Vonnegut on science communication

Three people in a bar, talking about science:

“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life some day,” the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. “Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”

“I missed that,” I murmured.

“I saw that,” said Sandra. “About two days ago.”

“That’s right,” said the bartender.

“What is the secret of life?” I asked.

“I forget,” said Sandra.

“Protein,” the bartender declared. “They found out something about protein.”

“Yeah,” said Sandra, “that’s it.”

– from Cat’s Cradle (p. 25 in the 1970 Dell paperback.)

China: plus ça change. . .?

Open question: If China has a revolution what happens to all that US debt its holding?

Worth reading today

From Ars Technica, why tablets are yet one more way to waste your time:

In fact, even when I’m traveling, I don’t bring the iPad if I plan to be productive. I find most apps to be a waste of time—often they’re incredibly fun and fascinating wastes of time, but they’re still time wasters. And even the productivity apps that I love, like scientific and/or financial calculators and things like OmniFocus, have desktop counterparts that I’m faster with….

Some of the really savvy new media efforts like Flipboard are exciting, but after the initial “wow” factor wears off, these apps mainly serve to remind me that there’s already too much good stuff to read out there, and that my life is slipping away from me in an infinite stream of interesting bits about smart animals, dumb criminals, outrageous celebs, shiny objects, funny memes, scientific discoveries, economic developments, etc..

And, from the NYRB, Freeman Dyson on James Gleick’s forthcoming book:

Gleick’s book has an epilogue entitled “The Return of Meaning,” expressing the concerns of people who feel alienated from the prevailing scientific culture. The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.

Gene Logic: Finding your (micro)Identity

The secret to success in life is to find your identity, particularly if you are a cell. Achieving and holding an identity is the prime concern of life at its most fundamental, cellular level; it is the key to engaging in behavior which best meets the challenges and demands of the molecular thicket that is the environment of the cell. Life can downright bewildering on the micron level. An identity makes this world navigable. Identity determines how a cell looks, what it eats, and the company it keeps. It specifies what environmental signals can be received, and what responses those signals elicit. An E. coli bacterium metabolizing a favorite monosaccharide in your gut, a yeast cell looking to hook up with one of the opposite gender, a nerve cell in your brain primed for an electric response, that light-detecting rod cell in your retina, the myocyte harboring a molecular power train in your bicep, and a cancer cell gone rogue: each of these has at its core an identity that dictates its behavior.
Continue reading “Gene Logic: Finding your (micro)Identity”

Science vs getting a life

That seismic rumble you feel is 100,000 postdocs and grad students nodding their heads:

Goodbye academia, I get a life:

The ones I’ve seen thriving in Cambridge, apart from geniuses (there are a few), are the guys who cling to a simple ecological tenet: Find your niche, where you are indispensable, and keep it in your claws at all costs. This means basically that these people do always the same thing, over and over again, simply because it’s the lowest-risk option. I could have done the same (I was pretty skilled during my Ph.D. in a quite obscure but interesting biophysics experimental technique) but I thought that doing science properly was also about learning and broadening your expertise. How wrong I was.

You can imagine yourself what does it mean also for research in general: Nobody takes risks anymore. Nobody young jumps and tries totally new things, because it’s almost surely a noble way to suicide your career. Continue reading “Science vs getting a life”