Neither "skateboarding" nor an "accident"

Letter submitted to the Baltimore Sun:

***

Dear Baltimore Sun,

I was disappointed to see your headline for the story about U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Hans Loewen's untimely death ("Midshipman dies after skateboarding accident", March 30).  From the family memorial, it sounds like Mr. Loewen was run over by a car.

Americans consistently and significantly underestimate the dangers posed by motor vehicles, and headlines like this one contribute to this public misperception and the consequent underinvestment in public transit infrastructure, difficulty in passing distracted driving laws, and, of course, tragic and entirely preventable deaths of pedestrians, cyclists, and skateboarders, not to mention occupants of other motor vehicles.

***

(As far as my own title, I certainly don't mean to suggest that whoever was driving the car intended to kill anyone, but I do very much want to reinforce that crashes aren't accidents.)

To wink, or not to wink: Or, How long should I really spend on that job application?

My second post for the ACS Chemical Biology Community, "To wink, or not to wink: Or, How long should I really spend on that job application?", is up.

new ACS Chemical Biology Community blogging gig

I'm very honored to be blogging for the ACS Chemical Biology Community on the ACS Network (and no, you don't have to be an ACS member to read my blog posts).  My first post, "So you're just going to sit at home?", is all about how looking for a job is a full-time job.

word of the day: confrere

The word of the day is confrere:

Etymology:  Middle English confrere (compare frere, Friar), < French confrere (13th cent. in Littré) = Provençal confraire, Catalan confrare, Spanish co(n)frade, Italian confrate, medieval Latin confrāter, < con- together with + frāter brother. As a naturalized English word (of which the pronunciation would now be /kɒnˈfrɪə(r)/ or /-ˈfraɪə(r)/ ) it appears to have become obsolete in 17th cent.; but it has been taken back into frequent use as a borrowing from modern French, and is usually written confrère. 

1. A fellow-member of a fraternity, religious order, college, guild, etc., a colleague in office. 

2. A fellow-member of a learned profession, scientific body, or the like.  [ < modern French.] (OED)

"The paradox is that, just as Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo dramatizes paranoia with a texture of specificity, the paranoid types are, in their own way, often much more empirically minded - willing to follow the evidence where it leads, even if that is right through the looking glass - than their more cautious confreres.  it is, in other words, possible to construct an intricate scenario that is both cautiously inferential, richly detailed, on its own terms complete, and yet utterly delusional."

 - Adam Gopnik, "Closer than that: the assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: fantod

The word of the day is fantod:

Etymology:  ? An unmeaning formation suggested by fantastic adj. and n., fantasy n., etc.: compare fantigue. 

A crotchety way of acting; a fad. (OED)

"I do care about them, but what they don't know, and I would never have the heart to tell them, is that the idea of their no longer being a married couple bothers me not at all.  My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I'd get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude.  These scenarios give me the fantods.  Am I selfish?  Yes and no.  I'm a bachelor and hope someday to be an old bachelor."

 - Thomas McGuane, "Weight Watchers", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: bentonite

The phrase of the day is bentonite:

Min.

A clay found in the Fort Benton strata of the Cretaceous of Wyoming. Also, any of several clayey deposits containing montmorillonite which have various practical applications. (OED)

"The doctor who'd hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house excavated for a pond, and I had my Nicaraguan, Angel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out."

 - Thomas McGuane, "Weight Watchers", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

phrase of the day: hang the moon

The phrase of the day is hang the moon:

(idiomatic, US) To place the moon in the sky: used as an example of a superlative act attributed to someone viewed with uncritical or excessive awe, reverence or infatuation. (Wiktionary)


"He and my mother had been a glamorous couple early in their marriage; good looks, combined with assertive tastemaking, had put them on top in our shabby little city.  Then I came along, and Mother thought I'd hung the moon.  In Dad's view, I put an end to the big romance."

 - Thomas McGuane, "Weight Watchers", 4 November 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: wrong-foot

The word of the day is wrong-foot:

1. trans. In tennis, football, etc.: (by deceptive play) to cause (an opponent) to have his balance on the wrong foot.
2. trans. fig. To disconcert by an unexpected move; to catch unprepared. (OED)


"The writer-director of 'Friends with Money' (2006) and 'Please Give' (2010) has a wonderful ear for blunders, for jokes that wrong-foot the listener, for kindnesses that don't quite reach the person they are intended to reach."

 - David Denby, "Drifting: 'Gravity' and 'Enough Said'", 7 October 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: pudendum

The word of the day is pudendum:

Etymology:  < classical Latin pudendum, lit. ‘that of which one ought to be ashamed’, use as noun (usually in plural, pudenda , to denote the external genitals) of neuter gerundive of pudēre to cause shame, ashame (see pudent adj.); compare also classical Latin pars pudenda shameful part. Compare Middle French pudendes , plural noun (1532; compare parties pudendes , plural (1509), lit. ‘shameful parts’), pudende , singular noun (1555), French pudendum (1765), pudenda , plural noun (1845; now arch. or literary). Compare earlier pudend n.In post-classical Latin pudenda is also used with spec. reference to the male genitals (4th cent.; 5th cent. in Augustine in pudenda virilia).1. In pl. and sing. The external genitals; esp. the vulva. 

2. fig. The shameful parts of something. rare. (OED)

"Sex figures frequently in the MOMA show, as with 'The Rape' (1934), a painting of a face in which breasts, a navel, and a pudendum stand in for the eyes, the nose, and the mouth."

 - Peter Schjeldahl, "In the head: Balthus and Magritte reconsidered", 7 October 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: exegete

The word of the day is exegete:

Etymology:  < Greek ἐξηγητής an expounder, interpreter, < ἐξηγεῖσθαι (see exegesis n.): compare French exégète.(Show Less)

An expounder, interpreter.

1. Ancient Greek Hist. At Athens, one of those three members of the Eumolpidæ, whose province it was to interpret the religious and ceremonial law, the signs in the heavens, and oracles. 

2. One who explains or interprets difficult passages; one skilled in exegesis; an expounder. (OED)

"Pierre went on to be a cult hero of French intellectuals as a devoutly obscene philosopher, novelist, graphic artist, and exegete of the Marquis de Sade."

 - Peter Schjeldahl, "In the head: Balthus and Magritte reconsidered", 7 October 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: patsy

The word of the day is patsy:

colloq. (orig. U.S.).

A person who is easily taken advantage of, esp. by being deceived, cheated, or blamed for something; a dupe, a scapegoat. (OED)

 

 

"But whatever possibilities Seyfried may have as an actress are eradicated by the filmmakers' strategy of making their heroine-victim a woman without will, direction, ideas, temperament, unintentionally following the scheme of classic pornography.  They also ignore the real Lovelace's many attempts to reinvent herself throughout a long media career.  (She wrote not one book about herself but four.)  Traynor certainly treated her savagely, but Lovelace - a complicated, determined, often desperate woman - was something more than his patsy."

 - David Denby, "Social history: 'The Butler' and 'Lovelace'", 26 August 2013 The New Yorker

 

word of the day: aedile

The word of the day is aedile:

Etymology:  < classical Latin aedīlis Roman magistrate charged with the supervision of public buildings, games, markets, and other municipal matters < aedēs , aedis building, house (see edifice n.) + -īlis -il suffix. In extended sense ‘municipal officer’ after French édile (1754 in this sense; 1213 in Old French denoting a magistrate in ancient Rome).

 A. n.  Roman Hist. Any of several magistrates who superintended public buildings, policing, and other municipal matters. Hence in extended use: a person in charge of urban housing and building; a municipal officer. (OED)

"No such titan ever visited
during my days as aedile."

 - John Ashbery, "Gravy for the prisoners", 26 August 2013 The New Yorker

word of the day: holler

The word of the day is holler:

U.S. colloq.

Variant of hollow n. 2. (OED)

"Some varieties survived only on isolated family farms or in the hidden hollers that Roberts found in his wanderings."

 - Burkhard Bilger, "True Grits: In Charleston, a quest to revive authentic Southern cooking", 31 October 2011 The New Yorker

word of the day: samizdat

The word of the day is samizdat:

Etymology:  Russian, abbrev. of samoizdátel′stvo self-publishing house, < samo- self + izdátel′stvo publishing house. 

 

The clandestine or illegal copying and distribution of literature (orig. and chiefly in the U.S.S.R.); an ‘underground press’; a text or texts produced by this. (OED)

"Three years earlier, Roberts, David Shields, and a handful of others had founded the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, to promote the study and production of heirloom grains.  But most of their research was still done in the margins of their academic work.  They circulated their findings samizdat fashion and passed around envelopes full of endangered seeds."

 - Burkhard Bilger, "True Grits: In Charleston, a quest to revive authentic Southern cooking", 31 October 2011 The New Yorker

thoughts on Science's predatory journal sting

I commented on this discussion on the American Chemical Society's LinkedIn page, but I know LinkedIn posts don't stay up for long, so I thought I would preserve it here for posterity.

The post was about this story from NPR, reporting on a piece in Science about a sting to expose predatory journals.

Here's my comment:

"The fatal flaw of the spoof study was that it lacked a negative control, but so too did this piece of stunt journalism.  Maybe he told too many coworkers about his project to be able to send it to Science, but what about Science Translational Medicine, Nature, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, etc. etc.?  It's true that the rate of acceptance of the spoof paper among open access journals was shockingly high, but if he's going to make the claim that this is a problem with open access and not with publishing in general, he really needs the traditional publisher control.  Any sort of argument that traditional publishers don’t have the same financial incentives to publish bad papers as open access journals that charge publication fees, and therefore are unlikely to accept the spoof study, is cute, but is not science.  Besides, many subscription-based publications, such as The Journal of Biological Chemistry, also charge publication fees, too, and have the same financial incentive to publish as many papers as possible.

"Predatory journals are an important issue, and I’m glad he’s raising awareness about it, but I’m not convinced this was the best way to do it.  In particular, I’m puzzled as to why he pretended to be from Africa.  He says “My hope was that using developing world authors and institutions would arouse less suspicion if a curious editor were to find nothing about them on the Internet”, but I thought the whole point was to reveal that editors of some journals don’t even bother to do even the most basic homework on the papers submitted.  By deliberately making the manuscript difficult to read, he undermines his claim that “This sting did not waste the time of many legitimate peer reviewers.”  I fear that this sting could very well erode trust in the scientific process, and might make Western journals even more suspicious of papers submitted from developing countries, simply because they are from developing countries."

phrase of the day: inter alia

The phrase of the day is inter alia:

[Latin, Among other things.] A phrase used in Pleading to designate that a particular statute set out therein is only a part of the statute that is relevant to the facts of the lawsuit and not the entire statute.
Inter alia is also used when reporting court decisions to indicate that there were other rulings made by the court but only a particular holding of the case is cited. (The Free Dictionary)


"The control of biological function by light is enabled, inter alia, by the incorporation of molecular photoswitches into biomolecules and bioactive compounds.

 - Willem A. Velema et al., "Optical control of antibacterial activity", Nature Chemistry doi:10.1038/nchem.1750 (published online 15 September 201)

molecule of the day: anisomycin

The molecule of the day is anisomycin:

(PubChem)
It's a natural product from Streptomyces that inhibits protein translation in eukaryotes.  It can be used to determine whether a phenomenon depends on protein synthesis.

molecule of the day: dipicolinic acid

The molecule of the day is dipicolinic acid:

It's a chelating agent, used, for example, in this paper.

word of the day: schliere

The word of the day is schliere:

Etymology:  German, < regional Schliere (feminine) striæ, streaks, corresponding to Schlier (masculine) marl, < early new High German schlier (masculine and neuter), < Middle High German slier mud, related to Middle High German slier, sliere ulcer, < Old High German sclierrun (dative plural). 

 

b. A zone or stratum in a transparent medium whose density differs sufficiently from that of the surrounding medium for it to be detectable by refraction anomalies, usu. in consequence of pressure or temperature differences or composition inhomogeneities. (OED)

 

"With the introduction of the phase plate into the schlieren optical system and the development of double sector cells and synthetic boundary cells along with refinements in theory, great strides have been made in the accuracy of the determination of sedimentation coefficients (for a detailed account of these developments see reference 2)."

 - Howard K. Schachman, "Deductions from Hydrodynamic and Thermodynamic Measurements", Brookhaven Symposia in Biology 13:49 (1960)

word of the day: collimate

The word of the day is collimate:

Etymology:  < ‘collīmāre’, an erroneous reading, found in some edd. of Cicero, of Latin collīneāre, < col-, com- together + līnea line, līneāre to bring into a straight line. 

 

2. trans.

a. To place or adjust (a telescope) so that the line of sight is in the required position; to place (two telescopes, lenses, etc.) so that their optical axes are in the same line.

b. To make parallel, as a lens, the rays of light passing through it. (OED)

"General attrib. uses of pl. schlieren, with reference to an experimental method for the observation and recording of schlieren in transparent media, in which the specimen is illuminated with a collimated beam of light, and the diffraction pattern resulting from localized refraction of light rays by the schlieren is photographed or displayed on a screen."

 - OED