His Brains, anyway. (Which he never talked about himself, but that’s neither here nor there.) Random fluctuations make an appearance in Dilbert. (Hat tip Nick Suntzeff.)
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One can only wonder what Calvin and Hobbes could have done with this.
Cosmic Variance is a group blog by people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists:
Our day (and night) jobs notwithstanding, the blog is about whatever we find interesting — science, to be sure, but also arts, politics, culture, technology, academia, and miscellaneous trivia. We have similar outlooks on many things, widely disparate opinions about others, and will do our best to keep the discourse reasonably elevated.
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April 27th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
I like Dilbert. But Scott Adams is batsh*t crazy when it comes to science….
And Calvin & Hobbes
April 27th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Watterson’s take would have been funnier, for sure, and minus the mysogyny.
April 28th, 2009 at 6:46 am
I read Scott Adams’s blog, and I can confirm Eugene’s claim. His science posts generally leaving me yelling at the screen.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:41 am
Maybe I’m being a little picky, but it seems to me that Adams (or at least Dilbert) has conflated the Boltzmann brain paradox with the “brain in a vat” thought experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
April 28th, 2009 at 8:30 am
I don’t know. I didn’t see it as this. Dilbert, in the comic, is continually portrayed as a man who is completely undesirable to any woman, and fails at many attempts to woo one or another. I’m not quite sure how that is mysogynistic, or how his therapist’s practical joke is anything more than a continuation of this theme.
April 28th, 2009 at 9:16 am
Maybe I overreact, Jason, but I really can’t imagine that a woman who hasn’t bought into patriarchal concepts of female sexuality would find the little “joke” funny. And Stephen is right: Dilbert’s notion isn’t Boltzmann’s.
April 28th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Scott Adams is hopelessly misogynist and an anti-science crackpot. Also, he can’t draw very well, and his schtick was tired ten years ago. Still: Boltzmann brains in the comics!
April 28th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Really? Where do you ever get that he’s an anti-science crackpot? (That would surprise me.) And I’d put him perhaps just a little bit on the misogynist side, but nothing I’ve seen yet would put him in the category of “hopeless”, being that I’ve seen far far worse elsewhere…
April 28th, 2009 at 10:55 am
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/fossils_are_bul.html
April 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Scott Adams is by training a telecom engineer, or anyway he was a programmer in PacBell.
I’ve found many engineers to be rather opinionated about sciences in which they are not trained: Because they are qualified to draw conclusions in their own area of specialization, quite a few of them extend this attitude towards all other technical and scientific topics – even in areas for which they have no training and no exposure to facts beyond what they either see on TV or read on webpages.
Usually, they are not anti-evolutionist, but many are deniers of anthropogenic global warming.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
OK, you’ve definitely convinced me!…
April 28th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
But … his reality is entirely imagined. Is that given him Adams too much credit?
I actually liked that punchline. I’d do that sorta thing myself if I could pull it off.
April 29th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Jeepers guys, lighten up a little ! It’s a three panel cartoon ! It’s popular. It may even cause some people to do a Wikipedia search on Boltzmann Brains. They may even learn something as a result.
You might as well start wailing on Star Trek and Scooby Doo. Or Calvin’s transmogrifier.
As for Neal’s comment, I’ve often found many physicists to be rather opinionated about fields in which they’re not trained, etc etc. I think it may be a general human trait. Clearly I’m one of the exceptions, and without it most blogs would be duller and quieter. Just try to keep things in perspective eh ?
April 29th, 2009 at 9:15 am
The Mighty Biff:
There is a difference in attitude: Many engineers seem convinced that whatever it is that they know about this unfamiliar subject is sufficient to make a definitive judgment. Physicists and other scientists are generally more conscious of the fact that there MAY be dimensions, aspects or facts of which they are unaware, and which might have a game-changing impact.
Pure mathematicians are out on another limb entirely.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Sounds like a lot of people here take Scott Adams a lot more seriously then he takes himself. Maybe concentrating on science leads to a reduced capacity to recognize satire and sarcasm.. Scott frequently tosses out ideas just to get the blood boiling. Seems to work, doesn’t it?
Personally, I enjoy Scott’s blog – but enjoy even more peoples’ reactions to it.
April 29th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
“I’m not quite sure how that is mysogynistic,”
Come on, it involves a picture of a *woman*, drawn by a *man*.
You need to get with the feminist flow.
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:22 am
I’ve often gotten the fealing that Adams is in fact pro-science, and that his writtings are merely a parody. It’s quite hard to tell, because if that were true, he gives no indication whatsoever, but still… I can’t help but read between the lines and see a whisper of a smirk hiding there…
September 10th, 2009 at 8:56 am
[...] that must be fought by superheroes. Witness Boltzmann brains. Sure, they’ve already made a cameo in Dilbert, but the stakes were pretty low. Now Jim Kakalios (author of the excellent The Physics of [...]
September 12th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Neal J. King said, “Scott Adams is by training a telecom engineer, or anyway he was a programmer in PacBell.”
Wrong.
From reading some of Adams’ books I know that he was by training an economist. He hacked around in midlevel management jobs and office politics and exaggerated his computer experience until he found himself assigned to managing engineers as if he knew what he was doing. He came to appreciate engineers, however.
Most people assume that Dilbert is an avatar for Scott Adams. Actually, Adams is more the Pointy Haired Boss.