Jason Martin writes for Ars Technica about being struck by lightning:

Yesterday, I was sitting in my studio office—basically a converted garage—while a thunderstorm brewed outside. After wrapping up a conference call with some of Ars’ finest, I was getting ready to dive back into work when the storm really picked up. “Ahhhh,” I thought as I leaned back in my chair to stare out at the strange greenish light against a purple-clouded backdrop. “So beautiful!”

At that moment—and this part is a little foggy—a bright arc of electricity shot through the window and directly into my chest. I’m not sure whether the arc originated from the sky or the ground, but it knocked me out of my chair. I hit the concrete floor and bounced back up to my feet, which were shuffling at top speed into a bookshelf. I remember thinking, “OK, going to die now. Do not fall down. Do not pass out.”

Daniel Dennett shares his ideas on how to think. I found the following particularly relevant for scientists:

In science, you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else’s experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. (Physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously expressed his contempt for the work of a colleague as “not even wrong”. A clear falsehood shared with critics is better than vague mush.)

This, by the way, is another reason why we humans are so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

I am amazed at how many really smart people don’t understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.

Christopher Mims, Quartz, on mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor’s plans for 3D food printing:

He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Erica Klarreich, Simons Foundation:

Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1991 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.

“Basically, no one knows him,” said Andrew Granville, a number theorist at the Universite de Montreal. “Now, suddenly, he has proved one of the great results in the history of number theory.”

Matthew Baldwin, writing for The Morning News:

The following are excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present.

A couple of my favorites:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“So many other good books…don’t waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed.”

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“Well, it’s a girl’s world. The world of Gloria Steinem and the popular feminism, as distilled on TV (including CBC shows, not all fundamentalist Hollywood garbage) of my youth is GONE. Now the girls run the show. You’re not allowed to call them sluts. And it’s impossible to call them virgins. They’re all doing Rhett Butler. So what are they? Idiots… Hope you like the Gangstas. It’s what you deserve.”

Dr. Chad Shafer sums up my general feelings regarding particular aspects of severe weather media coverage:

I mourn for the victims of the Moore tornado, but I mourn too for the apparent loss of at least some of our collective humanity…

Shafer references a specific interview of a young tornado victim. I do see the value in broadcasting the names and faces of children who are separated from their parents. However, I felt the scope of the interview went beyond useful dissemination of information and into tone-deaf dissociation. I don’t mean to unduly judge journalists - that was a tough situation. I just wish we would stop treating our neighbors like props in a reality show and instead respect their human dignity.

Jeffrey Kluger, Time, highlights the work by my fellow National Weather Center residents on May 20th in warning the public about the impending tornado emergency:

Sometime between 2:20 and 2;30 PM, the center issued a severe thunderstorm warning, which meant that tornadoes might be imminent. Given the severity of the conditions, Smith says they were poised to issue both that warning and the tornado emergency warning sooner than they might normally have been. A handful of the meteorologists, including Smith and Andra, were clustered at one of the eight work stations. Andra was the day’s “event coordinator,” making the moment to moment calls. They were all focusing on one of the screens that was showing a radar scan of the entire storm system. Based on the data stream they had coming in, they could overlay a relatively specific threat area on that larger  image. The meteorologists knew not just the likely tornado’s intensity but something about its track, so the footprint they drew was both immediate and predictive—at least a little.

I’m a postdoctoral researcher on the top floor of the building and am not involved in anyway with forecasting. Instead, I am generally busy playing with computer code or watching radar. My interactions with the operational staff are few, and on most days I never even visit the second floor (those guys are busy). It’s days like yesterday, however, that offer a reminder of how very glad I am that we have that second floor. Damn fine work.

Sabrina Taverise, New York Times:

A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.

Mat Honan, Wired, writes satirically about an oasis inspired by Google CEO Larry Page:

“As soon as you hit Google’s territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws–or lack thereof–apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn’t speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it.”

Phillip Elmer-DeWitt:

Student activists at Harvard University like to pore over the quarterly filings of the Harvard Management Company for investments they find politically incorrect — like Smith & Wesson (gun manufacturer) or Vale S.A. (Brazilian mining).

But when someone at Bloomberg News opened Harvard’s latest SEC 13F what jumped out at them was the first line of the form: The sale of 100% of the university’s holdings in Apple (AAPL).

Crappy journalism.