Miscellany

From the Reuters story about our raid on Chalabi’s headquarters:

An opinion poll found only seven percent of Iraqis now viewed U.S. troops as “liberators,” compared to 45 percent six months ago.

The poll was conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies in April, before pictures of soldiers abusing prisoners drove another wedge between Americans and Iraqis.

Do you think it’s improved since then?

More evidence for an accelerating universe, this time from the Chandra X-ray satellite observatory. They observe X-rays from the hot gas in distant clusters of galaxies. A cluster is just a set of galaxies bound together by their mutual gravitational pull; but in addition to the galaxies themselves, the cluster is full of hot gas between the galaxies, not to mention dark matter. This picture is of the cluster Abell 2029; in blue you see the galaxies (visible in ordinary light) and in red the hot gas (reconstructed from the X-ray image). Knowing the properties of the gas, they can figure out the distances to the clusters. Comparing these with the redshifts (which tell us by how much the universe has expanded since the light we see left the cluster), we can reconstructe the expansion history of the universe.

The answer they get for the acceleration is consistent with our recent consensus model for cosmology, including substantial dark energy that seems to be nearly (or exactly) constant as the universe expands. So, not a dramatic overthrowing of what we already knew, but a nice confirmation. Which is very important, when the thing you’re confirming is as surprising and ill-understood as the acceleration of the universe. Our previous evidence (from distances to supernovae, temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and the dynamics of galaxies and large-scale structure) was very good, but every extra piece of evidence bolsters the case for this preposterous universe.

Chandra is named after Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, one of the leading theoretical astrophysicists of the 20th century. Also a longtime University of Chicago faculty member, and part of a tradition at NASA of naming its satellite observatories after famous scientists with UofC connections — Chandra was preceded by the Hubble space telescope, named after a prominent alumnus, and the Compton gamma-ray observatory, named after another former faculty member. This tradition ended with the Spitzer infrared observatory, but that’s okay because Lyman Spitzer was my grand-advisor (the Ph.D. advisor of George Field, my adviser). After that things went dramatically downhill, with the successor to Hubble being named after James Webb, a former NASA administrator.

Maybe I will not stop posting happy things until all the evil people go away. That might work, don’t you think? From Circa75 via Atrios, a first-person account of getting a marriage license in my old home town of Cambridge.

A sign poking up from the crowd saying “YAY” caught my eye. Some people had “Toto, we’re not in Kansas, Welcome to Equality” signs for the Phelps folks, but the crowd had grown so large you couldn’t tell if they were still there.

Aaron and I looked at each other, mouths open. Who are all these people? They’re not all here to get married, right? Where do we go? Are these all straight people? This is incredible! We didn’t speak, but we were clearly thinking the same thing.

I thought I caught a glimpse of a couple walking up the stairs before one enormous cheer, but I couldn’t be sure. We edged closer to the steps, and I could suddenly see a line of cops in riot gear leading up to the main entrance. I turned to one of them and asked him if we were too late to get in for a license.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We’re just keeping this area clear. You can’t stand here.”

…

At that point another cop walked up to people standing behind us and told them they had to clear a path. He started towards us, and Aaron grabbed me and pulled me back into the crowd.

“I think we can just walk up here,” I told him. “Come on!”

Aaron grabbed my hand and we walked forward up the steps.

Off to my side someone said, “Look, here goes someone else!”

Suddenly a roar erupted all around us. Things began to move more slowly. I grabbed Aaron’s hand tighter and started running forward up the steps. Everything was a blur. I lost his grip briefly as he stopped close to the entrance to accept a rose from someone in the crowd. I paused at the top of the steps, and turned to wait for him.

I’ve been in front of some large, happy, and cheering crowds before, but only on a stage — never with a throng pressing in from all sides, with clapping hands outstretched, cameras flashing, and a deafening roar.

I stood there facing the crowd as Aaron walked towards me with a sparkle-encrusted yellow rose and a huge grin on his face. As he reached me, I put my hand around his waist and waved to the crowd. I tried to look at all the people, but my eyes couldn’t focus.

Try to read the whole thing without getting choked up, I dare you.

From Matt Stoller by way of The Poor Man, one of the funniest things you’ll ever read: the 2000 Republican Party Platform. Probably it wasn’t so amusing at the time, but age does wonders. Here, just a few choice excerpts:

“The arrogance, inconsistency, and unreliability of the administration’s diplomacy have undermined American alliances, alienated friends, and emboldened our adversaries.”

“Nor should the intelligence community be made the scapegoat for political misjudgments. A Republican administration working with the Congress will respect the needs and quiet sacrifices of these public servants as it strengthens America’s intelligence and counter-intelligence capabilities and reorients them toward the dangers of the future.”

“The current administration has casually sent American armed forces on dozens of missions without clear goals, realizable objectives, favorable rules of engagement, or defined exit strategies. Over the past seven years, a shrunken American military has been run ragged by a deployment tempo that has eroded its military readiness. Many units have seen their operational requirements increased four-fold, wearing out both people and equipment.”

“The rule of law, the very foundation for a free society, has been under assault, not only by criminals from the ground up, but also from the top down. An administration that lives by evasion, coverup, stonewalling, and duplicity has given us a totally discredited Department of Justice.”

“Sending our military on vague, aimless, and endless missions rapidly saps morale. Even the highest morale is eventually undermined by back-to-back deployments, poor pay, shortages of spare parts and equipment, inadequate training, and rapidly declining readiness.”

“Our goal for NATO is a strong political and security fellowship of independent nations in which consultations are mutually respected and defense burdens mutually shared.”

“Inspired by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Republicans hammered into place the framework for today’s prosperity and surpluses.”

Here at Preposterous, we aim to provide entertaining distractions from the relentlessly depressing real world. Good to know that the Republican National Committee is collaborating in the effort.

You wonder why people get confused by science stories in the press? Two studies on the efficacy of Atkins-like low-carb/high-protein diets were recently reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. If you visited the Google News page devoted to coverage of these stories (here is the page itself, although the content may shift with time), these are the first six headlines you would have seen, without any editing on my part:

• Low-carb not a slimmer diet (USA Today)
• Studies test value of low-carb diets (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
• Studies: Beneficial Low-Carb Diet (CBS News)
• Study casts doubt on benefits of Atkins diet (MSNBC)
• Scientists endorse Atkins diet (BBC)
• Low-Carb Diets Work Better in Short Term – Reports (Reuters)

Remember, these are reports on the same two studies. Scorecard: two positive headlines, two negative, one noncommittal, one ambiguous (“…in short term”).

Sometimes, if the medium is not actually the message, it nevertheless garbles the message so much as to be counterproductive. In particular, the need for a short and punchy headline forces distortion, not just oversimplification, of the story being reported. (Let’s face it, would you click first on the story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune?)

You can’t blame science reporters, who have a tough job and don’t write headlines anyway. A daily newspaper is just not an effective way to teach science. The news cycle demands that results be packaged in both catchy and timely ways, whereas the actual way that science is done is more often characterized by a gradual emergence of consensus. Not that I know what the proper remedy is, other than to teach students to be more aware and science-literate by the time they finish high school, so can they take simple headlines with a grain of salt.

A couple of the many couples getting married in Massachusetts today (Associated Press photos). Julie and Hillary Goodridge, lead plaintiffs in the case to allow same-sex couples to marry, getting their marriage license:

John Mirthes and Rick Reynolds chat with volunteer Sian Robertson as they wait to file their intent to marry:

I’m told that scenes like this are going to be the end of civilization as we know it. But with all the other images we’ve been seeing in the news lately, these made me feel good.

(Related: Career choices explained.)

Josh Marshall has an excerpt from a Washington Times excerpt from Bill Sammon’s new book, Misunderestimated: The President Battles Terrorism, John Kerry and the Bush Haters. Here is my own excerpt of Josh’s excerpt:

“I get the newspapers — the New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post and USA Today — those are the four papers delivered,” he said. “I can scan a front page, and if there is a particular story of interest, I’ll skim it.”

…

“He does not dwell on the newspaper, but he reads the sports page every day,” Mr. Card said with a chuckle.

…

Mr. Bush thinks that immersing himself in voluminous, mostly liberal-leaning news coverage might cloud his thinking and even hinder his efforts to remain an optimistic leader.

Remember, this is a pro-Bush book, reprinted in a pro-Bush newspaper.

You want to know why liberals are really so angry? You can’t parody this guy! His reality exceeds our best attempts at humorous exaggeration.

I missed poem on your blog day. Here’s a belated entry by Kate Ryan, recent winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize.

THE OTHER SHOE

Oh if it were

only the other

shoe hanging

in space before

joining its mate.

If the undropped

didn’t congregate

with the undropped.

But nothing can

stop the mid-air

collusion of the

unpaired above us

acquiring density

and weight. We

feel it accumulate.

… here at the new & improved blogspot. At first it wouldn’t let me publish my last post, and now it’s repeating it over and over. Hopefully we’ll return to normal soon.

Some reactions to my list of misconceptions about cosmology. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles has misconceptions about quantum mechanics and thermodynamics. It’s a very good list, even if he does say that vacuum energy is useless. It’s useless in the sense that it cannot be made to do thermodynamic work (because the vacuum energy is spread absolutely uniformly), but in another sense it’s quite useful: it makes the universe accelerate, thereby giving cosmologists something deep to think about. (And occasionally get them a job.)

Chris C Mooney notes that a planetarium show at the Smithsonian doesn’t even mention the Big Bang, although it’s supposed to be a tour of the universe. So perhaps one of the sources of misconceptions is that we aren’t clear enough about what we actually do think people need to know? Right off the top of my head, here are some facts about cosmology I think every educated person should know:

• The universe is big. The Sun is a star, located in a galaxy with about a trillion other stars. There are a lot of other galaxies in the observable universe (about 100 billion), distributed evenly on large scales.
  

• It’s getting bigger. Very distant galaxies are moving away from each other.
  

• It’s old. If we trace the expansion backwards in time, everything crunches together about 14 billion years ago, at what we call the “Big Bang.”
  

• We don’t know how it started. The Big Bang itself lies outside our current understanding, although we do understand things very well at a time only about 1 second after the Bang. During or before that first second, we have good ideas but no direct empirical constraints.
  

• It’s dark and mysterious. Only five percent of our universe is “ordinary” matter; about 25% is some dark matter particle we haven’t yet discovered in the lab, and about 70% is a smoothly-distributed and nearly-unchanging dark energy.
  

• We don’t know how it will end. To predict the future would require a better understanding of what the dark energy is and how it will behave in the future. This is one of the things we’re trying to understand.

That’s not so many, for such a big universe. How do we get these into high school curricula?