academiblog

 Last week I gave 5 talks in 4 days; two to faculty at UC Berkeley and two to graduate students at the same institution.  The fifth was a talk at Stanford to the engineering graduate students.  Although it sounds like a marathon, it turned out to be a perfectly delightful experience, because of the people in the audiences and their enthusiasm for what I had to say.  This is one of the phrases that I ended up saying to them repeatedly in response to certain questions: “You are the experiment; your behavior is the data.” Let me explain what I meant by that.  But first, for you non-science types, let me review with two sentences.  Every experiment involves a hypothesis.  You test the hypothesis by getting data. For example, you wonder which food ants prefer; honey or sugar.  You may hypothesize that they prefer sugar, because ants don’t want to get stuck in the honey.  You put out the honey and sugar, and count the number of hungry ants that run to each food.  Their behavior is the dat

This article, Hollywood Shadows: A Cure for Blocked Screenwriters , is a hoot! Two Hollywood therapists use sometimes outlandish techniques, which are really exaggerations of the techniques that we are always telling you about at Academic Ladder, to get Hollywood writers past their blocks. Some of his techniques go waaay beyond what we do. Enjoy!