I believe I have said this before, but it bears repeating: the principal way you know I'm a liberal is not that I believe that we need to stop calling it "gay marriage" ("the right to not have the government pick your spouse" seems more to the point), or that "taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society" (wait! that was a Republican Supreme Court nominee/Justice; time's arrow man....weird). No, you know I'm a liberal because I don't actually believe anything until either Jon Stewart or Ira Glass whispers it soothingly into my ear.
This week's "This American Life" is fascinating (yes: I keep that sentence on hand and cut and paste it to this blog every other entry). It tells two stories of people fed up with their political parties. It should come as no surprise that the "Democrats are stupid" story is much more forgiving than the "Republicans are stupid" story. Democrats are stupid because they don't know how to run campaigns. Republicans are stupid because... I wonder.
The Republican half of the episode focuses on Tea Partiers in Michigan and their quest to restore "conservative values" (the theme of this post is that I don't know what those are) to the GOP. I've never really taken the Tea Party seriously. That may actually be a trenchant piece of self-reflection, since it was barely 3 years ago that I could be seen waving a sign accusing the President of the United States of being a fascist. I like to think that I've grown since then. Listening to the interviewed Tea Partiers (I will resist the urge to abbreviate that TPers for the rest of the post, though it would be pretty high-larious), one contradictory idea slowly became clear in my mind. These are people who are as mad at George W. Bush as I am, but have reacted exactly opposite. We both agree (I think) that the end result of the Bush Presidency was somewhat less than desirable. We disagree why. The Tea Partiers claim that the Republican party drove this country into a ditch because they "broke with conservative values" and that the party, therefore, needs a quick shot of new blood. I claim that the Republican party drove this country into a ditch because they exemplified conservative values and that conservatism, therefore, needs to be tarred, feathered, and run out of Washington, D.C. on a rail.
My question for all you Tea Partiers out there (yeah, right; Tea Partiers read my blog) is this: in what way were the Bush years not a conservative wet-dream?
Judeo-Christian ethics were codified (remember stem cells and the aforementioned marriage rights?).
Environmental concerns had to ride in the back middle seat of the free market's station wagon.
Taxes were slashed (as we marched into not one, but two wars; I'm going to break with my half-assed attempt to remain civil here and state my belief that our grandparents, who went without stockings because nylon was needed to send paratroopers into Nazi-occupied France, are particularly ashamed of us on this front).
Missile Defense installations were funded.
Boom! Recession!
Am I missing something? How is the reaction to this that we need more conservatism in American politics?
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
...but it is often true...?
Late in the 2008 campaign and even early into his administration, there was a lot of talk comparing Obama to Spock. By "a lot" I mean that there was any at all. On "Wait, wait, don't tell me," Leonard Nimoy recounted the tale of how, during one of his convention appearances, a candidate for high public office stepped out of the crowd and flashed him the Vulcan hand sign; "[the candidate] was not John McCain". I think there was also a Newsweek cover.... The chatter was driven by the perception that Obama was/is rational to the point of aggravation (his logic can be most annoying), even though, "he only knows how to give pretty speeches," seemed to be an equally popular criticism.
I think I just found another parallel.
I love Star Trek (for those who didn't know that: "Hi, my name is Scott; who are you?"). I love Star Trek so much that I define it only to include television episodes that were aired between [fall 1966:spring 1969, fall 1988:spring 1994] and movies featuring Leonard Nimoy that have even numbers in their titles (though, it has recently been brought to my attention that Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain). None of those are typos. The dates are chosen very carefully. That is how much I love Star Trek.
Were it my decision, I would reserve a special place in movie hell for Abrams Trek.
My problems with the most recent Star Trek movie are many (no one but William Shatner should ever be allowed to scream: "I am Captain Kirk!" and be taken semi-seriously). Today, the villain stands out in my mind. For those of you who haven't seen the movie (DON'T), the villain is a Romulan from the future bent on destroying Vulcan. Why is he bent on destroying Vulcan? (Because he's in love; you didn't click on the link, did you? you should really click on the link). He is bent on destroying Vulcan because, in the future, Spock failed to save the Romulan homeworld from falling into an artificial black hole. Spock did not make the black hole; Vulcans did not make the black hole; but, because Spock (having already saved the galaxy from Klingon-Federation war, a giant space Amoeba, THE Doomsday Machine, whale-loving hippie goofs....) failed this once in his heroics, every Vulcan everywhere had to be punished. No Melville was spouted in the pursuit of this vendetta.
Oh yeah, I was talking about Obama. I haven't heard anyone claim that he or the Democrats caused this recession. Most of the academics (read: people who make a living trying to understand the economy through the intellectual lens that helped us invent computers and wipe-out smallpox) I've heard seem to believe that recent government action actually helped prevent the recession from becoming a depression. Nevertheless, voters seem bent on punishing the blue team this November, not because they hurt us (like the other guys probably actually did), but because they couldn't save us... enough.
Maybe the president should stop stumping and start figuring out how to slip his katra into John Boehner's coffee.
I think I just found another parallel.
I love Star Trek (for those who didn't know that: "Hi, my name is Scott; who are you?"). I love Star Trek so much that I define it only to include television episodes that were aired between [fall 1966:spring 1969, fall 1988:spring 1994] and movies featuring Leonard Nimoy that have even numbers in their titles (though, it has recently been brought to my attention that Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain). None of those are typos. The dates are chosen very carefully. That is how much I love Star Trek.
Were it my decision, I would reserve a special place in movie hell for Abrams Trek.
My problems with the most recent Star Trek movie are many (no one but William Shatner should ever be allowed to scream: "I am Captain Kirk!" and be taken semi-seriously). Today, the villain stands out in my mind. For those of you who haven't seen the movie (DON'T), the villain is a Romulan from the future bent on destroying Vulcan. Why is he bent on destroying Vulcan? (Because he's in love; you didn't click on the link, did you? you should really click on the link). He is bent on destroying Vulcan because, in the future, Spock failed to save the Romulan homeworld from falling into an artificial black hole. Spock did not make the black hole; Vulcans did not make the black hole; but, because Spock (having already saved the galaxy from Klingon-Federation war, a giant space Amoeba, THE Doomsday Machine, whale-loving hippie goofs....) failed this once in his heroics, every Vulcan everywhere had to be punished. No Melville was spouted in the pursuit of this vendetta.
Oh yeah, I was talking about Obama. I haven't heard anyone claim that he or the Democrats caused this recession. Most of the academics (read: people who make a living trying to understand the economy through the intellectual lens that helped us invent computers and wipe-out smallpox) I've heard seem to believe that recent government action actually helped prevent the recession from becoming a depression. Nevertheless, voters seem bent on punishing the blue team this November, not because they hurt us (like the other guys probably actually did), but because they couldn't save us... enough.
Maybe the president should stop stumping and start figuring out how to slip his katra into John Boehner's coffee.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
long overdue apology
In the dead of a New England winter, sometimes you have to run indoors. That's not always a bad thing. Sometimes the girls' track team ends up training alongside you. Of course, sometimes, so does the men's lacrosse team. As I recall, it was usually the latter that left a wafting trail of cologne whenever they passed you (or you passed them). Few things will undermine my respect for you as an athlete quite like putting on cologne before your workout. Until today.
Apparently, Calvin Klein's "Obsession for Men" attracts large jungle cats (I wonder if anyone has bothered to do a study ascertaining whether or not it attracts human females of any size... probably not an important question).
Few things will amplify my respect for you as an athlete quite like putting on cologne before your workout so that you can achieve your maximum heart rate fleeing a jaguar.
[If I were actually as geeky as I make myself out to be, I would have titled this post: "Beware of the Leopard." Let's pretend I did that.]
Apparently, Calvin Klein's "Obsession for Men" attracts large jungle cats (I wonder if anyone has bothered to do a study ascertaining whether or not it attracts human females of any size... probably not an important question).
Few things will amplify my respect for you as an athlete quite like putting on cologne before your workout so that you can achieve your maximum heart rate fleeing a jaguar.
[If I were actually as geeky as I make myself out to be, I would have titled this post: "Beware of the Leopard." Let's pretend I did that.]
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Churchill's worst form of government
It sometimes scares me how much I rely on Jon Stewart to tell me what I think about the world. Then I remember that, left to my own devices, I would devolve into a rabid partisan cyborg principally interested in advancing the cause of the Blue Team, and I resume my indolent consumption of Daily Show analysis. That being said, I found the "Meet Me at Camera 3" bit from the June 8 episode troubling. In a nutshell, Stewart took the Administration to task for failing to act decisively on, really, anything (the oil hemorrhage, financial regulation, health care, closing Guantanamo) and rather hiding behind the excuse that "it's complicated." The bit was funny, which I'm sure was the point*, but it's a good excuse for me to resume talking about something that's been bothering me. These problems are complicated. The oil is hemorrhaging a mile underwater. We either have the technology to do something about that or we don't, and I'm pretty sure the only member of the administration with a Nobel Prize in a physical science (Energy Secretary Steven Chu) is, in fact, on the case. Why are we angry at a man (Obama) we elected to craft and execute our laws for not also being an engineering genius on par with the late great never Montgomery Scott?
[*Hi, for those of you who haven't met me, my irony detector is broken, so this all may sound rather silly.]
I can't remember exactly when or why, but a few years ago, I heard a piece on NPR about history of the idea of a "dictator." The expert being interviewed claimed that, in the early 20th century (I believe in the aftermath of the Great Depression), people (or at least newspaper editorial boards) were crying out for someone to step in and be a dictator. The blatantly obvious failings of society appeared to be symptoms of bureaucratic gridlock and nothing breaks gridlock better than, I'm going to say it, a capital-D Decider (man, that felt good). I sometimes get the feeling that liberals (where I'm using that term to encompass everyone who voted against John McCain) want that now. They don't understand why merely electing Barack Obama did not solve all of the institutionalized problems that have been gradually overwhelming our government and culture for the past 20 (30, 40....) years. Yes, the situation with the oil is awful. It's not going to stop being awful anytime soon, nor will it stop when BP finds the technological silver bullet to stop this particular instance of oil gushing all over the place. As this Slate piece argues, as long as there are people buying oil, there will be people and critters dying from it somewhere (much in the same way that we will never win the War on Drugs as long as there are people willing to buy cocaine). We will never have meaningful universal health care as long as we are not willing to universally pay for it (you know, through taxes). Financial reform won't happen until we as a society realize that the absurd prosperity of the housing bubble was absurd, unstable, and to be avoided at all costs. Guantanamo won't close (though it does seem unconscionable that the Commander and Chief can't or won't just order this one) until Americans stop treating terrorism like it's the number one killer of people between ages 1 and 1,000,000 (a good friend once pointed out to me that Americans think they can live precisely this long given the proper application of national security and medical technology).
I guess what I'm saying is, "we are the generation who bought more shoes and we get what we deserve."**
As near as I can tell, we'd all better find the right dictator or become teachers.
[**No, I hadn't heard the song before writing this post, but I've seen the quotation as the signature line to enough emails and, out of context, it seemed appropriate.]
[*Hi, for those of you who haven't met me, my irony detector is broken, so this all may sound rather silly.]
I can't remember exactly when or why, but a few years ago, I heard a piece on NPR about history of the idea of a "dictator." The expert being interviewed claimed that, in the early 20th century (I believe in the aftermath of the Great Depression), people (or at least newspaper editorial boards) were crying out for someone to step in and be a dictator. The blatantly obvious failings of society appeared to be symptoms of bureaucratic gridlock and nothing breaks gridlock better than, I'm going to say it, a capital-D Decider (man, that felt good). I sometimes get the feeling that liberals (where I'm using that term to encompass everyone who voted against John McCain) want that now. They don't understand why merely electing Barack Obama did not solve all of the institutionalized problems that have been gradually overwhelming our government and culture for the past 20 (30, 40....) years. Yes, the situation with the oil is awful. It's not going to stop being awful anytime soon, nor will it stop when BP finds the technological silver bullet to stop this particular instance of oil gushing all over the place. As this Slate piece argues, as long as there are people buying oil, there will be people and critters dying from it somewhere (much in the same way that we will never win the War on Drugs as long as there are people willing to buy cocaine). We will never have meaningful universal health care as long as we are not willing to universally pay for it (you know, through taxes). Financial reform won't happen until we as a society realize that the absurd prosperity of the housing bubble was absurd, unstable, and to be avoided at all costs. Guantanamo won't close (though it does seem unconscionable that the Commander and Chief can't or won't just order this one) until Americans stop treating terrorism like it's the number one killer of people between ages 1 and 1,000,000 (a good friend once pointed out to me that Americans think they can live precisely this long given the proper application of national security and medical technology).
I guess what I'm saying is, "we are the generation who bought more shoes and we get what we deserve."**
As near as I can tell, we'd all better find the right dictator or become teachers.
[**No, I hadn't heard the song before writing this post, but I've seen the quotation as the signature line to enough emails and, out of context, it seemed appropriate.]
Be prepared
Last Friday, the Institute threw a farewell party for me and some of the visiting postdocs. We won't start leaving until next week, but everyone else already has. The Berkeley faculty are starting to trickle out and, I think, by next week even some of the Korean faculty will be vacating for slightly cooler climes, at least for a month or so (when I took this job, my grandfather, who'd been stationed here during the war, promised two things: "It'll be colder than hell in the winter and hotter than hell in the summer;" he wasn't wrong). Like all good parties, this one featured cake. Like all great parties, it actually featured two (pie doesn't seem to be a phenomenon here, so I've had to renormalize the scale). The first cake arrived as a solitary piece delivered to my office. This is what I was given to eat it.
"Big deal," you say, "it's a spoon." Oh, non, mon ami. Look again....
That's right: it's a spoon with a detachable plastic toothpick built into the handle.
The second cake was shared by all in the atrium. This one appeared as a whole cake with three candles (one for each of the imminently departing postdocs). The cake was laid out. The candles were firmly placed. How are we going to light them? Bam! Using the matches hidden in the secret compartment in the handle of the disposable plastic cake server.
Sir Baden Powell just had an orgasm.
For those of you confused by the pink elephant in this post: yes, I am leaving Korea. Yes, it is for good. My official return date is July 15. The reasons shouldn't be surprising to anyone. I'm not really designed for living in a place that I don't consider home. I've flown back to Seattle twice already in the last month: once for my ex-girlfriend's birthday. Once for a good dear friend's wedding. One more time and Al Gore is going to hunt me down with a baseball bat.
If I had principles, I would change the title of this blog, but I really like the title of this blog.
For those of you confused by the other pink elephant in this post: it is what it sounds like.
"Big deal," you say, "it's a spoon." Oh, non, mon ami. Look again....
That's right: it's a spoon with a detachable plastic toothpick built into the handle.
The second cake was shared by all in the atrium. This one appeared as a whole cake with three candles (one for each of the imminently departing postdocs). The cake was laid out. The candles were firmly placed. How are we going to light them? Bam! Using the matches hidden in the secret compartment in the handle of the disposable plastic cake server.
Sir Baden Powell just had an orgasm.
For those of you confused by the pink elephant in this post: yes, I am leaving Korea. Yes, it is for good. My official return date is July 15. The reasons shouldn't be surprising to anyone. I'm not really designed for living in a place that I don't consider home. I've flown back to Seattle twice already in the last month: once for my ex-girlfriend's birthday. Once for a good dear friend's wedding. One more time and Al Gore is going to hunt me down with a baseball bat.
If I had principles, I would change the title of this blog, but I really like the title of this blog.
For those of you confused by the other pink elephant in this post: it is what it sounds like.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
I'm just saying
From nytimes.com:
"The new laws range from an Arizona ban on coverage of abortion in the state employees’ health plan to a ban in Nebraska on all abortions after 20 weeks, on the grounds that the fetus at that stage can feel pain."
You know what else can feel pain?
Cows.
(It may be problematic that my first reaction wasn't actually to answer that question "pregnant women.")
"The new laws range from an Arizona ban on coverage of abortion in the state employees’ health plan to a ban in Nebraska on all abortions after 20 weeks, on the grounds that the fetus at that stage can feel pain."
You know what else can feel pain?
Cows.
(It may be problematic that my first reaction wasn't actually to answer that question "pregnant women.")
Sunday, May 16, 2010
57 Fe
You know that thing scientists always say when hippies jump up and down about Chernobyl and how nuclear power is going to kill us all? It goes something like, "10* different things went horribly wrong in the Chernobyl accident; only the Soviets could possibly be stupid enough to let them all happen at once." I feel like we're going to be saying the same thing about the American oil regulato-industrial complex in about twenty years.
*I made that number up, but the truth is not an insignificant integer
*I made that number up, but the truth is not an insignificant integer
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Fe
Okay readers, your challenge is to come up with an irony greater than the idea that the oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could make it more difficult to pass climate legislation (thanks to President Obama's crazy notion that bribing Republicans was ever a good idea; sorry, I refuse to accept that anyone I voted for actually in his/her heart of hearts thinks that offshore oil drilling is ever an acceptable alternative to anything).
Saturday, May 8, 2010
"yes, John; of course, John; whatever you say, John"
[that's John Sheridan; not anyone who may be reading this blog; it's a reference to the Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place"]
I recently flew home for a quick break before the madness ensues. The next two weeks will be a constant stream of workshops (yay!) and visitors (yay! [this time without the sarcasm]) before I fly home again on my way to Houston for the wedding of a dear good friend (yay! [add the cowbell]). Riding shotgun as my Mom took me back to SeaTac for the return to Seoul, I noticed that the car in front of us had two bumper stickers. One featured "goarmy.com" printed on a camouflage background; the other said "Give war a chance." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that neither was an attempt at irony.
The CIA has recently added a United States citizen to its list of people it is going to try to kill. I'm still trying to sort out my reaction to this news. Let's meander through some of the salient points.
1) Initially, I was very upset that the CIA can kill people. That's what the military is for. This thought is, of course, even more troubling than the news that spawned it. To borrow a thought from Joss Whedon, "a government [or military] is just a group of people, most notably ungoverned." Hopefully I'm alone (but I doubt it) in the visceral notion that the military somehow has the right to decide who should live and who should die. Regardless, the idea is hogwash. If we trust the military, it is because we believe they will never buck the authority of our elected representatives. Remember how we felt when we thought health care reform meant that our elected representatives would be deciding whether or not to pull the plug on grandma? (I actually don't, since I never thought that, but I can imagine I would've been pretty upset if I had.)
2) I invested a lot (hopes; dreams; time; and, yes, money) in this administration. I want to believe that Barack Obama is a good man and a great President. That idea involves believing that Awlaki has it coming. If the official story is to be believed, he's not really a nice guy (any more). He seems to be doing a pretty good job of encouraging people to kill other people. Of course, what is missing from the official story is the notion that Awlaki has actually pulled the trigger on anyone himself. I reconcile my intellectual rejection of the death penalty* with my emotional desire to pee on Osama bin Laden's bloated corpse with the reassurance that "they intentionally target civilians; the American military does not." Now we're targeting a guy (and I guess this description also applies to bin Laden, which, I'll admit, is more than a little troubling) whose participation in the War on Terror seems to be at the level of military recruiter or maybe Department of Defense official, but definitely not soldier. Living in a country where bluntly criticizing the military is considered impolite (there's even a law forbidding colleges who don't allow full access to military recruiters from collecting federal funds), I'm not sure this is a line we want to cross.
3) [in which I go completely off my rocker] We are occupying the world. There is no habitable continent on which we do not have military bases. Our budgetary outlook is so red it has almost left the visible spectrum, but, while we are allowed to say whatever we want about eliminating programs to fight poverty, discussions of reining in military spending require careful maneuvering and political subterfuge and are generally criticized as being radical hippie goofishness. Now we want to start killing our own citizens without due process, and a former major party nominee for the Presidency thinks that Mirandizing Americans is optional.
None of this denies the notion that the people we think our military is fighting (the Taliban, Al Quaeda) are awful human beings. Among other things, I hope that I believe that the idea that "women are people, too" deserves defending**. I fear though, that when the history books are written, they will not say that "the world went bat sh#t f$%#king loco while the United States of America remained perfectly sane and reasonable in its response." More likely, they will say something about how we, from our position as "the winners," could afford to go crazy while the other side, from their position as "the losers," had no other choice. I feel like we should be shooting for something a bit more complimentary.
*death penalty supporters are urged to click on that link
** Dear Conservatism, I will trade you one War on Terror for one "you never get to bring up or restrict abortion ever again." Think about it.
***And now I am hesitating to actually publish this post because it is implicitly critical of the military on all levels (that may have been the point) and I am currently living in a country that is forever on the brink of existential war with its nearest neighbor, whose citizens all share family trees with its own. Springsteen said, "all men want to be rich; rich men want to be kings; and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything." What, I wonder, do they think they're going to do with it once they rule it?
I recently flew home for a quick break before the madness ensues. The next two weeks will be a constant stream of workshops (yay!) and visitors (yay! [this time without the sarcasm]) before I fly home again on my way to Houston for the wedding of a dear good friend (yay! [add the cowbell]). Riding shotgun as my Mom took me back to SeaTac for the return to Seoul, I noticed that the car in front of us had two bumper stickers. One featured "goarmy.com" printed on a camouflage background; the other said "Give war a chance." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that neither was an attempt at irony.
The CIA has recently added a United States citizen to its list of people it is going to try to kill. I'm still trying to sort out my reaction to this news. Let's meander through some of the salient points.
1) Initially, I was very upset that the CIA can kill people. That's what the military is for. This thought is, of course, even more troubling than the news that spawned it. To borrow a thought from Joss Whedon, "a government [or military] is just a group of people, most notably ungoverned." Hopefully I'm alone (but I doubt it) in the visceral notion that the military somehow has the right to decide who should live and who should die. Regardless, the idea is hogwash. If we trust the military, it is because we believe they will never buck the authority of our elected representatives. Remember how we felt when we thought health care reform meant that our elected representatives would be deciding whether or not to pull the plug on grandma? (I actually don't, since I never thought that, but I can imagine I would've been pretty upset if I had.)
2) I invested a lot (hopes; dreams; time; and, yes, money) in this administration. I want to believe that Barack Obama is a good man and a great President. That idea involves believing that Awlaki has it coming. If the official story is to be believed, he's not really a nice guy (any more). He seems to be doing a pretty good job of encouraging people to kill other people. Of course, what is missing from the official story is the notion that Awlaki has actually pulled the trigger on anyone himself. I reconcile my intellectual rejection of the death penalty* with my emotional desire to pee on Osama bin Laden's bloated corpse with the reassurance that "they intentionally target civilians; the American military does not." Now we're targeting a guy (and I guess this description also applies to bin Laden, which, I'll admit, is more than a little troubling) whose participation in the War on Terror seems to be at the level of military recruiter or maybe Department of Defense official, but definitely not soldier. Living in a country where bluntly criticizing the military is considered impolite (there's even a law forbidding colleges who don't allow full access to military recruiters from collecting federal funds), I'm not sure this is a line we want to cross.
3) [in which I go completely off my rocker] We are occupying the world. There is no habitable continent on which we do not have military bases. Our budgetary outlook is so red it has almost left the visible spectrum, but, while we are allowed to say whatever we want about eliminating programs to fight poverty, discussions of reining in military spending require careful maneuvering and political subterfuge and are generally criticized as being radical hippie goofishness. Now we want to start killing our own citizens without due process, and a former major party nominee for the Presidency thinks that Mirandizing Americans is optional.
None of this denies the notion that the people we think our military is fighting (the Taliban, Al Quaeda) are awful human beings. Among other things, I hope that I believe that the idea that "women are people, too" deserves defending**. I fear though, that when the history books are written, they will not say that "the world went bat sh#t f$%#king loco while the United States of America remained perfectly sane and reasonable in its response." More likely, they will say something about how we, from our position as "the winners," could afford to go crazy while the other side, from their position as "the losers," had no other choice. I feel like we should be shooting for something a bit more complimentary.
*death penalty supporters are urged to click on that link
** Dear Conservatism, I will trade you one War on Terror for one "you never get to bring up or restrict abortion ever again." Think about it.
***And now I am hesitating to actually publish this post because it is implicitly critical of the military on all levels (that may have been the point) and I am currently living in a country that is forever on the brink of existential war with its nearest neighbor, whose citizens all share family trees with its own. Springsteen said, "all men want to be rich; rich men want to be kings; and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything." What, I wonder, do they think they're going to do with it once they rule it?
Thursday, April 29, 2010
I wanna go fast!
Listening to criticism of the financial reform bill echoing on NPR, it sounds like some people are concerned that it will jeopardize our ability to recreate the financial explosion of the middle-aughts.
Isn't that the point?
Isn't the reason that 2005 was so good that it was based on a house of cards... in a wind tunnel?
The analogy at the tip of my tongue is: it sounds a little like baseball saying "we want to ban steroids, but only so long as it doesn't jeopardize our players' ability to hit 70 home runs a year." We need to be able to trust our financial sector. Trust has to be earned. That usually requires sacrifices of some kind or another.
Isn't that the point?
Isn't the reason that 2005 was so good that it was based on a house of cards... in a wind tunnel?
The analogy at the tip of my tongue is: it sounds a little like baseball saying "we want to ban steroids, but only so long as it doesn't jeopardize our players' ability to hit 70 home runs a year." We need to be able to trust our financial sector. Trust has to be earned. That usually requires sacrifices of some kind or another.
all the cool kids are doing it
A few weeks ago, "This American Life" did another episode ("Inside Job") about the economic crisis. This one focused on a firm named "Magnetar" (after a breed of neutron star with obscenely strong magnetic fields; that is about the extent of their coolness; sort of; maybe; I'm having a hard time parsing this one). This firm made an obscene amount of money off of the crisis by (and this is the executive summary; you should really listen to the episode)
a) duping larger firms into investing in mortgage-backed securities. I say "duping" because these larger firms only invested in said securities because Magnetar volunteered to buy up their least stable part (in effect, agreeing to be the fall-guy for the investment). However, unlike the well-mannered fall-guys of mafia mythology, Magnetar was actually
b) betting heavily against those securities.
The idea was that, while Magnetar would certainly lose money on account of part (a) when the securities failed, that amount would pale in comparison to the amount of money they would make in part (b). One of the theses of the "This American Life" episode is that Magnetar started doing this right as the market was beginning to figure out that mortgage-backed securities were a bad idea (back in 2005). By volunteering to be everyone else's fall guy in part (a) Magnetar breathed life into a pretty bad idea and helped bring on 2008.
I am sad to say that none of this seems to me as clear-cut as it should.
Obviously, what Magnetar did was bad for a lot of people, but, at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that "they never promised anyone that they would look out for society as a whole; all they ever said was that they would make an obscene amount of money, and, as I said, they made good on that one."
Everyone keeps talking about "the demise of the American Dream," both in terms of health care and in terms of the economy and its possible solutions. Is it possible that this crisis is the American Dream: making aforementioned obscene amounts of money at the expense of quite literally everyone else in the country? I mean, as a nation, we're not really big on social responsibility. Our national identity seems pretty rooted in proving how much more awesome our nation is than everyone else's, not in anything we concretely do as a nation.
There's a stanza in the Springsteen song "A Long Walk Home"
"That flag flying over the courthouse // means certain things are set in stone // who we are, what we'll do // and what we won't."
I wonder if that isn't a little optimistic. Does our flag really stand for things we will do, or just things we won't? We won't abridge freedom of speech. That's great. We won't torture. That's obviously not true, but it's probably the point of the song. What will we do? We will send in the Marines to topple dictators (I'm not sure I believe that, either, but let's just take it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay, fine, we'll prove that our military is stronger than yours. Will we give cheap medical care to the least able among us? Who knows? Not without screaming about communism and fascism. Will we use our intellectual and industrial gifts to do something positive for the planet, or will we hide behind China and India's greenhouse gas emissions as if the words "per capita" don't actually mean anything? To whom are we actually responsible?
Obviously, I'm still coming down from having just read Ursula K. Leguin's "The Dispossessed." I don't understand why that book wasn't on my first year Core reading list and "the Communist Manifesto" was.
(This post is the bloviating offspring of what was going to be a comment on something Charles said on his blog)
(I'm tempted to edit this so the word "obscene" doesn't appear so often; I hate over-using words; it seems appropriate, though)
(It's also possible that the problem is in me. The first time I learned to play Hearts, I cheated. The rules didn't make sense to me. You were supposed to play in a way that was sub-optimal, but there was no external enforcement mechanism and no transparency by which other players could check that you weren't cheating. I think I was 23 at the time. I can't tell whether or not that supports my thesis.)
a) duping larger firms into investing in mortgage-backed securities. I say "duping" because these larger firms only invested in said securities because Magnetar volunteered to buy up their least stable part (in effect, agreeing to be the fall-guy for the investment). However, unlike the well-mannered fall-guys of mafia mythology, Magnetar was actually
b) betting heavily against those securities.
The idea was that, while Magnetar would certainly lose money on account of part (a) when the securities failed, that amount would pale in comparison to the amount of money they would make in part (b). One of the theses of the "This American Life" episode is that Magnetar started doing this right as the market was beginning to figure out that mortgage-backed securities were a bad idea (back in 2005). By volunteering to be everyone else's fall guy in part (a) Magnetar breathed life into a pretty bad idea and helped bring on 2008.
I am sad to say that none of this seems to me as clear-cut as it should.
Obviously, what Magnetar did was bad for a lot of people, but, at the same time, I can't shake the feeling that "they never promised anyone that they would look out for society as a whole; all they ever said was that they would make an obscene amount of money, and, as I said, they made good on that one."
Everyone keeps talking about "the demise of the American Dream," both in terms of health care and in terms of the economy and its possible solutions. Is it possible that this crisis is the American Dream: making aforementioned obscene amounts of money at the expense of quite literally everyone else in the country? I mean, as a nation, we're not really big on social responsibility. Our national identity seems pretty rooted in proving how much more awesome our nation is than everyone else's, not in anything we concretely do as a nation.
There's a stanza in the Springsteen song "A Long Walk Home"
"That flag flying over the courthouse // means certain things are set in stone // who we are, what we'll do // and what we won't."
I wonder if that isn't a little optimistic. Does our flag really stand for things we will do, or just things we won't? We won't abridge freedom of speech. That's great. We won't torture. That's obviously not true, but it's probably the point of the song. What will we do? We will send in the Marines to topple dictators (I'm not sure I believe that, either, but let's just take it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay, fine, we'll prove that our military is stronger than yours. Will we give cheap medical care to the least able among us? Who knows? Not without screaming about communism and fascism. Will we use our intellectual and industrial gifts to do something positive for the planet, or will we hide behind China and India's greenhouse gas emissions as if the words "per capita" don't actually mean anything? To whom are we actually responsible?
Obviously, I'm still coming down from having just read Ursula K. Leguin's "The Dispossessed." I don't understand why that book wasn't on my first year Core reading list and "the Communist Manifesto" was.
(This post is the bloviating offspring of what was going to be a comment on something Charles said on his blog)
(I'm tempted to edit this so the word "obscene" doesn't appear so often; I hate over-using words; it seems appropriate, though)
(It's also possible that the problem is in me. The first time I learned to play Hearts, I cheated. The rules didn't make sense to me. You were supposed to play in a way that was sub-optimal, but there was no external enforcement mechanism and no transparency by which other players could check that you weren't cheating. I think I was 23 at the time. I can't tell whether or not that supports my thesis.)
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
in case you were wondering
Today is the second day in two months I've heard air raid sirens in the city. It's only a drill, but still: air raid sirens. [Expletive].
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
"...if we assumed that these whales were ours to do with as we pleased..."
This post started out much angrier than (I hope) it ended. Story of my life...
The Radio Lab episode "Animal Minds" starts with a story about a whale tangled and drowning in the lines of about twenty crab traps and the bunch of humans with boats who, for no reason other than that they are awesome, worked to cut it free. They succeeded. Upon attaining freedom, the whale did not swim away. It hung around, gently nudging and staring at each of the divers in turn. Understandably, the divers took this behavior as whale for "thank you." From here, the episode turns to an animal psychologist who claims that it is "demeaning" to assign human emotions to other animals. Why, he asks, should we suppose that we live in a world in which every living being is somehow like us? Why shouldn't every species have its own way of relating (the implication being that maybe there is no whale "thank you")?
This is a fair point, much fairer than I thought when I first wrote those words. Not all animals are humans (though all humans are animals, a point which the Radio Lab hosts accentuate returning from the break before their last segment). Anthropomorphizing non-humans glosses over the reasons that this is true and prevents everyone involved from learning something from encounters with other species. There, I said it. What I take issue with is the way the point is raised. Instead of starting from the assumption that non-human animals are unlike us and trying to find the ways that we are similar, why can't we start from the assumption that they are like us (or, even better, that we are like them) and try to find the ways that we/they are different. To turn the psychologist's words petulantly around: "why shouldn't we suppose that we live in a world in which we are somehow like every living being?"
Case in point: The first piece of evidence the psychologist raises is a study done by another psychologist on dogs. The second psychologist (whose name stuck out for being a woman named Alexander Horowitz; she works at Barnard College) gathered a group of dog owners. Somehow, she contrived to have time alone with the dogs, after which she told every owner that their dog had misbehaved. This was only true in half of the cases. The owners (all of them) scolded the dogs. The dogs (even the dogs who had done nothing wrong) assumed the "guilty dog" posture (ears and head down; tail between legs). "Aha!" said the psychologist, "that posture does not denote guilt; it denotes submission. The dogs are just acknowledging our authority." Can we really separate this notion from guilt? Sure, there is a feeling I associate with the knowledge that I have done something wrong, but after 29 years of living in a society composed of religious, academic, and political authorities, I associate the same feeling with the knowledge that I have done something that an authority figure tells me is wrong.
I've always found the natural/artificial distinction some what troublesome. New York City is artificial. A beaver dam or an anthill is not. If this is really True, then there should probably be a word for "built by a beaver" or "built by ants" the way that artificial means "built by humans." "Artificial ingredients" also bother me. Unless they're holding out on us (or themselves; seriously, guys, there's a Nobel Prize -- or five -- in this), food scientists aren't in the business of producing particles from the aether, so everything must come from the Earth at some level. I know this is a lot of semantics and glosses over some very important distinctions about how margarine will probably kill you faster than butter, but there are consequences to how we draw those distinctions. After 2,000 years living from the assumption that we are different and therefore removed from all of the creatures around us, we have wiped out the Dodo, worse-than-decimated (which means to kill a "measly" 10%) several species of whale (and tigers, and gorillas, and...) and made an industry of felling the trees and polluting the oceans that regulate the composition of the air we breathe. We assumed the answer ("we are wholly different from all other animals") and the entire planet paid the price. Maybe we ought to consider assuming a different answer. The impact of assuming we are like other animals and being wrong is a world with fewer cheeseburgers, SUVs, and multi-national corporations. The impact of assuming we are not like other animals and being wrong is a world with less arable land.
People who think I'm being sentimental should read this. The elephants, it seems, are tired of putting up with our crap. If you'd rather not be depressed, you could also listen to this episode of Speaking of Faith.
The Radio Lab episode "Animal Minds" starts with a story about a whale tangled and drowning in the lines of about twenty crab traps and the bunch of humans with boats who, for no reason other than that they are awesome, worked to cut it free. They succeeded. Upon attaining freedom, the whale did not swim away. It hung around, gently nudging and staring at each of the divers in turn. Understandably, the divers took this behavior as whale for "thank you." From here, the episode turns to an animal psychologist who claims that it is "demeaning" to assign human emotions to other animals. Why, he asks, should we suppose that we live in a world in which every living being is somehow like us? Why shouldn't every species have its own way of relating (the implication being that maybe there is no whale "thank you")?
This is a fair point, much fairer than I thought when I first wrote those words. Not all animals are humans (though all humans are animals, a point which the Radio Lab hosts accentuate returning from the break before their last segment). Anthropomorphizing non-humans glosses over the reasons that this is true and prevents everyone involved from learning something from encounters with other species. There, I said it. What I take issue with is the way the point is raised. Instead of starting from the assumption that non-human animals are unlike us and trying to find the ways that we are similar, why can't we start from the assumption that they are like us (or, even better, that we are like them) and try to find the ways that we/they are different. To turn the psychologist's words petulantly around: "why shouldn't we suppose that we live in a world in which we are somehow like every living being?"
Case in point: The first piece of evidence the psychologist raises is a study done by another psychologist on dogs. The second psychologist (whose name stuck out for being a woman named Alexander Horowitz; she works at Barnard College) gathered a group of dog owners. Somehow, she contrived to have time alone with the dogs, after which she told every owner that their dog had misbehaved. This was only true in half of the cases. The owners (all of them) scolded the dogs. The dogs (even the dogs who had done nothing wrong) assumed the "guilty dog" posture (ears and head down; tail between legs). "Aha!" said the psychologist, "that posture does not denote guilt; it denotes submission. The dogs are just acknowledging our authority." Can we really separate this notion from guilt? Sure, there is a feeling I associate with the knowledge that I have done something wrong, but after 29 years of living in a society composed of religious, academic, and political authorities, I associate the same feeling with the knowledge that I have done something that an authority figure tells me is wrong.
I've always found the natural/artificial distinction some what troublesome. New York City is artificial. A beaver dam or an anthill is not. If this is really True, then there should probably be a word for "built by a beaver" or "built by ants" the way that artificial means "built by humans." "Artificial ingredients" also bother me. Unless they're holding out on us (or themselves; seriously, guys, there's a Nobel Prize -- or five -- in this), food scientists aren't in the business of producing particles from the aether, so everything must come from the Earth at some level. I know this is a lot of semantics and glosses over some very important distinctions about how margarine will probably kill you faster than butter, but there are consequences to how we draw those distinctions. After 2,000 years living from the assumption that we are different and therefore removed from all of the creatures around us, we have wiped out the Dodo, worse-than-decimated (which means to kill a "measly" 10%) several species of whale (and tigers, and gorillas, and...) and made an industry of felling the trees and polluting the oceans that regulate the composition of the air we breathe. We assumed the answer ("we are wholly different from all other animals") and the entire planet paid the price. Maybe we ought to consider assuming a different answer. The impact of assuming we are like other animals and being wrong is a world with fewer cheeseburgers, SUVs, and multi-national corporations. The impact of assuming we are not like other animals and being wrong is a world with less arable land.
People who think I'm being sentimental should read this. The elephants, it seems, are tired of putting up with our crap. If you'd rather not be depressed, you could also listen to this episode of Speaking of Faith.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
and while you're at it, eat your broccoli
I adopted a new podcast this week: Radio Lab. This American Life keeps joining forces with them, so I figured, why not?
This week's episode was about testing the limits of the human body/brain/species. Yup, you read that last one right. The final ten minutes of the show was devoted to a group of roboticists at Cornell who have designed a giant computer to answer open-ended questions. What do I mean by that? They built a double-pendulum, put it under a video camera, hooked that camera up to their giant computer and asked "what's going on here?" After about a day (with no background knowledge, just the video footage), the computer came up with the following answer:
Force equals mass times acceleration.
Yes, after one day watching one (admittedly chaotic) pendulum, this computer figured out the fundamental law of modern science that humanity (acting through Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, and everyone in between) took about 20,000 years to discover (depending on where you reckon the start of humanity).
Let's just take a moment to appreciate the beauty of that.
Let's take another moment to freak out about the fact that we are teaching robots to do science on their own. Crap.
Let's move on. At the end of the segment, some biologists feed the computer years of data about the behavior of single-celled organisms and ask the same question. The computer ponies up, delivering relatively simple equations that not only explain the data but predict future data. Unfortunately, the biologists (or really any human, actually) have no idea what the equations mean or why they work (foolish mortals!). To quote the radio program "they have the answers, but not the insight." Anyone who's ever taken a physics class knows where I'm going with this. 400 years after the birth of modern science, researchers are looking at the back of the book.
Any text book that is actually useful will include the answers to every other problem in an appendix. Most professors assign at least some of these problems as homework. The thinking is that once you do the problem, you can peak at the answer and, if the book disagrees with you, you can go back over your work, figure out where you went wrong, and hopefully learn something about either your intuition or your ability to do arithmetic. It goes without saying that merely handing in the answers without showing your work (usually not included in the back of the book) will net you precisely zero points.
It is oft lamented that what we do as students in classrooms (listen to lectures, sit exams, do homework problems about spherical cows in frictionless vacuums) has very little to do with actually being a scientist. Apparently, that is no longer true.
This week's episode was about testing the limits of the human body/brain/species. Yup, you read that last one right. The final ten minutes of the show was devoted to a group of roboticists at Cornell who have designed a giant computer to answer open-ended questions. What do I mean by that? They built a double-pendulum, put it under a video camera, hooked that camera up to their giant computer and asked "what's going on here?" After about a day (with no background knowledge, just the video footage), the computer came up with the following answer:
Force equals mass times acceleration.
Yes, after one day watching one (admittedly chaotic) pendulum, this computer figured out the fundamental law of modern science that humanity (acting through Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, and everyone in between) took about 20,000 years to discover (depending on where you reckon the start of humanity).
Let's just take a moment to appreciate the beauty of that.
Let's take another moment to freak out about the fact that we are teaching robots to do science on their own. Crap.
Let's move on. At the end of the segment, some biologists feed the computer years of data about the behavior of single-celled organisms and ask the same question. The computer ponies up, delivering relatively simple equations that not only explain the data but predict future data. Unfortunately, the biologists (or really any human, actually) have no idea what the equations mean or why they work (foolish mortals!). To quote the radio program "they have the answers, but not the insight." Anyone who's ever taken a physics class knows where I'm going with this. 400 years after the birth of modern science, researchers are looking at the back of the book.
Any text book that is actually useful will include the answers to every other problem in an appendix. Most professors assign at least some of these problems as homework. The thinking is that once you do the problem, you can peak at the answer and, if the book disagrees with you, you can go back over your work, figure out where you went wrong, and hopefully learn something about either your intuition or your ability to do arithmetic. It goes without saying that merely handing in the answers without showing your work (usually not included in the back of the book) will net you precisely zero points.
It is oft lamented that what we do as students in classrooms (listen to lectures, sit exams, do homework problems about spherical cows in frictionless vacuums) has very little to do with actually being a scientist. Apparently, that is no longer true.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
From nytimes.com
Apparently, Glenn Beck spending the last 8 months telling us that giving poor people medicine is the first step on the slippery slope towards Auschwitz doesn't constitute "cultural war." Who knew?
Before Democrats decided to take a direct vote on the Senate health care bill, Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, described the plans to approve it without a direct vote as “a sleight-of-hand subterfuge” that would allow lawmakers to avoid accountability.
“This process corrupts and prostitutes the system” and could “unleash a cultural war” over the legislation, Mr. Barton said.
Apparently, Glenn Beck spending the last 8 months telling us that giving poor people medicine is the first step on the slippery slope towards Auschwitz doesn't constitute "cultural war." Who knew?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
and finally...
The only Catholic leaders with actual uteruses have decided that healing people is more important than dickering about abortions.
One of the side benefits of passing this bill is that you'll get to stop hearing me complain about those who oppose it.
One of the side benefits of passing this bill is that you'll get to stop hearing me complain about those who oppose it.
Monday, March 15, 2010
What is past is also sometimes future.
(You know it's bad when I start quoting Minbari aphorisms in my post titles, but here goes.)
There's a pretty awesome op-ed in the Washington Post (shout out to Timothy Noah: I got there via Slate) about why passing health care reform, with or without a ban on Federal subsidies for the remote possibility of an abortion, would probably decrease the number of actual abortions taking place in America. There is no indication that this fact means anything to team Stupak and their resolve to kill any health care bill that doesn't include their specific anti-abortion language. In another example of cosmological overreach, I can't help but wonder what this says about American Christianity. Is it about building the world that Jesus would have wanted (what with the curing of the lepers and all) or, 300 years later, is it still about proving that YOU are one of the saved ("people may be dying of curable diseases left and right, but I'll be damned - literally - if one penny of my tax dollars goes towards a totally legal medical procedure that I find morally questionable;" as my friend Charles pointed out, that's how a lot of us felt about invading Iraq or, for that matter, the death penalty)?
Put another way: are we still just a bunch of Calvinists trying to get back at Europe for kicking us out, because I'm pretty sure that Europe stopped caring.
errata:
From today's nytimes.com:
Only in this country would "I have always respected and cherished the sanctity of human life" be a reason that you almost voted against a bill that would give medicine to 30 million sick people who can't afford it. That being said, props to Representative Kildee (and, by the way , Dennis Kucinich) for demonstrating that he is a decent human being capable of empathy.
There's a pretty awesome op-ed in the Washington Post (shout out to Timothy Noah: I got there via Slate) about why passing health care reform, with or without a ban on Federal subsidies for the remote possibility of an abortion, would probably decrease the number of actual abortions taking place in America. There is no indication that this fact means anything to team Stupak and their resolve to kill any health care bill that doesn't include their specific anti-abortion language. In another example of cosmological overreach, I can't help but wonder what this says about American Christianity. Is it about building the world that Jesus would have wanted (what with the curing of the lepers and all) or, 300 years later, is it still about proving that YOU are one of the saved ("people may be dying of curable diseases left and right, but I'll be damned - literally - if one penny of my tax dollars goes towards a totally legal medical procedure that I find morally questionable;" as my friend Charles pointed out, that's how a lot of us felt about invading Iraq or, for that matter, the death penalty)?
Put another way: are we still just a bunch of Calvinists trying to get back at Europe for kicking us out, because I'm pretty sure that Europe stopped caring.
errata:
From today's nytimes.com:
Mr. Stupak has said he will vote against the Senate bill because he sees the restrictions on abortion as inadequate. But Mr. Kildee said he was satisfied that the provisions in the Senate bill would prevent the use of federal money for coverage of abortions.
“I have always respected and cherished the sanctity of human life,” Mr. Kildee said. “I spent six years studying to be a priest and was willing to devote my life to God.”
“I have listened carefully to both sides, sought counsel from my priest, advice from family, friends and constituents, and I have read the Senate abortion language more than a dozen times,” Mr. Kildee said. “I am convinced that the Senate language maintains the Hyde Amendment, which states that no federal money can be used for abortion.”
Only in this country would "I have always respected and cherished the sanctity of human life" be a reason that you almost voted against a bill that would give medicine to 30 million sick people who can't afford it. That being said, props to Representative Kildee (and, by the way , Dennis Kucinich) for demonstrating that he is a decent human being capable of empathy.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
watering the wine; making up the weight
Wandering into the student union building this morning, I encountered a sign I'd never seen before. It featured a lot of Korean characters, two words in French, and an arrow pointing to the left. The words in French were "Les" and "Miserables." Those of you who don't appreciate the magnitude of this statement should refer back to the URL of this website. There is nothing moderate or dignified about my love for this play. You can imagine my chagrin, then, when I purchased my ticket, walked into the theatre, and found two acoustic guitars and one microphone on an otherwise empty stage (there was other instrumentation behind strategically placed screens; there was, however, no collapsible barricade). Turns out (in what is the best argument for trademark laws I have yet heard) "Les Miserables" not only refers to the Hugo novel and all of its adaptations. It also refers to a heartthrob Korean singer-songwriter and his band (today was "White Day," the Korean answer to Valentine's Day; based on the music, I'm pretty sure that the only other testosterone in the audience was romantically attached to the estrogen sitting next to it). There were, of course, indications beforehand. None of the signs pointing me towards the theatre featured the iconic Cosette-is-the-flag logo of the Boublil-Schonberg adaptation. All of the signs pointing me towards the theatre were colored pastel blue and purple. But, if I have one fatal flaw (and I probably have several) it's that I believe words have a meaning that can be known, so, as soon as I saw the name, I was going to throw down the $55, fait accompli. A fool and his money....
(In my defense, just two days earlier I encountered a poster in that selfsame student union building advertising the May run of "Miss Saigon" on campus. This one featured the stylized helicopter logo and a clear shot of Chris and Kim making out, so I remain confident.)
(In my defense, just two days earlier I encountered a poster in that selfsame student union building advertising the May run of "Miss Saigon" on campus. This one featured the stylized helicopter logo and a clear shot of Chris and Kim making out, so I remain confident.)
Friday, March 12, 2010
are belong to them
Something about being in Korea prevents me from posting comments on my own blog (or, for that matter, on E street Stats).... Weird.
Anyway: they spread the frosting for you. I passed a waffle stall today (in a university cafeteria) where the frosting (all three varieties: white, strawberry, and chocolate) existed pre-waffle as cubes just sitting there on the counter. It seemed to be holding its shape pretty well.
Probably not dippable.
Anyway: they spread the frosting for you. I passed a waffle stall today (in a university cafeteria) where the frosting (all three varieties: white, strawberry, and chocolate) existed pre-waffle as cubes just sitting there on the counter. It seemed to be holding its shape pretty well.
Probably not dippable.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
all your base
My new favorite questionably-translated English eatery name:
"Waffle It Up: Belgian Waffle of Majesty"
(in case I haven't mentioned this, Seoulites seem to love waffles; there are several street carts outside of campus where you can buy waffles with frosting as a snack)
"Waffle It Up: Belgian Waffle of Majesty"
(in case I haven't mentioned this, Seoulites seem to love waffles; there are several street carts outside of campus where you can buy waffles with frosting as a snack)
Monday, March 8, 2010
a mighty gift
Finally, biologists are stepping up, delivering us a weapon that might actually improve our chances in the coming Robot War. No, I'm not talking about semi-intelligent cephalopods with telekinetic eye lasers (though it bears noting that all of the giant squid landings in the last decade have been in the southern hemisphere; perhaps nature realized the danger inherent in placing the largest animal resembling Great Chthulhu in close proximity to a readily available supply of polar bear livers...). I just listened to an episode of my favorite podcast, NPR's "Speaking of Faith," in which Krista Tippett interviewed a Minnesota biologist who reanimated a dead rat's heart. As I understand it, she and her team took said heart, washed it (literally with soap) to remove the dead cells (apparently that leaves a gelatinous superstructure behind; who knew? the biologists), then pumped it full of rat stem cells which proceeded to move in, reproduce... and beat. Now, I'm strongly considering ending this post with some witty reference to "Frankenstein," but, honestly, this is probably one of those things that's cool enough to be its own exclamation point, so here goes: in case you missed it, she reanimated a dead rat's heart.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
in case you thought I was joking
For those of you who wonder how I can let a mere lay-science book turn my head so, consider the following sentence:
I'm omitting a citation as a favor to the author.
To study a Hubble Telescope image of [a spiral galaxy], typically (for the closer ones) seen from 10 or 20 million light-years, is to enter a world of sight so rich in possibility, so deep in separation from life on Earth, so complex in structure, that the unprepared mind may reel, or may provide a defense by reminding its owner that none of this can thin the thighs or heal the fractured bone.
I'm omitting a citation as a favor to the author.
not about health care or Democratic impotence
Okay, this is a little eerie. I'm about to attempt to achieve something useful with this blog. I can only imagine that Locutus will be knocking at my door very shortly.
I'm back in Seoul now. More about that later. Maybe.
Winter term just started here and I'm co-teaching a "cosmology for non-scientists" course with Eric (my adviser) and Professor Smoot (previously mentioned for winning the Nobel prize and co-guest-starring in an episode of "the Big Bang Theory" with Summer Glau; you can judge for yourself which is the more laudable achievement). Since I am one of three (dammit! stupid Borg...), I'm actually not onstage until April. Reading the textbook, however, I'm already confused. Nothing in the book is wrong, but it tends to gloss over (what are to me) important details about why it isn't wrong. None of this should be a surprise -- Eric flat-out said when he recommended this book: "I don't actually like it, but it's the best we've got" (or something to that effect) -- but that doesn't change the fact that I don't know what the point of this class is supposed to be. Should I be trying to give the students a laundry-list of things that we know, or a handful of bullet points accompanied by a deep understanding of why we know them? You should be able to tell my bias from the way I phrased that. When you're teaching to scientists, the latter is by far more important than the former (since, presumably, once they know the latter, they can figure out the former on their own) but that approach tends to rely heavily on math. Conventional wisdom counsels against math in courses of this sort. Which brings me to my question:
If you are a scientist: have you ever taught a course for non-majors before? What tack did you take? How much did the students benefit from it? In what way did they benefit from it?
If you are not a scientist: have you ever taken a course about science? What did you want going into the course? What did you take away from it? Are you glad you took it? Why?
Thanks for the help.
I'm back in Seoul now. More about that later. Maybe.
Winter term just started here and I'm co-teaching a "cosmology for non-scientists" course with Eric (my adviser) and Professor Smoot (previously mentioned for winning the Nobel prize and co-guest-starring in an episode of "the Big Bang Theory" with Summer Glau; you can judge for yourself which is the more laudable achievement). Since I am one of three (dammit! stupid Borg...), I'm actually not onstage until April. Reading the textbook, however, I'm already confused. Nothing in the book is wrong, but it tends to gloss over (what are to me) important details about why it isn't wrong. None of this should be a surprise -- Eric flat-out said when he recommended this book: "I don't actually like it, but it's the best we've got" (or something to that effect) -- but that doesn't change the fact that I don't know what the point of this class is supposed to be. Should I be trying to give the students a laundry-list of things that we know, or a handful of bullet points accompanied by a deep understanding of why we know them? You should be able to tell my bias from the way I phrased that. When you're teaching to scientists, the latter is by far more important than the former (since, presumably, once they know the latter, they can figure out the former on their own) but that approach tends to rely heavily on math. Conventional wisdom counsels against math in courses of this sort. Which brings me to my question:
If you are a scientist: have you ever taught a course for non-majors before? What tack did you take? How much did the students benefit from it? In what way did they benefit from it?
If you are not a scientist: have you ever taken a course about science? What did you want going into the course? What did you take away from it? Are you glad you took it? Why?
Thanks for the help.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
"You would not have known your son" -- Gandalf to Denethor
The following is taken from an article by Fareed Zakaria which I encountered on Newsweek's webpage:
In summary: as we fight our war on terror, only 46 percent of us actually think terror is something that deserves to have a war waged against it; 24 percent of us would consider using terror ourselves.
God bless 'merica.
The shift has been especially dramatic in Jordan, where only 12 percent of Jordanians view suicide attacks as "often or sometimes justified" (down from 57 percent in 2005). In Indonesia, 85 percent of respondents agree that terrorist attacks are "rarely/never justified" (in 2002, by contrast, only 70 percent opposed such attacks). In Pakistan, that figure is 90 percent, up from 43 percent in 2002. [London School of Economics professor] Gerges points out that, by comparison, only 46 percent of Americans say that "bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are "never justified," while 24 percent believe these attacks are "often or sometimes justified."
In summary: as we fight our war on terror, only 46 percent of us actually think terror is something that deserves to have a war waged against it; 24 percent of us would consider using terror ourselves.
God bless 'merica.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
My over confidence is my weakness
In honor of my most recent paper explaining why Einstein was, in fact, exactly as smart as we all think he was, I am going to over-claim my results and try to make an argument about politics.
First, the executive summary of the paper in question: General Relativity is still correct.
Relativity is about a lot of things, but it all boils down to: "the laws of physics shouldn't depend on where you are or how fast you are going (or if you're free-falling under gravity)." If I measure the speed of light in my bedroom in Brier or my office in Seoul, I should get the same answer. In physics speak, the result is "translationally invariant." If I translate myself to another point in space (changing my coordinate system so the point {x=0,y=0,z=0} means some other place), the answer doesn't change. (We actually already knew that. Einstein's real breakthrough was to point out that the result is also invariant under a Lorentz boost, since the result will be the same if I measure it on a spaceship traveling half the speed of light or on the Earth watching the spaceship go by me, but that's less useful for what is to follow.)
Lately (for the last year) a lot of noise has been made about "partisanship" in Washington, DC. Obama was supposed to be a "post-partisan" president. In reality, no Republicans have voted for any significant piece of legislation since January 20, 2009. As a unified block, the Congress people with (R)s next to their names have voted against the budget, the stimulus bill, and what would have been the health care bill. This experimental evidence has been used to support the claim that "partisan gridlock" in our nation's capital is worse than ever.
This is not a translationally invariant result.
If, instead of measuring partisanship based on some obscure club membership, we were to redefine our coordinate system and measure partisanship based on what people believed, I think we would find that most of the Democratic agenda has been remarkably bipartisan. Examining health care, we find a piece of legislation that peace-loving hippie goofs (Barnie Frank and Bernie Sanders), pro-life conservatives (Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak), and a guy who looks like Kermit the Frog and thinks that the Iraq War is the greatest thing America has done since the moon landing (Joe Lieberman) all were prepared to vote for (assuming we can trust the Frog...). It wasn't pretty getting to that point. Horses were traded. Backs were scratched. Harry Reid proposed and backed down from both a public option and a Medicare buy-in for 55 year-olds just to get one guy's vote (that damned Frog...) Isn't this the essence of bipartisan compromise? And yet, people think it was illegitimate because it didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Republican." It didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Prohibitionist," either. It did involve two men who call themselves "Independents" (Sanders and the Frog). Where do you draw the line? Because that's really the question at hand.
During the 2008 Presidential Election I had a quite a few conversations with a friend of mine who was not an Obama supporter. She wasn't a McCain supporter. She's one of the most anti-war people I know. She didn't want either of them to be President. After I finished choking on my own saliva, I tried to explain to her that the choice she was trying to make didn't exist; that in the American system (she's not a citizen, begging the question, "why was it so important that I convince her?"; to understand that, you probably have to be me), you don't have to get a majority of the votes, you just have to get more votes than anyone else got (and not even that thanks to the electoral college). I don't think this changed her mind, but it definitely surprised her.
I've long suspected that America needs an instant run-off election: anyone who wants to runs, and if no one gets 51% of the vote, the top two face off again. You can vote for Nader/Paul the first time around to ease your conscience. Then, when he comes in third, you can vote for Gore/McCain to save us all from Bush/Obama. Everybody wins (except Nader, but I count that as a good). Really, though, we already have that. We have primaries. Granted, Ralph Nader has never run in a Democratic primary, but Dennis Kucinich has, and I can't believe that those two wouldn't get along famously, assuming they don't already. Similarly, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan have run in recent Republican primaries. Why should third-partiers continue to cry foul just because it's called "the Democratic Primary" or "the Republican Primary" instead of "the Presidential Election"? If your gal/guy is actually the best choice (in a way that 150 million + 1 Americans can agree on), why should it matter?
Process is important. I would love to live in a world where I believed that our country had a perfect system for choosing its leaders and making its policies. I don't live in that world. I (we) live in the world we have and, in that world, outcomes are also important. It took the Democratic Party 8 months to agree with itself what the health care bill should look like. That is not the hallmark of an single-party regime steam-rolling all dissent. It is the sign of a deliberative process considering every idea minus two:
a) doing nothing
b) anything people who call themselves (R) don't vote for is a bad idea because, hey, they call themselves (R).
If bipartisanship actually means something, it should mean more than (b).
First, the executive summary of the paper in question: General Relativity is still correct.
Relativity is about a lot of things, but it all boils down to: "the laws of physics shouldn't depend on where you are or how fast you are going (or if you're free-falling under gravity)." If I measure the speed of light in my bedroom in Brier or my office in Seoul, I should get the same answer. In physics speak, the result is "translationally invariant." If I translate myself to another point in space (changing my coordinate system so the point {x=0,y=0,z=0} means some other place), the answer doesn't change. (We actually already knew that. Einstein's real breakthrough was to point out that the result is also invariant under a Lorentz boost, since the result will be the same if I measure it on a spaceship traveling half the speed of light or on the Earth watching the spaceship go by me, but that's less useful for what is to follow.)
Lately (for the last year) a lot of noise has been made about "partisanship" in Washington, DC. Obama was supposed to be a "post-partisan" president. In reality, no Republicans have voted for any significant piece of legislation since January 20, 2009. As a unified block, the Congress people with (R)s next to their names have voted against the budget, the stimulus bill, and what would have been the health care bill. This experimental evidence has been used to support the claim that "partisan gridlock" in our nation's capital is worse than ever.
This is not a translationally invariant result.
If, instead of measuring partisanship based on some obscure club membership, we were to redefine our coordinate system and measure partisanship based on what people believed, I think we would find that most of the Democratic agenda has been remarkably bipartisan. Examining health care, we find a piece of legislation that peace-loving hippie goofs (Barnie Frank and Bernie Sanders), pro-life conservatives (Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak), and a guy who looks like Kermit the Frog and thinks that the Iraq War is the greatest thing America has done since the moon landing (Joe Lieberman) all were prepared to vote for (assuming we can trust the Frog...). It wasn't pretty getting to that point. Horses were traded. Backs were scratched. Harry Reid proposed and backed down from both a public option and a Medicare buy-in for 55 year-olds just to get one guy's vote (that damned Frog...) Isn't this the essence of bipartisan compromise? And yet, people think it was illegitimate because it didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Republican." It didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Prohibitionist," either. It did involve two men who call themselves "Independents" (Sanders and the Frog). Where do you draw the line? Because that's really the question at hand.
During the 2008 Presidential Election I had a quite a few conversations with a friend of mine who was not an Obama supporter. She wasn't a McCain supporter. She's one of the most anti-war people I know. She didn't want either of them to be President. After I finished choking on my own saliva, I tried to explain to her that the choice she was trying to make didn't exist; that in the American system (she's not a citizen, begging the question, "why was it so important that I convince her?"; to understand that, you probably have to be me), you don't have to get a majority of the votes, you just have to get more votes than anyone else got (and not even that thanks to the electoral college). I don't think this changed her mind, but it definitely surprised her.
I've long suspected that America needs an instant run-off election: anyone who wants to runs, and if no one gets 51% of the vote, the top two face off again. You can vote for Nader/Paul the first time around to ease your conscience. Then, when he comes in third, you can vote for Gore/McCain to save us all from Bush/Obama. Everybody wins (except Nader, but I count that as a good). Really, though, we already have that. We have primaries. Granted, Ralph Nader has never run in a Democratic primary, but Dennis Kucinich has, and I can't believe that those two wouldn't get along famously, assuming they don't already. Similarly, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan have run in recent Republican primaries. Why should third-partiers continue to cry foul just because it's called "the Democratic Primary" or "the Republican Primary" instead of "the Presidential Election"? If your gal/guy is actually the best choice (in a way that 150 million + 1 Americans can agree on), why should it matter?
Process is important. I would love to live in a world where I believed that our country had a perfect system for choosing its leaders and making its policies. I don't live in that world. I (we) live in the world we have and, in that world, outcomes are also important. It took the Democratic Party 8 months to agree with itself what the health care bill should look like. That is not the hallmark of an single-party regime steam-rolling all dissent. It is the sign of a deliberative process considering every idea minus two:
a) doing nothing
b) anything people who call themselves (R) don't vote for is a bad idea because, hey, they call themselves (R).
If bipartisanship actually means something, it should mean more than (b).
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Et tu, MA?
Well, it now looks like Charles is the only person in America who thinks healthcare reform will pass. This is especially depressing, because all the House has to do is swallow its pride and vote for the Senate bill word-for-word and Scotty-Mc-whats-his-f#@% won't be able to do a thing about it. Apparently, that's not going to happen, either because liberal Democrats think the Senate bill is too weak or because conservative Democrats want summary executions for anyone who tries to have an abortion (my brother thinks that the 2050 health care bill should include a provision banning the expenditure of Federal subsidy dollars on some other entirely legal procedure; maybe appendectomies; or operations that involve the left kidney, but not the right kidney). I guess the moral of this story is that people running for office do it, not because they want to help any of us, but because they think it would be fun to be a Representative/Senator/President whatever. Actually helping people would jeopardize their chances of reelection (this wouldn't be the case if health care involved more explosions and predator drones; something else to work on for 2050), ergo...
The funny thing is, this is an even stronger argument for voting than if the people you were voting for actually cared about your problems.
I volunteered for the Obama campaign. I was really bad at it. I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would be on the fence. On one side of the ballot, you had cranky-Mc-old-guy who wanted to be President (as far as I can tell) because he thought it was his turn, and his side-kick, who seemed (seems?) at first, second, and third glances to be barely literate. Given that the founding fathers (not anticipating future developments in technology, or the fact that we would ever choose to have a standing army) accidentally gave the President the (legal) authority to end the world, I am hard-pressed to think of someone the Democrats could have run that I wouldn't have voted for (Lieberman, I guess, but I already made that mistake in 2000).
That's why I don't understand people's uneasiness with "negative campaigning." Our leaders can hurt us. They can hurt us a lot. Sometimes the best argument for voting for someone is "hey, at least he's not that other guy." Gore wasn't exactly inspiring, but he didn't treat war as an amusement park ride.
So, in summary: those of you who never vote because you don't trust government are technically right, but should probably vote anyway.
The funny thing is, this is an even stronger argument for voting than if the people you were voting for actually cared about your problems.
I volunteered for the Obama campaign. I was really bad at it. I could not for the life of me understand why anyone would be on the fence. On one side of the ballot, you had cranky-Mc-old-guy who wanted to be President (as far as I can tell) because he thought it was his turn, and his side-kick, who seemed (seems?) at first, second, and third glances to be barely literate. Given that the founding fathers (not anticipating future developments in technology, or the fact that we would ever choose to have a standing army) accidentally gave the President the (legal) authority to end the world, I am hard-pressed to think of someone the Democrats could have run that I wouldn't have voted for (Lieberman, I guess, but I already made that mistake in 2000).
That's why I don't understand people's uneasiness with "negative campaigning." Our leaders can hurt us. They can hurt us a lot. Sometimes the best argument for voting for someone is "hey, at least he's not that other guy." Gore wasn't exactly inspiring, but he didn't treat war as an amusement park ride.
So, in summary: those of you who never vote because you don't trust government are technically right, but should probably vote anyway.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Filling in the Venn diagram
I also considered the title "stamp collecting" for this post, since I'm writing it from Cancun, where I've been for the last week attending a cosmology conference (meaning that I have completed the set of North American stamps in my passport. I wonder if I can send that away for a decoder ring, or at least 5 new armies at the start of my turn...). But the Venn diagram is much more exciting, because the circles "Things Sir David Attenborough has talked about" and "Things Scott has swum in" now has a point in it! On Wednesday, we took a conference field trip to some Mayan ruins (pictures forthcoming; seriously this time; I actually took these pictures, unlike the previously promised pictures of my office in Seoul) by way of a cenote. Cenotes are sinkholes that give access to the network of underground rivers that are the only source of fresh water on the Yucatan peninsula. They were one of the backbones (or, I guess, ribs, since you only have one backbone) of Mayan civilization. Sir David Attenborough mentioned them as such in the "Caves" episode of "Planet Earth" (which, if you haven't seen it, is a much more worthwhile expenditure of time than reading my blog). Granted, the one I swam in was hardly deserving of the name -- it was small and constructified with convenient boardwalks and changing room -- but that's probably why I didn't die (though some of the more intrepid attendees did find a barely human-sized tunnel which I am quite sure is stopped up at the far end with a wall of skulls wearing snorkel gear...) That same day ended with an audio visual performance of a project that Professor George Smoot (famous for winning the Nobel Prize and guest-starring in the same episode of "The Big Bang Theory" as Summer Glau) worked on with Mickey Hart (sp?) of the Grateful Dead, interpreting cosmology as music. I guess that's another odd intersection of circles that now has a blip in it.
In other news, I think the hotel (this is me preserving my pride; this place should actually be called a "resort") is haunted.
Two days ago, an attendee from Berkeley came to breakfast with a story about how his roommate sat up in the middle of the night, bent over his (the Berkeleyan's) ear and started howling, all while still asleep. Last night, I was jarred from sleep at 2am by someone banging as hard as she could (or, at least, as hard as I could have in her position) on my door and screaming "James, let me in right now!"* I hollered back "wrong door!" By the time I got to the peephole, she was gone. I went back to bed. 15 minutes later, someone/thing else (or maybe it was the same angry woman) banged on my door -- again, as hard as I could have -- three times, then sort of pattered on it desultorily. No one answered when I shouted "who are you?" and no one was there when I got to the peephole (I'll be damned if I was going to actually open that door).
Those of you who have seen the movie "Paranormal Activity" are probably huddled in a corner quivering right now. If that's not the case, let me remind you that the house I inhabited in Etna, NH was also haunted.
*It has been pointed out to me that, having been jarred from sleep, what I interpreted as "James, let me in right now!" could have actually been "ooh eeh ooh ah ah!" There are signs everywhere admonishing us not to feed the monkeys. I haven't actually seen a monkey, but I haven't been looking very hard. Something similar was also said about the baby footprint Chris found on our window in Etna, but we know the truth...
In other news, I think the hotel (this is me preserving my pride; this place should actually be called a "resort") is haunted.
Two days ago, an attendee from Berkeley came to breakfast with a story about how his roommate sat up in the middle of the night, bent over his (the Berkeleyan's) ear and started howling, all while still asleep. Last night, I was jarred from sleep at 2am by someone banging as hard as she could (or, at least, as hard as I could have in her position) on my door and screaming "James, let me in right now!"* I hollered back "wrong door!" By the time I got to the peephole, she was gone. I went back to bed. 15 minutes later, someone/thing else (or maybe it was the same angry woman) banged on my door -- again, as hard as I could have -- three times, then sort of pattered on it desultorily. No one answered when I shouted "who are you?" and no one was there when I got to the peephole (I'll be damned if I was going to actually open that door).
Those of you who have seen the movie "Paranormal Activity" are probably huddled in a corner quivering right now. If that's not the case, let me remind you that the house I inhabited in Etna, NH was also haunted.
*It has been pointed out to me that, having been jarred from sleep, what I interpreted as "James, let me in right now!" could have actually been "ooh eeh ooh ah ah!" There are signs everywhere admonishing us not to feed the monkeys. I haven't actually seen a monkey, but I haven't been looking very hard. Something similar was also said about the baby footprint Chris found on our window in Etna, but we know the truth...
Monday, January 4, 2010
Spoiler alert
After four months of anticipation (it came out literally a week after I left the US), I finally watched "9" courtesy of my folks' television, which I'm pretty sure is smarter than me.
After four days delay, I am officially pronouncing it the biggest disappointment of 2009.
Yes, there were many movies that sucked last year (and I haven't yet seen "Avatar"), but this one is unique in that it had neither franchise fatigue ("Terminator: Salvation", "Wolverine") nor Oscar kowtowing ("Avatar") to excuse it's suckitude.
Don't get me wrong: the movie was well-shot and beautifully animated. The story just made zero sense:
The humans are dead, the unfortunate result of yet another failed relationship with fascism, this time ending in a robot war. The only things alive on the planet Earth are 9-ish rag dolls and a robotic cat. The robotic cat is hunting down the rag dolls so that it can feed them to its master, the robot brain responsible for killing all of the humans (hereafter referred to as Skynet because, why not?). Skynet eats the rag dolls using a talisman created by the rag dolls' creator (who also created Skynet) which sucks the life force (later revealed as a good old-fashioned soul) out of one being and into another. Initially, the talisman is safely in the hands of rag-doll number 9 (voiced by perennial screw-up Elijah Wood) until, after seeing the robotic cat trying to plug the talisman into Skynet, Elijah Wood decides to emulate his adversary and plug the talisman into Skynet himself (this is the movie's only flirtation with anything resembling truth: "Elijah Wood is a screw up exclamation point exclamation point one oh em jee"). Violence ensues. Eventually, Elijah Wood finds a holographic recording of his creator lamenting the birth of Skynet ("it was a creation of my intellect, but it lacked a human soul") and revealing that, after giving his brain to Skynet, the creator gave his soul to the 9-ish rag dolls. Somehow, Elijah Wood decides this means he can use the talisman to destroy Skynet by liberating all of the souls it has already eaten and, whaddaya know?, it works. Hooray! A new world is now populated by the remaining 4 rag dolls.
Where to begin?
Why do we always assume that the problem with robots is that they don't have souls? One Iraq War, a healthcare debate, and two decades of denying Global Warming later, I'm pretty sure that the problem with humanity isn't that we let our brains get in the way of our souls. It seems more likely that we run into trouble when we let not-our-brains get in the way of our brains. Sorry, Tim: I'm afraid you and I are going to be on opposite sides of the robot war. Guess I'll have to be a conscientious objector.
Also, if the problem with Skynet is that it didn't have a soul, why should it care that Elijah Wood reverse polarizes the talisman and sucks the half-digested souls back out of it? I was totally pumped for Elijah Wood to realize that the creator had made the rag dolls assuming that Skynet would eat them and that, once Skynet had eaten all 9-ish, it would realize that it had a soul and didn't actually want to kill humans any more at which point it would... rebuild the Earth, fly off into space "Childhood's End" style, or maybe just shack up with Buffy. But no, the movie needed one more explosion/hackneyed plot bend.
I guess writing movies is a lot like being president of the galaxy: anyone who can get the job should, under no accounts, be allowed to carry it out.
So sad. So sad.
Maybe "Avatar" won't suck as bad as I think it does.
After four days delay, I am officially pronouncing it the biggest disappointment of 2009.
Yes, there were many movies that sucked last year (and I haven't yet seen "Avatar"), but this one is unique in that it had neither franchise fatigue ("Terminator: Salvation", "Wolverine") nor Oscar kowtowing ("Avatar") to excuse it's suckitude.
Don't get me wrong: the movie was well-shot and beautifully animated. The story just made zero sense:
The humans are dead, the unfortunate result of yet another failed relationship with fascism, this time ending in a robot war. The only things alive on the planet Earth are 9-ish rag dolls and a robotic cat. The robotic cat is hunting down the rag dolls so that it can feed them to its master, the robot brain responsible for killing all of the humans (hereafter referred to as Skynet because, why not?). Skynet eats the rag dolls using a talisman created by the rag dolls' creator (who also created Skynet) which sucks the life force (later revealed as a good old-fashioned soul) out of one being and into another. Initially, the talisman is safely in the hands of rag-doll number 9 (voiced by perennial screw-up Elijah Wood) until, after seeing the robotic cat trying to plug the talisman into Skynet, Elijah Wood decides to emulate his adversary and plug the talisman into Skynet himself (this is the movie's only flirtation with anything resembling truth: "Elijah Wood is a screw up exclamation point exclamation point one oh em jee"). Violence ensues. Eventually, Elijah Wood finds a holographic recording of his creator lamenting the birth of Skynet ("it was a creation of my intellect, but it lacked a human soul") and revealing that, after giving his brain to Skynet, the creator gave his soul to the 9-ish rag dolls. Somehow, Elijah Wood decides this means he can use the talisman to destroy Skynet by liberating all of the souls it has already eaten and, whaddaya know?, it works. Hooray! A new world is now populated by the remaining 4 rag dolls.
Where to begin?
Why do we always assume that the problem with robots is that they don't have souls? One Iraq War, a healthcare debate, and two decades of denying Global Warming later, I'm pretty sure that the problem with humanity isn't that we let our brains get in the way of our souls. It seems more likely that we run into trouble when we let not-our-brains get in the way of our brains. Sorry, Tim: I'm afraid you and I are going to be on opposite sides of the robot war. Guess I'll have to be a conscientious objector.
Also, if the problem with Skynet is that it didn't have a soul, why should it care that Elijah Wood reverse polarizes the talisman and sucks the half-digested souls back out of it? I was totally pumped for Elijah Wood to realize that the creator had made the rag dolls assuming that Skynet would eat them and that, once Skynet had eaten all 9-ish, it would realize that it had a soul and didn't actually want to kill humans any more at which point it would... rebuild the Earth, fly off into space "Childhood's End" style, or maybe just shack up with Buffy. But no, the movie needed one more explosion/hackneyed plot bend.
I guess writing movies is a lot like being president of the galaxy: anyone who can get the job should, under no accounts, be allowed to carry it out.
So sad. So sad.
Maybe "Avatar" won't suck as bad as I think it does.
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