Travel

YK2

I know that you’ve all booked your tickets for Chicago in August, for the big YearlyKos shindig. True, it’s not exactly like going to a physics conference; the halls will be filled with candidates trying to drum up votes, and people who use words like “netroots” unironically. But if last year’s event was any indication, there should be all sorts of fun people there, even if it’s harder to find poker tables in Chicago than in Vegas. (You have to go to the riverboats in Gary.)

Like last year, the inimitable DarkSyde is making sure that science is well-represented, including a high-powered Science Panel. Last year the role of “bearded ScienceBlogger battling against creationism” was played by PZ Myers; this year it will be played by Ed Brayton. The role of “clean-shaven 4-star general who will talk about cosmology and the anthropic principle” was played last year by Wesley Clark; this year it will be me, except for the 4-star general part. The role of Chris Mooney will continue to be played by Chris Mooney. I’m honored to be participating, even if the commenters at Daily Kos are wishing it was my fiancee instead.

I hope any readers who are at the event will give a shout. It will be fun to return to the old haunts, go down to 75th Street to listen to Vonski, maybe indulge at Alinea if we save our pennies. And we all know that the weather in Chicago in August is invariably pleasant and charming, so there’s really no exuse.

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Orbitz is the Workshop of Satan

In China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, there is a scene in which Mayor Rudgutter parleys with the ambassador of Hell. It’s a negotiation he has performed before, but is nevertheless disconcerting; although the ambassador appears as a well-spoken and immaculately dressed man, his words are accompanied by a faint echo from deep in the Pit below, “in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture.”

I’m pretty sure I heard the same thing on the phone with Orbitz last night.

Our story begins several months ago, when I booked a round-trip ticket to attend a conference in Greece. (I normally wouldn’t even bother relating this little adventure, except that extensive focus-grouping has revealed that readers love nothing more than chronicles of our travel-related follies.) It was in September, just after I had moved to LA, and various things came up that couldn’t be neglected — unfortunately, and uncharacteristically, I ended up canceling the trip at the last minute. Which was too bad, as I had paid $1600 for the fare on Orbitz.

But all was not completely lost — they let you keep the unused ticket for up to a year, and later on you can exchange it for some other international trip on the same airline (paying whatever change fees and fare differences apply, of course). As it turns out, I’ll be traveling to England later this month, so last week I attempted to use my credit from the Greece flight to pay for the ticket.

It wasn’t as easy as it might have been. First, despite being one of those explicitly web-based companies that wants you to do everything online, and makes some effort to hide their phone number from you, this specific transaction is one you can’t do on the web, you have to call them up. Where, of course, the department you want to speak to is not one of the options you are given by the automated voice system that answers the phone. But that’s not the issue here. Once I did reach a human being, I explained what I wanted to do, and was told that I needed to mail the paper ticket back to them via a service that could track its progress, and call back once I could demonstrate that the package was in transit.

So okay, I did that, and Sunday called back, ready to get a new itinerary. In fact I had previously gone onto Orbitz and found exactly the itinerary I wanted. It was a little complicated, since I wanted to fly from LAX to London, take the train to Durham a few days later, and then fly back to LA from Durham, but I found a semi-reasonable set of flights that got me back to LA only half an hour after midnight. And a tiny bit of extra trickiness, as the return flight from London to LA (after a short flight from Durham to Heathrow) actually stopped at Dulles for two hours before continuing on with the same flight number — as I painstakingly described to the guy on the phone.

But at least it was a relatively cheap ticket — only $700 or so. Once they added a $200 change fee and various miscellaneous gouging add-ons, the whole thing came to about $1000. Which was less than the $1600 I had originally spent, so I was going to be out about $600. (What, you didn’t think they were just going to give it back to me, did you?) But I accepted that, as you always lose big-time when you try to make such changes.

But then yesterday when they emailed me the itinerary, there was a bit of a surprise. (Yes, for some reason it takes a day to email the itinerary — some times the Tubes are just a little clogged, you know.) And the return flight had me going from London to Dulles and staying there, not continuing on to LAX. I might not even have noticed, had I not gone to choose seats on the flight — all of the flight numbers and departure times were right, which is all I usually pay attention to.

So I called again, and explained the problem. In particular, I explained that I had asked to take that flight all the way back to LAX, and their agent had obviously not typed that in, which was their mistake. They pointed out that the agent verified the itinerary with me before booking it, which I’m ready to believe is true. It was my mistake not to catch that the flight he had me on didn’t continue to LA, although an easy mistake to make — that’s what happens when you pay attention primarily to the flight numbers and departure times.

Can they fix things by putting me on the flight that I had asked for, the leg going from Dulles to LAX? Sure they can — for the fare difference, plus another $200 change fee, for a total of $300 extra. Even though they had screwed up? Yes. Could that $300 come out of the $600 of free money I was already giving them? No. How many minutes of frustrating phone conversation would it take to uncover these pleasant truths? About 45.

So $300 of my money has disappeared into the ether, as the result of an easily-correctable mistake. It’s not my first bad experience with Orbitz — they are notorious for doing things slightly wrong, and making them nearly impossible to fix, or at least gouging you whenever a fix is required. For example, if you book a hotel through them, the hotel is completely unable to fix or alter anything about the reservation; only Orbitz can do so, and they’re not always so helpful about it. (Other examples of Orbitz’s evil ways here, here, here.) But it will be my last, as I’m not going to be using them any more.

In fact, I’d like to call for a boycott. If I remember correctly, Bill O’Reilly was able to bring down the government of France by asking his listeners to stay away from French products. Surely if CV readers stayed away from Orbitz in droves, the company would spiral into a tailspin of bankruptcy and shame. (Or at least give me a sense of personal vengeance, which is more important.) So let’s get on that right away, okay? It’s about time we used the power this blog to make the world a better place.

And suggestions for alternative sensible ways to make complicated travel arrangements are welcome.

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Summer School

Eavesdrop on an informal gathering of professional cosmologists, and you might hear them debating the relative merits of different strategies for measuring the dark energy equation-of-state parameter. Or they might be talking about which department is trying to steal whom away from where, the questionable competence of different funding agency administrators, or which airline has the best frequent-flyer program. Here is a question you won’t hear very often: “Did space and time exist before the Big Bang, and if not, can we make sense of the existence of our universe without invoking the presence of God?” But students will happily talk about such things — they haven’t yet figured out that they’re not supposed to. That’s why, when one finds oneself lecturing along with one’s colleagues at a summer school for physicists, it’s much more fun to hang out with the students.

I’m spending this week at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, an historic town overlooking the Adriatic Sea at the border of Italy and Slovenia. The ICTP is a little bit older than me, founded in in 1964 by Abdus Salam, who shared the Nobel Prize with Glashow and Weinberg in 1979 for their unified theory of the weak interactions and electromagnetism. Salam, from Pakistan, was committed to bringing modern science to developing countries, and an important mission of the ICTP is to collect scientists from around the world into one place to exchange ideas. It’s not hard to coax busy researchers into visiting Trieste, as you might guess from this view of the Adriatico Guest House where most of us are staying.

ICTP Adriatico guest house

I’ve been lecturing on introductory cosmology and the early universe at a summer school organized by Uros Seljak and Paolo Creminelli. The school spans quite a range of topics, from Tom Abel talking about early star formation to Alex Vilenkin talking about the multiverse. Five or six hours of lectures a day over the course of the two-week school keep everyone busy — for anyone out there wondering whether a career as an academic is for them, ask yourselves whether taking notes on talks about structure formation and linear perturbation theory sounds like a fun way to spend your summer vacation.

Admittedly, a salt mine it’s not — it’s a social occasion as well, in a gorgeous setting, and well, most of us manage to take advantage of the surroundings in our downtime. Yesterday evening Uros, who was born and lives nearby in Slovenia, took some of the lecturers out on his small boat (photos forthcoming, if I can get my camera to talk to my computer) to a seafood restaurant up the coast, where we enjoyed a light Italian repast. That is to say, over the course of several hours the server chose for us a substantial selection of antipasti (cozze, mussels, caught within sight of the restaurant, were the featured ingredient), followed by heaping plates of pasta, leading eventually to fresh grilled dorade and sea bass over vegetables, and concluding ultimately with biscotti dipped in sweet wine. Carafes of prosecco were produced to help keep the food going down smoothly. I was ready to push away from the table and stumble back to the guest house when the proprietess arrived with a bottle of grappa and a collection of shot glasses. We soldiered on.

As much as I do enjoy the company of my colleagues, however, the true joy was the previous evening, when I inserted myself into a group of students (mostly graduates from various countries of Europe) for drinks after an afternoon dinner reception. Starting with God and the Big Bang, we enjoyed the kind of good old-fashioned bull session in which college students regularly indulge, but which becomes increasingly less frequent as we grow old and settled in our opinions. Can you be a good physicist without knowing general relativity? What is the proper ratio of gin to vermouth in a dry martini? Does slow-roll inflation necesarily predict a nearly scale-free spectrum of primordial perturbations? What are the crucial differences between Croatian and Bulgarian accents? Why would anyone prefer The Animals’ version of I Put a Spell on You to the original by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins?

There is no occupation, from fighter pilot to professional hockey player to homicide detective, that is completely free from the danger of creeping professionalism — an adaptation to the customs and techniques of the discipline so thorough as to render the marvelous routine, pushing the sources of awe and wonder to the background in favor of more pressing and mundane concerns. It’s good to be reminded now and then of the open-minded stance toward the deep questions of the universe that originally motivates people to plunge into such a wildly impractical occupation as “professional cosmologist.” My deep thanks to Lyuba, Lily, Kai, Leonardo, Arti, Guillermo, Alex, Dominika, and all the other students at the school here in Trieste, for providing such vivid examples of why we all become scientists in the first place.

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Foreign Correspondent Checking In

Joyeux 4th of July, mes amis américains! I am checking in from Montréal, a temporary stopover on the way back to the U.S. of A. from a brief visit to Quebec City. I was there for Renaissance Weekend, an occasional (five times per year) gathering of the important, demi-important, and merely interesting and/or well-connected to get together and talk about stuff.

I had a great time, and I would be happy to tell you all about it if RW goings-on were not strictly off the record. (For example, I could reveal the amusing story behind how nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler met his wife Rosa Wang, or how I took down a huge pot from Scripps College president Nancy Bekavac when my quad tens demolished her ace-high flush, but rules are rules.) But I am perfectly within my rights to share things that I said myself. I gave a few mini-presentations, among which was one in a series of two-minute lunchtime talks on “What I Would Do If I Could,” a rather free-ranging topic if ever there was one. Other people suggested banning torture, printing people’s phone numbers on their license plates, or moving to a chocolate-based economy. Here was my little spiel:

If I could propose one thing, it would be to do everything in our power to encourage young girls to get excited about science, math, and technology.

As a physicist, I know that my field is only about ten percent women. There is a theory on the market, occasionally suggested by people in positions of power and influence, that an important contributor to this imbalance is a difference in intrinsic aptitude. The technical term for this theory is “bullshit.” I say this not as a starry-eyed egalitarian, but as one who has looked at the data. This is a theory that makes predictions, and its predictions are spectacularly wrong. If they were right, the fraction of women that dropped out would rise at the higher ranks, as the competition for positions became more fierce; that’s not true. The percentage of women scientists would be basically constant from place to place; that’s not true. The fraction of women getting physics degrees would be stable over time; that’s not true. The truth is that women drop out of science between high school and college (and, tellingly, disproportionately more women try to specialize in physics later in college than those who choose physics as a major during their first year). And they do so because they are discouraged by a million small signals that add up to a powerful cumulative message.

We shouldn’t encourage girls to be enthusiastic about science, math, and technology because we need more scientists, mathematicians, or engineers. We should do so because many young girls are potentially interested in technical fields, and this interest should be celebrated, not deprecated. Support to pursue one’s passions is something that everyone deserves, regardless of their chromosomes.

Let freedom ring, everybody.

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Short Cuts

Bits and bobs accumulated while I was traveling, offered up as I recover from the traumatic trip back to Chicago. (I wasn’t at Don and Crystal’s wedding, but many congratulations to the happy couple!) I had an early flight scheduled Sunday, but I was feeling lazy and unmotivated to arise at dawn to return my rental car, so I called United and asked whether I could go standby on a later flight. They indicated that there should be no problem, as the later flights had plenty of open seats. This turned out to be one of those things they believed even though they couldn’t prove, in fact even though it wasn’t true. After sitting in LAX, watching two flights to Chicago take off full without me, I finally squeezed onto a plane that was scheduled to reach O’Hare at 10:44 p.m. Of course, it took off only after an hour-and-a-half delay, and then landed safely around 12:30 a.m. Sadly, it landed not in Chicago, but in Rockford IL, since it was apparently a bit breezy in Chicago. (Windy city and all that.) After some tense moments when it appeared as if we might all climb aboard busses and drive the rest of the way, the plane did take off again, landed safely in the appropriate airport, and I endured a tense half an hour in which everyone on the flight retrieved their luggage except me. Finally mine came out, allowing me to proceed to the character-building exercise of standing in the rain for another half an hour to get a taxi. Arriving to my chilly lakeside condo at 3:30 a.m., since apparently some bozo left the window open when he left for L.A. For as much as I travel, it’s been a long time since I’ve been subjected to such delays, so I suppose I was due.

And while we were away:

  • Peter Woit reports that the second- and third-year WMAP results are soon to be released, which looks to be true. My guess is that there won’t be any universe-shaking surprises, just some careful results about polarization of the CMB, which is a very tiny signal that is hard to measure.
  • Krispy Kreme burgerGrrlscientist points to a bit of culture you can only find here in Illinois: the best hamburger ever. Served, apparently, at the ballpark of minor-league baseball team the Gateway Grizzlies. What is it, you may ask, that separates this particular all-beef patty with two slices of cheddar and two strips of bacon from its artery-clogging competitors? It must be the bun, which consists of two halves of — wait for it — a Krispy Kreme Original Glazed donut. Mmm. It’s only 1000 calories, so you might want to order two.
  • Alina Stefanescu , via Marginal Revolution, points to a condensed version of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in cartoon form. Originally published in the 1950’s in Look magazine, and distributed by General Motors. Hayek was an economist and political philosopher, popular today among libertarian-leaning types for his warnings against the horrors of collectivism. It’s interesting to me how the process of creeping loss of liberty described in The Road to Serfdom sounds these days like a warning against the excesses of our putatively-conservative administration. (At least, according to that notorious pinko sympathizer Sandra Day O’Connor.)
    road to serfdom
    And now there’s a movie version!
  • Occasional CV commenter John Farrell points to a slightly more conventional documentary: The Bag of Knees, about the lives and choices of nurses. You can see a preview, and it’s available for purchase on DVD.
  • Continuing on the movie theme, from Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy comes perhaps the second-cutest thing ever: this somewhat unequal cat fight.
    cat fight
    The cutest thing ever was of course already referenced here. Those darn cats.
  • My interminable trip home was enlivened by a celebrity presence on the plane, one celebrated for his persistent cheerfulness: that’s right, Richard Simmons. There was a touchy moment when we were on the ground in Rockford and it looked like he was going to lead the plane in singing campfire songs. The previous evening, playing poker at an L.A. cardroom, the table behind me featured a game between Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and a couple of their friends. Which of these counts as a more significant celebrity sighting will depend on your personal cultural matrix.

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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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