A recent xkcd (#1520, “Degree-Off”) on competition between academic disciples:
Competition between academic disciplines — not just in the natural sciences, as here — is a recurrent theme in the strip. We have to wonder what the Chemistry panelist is going to say. Better Living Through Chemistry?
From a memoir piece by Sissela Bok in the Spring 2015 issue of The American Scholar, “Meeting the Mystics: My California encounters with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley”, about a time in her life shortly after she married Derek Bok (in 1955) and settled in the United States. Through her husband, she met a set of mystics, rebels, and countercultural icons. A photo from January 1960 in Southern California:
Left to right: Gerald Heard, Christopher Isherwood, Sir Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, and Linus Pauling
Rebels all, mystics, LSD explorers, and so on. All, of course, men. And all in suits; well, the ’60s had not really gotten underway yet. You can tell that Heard was the true rebel because he’s the only one with a beard.
This morning’s name was Gil Chaitin, and that led immediately to Gregory Chaitin. Both academics, but in very different fields.
Late last week, the Stanford Linguistic Department’s assistant e-mailed me about a phone call (for me) that had come into the department: a Mr. Ethics, representing a magazine, wanted to talk to me about a story he was working on, and left a New York City phone number.
I tried to check on this fellow Ethics, to no avail, until I realized that the assistant (who is very good at her job, but is not a native speaker of English) had almost surely gotten the name wrong. Eventually I figured out that the man’s name was Essex, not the unlikely Ethics. By then the day was over in New York City; in any case, I thought the phone call to my department was an ominous sign.
In the January/February issue of Stanford magazine, “Watch Your Words, Professor: In 1900, Jane Stanford forced out a respected faculty member. Was he a martyr to academic freedom or a racist gadfly who deserved what he got?” by Brian Eule, beginning:
On a Tuesday afternoon in November 1900, Edward Alsworth Ross gathered several student reporters in his campus office. Ross, 33 years old and a Stanford economics professor of seven years, had joined the university just two years after its opening. He was a captivating sight, 6-foot-5 and nattily dressed in a suit that favored his athletic physique.
Ross was popular with students and esteemed in his field. David Starr Jordan, the university’s first president, had recruited him not once but twice. Plucked from Jordan’s former home at Cornell, Ross was emerging as a scholarly star. Now, his time at Stanford was coming to an abrupt end.
Ross held a lengthy written statement he had prepared for the San Francisco newspapers. He handed it to the students.
“Well, boys,” he said, “I’m fired.”
From today’s Stanford Report, an obit for Patrick Suppes: “Patrick Suppes, Stanford philosopher, scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, dies at 92” by Michael Friedman.
The overview:
Patrick Suppes’ long career at Stanford began in 1950. As both a philosopher and scientist, he influenced a large number of fields. Drawing on his experience as an army meteorologist, he once compared predicting the weather to economics, both handling a vast flow of non-experimental data. As a successful entrepreneur he was also a leading donor to educational activities at Stanford.
From someone using the name “Tomas Kant”, to a huge number of groups (including the linguistics faculty at Stanford), a call for papers for a “journal”:
International journal of science, commerce and humanities (IJSCH) is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed multidisciplinary journal published by post academic publications. The objective of (IJSCH) is to provide a forum for the publication of scientific articles in the fields of science, commerce and humanities. In pursuit of this objective the journal not only publishes high quality research papers but also ensures that the published papers achieve broad international credibility.
Yes, it stinks of spam; note the absurd breadth of the fields covered, and the absence of capitalization in the names of the “journal” and its “publisher”.
Several correspondents have written to compliment me on the content and organization of the “About (academic)” page on my website (here). One went so far as to refer to the goldilocksian mean — not too small, not too big, and (though this isn’t in the Goldilocks fairy tale) “everything easily discoverable”.
These nice comments inspired me to spend yesterday adding to the “Handouts for conference papers” section of the page, adding links to handouts from four Stanford Semantics Festivals.
And then there’s the nice derivational formation goldilocksian ‘just right’, a useful (and, given that you know the fairy tale, easily comprehensible) innovative adjective, moderately frequent (on the order of 6k ghits, dupes removed) but not in the OED.
(From my life.)
A note from Saturday, when I started the day very early (around 4 a.m.), working on comics-related things. Later, I went to lunch with my daughter and realized just before it that I had managed to forget to have breakfast.
These days, breakfast is either a leftover from dinner the day before (recently: Tuscan shrimp pasta, pizza) or just granola. But I usually remember to have it.
The bad lure of academia.
Karen Chung on Facebook points me to this PHD comic (of January 15th):
Oh my.