blake johnson

I found yet another article responding to Summer’s remarks: The New Republic Online: Body of Evidence. I really liked the concluding paragraph:

Summers’s “problem” is that he submits every argument with a grain of evidence behind it to serious and scrupulous scrutiny. And this scares our supposedly daring academic culture, which lives in fear of what it refuses to know. As yet another of Curie’s biographers suggested, “She had survived because she had made men believe that they were not just dealing with an equal, but with an insensitive equal.” Summers knows that the age of such painful self-denial is gone, and good riddance. Still, the academy is the academy; it is not a community center. Students ought to know more than they do, and it is on Summers’s agenda that they will. No American university has yet truly grasped how the revelations of science touch on history and art, philosophy and poetry, and it is on Summers’s agenda that at least Harvard will try. In all this, he imperils the unexamined orthodoxies of the ensconced. And now, his enemies see a chance to counterattack. Let’s hope they fail and he succeeds.

Ah, my CAPTCHA comment system stopped working after my web host put my username back into a “jailshell”. I don’t know when I’ll get around to fixing it, but hopefully it won’t be too long.

Harvard Professor Steven Pinker weighed in on the woman in science “scandal” created by Larry Summers. His response to the issue is classic Pinker:

when it comes to this issue, ordinarily intelligent scientists suddenly lose their ability to think quantitatively and warp statistical hypotheses into crude dichotomies.

My response: yes.

There’s a book called Getting Things Done which is generating a lot of excitement among blog community. I must admit that I’ve never felt particularly unable to generate, categorize, and act on those things which I want to do, but I bet that I could learn some useful tips from a big-picture book like this. I’ll have to consider putting it on my “to read” list.

I ran across a couple posts on various blogs about a new piece of software called Quicksilver for Mac OS X. It isn’t quite clear from the description on the website as to what exactly Quicksilver does, but it seemed to be generating a lot of buzz in the blogosphere, so I took it for a test drive this afternoon. All I can say is: this is one of the coolest utilities I’ve seen in a long time!

If you have Mac OS X, take it for a whirl today. I’d also recommend following a couple of the tutorials in the documentation section.