We live in a difficult era for satire. It’s not that there’s a shortage of targets deserving a humorous skewering, but the obvious candidates are so quick to dive headlong into self-parody, as with this recent gem from the anti-sex movement: It’s been linked in all sorts of places, but I think Matt Yglesias has… Continue reading Sex, Engineering, and the Difficulty of Satire
Category: Society
The Consequences of Poor Science Popularization
You may be wondering whether the recent spate of blogging about science in popular media and peer review (by the way, you should definitely read Janet’s two posts on these issues) has any connection to my talk next month at the Science in the 21st Century workshop. Yes, yes it does– I figure that I’m… Continue reading The Consequences of Poor Science Popularization
Popular Media Should Do Science
Lest you think I’m transforming the entire site into cute-baby-pictures-dot-com, let me reassure you that while the posting frequency may drop off a bit, Uncertain Principles will always be your go-to site for slightly ranty blogging about issues of science and larger culture. Well, one of them, anyway. This is brought to you by a… Continue reading Popular Media Should Do Science
What Humanists Think
Last weekend’s post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there. I may have some additional comments on the issue later,… Continue reading What Humanists Think
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion. I’m not sure if this… Continue reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
Failing Schools: Better Than Nothing
You know, my opinion of “No Child Left Behind” style attempts to measure “failing” schools is as low as anybody’s, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous: Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if evaluated using a less biased measure,… Continue reading Failing Schools: Better Than Nothing
Email Passeth All Understanding
The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology: Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don’t really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they’ll do that with cc’s all the way… Continue reading Email Passeth All Understanding
Two Cultures Round-Up
Because I am a Bad Person who thinks and types relatively slowly, I have been lax about following up to the many excellent posts that have been written in response to this weekend’s two cultures posts. Let me attempt to address that in a small way by linking a whole bunch of them now: My… Continue reading Two Cultures Round-Up
Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
The New York Times front page yesterday sported an article with the oh-so-hip headline “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?.” This turned out to be impressively stupid even by the standards of articles with clumsy slang in the headlines: Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it… Continue reading Reading Is Reading, but Books Are Not Fungible
Paging Humanities Bloggers…
A question raised in comments to yesterday’s rant about humanities types looking down on people who don’t know the basics of their fields, while casually dismissing math and science: [I]t occurs to me that it would be useful if someone could determine, honestly, whether the humanities professors feel the same sense of condescension among science… Continue reading Paging Humanities Bloggers…