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:

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.

"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:

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.

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).

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.

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...

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.