Remind me not to mess with John Banville

/ 1 Comment

A smackdown in the Letters section of the June 23, 2005 New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

I don’t agree with John Banville’s judgment that “Saturday is a dismayingly bad book” [NYR, May 26], and I have to wonder whether we are reading the same book (has the American edition, perhaps, been modified from that published in the UK in January by Jonathan Cape?).

Banville writes: “Perowne goes on to his squash game, which he manages to win despite the fright he has endured and the punch in the sternum that Baxter delivered him.” And later, “having thrashed his squash opponent, Perowne returns to the arts of peace.”

In the squash game, as published in the UK, at seventeen pages’ length, Perowne loses.

John Sutherland
Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus
Department of English
University College, London

John Banville replies:

Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the Department of Trivia. I have no knowledge of, and care nothing for, the game of squash. Having read Ian McEwan’s description of the match between Perowne and his American friend, all seventeen pages of it, I formed the notion that after a shaky start, and despite his experiences in the morning–traffic accident, encounter with thug, punch in the chest, etc.–Perowne managed to outplay his opponent, who, however, deprived him of what he clearly considered a victory by demanding a let or somesuch–as I say, I am ignorant in these matters, and McEwan’s account of the game made me no wiser, due no doubt to my sluggish comprehension rather than his powers of description. Perowne seemed to regard his opponent’s maneuver as not cheating, exactly, but certainly a less than generous broadening of a very fine line, although he did grudgingly consent to go on playing and lost, something which obviously meant more to him than it did to me. One concludes that there are no moral victories in sport, an activity which, as in a letter to an editor, it is easy to score by a technicality.

Remind me not to mess with John Banville Read More »

1 Comment

Senator endorses Intelligent Design

/ 12 Comments

But perhaps not one you’d think. From the Arizona Daily Star, via Wonkette.

On Tuesday, though, [John McCain] sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.

McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

The theory of intelligent design says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and that a higher power must have had a hand in guiding it.

There are liberals out there who are fond of John McCain because he’s some sort of “maverick.” This time he’s lining up with the majority, it would seem.

Update: And now he’s flip-flopped on gay marriage, in the wrong direction. I hope he enjoys life as a pandering politician more than he did as a principled statesman.

Senator endorses Intelligent Design Read More »

12 Comments

arxiv.org Joins the Blogosphere!

/ 24 Comments

Over the last fifteen years, the way that physicists communicate research results has been revolutionized by arxiv.org, the preprint server devised by Paul Ginsparg (formerly xxx.lanl.gov). Any time you write a paper, you send it to the arxiv, where its existence is beamed to the world the next day, and it is stored there in perpetuity. Along with the SPIRES service at SLAC, which keeps track of which papers have cited which other papers, physicists have a free, flexible, and easy-to-use web of literature that is instantly accessible to anyone. Most people these days post to the arxiv before they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody actually reads the journals — they serve exclusively as ways to verify that your work has passed peer review.

So it’s exciting to see the introduction of trackbacks to the abstracts at arxiv.org. As blog readers know, an individual blog post can inform other blog posts that it is talking about them by leaving a “trackback” or “pingback” — basically, a way of saying “Hey, I’m talking about that stuff you said.” This helps people negotiate their way through the tangles of the blogosphere along threads of common interest. Now your blog post can send trackbacks to the abstracts of papers at the arxiv! Here’s a test: I will link to my most recent paper. If it works as advertised, the trackback will appear automatically, due to the magic of WordPress.

Now, if you write a paper and people comment on it on their blogs, that fact will be recorded right there at the abstract on arxiv.org. Drawing us one step closer to the use of blogs as research tools.

Update: In the comments, Jacques points to an explanation of some of the history; he was (probably) the first to suggest the idea, years ago (which is millenia in blogo-time).

arxiv.org Joins the Blogosphere! Read More »

24 Comments

Not Even Wrong

/ 75 Comments

Peter Woit, noted blogger and string-theory gadfly, has written a book about his objections to string theory: Not Even Wrong, to be published next year by Jonathan Cape.

Good. I completely disagree with Peter’s opinions about string theory, and think that his accusations that the Landscape is non-scientific are completely off the mark. But his objections are not crazy, and his dislike for the theory is grounded in an informed scientific judgement. (Sometimes more than others, but that’s a matter of personal opinion.)

The whole discussion is a nice contrast with the Intelligent Design mess. The fact is, we don’t know what is the correct theory that unifies particle physics with gravitation. String theory is far and away the leading candidate, but its status as leader is a reflection of the educated judgement of the experts, not any airtight evidence. This judgement comes from looking at various pieces of information — what we know about gravitation, and quantum mechanics, and particle physics, and the history of ideas in physics, and the mathematical structures underlying gauge theory and general relativity, as well as an intuitive feeling for what principles are most important and what clues most worth pursuing — and deciding which path toward progress is likely to be fruitful. When people like Peter (or Lee Smolin) read these tea leaves, they come to a different conclusion than most scientists in the field. But it’s healthy disagreement among professionals working at the edge of what we know and don’t know — not politically-motivated intervention from people who have no clue, just an agenda, and operate completely apart from the scientific mainstream. To people looking in from the outside, I hope an accurate picture comes across: there is a widespread feeling that string theory is the best hope for a quantum theory of gravity, but it’s not a settled issue, and we’re working in good faith on moving forward.

So I’m happy to see this side of the argument represented in the popular press, even if I disagree — we shouldn’t be afraid of the free market of ideas. If people don’t agree, they should explain the sources of their disagreement rationally. There is always the danger of misprepresentation of course, and in this case there is an obvious worry — that a spate of stories will appear about how string theory is in trouble, and a house built on sand, and so forth. That might be true, but certainly isn’t the impression I have from talking to string theorists. In any event, I hope that we defenders of the theory can stick to the high road, and welcome this intervention in the discussion of these important ideas.

Not Even Wrong Read More »

75 Comments

Let down

/ 25 Comments

I tried to give the New York Times series on intelligent design the benefit of the doubt, I really did. While the first installment received a lot of heated criticism around the science blogs, I was cautiously optimistic. It did, after all, expose the Discovery Institute as a public-relations machine rather than a scientific institution. True, it didn’t emphasize the obvious shortcomings of ID, but I agreed with PZ that we should wait for the next installment — hopefully the science would be front and center there.

What a disappointment. Today’s article (by Kenneth Chang) is a disaster — the usual credulous rehearsal of “balanced” arguments on each side, leading the non-expert reader to imagine that there is some sort of real “controversy.” You wouldn’t know from the article that ID enjoys the same level of support among biologists as the flat-Earth theory does among astronomers. Pharyngula, Chris Mooney, Brad DeLong, Arthur Silber, Abnormal Interests, and Brian Leiter administer the requisite flogging. My heart’s not in it.

It’s sad to see the basic workings of science undermined by buzzwords and fast talk and misrepresentations and fallacious arguments in the name of a politico-religious agenda, and to see the media go along for the ride. If newspapers wanted to write straightforward stories about natural theology as a religious question, I wouldn’t care at all. But everybody knows it’s not science, and it’s depressing to see the charade treated with such seriousness.

Update: Tuesday’s article is about scientists’ attitudes toward God, by Cornelia Dean. Not especially good or bad; PZ is not very happy. But as Jay mentions in comments (and Thoughts from Kansas blogs about), there is a nice opinion piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg that muses on the mind-boggling timescales invoked by evolutionary biology, not to mention cosmology. It’s a nice reflection on real science and the awe it engenders; opening yourself up to the way the universe really works is infinitely more rewarding than making up your mind ahead of time and insisting that the world work that way.

Another update: Kenneth Chang, author of the second NYT piece, has left a comment on Pharyngula (and now here). He points out, correctly, that the article was not for us (scientifically literate blog readers). But I think he dramatically underestimates the extent to which he gives the wrong impression of the science — there is no scientific “controversy” whatsoever, and that message did not come through with nearly the clarity that it should have. It’s not a matter of factual errors, it’s about an accurate portrayal of the status of this conflict.

Let down Read More »

25 Comments

Deep time

/ 8 Comments

Dinosaur comics discusses entropy and the fate of the universe.

Dinosaur comics

T. Rex muses on the Poincare recurrence theorem and Boltzmann’s suggested resolution of the arrow of time problem, but Dromiceiomimus seems to have a better understanding of the lessons of modern cosmology. Utahraptor, meanwhile, argues that the universe is not manifestly ergodic, and insists that the entropy problem is not yet resolved.

Deep time Read More »

8 Comments

Nonsense and propaganda

/ 10 Comments

A New York Times article by Jodi Wilgoren talks about the Discovery Institute, the folks pushing Intelligent Design creationism. Entitled “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive,” it goes through the history and funding of the DI, and touches on their relationship to the conservative and evangelical movements.

My reading was that the article was a step in the right direction. It’s being criticized, I would say a little too harshly, by the pro-science side of the blogosphere — Arthur Silber, Carl Zimmer, and even Atrios, although PZ Myers is somewhat more measured in his condemnation. I think the difference in reaction comes down to the same distinction that arose in a previous post on intelligent design, where I suggested that it was “propaganda” and Mark commented that it was just “nonsense.” Scientists quite understandably want everyone to know that ID is completely non-scientific nonsense. And of course that’s true, but you’re just not going to get a non-opinion article in a major newspaper entitled “Intelligent Design — Nonsense, or Bullshit?”

But I don’t think we necessarily should be arguing the scientific merits of ID in the newspapers, precisely because there aren’t any. We should be shifting the debate by making it clear that this is not a scientific controversy — it’s a self-conscious propaganda machine. Again, real scientists publish articles and give talks at conferences, they don’t try to push their ideas onto school boards. I would say that the message we most need to get out there is that the entire notion of ID is absolutely nothing more than a political movement, not a scholarly dispute. Wilgoren’s article, while annoying in many ways, takes important steps in that direction:

When President Bush plunged into the debate over the teaching of evolution this month, saying, “both sides ought to be properly taught,” he seemed to be reading from the playbook of the Discovery Institute, the conservative think tank here that is at the helm of this newly volatile frontier in the nation’s culture wars…

Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization’s intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life’s origins known as intelligent design.

Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.

Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs – and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.

That’s exactly what I want people to hear. Yes, it’s annoyingly misleading to be described as “on the defensive,” but we are on the defensive — not about the tenets of evolution, but about defending sensible curricula in our public schools. On blogs or in conversation it’s fun to demolish the usual ID arguments about transitional fossils or the second law of thermodynamics, but once we enter into those arguments in the public sphere, we’ve lost — the IDers can always throw out enough buzzwords and lies to make it sound like there really is a controversy. But if the popular view of the ID movement were that it was a well-financed propaganda machine without any connection to academic discourse, we’d be in much better shape.

Nonsense and propaganda Read More »

10 Comments

Worst-case scenarios

/ 17 Comments

One of the countless mistakes made in the planning and execution of the Iraq war was the baffling Pollyannaism of the planners. It’s one thing to put an optimistic face forward, but an entirely different thing to be legitimately surprised when things don’t work out in the way you intended. I would have thought that planning for worst-case scenarios is standard operating procedure for military operations, but Rumsfeld and his underlings seemed to be simply stuck when things went wrong.

Deep into the mess, it’s still worth asking what is the worst-case scenario for Iraq, and I don’t see many people making the effort. I’m certainly no expert, but even I can see a clear path to much worse outcomes than most people seem to be contemplating. Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy has laid out a useful categorization of the possibilities, on which Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber offers useful commentary:

  1. The U.S. beats back the insurgency and democracy flowers in Iraq (call this the “optimistic stay” scenario),
  2. The U.S. digs in its heels, spends years fighting the insurgency, loses lots of troops, and years later withdraws, leading to a bloody and disastrous civil war (the “pessimistic stay” scenario);
  3. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out relatively soon, and things in Iraq are about as best as you could hope for, perhaps leading to a decent amount of democracy (optimistic leave), and
  4. The U.S. decides that it’s no longer worth it to stay in Iraq, pulls out soon, and plunges Iraq into a bloody and disastrous civil war with the bad guys assuming control eventually (pessimistic leave).

I can be more pessimistic than that! The hints are right there in the attempts by some Shia clerics to carve out some autonomy for Shiites in the oil-rich southern provinces of the country. The proposal, which would have isolated the Sunni minority in the relatively poor central regions between Kurdish and Shia territories, seems to have been defeated as far as the Iraqi constitution is concerned. But things are far from settled, and it raises the possibility that the civil war will ultimately result in partition of the country.

Iraq was one of those ethnically heterogeneous nations that were awkwardly pieced together in the process of colonialization and its aftermath. It’s very common for such states to dissolve when the bonds are loosened.

Iraq, forged by the British from the war-torn scrap of the collapsed Ottoman empire, survived as a single state only because of the iron fists of monarchs and, in more recent decades, former dictator Saddam Hussein.

Despite that, there is a fear that its disintegration could trigger unpredictable consequences for all of its uneasy neighbours — Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Some critics now say that the policy pledge of trying to keep Iraq whole was always doomed. “Iraq is the last, multiethnic state, left over from the First World War,” said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. ambassador with experience in both the Balkans and Iraq.

“Democracy killed the Soviet Union, it killed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and it will kill Iraq,” he said in an interview from Baghdad.

“A managed breakup is not easy, but it will be less violent than a forced and unhappy union,” said Mr. Galbraith, now a senior diplomatic fellow at the Washington-based Center for Arms Control.

Maybe it will be less violent; but the opposite is certainly conceivable. Imagine that the Kurds and the Shiites really carve out separate countries for themselves. The Shia region will naturally ally with Iran, as has already been happening. The existence of a sovereign Kurdish state will be unacceptable to leaders in Turkey, who worry that their own Kurdish minority will push to secede. Meanwhile the small Sunni minority will be left without significant oil wealth, but with a memory of ruling the country for decades.

It’s not hard to imagine disaster: a conflict between one or the other of these remnant states spreading to their natural allies in the region. Iran and the former Iraq have a long history of bloody warfare; it’s not hard to envision a conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis, with Iran jumping in on the Shiite side. The Sunnis have allies throughout the Arab world, any one of which might come to their aid — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria. Turkey could easily see the chaos as a good excuse to subdue the Kurds, opening up a regional conflagration. Saddam already established the precedent of lobbying missiles at Israel when things look grim; various of the states involved could get a similar idea. Unlike the first Gulf War, in which the U.S. was trying to hold together a fragile coalition of regional allies, the Israelis would have little motivation for sitting quietly without retaliating (nor should they). It would be, to put it mildly, a mess.

To be clear, I don’t think such a scenario is at all likely; but I don’t think it’s inconceivable, either. And it should be our job to contemplate the worst possible outcomes of unstable situations like we find ourselves in right now. This is why, although I’ve always been anti-war, and certainly against the establishment of permanent U.S. bases (one of the many unspoken agendas of the war), I’ve never been in favor of setting a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, an idea that seems to be gaining currency among Democrats. I’m of the Colin Powell “you break it, you bought it” school, and we have certainly broken it. Right now, how long we stay in Iraq should largely be up to the judgement of the Iraqis themselves, acting as a sovereign nation; so long as our troops are serving a useful purpose in helping the country stay together and move towards peace, it’s our obligation to stick it out.

Update: At Obsidian Wings, hilzoy has a discussion of Iraqi militias that won’t make anyone feel more optimistic.

Worst-case scenarios Read More »

17 Comments

The Republican War on Science

/ 19 Comments

I finally received my copy of Chris Mooney’s new book, The Republican War on Science. Chris is a longtime blogger at The Intersection, now also blogging at ScienceGate. I guess you can figure out from the title what the book is about. Here’s what Neal Lane says on the back cover:

A careful reading of this well-researched and richly referenced work should remove any doubt that, at the highest levels of government, ideology is being advanced in the name of science, at great disservice to the American people.

Lane was the White House Science Advisor under Clinton, as well as former director of the National Science Foundation, so he knows what he’s talking about.

I’ll wait until I’ve actually read the book to offer any opinions. The funny thing to me was a few months ago, when I was told that I’d be receiving a complimentary media-review copy of the book. I figured it must have been some kind of mistake; I’m not the media, I’m a highly-trained expert to whom the media comes when they want deep insights into the important cosmological issues of the day. But no, apparently I am now the media (or at least part of it), thanks to this blogging thing. I feel tawdry somehow, but I suppose one gets used to it. (Some of my best friends are in the media.)

The Republican War on Science Read More »

19 Comments
Scroll to Top