Racist AP captions

From metafilter,

black people loot , white people find. Racist photo captions by Yahoo News/AP illuminate more than Katrina's aftermath. If these pictures are taken down, there are mirrors here (loot, loot, find).

The Punctuated Equilibrium of Bush's Popularity

Via Slate, I was directed to this graph of popularity of President Bush, created by Professor Pollkatz. It's fascinating - there has been no sudden decline due to the effects of the war. Rather, it's the return to the natural popularity of Bush before the perturbation due to 9/11.

You can't handle the truth

I am a scientist and supposedly, I deal with truth. You can always read about the miraculous powers of science in ferreting the secret knowledge of the universe in nepotistically self-congratulatory editorials of journals like Nature, Science or PNAS (pronounced Pee-Nas). But when I try to compare the mystical experience of finding the (scientific) truth to my daily ritual of coming in to lab every day, writing code, running computer programs and formatting tidy little tables in Microsoft Word, I have great difficulty in seeing where the truth actually blossoms.

At what point does one discover the truth? Is it when I have the idea, when the program has calculated the numbers and written to the hard-disk? When I see the data for the first time? But then, one is never sure that the run is good, so you run it again. Then you type up a breezy little paper, situating your idea in the forest of competing claims and counter-claims. That delicate process of positioning your data so that it never strays too far from the main-stream, yet says something of some originality. And so, you might publish a paper. But, like the tree that falls in the forest and no one hears it, what good is a paper if no one cites it? Yes, the process of submitting a paper to a professional journal is full of heart-ache and pain. Waiting for an editor and his cohort of reviwers to pass judgement on your article seems more like being in middle school again, waiting to be admitted into the circle of popular kids. Is your science hot or not?

I got to thinking about this especially after following yet another round of Creationism vs. Evolution debate that has wracked the United States for decades. Of course, the Defenders of Rationality have all come out of the wood-work to defend the legacy of Charles Darwin from the Heathens of the Gate. Whereas the Fathers of the Christian Faith is bravely trying to scale the walls of the godless traitors of this great Christian land (after all Jesus Christ was voted as the 13th greatest American). Whilst we can all laugh heartily in the ivory towers of academia at the shoddy arguments produced by the Creationism, and in particular the Intelligent Designers, I can't help wondering if the argument of the Evolutionists is all that airtight.

Don't get me wrong, I love evolution, I buy it, I'm a card-carrying (phd) scientist. But I've rarely heard any scientist explain how ideas change into experiment into data into theory, fact and truth. Every step of this evolution seems to me, fraught with logical holes. Most scientists don't realize this because they've spent their who careers learning science and not the history of science. Few have grappled with Hume's challenge to empiricism, Kant's rebuttal of Hume, Hegel's theoretical rejoinder to Kant, and the whole ecology of sociologists of science. Not that I blame my fellow scientists for their ignorance. There's only so many hours in a day, and it's tough enough to absorb a few branches of the many scientific disciplines. I call myself a biophysicist but definitely less biology than physics. I'd have trouble telling you what fungi is.

This confusion I think is at the heart why most of my fellow post-docs and grad students dread that most onerous of tasks - writing an article. The fact is, they don't know why, or how the process of justifying their scientific claims really entails. Now of course, any post-doc who makes it up the next rung of the academic ladder must learn this, but it's by osmosis. Like at the moment, our lab is hard at work on the next "big" paper from the lab. My boss is keenly trying to position the paper in such a way that it will seem important. It's not so much bending the results but it's like rotating a sculpture of woman around at the right angle so that the shaft of light from the sky-light will catch the lips just so.