Breaking News

I know that I'm everyone's source for late-breaking physics-news, and so I've rushed to the terminal (neh, laptop) to update you all.

Everyone's favorite Star Trek-related author and physicist Lawrence Krauss is talking about The Higgs Boson Hangover. It's pretty mild compared to what Peter Woit might say, but then again this is in Slate and probably reaches a wider audience. The older I get, the more I realize that I continually overestimate the understanding of science and how it proceeds by the general public. And so it's good to publicize that scientists tend to want to be surprised instead of proven right.

Doug is discussing some fraud in the biomedical community about which I was completely unaware. This is, of course, part-in-parcel of how science corrects itself. Teaching the scientific method in school is all well-and-good, but I think it would behoove us to teach how science-the-enterprise corrects for the faults of those who practice it.

Slashdot today mentions a Forbes article about how I've got such a low-stress job. The link isn't working for me and so I've not read it, but apparently there's a big stink about it, and Slashdot has a number of links to some arguments against.

Finally, unrelated to physics, I wanted to link to a couple pieces by, and with, the person who turned-in Bradley Manning for allegedly leaking all those documents to Wikileaks: a very difficult piece by Adrian Lamo and a chat with him and someone else. Whatever one thinks of Manning's actions, the torture he's been put-through is awful and inexcusable.

This is a long read, but I found it pretty interesting. A guy who abandoned his goal of entering the academic linguistics world, but still had the drive to contribute bycreating a new language. But at one point he's quoted as:

I was surrounded by all these people hanging on my every word. It was intoxicating-especially for a loner like me. For one day, I got to play as an academic. I got to live this fantasy where I took the other path in the garden. I got to see what it would have been like if I had gone to graduate school and become a professional linguist. The fates of the universe tore open a window to show me what my life could have been. That night, I went back to my room, took a shower, and burst into tears.

Umm, where are these people hanging on to my every word? Am I doing this wrong?

Naughty, Naughty Boy

This guy's no physicist (but did major in math as an undergrad), but he is an academic who got in trouble with financial reimbursements from his University: Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia of whom you may have heard via the best-seller Freakonomics which features his work prominently.

This type of financial ''discrepancy'' doesn't seem terribly uncommon, but I don't see how this happens as much as it seems, given how tight and controlled most university's systems are. It's probably just that my mind isn't built to see the ways to abuse the system (that's not supposed to sound as immodest as it does).

His story and rise to academic stardom though is quite emblematic of how the academic world deviates from a pure meritocracy. Not to take anything away from the guy, but he clearly knows how to work the system and it's hard to believe there aren't many others who have gained far less with work just as significant.

A bit more can be found at the Freakonomics blog.