How strange that you, of all of us, would prove to be the most hopeful.

Click to enlarge:

Thanks, CPFaSCPH Nate!

I’ve been listening to the CBC’s podcast series “How To Think About Science”, and I find Simon Schaffer’s below example (in response to host David Cayley’s setup) hilarious. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think it’s a combination of this being a double-tedious election year and me remembering having textbooks that constantly fell prey to the problem described below. (History more than science, but still.)

Cayley: (Describing a study made of scientists in the seventies and eighties.) “Scientists began to look less like oracles and more like skilled carpenters. Their knowledge was not the very voice of nature, but a human product, something that had to be made and maintained. This turned the relationship between science and society upside down. Formerly, science had been seen as social only when it was wrong. Social constructs distorted and corrupted knowledge. True knowledge was immaculate, untouched by human hands. Now, Schaffer says, the sciences began to be understood as inherently social.”

Schaffer: “What people say about the world, in groups, and how they come to agree, and how they find out how things are, has the quality of an institution, and it should be analyzed the way other institutions are analyzed. That meant, for example, that it was extremely unpromising — to put it mildly — to suppose that social principles are only acting when folk get things wrong. So for example, it didn’t look remotely plausible to say that Isaac Newton thought that there was an inverse square law of gravity acting instantly at a distance through empty space between the centers of distant bodies because there is an inverse square law acting instantly from the center of one body to another through empty space, and that Leibniz disagreed because he was German.”

I don’t know what’s going on with B&T’s server. (It’s affecting my e-mail too, those of you that are wondering what’s taking so long.) Maybe it’s an editorial commentary. Or massive traffic seeking a Vegas recap.

Either way, it looks like the warning shot has passed harmlessly overhead, and we are powering back up. To hold you, I leave you with

Reason #4,193 Why I Love Sports Talk Radio

Tony Kornheiser has returned to Washington Post Radio.

Mr. Tony: Every college graduaton always has some self-congratulatory awards to the college professors, which is fine. Then they have a-a student speaker, and a guest speaker. The student speakers should not be allowed to speak. They have nothing to say. They are…they are foolish. And I love them all, but they’re foolish because they’re optimistic. And they still think “we can change the world”, and they exhort their fellows to change the world, and…what, David?

David Aldridge: Do you ever think that this graduation, this whole thing, may not just be for you?

Mr. Tony: No.

Juli Mac has, quite sensibly, taken the step of letting us all know what sort of sendoff she wants, should she die unexpectedly and in the company of everyone more qualified to see to it. Naturally, I have started thinking about the same thing. Really, it’s important to make sure everyone knows what you want, lest you wind up boxed among people saying “I dunno. What do you want to do?” until you smell bad enough that they just bury you. I gave it a great deal of thought, and considered all my options carefully, and took the measure of my surviving loved ones, and what is most important to all of us, and what would give greatest comfort. And I have decided, after much contemplation, that I wish to be memorialized as a seasoning.

I read once that the pigs destined to be the very best lardo are fed only apples, walnuts, and cream for the last few months of their lives, so given that I should taste reasonably good. I’m not suggesting I be cured into prosciutto or have my liver seared and served with caramelized apples or have y’all barbecue my shoulder or anything weird like that; I think I would be better off rendered, dried, and granulated. Like garlic. I would live on forever in my closest circle of friends, a little shaker-jar of warmth and closeness for those times I am missed. A couple shakes of me over a baked potato, a quarter-cup in the Super Bowl Chili year after year, an bit infused into a bottle of fine vodka. Or maybe as part of a dry rub on ribs, smoked to beautiful fragrant memories by one of my grandpits.

“This experiment essentially involves looking at the ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ experiment from the point of view of the cat.”