cossatot

What is also quite fascinating to me is that many of the Cherokee of the time considered writing to be a form of witchcraft. Sequoyah allegedly [e.g., 1] decided that it was not based on his observations of white men, but his initial trials of teaching written Cherokee were sufficient to bring charges of witchcraft against his daughter, his first pupil. However, after some demonstrations, it was shown to be what it is, a very simple but extremely effective tool.

I'm sure many of the readers of this fine forum know the quote (and provenance, which I don't) that is something like 'any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic'.

[1]: https://cherokee.org/About-The-Nation/History/Facts/Sequoyah...

This is really cool, and I'm heartened that you've formed a business around this. What kind of projection do you use? DO you select the displayed stars from the zillions in that azimuth by their distance to Earth, or brightness on earth?

No need to call anyone delusional.

The Ozark balds exist primarily because the tops of hills in the White River Valley have very little soil, as they're made up of dolomitic limestone that dissolves in rain water instead of breaking down into clays. The scant soil that exists is enough to host grasses, but few trees; Eastern Red Cedar can grow, but before widespread fire suppression, it was pretty contained to fire-protected rock outcroppings. With fire suppression (which may have stabilized the soil and limited erosion as well), Eastern Red Cedar and some oaks (blackjack and post oak) are filling in the balds. This is in constrast to the Appalachian balds that are mainly a product of climate differences between the peaks and the lower hillslopes.

The hills to the north of the White River Valley (around Springfield) and south (south of Harrison) are capped by rock layers that have a relatively high clay content and produce soil that can more easily support forests.

The Bald Knobber history is pretty interesting. I had always thought of them as analogous to the earliest KKK (also a Reconstruction-era vigilante group initially) but I hadn't realized until I read the surprisingly detailed Wikipedia page that the Bald Knobbers were Republicans who sided with the North. (Unfortunately, the Bald Knobbers are history at this point, while the KKK is still quite active in the area, especially Harrison/Boone County, Arkansas).

I'm reading Minter's Junkyard Planet right now, whic is primarily about the global recycling trade. It's quite interesting, though a little too first-person/anecdotal. nonetheless it's thorough enough to give a good idea of what is happening in various parts of the trade network. Well recommended, if you're curious to what happens when you recycle a can or junk a car.

The canonical paper on this topic is Edmund Schulman's classic "Longevity under Adversity in Conifers" (1954)[1]

When I worked in a tree-ring dating lab, we always sought out the harshest local environments in a region and then at a given site, the harshest micro-environments (typically water limited but fire protected) because that's where you find the most ragged, pathetic, and correlatively oldest trees around with the most climate sensitivity in their ring patterns. This makes the ideal trees to date and build climate chronologies from.

[1]: https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/1682970

Find a problem that you are interested in and have the capacity to make progress and enjoy at least most of the grind (and it will be a grind). If you choose something simply because it's a big problem but not something you have a natural affinity for, you may not end up making a difference because you won't be effective. If you're not effective, it'll be really hard to find someone to pay you to work on it, regardless of the problem.

Given the options that you have stated, progress with energy will produce progress on a wide variety of other problems because it's a physical and economic limiting factor for almost all activities. Creating cheaper, cleaner and/or more available energy will have an impact on human health and well-being, because it makes society more affluent and able to channel more resources into healthcare. Making progress on healthcare doesn't itself produce the same sort of spillover effects into as many other sectors, though it is undoubtedly beneficial. It also seems that many of the biggest challenges in healthcare are regulatory or policy-oriented and not necessarily technical, whereas many fundamental problems in the energy field are technical in nature.

I, personally, am a geologist and work for a seismic hazard and risk nonprofit that works with governments, insurance companies and other parties to better assess and ameliorate earthquake risk. My training is in more fundamental geologic research (not societally oriented at all) but I have veered towards earthquake hazards in my career because I find it to be more satisfying, both in terms of the societal benefit and in terms of my day to day effort and existence.

Earthquakes aren't anywhere as dangerous as cancer or heart disease or drunk driving, but I don't think I'd be nearly as good at solving any problems with those things. I deeply love the earth and think it's beautiful, and this motivates me to work hard at understanding it better and translating that understanding into useful information for people who want to make safer buildings and communities.

This is great. Is any of it available? I've spent a lot of my winter break working on fitting splines to my hand-drawn chines and then make developable surfaces out of them for stitch and glue kayak building. I'm still in the hacky Jupyter notebook phase of the project but I'd love to see what you've produced.

I'll agree with Yaa101 that a big part of the story is the picking of low-hanging fruit, or to put it less metaphorically, that in the first 100 years of institutionalized science (let's say 1850-1950 without getting caught up in the exact dates), there were a lot of fundamental questions that could be addressed through the application of relatively systematic, rigorous observation and experimentation, and modeling with the kind of math you can do on a chalkboard.

Within this time period, though, a lot of these questions were addressed and the new questions that arose required more data, better instrumentation, and more advanced mathematical modeling techniques to address.

In my own field (geology, in particular tectonics and earthquake studies), this was laid out in a very explicit manner: the fundamental mode of observation is geologic mapping, and the terrestrial surface of the earth slowly got mapped. The mapping of the past may be refined or re-interpreted but rarely does it need to be redone from scratch. It is done to a reasonable level of resolution. There is still a lot of unknown under the ocean basins, but we have strong theoretical and empirical arguments for why those areas are not as complex as continents and therefore less interesting.

The late 1960s through the mid 1980s saw the development of plate tectonic theory which completely revolutionized the science. Now, 50 years in, we have some second- or third-order questions but most of the first-order questions have been addressed.

Today, the major developments of the field come from better instrumentation, for the most part. In the sub-field of tectonics, progress comes from the development and application of new methods for dating rocks or other geologic features (including things like exposure dating or 'how long as this rock been at the surface of the earth'), and from using satellite-based measurements of earth deformation (GPS and radar interferometry) to actually measure the motion of tectonic plates and sub-plates. Additional, continuous refinements in seismic imaging of the subsurface (driven by the oil industry primarily) has also been very helpful.

This stuff is really expensive! It's hard to go camp out, hike a bit, make some observations, and write a good paper. The instrumentation to get the age of rocks might cost $100,000 and then when consumables and salary are factored in it might cost $500-$2000 per sample. You might need 10-20 samples to really find out anything new in your 10-km by 10-km area of interest. And I believe that geology is quite cheap relative to high-energy physics or whatever. Major geophysical experiments can cost millions. We piggyback on physics and other tech to a large extent---launching GPS satellites for example, or using obsolete particle accelerators for geochemical measurements. The oil industry spends (tens of?) billions a year acquiring data as well but very little of it becomes public or available to researchers, though the cumulative data release from industry is significant. [NB, I may be 1 order of magnitude short on any of these numbers.]

In general there have been very few major theoretical advancements in the past 20-30 years. We have gotten better at recognizing coupling between tectonic process and earth surface processes, and as instrumental datasets slowly increase (as we observe more earthquakes, etc.) some smaller boxes get checked. However, a geologist from the mid-1980s would be able to navigate today's scientific landscape pretty well. The fads are different but like any fashion, many are cyclical and were fads in the 80s too.

I personally see advancement coming from better statistical and numerical modeling, and the availability of high-quality global datasets (primarily created through large international collaborations, which is a post-cold war thing). I also see a lot of room for improvement in our understanding of the coupling of mechanisms spanning vastly different timescales--for example earthquakes occur in seconds, post-earthquake phenomena last weeks to decades, the earthquake cycle lasts hundreds to thousands of years, and the cumulative deformation from earthquakes and related processes is what we call 'tectonics' over millions of year timescales. It's really hard to make a single numerical (i.e., finite element) model that works over all of these timescales and is driven by basic physics (i.e. an earthquake results from forces applied rather than being imposed). Nonetheless there are almost certainly a lot of really important coupling processes that occur on these different timescales but they are really hard to analyze (and a lot of interesting stuff happens at 20 km depth and at mm/yr rates, which is pretty damn hard to observe).

So I guess I see a lot of 21st century science as bridge building rather than outright discovery. This is fine. An analogy would be moving to a new country. The first bit is the discovery of the place, then you learn what language they speak. The learning doesn't stop there. As you learn the language, a lot of daily stuff makes sense. As you gain an understanding of the culture and the history, and can interact in a meaningful way, the value of that learning continues to increase, but it doesn't feel like 'discovery' like it did in the first year.

The town has its merits. The arts--especially museums--are quite good, as is a lot of the downtown architecture and housing in midtown (gorgeous houses). It is an oil town after all. With that also comes its fair share of conspicuous consumption in terms of shi-shi restaurants and shopping if that's your thing. The oil industry has also brought in more diversity than you'd think, particularly people from the middle east. The music scene used to be great though fairly country oriented (with lots of blues, rock and swing influence and a big independent/DIY aesthetic), though that genre has certainly lost almost all of its vitality and I expect Tulsa's music scene has gone the same way. The philharmonic and ballet also used to be decent (could be still?) and tickets may be cheap and available enough to just drop in if you're interested.

In terms of big-city amenities, arts, culture, nightlife, etc. it definitely beats the South SF Bay area on all fronts except cheap, delicious Asian restaurants. But it can't compete with LA, SF proper, DC...

You can also expose your children to experiences like having horses, which is harder in cities, but contributes to well-roundedness in a variety of ways. You can even go to the museum in the morning and go ride horses in the afternoon because getting from A to B is easy.

That being said, it is a pretty conservative place, and it's a long way from anywhere that's not (outside of college towns), and it's a long way from anywhere that looks different except the Ozarks. You'd probably be fine as a non-surfing liberal atheist except dating could really suck. Life could also be pretty hard for various ethnicities and other sorts of minorities, but less so than most other places within a thousand miles.

WARNING: DIGRESSION

In my experience with many of these places though, a lot of the problems are with the mindset, both of the city itself and of individuals who kind of fall in line.

You can move to a big coastal city and feel the energy of the place--movers moving, shakers shaking--and it's kind of true but it can be very hard to tap into that energy unless you're already connected and have a fair amount of disposable income. If you want to do things, make things, start a business, paint, build boats, join a band, or whatever, it's a lot easier to do in a place where you can afford a garage and not live 40 min outside the city, and where you aren't slammed just trying to pay $3000/month in rent.

If you want to be an active participant in arts, music, crafts, etc. it is generally easier to do in a place like Tulsa or Salt Lake City. You'll have more time and perhaps more income, and networking is pretty easy when the networks are small. You may or may not outgrow the scene eventually. The downside is that people spend a lot of time bitching about how nothing is going on in their small scene or small city and how it'd be so much better to be in a big city with the famous people in their field, and this can be demoralizing to the more sensitive or inexperienced.

However if you want to be a passive participant, a spectator, then it's probably better to be in a city where you can go from gallery to gallery and drink wine and gossip, or if you have the cash on hand to see the luminaries in your musical genre of choice play every Friday night.

(Assuming that the author posted the page)

What is the license for the code samples? I seem to remember that the code in Numerical Recipes, which is stated as a similar book to some degree, is actually fairly restrictive [0].

[0]: http://mingus.as.arizona.edu/~bjw/software/boycottnr.html

"The clear implication was that as a black girl she could never become an engineer, let alone have anything to do with such a vessel."

"It would have normally taken two years to produce a rough design of a ship on paper, but during the heat of the Vietnam War Ms. Montague was given one month to design the specifications for a frigate. She did it in 18 hours and 26 minutes."

"At the height of her career, she was briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff every month and teaching at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Many of her ship designs are still in use."

This is a fantastic story. Thanks for submitting.

I love this album. It's got my vote for the single best piece of art made in the 1990s. I don't know of anything else that has the range of content (going from swagger to fun party music to exploring the depths of the "black experience"), while also pushing ahead on the form/style front, from a couple of underdogs. It's also worn the test of time (and many, many repetitions) quite well, which doesn't have to be the case for revolutionary works of art.

I think that the filters you mention are an important mechanism here. These continuous variables like IQ or test scores get mapped onto binary ones (filters/gates) as you make it, or don't, into schools or jobs or other opportunities. It's not necessarily a linear or symmetrical mapping, either.

For example, when I was in graduate school, the chair was discussing how high GRE scores were not very strong indicators of 'success' in grad school (i.e. doing good research, publishing it, and getting out in a reasonable time). However, low GRE scores were much stronger indicators of 'failure' given these criteria.

IQ probably maps pretty linearly to GRE scores (for most of the small subset of the population who would ever take such a test), but with regards to scientific progress there are a series of thresholds that are more important (grad school, faculty hiring, securing funding, etc. etc.). These thresholds are really about opportunity and access.

I think a lot of us scientists wouldn't view any discipline not fundamentally based in collecting and interpreting observations as a science at all, much less an ur-science.

It depends on the books and your rate of reading. I spend about $100/month on books which is often only 2 or 3. I can't always justify spending more. I would agree with you in the case of fiction, as the books are cheaper and better represented at libraries. But non-fiction is expensive, and I read a lot of technical and niche nonfiction.

I've always felt that First Aid Kit, who have mastered American country-folk musical styling, lay it on a bit thicker than necessary with idioms. It's a bit like someone showing up to a cowboy bar wearing spurs.

I always thought it was about babies, and I'm a native English speaker.

Douthat's probably the best opinion writer at the NYT. Although I disagree with him on many fronts, particularly religious ones, his writing is by far the most reasoned.

However I think this piece reflects a bit of ignorance with regards to the value one gains from a science degree versus a humanities degree. I'm speaking from the position of one who took a lot of English course work (particularly creative writing and critical theory) but dropped the second English major while keeping on with geology through a postdoc. I don't know how much this applies to an engineering degree as science shares more with the humanities than engineering does, and my experience with the engineering curriculum is limited to math/physics courses and having civil engineering students who took geology electives.

When learning a science, one generally learns about the history of the science and the process of societal knowledge-building through this lens. Though Douthat may decry a reduction of history to a 'litany of crimes and wrongthink', here we learn it as a kind of human Markov process with accumulating insight and wisdom, eureka moments and wrong turns, and how internal forces, hidden agendas and external shocks can promote and impede progress. The 'history and tradition' that Douthat feels are no longer valued in technocratic society is actually embodied in science's theory and practice--with the constraint that it is constantly tested, refined and improved (though not monotonically).

There is also a good amount of philosophy involved with working at the ragged edge of knowledge (though this may not really sink in until you get involved with research). It's tough to sift through and braid loose threads of truth, some of which may be based in logic and mathematics, observations, and insights from instrumentation and modeling that may be not yet be fully tested.

Additionally, there is a humility that accompanies the struggle to find knowledge and truth that may be unattainable, forever or at least in a lifetime. Anything that has happened on Earth over the past 4.6 billion years is within the purview of geology, but only events that have left a mark may be investigated. Given the finiteness of the Earth's surface and near surface, the vast majority of events have had all of their records erased and that bit of physical memory has been overwritten. Some questions are as unanswerable as the timeless questions of religion, though perhaps for different reasons. However it is probably less clear from the outset which scientific questions may be answered than which humanistic questions--as a practitioner you have to make the call whether to proceed and when to turn back (cue Kenny Rogers).

And furthermore, a lot of this occurs in an arena that has quite a bit less of the sort of moralistic/nationalistic/etc. status ranking that plagues the humanities currently. Jake Seliger is spot-on in his diagnosis of this in the humanities in the blog post he linked to in another thread. While there are certainly turf battles, issues with illogical attachments to discredited theories due to sunk costs and so forth, different theories of earthquake nucleation don't have the immediate implications for the status of different social groups (beyond researchers themselves) and it's not straightforward to moralize any of it. The different lenses that are applied to knowledge through different techniques (instrumentalists vs. theoreticians) are not so different than the different lenses of critical theory and modern identitarianism: What does this problem look like to a geophysicist who does seismic imaging, and what does it look like to a fault geologist, and what does it look like to a statistical seismologist? And while one group may have the upper hand in investigating a specific issue, almost everyone is working towards the same positive-sum goal (though the short-term scrabble for funding an influence is absolutely not positive-sum).

I think the society that Douthat fears is not 21st century science, but perhaps something more akin to early 20th century scientism--the technocratic philosophy that permeated Leninism, Modernist architecture and urban planning (Le Corbusier, etc.), Taylorism in management at all levels, and so forth. Inducting more college students into a discipline's quest for truth through experiment and falsification will not degrade our culture in the manner he supposes.

(And as a short personal anecdote: I decided to abandon the English major the day I went to Poetry at 10:30, in which we fruitlessly debated the word 'race' in a poem "literally" about a white girl seeing a black girl on the other side of some train tracks, after going to Petrology at 9:30 and working through the geochemical data from earth and lunar rocks that show when the moon was separated from the earth 4.5 billion years ago. Who exactly is pursuing truth and beauty?)

I've read an argument recently that the lion's share of the increase in longevity throughout the 20th century in America is almost entirely due to better hygiene at the personal and civil infrastructural levels, with a bit coming from antibiotics as well.

Doctors and the rest of modern medical care have provided some increases in the quality of life and certain treatments (i.e. orthopedics) are undeniably better but this doesn't do much to increase lifespans.

I believe this was from The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Gordon.

Totally. Just like seatbelts.

One assumes it's growth of the staff and associated expenses, not growth in revenue, profit or customer base.

I've been doing academic-type blogging since I was halfway through my PhD; it's been about 7 years now, and I continue as a non-academic scientist. My main advice is, as many others have said, to just write. Keep at it, and you'll figure out the rest as time comes. Try to bang out a post a week at minimum and things will fall in line.

I personally found that--in contrast to what many suggest here--I have almost no interest in explaining anything to non-specialists. Instead, my blog is mostly (or most successfully) a forum for me to work through ideas. Many times I will have a small nugget of a thought, and I will make a blog post where I model something in a Jupyter notebook. A couple of times, these have turned into papers, so that's been very helpful personally. I am also making an effort to write about topics that I don't understand, highlighting where I'm confused, as a way of getting my thoughts in order (and not all of these things may be understood by any scientists).

One consequence of ignoring explanation is that I have no regular readers (as far as I can tell; I don't use tracking scripts), and posts aren't widely read unless I promote a post by emailing it to people that then put it on twitter or facebook or whatever; I don't use those myself. This isn't directly a huge problem for me (although more positive name recognition couldn't hurt), but it might not be what you're after.

If I was in grad school now, I would use the blog as a way of making high-quality, permanent notes of things that I learned, whether they're concepts, mathematical or computational techniques, literature reviews, etc. Give attribution where appropriate and don't share homework solutions (use your best judgement on exercises and maybe change the problem sufficiently if you really want to blog your homework. Or just ask your professor...). There is a lot that I've halfway forgotten over the years and my paper notebooks haven't all survived many moves, etc., and don't have the quality that I would have put into them if I were making them public. I am starting to do what I can to make good notes in emacs org-mode when I learn new stuff or need to revisit important things in my day to day work as a researcher, but it's tough. (The format of good digital note-taking isn't important; the practice is.) Grad school is basically about this, so making good notes (ideally with some illustrative, working code where appropriate) will pay dividends in your later work.

Good luck!

Universities in developing nations get heavily discounted if not free subscription and individual access fees to most journals. Library subscriptions are negotiated on a school-by-school basis and you can be sure that a university in sub-Saharan Africa isn't paying the same as Yale.

This is absolutely wrong. Academic journals provide value through scientific aggregation, review, editorial curation, publication, archival curation, and promotion.

Yes, you can bypass all of this and put your non-reviewed pdfs on your personal website. No one will care, in part because no one will even know and if they do, they have to do the hard work of review in order to decide whether a paper is worth trusting. But how will anyone find out?

As an author, I've made a point never to publish in a paper not backed by a non-profit scientific society with a decent open-access policy, after doing so in the past. I also put all of my pdfs on my website including appropriate white papers that are working drafts, making it clear to others that they haven't been accepted through peer review.

As a reader, however, I keep up with the literature (aside from targeted Google Scholar searches) through Table of Contents emails from a few journals--mostly non-profit society journals but a few others including Nature. The editorial curation aspects which limit the number of accepted papers per issue make this possible. I'm not going to drink from the firehose of shit that is produced each month, especially before peer-review. Yeah, it sucks when your paper is accepted by reviewers but gets nixed by the editors because it's not cool enough, but... you know, get back to the bench and make it cooler if you want people to care. Welcome to the 21st century and attention scarcity.

You can change the name 'Nature' to whatever open-access journal you'd like, but the power behind it is that it's a sign that Important People have decided your paper is one of the 10 most impactful papers in your field that year. That's why people care.

Copernicus Publications publishes a host of journals, many on the behalf of non-profit scholarly and scientific societies [1]. For some or all of their journals, including those by the European Geosciences Union, peer review is open and there is a month-long public discussion forum for each manuscript.

I've got a paper in review with one of the journals right now, but several of my colleagues have expressed caution with open peer review. I think a lot of scientists are worried about making work public that hasn't been privately vetted during peer review, and maybe being caught with an embarrassing mistake.

[1]: https://publications.copernicus.org/

Only math/physics/CS papers are put on arxiv. These are a small fraction of the total academic and industrial research output. In my own field, earth science, there is an arxiv-clone (eartharxiv.org) that is a few months old. I bet the majority of earth scientists (and certainly 90% of geologists) have never heard of arxiv.

Furthermore, many people just put pre-prints on arxiv etc. and don't update after peer review. Peer review is painful at best and quite flawed but the median paper is actually better after it, and many papers rightly don't make it through. Having open-access curated journals makes a lot of this better.

All the conferences in my field have literal security guards checking the badges that are only handed out after paying hundreds of dollars to register.

PDF of original paper here, with less-informative title: https://colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2018one.pd...

I really wish the approach to making university education more affordable was by subsidizing the universities more instead of subsidizing loans. I don't know if hand-outs to banks was the only way that the left could get enough support from the right to get any legislation passed or what, but it's terrible both for those who do take out loans and those who just cough up more of their own or their family's money.