Miscellany

Yet more science blogging. All the cool kids are doing it.

Steinn Sigurðsson is an astrophysicst at Penn State, with a new blog called Dynamics of Cats. He already has some good posts up on the crucial question of how to become an astrophysicist: Part 0, Part 1.5. Okay, so he’s an astrophysicist, not a mathematician.

I should also point you to Electron Blue, where Pyracantha explains how your world-view changes when you begin to think in terms of vectors. I would describe it as a shift from Aristotelian to Galilean intuition — the world is a different place once you’ve internalized the conservation of momentum. Quantum mechanics is another shift entirely.

And another thing: as mentioned in the comments to the previous post, Kriston at Grammar.police found some great negatively-curved spaces, made of yarn. (For mathematical details see section 3.9 of Spacetime and Geometry.)

You can’t spend all your time reading about torture and the rule of law and creeping superstition. Take a break and read a little about astronomy, why don’t you? And pause to admire this perfectly useless, somewhat grainy, but undeniably beautiful picture.

The Volokh Conspiracy, one of the places you hope to be able to go for intelligent conservative commentary in the blogosphere, is on a roll. And not a good one.

First, Eugene Volokh comes out in favor of torturing especially heinous criminals before they are executed, like they do in Iran. As a law professor, he understands that this would run counter to the prohibition we have against cruel and unusual punishment, so he suggests amending the Constitution.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

Many responses back and forth. Eventually, after considering arguments made by Mark Kleiman, Volokh slightly retreats, but only because he doesn’t think his proposal would be workable; not because he thinks it’s horrifying.

As Volokh himself says, this actually isn’t an issue that is likely to be resolved by rational argumentation; it’s a matter of “moral intuitions and visceral reactions.” He’s right. My own moral intuition wishes that people in general, and law professors in particular, understood retributory bloodlust as a natural human reaction, but one that we should learn to suppress, not to indulge in. That’s supposed to be one of the features that makes this a better country to live in than most.

Yesterday, David Bernstein expressed outrage that the public schools are wasting money on actually paying salaries to teachers — as much as $45,000 per year for starting teachers. Kleiman again took him to task. (This could become a full-time job.) Not as morally repugnant as Volokh’s intuitions, but another remarkably depressing position.

It’s the usual set of arguments: teachers get summers off, work short hours, get raises that are not based on merit, generally aren’t as smart and talented as, say, lawyers. I think there’s a case to be made that a combination of the teachers unions and the bureaucratic tendencies of local governments introduce a degree of sclerosis into the system. But really, do the people who make these arguments sit down and think about the directions in which the causal arrows are pointing? Yes, teachers can get summers off. Are they supposed to pick up a part-time lawyering job over the summer to supplement their income? The fact is, there’s very little reason under the present system for a talented and ambitious college student to aim at a career as a public school teacher. Isn’t it an important job, for which we should try to attract the brightest practitioners possible?

Elementary and secondary school teaching is one of the worst-paying jobs that a college student can shoot for. Are we surprised that such a system produces some teachers who are under-qualified or under-motivated? And do we really think that cutting their salaries is the way to make it better?

Sometimes my expectations need to be re-adjusted, and other times they’re right on.

Even in the face of all the assaults against teaching evolution in this country, this story mentioned at Pharyngula took me by surprise: science museums that won’t show IMAX films that mention evolution, the Big Bang, or geology.

The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen.

Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject – or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth – fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say – perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film’s bottom line – or a producer’s decision to make a documentary in the first place.

Okay, science museums. That are afraid to talk about evolution, the Big Bang, and geology. Institutions whose nominal purpose is to educate people about science. I just can’t quite wrap my head around this idea. And somehow I don’t think that squeals of outrage from elite Northern liberal bloggers are going to make them change their minds. I’m going to redouble my efforts to help promote the Project Exploration science center that we’re planning here in Chicago, and suggest a greater emphasis on traveling exhibitions of some sort or another.

On the other side of the ledger, we have the Terri Schiavo melodrama. (Good articles at Majikthise and Alas, a Blog.) The last thing the blogosphere needs is more comment about the case. But I was struck by the mention by Ezra Klein (that he got from No More Mister Nice Blog) of a set of talking points being passed around by Republicans.

ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: “This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited…” and “This is a great political issue… this is a tough issue for Democrats.”

In all honesty, my reaction upon reading that was, “That seems like a pretty straightforward memo; I’m not sure what is so notable about it.”

Finally I realized: the thing that was supposed to be shocking is that the GOP is consciously using the case to score political points. The thought that they weren’t — that Frist and DeLay were actually motivated by concern for the woman — had simply never occurred to me.

Sidney Coleman is one of my heroes, too. So you should go read Jacques Distler’s liveblogging of the mini-conference being held in Sidney’s honor.

Sidney was not my thesis advisor (that was George Field, another hero), but he was on my dissertation committee. I had arguably the briefest defense in the history of Harvard’s astronomy department. Bill Press asked all of the questions, and Sidney answered all of them, while I stood there politely. Eventually Bill gave up and they awarded me my degree.

I spent a lot of time in Sidney’s office, and he was always ready to answer questions. This little recognition is long overdue.

Update: Luboš also has a report, with pictures. Also Peter Woit, Serkan Cabi, and David Guarrera.

Blogging is breaking out all over! Lauren Gunderson, a playwright and actor from Atlanta, has started a blog called Deepen the Mystery. (Aside: why is someone who “writes” “plays” called a “playwright“? I mention this only as an excuse for consistently misspelling this elementary word.)

I met Lauren at the Santa Barbara conference; her special expertise is writing plays with scientific themes. One of them, Background, tells the story of Ralph Alpher, who, along with Robert Herman and George Gamow, pioneered the Big Bang model. They more or less figured out the whole story, including predictions for primordial nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. Absolutely ground-breaking work, well above the conventional standard for winning the Nobel Prize and much more — but when the CMB was actually discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965, there was practically no recognition of their work. To this day, although the names of Alpher, Gamow, and Herman are certainly mentioned, they aren’t emphasized as much as they should be. (Alpher and Herman have written a slightly bitter book about the whole thing.) The play tells Alpher’s story backward in time — just as we reconstruct our understanding of the Big Bang.

Lauren’s new blog features a picture of the author jumping with enthusiasm for the new medium. Mark Trodden’s does not. Does this reflect a difference between women and men, or between humanists and scientists? Whatever the explanation, we should be grateful.

Black holes? On Long Island? The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory smashes together heavy ions (no surprise there) in an attempt to re-create the quark/gluon plasma state of the early universe. Horatiu Nastase, a bold theorist, has suggested that certain features of the resulting fireball can be understood in a “dual” description, in which the fireball becomes a ten-dimensional black hole! Duality in this sense means that there is a one-to-one map between the dynamics of the real-world fireball and the completely-imaginary black hole. This seems to be a long-shot suggestion, at best; but certainly an intriguing idea, and worth pursuing. But not in any sense an honest black hole here on Earth. (Not that we should be worried, as the little guys would presumably just evaporate away in a jiffy.)

Peter Steinberg at Quantum Diaries has a fuller explanation.

Update: in the comments, cvj (the nom de internet of Clifford Johnson) mentions that he and his collaborators have been pushing similar ideas for quite some time now. Clifford has set up a web page that talks about the phase diagrams of charged black holes in anti-de Sitter space, which could be dual to hot nuclear matter.

Patricia Barber is of course one of my favorite jazz musicians. She was recently asked by Poetry magazine to write, as an outsider, about poetry. Her comments are reprinted at the Chicago Public Radio website.

I am a songwriter, which is not the same thing as a poet. Poetry is a passion, my ever present guide and inspiration, though I indulge in very little of the lingua franca of the art. The truth is that I guard a deep well of ignorance; I deliberately protect an anti-position.

Music is a demanding but mysterious discipline whose clubhouse is exclusive. Membership is inherited more than earned. It is a gift endowed by blood, then perfected by tremendous desire and perseverance. The best a music teacher can do is lead by example or perhaps draw the student’s ear toward general musical patterns. The task of finding a musical path is left to the student. All musicians understand that even after years of musical scholarship, in the end, composing successfully is a lot like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Unlike the musical language, words are accessible to all. Accessible to too many. There is a myriad of poetry teachers and books on books. Better to stick my fingers in my ears when encountering cocktail chatter about iambic pentameter. “Wonder” has great power, like jet propulsion, like pleasure, and self-discovery is a path to wonder as well as a profound path to knowledge.

“Accessible to too many”? Discuss.

Truth! In the U.S. Senate, no less! Don’t get too used to it, would be my advice.

First, a sense-of-the-Senate resolution, the Nelson amendment, which read:

It is the sense of the Senate that Congress should reject any Social Security plan that requires deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt.

The vote split exactly fifty-fifty, with every Democrat voting in favor. In other words, fifty of fifty-five Republican senators are on the record as favoring either deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt. Probably both!

Meanwhile, in committee, Alan Greenspan tries to slip one by:

Alan Greenspan and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton clashed briefly Tuesday over rosy surplus forecasts the Federal Reserve Chairman relied on to support President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, estimates that turned out to be considerably off the mark.

“It turns out that we were all wrong,” Greenspan conceded at a Senate hearing.

“Just for the record, we were not all wrong, but many people were wrong,” Clinton, D-N.Y., quickly shot back.

I love this tactic (also popular in discussions of Iraq’s WMD) — make some bombastic claim, ignore the opposition, and when you are proven wrong, claim that everyone agreed with you in the first place. Genius.

My friend and frequent collaborator Mark Trodden has buckled under the pressure and finally started a blog of his own, Orange Quark. “Orange” because he is in the Physics department at Syracuse, a Big East power and longtime rival of my alma mater, Villanova. Both schools somehow made it into Slate’s list of NCAA basketball teams we hate, which makes little sense to me.

Mark’s humor and intelligence will be very welcome in the blogosphere. His first post introduces himself, but I should also say that the graduate students at the Cosmo-02 conference voted him “Best-Dressed Cosmologist” in a contest that wasn’t really very close. Okay, so the competition wasn’t all that fierce. There was also a vote for worst-dressed, which had a rather more crowded field. And I’m going to keep the winner of that one secret.

Rumors persist that Lisa Randall will also start blogging soon. I think it would help with her book sales.