Yearly Archives: 2004

Richard Dawkins had reviewed a book titled “Intellectual Impostures” by Alan Sokal back in 1998. The book discusses the utter bullshit coming from the mouths of many academics. To quote Dawkins:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

“We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.”

These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences — sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous — and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge. [But] it’s tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French ‘philosophy’, whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?

I love this part, too:

The feminist ‘philosopher’ Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton’s Principia (a “rape manual”), Irigaray argues that E=mc² is a “sexed equation”. Why? Because “it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us” (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an ‘in’ word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray’s thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. “Masculine physics” privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray’s thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:

“The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids… From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.”

You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve.

An interesting (and entertaining) read…

A (student? prof? researcher?) at the Israel Institute of Technology has created some amazing three-dimensional models of M.C. Escher’s impossible drawings.

Back in 1998, I lost quite a bit of hearing in my right ear due to a viral infection. I remember lying in bed and having the strange sensation of my ear “popping in reverse” (it’s hard to explain). After several visits to the ear doctor — one visit specifically to test if I had a tumor — I was diagnosed with sudden deafness. I lost the majority of hearing in the high- and mid-range in that ear, combined with a wonderful case of tinnitus (ringing). I’ve been living with it ever since, and to be honest, I’ve mostly come to terms with it. If the ringing gets too annoying at night, I simply turn on the air conditioner and the white noise blocks most of it. The hardest part is trying to hear conversations where there’s a high level of background noise. The good news is that the left ear seems to have adjusted to the other ear’s problem, and I can carry on conversations much easier than I could after the problem first occurred.

Anyways, I saw an article on the BBC’s web site this morning that stated that vitamin E can help to restore hearing in some people that suffer from sudden deafness. I hope it’s true – it would be great to regain any of the hearing I’ve lost. I already take 400-800 mg of vitamin E every day to help recover from heavy weight lifting sessions. The vitamin helps speed up recovery from torn muscle tissue — I honestly feel less muscle pain after taking it in the morning.