Relevant History

Bloomington

I've been in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference on visualization and the history and philosophy of science. It's one of those events that brings together my old life as an historian, and my new life as a futurist: on one hand we're mainly talking about how visualizations of scientific communities and social dynamics can be used by historians and philosophers; on the other I suspect that there are cool things I could do with these maps to forecast the future of science.

the official conference picture, via flickr

There's one other think-tank person here, which saves me from being the one non-academic Ph.D. in the room, the scholarly equivalent of Stephen Colbert's one black friend.

There have been some efforts to use scinometric (or "science of science") maps in the history of science, but so far as I know, most of this work has followed fairly conventional historiographic paths: for example, mapping the Darwin or Mersenne correspondence, or asking questions about the growth of scholarly networks. We've not yet used them to something radically new, like using geographical coding to calculate the speed of the transmission of ideas or instruments, or constructing agent-based models of scientific communities and seeing how they evolve over time. But that's why we're here-- to think about how we could create such things, and what benefit they might bring.

I quite like Bloomington, or the few blocks of Bloomington that I've seen.

via flickr

The place is enormous. It has roughly the same number of students as Berkeley, but physically it's much larger. It also takes collegiate Gothic (a somewhat stripped-down, modernized version) to a scale I don't think I've never seen before. If you took Princeton or Bryn Mawr, put it on a balloon, then blew up the balloon to five times its previous size, you'd get the IU campus. Yale and University of Chicago bear some family resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge, thanks to their small scale; IU takes Gothic where it's never gone before.

via flickr

It's also pretty heavily wooded. There are a couple streams that flow through the campus, and they're surrounded by forest and crisscrossed with little footbridges.

campus tuesday night, via flickr

the same location, wednesday afternoon, via flickr

The town has a lot of restaurants, and a lot of foreign food, for a place its size. Tuesday night I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, and last night it was Thai at Siam House. (Both are a serious challenge to dieting!) One local attributed this to the long presence of foreign students at IU, some of whom brought spouses or other relatives who went into the restaurant business. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but for whatever reason, there's good food here.

siam house, via flickr

There's a bit of a restaurant row, small places in old houses. That's cool, as it gives the restaurants a more informal character.

restaurant row, via flickr

There are also rabbits that come out in the evening, which adds one more little (furry and bouncy) note of whimsy to the place.

insouciant bunny, via flickr

Read it in the line for tickets to Maker Faire

My latest article, on tinkering and the future, has been published in the latest issue of Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. The piece is an effort to draw together a couple of my research and personal interests (though the boundaries between those two categories is pretty blurry), and to see the tinkering / DIY movement as one piece in an emerging strategy for creating better futures.

Almost forty years ago, the Whole Earth Catalog published its last issue. For the American counterculture, it was like the closing of a really great café: the Catalog had brought together the voices of contributors, readers and editors, all unified by a kind of tech-savvy, hands-on, thoughtful optimism. Don't reject technology, the Catalog urged: make it your own. Don't drop out of the world: change it, using the tools we and your fellow readers have found. Some technologies were environmentally destructive or made you stupid, others were empowering and trod softly on the earth; together we could learn which were which.

Millions found the Catalog's message inspirational. In promoting an attitude toward technology that emphasized experimentation, re-use and re-invention, seeing the deeper consequences of your choices, appreciating the power of learning to do it yourself and sharing your ideas, the Whole Earth Catalog helped create the modern tinkering movement. Today, tinkering is growing in importance as a social movement, as a way of relating to technology and as a source of innovation. Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.

What is interesting is that at its best, tinkering has an almost Zen-like sense of the present: its 'now' is timeless. It is neither heedless of the past or future, nor is it in headlong pursuit of immediate gratification. Tinkering offers a way of engaging with today's needs while also keeping an eye on the future consequences of our choices. And the same technological and social trends that have made tinkering appealing seem poised to make it even more pervasive and powerful in the future. Today we tinker with things; tomorrow, we will tinker with the world.

The piece is also an attempt to think more deeply about things we talked about at the conference on tinkering that Anne Balsamo organized last year (and I continued thinking about in other venues).

[To the tune of Elvis Costello, "I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down," from the album The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions (I give it 2 stars).]

Seed Magazine piece

I've got a new short article at Seedmagazine.com, on automated scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge. Sounds fascinating, I know, but it really is a better read than I make it sound.

In a recent article in Science, Cornell professor Hod Lipson and graduate student Michael Schmidt described a new computer system that can discover scientific laws. At first glance, it looks like a fulfillment of the dreams of “computational scientific discovery,” a small field at the intersection of philosophy and artificial intelligence (AI) that seeks to reverse-engineer scientific imagination and create a computer as skilled as we are at constructing theories. But if you look closer, it turns out that the system’s success at analyzing large, complicated data sets, formulating initial theories, and discarding trivial patterns in favor of interesting ones comes not from imitating people, but from allowing a very different kind of intelligence to grow in silico — one that doesn’t compete with humans, but works with us....

lder AI projects in scientific discovery tried to model the way scientists think. This approach doesn’t try to imitate an individual scientist’s cognitive processes — you don’t need intuition when you have processor cycles to burn — but it bears an interesting similarity to the way scientific communities work.

Though I have to give credit where it's due: if it turned out well, it's because it's a great project, and several people were very generous with their time, talking me through its details, and speculating on what the project and this approach to automated scientific discovery could mean for the future of science. I should never be amazed that people are almost always willing to talk about their work and what makes it interesting, but I never fail to be. Remember that when I call you!

China, land of different collective tacit knowledge, here I come

I'm on the Caltrain from San Francisco to Palo Alto. I spent the day here getting a visa to go to China at the end of the month. I'm planning to be there for about a week, mainly in Beijing.

The Chinese consulate is located on the edge of Japantown. Today it had police barricades and several fairly bored-looking cops, and a couple Falun Gong demonstrators. I don't know if this is normal (I suspect the demonstrators kind of come with the place), or whether the police are here because of the Tibetan anniversary; however, the only excitement was inside, and caused by a few irate people yelling about their service. I got there at about 10:45, and joined a long line of people; initially I was seriously worried about whether I'd be able to get a visa today, but quickly realized that the line was moving relatively quickly.

Once inside I was struck by something else: that while my first impression was that it was pretty chaotic-- lots of people, several very long lines, a certain number of raised voices, an intercom that didn't work THAT well-- after a few minutes I could see that it was, in its way, pretty speedy. There were hundreds of people there, and all things considered, everything moved rather fast. Whatever social cues I follow that tell me that things are going well or poorly didn't quite apply here.

It put me in mind of Harry Collins' description of tacit knowledge. As he explains it, there's contingent tacit knowledge, which is stuff we don't talk about for various reasons but could. Somatic tacit knowledge, in contrast, is physical: putting on clothes is a good example (if you watch young children, they're figuring out how to interpret various kinds of resistance, and figure out that THIS means the sleeve is turned inside-out, THAT means the collar is just to the left, etc.). Finally, there's collective tacit knowledge, which you can only get by immersing yourself in a society. Riding a bike requires somatic tacit knowledge; riding a bike in traffic requires collective tacit knowledge; riding a bike in Copenhagen, Davis CA, and Mumbai requires the same somatic knowledge, but verrry different collective knowledge.

There are social signs we learn that tell us whether a place or situation is safe or unsafe, chaotic or orderly, quiet or tense: how people stand, how they speak, how frustrated or angry they act, whether there are kids or old people present, how friendly the guards or soldiers are, etc. etc. ad infinitum. The ability to read those signs is one thing that distinguishes insiders from outsiders, because they vary from culture to culture. (Not knowing them is one of the things that can get you into trouble in a strange place; and their comforting presence is one of the things that you pay for when you stay in places like business hotels.) Making sense of the consulate, I realized, required a slightly different body of collective knowledge than I apply when I'm in downtown Palo Alto. Once I got that, I was able to see that it was actually a smoother operation than I'd first realized, the presence of loudly angry aged Chinese women aside.

And indeed, I got in right under the wire: I was the last visa applicant they took before breaking for lunch. The whole process took about 45 seconds: I handed in my paperwork, picture, and passport, had a brief discussion about whether I wanted rush service (I did), and was told to come back in a few hours. Sure enough, that afternoon (after lunch in Japantown, which seems now to largely consist of Korean restaurants, and some work at Cafe Murano, a very cool little place on Steiner) they had it ready.

The visa takes up a full page in my passport, for some reason. Whenever I got to the EU, I'm lucky to get stamped; Singapore and Malaysia have nice-looking entry and exit stamps; but China and South Africa take up whole pages in my passport. There's probably some contingent social knowledge that explains why this is.

From X2 to Signtific

The Institute's new future of science Web site is now live. For the last couple years we've been running the project under the name X2-- an historical reference to the X Club, a group I've long found fascinating-- but we've updated the name to Signtific, and rolled out a new, much more user-friendly Web site.

No time to stop and relax, though. We've also nearly finished development of a custom version of the online mapping tool that I started using last year (here are copies of my paper spaces and end of cyberspace maps, for example), which promises to be pretty amazing. So no rest for the wicked.

Reflections on tinkering

I spent a really stimulating day yesterday at the Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge conference, listening and talking to people like Dale Dougherty (founder of Make Magazine, the Maker Faire, etc.), Mitch Resnik (MIT Media Lab), Rick Prelinger (the Prelinger Library and online film collection), Anne Balsamo, and others. We're meeting for part of today, but I wanted to start reflecting on yesterday's discussion; and in particular, I want to get at the question of what tinkering is. Is it a unified body of practices? Is it a distinct set of skills? is it an historical moment? Is it just a trendy name? This is something we spent a fair amount of time discussing, either formally or informally, and the answer is: It's all of those. I also thinking there are a couple other important things that define tinkering.

What is Tinkering?

You can define tinkering in part in contrast to other activities. Mitch Resnick, for example, talks about how traditional technology-related planning is top-down, linear, structured, abstract, and rules-based, while tinkering is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented. (Resnick is very big on creating toys that invite tinkering.)

Anne Balsamo and Perry Hoberman have looked at a wide variety of tinkering activities, ranging from circuit bending to paper prototyping to open source to blogging. They argue that these varied activities are unified by a common set of principles or practices. (The following are just highlights.)

• Tinkerers improvise, iterate, and improve constantly.
• Tinkerers use materials at hand, combining heterogeneous parts and components (e.g., raw and finished materials, handmade and industrial objects, customized and personalized consumer products) in ways that push beyond the boundaries of their original contexts. As a result, tinkered objects tend to be collages, appropriations, and montages. Tinkering is bricolage.
• Tinkerers are also social animals. Their success depends in part on being able to tap into porous and ad-hoc communities. For most of what they do the manual is useless; other tinkerers are the only ones who are likely to have the information you need.

Tinkering isn't so much a specific set of technical skills: there tends to be a pretty instrumental view of knowledge. You pick up just enough knowledge about electronics, textiles, metals, programming, or paper-folding to figure out how to do what you want. It certainly respects skill, but skills are a means, not an end: mastery isn't the point, as it is for professionals. Competence and completion are.

Is Tinkering Shallow or Deep?

One of the things I talked with several people (Mike Kuniavsky in particular) about was how historically specific tinkering is. The deeper question is, is this just a flash in the pan, a trendy name without any substance underneath? The answer we came up with is that this is like a musical style, both the product of specific historical forces, and an expression of something deeper and more fundamental. (Think of jazz: you can talk about how it emerges in the early 20th century out of blues, ragtime, and other previous musical forms, reflects particular sociological and historical trends, and is guided by certain assumptions about beauty and what music is; but at the same time, it definitely expresses a deeper impulse to create music.)

Think of the historically contingent forces shaping tinkering first. I see several things influencing it:

• The counterculture. Around here, countercultural attitudes towards technology-- explored by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said (here's my review of it), Theodore Roszak (his Satori to Silicon Valley is still one of the best essays on the historical relationship between the counterculture and personal computing) are still very strong, and the assumption that technologies should be used by people for personal empowerment. Tinkering bears a family resemblance to the activities embodied in the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Agile software. Mike sees some similarities between agile software development and tinkering; in particular, both are attempts to break out of traditional, hard-to-scale ways of creating things.
• The EULA rebellion. The fact that you're forbidden from opening a box, that some software companies insist that you're just renting their products, and that hardware makers intentionally cripple their devices, is a challenge to hackers and tinkerers. Tinkering is defined in part in terms of a resistance to consumer culture and the restrictive policies of corporations.
• Users as Innovators. The fundamental assumption that users can do cool, worthwhile, inspiring, innovative things is a huge driver. Tinkering is partly an answer to the traditional assumption that people who buy things are "consumers"-- passive, thoughtless, and reactive, people whose needs are not only served by companies, but are defined by them as well. When you tinker, you don't just take control of your stuff; you begin to take control of yourself. (John Thackara talks about user innovation wonderfully in his book In the Bubble. As C. K. Prahalad argues, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to users who are high-tech geeks: companies serving the base of the pyramid see the poor as innovators.)
• Open source. Pretty obvious. This is an ideological inspiration, and a social one: open source software development is a highly collective process that has created some interesting mechanisms for incorporating individual work into a larger system, while still providing credit and social capital for developers.
• The shift from means to meaning. This is a term that my Innovation Lab friends came up with a few years ago. Tinkering is a way of investing new meanings in things, or creating objects that mean something: by putting yourself into a device, or customizing it to better suit your needs, you're making that thing more meaningful. (Daniel Pink also talks about it in his book A Whole New Mind, on the shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. The geodesic dome is a great example of a technology whose meaning was defined-- and redefined-- by users.)
• From manual labor to manual leisure. Finally, I wouldn't discount the fact that you can see breaking open devices as a leisure activity, rather than something you do out of economic necessity, as influencing the movement. Two hundred years ago, tinkering as a social activity-- as something that you did as an act of resistance, curiosity, participation in a social movement, expression of a desire to invest things with meaning-- just didn't exist: it's what you did with stuff in order to survive the winter. Even fifty years ago, there was an assumption that "working with your hands" defined you as lower class: "My son won't work with his hands" was an aspiration declaration. Today, though, when many of us work in offices or stores, and lift things or run for leisure, manual labor can become a form of entertainment.

No doubt there are other sources you could point to-- microentrepreneurship or the growth of "jobbies," the presence of an infrastructure that supports the sharing and tracking of unique handmade things (from eBay to ThingLink).

Does Tinkering Matter?

That's a pretty varied list. And it suggests that tinkering is more than a local, Valley, geek leisure thing.

First, tinkering is a powerful form of learning. Even if it doesn't stress mastery of skills, tinkering does emphasize learning how to use your hands, learning how to use materials, and to engage with the physical world rather than the world of software or Second Life-- though tinkering does share a sensibility toward the world that lots of kids demonstrate to programs and virtual worlds: you just get in there, hit buttons, and see what happens.

This really matters because you can be creative with stuff in ways you can't with bits, and that the more you understand the possibilities and limitations or materials-- or more abstractly, if you learn how to develop that knowledge-- the smarter you become. In this respect, it dovetails with "a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering" that Gregg Zachary wrote about a few weeks ago: "a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands." (I write about this at greater length on End of Cyberspace.)

Second, tinkering is forward-looking. It's partly about how we'll use and interact with technologies in the future. As much as any loose movement can be described this way, tinkering is a set of anticipatory practices, aimed at developing a sensibility about the future. It's a way to develop skills that are going to matter in the Conceptual Age, in the ubiquitous computing world. As we move into a world in which we can manufacture things as cheaply as we print them, the skills that tinkerers develop-- not just their ability to play with stuff, or to use particular tools, but to share their ideas and improve on the ideas of others-- will be huge. (I talk about this some in an article in Samsung's DigitAll Magazine.)

Finally, tinkering is an expression of the nature of our engagement with technology. If you buy the argument of Andy Clark that we are natural-born cyborgs, you can see tinkering as a form of co-evolution with technology, or a kind of symbiotic activity.

[Update 5/29/2009: I just published a new piece on tinkering and the future in Vodafone's Receiver Magazine. Check it out!]

The sociologist of science in me loves this

William Saletan has a piece in Slate looking at the (not very strong) dispute over whether Michael Phelps won the 100-meter butterfly, in which he edged out Serbian Milorad Cavic by 1/100 second. (Cavic, incidentally, was born in California, and went to UC-Berkeley. Like lots of Olympians, he seems to be as much a product of the U.S. as members of the U.S. Olympic squad.)

The problem, Saletan argues, is that in a race this tight, the uncertainties created by the way the scoreboard records times may make it impossible to determine who really won. The scoreboard, he contends,

doesn't tell you which swimmer arrived, touched, or got his hand on the wall first. It tells you which swimmer, in the milliseconds after touching the wall, applied enough force to trigger an electronic touch pad.

[Cornel Marculescu, head of the world swimming federation, FINA] says there's ''absolutely no doubt'' who won, because the clock registered Phelps' arrival first, and "the touch stops the clock.'' Not true. A touch doesn't stop the clock. The touch pad is designed to require a certain degree of force, because otherwise, slight pressure from the water would trigger it. "You can't just put your fingertips on the pad, you really have to push it," the race timekeeper explains. A FINA vice president says the crucial moment is "the instant of depression, of activation of the touch pad, not contact with the pad."...

Technically, the question of who touched first doesn't matter. FINA and the Olympics honchos agreed beforehand to use the touch pads; the touch pads require pressure; all swimmers and their coaches should know this.... I'm not saying the touch-pad system is fishy. It beats the heck out of the old stopwatch method, not to mention the mysteries of judging gymnastics. It's the fairest, most precise system around. And that's the point: Even the most precise system leaves a gray area. In this case, it's the area between touching and pressing. Did Phelps beat Cavic to the wall? We'll never know.

This is the kind of thing that sociologists of science are familiar with. Experiments, they argue, aren't simply direct engagements with Nature, but with things that are proxies for natural phenomena. A neutrino experiment, to paraphrase Trevor Pinch's book Confronting Nature, doesn't generate a bowlful of neutrinos; it generates a set of signals that are translated into graphs that conform (or don't) to theories about how neutrinos ought to behave.

We saw in the 2000 election that even something apparently as straightforward as counting votes was pretty complex, and that we normally weren't aware of the complexity not because it didn't exist, but because normally it didn't seem to matter. And Saletan points to another example of how an instrument-- in this case a touch pad-- that's intended to measure something in a straightforward way and eliminate ambiguity can, under certain circumstances, be revealed to be another proxy.

sports, STS

Giving STS a good name...

Wonkette reports that a Dartmouth professor

is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her.

Looking at that academic pedigree, I immediately started to worry. Sure enough, she was teaching STS. Her book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form "is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study that shows a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory."

With many new insights on the link between science (in the form of DNA, a set of codes) and literature (in the form of language, another set of codes), this book looks at modern experimental science within the framework of semiotics. Priya Venkatesan reveals the extraordinary parallel between the work of scientists and the work of narratologists who develop narrative paradigms and analyze literary texts. Molecular Biology in Narrative Form will be a useful resource for scientists and literary theorists interested in the epistemological workings of science, as well as, anyone that desires to explore the linkages between scientific theory and literary analysis.

Two things come to mind. First, didn't Lily Kay and Tim Lenoir do exactly this about 15 years ago? Or does the project just bear a strong resemblance to George Landow's Hypertext, with its argument for unexpected parallels between computer science and literary theory?

And... suing her students? Huh?

[To the tune of Times Online, "The Bugle - Episode 16 - Afghanistan in a zen state of chaos," from the album "The Bugle - Audio Newspaper For A Visual World".]

Paper Enigma machine

Sure, the Enigma was cracked in World War II, but it's still a pretty cool device. Did you know you can make a (very simple) paper version?

[via Bruce Schneier]

[To the tune of Perpetual Groove, "Get Down Tonight," from the album "Live at The Music Farm, 31 December 2006".]

Technorati Tags: mathematics, security

Reprints!

Got a pleasant surprise today: a package of reprints for my latest article, a piece on "The Industrialization of Vision in Victorian Astronomy" in Bildwelten des Wissens. It's always nice to get these. I'll have to send them off to various academic friends, for whom the ritual of receiving reprints holds some cultural meaning.

The article is one I wrote a while ago, but never quite got around to publishing; so when the chance came last year to contribute to this issue, I figured, why not make good use of it? I'm not doing much work on Victorian science now, but still it's a subject that never ceases to be interesting.

And in an ironic twist, last night I was up late answering queries from an editor who's working on a piece of mine on mobility and the end of cyberspace. My old and new intellectual lives overlapping.... Though actually I think that's not quite correct: you don't really have old and new intellectual lives, unless you completely change fields and go from, say, string theory to eschatology; you just mobilize your interests and intellectual skills around different subjects.

[To the tune of Ben Folds & William Shatner, "In Love," from the album "Fear of Pop, Vol. 1".]

Technorati Tags: academia, history of science, postacademic

In the Mercury News

John Boudreau, unable to get anyone credible to comment on the Deep Meaning of the Microsoft! bid for Yahoo!, quotes me! in today's Mercury News!:

After just 14 years in which it helped launch the Internet age, Yahoo has hit "middle age" and faces the fate of many other iconic Silicon Valley companies - takeover bait.

Microsoft's $44.6 billion unsolicited bid for Yahoo is yet another indication of a common valley axiom: Innovate or face unwanted suitors.

"Yahoo may join the long list of distinguished companies going back to Fairchild Semiconductor known in their time for doing great stuff that couldn't keep up with the times," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director for the non-profit Institute for the Future.

Actually, I love you John-- you do great work, and help me look more impressive to my in-laws.

[To the tune of Ella Fitzgerald, "It's Only A Paper Moon," from the album "Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook".]

Technorati Tags: history of science, Silicon Valley

Digital cultures of California

This forthcoming issue of Convergence looks really interesting.

Special Issue on ‘Digital Cultures of California'
Guest editor: Julian Bleecker (Near Future Laboratory and University of Southern California)

This call invites submissions for a special issue related to digital cultures of California. Internationally, California is a phenomenon in terms of its relationship to creating, consuming and analyzing the era of digital technologies. From the legendary garage entrepreneurs, to the multi-billion dollar culture of venture capital, to stock back-dating scandals, to the epic exodus of California’s IT support staff during the Burning Man festival, this territory plays an important role in the political, cultural and economic underpinnings of digitally and network-mediated lives on a global scale.

Half of my brain trying to figure out if there's some piece of my end of cyberspace project that I can carve out and submit, and the other half is more sensibly telling me to get the Hell back to work on the book ms. This damn essay on paper spaces-- on how some interactions with paper are more architectural and spatial than merely personal (obviously I need to work on the language a little)-- is the last distraction I should allow myself.

[To the tune of Billy Idol, "Flesh for Fantasy," from the album "Rebel Yell".]

Technorati Tags: California, digital culture, end of cyberspace, postacademic, writing

History of the signal board?

Has anyone written about the history of those boards that stock exchanges use to show information to traders-- the ones that in the movies always have guys running around them, frantically updating prices?

[To the tune of Ratatat, "Wildcat," from the album "Classics".]

The utility of STS demonstrated yet again

Thomas Van der Waal has a great post about "the elements in the social software stack." In addition to having some great advice, and offering a nice clear way to think about social software, the following bit jumped out at me:

It was through reading Jyri Engeström's blog post about "Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality" that I came to have familiarity with Karin Knorr Cetina's object-centered sociality. It was through the repeated mentioning of this Knorr Cetina concept by Rashmi Sinha in her presentations and from personal conversations with Rashmi that the ideas deep value sunk in (it is a concept central to Rashmi and Jon Boutelle's product SlideShare).

Interaction designers have long been reading anthropology-- Chris Espinoza once told me that when they were designing the first Mac interface, he and the other designers had copies of George Lakoff's work on metaphor in the office-- and I've been aware for a while of more academic interface design types being familiar with STS and history of technology. But it's good to see that people who are actually doing serious products-- Jaiku, SlideShare, etc.-- are using it, too.

[To the tune of Cocteau Twins, "Pur," from the album "Four-Calendar Cafe".]

Technorati Tags: postacademic, social software, STS

I would have so won this

Proving that half of my brain is also filled with game memories.

"Tron Contest Framed," from the fantastic Retro Arcade set on Flickr.

Tags: arcade, videogames, tron

New review

My review of Stuart Clark's The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began is in the latest issue of American Scientist.

It was a good book, but to be perfectly honest, it was one of those reviews that the editor took apart, rearranged, and greatly improved. So equal credit on this one should go to Flora Lewis.

Thanks to Bill C. for letting me know it was out!

[ Posted from Caffe Espresso 1929 via plazes.com ]

Technorati Tags: astronomy, books, history, history of science, science

Off to Berlin

My article on the industrialization of visualization in 19th century astronomy, that is, not me. I hope the editors think well of it. It's a shorter piece, but that's what the journal publishes.

I still need to root around to see if I have any pictures I can run with the piece.

The article is actually one I started ten years ago, but set aside to write a couple other things; but in the intervening years, there have been a number of articles on photography, drawing, and observing practices in Victorian science, so I was able to fill in a couple gaps, and send it off. It's a relatively short piece. We'll see.

Now back to other things, most particularly the end of cyberspace.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," from the album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".]

Technorati Tags: astronomy, history of science, science, visualization

Back to works

We're on UAL 931, heading back to San Francisco. Dinner has been served, curtains are drawn, overhead lights turned off-- though it's only early evening London time and we're flying in sunlight all the way to California-- so it's time to put on the noise-cancelling headphones and take stock.

The big thing on my persona plate is a piece for a German history of science volume on visualization in science. I'm adapting a chapter from my eclipses book, which means cutting it down by about 70%, and maybe working in some new stuff (if there's any room at all) drawing comparisons between 19th century challenges in fieldwork and representation (in particular the issues around reproducing delicate images for publication) and current issues in simulation or computer visualization. There probably won't be room for the latter.

I'm also supposed to audition for a little column in an Asian culture magazine. I'll throw together something based on a couple posts to my kids' blog, but I think I've got too much on my plate to do a regular gig.

At work, there's more going on than I really want to think about at the moment, but I can get it all together.

Technorati Tags: history of science, postacademic, travel, work

London trip photoset

A Flickr photoset of pictures of this weekend. No captions or geolocations yet, I'm mainly focused on getting them up.

Edmund Halley plaque at Westminster Cathedral, via flickr

It's a lovely morning, though my wife's luggage is still missing. Now off to breakfast. Doubtless I'll post pictures of that, too.

Technorati Tags: England, history, history of science, London, travel

Yet MORE James Cook-related monuments!

To add to the ones at Greenwich and Kauai:

A plaque to cook at Westminster.

via flickr

And a memorial in Turku to Hermann Sporing, a Finnish naturalist who went on Cook's first voyage.

via flickr

Technorati Tags: England, history, history of science, James Cook, London, travel

I look forward to the day when real news sounds DIFFERENT from The Onion

I have a theory that the world is collapsing into self-parody. The latest data-point: a report that "a memo distributed" by the office of Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges "says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect."

Bridges (R-Cleveland) denies having anything to do with the memo. But one of his constituents said he wrote the memo with Bridges’ approval before it was recently distributed to lawmakers in several states, including Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” the memo says. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools because it is “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”...

Bridges denied writing or authorizing the memo.

“I did not put it out nor did I know it was going out,” Bridges said. “I’m not defending it or taking up for it.”

But he added:

“I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory,” Bridges said. “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”

That's the spirit! Why teach anything?

Oh, the authors of the memo also contend that the earth is flat, and the whole heliocentric thing is another Jewish conspiracy.

[To the tune of The Rolling Stones, "Anybody Seen My Baby," from the album "Forty Licks (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: education, science

A handy guide to manipulating science

Jonathan Chait piece in The New Republic on the work of economist Alan Reynolds, and his efforts to challenge claims that income disparity between rich and poor has increased. Chait argues that there's a clear strategic pattern between his work, the rhetorical battles of the intelligence design movement, and global warming skeptics. Reynolds' role is to get "newspapers treat the question as a matter of dispute rather than a settled fact."

If this sounds like the conservative stance on global warming or evolution, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Like those two issues, the existence of rising inequality is beyond dispute among academics who study it.... [T]he ambition of the conservative counterestablishment in these areas is not to overturn the scholarly consensus but simply to make the topic appear so complicated that laypeople and the press don't know what to believe.

But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.

Introducing ideology into a debate is one of the think-tank hack's strongest weapons. It demystifies a complicated issue, moving it from the realm of science into the realm of politics. The think-tank hack confesses he has his biases but then claims that his opponents in academia or government do, too. Evolution is the secularist science establishment's campaign to discredit religion; global warming is being pushed by regulators who would gain enormous power from new pollution controls; et cetera.

Since the goal is not winning these debates but merely achieving symmetry, the hack's most effective technique can be taking the accusation that would seem to apply to him and hurling it at his opponents. "The politically correct yet factually incorrect claim that the top 1 [percent] earns 16 [percent] of personal income appears to fill a psychological rather than logical need," Reynolds writes in the [Wall Street] Journal. "Some economists seem ready and willing to supply whatever is demanded." So, while you might think Reynolds is a hack mining the data for results that would conform to his political preferences, he has already made the same charge against the other side. Who can tell who's right?

Essentially, this comes down to a few basic moves:

1. Cast whatever doubt you can about the level of certainty your opponents' views deserve. If you have to take what insiders regard as normal technical disagreements and turn them into proof that "the science is still unclear," so be it.
2. Encourage the press to generate the appearance of a controversy.
3. Argue that since there's a controversy, prudence demands 1) waiting for more solid science before making a final decisions, or 2) letting people make up their own minds.

This is the intellectual equivalent of guerilla warfare. You don't have to win. If you can not lose decisively, you can claim a moral victory. If you can keep the battle going, you increase the odds that the other wide will give up.

Technorati Tags: STS

Looks like we're live...

The Delta Scan is open!

[To the tune of U2, "Until The End Of The World," from the album "Achtung Baby".]

Technorati Tags: future, IFTF, science, technology, UK

This kind of thing happens when you're the office historian of science

Someone at work customized my keyboard.

via flickr

I don't know who did it, but I have my suspicions....

Technorati Tags: history of science, IFTF, STS, work

Must... photograph... everything

I've taken over 500 pictures, and I've been here just over twelve hours. In my defense, however, I've never been to Hyde Park or Grosvenor Square before; nor have I been to Greenwich, which is where I went late this afternoon, to see some friends and visit the Royal Observatory.

I'd never been to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, despite having written a dissertation in which it figures fairly prominently. The reason is simple, if over-utilitarian: the ROG papers are at Cambridge.

The thing I wasn't prepared for was the scale of the place. It's tiny. And it's incredibly close to the old Royal Naval College, and the royal residence and deer park. Yet from this modest facility, which was so routinely underfunded John Flamsteed had to take in private students to supplement his income when he was Astronomer Royal, England basically built the scientific infrastructure to support its navy (calculating tide tables, testing instruments, and the like) and defined time (they don't call it Greenwich Mean Time for nothing).

This modesty is almost-- not quite, almost-- enough to make me buy into John Horgan's argument that we've come to an "end of science," in which all the big discoveries have been made, and it's becoming exponentially more expensive to fill in the details. The Large Hadron Collider, which goes online at CERN next year, and which physicists hope will provide some data that lets them decide whether string theory is right or not (the worst outcome would be ambiguous data, one physicist told me), costs billions of dollars, will require some 2,000 people to run, and is expected to generate between 10 and 20 petabytes of data a year. Yet with a few relatively modest buildings, simple instruments, and a lot of care, British astronomers did incredible things.

It's nice to have a steady gig

The Mercury News has an article on the 5th anniversary of the debut of the iPod. It starts with a quote from Creative Strategies' Tim Bajarian, and includes the following:

"The iPod is the first glimmer of a future in which we will have very small devices that let us carry around tons and tons of information,'' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director for the non-profit Institute for the Future. "That will have an affect on the way people relate to their pasts, and the way media serves as a source for shaping their identifies.''

The number of times Tim and I have been quoted in the same article is scary. Actually, he gets quoted all the time. I should say, the odds that I'll get quoted in an article-- especially an article about anything Apple-related-- and he won't are very, very small.

I really thought another line I tossed out-- "People carry the Walkman, but they wear the iPod; there's all the difference in the world"-- would make it into the article. But hey.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "This Boy," from the album "Anthology 1 (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: ipod, ubicomp

Back in the world of gentlemen

A couple weeks ago, my SUNet ID-- the electronic identity that lets you access most everything at Stanford-- expired. Since it's what lets me get into the library, and get to the e-journals, losing it was a bit like having the instrument panel of your car go out: you can still do stuff, but you're kind of blind.

Thanks to the good offices of the STS admin, it's now working again.

I feel a bit like one of the guys in the Cadillac "Diner" commercial-- welcome back to the world of gentlemen. (The commercial makes a nice point, but its stylized, Reservoir Dogs meets Kabuki theatre character, somewhat undermines it.) Since I rarely go to scholarly conferences, and let my various society memberships lapse, my connection to Stanford has both serious functional benefits, and is my last connection to the professional identity I once worked hard to build.

As cool as it is to be a futurist, the basic fact is, anybody can claim to be a futurist. I'm a futurist. Newt Gingrich is a futurist. The guy who sprinkles blink tags liberally on his Web sites and talks about how with five more turns of Moore's Law we're all going to start communicating by beaming pictures into each other's brains is a futurst. The other guy who makes tin foil hats to keep the pictures out is a futurist. There's no exam, no professional society that exerts any kind of regulatory or gatekeeping function, no canon to speak of.

In other words, it's harder to get a SUNet ID than it is to be a futurist. Maybe that's the biggest reason I want to keep it active.

[To the tune of Natalie Imbruglia, "Torn," from the album "Left of the Middle".]

Technorati Tags: future, postacademic, Stanford University

One small step...

So it is "one small step for a man" after all.

Quote of the day

"Technology is powerful, but history is more powerful." (Nicholas Carr)

[To the tune of The Beatles, "The Fool On The Hill (Take 4)," from the album "Anthology 2 [Disc 2]".]

Missing moon tapes

13,000 tapes of NASA's Apollo missions-- including the moon landings-- are missing:

What's missing are the never-before-broadcast clear original videos - not the grainy converted pictures the world watched on television more than three decades ago.

The tapes aren't lost, insists the NASA official put in charge of the search. But he doesn't know where they are....

Until Tuesday, the search for the tapes was a spare-time deal and retirement hobby for [senior NASA engineer] Nafzger and the 81-year-old [Apollo television camera manager Stan] Lebar - not anything organized. Now with news reports of the lost tapes and NASA wanting data for its new lunar missions, the agency ordered a search of its cosmic attics....

Nafzger hopes the hunt can be wrapped up in under six months with five workers and a bit of travel. Stored in more than 2,000 boxes, each tape lasts only 15 minutes. Everything from all 11 missions - from launch to splashdown - is on the videos, Lebar said.

There are 15 reels (three boxes) for just Apollo 11's stay on the moon, Lebar said.

"It's the whole history of the entire mission, of everything that went on," Lebar said.

And they're somewhere, but no one knows where.

Starting in 1970, the tapes were shipped to the National Archives' massive record center in Suitland, Md. And Lebar had hoped he hit pay dirt when he went to the record center, which he compared to the massive warehouse of long-forgotten boxes seen in the final scene of the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

But when Lebar got to the area the boxes were supposed to be, he found empty shelves. Later, he and Nafzger determined all the boxes were returned permanently to Goddard.

"They're not lost," Lebar said, "it's just we haven't gotten to the next step yet."

[via NKT, the most brilliant tech blog in the universe. It's like Dr. Dre meets Dr. Dobbs]

Technorati Tags: history of science, space

The next turn in sociology of science?

Having attended graduate school when constructivism reigned supreme in sociological accounts of science, and then rebelling against it later, I was struck by a recent post to the Penn HSS blog on the rise of neo-institutional sociology of science:

[C]onstructivist sociology of science offers case-based analysis celebrating contingency and locality, favors archival and ethnographic methods, emphasizes agency over structure, and often focuses on issues related to epistemology and knowledge. Neo-institutionalism, on the other hand, searches for patterns over time and space, is more enthusiastic about using statistical and quantitative methods, emphasizes how structure can constrain actors, and returns in part to a sociology of scientists and organizations that was more characteristic of the pre-constructivist, Mertonian era.

Hmmm. Doesn't sound like a bad thing.

[To the tune of David Pack, "Think Of U (Song 4 Kaitlyn)," from the album "The Secret Of Movin' On".]

Technorati Tags: history of science, STS

Quote of the day

From Stephen Bodio's Querencia, an anecdote about the famed British soldier, ornithologist and spy (and subject of a recent New Yorker article) Richard Meinertzhagen:

In his eighties he was seated next to a woman who did not approve of shooting. "Colonel Meinertzhagen, I suppose you are still shooting those poor little birds-- boom, boom!"

He fixed her with a steely eye. "No, madam. Boom."

Technorati Tags: biology, history, history of science

If I had a spare couple million...

...I'd definitely bid on the Robert Hooke notes coming up for sale.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a hitch: the Royal Society claims they were stolen from its archive. 300 years ago.

It's really true what they say: the English think 100 miles is a long way, while Americans think 100 years is a long time.

Royal Society moves to block sale of £1m manuscript

The Royal Society is trying to block the auction of a 17th-century manuscript that charts the beginning of modern science.

Britain's premier scientific academy believes the 520-page document, by the scientist Robert Hooke, may have been stolen from its archives 300 years ago....

The document, valued at £1m, consists of Hooke's minutes of Royal Society meetings between 1661 and 1682. Hooke was one of the society's original fellows and he peppered his notes of the meetings with acerbic asides. His notes were later transcribed as official minutes, which the Royal Society still holds....

The manuscript contains descriptions of the first glimpses of sperm and micro-organisms using an early microscope and discussion between Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Isaac Newton over the nature of gravity.

Update: Turns out the Royal Society will get the manuscript after all. But I still want to hear the story about why they think it was stolen in the early 1700s-- twenty or thirty years after Hooke wrote it.

[To the tune of Chaka Khan, "Little Wing," from the album "Power Of Soul".]

The long-unpublished review of "What the Dormouse Said"

Last year, I sent the L. A. Times a review of John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said. Unfortunately, it arrived in between editorial regimes, and it never got published. So, I'm posting it here.

I don't mention it in the review, but Peninsula School, where my kids go, makes several appearances in the book. I hadn't realized that the school had this subterranean connection to the origins of personal computing, but it does. Really a fascinating place.

[To the tune of Gil Evans, "Little Wing," from the album "& British Orchestra / BBC".]

Technorati Tags: culture, history of science, menlo park, Peninsula School, Silicon Valley, What the Dormouse Said

Quote of the day

From Kaus:

Those who don't ignore history are condemned to think it will be repeated.

Technorati Tags: history

Don't worry, Dick Cheney has the authority to declassify them

Slate's Fred Kaplan reports on an "absurd scheme to reclassify documents" previously declassified by government agencies:

[O]ver the last five years, in a program that itself has been a secret, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have reclassified 9,500 documents, constituting more than 55,000 pages, some of them dating back to World War II.

Historian Matthew Aid had a long article about the program.

[To the tune of Fleetwood Mac, "Little Lies," from the album "The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac".]

Technorati Tags: history, security

Happy 20th, virus!

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the first computer virus, the Brain. According to the Master, "It was a boot sector virus, and spread via infected floppy disks." Compared to today's monster, the virus was relatively harmless.

Commenters on the Schneier blog claim that the virus was "an advertisement for a Pakistani computer store," and the author "later went on to found a company that runs (ran?) Pakistan's TLD."

Technorati Tags: security

STS references are inescapable in my universe

In Denmark, I ride on the world's only train system named in honor of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Last weekend, at the California Academy of Sciences, I saw an ad for an old TV show:

Where's Bruno?

Technorati Tags: California Academy of Sciences, STS

Getting the garage ready for 2006

Amid the flurry of activity with the water heater, the dangerous heating exhaust, and the roofing extravaganza, one other activity has really stood out, and been a nice counterpart to all those repairs: getting the garage in shape to use as a home office.

Technorati Tags: STS

Myth of the Paperless Office

I'm rereading Myth of the Paperless Office, as part of my new high-fiber regimen, and because I read it in a hurry last time and felt like I didn't get quite as much out of it as I should. I picked it up after reading Malcolm Gladwell's review of it in The New Yorker, and my impressions of the book were pretty strongly shaped by that review: I was reading it looking for what Gladwell saw it in.

The myth of the paperless office, indeed!

For a university press book about the automation (or non-automation) of office work, it got a surprisingly large amount of play in the general press. Though the Guardian's review had the great damning-with-faint-praise line (and this isn't an exact quote), if you must read one book about office automation, read this one. (Ow.)

What strikes me most about the book this time around is how obvious a lot of the stuff in the early chapters is-- which is not to say it's not useful. There are some books whose arguments or findings seem completely and utterly sensible, which only makes you wonder why they're not already common knowledge.

Take, for example, their observations about the complexity of reading. They make two big arguments. First, there are actually many different kinds of reading: an English professor reading a manuscript in an archive, a pilot going over flight plans and safety checklists, and a law clerk reading a draft of a ruling, are all reading-- but they're all doing it in different ways. Handwritten manuscripts, manifests and checklists, and typescripts of legal opinions all look different, contain different kinds of information, and are read with different purposes in mind. (I think this is a point that even many historians of reading don't give quite enough attention to.)

Second, reading is rarely the solitary, linear activity posited by literary theorists. Most reading that's done in the workplace is embedded in other activities: people read across multiple documents (to compare arguments or facts, say), take notes while reading, read documents with other people in meetings, or move between printed documents and word processor files open on a computer. The classical model of reading so beloved by defenders of the book-- someone sitting with a book, oblivious to the world-- is beloved because it's a luxury.

Paper also turns out to have other functionalities that are easy to overlook, but which are important to pay attention to in the workplace. One of the best sections of the book is its discussion of the role that paper plays in air traffic control centers. Air traffic control centers are filled with little slips of paper with information about every plane that controllers are watching. As planes moves through their territory, controllers may make notes on the slips, then pass them on to other controllers. You'd think that if there was any kind of document that would benefit from computerization, this would be it.

But it turns out that those slips aren't just inefficient legacies of an older system. One of the most important things an air traffic controller has to know is which planes he or she is responsible for. Those slips of paper offer a very efficient way to gather that information; as the developers of the Ambient Orb would put it, they make the information a "glanceable thing." When a plane passes from one controller's screen to another, the paper is handed off-- an act that reinforces the transfer of responsibility. And the paper also makes it easier for supervisors to see if someone is overloaded, and to transfer some of their planes to someone else-- by taking a few slips of paper and moving them to someone else's desk.

The point that Myth of the Paperless Office makes is, if you were to create a truly paperless office, you have to create a paperless system that can handle all these different kinds of reading. Assuming that the printed page is just an extremely clumsy storage device for words and numbers misses the affordances that readers exploit in paper, the varied natures of reading, and the roles paper documents play in the workplace.

Technorati Tags: books, epaper, reading, work

Technical writing and deep thought

For some time, my Long List of Unwritten Articles That I'll Get Around to One Day has included a piece on technical writing in Silicon Valley (along with articles on churches, schools, swim clubs, and informal social networks in the Valley; a piece on the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group; William H. Wesley's mid-1850s work as an illustrator to both Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley; and even more obscure topics).

Technical writing is one of those forms of invisible technical labor that we never pay any attention to, but which plays an important role in mediating between technologies and users, and structuring the way people think about products.

It's also a literary genre that has been transformed a couple times in the last twenty years, first by hypertext and CDs, next by the Web, and finally by discussion groups. Indeed, not including a user manual is increasingly popular, both as a way of saving money, and as a way to send the signal that "our product is so easy to user that it doesn't need a manual." (Of course, whether it is or not is another question; and usually the answer is, "of course not.")

Josh Greenberg is working a piece on "The Instruction Manual and the Wiki" that actually covers some of this territory:

I’ve been thinking a lot about instruction manuals as a metaphor for the ways that we use technology; if, following general STS theory, the actual meaning of a technology is structured by the frame of knowledge layered on top of it, then we can think of there being a sort of cultural “instruction manual” for every artifact.

A key property of an instruction manual is that it’s tangible, words on paper, a fixed codification of what one can do with a specific thing. When we buy a new camera or VCR or microwave oven, the manual that comes with it was produced by the corporation that made the artifact itself (though not necessarily by the actual designers and engineers who made the artifact; this is an important point, and one which cries out to be studied by some sort of ethnography of technical writing). We, as consumers/users, are expected to learn how to use this new thing we own by reading the manual.

One might raise the point that instruction manuals are almost universally reviled, and the goal of many designers is to create technologies that are, in a sense, prêt à employer – for many, the ideal design is one which requires no instruction manual, but which is so obvious on its face that any further discussion of how it is to be used is superfluous. The thing that gets left out of this argument is the fact that there is still an instruction manual of sorts, just one which hangs in the intangible threads of culture that inform our day-to-day lives. At one point, users needed an instruction manual to understand that a green button with a right-pointing triangle meant play and a red button with a square meant stop, but this knowledge became so ubiquitous as to become invisible, so commonplace as to be obvious.

Technorati Tags: history, Silicon Valley, STS

Timeline

A decade ago* (could it be that long? really?) I worked on a series of timelines for the Encyclopedia Britannica CD. It was a pretty intense learning experience, and later became the subject of an article.

Peter's been working on a timeline for the Danfoss Universe site. Having been involved in these things myself, I have to say: this one is really beautiful. Actually, let me amend that to, Wow. Check it out.

*No, it wasn't a decade ago. It was only eight years ago. Whew. No, wait...

[To the tune of Genesis, "Squonk (Live Version from Seconds Out)," from the album "A Trick of the Tail".]

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, history, information design

A body at rest...

Okay, that's Newton. Still, from the New York Times:

Polish archaeologists say they are all but certain they have located the skeletal remains of Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer and cleric whose theory that the planets revolved around the Sun revolutionized astronomy.

Technorati Tags: astronomy, history

Getting "not even wrong" wrong

Oops. Bob McHenry gently raised the issue of whether Einstein should be credited with the "not even wrong" phrase, as I did in my post about scientists' blogs as a resource for STS:

Alex, I think the "not even wrong" line is usually attributed to Wolfgang Pauli.

Coming from Bob, I took that to mean, "Look it up, stupid. Everybody knows this." Turns out Bob's right (not something that was really in question).

But there is, as we used to say in my old line of work, a teachable moment in the error. (Actually, full disclosure: I never used the term "teachable moment" when I was teaching, on the grounds that all moments had some kind of pedagogical potential.) A few weeks ago, the Guardian ran a piece about the phrase, and its renewed popularity:

[T]he withering comment for which he's best known combines utter contempt on the one hand with philosophical profundity on the other. "This isn't right," Pauli is supposed to have said of a student's physics paper. "It's not even wrong."

"Not even wrong" is enjoying a resurgence as the put-down of choice for questionable science: it's been used to condemn everything from string theory, via homeopathy, to intelligent design. There's a reason for this: Pauli's insult slices to the heart of what distinguishes good science from bad.

But while Pauli was famous for having said this, the documentation is pretty sketchy. Interestingly, Peter Woit himself grappled with this problem:

When I first started thinking about using “Not Even Wrong” as the title of a book, I did some research to try and find out where the supposed Pauli quote came from. No one seemed to have any information about this, other than the attribution to Pauli, and various different stories existed about the context in which he had used the phrase. I started to worry that these stories, like many of the best ones about Pauli, might be apocryphal....

Turns out that the term doesn't show up in Pauli's correspondence; it seems to be something he just used in person. Woit continues,

I contacted a few physicists who had some connection to Pauli to ask them about this. Prof. Karl von Meyenn, the editor of Pauli’s correspondence, wrote back to tell me that the phrase doesn’t occur in his correspondence. He pointed me to a biographical notice about Pauli written soon after his death by Rudolf Peierls as the best source for the story of Pauli using the phrase.

The Peierls obit relates an anecdote in which "a friend showed him the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly ‘It is not even wrong.’"

Had Pauli had a blog, though, I'll bet the term would have shown up there. Of course, given my earlier post, I would think that.

Technorati Tags: blogging, physics, science, STS

Charles Darwin Has a Posse

Brilliant.

Charles Darwin Stickers

These stickers are being introduced to spread awareness and appreciation of Charles Darwin, whose theory of natural selection provided a simple, non-supernatural explanation for how life on earth had evolved and continues to evolve today. Although this stickering project is probably futile, it will hopefully delay our slip into Dark Ages II by several days, or perhaps a week.

(via Epistemographer)

[To the tune of The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money," from the album "Abbey Road".]

Technorati Tags: science, STS

Scientists' blogs and the sociology of knowledge

If some smart STS graduate student or new Ph.D. isn't already on the ball, someone should look at scientists' blogs as a resource for writing the sociology of knowledge.

A little while ago I happened upon string theorists' blogs, and while I know next to nothing about string theory, nor can I really follow most of the discussion (the math is way too advanced for me), it strikes me there are a circle of people-- among them Peter Woit's povocatively-titled Not Even Wrong (a reference to a famous Einstein Wolfgang Pauli dismissal of a critic's work as "so bad it's not even wrong"), Lubos Motl's Reference Frame (a relativity reference, I believe), the String Coffee Table-- who are taking public the kinds of discussions and arguments that, in the past, historians were lucky to find recorded in letters or private notebooks.

Usually, records of this kind of discourse were pretty second-hand: X tells Y about what he heard A said to B about C's latest theory at the open bar. I was beyond thrilled to find notes passed during monthly meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society: that kind of thing almost never survives long enough to become part of the documentary record.

Now, thanks to blogs-- and more important, the behavior they enable, the kinds of detailed record-keeping that they allow, and the way they can themselves become a medium for conducting discussion-- the number of opportunities for writing a Great Devonian Controversy for contemporary science go up. (The bookcase industry should watch this trend avidly.)

I don't know how many scientific communities have members who've taken to blogging; and I suspect that for physicists, blogging may feel a bit like the sorts of conversations that you have at conferences and workshops. Plus they've been early adopters of IT for scientific communications, what with ArXiv and the like. If you stick to string theory, you get to wade through chatty posts like

Nikita Nekrasov has analyzed Berkovits' pure spinor formalism or, using his more general words, curved beta-gamma systems.... As we discussed previously, the pure spinor formalism makes the whole superPoincaré symmetry manifest. The price we pay is a curved system of ghosts - bosonic objects "lambda" that live in the space of "pure spinors".... (from Lubos Motl's blog)

and

I thought it was very cool when, about a year ago, I learned that Milnor proved there were 7-spheres which are not diffeomorphic to the standard 7-sphere. (from David Guarrera's Worldsheet)

--but there's also a lot of back and forth about questions like whether string theory is similar to intelligent design, whether some bigwig's talk at the Kavli Institute at UCSB was any good, notes from conferences, and the like.

Overall, for scholars interested in sources that get them closer to fine grain of the history of ideas and practices, or for scholars interested in studying scientific communication in its own right, this seems like a natural field to try to exploit.

[To the tune of The Beatles, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," from the album "Abbey Road".]

Technorati Tags: blogging, physics, STS

I go away from a couple days...

...and someone shoot a hole in the claim that Archimedes' mirrors could have sank the Roman fleet at Syracuse:

Doubt cast on Archimedes' killer mirrors

According to sketchy historical accounts, Archimedes torched a fleet of invading Roman ships by harnessing the power of the sun as they sought to capture the Sicilian city in 213BC. Using large mirrors made of bronze or glass, the mathematician and erstwhile military adviser to King Hiero focused the sun's rays on the ships and, according to ancient writings, reduced them to cinders.

On Saturday, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona set off for San Francisco bay to test if Archimedes' death ray could have been anything but a myth.

For their first attempt, the MIT team assembled a 300-square-metre bronze and glass reflector on the edge of the bay and tried to set fire to an old fishing boat bobbing in the water 45 metres (150ft) away. After seeing a little smouldering, but nothing else, the team had a second go, this time with the boat only half the distance away. The focused beam of sunlight lit a small fire, but it soon fizzled out.

Technorati Tags: history, STS

I love DSB

(8:16 a.m., local time) Like the Isis theatre in Aspen, the Danish rail system has a history of science overtone. When you're a graduate student, you have fewer more faithful friends than the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, or the DSB as it's universally known. Just like the railways here.

Proving once again that you can take the boy out of history of science, but you can't take the history of science out of the boy.

Technorati Tags: denmark, STS, travel

You can take the boy out of the history of science...

...but you can't take the history of science out of the boy.

via Flickr

For the uninitiated, Isis is the official journal of the History of Science Society. I worked as their editorial assistant for a year.

via Flickr

Okay, so that picture was a little fuzzy....

Technorati Tags: Aspen, Colorado, history, STS, travel

Noyce biography

I don't know how long it's been out, but I just stumbled on my review of Leslie Berlin's The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, in the November-December 2005 issue of American Scientist. Doesn't look like there's a password required to get to the piece.

For those who don't know about him, here's a brief bio:

Noyce, the son of a minister, attended Grinnell College and then got a doctorate in physics from MIT. Two years later, in 1955, he moved to California to join a company in Palo Alto that had just been started by William Shockley, one of the coinventors of the transistor. Shockley's remarkable eye for talent was exceeded only by his gift for mismanagement. Less than two years later, the men in the photograph, who had all worked for Shockley—the "Traitorous Eight," he named them—were dissatisfied enough to strike off and found their own company: Fairchild Semiconductor. There Noyce invented the integrated circuit (at about the same time that Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby also produced one). And he quickly rose to the rank of general manager. A decade later, Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild to start a second company, Intel, which became a leader in the semiconductor industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

So he's well worth a biography. And Leslie Berlin's is a good one.

[To the tune of Zero, "Little Wing," from the album "1990-05-26 - Sweetwater Saloon".]

Technorati Tags: books, Silicon Valley, STS