Some Science Jokes for the New Year

Always game for a lame one or two, am I, so here are some science  jokes for the New Year:

Two theoretical physicists are lost at the top of a mountain. Theoretical physicist No 1 pulls out a map and peruses it for a while. Then he turns to theoretical physicist No 2 and says: "Hey, I've figured it out. I know where we are." 
"Where are we then?" "Do you see that mountain over there?" "Yes." "Well… THAT'S where we are."

A blowfly goes into a bar and asks: "Is that stool taken?"

A statistician is someone who tells you, when you've got your head in the fridge and your feet in the oven, that you're – on average - very comfortable.

And a couple of limericks to finish with:

A friend who's in liquor production,
Has a still of astounding construction,
The alcohol boils,
Through old magnet coils,
He says that it's proof by induction.

A mosquito was heard to complain
That chemists had poisoned her brain.
The cause of her sorrow
Was para-dichloro-
diphenyl-trichloroethane.*

*p.s. That's DDT.

The September 1991 Mineriad

22 years ago, in September 1991, I happened to be in Bucharest.  I was working in France, which had had strong links with Romania, and so after the 1989 revolution they tried to fill the vacuum and  sent us over for the first post-communist Franco-Romanian Biophysics conference. But we weren't the only visitors: several thousand Jiu valley miners had been organized  to come and cause trouble - the "Mineriad". Nice lads, most of them. They were wearing wellies and carried sticks (see above), slept in the parks, and shouted "Jos Iliescu" ("Down with Ion Iliescu", the President). Now, this confused me because I had thought it was Iliescu who had arranged for them to come in the first place, laying on trains etc (maybe a Romanian reader can clue me in?).

The night was full of the sweet aroma of CS-gas: Jean-Louis said he'd already experienced that, much worse, in '68. Next morning, they marched to the parliament building. We tagged along, at the back, so we missed the fighting, hundreds injured, deaths etc. They petrol bombed the parliament and the Prime Minister (Petre Roman) resigned. That was a momentous visit, I guess. The conference led to my establishing a strong association with the guys there, who throughout everything had maintained a love for science. I brought students back to Germany, France and the USA, and they did great stuff.  I want to go back to Romania, back to the monasteries in Moldavia, the mountains of Transylvania, to Bucharest, and all the friends I made there. Maybe even, one day, to drink beer with miners in the Jiu valley..........

Whopping University

The USA is in chains. The chain stores are all over the USA, draped everywhere like kudzu.  In the drive for efficiency everything has been automated, standardized, homogenized and cheapened. In doing so all that is left is unskilled minimum-wage jobs operating easy machines. Society is indeed on the way to a utopia where only university professors and entertainers need to work? Wait. Professors? We can downsize them, too! And make billions.

It has started already. Online courses are multiplying. Large lecture courses are being taught by low-paid adjuncts rather than faculty. Here's how to finish the job, once and for all, with the creation of Whopping University.

Firstly, you make sure that WU is created  by the same banking conglomerates that  own the present  chains. You know the types;  Goldman Sachs, Bain, 3G Capital, Falfurrias etc. They have the dosh to kick-start this and they know how to quickly standardize.

Then, you drive all other colleges out of business, retaining only their football and basketball teams. How do you do this? You offer good-looking, well-packaged degree courses for $10,000. And how, pray,  is this miracle to be achieved? Using a single team of highly charismatic professors you produce online lectures for all subjects in demand and at all levels. These syllabi are well crafted, easy to follow. The lectures are good and cheap. Every student in every state has the same selection. Perfect core curricula. All lectures are  followed by the students at home on their computers. The accompanying tests are fair, securely computerized, multiple choice. No more need for lecture halls, libraries, classrooms etc, anywhere in the land. No books required, everything kindled.

What about the interactive sessions? Well, you need a few of these, but these can be online, too. And you don't need professors for them, either. Students form interactive groups amongst themselves. And, a few graduates can be employed online at minimum-wage levels to provide a bit of expertise at some of these discussion sessions. Same for essay grading in the few subjects that still require those: all done via e-mail.

What about lab sessions/field-work? Hum. Indeed. Not easy to get rid of localizing that. We'd have to set up highly uniform entities, but this could be done cheaply no doubt. Little  purple Whopping Lab Huts dotted over the nation with little purple WU vans taking students out to corporate-owned fields.

And there we have it.  5 million students graduating per year at $10,000 per degree means $50bn of  annual revenue to be taken over. OK, that's about a tenth the size of Walmart but that's just counting the USA. Whopping  University International could doubtless at least double turnover. And we can expand into high schools, too, replacing teachers with low-paid minders who just need to keep the kids watching their screens. An initial investment of about $100bn should suffice to create an unbeatable, irresistible entity capable of folding the 2000 or so colleges presently leaching students' pockets in the USA. Let's lobby congress to keep funding the scholarships though - even WU degrees need to be taxpayer funded, don't they? Those old colleges with high reputations (Harvard, Stanford etc) can franchised into the WU structure - their names would be useful - indeed, by a click and an extra debit you can say your WU degree comes from Harvard. Massive profitability after 2 years. Education for the masses! Let's take over with Whopping University!

Science on Shaky Ground

Listen to Sally Ellingson and myself on NPR's "All Things Considered" as we discuss possible effects of recent government funding reductions for science.

No, I didn't build it myself, but....

I just delivered the Karcher Lecture at the University of Oklahoma. People call this university OU and not UO. [I wondered if this was  to avoid  students saying "I go to the University of Oklahoma" and being subjected to the smug retort: "Ah, You Owe!" But, I digress :-)]. Karcher discovered reflection seismography  when working for NIST, used these to discover oil, then co-founded what became Texas Instruments.  Texas Instruments is where Jack Kilby worked when he invented the integrated circuit, the basis of computer hardware. He won the 2000 Physics Nobel for that. I liked Kilby's Nobel lecture in which he stated how he felt when he saw a computer: 'It's like the beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam. "No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on my idea."'

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was today awarded to my postdoc advisor, Martin Karplus (above) together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel. These are three of the main developers of our field of biomolecular simulation. This announcement was somewhat a surprise as this field had not been a favourite in the "betting". Also,  there are several other scientists in the field who, in my opinion, have made comparably strong overall contributions. However, what the three winners played leading roles  in in the 1970s was certainly special -  the genesis of biomolecular simulation.  Scientists had before that time already been deriving spectroscopic force fields, to match infrared and Raman frequencies, but these don't provide information on structural energetics. Also, others had been working on molecular mechanics force fields and methods to find energy-minimum conformations of organic molecules and peptides. The three winners, inspired by Lifson in Israel, were at the origin of many of the ideas that have slowly blossomed into the present-day biomolecular simulation field, in all its glory, with molecular dynamics simulations of biomacromolecules, QM/MM calculations of reaction rates (which, perhaps surprisingly, was the sole subject of the Nobel citation), protein folding calculations, free energy analyses, the design of drugs currently on the market,  and everything else.

All three of the winners have had to endure heavy professional criticism from different parts over the years. Our field was frowned upon by many for a long time. Many of the calculations performed were, and are, wrong, inconsistent, biased and disagree with experiment and these shortcomings were jumped upon by discreditors and still are, although to a lesser extent, nowadays. However, the three Laureates certainly got everyone's attention early on. I don't know Michael Levitt personally so well, but of course I know his work. In the 1970s and 1980s, working in Cambridge, he published papers folding BPTI and predicting protein stability that created quite a storm. Arieh Warshel was at the origin of some of the key concepts in the field - I would think of his multiple papers on the electrostatic control of enzyme reactions. As for Martin, he's been absolutely towering. Carefully building up the complexity of the systems he studied, from simple hydrogen reactions through conformational NMR to large biological complexes, his contributions have been wide-ranging, careful, and thorough. His QM/MM work was but a small part of his overall career.

As ever in human life, the strongest reflections at these times are maybe personal. Michael Levitt impressed me by working mostly alone for a long time, when everyone else was building up large groups. Many of us know the twinkle in Arieh Warshel's eye when he stands up in a conference and criticizes the speaker, and we can all recognize his 'anonymous' referee reports. As for Martin, he has left an indelible impression on all of us who have passed through his lab over the last 50 years. He's has been a dedicated servant to science - a role model for us all. Congratulations to all three - and to my ex-boss in particular!

And When They're 45?

I'm currently at a workshop in Lausanne, Switzerland and one of the lecturers is Dorothee Kern from Brandeis University. She was point guard in the East German National Basketball team in the 1980s and has kept playing, leading the German National Over-45s to winning the world championships this year. I asked her about the USA team. Given that they're so good at college, how did they do? Dorothee answered that they didn't even have a team.

This is sad, but jives with my experience of adults doing sports in the USA. They are active at school, jamming the soccer fields with kids playing soccer under the adoring eyes of parents, but by the age of 20 everything has stopped. Inactivity, indolence, unhealthy obesity.

The next Master's World Basketball championships is in Orlando, sponsored by ESPN. Maybe the USA won;t have a team there, either?