My former PhD advisor got the Nobel Prize (John Clarke at Berkeley). It was without question the dullest work I’ve ever done in life and should have left earlier.
My former PhD advisor got the Nobel Prize (John Clarke at Berkeley).
It was without question the dullest work I’ve ever done in life and should have left earlier. https://t.co/fDNDDdsuyn
— Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) (@antoniogm) October 7, 2025
“Women in Science” (Greenspun 2006): This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.
Oregon’s governor has been posting her opposition to the federal government’s plan to clean up mostly peaceful Portland, e.g., this tweet:
Not having previously heard of this person, I visited her official web site to learn something about her background:
On November 8, 2022, Tina Kotek made history along with Maura Healey of Massachusetts, becoming the first openly lesbian governors elected in American history.
Throughout Tina’s professional career as an advocate for those in need, she has carried the value of service instilled in her by her parents to get real results for Oregonians.
Tina’s grandparents came from Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century to find opportunity and a better life. Her parents were proud first-generation Americans. They believed in hard work, being informed citizens, and encouraging their children to follow their dreams.
Tina moved to Oregon from the East Coast in 1987, and fell in love with the beauty of the state and the openness of the people. She finished her undergraduate degree at the University of Oregon, graduating without student debt because of a Pell grant, work study assistance, and affordable tuition.
Tina came out as a lesbian in her early twenties. While it wasn’t always easy, each experience coming out to others strengthened her resilience. While getting her graduate degree, Tina fought for and won domestic partnership rights for faculty and students at the University of Washington.
The word “lesbian” appears four times in this official biography, including in the very first sentence. The reader learns about the governor’s passion for lesbianism twice before learning anything about a job that the governor might have had prior to becoming governor (unless one considers “having sex with other women” to be a job?). In other words, the reader might reasonable infer that the governor’s primary qualification for being governor is lesbianism (or “identifying as a lesbian”).
Donna Strickland: I think the biggest mistake we make in teaching, all the way up through undergrad, is teaching what science we already know. Science is not about knowing; it’s about figuring out how to ask the question why. It’s not about learning how everything else has already been done. That’s not to say we don’t need that, but we should instruct them to ask the right questions as opposed to knowing the answers. … As students, you’re always taught that you’re not going to succeed unless you know all the answers. The higher you go in science, the fewer answers there are. The goal is not to have the answers but, first, to be able to ask the right questions.
Especially now that Grok and ChatGPT know all of the answers, why not reengineer education around trying to answer new questions? Young people would still have to do the drudgery of learning the answers to old questions, of course, but they’d be doing that in the context of trying to make some progress on an unanswered question. The same thinking would enliven our nation’s science museums, most of which explicitly say “the Science is settled”.
I’m not sure that the book lives up to the “ignite your career” promise from the title, unless the strategy to “ignite your career in Science” is to quit and do medicine instead. Donna Strickland echoes what I wrote in “Women in Science” (2006; “This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.”):
Keating: What are your feelings on how the status of women has changed over your career, and where do you see it going?
Strickland: Well, it’s changed, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that physics itself is not appreciated highly by society. All these other issues, why they say women don’t want to do physics, would have been true in medicine as well—and yet now more women go into medicine than men. Parents still tell children that are good in science to become doctors. If you get paid well, society says, “We value this.” Physics is not one of those valued things; it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman…
Many of the interviewees point out that there is a huge overproduction of PhDs relative to the number of sought-after academic jobs and that the chance of career success is low. A book like this, in which Nobel laureates are interviewed, is almost the definition of sample bias. Undergrads at a Queers for Palestine League university fall prey to this as well. The freshman at MIT or Yale subconsciously absorbs that being a tenured biology professor at MIT or Yale is a typical outcome for someone with a biology PhD because tenured biology professors are the only PhD biologists that the freshman has encountered.
The book contains some information that is misleading, e.g.,
For example, even with a doubling of salary, you’re not likely to register a doubling in well-being. In fact, the effect of wealth has been shown to be nonlinear. Beyond a certain income threshold, happiness saturates, leading to a diminishment in returns beyond, according to Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman.
A 10% raise delivers a similar boost in satisfaction across income levels, research finds
A big raise provides significant boosts in happiness even at household incomes of $500,000, according to a new research report.
A wealth of research has long shown that more money makes a big difference to people with low pay, moving them from insecurity to stability. Above that level, the effect is often assumed to be much smaller.
But according to a paper by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the bonuses and leaps in income high earners reap are so large that they keep adding to well-being in the same way that smaller pay bumps do at lower tiers of earnings.
So it’s true that a $1 raise doesn’t make a Wall Street hero significantly happier, but there isn’t a diminishing return to a 10 percent raise.
The book reminds us that academics all around the world love to see elites locking down the peasants. Tim Palmer, a senior citizen physicist in the UK, celebrates the fact that eventually the rulers of the UK locked down their young healthy subjects in an attempt to slow the spread of a disease that kills 80-year-olds:
Palmer: It’s a tough problem. As a scientist, we can’t make decisions. All I can do is lay out the signs as clearly as possible and hope the politicians get it. At least in the UK, politicians did get it eventually with COVID. They were slow on the uptake—and the science, of course, was pretty uncertain in the initial phase, largely because a lot of people were asymptomatic—but they did get it eventually.
Of course, the UK had a higher COVID-tagged death rate than do-almost-nothing Sweden and a higher rate of excess deaths compared to do-almost-nothing Sweden. The lockdowns in the UK were spectacular failures, in other words, by the advertised standards of the Covidcrats (minimize Covid-tagged deaths even if it drives up long-term deaths from other causes, such as unemployment, sedentary lockdown lifestyle, alcohol consumption, deferred health care, and lack of education) and yet the Nobel-winning genius considers the muscular Science-informed public policy to have been a success.
Let’s circle back to the issue of victimization by gender ID. Donna Strickland again:
The problem in the seventies, in my time, is that women were told we could do anything, but the men weren’t told you also have to do your share. When Maria Goeppert Mayer won her Nobel Prize [in 1963], the newspaper wrote, “San Diego housewife wins Nobel Prize.” Everybody said it’s OK that she’s doing science because she’s also doing all her women’s jobs too. Well, this is not possible. It’s not possible for us to be twice as much. We will have around-the-world gender equity when we also let men look after children and the elderly. It bothered me during COVID-19 that it was like, “Well, all the women have to lose their jobs because they’re the ones who look after kids and the elderly.” I don’t think women are more caring than men. That’s just as offensive as saying women aren’t as smart as men. If everybody did their share, then everybody could have an equal shot at it.
She doesn’t want “everybody to do their share” on construction sites, on Florida roofs in July, or on oil rigs, but rather wants men to relieve women of some onerous household chores, such as putting shirts into electric washing machines and dishes into automatic dishwashers. She is echoing Bill Burr on the subject of a job that can be done in one’s pajamas being the hardest job in the world:
Let’s close with a Nobel nerd’s prediction of where we end up relative to our AI overlords:
Geradus ’t Hooft: I expect there will be an intelligence so smart that Einstein, Feynman, and ’t Hooft would all look like primitive gorillas. The point is that all abilities of biological life forms can be copied by human engineers: we make houses taller than trees, dig holes deeper than moles can, we can fly faster and higher than birds, with much heavier machines, and so on. So why can we not produce brains that work better than the human brain? Well, biology took millions of years to create us; our machines are only a few centuries old, and we’ll get there and beyond. I do not quite follow the ideas AI engineers are using. I think it could be done better, but comparing the previously mentioned examples, people will make many different AI machines, each for their own particular purposes.
On a windy September morning, Josh and Jordan Gackle huddled to discuss the looming crisis facing their North Dakota soybean farm.
For the first time in the history of their 76-year-old operation, their biggest customer — China — had stopped buying soybeans. Their 2,300-acre soybean farm is projected to lose $400,000 in 2025. Soybeans that would normally be harvested and exported to Asia are now set to pile up in large steel bins.
If we ask the Google for a quick summary of “soybean futures” we get the following chart that shows prices almost exactly where they were on January 1, 2025:
How can there be a “crisis” and at the same time an unchanged price? Is there some other soybean price index that should be considered?
It’s been roughly two years, almost to the hour, since Gazans streamed across the border fence to rape, murder, and kidnap Israeli civilians (more than 800 murdered):
We’re informed than the Gazans have had no food, no electricity, no shelter, and no Internet for two years. Here are some recent photos from UNRWA (all of the fighters and “civilians” who perpetrated the October 7 attacks were graduates of UNRWA schools and some UNRWA employees directly participated in murders and kidnapping) of children who haven’t had any food for two years:
UNRWA remains one of the largest providers of emergency learning and psychosocial support across #Gaza.
With 236 school counsellors and over 300 assistants, the Agency has conducted over 328,000 psychosocial support sessions for 730,000 displaced persons — more than half a… pic.twitter.com/v0zNGHEtbN
They’re playing their violins, undamaged after what we’re told has been “carpet bombing”, and sitting/standing within an apparently undamaged school, after what we’re told has been specific targeting of schools (UN) by tanks, artillery, and 500 lb. bombs:
Instead of foraging for scarce food after two years of “famine”, the kids are encouraged to expend extra calories by running around (on a perfect-condition patio surrounded by perfect-condition walls?):
See also this video, posted September 20, 2025, of Gazans who’ve received “10 million health consultations” at the clinic, in which PCs are fully powered and everyone seems to be of normal weight.
Amid continuous displacement and ever-deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza, UNRWA provides healthcare and relief services to displaced persons.
Since the war began, UNRWA teams have provided nearly 10 million health consultations across the #Gaza Strip.
The Japanese and Germans felt defeated towards the end of World War II and were in no mood to continue the war or start another one. Based on the photos, videos, and interviews coming out of Gaza, there is no indication of any Gazan believing that the Gazans have been defeated. The New York Times followed up with 100 out of the 700 Gazans they’ve interviewed since October 7, 2023. Not a single interviewee mentions wanting to abandon the goal of destroying the Zionist entity. Nobody wants to surrender, recognize Israel, or release hostages. What Gazans want, it seems, is a victory over Israel at a lower personal cost, e.g., via emigration to Europe or the U.S. and letting the Gazans who stay in Gaza carry on fighting.
The Hamas leadership, consistent with popular opinion surveys, explicitly says that everything since October 7 has gone better than planned (CNN):
The question for today is where we think the Gazans will be in two additional years. Let’s suppose that the answer to Government restart or Hamas deal will happen first? is “Hamas-Israel deal”. The fighting in Gaza ends tomorrow. What will the Gazans be doing two years from now? Will any still be living in tents? How many attacks will Gazans have perpetrated against Israeli civilians, e.g., by firing rockets? (The fighting can continue long after the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) signs a deal because the Hamas folks can legitimately say that they don’t control Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam; “has called upon Muslims to carry out lone wolf attacks against Israel”), Jaysh al-Ummah (“Jaysh al-Ummah has criticized Hamas as being too moderate and not focused enough on Islamist projects”), the Abdul al-Qadir al-Husseini Brigades, the Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade, or a rebooted Jund Ansar Allah.) What percent of Gazan GDP will be money extracted from U.S. taxpayers, who’ve historically been the biggest enablers of the Gazans’ military efforts (by being the biggest suppliers of cash to fund all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc., and thus enabling Gazans to spend up to 100 percent of their productive energies on preparing for a river-to-the-sea liberation)? Will the Gazans have launched another October 7-style attack? (my prediction: no, because it will take closer to 4-5 years to rearm and for the Israelis to become complacent)
I want our kids to appreciate Playstation 9 when they’re adults and, thus, I take them to art museums whenever we travel. The Rhode Island School of Design Museum is a decent-sized crowd-free museum in which the art can actually be appreciated. We learned that the ubiquitous Dale Chihuly is a RISD graduate and former teacher:
We also learned about queer knitting and queer resistance:
And that one could get academic credit for taking a course titled “Queer People/Places/Things”:
At the subscription library Providence Athenaeum we found a database #Resisting computerized management:
One lonely storefront clung to the five-year-old theory that Black Lives Matter:
An Episcopal church associates the sacred Rainbow Flag with a quote from Jesus: “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Is the implication that Jesus went to the bathhouse regularly? If not, how is a practitioner of Rainbow Flagism loving his 25 or 50 new friends the way that Jesus loved people?
A United Church of Christ:
The First Baptist Church mixes Rainbow Flagism with cautionary words about the dictator in the White House: “Speech Remains Free When We Pay Attention”. The folks who supported forced vaccination and forced masking celebrate #BodilyFreedomForever:
The Manchester synagogue attacker was Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent.
“Syrian descent”? Meaning that his ancestors came to England after the Second Crusade besieged Damascus? (before the country of “Syria” existed)
Al-Shamie, who lived in Prestwich, Manchester, is understood to have entered the UK as a young child and was granted British citizenship in 2006 when he was around the age of 16.
So… Jihad wasn’t born in the UK and then lived in the UK with a UK passport. The article never describes Jihad as an “immigrant” or uses the word “immigrant” or “migrant”. So, to the extent that stabbing and running over Jews on Yom Kippur are crimes in the UK there is no immigrant guilty of those crimes. Jihad was not an “immigrant.”
Separately, would it make sense to grant immediate British citizenship to anyone named “Jihad”?
Finally, how about a movement regarding this noble enricher who was unjustly killed by police with “His name was Jihad; Say His Name” signage? From Grace Lutheran Church in Wisconsin:
Tweak it to “Jihad Al-Shamie. Listen to his name. Say his name aloud. Hear yourself saying his name.” I asked Grok to work on this:
Recent email from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Boston:
Of course, I had to click down and see what the event “For gender expansive, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ kids ages 0-8” was all about:
Come together with other gender expansive kids and their families for a playground playdate in Cambridge. Socialize with parents and caregivers while the kids run, climb, and slide. Then, enjoy a craft and allergy-friendly snacks with new friends. For gender expansive, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ kids ages 0-8 yrs with their caregivers.
Apparently, at least in Boston/Cambridge, the odds of a 6-year-old child being both 2SLGBTQQIA+ and highly allergic are fairly high….
I visited Providence, Rhode Island to check in with a professor at Brown and to torture our 10-year-old with some art museums.
The highlight of the visit was the massive liberation of previously sequestered carbon on Saturday, September 27 via Waterfire.
Here is some of the wood set up and also one of Elizabeth Warren’s cousins paddling in a dugout canoe:
While there we learned that cherished American liberty has been replaced by the cruel tyrannical rule of a king. Also, there is no urgency about protesting the situation and we can endure three additional weeks of tyranny before holding a “No Kings” march:
It’s important to “fight Trumps fascism”, but only one day out of every 14:
While living under fascism don’t forget to also help support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad by feeding every Gazan fighters’ kids:
The RISD Museum’s Charity, circa 1550, reminds us that we will never run out of resources if we promise to fund an unlimited number of other people’s children:
The officials who work in the State House want to remind you to (1) use all of your federal EBT/SNAP benefits, and (2) adopt a pit bull.
The 10-year-old caught a break when we spent the afternoon at the Electromagnetic Pinball Museum, about 12 minutes north in Pawtucket. It’s an all-white group of people embedded in an all-Black neighborhood of, I think, Cape Verdean migrants enjoying a comprehensive welfare lifestyle. Here’s a thoughtful exploration of AANHPI cultural heritage and also a machine with an Elizabeth Warren theme:
What’s on the mind of Brown students? Free Palestine and Boycott Israel; Fight Against Fascism; organize a bbq restricted to students with one skin color; go on vacation with fellow students of one skin color.
In both the opening and closing sections, the book explains that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, the Religion of Peace. The world’s terrorists are Christian, white, Hindu, and/or Jewish. The pages in between describes Iranian Muslims burning alive other Iranian Muslims, in the name of Islam, for the un-Islamic act of going to the movies (Cinema Rex fire, in which hundreds died).
As with Mamdani backers, elite progressive Iranians who had thrived under the Shah were eager supporters of the Islamic Revolution proposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (they imagined that he would defer to credentialed elites when he picked ministers). Part of their motivation seems to have been jealousy that members of the Shah’s inner circle were getting far richer than they were (kind of like elite New Yorkers who aren’t in rent-stabilized apartments are jealous of those who are and New Yorkers who earn $300,000/year are envious of those who earn $30 million/year). Like Andrew Cuomo, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, last in the line of 2,500 years of monarchy, was fond of partying with young females. Another parallel is that the current U.S. government is accused of being disorganized while the author describes the Carter administration as exhibiting “colossal incompetence”. The author blames Jimmy Carter and friends for Iran becoming an Islamic dictatorship, rather than transitioning to a post-Shah parliamentary democracy, and also for the U.S. Embassy being held hostage for more than a day. The book describes Ayatollah Khomeini’s initial reaction to the embassy takeover as a direction to get the students out immediately. After Jimmy Carter signaled a willingness to negotiate rather than threatening a traditional military response to what the author describes as an “act of war”, the Ayatollah changed his mind and told every Iranian to support the “students”. Carter was, therefore, the cause of the 444-day “crisis” (the world’s longest prior to the Maskachusetts, California, and New York governors’ states of emergency for coronapanic?). Carter eventually transferred to Iran $25 billion in today’s mini-dollars (previously frozen assets) to secure the hostages’ release.
The author says that American Democrats were happy to see the Shah go and the Ayatollahs take over partly because of false information about the Shah promulgated by non-profit organizations and U.S. media. Amnesty International, today famous for its anti-Israel propaganda, said that the Shah was holding 100,000 political prisoners when, in act, the number was less than 3,000. The Shah and agencies under his command had executed roughly 100 opponents of his regime over the years, but U.S. media reported that thousands of Iranians opposed to the Shah were being killed. (The book notes that thousands of Iranians were ultimately killed for their political views, but nearly all of them were killed by the Islamic government that took over from the Shah.)
Iran is a fascinating case study in how far an empire can fall. The Persians were empire builders in the same league as the Romans and Chinese. They got taken over by Arabs during the Muslim Conquests and lost their religion (Zoroastrianism) and could no longer use their own language for religious purposes. After about 1400 years of Persian-style government, which was tending towards westernization, combined with Arab-originated religion they ended up with an Arab-originated government (Islamic theocracy). The Arab-inspired theocracy took over shortly after the Pahlavis and friends celebrated 2,500 of Persian Empire. Today the non-Arab Iranians are the primary military supporters of Arabs (since the 1960s, calling themselves “Palestinians”) fighting to destroy the Zionist entity and they suffer much of the Israeli military action formerly directed at Arab states such as Egypt and Jordan.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran is a fascinating study in how westernized elites who’ve been huge beneficiaries of a system can turn against it.
Fun fact: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was a qualified Boeing 707 pilot who often flew left seat until the plane was in cruise. Not-to-fun fact: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1974 and died 1.5 years after fleeing from the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In other words, the Iranians who hated the Shah needn’t have done anything to get rid of him other than wait a couple of years.
Related:
Ebrahim Yazdi, U.S.-educated founder of the Muslim Students Association, who became the interpreter for Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris for the foreign journalists who showed up unable to understand Farsi and who didn’t bring their own interpreters (Yazdi considerably softened Khomeini’s anti-West/anti-Jew message while interpreting). Yazdi imagined a progressive Shah-free future for Iran with an Islamic flavor and ended up falling out of favor with the government of Mullahs. He was ultimately imprisoned.
Reza Pahlavi, the Shah’s son, has been living in the D.C. suburbs and received pilot training from the USAF (his web site)
Grok’s attempt at showing Mayor Mamdani in an Iranian ayatollah’s robes:
