agarsev

In biology: morphology of organisms, evolution, ecology. And those deal with systems, so they use a lot of math. But interspersed with the math, you always find natural language descriptions, definitions, explanations, which are necessary for understanding and complete modelling of the theory. These make reference to the shared human experience of the world, and are not formalized in logic. Not that they cannot be, or at least so I hope. But we're very far from it today, that's what I mean.

Maybe relatedly, humans think of the world in fuzzy terms. At some point we're going to need a system for formalizing fuzzy thought, and no, fuzzy logic is not it, because that's just a continuous extension to boolean logic. Human thinking is fuzzy beyond that. But, as a computational linguist, I sometimes worry that we already have that system: natural languages!

I think this is a very widespread idea, I used to believe in it too, perhaps due to our background. However, if you work on translating science to computers, you soon find it's not so true. There are some many ideas in science which are not mathematically encoded, but rather in human language, it's kind of frustrating. The "low-level" sciences like physics have spoilt us with their very math-like nature. But even in those sciences there are a lot of things which are not well-defined, but rather rely on human intuition and language. If you go "upwards" in the stack, you find things like biology where there is a lot of very formal scientific knowledge which is not maths. And I work in linguistics, so just imagine what it's like at this level ;)

> (nothing specific about English here, most of us speak like that in our native languages)

I think it actually is something specific about English. English is stress-timed, which means that sounds are given variable amounts of time, and what gets a regular timing and rythm is stress phrases. Many other languages are syllable timed, which means that the syllables each get roughly the same amount of time. This is probably what creates the impression of the english mumbling, speaking fast, or "eating" sounds.

Edit: agree on the rest, it's probably not the vocabulary or the grammar

The article makes the point that in a particular funding call, men got more money than women because there are more men of some ages due to imbalances of the past, rather than because of discrimination against women. However, it does not argue why funding should be awarded base on the merit of the work. Additionally, the last paragraph is unnecessary and lowers the article's value in my view. Discriminating against a majority to make more space for a minority might be the wrong thing to do, but it is in no way equivalent to discriminating against a minority to exclude that minority from participation.

On the topic of the title, even if it's not addressed in the article itself, why would someone argue against evaluating scientists for their work instead of their identity? The problem is that science is so specialized today that only other specialists can value each other's work. But some external control or balancing force is necessary to avoid politics and tribalism (yes, scientists are human too). Forcing diversity in funding may be a way to disrupt endogamous tendencies without compromising quality of research (unless you believe that women or cultures or whatever do worse science).

On the other hand, a lot of science is "hit and miss". Many important discoveries are found by chance. And a lot of extremely important basic research is not obviously important until some flashy result is achieved, if ever. Funding this is almost a lottery. And therefore, it is a good place to exert some action into diversity. There are still many high profile grants and awards for excellent researchers and groups, so it is not a problem and, who knows, maybe it is good, to distribute funding to increase social representation so that science does not become (or keeps on being) a white, well-off male game.

> There is a high correlation and probably causal relationship between increasing global pollution and improved living standards.

That would be if pollution was a global phenomenon. Climate is global and chaotic, and we only have one planet so we can't compare, but pollution levels are local are different between heavily industrialised places and times and less so places and times. I'm sure there is extensive and conclusive research that pollution is bad for your health, which is an important part of living standards.

What happened at the K-Pg limit with dinosaurs and crocodiles is similar, both went from being very wide to a handful of species remaining. The difference is what happened afterwards, when the few (single?) species of dinosaurs that remained diversified into what we now call birds.

The interesting thing from the article is that crocodiles are still evolving rapidly, but not diversifying! they seem to be successful in their narrow and specialist niche.

In the research page linked, there is extensive research on the effects of bright light exposure to circadian rythms, which may indeed alter quality of sleep by altering natural biorythms (note that no effect is produced on sleep itself, but rather on its timing, and this in turn affects its quality).

There is, however, very little research linked to blue light in particular, and it is inconclusive and contradictory. The best source they cite is actually against the hypothesis:

"Occasional claims that the light sources with emissions containing blue light may cause eye damage raise concerns in the media. The aim of the study was to determine if it was appropriate to issue advice on the public health concerns. A number of sources were assessed and the exposure conditions were compared with international exposure limits, and the exposure likely to be received from staring at a blue sky. None of the sources assessed approached the exposure limits, even for extended viewing times."

On a more subjective note, how they bury the actual research below tons of related-but-not-really articles, pop media links, and "explanations" makes me suspicious.

And mind, I do set my screen to redder tones in the evening and find it pleasant and probably helps me set the mood to go to bed, but I don't think research supports physiological or health reasons to avoid blue light or spend money on blue light avoiding, as the OP link seems to say (I don't read German :(

In academia, you're often evaluated on "impact". So you have an incentive to be impactful, not truthful, and while many (most?) try to be honest in the content, hyping the title is an easy way to increase your metric (impact) while not having a very bad conscience because "everyone does it" and "the truth is in the contents, actually"

It is true that English is extremely analytical, but most european languages are fusional rather than analytical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language

I think it is fine to pursue this ever increasingly detailed classification of things (not only in art or pop culture, this applies to other knowledge too, including science). The problem might come if one takes one of these descriptive, post-hoc classifications, ignores the fact that they are often diffuse and imperfect, and then tries to use it as a predictive model to explain and deal with everything, and discard any data that doesn't fit. But people like meta, so it might not even be a problem :)

I think that what some outside of academia might miss is that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific output by the entities that grant you funding and career prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not the distribution problem.