London
I have nothing useful to say about the terror attacks in London. Granted, this hasn't stopped any number of people from spouting off (Hint: nobody involved in the production of SportsCenter has anything meaningful to contribute. Please stop.), but I'm in the middle of one of my intermittent attempts to be a better person, so I will merely offer my pitifully inadequate condolences, and then shut up.
If you want useful information, go here. Or, better yet, turn your computer off and go do something else for a few hours.
Inconsequential blogging (and really, there is no other kind) will resume after a decent interval.
Posted at 9:53 AM | link | follow-ups | 1 comment
Top Sports Moments
Having snarked in Kevin Drum's direction earlier today, and having had a very long day at work, I'll lift a happier post topic from Calpundit Monthly: "What are the ten most memorable sports moments that you yourself have either seen in person or watched live on TV?"
This is, of course, a fairly personal and idiosyncratic list, consisting mostly of moments that were important to me, and not so much the all-time classic moments in their respective sports.
#1: The top spot is a tie between Maryland winning the 2002 NCAA basketball title and Syracuse winning the 2003 NCAA basketball title. Not only did I watch both of those live on tv, I stayed up until 2 am both times to watch the post-game coverage...
If pressed, I would probably give the edge to Syracuse, just because Jim Boeheim had come so close twice before. But that Maryland team was a pretty special bunch, so it's a tough call.
#3 is the Giants winning the Super Bowl, when Scott Norwood yanked a potential game-winning field goal for the Bills. This was especially sweet given that the run-up to the game had all been about how great the Bills were, while the Giants had limped into the championship. I was a sophomore in college that year, and wound up watching the game with a bunch of Bills fans, one of whom was literally dancing on a table when the Bills got a safety in the first half. Watching them deflate as the Giants hammered the ball down the field for two clock-killing drives was so much fun, I'm almost ashamed to admit it.
#4 would probably be the Yankees winning the World Series in 1996, for the first time in umpteen years. A couple of friends had come down to DC to run in the Marine Corps marathon the next day, and we stopped off in a sports bar to watch the game. When the game ended, they briefly debated driving back to The City for the celebration, but they actually did run the race.
It ends up high on the list because the Yankees were so bad through the 80's and early 90's-- basically all of my sports-fan life-- and I took so much crap for rooting for them (to the limited degree that I follow baseball). That was an interesting team, too, with John Wetteland as the closer-- he would come in with a one-run lead in the ninth, and promptly load the bases before striking three guys out . If you want to know why Joe Torre always looks sick to his stomach, well, it starts there.
#5 is the Patriots beating the Rams in the Super Bowl (I refuse to look up the Roman numerals-- you know which game I mean). Not only because it made Kate happy, but because I hated, hated, hated that Rams team.
#6 is a weird one: Ray Bourque winning the Stanley Cup. I don't even like hockey, but the man spent twenty-two years-- 22!-- as a top-rank professional hockey player without winning a championship. You've just got to root for a guy like that. Kate was living in New York that summer, and I was down visiting, and I remember watching the final five minutes or so on the tv in her sweltering apartment. The look on Bourque's face when they handed him the cup was unforgettable.
#7: Syracuse losing to Indiana on a last-second Keith Smart jumper in 1987. They're not all happy memories, OK?
#8: The Williams-Amherst football game in... 1996, I think. Amherst took a late lead on a two-point conversion when they lined up as if to kick the extra point, and then passed to a tight end standing all alone over by the sideline. Williams got the ball back with something like a minute left, drove the length of the field, and kicked a game-winning field goal that hit both uprights before bouncing through.
(Hey, it was shown on NESN, and on a satellite feed for an alumni event in DC...)
#9: There are a whole bunch of college basketball upsets that could go here-- Hampton beating Iowa State would be a good one, or Princeton over UCLA-- but instead, I'll go with one that didn't happen: #16 Princeton losing to #1 Georgetown in 1989, after playing a nearly perfect game. They should've won, too-- Alonzo Mourning clocked the Princeton center, who played the rest of the game with a bloody nose. He should've been tossed, but the ref didn't see it. That was a fantastic basketball game, and I watched the whole thing from about eight inches away from the tv screen.
#10: Derek Redmond being helped across the finish line at the 1992 Olympics. He pulled a hamstring halfway through the race, and fell to the ground. A medical crew came out to get him, but he got to his feet, and started hopping the rest of the way. Eventually, his father came out of the stands, and helped him along for the last fifty meters or so.
The most remarkable thing about it was probably that the tv announcers just kept their mouths shut, and let the moment happen. I'm not sure who was calling the Olympics that year, but whoever it was, they deserve a medal-- most sportscasters would've walked all over one of the most moving things I've ever seen at a sporting event.
There are a whole bunch of other things that could go on here-- all of Michael Jordan's championships, for example, some notable boxing championships-- Tyson losing to Buster Douglas, George Foreman winning at 45-- the "Dream Team" in 1992, and a bunch of other stuff.
It's probably also worth noting a few classic ones that I didn't see: I was on a plane during the famous Duke-Kentucky semifinal in 1992, and I've never actually seen that game. I remember hearing about the 1980 Olympic hockey victory, but I didn't see it, as I was nine, and don't like hockey. There are also a whole bunch of famous baseball moments-- Bill Buckner, Kirk Gibson, Bucky Dent-- that I didn't see because I'm not a baseball fan.
I don't think I saw the Fred Brown pass to James Worthy in 1982, Lorenzo Charles's dunk in 1983, or Villanova's perfect game in 1985 live, but I've seen them so many times on highlight shows that I can't be sure. Memory is a malleable thing.
I could keep jabbering about this stuff for hours, but I've probably bored most of my regular readers to tears already, so I'll stop now.
Posted at 9:36 PM | link | follow-ups | 6 comments
Man Never Is But Always To Be Blest
One argument that I hear frequently from moderate conservatives is that although they don't like the Christian right much, they continue to support the Republican party because they don't think it has that much influence. Liberals, they say, are just overreacting.
If there's anything good that might come from the impending Supreme Court fight, it's the possibility that these folks might realize that times have changed: the Christian right is no longer just a bunch of marginalized yahoos who get nothing but lip service from cynical Republican leaders. That was arguably the case in the 80s, but it's not anymore. If progressive groups have any brains, they'll do their best to goad the Dobson/Falwell/Bauer faction into revealing their real natures on a national stage once and for all. The more publicity these guys get, the better it is for the liberal cause.
Yeah, that'll work. And keep pounding on the lack of justification for the Iraq debacle. Any day now, people will figure it out and give up on Bush.
See, this is why I try not to talk about politics...
Posted at 8:15 AM | link | follow-ups | 10 comments
Look Over There!
Things are pretty busy at work at the moment, though not in a way that inspires much in the way of blog posts. I've got a few ideas for things that I'll type up when I have time, but I can't really say when I'll get to them.
I have started to hack through some of the gigantic booklog backlog, though, with four new posts in the last few days: The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, Killing Yourself to Live, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and Odd Thomas. This still leaves me several months behind, but every little bit helps.
If you're just dying for something to read, that'd be a good place to look.
Posted at 9:42 PM | link | follow-ups | no comments
Dry Your Eyes and Baby Walk Outside
In a comment to the previous post, in with a bunch of other stuff, Jasper Janssen writes:
Having a top ten that is 7/10ths Presidents is ridiculous though. Oprah Winfrey is the Token Ladi Di.
See, I don't aqctually have a problem with the list being dominated by political figures. In fact, despite what I said in the last post, if you asked me for a list of "Greatest Americans," I doubt that I'd have any scientists in the top ten.
The reason for that is that nationality is sort of incidental to scientific fame. Einstein's famous because he was a brilliant physicist. He would've been just as famous had he been born a citizen of a different country. The same is true for almost any scientist-- Jonas Salk did great things, but they had little to do with his being an American.
If you ask me for a list of "Greatest Americans," I interpret that as people whose fame is inextricably bound up in their American-ness. That is, people who helped define the idea of what America is, and what it should be, not just famous people who are American citizens by an accident of birth.
That gets you a list that's pretty heavily skewed toward Presidents and politicians and the occasional general. People like Lincoln and Jefferson and both Roosevelts. Non-Presidents making that sort of list also tend to be politically active types-- Martin Luther King, Susan B. Anthony, Ben Franklin. You can probably sneak the occasional general on there (though most of the really big ones were also Presidents), and some other Cabinet members (George Marshall of Marshall Plan fame comes to mind). Given the way I interpret the question, though, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
This reading of the question is also why I'd give Washington the top spot, by the way. Not only did he play an important role in winning the Revolution in the first place, his actions after the war, particularly in stepping down after two terms, were instrumental in allowing us to keep the republic, once we had it. And there's nothing more essential to American-ness than that.
And that's as good a place to end an Independence Day post as any.
Posted at 8:28 AM | link | follow-ups | 14 comments
Greatest Overlooked American Scientist
Jim Winter, sitting in for John Scalzi, mentions the "Greatest American" poll done by the Discovery Channel. The final list is depressingly stupid even by the standards of list shows on basic cable:
1.) Ronald Reagan
2.) Abraham Lincoln
3.) Martin Luther King
4.) George Washington
5.) Benjamin Franklin
6.) George W. Bush
7.) Bill Clinton
8.) Elvis Presley
9.) Oprah Winfrey
10.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt
I mean, really. Even leaving aside the fact that nobody who became famous in the last twenty-five years ought to even be on the list, this is absurd. Oprah Winfrey, fer Chrissakes? Unless I'm getting my pop-culture dingbats mixed up, didn't she launch the career of "Dr. Phil"? That alone ought to get her a war-crimes trial, not a "Greatest American" vote...
Jim offers a much more reasonable list (read the post for his reasoning):
1.) Abraham Lincoln
2.) Martin Luther King
3.) George Washington
4.) Benjamin Franklin
5.) Albert Einstein
6.) Thomas Jefferson
7.) Franklin Delano Roosevelt
8.) Theodore Roosevelt
9.) Thomas Alva Edison
10.) Bill Gates/ Steve Jobs
I don't have any big complaints about this list, though I'd personally have the top three as Washington, Lincoln, King, in that order. But that's a quibble.
The interesting thing to me is that Jim, being a person with a brain, put a bunch of science types on his list. As a science type myself, I applaud this, and it's just disgraceful that Albert Einstein comes in at #14, trailing not only Elvis and Oprah, but also Billy Graham and Walt Freakin' Disney. I apparently live in a nation whose citizens are, on average, dumber than eggplant.
In an attempt to accentuate the positive, though, I want to talk about the science side of things for a second. It doesn't really feel right to count Einstein as a "great American," even though he died as an American citizen-- his finest work was done in Europe.
If you exclude Einstein, the top scientist on the list probably ought to be Jonas Salk (who did at least get nominated). His omission, ironically, is probably the greatest testament to his success-- probably very few of the people voting can remember a time before the polio vaccine. His work helped to nearly eradicate one of the nastiest diseases around, though, and that's an achievement that ought to be celebrated. He did as much to shape the world we live in as any of the others in the top ten, but he did it quietly.
I want to throw out the name of another great American scientist, though, who didn't even make the list of nominees: John Bardeen. Bardeen is, I believe, the only person ever to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field (Linus Pauling (another glaring omission from the Top 100) has two, one in Chemistry and one in Peace, and Marie Curie got two, in Physics and Chemisty). He shared the Physics prize in 1956 for helping invent the transistor (with Walter Brattain and William Shockley), and again in 1972 for helping develop a working theory of superconductivity (the "BCS" theory, with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer).
Jim writes of Gates and Jobs that:
These guys share the #10 slot because they've done more to change the way we live our lives than any other business person or inventor in the last fifty years.
Without Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley, Gates and Jobs would have nothing to invent. The whole computer revolution really begins with the invention of the transistor. That by itself would be worth a spot on the list, and BCS theory is a pretty impressive second act.
He's more deserving than Oprah, that's for damn sure. And really, it doesn't speak well of our society that men like Bardeen, Salk, and Pauling are left off the list in favor of talk-show hosts and televangelists.
Posted at 1:38 PM | link | follow-ups | [ hide comments ]
One entire category missing from both those lists that always turns up in “Greatest Briton” surveys is ‘engineers’. We rarely have a top ten without one or more of Stephenson, Brunel, Watt, and so on. The closest you have there is Edison, who I would call ‘inventor’, though don’t ask me to draw the line between the two. Have you no famous names among the builders of the Hoover Dam, or the great railways, or ships, or bridges, or skyscrapers?
(the other missing category, of course, is poets, writers and artists, with the exception of The King)
Del, 2005-07-03, 6:56pm [link]
I don’t believe the US has any engineers of the caliber of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The man not only did great works, he did a lot of them, in a lot of different fields. The railroads, the bridges, the docks, the bridges under the railroads, the Great Western, the Great Britain, the Great Eastern.. He also did a fair few of them as more or less a mercenary contractor, taking the financial risks of the whole project, rather than just a salaried engineer.
The US has great works, oftentimes characterised by the struggles of one man to make them work, financially and physically—you mentioned Hoover Dam, but there’s also the Panama Canal (which has two of them—one building the Canal, one the doctor that mostly eradicated Malaria among the workers and their families), the Brooklyn Bridge, and various others. I don’t know of any one American who was involved as a principal in more than one of those major works, though. You could say that Brunel didn’t take the term “Life’s Work” entirely seriously.
Also simply due to the realities of American demographics, most of the really brilliant scientists there tended to be immigrants, or at least educated outside the US (especially, of course, in the Nazi era—Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Tesla..).
Having a top ten that is 7/10ths Presidents is ridiculous though. Oprah Winfrey is the Token Ladi Di.
I’m really having a hard time thinking of truly great Americans in the engineering category—for that matter in the inventor category I’m not so sure I really like Edison, but I also can’t think of anyone else at the moment. Moore might be a good one.
I don’t really think the ‘computer revolution’ begins with the transistor, though. Just the transistor gives us small and lowpower radios and TVs. It’s the Integrated Circuit that gives us anything more than that—whether it’s desktop calculators or full-blown computers. Transistor logic is still too large and powerhungry to make computing ever be more than a toy for the rich and administration for governments and large corporations. The MULTIVAC model, basically. Brain the size of a city, and all. Sure, it builds on previous work—but transistors also build on previous work, all the way back to Faraday’s work with electricity.
And if you’re going to nominate software people, you might as well make it out to the people who invented wordprocessing, and especially the spreadsheet (as wordprocessing tends to follow on from electric typewriters in a fairly natural fashion). Jobs and Gates did approximately nothing, except get very very rich off of recognising an awesome business opportunity and grasping it with both hands. If you’re going there, go for Woz, who truly did some innovative things with the hardware.
Jasper Janssen, 2005-07-03, 8:10pm [link]
The Roeblings, John and Washington, are fairly prominent names (bridge builders; Washington headed the Brooklyn Bridge project). They’re the most famous American civil engineers I can think of. But they’re not as gigantic figures as Brunel.
The really well-known names of this sort in America tend to be architects. The only figure I can think of with his hand in so many extremely prominent works is landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who shaped so many American cities with his green spaces. And then there’s Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, etc.
Matt McIrvin, 2005-07-04, 2:57am [link]
Another doble Nobel Prize winner was Frederick Sanger. He won one in Chemistry in 1958 for sequencing the first protein (insulin). The second (also in Chemistry) came in 1980 for developing a method for rapidly sequencing DNA.
Talk about a long and productive career.
Pablo Ariel, 2005-07-04, 7:57am [link]
The Roeblings, John and Washington, are fairly prominent names (bridge builders; Washington headed the Brooklyn Bridge project). They’re the most famous American civil engineers I can think of. But they’re not as gigantic figures as Brunel.
John M. Ford made a mention of another bridge-builder, Othmar Ammann, in a Making Light comment thread. I can’t say I’d ever heard of the guy before, though…
The really well-known names of this sort in America tend to be architects. The only figure I can think of with his hand in so many extremely prominent works is landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who shaped so many American cities with his green spaces.
There’s always Robert Moses, but I don’t know how well known he is outside New York.
Chad Orzel, 2005-07-04, 9:02am [link]
We appear to be having an issue with the posting of hyperlinks in comments at the moment. I have no idea what’s going on, and neither does Kate. But if youre comment won’t post, try taking out the href’s, and see if that works.
Chad Orzel, 2005-07-04, 9:07am [link]
Why having Reagan as #1 is ridiculous? He was important in crushing the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War, liberating millions of people in Eastern Europe. That counts for something. And he should be especially cherished by you laser guys ;-)
I certainly think that the inventors of the transistor and the inventors of the integrated circuit are certainly among the most important scientists/engineers of the twentieth century. In fact I think we will look back in fifty to a hundred years, when Moore’s law in solid state systems comes to an end, and compare this technological breakthrough to perhaps the greatest prior breakthrough in recent human history, the invention of the printing press. And while I think one can certainly argue that the five or six people involved in these two steps are really deserving of recognition, because they are a multitude, they will perhaps forever be excluded from individual recognition.
That being said, John Bardeen is certainly one of the must underappreciated scientists of the last century. Inventing the transistor AND solving a longstanding problem in basic physics? That’s absolutely and totally astounding and the fact that no one knows his name is a bit depressing.
Dave Bacon, 2005-07-06, 12:07am [link]
Chad,
I agree with you regarding Bardeen.
Along the same lines, C.S. Peirce was the first to suggest using Von Neumanns gates with controlled current to perform electric calculus. He was also a working physicist who’s credited along with Frege with developing predicate calculus.
Aside from Peirce, it’s worth noting that the interferometer experiment that provided the equations that Einstein went on to use in the SP was the brain child of Michaelson, a physicist, and Morley, a civil engineer from Cleveland; and that the Interferometer apparatus was itself a success and is used more or less in the same form to this day.
J. Janssen: regarding US engineers and inventors. Um.. Robert Fulton was born in Pennsylvania. C. Sholes, of typewriter fame, was also American. Ummm… McCormick, inventor of the mechnical reaper. Ernst Lawrence (cyclotron). J. Henry (see Faraday). Even if one doesn’t count Tesla as an American, Westinghouse certainly was, and I think it’s safe to say transformers are a neat invention. Noyce (Intel co-founder) and Kilby (TI) are co-credited with the invention of the integrated circuit, both US born and bred. W. Bennett invented the RF mass spectrometer…. etc.
Engineering aside, it’s hard to see where you’ve gotten the idea that the US hasn’t contributed it’s fair share of great physicists or inventors.
A Scott Crawford, 2005-07-07, 12:41am [link]
rwerp:
Why having Reagan as #1 is ridiculous?
He’s too recent.
It’s not quite as ridiculous as putting Clinton or Bush on the list, but not enough time has passed to allow a rational assessment of his place in history.
A. Scott Crawford:
Aside from Peirce, it’s worth noting that the interferometer experiment that provided the equations that Einstein went on to use in the SP was the brain child of Michaelson, a physicist, and Morley, a civil engineer from Cleveland; and that the Interferometer apparatus was itself a success and is used more or less in the same form to this day.
More importantly, Morley was a Williams grad…
You could also throw in people like Millikan and Arthur Holly Compton.
Engineering aside, it’s hard to see where you’ve gotten the idea that the US hasn’t contributed it’s fair share of great physicists or inventors.
I never said that.
Scientists in particular are badly neglected on the “Greatest American” list (if your criteria are going to allow dingbat celebriaites, there ought to be a spot on the list for John Bardeen). That’s not because we don’t have our fair share of great scientists (if anything, we’ve probably got more than our share)—it’s because the average survey respondant is dumber than a bag full of hammers.
Again: Oprah!
Chad Orzel, 2005-07-07, 6:48am [link]
Chad,
I was asking the question to J. Janssen, rather than yourself. And if my slopply formatting gave others the impression I was misrepresenting your position, I apologise.
J. Janssen demonstrates why Americans should remember to be skeptical of the BBC. A lot of science texts that Pearson publishes have the same habit of writing off huge swaths of American scientific and engineering accomplishments, and selling the result to US primary school systems without blushing.
As the problem isn’t unique to American scientists, it’s worth asking why we’re so quick to believe the worst about ourselves. It borders on institutionalized weirdness, and it’s simply not clear to me why our modern intellectual culture does it?
A Scott Crawford, 2005-07-09, 2:57am [link]
COMMENTS ARE CLOSED.
Please visit Uncertain Principles' new location at ScienceBlogs to comment.
Salk actually affected how Americans live their lives. BCS theory hasn’t, so there’s nothing to separate Bardeen from the other two transistor inventors—you’d be declaring a shared slot, as was done for Gates and Jobs.And you’re making a common mistake by muddling the difference between hardware and software and making a statement about one or the other being more important. Technically speaking, software needs no hardware at all to be created, it is its own entity so to speak (but at that point it is only as useful as say, algebraic topology). Hardware without software is just so much geekery, maybe fun to build but not much use to the average person. It is the marraige of the two that makes a revolution in the way people can live their lives.
agm, 2005-07-03, 4:17pm [link]