Transmillennial

One of the books I've most enjoyed in the last 10 years was Hanna Rosin's The End of Men: and the Rise of Women . Despite its somewhat click-baity title (but hold muh beer, Hanna, and watch this!), TEOM wasn't an anti-male screed. In fact, I got the sense that Rosin was quite sympathetic to the men whose imminent demise she was predicting. The thesis of the book was that as manufacturing industry had declined, the traditional model of male breadwinner/female mom had disappeared. Women were now better than men at getting jobs in the new service/information economy, and while they were hard pressed to be both breadwinners and moms, they were surviving. Men, meanwhile, had been slow to adapt, refusing to take over part of the traditional female role while women were coopting theirs, and were mostly just 'going fishing'. And women, reasonably, were asking why they needed a full-time male, when they could always get one when needed. What's fascinating is that it ...

Amie Wilkinson of U Chicago, and Benson Farb of the NYJM, issued statements yesterday rebutting Ted Hill's apparently mendacious account in Quillette of his junk-science paper and its retraction. Wilkinson's statement. Farb's statement. Prediction: Quillette and the people who should know better (Pinker, Christakis) who jumped all over this will acknowledge no fault, and next week we'll do it all over again.

I've been a chemist, formally, for 32 years. Before that I was a biochemist or biophysicist. And one of the frustrating things about chemistry is all the important laws seem to be taken, and also that they all seem to have to be of major scientific importance. So we have The Second Law of Thermodynamics (big) and the Law of Definite Proportions (important, if not always obeyed) and the Ideal Gas Law (ditto). After 32 years in the field, you'd think I could have a law too, but it looks increasingly unlikely. Sad trombone. But then I found out that in mathematics, apparently there are all sorts of laws lying around to be discovered, that don't seem that, well, important. Like Benford's law . Benford's Law says if you have a big list of random natural numbers, the most common leading digit is 1, followed by 2, followed by 3, etc. I've explained it all in a previous post. The great thing is, once I'd gotten over the astonishment that they would actually call t...

I'm not going to apologize for my previous post , which treated a cranky paper, and the outrage machine that cranked up upon its retraction, with all the respect it deserved. However, now some Very Serious Individuals have weighed in, and some things I thought intuitively obvious aren't intuitively obvious to them. So I'll try to be serious (this isn't a good start, though). First of all, there's a reason we specialize in science. I'm about as cross-disciplinary as it gets (biochemist who became a biophysicist who becamea chemist, who's published in all the major subdivisions of chemistry, and now does gas-phase physics; or dilettante, you choose). And at the same time, I'm leery of weighing in on the details of a field in which I'm not a specialist. Science these days is too big and complicated for that. And so the first rule for journal editors should be: don't publish stuff from outside your field. Generalist journals like Science and Natu...

This briefly pegged the Intellectual Dork Web 's outrage meters a week or so ago. This sentence alone should cause your crank detectors to twitch. I came up with a simple intuitive mathematical argument based on biological and evolutionary principles Riiiight...because evolutionary biologists are idiots and were waiting for an mathematician to come along and apply 'simple intuitive mathematical arguments' to solve a problem they hadn't figured out in 150 years. But honestly, some mathematicians and physicists really do think like this. I've met several. This is the cartoon posted on my office door. He's obviously written his own wiki page , and its hilarious. His life's work is "Benford's law", which says that in large collections of numbers, more of the numbers than average will have small leading digits. I can lay out a proof for that in 5 minutes, and could write up a rigorous proof in an afternoon. Let's say you have a rand...