Yum!

"What if knowledge itself were delicious?"

-Roland Barthes

"Never"? Hardly.

With the growth of the PLoS journals, there's recently been a rise in discussion of alternative forms & variants of scientific peer review. In this context, we'd like to raise the big question: What good is peer review, anyway? To do so, we'd like to use as an example, not a journal article, but rather a book.

In 2002, Stephen Wolfram, founder of Mathematica (official corporate motto: "No, we're not MatLab."), self-published a big book, modestly titled "A New Kind of Science". The following appears on page 443 of that book:

"… [a] systematic decrease in randomness … would certainly in principle be possible … But somehow it seems that [suitable] initial conditions … never actually occur in practice."

"Never"? In fact, the appearance of order out of apparent randomness, due to carefully crafted initial conditions, occurs (conservatively) billions of times every day, in the world's MRI scanners, as NMR spin echo formation is essential for much of MRI.

What else in the book would have surprised (and been corrected by) peer reviewers, we cannot say.

Good news!

Aspiring non-conformists will be happy to learn that a guide to non-conformity is now available for purchase.

...and he should know!

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

-Richard P. Feynman

Hooray for the Harbor Tunnel!

Did we mention the major downtown tie-ups caused by road-work in preparation for next year's Baltimore Grand Prix?

One day last week, a colleague said that, coming in, he takes Russell Street to avoid I-395 congestion.

That same day I got an email about a new website with suggestions for dealing with the roadwork. So I checked it out. And the first recommendation I found was to take I-395 to avoid Russell Street congestion.

[Note: NeuroCooking recommends the Harbor Tunnel!]

Baltimore Grand Prix 2011!

With Labor Day 2010 freshly behind us, let us look ahead to Labor Day 2011,

which will feature the inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix,

which will feature cars racing at extreme speeds on the streets of central Baltimore!

Yes, those are the same streets of central Baltimore used daily by many commuters, especially those trying to get from the South to an esteemed hospital complex on the Eastside. And yes, as you might imaging, some renovations are required to get those funky old downtown streets in shape for race cars. So... Guess when the renovations start? A month before the race? Three months before? Six months before?

Actually, the renovations, with plentiful lane closures along major routes, started months ago.

Yup. Tens of thousands of people – make that hundreds of thousands of people – will be inconvenienced for more than year, in order that, during a few hours of racing over two days of the Labor Day 2011 weekend, a few dozen people can drive real fast.

Makes sense to me!

[Note: NeuroCooking recommends the Harbor Tunnel as an alternative!]

The future is here, now.

We've all heard the complaints:

"Where is my jet-pack?"

"Where is my personal heli-car?"

"Where is my robot dog?"

It would appear that the future of the past has not arrived.

However, recently, three things have convinced us that, in fact, the future really is here.

Those three things are: The iPhone, the iPad, and spray-on sun-screen.

Up to 200 MPH, in the middle of downtown!

There are two signs that the IndyCar racing series will include the inaugural Baltimore Grand Prix over Labor Day 2011: The roads of central Baltimore are all torn up, and you can already buy hats:

what kind of threat?

Recently, we were talking about the situation in Iraq, and how the Iraqi politicians still haven't formed a government, five months after their elections.

I said that in the US system, we think that people who lose elections can just wait till the next election to try again. However, in Iraq, things are quite different, in that people who lose elections might have to go into exile to protect their lives. The phrase I used for this was "existential threat", as in, those politicians are afraid to compromise because they, perhaps correctly, perceive a loss as an existential threat. And when I said that, she let out a little inappropriate laugh.

So, later, I asked about that little laugh. I asked whether, in response to the phrase "existential threat", she had visualized a little man in a beret threatening to hit someone over the head with a baguette.

And, at that, she laughed so hard that she had to stop to catch her breath.

[Note: Yes, it's not funny if you have to explain it, but the point is that the word "existential" can refer to, um, existence, or to the philosophical school of existentialism, which might be best known for its proponents who are, yes, French.]

Everyone wants to be a Hero

My new essay is up at PhilanTopic, Everyone Wants to be a Hero.

Here's an excerpt:

Everybody wants to be a hero. Smart leaders and organizations know that. You also know it's natural for people to align themselves with solutions rather than to associate themselves with problems. You want the audiences for your stories to relate as much as possible to the protagonists in the stories you choose to share and to empathize with the protagonist’s heroic journey.

Here's an example...