Miscellany

Tom Toles.

From Zev at 3w:

How Many U of C Students does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Shhh! We’re trying to study!

Last night at 10:36 the lights in the Reg went off for a good ten minutes and no one budged. Everyone insisted on working by the light of their laptops and that was that. A true UofC moment.

Via Brad DeLong, Don Herzog at Left2Right is taken aback by a remark of Justice Scalia’s during oral argument in Van Orden v. Perry (one of the Ten Commandments cases, from Texas).

JUSTICE SCALIA: And when somebody goes by that monument, I don’t think they’re studying each one of the commandments. It’s a symbol of the fact that government comes — derives its authority from God. And that is, it seems to me, an appropriate symbol to be on State grounds.

Did you all know the “fact” that our government derives its authority from God? I remember being taught in school something about that authority being derived from the consent of the governed, but those were more permissive times.

Read what Herzog and DeLong have to say, there’s very little to add. If you are wondering whether Scalia’s ravings stem from some internally consistent theory, Ed Brayton will set you straight. And a great series of posts at Blondesense demolishes the notion that the Ten Commandments are somehow the basis for our laws: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.

George Musser is an occasional Preposterous commenter, and in his spare time is also an editor at Scientific American. Lacking a blog of his own, he recently contributed to SciAm Perspectives, a blog by Scientific American editors. (Bet you didn’t even know they had a blog, did you?)

George writes about his efforts to follow up on a provocative number he found in the January 8th Economist: “The United States Geological Survey reckons that the economic losses from natural disasters in the 1990s could have been reduced by $280 billion by investing just one-seventh of that sum in such measures [as planting trees, building dikes, and strengthening houses].” That’s a lot of money we could save! But what happens when you try to chase down the source of the claim?

With the written trail having grown cold, I turned to several experts on disaster preparedness, at USGS and elsewhere, and started going down a chain of contacts. It took nearly a month to reach the conclusion that no such report exists, at least not in the collection of any of the researchers who would have been involved in preparing it. The numbers, instead, appear to have come from a Munich Reinsurance report and it is not at all clear that they prove what they were later claimed to prove.

The sad but unsurprising lesson being that you can’t believe everything you read. This is the unfortunate side of the speed with which “memes” can spread in our hyperconnected world — it’s much easier to make an exaggerated claim and get it out there into the meme pool than it is to stamp it out once it’s public. And obviously, this is far from the most pernicious example.

So it turns out that I’m quite wealthy. Not because of any recent windfall, just because I’m a middle-class citizen of a country that is really rich, compared to other countries. Think of it this way: if your annual income is $1,000, you’re solidly in the top 50% of people in the world. Personally, I’m in the top 1% of wealth, with only about 40 million people richer than me worldwide (compared to about six billion who are poorer).

Go check your own position at the Global Rich List (via 3 quarks daily). The idea, of course, is to guilt you into giving more money to charity. I’m a strong believer in donating to charity, but am remarkably guilt-free about being well-off myself. (We won’t get into other things I feel guilty about, like the final exam I gave to my GR class.)

Of course, maybe we could actually do something about it. Jeffrey Sachs thinks we could end extreme poverty worldwide for a mere $150 billion per year. As Daniel Drezner says, this is something we should be talking about more. (He also says that academics can be bloggers, which is good to hear. There does, however, seem to be some risk of alienating your senior colleagues.)

In the most recent issue of symmetry magazine, Joe Lykken talks about how physicists give names to the things they invent and discover, and he calls out cosmologists for their most embarrassing failure.

The cosmologists have the worst of both worlds. They are plagued by non-serious cutesy names, from the Big Bang all the way to Wimpzillas and the Cardassian Expansion. At the same time, they have decided to adopt the name Standard Model to refer to the currently favored cosmological scheme, apparently because their previous name, the “LambdaCDM Concordance Model” was even worse. Should we charge them a licensing fee?

He’s right, of course. We have this amazing model of the universe, with ordinary matter sprinkled lightly amidst the dark matter and dark energy, expanding in accordance with Einstein’s equation from an initially hot, dense state. Using only physics we know, we can extrapolate back fourteen billion years to what the universe was doing when it was just a few seconds old, and make predictions that fit perfectly with observations. And yet we can’t come up with a good name for the mode. (“The Preposterous Universe” is fun, but too cutesy. Likewise “the cosmic martini,” in which ordinary matter is an olive, dark energy is the gin, and dark matter the vermouth. Too goofy, sorry.) The idea is to be both inspiring and descriptive without being silly. Any suggestions?

Here I thought that you knew you had a functioning democracy when the ruling political party voluntarily steps down after losing an election. Ben Sargent is much more sophisticated.

Damn Michael Bérubé. This talk-show idea is too much fun. I spent the drive to campus thinking about who to invite on the show. Here are my choices for the first couple of weeks:

• Mon:Steven Weinberg, Jeanette Winterson, Angelina Jolie
  Musical guest: Medeski, Martin and Wood
• Tue: Larry Summers, Lisa Randall, Cornel West
  Musical guest: Robert Randolph and the Family Band
• Wed: Sir Roger Penrose, Jonathan Lethem, Christopher Walken
  Musical guest: The Bad Plus
• Thu: Richard Dawkins, Tom Stoppard, George Clooney
  Musical guest: Luciana Souza
• Fri: Gary Wills, Richard Friedman, Sister Wendy
  Musical guest: Leonard Cohen
• Mon: Sir Martin Rees, Toni Morrison, Shaquille O’Neal
  Musical guest: Jason Moran
• Tue: Kathleen Sullivan, Karl Iagnemma, Sir Ian McKellen
  Musical guest: Queen Latifah
• Wed: Donald Rumsfeld, Howard Zinn, Uma Thurman
  Musical guest: Bootsy Collins
• Thu: Wendy Freedman, Richard Posner, George Carlin
  Musical guest: Sergio Assad
• Fri: Brian Greene, Barak Obama, Jodie Foster
  Musical guest: Either/Orchestra

I could go on forever. Didn’t even get a chance to invite Amartya Sen, Umberto Eco, or Nigella Lawson. Admit it, this show would rock. We would be crushing Jay Leno like a little bug. Mike Ovitz, call me!

Update: Now with links. Because you’re too lazy to google for yourself, you know you are.

Awesome. Michael Bérubé rewrites the evening TV programming schedule in our new, ideologically-balanced world. I get the coveted 11:00 p.m. slot, which means that I don’t score the prime-time audience, but I have more freedom to explore edgy avant-garde humor. And Dennis Miller is welcome to my office at the Enrico Fermi Institute, I’m cool with that. I have a pile of final exams for him to grade, too.

Like Michael, I’ll be taking suggestions for guests on the show. Probably for the first episode, I’ll invite Steven Weinberg, Jeanette Winterson, and Angelina Jolie. Musical guests will be Medeski, Martin and Wood. Anyone want to audition for the role of fawning sidekick?

A post you shouldn’t miss (and likely have already seen) from Kevin Drum. This is a map of links between political blogs, taken from this study. Blue for liberals, red for conservatives.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that conservatives tend to link to each other more than liberals do; I have no idea why. But the obvious disconnect between the hemispheres is more obvious as well as more interesting: liberal blogs tend to link to each other, as do conservative blogs, and not so much across the divide. (The bloggy version of a phenomenon that has already been noticed in book-buying habits.) And it’s a shame, much as I am guilty of it as anyone else.

Not that it’s an original thought, but I believe this fragmentation is going to have a larger and larger effect on how people view the world. Instead of being forced to get our news through bland, centralized media, Americans are going to be increasingly dependent on sources that are strongly filtered through some ideological lens or another. It will become increasingly impossible for people with different politics to even have sensible conversations, as their impression of the facts will be as different as their impression of what the important issues are. I had a brief glimpse of this when I mentioned to someone of a different political persuasion (you know, the persuasion that considers Fox News to be a reliable source) that I was traveling to Colorado. The immediate response was, “you’re not meeting with that lunatic Ward Churchill, are you?” I worry that moments like this will only grow more common.

Of course, there’s also this:

The study also found (unsurprisingly) that blogs are primarily a medium based on criticism, not support […] Donald Rumsfeld, for example, is cited almost exclusively by liberal bloggers, while Michael Moore is ignored by the left but widely cited by the right.

Right. Keeping in mind, of course, that Michael Moore is a guy who makes movies, while Donald Rumsfeld is the Secretary of Defense. (At which point I realize that this post embodies everything it decries.)