My first contribution to the Brandeis Science blog

My first post at a widely-read (ie, not this) blog is based on my friend Dennis Brietsprecher's recent paper in Sciecne.

The Information Diet: Some Thoughts

I recently read "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson, on my Kindle. Kindle allows you to immediately post to Facebook when you've finished a book, thus telling the world that you read and what you're reading. You don't necessarily need to say what you thought of the book, but I suppose it's implied that if you made it through the whole thing and chose to share it with the world, then it must be good enough. Indeed, I liked this book, or at least parts of it. It's ironic, however, to finish a book about information obesity and then immediately post about it on Facebook, so I waited a couple of weeks for my thoughts to digest, first.

Addressing the Alarming Rise in Zombie and Mermaid Sightings (actually, citings)

Drawing by Sean Adams, 
http://iamamermaid.com/2011/09/09/michelle-mccrary-and-zombie-mermaids/ 

A few weeks ago, the Center for Disease Control was forced to issue a statement that there is no zombie virus. While this might seem an absurd thing for a government agency to say, the whole story is somewhat more convoluted. As I learned from a talk given by science writer Carl Zimmer and posted online, the CDC had posted a story on its website with instructions to prepare people for the zombie apocalypse. The intention was to create greater awareness of disaster preparedness issues so that, by thinking about zombies, people would give some thought to earthquake, hurricane, and disease outbreak-type situations. In other words, a PR stunt. The strategy backfired when rumors started on the web about a real zombie apocalypse, and went viral. At that point, the CDC was tied up in the matter and forced to sound ridiculous.

Error bars in Excel

I recently upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010 and quickly regretted it. While Microsoft continually makes their programs more visually appealing, very rarely do they add any improvement in functionality, and quite often, things only seem to get worse.

(On a related note, I recently read that Internet Explorer is the only web browser still using a faulty method for interpreting CSS layouts, which is why for the forseeable future, all webpage files will have to begin with an otherwise unnecessary piece of code that does nothing but tell IE to behave properly.)

Anyway, as a scientist, I'm always using error bars. Error bars are a visual way of representing the uncertainty associated with a measurement ... and they are critical for everything we do. No data is meaningful unless one can ascribe an estimate of how close a measured value might be to a true value - a number we can never be totally confident of. So error bars are important. And they keep getting harder and harder to find.

Jorge Cham and the Higg's boson

A wonderful new animation appeared today about the Higg's boson and just what is going on at the Large Hadron Collidor. The drawings are by Jorge Cham, of PHD Comics fame (speaking of which, today's comic seems to be about career crises, which suits this blog just fine).

I have always been interested in particle physics, though I have no formal training in it, and this cartoon is a bit of an inspiration that some science training doesn't go amiss when communicating with the public - he seems to have a firm grasp of the science while also creating an informative (and fun) video.

I hope Jorge is making some money with his various endevours; when I saw him speak at Princeton some years ago he definitely had a job other than professional cartoonist. I know his books draw a profit, but really, when your primary audience is grad students and all the content is available online, you can't expect too many sales. His Wikipedia page makes no mention of his "day job", however.

Informing people about science seems to be a new direction for him ... perhaps as his audience moves out of grad school and into the world he'll find an increasing market for scientists wanting to find new ways to communicate with the public.

Beginning with Adobe Illustrator

I've avoided a thorough study of Illustrator's many functions up until now because it is, of course, an art program, and visual art was never my forte. In Grade 1, my art teacher had a special conference with my parents to address my inability to draw even the most basic forms, and even by high school concepts like perspective were beyond me.

I was relieved to discover that creating art in Illustrator is not like creating art in the real world. Drawing a perfect circle, for example, is trivial, whereas I doubt if I could do it on paper unaided. Since the first thing you learn is creating shapes without any fill, I started practicing by creating a variety of cell shapes that may come in handy. Creating, for example, a yeast cell with a mother and bud that is symmetrical is not quite as trivial as drawing a circle, but the steps involved are technical (don't require hand-eye coordination), and I quickly figured out a few tricks (e.g., if you want a symmetrical shape, you can worry about getting one side just right, then cut the shape in half and duplicate a reflected version of it). Modifying, recoloring, rotating, shading, even adding a "membrane" (border of a different color) is all trivial once you have the basic shape.

New Directions

I’ll open this post by making three obvious statements, which might appear to be unrelated:

1. I haven’t posted on this blog much. I can see from my history I made three posts in July of 2010, and that it’s been largely dormant since then. This is, I believe, because my blog really lacks a purpose, and has drifted from the purpose I originally intended it to serve.

2. The job market for Ph.D.s right now, especially those who want to continue in academia, is simply terrible.

3. The inevitable change that comes with new parenthood is simply a change of perspective. No matter how many times you are told that it will happen to you, you never quite believe it.