and hold that against you. These days, the danger of being active on social media (blogs included) is that somebody’s going to find something you wrote offensive and whip up a mob that will ruin your reputation, try to get you fired, and even send you death threats.

That’s made a lot of people who might’ve blogged much more gun-shy than they might’ve been back when “Dean Dad” and I were starting out. This is particularly true for people on the administrative side of academia, who face a far greater risk of being read as speaking for the institution, and often don’t have the security of tenure. Even as a tenured professor, I’ve become much more circumspect, particularly since I wound up being a department chair– there’s a weight of responsibility that comes with those roles that makes it risky to speak too freely. The less they speak, particularly in a form that will be Google-able for years to come, the lower the risk.

In the end, though, I think the biggest factor is that it takes a certain type of personality to make it as a blogger. You have to enjoy communicating through the written word in a way that isn’t all that common. Even in academia, where people’s careers are built on the production of text, you don’t see many people who are actually good at the sort of communication needed for blogging. That’s part of why there are so many tedious meetings that could’ve been emails, and so many stupid faculty-email-list fights: a large fraction of the population, including most professional academics, find it a distasteful chore to type words into a computer and share them with other people.

That’s not a problem I’ve ever had– I discovered Usenet in my senior year at Williams and immediately embraced the idea. I spent a lot of my grad school years making friends and socializing with people on Usenet, some of whom I still haven’t met in person all these years later. The move to blogging was a natural and fairly smooth transition for me, and these days I get a little twitchy if I go too long without being able to type words into a computer and share them.

But where many of us thought, back in 2002, that this was the Hot New Thing and lots of people would discover how wonderful it was, the last decade-and-a-half has made clear that it’s actually a very unusual thing to enjoy. There’s a reason why the vast majority of blogs have a dozen or two posts with the time between them increasing until they just sort of… stop. It’s the same reason why most Twitter and Facebook feeds are dominated by reshared memes and thoughts from others. The weird thing isn’t that more academics don’t blog, it’s that people like me and Matt Reed keep blogging over the span of so many years.

I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing something more substantial than just Twitter threads in my morning at Starbucks, so let’s talk about my weekend. On Friday, I got in the car a bit before 9am and headed south, to Brooklyn to see the Hold Steady do a show at the Brooklyn Bowl. This is part of a four-night stand there, something they’ve done three years running now; this is their new model, which they seem pretty happy about. Kate got me the ticket as an early Christmas present, and it included a walking tour of Brooklyn music spots with noted music critic Rob Sheffield and a sound check event with the band, thus the early departure.

I did this same sort of thing a couple of years ago, and at that time they were still working out how to do these. The sound check then was a real rehearsal– they went through one song several times, with some false starts– and the happy hour afterwards was just the band mingling with fans. This time out, it was a little more structured– when we got to the venue, we could hear them rehearsing inside (they were playing “Ballad of the Midnight Hauler” for reasons that will become apparent later). After a bit, they let the fans in, and when the band came out they did some Q&A moderated by Rob Sheffield, mixed with a handful of songs.

The Q&A was pretty entertaining– mostly funny stories about past shows and songs and the movie The Last Waltz. Craig Finn does most of the talking, as you would expect, but Tad Kubler is sneakily hilarious, and they got good bits from Steve Selvidge and Galen Polivka as well. There was an extended bit attempting to make an analogy between the current lineup and the full Wu-Tang Clan, hampered a bit by the fact that Sheffield was probably the only one on stage with a chance of naming all the members of Wu-Tang Clan. (There was some agreement that Bobby Drake is ODB, and Tad Kubler the RZA, then they sort of fell apart…)

They played a nice mix of songs: two of the new tracks they’ve released over the last year or so (“Confusion in the Marketplace” and “Esther,” both of which made the set list that night), a couple old songs (“One for the Cutters” and “212 Margarita,” which Sheffield specifically requested), and one unreleased track that had debuted the night before (“The Last Time She Talked to Me,” which they payed in part because includes a reference). Finn said during the Q&A that he had gone through the list of 60-ish songs they’re comfortable playing live and rated them on an A-B-C scale as to how frequently they should show up in set lists, “C” songs being ones that would only appear in one show of the residency. A couple of the sound-check songs were “C” tunes not on the schedule for later that night, so that was a nice bonus.

There was also a photo op portion of the happy hour, so I can add this to my collection:

(Craig Finn saw my Mountain Goats shirt and said “Hey, that’s a cool shirt, I hadn’t seen that one before…” thus totally validating my child-of-the-80s committment to not wearing a T-shirt of the band I’m going to see. A few other people commented on it as well, so that was fun…)

As had happened a couple of years ago, I was struck by how much more low-key they were at the sound check than in the actual shows I’ve seen. Finn sounded a little hoarse (not the least surprising), and they were all bundled up in warm clothes, so I was a tiny bit worried that they’d be off their game. I shouldn’t’ve been.

They came out to the Boz Scaggs song “Lido Shuffle,” which was an outstanding choice because that got the whole crowd doing “Whoa oh oh oh” sing-along even before they set foot on the stage, and hit the ground running. “Banging Camp” into “Magazines” into “Ask Her For Adderall” is a real strong opening, and the whole set list was awesome high-energy stuff. They’re definitely picking songs to maximize their current lineup– “Charlemagne in Sweatpants” and “Most People Are DJs” give room for multiple guitar solos, and “Esther” and “Don’t Let Me Explode” have some great keyboard stuff.

There were also some “white whale” tunes in there– I had never heard “Ascension Blues” before (it was a bonus track on a different version of Stay Positive than the one I bought), and of course the encore featured the aforementioned “Ballad of the Midnight Hauler,” which is an awesome song that I don’t think has been released before. That was part of the encore, for which they brought out Doug Gillard of Guided By Voices for the rarely seen four-guitar attack.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen them live, and all the shows have been excellent. There’s a small part of me that thinks it’s maybe a little silly for a 47-year-old to drive six hours round trip for a rock show, but on the other hand, there’s no better band for it. On the walking tour, Sheffield told a story about seeing the Hold Steady for the first time by accident– they were opening for another band, and he’d shown up late hoping to miss the opening act. He said he was about 38 at that time, and a few songs in he was caught up in the complicated songs and dense references and realized that “This is a band engineered for 38-year-old music nerds…”

As projected in their lyrics, a lot of the fans at the shows have kids of their own– unlike the guys I had dinner with between the sound check and the show, I had to leave early Saturday morning to drive home and take SteelyKid and The Pip cross-country skiing. As exhausting as the weekend was, though, there’s still something very liberating about spending a few hours with several hundred other people singing along to rousing songs about parties and drugs and crime and Catholicism. I didn’t get that much sleep, but still feel pretty sweet as we head into December and everything that brings.

Everybody’s favorite nerdy stick-figure comic ran a joke about Karl Popper, the philosopher of science best known for pushing the idea that science works on the falsification of theories. Popper’s work is widely regarded by philosophers as superseded, but he remains popular with scientists. He may be particularly popular with physicists, or it may just be that I mostly read and follow physicists, but if you hear a random physicist asked to explain how science works, odds are pretty good you’ll get a description in a Popper-ish vein: that we make theories, and test them against observation by looking for places where they fail, so a theory can be “proven false” but never “proven true.” This is usually accompanied by teeth-gnashing from nearby philosophers.

I’ve watched this process repeat many times, often followed by lamentations about why physicists cling to these outmoded ideas when philosophers have known for decades that there are numerous places where Popper’s model fails. In the end, I think he continues this shambling philosophical afterlife because while it might not be logically watertight, the notion of falsification as the core of science is useful in practical terms in a way that many later theories are not.

That is, Popper’s sketch of the process of science provides a model to aspire to, even if it doesn’t perfectly describe everything. If you’re a working scientist, it gives you a generally useful sense of how to proceed: you take a model of whatever phenomenon you’re observing, and you try to poke holes in it. Even when you’re the one who invented the model, and are thus invested in its success, you look for places where it might fail as a pre-emptive measure because your rivals are going to do exactly that, and you need to have counter-arguments ready for them. Popper’s falsification theory is not a properly complete model of How Science Works, but it survives among working scientists because it’s a useful heuristic for identifying what to do next.

That also probably accounts for the relative unpopularity of “social construction” theories of science. It’s not that scientists are just too ignorant to notice the social elements– nobody who’s dealt with Reviewer 2’s demands for marginally relevant citations would be foolish enough to claim that there isn’t a social element to the process of science. But it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do with that information, other than gnash your teeth and add the citations the reviewer asked for.

Popper’s ideas lend themselves to direct application in clear and simple ways that the ideas of Kuhn and the rest do not. And that’s (my arrogant physicist’s view of) why scientists keep trotting Popper out and giving philosophers heartburn.

I ended up posting a whole bunch of stuff at Forbes last month, and as a result it seems appropriate to collect those links here now, rather than waiting for a quarterly round-up at the end of the year. So, here’s what I wrote in October:

• Nobel Prize in Physics 2018: How to Make Ultra-Intense, Ultra-Short Laser Pulses: This year’s Nobel was really two half-prizes; this digs into the physics behind the half that went to Strickland and Mourou.
• Nobel Prize in Physics 2018: How to Manipulate Small Objects with Optical Tweezers: This is the second half of the Nobel, dealing with the physics behind Art Ashkin’s half-a-prize.
• Breakfast Cereal and Sinking Ships: The Billion-Dollar Physics of Granular Materials: A passing observation while making weekend breakfasts for the kids connected (in my mind) to an article about maritime disasters, so I wrote a quick post about it.
• What Is a Quantum Computer? The 30,000-Foot Overview: A blog version of a talk I gave at the National Association of Science Writers meeting in Washington, DC. This is a very general overview of what quantum computers are and why they’re more powerful than classical computers (for certain kinds of problems).
• How Does the “Shape” of an Electron Limit Particle Physics?: I would’ve been plenty happy with the preceding collection of posts, but the ACME collaboration went and released new results about their ongoing search for an electric dipole moment of the electron without checking that it fit my schedule, so I had to write about it in an already full month..

So, yeah, that’s quite a bit of stuff. As always, this was a mixed bag from the standpoint of readership: I was disappointed that the Nobel posts didn’t get more attention, but the media moment sort of got eaten by first the celebration of Donna Strickland being the first woman in decades to win, and second by a dumb argument about her faculty rank. That missed opportunity kind of annoys me.

I was pleased by the generally positive reception of the quantum computing and electron EDM posts, though. And, you know, that’s blogging for you…

This Bruno Latour piece in the New York Times has come across my radar several times in the last week and a bit, including via faculty email. I’ve had the tab open for quite a while now, and probably ought to just bang out something quick to be done with it.

To my mind, the most striking part of the article was the early anecdote about Latour being amused that a scientist he met asking him whether he believed in reality. The story notes that “Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality,” and was surprised to learn that scientists thought he had. That story got me thinking about whether the whole “Science Wars” phenomenon, with its Sokal hoaxes and all the rest, isn’t really just a problem of marketing gone mad.

When you boil it down, social constructivism is basically the claim that human factors play a role in the process of hashing out what theories of science get accepted. This is not actually a surprise to anyone in science who has ever worked in a research lab, or dealt with the dread Reviewer 2. And yet, this has been a massive source of bad blood between scientists and academics from “science studies” for decades.

So why is this controversial? I half think it’s because what’s actually a fairly benign idea was wildly oversold as revolutionary stuff, completely overturning the authority of science. This happens for a lot of reasons– the general academic need to puff up the importance of your field, and some petty cross-disciplinary point-scoring being the two biggest– but the problem is that folks on the science side took the hype more literally than they should’ve.

That is, if the point is just “social factors play an important role in the process of getting scientific theories accepted,” well, that doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary or authority-overthrowing. Denying the existence of objective reality, though, that would be revolutionary enough to justify the dramatic claims made about social constructivism, and the infamous opacity of academic prose makes it seem plausible to folks not in the field that that’s actually what’s being claimed.

Thus, scientists decide that folks from “science studies” are a bunch of reality-denying lunatics. And on the other side, the “science studies” crowd figures that reaction can’t possibly be sincere, and thus is actually a political move to preserve the social power of science, and respond accordingly. And then everything spirals out of control until you get people running around pranking journals and pretending that they’ve made a brilliant point of some sort.

I’m not entirely confident that this is an accurate assessment– I haven’t read any of Latour’s work; just looking at the chapter titles of his new book made me sigh heavily, so I’m not in a huge hurry to do that. It does fit fairly well with most of my encounters with the whole giant mess of arguments around this area, though. And I think you could quite reasonably construct (heh) a view of the world in which social factors are important for shaping the scientific consensus and that scientific consensus is also a highly accurate reflection of an objective reality.

So for the purposes of this blog post, at least, that’s what I’m going to run with: the whole mess is a result of “science studies” academics overhyping their work, and too-credulous scientists taking those inflated claims too seriously.