Agent

John Scalzi has done an interview with a booking agent for superheroes.

Q: Okay. It’s a Gila Lizard large enough to stomp a car, that shoots poison from its tear ducts.
A: Good. That’s a Class Four monster, which is our classification for non-sentient mutated animal species, with the poison-casting sub-classification. Now, if this were a real emergency I would check the ISSB database, but off the top of my head I can tell you that there are three ISSB-affiliated super beings that could respond in under an hour with powers that would be useful for this particular mission: Battling Tiger in Glendale, ElectroBot in Emeryville and Bryan Garcia in San Jose.
Q: Bryan Garcia?
A: Yes. What about him?
Q: It’s just not the usual sort of super being name.
A: He’s new and he thinks the super being masked identities thing is kind of silly. He fights in jeans and t-shirt. Whatever makes him happy.

Not much stranger than my job.

Celebrity endorsements

I doubt there's enough money in the world to get these actors to reprise these roles, but they're doing it to support Barack Obama.

Voting

Via Content Love, I learn of Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker describes the history of voting proceedures.

In this fall’s Presidential election, every citizen who is eighteen or older—except, in some states, prisoners and felons—will be eligible to vote. Somewhat more than half of us will turn up. We won’t be clobbered, stabbed, or shot. We will not have to bring our own ballots. We will insist that how we vote be secret. The founders didn’t plan for this. No one planned for it. There is no plan. It’s patches all the way down.

Fascinating.

Virtual flash mob

Ganked entire from Nfiniteperplexity:

I logged on to World of Warcraft last night and got EATEN BY ZOMBIES! Apparently there's a special event to promote the new expansion or something. It was pretty funny because normally everything that happens in World of Warcraft is pretty well understood; if you don't understand how the seasonal Brewfest event works you can ask questions in the general chat channel and someone will probably answer you. But last night it was more like:

[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] some_dude: wtf is going on?
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] helpless_noob: lol zombies evrywhere!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] random_person: omg i got killed like four times
[1. General] some_dude: they even killed the flightmaster
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] random_person: what the hell i'm a zombie now
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] helpless_noob: I think you can get cured in Orgrimmar
[3. Local Defense] The Crossroads is under attack!
[1. General] other_guy: uhhhh...zombies?
[1. General] random_person: braaaaaaainnnnsss!

I can't explain why, but this amuses the hell out of me.

Olympians

Via Thomas Roche, a spicy and strangely sweet story from Olympian Matthew Syed in the London Times Online about sex in the Olympic village.

No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical. It was an effort of will to keep everything in check until competition had finished. But, once we were eliminated from our respective competitions, we lunged at each other like suicidal fencers.
....
For some reason the International Olympic Committee insists on bunching the swimming events towards the beginning of the Games with the inevitable consequence that the aquatics folk get going earlier — sexually I mean — than everyone else. So much so that, at the outset of the Sydney Olympics, Jonathan Edwards, a Christian and triple jumper extraordinaire, caused a ripple by telling them publicly to keep a lid on it. Edwards was simply concerned about getting woken up by creaking floorboards ....

Mr Syed is a world-class competitor in table tennis.

Journalism

Brad DeLong:

Joe Klein of Time has been banned from the McCain plane, while other Time employees Jay Carney, Michael Scherer, and Mark Halperin are still allowed on it.
....
It seems to me that right now Jay Carney, Michael Scherer, and Mark Halperin have a choice: they can either write stories true enough about the McCain campaign to get themselves banned from the McCain plane, or they stay on the plane through the election and so shred their journalistic reputations for all time.

The problem is that there is a long institutional history here.

I strongly recommend clicking through and reading about that institutional history. It tells a story that sums up our current crisis of politics and journalism as well as any 824 words possibly could.

Safety first

Jim Macdonald at Making Light liveblogs the shlocky horror movie Unearthed and — bonus! — includes helpful safety tips.

The title sequence ends with someone (face has been concealed throughout) racking a shotgun and walking off-screen.

From there — we’re in a diner somewhere in the Southwest. A nice waitress is filling someone’s thermos with coffee, and talking with the guy about his dogs. A thermos of coffee is a good thing. But not much good against dehydration.

6:23 The guy is a truck driver. Big point made of his tee-shirt (that had better be important later). He’s heading out … uh oh! Something scuttled across the road (it’s dark!) and looks like he crashed. But he (like all Making Light readers) was wearing his seat belt. I sure hope he’s okay.

8:55 Uh oh. Looks like the fuel truck (which our guy was driving) has blown up. A Black Dude from Detroit in a Fancy Car has arrived at Russell Means’ gas station with the news. Russell is there with his beautiful young Native American female scientist relative (you can tell she’s a scientist because she has a microscope). No gas available at the gas station.

Making Light readers who know that Half A Tank Is Empty will be okay, because they already refueled.

As usual at Making Light, the comments are actually worth reading.

Polling data

Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium makes an astonishing observation.

It is not in the interest of individual pollsters or media organizations for you to have the most accurate possible picture of the horserace.

Of course!

Follow the link; he digs into it, and it's fascinating.

Veep

Provoked by the Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency, Brad DeLong notices something.

The Vice President of the United States is the President of the Senate. That means he sits up front. He has the gavel. He chooses who gets to speak next. He chooses when to gavel them to sit down. He makes procedural rulings--which can be overruled by a simple majority vote, it is true, but he makes procedural rulings.

It is true that the Vice President has not traditionally exercised his powers to be President of the Senate. If the President were to tell the Veep to exercise them, it would piss the Majority Leader off--and the Minority Leader too to the extent that the Minority Leader hopes to someday become Majority Leader. But we could someday have a Constitutional Moment, couldn't we? The Vice President could show up and take the chair, right? And then call on and recognize whomever he or she chose and only whomever he or she chose for just whatever purposes he or she chose--and the Veeps decisions would stick, to the extent that he or she was sustained in rulings by fifty-one senators.

Bruce Ackerman at The American Prospect explains this weird little aspect of our government.

Under the original U.S. Constitution, members of the Electoral College didn't cast one ballot for president and one for vice president. The Founders distrusted political parties and sought to minimize their influence. They refused to allow electors to designate a party ticket for a two-candidate slate, as they do today. While electors were each given two ballots, they were told to cast both ballots for the men they considered best qualified for the presidency. The candidate with the most ballots became president; the runner-up became vice president. This system virtually guaranteed that the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, would be the president's principal political antagonist.

But party politics quickly proved too powerful for the Founders' ingenious efforts. During the election of 1800, all the Republican electors voted for the party ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, giving each of them 73 votes in the Electoral College. Although everyone knew that Burr was the party's vice presidential choice, the tie threw the proceedings into the House of Representatives, and the Federalists almost succeeded in making Burr president. When Jefferson finally ascended to the presidency, the Republicans made sure that the problem wouldn't happen again by enacting the Twelfth Amendment, which created the Electoral College voting system we have today.

But the Jeffersonians failed to consider how this constitutional change could transform the Senate presidency into an instrument of presidential power. It inadvertently created a constitutional time bomb that has been ticking for two centuries. It hasn't gone off only because vice presidents have understood that the Senate was its own place and that their constitutional responsibility was to protect the integrity of its procedures.

Ackerman's post is worth reading in full, since it is occasioned by some moves by Vice President Cheney.

Kids today

My soul sister is a high school principal. One day she stumbled into a conversation her kids were having about what radio stations they favour, and they wound up speculating about her musical tastes. Too amused by the guesswork, she refused to tell them. One of the kids finally closed the discussion by suggesting that of course she wouldn't listen to any of the stations they were familiar with, she probably liked rock ’n’ roll.

Yeah. Rock ’n’ roll, the music of old people.

I'm pretty accepting of my geezerhood these days. That music they listen to, it's just noise. And what are they thinking, going out dressed like that?

Oh, my aching back.

Wicked Warren Ellis, a.k.a. “Internet Jesus,” is forty years old and hipper than I will ever be. His blog demonstrates that he keeps up on weird pop music, European art movements, disturbing body modifications, et cetera. The participants in the online fora he hosts appear to be composed of Intense, Well-Read Young Men and Sassy, Exhibitionistic Young Women. I was the first person I knew who had heard of le parkour and I knew it because of a Warren Ellis comic book.

Today he's writing about his thirteen year old daughter.

My daughter is now 13. You can tell this by the way she presents herself for dinner at a restaurant wearing red and black striped fingerless gloves, a black puffball skirt and tights, a t-shirt that’s the dilute 2008 iteration of an idea Vivienne Westwood scrawled on the back of a fag packet in 1976, and a pair of boots that appear to have been fashioned from the hollowed-out legs of a particularly unfortunate black bear.
....
Having accounts on social network services is evidently “sad.” She’s forgotten her email password and messages her friends through game and fashion sites. She uses YouTube to listen to music.

His daughter, of course, does not think he is cool.

Rock!

Peak Wingnut?

John Cole at Balloon Juice suggests that the era of right-wing nonsense may be on its way out, and that we might already have passed Peak Wingnut.

These days, there seem to be more than enough outlets to rebut the bullshit, the media is tired of being treated like morons, and the Democrats seem for once ready and itching for a fight. But most of all, the attempts just seem so feeble.
....
Nothing like two wars, an economic meltdown, and Sarah Palin to bring clarity to the debate.

But he updates his post quickly.

Never mind, via the comments, I see I spoke too soon.
....
wingnut is a renewable resource. Peak Wingnut was the shortest lived “theory” ever.

Indeed, he goes on to guess that the right wing will only get battier in the years to come.

Wingnuttery, online, at home and in paranoid little gatherings, is about to get almost unimaginably worse. Bloggers know better than to say it in so many words, but as a community defending crap like Katrina, Rumsfeld, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales has left the online right depressed, let down and exhausted.
....
The stupid that will come after their party leaves town on a rail will make the last eight years look like a junior UN meeting.

Say Hebbo to Tarvuism

I've just discovered Tarvuism, a whole religion I've never heard of, described in astonishing detail at the Tarvu.com website. I had thought that the Church of the SubGenius and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster were the most exciting new religions happening today, but Tarvuism covers some territory that I hadn't realized I was missing. Plus It's SO easy to join^™!

The belief system seems wholesome enough on the face of it:

• Tarvu is our Lord God
• There are two universes
• The Tarvunty is the Holy Book
• We should all “be nice”
• Men and women are equal (to each other)
• Tarvu's Prayer should be said every day
• Octopuses are holy creatures
• Everyone has an invisible guardian from Universe A.

And I gotta love the names of the books of the Tarvunty: Beginnings, Questions, Narratives, Lucky Numbers, Paradoxes, Ablutions, Recipes, Fools ...

Facts

I turns out that Wil Wheaton is cooler than Chuck Norris. Much cooler.

6. Accurately depicted in GURPS, Wil Wheaton as a character would cost 413 points.
7. Wil Wheaton has access to seventh level disciplines.
8. Wil Wheaton once visited the eighth dimension using his own home-made oscilation overthruster.

Or if not cooler, at least geekier.

Via Wil Wheaton himself!

Moral codes

Brad Hicks, reflecting on why folks vote Republican, makes a more general observation about moral reasoning.

I long ago got my nose rubbed in the fact that there are two competing views in American society of what a code of morality means. For a while, I thought it was a crazy vs. sane thing. When I found out otherwise, I suspected it was a social-class based thing. When I found out I was wrong about that, I concluded that no, it's just a cultural thing, something that runs in families, just as some families are shouters and some are deeply afraid of open displays of anger. Anyway, the divide is this. Some people believe that when you adopt, and state, a code of morality that that code is a sacred promise that you are making to yourself, to your family, to society. They believe that if you fall short of your sworn code of morality, it may be a sin that God can forgive, but it is a sin against yourself that you should never forgive. They (we) believe that you should hold it against yourself for the rest of your life that you knew better, promised better, and did whatever it was anyway. On the other hand, there are people who believe that no matter how high or low you set your moral standards, you're going to break them some of the time. To them, a moral code is not so much a set of promises as a set of aspirations. Which means that to them, it's not really fair to judge someone by how often they fail to live up to their own moral code (or society's). Why not? Because they sincerely believe that everybody breaks their own moral code roughly equally often, that the only thing that conceals this fact is that some people are just lucky enough or sneaky enough to hide it better when they do. Believing this, they judge people, morally, by what they promise to do, by what they say that they're going to do. Why? Because they believe that the people who promise more are the ones who will try harder.

Mortaging your future

James Howard Kunstler observes “Fannie and Freddie ... managed during the past decade to make housing virtually unaffordable for any normal, responsible person unwilling to game the system.” Case in point: Elusis tells the tale of how she got burned with her subprime mortgage.

I thought it might be worthwhile to tell my personal story of being a subprime mortgage-holder, because I really feel like I did as much as I could to do things right, and still got screwed.
....
I got steered into dodgy mortgages when it's possible I might have qualified for better ones (and if I didn't, I might have opted to rent rather than buy!). The terms my mortgages were written for don't square with my memory of what I agreed to, which I only discovered too late in the process to call things off. As a result my payments were always more than I had really comfortably planned for, and yet I managed to make my payments on time every month. In the end, other bad mortgages destroyed the appraisal value of my property, and forced me to pay money to hand over my place to a buyer (who, fortunately, was a friend and someone I could unequivocally say did absolutely nothing but try to make the deal work out in my favor; she even paid all the closing costs when we found out the devastating news about the appraisal.)

I suppose people might find much to criticize in this story. It's always easier to armchair quarterback. I'm not ultra-naive about finance but I'm not super-savvy either. I felt reasonably sure that I understood the terms of my loans and that what I eventually got was not what I agreed to, but would a court of law find that I was misled, or that I misunderstood? I could have been more forceful about wanting to try for a conventional mortgage rather than the no-document, but when you're looking at dozens of hours of work and phone call after phone call for more pieces of paper, with someone saying “it's fine to do it this way,” what choice would you make? When you're sitting across from an expert who's done hundreds of loans, would you second-guess them?

I wasn't trying to over-reach; I knew I couldn't afford a stand-alone house or even a two-bedroom. I bought a well-kept but modest place — no jacuzzi or covered parking or fitness club or new appliances or bathtub with jets. I had been concerned about the market for some time, but the experts I was with told me I needn't worry. And when I found out what the real terms and costs were of the loans I signed, I made every effort to pay them, even over-pay them, to do the financially-responsible thing.

It's a good demonstration of how even people trying hard to be responsible during the housing bubble had an uphill battle.

Torture

Digby assembles the story on McCain folding on torture which I've been too lazy to line up.

McCain was supposed to be the stalwart opponent of torture and he failed. He was the shiny pink lipgloss on the pig called the Military Commissions Act, and it was actually the lowest, most dishonorable betrayal of principle I've ever seen a politician make. To give him credit for being against torture when he sold his reputation as a POW to the Bush administration to help them legalize it is just mind-boggling.

Here is what happened:

After first insisting that federal law clearly and unambiguously outlaw “torture,” McCain suddenly caved to White House pressure on the MCA, allowing the Administration to insert into the law a clause that effectively allows (and, indeed, legally buttresses the efforts of) the executive branch to implement torture as a means of interrogation.

Without McCain’s pander, there would have been no bad law for the Court to strike down last week. Without McCain’s grandiloquent appeal to Democrats and moderates during that lame-duck session, there quite possibly might have been a better law ...

....
McCain then went on to vote against the legislation that would have required the CIA to follow the Army Field manual, which would have explicitly banned the agency's use of torture. And this week, we found out even more about the cover-up of these activities which the administration had already approved. McCain has not stepped up to condemn this as far as I know.

Here's how John Weaver, his former close advisor, described the fearless maverick's “negotiations” with the Bush administration on the Military Commissions Act in a Frontline interview:

....
There's one other practical side of it, though, the much-talked-about CIA loophole. Where does that come from?

When you're trying to pass something, the perfect can be the enemy of the good. And I think at the end of the day, they did the best they could on that issue. And I think that's how he sees it. I mean, he worked very hard with [Sen.] Lindsey Graham [R-S.C.] and with Colin Powell. And I can assure you that if he's president, that will be fixed immediately.

Some honor. That is all utter bullshit. The signing statement wasn't the problem, although it was odious. The MCA itself, the one that McCain allegedly negotiated, said that that detainees had no right to judicial review, thus removing any chance that anyone would ever know if they'd been tortured or if the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture, had been violated. Here's Jack Balkin:

Any CIA official who acts in good faith will probably conclude that waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions, and related techniques violate one or more of these features of American law.

What the new Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) did, however, was to make these legal norms effectively unenforceable. That is why Rickard's op-ed is a bit misleading. The McCain Amendment does not provide an individual remedy for violations, the MCA states that individuals cannot enforce their rights under the Geneva Conventions in judicial proceedings, including applications for habeas corpus.

The bottom line is simple: The MCA preserves rights against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but it severs these rights from any practical remedy.

....
I never liked McCain, obviously. He's a conservative and a jerk. But I did think he had some core principles until he sold his soul on this issue. It's true that you can't let “the perfect be the enemy of the good” but when it comes to torture, it's not about “perfect or good.” It's simply about “right and wrong.” If McCain had stood up against this bill, it wouldn't have passed. The nation would have preserved some semblance of its tattered honor. Instead, he basked in the glow of his president's approval and later went on to enable the CIA to torture even further. He deserves nothing but contempt for that craven and disreputable act.

H+

I'm old that I saw the first issue of Wired on the newsstand and decided not to pick it up. Did I really need another Mondo 2000?

What with the future looking so gloomy, maybe we do. So Chairman Sirius is back, with folks like Charles Stross, Warren Ellis, and Cory Doctrow in his posse, with a magazine they're calling H+.

I kept waiting for McCain to attack the darkness

HILARY: I mean, never mind that I'm the one with 17 Wisdom, but does anyone listen to the girl? Noooooo.

RON PAUL: Also Mitt have stupid name. Who name kid after baseball equipment?

KUCINICH: HAY YOU GUYS CHECK OUT MY HEAD OF VECNA TRICK

HILARY: This never would have happened when Tim Russert was our GM.

If you didn't get it, never mind. If you did, there's more. Via Indri.

Tools

I give you the Perfect Bruce Sterling Essay: Six hundred and sixty words tying together the iPhone, Third World poverty, the Leatherman multi-tool, Eastern European collapse, fabricating prototypers, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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.