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Stay tuned for some big (but hopefully invisible) changes:
OK, academic scientists are clearly upper-middle-class, and on a day when it's more obvious than ever that the poor in this country get a raw deal in everything up to and including disaster relief, I don't want to bellyache too much about how hard it is to do a job I love in an interesting place with lots of smart people.
(So please, donate to the Red Cross or your other favorite charity.)
But still, it was interesting to read this on CNN:
A career with one of the most disproportionate ratios of training to pay is that of academic research scientist.
A Ph.D. program and dissertation are requirements for the job, which can take between six and eight years to complete. [Actually, in the UK it usually takes 3-4 years.]... Add to that several years in the postdoctoral phase of one's career to qualify for much coveted tenure-track positions.
During the postdoc phase, you are likely to teach, run a lab with experiments that require you to check in at all hours, publish research and write grants – for a salary that may not exceed $43,000.
The length of the postdoc career has doubled in the past 10 years, said Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. "It's taking longer and longer to get there. You can't start a family. It's really tough."
And it's made tougher still by the fact that in many disciplines, there aren't nearly as many tenure-track positions as there are candidates.
Among all the tragic stories coming out of New Orleans, the devastation of families and homes, I've learned that Alex Chilton is among the missing. Chilton was, first, the teenage singer of the Box Tops who had a late-60s blue-eyed-soul hit with “The Letter. In the 70s, Alex formed Big Star, one of those obscure bands that seems to have only sold records to future 1980s indie rockers (The Replacements named a song after him; The Bangles covered “September Gurls” and, now that indie has been mainstreamed, the theme song to “That 70s Show” was Big Star's “In the Street”). Since the 70s, he's tried to live down his cult-hero status, moving between Memphis and New Orleans, releasing songs like the sublime “No Sex”, the silly “Dalai Lama” in the 80s, and a series of albums of obscure covers during the 90s, and, latterly, touring solo and with various reformed versions of the Box Tops and Big Star.
In their eponymous song in his honor, the Replacements imagined the rock’n’roll world I wish we lived in:
Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round
They sing "I'm in love. What's that song?
I'm in love with that song."
… I never travel far
without a little Big Star.
-The Replacements, Alex Chilton
(So again, not to belabor the point, but please donate to the Red Cross or your other favorite charity.)
Update: Alex has been found, safe and well, apparently!
In the Guardian, Paul Davies writes about investigating the origins of life on earth and, possibly, throughout the Universe. Davies, a media-savvy astrophysicist with a notable spiritual, if not mystical, streak, comes dangerously close to advocating something like Intelligent Design, albeit a more primordial level than its usual crackpot promoters. He talks about the existence of a “life principle”, egging those pesky little molecules in that primordial soup into somehow life-like combinations:
Because even the simplest living cell is immensely complex, the odds of such a thing forming by chance are virtually zero. If that's the way it happened, then life is a freak phenomenon, and we will almost certainly be alone in the universe. However, the search for life beyond Earth, which underpins the burgeoning field of astrobiology, is based on a belief that chance played only a subordinate role. Instead, some sort of “life principle” is envisaged to be at work in the universe, coaxing matter along the road to life against the raw odds.
The problem here is “virtually zero”, which is not zero, combined with the usual fallacy of design-promoters: just because we aren't smart enough, or just don't know enough yet, to see the gradual steps between a random primordial soup and the first self-contained bacteria, doesn't mean that it didn't happen in gradual steps. The chances of life arising may be very small indeed at some particular time, in some particular bit of primordial soup, but over a billion years and immense numbers of combinations of molecules, lightning bolts and dirty water, all under conditions we don't understand nearly well enough to enumerate in any precise way, makes it just as possible -- given our meagre knowledge -- that life in the Universe is unlikely as it is likely.
As a scientist with some desire not to descend completely into the depths, Davies claims some sort of testability for this “principle”, looking for mirror versions of the molecules like DNA, RNA and the like which are the basis of “life as we know it,” but which could have formed the basis for a parallel evolutionary tree if life were easy to form in the Universe. Interesting though those experiments may be (and, not being a xenobiologist, I'm not sure I can judge) they seem to be able to shed light not on any grand cosmic principles, but on the dirty and contingent -- and wonderful as far as we should be concerned -- mechanisms by which life formed here, in this one place, four or so billion years ago.
(Full disclosure, or possibly just self-aggrandizement: Davies has been a visitor here at Imperial, and I've written papers with Charles Lineweaver, one of his co-authors on this work.)
Also, I note with some sadness that today marks the passing of The Guardian's weekly science section, called “Life”, to be replaced in their coming re-design by a daily science page. Despite the brave face they try to put on it, this will almost inevitably lead to a reduction in science coverage.
I was enjoying the new, redesigned Guardian newspaper today, until I came to the end of the new G2 features section, and an offensive interview with chief Intelligent Design crackpot Michael Behe, under the inappropriate banner, "Ideas". Offensive because interviewer John Sutherland doesn't call Behe on any of his flagrant misstatements (I hesitate to call them lies since that implies that Behe is smart enough to know he's wrong, and anyway I do give him the benefit of the doubt on his misguided sincerity); offensive because he lets Behe twist Richard Dawkins's own words against evolution; offensive because he lets Behe claim that intelligent design isn't about religion; and offensive because he encourages Behe to compare himself to -- wait for it -- Galileo. This isn't impartial journalism; it's peddling snake oil.
Update: and see Pharyngula for his usual detailed dissection of Behe's crackpot ideas.
But at least they cut into Behe's crackpot two-page spread with a couple of columns on tagging and Folksonomies.
On the other hand, adding insult to injury, they've got rid of Doonesbury, and its increasingly rare homegrown American political commentary. Damn you, Guardian editors.
Update: They're bringing Doonesbury back!
Unlike their sister paper, The Guardian, who seem willing to pander to the crackpot anti-evolution right, The Observer not only reports on the Religious Right's weird valorization of the film March of the Penguins, but is also willing to point out the truth in an editorial (aka leader):
If ever the world needed reminding about the oddities of America's Christian Right, its espousal of the film March of the Penguins provides us with a perfect example. To the movement's intellectuals, this French nature documentary - with its images of birds blinded by blizzards but still battling to protect their young - affirms decent, traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child-rearing. Boys and girls have been urged to watch with notebooks to write down pious musings as they watch this life-affirming work. Penguin decency needs shouting about, it is argued. It shows us The Way.... We should remember the words of the film company executive responsible for March of the Penguins: 'You know what? They're just birds.'
What kind of beneficent god would create these wonderful creatures but make them endure 70-mile trips to feed their young?
(The NY Times ran a very similar article last week, using many of the same quotes, and its own editorial today.)
The Observer also reports on the supposed anti-US bias of the BBC's Katrina reporting, citing a second-hand report from the always fair and balanced tycoon Rupert Murdoch on a conversation with Tony Blair. The PM supposedly referred to the BBC's coverage as "gloating" and "full of hatred of America". Even Bill Clinton seemed to echo these criticisms.
I'm not so sure: I was in the US for the entire week of Katrina, and the reporting there was no less angry: angry not at the people of New Orleans, of course, but angry at the government for its slack response, its representatives' willingness to tell bald-faced lies about the state of the poor (in several senses of the term) people in the Superdome, for example. That veneer of supposed objectivity (and of course we must emphasize the "supposed") is rarely cracked in US reporting, but Katrina was one event which actually brought the reporters straight into the story, a stark contrast to the sorry, spoon-fed "embedding" they and we have had to endure of late.
For some reason, the BBC's Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one -- the questions that the Big Bang, as it stands today, leaves unanswered. The Big Bang per se is simply the idea that the Universe started out hot and dense and has been expanding ever since. This is borne out in great detail by observations such as the expansion of the Universe itself; by the abundances of the light elements like Hydrogen and Helium which were "cooked" in the heat of the Universe when it was just a few minutes old; and by the Cosmic Microwave Background which I spend much of my time investigating, the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang (see the picture below).
The unanswered questions are addressed in refinements to the Big Bang such as the ΛCDM model, which posits the properties of the particles and energy that make up of the bulk of the Universe: CDM is "cold dark matter" which we've only observed via its gravitational effects, but haven't yet seen the requisite particle in the laboratory; Λ -- or "dark energy" -- is something like Einstein's famous Cosmological Constant which seems to be driving the universe to expand ever faster, and whose identity is completely mysterious -- and even worrying. (This is the explanation for Tom Shanks' experts-only quip of a few weeks ago.)
The feature also included a brief statement from my colleague Kate Land, who has been working with Joao Magueijo (and neither of whom I seem to be able to point to right now) investigating some of the unexpected patterns we see in the CMB, and whose work may point to yet more refinements to or revisions of the Big Bang.
For us experts, the most interesting part of the interview was the statement that we should expect new results from the WMAP satellite in November. WMAP reported its first results back in 2003, and we've been waiting for their analysis of yet more data for the past year and a half or so (meanwhile, experiments like Boomerang have continued to analyze their own CMB data).
The best thing so far about "No Direction Home", Scorsese's Dylan PBS/BBC2 documentary, hasn't been the hagiographic tone (although Allen Ginsberg is always a joy to behold), nor even hearing Dylan's own flat, midwestern drawl, but the footage of his performances with his band (later The Band, who got their own Scorsese treatment in "The Last Waltz") during their infamous 1966 UK tour: loud, angry, gorgeous and in many ways a better fit to "Like A Rolling Stone" than the original studio band. The reactions from the English crowd to this onslought were puzzling and hilarious: "I'm here to see Bob Dylan, not a pop group", to which a wiser fan responded, "Not many pop groups like that!"; another wailed, in a line that would have been appropriate as a Dylan lyric: "He's changed from what he was; he's not the same as what he was" -- as if that were bad thing.
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