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7,366 articles mezi dny 1.12.2011 a 31.12.2011
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FRIDAY 30. DECEMBER, 2011
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23:59
2011: the year in review
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23:59
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23:57
Harbor Porpoise Return to San Francisco Bay
Harbor porpoises are returning to San Francisco Bay in increasing numbers after having evacuated the area during Word War II. -
23:37Christmas came with a record-breaking temperature at the South Pole this year.
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23:18You might not think that a collaboration to study the chemical and physical properties of ancient Attic pottery would have anything to do with space missions, but, well, you'd be mistaken.
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23:04
PETA seeks memorials to cows killed on Ill. roads (AP)
AP - An animal rights group wants Illinois to install highway signs in memory of cattle killed when trucks hauling them flipped in two separate wrecks. -
23:00
Science has its silly in-jokes, just like any other profession, but more and more it informs 'proper' comedy now, too
Is there something funny about science? Audiences at Robin Ince's seasonal slice of rationalist revelry, Nine Carols and Songs for Godless People, seemed to think so. This annual event, at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London, is far more a celebration of the wonders of science than an exercise in atheistic God-baiting. In fact, God gets a rather easy ride: the bad science of tabloids, fundamentalists, quacks and climate-change sceptics provides richer comic fodder.
Time was when London theatre audiences preferred to laugh at science rather than with it, most famously with Thomas Shadwell's satire on the Royal Society, The Virtuoso, in 1676. Samuel Butler and Jonathan Swift followed suit in showering the Enlightenment rationalists with ridicule. In modern times, scientists (usually mad) remained the butt of such jokes as came their way.
They haven't helped matters with a formerly rather feeble line in laughs. Even now there are popularizing scientists who imagine another repetition of the 'joke' about the physicist who claims to have solved a dairy farmer's milk-production problem (his theory only works for spherical cows) will prove them all to be jolly japers. And while allowing that much humour lies in the delivery, there are scant laughs still to be wrung from formulaic juxtapositions of the exotic with the mundane ("imagine looking for the yoghurt in an eleven-dimensional supermarket!").
Meanwhile, science has its in-jokes, just like any other profession. A typical example: A neutron goes into a bar and orders a drink. "How much?", he asks the bartender, who replies: "For you, no charge". Occasionally the humour is so rarefied that its solipsism becomes part of the joke. Thomas Pynchon, for instance, provides a rare example of an equation gag, which I risk straining the Guardian's typography to repeat: ∫ 1/cabin d(cabin) = log cabin + c = houseboat. This was the only calculus joke I'd ever seen until Matt Parker produced a better one at Nine Carols. Speaking of rates of flow (OK, it was flow of poo, d(poo)/dt – some things never fail), he admitted that this part of his material was a little derivative.
The rise of standup has changed everything. Not only do we now have standups who specialize in science, but several, such as Timandra Harkness and Helen Keen, are women, diluting the relentless blokeishness of much science humour. Some aim to be informative as well as funny. At the Bloomsbury you could watch Dr Hula (Richard Vranch) and his assistant demonstrate atomic theory and chemical bonding with hula hoops (more fun than it might sound).
As Ben Goldacre's readers know, good jokes often have serious intent. Perhaps the most notorious scientific example was not exactly a joke at all. Certainly, when in 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal got a spurious paper on "quantum hermeneutics" published in the journal of postmodern criticism, Social Text, the postmodernists weren't laughing. And Sokal himself was more intent on proving a point than making us giggle. Arguably funnier was the epilogue: in the early 2000s, a group of papers on quantum cosmology published in physics journals by the French brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov was so incomprehensible that this was rumoured to be the postmodernists' revenge – until the indignant Bogdanovs protested that they were perfectly serious.
But my favourite example of this sort of prank was a paper submitted by computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler to one of the "junk science" conferences that plague their field with spammed solicitations. The paper had a title, abstract, text, figures and captions that all consisted solely of the phrase "Get me off your fucking email list". Mazières was keen to present the paper at the conference, but was never told if it was accepted or not. Reporting the incident made me probably the first and only person to say "fucking" in the august pages of Nature – not, I admit, the most distinguished achievement, but we must take our glory where we can find it.
guardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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22:24
Deep Gulf drilling thrives 18 mos. after BP spill
(AP) -- Two hundred miles off the coast of Texas, ribbons of pipe are reaching for oil and natural gas deeper below the ocean's surface than ever before. -
22:24(AP) -- After a customer backlash, Verizon Wireless on Friday dropped a plan to start charging $2 for every payment subscribers make over the phone or online with their credit or debit cards.
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22:10
Moss Has Cloned Itself for 50,000 Years, Study Says
A Hawaiian moss is an ancient clone that may be one of the oldest multicellular organisms on Earth, a new study says.
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22:02
Dot Earth Blog: Notes from a Blogging 'Discomfort Zone'
More on the two-way nature of blogging and the power of the Web to improve humanity's journey.
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21:40Navopatia Field Station, in Mexico, is home to a smaller subspecies of Gambel's quail.
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21:39AP - North Carolina deputies are investigating a farm that raises turkeys for Butterball LLC after an animal rights group said it captured undercover video showing animal cruelty.
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21:15SPACE.com - The six astronauts living on the International Space Station may not be able to see fireworks from their orbital home, but the dramatic views of the Earth below will provide a stunning backdrop for them to ring in 2012 from space.
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21:06Around the country, eco-conscious parks, businesses and local jurisdictions have devised interesting ways of recycling trees.
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21:05Do you know which is the funniest joke in the world? It might involve New Jersey.
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20:39
AP - Two hundred miles off the coast of Texas, ribbons of pipe are reaching for oil and natural gas deeper below the ocean's surface than ever before.
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20:24A 39-year-old man is in critical condition after testing positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, state media reported Saturday quoting local health authorities.
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20:10LiveScience.com - Christmas Eve brought some celestial magic for hundreds of people across Germany and nearby countries. Eyewitnesses reported seeing between one and three glowing orbs in the night sky, with tails variously described as white, red, or green, depending on the location of the observer.
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20:06Reuters - A judge blocked California's signature attempt to lower greenhouse gas emissions, a victory for out-of-state ethanol producers and refiners that has California's air quality board vowing to appeal.
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19:48
Graphene gives protection from intense laser pulses
Single-sheet graphene dispersion when substantially spaced apart in liquid cells or solid film matrices can exhibit novel excited state absorption mechanism that can provide highly effective broadband optical limiting well below the onset of microbubble or microplasma formation.
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19:48A study of 20 elementary schools in Hawaii has found that a focused program to build social, emotional and character skills resulted in significantly improved overall quality of education, as evaluated by teachers, parents and students.
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19:48
Space Mountain Produces Terrestrial Meteorites
The discovery of a towering mountain on Vesta could solve a longstanding mystery: How did so many pieces of the giant asteroid end up right here on our own planet? -
19:47The centuries-old pipe mouthpiece may have been used for hashish and bears the words, "love is language for the lovers."
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19:40HB3Labs has retrofitted the ubiquitous hoodie with earbuds on the end of drawstrings.
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