Alan Burdick's Blog, page 5
May 5, 2017
Go Ahead, Interrupt My Day
May 4, 2017
Go Ahead, Interrupt My Day
Let’s say you’re busy at your desk and don’t want to be interrupted. How do you let your colleagues know? In the old days, back when people worked in offices that contained actual offices, you could close your door. But in the modern, open office, the physical barrier needs to be more conceptual—headphones, maybe, or earbuds. Put them on, tune out your co-workers, and get stuff done, or at least disguise yourself as a person who is getting stuff done and should not be interrupted.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Listening to Ordinary Russians by Drawing Them One by One
April 26, 2017
Did Humans Arrive in America a Hundred Thousand Years Earlier Than We Thought?
In 1992, Thomas Deméré, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum, and several of his colleagues were called in to inspect an array of bones that had been unearthed by highway workers building Route 54, just south of the city. What turned up was the Pleistocene. The site was rich with fossils tens of thousands of years old, including the remains of a camel, a horse, a dire wolf, a ground sloth, and, most impressive, a mastodon. Today, the area stretches with ranch homes and water-restricted lawns; way back then, it was a broad floodplain with a single shallow ribbon of water winding through it. “It was a very nice place to live, I’d think, not far from the coastline,” Deméré said at a press conference yesterday.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Life Wuz Here, 3.7 Billion Years Ago
Remember the Titanosaur
Which Came First, Humans or Tools?
April 23, 2017
The Usefulness of a March for Science
Not quite promptly at six o’clock on Saturday morning, two dozen scientists whose fields of study can’t be summarized in a sentence boarded a bus at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and headed south, bound for the March for Science, in Washington, D.C. “I hope it doesn’t rain,” Ed Witten, the first and only theoretical physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, the Academy Award of mathematics, said. Witten, who is in his sixties, is tall even when seated and speaks in a measured, almost sheepish tone. He was reading a book about the First World War on his Kindle, a device that, he conceded, he hadn’t yet mastered. The sky, still pale, was cloudy, and the forecast did indeed call for rain.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:My MacBook: A Complete Guide for Electronics-Ban Airport Thieves
Can President Trump Learn on the Job?
The Real Trump Agenda: Helping Big Business
April 21, 2017
The Loch Ness Monster of Mollusks
The last time people thought very seriously about shipworms—people other than shipworm scientists, that is—was likely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when wooden ships still reigned. A shipworm is in fact not a worm but a clam that looks like a worm and eats wood. The hinged shell of the typical bivalve has been reduced, in the shipworm, to a tiny pair of scrapers at the front end, which the animal uses for burrowing, like the tunnel-boring machines grinding away under Manhattan’s Second Avenue to extend the new subway line.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:A Tale of Cataclysm, Written in Penguin Guano
March 22, 2017
“Paging Dr. Fraud”: The Fake Publishers That Are Ruining Science
In the fall of 2015, a young scholar named Anna Olga Szust began sending her C.V. and a cover letter to scores of scientific journals, with the hope of being named an editor. Editors play a vital role in the world of science publishing, checking the methodology of authors and managing the peer-review process; they are the thin red line between fact and fakery. At the same time, being appointed a journal editor is one of the many essential rungs in a scientist’s climb toward credibility and tenure.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Sage of Yale Law
All Possible Humanities Dissertations Considered as Single Tweets
Fixing the Ph.D.
March 12, 2017
Can We Fix Daylight-Saving Time for Good?
A clock does two things. It acts as a timer, marking how much time has gone by and indicating how much is left, and it gives you your position—that is, where, or when, you are at this very moment in the sea of minutes and hours. “What primarily the clock does,” Heidegger wrote, is “to determine the specific fixing of the now.” Twice a year, though, it doesn’t, as you are now groggily aware. At exactly 2:01 A.M. on the second Sunday in March, “now” becomes one hour later, ushering in daylight-saving time and ushering out an hour of sleep. And, at 2:01 A.M. on the first Sunday in November, the clock is turned back an hour; in an instant, “now” becomes “then,” and we live sixty minutes all over again.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Canadian Scientists Know What to Expect from Trump
The Deep Denialism of Donald Trump
January 20, 2017
The Metaphorical Meaning of a Moth Named After Trump
Until this week, the genus Neopalpa consisted of a single species of moth, Neopalpa neonata, about which virtually nothing is known beyond its underwhelming appearance. The size of a thumbnail, with dark, mottled wings folded straight back, N. neonata could be mistaken for a dishevelled roach or a tiny, moth-eaten butterfly. The genus belongs to a wider family, Gelechiidae, the twirler moths, so called for their habit of spinning in circles on the surface of leaves. There are more than forty-five hundred species of twirler moth around the world, many of them agricultural pests—the conifer needleminer, the peach twig borer, the red-necked peanutworm moth, the pink-washed aristotelia. Neopalpa neonata occupies a range from California to northern Mexico, but what it does there is unclear, since the moth isn’t well studied and just a few specimens exist in museum collections, including one recovered from a tomato plant.
Inaugural Fashion: White Is a Color of Mourning
Watching Trump’s Inauguration from the Cheap Seats
A Dark Inaugural
January 9, 2017
The Many-Moons Theory
Unbeknownst to most earthlings, the moon is experiencing a crisis. Geophysicists will tell you that it’s a “compositional” crisis—a crisis regarding the stuff of which the moon is composed. But it’s also an identity crisis, as much for the scientists as for the object they study.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:NASA’s Overlooked Duty to Look Inward
A Space Rocket for the Common Man
Catching Dust
December 11, 2016
The Secret Life of Time
Some nights—more than I like, lately—I wake to the sound of the bedside clock. The room is dark, without detail, and it expands in such a way that it seems as if I’m outdoors, under an empty sky, or underground, in a cavern. I might be falling through space. I might be dreaming. I could be dead. Only the clock moves, its tick steady, unhurried. At these moments I have the most chilling understanding that time moves in only one direction.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Intoxicating Promise of New York City’s Night-Life Flyers
What It Would Take to Set American Kids Free
How I Explained the Election to My Six-Year-Old Daughter
