Pseudoscience

I recently finished reading a curious book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character. It’s a collection of memories and funny stories by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who tells about all kinds of things: from fixing radios as a child, over his involvement in developing the atomic bomb, to his many adventures with beautiful blondes – the typical life of the average academic, quoi. (Not.)

Now if there was one thing Feynman couldn’t stand, it’s pseudoscience. In his last chapter of the book, he explains why:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

On the one hand, it’s really quite fascinating to see that Feynman reacted so heavily against pseudoscience because of his unshakable belief in science itself. On the other hand, it’s quite tragic that what Feynman complained about decades ago (the above was written in 1974), still applies today.

Indeed, it’s tragic how much pseudoscience is still around these days. One very clear example of this is what is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Confusing an event that preceded another event with one the cause of the latter event. Indeed, only today there was a very clear example of this kind of mistaken logic in the papers.

Four hours of sport a week reduces your chances of having a burn-out by half the article in question said. An Israeli study had studied workers for nine years and observed that the more people did sports, the less their chances were of getting a burn-out. Ergo: doing sports prevents a burn-out.

But this is faulty logic. It’s not because event A is followed by (post hoc) event B, that event B is caused by event A (propter hoc). It’s not because you do sports, that you don’t get a burn-out; just like it’s not because you don’t do sports that you do get a burn-out. Think about it. Isn’t it much more logical that people who exercise for four hours a week have energetic personalities and are therefore (either genetically or psychologically) less prone to get a burn-out anyway? At the very least the Israeli experiment does not prove that exercise is the cause of the lack of the burn-out.

The same is true for all the alcohol versus life expectancy research. Every so often there is a study that proves that one or two glasses of beer or wine a day supposedly makes you live longer. Indeed, when you observe a bunch of people, those who drink moderately tend to live longer than those who don’t drink at all. But that doesn’t prove that moderate drinking is the cause of living longer. Isn’t it more likely that most people who drink moderately probably live an easier, a funner, in short a happier life than those who never touch a drop of alcohol? And happy equals less stress equals less cardiovascular disease. But if you’re happy because of another reason, like through having a rewarding job, a good family life, etcetera, I’m sure it’s just as beneficial for your life expectancy. So it’s happiness that makes you live longer, not alcohol.

After all, Feynman stopped drinking very early on in his life and he lived to be 70, which was exactly the life expectancy of a male at the time.

Aha!

Quantum of doubt

When I was a teenager, I hated physics. And I sucked at it too. I remember one time having to calculate the amount of air pressure within a sealed water bottle. Triumphantly I quickly wrote down: 0. Because, I reckoned, since there is a cap on the bottle, that prevents the pressure from the outside air getting into the bottle. Of course, I was wrong. But I remember sharply - yes, with all the sharpness you can expect from a 14-year-old boy who was publicly laughed at by his alcoholic physics teacher for that answer - that no one bothered to explain why I was wrong. I just sucked at physics (like I sucked at geography or musical education) and that was that.

Today I know that I didn’t hate physics because I sucked at it, but because nothing we were ever taught in high school physics was interesting enough for me to want to try and be better at it. Indeed, for our class (that got only one hour of physics a week) the most interesting chapters were dropped with the message ‘You guys won’t understand this anyway’. And so physics became a kind of applied mathematics. All I remember us doing was calculating things like how quickly a drop of water falling from a cloud would hit the ground (remember F_z?). For someone like me, who was basically only interested in stories and therefore forever looking for the why behind everything, it was torture. Because no one ever talked about the whys. Physics, from the Greek word for ‘the things of nature’, should be about explaining how and why our physical world behaves the way it does. But we never heard anything about that. I guess if you asked our teachers they would have said that that was way too difficult for us.

Yet one year ago, probably almost to the day in fact, I was waiting with Fred for a Japanese train to arrive (Japanese trains are never late, so we must have been early) and I was listening to him explaining Einstein’s relativity theory and I realised that, when properly explained, even the most fundamental physics are not difficult at all. With ever growing eyes and ears and even brain, it seemed, I suddenly understood why distance and time are ultimately relative. I still rank that very moment firmly within the top five of interesting insights I’ve ever had. For one, because Einstein’s discovery is mind-blowing, but also because I realised then and there that physics can be interesting. In fact, it’s probably the most interesting thing there is.

Now yesterday evening I had another ‘physical’ experience, so to say, while watching the BBC documentary ‘A Night with the Stars’ (watch it here on YouTube). In the program, Manchester University physics professor Brian Cox explained the rudimentary elements of quantum theory which accounts for just about everything, so it seems. It answers questions like why it is that even though atoms consist of more than 99,9% empty space, you don’t fall through your chair while reading this. Or why it is when I rub my hands, every atom in the universe instantly changes ever so slightly (something to do with energy levels of electrons). Or why you can put something in a box, preferably a rather small one, wait a while (okay, a rather long while) and have a reasonable chance that whatever you put in the box will not be there anymore when you open it. Fascinating stuff, really, discovered by mostly young researchers who must have had a brain running on kerosene.

In fact, the longer I watched the documentary, the more I started thinking about these geniuses of quantum theory, people like Max Planck, Wolfgang Pauli or Werner Heisenberg, and the amazing discoveries they made. And I must confess that suddenly I was insanely jealous of them.

Indeed, being in academic research myself (but about literature for God’s sake!) I suddenly felt like an imposter. Really, I asked myself, has any scholar in the humanities ever produced anything as staggeringly true as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (pun not intended)?

I mean, just look at it. Even if you don’t understand it (like me), you have to realise one thing. This is a mathematical formula, which means that it is universally true: always and everywhere, for every fucking particle in the whole Goddamn universe!

Indeed, nothing we scholars in the humanities will ever put down about anything, no matter how hard we research it and how much we think about it, will be able to boast a fraction of the value Heisenberg’s discovery. And that’s a bit of a blow. Especially since no one in humanities and particularly in my small field seems to care very much about this.

Sure, we can’t all be Nobel Prize winners and research in the humanities is fundamentally different to physics, but what annoys me is that lately it seems no one around me is truly trying to push the boundaries of what we know anymore. Academic research should be about formulating, testing and refining hypotheses in an open, but ever critical environment. Yet lately, it seems that a lot of what I see in my small field boils down to formulating clichés, testing the limits of everyone’s patience, refining the art of looking smart in a self-important, but ever empty environment.

After all, we might have been the people who invented the names ‘alpha’ and ‘beta sciences’, but after yesterday, I’m having real doubts about the value judgement seemingly implied in this alphabetical order. Because I seriously ask myself: is what I’m doing as good (for lack of a better term) as what a physicist does?

Truth be told: I’m not so sure anymore…

Solvitur Ambulando

It is often said that problems are solved by walking. Well, it obviously depends on the nature of your problem; I am pretty positive it doesn't work if your only issue is that you can't sit still. It surely works for me though: whenever I get stuck on a problem, be it of academic or personal nature, I tend to start walking about. Often accompanied by my iPod, since music somehow seems to free my mind, and preferably ending my thoughtful strolling underneath an ash tree (how do you mean, you don't have a favourite tree?).

For those of you who are not sure what I'm talking about, here's a description I have found on Wikipedia: walking is defined by an 'inverted pendulum' gait in which the body vaults over the stiff limb or limbs with each step. Imagine our parents taught us how to walk by reading this definition out loud; life could have been slightly more awkward, isn't it? Or at least funnier...

At this very moment - staring at my students wrestling themselves through their exam, I wonder how many people are actually suppressing the urge to walk around. I would love it, if people were to start walking pensively through the auditorium, hands neatly folded behind their back, staring at the ceiling with a slightly tilted head until that liberating insight crossed their mind. As a matter of fact, I would even organize peripatetic exams, taking my students out for a walk in the park. Hunting for rabbits included, nothing beats illustrating your answer using a dead bunny...

What somehow prevents me from actually suggesting this, is the idea that some people might insist on doing that other activity that induces brain activity. Because no matter how dull surveilling exams can be (read: is), it could still be worse: waiting on the other side of the toilet cubicle until people hand in their erhm... answer sheets? No thanks...

Mrs. Robinson

Research is a fascinating thing. Only today I read on The New Scientist that after additional observations our beloved neutrinos seem to continue their quarky behaviour and might after all be able to travel faster than the speed of light (story here). If it were true (and I still think we need to be careful), it would be a jaw-dropping finding.

Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!

And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.

Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.

Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.

Youth of Today

Today is International Student's Day, in commemoration of what happened in Prague in 1939. On October 28, a demonstration was held in Prague to commemorate the anniversary of the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic. During this manifestation, suppressed by Nazi forces, an unfortunate Czech student (Jan Opletal) was shot in the stomach. He died in the hospital on November 11. A few days later, his body was transported from Prague to his home town in Moravia, and the funeral procession (attended by thousands of students) turned into an anti-Nazi demonstration. The Nazi's responded with drastic measures: all Czech higher education institutions were closed down, more than 1,200 students were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and on the 17th of November nine students and professors were executed without trial.

Personally, I can relate to this story because of two reasons. First of all, I have spent one whole year at the Charles University in the beloved city of Prague. Not only is the Czech Republic's ancient capital a captivating and truly fantastic place to live (or wander around as a tourist), I can also say that my year in Prague has given shape to the life I am living now. People that stuck with me, experiences that were etched in my mind, and opportunities that changed the course of my career.

Secondly, I have a job (a.o. because of my stay in Prague) which brings me in contact with students on a daily basis. And 'they' can say what they want, but my impression is that the youth of today still embodies a lot of fire and passion. Of course, it's different from what my father told me, and I guess that even the comparison with my own student years wouldn't make any sense at all - despite my relatively young age, but still: deep down, students will never change. And this is not about the unconditional love for beer, cheap food and fellow students of the opposite (well, you know what I mean) sex, this is about their desire to connect, change and contribute.

For the students!

Keep raising your voices, preferably not during my classes ;)

Bogey-Wogey

I'd say 'bogeys' is a misnomer. I don't know about you, but to me it sounds like candy. Red candy, to be more precise, shaped like a rabbit and slightly sour-tasting. The kind of candy that makes the muscles between your mouth and ears contract spontaneously when you have more than one.

As it stands, bogeys are pieces of dried nasal mucus. Dry snot, if that sounds more familiar to you. And if you still don't know what I'm talking about here, then visit the nearest primary school and turn over a random chair: the chunky pieces attached to the bottom of the seat might ring a bell. Unless they are pink of course, that used to be bubblegum.

You might be wondering where this is heading to, as the subject of today is not exactly the most tasteful one (we all tried it, no need to be judgemental here) and bordering a line which you don't necessarily want to see crossed - right? The thing is, this Fred is having one of those days in which my head seems to be filled to the brim with snot. I have no sense of smell at all today, and a voice which is so nasal that you could easily mistake me for Fran Drescher (The Nanny, anyone?).

But a Fred wouldn't be a real Fred if he didn't try to look at the slimy gooey stuff from the scientific point of view. And this is why I spent the fifteen-minute walk from my office to the lecture hall thinking about mucus.

And it led me to a baffling realization: we can't tell whether our own snot stinks!

Standard questions

Some things are just harder to explain to people than others. One of the challenges that we - Fred the mathematician and Fred the philologist - are often facing, is how to explain to people what 'doing current research' actually means. For it seems that many people genuinely believe that 'everything has already been done' in our areas. When it comes to swallowing strange objects (lamb bulbs, hairy spiders the size of a triple Whopper pizza burger, pointy objects in all sizes and shapes), walking on things that were not really meant to be walked upon (burning ropes, hot coals, hungry alligators, sidewalks in London's shopping streets during Christmas time) or doing plainly weird shit with your body (having coral implants in your forehead, eating nothing but raspberry yoghurt for 5 years, throwing yourself out of an airplane wearing nothing but a flashy jumpsuit), you do have a point: these things have all been done, either by a bunch of idiots making late-night television shows (there used to be a time 'Jackass' was nothing but a male donkey) or, more than often, by some random Asian guy. Most likely a five-year-old Chinese kid, who will still beat you blindfolded, balancing seven bowling balls on the head.

Anyway, doing research.

I usually compare this facet of our jobs with what artists are doing. Replace the free drugs and wild nights shagging groupies by slurping down liters of coffee and friendly winks from the cute librarian, replace festival grounds with 60,000 ecstatic youngsters by lecture halls housing a handful of old professors dozing off and young PhD students staring at our presentation like squirrels staring at coconuts ('What the hell is this?') and replace 'most popular download on iTunes' by a bunch of papers read by a select group of self-proclaimed connoisseurs, and there you have it: the perfect analogy.

That's right, we are artists. Because we create, hoping to be original, and basically depend on that thing called 'inspiration'. Which is a bit like a wet dream, if you'd ask me: every once in a while, it just happens. Out of nowhere. A lightning flash of materialized concentration. And surely, it helps if we read some related material or hear other people talk about it (just don't push the analogy beyond its boundaries, ok?), but in the end we can't control it. Well, there is of course a proverbial helping hand, but my experience is that this seldom leads to the same satisfactory feeling. Because true inspiration contains enough seeds for a few fruitful ideas, and reduces the rest of our time behind the desk to cleaning up the details.

The undersigned Fred did not have a fruitful day. Mark my words, 'doing current research' is more about the research than it is about the doing...

And how was your day today?

PhD peculiarities

Last Sunday Fred came over to my place and we had a healthy discussion about stuff only Freds can have discussions about. The matter at hand was Latin alliteration and assonance and its relation to independent and conditional probability. But rest assured, I won’t bother you with the details…

However, at some point in the conversation a strange fait divers came up, which I am sad to say I can’t recall anymore. What I do remember is that I could proudly refer Fred to the passage in my PhD thesis where said fait divers was mentioned. Which reminded me how much strange stuff there actually is in my PhD! For a thesis about one year (1598) of a humanist's correspondence, there sure is a lot of unexpected information in there. Only recently, for instance, I told my friend E. about the fact the Romans collected taxes on pee (the urinae vectigal) as it could be used in the leather industry…

Indeed, this is only one titbit of the gazillion strange little pieces of information contained in the 911 pages of PhD I worked on from 2003 to 2009 (yes, I had no life then, thank you). As I was able to do so by your hard-earned tax-euros, I thought it only fair to give you a small sample of such PhD peculiarities.

My PhD will inform you about:

1. The precise name of the Roman gladiator who fought wearing a helmet without any openings for the eyes and who therefore competed completely blind (Andabata).
2. The way the 1598 peace talks between the Spanish and the French at Vervins almost didn’t start because of a row about the exact formation in which the different diplomats would be seated during the negotiations.
3. The different sources and opinions about the life span of the Phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes (500 or 1000 years depending on whether you believe the Greek or the Roman tradition).
4. The title of a book in which you can check what the weather was like in the Low Countries (Belgium and The Netherlands) from 1000 AD to the year 2000 (J. Buisman, Duizend jaar weer, wind en water in de Lage Landen, Franeker, 2000).
5. The fact that the Greeks seem to have been more afraid of the sea than the Romans. (If you don't believe me, see De Saint-Denis, Le Rôle de la Mer dans la Poésie Latine, pp. 300-302).
6. The differential diagnosis (yes you know this term from House MD) for an oedema (which can be caused by anything from small bruises to serious infections, heart failure, nefrotic syndrome (kidney failure) or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system).
7. The fact that Spa water was already sold in bottles in 1598.
8. The mathematical problem of the quadratura circuli, the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge (it took people until 1882 to realise that it’s actually impossible).
9. Who brought the tulip to Europe, who popularized its cultivation, and when the Dutch tulpomania reached its zenith (Augerius Busbecquius, Carolus Clusius and the 1630s)
10. The phrase: “Can I have another gin-tonic?” in Modern Greek (και άλλο τζιν τόνικ)
11. A lengthy discussion of the correct surname of Thomas Rhediger (Rhedigerus, Redingerus, Rehdiger, Rudinger, Rudiger, Rüdiger, Rediger, Redinger or Rehdiger?)
12. The fact that horridula virtus (‘the hard virtue’) is a strange expression because the adjective horridulus is usually employed in Latin in connection with nipples.
13. That Pliny the Elder knows a plant that will give you difficulties peeing, which is strangely called chamaeleon (see Plin., hist. nat., 22, 18, 21)
14. Some considerations on why the Persian imperial messengers called Peichi (Peykān-i Hāsṣṣa) could have carried a small axe and a flask of perfume with them (perhaps the perfume was a gift, emergency payment or just good manners when they had travelled for miles on end to deliver the message?)
15. That the 41st abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Liessies near Avesnes was a naughty man because he drank and partied at the monastery.

Phew! And still the papers are saying that university education in Belgium needs to be of ‘more general’ interest.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a blog on Fred and Fred if there weren’t a little twist to it. Of the aforementioned fifteen peculiarities, one is not really mentioned in my PhD. Can you spot which one ? It’s number -1000+8371-7359 (just a calculation as a spoiler alert…). But mind you that’s only because I struck it out at the last minute. It’s still the God honest truth!

PS: if ever you would feel the need to learn more about which plants cause difficulties peeing or about Latin adjectives usually associated with boobies, you can read the full version of my PhD through this link. Enjoy!

There’s a word for it

If you know anything, anything at all, about me, you’ll know that I like words. Which is quite the understatement. Oh how I veritably venerate verbiage, lavishly love language and wantonly worship words! I’ll tell you a secret: whenever I meet a new word I particularly like, I repeat it over and over to myself, sometimes even giggling rather foolishly. Oh how I want to eat the Latin ruminare (what cows do with their food)! How I rage and rumble and ravage when I taste the Flemish rulokte (‘wild’) on my tongue! Or how I get misty-eyed when I read the French larmoyant (‘to cry for’). To me, many words feel like what they mean. Conversely, some words feel like the opposite of what they mean, like linoleum, which should have been the name of a pleasant Mediterranean seaport, as one of my word heroes L.P. Wilkinson once observed, not the rather unpleasant floor covering. And so every word tells a story to me. Which has been a blessing, because it's probably the sole reason I'm not living in a cardboard box today!

But why am I telling you the presumably bleeding obvious? Well, some time ago a few of you told me you were happy that I introduced you to the word meteo sensitive (i.e. your temper follows the weather). To be exact, my friend W. mentioned it to me first a while ago, so I shouldn’t claim credit. However, this reminded me of a few other words that you might not know but find funny or deem interesting. Fred himself used one in his very first blog: retrotort, and so I thought I’d teach you some more just in case you have to spice up a boring dinner party (Caution: Fred and Fred will not be held accountable should anyone use these in a frantic attempt to keep the conversation going on a date. The results could be unforeseeably disastrous.)

(1) Backronym

We all know an acronym, right? It’s a word that’s actually not a word but a compilation of the first letters of a phrase, like radar which was coined in the 1940s from ra(dio) d(etection) a(nd) r(anging). Well, a backronym is the opposite of that. A word which people think is an acronym, or make into one, but really isn’t. A good example is SOS. I always thought SOS was short for Save Our Souls. Turns out that’s not how it originated. The army just wanted a simple Morse code for a distress signal, so they chose …---…, which spells S O S by chance, not because it’s short for something. Alternatively, a backronym can also be used to (somewhat corny) comic effect. Like when you’re fed up with your old Ford-car and tell a friend Ford actually stands for Fix Or Repair Daily.

(2) Complisult

Another good one is a complisult, which is a compliment and an insult mixed together, like in the sentence “That’s such a nice dress. It does wonders for your figure” or “You’re smarter than I thought!”. At first it looks like a compliment, but in fact when you think about it, it’s more like an insult. Sometimes you can leave the insult part elliptically, like in the famous “Do you think she’s pretty? - She has a wonderful personality.”.

If you’d like to know more unusual but fun words that fit into this category of There’s a word for it, you can check out the homonymous (there’s another one!) book for sale on Amazon! And if you’re still not convinced why you should like words, have a look at what Stephen Fry has to say about it, typecast in the craftiest of kinetic typographies:

Word.

X-men

It's August, and for unfortunate students this means resit examination time - not exactly the highlight of a young adult's summer (even though, technically speaking, there was no summer). Neither is it for the assistants: I am pretty sure that 'surveilling students for a whole afternoon' beats 'watching paint dry' on the Universal Scale of Boredom. Just imagine you're an assistant at the College of Arts and your supervisor teaches 'Advanced Portraying Techniques III: Using Slow Drying Paint in Extremely Cold Conditions'...

For the grading teachers however, resit exams are not that bad, as it gives them yet another opportunity to observe students and to realize that some of them have rather special abilities and habits. Here's an overview of the most fascinating species:

Time-warp (wo)man:

These students are known for bending time, although rarely to their advantage. When you look at them during the exam, you will never see them loitering. They always seem to be completely immersed into their tasks, frenetically scribbling on their exam copies as if they're afraid that their knowledge may evaporate into thin air. More than often in a handwriting which leaves so much space for interpretation that you could easily loose an elephant in it. Strangely enough, their exam papers never contain more than half an answer to one (of many) question(s). This often leaves teachers behind with the feeling that they lost the rest of the exam somewhere on the way from the auditorium to their office, but the truth is of course that these students only had time for half a question, as they bend time.

Rubberface (wo)man:

This is the type of students you would love to see in a black suit and matching hat, with a white painted face, carrying a basket and picking imaginary plums. They are true mime artists, wrapped around a mind that had different plans for the future. Observing these students is particularly funny and entertaining, as you can deduce their thought process and progress - or, as is often the case, lack thereof - on the exam from their facial behaviour. And they know how to handle the complete spectrum: from anguished expressions over Archimedesque moments of insight to the look on their face when they raise their finger and ask you wether they can go to the toilet (I once had the impression the plums were not that imaginary), it all comes with a powerful visualization.

The Non-Sensei:

Also these students are true artists, in a sense which transcends reality. Unlike the time-warp people, they always hand in an exam which contains more pages than reasonably expected. The surprising thing however, is that their exam is a bizarre mixture of facts, ideas and shreds of course material which makes no sense at all. To outsiders, their exams must look like exemplary answer sheets, but these students have the unique (and, let's be realistic, pretty useless) ability to blend a whole lot of true facts and correct pieces of information into an answer which lies so far from the truth that it makes teachers question the very concept of grading. They never reach the absolute minimum score however, as even the most down-to-earth teacher takes into account the possibility that their exam copy is a message from outer space. And you don't want to be the dork who pissed off the aliens, do you?

Disclaimer: this survey is by no means complete. If you feel that your abilities have been gravely overlooked, please accept my apologies. You can always use the comment box to update this limited account.

Scholarly Stresses

Oh it's been one of those days to forget. Quickly.

Part of my job entails being the editorial assistant of a journal for Neo-Latin Studies. Doesn't sound exciting, does it? But it gets worse. Here's what I did today - all day, by myself - in my honourable capacity of editorial assistant: I standardized footnotes. Yes. I spent my whole day reviewing papers and correcting this:

'Scholarly Stresses and Strains: the Difficult Dealings of Bonaventura Vulcanius and Henricus Stephanus over their Edition of Arrian's De Expeditione Alexandri Magni Historiarum Libri VIII', in Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks, Bruges 1538- Leiden 1614. Papers edited and introduced by Hélène Cazes, Brill's studies in Intellectual history, 194 (Leiden - Boston, 2010), 351-359.

into this:

Gilbert Tournoy, ‘Scholarly Stresses and Strains: the Difficult Dealings of Bonaventura Vulcanius and Henricus Stephanus over their Edition of Arrian’s De Expeditione Alexandri Magni Historiarum Libri VIII’, in Hélène Cazes (Ed.), Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks, Bruges 1538 – Leiden 1614, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual history, 194 (Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2010), pp. 351-359.

And, yes sir, this is very important. Seriously. Oh, it doesn't look that different? Note the alignment (justified instead of left), note the quotation marks (rounded instead of straight), note the length of the dash between Leiden and Boston, note the capital letter in Studies. Of course, I am a highly trained professional at this, having taken an exam during my first year at university on this sort of thing (bibliographical style sheet) and proudly boasting several years of experience at the journal in question. My Lord...

Apart from such intellectual haut cuisine my day also figured: doing laundry (goody!), buying stamps (exciting!), doing dishes (happy happy, joy joy!), stubbing my toe against the coffee table (auch!). That's abou it. Hell, I'm so numb that only now (not kidding), I realise how ironic the aforementioned title of my example is...

Scholarly stresses, you got that right!