Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
Image by Midjourney v6.1. The prompt was my own.
Thagomizer, “the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurian dinosaurs”, is a word that made the most unusual jump from a cartoon panel into scientific texts. I recently learned of another word that is making a similar jump: hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, a faux Latin word to describe a made-up condition — fear of long words.
The wikipedia article shows to references, one reviewed by a Doctor of Psychology and a cursory internet search shows one more, “medically reviewed by an MD”. How these people approved these articles to come out and validate hippopoto… as a medical condition is beyond me. I heard about the word from my 2nd-grader who in turn heard it from her science teacher (who, I assume, gets her own scientific information on TikTok), so the damage is real. This phobia doesn’t exist, people, and if you do get symptoms listed here upon exposure to a long word, well, here is another word for you.
But here is the twist: the likely origin of the word as noted on a BBC website is this poem of the same name by one Aimee Nezhukumantathil (sic!) and you should click and read the whole thing but this is how it starts:
On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule
is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels
to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor…
I empathize. This should be a real word! But unlike the thagomizer which was a real part of actual dinosaurs there is no medical condition equivalent to “fear of long words”. So let’s please find a better definition for it.
Man-made things don’t get better on their own, and without care and attention will in fact get worse. A post from Patrick Collison on X about important historical novels is a good example, not just because of the topic (19th century novels had more complex language, more intricate themes and had more respect for the characters than their modern counterparts) but also, well, just look at the teXt itself: a supposedly text-oriented platform has no formatting, no links, and is an insult to the eyes. Enshittification in action.
I’m familiar with Adam Mastroianni’s thesis that science is a strong-link problem — here is at least one mention on this blog — and I am certainly familiar with the recently uncovered shenanigans in Alzheimer’s disease research, but I never thought to connect the dots in the latter refuting the former. Well, paleontologist Matt Wedel did just that:
I’m going to wane philosophical for a minute. In general I’m very sympathetic to Adam Mastroianni’s line “don’t worry about the flood of crap that will result if we let everyone publish, publishing is already a flood of crap, but science is a strong-link problem so the good stuff rises to the top”. I certainly don’t think we need stronger pre-publication review or any more barrier guardians (although I have reluctantly concluded that having some is useful). But when fraudulent stuff like this does in fact rise to the top in what seems to be a strong-link network — lots of NIH-funded labs, papers in top journals (or, apparently, “top” journals) — then I despair a bit. Science has gotten so specialized that almost anyone could invent facts or data within their subfield that might pass muster even with close colleagues (even if those colleagues aren’t on the take, he said cynically — there is a mind-boggling amount of money floating around in the drug-development world).
There is indeed. Lots more at the link, mostly about paleobiology, ending with these wise words:
So if you want to do good work — in this metaphor, to be at the top where the good science floats (eventually, alongside a seasoning of not-yet-unmasked bad science) — then I think you have to be aware that other cells exist, and occasionally peer into them, if for no other reason than to make sure you don’t accept an idea that’s already been debunked over there. And you need to read broadly and deeply in your own cell — there’s almost certainly valuable stuff you don’t know because the relevant works are stuck to the bottom of the pot. Go knock ’em loose.
📺 Ars Technica’s list of best television in 2024 goes on and on (and on, and on). This is why I barely watched anything this year, and most of what I did see were Modern Family reruns.
📚 Finished reading: Order without Design by Alain Bertaud, which is more of a textbook for urban planners than something one would read in their spare time but still managed to grab my attention and change my mind on a few things. Bertaud makes the case for organic, bottom-up growth of cities in the style championed by Jane Jacobs while at the same time noting the costly second-order effects of NIMBY-ism, 15-minute-city projects, public-transport-for-its-own-sake movements and other causes taken up by modern-day Jane Jacobs wannabes. So yes, I am now more skeptical of both 15-minute cities and public transport. Caveat lector.
I have been reading Order without Design for the last few weeks — it’s a dense book! — so it is complete coincidence that its author Alain Bertaud was on EconTalk as a guest the same week that I finished it. Bertaud talked to to Russ Roberts once before, back in June 2019. I haven’t listened to either episode yet but they’re on the list.
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
Image by Midjourney v6.1. The prompt was my own.
🍿 Krampus (2015) is comedy-horror fun for the entire family with great practical effects and a clear, if simple, message. Will watch again, this time next year.
I was peripherally aware that large language models have crossed a chasm in the last year or so, but I haven’t realized how large of a jump it was until I compared ChatGPT’s answer to my standard question: “How many lymphocytes are there in the human body?”.
Back in February of last year it took some effort to produce an over-inflated estimate. Today, I was served a well-reasoned and beautifuly formatted response after a single prompt. Sure, I have gotten better at writing prompts but the difference there is marginal. Not so marginal is the leap in usefulness and trustworthiness of the model, which went from being an overeager high school freshman to an all-star college senior.
And that is just the reasoning. Creating quick Word documents with tables and columns just the way I want them has become routine, even when/especially if I want to recreate a document from a badly scanned printout. My office document formatting skills are getting rusty and I couldn’t be happier for it.
In his Kefahuchi Tractt trilogy, M. John Harrison conjures up alien algorithms floating around the human environment, mostly helpful, sometimes not, motives unknown. Back in the early 2000s when the first novel came out I was wondering what on earth he was talking about but for better or worse we are now headed towards that world. Whether we are inching or hurling, that depends entirely on your point of view.
(↬Tyler Cowen)
🍿 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) is an underappreciated marvel that starts with racism and murder, revs things up with a powerful man’s lust over a young woman and ends with near-genocide, to the tune of Latin chants. Heavy topics for a Disney cartoon! And oh that villain song…