“I have been seriously attempting to raise money to carry out this science education effort ever since the Nobel Prize (in 2001),” Wieman said. “While on sabbatical last year I prepared about 34 proposals for support directed to private individuals and foundations, mostly in Colorado, and to state and federal funding agencies,” he said. None of the proposals were awarded.

Carl Wieman.

Two quotes from Bad Blood: Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. Only without much silicon.

“Henry, you’re not a team player,” she said in an icy tone. “I think you should leave right now.” There was no mistaking what had just happened. Elizabeth wasn’t merely asking him to get out of her office. She was telling him to leave the company—immediately. Mosley had just been fired.

He also maintained that Holmes was a once-in-a-generation genius, comparing her to Newton, Einstein, Mozart, and Leonardo da Vinci.

The reality distortion field lived on. Medicine is indeed tricky.

This is a scary story. But the lesson is (yet again) our inability to understand what makes humans tick.

The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History | WIRED

How Maersk was taken down by Russian malware, and how it recovered. The passage that got the attention is the bit about flying a domain controller backup in from Ghana (the only one that survived). The one that matters is that they were still running Windows 2000 on some servers and hadn’t carried out a proposed security revamp because it wasn’t in the IT managers’ KPIs and so wouldn’t help their bonuses. Link  

Via Ben Evans

This is from David Hubel, although the citation is not to hand.

Most importantly, today’s organization of science tends to deprive a young scientist of one of the most important learning experiences, that of thinking up a project of one’s own and carrying it through; deciding for oneself, independently, whether to persist or to give up and switch over to something else.

This is essentially about the importance of the ‘Long Now’.

What’s the point of scholarly academies? | Times Higher Education (THE)

Academies can also argue for different research priorities from universities, he pointed out. As if by “magic”, when universities create their own research strategies, “they all focus on medical sciences and life sciences”, he said. But their motivation is often financial, as they want to host subjects with strong economic links, he said.

On the contrary, academies are better placed to make the case for the less lucrative humanities and social sciences, he argued, and do not need to generate corporate research funding, meaning that they can be more objective about what type of research is needed to help society. One of the key roles of academies is “thinking about the societal consequences of new knowledge”, Professor Loprieno added.

I read this book so long ago I cannot remember when. But Perutz had a way with words ( as well as molecules).

Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?

What is Life? helped to make influential biologists out of several physicists: Crick, Seymour Benzer and Maurice Wilkins, among others. But there’s no indication from contemporary reviews that many biologists grasped the real significance of Schrödinger’s code-script as a kind of active program for the organism. Some in the emerging science of molecular biology were critical. Linus Pauling and Max Perutz were both damning about the book in 1987, on the centenary of Schrödinger’s birth. Pauling considered negative entropy a “negative contribution” to biology, and castigated Schrödinger for a “vague and superficial” treatment of life’s thermodynamics. Perutz grumbled that “what was true in his book was not original, and most of what was original was known not to be true even when the book was written”.

Discreet music: at the heart of Brian Eno’s work | Financial Times

He finds the current art scene disturbing in its voracious focus on acquisition. “It is not so different from bitcoin. Art is the ultimate cryptocurrency. What the art world is doing is engineering the consensual value of something, very quickly. It only needs two people, a buyer and a seller.”

“And often the learned men of our time are only dwarfs on the shoulders of dwarfs.”

The Name Of The Rose by Umberto Eco

Is identity politics ruining democracy? | Financial Times

School leavers and manual workers have propelled Britain into Brexit and Donald Trump to the White House. Universities once thought they were the answer to inequalities of identity. Now they realise they are part of the problem.

USS crisis: can the pension system be reformed? | Times Higher Education (THE)

As such, the 2004 Pensions Act is a prime, but by no means unique, example of well-intentioned but inept financial regulation. Over-prescriptive, it has led to the demise of the defined benefit schemes that it was designed to protect. If proposed changes to the USS are implemented, there will be no defined benefit schemes of any significant size outside the public sector open to new members.