Seth's Blog

In this TED video Lisa Donnelly, a cartoonist, says

women + humor = change

I’m not sure what changes she means. But I think she is saying something important. Humor has a way of making change easier.
In the 1980s a friend of mine named Melody McLaren worked as a personal assistant in a London advertising agency. One of her co-workers was a woman named Denise Taylor. Denise was the personal assistant of the managing director, Chris Ogilvie-Taylor. Normally personal assistants get a nameplate on the appropriate door but Denise did not because her boss, Ogilvy-Taylor, was worried about the appearance of nepotism.
Everybody — except perhaps Ogilvie-Taylor — thought this was unfair. But Ogilvie-Taylor’s boss was on a different floor. It would have been dangerous and strange to appeal to him.

My friend conceived a brilliant and surprising solution. She wrote a long poem, maybe 60 lines long, with rhyming couplets, about an imaginary town of Taylors (a play on “tailor”). The point of the poem was that Denise deserved her name on the door. Then, with the help of the art department, my friend wrote the poem on a giant card, about six feet high. The card was passed around the office. Everyone signed it. Then it was put in Mr. Johnson’s office. Soon Denise got a nameplate.

This was not exactly humor — more like whimsy, with humorous elements. It facilitated change.

Another example comes from a Chinese blogger:

On Oct. 20, a female blogger in northern China nicknamed Piggy Feet Beta announced a contest to incorporate the phrase “Li Gang is my father” into classical Chinese poetry. Six thousand applicants replied, one modifying a famous poem by Mao to read “it’s all in the past, talk about heroes, my father is Li Gang.”

Here too we have the three elements: woman, humor, change.

A friend of mine from Poland was surprised we had jokes in America. He thought the sole purpose of humor was to criticize the government. And our government was pretty good.

Sure, jokes are a way of saying the unsayable (e.g., dirty jokes). Sure, they can empower the weak, not just the strong (e.g., racist jokes). What’s interesting here is (a) Donnelly felt her equation was interesting (she’s right), meaning most of her audience didn’t know it; (b) she didn’t illustrate it well (why not?); (c) humor can be useful in everyday life (as my friend’s example shows), not just to criticize the government. I think this point should be incredibly obvious, like the sky is blue, but it isn’t.

One of my students is in Egypt. She writes:

I may be leaving here soon. Two of the foreigners here that I know that were in the protests have been arrested by the army and taken to a military academy- they were able to contact the German embassy as they are German and the embassy came to take them and keep them safe in a hostel until they are able to leave the country. People are beginning not to trust any foreigners here, not only journalists, and have begun to say that foreigners are spies stirring up trouble on behalf of foreign governments. The German girl that I went to the demonstrations with saw her own Egyptian neighbor talking to the army officers about her and her landlord and her roommates while she was being detained. Of course all journalists are being attacked right now. And the mood has just become very hostile towards foreigners. We are getting reports on a mailing list called Cairo Scholars (for foreigners living in Cairo) of all different types of incidents directed at foreigners here.

This study found that women who win a Best Actress Oscar have a much higher rate of divorce in the following years than the losing Best Actress nominees and the Best Actor nominees, both winning and losing. A Chinese joke I heard recently says essentially the same thing:

There are four kinds of people: 1. Man. 2. Woman. 3. Woman with a Ph.D. 4. Someone who will marry a woman with a Ph.D.

Via Marginal Revolution.

In the IEEE Spectrum, Paul McFedries, the author of Word Spy, writes about new words generated by new kinds of science made possible by cheap computing.

Perhaps the biggest data set of all is the collection of actions, choices, and preferences that each person performs throughout the day, which is called his or her data exhaust. Using such data for scientific purposes is called citizen science. This is noisy data in that most of it is irrelevant or even misleading, but there are ways to cull signal.

That’s not my understanding of what citizen science means. I’ve seen it used when non-scientists (“citizens”) help professional scientists. The Wikipedia definition is

projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation

Bird-watching, for example.

My self-experimentation is not citizen science. I am not doing it to help a professional scientist nor as part of a project. I do it to help myself — in contrast to professional science, which is a job. Almost all self-experimentation by professional scientists and doctors has been done as part of their job. So let me coin a term that describes what I do: personal science. Science done to help the person doing it.

I believe personal science will grow enormously, for several reasons: 1. Lower cost. The necessary equipment, such as software, costs less and less. I use R, which is free. 2. Greater income. People can afford more stuff. 3. More leisure time. 4. More is known. The more you know, the more effective your research will be. The more you know the better your choice of treatment, experimental design, and measurement and the better your data analysis. 5. More access to what is known. For example, Dennis Mangan discovered via the internet that niacin had cured restless leg syndrome. 6. Professional scientists unable to solve problems. They are crippled by career considerations, poor training, the need to get another grant, desire to show off (projects are too large and too expensive), and a Veblenian dislike of being useful. As a result, problems that professionals can’t solve are solved by amateurs. The best-known example is the invention of blood-glucose self-monitoring by Richard Bernstein, who was not a doctor when he invented it.

Sounds like we’re under attack. Bombs going off, gunfire. A few fireworks.

More At midnight I was awakened by the densest loudest fireworks I have ever seen. About two per second for ten minutes or even longer. One launch pad was on the street near my apartment; I could see two other sources further away — geysers of glittery light. This proves the Chinese invented fireworks, I kept thinking. They were so pretty and varied I didn’t mind being woken up. And it was so nice to be able to watch them from my warm apartment.