Racist Incidents After Obama's Victory

This comes in the news: "From California to Maine, police have documented a range of [racist] incidents, including vandalism, threats and at least one physical attack. There have been "hundreds" of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes." These are worrisome signs. We are in this together and Obama's election speaks about a better place----for everybody.

Science/Social Science Thinking

Feynman, 1962: "The purpose of scientific thought is to predict what will happen in given experimental circumstances. All the philosophical discussion is an evasion of the point. The mesons do not go at the speed of light." (Note: "In particle physics, a meson is a strongly interacting boson—that is, a hadron with integer spin."——wikipedia, "Mason") I discussed the difference between scientific thought and social-scientific thought in my history of class a few meetings ago. My students were right in pointing out that there are different types of sciences (biology and physics, for instance) and different types of social sciences (history and economics, for instance) and that scientific thought is one things for physics and another for geology. At the end, I mentioned that ways of thinking were connected to communities that pose and resolve problems in particular ways and that our respective training consist in learning/becoming a member of a particular community. Feynman's community understands things that I do not know: speed of light and mesons (and hadrod, integer spin, and boson).

Twitter and Academics

I have been using twitter (a micro-blogging tool) for almost six months or so. I am following a number of people connected to particular areas of interest: a group of journalists, a group of Colombians (in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), a group of newspapers, a group of social-network entrepreneurs (or whatever they call themselves), a group of postgraduate students; a group of moms working from home, a group of people connected to NASA and other space programs (in Europe), and one or two singers and actors. I have learned to enjoy the conversations that take place on twitter: I get information (from newspapers and journalists) and I get to hear conversations about politics, cooking, teenagers, lack of inspiration for this or that, and about working projects in Bogotá.

I wonder why there are not more people from the academic world using it. It could be that I have not looked well in twitterland but so far I have only found a couple of people in journalism schools not body in history (my area). When I first began interested in twitter, I sent an email to a group of colleagues in history: two of them opened accounts but they stopped using it few days later. I could not convince my colleagues to use it (not that I tried hard: I myself did not know how to use it) but my sense is that very few people in the academy is using it. I think it could be a great tool to connect people in our areas of expertise to twitte about the books we are reading, the problems we are having with our writing, or just about our lives in the classroom, and outside. Perhaps in a year or so the circle will start to include those in the academic world.