June 2004

Good news and bad news here at Preposterous HQ. The good news is, we’ve added a Google search to the site — find it near the bottom of the right-side column. (I noticed this gizmo at Christina’s LIS Rant.) Now you can find out how many times I have mentioned Einstein (9), God (8), or Bush (16). Something should be done to redress the balance there.

The bad news is this paragraph I came across at Blogshares:

Preposterous Universe suffered a huge setback with several analysts urging their clients to ditch the stock as it suffered a public relations disaster. The exact nature of customer dissatisfaction was not known but Alan Dean was rumoured to have had a hand in it. Industry insiders suspect a Schroedinger’s Cat (artefact) was involved. Preposterous Universe share price dropped from B$745.92 to B$305.83.

I think I might be worried/sad/philosophical, if only I had any idea what any of it meant.

This is an image of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt”), taken by NASA’s Stardust spacecraft as it did a fly-by in January.

Can you believe it? It looks too dramatic to be true, although I’m sure it’s for real. The heavily cratered surface seems different from other comets we’ve seen up close. Probably the image was tinkered with a bit to bring out the highlights, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

So is the mission: Stardust is not just taking pictures, it has captured material from the comet’s tail and is sweeping its way back to Earth. In January 2006, if all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will land gently in Utah, and scientists will begin analyzing the comet material in the lab. A great example of what wonderful science can be done without diverting all of our money into sending astronauts to Mars (sorry, couldn’t help myself).

There are interesting and uninteresting questions one can ask about torture. An interesting one is “Is it ever morally permissible for a regime to torture prisoners?”

I would love to answer “No”, but it’s a complicated question. The standard arguments in favor of torture are well known. Imagine we are in a situation of imminent peril to a very large number of people (a “ticking time bomb,” literally or figuratively), and we know for sure that a certain prisoner has information that could be used to prevent the disaster, and strongly suspect that the prisoner would give up the information under torture but would not under conventional interrogation. That’s a lot of conditions that must be satisfied (1. imminent danger to 2. a very large number of people, 3. knowledge that prisoner has crucial information that 4. they will not give up without torture but 5. they might give up under torture), but I would add at least one more: 6. the prisoner must, by previous actions, have forfeited even minimal personal rights, e.g. by committing some egregious crime. I don’t think it’s right to torture an innocent bystander who happened to overhear a terrorist plot but for some reason doesn’t want to divulge the information. If all of these circumstances clearly applied, I would be willing to concede that torture would be justified. Under ordinary non-desperate conditions, I strongly believe that every person has a minimal set of rights that society has no right to violate; but under well-defined emergency conditions, the interests of the larger group can reasonably take precedence.

The problem, of course, is that such stringent conditions rarely apply. I used to be in favor of the death penalty, as I believed that there were some people who had, by their behavior, given up any right to live. I still believe that, but now I am strongly anti-death-penalty, only because I have no confidence whatsoever that our justice system can accurately determine who those people might be. Even the chance of one mistake, putting someone to death who was innocent (or even not as unforgiveably guilty as had been supposed), makes the use of the death penalty completely unpalatable. Similarly with torture — the danger that it could be used against people who do not meet all of the above criteria is real and terrible. Of course, with the death penalty there is a straightforward alternative (life imprisonment), whereas in the shadow of a ticking time bomb the choice may not be so clear.

There are further problems, which have been widely discussed of late: specifically, the longer-term deleterious effects of being known as a country that permits torture. Breaking the prohibitions against such behavior invites similar treatment of your own citizens, not to mention general resentment among people who tend to sympathize with the tortured subjects. On the other hand, if all of the above highly restrictive conditions were actually met before torture was ever used, it would be confined to moments of such extreme danger that the attendant bad publicity would likely be an irrelevant side issue.

There are interesting blogospherical thoughts on the issue from Jack Balkin, Eugene Volokh, Kieran Healy, and Matthew Yglesias, among many others. It’s very difficult, as Volokh mentions in another post, to even think rationally about these questions, as the real-life consequences are so sickening. But, as recent events have shown, we have little choice.

An example of an uninteresting question about torture would be: “Did high-level officials in the Bush administration understand how it was being used in Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons?” This question is uninteresting, not because it is unimportant, but because the answer is perfectly obvious: Of course they did. Not only does it seem implausible on the face of it that widespread patterns of similar behavior spontaneously arose in the acts of a few bad apples, and not only do the infamous torture memos and other documents make clear how the administration was planning its legal justification all along, but the administration has been very open in its view that there should be essentially no restrictions on how the “war on terror” should be conducted, in any theater and by any U.S. agent. The President and his officers consider themselves to be unimpeachable agents of good in the war against evil, and will never hesitate to break a few eggs in the process of making their omelet against terror. What’s been happening in Iraq is a perfectly consistent extension of well-documented policy, and there’s no reason to think that it’s disconnected from the orders from on high.

The only reason the administration is acting even somewhat contrite is because there were photos taken, and the images are too vivid and horrifying for anyone to admit they were part of an approved policy. Had the evidence been limited to testimony of prisoners and Amnesty International reports, the response would not have extended beyond stonewalling. Who knows what else is still going on.

Update: Never mind. Belle Waring has answered all the questions. Or unasked them, at any rate.

I confess that I’ve never read Ulysses (although Dubliners was brilliant), but I don’t see why that should stop me from celebrating Bloomsday. Today is the centenary celebration of the wanderings of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin, as recounted in James Joyce’s masterpiece.

My best Bloomsday experience, believe it or not, was at an Irish pub in Paris a few years ago. (Don’t be too surprised; Paris has at least thirty-eight Irish pubs, which although probably not as many as Chicago is still pretty good.) Everyone in the pub spoke English, mostly with delightful Irish accents. A group of actors visiting from Ireland took turns reading from Joyce’s works, including a yeomanlike effort at Finnegan’s Wake. My favorite was the reading from The Dead. An overly long excerpt:

She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:

“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”

She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.

“Why, Gretta?” he asked.

“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.”

“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling.

“It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother,” she said.

The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.

“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically.

“It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, “named Michael Furey. He used to sing that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate.”

Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.

“I can see him so plainly,” she said, after a moment. “Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them — an expression!”

“O, then, you are in love with him?” said Gabriel.

“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway.”

A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.

“Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?” he said coldly.

She looked at him and asked in surprise:

“What for?”

Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:

“How do I know? To see him, perhaps.”

She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.

He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

If I were quicker, I’d be ahead of the curve. I had been planning to mention this poll about religious belief from pollingreport.com, which had been forwarded to me by a friend, but hadn’t gotten around to it; now somehow everyone is all over it. (See comments from Ed Brayton, Kieran Healy, and Eugene Volokh.)

The interesting thing is, the numbers that are making people jump are those concerned with literal interpretations of the Bible: Sixty percent of American adults believe in the literal truth of the Flood, sixty-four percent in the parting of the red sea, and sixty-one percent that the world was created in six days. These are indeed alarming, as is the fact that seventy percent of adult Americans believe in Hell and the Devil. The number that is most scary to me is the biggest one: Ninety percent believe in God. To me, the belief in God is no more intellectually respectable than belief in Hell or in the Flood, or in the six-day creation. After all, the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, and why would He lie? (Although even the authors of the Left Behind series agree that the part in Revelation about the sword coming out of Jesus’ mouth is supposed to be symbolic.)

The amount of observational evidence for God is precisely equal to that for the Devil, the Flood, astrology, or the Easter Bunny: zero. There are plenty of a priori arguments floating around, but anyone who isn’t already convinced can see that they’re pretty silly. It shouldn’t be any more respectable to believe in God than it is to accept the more extravagant consequences that follow from such a belief. I hate to admit it, but religious liberals who cling to a wishy-washy notion of divinity that is shaped to conform to their pre-existing beliefs seem to be less intellectually honest than the Biblical literalists. For the same reason, I find myself sympathizing with the bishops who refuse communion to openly gay couples — of course they are wrong, but at least they are being consistent, as officers of a church that condemns homosexuality. Religious belief is a strong and meaningful stance to take on how the universe really works; one that is wildly at odds with all of our experience, but not one that lends itself to arbitrarily picking and choosing among its tenets.

The only interesting thing I have ever learned from Mickey Kaus’ blog: the internet is spelling the death of fashion. Not that anyone should be surprised, really.

Apparently, in the good old pre-electronic-dissemination-of-information days, a new trend could sweep onto the scene and enjoy months of popularity within the safe confines of fashionista circles. Whereas today, the “derisive cackling of so many bloggers” is able to squelch revolutionary new ideas (like the fauxhawk, here fetchingly modeled by David Beckham) before they can live out their natural spans.

But I have faith in the ability of cultural institutions to adapt and thrive under challenging new conditions. The fashion vanguard will have to develop new strategies to resist the taunts of the uncultured, or even to exploit them in the service of greater hipness. What could be more cool than to not only look cutting-edge, but to be persecuted by the electronic masses at the same time? We owe a debt of gratitude to our scenester elites, who are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of faceless bloggers in order that innovative hairstyles may continue to be explored.

Hey, this is my 100th post. Congratulations, in a sense, to me.

The Poor Man points to a post by Brad DeLong, which in turn relates an email account of a talk by Seymour Hersh here at the University of Chicago. The talk was about the torture at Abu Ghraib, giving the very vivid impression that things were much worse than we’ve been told thus far. DeLong says “If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush administration is worse than I had imagined–even though I thought I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always worse than one imagines.” An inspired formulation, very reminiscent of Hofstadter’s Law. I therefore propose DeLong’s Law:

The Bush Administration is always worse than one imagines, even when taking into account DeLong’s Law.

It’s useful to keep in mind, even if it’s no real help.

Update: Actually, DeLong has a few other laws (here, here, here), so I’m not being original.

The NBA Finals are underway, and like many expatriate Philadelphians I am watching with mixed feelings. On the one hand you have the Lakers, one of those dominant teams overflowing with arrogant superstars who are impossible to like, not to mention the frequency with which the franchise has beaten up on my beloved Sixers in NBA finals past (2001, 1982, 1980, 1954, and 1950 — the last two in the Sixers earlier incarnation as the Syracuse Nationals, and the Lakers earlier home in Minneapolis). So under ordinary circumstances it would be easy to root for the Detroit Pistons, plucky underdogs with hard-working overachievers like Rip Hamilton and Ben Wallace. The complicating factor is coach Larry Brown, who for the previous six years had been coaching the Sixers. Brown resurrected the franchise from the doldrums, leading us to the Finals in 2001, only to jump ship after realizing that a series of bad deals he himself had made had left the team stuck in mediocrity. Adding everything up, I still have to root for the Pistons, who are now up two games to one after completely dismantling the Lakers last night. Announcer Al Michaels, assuming like the rest of the media that the Pistons have no real chance to win the series, was trying to be complimentary halfway through the second half when he started to say that the Pistons had at least guaranteed that the series would go six games — before catching himself as he realized 1) how condescending that sounded and 2) that the series is by no means guaranteed to go six games, the Pistons could very well win it in five.

The playoffs have been very entertaining thus far, but ESPN decided to spice things up by having a round-table discussion with Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and rookies Carmelo Anthony and LeBron James. James and Anthony are both only 19 years old, but it was the wise old heads Bird and Magic that said the stupid things that discussions like this always seem to generate. In particular, Bird thinks that the NBA needs more white superstars to get people interested in the league. (And Magic immediately agreed with him.) He’s going to get in trouble for that, obviously. Hopefully the criticism will point out that Bird is being clueless, not racist — although in the context of sports it’s not always a useful distinction to draw. The NBA is about 77% African-American, and has been for a while. As people will quickly point out, race hasn’t been an obstacle to popularity for Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Allen Iverson, and countless others. But while Bird emphasizes that blacks are the best athletes in the world etc etc, by claiming the you need white stars to interest a white audience he injects the race issue where it just isn’t as important as he supposes. What the NBA really needs is a minor-league system, so that youngsters who skip college can get trained in how to play the game, including occasionally making a fifteen-footer and executing a pick and roll (or even a simple entry pass). If the quality of the product is there, the fans will follow.

Note added in proof: As this article was being prepared, we became aware of similar work by Uncertain Principles.

It looks like the Higgs boson, the only part of the Standard Model of particle physics that has not yet been directly detected, might be heavier than we thought, and correspondingly even more difficult to detect. This, anyway, is the claim of a new analysis from the D0 experiment, one of the two (along with CDF) large general-purpose detectors at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. (See also comments from David Harris.) What they’ve actually done is to improve their measurement of the mass of the top quark, the penultimate particle of the Standard Model, discovered at Fermilab in 1995. Through the miracle of quantum mechanics, the properties of all the different particles of the Standard Model come into calculating the rates of various interactions; so given what we know about certain interactions, we can infer the mass of the Higgs if we very accurately know the mass of the top.

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions that go into such an inference. Personally, I tend not to trust them; the history of physicists predicting the mass of particles like the top and the Higgs is not filled with spectacular successes. Usually we don’t come up with a convincing explanation until after we’ve finally measured it.

Fermilab’s Tevatron is currently the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world, and two of its major goals are to find the Higgs and to find something completely outside the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry or extra dimensions. Competition is on its way, from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, which is scheduled to turn on in 2007. The LHC will have a significantly higher energy than the Tevatron, and should easily be able to detect something new and interesting, whatever that may be. There is a “nightmare scenario” in which the LHC discovers the Standard-Model Higgs and nothing else, giving us no clues about new physics; I’ll put long odds against it, though.

Particle physics is desperate for an experimental discovery that isn’t already accommodated by the Standard Model; no particle accelerator has given us such a surprise since, oh, the mid-Seventies. This drought has caused a great deal of anxiety and hand-wringing, but it is certainly the exception rather than the rule; more often in physics the experiments are running far ahead of the theories, and we’re scrambling to explain all of the new phenomena being uncovered. I suspect we’ll be rapidly back into such a phase once the LHC comes online, if not sooner. (For any physics undergraduates or beginning graduate students out there who are worried about job prospects and wondering what field to go into, my advice would be particle phenomenology. In the five-year timescale to get a Ph.D., the field will go from being listless and anticipatory to rambunctious and contemporary, and good young people will be in huge demand.)

Following up on my story about switching from a computer-projected talk to a blackboard talk at the last minute, Chad Orzel hashes out the pros and cons of blackboard vs. computer vs. overhead transparencies. (I talk about “computer” presentations rather than “PowerPoint” because I actually use StarOffice, which has a better equation editor and also is free.) Michael Nielsen and Doron Zeilberger give their takes as well.

This is the kind of thing scientists talk about when they’re not uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Computer presentations have become the standard in many fields, although there is a substantial wailing about the attendant impersonality (and often incomprehensibility) of the result. Edward Tufte has written a celebrated anti-PowerPoint screed, even holding the conventions of that particular medium partially responsible for the Challenger disaster (apparently NASA engineers gave a PowerPoint presentation on the problems during the flight that served to camouflage rather than highlight the potential dangers). As Chad points out, it’s one thing to stand at the blackboard and talk about theoretical ideas involving equations and some simplistic figures, but very different if you are trying to present data. Personally I will use the computer if I’m giving a colloquium or conference talk, and prefer the blackboard if I’m giving a more specialized seminar. This particular conference was small and specialized enough that using the blackboard made sense. It certainly slows down the presentation, which is almost always good. In principle a sufficiently talented speaker can go at the right pace and be perfectly understandable while using slides, but in practice the chalk tends to force you to go at a reasonable pace and leave out superfluous details that you’re tempted to include on your slides.

What scientists will never understand is why folks in the humanities will literally read their papers — just stand up there, manuscript in hand (or on podium), and read each word verbatim, even if everyone in the audience has a transcript right in front of them. What is the point of that? The first time I saw it I was baffled, and I still haven’t quite figured it out. I tried it myself when I gave a talk at a humanities conference, but to be honest I just couldn’t do it — I kept extemporizing, so much so that none of my sentences appeared just as they were on the page.

It’s good to be open-minded about the practices of different disciplines, and for a long time I excused this weird habit by figuring that humanities talks had to be extremely precise with their language, with every word chosen carefully after hours of late-night concentration. But I’ve come to believe that there’s really no excuse. The quality of presentation of a talk that is directly read off the manuscript will just never be as good as one that is given from notes or an outline. Whether or not the precision of the writing seems to be of utmost importance, it’s not as if the listeners are going to remember the talk word-for-word, so I think an engaging presentation of the general ideas will always be more effective than a stodgy reading of perfect precision. Can we scientists (who, more often than not, give awful talks, but for different reasons) somehow persuade our less quantitative colleagues to free themselves from the prison of the printed page?