This Sunday night (Dec. 3) I’ll be appearing on Coast to Coast AM, a popular radio show hosted by Art Bell. The show is broadcast live, starting at 11:00p.m. Pacific time (2:00a.m. Eastern), and runs for three hours. Since I’m sure everyone will want to stay up to listen, you can find your local affiliate here.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, Coast to Coast (originated by Bell, now hosted by him on weekends and by George Noory during the week) specializes in discussions of, how shall we put this, esoteric phenomena. UFO’s, psychic powers, ghosts, that sort of thing. The hosts generally take a non-judgmental attitude, while callers and guests have been known to get quite enthusiastic. But the show also tackles more straightforward science topics, as well as politics, religion, civil rights, and what have you. Bad Astronomer Phil Plait has been on the show several times, debunking the craziness of Richard Hoagland and other crackpots.

I won’t be sharing any inside information about alien abductions — we’ll be talking about time travel and the dark sector. Okay, to the untutored eye, those topics don’t seem any more respectable than the paranormal, but we’ll be sticking quite closely to the normal, thanks very much. I hope to get a chance to talk about how respectable science is distinguished from UFO and ghost studies — it’s not quite so easy to move beyond the “I know the difference when I see it” level of distinction. But I think it’s crucially important to preach not only to the converted, but also to the skeptical. The fact that we can talk about dark energy and time travel in a rigorous scientific context should be all the evidence anyone needs that the real world is more than marvelous enough; there’s no reason to cling to ideas that don’t fit in with what we know about science.

And for C2C regulars who are just discovering Cosmic Variance for the first time, here are some older posts that touch on the ideas we’ll be talking about on the show — dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of time. Looking forward to the show!

• Dark Matter Exists
• Identifying Dark Matter
• Out-Einsteining Einstein
• Shaw Prize for the Accelerating Universe
• The future of the universe
• Dark Energy Task Force Report
• Future Cosmology Nobels
• Dark Energy Has Long Been Dark-Energy-Like
• Don’t Be Fooled by w!
• How Are We to Make Progress With w?
• Alex Vilenkin – Many Worlds in One
• The Arrow of Time
• Boltzmann’s Anthropic Brain

Study by Robert Whaples, summarized by Greg Mankiw:

• 90.1 percent disagree with the position that “the U.S. should restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries.”
• 87.5 percent agree that “the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade.”
• 85.2 percent agree that “the U.S. should eliminate agricultural subsidies.”
• 85.3 percent agree that “the gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged.”
• 77.2 percent agree that “the best way to deal with Social Security’s long-term funding gap is to increase the normal retirement age.”
• 67.1 percent agree that “parents should be given educational vouchers which can be used at government-run or privately-run schools.”
• 65.0 percent agree that “the U.S. should increase energy taxes.”

They like the free market, don’t they? Well, so do I. I basically agree with all of them except the bit about school vouchers — I even willing to be convinced about that, but the data so far seem to speak strongly against the success of vouchers (as I vaguely recall). The incentive structures don’t really point in the right direction. From the table, note that the above answers lump together “agree” and “strongly agree”; in fact, when it comes to vouchers, the agreement is not strong.

If you disagree with the economists, here’s why. All via Marginal Revolution.

Much subtle wisdom in today’s Piled Higher and Deeper.

Submitted without comment: how to pray facing Mecca from low-Earth orbit. An excerpt from “The Determination of Prayer Times and Direction of the Qiblah in Space,” by Dr. Zainol Abidin Abdul Rashid, translated from Malay by Jessica Ramakrishnan, published in the November issue of Harper’s, and also here. Presented at a conference on Islam and Life in Space.

As trips to space become commonplace, human civilization will no longer be tied to the surface of the Earth. But Muslims, wherever they are- whether on Earth or in space – are bound by duty to perform the obligations of worship.

A Muslim who wants to travel must study the techniques of determining prayer times and the direction of the Qibla ahead of travel in order to achieve complete worship. I will elaborate the method of determining prayer times and the Qiblah direction in space, primarily on the International Space Station (ISS). The ISS is more than 200 miles from the earth’s surface and orbits the earth every ninety-two minutes, or roughly sixteen times a day. Do we have to worship eighty times a day (sixteen orbits a day multiplied by five prayer times?) This seems unlikely, since it is compulsory for a Muslim to pray five times a day according to an Earth day, as determined by Allah during the creation of Heaven and Earth – no matter where in space the Muslim is located.

As for the Qiblah, for Muslims there is only one the Kaaba, located in Mecca. A Qiblah that changes in references to a specific system is not in order! It must be remembered that Allah’s creation is ordered.

A user-friendly, portable Muslims in Space calculator , could determine the direction of the Qiblah and prayer times on the ISS. Its essential feature would be the use of the Projected Earth and Qiblah Pole concepts. These are based on the interpretation of the holy house of angels in the sky above Mecca. The place is always rich with angels worshipping. As many as 70,000 angels circumambulate it every day. Thus, one virtual Qiblah pole can be taken as a universal reference to determine the direction of the Qiblah. When Earth is projected to the height of the ISS, every point on its surface is projected also, including the Qiblah point, which can be projected upwards and downwards along the Qiblah Pole. This allows the direction of the Qiblah to be determined in space and in the bowels of the Earth.

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.

Thanksgiving is over, and most of us in the U.S. have had our fill of turkey leftovers fixed in various ways – but there is one more set of turkeys to swallow. The annual list of Top Ten Turkeys. As compiled by KFOG, a Bay Area radio station, on their popular 10@10 morning program. A KFOG turkey is a song that is truly stupid, you know better and yet you actually think it’s a good song. Despite your best efforts, you end up humming it in the car. Generally the instrumentation is decent, but the lyrics are a problem. Here is this year’s set:

1. Boys Don’t Cry – I Wanna Be A Cowboy
2. Clarence “Frogman” Henry – Ain’t Got No Home
3. The Vapors – Turning Japanese
4. Baltimora – Tarzan Boy (voted best of set)
5. Trashmen – Surfin’ Bird
6. Blue Swede – Hooked On A Feeling
7. They Might Be Giants – Istanbul (Not Constantinople)
8. The Monkees – Gonna Buy Me A Dog
9. Chumbawamba – Tubthumping
10. Toni Basil – Mickey

BONUS TRACK: The B-52′s – Rock Lobster

The best turkey of the set was decided by vote from Fogheads (yes, they really use that term) who email or blog in their vote. The Monkees Gonna Buy Me a Dog gets my vote for best turkey of the set. I must admit that it has always made me laugh, and for some incomprehensible reason I actually like it, even though I know I shouldn’t.

The Blue Swede, Vapors and Toni Basil (I truly despise this one) tunes are repeats from last year’s turkey set list, prompting me to wonder about the depth of KFOG’s collection. I am sure CV readers can nominate many more turkeys, so perhaps we should help KFOG out next year!

N.B.: OK, I know, I know. I’m late with this post. Thanksgiving is over and done. But over the holiday, I had a house full of relatives, did all the cooking, and broke out in hives, so you gotta gimme me a break here.

I’ll admit that for a while now I’ve been unsure what to do with the following bit of photographic evidence that happened to fall into my hands. But, following PZ’s sterling example, our first duty must always be to honesty, and let the chips fall where they may.

Whatever can it be?

Today we give thanks for the Lagrangian of the Standard Model of Particle Physics, after electroweak symmetry breaking, with no explicit Higgs boson.

It’s served us well for three decades, withstanding every challenge that particle accelerators could think to throw at it. But it’s going to be blown out of the water in a couple of years. Still, a pretty good run. Thanks, Standard Model Lagrangian!

I love the internets, because they know more about the ancient Greeks than I do. Timaeus is one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, the one that deals with the origin of the universe. (Long story short: the demiurge created our universe, but not out of nothing; rather, by organizing some of the pre-existing chaos.) It’s also where Plato talks about Atlantis, and has remained popular for that reason. I don’t know much about Plato, but I do know something about the creation of the universe, so I’ve been invited to a conference on Timaeus to be held in Urbana next year. Which means, I suppose, that I should actually read the thing.

But my ancient Greek is rusty, so I’ll be reading it in translation. Anyone who has made any non-trivial effort to read classics in translation knows that the particular translation makes all the difference in the world — two different translators can render the same text as stilted and incomprehensible or cogent and compelling. But how to choose? I’m not so dedicated to this project that I’m going to pick up six different translations and compare them side by side.

Fortunately — the intertubes have already done it for me! We’ve reached that lovely critical point at which, given any question you have, someone has answered it on a web page somewhere, and Google can lead you to it. A bit of poking around led me to this page by Joseph Wells. He seems more interested in arguing about the existence of Atlantis than in addressing the qualities of different translations, but whatever — I didn’t say your questions would be answered intentionally. The page lists side-by-side tiny excerpts from the Timaeus in six different translations, so you can compare for yourself. For example:

What more could you ask for? On this basis I’m going for the Zeyl translation, which seems to read the most like something that could have been written in English. I kind of like “navigable” rather than “passable,” but you can’t have everything.

Broadly speaking I have two great literary loves. Sure I enjoy plenty of grand historical fiction, and certainly I won’t argue the objective worth of any literary giant with you. But when I’m browsing in a bookstore, or sitting at home in front of the fire, I will inevitably buy, or pull from my shelves, a great work of contemporary fiction, or (and I use this word because many people think of these as disparate categories, although you’ll find some crossover in one of Sean’s posts) something that qualifies as a contemporary detective drama.

In these categories, I have many favorites, but in almost any reading physicist’s list (and I am no exception) of great contemporary authors you will find Thomas Pynchon, even if they have only read Gravity’s Rainbow. In my other category, I really do have a favorite, and it is Ian Rankin. Rankin’s plots are tightly constructed, and his deeply-flawed-but-fundamentally-good protagonist, Inspector John Rebus, is a wonderful example of the type. But it the coupling of these staples of the genre with a nuanced understanding of Rebus’ territory – modern day Edinburgh – that puts Rankin in a class of his own, closely followed, in my opinion, by Peter Robinson.

When I read Rankin, I can feel the chill of an Edinburgh winter, smell the inside of a rundown pub, taste the beer. I become invested in his battles in this world because it is, in my experience of similar parts of the country, such a faithful description. Because of this, I buy into Rebus’ tribulations to an extent to which no plot device on its own could ever entice me.

Pynchon and Rankin are two pillars of my literary world, but I must confess, even though I am aware enough to see that many of the qualities that I admire are common to them both (they are both bawdy, for example), I have never thought of them in the same mental breath.

But all this changed on Saturday, when I read a wonderful essay in The Guardian, written by Ian Rankin, and in praise of – you guessed it – Thomas Pynchon.

It turns out that Pynchon is one of Rankin’s heroes, and that Rankin has done his hero proud as he bubbles over in excitement at the impending release of Pynchon’s new work

… once more I would begin to inhabit the shadowy, conspiracy-driven theatre of the absurd that seems to be Pynchon’s imagination. It’s a place that constrains and hypnotises the general reader, and exerts an even greater pull on the true fan. My wife and children would lose sight of me for as long as it took to read the book, and afterwards I would be shell-shocked, wide-eyed, and seeing everywhere around me the signs of another world, similar to the one I seem to inhabit, but darker, odder, and altogether funnier.

[...]

It will be a challenging book – Pynchon’s novels are nothing if not challenging – and I’ll be first in the queue to buy it, because (in an all-too-Pynchonesque twist) the joint UK and US embargo on reviewing the book meant I was not able to read it prior to commencing this appreciation. Nevertheless, let us begin.

This infatuation goes all the way back to Rankin’s student days

Pynchon seemed to fit the model I was learning of literature as an extended code or grail quest. Moreover, he was like a drug: as you worked out one layer of meaning, you quickly wanted to move to the next. He wrote action novels about spies and soldiers which also happened to be detective stories and bawdy romps. His books were picaresquely post-modern and his humour was Marxian (tendance: Groucho). On page six of The Crying of Lot 49, the name Quackenbush appears, and you know you are in safely comedic hands.

It is pointless for me to try to do justice here to Rankin’s homage to our common hero, but I hope those of you with a literary bent will take a look at the article. I particularly liked the suggestion that, while one of Rankin’s inspirations is a “literary giant”, this might be a two way street

Yet his books are romps and detective stories. In Lot 49, the heroine Oedipa Maas begins to feel like “the private eye in any long-ago radio drama”. Pynchon has also credited the spy novels of Graham Greene and Le Carre and the thrillers of another Scot, John Buchan, as inspiration, alongside likelier suspects such as Jack Kerouac (and Pynchon does remain the most Beat of contemporary literary authors).

If you aren’t familiar with Rankin’s work it is well worth a look. You don’t need experience of gritty British pubs, and you don’t need to know Edinburgh. You just need to recognize realism when you read it.

Oh, and the plots are a lot of fun too.