The day after the inauguration I picked up a copy of the Washington Post. Right on the front page, below the article on our new President, was an article about the performance of the stock market on Inauguration Day (including a handy table of the performance over the last 15 inaugurations). The markets tanked, with the Dow shedding 4% of its value. The Wall Street Journal also ran some commentary noting the connection between Obama’s election and market performance. Is there an important message here? No. There is essentially zero causation between Obama’s installation in the oval office and market performance on the same day. It’s not like stock brokers woke up that Tuesday morning, flipped on their TVs, discovered that Obama was about to become president, and decided to dump their portfolios. Obama’s election has been incorporated into market valuations for months. These articles are tantamount to talking about the weather on inauguration day (brutally cold, I can assure you). Obama had little to do with the miraculous break in the clouds and sunshine that immediately preceded his swearing in. Newspapers are unlikely to devote an article to the weather on 1/20. And they’re certainly not going to put such an article on the front page. So why are the markets so fetishized that their performance is considered front-page “news”, even on a day with plenty of other notable events?

The market drop is indeed relevant, not as a sign of what Obama will do to the financial markets, but rather, what the financial markets will do to Obama. We are in an era of immense volatility and huge losses. In other times a 4% drop would be highly unusual and notable. But, sadly, in the present climate it has become routine. The economic downturn will almost certainly impact essentially every aspect of Obama’s time in office.

As it happens, the weather can also play an important role in the inauguration of a President. It was bitter cold for President William Harrison’s inauguration in 1841. His speech lasted for almost two hours (a record length), with him standing outside with little shelter. He caught pneumonia, and within a month was dead. There was undoubtedly little correlation between the cold and his death. But it makes for a perfect apocryphal story.

If you’re a friend of a Brit, then you’ll undoubtedly know that we’re a dry people, and you may sometimes find yourself doing a double take and wondering whether we’re joking or serious. But after reading yesterday’s Guardian, I’m wondering whether I’ve spent enough time out of the country to lose my own edge. Perhaps I can on longer distinguish finely-crafted satire from mind-numbing stupidity.

This crisis of self-confidence was brought on by reading Michele Hanson’s article, as part of Cif charades “:A special Christmas series in which Cif regulars write about a counterintuitive topic suggested by our readers” I’ve looked at others in this series, but unfortunately they haven’t provided me with the appropriate humor/bullshit compass necessary to divine the meaning of Hanson’s column. I’ve even checked myself against coumns that I know to be humorous, such as David Mitchell’s recent fun rant, but I can’t find a problem.

So maybe it’s me. Maybe I’ve lost the ability to tease out the dark humor in

Quantum physics is a bit of a black hole to me. You jump in and where do you get? Nowhere.

or

I wonder whether there weren’t better things physicists could have been doing over the last century. Just look where their work has got them. Niels Bohr, whose research led to quantum mechanics theories, went off to work on the Manhattan Project, and we all know where that got us. Thank you Oppenheimer, Bohr et al for the atom bomb.

For a moment, I thought I recognized something familiarly jolly in Hanson’s closing remarks

I asked another friend out with her dog. Her knowledge of plain, never mind quantum, physics was fairly basic. “Apples fall on your head,” she said. “Heat rises except in my oven, and E = mc².”

I can manage that, except for the last equation. Let’s not go there.

until I realized they just reminded me of a lazy undergraduate who claims they can’t do addition because they’re “not a math person”.

So I’m stumped. Surely The Guardian wouldn’t green-light a thoughtless and meaningless column by a patently ignorant and anti-intellectual author, would they? So how come I’m not finding it funny?

Google is now serving up more than a hundred years of photographs from Life Magazine. The pictures of the early days of astronomy are just spectacular. The archives contain images of many astronomers who were critical figures in the development of the field, but who have yet to have telescopes named after them. A large fraction of them also seemed to smoke pipes.

A huge hero of mine is Walter Baade. Baade was the guy who essentially took over observations at Mt Wilson during the blackouts of WWII. With the lights of Los Angeles snuffed out, and unable to serve in the military himself, he pushed the telescopes on Mt Wilson to their limits, and established the study of stellar populations in nearby galaxies.

There are some terrific pictures of Walter Adams working at Mt Wilson. In the picture below, he’s holding the telescope controls used for guiding. During an astronomical observation, you have to move the telescope to compensate for the earth’s rotation. Nowadays, your computer can take care of it by adjusting the position to keep a bright star at a fixed position on a CCD camera. Back then, you looked through a little spotting scope, and manually adjusted the telescope position to keep it pointed at the right part of the sky. If you let it drift, your image would be blurry. No pee breaks for you, Dr. Adams!

The guy kneeling in the figure below is Gerard Kuiper, working on a telescope at McDonald Observatory. He was a planetary astronomer, and the guy for whom the “Kuiper Belt” in the outer solar system was named, although Edgeworth probably deserved more credit for it. (Kuiper actually does have an airborne observatory named after him).

And you have to love this picture of Frank Drake, working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank West Virginia. You really can never have enough toggle switches. FYI, Drake is the guy behind the “Drake Equation”, used to estimate the likelihood of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.

And finally, a wonderful overhead shot of the 100″ telescope at Mt. Wilson

The pictures above are a tiny fraction of the available pictures of working scientists. Cancel your afternoon appointments and dive in.

The Guardian has carried out a quite fascinating project. They have identified children raised in Britain, but originating from almost every country in the entire United Nations’ list (omitted were San Marino, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, Naura, Paulu, the Central African Republic and North Korea), photographed them, taken their stories, and posted them on the Guardian web site.

It is remarkable to me to see such a collection of children, from every corner of the planet, gathered in my home country; a tiny island off the coast of mainland Europe. Their personal tales are intriguing – some heartwarming, others heartbreaking – and provide a sampling of some of the world’s recent history.

I had the pleasure the other day of talking with science writer Jennifer Ouellette, blogger at Cocktail Party Physics, who also happens to be a black belt in jujitsu (!), and Sean’s wife. The conversation was recorded for Bloggingheads.tv, which is a (to me) peculiar project to record bloggers talking to each other. I admit to being baffled that people actually want to listen to bloggers talk into their computers. However, people seem to actually watch these discussions, and given that I enjoy talking about science (and had never had the opportunity to meet Jennifer before), it seemed like a fun thing to do. If you’re interested, the discussion is here:

While I enjoyed the actual discussion, I confess to finding it disconcerting to have a recording of myself floating around the internet. I still have a bit of the anxious 13 year old stuck in my head, replaying years-old conversations where I wish I hadn’t said something, or said something different. The rational 40 year old part of me knows these conversations were long forgotten by everyone but me, but with the internet, they’re actually not. Instead, people can replay them over and over, and (even worse) comment on whether or not I misused a particular word (I did — I said “spurious” when “serendipitous” would have been more appropriate), or whether or not it’s distracting that a hunk of my hair tends to fall down and cover my one non-functional eye. It’s like my middle school nightmares actually coming true. I’ve progressed enough in the intervening two decades that I’m not paralyzed or depressed over it, but the desire to get everything just right, and feeling faint flips in the stomach when you fall just a little bit short, has never completely gone away.

If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:

Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.

Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)

The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.

The documentary film The Atom Smashers, which I posted about earlier, premiered at the Museum of Science and Industry last week, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with Mark Oreglia from Chicago, Ben Kilminster and Marcela Carena from Fermilab, Robin and me from UC Davis, and the two filmmakers, Clayton Brown and Monica Ross. We took individual questions from a moderator, Sylvia Ewing, and then from the audience. I have to say that my favorite question came from a student who asked if our quest to understand nature at the particle level was never-ending, due to Godel’s Theorem or something like that. That question is worth a post all by itself, and I want to apologize to than young man for not answering it more fully. Bottom line answer: it probably is never-ending, but more like an infinite series is never ending, rather than the truth being out there, never accessible to experiment.

Ben Lillie, a theorist from Argonne/Chicago who attended the premiere, wrote a very thoughtful review and captures a lot about what folks have been saying. Julia Keller wrote an article about it two days before hte show for the Chciago Tribune. The film was shown at Fermilab yesterday, and overall we’ve gotten a lot of great positive feedback on it.

Robin and I only saw the movie the night before the premiere for the first time, and had only 24 hours to get over the weird feeling of seeing yourself in a movie. But Clayton and Monica did a great job of picking out some of the more interesting and intelligent things we had to say, and they fit well into the overall story line of the film.

This is a truly new approach to making a science documentary, rarely if at all pedagogical about the science itself, but rather digging a level deeper into what it’s like to do what we do, what motivates us, and the never ending struggle to maintain funding. There is kind of a bittersweet feeling at the end – no Higgs, no funding – but the fact that we all still hope that we will break through some day soon to the next level of understanding about our universe is palpably present at the end.

The film will be shown on PBS’s Independent Lens on Nov. 25. Bravo, Clayton and Monica and all the rest at 137 Films!

Several months ago, in the heat of the republican primary, Yahoo news asked the candidates: Mac or PC? McCain’s response was revealing… and disturbing.

Neither. I am an illiterate who has to reply on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now come some even more impressive quotes in an interview with the New York Times.

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

…

Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

I know the internets are confusing and all, but I’m frankly a bit baffled by this. He needs help “getting on”??? To read newspapers? Hard to imagine that there’s not a computer he could use somewhere, already attached to the internet, and probably even with the browser already installed. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have to learn how to set his DNS servers in order to read the New York Times. Is it typing the URL that’s difficult? My grandmother, by the way, who is more than a decade older than McCain, seems to have figured this out just fine, even without a campaign staff to help.

The level of cluelessness here is deep — not only does he admit that he’s completely illiterate, he demonstrates a basic lack of familiarity with the terminology (he also mentioned that his staff shows him Drudge, because “Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge.”), much like his colleague Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens, opposer of net neutrality.

And it’s important. At the risk of stating the obvious: Internet policy has direct relevance for our most fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic access to information. Computing is increasingly critical to our increased understanding of the Universe, financial markets, and disease. The internet and social networking tools are rapidly revolutionizing the way we interact with each other, citizen’s access to and engagement in government, and government accountability. These things are central not only to innovation and the global economy, but to 21st century democracy in America and the world. It’s really hard to see how you can fully appreciate these issues if you don’t know the most basic things about operating a computer. Leadership matters.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a twitter account. (He also hired one of the Facebook founders to start his myBarackObama site, which has clearly been responsible for a good deal of his internet fundraising and organizing.) He gets it.

We have an interesting illustration of how the internet is changing the nature of political punditry, in the form of the ongoing spat between Joe Klein and the liberal blogosphere. Bloggy triumphalism can be tiresome, and the MainStream Media aren’t going to be replaced in the foreseeable future, if only because they actually put a great deal of effort and resources into real reportage. You know, calling people on the telephone, traveling to places where interesting things are happening, stuff like that. Annoying as they may be at times, the MSM are still the primary source for information about what is going on in the world.

When it comes to opinionmongering, though, we are faced with a completely different kettle of fish — ones with sharp teeth and short tempers. Journalism requires work, but anyone can have an opinion, and most everyone does. Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument. That, in principle, is why we have pundits in the first place; they are supposed to be better-informed than average, and generally capable of intelligently articulating the opinions they have. The best pundits, presumably, should be those that have the most interesting opinions, and are the best at explaining and arguing for them.

Problem is, these are subjective criteria. What typically happens in the MSM is that, by some quite mysterious process, an editor or publisher decides that some particular person with opinions would make a good pundit, whether its because of the sparkle of their prose or the cut of their jib. A column or regular TV appearances are granted. And then, amazingly, they’re in forever. Rarely are columnists fired for not making sense; once they claim that status, they tend to keep it, no matter how pointless or uninformed their work turns out to be. It’s as if the NBA drafted players straight out of high school, but then they never had to play a game; they all just received long-term contracts, with salaries based on how good they look during lay-up drills and dunk contests. Maureen Dowd will be taking up space on the New York Times Op-Ed pages for decades to come.

Blogs work on a different model. Despite various well-documented biases and ossification of hierarchies, the blogosphere is still largely a meritocracy, in which success is driven by the free market of links. Say things that are interesting, well-informed, and thoughtfully presented, and someone will link to you. Word will spread, and you can be a success. Admittedly, you can also be a success by spouting complete nonsense, if you do it in a way that enough people approve of. The point is not that what rises to the top is exclusively meritorious; it’s that merit is one of the ways in which you really can rise to the top.

Joe Klein, longtime columnist for Time magazine and anonymous author of Primary Colors, is doing his best to inadvertently prove the dramatic superiority of the blog model for developing pundits. Klein has never been a favorite among lefty bloggers; although purportedly liberal himself, he comes off more as a smug apologist for accepted Washington consensus than as a shrewd analyst. On the Iraq war in particular, he’s shown something other than courage; in fact, what ever the opposite of courage is, he’s pretty much shown that. Now that the war has turned out to be a disaster on all fronts, he insists that he was against it all along. Which is funny because, in all of those columns he regularly penned for our largest-circulation newsweekly during the time when the wisdom of going to war was actually being debated, he forgot to mention it. He was asked about the issue point-blank at the time, by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, and replied “This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.” Somewhat short of a full-throated denunciation.

But what’s a little weak-kneed simpering among friends? You don’t have to go on the Sunday talk shows every week, and in a few months whatever you said at the time will be forgotten anyway. But now Klein has embarked on a new adventure — he’s blogging, as part of Time’s group effort called Swampland. We begin to perceive the outlines of an actual conversation; there are comments on his posts, and other bloggers can link to him and offer critiques (with explicit citations) practically in real time. And they’ve been calling Joe Klein on his crap. (Or, I should say, “calling him on his shit,” since one of the standard fallacies wielded against bloggers is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously because they use curse words.) It’s like all those young draft picks had to suddenly start playing games, and not against the Washington Generals, either.

The results haven’t been pretty. Atrios, in particular, has been tireless in combatting the idea that mainstream journalists are just liberal mouthpieces, and is quick to point out how often supposedly-liberal pundits like to carry water for Republicans. Most journalists probably do self-identify as liberals — but, much more relevantly, they are part of the professional political class. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to cozy up to power, and try their best to reflect the conventional wisdom of their friends in the same class. Smart political operatives have learned to play them like very loud fiddles, so that the desired message can be broadcast under the cover of neutral journalism.

(more…)

In Sunday’s New York Times, Julie Bosman has an interesting article about a mini-crusade to keep an award-winning children’s book off library shelves. The book, “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, won this year’s Newbery Medal, and is taking flak because of a single word, which appears on the very first page. That word is (and I hope any children reading will cover their eyes) scrotum.

So what is this filth that threatens to infiltrate children’s libraries? Well, the word apparently arises is the following context

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

The Times article contains a number of quotes from librarians that I found pretty silly

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote…

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J.

Andrea Koch, the librarian at French Road Elementary School in Brighton, N.Y., said she anticipated angry calls from parents if she ordered it. “I don’t think our teachers, or myself, want to do that vocabulary lesson,” she said in an interview.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

What exactly is going on here? Around fifty percent of the people who might read this book will have already found, after a casual inspection, that they possess a scrotum. If one wanted a natural way to talk to one’s children about what their body parts are and what they are called, surely having one crop up in a kids book would provide that. There is certainly nothing sexual about a dog being bitten on his scrotum (unless he specifically asked the rattlesnake to do it, and was found tied to his kennel with silk scarves. But I digress.). And telling a child that a scrotum is a particular body part that either they or their classmates possess does not seem to be necessarily sexual either.

Is it thought that keeping the name of the body part secret will make them less likely to realize that it can be used for Satan’s work?

The author is understandably, to my mind, confused by the kerfuffle.

Reached at her home in Los Angeles, Ms. Patron said she was stunned by the objections. The story of the rattlesnake bite, she said, was based on a true incident involving a friend’s dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

This is what really gets me about censorship. Nobody would argue that the children’s section of the library should contain hard-core pornography, but I wish people weren’t so touchy as to squash things that might trigger, and help nurture curiosity. I would have thought that any teacher worth their salt would welcome a child initiating “that vocabulary lesson”. Micromanaging a child’s environment to this level, where one tries to avoid their knowing what perfectly natural body parts are called, strikes me as, well, you know, what a scrotum contains – bollocks!.