Trendspotting

Having received a gift of bacon flavoured jelly beans, a bacon-loving acquaintance reports to me that bacon may have finally jumped the shark.

Mensch

Via Indri, an evidently true tale of gentlemanly behavior. Schmaltzy, but with a socko ending.

I don't really think this is the sort of thing that should affect any important decisions you'll be making in the next few weeks — other considerations are much more important — but it's comforting. And I have to say, not entirely surprising.

Political commentary

Today I hand the microphone to Matisse.

I did get a nice email from Bill Whittle, the guy who wrote the National Review Online article I blogged about last week. Someone told him I'd written about his piece, and we had a pleasant exchange about it. It's safe to say he and I don't agree about the overall health care issue. He says that having free health care would makes us slaves.

This is your basic Hayekian “Road To Serfdom” argument: if you become economically dependent upon the state you become its slave. I would counter that argument by talking about democratic accountability, the inherently complex interdependence of people in society, positive vs negative liberty, the role of government in solving problems that private enterprise cannot address well. But Matisse ... I should say, Mistress Matisse ... has a different critique.

I think that Mr. Whittle has no idea how difficult it is to make even one person a really good slave, let alone a nation of them. Sure, we'd all be in chat rooms and on personals sites, saying we were slaves, but in reality we'd be whining, demanding, manipulative do-me queens, who expected our government overlords to fall out of bed every morning in full fetish attire and spank our butts before they even had a cup of coffee. Trust me on this, Mr. Whittle — in six months our liberal Masters and Mistresses would be running for the exits. It's not for wimps, this slave-making business.

I defer to the Mistress' expertise on this question.

Devobama

Since I know I have at least one reader in Ohio, and many Devo fan readers, I have to point to this performance by Devo at the Acron Civic tomorrow to raise money for the Obama campaign.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon calls this “further evidence of Devo's infinite coolness,” and who am I to argue?

Supervillainy

I recently picked up Austin Grossman's novel Soon I Will Become Invincible, but lost my enthusiasm for it midway through. The character of aging superhero Blackwolf is cool — obviously inspired by Batman, Blackwolf lacks superpowers but is smart, skillful ... and was diagnosed as slightly autistic in childhood. The chapter titles are great: “Welcome to my Island,” “Maybe We Are Not So Different, You and I.” But midway through the little witticisms about “malign hypercognative disorder” and so forth lost their sparkle, and it seemed like the novel just didn't seem to have much to say.

Instead, I offer you a little story in the same spirit: I remember when it was me who made you want to take over the world and enslave humanity

And if you like that, don't forget an oldie but a goodie, available in The Onion archives: Dept Head Rawlings' invaluable briefing transcripts:

• Allow Me To Introduce You To The Other Members Of Alpha Bravo Team
• By Now, The Uzbekistanis Have Discovered The Disappearance Of Their Orbital Platform
• I've Received Some Unpleasant Information Regarding My Estranged Half-Brother's Involvement In The Barcelona Debacle
• We Have Confirmation That Someone Has Tested A Thanatos Device
• Pierre Will Be Leading The Vertical-Insertion Team Into The Vakhan Territory
• We Have New Intelligence Regarding The Identity Of The Counter-Spy Within The Department

Trek

Okay, I am weak. I absolutely want to see this movie.

Via io9.

Global warming

True tales of physics class

My recent post about approximations has me thinking of a couple of funny stories from when I was in college.

Well, funny on the scale of physics stories ...

---

The coolest class I took in my major was Physics 10. It was only one day a week, only worth one unit. Each class session would feature a different prof talking about something they were doing in their current research. One week, a particle physicist told a story about hanging out with one of the marine biology professors over lunch.

“How do dolphins make those high-pitched sounds they use for echolocation?”

“We don't really know. They don't have anything like our vocal cords.”

“Really? That's interesting. I'm not surprised that vocal cords won't do it; I guess you'd need some kind of specially adapted mechanism, since it takes so much more energy to make a high-pitched sound than a low-pitched sound.”

“It does? Living things which conserve energy have an evolutionary advantage, so I wonder why the echolocation chirps are so high-pitched.”

“That's easy. Do you know the frequency of the chirps?”

“It depends on the species. The one I'm working with now chirps at about 30,000 Hertz.”

At this point in the story, the prof said to the class. “I happen to know that the speed of sound in seawater is about 1500 meters per second. Who knows what I said to the marine biologist next?”

There were forty students in the room, and every hand went up. (When I tell this story to other physics students in recovery they always laugh at that part, because they know the answer, too.) The prof pointed to someone at random, who said, “The smallest fish that species of dolphin eats is five centimeters long.”

“Right!” said the professor. “The marine biologist was very impressed.” Everyone in class laughed.

Secret physicist humour. (I'll reveal the secret after my next story.)

---

In my upper-division mechanics class, the prof would often propose a problem off the top of his head and then work on it at the board, soliciting comments from the peanut gallery as he went along. It was a tough class, but fun: we were usually all hanging on by our fingernails as the problem unfolded on the board.

One day I found myself in the weeds: I couldn't follow the problem at all. Looking around, I could see that I wasn't alone. The prof was still rolling and I was paying close attention, trying to find the thread again. Was he integrating across the angle a couple of steps back? Why?

I was feeling embarrassed to be so baffled when the prof suddenly stopped cold, staring at the board. Seconds ticked by. Nobody said anything. He took a step back from the board.

He stroked his chin.

He looked back around at the students; we all shrugged.

He looked back at the board.

He took another step back.

Without looking away from the board, he said, “You know that thing, where you're working, it all turns into a sea of Greek letters, and you realize you've forgotten what the problem was?” Chuckles all around. Oh yeah, we knew that thing.

He turned to face us. He had a spooked expression, half-feigned but half-serious. “You can get lost in there.” Students were nodding. “We have a name for those people, who get obsessed with the symbols and never ... come ... back. We call them ... mathematicians.”

---

For folks curious about the first story: if you divide the speed of sound in a medium by the frequency of a particular sound, you get that sound's wavelength. (1500 m/s) / 30,000 Hz = 5 cm. An object smaller than the wavelength of a sound won't interfere with the sound very much, just as the skinny pilings under a pier don't interrupt the waves coming in, so echolocation wouldn't work on a smaller fish.

I'm not making this up

George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey are currently shooting the film Men Who Stare At Goats.

Further proof that my blog puts you ahead of the curve.

Congratulations

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for Economics. I don't have an informed opinion of him as an economist, though what I can understand of his thinking seems extraordinarily sensible ... but my opinion of him as a public intellectual could not be higher.

Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber observes:

I can’t help thinking that this is actually Krugman’s reward for being the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism for the last fifteen years, starting with the use of the liquidity trap to explain the Japanese slump, going through his prediction of the Asian crises and onward to today. In which case, well done the Nobel [see note 1 again] committee — Krugman’s NYT column has been more use to the public standing of economists than more or less anything published in the journals.

And, of course, congratulations to Prof. Krugman himself, who might very well have believed that he’d done his professional status irreparable harm by taking such an aggressive line against the government of the day; he now gets the double pleasure of receiving the highest reward in economics, just as all of his detractors see their repuations ruined. There is probably some pithy epithet from Keynes or JK Galbraith to be inserted here on the general subject of honesty being the best politics, but I can’t think of it just at this instant.

DeLong responds:

Time quotes me this morning as saying that Paul is “the best claimant to the mantle of John Maynard Keynes” that we have. And I think I am more right than I knew, for I think that the “pithy epithet” is rather long, and is the opening to the preface to Keynes's Essays in Persuasion:

HERE are collected the croakings of twelve years — the croakings of a Cassandra who could never influence the course of events in time. The volume might have been entitled “Essays in Prophecy and Persuasion”, for the Prophecy, unfortunately, has been more successful than the Persuasion. But it was in a spirit of persuasion that most of these essays were written, in an attempt to influence opinion. They were regarded at the time, many of them, as extreme and reckless utterances. But I think that the reader, looking through them to-day, will admit that this was because they often ran directly counter to the overwhelming weight of contemporary sentiment and opinion, and not because of their character in themselves. On the contrary, I feel — reading them again, though I am a prejudiced witness — that they contain more understatement than overstatement, as judged by after-events. That this should be their tendency, is a natural consequence of the circumstances in which they were written. For I wrote many of these essays painfully conscious that a cloud of witnesses would rise up against me and very few in my support, and that I must, therefore, be at great pains to say nothing which I could not substantiate. I was constantly on my guard — as I well remember, looking back — to be as moderate as my convictions and the argument would permit...

Edward L. Glaeser explains briefly what he actually won the prize for.

Mr. Krugman published two seminal papers in 1979 and 1980 that made sense of the fact that Toyota sells cars in Germany and Mercedes-Benz sells cars in Japan.
....
Mr. Krugman’s trade models became the standard in the economics profession both because they fit the world a bit better and because they were masterpieces of mathematical modeling. His models’ combination of realism, elegance and tractability meant that they could provide the underpinnings for thousands of subsequent papers on trade, economic growth, political economy and especially economic geography.

And let me also offer Dr Krugman's essay Incidents From My Career. Though much of it is opaque to civilians without serious training in economics, the tale it tells of the rhythms of an intellectual career is thoroughly engaging.

I had learned about monopolistic competition from a short course given by Bob Solow in 1976, and I guess the idea of applying the new models to trade had been percolating in my mind ever since. I have, however, a typical pattern in my work: I will have a foggy idea that I play with occasionally, sometimes for years; then some event will suddenly cause the fog to lift, revealing an almost fully developed model. In this case, in January 1978 I paid a visit to Rudi Dornbusch to talk about my work, and prepared a list of possible ideas, including as an afterthought the idea of a monopolistically competitive trade model. When he flagged the idea as interesting, I went home to work on it the next day — and knew within a few hours that I had the key to my whole career in hand. I distinctly remember staying up all night in excitement, feeling that I had just seen a vision on the road to Damascus.

More Palin

Norm Scheiber's article Barracuda in The New Republic explores Sarah Palin's early career and comes to this conclusion:

These days, Palin is engaged in this same fight against elites, though on a considerably larger stage. “I'm not one of those who maybe came from a background of, you know, kids who perhaps graduate college and their parents give them a passport and give them a backpack and say go off and travel the world,” she recently told Katie Couric. “No, I've worked all my life.” That hardly makes her the first politician to run on class resentments — nearly every conservative from George W. Bush to Mitt Romney has sought a bond with voters by attacking the over-educated and entitled. But more often than not these conservatives are elites themselves; hence the spectacle of Yale legacies and Harvard millionaires (and most of the Fox News executive suite) railing against wine-swilling sophisticates.

Palin, by contrast, may be the first conservative politician since Nixon to experience resentment so authentically. For her, it's not so much a political tool as a motivating principle. A trip through Palin's past reveals that almost every step of her career can be understood as a reaction to elitist condescension — much of it in her own mind.

Passage

If you have any doubt that computer games are a valid and potentially serious art form, try playing Jason Rohrer's little gem, Passage. It's free and it takes mere seconds to download, and only a few minutes to play all the way through.

Though I guarantee you'll play it at least a second time.

Joel Johnson at bOING bOING Stuff says:

Where most games tell a story, Passage is just a sentence. But what a pregnant, forlorn sentence.

From start to finish, the game can be completed in five minutes. But there's no rush.

At Play This Thing the99th calls it “The Game That Almost Made Me Cry,” saying:

I'm talking about 8-color pixel sprites making me feel something that Final Fantasy could only pull off non-interactively with cheap (read: extremely expensive) parlor tricks of CG and professional voice acting.

Anthony Burch has a long review worth your time as well.

Mr Rohrer provides a creator's statement which is worth checking out, but don't make reading it a substitute for playing the game. He starts it by saying:

Your interpretation of the game is more important than my intentions. Please play the game before you read this.

Right.

The philosophy and psychology of fonts

Rands of Rands In Repose offers a Nerd Handbook for people conducting relationships with aspies, or at least folks in the foothills of Asperger's. There's a witty little aside about fonts which I really like.

He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

The reason for this typeface selection is, of course, practicality. Monospace typefaces have a knowable width. Ten letters on one line are same width as ten other letters, which puts the world into a pleasant grid construction where X and Y mean something.

For the uninitiated:

This is an example of a monospaced font in 
action. Notice the way the letters line up; 
this is what most typewriters produced, back 
in the day. Monospaced fonts are useful for 
making ASCII art like this:

 ___________________          _-_
 \==============_=_/ ____.---'---`---.____
             \_ \    \----._________.----/
               \ \   /  /    `-_-'
           __,--`.`-'..'-_
          /____          ||
               `--.____,-'

... but being significantly less readable than the proportional fonts that post-Mac computers have made us accustomed to seeing, they're not good for much else. Unless you have a certain frame of mind which requires a certain kind of order.

For the record, I held onto monospaced fonts for my email for a little while — how else could I be sure I was seeing a .sig as intended? — but I'm not geeky enough to use them any more.

)O+

Mercury goes direct on Wednesday. Not soon enough for my taste.

You can guess the word

Noting along the way that I agree with Hilzoy that we should keep our rhetorical hands off of Sarah Palin's family, I have to say that Samantha Bee is my secret feminist girlfriend.

Holiday

It seems that today is World Mental Health Day.

Uh, okay.

No greater honour

From last year's long New Yorker article about The Wire, the best television show ever made.

Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”

Swing voters

George Packer at The New Yorker pays a visit to Ohio. His article is full of heartbreaking stories of working class struggle that remind me how thankful I am for the life I have.

But it's mostly about politics ...

Every morning at seven, Cotter and Morris had coffee at Bonnie’s Home Cooking, on Main Street across from the gas station. The menu was scrawled in Magic Marker across a whiteboard, and almost nothing cost more than five dollars. On the morning I visited, a dozen men and women came in for their coffee and eggs. One of them, a retired union coal miner, was identified to me as if he were a rare species of bird. Three people, including Morris, expressed reluctant support for Obama. The nine or ten others were roughly split between voting McCain or sitting it out.

Dave Herbert was a stocky, talkative building contractor in an Ohio State athletic jersey. At thirty-eight, he considerably lowered the average age in Bonnie’s. “I’m self-employed,” he said. “I can’t afford to be a Democrat.” Herbert was a devoted viewer of Fox News and talked in fluent sound bites about McCain’s post-Convention “bounce” and Sarah Palin’s “executive experience.” At one point, he had doubted that Obama stood a chance in Glouster. “From Bob and Pete’s generation there are a lot of racists—not out-and-out, but I thought there was so much racism here that Obama’d never win.” Then he heard a man who freely used the “ ‘n’ word” declare his support for Obama: “That blew my theory out of the water.”

A maintenance man at the nearby high school, who declined to give his name, said that he had been undecided until McCain selected Palin to be his running mate, which swung his support to Obama.

“So you’re a sexist more than a racist,” Herbert joked.

“I just think the guy Obama picked would do better if he got assassinated than McCain’s if he died of frickin’ old age in office,” the maintenance man said.

Four women of retirement age were sitting at the next table. All of them spoke warmly of Palin. “She’d fit right in with us,” Greta Jennice said. “We should invite her over.” None had a good word to say about Obama. “I think he’s a radical,” a white-haired woman who wouldn’t give her name said. “The church he went to, the people he associated with. You don’t see the media digging into that.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.

“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added.

“I think the party-line Democrats are having a hard time with Obama,” Bobbie Dunham, a retired fourth-grade teacher, told me. When I asked if Obama’s health-care plan wouldn’t be a good thing for people in Glouster, she said, “I’ll believe it when I see it. If it’s actually happening, I’d say that’s good.” But she and the others had far more complaints about locals freeloading off public assistance than about the health-insurance industry and corporations. Dunham declared her intention to write in a vote for either Snoopy or T. Boone Pickens. “I’m not going to vote for a Republican—they’ve had their chance for the last eight years and they’ve screwed it up,” she said. “But I really just don’t trust Obama. He only says half-truths. He calls himself a Christian, but he only became one to run for office. He calls himself a black, but he’s two-thirds Arab.”

Remind me why I claim to believe in democracy?

I should say, though, that Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings reads the same article and finds hope for the better angels of our nature.

of particular concern to Obama supporters is the potential for a “Bradley Effect” on election day — or lower than expected turnout driven by racial animus
....
However, there are also indications that there might be an opposite Bradley reaction (Bradley 3.0) that could, even if not fully, at least somewhat counteract the effects of Bradley 1.0 and 2.0. The newest version, an anti-Bradley really, is based on the theory that in some regions, supporting a black candidate is so unpopular that residents and, at times poll respondents, conceal their prefernce for the black candidate.

He finds this in Mr Packer's article; the emphasis is Mr Martin's:

“I don’t know anyone who’s for Obama,” said Jennice, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton and who won’t vote in November.

“If they are, they don’t say it, because it would be unpopular,” an elderly former teacher named Marcella said. That had not been true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry, she added. [...]

As the guests drank sodas and ate pigs in a blanket in Babe Walker’s living room, Gwinn asked for volunteers to make phone calls and go door to door. There were not many takers. “Local validators are very important,” she said, with urgency. “A lot of people are secretly for Barack, but they’re afraid to go public. You know everyone in this town. So if there’s anybody out there with misinformation, you have to find them and say, ‘It’s not true. He’s not a Muslim.’ ” Seeing an Obama sign in a neighbor’s yard could make a huge difference in a place like Glouster, she said.

Mr Martin has more to support the claim. Which really tells us that there's no saying what will really happen on election day. Cross your fingers.

Eating the seed grain

Alex Steffen at World Changing frames our problem well.

One way to wrap our brains around the implications of that many people sharing a small planet is to do some math, divide up the usable part of the globe by the number of folks who want to use it. This would give us a sense of what a fair share would be for each of us.

To be really fair, though, we should probably not use up everything right away. Our kids and grandkids may want to eat, drink and breathe, too. So, we should probably only take as much as we can while allowing nature to renew itself.

It's like when people plan for retirement. You save money — build up a investment portfolio, say — and then try to live on the revenue those investments create. In this case, our natural “capital” is a gift we've inherited simply by having the good luck to evolve on such a bountiful planet. And in using that capital, we should leave enough nature undestroyed that future generations can draw upon it as well. We should leave the capital alone and live off the interest.

So, really, we don't have an entire planet to use, if we're being fair about it. We don't even have a quarter of the planet to use. What we have, if we're being fair, is that portion of the planet that we can use without trashing nature so badly that our grandkids are reduced to grubbing for withered tubers in a world of cockroaches and weeds — divided by the number of people who want to use it.

How much nature is that per person? Well, luckily, some ecogeeks have worked that out for us. They've found a way to measure the impacts of our lives on the planet, what they call our “ecological footprints.” In a fair and sustainable world, these ecological footprints would work out — in Matthis Wackernegel's equations, which really smart people seem to think are pretty accurate, if not perhaps a bit optimistic — to about 1.9 hectares per person (that's 4.7 acres). In other words, if you divided the usable part of the world up by the number of people who want to use it, we'd each have find a way to meet our needs sustainably from the bounty of a little under 2 hectares.

Unfortunately, we're already using an average 2.3 hectares per person, planetwide. To make matters worse, our sustainable share of the planet is shrinking. Part of this is a natural result of population growth: divide the planet by more people and you get a smaller piece of land.

But the planet is shrinking for another reason: we're using it up. We each get 1.9 hectares, and we're already using 2.3. Where's the extra half a hectare coming from? It's coming from nature's capital. Every year, we cut more forests, graze more cows, drive more miles, dump more trash — gobble up more stuff, and spit out more waste. And since we're already gobbling and spitting more than the planet can sustainably take, the result is that every year nature has less to offer us. To make matters worse, this spiral seems to be accelerating and the gap between sustainability and reality widening.

Here too, really geeky guys with supercomputers have gone to work, and one thing they've found is pretty shocking: as they'd put it, we're already using between 40 and 50% of the world's “net primary productivity.” What that means, for those of us whom math makes sleepy, is that humans are using about half of all the life on earth — that about half of all the plants, insects, microbes and mammals alive on the earth are being sucked into the systems that go to feed our needs.

The mighty dead

 
 
 

I lost a friend yesterday. We knew it was coming, but still ...

I can't think of anything to say in this space.

Protocol

Emily Post, Etiquette, 1922.

The “Cut Direct”

For one person to look directly at another and not acknowledge the other’s bow is such a breach of civility that only an unforgivable misdemeanor can warrant the rebuke. Nor without the gravest cause may a lady “cut” a gentleman. But there are no circumstances under which a gentleman may “cut” any woman who, even by courtesy, can be called a lady.

On the other hand, one must not confuse absent-mindedness, or a forgetful memory with an intentional “cut.” Anyone who is preoccupied is apt to pass others without being aware of them, and without the least want of friendly regard. Others who have bad memories forget even those by whom they were much attracted. This does not excuse the bad memory, but it explains the seeming rudeness.

A “cut” is very different. It is a direct stare of blank refusal, and is not only insulting to its victim but embarrassing to every witness. Happily it is practically unknown in polite society.

---

Update: It turns out they did shake hands.

Test

Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel Space Cadet has this terrific passage where teenagers wanting to join the Space Patrol are subjected to a series of tests: getting spun in centrifuges, operating faux spaceship controls while being shaken around, and so forth. This test has always stuck out in my mind:

Late in the day he was ushered into a cubbyhole containing a chair, a gadget mounted on a desk, pencil and paper, and framed directions.

“If any score from a previous test,” Matt read, “appears in the window marked SCORE, return the starting lever to the position marked NEUTRAL to clear the board for your test.”

Matt found the window labeled “SCORE”; it had a score showing in it—“37.” Well, he thought, that gives me a mark to shoot at. He decided not to clear the board until he had read the instructions.

“After the test starts,” he read, “a score of ‘1’ will result each time you press the lefthand button except as otherwise provided here below. Press the lefthand button whenever the red light appears provided the green light is not lighted as well except that no button should be pressed when the righthand gate is open unless all lights are out. If the righthand gate is open and the lefthand gate is closed, no score will result from pressing any button, but the lefthand button must nevertheless be pressed under these circumstances if all other conditions permit a button to be pressed before any score may be made in in succeeding phases of the test. To put out the green light, press the righthand button. If the lefthand gate is not closed, no button may be pressed. If the lefthand gate is closed while the right light is lighted, do not press the lefthand button if the green light is out unless the righthand gate is open. To start the test move the starting lever from neutral all the way to the right. The test runs for two minutes from the time you move the starting lever to the right. Study these instructions, then select your own time for commencing the test. You are not permitted to ask questions of the examiner, so be sure that you understand the instructions. Make as high a score as possible.”

“Whew!” said Matt.

Still, the test looked simple—one lever, two pushbuttons, two colored lights, two little gates. Once he mastered the instructions, it would be as easy as flying a kite, and a durn sight simpler than flying a copter!—Matt had had his copter license since he was twelve. He got to work.

First, he told himself, there seems to be just two ways to make a score, one with the red light on and one with both lights out and one gate open.

Now for the other instructions— Let's see, if the lefthand gate is not closed—no, if the lefthand gate is closed—he stopped and read them again.

Some minutes later he had sixteen possible positions of gates and conditions of lights listed. He checked them against the instructions, seeking scoring combinations. When he was through he stared at the result, then checked everything over again.

After rechecking he stared at the paper, whistled tunelessly, and scratched his head. Then he picked up the paper, left the booth, and went to the examiner.

That official looked up. “No questions, please.”

“I don't have a question,” Matt said. “I want to report something. There's something wrong with that test. Maybe the wrong instructions sheet was put in there. In any case, there is no possible way to make a score under the instructions that are in there.”

“Oh, come, now!” the examiner answered. “Are you sure of that?”

Matt hesitated, then answered firmly, “I'm sure of it. Want to see my proof?”

“No. Your name is Dodson?” The examiner glanced at a timer, then wrote on a chart. “That's all.”

“But— Don't I get a chance to make a score?”

“No questions, please! I've recorded your score. Get along—it's dinner time.”

Tricky!

McCain

Looking for a full-throated critique of how John McCain is not the man who has been sold to us? Tim Dickinson's article Make-Believe Maverick in this week's Rolling Stone delivers the goods.

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Seriously. Did you know that McCain has cost the US five airplanes? You've heard about the one that was shot down, I'm sure ... but then there are four that he crashed. Taking out five planes makes you an ace, right?

Approximations

The post Assume a Spherical Physicist at The First Excited State brings back happy memories of when I was in school. I never mastered thermogoddamics, but I was a whiz at rapid approximations.

• It’s on the order of…

This is the jargon that physicists use when we are doing really rough estimates. Often, you don’t care what the actual numerical value of something is, you just want to know whether it’s about a meter, a nanometer, or a kilometer. This gives us free license to be sloppy. Pi is equal to 3, or 1 if we really feel like it. We don’t have to remember whether the equation has a factor of 2 in it, or the exact values of constants, and we can feel free to make any of the other approximations as we see fit. These calculations are sometimes called “back of the envelope calculations,” since we might work them out on any scrap of paper lying around, as the answer will not be quite worth saving. This is not to say that the answer is unimportant, however, as the calculation can give us a conceptual understanding of how the system in question behaves.

The new blog Shores of the Dirac Sea has a nice list of how such approximations are called in the jargon of technical papers:

• “Toy model”: hopefully this model has something to do with the original problem that I couldn’t do.
• “This is a very rough approximation”: We are calling a spherical cow a spherical cow. If you are lucky the order of magnitude is right.
• “An approximation”: One can probably do better, but this is all I can do now.
• “To zero-th order”: This suggests that there is a systematic way to improve the calculation: these are called first order, second order, etc.
• “An uncontrolled approximation”: Something that seems to work even if I don’t know why.

One of my profs used to say, “The most important thing is physics is to make an even number of sign errors, so that you are right about whether the result is positive or negative.”

Spoooooky

Since I know I have readers who dig that sort of thing (including myself, for later reference) I offer this handsome set of alchemical symbols.

Exactly what I saw

On dKos, via Veleda.

White Dahlia

Ganked entire from Warren Ellis:

Lucius Shepherd's Larisa Miusov

A peculiar, manic-depressive little story about Hollywood, the way men think about women, and being Russian. In three parts. 1 2 3. Shepard remains a gloomy, drunken wizard with language.

If you liked that, I strongly recommend his novel A Handbook of American Prayer.

Education

William Deresiewicz writing at The American Scholar reflects on what elite universities produce.

There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their sat scores are higher.
....
An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries.
....
In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”
....
For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

He also points out something I realized when I was a high school kid. People were surprised that I, a pretty sharp cookie, was not motivated to want to pursue admission to a famous Ivy. I had already caught on that the college admissions process is not only a test of intellect, it's a test of temperament.

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.
....
Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

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Today's quote

Alaska politician Andrew Halcro, describing what it's like to debate Sarah Palin, quotes her saying this:

Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, “Does any of this really matter?”

That's contemporary American politics in a nutshell, ain't it?