At Whom Are We Laughing?
I have an article that somebody tore out of the September 1998 Physics Today, called "The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?" The article points out that pioneers of quantum theory such as Bohr and Pauli were quite happy to pontificate about political, spiritual, artistic, or mystical/religious implications of quantum mechanics. If black-sweatered deconstructionist humanities professors were to say similar things today, they would be considered naive or stupid by most scientists today.
I don't think I tore this article out myself, I think someone sent it to me or gave it to me in 1998. It bothers me that I can't remember who.
Wedding Ring Stiction
Maribeth bought me a replacement wedding ring. The original ring was slightly loose and I would sometimes slip it off and on. I had a near-miss experience where I lost it for a few days, but it turned up in my jacket pocket. And then I lost it again presumably-for-good somewhere in Santa Barbara.
The new one is tighter-- it leaves a mark on my finger. I wasn't sure whether this would turn out to be a good thing (harder to take the ring off, or for it to fall off) or a bad thing (because it would bother me and make me want to take the ring off). But a few days in, I think it will be a good thing. I think the ring is wearing itself a little groove in my finger and I will forget about it. Hopefully my finger won't get any fatter.
By the way, it's interesting that you can slip a ring off a finger more easily by twisting it. I guess this is because the stiction and/or the coefficient of static friction is greater than the coefficient of sliding friction, so if you can get up some sliding velocity in the azimuthal direction around your finger, it's easier to slide up the finger also.
Re-write: Perhaps that was not the best use of the word "because." Because the stiction is greater than the friction? Isn't that just a description of the phenomenon rather than an explanation? Why is static friction greater than sliding friction anyway?
Also, perhaps losing a wedding ring "for good" was not the most fortuitous phrasing.
Why are television captions so bad?
The closed captions on television are often wrong. I was thinking about this while watching U2 perform at the inauguration of the Clinton Presidential Library on C-SPAN. The C-SPAN captions had U2 singing. "Some day, bloody some day... some day, bloody some day," and so on all the way through the song.
It seems to vary from time to time or from show to show (probably, from transcriber to transcriber). Sometimes the captions will be quite good with few mistakes, but sometimes they will be unreadable, consistent gibberish.
Granted, real-time transcription may not be easy, but for any program that isn't live, the transcribers should have access to the script. Even live shows could be broadcast with a few-second delay. In the case of the library inauguration, the transcribers could have been given a copy of the planned song lyrics. Why don't the same market dynamics that result in TV personalities being paid large amounts of money, act to devote enough money to the captions to get them right?
It's not just the audience of old deaf people we're talking about after all, but the audience of people watching television in bars, in airports, in hairdressers, in stores, and possibly in the workplace.
