Monday, June 3, 2013

Monday Links: Patrick Stewart, How to Use a Semicolon, and Being Wrong in Science

Anyone alive who needs convincing that Patrick Stewart is an amazing man is beyond hope. Anyone who doesn’t understand that men also have an obligation to stand up for the safety of women after watching Patrick Stewart say as much needs to watch more Star Trek: The Next Generation and make it so. It's not the only thing he says in the video, but it's a striking and true statement.

The sentence before last was certainly too long. When caught in a similar situation last week, I sought out a reference on how to use the fabled semicolon. After trudging through a waist-high swamp of pages on the mechanics of removing tumors of the intestinal tract*, I happened upon this lovely visual guide on The Oatmeal. Do not read if bears and dinosaurs co-existing on the same web page by any means offends you, though I cannot imagine how that would be possible.

And since that last paragraph acquired entirely too silly a tone, I shall round off this week’s links with an article by Ethan Siegel on Starts With a Bang about how all scientific theories are (at least partly) wrong, how most new ideas are completely wrong, and why it’s important to come up with them anyway.

What’s that, you say? Come now, you didn’t seriously expect some kind of Spanish Inquisition?


*This is no exaggeration; it is, in fact, entirely false.