Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

Since corporal punishment in class is off limits, we need the NCSE

Social (not scientific…) controversy over science issues sometimes gives students a chance to act up.

Eugenie Scott has a guest post up at Real Climate on why the NCSE has taken up the issue of climate change in the classroom:

Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class.

Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up.

“Mrs. Brown! My dad says global warming is a hoax!”

Or you come to school one morning and the principal wants to see you because a parent of one of your students has accused you of political bias because you taught what scientists agree about: that the Earth is getting warmer, and human actions have had an important role in this warming.

Cormac McCarthy, science editor

Continuing on the theme of scientists and novelists:

From the Guardian:

McCarthy has long enjoyed a close interaction with scientists, keeping an office at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research centre that also houses a host of scientists, founded by the Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann. (George Johnson’s biography of Gell-Mann, Strange Beauty, reveals that McCarthy performed a line-edit on the entire manuscript of his The Quark and the Jaguar, “but Gell-Mann was too rushed and disorganised to take advantage of the suggestions”).

Gell-Mann disorganized… that makes me feel better about my own work habits. On the other hand, Gell-Mann is a genius.

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit

If a famous novelist visited your lab, would you remember it?

Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel The Marriage Plot features a bipolar yeast geneticist. While writing the book, Eugenides, who lives down the road from several world-famous yeast genetics labs at Princeton, decided to do a little research. He visited David Botstein, one of the elder eminences of yeast genetics, got a tour of the lab, and nobody there seems to remember the visit. From the New York Times: Continue reading “Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit”

Tell me why I’m doing this again?

They don’t tell you this in Bio 101:

Ars Technica, The Tenure Track Not Taken:

Becoming a university professor requires a lot of work for very little financial reward, compared to most other professions. In STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, the minimum requirement is four years of undergraduate education, plus anywhere between four and a half and eight years of graduate studies, followed by an (ever increasing) number of years of post-doctoral work. That may get you an assistant professorship where, at a state university, the starting salary is in the $60k-70k range.

(The only other career path I have seen that has similarly low pay for exorbitant requirements is becoming a chef. In both cases, you only do them because you simply love doing them.)

Continue reading “Tell me why I’m doing this again?”

Sunday Poem

Phosphor Reading By His Own Light

It is difficult to read. The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.

The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

The greenness of night lies on the page and goes
Down deeply in the empty glass…

Look, realist, not knowing what you expect.
The green falls on you as you look,

Falls on and makes and gives, even a speech.
And you think that that is what you expect,

That elemental parent, the green night,
Teaching a fusky alphabet.

– Wallace Stevens

Stevens is not easy, but he repays the effort with his remarkable word choice and fierce cognitive engagement. Of particular interest to the scientifically inclined, his poems are often about the intersection between our minds and reality – clearly a theme in this poem. (Maybe this poem is also about you, trying to read this poem.) As he once wrote, “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.”