Miscellany

When I arrived in Paris, I was hoping to zip quickly through customs, as I hadn’t checked any baggage. But there was a huge line at passport control, for which the explanation was readily apparent: there wasn’t anyone manning the booths, so nobody was going through. We stood for a while in line, quietly grumbling. Suddenly there was a muffled bang that startled the waiting travelers; over a railing we could see security officers dealing with some sort of equipment. Had they just set off a controlled explosion of a suspicious-looking parcel? I have no idea, but officials soon appeared at the passport control booths and we began to move expeditiously through the checkpoints, fanning out to escape the airport.

It’s not so easy to forget the possibility of a terrorist attack here — there are no ordinary metal trash cans on the streets, just transparent green plastic bags hanging from metal hoops. The preference for plastic bags over metal cans goes back to the series of subway attacks in Paris in the mid-Nineties. Even though I’m sure that car crashes (or scooter accidents, in this city) are statistically a much greater threat to one’s health, the constant reminders of more horrific possibilities must exact quite a psychic toll.

Now London has been attacked in a series of bombings. The explosions targeted the public-transportation system at the height of rush hour — clearly designed to kill and hurt the largest possible number of people. The city is used to terrorism, having dealt with the IRA for so many years, except that you never really get used to it. I wonder if the culprits have any feeling whatsoever that their actions will really help redress whatever wrongs they perceive, or whether they act out of simple mindless rage?

London will host the 2012 Olympic Games. All I can say is, thank goodness New York didn’t win. One of the things I noticed here in Paris this week was how much people really did care about hosting the Olympics — it was all people were talking about. I teased them by saying that Hillary Clinton was going to bring it to NYC, but they seemed (correctly, in retrospect) much more worried about that suspicious Tony Blair. Not that I have much actual data, but my feeling is that people on the street in New York weren’t really worked up about this, no? But in Paris this is their third serious bid in recent years (1992 and 2008), and they haven’t hosted since 1924, so this defeat means that it’ll be a long time before the French have any enthusiasm for trying again.

One of the things in London’s favor was, paradoxically, that there would actually need to be a greater effort to get the city in shape for the Olympics. As a result, the Games would leave a greater legacy on the city itself — the East End would undergo a relatively substantial transformation. This might even be true, if my impression is correct about the improvements that Atlanta witnessed when they hosted the Games. But still, I’m surprised that people care so much about this. It’s not like it’s the World Cup or anything.

I mostly slept through Independence Day, and so missed the celebratory fireworks from smashing into another celestial body (Matt McIrvin points to pictures here, here, here, here, and PZ Myers links to movies). For the next two weeks I’m in Paris, which (according to some myths) liberty was invented a couple of centuries ago, and (according to others) it now comes to die. Whatever, the croissants are excellent.

In honor of our freedom, here’s a reminder of the dangers we face, from Brian Leiter.

Herewith Newt Gingrich (as reported by The National Review), former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and still prominent spokesman of the American right (which now runs the country, in case you forgot):

We ought to say to [state university] campuses, it’s over…We should say to state legislatures, why are you making us pay for this? Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law. Tenure is an artificial social construct. Tenure did not exist before the twentieth century, and we had free speech before then. You could introduce a bill that says, proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal.

Why stop there? Why not “proof that you didn’t vote for George W. Bush is grounds for dismissal”? Or how about “proof that you don’t believe in God,” since that’s tantamount to being anti-American anyway? Such a law is obviously unconstitutional, but this apparently didn’t bother Herr Gingrich.

“Proof that you’re anti-American is grounds for dismissal” is such a perfectly anti-American sentiment that I’m surprised Gingrich’s head didn’t explode. Of course, I suspect that his head is made of animatronic plastic and that he’s controlled by radio signals sent from an undisclosed location, but that’s just me.

Here I am, a fully credentialed professional scientist, and I get my cool science tips from BlondeSense. I did know that the NASA probe Deep Impact is scheduled to collide with the comet Tempel 1 early in the morning of July 4th (or late at night on the 3rd, depending on your local time zone). But I didn’t know there’d be a webcast. Don’t expect smooth high-resolution video, but you can get images updated every 45 seconds from Kitt Peak, or watch NASA TV.

I won’t be watching in real time, as I’ll be winging my way over the Atlantic Ocean from Chicago to Paris at the moment of collision, about 12:52 a.m. Central Time on July 4th. You feel sorry for me, I know.

By the way, are the folks at NASA public-relations geniuses, or what? Not only do they schedule the impact for Independence Day, but they’ve made a CD with the names of 650,000 people who signed up for the Send Your Name to a Comet campaign. A copy of the CD is on the spacecraft, and will smash into the comet along with the rest of it. Brilliant. If only they would use their powers for good.

Josh Faber, an astrophysics postdoc at Urbana-Champaign, is looking for ideas. He is working with the Orpheum Children’s Science Museum on projects for an upcoming Einstein day to be held in the fall. They are looking for ideas for hands-on demonstrations that would help teach young kids about various ideas from Einstein’s work (relativity, photoelectric effect, whatever). The idea, as I understand it, is that they are really looking for demonstrations, not just some paragraphs of text. I think that being metaphorical is okay (such as the old chestnut of a curved rubber sheet to represent curved spacetime), but the underlying scientific concepts should be correct.

Leave suggestions in the comments. Let’s see if anyone can come up with anything that makes it into the museum.

Remember when we talked about Chief Illiniwek, the University of Illinois mascot? The Chief’s supporters claim that it’s really a gesture of respect to have a student dress up in war paint and do silly dances — a matter of honoring the bravery of Native Americans. Notice any similarity to the explanations coming from Mexico these days?

The new issue of symmetry magazine has hit the virtual newsstands (and the real newsstands, for all I know). Much good stuff as usual, including a deconstruction of the CMS experiment at CERN that I mentioned a few weeks ago. There is also an interview with new Fermilab director Pier Oddone, who quotes with approval the motto of Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” Apparently the 21st-century realization of this advice is to build a linear collider.

There is also a tiny contribution by me: extra dimensions in 60 seconds. Okay, so I had to gloss over some details. Even better, you can learn that Alan Guth’s real claim to fame is not that “inflation” stuff — it’s that he is the only person to have written papers with both me and Lisa Randall.

Only fifteen minutes into my vacation, but I can hardly resist posting this.

Saddam learned the names of the GIs guarding him, was interested in the details of their lives, which they were not supposed to discuss, and sometimes offered fatherly advice. They conversed in English.

O’Shea said when he told him he was not married, Saddam “started telling me what to do.” “He was like, `you gotta find a good woman. Not too smart, not too dumb. Not too old, not too young. One that can cook and clean.'”

Then he smiled, made what O’Shea interpreted as a “spanking” gesture, laughed and went back to washing his clothes in the sink.

(Mark my words, there will soon be a recognized psychiatric diagnosis for the syndrome which forces people to think “blog this” whenever the read something interesting.)

Much as it pains me, I’m going to go on what bloggers typically call an “hiatus,” although I prefer the term “vacation.” From blogging, anyway. Not that I’m going on any sort of real vacation, but I’ll be traveling like crazy for the next month or two, and between that and the rest of my life I don’t want to feel like a bad person if I don’t blog every day.

I’ll likely still post some stuff, albeit very rarely, for the next few weeks. After that, storm back re-invigorated and saucier than ever.

It’s tough sometimes, being a middle-class straight white American male. I mean, we rule the world, and it’s really hard to get anyone to feel sorry for us. We have feelings too, you know.

So it’s good to know that, as an atheist, I’m a member of an honest-to-God persecuted minority. The latest example comes from Brooklyn College, where Timothy Shortell was forced to decline the position of chair of the Sociology Department after the tabloids discovered that he was an atheist. (Don’t they realize how hard it is to get good department chairs?) Read the story at Majikthise and Feministe. The real source of trouble was an essay on anti-naturals.org, in which Shortell had not-so-nice things to say about religious morality. As Lindsay says,

The essay argues that religious faith undermines an agent’s capacity for true morality. The author makes the rather commonplace observation that people who use a code of “revealed truths” to guide their behavior are shirking the hard work of moral deliberation. The author calls these people “moral retards.” Unfortunately, the author conflates blind followers of religious dogma with thoughtful believers who reason independently within a religiously-informed framework. Make no mistake, the former really are moral retards. They may conduct themselves well if they seize on a sound set of rules, but “just following orders” isn’t a moral position, even if you think you’re just following orders from God.

I’ll be blunt, anyone who claims to be shocked by this line of reasoning in 21st century is either ignorant or disingenuous.* Would the tabloids have prevented Freud or Nietzche from chairing a department at CUNY? They disparaged religion in much harsher terms than poor Tim Shortell, and they did so in the scholarly works that made them famous. Heck, Plato more or less demolished the divine command theory of morality 2400 years ago with the Euthyphro Dilemma.

Jokes aside, this is a completely inexusable violation of academic freedom, not to mention religious freedom. The administrators at CUNY (of which Brooklyn College is a part) should be ashamed of themselves.