Stem the STEM Tide

When I first started college, I pursued a major in acting, a degree choice that was accepted by my liberal, teen-of-the-60's mother and greeted with no small amount of eye-rolling by any number of friends and well-wishers: What, exactly, did I think I was going to do with a degree in acting?.  I suppose on some level I, too, asked myself that question and came up with an unsatisfactory answer because, midway through my sophomore year I switched my major from the dramatic arts to the more socially acceptable English, with a soupcon of education-training thrown in.  Strangely enough, this was seen as a rational move, a practical step down the road to responsible adulthood.

Nowadays, though, such a change of major would elicit so much eye-rolling as to strain the optic nerves: Not only would a switch from drama to English be seen as, at best, a lateral move on the continuum of frivolity, but I would also be condemned for wasting my time and money on the inevitable inefficiencies of transferring.  Nowadays, if a student goes to college intending to study anything less obviously practical than, say, applied nuclear physics, he risks incurring the wrath of parents and society alike.  English--a major once so respectable as to inspire musical-theater balladry--is now just another academic dead-end.

Colleges have begun to take notice.  At Stanford and Harvard and any number of other bastions of higher education, administrators look on with concern as the enrollments in once proud humanities departments continue to shrink.  While the trend didn't start with the global economic meltdown, the recession has seemingly channeled ever-greater number of students into the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math)--these seeming to offer students greater chances of gainful employment upon graduation.  Why, the thinking goes, would anyone waste four-plus years and potentially tens of thousands of dollars on a degree in something as squishy as English?

I have to admit, I find myself on the defensive when confronting the question, "What good is an English degree?"  I mean, there is something apparently self-indulgent about spending years reading and discussing good books when one could spend those same years learning how to splice a nucleotide to a particle accelerator.  Or whatever it is that science people do.  Then again, maybe nucleotide-splicing is just as self-indulgent in its way, as the people who major in science probably enjoy lab work just as much as English majors enjoy books.

Or at least, they probably did, back in the days when not everyone felt compelled to major in "practical" fields whether they wanted to or not.  Which I think is an important point: Do we have more STEM majors because people want to major in STEM fields or simply because people think that only by majoring in these fields will they be able to find work?  And if the reason is the latter, then won't they be disappointed when they graduate and find themselves having to compete with a multitude of other graduates for what will still be a limited number of positions?  And won't the ones who get the best jobs still be the ones whose enthusiasm for the subject has led them to achieve at the highest levels--the ones who probably would have gone into the sciences anyway?

Humanities majors may not be as well-versed in the workings of the atom or the proper way to run an economy as those who pursue more scientific fields.  But those who study English or philosophy or music or, yes, drama develop valuable skills nonetheless--communication skills, writing skills, those oft-mentioned critical thinking skills that everyone values so highly.  Not everyone, frankly, is cut out for scientific careers--I'm certainly not--so why shouldn't students follow their passions to find something at which they can excel?  The jobs will come.  For what it's worth, while most of my fellow drama majors may not have achieved Broadway superstardom or landed lucrative multi-picture deals, they have pretty much all gone on to successful careers in any number of fields.  Who could argue with that?

Where Can I Get a Job Deoxygenating Mice?

Well, some good news for a change.  We've all grown weary of the constant drumbeat of news stories about how this or that thing that we've loved for years is slowly killing us.  Salty snacks raise blood pressure!  Red meat clogs arteries!  Masturbation leads to memory loss!  And, of course, Masturbation leads to memory loss!  So you can imagine my relief when I read today about a long-term study that has determined that drinking coffee increases longevity and helps stave off dementia.  Sure, I'd rather hear that eating pork chops improves muscle tone, but good news nonetheless.

"In a 2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing them to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the mice received a dose of caffeine that was the equivalent of several cups of coffee. After they were reoxygenated, the caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new memories 33 percent faster than the uncaffeinated."  Specifically, caffeinated mice took 33 percent less time than uncaffeinated mice to bite the noses of the scientists who had deprived them of oxygen.

Pop Quiz

I just took this science quiz designed by the Pew Research Center and the Smithsonian Institution.  The purpose is to gauge the scientific literacy of the general population   All in all, it's a pretty easy quiz, featuring questions like, "What is nanotechnology?" and "What is 'fracking'?"  I was cruising along, I think, until I got to this question, "Are you male or female?"  I guess I got flustered.  And, while I'm flattered that the Pew Research Center selected me as a topic for a question on their quiz, I don't see how the general population is expected to just, y'know, know whether some random blogger is male or female.  No wonder the country's scientific literacy is deemed so low.

The Tough Get Going, Going, Gone

From the "Well, I Could Have Told Them THAT" file: Science is hard.  They don't call 'em the "hard sciences" for nix.

As America laments its slippage in the world rankings of science education--we currently rank somewhere between Antarctica and Hogwarts--it turns out there is a perfectly reasonable explanation: Science majors at the nation's premier institutes of higher learning--being, as they are. quite brilliant, after all--have decided that advanced classes in calculus and physics hardly merit the slog.  Why struggle through a science curriculum when the likely reward after completing doctoral studies is simply overwhelming student loans and a slim possibility of a tenure-track university position or slightly more remunerative research work in industry?  Why not use those math smarts to come up with the next economy-wrecking financial shenanigan that will at least reward you handsomely until the bubble bursts?

University science departments have in some cases revamped their curricula to focus more on hands-on activities, allowing students to "do" science rather than just "study" it.  A good strategy, and one that other non-scientific disciplines might consider emulating.  Indeed, while college administrators lament the fact that science majors opt out of "hard" majors for "easier" ones like the humanities, the solution may rest only partially in making the sciences more palatable.  Maybe we should also make the "easy" majors less desirable, i.e., harder.  Just as science majors should "do" science, so, too, should those majoring in social sciences and the humanities "do" those fields.  Primarily, this means researching and, especially, writing--writing prolifically, writing constantly, writing exhaustingly.

America might then not only lose fewer budding Einsteins in our nation's science programs; America might also gain a few more Roths or Vonneguts or Chabons (take your pick) and a few less Dan Browns.

Well, So Much for THAT

A group of physicists in Hong Kong has conclusively concluded that time travel is impossible.  This has something to do with the fact that a photon can not travel faster than the speed of light.  Somehow, the fact that nothing (or "nothing") can travel faster than the speed of light (or "warp one") eradicates the very possibility of time travel.

We don't pretend to understand any of this.  Frankly, we still can't understand why it is physically impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (give or take).  Why can there NOT be something that travels at, say, 186,001 miles per second (give or take).  What if someone strapped a teeny tiny rocket to the back of a photon?  Wouldn't THAT make it go faster? 

And check out the approval rating of Congress: THAT's certainly streaking downward at faster than lightspeed! (Ba-dum-bump!)

Here at Solipsist HQ, we refuse to throw up our hands and despair at the possibility of time travel.  As for the physicists' declaration, just remember: The world was flat until it wasn't.  The atom couldn't be split until it was.  We'll see you in the future.

Solipsistography
"Great Scott! Time Travel Appears to Be Impossible"