Think like an economist

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I learn a lot from reading Brad DeLong or the economically-inclined folks at Crooked Timber, but I get special enjoyment from Marginal Revolution. (I’m actually not being sarcastic for once, in case it’s unclear.) Much like training in physics affects they way you view the physical world, training in economics affects the way you view — well, almost everything. All of life becomes an exercise in maximizing returns and minimizing costs, subject to constraints. Consider for example the Tennis Ball Problem.

How many tennis balls should you play with?

Let’s say you had many, many balls and you could open the cans for free and never run out. Opening a new can every four points (four balls fit in a can) would lead to a massive clean-up and carry problem at the end. Furthermore how much help is it having more balls? Once they hit the net you still have to deal with getting another ball into play. In other words, the real trick is to manage your stock well (read: aim for good volleys), not to just to speed up the flow of balls into the court.

Just one ball is not efficient, because when it falls out of play it is probably far from you. The greater the number of balls, the more likely at least one will be close.

Many problems in life, including those of dating, the number of children you should have, and optimal inventory management, resemble the tennis ball problem.

I do not know how to solve the tennis ball problem, but I feel that twelve balls is too many.

Those last two sentences just about sum it up, don’t they?

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Bad news continues to mount for administration

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GREENBELT, Maryland (AP) — Bad news continued to accumulate for the Bush administration today, when senior government officials revealed that someday the Sun will go out and the world will end. Despite attempts to classify this sensitive information, whistleblowers at NASA confirm that our planet’s star does, indeed, have only a finite amount of hydrogen with which to produce energy via nuclear fusion.

Evidence of this scandal came to light only slowly, after investigation of comet dust around a white dwarf star far from our solar system.

“We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun,” said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, “I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system.”

This alarming prognosis was quickly suppressed by officials. Senior sources insist that, in a post-9/11 climate, it is the government’s duty to reassure the public of the stability and security of heavenly objects.

An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, “NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios.”

The Bush administration and its allies in Congress have recently been buffetted by a series of setbacks, including the absence of WMD’s in Iraq, the continuing failure to capture Osama bin Laden, a ballooning budget deficit, increasing anti-Americanism abroad, corruption scandals that have forced Tom DeLay to step down as House Majority Leader, an unworkable Medicare prescription-drug plan, fallout from the disastrously inept response to hurricane Katrina, continuing investigations into the outing of CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and Vice-President Cheney’s habit of shooting his friends in the face with a shotgun. These troubles were recently compounded by revelations that NASA had been moving to expunge any mention of troublesome scientific facts from its public presentations. Officials insisted that political considerations played no role in the dying-Sun scandal.

Dean Acosta, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said the editing of Dr. Kuchner’s comments was part of the normal “give and take” involved in producing a press release. “There was not one political person involved at all,” he said.

A high-ranking White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, insisted that the finite nature of the Sun’s fuel had first become known during the Clinton administration, although apparently no action had been taken to deal with the problem.

Bad news continues to mount for administration Read More »

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Deeply disturbing factoids

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The point about George Deutsch, NASA’s self-appointed enforcer of theological correctness (now ex-), is not that he was an ambitious young political hack who embellished his resume and overreached his authority. It’s that the particular type of behavior in which he engaged — imposing a faith-based worldview where it is completely inappropriate — is a singular hallmark of this administration, and one that originates at the very top. Ezra Klein points to just one example.

I want to highlight this graf from Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of Bush-speechwriter Michael Gerson:

“The President can’t imagine that someone who is President of the United States could not have faith, because he derives so much from it,” Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, said. “I can see him struggle with other world leaders who don’t appear to be grounded in some faith,” he said. He added, “The President doesn’t care what faith it is, as long as it’s faith.”

That’s a deeply disturbing factoid. Bush, after all, isn’t traipsing around the world calling for testimonials, but meeting with fellow heads of state to discuss world affairs. It’s not clear where religion would figure into the conversation. Moreover, the emphasis on faith as a general character trait rather than Christianity as a foundational world view is even less explicable. If Bush believed so deeply in Jesus Christ and an intelligible God that he couldn’t relate to those without the same worldview, that would be parochial and worrying, but understandable. Simply lacking comfort with those who haven’t decided to trust in a higher force, however, belies a real insecurity with the very concepts of self-determination and free will, not to mention a fear of making decisions unaided.

“The President doesn’t care what faith it is, as long as it’s faith.” I’m trying to wrap my poor faithless noodle around that one, and not quite succeeding.

Deeply disturbing factoids Read More »

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Cartoons

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I’m guessing that you’ve heard about the Mohammed cartoon controversy (see Wikipedia article). To make a long story short, Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, just trying to do their bit for world peace and harmony, invited artists to submit cartoons with the prophet Mohammed as their subject. They published twelve of them, featuring various degrees of ridicule of Islam. (You can see the cartoons here.) Muslims worldwide reacted with outrage, featuring protests, rioting, arson, and at least one counter-cartoon contest — sponsored by an Iranian newspaper, asking for cartoons about the Holocaust. (Presumably because they think that Danes were the major targets of the Holocaust?) There is no shortage of blogging on the topic; for contrasting views, see series at Daily Kos and the Volokh Conspiracy.

I haven’t said anything about the controversy, both because I’ve been busy and since I thought the major points were perfectly obvious. The most-discussed points of contention seem to have been: “Did the Danish newspaper have the right to publish such offensive cartoons?”, and “Did the protestors have the right to resort to arson and rioting in response?” Put that way, the answers are obviously “Yes” and “No,” and there’s not much more to say.

Denmark, as far as I know, is not covered by the First Amendment, but in a democratic society newspapers should be permitted to publish just about whatever they want. The fear of offending people is no reason to suppress public speech. (Speech within private associations is a different matter.) The correct response, if something is said with which you disagree, is to say something else in return — the free market of ideas. True, the cartoons in question are low-brow and intentionally provocative, not the expression of any subtle argumentation. But quality of the speech is not relevant. If you don’t like it, let your displeasure be known, like this London (!) protester is doing:
Freedom Go To Hell
A little self-undermining, maybe, but certainly taking advantage of an appropriate outlet for his own personal expression.

The violent reaction from some Muslims (not all, certainly) is completely inappropriate by any standard. This kind of destructive impulse is not something unique to Islam; it’s a familiar human response, one that is encouraged by fundamentalism of all kinds. At its source, it’s the same impulse that leads people to bomb abortion clinics or set fire to rural churches. Demonization of people unlike you, and violent action against them, is a frequent feature of extreme religious belief; not all religious belief, obviously, but a particularly virulent strain. It is antithetical in every way to the values of a liberal democratic society. This is a paradox of free societies: they must tolerate all sorts of belief, even those that are incompatible with freedom.

The subtleties of the cartoon issue only arise when we move from the question of whether Jyllands-Posten should have been allowed to publish the cartoons (since they obviously should have been), to whether it was a good idea to actually do so. Just because speech is allowed doesn’t mean it is mandatory. Knowing that the cartoons would offend the sensibilities of many Muslims, should the newspaper have printed them?

It’s easier to defend freedom of offensive expression when you’re not the one being offended. The same newspaper has apparently been less willing to publish potentially offensive cartoons about Jesus, for example. And many of the folks who are vociferously defending the cartoons are less willing to stand up for freedom of expression when it comes to flag burning. On the flip side, they have asked whether those who wring their hands over giving offense were all that bothered about works of art that offended Christians, such as Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ or Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (you know, the one with the elephant dung).

Whether or not a group should offend another group (granting that they have the right to) isn’t a matter of fundamental rights, it’s a matter of politeness and civil discourse. The analogy between the Mohammed cartoons and Piss Christ is not a very close one. The former were published in a newspaper, almost begging to be distributed as widely as possible. The latter was shown in an art museum; if you didn’t want to go, nobody was forcing you. Art is (sometimes) supposed to be shocking and provocative; the idea that a gallery should refrain from displaying pieces that offend some people’s sensibilities is dangerous and counter-productive.

Still, even though it was a much more public forum, I don’t think that requirements of civility and politeness are paramount here. It’s true that, although I personally am happy to explain to Muslims why their ideas about religion are completely incorrect, I wouldn’t go out of my way to simply be offensive to their beliefs. But it’s not my newspaper. The editors of Jyllands-Posten weren’t being offensive by mistake; they were making every effort to be offensive, but it’s not like they were putting up posters in downtown Mecca. I may think it’s juvenile and stupid (and I do), but it’s their choice. I doubt that many of the rioters are regular readers of Jyllands-Posten, a right-wing Danish rag; they should have just ignored it.

Unfortunately I can’t demonstrate my good faith by my willingness to allow anyone to offend my own beliefs in the same way, since my beliefs are of a somewhat different character. But, for the record, if anyone wants to draw some offensive cartoons about Galileo, or John Stuart Mill, or Charles Darwin, or Virginia Woolf, or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Bertrand Russell, be my guest. I promise not to riot.

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Is this a date?

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Question of the day: Highly-credentialed academics vs. nervous high-school students — is there a difference? The forums at the Chronicle of Higher Education erupt with excited controversy over whether coffee with a colleague is an innocent intellectual meeting, or rife with illicit romantic subtext. (I think it’s available to non-subscribers; let me know if not.)

Is this a date?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 11:32

I have been having great discussions with a man that is interested in the same research of which I am involved. After a flurry of emails, I (innocently, really!) suggested that we get together for coffee, which we are doing tomorrow. Today, I received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.” Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

Full disclosure: We are both married.

Confession: He’s attractive.

I’m feeling a little panicky right now.

Men! They are so inscrutable sometimes. Who knows what this cryptic email is supposed to mean? The Chronicle’s readers bravely wade in.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: Prytania
Date: 01-18-06 11:38

It’s possibly innocent and possibly not–depending on how coffee goes. You know the answer to this.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single gal
Date: 01-18-06 12:11

Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.

I was happy for you up till the final part of the e-mail! Get out now.

just coffee
Author: missing Europe
Date: 01-18-06 12:52

Why can’t you people just go for coffee with someone who is pleasant company? What’s the problem?

What a wet blanket is this “missing Europe” person. Sure, it could just be coffee, but what fun is that?

Is it possible?
Author: brewhaha
Date: 01-18-06 12:54

I’ve been thinking of starting a new topic on a closely related question — IS IT POSSIBLE for people who share peculiar scholarly interests to work together closely without feeling turned on by each other’s company?

By “turn on” I don’t mean necessarily that sexual involvement is inevitable. Hardly. But I’ve noticed of late that a lot of people seem to have intellectual crushes on each other. I’m no exception. I’m wondering if it’s just human nature, then, that spending such time together with a member of the preferred sex makes romantic attraction (of whatever degree) inevitable.

I’m in Coffee Drinker’s shoes constantly — where the male colleague starts showing signs of extra-scholastic interest. For the most part, I keep my husband up to date on these developments and he has so far found them to be exceedingly amusing (maybe it makes him feel more macho that his wife is considered attractive by other men). I’ve also discussed this with a close friend/male colleague who has a similar problem — he says it’s because we both look people in the eye more than others (Americans) do, and so normal humans perceive it as flirting behavior, even though it’s not intended as such.

Coffee Drinker, tread carefully. A few months ago, I had a very bad experience with a senior colleague who apparently thought something was going on between us because of the awesome intellectual rapport of our conversations. (That I shared with my husband a blow-by-blow of each and every conversation didn’t make a difference).

I suppose the question we should try to answer is: WHAT CAN WE SAY OR DO, IN A NON-THREATENING COLLEGIAL WAY, TO NIP THIS IN THE BUD — that is, without coming across as mental (or vainglorious).

Whoa! “brewhaha” ups the ante, suggesting that it’s impossible for colleagues who share intellectual interests to work together without getting turned on. (For the record: brewhaha is not right. It’s perfectly possible to work with members of various genders without getting all distracted. But let’s run with it a bit.)

Re: Is this a date?
Author: ExPat in UK
Date: 01-18-06 13:46

Coffee drinker wrote:

> Today, I
> received an email from him telling me to “have a great day.”
> Nothing else in the email, just that sentiment. Is it possible
> that this man thinks that “coffee” is a euphemism for ______?

I’m totally confused… just where and when has ‘have a great day’ turned into ‘I want to suck your toes’

Finally, someone had the courage to put all of our thoughts into concrete imagery. Thanks for that, ExPat.

Re: Is this a date?
Author: single guy
Date: 01-18-06 14:16

“Yup–everything you described to me sounds EXACTLY like a date–the “have a nice day” e-mail is just the kind of thing men send when they are interested in you. It’s textbook.”

“single gal” knows men! she’s right–men don’t email women wishing them a good day if they have no interest. plus, you invited him for coffee–to a man (and we’re notoriously bad at reading signals) this says “ding, ding, ding, she likes me (in some way.)”

I so don’t believe that “single guy” is a single guy. Regardless, there is some truth there. It’s not so much that men are bad at reading signals — they just read them whether they are there or not.

Re: What?
Author: Varying degrees
Date: 01-18-06 14:47

It’s kinda fun to have these innocent meetings and conversations with the sexual tension bubbling beneath the surface. It’s a bit naughty while being completely innocent. The forbidden fruit is tempting. It’s nice to look at it, hold it, smell it, squeeze it, but oh no, I don’t dare taste it…oh but it would be so delicious. Alas, I cannot….

Well, we should stop here, as this is a family-friendly blog. There’s much more. Suffice it to say that “Coffee drinker,” while perhaps confused, hasn’t lost all perspective.

Re: What?
Author: Coffee drinker
Date: 01-18-06 14:49

Prytania wrote:

>
> She’s totally titillated by this experience but has no one to
> share it with for the obvious reasons.
>
> You know you are, OP. No judgements here.

Yeah, well, maybe. But not enough to shave my legs before I meet him.

Is this a date? Read More »

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Administration official: "Big Bang" is just a theory

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You’ve heard, I hope, about NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who the Bush administration tried to silence when he called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. Cosmology, as it turns out, is not exempt from the radical anti-science agenda. The New York Times, via Atrios:

In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.

…

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose resume says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”

It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”

Emphasis added. Draw your own conclusions, I’m feeling a bit of outrage fatigue at the moment.

Update: Phil Plait has extensive comments at Bad Astronomy Blog. Also Pharyngula, Balloon Juice, Stranger Fruit, Gary Farber, Mark Kleiman, World O’ Crap, and Hullabaloo.

Update again, for our new visitors: Folks, of course the Big Bang model is a theory, and of course it is also correct. It has been tested beyond reasonable doubt: our current universe expanded from a hot, dense, smooth state about 14 billion years ago. The evidence is overwhelming, and we have hard data (from primordial nucleosynthesis) that the model was correct as early as one minute after the initial singularity.

Of course the initial singularity (the `Bang’ itself) is not understood, and there are plenty of other loose ends. But the basic framework — expanding from an early hot, dense, smooth state — is beyond reasonable dispute.

It’s too bad that scientific education in this country is so poor that many people don’t understand what is meant by “theory” or “model.” It doesn’t mean “just someone’s opinion.” Theories can be completely speculative, absolutely well-established, or just plain wrong; the Big Bang model is absolutely well-established.

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Why 10 or 11?

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Why does string theory require 10 or 11 spacetime dimensions? The answer at a technical level is well-known, but it’s hard to bring it down to earth. By reading economics blogs by people who check out political theory blogs, I stumbled across an attempt at making it clear — by frequent CV commenter Moshe Rozali, writing in Scientific American. After explaining a bit about supersymmetry, Moshe concludes:

A guide in this pursuit is a theorem devised/put forth by physicists Steven Weinberg and Edward Witten, which proves that theories containing particles with spin higher than 2 are trivial. Remember each supersymmetry changes the spin by one half. If we want the spin to be between -2 and 2, we cannot have more than eight supersymmetries. The resulting theory contains a spin -2 boson, which is just what is needed to convey the force of gravitation and thereby unite all physical interactions in a single theory. This theory–called N=8 supergravity–is the maximally symmetric theory possible in four dimensions and it has been a subject of intense research since the 1980s.

Another type of symmetry occurs when an object remains the same despite being rotated in space. Because there is no preferred direction in empty space, rotations in three dimensions are symmetric. Suppose the universe had a few extra dimensions. That would lead to extra symmetries because there would be more ways to rotate an object in this extended space than in our three-dimensional space. Two objects that look different from our vantage point in the three visible dimensions might actually be the same object, rotated to different degrees in the higher-dimensional space. Therefore all properties of these seemingly different objects will be related to each other; once again, simplicity would underlie the complexity of our world.

These two types of symmetry look very different but modern theories treat them as two sides of the same coin. Rotations in a higher-dimensional space can turn one supersymmetry into another. So the limit on the number of supersymmetries puts a limit on the number of extra dimensions. The limit turns out to be 6 or 7 dimensions in addition to the four dimensions of length, width, height and time, both possibilities giving rise to exactly eight supersymmetries (M-theory is a proposal to further unify both cases). Any more dimensions would result in too much supersymmetry and a theoretical structure too simple to explain the complexity of the natural world.

This is reminiscent of Joe Polchinski’s argument (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, somewhat serious) that all attempts to quantize gravity should eventually lead to string theory. According to Joe, whenever you sit around trying to quantize gravity, you will eventually realize that your task is made easier by supersymmetry, which helps cancel divergences. Once you add supersymmetry to your theory, you’ll try to add as much as possible, which leads you to N=8 in four dimensions. Then you’ll figure out that this theory has a natural interpretation as a compactification of maximal supersymmetry in eleven dimensions. Gradually it will dawn on you that 11-dimensional supergravity contains not only fields, but two-dimensional membranes. And then you will ask what happens if you compactify one of those dimensions on a circle, and you’ll see that the membranes become superstrings. Voila!

Why 10 or 11? Read More »

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Like this!

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You know who I would not want on my baseball team? A. J. Pierzynski.

Google the phrase clubhouse cancer and the first two results will be stories about Chicago White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski. Teammates and members of the media use those words and others—unprofessional, immature, arrogant, aloof—to describe him. His baseball misdemeanors are legion: chirping at the opposition, bitterly contesting balls and strikes (very stupid for a catcher, who must win goodwill for his pitcher), and venting his frustrations on opposing first basemen. “He doesn’t have a lot of baseball etiquette,” says one ex-teammate. “He’ll deliberately step on your foot at first base, then say, ‘Man, I didn’t mean to do that!'”

The most telling of the many, many (seriously, you wouldn’t believe how willing people were to talk about this guy) Pierzynski anecdotes we heard took place during spring training in 2004. Pierzynski, crouched behind the plate, took a pitch to the groin. Rushing to his aid, trainer Stan Conte asked him how he felt. “Like this!” Pierzynski grunted, then savagely kneed Conte in the balls.

“You just want to choke him,” says the ex-teammate, who has also played against him. “You want your pitcher to hit him in the head.”

Via Gapers Block.

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The truth, the whole truth, but perhaps not the literal truth

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Would it surprise you to learn that, when George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address presented a goal of cutting down on our imports of oil from the Middle East by 75%, his advisors had to explain the next day that this wasn’t meant to be the literal truth? Turns out that we import about 20% of our oil from the Middle East, and that region has the most abundant and easily accessible supplies, so that even if alternative fuels displace an amount equivalent to 75% of our imports from the Middle East, those will really be the last to go. (We import about 60% of our oil all told, so reducing all imports by 75% is not on the agenda.) Apparently some of our oil-producing allies in the region took him seriously — just like they did last year after the Second Inaugural Address gave them the mistaken impression that we had something against repressive dictatorships. They need to understand that these speeches are not about the ordinary “literal” truth that scientists are so fond of, but a larger, purpose-serving truth in which our President specializes.

Toles - Bush and Science Would it surprise you to learn that, when George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address proposed a multibillion dollar initiative to strengthen education and research in math and science, two-thirds of the money is actually not in the form of funding, but rather tax breaks for businesses? In fact, tax breaks that already exist, but are renewed annually, and Bush would simply like to make permanent?

What’s that? You wouldn’t be surprised? You hopeless cynic. Next you’ll be wondering how our President can be a rancher if he doesn’t know how to ride a horse.

The truth, the whole truth, but perhaps not the literal truth Read More »

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Wedgies

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Intelligent Design isn’t science, it’s simply a public-relations strategy to force religion into public high schools. Duh. But the ID folks will swear on a stack of Bibles that it has nothing to do with religion, it’s just a natural product of the scientific process. Which makes it remarkably dumb to actually write a strategy document detailing how ID is used to sneak religion into public life — these things have a way of leaking out into the public. Wedge Document But they did, and it did, and the result is the famous Wedge Document.

Now the story can be told of how the Wedge Document was secretly copied and released onto the internets. Turns out it was the heroic clandestine efforts of Matthew Duss and Tim Rhodes, who are clearly worthy of a Nobel or a MacArthur or some kind of prize. (I doubt they’re eligible for the Templeton Prize.) Pharyngula has the story, as well as a pdf version of the Wedge Document itself, complete with the Discovery Institute address and email at the bottom, not to mention some sort of weird Masonic pyramid logo. Priceless.

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