Focus is overrated
LinkedIn cracks me up. It’s useful. I like it. I have used it to find new contacts who’ve done work for my publication and website.
But it has the reputation of being “more business-like” than Facebook. Which makes the Google ads really puzzling. And this isn’t a random occurence – it’s always stuff like this:
A followon to yesterday’s post.
The plight of the specialist is that nobody understands you.
You’re a tech guy and you’re surrounded by non-engineers. You’re a PhD whose discipline is lost on the general public. You’re a classical pianist and your kids like to crank up Avril Lavigne. You’re a mathematician whose Wikipedia entry is critiqued by dunderheaded liberal-arts-major bloggers.
Poor you.
The really unfortunate thing is that many specialists respond by characterizing everyone else as stupid. “They just don’t get it” is one my least favorite phrases – it’s dismissive, it’s snotty and most of all, it’s a cop-out. If you want people to understand and appreciate your area of knowledge, it’s up to YOU to figure out how to communicate about it in an interesting way. The world does not owe you their appreciation, and (are you sitting down?) there’s nothing inherent to your discipline that makes it more worthy of attention than everybody else’s. Book smart isn’t the only kind of smart. Physicists aren’t the only intelligent life on the planet.
It’s good for me to repeat this periodically. Because I sometimes encounter difficulty persuading people of the value of my ideas. Easy to resort to blaming them, but that doesn’t get me anywhere.
The Hutchinson Metric:
“Considering only nonempty, compact, and fintite [sic] metric spaces. For a space X, let P(X) denote the space of Borel probability measures…”
Of course it’s more in the spirit of things to correct such an article, not mock it. But it’s humorous when somebody’s head is so buried in their own space that they can’t communicate with non-experts.
Addendum: Somebody already fixed the fintite metric spaces. It would also be stronger with a lead sentence like “In mathematics …” but since I don’t understand the Hutchinson Metric, I can’t write it.
Second addendum: Somebody added a lead sentence like “In mathematics …” and did it in a way that brilliantly makes fun of my first addendum. :)
Lake Baikal is like a little reverse-Madagascar.
It’s tucked away in Siberia and, in fact, very little was known about it until it got in the way of the Trans-Siberian Highway, which presumably makes the Trans-Taiga in Quebec look like a bike trail. As Baikal is rather big – it allegedly contains as much water as all the Great Lakes combined – building around it took quite some time.
Two-thirds of the region’s fauna are found nowhere else in the world. This is what brings Madagascar to mind - Madagascar’s unique ecosystem is of land isolated by water; Baikal’s is of water isolated by a zillion miles of land.
The picture there is Olkhon Island, the second-largest lake-bound island in the world.
All in all, one of the most interesting articles I’ve found on Wikipedia.
Contestants:
Judges:
Seems inevitable, doesn’t it?
The gharial is sort of a crocodile that got shafted by nature, with a narrow mouth that makes it look like an incredibly fat gar fish with legs and armor.
Well, no worries. Like frogs and bees, the gharial is on the way out. Looks like some strange parasite is infesting their kidneys and livers.
One less thing that can eat you if you’re swimming in a river in India. (Although the parasite doesn’t sound fun either.)
p.s. In case the tone doesn’t come through right, my cheering is facetious. And gharials don’t eat many people.
40% is some kind of magic number in the food world. A ton of your standard off-the-shelf spirits check in at 80 proof, i.e. 40% alchohol content. Kinda likewise, a lot of canned foods seem to provide you with roughly 40% of the USRDA of sodium.
Hormel Chili No Beans, the food substance I hate to love, is one example. Campbell’s Chunky Soups are another. Except for one important note: that’s 40% of your daily sodium intake PER SERVING, and the cans I was looking at allegedly contain “about two” servings. So if like a normal human you eat the whole can of soup, those Saltines you were eyeing as a side dish are not a great idea.
I think eating “low sodium” or “low fat” variations of your favorite foods is a dead end. They don’t taste as good. Makes eating a chore. A more useful idea is to get your flavor from healthier seasonings. Black pepper – good on fries. Chili peppers, bell peppers, onions, garlic - good eatin’. Skip the ketchup-flavored corn syrup and go with salsa or mustard.
You know it originally meant left-handed. Mark of the devil, presumably, to be left-handed. Odd. Disturbing. Sinister.
That’s why they won’t make you a Guitar Hero controller. (I am hopeful of creating an infinite pingback loop with Liquid Egg Product here.)
Yes, and if you speak French you know right is droit (pronounced “dwaht” of course) and because right is good and normal, in English if you are nimble and skilled you are adroit (*not* pronounced “ah-dwaht”, of course). And left is gauche, and because left is bad and sinister, in English you are gauche if you are lacking in taste and class.
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