Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Continuing the end-of-year purge of things I don’t have time to properly blog about: be sure not to go to dinner with this guy. He might lash out at you as everyone is heading home.

“We’re going to split the bill,” said the organizer at my friend’s ninth grade birthday party. I didn’t think much of it until I ended up paying $40 for a $10 entrée. I felt cheated because I didn’t order a drink like most others. I was afraid to ruin the party mood, so I concealed my own anger, and that ended up ruining the night for me.

Now, I almost have sympathy; if you’ve ever gone to dinner with a collection of scientists, you’ll find that their vaunted mathematical skills tend to whither under the pressure of calculating tax and tip, and the person who volunteers to collect the money often ends up chipping in extra to cover the shortfall. But Mr. Talwalkar goes far, far overboard, devising an elaborate scheme by which everyone in the party receives emails ahead of time informing them that they will be strictly limited in the menu options once they reach the restaurant. It’s a common syndrome among people with something of a quantitative bent; fixating on the relationship between the money they are paying and the tangible goods in front of them in the form of food and drink, they completely discount the goods associated with having a good time in a social atmosphere and not worrying too much about who had how many bites out of which appetizer.

Admittedly, this guy probably gets more enjoyment out of solving a game theory problem and enforcing conformity with his rules than he would by relaxing and telling stories at dinner. That’s why you have to choose your dining companions carefully.

It seems that archeologists have definitively identified the remains of Copernicus, using a combination of forensic reconstruction and DNA matching. Historians were pretty sure that he was buried in a particular church, but weren’t quite sure where within it the grave actually was. They found a likely set of bones a few years back, and a reconstruction of the face from the skull sure looked an awful lot like Copernicus. (It also happened to look an awful lot like James Cromwell, the actor who played Farmer Hoggett in Babe, but he’s still alive).

While exercises like this are of historical interest, to me they’ve always raised the question as to when a set of remains becomes fair game for mucking about. If you were to dig up poor great aunt Edna, extract her skull, and sent it off to a lab in Sweden, you might be looked upon as being disrespectful or worse. But, digging about to find the remains of Copernicus is apparently completely OK, and was actually ordered by the local Catholic bishop. So when does this happen? Is there something like the copyright system where the right to be outraged by disturbance of a grave expires after a certain number of years? Is it more like radioactivity of the soul, where the connection to something sacred fades with an e-folding time?

It’s certainly a culturally loaded question as well. Locally, a set of 9000 year old remains found in the Pacific Northwest were the subject of dispute. Local tribes claimed Kennewick Man as one of their ancestors, and requested that the remains be given back to the Umatilla tribe for reburial. Scientists, on the other hand, wanted to continue to study the remains, and argued that testing showed that the skeleton was unlikely to have actually been a member of one of the tribes. There are on-going law suits to repatriate native american skeletons to their tribes. So obviously different cultures have different standards for when it’s acceptable to study their dead, and Copernicus lost out.

What a day. History being made.

After voting, I celebrated with a bacon-wrapped hot dog from a local street vendor. Mustard and onions. America, baby.

Let’s take this country for a spin and see what it can do!

Via Sociological Images.

That’s why you should become scientists, kids! (Because engineers don’t have sex. You want me to spell it out for you?)

I really should just leave it at that, but the sprawling, multifaceted stupidity of this public service announcement — apparently having sex, like smoking the wacky weed, kills brain cells and will cripple your SAT scores, or something — is difficult to let pass without comment. The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing. There are real concerns that adolescents should be taught about — disease and the risk of unwanted pregnancy being the obvious ones. But they should also be taught that, as long as you are careful about such things, there is nothing wrong with having sex. Done correctly, it can be fun! Sure, there can be emotional trauma, awkward moments, broken hearts, impetuous late-night phone calls that you wish you could take back the next day. But these are downsides associated with life, not with sex per se.

But as a society, we’re too uptight and hypocritical to say these things. Instead, we get stuff like abstinence-only sex ed, with predictable results. And adolescence, which isn’t going to be an easy time of life for most people no matter how much sensible advice they are given, becomes just that much more agonizing and uncertain.

Except for engineers, of course! They have it figured out.

Physicists love spontaneous symmetry breaking. It’s a great way to reconcile the messiness of reality with our belief in simple and beautiful underlying mechanisms. We posit that the true fundamental dynamics of the world has some symmetry — X can be exchanged with Y, and all relevant processes are unchanged — but the actual state of the world does not respect that symmetry, which leaves it hidden (or “nonlinearly realized,” if you want to sound all sciencey). Deep down, a (left-handed) electron is completely interchangeable with an electron neutrino; but in the world as we find it, this symmetry is broken, and we end up with an electron that is charged and massive, a neutrino that is neutral and nearly massless. The Higgs boson that the Large Hadron Collider is looking for would be the telltale sign of the mechanism behind this symmetry breaking.

For reasons which escape me, this concept has not been borrowed (as far as I can tell) by social scientists and pundits more generally.^* Which is too bad, as it explains a great deal. For example, appealing to the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking would have been really helpful to Whoopi Goldberg on The View recently, as she patiently tried to explain to a distraught Elisabeth Hasselbeck why it’s just not the same when black people use the word “nigger” as when white people do. (From Sociological Images, via The Edge of the American West.)

Which is not to say that it’s always okay, or that there is no thoughtful critique of the re-appropriation of derogatory language by targeted groups, etc. Just that “If it’s wrong when white people say it, it should be wrong when black people say it too! It’s just not fair!” is far too simple-minded to carry any weight.

Let’s imagine that, in our view of a happy future utopia, all races find themselves in situations of perfect equality of opportunity and dignity. Everyone enters society with equal status, and people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (The “symmetric vacuum.”) In such a world, arguments like “If you can do it, why shouldn’t I be able to?” would be perfectly legitimate. But even if we want that to be the world — even if we believe that the grand unified theory of social ethics involves a symmetry of rights and obligations under the interchange of various racial categories — it’s not the world in which we live. In the real world, different races don’t go through life with the same masses and charges (if you will). There really are such things as discrimination, legacies of poverty and exclusion, and so on. We can argue about the best way to deal with those features of reality, but pretending that they don’t exist isn’t a very useful strategy.

As Whoopi explains, many blacks have chosen to re-appropriate the n-word as part of a conscious strategy of fighting back against a power dynamic that uses language to keep them at the bottom. Again, one can argue about the effectiveness of that strategy, and the circumstances under which it is appropriate, and whether Jesse Jackson should really have used that term in referring to Barack Obama. But it doesn’t follow that “if it’s fair for you, it should be fair for me.” Here is a guy who sadly doesn’t get it; a white high-school teacher who is genuinely puzzled about why he got in trouble for calling one of his black students “nigga.”

I was contemplating writing this post for a long time, with the relevant symmetry being men/women and the social milieu being the scientific community. Too many physicists reason along the following lines: “Men and women should be treated equally. Therefore, any time we privilege one over the other, as in making a special effort to encourage women in science, we are making a mistake.” That would be a reasonable argument, if the symmetry weren’t dramatically broken by the state in which we find ourselves. Which happily is not a stable vacuum! (Note that the underlying assumption is not that different genders or races are necessarily equivalent when it comes to innate abilities; that is largely beside the point, and obsession about those questions gets to be a little creepy. But they should certainly have equal opportunities — and right now, they don’t.) Treating one group differently than the other isn’t what we ultimately want to be doing — it’s not part of the happy utopia — but it might be the best response to the current state of unequal treatment overall.

But Whoopi’s little teaching moment was too good to pass up. If the discussion of race and gender in the rest of the MSM rose to that level of sophistication, we’d all be better off.

———-

^*I’ve been searching for an excuse to mention Kieran Healy’s Standard Model of Sociophysics. I’m not sure if this is it, but I’ll take it.

Happy Independence Day!

Democracy
Leonard Cohen

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel
that this ain’t exactly real,
or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin’
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It’s coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It’s coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we’ll be making love again.
We’ll be going down so deep
the river’s going to weep,
and the mountain’s going to shout Amen!
It’s coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on …

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

George Carlin passed away Sunday afternoon.

There’s a place for respectful, good-faith argumentation between people who respectfully disagree — but some good old-fashioned mockery is occasionally called for, as well.

He told it like he saw it, that’s for sure.

Another strike against the tendency to see cultural predilections of the moment as direct reflections of underlying genetically-determined features of human nature. For years, everything related to computers has been a predominantly male domain. But the New York Times reports on a dramatic shift: these days, young girls are much more likely to be creating original Web content than young boys.

Indeed, a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).

Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

The explanation offered for boys’ dominance in the video-posting category was that this was the best way to brag about one’s skateboarding prowess, although evidence for that hypothesis seems to be largely anecdotal.

Note that this phenomenon should not be taken as evidence that women are genetically predisposed to make Web pages (or to blog) — although, as you might expect, there is no shortage of just-so explanations bandied about. But it’s great that the internet has lowered the considerable barrier to young girls becoming interested in computers, and we can hope that some of them get inspired to continue onto technical careers.

Actual footage of U.S. Senator Arlen Specter questioning National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell as part of an inquiry into whether or not the New England Patriots sneakily videotaped their opponent’s sidelines. An issue, we can all agree, of world-historical importance.

Brad DeLong disentangles the messages that a (male) professor sends by wearing a tie. (Inspired by this sad little diatribe, properly mocked here.)

I have found that wearing a suit and tie is very effective if done occasionally with non-math-oriented students. It tells them that I care because it shows that I have taken sufficient time to prepare and teach the class even though I am a busy person whose schedule requires meetings with:

• some powerful political figure,
• some powerful economic figure,
• some powerful university administrative figure, or
• some TV interviewer

With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms

Cf. Focus. Professors were once students.