I just thought you should know that Allen Iverson is currently ranked #1 in the NBA in scoring (30.8 per game), #2 in steals (2.44), and #5 in assists (8.0). He will be the first person to rank in the top five in all three categories since — well, since ever. Nobody has ranked in the top five in those categories since steals were first kept as an official statistic in 1972.

Also, he will join Wilt Chamberlain, George Gervin, and Michael Jordan as the only players to win four NBA scoring titles. And they were all at least six inches taller than he is. But he has a lot of tattoos, so he must be a bad person.

Via Daily Kos, a Washington Post article about the new warm-and-fuzzy Larry Summers.

Last week, Summers (who is addressing the Harvard Club in Washington this evening) struck a very different tone.

“You know, universities like ours were structured in their basic structure many years ago, and it’s probably an exaggeration but not too much of one to say that they were designed by men for men,” he said. He announced that he had five points, and then spoke extemporaneously for almost half an hour, his mind clicking through the main issues, adding examples drawn from as far afield as the physics of electrical charges and orchestra auditions. But he also spoke with a personal touch, noting that he himself had to draw a strong red line around his private family time, and that he, like everyone, had biases that he was only just learning about.

“I know that there is one additional thing that I’ve learned and that is that what Harvard does and says has an enormous resonance that goes beyond Zip code 02138,” he said near the end. That remark was meant, no doubt, in all humility. Throughout the past months, one consistent criticism of Summers, coming from his supporters and detractors alike, is that you can’t just flap your mouth like a brash undergraduate when you’re the president of Harvard. But, as with so many things about Harvard and about this particular president of Harvard — right down to the car he arrives in — there is a (perhaps) unintentional arrogance to it.

Summers’s talk was greeted warmly by those present last week. His light touch, his hints at self-deprecation, his embracing of ideas about discrimination and bias that he seemed to dismiss in January were reassuring. Everyone who has made any effort at developing a theory of Larry Summers — and that includes most people at Harvard — would find in this talk evidence that, at worst, he has some rough edges, that his reputation for arrogance is a quirk that he can, through effort, compensate for with charm. But there are many theories of Larry floating around, and for those who hold the darkest of them — those who parse every word he utters for evidence of malign intent — this wasn’t a new Larry, but merely a guy choosing his words very carefully for public consumption.

I don’t know whether the contrition is honest, or just political positioning; but I don’t see any reason not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that I’m in any hurry for people to forgive and forget; in the meantime, other universities are benefiting as top scholars gradually leave Harvard for more peaceful pastures, such as the return of political scientist Michael Dawson to Chicago.

Defenders of Summers’ original remarks consistently miss the point. They would like to pretend that his critics were arguing either that there are no differences between men and women, or (even worse) that we aren’t allowed to talk about such questions. Rubbish. As I mentioned long ago, of course there are differences between men and women. Some of them might even be relevant to being a scientist. Some of them might even favor men! It’s really hard to tell, since the signal is so incredibly tiny and hard to measure.

It is also not the point. The point (for those who have missed it) is whether such intrinsic differences have anything to do with the actual disparity in the representation of men and women in science. And the truth is, they don’t, at least not at any significant level. You can use this hypothesis to make predictions, and they all come out wrong (for example, the under-representation of women should be nearly uniform from place to place and over time, which is dramatically off, even if progress is slow). And you can actually study the factors that keep women away from science, and you find beyond the shadow of a doubt that a slew of systematic biases are to blame. Talk all you want about intrinsic differences, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re explaining anything about the current situation.

The idea that Summers’ critics want to stifle investigation of the truth is even sillier. There are many social scientists who work precisely on the existence and impact of innate differences between men and women; these people are real scholars, and nobody is trying to get in their way. The criticism of Summers was never that he was telling an unpleasant truth, it’s that he was wrong. It’s okay to be wrong when you’re an assistant professor and minor-league blogger like myself; the rules are different when you are the president of a university. In particular, if you choose to turn a blind eye to a substantial degree of discrimination in your midst, which you really should be leading the fight to do away with, and you are clearly unfamiliar with the basics of what you’re talking about, don’t be surprised when people are upset.

To be perfectly unambiguous, at the risk of being somewhat repetitive: the point is not that certain hypotheses shouldn’t be entertained. The point is that, if you are in a position of great influence and authority, and you haven’t carefully looked into the subject matter, and you’re wrong, and you’re wrong in a way that is potentially damaging to a great deal of people — you’re going to get into trouble. (People are welcome to disagree with me that Summers was wrong; but to pretend that anyone was attempting to stifle free inquiry is simply dishonest.) If Summers had come out in favor of creationism or astrology, the reaction would have been very similar. Maybe he’s learned a lesson; at least he has people talking about the issues.

Lots of good stuff in the latest issue of symmetry magazine. Highlights include:

• An article by Rachel Ivie on representation of women in physics. It’s certainly growing, just taking a while to catch up to other fields. Still a long way to go.
• An introduction to plasma acceleration as a new technology for particle colliders. This is the kind of radical new technology that will make future ultra-high-energy accelerators possible. Quantum Diaries blogger Caolionn O’Connell is quoted extensively.
• Barry Barrish on progress towards an International Linear Collider. It’s good to have someone so sensible in charge of the effort. (He’s also Director of LIGO in his spare time.)

Back in Chicago, for a day or two before flying off once more, after an enjoyable couple of days in New York (and DC before that). I was visiting the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, which is an active and fun place to think about fundamental physics and the universe. NYU has been on a hiring binge lately, and the CCPP has the demographics to prove it: Glennys Farrar (PhD 1971) is the sage leader, and the other six faculty members have all received their PhD’s since 1992. So they’re all at the top of their game, and are helping to make NYU one of the major players in this field. (In a couple of decades they’ll just be a collection of old faculty members taking up space; but won’t we all? Be old, I mean, not a collection of faculty members.) (Update: Astronomers, apparently, can be useful for quite a long time.)

While in New York, I got to see this blog in the newspaper: there is an article about academic blogging in this week’s Village Voice. It’s written by Geeta Dayal, who runs the Proven By Science blog. Looks like fellow Chicagoan Eszter Hargittai (of Crooked Timber fame) and I have learned the same lesson from blogging: that you have to actually think through what you are going to say, since it will be read by a bunch of people! Can’t be quite as casual as you are when you’re just expostulating over coffee. (Readers can judge for themselves how careful I actually am.)

One of the great things about academic blogs is the chance to see through the conventions of scholarly writing and peek at the extracurricular concerns of the flesh-and-blood people who comprise the professoriate. Here is as good an example as you will ever find: Michael Bérubé describing his son Jamie’s mastery of Beatles arcana. Jamie, if you aren’t familiar with the backstory, has Down’s syndrome, but don’t let that fool you; when it comes to the lyrics of the John songs and the Paul songs, Jamie will kick your ass.

By Tom Toles.

I’m still at NYU, giving a seminar this afternoon on inflation and the arrow of time. Tomorrow it’s back to Chicago, where I’ll be hosting Neal Lane, former White House Science Advisor. He’ll be giving our Physics Colloquium, with the the provocative title: “One perspective on American science – some trouble ahead!”

Then it’s off to Florida for the APS Meeting. I’m the organizer for a session on “Cosmological Constraints on Theories of Gravitation and Fundamental Physics,” featuring talks by Arthur Kosowsky, Hiranya Peiris, and fellow cosmologist/blogger Mark Trodden. Should be fun.

Not that any of this traveling is an excuse for flimsy blogging, but there you have it.

Among other responses to the post about fundamental physics in the U.S., there was a position that one occasionally hears: “Who cares about particle physics, we can just do astrophysics instead, it’s cheaper and more fun.” I’ve heard this claim even (especially?) from people who have been experimental particle physicists themselves, and have decided to move into astrophysics. This is actually quite an established career path, although not always the easiest one.

The truth is: that’s a fine philosophy if your concern is with the employment prospects of physicists, but not if your concern is understanding deep truths about nature. Both astronomy and accelerator-based experiments can teach us something about fundamental physics, but there is no sense in which one is a replacement for the other. That’s the point of the surveillance vs. interrogation metaphor. Astrophysics is like eavesdropping: you can overhear things that you wouldn’t learn under direct questioning, but you have to take what you can get. Astrophysicists take advantage of the fact that the universe provides higher energies and longer timescales than anything we can duplicate in the lab. But if there’s something specific you’d like to know, but it isn’t an important astrophysical process, you can’t learn anything about it. Particle physics is like interrogation: there are some questions that Nature will clam up and refuse to answer, but at least you can ask very detailed queries under well-controlled conditions.

To be somewhat less allegorical: imagine that we are able to detect dark matter, either “directly” (when we detect the collision of a dark matter particle with material in an underground cryogenic detector) or “indirectly” (when we observe radiation from the annihilation of dark matter particles in the centers of galaxies). Either scenario is quite plausible, if the dark matter is a weakly-interacting massive particle. But then you might like to know, so what is that particle? Is it the lightest supersymmetric partner? Is it a Kaluza-Klein state in a theory with universal extra dimensions? Is it something exotic and different, that we haven’t already theorized about? Astrophysical observations will never tell us the answer to these questions. You need to not only see the particle, but to measure its interactions with other particles, known and yet-to-be-discovered. The only way to do that is to push the energy frontier forward at particle accelerators. Similar stories can be told for questions about baryogenesis, extra dimensions, technicolor, and any other theory of physics beyond the Standard Model; Mark has posted about this, and I have a talk I gave a while back.

To be sure, particle physics has issues. Mostly, it’s extremely expensive. After the LHC at CERN, we’ll want to build the International Linear Collider, for which the numbers look like eight billion dollars or so. That’s a lot of cash to devote to pure intellectual curiosity. I think it’s well worth the cost, but others might not. That’s okay; it’s a debate worth having, and I’d be happy to defend the side of devoting some tiny fraction of our wealth to discovering the laws of nature. But it should be clear that this is the choice with which we are faced: spend the money, or don’t make the discoveries. Looking through telescopes will always be a complement to colliding particles, never a replacement.

National Poetry Month continues. (And I am still on the road, currently shifting from D.C. to NYC.) So here is a prose poem from Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire, translated by L.M. Friedman.

Unhappy perhaps is man, but happy the artist torn by desire.

I am burning to paint her, that enigmatic woman whom I had glimpsed so rarely and who fled so quickly, like something beautiful regretfully left behind by a traveler swept off into the night. Ah, how long it has been already since she vanished!

She is lovely, and more than lovely: she is astonishing. Darkness abounds in her, and she is inspired by everything deep and nocturnal. Her eyes are two caverns in which mystery vaguely flickers, and a sudden glance from her illuminates like a flash of lightning — an explosion in the dark of night.

I would compare her to a black sun, if only one could conceive of such a star pouring forth light and happiness. But it is the moon, rather, to which she is more readily likened; it is the moon that has marked her indelibly with its redoubtable influence; not the stark white moon of romantic idylls, that icy bride, but the sinister, inebriating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night and brushed by racing clouds; not the peaceful, discreet moon visiting the sleep of guiltless men, but the moon ripped from the heavens, defeated and rebellious, that the Thessalian witches cruelly compelled to dance on the terrified grass.

In her little skull dwell a tenacious will and a love of prey. And yet from the lower part of that disturbing face, beneath restless nostrils eagerly inhaling the unknown and the impossible, laughter will burst out suddenly and with ineffable grace, and her wide mouth, all redness and whiteness — and delectable — makes one dream of the miracle of a superb flower blossoming in a volcanic soil.

There are women who fill men with a desire to conquer them and have their way with them; but this woman inspires a longing to die slowly under her gaze.

Greetings from Washington, D.C., where I gave a colloquium yesterday at Goddard Space Flight Center. Had fun catching up with old friends, and listening to NASA scuttlebut. (Science-wise, things are looking pretty gloomy right now, although not completely hopeless.) Less fun was when my laptop, for the first time ever, balked at transmitting my talk to the projector. I managed to convert my OpenOffice presentation to PowerPoint, saved it to a flash drive, transferred it to another laptop, and used that. (I don’t have PowerPoint on my computer, and nobody else has OpenOffice.) So it was salvageable, but about 10% of my figures didn’t show up, which was disconcerting.

In lieu of substantive blogging, the good news is that I am now empowered to participate in everyone’s favorite blog game: the Friday Random Ten, in which you put your iPod (or whatever) on shuffle and list the first ten songs that show up. I think I saw it first at Rox Populi (who disowned it, but can’t seem to give up), but also at Feministe, Pandagon, Pharyngula, Grammar.police, Majikthise, Yglesias, and Crescat — so an eclectic crowd indeed. After buying the damn iPod six months ago, I have finally gotten around to downloading my CD’s to it (half of them, anyway), and am now equipped to play along. Day late, dollar short, whatever.

1. Pat Metheny Group, Double Blind
2. Maria Papadopoulou, Maskaremeni
3. Aretha Franklin, Hello Sunshine
4. Cecilia Bartoli, E’ Amore Un Landroncello
5. Living Colour, Time’s Up
6. PJ Harvey, Is That All There Is?
7. Duke Ellington, Wig Wise
   
8. Yes, South Side of the Sky
9. Isaac Hayes, Chocolate Chip
10. Lauryn Hill, I Used To Love Him
    

Not sure how accurate a window into my soul this is supposed to provide. But any technology that juxtaposes Yes with Isaac Hayes can’t be all bad. The world needs more progressive soul. (Or hot-buttered pretension, depending on your view.)

Book royalties are not subject to self-employment taxes. Hey, I don’t make the rules.

Tavis Smiley is a hard worker, hosting talk shows on both PBS and public radio. (He’s no longer doing a daily show on NPR, but will be starting again with a weekend show for Public Radio International.) Tavis can be goofy at times, but I owe him big time for introducing me to Oscar Brown Jr.

Born in Chicago in 1926, Brown is probably most famous as a singer, songwriter, and lyricist. But he has also been active in television, and at the age of 26 hosted the nation’s first Black radio news show. His masterpiece is his first album, Sin and Soul from 1960. The songs are a mixture of styles, from the deadly serious to the lushly beautiful to the cheerfully frivolous. The most well-known is Afro Blue, a tune that started life as an instrumental written by Mongo Santamaria. It became famous when John Coltrane recorded it, but became a standard after Brown wrote lyrics for it.

If anything, the flaw in the album is that Brown has too much range, and will juxtapose a jaunty ditty with something deadly serious. An example of the latter is my favorite song on the album, Bid ‘Em In. Brown sings it almost a cappella, in the style of an auctioneer, accompanied only by the percussive rap of a gavel. It tells the story of the auction of a slave girl.

Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!
That sun is hot and plenty bright.
Let’s get down to business and get home tonight.
Bid ’em in!

Auctioning slaves is a real high art.
Bring that young gal, Roy. She’s good for a start.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Now here’s a real good buy only about 15.
Her great grandmammy was a Dahomey queen.
Just look at her face, she sure ain’t homely.
Like Sheba in the Bible, she’s black but comely.
Bid ’em in!

Gonna start her at three. Can I hear three?
Step up gents. Take a good look see.
Cause I know you’ll want her once you’ve seen her.
She’s young and ripe. Make a darn good breeder.
Bid ’em in!

She’s good in the fields. She can sew and cook.
Strip her down Roy, let the gentlemen look.
She’s full up front and ample behind.
Examine her teeth if you’ve got a mind.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Here’s a bid of three from a man who’s thrifty.
Three twenty five! Can I hear three fifty?
Your money ain’t earning you much in the banks.
Turn her around Roy, let ’em look at her flanks.
Bid ’em in!

Three fifty’s bid. I’m looking for four.
At four hundred dollars she’s a bargain sure.
Four is the bid. Four fifty. Five!
Five hundred dollars. Now look alive!
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in!

Don’t mind them tears, that’s one of her tricks.
Five fifty’s bid and who’ll say six?
She’s healthy and strong and well equipped.
Make a fine lady’s maid when she’s properly whipped.
Bid ’em in!

Six! Six fifty! Don’t be slow.
Seven is the bid. Gonna let her go.
At seven she’s going!
Going!
Gone!
Pull her down Roy, bring the next one on.
Bid ’em in! Get ’em in! Bid ’em in!

The song enjoyed a rediscovery last year, when it was made into a short animated film by Neal Sopata. The film is astonishing and powerful, although I would give most of the credit to the song itself. Hopefully publicity from film will turn a new audience onto the work of this master.