Miscellany

I remember, back in 1992 when the Dream Team of NBA stars first participated in the Olympics, someone telling me with a straight face that the US would never lose a basketball game in international competition again. Why not? Because basketball is a black person’s sport, and the Europeans and South Americans just couldn’t compete athletically.

Someone forgot to tell the Argentinians and Italians, as the former beat the latter for the gold medal yesterday. The US managed to squeak by a small former Soviet republic to claim the bronze. The team played hard, but was under-prepared and put together badly for this kind of competition, with a bunch of swingmen who can drive to the basket and a significant lack of big men and outside shooters.

Who comes out of the fiasco looking the best, from the US side? None other than poster boy for selfishness Allen Iverson.

To the Shaqs and Garnetts and T-Macs and Ray Allens who had better things to do than protect their homegrown game, Iverson said: “They have to understand that, first and foremost, it’s an honor to be selected on this team. It’s something that you should cherish for the rest of your life, and honestly, it’s something I will cherish without winning the gold medal.

“I feel good about taking part in something like this. I feel like a special basketball player to be selected to a team like this.”

To his former coach in Philly, Brown, who complained about the only-in-America rush job needed to field an Olympic team when he wasn’t busy ripping his players and the USA Basketball selection committee that picked them, Iverson said: “I don’t want to make (the rush job) an excuse. I think the time that we had, it was already known that that’s how much time we were going to have. And we had to understand from the first day that that was the amount of time we had to prepare.”

Like Lindsay, I don’t really care that much about the Olympics. But it was sad to hear that the US team went from being worshipped a decade ago to being booed off the court this year. Of course, that might have something to do with issues other than basketball.

I’m back from the European Forum in Alpbach (where I was referred to as “herzig,” which I think is good). Many thanks to Lindsay for keeping things active while I was away. Only after getting there did I understand what the Forum is about, partly because it is such a sprawling multi-dimensional thing that a focus can be hard to pinpoint. There are many events involving all sorts of discussions on politics, culture, and anything else (science is represented, but only as an amusing distraction). The seminar week, which is what I was there for, is almost a summer school; twelve seminars go on for a week of lectures, and about three hundred students (largely graduate and professional students) from throughout Europe come to listen and participate in the discussions. But the definition of “student” is pretty loose, and a good number were well past their student days.

What became clear only gradually was that, since most of the students are interested in public policy questions, many of the attendees are there largely to network amongst their fellow students, rather than to actually attend the seminars. And the seminars they did attend were those that related in some way to their careers; i.e. questions of European politics. So everyone was interested in our little cosmology discussion, but very few people actually came to it.

That’s okay, since you can still learn interesting things by talking to the other attendees. Issues of the European Union were especially popular, for understandable reasons. Someone gave me an article to read by Stephen Breyer, my favorite Supreme Court Justice (although if Kathleen Sullivan is ever appointed, she will be granted this coveted honor), musing about the new European Constitution. It was fascinating reading, especially because Breyer was trying very hard to be polite but clearly has substantial worries about the new document.

One of his worries is obvious: the new constitution is far too long (about eighty percent of it should be cut, in Breyer’s estimation). In an effort to keep everybody happy, the framers have stuck all sorts of things into the constitution that should be ordinary law. One of the crucial features of a constitution is that it should be possible, but very hard and extremely rare, to amend it; so it should stick to enshrining absolutely bedrock principles rather than including every policy we might agree upon at the moment. (He also points out that the European court will have over twenty justices, speaking multiple languages, and can’t resist mentioning the difficulty that he and his eight very capable colleagues sometimes have in reaching consensus, even in a common language.)

The more subtle of Breyer’s points is the ease with which the constitution will allow centralization of power. From personal experience, he knows how ambiguous language in a constitution can be interpreted to funnel more authority to the federal government. He mentions the example of education, where the constitution innocently gives the European Commission power to pass rules to facilitate cooperation and compatibility between the educational systems of the member states. Who could object? Well, cooperation takes a lot of forms — Breyer imagines that before too long the EC will be passing whatever regulations it likes on school systems throughout Europe, all in the name of increased cooperation. It will be interesting to see how the constitution actually fares in action (although they did manage to keep Christianity out of the preamble, despite heavy Papal lobbying).

So, while we’re at it, do Europeans hate Americans? Well, the participants at Alpbach are traditionally conservative, establishment-oriented types, who generally are more pro-American than their lefty counterparts. But one over-simplified way to describe the current situation is that both left-wing and right-wing Europeans are horrified by our current administration. They don’t hate Americans, but the disgust with the Bush regime is palpable. Of course, these are people who will willingly sit through hours of discussion and dialogue relating intricate philosophical questions to concrete issues of policy; something tells me Bush wouldn’t like them, either.

If there’s one thing that you learn by being in academia, or by being a blogger for that matter, it’s to speak with authority on things you know little about. On Sept. 1st I get to put my skills to some use, participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company. Their upcoming season, entitled “Chaos Theory and Other Family Gatherings,” features three plays with some connection to science: Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, and Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones. Each play will be commented on by an expert of some sort or another, and then we will all join in with artistic director James Bohnen to discuss connections and so forth. I’m responsible for Humble Boy, and will also give some sort of lecture when the play opens in the spring (not that you can glean any info about it from the RBTC website).

I haven’t actually read the play yet — that’s a project for the plane ride home — but I’ve learned some of the basics about it. It’s loosely inspired by Hamlet, and features as its central character an indecisive theoretical physicist who is struggling in his personal life when he’s not busy trying to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. (Well, who isn’t?) I’m crossing my fingers here — the track record of authors using science as a source of metaphor and imagery is a mixed one, at best. I’ll let you know how it goes.

And now I need to hop in a train and cross the Alps. You’re in Lindsay’s capable hands for the duration.

Being a science journalist has to be one of the most difficult jobs I can think of, requiring both common journalism skills as well as an ability to understand and judge the importance of claims in a wide variety of obscure specializations. Still — a lot of it is very bad. Which is a shame, since so many people get most of their knowledge about contemporary science through the news.

Fortunately, there are certain strategies that can help you understand what is really going on when you read a piece of science journalism. As an example, let’s consider the breaking news about the cave linked to John the Baptist that has just been found in Israel.

TZOVA, Israel (Reuters) – A British archeologist has dug up evidence linking John the Baptist to a cave used for bathing rituals in hills near Jerusalem in what he said could be one of the biggest recent finds for Christian history.

Shimon Gibson, who has been digging in the Holy Land for nearly three decades, told Reuters he believed the cave, hewn 24 yards deep into a rocky hillside, might also have been visited by Jesus as well as New Testament preacher John.

Okay. For a start, these claims seem pretty grandiose. I don’t know anything about archeology, and precious little about Biblical history, so for all I know this guy could be completely accurate. But you do worry a little when scientists not only make absolutely fantastic claims, but seem willing to extrapolate far beyond what they have actually found evidence for (in this case, talking about Jesus). There is pressure to make your findings sound interesting to the public, and sometimes we get overly enthusiastic, but this is definitely a warning sign.

Discovered by Gibson in 1999, excavations at the cave since then have revealed a large bathing pool as well as objects used for anointing rituals that would be quite different from those used by most Jews there nearly 2,000 years ago.

Gibson, 45, said evidence of specific links to John at the site came from drawings made 400 to 500 years later, which portrayed him in a similar way to other Byzantine art. One of the pictures also showed John’s severed head.

Perhaps this is just me, but that last paragraph makes no sense. Are the drawings at the site, or are there drawings elsewhere that link John to the site? Why do we care that he is portrayed in a similar way to other Byzantine art? How do we know that the drawings are of John the Baptist? Most of all, do the conclusions being reported here rely on the assumption that there are no distortions that might creep into an oral record over a period of 400 years?

“Nothing like this has been found elsewhere,” Gibson said. “It is the first time we have finds from the early baptismal period … It is an amazing discovery that happens to an archeologist once in a lifetime.”

The discovery, 15 minutes drive into hills west of Jerusalem, is due to be announced officially Tuesday, ahead of the launch of a book by Gibson.

Ding ding ding! He’s writing a book. Already has written one, in fact. So there might be some conflict of interest between appropriate scientific skepticism and the selling of the story. Also, why is the finding only being announced now? It must have taken some time to write the book — presumably the archeological finding would have been published in a reputable journal some time back?

Any discovery of sites linked to the Bible is certain to stir controversy and its share of skepticism, but Gibson said he had carried out many tests to satisfy himself that his theory was sound. The Bible describes John performing baptisms — including that of Jesus — in the River Jordan, a good 25 miles east over the Judean desert.

But Gibson said the site at Tzova could be linked to early years “when John sought solitude ‘in the wilderness.”‘

Okay, now we are told that there is actually a conflict between what we know about John and where the cave was found. And a flimsy explanation is offered. But we are supposed to be reassured, since Gibson himself has carried out many (unspecified) tests. Notice that there are no outside experts quoted in the article. Even when there are, you need to take what they say with a grain of salt, since they have typically not had a chance to review the claimed findings in any detail, and have to rely on their general expertise in the subject area. When they are completely absent, it’s a bad sign.

“In addition to John the Baptist, there’s a possibility that Jesus used this cave as well,” said Gibson.

Yes. There is also the possibility that Alexander the Great slept there, and the Loch Ness monster has visited. There are lots of possibilities. If there were any actual evidence that Jesus had been there, do you think we’d spend so much time talking about John the Baptist?

Gibson said he was sure the cave could not have been put to other uses — as a water store or a hideout for example — or that it was used by any other group carrying out similar types of rituals around the same time as John.

“I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence,” said Gibson, who said he was not religious himself. “Pilgrims will be flocking to the cave.”

What coincidence? That some non-famous person was using the cave for some good reason? Most of the people alive two thousand years ago were not celebrated figures from the Bible, and most archeological findings are not going to represent important events in the lives of famous people.

Again, I have no expertise in this actual area, and for all I know Gibson may turn out to be completely correct and his findings may go down in history as a major breakthrough. But we don’t have evidence for that from this story. The journalist can always say that they are simply reporting what they have been told. But I don’t really think that is the end of the journalist’s job — it’s perfectly appropriate to exercise some judgement about the claims being made. Unfortunately, if you spend just a day talking to outside experts and verifying the credibility of the story, your rivals will get the story out before you, and that’s the major criterion for success in the news business. So it’s up to the readers to use their own judgement.

My personal experiences have been with stories about science. But something tells me that stories about politics are not that different.

Switzerland is a very cosmopolitan country (despite clinging to their own currency rather than bowing before the Euro), with no fewer than four official languages (German, French, Italian, and Romansh). On the Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Geneva, each announcement was first made in German and then repeated in both French and English. I don’t know whether the English was simply a bow towards the universal language of the world, or whether the fact that the flight was officially a code-share with United had something to do with it.

The existence of multiple official languages must create occasional headaches. Of course, in the U.S. we don’t have any official language, attempts by organizations like U.S. English notwithstanding (warning: cheesy patriotic music). And English doesn’t have an official governing body, so we don’t have to live through nonsense like the German spelling reform. Which I think is a good thing, since like Steven Pinker I fall firmly on the descriptivist side of the descriptivist/prescriptivist debate over the nature of language, believing that rules bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. (Although I enjoy reading David Foster Wallace defending the opposition.)

Despite our lack of central authority, the usage of American English is probably more standardized than either French or German. But we do have charming regionalisms, which have been studied in the fascinating Dialect Survey. The Dialect Survey maps will tell you, for example, that “the devil is beating his wife” is simply Southern for “sunshower,” while the important dibs/shotgun distinction has no strong geographical bias. I was interested to see that my linguistic upbringing was almost perfectly standard, in that I fall into the majority category of almost every regionalism. The one noticeable exception was that I grew up calling subs “hoagies,” a distinct Philadelphia/New Jersey usage. And I am shocked to learn that nearly half of the country refers to sneakers as “tennis shoes.” Takes all kinds, I guess.

Also, over seven percent of Americans have no word to describe the concept of ogling. How do they make it through the day?

Greetings from Frankfurt airport! I have nothing special to say, but it just feels especially modern and sophisticated to be able to sit in a European airport cafe and post to the same blog that I would from home. German was the language that I took in high school, but it appears to have completely fled my brain; when I try to talk to any of the airport staff, it comes out in French, and I don’t even speak French. Fortunately they all speak English, as nobody is surprised to hear. Unfortunately, Germany seems to be one of those benighted countries in which the default mode for cappuccino is to have cinnamon on top.

No sleep on the flight over. All of my immediate neighbors were part of a single group, who seemed new to the concept of transatlantic travel, and thought it would be fun to chat the night away rather than grabbing a precious hour or two of sleep. What kind of group was it, you may ask? Well, they were going to Athens. For the Olympics. But not to actually watch the sporting events. No, they were going to be handing out tracts to passers-by, trying to persuade them to accept Jesus as their savior. (Chick tracts? I don’t know, and feared to ask.) I alternated between reading the latest Harry Potter book (now out in paperback) and working on a paper on the Big Bang — so I don’t know if they didn’t proselytize to me because they were saving their energies for Greece, or because they had given up on me without even trying.

Okay, so I did have something to say. I’m just too exhausted to say it in any sort of nuanced way.

The image of the United States in the world has, to be sure, taken a big hit over the last couple of years. Clearly drastic measures are called for. What better way to get people throughout the world to think better of us than to let them listen to some cool jazz? Something along those lines must have been going through the minds of the clever folks at the State Department and Lincoln Center, when they got together to start the Jazz Ambassadors program.

The idea is to assemble a few small groups of talented (and hopefully diplomatic) musicians, and send them on several-week tours of places that don’t get much exposure to US culture. I know about it because Michael Raynor, a friend of mine who is Von Freeman‘s drummer, has just left for a tour with the Chicago Jazz Quartet, a group thrown together for just this purpose. They will be visiting Vietnam, Thailand, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh before returning to the City of the Broad Shoulders. Perhaps, through the wonder of swinging, improvised music, they can bring peace and prosperity to the far reaches of the earth. Or maybe they will merely entertain and stimulate some audiences of people who think of Rambo when anyone mentions the United States. Which would make the project more than worthwhile.

Meanwhile, I shall go hop on a plane, and when you next hear from me I should be in Geneva, land of international banking, accurate timepieces, and high-energy particle physics. Further reports as events warrant.

The National Science Foundation runs a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which provides funds to universities that would like to sponsor undergrads to visit for the summer and engage in some real live research. This summer I’ve been advising Suz Tolwinski from Brown (see a tiny picture at my group web page), who gave a presentation this morning on what she’s accomplished.

Undergraduate research experience is very valuable, but it’s hard to do as a theorist, since there is so much background knowledge required before you can do original work. I’ve advised a few undergrads, both during the school year and during the summer, and usually ask them to learn enough general relativity and cosmology that they can at least begin to answer an original question. (Actually, I usually just say “no,” but occasionally the stars align correctly and I agree to advise someone.) If all goes well, at least they will learn a lot of good physics. But teaching yourself GR over a summer, with time enough left over to work on a real problem, is undertaing a tremendous task. Suz did a great job, learning both GR and some bits of classical field theory from scratch, and then investigating whether Lorentz-violating vector fields would lead to an observable anisotropy (direction-dependent stretching) in the expansion of the universe. This is an extension of work I did with Eugene, except that Eugene’s vector fields were pointing in a timelike direction, and Suz’s were spacelike. Which is actually harder! So I was very impressed with the final project.

Actually, I was impressed with all of the REU presentations this morning, on topics from waves traveling through sand to numerical investigations of cellular automata. It was a tremendous joy to hear about the accomplishments of these students, especially when you remember that doing physics research is not how most undergraduates spend their summer vacations. Being an academic can be a stressful occupation, as discussed recently in posts at Pharyngula and Uncertain Principles (referencing several other academic blogs, including Making Contact, Steven Krause, Playing School, Irreverently, Just Tenured, Barely Tenured, and Bitch. Ph.D.). One of the things that Suz has been wondering about is how happy one actually is as a science professor, especially after talking to current graduate students and hearing stories of, shall we say, incomplete contentment. I’m not the most representative person to comment on the pros and cons of academia, since I’ve been passionately in love with the idea of being a professor ever since I understood what it meant. I mean, our job is to teach and do research; what could be better than that? There are certainly less-fun parts of the job (applying for grants, grading, committee meetings, etc), and it can undoubtedly be stressful and over-competitive. But it’s too easy to get run down by these aspects and forget about the exhilarating ones. Listening to a collection of talented and enthusiastic students explain the research they’ve been doing over the summer is an excellent way of being reminded.

Tangled Bank #9 is now online over at Pharyngula. The idea behind Tangled Bank is to collect together a weekly greatest hits of science/nature posts in the blogosphere and stick them in one place for easy consumption. The greatness of the posts themselves is decided upon by their authors; if only more things in life worked that way.

Most of the TB posts are oriented toward the biological sciences; I sneaked myself in only on the basis of my dinosaur reports. Maybe they should do more physical sciences?

On Friday I head off again for a couple of weeks, and blogging abilities might be spotty. I’m spending a few days visiting friends at CERN, the particle accelerator in Geneva where the World Wide Web was born, so presumably it won’t be too hard to find an internet connection (although things might be hectic). After that it’s off to the European Forum Alpbach, where Bob Wald and I will be giving a series of lectures on cosmology. Alpbach seems pretty far away from everything (not even a train station), and I’m guessing it’s rather isolated.

So I’m very happy to introduce another guest-blogger to keep things cooking while I’m away: Lindsay Beyerstein will be piloting Preposterous while I’m galivanting around the Alps. Lindsay is the proprietess of Majikthise, one of the most stimulating and well-written blogs out there, as you will soon discover if you haven’t already.

I am hoping that my willingness to choose guest-bloggers who are more entertaining than I am will be seen as an indication that I am self-confident enough to not fear being upstaged, much like John Kerry choosing John Edwards as his running mate.