Further Blogging Is Superfluous
The Red Sox, for better or worse, are no longer a symbol for inevitable failure, no longer a metaphor for situations designed to gin up hopes and blow it all at the last possible moment, again and again. They're just a pretty good baseball team in the AL East that wins championships now and again. They spend a lot of money and have irritating, self-absorbed fans. They've become a little bit more like the Yankees.
Some of you may be saying, "Ah, but the fact that bin Laden is still alive is proof of the Bush administration's failure in the war on terror - proof that we shouldn't vote for him!" The Medium Lobster would laugh at your naivete - if this situation weren't so deadly serious. For only George W. Bush has the pure, hard determination to stand up to terror. And only George W. Bush has the unswerving, unfailing incompetence to allow terror to spread so he can continue to stand up to it.
Of course, maybe *that's* just what Osama wants us to think. By criticizing Bush, we'll realize that he really wants to support Kerry, but we'll see through his game and support Bush instead, which is in fact just what Osama wanted all along!
Hmmmm. This is just too difficult. Maybe we should just ignore the bastard and vote for whoever we damn well please.
Posted at 8:17 AM | link | follow-ups | 2 comments
Guess Who's Back?
Via Kathryn Cramer, there's now an Official Afshar Experiment Blog. This was probably inevitable.
The long-awaited paper is also now available as a pre-print. It's quite long (33 pages of PDF, including quite a few figures), and the site says it's been submitted to the American Journal of Physics, of all places. Not that I have anything against AJP, mind, but it's a journal where I expect to find papers with a more pedagogical slant, and not anything particularly groundbreaking, as this claims to be.
(If you'd like to know more, here's my original post on the subject. There have been numerous updates since, but that's got the basic facts.)
Posted at 7:45 AM | link | follow-ups | 3 comments
Take a Deep Breath
There's been a lot of talk in the blogging world lately about the woman who was visited by the Secret Service regarding some things she posted on her LiveJournal. This is generally held to be yet another example of the incipient fascism of the Bush Administration. Now, I haven't read the actual comments in question (the post that triggered this was taken down), but I'd like to strike a note of cautious dissent, here, as I think that this is a case of misplaced outrage.
The thing to remember here is that this is what the Secret Service does. This is what they've always done (I've heard dozens of stories about people getting visits from them over stupid things said in the heat of the moment, going back twenty years). It's their job. They have no sense of humor, and you don't really want them to have a sense of humor, given what their charge is.
If there's someone deserving of condemnation in this, it's the anonymous tipster who forwarded the post to the FBI and Secret Service (point #5 in the post linked above). Turning someone in for what were undoubtedly innocent remarks (though, again, I haven't seen them) is a despicable act, and I hope they get slapped for filing a false report, or whatever the equivalent Federal charge is.
But the Secret Service is, as far as I can tell, blameless in this. Yes, it's scary to have them show up, but they're doing what they have to do.
In a similar vein, it's important to be careful about how and where the outrage is directed in cases like the Wisconsin school thing, or the Iowa "sniper" comment. While I don't doubt that the kid in Iowa really was told that a sniper would take him out if he started protesting, I am equally confident that that statement was not the official policy of the Bush-Cheney campaign. That has the ring of the sort of jackass statement that some local functionary would make on his own initiative, just to scare the kid. (The Wisconsin incident could be the same thing, or it could be a case of teen confusion between "expelled from the event" and "expelled from school." Tough call.)
While the honorable thing to do would be for the campaign to find said jackass, and put him in the stocks in the town square to be pelted with rotten vegetables, focussing on the "sniper" crack (or any of the more extreme statements made by Bush security people) misses the point. The point is not that it's outrageous that dissenters are threatened with execution if they act up at a Bush-Cheney rally-- the point is that it's outrageous to be excluding them at all, no matter how politely they're turned away. The threats and arrests just add an extra layer of melodrama to what's already a pretty deplorable stance.
(And before anyone chimes in with "Kerry did it too!" let me highlight this bit from the Des Moines register article:
The Bush campaign was asked to cite any instances where Republicans or others were denied access to Kerry events in Iowa, but declined to provide any examples.
"Declined to provide any examples" is a phrase which here means "were talking out their asses, and got called on it.")
Posted at 7:50 AM | link | follow-ups | 17 comments
I Transcend Bubble Sheets
I received a survey recently that's meant to "collect basic data on college faculty, including background and demographic information, attitudes and values, pedagogy, and professional activities." (That's a quote from the cover letter. I'm not going to name the organization, though, out of some vague sense that it would be better not to.) As usual, it served as a nice reminder of just how different the sciences and humanities are in academia, and the degree to which "faculty" is assumed to mean "humanities professor."
A fair number of the questions concerned what I think of as humanities-specific issues. Every one of the pedagogy questions asked specifically about race and gender issues, and there were a bunch of "values" and "spirituality" questions. And, you know, there's just not much chance that I'm going to assign any readings on women and gender issues. I mean, there'll be the occasional woman mentioned-- it's hard to teach physics without mentioning Marie Curie-- but that's not really the focus of anything we do.
As with most bubble-sheet surveys, I was left wanting some more options. I feel like a heel filling out the "Not Important" oval for a question on my opinion of the importance of promoting racial diversity. I do feel that it's an important thing in a very general sense, but it's just not something that comes up in my classes, and there's no "Not Applicable" bubble on the form, so "Not Important" is the best available answer. There is a question asking for information about your discipline, so they can make the correlation, but I'm a little afraid that this will just lead to people thinking that scientists are a bunch of sexist, racist bastards.
It's also striking to notice how the sciences get shorted in the pedagogy questions. In a question about elements used in courses, along with the obligatory race and gender questions, there or lines for "Community service as part of coursework," "Essay mid-term and/or final exams," "Multiple drafts of written work," and "Reflective writing/ journaling." There's no line for anything remotely like a laboratory component ("Hands-on instruction" or some such would be nice), and class demonstrations are grouped together with "recitals." I suppose exams consisting of free-response problems might be construed as "Essay exams" in some sense (that's how I answered it, anyway), but it's not a particularly good fit.
I'm also puzzled by the repeated questions about "spirituality" and "spiritual development." A couple of mentions are to be expected, but it showed up often enough that I almost suspect an agenda.
Anyway, I filled out the survey as honestly as I could, and I'll send it in. I can't help thinking that it's a deeply flawed instrument, though, and flawed in a way that reflects some really fundamental misunderstandings of the science side of academia on the part of the people who put this together.
Posted at 9:30 AM | link | follow-ups | [ hide comments ]
Mark, 10.28.2004, 11:44am [link]
I think it just goes to show that you are too dismissive of these very real concerns: a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
tim, 10.28.2004, 12:02pm [link]
I don't think there's anything wrong with asking about race and gender issues, as those questions loom large in pretty much any field in the humanities and social sciences. Information about the number of faculty dealing with those issues in classes is probably an important thing to have.
It's just not particularly relevant to what I do, and I would've liked an option that made that clear. I would hope that they can work that out from the discipline information, but I'm a little uneasy.
There wasn't any option to add a cover letter or that sort of thing, though I might consider sending them a note under separate cover complaining about the lack of science-oriented questions. On further inspection, though, the letter does not include any email contact information, so the odds aren't especially good.
Also, what Nathan said.
Chad Orzel, 10.28.2004, 2:43pm [link]
Cryptic Ned, 10.28.2004, 3:03pm [link]
"I don't think there's anything wrong with asking about race and gender issues, as those questions loom large in pretty much any field in the humanities and social sciences."
Wow, okay, that's knocked me out of my ironic stance. Could you elaborate on this? Why would race and gender be important in pedagogy in the humanities, but not in physics. If not in the pedagogy of thermodynamics, why in the pedagogy of, say, Chaucer?
tim, 10.28.2004, 4:32pm [link]
First of all, I'm using "pedagoy questions" to refer to questions like "How important do you feel it is to address questions of race an ethnicity in your classes?" or "How often do you assign readings dealing with women and gender issues?" This is not anything to do with how to approach teaching students of different genders or races. That's a different flamewar entirely.
With that in mind, a huge amount of current scholarship in the humanities deals with these questions. As such, not only is it appropriate for a faculty member to address questions of race and gender in class, it would probably be irresponsible not to.
On a more fundamental level, it's entirely reasonable to expect that race and gender (and a host of other factors) might affect the interpretation of works of literature, or historical events. For something as subjective as literary interpretation, personal background can make a great deal of difference, and two people of different races may quite reasonably view the same work in completely different ways. This extends into most of the social sciences as well.
In physics and most areas of the natural sciences, on the other hand, these issues really play no role (unless you want to wander off into Thomas Kuhn territory, which isn't actual science). The acceleration due to gravity near the surface of the Earth is 9.8 meters per second per second, and that's not open to interpretation. No matter what color your skin is or how your genitalia are arranged, the force of gravity is exactly the same.
As such, there's really no sensible way to assign readings that deal with race and gender issues, and no particular reason to be discussing them in class. It's just not applicable to the subject matter.
Chad Orzel, 10.28.2004, 5:32pm [link]
Don't get me wrong, I understand that this kind of thinking is an undeniably strong influence in those fields, but I'm not sure it is always legitimately so.
That's why I gave the specific example of Chaucer. It's hard to imagine that the students of Chaucer are really best served by readings dealing with gender issues. (I suppose the Wife of Bath's Tale addresses some "gender" issues, but probably not in the way that the questioners are anticipating. She is not, after all, oppressed; it's her unfortunate husbands who have done all the suffering.)
And, btw, it's not as if the sciences aren't under assault (though that's not my axe to grind. The sciences will take care of themselves). There are, at the grade school level, plenty of initiatives to teach, for example, multi-cultural math. (And some of the people who study scientists *will* take issue with you on the importance of ethnic or gender politics in physics, although I won't.) It just so happens that those folks aren't winning that war.
What I'm trying to suggest is that, perhaps, while it is important to have readings on gender or ethnic issues in those handful of courses in the humanities in which those readings do play an important role, I am not convinced that those issues are central to very many of the courses, even in the humanities.
I think it is, for example, perfectly reasonable to get through a two semester survey of philosophy considering, for example, issues of identity, the existence of God, the existence of anything, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundations of ethics, truth, secondary qualities, philosophy of the mind, and mereology without assigning any reading particularly aimed at gender or ethnic politics, and without leaving the students ill-served by it. Or get entirely through a senior seminar on philosophy of the mind. Or a course on Descartes.
I think you can give a two semester (pre and post revolution) history of Russia, and if you don't make it a point to assign readings on gender or racial issues, you won't handicap the students.
I'll bet you can get through macro and micro economics, too, without gender and race.
I'm challenging the perception - which I grant is widespread - that the gender or racial politics should play such a central role in the study of humanities - literature in particular. It's obviously implicit in the survey you got, and while it seems strange to you to answer those questions as a physics professor, why shouldn't it seem just as strange to the philosophy professor, the history professor, the economics professor, or even the literature professor who is not teaching a course specifically designed to address those topics?
tim, 10.28.2004, 8:18pm [link]
I am also quietly amazed at people who think that race, gender, and religion aren't germane questions to a study of Chaucer, whose writing are largely concerned with gender relations and present divers critiques of religion. (I'm quietly weaseling on the race thing,because I can't remember if Chaucer has any of that super-overt old-time anti-Semitism.)
Mike Kozlowski, 10.28.2004, 8:32pm [link]
Some of the more interesting courses I took in philosophy were on gender issues. The whole essentialism versus socialisation question is very relevant to philosophy, because it throws sidelights on stuff like the mind/body question. And as for epistemology, where better to start than "Imagine truth to be a woman - what then?"
"I think you can give a two semester (pre and post revolution) history of Russia, and if you don't make it a point to assign readings on gender or racial issues, you won't handicap the students."
What, discuss the Russian revolution without discussing the progress of women's emancipation, both as an interesting subject in its own right and as a case study of civil rights and social change in the revolutionary period? (and the similar changes in attitudes to Jews in that period)
Why is it only natural to discuss how a subject affected white males?
Ray, 10.29.2004, 4:55am [link]
So it seems that either it is possible and reasonable to get through Chaucer without assigning specific readings on gender issues, or there are a lot of students out there being shortchanged.
tim, 10.29.2004, 7:36am [link]
No doubt. And there is room for philosophy courses to address the issue. But there are plenty of topics in philosophy for which the question of "racial diversity" or "readings on gender issues" won't ever arise. I'm not arguing that there isn't a place for those questions in philosophy - just that they aren't general concerns to all courses, the way the questionnaire (allegedly) presumes.
"And as for epistemology, where better to start than 'Imagine truth to be a woman - what then?' "
Well, I was with you up to this point. What then, indeed! I suppose that would explain Bill O'Reilly's desperate grappling with the Truth.
tim, 10.29.2004, 7:44am [link]
However, it's entirely reasonable to ask people in those disciplines how often they teach about race and gender in their classes, and expect a non-zero answer. In the physical sciences, on the other hand, the question doesn't make all that much sense. It's conceivable that you could put together a general education course about the great women of science, and make it work, but I have a hard time seeing any way to get race and gender into normal major-track classes.
The survey itself only asked "how often do you do these things" and "how important do you think these things are." Any prescriptive subtext you're reading into it is most likely the result of my uneasiness about answering those questions.
(I will say, however, that given the importance of race and gender studies in many fields of the humanities, a good case could be made that someone teaching about Chaucer or Plato without ever mentioning race or gender is probably negligent, at least to the degree that they're expected to give students a sense of the current state of scholarship in their subject.)
Chad Orzel, 10.29.2004, 8:50am [link]
Sure, but you talked about a two-semester survey of philosophy. And I would expect such a survey to cover gender issues.
I don't expect a short series of lectures on Kant or Descartes to cover gender, race and ethnicity, but that's the difference between a course on a narrowly-defined subject and a survey course.
Ray, 10.29.2004, 8:53am [link]
As such, there's really no sensible way to assign readings that deal with race and gender issues, and no particular reason to be discussing them in class. It's just not applicable to the subject matter."
Sorry for the long quote, but I think that this subsumes three distinct issues.
1) Are gender and race issues a part of the course.
2) Are there gender and racial perspectives on the subject matter of your course.
3) Are there gender or racially influenced pedagogical approaches which may better serve some of the students in your course.
I don't know what the questionnaire was asking, but there will be only a few courses in the Humanities in which 1) is true. (In Chaucer, for example, it is not.)
There will be many more in which 2) is true. For example, it is possible to look at the Wife of Bath's Tale in terms of gender politics - even if you think that gender politics isn't the focus of a literature course. One can also look at the gender politics approaches to math and science, even though that seems so far out of the mainstream. (Iragaray's assertion that boundary value problems reflect a uniquely masculine approach to mathematics, for example.)
And, of course, everything is susceptible to 3), though I'm not sure (from your description) that the questionnaire was asking you about 3).
So the question is really, in courses where the subject matter is not questions of race or gender, how relevant a question is it to ask whether you are inserting gender or race based perspectives? Why do we take it for granted that a literary analysis of Chaucer, macro-economics, metaphysics, etc. should include discussions of sexual politics?
tim, 10.29.2004, 9:11am [link]
"Sure, but you talked about a two-semester survey of philosophy. And I would expect such a survey to cover gender issues."
That's surprising to me, because I would not. (For example, in collecting my brief list of topics, I made recourse to the tables of contents of Nozick's Philosophical Explanations and Hales' Metaphysics, and neither introduced gender issues - the first being a general survey text, the second being a survey of metaphysics, specifically.)
Also, you asked a fair question about the Russian Revolution which I don't want to appear to be dodging. It is absolutely true that the question of women's rights and women's political activity was important in the revolutionary movement. But let me ask the question this way: if you assigned, say, McCauley, =Stalin and Stalinism=, MacKenzie and Curran, =Russia, and the USSR in the Twentieth Century=, and Meier, =Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall= for a course on modern Russian history (Nicholas to Khruschev, say, subsuming the revolution), would you answer that you *had* assigned readings on gender issues? Would you feel that you had neglected to provide materials on important issues?
tim, 10.29.2004, 9:20am [link]
Because we're not three academic generations out from the people who think "sexual politics" have no place in the academy.
Ginger Stampley, 10.29.2004, 9:27am [link]
So I'll note quickly that:
"it's entirely reasonable to ask people in those disciplines how often they teach about race and gender in their classes, and expect a non-zero answer."
I think that is true of those classes which are on the subject of race and gender issues, and those classes in which race or gender issues are important, but I guess I'm in the minority here in thinking that this is a small subset of the classes in the humanities.
The subtext I think in the question is exactly that: it is perfectly reasonable to expect that all professors, whatever the course, be addressing these vital issues. You don't think it should happen in the sciences. I don't think it is necessarily a part of many of the humanities. I'm happy to leave the disagreement there, but for one last question.
"given the importance of race and gender studies in many fields of the humanities, a good case could be made that someone teaching about Chaucer or Plato without ever mentioning race or gender is probably negligent"
Let's turn this a little closer to the bubble survey question. Do you think that someone teaching Chaucer or Plato without assigning readings on women or gender issues is negligent?
And would you be willing to ask a couple of people at Union who do teach Plato and Chaucer if they think a course in those subjects that doesn't include readings on women and gender issues exhibits negligence on the part of the professor?
The opinions of the Union College professors aren't necessarily authoritative, but at least we could get opinions from people who have taught the course, which I assume you haven't, and which you can safely assume I haven't, either.
I can check in with a couple of professors I know who teach Plato and Chaucer, as well, if you are interested in their opinions.
tim, 10.29.2004, 9:36am [link]
Sure, but you talked about a two-semester survey of philosophy. And I would expect such a survey to cover gender issues.
In fact, I would go a bit farther than that, and say that the statement (emphasis added):
I think it is, for example, perfectly reasonable to get through a two semester survey of philosophy considering, for example, issues of identity,[...], without assigning any reading particularly aimed at gender or ethnic politics, and without leaving the students ill-served by it.
Is flatly wrong. Race and gender are central to the question of identity, at least as it's currently studied in academia, and I'd be very surprised if you could seriously consider identity in philosophy without discussing race and gender.
"given the importance of race and gender studies in many fields of the humanities, a good case could be made that someone teaching about Chaucer or Plato without ever mentioning race or gender is probably negligent"
Let's turn this a little closer to the bubble survey question. Do you think that someone teaching Chaucer or Plato without assigning readings on women or gender issues is negligent?
Your habit of excerpting bits of sentences without the important qualifying clauses is really exceptionally irritating. While I did say that, it was followed immediately by:
... at least to the degree that they're expected to give students a sense of the current state of scholarship in their subject.
I will happily stand behind my complete original statement. To the degree that faculty members have an obligation to teach their students something about the current state of scholarship in their discipline, anyone leaving out race and gender from a discussion of Chaucer or Plato is almost certainly negligent. I have little doubt that there are dozens of works out there discussing the gender politics of Chaucer and Plato, probably by some very important names in the field.
I was going to bring this up at this afternoon's faculty happy hour (which usually includes at least a couple of English and Classics professors) anyway; if anything interesting gets said, I'll let you know.
Chad Orzel, 10.29.2004, 10:18am [link]
So there's at least one person teaching this stuff who thinks gender issues are important.
Chad Orzel, 10.29.2004, 10:30am [link]
"Do you think that someone teaching Chaucer or Plato without assigning readings on women or gender issues is negligent?"
I haven't read Chaucer, but I think its difficult to teach the Symposium without bringing in gender issues.
Ray, 10.29.2004, 10:35am [link]
Ray, 10.29.2004, 10:37am [link]
"Is flatly wrong. Race and gender are central to the question of identity, at least as it's currently studied in academia, and I'd be very surprised if you could seriously consider identity in philosophy without discussing race and gender."
Chad, when they teach identity in intro philosophy (in, for example, Nozick's book), they are teaching things like the ship of theseus, not how we align ourselves in our societies. I know that you probably only hear "identity" associated with "identity politics" but it is not the same thing. Thing "closest continuer" not "effects of oppression."
(As far as "current scholarship in the field" - how much of "current scholarship in the field" do you introduce your intro physics students to when you discuss thermodynamics? Do you give them readings from current scholarship to supplement Tipler? But I didn't cut that out to misrepresent you - my phrasing of the question was designed to relate your assertion to your characterization of the bubble question: "there's just not much chance that I'm going to assign any readings on women and gender issues")
(p.s: my philosophy sources have come in already unanimously "no." FWIW. Your sources may differ. But they also indicate that Plato himself was quite a feminist. So, maybe the message is mixed - Plato spends a lot of time himself on sexual politics.)
(Finally: to what extent do you think that the material of the humanities is contingent upon sexual politics - in contrast, say, to 9.8 m/s^2 which you say is not.)
tim, 10.29.2004, 11:00am [link]
From my Chaucer source:
"I can't speak about 'gender issues,' but as far as issues concerning women and the relationship between the sexes, actually, yes, a teacher who did not assign readings about these 'issues' would be negligent because they are central concerns to many of Chaucer's works..." [it goes on to make the case.]
So I yield the point on Chaucer, and by proxy, literature in general.
tim, 10.29.2004, 11:59am [link]
There is no doubt that these issues are more difficult to incorporate at the college level, especially in physics and math, where the emphasis for college students is not on current research but on discoveries that occurred at a time when women's contributions were actively repressed.
My wife teaches psychology, where even in introductory courses it is much more common to incorporate current research, so for her, showing that women have contributed significantly to psychology research is as easy as giving the first names of the scholars she cites in her lectures.
I think anyone in the field of physics will acknowledge that the lack of women researchers in the field is a significant problem. I wonder if Chad or any of the other contributors to this site have any ideas about how to use the "bully pulpit" of introductory physics to address that situation.
Dave Munger, 10.29.2004, 12:13pm [link]
I agree that this is a worthy effort to make, and a good thing overall, but I wouldn't say that it requires a discussion of race and gender issues as part of the class. I think that the question of how best to approach female or minority students is distinct from the sort of race and gender discussions the survey is asking about.
As to what would be a good way to approach the problem of trying to reach out to women and minorities, I'm not sure. To be honest, I'm not sure anybody really knows.
One interesting note on this subject: Physics Today had an article some months back on a study of "thriving" undergraduate physics programs, that looked at attempts to reach out to women and minorities. What they found was that attempts to make the departments more attractive to women and minorities didn't end up making much difference. It wasn't because they didn't attract the targeted students, though-- the raw number of women and minorities did increase-- but because the number of non-targeted students increased by the same amount, keeping the overall proportions more or less the same.
This is probably less a statement about outreach efforts than a damning indictment of the normal arrangement of physics departments, but I thought it was interesting.
Chad Orzel, 10.29.2004, 2:00pm [link]
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED.
Please visit Uncertain Principles' new location at ScienceBlogs to comment.
Smit Isn't Hip
Calpundit Monthly has an executive summary of the Slate office poll, which comes down 45-4 Kerry over Bush (with one vote each for David Cobb, Michael Badnarik, and "I'm a Canadian"). Despite the huge margin, Kevin notes that "Genuinely enthusiastic Kerry endorsements were hard to find."
Of course, this shouldn't really be surprising to anyone. Slate isn't quite as painfully hip as Salon, but they're still part of the web-media culture. That's why you get all those cutely contrarian pieces from Hitchens and Kaus and Landsburg-- clever is hip (in the elite web-magazine-reading set, anyway), and they're going to position themselves as "clever" even if it means tap-dancing along the thin line separating it from "stupid."
There are a great many things in this world that are not the kind of clever that Slate wants, and genuine enthusiasm for a political candidate is right at the top of the list. It's so painfully earnest and unironic, like an early U2 album, that they just seem to flinch away from it, and find ways to run down both candidates (see, for example, their 2000 statements which are equally tepid in their support for Gore). Because, really, how can you seriously justify a statement like Timothy Noah's:
Sen. John Kerry is the least appealing candidate the Democrats have nominated for president in my lifetime. I'm 46, so that covers Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey, McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, and Gore.
(It's also worth noting that these are people coming off several months of writing columns excoriating Kerry for failing to do or say exactly what they wanted done or said at every significant or insignificant point in the campaign. Spending months being professionally critical of a person can't help but color your opinion of them.)
Note that I'm not trying to say that they're consciously choosing to pretend to not like Kerry in an effort to appear hip and clever. I'm just pointing out that they're in the business of "hip and clever," and have been for so long that everything they write ends up having that tone. Which isn't necessarily a Bad Thing-- I liked Seinfeld as much as the next person who isn't Kate-- but it means that they're not the place to go if you're looking for genuine, unstinting enthusiasm for, well, much of anything, really.
Of course, that just means I'm accusing their writers of being incapable of expressing genuine enthusiasm, which is probably more damning than accusing them of cynically feigning disinterest. But, hey, that's why I'm a crank with a weblog.
This is the one area in which I do agree with some of the talk about the special power of blogs. One thing that you get from weblogs that you really don't from traditional media is a sense of the author's real, unforced enthusiasm for whatever it is that they're into. Sometimes this can be a little uncomfortable-- LiveJournal people sharing too many personal details, PZ Myers expressing his love of critters with too many legs (or too few), unnamed physicists getting carried away with their liking of unnamed New Wave bands-- but it's more... I hate to say "real," as the term has been hopelessly corrupted by Great Plains propaganda and dreadful television shows, but "genuine" seems too stuffy a term for what I'm talking about.
There's nothing less hip than real unqualified emotion, but done well, it's vastly more compelling than self-conscious contrarianism.
Posted at 8:24 AM | link | follow-ups | 1 comment
4.5 Minutes of Community Service
Politics: Given what I said in the Making Light "October Surprise" thread, I feel some obligation to post information to enable people to actually do something about protecting the validity of the coming election. Happily, Mary Kay Kare has made it easy for me, posting a large compendium of election protection information.
So, here's your Public Service Announcement, brought to you by this station and the Blog Council: Vote. Preferably for Kerry, but whatever floats your boat. And do whatever you can to make sure that all the votes get counted-- volunteer if it's convenient, send money if it isn't, write emails or blog posts or whatever if you're broke.
I'm not so far gone in despair and paranoia that I think the current crop of thugs and felons would really try to cling to office in the face of a clear vote against them. But let's not make it a close thing, OK?
Posted at 8:20 AM | link | follow-ups | 1 comment
There But for the Grace of Geography
I realized last night that on the local level, this is probably the least interesting election ever for me. There's some suspense on the national level, and I'll admit to becoming an electoral-vote.com addict, but I just don't care at all about anything local. For this, I blame Tom DeLay.
It's not that he's done anything personally in upstate New York, you understand. It's just that so long as he and his band of apocalyptic Texas wing nuts hold power within the Republican party, I will not vote for a Republican for any office on any level. If you caucus with maniacs, you don't get my vote.
As a result, the only thing reason to even look at the piles of local campaign literature that keep showing up at Chateau Steelypips is to try to deduce the party affiliation of the candidates (which they make a little game of hiding). If they're Republicans, it goes straight into the trash. If they're Democrats, well, those flyers also go straight into the trash, but with the knowledge that I'll be voting for that person.
Of course, it could be worse. I could live in a swing state.
Posted at 8:15 AM | link | follow-ups | 6 comments
Quantum Hyperbole
Speaking of odd games and quantum mechanics, Dennis Overbye, science writer and Red Sox fan, has a column in the New York Times today explaining the role of quantum measurement in baseball. There's an I told you so element to this, too.
While I'm on the subject of baseball, a couple of items I forgot in my last post: Lay off the hyperbole, folks. Yes, Alex Rodriguez's slap at the ball in game whatever was clearly illegal. However, it was a long, long way from being the most disreputable and unprofessional action ever in the history of the game, as many Red Sox fans would have you believe. It's several orders of magnitude down from, say, spitting in an umpire's face. It's not even the most assholish base-running thing ever done-- if you call up Pete Rose, I'm sure he'd be happy to give you a highlight reel with a dozen examples of more obnoxious plays. And also fifty bucks to put on the Bengals.
Similarly, while Curt Schiiling's game six performance against the Yankees was impressive, it was not the most impressive example of playing through pain in any sport, ever, as the sports pundits would have you believe. Granted, this is colored by the fact that I think he's a dick, but I'd say that he's got a long way to go to match Byron Leftwich in college being carried down the field by his linemen so he could continue the drive.
"But that was just a meaningless college football game," you say, "while Schilling was on a much bigger stage." That's exactly my point: it was a college football game, with nothing but pride on the line, and the kid stayed out there playing quarterback on an ankle so bad he had to be carried down the field. He put his NFL future on the line, for nothing but pride. That's impressive.
Now, of course, hyperbole and lack of perspective are the bread and butter of sports pundit shows. Whatever happened this week is the best ever!!!, with the possible exception of things that happened so long ago that they've accreted layers of myth so thick that nobody can remember how things really happened. But there's no need to be stupid about it.
Actually, that isn't restricted to sports pundit shows-- pretty much any pundit show thrives on hyperbole and lack of long-term memory. This is why ESPN is a useful corrective for CNN: watch The Sports Reporters, or Around the Horn, and while you're gnashing your teeth at the manifest idiocy of whatever Mike Lupica or Woody Paige just said, pause and reflect that they know exactly as much about their area of expertise as, say, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala do about theirs. And probably more than Bob Novak.
It puts Crossfire in perspective, even better than Jon Stewart.
Posted at 8:10 AM | link | follow-ups | 7 comments
Dismal Game Theory
There's a surpassingly silly physics argument going on over at Crooked Timber. It all started with a post by Daiel Davies objecting to a weird variant of a Prisoner's Dilemma type game discussed by Steven Landsburg (author of a regular series of overly clever columns for Slate).
Landsburg is imagining a scenario in which the separated persons of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" scenario are placed in two different places, and not allowed to communicate. Each is asked one of two yes/no questions, and depending on the answers to both questions, they will either be punished or rewarded. He claims that the best strategy for this situation in a classical world is to agree beforehand to just say "yes" or "no" no matter what, which for the particular scenario he's using gives a 75% chance of winning.
However, this chance can be boosted to 85% through quantum mechanics (he says). If the two "prisoners" are allowed to consult an entangled pair of particles that they've prepared beforehand to have a particular correlation, and base their answers on that, they can do better. Davies objects that this is nothing more than a dodge around the "no communication" rule for the scenario.
Now, a great deal of the silliness of the ensuing argument traces directly to the fact that Landsburg himself appears to be a giant prating ass. He attempts to defend himself in the comments by slinging around accusations of ignorance, and poor reading comprehension, and all sort of other things that I find really irritating. Which is not to say that Davies isn't an arrogant SOB in his own right, but Landsburg's use of the medium of online argument is Shetterly-esque.
Anyway, among the annoying defenses he throws out there, he does make one legitimate argument to attempt to prove that there's no communication between parties involved, suggesting a convoluted alternative scenario using tennis balls and colored glasses. Davies responds with a second post showing that he can reproduce the same correlations by having one party determine his answer with a coin flip, and the second take instructions from a butler who knows both questions and one of the answers, but doesn't give any of that information to the other participant, just "yes" or "no."
Now, in the world of quantum information (at least, to the limited degree that I'm aware of the state of that world), this actually poses some interesting problems. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has really nailed down where the "magic" comes in in quantum information processing. A couple of years ago, it was shown that you could reproduce one of the really important quantum algorithms using classical modes in a laser cavity, which raises some really fascinating questions about the whole business.
Something similar might have grown out of the current argument. My personal feeling (without having read the original paper that Landsburg got all this from) is that if it can be reproduced with a classical method, the scheme in question isn't using any of the really interesting parts of the quantum nature of the state, but just relying on the two particles being correlated in a particular way. But there might be some subtlety that's been missed, here, or some refinement of the scheme which would make it more intrinsically quantum.
Landsburg's actual response, in comments:
My response is that no butler would actually behave that way, so the potential existence of such a butler does not suffice to make this model interesting. Quantum entanglement does behave that way, so quantum entanglement—-insofar as you believe it will someday be technologically relevant—-does suffice to make this model interesting.
So, to summarize, you're proposing a no-communication coordination game in which the players are asked weirdly arbitrary questions and rewarded or punished based on their answers and some fairly arbitrary rules, but they're allowed to take entangled quantum particles into their isolation chambers (along with the apparatus to measure same), and base their answers on the results of measurements of those systems.
And you're slagging off the butler analogue for being unrealistic?
And people wonder why physicists have such a low opinion of economists...
Posted at 9:07 AM | link | follow-ups | 13 comments
Trent Goulding, 10.28.2004, 11:18am [link]