Elitism

In grad school, many people seemed intellectually curious.  Here, it seems, siggnificantly less so - and it is kind of disturbing.  Researchers, with PhDs in physics, really shouldn't complain about news coverage for the Higgs boson, and really shouldn't say that such research is pointless.  We should celebrate all scientific achievements and understand that the microcosms that we choose to work on (or are coerced into working on by whatever circumstances) are not more important than some other microcosm.  Not everybody can directly work on everything, but everyone should be aware of what is out there and what remains to be discovered, especially for the bigger-picture items.  That's part of being a good scientist.

Sounds from the visible underground

I went to a fundraiser for a group that supports economic justice last night. Some highlights of the conversations (names changed for anonymity) (mostly paraphrased - I don't remember the exact wordings):

"[Rob] is like the smartest guy I've met."
"I don't know, I have a high threshold for 'smartest person...'"

"I bid on your military history lunch thing. I can't wait to discuss the Battle of Teutoberg Forest's impact on the unification of Germany."
"I don't really do unification of Germany ... I mostly do World War 2, some Civil War."
"Sumerian Civil War?"
"Nothing ancient."
"Oh."

"It would have been nice to have the money to go to grad school."
"My grad school was fully funded - I actually saved a small amount of money."

Sure, like everyone else, I don't like wasteful government spending. But how does one define waste? Surely bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age after we've killed the guy we're there to capture is wasteful. Or doing the same in Iraq years after the maniac we went in there to depose has been deposed. Or sending helicopters to see who's growing cannabis in their backyard or the country's backyard (national forests). But no, government waste these days includes funding for science, public education, law enforcement, guaranteeing a clean food supply, etc.

Elections, version Y2008

We've overcome one major civil rights hurdle with Barack Obama being elected president. However, with the passage of Calif Prop 8, Flo Prop 2, and various others (all except Calif 8 by huge margins) we still have much to do. One of the more interesting (awful?) facts is that 70% of African-Americans voted for Prop. 8, which was enough to tip the bill to the pass side (it would have failed, barely, had African-Americans voted 50-50 for-against) . This is a higher correlation than Christians (about 67% voted for) and the second highest correlation overall (90% of nonreligious people voted against). One would think a group with such a history of discrimination would vote vehemently against discrimination for other groups. This is apparently incorrect - nobody likes to be discriminated against, but people also, apparently, enjoy discriminating against others. Not surprising, as history has shown time and again.


Complete Prop 8 exit polls: http://media.sacbee.com/smedia/2008/11/05/18/prop8.source.prod_affiliate.4.pdf

Science

I haven't posted in a while, but I came across this http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science the other day. It's not so much about women in science (it starts out with the Larry Summers thing, and discusses a little bit about opportunity costs being greater for women), but more science careers in general. Excerpt: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." This is true, especially for young scientists, i.e. graduate students and postdocs. I could be making $50,000/yr with benefits and the possibility of raises while working 40 hours/wk in industry instead of the $20,000/yr with benefits for working 50-70 hours/wk right now. However, would I be any better off? I don't live below my means and can still live a middle-class lifestyle, and I have access to wonderful resources like the university library and have stimulating colleagues with whom to converse on a regular basis. Graduate school offers much more freedom in terms of working hours/places (if I want to work from midnight to 10 AM every day nobody would care as long as stuff got done, "work" can be defined as reading or writing or editing papers at Starbucks). If monetary reward is is all that someone wants, and a person is indifferent about intellectual stimulation, then sure, careers in American science, at least in academia, can be considered unwanted. The problem is that science is necessary for society to advance, and we need some nontrivial segment of the population doing science.

Winning

The Physics Grads Team won the May 6th Trivia Night at the Pub competition. Winning freally eels good. My life is now complete.

Lab continued

I found out that the post-doc in my lab has renewed her funding and will be here for I don't know how much longer (originally she was supposed to be done in May). This is a post-doc who doesn't speak English, doesn't talk to anybody in lab and monopolizes some of the equipment. Lab is going to be really crowded this summer with two (maybe three) more students joining. At least two of them are pretty cool and do things like speak English and attend pub nights so things should improve.