Asymptotes get in my way

wedding1

I know we have a lot of polyamorous people on this network, and people who are not interested in long term relationships, but that’s not me. I’m a devotedly monogamous kind of guy, and today is our 36th wedding anniversary, so I had to do some math. (Isn’t that everyone’s response to important dates?)

Percent of my life spent married to one person: 61%

Whoa. That’s disappointing. That number is just not big enough. So I had to fudge it a bit. We started seriously dating in 1976, so…

Percent of my life spent romantically involved with that person: 68%

That didn’t help much. Only 2/3 of my life? She’s so much more.

But hey, I met her for the first time in third grade, so maybe I can nudge it up further.

Percent of my life knowing that person: 86%

That really feels like cheating. She was just that other kid in class who was better at math than I was, so that shouldn’t count.

I know 100% is mathematically impossible because there were those 8 empty years where I didn’t even know she existed, but I have to strive for a percentage that approximates her importance. At least 99%. I estimate that in order to reach the point where I have spent 99% of my life married to Mary, all I have to do is live to be 2300 years old. And she has to live that long too, or there’s no point.

We can do that. Easy.

Then maybe we can aim for 99.9%.

Social justice networks are metastasizing!

metastasis |məˈtastəsəs|
noun (pl. metastases |-ˌsēz| )
the development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer.
• a metastatic growth.

It’s true — Freethoughtblogs has divided, although I prefer to think of it as multiplying. A new network has sprung from our loins, The Orbit, which includes some popular bloggers formerly of FtB, including Aoife O’Riordan, Ashley Miller, Brianne Bilyeu, Dana Hunter, Greta Christina, Heina Dadabhoy, Miri Mogilevsky, and Zinnia Jones, and incorporating several new bloggers as well. Head on over there, say hello, and start adding them to your RSS feeds.

You can also help them fund their efforts by donating to their kickstarter.

We’re hoping the trolls will be confused. Suddenly, more sites that are opposing and mocking them are spawning? Aren’t we supposed to be collapsing and going away?

Gaming the rankings

Academics have this scheme to rank different universities — many of them revolve around publication metrics, which is one entirely reasonable way to assess one part of the research enterprise. Unfortunately, if a university is ranked by how many publications are produced by affiliated faculty, one way to jack up the numbers is to buy nominal affiliations — pay researchers with successful publishing careers to put their university’s name on their CVs. All it takes is lots and lots of money.

King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Saudi Arabia is playing that game. They are contacting highly ranked researchers, offering them a pile of cash, and asking them to list KAU as one of their academic affiliations.

UC Davis professor Jonathan Eisen also contacted Pachter. Almost a year ago, Eisen had been solicited by KAU but ultimately declined the offer.

Most researchers, such as Eisen, were initially contacted by KAU via email and asked if they would like to join the university’s faculty as a “distinguished adjunct professor.” Eisen traded emails with several people at KAU, trying to figure out what the catch was.

“I tried to get them to explain what they were trying to do,” Eisen said. “It smelled really off.”

KAU offered him $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, according to an email sent to Eisen by KAU. In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.

So, basically, free money for sticking KAU’s name in a paper. I have to respect all the people with the integrity to turn that down, like Eisen did. Unfortunately, not everyone rejected them (and it’s also kind of hard to blame them — the life of a college professor rarely provides opportunities to get wealthy), and the stratagem worked.

Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.

Who knew you could just buy an academic reputation?

Please, no more blogger submissions for a while

I put out a call for applications for new FtB bloggers a while back, the response was a bit overwhelming — we got scores of applicants. Every minute of my free time today was spent organizing and reviewing and making short summaries for other FtBians to help them get through the pile, and I’m feeling a bit bleary-eyed now. So stop applying! No more for this round!

If you’re one of the applicants, we’re going to have the big evaluative review over the weekend and make some decisions then. We’ll contact people yes or no early next week.

Note that if we turn you down this time, it’s not necessarily an absolute rejection — we’ve got so many applicants that the field is particularly competitive, and some applicants will be deferred simply because we can’t cope with suddenly adding 40 blogs to the network. Don’t be discouraged, it may be that we’re just trying to get our first few bites down, and we’ll get around to gobbling you up eventually.

We’ll have a whole bunch of changes appearing next week, so stay tuned.

Today in Responsible Gun Ownership

Jamie Gilt loves her guns. She has a page titled Jamie Gilt for Gun Sense. So you’d think she’d be a regular poster child for the NRA.

She’s in the hospital now because, as she was toodling down the Florida highways in her pickup truck, her four year old son found a .45 calibre pistol in the back seat, and plugged his mom right in the torso. She’s going to live, fortunately, and will be back to praising guns soon.

I’m not laughing. I’m just kind of staggered by the explosion of cliches I’ve now read.

For my birthday? I’m touched.

This is so sweet. The channers/gamergaters/MRAs/generic assholes have declared 9 March to be a special day.

lauren-the-triggering-date

What is this all about? They’re upset about serious issues like Milo Yiannopoulos’s missing blue checkmark, and how people sometimes (rarely) bet banned or blocked for harassment, so they’ve decided to go all out repulsive for a day. They have a simple plan.

To participate all you have to do is post the most vile and offensive things you can think of (within federal law), in defense of freedom of speech.

Oh, man, brilliant. That’ll convince the world these worthies must be given a louder voice.

Emotionally invested in despising philosophy

Yet again, people are asking why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? I have a different answer than you’ll find at that link. It’s because so many smart people are idiots about psychology. I deal with a lot of atheists, and one of the many flaws in that group that have been coming to the fore lately is the obliviousness they have to their own motivations.

[Read more…]

He’s being silenced…SILENCED! He shouted.

Milo Yiannopoulos is still upset that Twitter removed the little blue verification check mark from his profile. I don’t even get what that is for, how to apply for one, or why anyone would bother, but it’s very, very important to Milo, and he’s been complaining bitterly about it for the past month now. It is an attack on his free speech, don’t you know, and we all know how important it is to these wankers to be able to shriek in public.

Just so you know how important this is, Milo crashed a White House press conference to confront the press secretary. My verification check was taken away for making fun of the wrong group of people, he whined. This is a whole new level of obsession over petty trivia.

I’m speechless.

I think I’ll walk down to the coffeeshop for my morning pick-me-up, and they better not be out of bran muffins today — a man my age needs his fiber. But if they are, I’m just going to turn around and go to the airport, get a flight to Beijing, and demand that President Xi Jinping do something about it! So I might be distracted for a few days.

FYI: I made it to the coffeeshop, and they had ONE bran muffin left. It was so close. Jinping can count himself lucky tomorrow, that by such a narrow margin he has avoided an international incident as an outraged American stormed his office and demanded that he deal with the muffin shortfall.