It’s soon midnight on Friday and I am not out partying. I am working. To add insult to injury I am lying on the floor with my laptop as this is the best way for my back to survive my work. I am stuck working on translating and commenting a software license. The deadline has come, gone and is now terrifying. It is on occaissions such as this I wish I was a welder who could not take his work with him home but when Friday comes be able to switch off and relax. Oh damn, it’s time for §10…
Academia
Scientific Humor: Cello Scrotum
In 1974 Elaine Murphy reported the condition that came to be known as “Cello Scrotum” to the British Medical Journal. The condition was supposed to be occur among cellists and was a painful complaint caused by their instrument repeatedly rubbing against their body. Well over 30 years later the originator admits that the condition was a just a hoax. BBC writes:
“Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim. “Somewhat to our astonishment, the letter was published.”
Baroness Murphy, formerly a professor at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London, did not sign the 1974 letter herself, fearing that she might get into trouble. Her husband John, now chairman of a Suffolk brewery, signed it instead.
The reason for coming clean according to the Baroness was when the hoax was included again in the 2008 Christmas edition of the BMJ. Even though making up science is serious I just can’t stop smiling at this which feels more like a prank than the scientific fraud it is. It also goes to show that even well established journals are not to be trusted.
Rubbing the cello against the body causes “cello scrotum”? It makes you wonder how the editors of the BMJ thought the cello was played – or did they think it was something that cellists did after hours?
Cellist by St Stev (CC by-nc-nd)
The blogger as social debater
On Friday I will be attending a meeting for green bloggers in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish green party (wanted to write Swedish greens but there was too much temptation for bad vegetable puns). During the meeting I will be giving a lecture on the role of the blogger as a social debater and I am looking forward to presenting some ideas on this topic.
Beyond the obvious short intro (minuscule) on what is a blog? and why is it different anyway? the question that must be addressed is whether or not the blogger has a role as a social debater? Naturally there are blogs that impact highly on the broader social debate but many of these belong to individuals or groups who are naturally part of the social debate and in these cases the blog is simply a different technical platform. The easiest example of this is a politician with a blog where the technology does not really create the social debater but only provides an alternate platform.
In the latter category I also want to add corporate blogs which are basically (but not exclusively) marketing tools.
But then there are plenty of blogs which seem to have created new social debaters, individuals who previously had no voice now have been empowered (ugly word, but valuable concept) and enabled into presenting their views. The question here is – what is their social impact? The blog gives them voice but does this shape social change?
Then there are the blogs which have masses of hits but low social impact. Fashion blogs, sex blogs, voyeur blogs, athletes blogs etc etc these generate masses of hits but can a million hits be the same as a social debate?
Finally there are the mass of unread blogs highbrow, lowbrow, academic, quirky, personal, public, exhibitionist and therapeutic. It would be easy to attempt to claim unread = no social impact but these may be the potentially important social movers. From the unread backwaters of the internet ideas have spread before and therefore it is difficult to simply sweep aside the masses of unread bloggers as socially unimportant.
As I said I am really looking forward to Friday… and if you are in Stockholm why dont you drop in? Here is the invite on Facebook
Productivity & bachelorhood
Not being part of a relationship obviously frees up more time for work (actually the same applies to being in a bad relationship but lets not go there) and Christopher Orlet has written an interesting article on this topic:
“The bachelor’s very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.” Who can argue that a brief catalog of famous bachelors reads like a roll call of the architects of Western Civilization?:
Pierre Bayle, Robert Boyle, Johannes Brahms, Samuel Butler, Robert Burton, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Giacomo Casanova, Frederic Chopin, Nicolaus Copernicus, Eugène Delacroix, Rene Descartes, Gustave Flaubert, Galileo Galilei, Edward Gibbon, Vincent van Gogh, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Hobbes, Horace, David Hume, Washington Irving, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Charles Lamb, T. E. Lawrence, Meriwether Lewis, Philip Larkin, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Michelangelo, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sir Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Alexander Pope, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, George Santayana, Jean Paul Sartre, Franz Schubert, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, Stendhal, Jonathon Swift, Nikola Tesla, Henry David Thoreau, Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec, Leonardo da Vinci, Voltaire, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Similarly the contributions of the many (ostensibly) celibate medieval monks and theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Desiderius Erasmus, Michael Servetus) were essential in dragging Europe out of the dark Age of Faith and paving the way for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.
But bachelorhood is not enough – you have to be willing to sacrifice to time and energy. On my part I have decided not to sacrifice everything anymore. In the final period of writing my thesis I was prepared to do anything to finish. I remember thinking, after working ludicrously long hours, not sleeping, eating crappy food that everything was ok as long as I got my heart attack – after I graduated. Today I will not do this. I work but I also exercise and attempt to enjoy life outside work. So I read the list of bachelors with interest but still see them as a long list of failures… I hope they were happier than I think they were.
Basic tip on essay writing
The new term has begun with new lectures and repeats of some old ones. Last week I gave a repeat performance (well for me at least) of my essay writing lecture. The main point is to get students thinking about their essays in time as well as getting them to understand how to write an essay. Then today I came across this wonderful quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry the author of, among other books, The Little Prince
The way to get people to build a ship is not to teach them carpentry, assign them tasks, and give them schedules to meet; but to inspire them to long for the infinite immensity of the sea.
The problem with poetic and romantic quotes such as these is that they presents a misleading view of much of the world. All too many essay writers attempt (and many succeed) in writing an essay with no clear idea of what an essay is. You would never think of asking someone who has never seen a house to build you one?
The trick is get students to understand this.
The best laid plans…
So at the beginning of the New Year I decided to plan, or at least, organize myself. As soon as I managed to define a vague plan of action I got sciatic pains that prevented me from working for a longer period of 10 minutes at a time. Then, today on the first real day of work – feeling a bit better and ready for action I readied myself for an intense morning of writing only to be reminded that I was due to give a lecture (I had forgotten).
After the lecture and a foodless lunch break I was interviewed by a PhD student writing her thesis on PhD academic bloggers. The result of the lecture and sitting still during the interview was the return of lower back pain.
Eventually realizing it was time to give up attempts to work I left and went to the gym for a yoga class – a great way to fix the ache in my back. Very relaxing.
So despite the best laid plans no real amount of work was produced… ah well there is always tomorrow.
Planning less for 2009
In the past I have always thought of New Years resolutions as being useless and lame since people should implement change when they need it and not save it for the 31 December. But 2008 flashed past in a blur and I want to know what really happened, why do I still feel like I am stuck in a different time zone – my body is still somewhere in September. Sure I have done lots of stuff and enjoyed most of it, there is still a residual feeling of restlessness.
So this year needs a better plan than the last one (which failed). Not really sure what the plan will contain even though the year has already begun and tomorrow is the first real day back at the office. What I do know now that I am actively making plans is that 2009 will contain less projects not more. More focus on the stuff I need to do and less small projects which make other people happy, eat up my time but lead (in the end) nowhere.
So what will 2009 contain? Natually teaching, blogging, photography as usual. But I want to carry through a larger writing project, something I have been on about before but still not managed to put this time into my schedule. Once the plans are set I hope also to be better at sticking to them.
Not sure this will be better or more fun but I think I will enjoy working on it.
Too many cooks…
Sometimes academics collaborate in writing projects but this is probably the most example: The ATLAS Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, is an article that has over 2,900 authors. This makes an average of 0.15 pages per author…
Can there ever be too many academics?
Counterfeiting in Vienna
Right now I am in Vienna, sitting in a project meeting on Counterfeiting as part of the EU project Counter which is a research project is designed to collect data, generate knowledge and disseminate findings on the European landscape for the consumption of counterfeit consumer goods. So today is full of interesting discussions with smart people in a beautiful city. More on the meeting later.
Vienna is a beautiful city and right now it is wearing a full set of Christmas deocrations and you cannot walk far before running into a Christmas market selling local wares, sweets and Gluwine. The only downside is the lack of stable Internet access so uploading photos will have to wait.
Fixing leaky legal systems
Too much of the Swedish legal education system is all about learning the law as it is. Attempting to develop a social consciousness about the way in which the law should be is almost frowned upon. This is important if the goal of law school is to produce skilled legal workers (in Swedish I would have used the word hantverkare). This however degrades the ability and importance of the law professional to the level of plumber, electrician or doctor. This last sentence is not meant in any way to degrade the knowledge necessary in these professions but refers to the way in which they approach and resolve problems.
The doctor, plumber, electrician and lawyer see a problem and apply the tools of the trade to fix it. And this is an important task in society. When your boiler is leaking it is important that you can call a plumber who arrives and resolves the issue without re-interpreting the way in which your house is built. But, (you knew that there would be at least one but…) between leaks the plumbers education should have encouraged him or her to think about how and why pipes, houses and people interact.
The ability to fix direct problems should not mean that these professions cannot evolve and challenge the established set of knowledge. The plumber, doctor and electrician all have the ability to change the way in which their professions understand their own work situation. The Swedish legal education system does not promote this kind of critical thinking.
For critical legal thought we must leave the cold Norse climate and look to the Anglo-American legal system. Sure, there are legal systems which promote critical thinking but not as much as the Anglo-American system. And sure, not all Anglo-American lawyers think critically – which is good since sometimes you need a lawyer to be, just a lawyer.
There are a multitude of examples, courses, books, scholars and whole schools of thought to promote critical legal thought or social legal theory. But one of the more enjoyable must be cross between law and literature which provides a mix of deep thought, social criticism and comic relief all in the academic format (not an easy task).
Take for example this article I just came across by Kimberlianne Podlas of the University of North Carolina: Homerus Lex: Investigating American Legal Culture Through the Lens of The Simpsons. (Seton Hall Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law 93, 2007). From the abstract:
The Simpsons is not merely the most successful cartoon in history (and seen in more than 70 countries), but a pop culture chronicle that uses satire to explore a variety of social issues. No subject is immune from its scrutiny, and the law is no different. Though not traditional law programming, The Simpsons includes some of television’s most profound depictions of the legal system, regularly referencing statutes, private settlements, and trials. Accordingly, it is important to understand what its legally-tinged themes communicate about the value of the legal system.
Embracing a socio-anthropological perspective, this paper studies the function, role, and ideology of law in Springfield, the hometown of the Simpson family. Rather than critiquing a few memorable episodes, it employs ethnographic analysis. Hence, it considers every episode of the first eight seasons, systematically recording each “instance” of law, organizing these into themes, and analyzing them with an eye toward understanding the values and operation of law.
Though politicians and media often present a pessimistic view of the legal system, where litigation is out of control and law impedes common sense justice, The Simpsons depicts a system that is just and beneficial to society. The Simpsons may satirize situations prompting legal action, it upholds the value of law in maintaining a civil society and being a tool that citizens use to right wrongs and make them whole.
This is not legal plumbing, this teaching in such a way as to encourge legal criticism and independent thought. No matter what the conclusions of the article, its very existance shows that law schools are capable of producing more than competent hantverkare who can be called to fix leaks.