Fo/u/r/ive Notes
For Mother’s Day, as it were, xkcd presents The Lawrence H. Summers Memorial History of Math and Science.
Buce at Underbelly does this, probably saving me the trouble of a post. (Consider this a SlothBear moment.)
The problem I want Drek the Uninteresting—or anyone else who knows the research—to address: if we assume that mercury in the vaccine wasn’t the cause of the rise in autism, what are the causes that have been identified?
Maligning Tony Kushner by the Trustees of CUNY while he is on the cover of the current issue of his alma mater’s alumni magazine probably was not a good idea.
Update: The one I left out earlier: the Second Quarter Kauffman Economic Bloggers Survey is out (warning: PDF). I’m especially thrilled by Mark Thoma’s victory (p. 12), though surprised that the margin was so small. Suggestions that the 35% who voted for the second-best option were desperately attempting to deny incompetence are, of course, beyond the pale.
dilbert dogbert gave us kudos as well as Buce. What a treat.
Marie’s last line made me laugh. What sort of person laughs about someone dying (I won’t mention the disease but she died “after a long illness”). The case of Meitner is really odd. I don’t know why she didn’t get even one Nobel. Noether is another matter. No non mathematician can understand 20th century math. I’d point out that her work (and her students work) was absolutely key to the classification of groups (turns out almost all finite groups can be understood as samples from Lie groups).
I’d add one more. Barbara McClintock is the only biologist who I have heard scored as just the best. She was decades ahead of the field. A bit eccentric (she won the Nobel for work published in the annual report of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because she got bored submitting manuscripts to jounals).
Joan Robinson was OK given that she was an economist.