Miscellany

Friday iChing: March Madness edition

It’s been a long time since we’ve busted out the Friday iChing, in which we use songs from our iTunes playlist as Tarot cards to tell the future. Fortunately Steinn has kept the tradition alive, but it’s time we step up to the plate. Also, substantive blogging is hampered by my travel schedule at the moment — and wouldn’t you know, I fly all the way to southern California just to get rained on.

Since it has been a while, and we don’t know when it will happen again, we should take advantage of the situation to ask a question of great magnitude and import: Will the plucky #2-ranked Villanova Wildcats and their scrambling four-guard lineup be able to charge through March Madness to win the NCAA basketball tournament? We point and click and the randomizer whooshes… The key explains each of the cards.

  1. The Covering: Madeleine Peroux, This Is Heaven To Me
  2. The Crossing: Thelonious Monk, Epistrophy
  3. The Crown: Bob Marley, Keep On Moving
  4. The Root: Vladimir Horowitz, Chopin Piano Sonata No. 2
  5. The Past: Von Freeman, I Love You
  6. The Future: Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song
  7. The Questioner: Yohimbe Brothers, Psycopathia Mojosexualis
  8. The House: LL Cool J, Jingling Baby
  9. The Inside: Ute Lemper, But One Day
  10. The Outcome: Squeeze, I Want You

Well, sometimes the Oracle speaks pretty clearly, even if it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. The Covering simply restates the obvious: it would be great to win the national title. The Crown, explaining the best that can be obtained, is “Keep On Moving,” which I take to imply that we can at least expect some advancement into later rounds. Vonski’s “I Love You” represents the past, an obvious allusion to Nova’s spectacular upset of Georgetown to win the 1985 national title in one of the most thrilling basketball games of all time. The Inside implies that we fans hope/expect to win it one day again — but the Outcome, “I Want You,” while again stating the obvious nevertheless seems to promise something other than complete fulfillment. So, either the iPod is just teasing us, or it’s going to be close-but-no-cigar for the valiant Wildcats this year.

That’s okay, so long as it’s not Duke, we can all be happy.

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The ultimate showdown

Things have been far too busy recently for me to do any substantive posting. But I have noticed that our discussions of topics such as race and gender and interpretations of quantum mechanics are far too genteel and rational for my tastes. (Seriously, why is it that people just cannot resist the temptation to argue with people who say outrageous things, even if they know perfectly well that those people are absolutely immune to reason?)

So I’d like to broach a more controversial topic. I’m thinking of buying a new laptop. Tell me: Mac or PC? I’ve used both quite a bit, so I’m not a fundamentalist either way. The Macs are of course Linux FreeBSD-based, which is useful if you’re a scientist. And there’s the fight-the-evil-empire business. But one cannot deny that there is useful software that isn’t available for Macs. And the variety of laptop hardware is much more diverse in the PC world, including attractively thin ultralights. So — reasonable cost-benefit analyses on either side? Your thoughts are welcome.

And play nice.

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Explaining America in movies

Found at Majikthise, Lawyers Guns and Money, and Lance Mannion, and apparently originating here: choose ten movies that you would show to someone to explain America to them. Here’s my list, off the top of my head, making some effort not to duplicate the others.

  1. The Player (1992)
  2. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
  3. Training Day (2001)
  4. Metropolitan (1990)
  5. Easy Rider (1969)
  6. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
  7. Hoop Dreams (1994)
  8. The Sting (1973)
  9. Glory (1989)
  10. Dr. Strangelove (1964)

I thought at first it would be hard to think of ten good ones, but I ended up having to leave out Fargo, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Thelma and Louise, The Conversation, The Untouchables, Blue Velvet, and a bunch more. I’m not providing any explanations for my choices — figuring it out should be half the fun.

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Titling

For reasons having nothing to do with the obscure films post, I recently had the opportunity to see Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (for perhaps the fifth or sixth time). It’s a close call between that and Casablanca for my all-time favorite movie — how can you go wrong combining Kafka and Orwell with Monty Python and Tom Stoppard? (Brazil, I mean, not Casablanca.)

Of course there is a wonderful backstory to the making of the movie, in which Universal studios chopped up the movie to make a “love conquers all” version with a happy ending, which Gilliam refused to have his name associated with. Fortunately that version never got released, as Gilliam resorted (intentionally or not) to a fiendishly clever strategy: he surreptitiously showed his version to groups of film critics, and the LA film critics society awarded its “best picture of the year” award to a movie that hadn’t even been released. The awards, which Universal would much have preferred go to its other movie Out of Africa, embarassed the studio into letting Gilliam’s version be distributed, albeit without any support.

You can read all sorts of fun trivia in the Brazil FAQ. My favorite is this: Sidney Scheinberg, president of Universal and the man in charge of the happy-ending version, decided he didn’t like the title, and solicited suggestions from his staff. (To be fair, the title would have made less for his version; in Gilliam’s version there is an elaborate soundtrack by Michael Kamen that is constructed primarily out of variations of the song “Brazil,” all of which was replaced in Scheinberg’s version by rock music, to attract teenagers.) Here are the suggested replacement titles:

  • If Osmosis, Who Are You?
  • Some Day Soon
  • Vortex
  • Day Dreams and Night Tripper
  • What a Future!
  • Litterbugs
  • The Works
  • Skylight City
  • You Show Me Your Dream…
  • Access
  • Arresting Developments
  • Nude Descending Bathroom Scale
  • Lords of the Files
  • Dreamscape
  • The Staplegunners
  • Progress
  • Forever More
  • The Right to Bear Arms
  • Explanada Fortunata Is Not My Real Name
  • All Too Soon
  • Chaos
  • Where Were We?
  • Disconnected Parties
  • Blank/Blank
  • Erotic
  • Shadow Time
  • Maelstrom
  • Forces of Darkness
  • The Man in the Custom Tailored T-shirt
  • Fold, Spindle, Mutilate
  • Can’t Anybody Here Play the Cymbals?
  • Sign on High
  • The Ball Bearing Electro Memory Circuit Buster
  • This Escalator Doesn’t Stop At Your Station
  • Gnu Yak, Gnu Yak, and Other Bestial Places

I can’t for the life of me understand what they were thinking for most of these. (Okay, I kind of like “Litterbugs.”) I suspect they had a thought process along the lines of “Well, the movie’s kind of weird, so let’s make the title … weird!” I’ve had my own battles with Physical Review over titles of my papers, but nothing like this.

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So much to blog, so little time

Things I would talk about at greater length and erudition if I were a man of independent means, rather than someone who supposedly works for a living. Also, today is my birthday; instructions on how to honor this auspicious occasion appear at the end of the post.

First, Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber has an eloquent article about academic blogging in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas.” The final paragraph sums it up:

Both group blogs and the many hundreds of individual academic blogs that have been created in the last three years are pioneering something new and exciting. They’re the seeds of a collective conversation, which draws together different disciplines (sometimes through vigorous argument, sometimes through friendly interaction), which doesn’t reproduce traditional academic distinctions of privilege and rank, and which connects academic debates to a broader arena of public discussion. It’s not entirely surprising that academic blogs have provoked some fear and hostility; they represent a serious challenge to well-established patterns of behavior in the academy. Some academics view them as an unbecoming occupation for junior (and senior) scholars; in the words of Alex Halavais of the State University of New York at Buffalo, they seem “threatening to those who are established in academia, to financial interests, and to … well, decorum.” Not exactly dignified; a little undisciplined; carnivalesque. Sometimes signal, sometimes noise. But exactly because of this, they provide a kind of space for the exuberant debate of ideas, for connecting scholarship to the outside world, which we haven’t had for a long while. We should embrace them wholeheartedly.

This business about certain academics viewing blogs as an unbecoming occupation is more true that I’d like to admit (although it is far from universal). And it extends to all kinds of pretentions to public-intellectual engagement, not just our daily interventions on the internets. Which is why it’s important to emphasize that true scholarship entails two tasks, both equally crucial: discovering new things about the world, and letting people know what it is we have discovered. The first is called “research,” while the second is sufficiently undervalued that we don’t even have a good name for it. Part of it is “education,” part is “outreach,” part is engaging in public debate. But whatever you want to call it, it is just as important as research itself. You might say that, without research, there wouldn’t be anything to outreach about. True, but if we never told anyone what we had learned, there wouldn’t be any reason to do research, at least not in intellectually-driven fields like cosmology and history and literary criticism. It’s like asking whether, in baseball, the bat or the ball is more important. Without either, the whole thing becomes kind of pointless.

Next, Abhay Parekh at 3quarksdaily asks what it is that makes people disbelieve in evolution. He points the finger of blame at the “decent with random modification” part of natural selection:

My explanation is simply this: Human beings have a strong visceral reaction to disbelieve any theory which injects uncertainty or chance into their world view. They will cling to some other “explanation” of the facts which does not depend on chance until provided with absolutely incontrovertible proof to the contrary.

I’m sure that’s part of it, although I suspect the truth is a complicated mess that varies from person to person. Others chime in: Lindsay at Majikthise thinks it’s about disenchantment and an absence of meaning in purely naturalistic theories of the universe; Amanda at Pandagon chalks it up to a need to feel superior to other species; PZ at Pharyngula points to the psychological drive to be part of something bigger. I think all of these are likely part of it, and would add another ingredient to the cocktail: resentment at being told what to think by arrogant elites. When people use “local choice” as an excuse to allow school boards to decide to teach all sorts of nonsense, defenders of evolution generally treat it as simply a tactic to further their religious agenda. For the Discovery Institute et al. that is no doubt correct; but for people on the streets who are speaking at the school board meetings, I suspect a lot of it it really is about local choice. They don’t like to be told by some mutiple-degreed Ivy League east-coast intellectual types that they should think this and not that. There is a particularly American cast to this kind of resentment, which helps explain why this poor country is so much more backward about these issues than our peers in Europe.

Finally, speaking of Lindsay, she has recently embarked on quite an adventure: inspired by the experience of reporting on-location in the aftermath of Katrina, she’s quit her regular job to become a full-time stringer. But she needs some help at the early stages, so this week she’s asking for donations in turn for by-request blogging! This sort of bottom-up structure is alien to us here at Cosmic Variance, where we figure we’ll write about what we think is best and you’ll like it, or learn to. But it’s an interesting experiment. And while you have your PayPal account handy, you could drop by to Shakespeare’s Sister, who was recently hit by a double whammy when she was laid off from her job and had her property taxes increased by 100%. She’s one of the most passionate and articulate bloggers we have, and if you like what you read there, don’t be shy about dropping off a couple of bucks.

That would make me a good birthday present.

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Power women

I don’t know about my co-bloggers, but reality has intruded and there hasn’t been much time for blogging this week. Instead, here is a photo of Angelina Jolie, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton.
angelina, condoleezza, hillary
They were each speaking at a dinner for the Global Business Coalition on HIV-AIDS. If the Washington Post is to be believed, Hillary had the best line:

“It’s hard being a beautiful celebrity,” Clinton said. “I wouldn’t know, but I’ve got to imagine it has to be very difficult.”

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Talk to a human being

One of the annoying aspects of modern life is the inability to get a real person on the phone when you attempt to call the service department of a major corporation. We’ve all been led through a labyrinth of touch-tone menu choices, only to discover that what we wanted wasn’t covered by the available options.

So here’s your shortcut: Find-A-Human. It’s simply a list of phone numbers for various corporations (banks, computers, travel, etc.) with instructions on which keys to push in your phone to most quickly get a real person on the line. Sometimes it’s sneaky — for Cingular, you can easily get a human by pushing the buttons as if you wanted to close your account, after which the person you get can help you with whatever you want. More often it’s straightforward — for Chase bank, you hit five, pause, then hit one, four, star, zero, just as you might have guessed.

Don’t say that Cosmic Variance never did anything for you.

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Planes vs. Cars

As usual, I’m later than everyone else, so I’m just now getting around to reading Freakonomics by Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner. The book grew out of an article for the New York Times Magazine by journalist Dubner about economist Leavitt. Leavitt (who is here at the University of Chicago) is a rising young star in the profession, who had previously garnered considerable publicity for his work showing the real reason behind the dramatic drop in crime rates during the 1990’s. It wasn’t stricter enforcement, or a better economy, or innovative policing strategies; it was Roe v. Wade. Leavitt argues that the availability of abortions prevented a large number of childred from being born to mothers who didn’t want them or were unable to take care of them, and that these at-risk kids are exactly the people likely to commit crimes as teenagers. The theme of the book, if there is one, is the attempt to tease out the counterintuitive structures of incentives and pressures that lay behind a wide variety of patterns in our daily lives. And there is, of course, a blog.

But I was happy to see a mention, if only very briefly in passing, of an issue I’ve long wondered about: the relative safety of air travel vs. automobiles. It’s a well-worn piece of wisdom that, despite the potential for spectacular accidents, air travel is actually safer than car travel. I’ve never been quite sure how seriously to believe this claim, since it was never spelled out how “safer” was being defined.

The facts are the following: many more people die in auto accidents each year in the United States (about 40,000) than in airplane crashes (less than 1,000). But that certainly doesn’t answer the question by itself. People spend a lot less time in airplanes than in cars, on average. In fact, it turns out that your risk of death per hour is about the same in a car as in a plane.

So, what’s the answer? Does that mean that air travel and auto travel are about equally dangerous?

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