Humor

Worst Predictions of the Year

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Foreign Policy has compiled a list of the Ten Worst Predictions for 2008. You’ll be happy to hear that physics has made the cut!

“There is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.” —Walter Wagner, LHCDefense.org

Scientist Walter Wagner, the driving force behind Citizens Against the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is making his bid to be the 21st century’s version of Chicken Little for his opposition to the world’s largest particle accelerator. Warning that the experiment might end humanity as we know it, he filed a lawsuit in Hawaii’s U.S. District Court against the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which built the LHC, demanding that researchers not turn the machine on until it was proved safe. The LHC was turned on in September, and it appears that we are still here.

Admittedly, FP didn’t get it quite right — as loyal readers know, it’s something of an exaggeration to say that the LHC was “turned on in September.” Protons circulated around the ring, but there were no collisions, and there won’t be until later this year. Still, they were right about the wrongness. The LHC is perfectly safe.

The other predictions were also amusing. Here’s my favorite:

“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006

Weekly Standard editor and New York Times columnist William Kristol was hardly alone in thinking that the Democratic primary was Clinton’s to lose, but it takes a special kind of self-confidence to make a declaration this sweeping more than a year before the first Iowa caucus was held. After Iowa, Kristol lurched to the other extreme, declaring that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and that “There will be no Clinton Restoration.” It’s also worth pointing out that this second wildly premature prediction was made in a Times column titled, “President Mike Huckabee?” The Times is currently rumored to be looking for his replacement.

Of course, asking Bill Kristol to predict the future is like asking Rod Blagojevich to head a good-government task force. Here’s my prediction: Kristol will continue to say dumb things, next year and far into the future. And get paid handsomely for doing so.

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The Hidden Complexity of the Olympics

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Chad laments that we don’t hear that much about the decathlon any more, because Americans aren’t really competitive. I also think it’s a shame, because any sport in which your score can be a complex number deserves more attention.

Yes, it’s true. The decathlon combines ten different track and field events, so to come up with a final score we need some way to tally up all of the individual scores so that each event is of approximately equal importance. You know what that means: an equation. Let’s imagine that you finish the 100 meter dash in 9.9 seconds. Then your score in that event, call it x, is x = 9.9. This corresponds to a number of points, calculated according to the following formulas:

points = α(x0–x)β   for track events,

points = α(x–x0)β   for field events.

That’s right — power laws! With rather finely-tuned coefficients, although it’s unclear whether they occur naturally in any compactification of string theory. The values of the parameters α, x0 and β are different for each of the ten events, as this helpful table lifted from Wikipedia shows:

Event α x0 β Units
100 m 25.437 18 1.81 seconds
Long Jump 0.14354 220 1.4 centimeters
Shot Put 51.39 1.5 1.05 meters
High Jump 0.8465 75 1.42 centimeters
400 m 1.53775 82 1.81 seconds
110 m Hurdles     5.74352    28.5    1.92    seconds
Discus Throw 12.91 4 1.1 meters
Pole Vault 0.2797 100 1.35 centimeters
Javelin Throw 10.14 7 1.08 meters
1500 m 0.03768 480 1.85 seconds

The goal, of course, is to get the most points. Note that for track events, your goal is to get a low score x (running fast), so the formula involves (x0–x); in field events you want a high score (throwing far), so the formula is reversed, (x–x0). Don’t ask me how they came up with those exponents β.

You might think the mathematics consultants at the International Olympic Committee could tidy things up by just using an absolute value, |x–x0|β. But those athletes are no dummies. If you did that, you could start getting great scores by doing really badly! Running the 100 meter dash in 100 seconds would give you 74,000 points, which is kind of unfair. (The world record is 8847.)

However, there remains a lurking danger. What if I did run a 100-second 100 meter dash? Under the current system, my score would be an imaginary number! 61237.4 – 41616.9i, to be precise. I could then argue with perfect justification that the magnitude of my score, |61237.4 – 41616.9i |, is 74,000, and I should win. Even if we just took the real part, I come out ahead. And if those arguments didn’t fly, I could fall back on the perfectly true claim that the complex plane is not uniquely ordered, and I at least deserve a tie.

Don’t be surprised if you see this strategy deployed, if not now, then certainly in 2012.

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Great Moments in Framing

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Via Sociological Images.

That’s why you should become scientists, kids! (Because engineers don’t have sex. You want me to spell it out for you?)

I really should just leave it at that, but the sprawling, multifaceted stupidity of this public service announcement — apparently having sex, like smoking the wacky weed, kills brain cells and will cripple your SAT scores, or something — is difficult to let pass without comment. The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing. There are real concerns that adolescents should be taught about — disease and the risk of unwanted pregnancy being the obvious ones. But they should also be taught that, as long as you are careful about such things, there is nothing wrong with having sex. Done correctly, it can be fun! Sure, there can be emotional trauma, awkward moments, broken hearts, impetuous late-night phone calls that you wish you could take back the next day. But these are downsides associated with life, not with sex per se.

But as a society, we’re too uptight and hypocritical to say these things. Instead, we get stuff like abstinence-only sex ed, with predictable results. And adolescence, which isn’t going to be an easy time of life for most people no matter how much sensible advice they are given, becomes just that much more agonizing and uncertain.

Except for engineers, of course! They have it figured out.

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Beyond the Room

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I’m sure Ruben Bolling is making fun of people I disagree with, and not of me.

The underlying point is a good one, though, and one that is surprisingly hard for people thinking about cosmology to take to heart: without actually looking at it, there is no sensible a priori reasoning that can lead us to reliable knowledge about parts of the universe we haven’t observed. Einstein and Wheeler believed that the universe was closed and would someday recollapse, because a universe that was finite in time felt right to them. The universe doesn’t care what feels right, or what “we just can’t imagine”; so all possibilities should remain on the table.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean we can’t draw reasonable a posteriori conclusions about the unobservable universe, if the stars align just right. That is, if we had a comprehensive theory of physics and cosmology that successfully passed a barrage of empirical tests here in the universe we do observe, and made unambiguous predictions for the universe that we don’t, it would not be crazy to take those predictions seriously.

We don’t have that theory yet, but we’re working on it. (Where “we” means an extremely tiny fraction of working scientists, who receive an extremely disproportionate amount of attention.)

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Giggling Uncontrollably

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Paul Krugman puts into anecdote form what many of us frequently feel:

So, you get through grad school. You do research that gets lot of citations. You get tenure. You branch out into policy work, and into writing for a broader audience. You try to play a role in the important economic debates. And finally, you really hit the big time — you’re debating the economy on Larry King, with who knows how many people watching.

And then Larry King wraps it up: “Tomorrow, we’ll talk about psychic kids.”

I was still giggling uncontrollably ten minutes after I left the studio.

(Via Dynamics of Cats. We also serve who link and laugh.)

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The Sneetches

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Atrios is right, this is pretty amusing:

“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.

Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.

In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.

“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.

If Aleya had been keeping up with blogs, she would have been less surprised at Huckabee’s reading level.

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Vice Vice Baby

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Book of Vice Academics, we’ve already decided, are sadly unfamiliar with guilty pleasures. But you know who are the true experts? Public radio show hosts.

Case in point: Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, has taken up the implicit challenge posed by William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, the very existence of which is a monument to the cherished American freedom to expound upon things to which one stands as a shining counterexample. Peter has responded with The Book of Vice, a work that is both infinitely more entertaining and ultimately more educational about the nature of right and wrong.

I can go on a first-name here, as I know Peter from my Chicago days, and we’ve even indulged together in approximately three of the seven types of vice he explores in the book. (I’m also “friends” with Carl Kasell on Facebook, but that’s not a very elite group.) Like any new author, Peter has now started up a blog, and I was able to prevail on our friendship to secure Cosmic Variance a place on its very elite blogroll. You are doubtless imagining a tensely-negotiated quid pro quo according to which I would agree to plug the book, and of course you are correct. But all this talk of virtue and vice activated some tiny shred of conscience that I hadn’t previously suspected, so I actually waited to read the book before I mentioned it. And: it’s great! Which saves me a certain amount of light stepping, book-review-wise.

The conceit of the book is that, unlike bilious blowhard Bill Bennett, whose greatest pleasure in life (other than chain smoking and dropping millions at slot machines) is publicly condemning the moral failures of others, Peter is a genuinely generous and good-hearted person, even shading toward the vanilla in the workings of his everyday life. Vice, in other words, just isn’t his bag. So when he brings his charming wife Beth along on a fact-finding (and strictly non-participating) mission to a partner-swapping swinger’s club, he reports back from the perspective of a fascinated anthropologist, not that of a jaded connoisseur. And, like any good social scientist, he doesn’t pre-judge, but let’s the experimental data determine the conclusions.

As a result, not all vices come in for equal measures of condemnation or celebration. Swapping sexual partners? Kind of boring, and ridden with self-deception. Modern high-tech gluttony? Awesome.

In case you were wondering.

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