More on 'jumping the shark'

So, I was at the welcoming reception talking to a collaborator and some of his friends from grad school (one of whom I met previously who is speaking in one of our sessions), and one person poses the questions, "What are the signs this conference has jumped the shark?"

In an earlier blog entry, I discussed one possible use of the term 'jumping the shark' in science.

So, the following were considered as possibly sufficient conditions (maybe each is sufficient?):

(a) Certain specific people (including some I like to rag on) are invited as plenary speakers.

(b) You're only allowed to give one talk every two occurrences of the conference.

(c) Hmmm... I'm pretty sure others were mentioned.


I then talked about how academic careers could jump the shark, and I mentioned Brian Josephson and my advisor as an example. (In the case of my advisor, he was trained as a theoretical physicist, yet he tries to prove Goldbach's conjecture, which has been unsolved for over 300 years, using elementary methods. He also used to show me his supposed "proofs," which I refuted easily. He also shows up at people's doors unanounced and tries to get instant gratification in answering his questions no matter what they're doing. I could expan on this description with mounds and mounds of detail, but it's quite clear that he jumped the shark.)

We also talked what would entail academic journals and departments jumping the shark.



I saw a lot of old friends, collaborators, and colleagues today. I'll write more about that later. I'll also write more about my recent credit card adventures and the stupidity tax I'm paying as a result. Some people really went leaps and bounds above the call of duty to help me out here. It means a lot to me.

Overheard in ACM 210a

In ACM 210a today, Professor Tom Hou said, "You don't want to jump the shock."

This is my quote of the day, and it will require some unraveling to convey the full significance.

First of all, it immediately made me think of the phrase jump the shark, an appreciation of which is required to fully enjoy the quote above. If you don't know what that phrase means -- and most of you should because I've discussed it on my blog before -- you owe it to yourself to take a look at the wikipedia entry on the other side of the link I provided.

The topic of the class is numerical methods for partial differential equations, and in the class of systems we're studying right now shocks are very common. When designing numerical schemes to deal with systems that can have this stuff, they typically have to be lower-order near the shock because if you're going to use nearby points for interpolation, you don't want points on both sides of the shock. That is, you don't want to jump the shock. Thus, Hou's comment (which was completely intentional) makes absolutely perfect sense scientifically. Moreover, he is as far as I can tell completely unaware of the term "jumping the shark," so it seems that he doesn't realize just how funny that comment is.

If I ever discuss the numerics of such systems in a talk, I am so going to use the picture of the Fonz jumping the shark on one of my slides. Maybe only one or two people in the audience will get the joke because it admittedly requires a reference leap, but it is bloody awesome!

'Jumping the shark' in science

What I am about to discuss is actually a fairly obvious use, although I have never heard anyone else use 'jump the shark' in this context. When I tried it last week on one of my former students, I found I had to explain the term from the beginning. (He became very amused after the long preamble.)

Basically, the term 'jumping the shark' ought to be used for old scientists who used to study real stuff but either have gone bonkers and now study some combination of bullshit and minutiae. An example sentence might go as follows: "Yeah, I realize this guy won a Nobel prize, but he jumped the shark after he turned 50." Maybe the term is already used for scientists, but
it clearly needs to if it isn't already because it's just that cool.

By the way, there are several amusing things in the wikipedia entry, so I highly recommend reading that.