Links for 2012-05-09

The general idea isn’t new, of course, but the numbers are. The story notes a threefold increase just from 2007 to 2010 in the number of people affected. I have to admit that my first response was “there but for the grace of God.” Anyone who clings to the myth of the academic meritocracy is invited to explain the speed of the increase in people in this position. Yes, I work hard at my job, but so do plenty of other people; denying the role of luck is just ungracious. That said, though, I wonder if this article – and others like it – will reach the audience it should reach. The target audience should be talented and ambitious undergraduates.

> look laptop There seems to be a dissertation chapter on the laptop. > read chapter It is long-winded and boring. You do not want to read it. > read chapter It is obnoxious. You hate it. > read book Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic. > read book Read. There is a book underneath it that concerns a related topic. > work on dissertation You spend two hours searching the OED for the usage history of the word devolve. > work on dissertation You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation. > work on dissertation You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.

After recently watching three seasons back-to-back-to-back (god help me), the only thing that I can say with any certainty that Ancient Aliens is either the product of a badly disordered mind or was designed to be a drinking game for skeptics: Every time an ancient astronaut theorist refers to “ancient texts,” DRINK! Every time the narrator (the delightfully-named actor Robert Clotworthy) begins an episode or a segment with the name of a location or a noun instead of a sentence, DRINK! Every time the the narrator asks a question that should be answered with an immediate, “Of course the hell not,” DRINK! Every time an apparently not crazy physicist, folklorist, or scholar gets cut off right before they say, “…but that doesn’t mean that ancient aliens existed,” DRINK! When an idea that was speculation in one sentence magically becomes the premise of the next segment, DRINK! Every time the narrator says, “And if so, why?” DRINK!

Thinking Putty (also known as Silly Putty) is a silicone polymer children’s toy. Silly putty is fun because it has some unique properties: it is viscoelastic, meaning it can be stretched and shaped and mashed back together again; and as its apparent viscosity increases directly with respect to the amount of force applied (read: it can be torn or shattered with impact). Silly putty is a non-Newtonian viscoelastic polymer, better characterized as a dilatant fluid. Also, it bounces. Ok, enough science. I’m sure we’ve all played with Thinking Putty in our youth, but how about magnetic silly putty? By adding a ferrous component to an already wacky toy we can keep all characteristics of the original putty, but now have the additional dimension of magnetism! I’ve seen magnetic thinking putty for sale on other websites, but I’ll show you how you can make your own for a fraction of the price and in about 20 minutes.

The bell curve powerfully shapes how we think of human performance: If lots of students or employees happen to show up as extreme outliers — they’re either very good or very bad — we assume they must represent a skewed sample, because only a few people in a truly random sample are supposed to be outliers. New research suggests, however, that rather than describe how humans perform, the bell curve may actually be constraining how people perform. Minus such constraints, a new paper argues, lots of people are actually outliers. Human performance, by this account, does not often fit the bell curve or what scientists call a normal distribution. Rather, it is more likely to fit what scientists call a power distribution.

When you step out the door, you’re playing a role. Whether you’re a hippie, stock broker, police officer or biker, you dress the way the world expects you to dress, you act the way the world expects you to act. So you can imagine how much more intense this is for celebrities, whose very careers depend on managing a public image down to the molecule. But even they can’t keep the occasional image-shattering photo from leaking out to the public …