I tried out this random paragraph generator, and with no prompting from me it generated the following two sentences.

A theorem screams? Can the countryside respond?

Can’t you just hear the heroic music playing in the background?

This article from the Washington Post on the persistence of myths reports some of the most disturbing research about human psychology that I’ve ever heard of. The repetition of a statement makes it more likely that the hearer will believe it. That much is not surprising, but the result obtains even in the context of being told that the statement is false. The mind remembers the statement, but slowly forgets the context.

Insert your joke about the Axiom of Choice here.

A disturbing story about the push-back against open access journals appeared in January’s Nature. The scholarly publishers have put together a front group, Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM) to combat the threat to their easy money stream. They have hired a PR organization whose media strategy is promote bizarre equivalences that would make the creators of Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks? proud.

Via John Baez at the n-category cafe.

With all of the fuss being raised about academic publishing, I want to draw everyone’s attention to the fact that our nation’s most trusted news source has ceased publishing. One of its strengths was its science reporting. Most journalism features science’s success. They instead, featured all of the many mysteries of the world that science could not yet explain: aliens, Bigfoot, Bat-Boy. I speak of course of the Weekly World News.

John Baez has an post up about web spamming by academic journal publishers. This is a rare case in which my cynicism may have outstripped reality, but I had always assumed that Google was deliberately allowing the publishers to do it. The misleading hits for journal articles seemed to appear simultaneously for every journal, so I had assumed that the journals had reached some sort of understanding with Google and I’d just missed the announcement.

Sorry posting has been light. I just moved, which is filled with many non-math-related activities such as unpacking, but also many math-related activities, such as wondering where all of your books went. The chaos is almost to an acceptable level, so posting should pick back up.

When I was a kid I loved astronomy, for two reasons: one was the pictures, and the other was the lists. I loved the lists of the closest stars, the brightest stars, the largest asteroids, etc. This photographic list of every body in the solar system larger than 200 miles in diameter manages to be both a picture and a list, which would have delighted my ten-year-old self.

Via Cosmic Variance.

We’ve had a lot of discussion of open access to scientific journals here, so I wanted to point out the Public Library of Science, a collection of open-access but peer-reviewed journals in biology and medicine that began in 2003. It’s an interesting test case, because there’s a lot more money at stake in medicine than in mathematics or physics. PLoS finances their publications through author fees in the 2000 dollar range.

This is somewhat off-topic for this site, but considering its importance, I thought it was important to post it.

The novel Snowcrash is a dystopian cyberpunk future where civil society has completely shattered and everyone lives in storage sheds. And it’s coming true. My advice? Buy shotgun shells and head for the hills.

In the novel, the Federal government (which no longer has any power, and survives as a contracting agency for large projects in need of bureaucrats) sends forms to its employees via computer that employees must read and fill out. The employees know that if they do it too quickly, they will get in trouble for not following the form closely enough, in which case they will be in violation of the law. Professors at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (including a math professor, Marvin Zemin) are in this exact situation. And when I read the novel, this stuck in my mind because it was so implausible…

(Story spotted on Uncetain Principles.)

I ran across a paper with a terrific title: The Earth Is Round (p < .05). The title is a parody of how results of statistical significance are reported (e.g. we can’t reject the roundness of the Earth at a 5% significance level). The points made in the article (addressed to an audience of psychologists) are probably familiar to anyone who uses statistics, but the title is memorable.