Monday, February 10, 2014

This week's C&EN

Lots of great articles in this week's C&EN:

2 comments:

  1. As far as scientific terminaology, I think Feynman summed it up best:

    "The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing."

    All this hand wringing about semantics in science is just mental masturbation by pedantic, OCD types who seem to rise in the ranks of academia. The type who need to stroke their ego by brow beating students who understand a concept but haven't adequately prostrated themselves at the altar of conformity… or to be more precise, it's easy to win an argument when your opponent needs you to sign their thesis.

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  2. In the 1960 photo of Franklin McCain, the worker behind the counter looks like he's African American. So many white people didn't dislike all black people, just equal black people.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20