October 2005

Obit here.

I’ve written an article on the academic promise of blogging which is up on the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s website ( free, permanent link is “here”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07b01401.htm). It should be appearing in print in their Oct 7 edition. In addition to the people at the _Chronicle_, and those mentioned in the piece, I owe serious thanks to Scott McLemee (many of my arguments riff on ideas tossed back and forth in our lunchtime conversations), and to Tim Burke, Alex Halavais, John McGowan, Laura McKenna and my fellow CT-ites for comments that fed into various iterations on the piece. Further comments welcome below, as usual.

Congratulations to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery that stomach ulcers are caused, not by stress as was formerly believed, but by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. This is a classic Nobel-type discovery beginning with Warren’s acute observation, and continuing with Marshall’s work in culturing and identifying the bacterium.

It’s a striking observation that, thirty years ago, nearly everybody “knew” two things about stress: it was the primary cause of ulcers and it was particularly common among people men in executive jobs. Although widely held, these beliefs had never been properly tested by research and both turned out to be false. Surprising as it may seem, it’s more stressful to be ordered about than to order other people about. More precisely, the prevalence of stress-related diseases increases as you go down hierarchies of authority, status and so on.

The Nobel Prize for Economics[1] must be coming up soon. I have some ideas as to who should win, but as I’m very peripherally involved in the selection process, I’ll keep them to myself.

fn1. Strictly speaking, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel

Shana Tova!

I know absolutely nothing about “Harriet Miers”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/03/scotus.miers/index.html, the new nominee to the Supreme Court, beyond the fact that she’s from Texas and is White House Counsel. But I think those two facts suggest we can be fairly confident in the following: (1) She’ll be a strong Bush loyalist. That follows just from the way this administration works in everything it does. (2) However, the fact that she’s a woman leads me to think that, unlike the likes of Michael Brown, she’s also competent and probably a pretty tough person. It’s hard to get to this point in U.S. politics without having those qualities if you’re a woman. I don’t expect to like many of her legal views, and I’m sure there are better candidates. But I’d be surprised if her confirmation hearings showed her to be clueless or a pushover.

Almost three years to the day after the last bomb attack in Bali, suicide bombers have struck again. (This is a good article about the aftermath.) Our family just got back from Bali last week. My heart goes out to the victims and their families, and also to the Balinese people more generally: they are all victims of these cowardly attacks. Bali’s economy, so dependent on tourism, was only now beginning to make a full recovery from the 2002 bombing; everyone I spoke to said that things were better, but not back up to pre-bombing levels. This second blow may cripple Bali for a long time. Hotels and expensive clubs like Ku De Ta have armed guards who check vehicles, but nothing can make a beachfront seafood restaurant, or a cafe on a heavily trafficked street, safe against a suicide bomber. What will happen to these families? [click to continue…]

We have a troll at the Valve, the Troll of Sorrow (among other aliases). I know, I know; just one. But that’s like having just one case of herpes. (Not that I would know, please believe.) We caught him from Adam Kotsko. I don’t blame Adam. We’ve tried the patent remedies. Deleting, IP blocking. A touch of disemvowelment. Nothing seems to reduce the unsightly swelling permanently. It’s an unusual strain, a platypus you wouldn’t believe in if it weren’t plainly real: antisemitic, homophobic, Quine, Russell and logical positivism-fixated. It’s strange that someone should be obsessed with providing slightly mistaken, severely tourettes-afflicted readings of the intricacies of the early 5’s of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. [click to continue…]

My interest in americana and similar was noted by a former student who runs the music pages of a local arts magazine, so I was drafted in to review a performance by “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com in Bristol the other day. As you’ll see from “the review in Decode magazine”:http://www.decodemedia.com/tiki-index.php?page=Tom+Russell+28+Sept , I had a good time, and I’m hoping for similar commissions in the future!

A while back, I read Mark Leonard’s ‘Why Europe will run the 21st century’ . I enjoyed his defense of the insidious usefulness of soft power, even if I found myself feeling a lot less sanguine about its potential limits. A short piece about Uzbekistan in yesterday’s Financial Times snapped those limits sharply into focus.

Next Monday, the European General Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC) will formally impose sanctions on Uzbekistan, almost five months after the massacre of protesting citizens in Andijan. What devastating blow will the GAERC deliver to the regime that slaughters protestors in their hundreds and boils dissidents alive? We will reduce the tiny amount of aid we now give Uzbekistan (about 8 million Euro p.a.), impose an arms embargo (though we sell them hardly any already), and stop issuing visas for ministers’ wives’ shopping trips to Paris. Soft power indeed.

The FT quotes a European diplomat saying “We’ve taken strong and determined actions which leave the Uzbeks in no doubt as to the strong feelings of the EU.” However, the Uzbek government already knew just how strongly the EU feels about its most recent actions and long decline into unapologetic authoritarianism. And it has known for a very long time that the EU has no bargaining or coercive power to effect any real change in Uzbekistan. [click to continue…]

I’ve been noticing a more and more frequent theme in the writings of the pro-war “left” recently, but no-one, I think, has managed to achieve “the narcissism and self-pity of John Lloyd”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/63736aa8-2fc4-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html in the Financial Times:

bq. The great betrayal of liberalism and of the left was not opposition to the war but the insouciant, opportunist, morally indignant denunciation of those who, for diverse motives to be sure, sought to give force to the rhetoric of liberation. They have been so content to denounce that they think nothing of what they damage. It is the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.

Good intentions should count for nothing here. You backed a disastrous project, mismanaged by morons, sold by lies, and it has turned into a bloody mess. But those who point this out attack “freedom itself.” Sheesh!

The New York Times has an article by Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia about Einstein’s famous equation E=mc². In it he says:

The standard illustrations of Einstein’s equation – bombs and power stations – have perpetuated a belief that E = mc² has a special association with nuclear reactions and is thus removed from ordinary activity.

This isn’t true. When you drive your car, E = mc² is at work. As the engine burns gasoline to produce energy in the form of motion, it does so by converting some of the gasoline’s mass into energy, in accord with Einstein’s formula. When you use your MP3 player, E = mc² is at work. As the player drains the battery to produce energy in the form of sound waves, it does so by converting some of the battery’s mass into energy, as dictated by Einstein’s formula. As you read this text, E = mc² is at work. The processes in the eye and brain, underlying perception and thought, rely on chemical reactions that interchange mass and energy, once again in accord with Einstein’s formula.

I only did high school science, but I’m sure I remember learning the exact opposite of this claim, that chemical reactions like combustion leave mass and energy unchanged, only converting some of the chemical energy in the fuel into kinetic energy, and some into heat, with a net increase in entropy. Only nuclear reactions, I was taught, converted mass to energy. Wikipedia seems to back this up, though it isn’t absolutely unambiguous.

Can anyone set me (or, less plausibly, Greene) straight here?

fn1. As an aside, I also remember reading that a more correct version would be E=M. The term in c² just reflects an arbitrary choice of units in the metric system. But maybe that’s wrong too.