Born dead

Matt Damon does a mediocre job as Jason Bourne (I've only seen the 1st in the series). He's way too serious and stiff. There are only two moderately funny lines in the movie. One, when Marie says not to forget her, Bourne says, "How could I? You're the only person I know." And then at the end, when he comes to see her again, he asks to rent a scooter and she asks, "Do you have ID?"

Just goes to show that a brilliant plot can make for a flat movie if the characters are 1-D. It's still a good idea; maybe I should read the book.

Speaking of books, I'm on the homestretch of Russo's Straight Man, and I'm finding it rather disturbing. Hank, the narrator, has half a dozen crushes, on practically every woman in the book. Despite being married to a super wife. I find that to be a frightening prospect. Could I turn out that way? Will I be leering after other women after I've tied the knot? I'm sure I'll always look, but will I be pulled with desire? I wonder if you can get to the point where adultery is like seconds on dessert: something that you know in theory would taste good temporarily but would have a net negative impact on utility. So you don't really crave a second helping for dessert. Can you grow out of the craving for other women?

I think the reason Feynman was such a philanderer is that he fell in love hard once early in his life, and lost that one (she died of TB). After that, love would never be as deep, so he had plenty of affairs (he married and had kids). I hope I don't turn out like that.

half of America believes in Creationism

This statement boggles my mind. But fully 45% of this nation believes that "God created humans in their present form sometime in the past 10000 years":
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20060608-111826-4947r.htm

If you take out the "10000 years" then you get 55% believing God created man in his present form:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/22/opinion/polls/main657083.shtml

Only 40% believe evolution is correct:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolution.html

USA has the second-lowest percentage of people believing in evolution, out of a survey of 32 developed nations. We fall behind Croatia, Latvia, and Cyprus. Only Turkey ranks even lower.

This is a serious statement about the condition of our society. Without understanding evolution, you're basically cut off from most of biology. It's going to be hard for you to accept a scientific way of thinking. This may be the greatest obstacle to building moral consensus as rational members of society.

designer genes

Just read an article on genetic engineering by Michael Sandel from the Apr 2004 Atlantic. He opens the possibility of choosing genes in our kids for stronger muscles, better memories, tougher immune systems, etc. The major downside he focuses is the existential dilemma that such power creates. By having direct control over the genes of our children, will we love them less, take less appreciation in their talents? But we already do some degree of genetic engineering in selecting our spouses.

I think the more problematic issue is a reduction in genetic diversity in the species. Let's say there's a gene for tallness. So everyone wants it. Next generation, everyone has the "tall" gene. But let's say there's some kind of bad side effect to this gene. It could make our entire population vulnerable to disease or malformation. Species with genetic diversity are more resilient. But who should be forced to carry on the less-desirable genes? What is to prevent runaway sexual selection--the peacocks with tails too big to lift?

The power to select our own genes is also the power to evolve ourselves into extinction. I wonder what we will do once the technology becomes available.

do you care?

I asked the ASSU prez (I think Elizabeth Han is her name) at an "elections" party last week what she was doing, and she said she was travelling the world, then going off on a Fulbright to fight world poverty. It got me thinking about why I don't do the same. I know in theory that the scourge of abject poverty is one of the great challenges we face today as a species and as a global civilization. And I know there is lots more we could be doing to alleviate it. But I'm not really doing anything about it. I give a little bit of dough now and then to 501c3's that are working on this (Soteni, Accion, Partners in Health), but it's really not that much. The main thing we ought to do is eliminate the West's trade subsidies, but I don't know how to get that to happen. I wonder if I really spent some time on my own in some of these countries if I would still be so apathetic. After all, my crusade to fix broken schools only came about after I spent some time in one. So maybe my apathy is just the consequence of my lack of exposure. Which makes it irrational, not considered. On the other hand, what is my comparative advantage in the field of international development. I'm sure I could help advance the cause, but is there really anything that I could contribute that others can't? Do I have any unique insights? Probably not. So my competitive advantage is probably stronger in physics/education, though you could also argue that I'm unlikely to make any truly unique contribution in either of those fields either....

wiki

I watched a TED talk by the founder of Wikipedia. It's a pretty impressive organization that does a remarkable job filtering good content from bad and basically self-policing. Apparently, there's only one full-time employee, a software developer named Brian. I find that hard to believe, but it is true that almost all of the work is done by an enormous volunteer labor force. That's very cool. It sounds like it would be a cool school project, for kids to edit and contribute to pages. What's the point of learning something new if you don't share it with other people?

I stopped by a Rosetta Stone booth at the mall today and got a quick tour. I was pretty impressed. They use voice analysis software to compare your speech with voice recordings. Pretty cool. Definitely wish I had had it when I was learning French, Spanish, German. Every kid studying a foreign language ought to be using this stuff.

so much to say

Set up a myspace account yesterday. That site is so much tackier than facebook. Fonts and graphics, the whole works is just not as slick as facebook's interface.

Obama nearly matched Clinton's fundraising, his $25m to her $26m. He's going to make this a real fight. I hope he can pull it off, but it still won't be easy with such an early primary. Gore still outranks Obama in California polls.

Good stat mech lecture today on random walks. Interesting use of Fourier transforms to look at the probability distribution. I haven't digested it, but it's kinda cool.

give a man a fish

I gave a hundred bucks to Accion, a micro-lending non-profit today. The idea of micro-lending makes a lot of economic and moral sense, and so I think it's the first place to start in any anti-poverty campaign. Still, I don't think micro-lending is anywhere near as helpful at elevating people out of poverty as trade is. Accion gives out about $3 billion in loans a year, if I read their statements correctly. Walmart, on the other hand, has annual revenues of $300 billion. Let's say only 10% of that goes to the wages of workers in other countries. Right there, they are providing 10 times as much money as Accion is. So it seems to me that trade is the critical lever for pulling people out of poverty. Of course, you also need access to capital and you need responsible, accountable government that creates the right conditions for economic growth. But trade is probably the most helpful ingredient.

auto bots

Car wouldn't start. How annoying. This time it doesn't seem to be electrical--the engine turns over, but doesn't catch. I wonder if it's gasoline related, since it seemed to putter out when it died on me. I don't know what else would cause that. But it's only just on E, not usually the time when it will give out. Cars suck.

Hotlanta

Whirlwind trip to the South. Lots to think about, from the NCTM conference, to the YTI reunion, to wild shenanigans with Grether at the local "watering hole" ("meat market" may be more correct...). I was pretty proud of myself for hooking Z up with the hottest girl in the club. My line was "Have you ever met a rocket scientist? No, well, let me introduce you to Zach." After that, Z's mojo took over, and before she left he had her number. What a stud. This girl was pretty cute; she looked like Britney Spears pre-K-Fed. Anyway, chances are always slim with someone that you meet at a bar, but as the sage Norm Constantine always says, "You can't score if you don't shoot." In general, I'd say that if I get a girl's number at a bar, the chances of anything semi-serious happening (let's say, a minimum of 4 dates), are about 1 in 5. In other words, of all the numbers I've gotten, there are about 4 times as many busts as hits. Ballpark. Then, other factors can tilt the odds either way (generally lower though).

3

Crappy day. Tired at work, in a funk, dozed for a while. Not good. I realize that if I don't bike to work, I'm just going to be in a bad mood, so it's probably smart to suck it up and just wear rain pants because I'll feel better later.

Went to an Iraq war vigil last night. The best part, I thought, was when some people shared their stories of people they know who are over there. Two people had friends who had joined the Marines, two others had relatives over there. Kids aren't going to school. Families are finding their homes completely looted. These kinds of direct human costs are the ones that are so easily forgotten.

Jane, a second-year, asked me how to calculate the differential decay rate for polarized neutron beta decay to show parity violation. I was really stumped. Brian and I tried to help her out for awhile, but we were really getting nowhere. It's a pretty fundamental problem, so I ought to understand it.

McCall matched at Stanford ortho! What a dude!

ides of march

Not a whole lot to say...went to the BBC last night, Nuthouse tonight. I was on shift last weekend at lab, so I figure I deserve some time off. Still need to get through the pile of mail on my desk...

late...

Forgot to write last night, so quick post here. Gave a SLAC tour yesterday to a group of senior citizens. The part they were most interested in was the evidence for the big bang. I need to read up on this. How do we know actually how old the universe is? I know it has something to do with the CMB, but it's not clear to me how the calculation is made. Also I need a better answer for "What came before the big bang?" I said it was just a singularity before which time and space did not exist, but that felt unsatisfactory. They all kept saying how much they enjoyed the presentation, but it felt rather dull to me. I think I need to spice it up with some more humor, anecdotes. Right now it's too flat. I'll keep looking for examples.

Rudolph the hard-nosed

Read the Newsweek profile of Giuliani today during lunch. I think he's the kind of person I'd vote for, if it weren't for 9/11. He's smart, and focused on results. But now in the post-9/11 era, he's understandably fixated on the "war on terror" (that's what makes him look strong), and I don't want to have another president who is so obsessed and power-hungry that he can't see the real way to win the war on terror: to win over the hearts and minds of the people around the world so that terrorism becomes socially unacceptable. Bush's war has done more to fuel the fire of terrorist than almost anything else. You can see it even in Latin America on his recent tour: he's met by protestors at every stop, burning him in effigy, and torching the US flag. When is this guy going to get the wake-up call? I fear that Giuliani's inflated view of his own destiny, almost Napoleonic, would drive him to escalate the militaristic side of this war and neglect building American soft power, which is where we ought to focus our efforts.

Pief Panofsky gave a colloquim today about nuclear weapons. Very well done. It's something that should be of grave concern. Monitoring nuclear material certainly is important. But the only viable long-term solution is going to come from the private sector: multinational corporations need to build links across borders that make it financially impossible for one people to hate or attack another. Only then will we live in a safe world.

"I was wrong"

Peter Beinert in the most recent (Mar 5 & 12) New Republic comes as close as he probably ever will for opposing the invasion of Iraq:

"...when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war -- as they did in Vietnam and Iraq -- because they think we're deluding ourselves about our motives our capacities or our motives, they're probably right."

He admits that this trillion-dollar, hundred-thousand-life was, for many who supported it, a roll of the dice:

"I was willing to gamble, too--partly, I suppose, because in the era of an all-volunteer military, I wasn't gambling with my own life."

Maybe these are some of the commandments we ought to be engraving on stone tablets:

1. Thou shalt not use military force except to protect innocent people from imminent violence.

2. Thou shalt not intervene in another country without building international consensus among democracies for that intervention.

3. Thou shalt not impose a form of governance upon another group of people. Persuade them through the moral force of your argument and the demonstration of your successes, but leave the decision up to the people themselves. This is the cornerstone of democracy.

4. Thou shalt not spill one man's blood without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the blood of that one man will spare the blood of many men.

The Iraq invasion violated all 4 rules. The first and last are similar, but I prefer the last. I think we should judge more of our actions with "blood calculus". Utilitarians may judge actions based on happiness, but before we can get to happiness we have to deal with the blood. Certainly blood is on a whole different order of magnitude than happiness. The amount of blood lost in the invasion of Iraq is far more than lost on 9/11, or 7/7, or from Hurricane Katrina. If you choose to do something that spills blood, you had better have some hard evidence that more blood would have been spilled otherwise.

The New Republic's credibility on foreign policy has been tarnished by its support of the Iraq War. It has only tentatively admitted what a more courageous publication would state boldly: "We Were Wrong." Fundamentally, the hubris to support such an invasion shows a gross misunderstanding of the principles of the evolution of society and government. They will have to do a lot to earn back our trust.

quotes

"Leaders are those who first say what future generations take as common sense." --me

"If the entire age of the earth were compressed to a single year, the 21st century would correspond to a quarter of a second in June."

Regarding the second quote, I think one of the big hurdles in learning science is coping with vast ranges of orders of magnitude. Two examples from either end of the spectrum:

1) If the sun were the size of a cantaloupe, earth is the head of a pin and the nearest star (alpha centauri) would be 1000 miles away.

2) If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a watermelon seed on the fifty-yard line.

To give people a sense of scale, I think we need more scale models that drive this home. Colleges and universities should try to make more of these. Boston has a cool scale model of the solar system, with planets scattered around the city. I could envision doing the same thing at Stanford, with the planets of the solar system set up along the path on Palm drive. Also I could see doing a cool time line of history on campus, maybe around campus drive. That really helps give people a sense for the length of time required for evolution to do its work. And for the relatively short duration of human civilization relative to the history of the earth.

pet peeve

I can't stand automated voice-recognition phone systems that try to record information from you. I was just calling Delta, trying to speak with a human being, but it refused to let me speak with an agent until I said what date I was departing. I said the date 3 times, but the voice recognition couldn't understand. Finally I said "I don't know" which is the secret password to get past that level. Lo and behold I finally reached a real person.

Half the time the data that is collected by those machines is not relevant (in this case I already had a record, so the agent just needed my confirmation number to pull all the information up). And often the computer records it incorrectly, and the live agent has to ask you for it all over again.

I just wonder if they have ever done field testing of this stuff to see how pissed off it makes people. Are there any people out there who actually enjoy this experience? And does it really save that much time? I find that very hard to believe.

Happy hr

Went to Harvard happy hour tonight. Cool to see lots of people I haven't seen in a while - Adam, Emily & Joe, Johann, Tom, Cendri.

Funny thing that happened last night. Walking home, past the GCC, I saw a girl in a golf cart who had managed to get it stuck between two metal bollards. She couldn't go forward or back, so her wheels were just spinning. Pretty hilarious. I wonder how she finally managed to get it out.

Another funny thing. My QFT professor, using her laptop to show slides in lecture, had her desktop on the screen, which had two icons on it for video files named GSpot and GSpot2. What is she doing with porn on her work computer?

Bleh

Quick post.
In kind of a funk since dinner. Oh well. On a positive note, I finished two projects that have been lingering for a while, which feels good.

First, I finished laminating all my publications. Right now they're all in one binder, but I'd like to split it up because it's pretty heavy. I think it looks pretty slick, so I'm proud of it.

Second, I posted my book list on my website:
http://www.stanford.edu/~wulsin/Uploads/BookReviews.mht
I hope it will give me some incentive to keep adding to it!

So I'm making some progress in documenting my intellectual growth.

OK, time for bed.

Moral reasoning

I spent half a year in college studying Rawls's Political Liberalism for a sophomore philosophy seminar. What I remember is that Rawls is trying to figure out how to get people to find a moral consensus when those people do not agree on the source of morality. If my moral beliefs come from the Bible and yours come from the Koran, then we will just never see eye to eye. I can't remember Rawls's resolution--I think he lays out some principles that people have to accept to enter into the discussion, or to go behind the veil of ignorance.

But I think Dennett lays it out much more plainly. He says that anyone who appeals to "higher authority" as a moral argument simply should be removed from the discussion. Their arguments should carry no weight in society.

Quoting Breaking the Spell, p. 295:
"It is commonly supposed that it is entirely exemplary to adopt the moral teachings of one's own religion without question, because--to put it simply--it is the word of God (as interpreted, always,by the specialists to whom one has delegated authority). I am urging, on the contrary, that anybody who professes that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible says so, or because 'that is what all Muslims [Hindus, Sikhs ... ] believe, and I am a Muslim [Hindu, Sikh ... ]," should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.
...
"The fact that your faith is so strong that you cannot do otherwise just shows (if you really can't) that you are disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate." [original emphasis]

It's hard-hitting language, but I think it's true and I think we need to talk about it more because a lot of people defend their moral positions simply because, "My faith tells me so." Now, the problem we run up against is that we live in a democracy, and my belief in democracy as an effective and just form of governance trumps my belief in policies defended by rational moral arguments. So it's incumbent upon rationalists to persuade society that supernatural beliefs should not be taken seriously.

teach talks

Gave a talk today at lab for the collaboration meeting. This is always a good experience: giving talks forces you to learn the subject well and then articulate it in a meaningful way to an audience. A very useful skill that is almost absent in our K-16 education. I think the key reason is: there is not enough time to have everyone in a class stand up front and spout off on their personal topic of choice. But technology offers an easy workaround: videotape the talks and then assign watching others' for homework. That way, you know that you're going to have an audience. And it saves the class time of sitting through all the presentations. All you need is a camcorder, digital editing software, and a website to upload the videos to. This must be the future of teaching. Public speaking is too important to ignore this kind of medium.

Beauty in the eye of genes?

Dawkins/Dennett rightly point out that we like what we like because it is good for us, or rather, for our genes. Sweets taste good because we need sugar. Salt water tastes repulsive because it dehydrates us. Feces smell terrible because they carry disease. And so on. Any organisms who didn't value things this way stood at a reproductive disadvantage.

Same applies to higher levels of taste. What art is most beautiful? The human nude (of the opposite sex, especially). There are many beautiful sunsets or mountainscapes, or horses, or swans, but none can evoke the same feeling as that of the human form. I used to think artists who painted or sculpted nudes were just playing to our primal desires, but I think they have no other choice. That's exactly what we will appreciate as beautiful!

The most beautiful sound is the human voice. Music can improve on it by adding beat, or wider range, but the human voice can't be topped in terms of aesthetic appeal. Don't fight it: embrace it. And we have. Most of our instruments have been designed to mimic the human voice in some form.

Nothing is inherently beautiful outside of the human context. There is no reason why sucrose is superior to saline solution, or why an hourglass form is more attractive than a rectangular shape, or why the spectral components of the human voice are superior to those of any other sound-maker. Beauty is evaluated by us, and we are programmed to be attracted to things that help us pass on our genes. I don't think this denigrates art or beauty at all. It just helps explain where our criteria for beauty originate from. There's no reason we can't take pleasure in it.

Prez Sez

Almost forgot to post...this may not be as easy as I thought...

Well, I had dinner with Stanford Pres. John Hennessey tonight. He was meeting with a bunch of grad students, who mostly had pleas for support for various projects (shuttles, programs, housing, etc.). But it was an interesting conversation, so I didn't butt in with any of my own questions.

I like his style--he's pretty down-to-earth, non-pretentious, but sensible and reasonable. Not afraid to make a mistake. On forgetting to put lockers in the new rec building: "That was just really stupid." On late notifications about the end to off-campus housing subsidies: "We should have notifitied you sooner."

The best thing he said was what I think more people in power need to be saying: "I would say that agriculture subsidies in Europe and America are simply immoral." Thank you. We need more and more people to talk about the immorality of these antiquated and destructive trade barriers.

Love at first sight?

I must say, this is pretty cool. So I think I'll have a go at the whole blogging enterprise. I wonder whether I'll enjoy blogging enough for it to stay fun, or whether I'll tire of it as quickly as I did of "diary-ing". I think posting daily up through Easter is a reasonable, if not artificial, goal to aspire to. Let's see how far I make it.

But before I sign off, a couple thoughts. If you make $80K per year, and we assume that the marginal cost of your labor equals the average cost (of course it isn't, but hear me out), then the marginal cost of your time is: $80K * (1yr/50 weeks) * (1 week/40 hours) = $40/hour * (1 hour / 3600 sec) =
1.1 cents/second. A penny a second. Every second of every day: another penny. Somehow that just seems like a lot. You can almost hear the penny falling into the piggy-bank with every tick of the second-hand. If you think about it for a while, it really makes you value time a lot more and money a lot less.

More time calculations: If you live to be 83.3 years old, you will have lived a thousand months. Every month of your life is 0.1%.

There are ~50 weeks per year, so every week is 2%. There are only 100 weekend days of the year, so every weekend night is 1% of the weekend nights for that year.

First post

Here goes. My first blog. I was daydreaming at work today, trying to figure out how to use a Citrix portal to run Windows applications on my Linux machine (warning! geek alert!), and something itched in me making me think that I ought to write a blog. If my youngest brother can make a blog as a puny college frosh, then certainly I'm up to the task.

Obviously, this software makes it easy enough for Grandma to make one. So that's not the challenge. I think it was probably a discussion with CB the other day about Lent: I said I wasn't giving anything up, but that if I you're going to do something unusual for forty days, you might as well make it proactive, like writing in a diary. She asked if I kept one, and I said that I only did when I was younger, still figuring out how the world. Now that I'm omniscient, what's the point?

But I think the more important issue (besides my omniscience) is that diaries are solipsistic. Sure, there are some things you can write in a diary that you wouldn't post publicly on the web; so it has its own niche. But after writing in a diary, I realized that the only reason why I was doing it was out of some self-centered hope for postmortal Anne Frank-esque fame. It's pretty naive and solipsistic to think that anyone, much less a large number of people will give a hoot about that kind of stuff once you're gone. Andy Warhol stored boxes and boxes of crap--shoelaces, trinkets, magazines--that some poor historian had to sift through eventually. He gets away with it because he's Andy Warhol. The rest of us, with much less than even fifteen minutes in the limelight, can't bank on that much.

But, the critics say, who will read it? (AD, I'm thinking of you on this one.) True, true, but the same argument can be levied against writing about the determination of Vub from exclusively reconstructed charmless semileptonic decays of the B meson, a piece of writing to which I devote a much larger fraction of time and which has a much smaller audience (let's be real--there are at most 5 people in the world who will ever read my disseratation, and probably not a single one of them will make it all the way through; who could blame them?). So the small-audience argument by itself does not discredit the medium.

I could keep going, but I wonder how this is going to look, so time to publish...

p.s. Is it possible to edit these posts easily? Only one way to find out.