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.

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)

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.

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).