Science and fundraising

A candid piece in PLoS Biology about grantsmanship and its ills, the stifling of creativity due to insecurity and poor criteria for evaluating proposals etc.

Borges the post-modern

Revisiting Borges (previous visit), a hilarious short story is Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote (link to Engl. translation).

It is the fictitious inventory and literary criticism of the lifework of a certain symbolist poet, Pierre Menard. The author has left behind many works, for example:

e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

However, most notable is his "Don Quixote" which is (spoiler alert) a word-by-word recreation of Cervantes' original.

So the critique goes:

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What a series of espagnolades that selection would have suggested to Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta! Menard eludes them with complete naturalness. In his work there are no gypsy flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. He neglects or eliminates local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal.

just to build up for the main pun:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

With this 1939 piece, says the anonymous expert from wikipedia:

Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response [citation needed].

Taxonomy of technical results

ok, ok, I'm back ...

here's a proposed taxonomy of technical results / scientific papers:

a technical result is a(n)
elegant/ugly
solution/non-solution to a(n)
difficult/easy
problem/non-problem.

We all hope (imagine?) to be producing elegant solutions to difficult problems, when more often we create ugly non-solutions to easy non-problems.

Is there any part of the science landscape not fitting onto this chart ?