This room-temperature superconductor news has potential to be either really big, or just another footnote in the history of physics, but either way the number of hits I got about it from different sources was interesting:
- RSS feeds: 3
- Everything else: 0
RSS wins! Again.
Two things keep me logging back in to Twitter X: DMs from people who should know better, and all of my colleagues who insist using it. But how else was I supposed to learn of this petition for ABIM to eliminate their “maintenance of certification” grift?
🧟 Beware of the zombie trials:
More than one-quarter of a subset of manuscripts describing randomized clinical trials submitted to the journal Anaesthesia between 2017 and 2020 seemed to be faked or fatally flawed when their raw data could be examined, editor John Carlisle reported. He called these ‘zombies’. But when their raw data could not be obtained, Carlisle could label only 1% as zombies.
Good thing that science is a strong link problem, because too many of the links are just sawdust and dreams. (via Derek Lowe)
🍿 Rewatched Gone Girl (2014) solely because of my dad, who remarked how Ben Affleck had never been in a good movie, which reminded me of this one. And yes, it took all of David Fincher’s and Rosamund Pike’s skills to make Affleck watchable, but it is the end result that matters!
True wealth as described by Nassim Taleb, on Twitter:
- Worriless sleeping
- Clear conscience
- Reciprocal gratitude
- Absence of envy
- Foamy coffee
- Crusty bread
- Inexperienced enemies
- Frequent laughs
- No meals alone
- No gym classes
- Gravel bicycling
- Good digestive functions
- No Zoom meetings
- Periodic surprises
- Nothing to hide: financial and fiscal tranquility
- Muscular strength & endurance
- Ability to nap
- Access to a hammock
“No meals alone” alone would cure America’s obesity epidemic. Not sure about that hammock, though.
There is predatory, and then there is predatory:
When Björn Johansson received an email in July 2020 inviting him to speak at an online debate on COVID-19 modeling, he didn’t think twice. “I was interested in the topic and I agreed to participate,” says Johansson, a medical doctor and researcher at the Karolinska Institute. “I thought it was going to be an ordinary academic seminar. It was an easy decision for me.”
…
All the scientists interviewed by Science say Ferensby’s initial messages never mentioned conference fees. When one speaker, Francesco Piazza, a physicist now at the University of Florence, directly asked Ferensby whether the organizers would request a fee, Ferensby replied, “No, we are talking about science and COVID-19.”
But after the events, the speakers were approached by a conference secretary, who asked them to sign and return a license agreement that would give Villa Europa—named in the document as the conference organizer—permission to publish the webinar recordings. Most of the contracts Science has seen state that the researcher must pay the company €790 “for webinar debate fees and open access publication required for the debate proceedings” plus €2785 “to cover editorial work.” These fees are mentioned in a long clause in the last page of the contract, and are written out in words rather than numbers, without any highlighting.
What an absolute nightmare. Predatory journals at least have the decency to ask you for them money up front.
And let’s take a moment to contemplate the ridiculousness of the current academic publishing and conference model. Note that there is nothing unusual in academic conferences requiring attendance fees from speakers. If you have an scientific abstract accepted for oral or poster presentation at ASCO, let’s say, you will still have to pony up for the registration fee. And publication fees for a legitimate open access journal can be north of $3,000. So how is a judge to know whether the organizer’s claims are legitimate?
The difference, of course, is that the good ones — both journals and conferences — don’t solicit submissions; you have to beg them to take your money. Which only makes the situation more ridiculous, not less.
🍿Mary Poppins (1964) is 139 minutes long! This may explain why I had never seen it beginning to end until recently. Did children actually sit in the movie theater for more than two hours back in the 1960s to watch this?
Don’t get me wrong, it is a good movie. But much too long.
Through much trial and even more error, I have finagled @pimoore’s wonderful Tufte theme to organize itself into a scripting.com-like chronological/reverse-chronological format. The next step is to fix everything I broke in the process. And to find ever better fonts, of course.
