As has become customary, when I changed the blog’s theme I also managed to break commenting for anyone not logged in (i.e., anyone other than me). ‘Tis fixed now.
Just a Coke please
Another year, another attempt to reinvigorate my blogging.
Even by my standards I’ve managed to produce an impressively long list of resolutions for this year. I know this is against the best advice of those who study the factors that allow us to keep our resolutions. But this time around I’ve decided to try to give myself the best chance of succeeding by just making so many resolutions that I’m bound to live up to one of them, if only by accident. There’s also the significant factor that I’ve had quite a bit of time off this last week, and so I’ve had all the time in the world to think of things it would be nice to try to do in 2012.
Besides, a half hour into the year it’s going quite well so far, so I may as well be optimistic about the rest of it.
A resolution that I expect to be among the most interesting to try to keep is one that I actually started on during 2011. It is to create a shorter-term resolution for each of the 12 months of the year. This is a slight variation on Matt Cutts’s 30-day challenges. I’ve changed it from 30-day periods to using calendar months mostly so that I can do something a little more daunting in February and only have to keep it up for 29 days (the leap year has unfortunately halved the effectiveness of this scheme).
But that’s a month away. I’d be getting ahead of myself if I revealed already what I hope to do then.
January, on the other hand, is literally on top of us. This month’s challenge is an echo of one I completed in June last year. Back then I went 30 days without caffeine. This time around it’s going to be alcohol. I expect to face a bit of skepticism when telling people about this endeavor. Most of my friends will be familiar with my claims of “giving up alcohol”, a phenomenon that seems to correlate strongly with late nights out and mysterious morning illnesses. So it’s worth pointing out two important facts: correlation does not imply causation; and I made the decision to cut out alcohol this month in state of complete sobriety and un-hungover-ness.
I put my celebratory wine glass down as the clock ticked towards 00:00, and I won’t be picking it back up until February.
Engaged
I’m getting married. So, there’s that.
Usernames that were already taken when I tried to register on Reddit
- OutOfMyElement
- ObviouslyNotAGolfer
- UrbanAchiever
- BrotherSeamus
Being Wrong
I enjoyed this paragraph from Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece on the reasons for, and consequences of, politicians’ love of certitude:
It is not clear why we enjoy certitude so much – certitude being the subjective experience of feeling certain. In contrast – as Kathryn Schulz observes in her wonderful book Being Wrong – there is simply no psychological experience of “being wrong” at all, only the lurching realisation of having been wrong until a moment ago.
I’ve never been a huge fan of being wrong. Now I can claim that I’ve never experienced it.
Finally
I’ve finally found a way to make England habitable.
I’ve always been bewildered yet faintly impressed that the rest of the world can survive with Fanta as its primary, and often only, carbonated fruit drink. I don’t think I need to point out to people who have tasted it that Fanta is the juice of Nazis.
Novel Dutch Immigration Requirements
From Johann Hari’s recent article decrying Britain’s acceptance of Muslim homophobia:
In the Netherlands, they now show all new immigrants images of men kissing, and if they object, they tell them they should go and live somewhere else.
If that’s true, it makes me like the Netherlands even more than I already did.
When Eileen took me to Amsterdam for my birthday in 2009 we stayed in a B&B run by a delightful (and delightfully stereotypical) gay Dutch couple. I couldn’t help but feel pity for all those people who refuse to get over their own problems with other people’s sexuality, because they will continue to deny themselves the opportunity to enjoy the company of so many good people.
UCD offers certificate in jabbing people randomly with pins
Via Buzz, an Irish Times opinion piece about Irish third level educational institutions offering new courses in sorcery (or its modern-day equivalent):
The Graduate Certificate in Healthcare (Acupuncture) at UCD is aimed at those with a primary degree in health care, eg medicine or physiotherapy. This is a part-time course delivered over one year. The programme “provides education in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) that will equip the healthcare professional with the necessary skills to assess and treat a broad range of acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions”.
This reflects extremely poorly on the Graduate School of Life Sciences, which offers the course. Perhaps worse than that, it also implies that some significant number of graduates coming out of UCD’s undergraduate courses in medicine are unable to distinguish real medicine from quackery. Otherwise there would be no-one going into this new program.
Maybe if UCD had turned down the road of pseudo-science sooner I could have gone straight from my theoretical physics degree into a postgraduate diploma in intelligent falling.
Some Advice
Don’t use data roaming when on holiday in Japan:
That’s a phone bill that cost as much as my last holiday.
Differentiating the Sexes
My higher level maths class for Leaving Certificate (the state exam at the end of secondary school in Ireland) was entirely populated with boys. I think there were one or two girls in the class at the beginning of the year, but they found the subject too time-consuming relative to the six or seven others that students study at that age; they dropped maths to ordinary level pretty early in the year.
My Leaving Cert. physics class was similarly populated.
In my first year of theoretical physics in university, one of my thirteen peers was a lady. In second year, she was no longer around. I studied almost entirely under male lecturers, and I graduated surrounded by male classmates.
My life is one big anecdote in support of the proposition that men are better at maths and hard sciences than women are. It’s particularly important, then, for me to always be aware of that wonderful assertion that “the plural of anecdote is not data”.
In that light, putting away my anecdote and replacing it with real data, we can find out the truth about gender and maths: that poor female performance in maths is strongly correlated with societal gender disparity; that stronger male performance in maths is accompanied by a corresponding weaker male performance in maths (i.e., that us guys push out both ends of the bell curve—for every genius there’s, well, someone less successful); and that young girls are more likely than young boys to inherit the maths anxieties of their teachers, setting them off on a course towards poor maths performance in later life. In short: women underperform in maths when they spend their lives being told that they will.
I’m delighted to see real results based on real data about maths performance. We will desperately short-change ourselves if we continue to discourage half of our potential mathematicians and scientists with baseless stereotypes. Not only that, but we’ll condemn more young men to an academic life devoid of the fairer sex. I moved out of physics into computer science for the girls, which gives you some indication of the sorry state of the physical sciences.
Maybe computer engineer Barbie will help.