Thursday 12 January 2012

Academic silly season

My optimism at the lack of Sudoku discussions at recent Joint Meetings -- see below, and hey, one post a year is better than none, right? -- was destroyed by the recent Boston meeting, where an entire session was dedicated to the numbers game. Worse, the only news story I saw come out of the conference came from that session.

This week, my girlfriend has been at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, TX, and the only story I saw come out of that was this, on the BBC, giving the "exact colour" (a dubious claim, since the work is statistical) of the Milky Way:
new spring snow, which has a fine grain size, about an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset...
Right.

It made me wonder if these are both examples of an academic silly season, akin to the summer silly season in August. Something to fill in the post-Christmas lull before the Euro takes a nosedive or soldiers in Afghanistan commit some atrocity. Oh, too late. (Earlier today this was the only story ahead of the Milky Way one on BBC News.) There have certainly been several other conferences recently that might have produced stories that passed me by. I will be on the lookout!