Category: Miscellany

I wanted to link to this cartoon, but PZ Myers beat me to it.

Kerry should have just shifted the topic to string theory. Aren’t politicians trained to answer the question they wanted to be asked, rather than what was actually asked?

Kerry’s penchant for hedging is obviously going to be a major GOP talking point in the upcoming election, in stark contrast with a President who doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “on the other hand.” Of course, to any reasonable person Bush’s single-mindedness and complete lack of doubt is a bad thing; in a complicated world, sometimes a little nuance is called for. Nevertheless, Kerry truly does have a problem with trying to have everything both ways, and deploying lawyerly caveats to make sure he keeps everybody happy. Of course, Clinton had a similar problem, and now he’s a bestselling author, so maybe it’s not an absolute barrier to success.

The press has already fallen for the stereotype of Kerry as being unable to construct a simple declarative sentence. Slate has a feature called “Kerryisms,” in which they strip a quote of its “caveats and curliques.” Eugene Volokh (not a typical Kerry voter, I would imagine) has shown how ridiculous the Kerryisms are (here, here, here); the caveats are very often simple and necessary parts of the meaning of the original statement. Saletan has a completely lame apologia for what he is trying to do. (The real reason for the feature is that Slate has an equally silly “Bushisms” feature, where they make fun of the President for his malapropisms, and as you know it’s important to be balanced.)

The message to future candidates for public office is clear. Speak in cliches, preferably ones with universal appeal. Stick to nouns and verbs, perhaps with an occasional adjective or adverb; anything at the level of a prepositional phrase is sufficient grounds to suspect insincerity or worse. Avoid complicated issues of public policy; the people need to have their hearts lifted by statements of steely resolve, and there’s little time for wonky hair-splitting.

Bush/Cheney ’04: Classical leadership in times of quantum uncertainty.

Way back in the early history of Preposterous Universe (the second post ever, in fact) we mentioned the lovely animated film Les Triplettes de Belleville, in the context of it being robbed by Finding Nemo for the best-animated-film Oscar. Something I had forgotten about, lost in all the excitement, was the appearance of Einstein’s equation in the opening sequence. Nobody is quite sure why. (Einstein’s equation relates the curvature of spacetime to the amount of energy and momentum. For details, see my short introduction to general relativity [pdf].)

The good folks at the American Physical Society have noticed this, and have even initiated a contest to help ferret out the reason for the equation’s appearance.

If nothing else, the filmmakers should be congratulated on choosing a much more profound equation of Einstein’s than the hackneyed old standby E=mc².

By the way, a serious plot flaw in Finding Nemo was pointed out at Rhosgobel:

Clownfish, of Finding Nemo fame, are a good example of a protandrous hermaphrodite: the largest individual fish in a group is female, the next smallest is the reproductive male, and the rest are typically non-reproductive. When the largest female is removed from the population the male becomes female, and a non-breeder becomes male. Thus, in Nemo’s case Marlin (Nemo’s father) should have turned into Marla once Coral (Nemo’s mother) disappeared.

Now that’s a Disney movie that might have been worthy of an Oscar.

Reflecting about the last post reinforces something I’ve noticed for a while: that blogging makes you, if not actually smarter, then at least more careful and better-informed. In the past I might have noticed the story about science education and responded with a practiced sigh. But in blogging about it, I went and took the three minutes necessary to find some actual evidence of how much money teachers made compared to other professions. If my opinions don’t actually change, at least the quality of evidence I can adduce for them improves a great deal.

By the way, I should have recognized that some people wouldn’t take the time to click the link to the study of salaries for different professions of Penn alumni. So, to save valuable time, here are the basic figures in convenient table format:

	Industry	Average Salary
	Communications	$163,414
	Consulting	$147,450
	Elementary/Secondary Education	$47,482
	Financial Services	$471,462
	Government	$82,677
	Higher Education	$58,623
	Law/Judiciary	$186,663
	Manufacturing	$120,324
	Medicine	$197,492
	Non-profit	$68,173
	Other Medical/Health	$100,711
	Other Services	$169,403

I wonder what precisely is included in “Financial Services.” Organized crime? Iraqi reconstruction contracts?

Everyone knows, or should know, that science education in American elementary and secondary schools is a travesty. This long-lamented fact reappeared in the news this weekend, after a group interview with science educators at the National Education Association’s annual meeting. People on the street might wonder whether this is a bit alarmist — is it really worse in the U.S. than elsewhere, or is science education really worse than education in other fields? I don’t know about other fields, but anyone on a college science faculty will tell the same story about comparing the U.S. to Europe and elsewhere: our undergraduate experiences are comparable, graduate education here is the best in the world, but secondary education is an embarrassing failure. All those stories you hear about students graduating from high school not knowing how to use a calculator or that the Earth moves around the Sun? Absolutely true.

Often the lamentations surrounding this state of affairs focus on the idea that we need to be training a new generation of scientists to maintain American supremacy or some such thing. I don’t care all that much about maintaining our supremacy, and I’m not even worried about a new generation of scientists; there are many more people who want to become scientists than we have jobs for them, and the individuals who are really interested in science will get a good education for themselves even if their schools are failing them. But I strongly feel that it’s important for every person to have a basic grounding in science, especially in the basic techniques and methodologies by which science actually works. Everyone should know the basic facts of physics, biology, and chemistry, but they should know how to formulate and test an hypothesis, and the basic notions of understanding data and uncertainties. It’s not that hard, really.

What to do? I’m a big believer that some situations really are solved by throwing money at the problem, or at least they won’t be solved without throwing money. But you have to throw the money in the right direction. New lab equipment and computers are nice, but aren’t in the top three priorities we should be focusing on. To me, these include: 1) Sensible curricula, including realistic studies of methodology, a firm grounding in the basics of each field, and a smattering of exciting modern topics to encourage interest; 2) Vastly improved standards for the training of science teachers, including greater flexibility to allow people with more expertise in science than in education to get involved, and 3) Making elementary/secondary teaching an attractive career option.

It’s only the last of these that requires serious money, but can anyone argue that it isn’t worth it? Look at this study of salaries of liberal arts alumni of the University of Pennsylvania about fifteen years after graduation. It’s a nice sample, since presumably everyone starts with relatively comparable education and employability. And what you find is that elementary/secondary educators are easily the lowest-paid profession (followed closely by college/university teachers!). You can do better working for a non-profit. (You can also generally do better by being male, but you knew that already.) The average teacher’s salary is about $47,000, compared to the average salary for the whole sample of $164,000. You do the math. Why would a talented young person choose this field?

If we had any sense, we would embark on a crash program to double teachers’ salaries across the board over the next ten years. One necessary step would be to shift the income stream for local schools from property taxes to statewide (or, even better, national) income taxes, so that the burden is distributed more equally. It’s not likely to happen, but until it does we’re just slapping new coats of paint on a desperately leaking boat.

Jon Stewart, being interviewed by Larry King, chatting about Bill Clinton.

KING: So you get angry?

STEWART: You get angry because it’s, you are so — so needing of that inspiration and that leadership and that mind and that intelligence and so angry that it would be wasted on such a trifle thing.

KING: Monica Lewinsky…

STEWART: Not to suggest Monica Lewinsky is a trifle. I certainly don’t want to hurt her.

(CROSSTALK)

KING: In an interview with British TV today, she said that Clinton’s description of their affairs an insult to anyone who reads it. Also says that Clinton destroyed her once the liaison became known.

STEWART: She is going to come out now with a line of grief handbags. Hopefully she can knit her way to health. I don’t know the woman. I’m sure she’s very nice, but quite frankly, I find that if I’m embroiled in a scandal I tend to not go on British television if I don’t have to. If I want to heal and be left alone, I tend to perhaps go off and try and find my way inconspicuously in the world as opposed to say going to parties where they might describe me as a portly pepper pot?

KING: Would you book her on “The Daily Show?”

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Would not?

STEWART: I would not.

KING: Have no interest, not curiosity about it?

STEWART: I have no interest. Curiosity in what sense?

KING: About her life. About what she got herself into, the events that occurred around her.

STEWART: I am very familiar with what she got herself into. I have gotten myself into that with people that I know.

KING: Elaborate.

STEWART: Sex, isn’t it? You never? How many times — you’ve been married like 28 times. You never had — come on, you’ve got kids!

KING: Okay, yes.

STEWART: Am I going to have to draw this for you?

KING: No. OK.

STEWART: But do you know what I’m saying? Why is anyone interested in what she does?

KING: Because she’s a victim and a participant and she’s a footnote in history.

STEWART: Footnote in history is the perfect way to describe her and that should close the book. Footnote in history. Thank you. Finally we have some perspective.

Originally linked to at Crooked Timber (pointing to a different quote). Read the whole thing.

Imagine that your home is broken into by a group of physicists with mischief on their minds. They grab your collection of books and CD’s, but instead of just making off with them, they crunch them together to make a black hole. (Applied physicists, obviously.) In the old days, you might have been quite despondent, thinking that all of the information in your collection of music and literature had been lost forever. However, as we all know by now, almost thirty years ago Hawking showed that black holes don’t just sit there, they emit radiation, and in the process of emission they lose energy and eventually evaporate away completely (if you don’t keep putting extra energy in). So now you might think that you could be very clever, and recover the information that you thought was lost: just observe absolutely every particle emitted in the Hawking radiation, and use your knowledge of what came out of the black hole to reconstruct what went in. In practice this would be a bit far-fetched, but in principle this is exactly what you could do if, for example, the pranksters had just set your collection on fire instead of collapsing it to a black hole. Physicists tend to believe that information is never really lost in physical processes, even if it gets re-arranged into less useful forms.

But black holes are different, sadly. To the best of our knowledge, there is no correlation between what went into making the black hole and what kind of radiation comes out. Indeed, there are reasonable-sounding arguments that there can’t be any such correlation. In that case, the information originally present in your books and CD’s has truly been lost.

Of course, we haven’t seen any black holes up close and evaporating, so these are all thought experiments thus far. But it bugs people to no end to think that evaporating black holes violate such a cherished notion of physics; this conundrum is known as the black hole information loss paradox. For a long time we didn’t even know whether the information could somehow be stored in a black hole, much less retrieved; more recently, however, string theorists have shown that (in many cases) that the amount of information in the black hole really is the same as contained in the stuff that went into making it. And there have been a couple of very clever proposals recently, one of which might turn out to be on the right track: Horowitz and Maldacena have suggested that the Hawking radiation that falls into the black hole is carefully arranged to cancel out the information of the infalling matter, effectively transferring it to the outgoing radiation; while Mathur has suggested that we need to dramatically change our ideas about what the interior of the black hole is like, enough so that the information is actually sitting close to the surface where perhaps it can escape more easily.

I bring this up because I have secret inside information which I now feel empowered to reveal, since the rumors seem to be public anyway. Stephen Hawking has asked to give a plenary talk at a big upcoming conference, where he says he will announce a solution to the information loss problem. As a member of the scientific organizing committee of GR17, I got the email request from our chief organizer; was there any chance we would say “no”? But actually I doubt very much that Hawking will simply announce a solution that everyone will agree with. Theoretical physics just doesn’t work that way. Even if he has a clever idea, people will have to wrestle with it themselves before it would catch on. Also, Hawking isn’t always right; for a long time he has been insisting that information really is lost, which is certainly a minority viewpoint. Unfortunately I won’t be at the conference, which is July 18-23 in Dublin. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing news reports about Hawking’s talk; the media love him, for good reason.

It’s generally a good idea to hold people who are on our side to higher, rather than lower, standards than people to whom we are opposed. That is why, for example, prisoner abuses by our own soldiers are upsetting in a different way than equivalent actions by terrorists would be (not that either are okay).

And that’s why I didn’t think much of Fahrenheit 9/11. I should say that it did live up to my expectations, which weren’t that high. Michael Moore is a talented polemicist and agitator, but also someone who is perfectly willing to use cheap ploys and judicious editing to create an emotional impact rather than a reasoned argument.

Moore has an overarching idea that colors everything he does: the conflict between the heroic genius of the virtuous working classes against the self-interested venality of the wealthy. As a result, the first half of the movie concentrates on an issue that is interesting but by no means central: the close connections between the Bush family and the Saudi ruling classes. (See also comments at Crooked Timber, Majikthise and uggabugga.)The connections are real, and worrisome; but even in the context of the movie it is not exactly clear what we are supposed to be concluding from the existence of the relationship. The movie would have been much better if it had concentrated on the war in Iraq and how it could ultimately prove disastrously counterproductive in the fight against terror, but this topic is sacrificed to concentrate on images of Prince Bandar and the Saudi embassy. Furthermore, Moore’s singlemindedness prohibits him from appreciating that there were multiple reasons for turning to Iraq; many people in the administration were actually idealistic about the opportunity to establish democracy in the Middle East. They might have been crazy, but the reasons for the Iraq war stretch well beyond the straightforward desire for increased oil revenues.

As far as technique is concerned, Moore has never met a theatrical stunt or piece of sentimental melodrama that he didn’t like. Concerned that members of Congress haven’t closely studied their own Patriot Act? Drive around in an ice-cream truck reading it out loud. The second half of the movie is driven by interviews with a Michigan woman whose son has been killed in the war. We get pictures of her crying, talking proudly about the military service in her family, worrying about job prospects for the youth of her community, and being dragged to the White House to cry again. From this I think we are supposed to understand that war is hell. I don’t see how this should be any more persuasive about the failure of our Iraq policy than interviews with the family of victims of accused murderers should sway our opinion of the death penalty.

Unlike some of my fellow liberals, I do not think that these manipulative rhetorical devices are okay when deployed in the service of liberalism because we all know that conservatives do much worse (an extension of the Lieberman doctrine that the U.S. can do nothing wrong since the terrorists were much worse). This judgment flows from a dramatic new ethical theory I have just now developed, called “two wrongs don’t make a right.” As has been pointed out elsewhere, Moore’s movies are like strident political cartoons; they can make you laugh and feel better if you are predisposed to agreeing with their point of view, but they’ll never convince you of anything. Which is too bad, since I’m sure there is plenty of good material out there to make a compelling documentary that sets out well-reasoned objections to our current misadventures. Or is that asking too much?

Last night at a jazz club I was talking to a graduate student at the UofC Divinity School, trying to explain the concept of extra dimensions of spacetime. The possibility of extra dimensions is one of the most exciting ideas in modern physics, but also the one I’ve had the most trouble elucidating to non-experts. (For noble attempts, see here, here, here, here, here.) I’m not completely sure why this is the one thing that is hardest to understand.

How do we know there are three dimensions of space? The simplest way is to take a set of meter sticks and tie them together, such that every one is perpendicular to every other one. What is the largest number of sticks for which you can do that? Three. If we lived in a world with two spatial dimensions, it would only be two, but if there were extra large dimensions it would be some bigger number. Given that we have developed mathematical techniques for describing the geometry of one-dimensional curves, two-dimensional surfaces, and three-dimensional spaces (not to mention four-dimensional spacetime), it shouldn’t be too surprising that we can straightforwardly generalize to higher numbers of dimensions. But people who spend their free time doing something other than studying mathematics don’t want to hear that — they want to know how you can visualize all these extra dimensions. We try our best, but ultimately you can’t really do it, and you have to resort to metaphor.

When trying to explain extra dimensions, there are a few standard analogies we always trot out. One is a straw, or garden hose. We can idealize a straw as a two-dimensional cylinder, but if you look at it from very far away it looks essentially one-dimensional. This is supposed to capture the idea that there can be extra compact dimensions at each point in space. I think this analogy is perfectly transparent, and everyone who hears it should instantly comprehend this otherwise difficult concept. But the actual reactions run the gamut from blank stares to gently-furrowed brows. (A very tiny gamut.) When I’m trying to explain this in a radio interview, it’s even worse, as the complete lack of visual aids renders me helpless. Is there some better metaphor lurking out there?

If string theory is right and there are seven extra dimensions curled up at every point in our apparently three-dimensional space, we are actually smeared out uniformly throughout these dimensions. This smearing can ultimately be traced back to our status as relatively low-energy phenomena in the universe. Something physicists take for granted is the connection between energy and distance: to access phenomena at very small scales (like a tiny curled-up extra dimension) requires the focusing of extremely high energies. That’s why we’re hoping to find evidence for extra dimensions at particle accelerators. It’s a long shot, though; we’re gradually increasing our reach in energy, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if the extra dimensions were well beyond our currently conceivable experiments.

Probably the best way to explain extra dimensions is to imagine that there were fewer dimensions, and how inhabitants of these lower-dimensional worlds could be convinced of the existence of three spatial dimensions. This was the strategy taken in Edwin Abbott’s classic social satire Flatland. Let’s not forget, however, that once the protagonist is convinced of the existence of extra dimensions and starts spreading the word, he’s thrown into jail for his subversive ideas.

Although I didn’t really succeed in conveying much understanding about extra dimensions, I did learn something about the divinity school: many, if not most, if its faculty members don’t believe in God. “Pretty skeptical about religion” was the description offered. I wonder if this phenomenon is widespread in divinity schools elsewhere?

Jarhead by Anthony Swofford is an account of Swofford’s experiences as a young Marine in the first Gulf War. It’s a riveting book, well worth reading, especially for the description of the training and culture of the Marines. There is not much combat in the book, largely because the combat phase of the war was so short. But there is some interesting insight about the relations between the U.S. forces and the local population. This story takes place in Saudi Arabia, after a small group of Marines have encountered a tribe of Bedouins who were complaining that someone had been using their camels for target practice.

We drive back to the Triangle on the superhighway and I sit in the back of the Hummer with Dettmann and Crocket and tell them what occurred with the Bedouins. They think the story is funny, and they both laugh and make jokes about “camel jockeys.” I’m not happy to be in the Triangle, and I’m even less happy about going to war as a hired man for another government, but I find their heartlessness particularly disturbing. I want to defend the Bedouins against this assault from these ignoramuses.

The Bedouins are not our enemy, and the Bedouins will not try to kill us whenever the Coalition decides to act. I’ve just experienced a human moment with the Bedouin, free of profanity and anger and hate. Because they are ignorant and young and have been well trained by the Corps, Dettmann and Crocket are afraid of the humanity of the Bedouin, unable to see through their desert garb into the human.

Before I have a chance to tell Dettmann and Crocket the reasons they are wrong, before I have an opportunity to explain the difference between the Bedouin and the Iraqis, a Mercedes sedan approaches from the rear, traveling at high speed. We occasionally see large Mercedes sedans on the superhighway, a Saudi male driving with a female or a few females in the backseat, each wearing a hijab, the traditional Muslim head covering. These brief, high-speed glances are our only exposure to the citizens of the country we’re protecting (the Bedouins are less citizens of the country than denizens of the land). We’re sure the Saudis prefer this arrangement. We are the ghost protectors. As the car closes in, Crocket stands in the back of the Humvee, holds the crossbar with one hand, and puts his other hand to his mouth, flicking his tongue between the two fingers. The driver of the Mercedes turns his head slowly, a little late to see Crocket, but one covered woman sits alone in the backseat of the car, and I watch her eyes follow Crocket’s rude gesture. I don’t know if she’s registering shock or confusion or disgust, but I know I will always remember her eyes, locked on the crude young American.

The Mercedes blows past and Crocket and Dettmann yell profanities and excitedly slap each other on the back. Dettmann calls Crocket a “ballsy motherfucker,” and Crocket says, “That bitch will never forget me. She wanted me.”

It’s not hard to see why sending our armed forces into a foreign country tends not to be an effective way to capture hearts and minds. The Marines are nineteen-year-old kids, far from home and trained in the difficult and specialized arts of winning wars. They are not a skilled cadre of career diplomats. And that’s the way it should be; empathy for the Other is not a skill that helps soldiers win battles, and might even help you get killed. Being a fighter is different than being a negotiator or statesman. If we are going to make a habit of nation-building in countries that aren’t fully convinced of our benevolence, we’re going to have to figure out better ways to manage the transition from battle to rebuilding.

Here’s hoping that all goes relatively well for the people of Iraq, who were graciously handed their sovereignty a couple of days early. Even if their new government arose out of the fevered imaginations of crypto-imperialist neoconservatives, we should all wish that the experiment with democracy turns out to be a true success. I don’t have much reason to believe that a real government by the people has a better chance of taking hold in Iraq than it does in, say, Russia, but I absolutely hope I’m wrong.

Meanwhile, the rule of law seems to be catching on in the United States as well, as the Supreme Court has used their combined legal acumen to determine that the President does not have the right to detain people for years without bringing charges or any access to the court system. It feels like a Leonard Cohen song is breaking out.

(Sorry for not linking to any other clever blogospherical thoughts on these weighty matters — still running around in headless-chicken mode.)