Patricia Barber is of course one of my favorite jazz musicians. She was recently asked by Poetry magazine to write, as an outsider, about poetry. Her comments are reprinted at the Chicago Public Radio website.

I am a songwriter, which is not the same thing as a poet. Poetry is a passion, my ever present guide and inspiration, though I indulge in very little of the lingua franca of the art. The truth is that I guard a deep well of ignorance; I deliberately protect an anti-position.

Music is a demanding but mysterious discipline whose clubhouse is exclusive. Membership is inherited more than earned. It is a gift endowed by blood, then perfected by tremendous desire and perseverance. The best a music teacher can do is lead by example or perhaps draw the student’s ear toward general musical patterns. The task of finding a musical path is left to the student. All musicians understand that even after years of musical scholarship, in the end, composing successfully is a lot like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Unlike the musical language, words are accessible to all. Accessible to too many. There is a myriad of poetry teachers and books on books. Better to stick my fingers in my ears when encountering cocktail chatter about iambic pentameter. “Wonder” has great power, like jet propulsion, like pleasure, and self-discovery is a path to wonder as well as a profound path to knowledge.

“Accessible to too many”? Discuss.

Truth! In the U.S. Senate, no less! Don’t get too used to it, would be my advice.

First, a sense-of-the-Senate resolution, the Nelson amendment, which read:

It is the sense of the Senate that Congress should reject any Social Security plan that requires deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt.

The vote split exactly fifty-fifty, with every Democrat voting in favor. In other words, fifty of fifty-five Republican senators are on the record as favoring either deep benefit cuts or a massive increase in debt. Probably both!

Meanwhile, in committee, Alan Greenspan tries to slip one by:

Alan Greenspan and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton clashed briefly Tuesday over rosy surplus forecasts the Federal Reserve Chairman relied on to support President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, estimates that turned out to be considerably off the mark.

“It turns out that we were all wrong,” Greenspan conceded at a Senate hearing.

“Just for the record, we were not all wrong, but many people were wrong,” Clinton, D-N.Y., quickly shot back.

I love this tactic (also popular in discussions of Iraq’s WMD) — make some bombastic claim, ignore the opposition, and when you are proven wrong, claim that everyone agreed with you in the first place. Genius.

My friend and frequent collaborator Mark Trodden has buckled under the pressure and finally started a blog of his own, Orange Quark. “Orange” because he is in the Physics department at Syracuse, a Big East power and longtime rival of my alma mater, Villanova. Both schools somehow made it into Slate’s list of NCAA basketball teams we hate, which makes little sense to me.

Mark’s humor and intelligence will be very welcome in the blogosphere. His first post introduces himself, but I should also say that the graduate students at the Cosmo-02 conference voted him “Best-Dressed Cosmologist” in a contest that wasn’t really very close. Okay, so the competition wasn’t all that fierce. There was also a vote for worst-dressed, which had a rather more crowded field. And I’m going to keep the winner of that one secret.

Rumors persist that Lisa Randall will also start blogging soon. I think it would help with her book sales.

Tom Toles.

From Zev at 3w:

How Many U of C Students does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Shhh! We’re trying to study!

Last night at 10:36 the lights in the Reg went off for a good ten minutes and no one budged. Everyone insisted on working by the light of their laptops and that was that. A true UofC moment.

Via Brad DeLong, Don Herzog at Left2Right is taken aback by a remark of Justice Scalia’s during oral argument in Van Orden v. Perry (one of the Ten Commandments cases, from Texas).

JUSTICE SCALIA: And when somebody goes by that monument, I don’t think they’re studying each one of the commandments. It’s a symbol of the fact that government comes — derives its authority from God. And that is, it seems to me, an appropriate symbol to be on State grounds.

Did you all know the “fact” that our government derives its authority from God? I remember being taught in school something about that authority being derived from the consent of the governed, but those were more permissive times.

Read what Herzog and DeLong have to say, there’s very little to add. If you are wondering whether Scalia’s ravings stem from some internally consistent theory, Ed Brayton will set you straight. And a great series of posts at Blondesense demolishes the notion that the Ten Commandments are somehow the basis for our laws: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.

George Musser is an occasional Preposterous commenter, and in his spare time is also an editor at Scientific American. Lacking a blog of his own, he recently contributed to SciAm Perspectives, a blog by Scientific American editors. (Bet you didn’t even know they had a blog, did you?)

George writes about his efforts to follow up on a provocative number he found in the January 8th Economist: “The United States Geological Survey reckons that the economic losses from natural disasters in the 1990s could have been reduced by $280 billion by investing just one-seventh of that sum in such measures [as planting trees, building dikes, and strengthening houses].” That’s a lot of money we could save! But what happens when you try to chase down the source of the claim?

With the written trail having grown cold, I turned to several experts on disaster preparedness, at USGS and elsewhere, and started going down a chain of contacts. It took nearly a month to reach the conclusion that no such report exists, at least not in the collection of any of the researchers who would have been involved in preparing it. The numbers, instead, appear to have come from a Munich Reinsurance report and it is not at all clear that they prove what they were later claimed to prove.

The sad but unsurprising lesson being that you can’t believe everything you read. This is the unfortunate side of the speed with which “memes” can spread in our hyperconnected world — it’s much easier to make an exaggerated claim and get it out there into the meme pool than it is to stamp it out once it’s public. And obviously, this is far from the most pernicious example.

So it turns out that I’m quite wealthy. Not because of any recent windfall, just because I’m a middle-class citizen of a country that is really rich, compared to other countries. Think of it this way: if your annual income is $1,000, you’re solidly in the top 50% of people in the world. Personally, I’m in the top 1% of wealth, with only about 40 million people richer than me worldwide (compared to about six billion who are poorer).

Go check your own position at the Global Rich List (via 3 quarks daily). The idea, of course, is to guilt you into giving more money to charity. I’m a strong believer in donating to charity, but am remarkably guilt-free about being well-off myself. (We won’t get into other things I feel guilty about, like the final exam I gave to my GR class.)

Of course, maybe we could actually do something about it. Jeffrey Sachs thinks we could end extreme poverty worldwide for a mere $150 billion per year. As Daniel Drezner says, this is something we should be talking about more. (He also says that academics can be bloggers, which is good to hear. There does, however, seem to be some risk of alienating your senior colleagues.)

In the most recent issue of symmetry magazine, Joe Lykken talks about how physicists give names to the things they invent and discover, and he calls out cosmologists for their most embarrassing failure.

The cosmologists have the worst of both worlds. They are plagued by non-serious cutesy names, from the Big Bang all the way to Wimpzillas and the Cardassian Expansion. At the same time, they have decided to adopt the name Standard Model to refer to the currently favored cosmological scheme, apparently because their previous name, the “LambdaCDM Concordance Model” was even worse. Should we charge them a licensing fee?

He’s right, of course. We have this amazing model of the universe, with ordinary matter sprinkled lightly amidst the dark matter and dark energy, expanding in accordance with Einstein’s equation from an initially hot, dense state. Using only physics we know, we can extrapolate back fourteen billion years to what the universe was doing when it was just a few seconds old, and make predictions that fit perfectly with observations. And yet we can’t come up with a good name for the mode. (“The Preposterous Universe” is fun, but too cutesy. Likewise “the cosmic martini,” in which ordinary matter is an olive, dark energy is the gin, and dark matter the vermouth. Too goofy, sorry.) The idea is to be both inspiring and descriptive without being silly. Any suggestions?

Here I thought that you knew you had a functioning democracy when the ruling political party voluntarily steps down after losing an election. Ben Sargent is much more sophisticated.