during the holiday weekend.
Bush's speech was -- as expected -- a zero. I did notice that CNN and other MSM outlets seemed to have grown a pair in their coverage of it. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have retreated to their undisclosed locations to plot their next attack on America's enemies (that would be the judiciary, the Senate, or the left in general but would not include Osama or al-Qaeda).
A calendar of progressive activist events coming in July has been posted at Houston Democrats and also the Democratic Underground.
Matthew Cooper -- as well as that douchebag of liberty, Robert Novak -- will probably avoid being jailed over the Plame affair, but it remains to be seen if Judith Miller will manage likewise.
Watch for one hell of a Friday afternoon document dump tomorrow.
This weekend at least, I think I'll stick to the chicken.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
CNN about Witten
David Goss has pointed out the following article to me:
It is unlikely that my readers will learn too much physics out of it, but it's fun and it describes our task in a realistic yet pretty optimistic manner.
It is unlikely that my readers will learn too much physics out of it, but it's fun and it describes our task in a realistic yet pretty optimistic manner.
Slate
... handicaps the Justice horse race Luttig, Roberts, Garza. Of course it may yet be awhile before post time, as Rehnquist continues to hang on by his fingernails.
The most incredible news in that article -- from a dozen disconcerting things to choose -- has to be the news that Al "Abu Ghraib" Gonzales is considered by the Talibaptists too moderate a candidate to be submitted.
*insert head-banging-against-wall emoticon here*
Update (6/29): Kos has more, including speculation on O'Connor, as well as Harry Reid's suggestions on Supreme Court nominees from among his peers.
Update II (6/30): A pretty interesting story here about summer vacations and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns and lives placed on hold, waiting for the eventual Supreme Court vacancy.
The most incredible news in that article -- from a dozen disconcerting things to choose -- has to be the news that Al "Abu Ghraib" Gonzales is considered by the Talibaptists too moderate a candidate to be submitted.
*insert head-banging-against-wall emoticon here*
Update (6/29): Kos has more, including speculation on O'Connor, as well as Harry Reid's suggestions on Supreme Court nominees from among his peers.
Update II (6/30): A pretty interesting story here about summer vacations and multi-million-dollar ad campaigns and lives placed on hold, waiting for the eventual Supreme Court vacancy.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Election Assessment Hearing here Weds. 6/29
On Thursday, June 30th, the (James A.) Baker -- (former Pres. Jimmy) Carter Commission on Federal Election Reform will hold their second and final hearing at the campus of Rice University.
The commission has already refused to hear the testimony of Rep. John Conyers, who of course headed a congressional subcommittee investigation into the voting irregularities with regard to the 2004 election in the state of Ohio. David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 presidential candidate, was also denied the opportunity to testify about the problems he encountered with Ohio's electoral processes during the attempted recount. Other election process researchers, analysts, investigators and atorneys were likewise refused the chance to report their findings of problems with our election processes during the 2004 election.
In response to this apparent lack of interest on the part of the Baker-Carter Commission in surveying problems with election processes evidenced in the last election, and in order to provide state election officials with data which will help them make informed decisions, 51 Capital March, with the endorsement of BradBlog, CAEF, IPPN, J-30 Coalition, USCountVotes, VotersUnite and others, is sponsoring an Election Assessment Hearing to be held in Houston on June 29th, the day before the Baker-Carter Commission is scheduled to meet.
Here's the location and agenda, and this is the list of presenters, which include Cobb and Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org .
Update (7/1): DemoDonkey posts her report on the hearing here.
The commission has already refused to hear the testimony of Rep. John Conyers, who of course headed a congressional subcommittee investigation into the voting irregularities with regard to the 2004 election in the state of Ohio. David Cobb, the Green Party's 2004 presidential candidate, was also denied the opportunity to testify about the problems he encountered with Ohio's electoral processes during the attempted recount. Other election process researchers, analysts, investigators and atorneys were likewise refused the chance to report their findings of problems with our election processes during the 2004 election.
In response to this apparent lack of interest on the part of the Baker-Carter Commission in surveying problems with election processes evidenced in the last election, and in order to provide state election officials with data which will help them make informed decisions, 51 Capital March, with the endorsement of BradBlog, CAEF, IPPN, J-30 Coalition, USCountVotes, VotersUnite and others, is sponsoring an Election Assessment Hearing to be held in Houston on June 29th, the day before the Baker-Carter Commission is scheduled to meet.
Here's the location and agenda, and this is the list of presenters, which include Cobb and Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org .
Update (7/1): DemoDonkey posts her report on the hearing here.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Google's maps
Most of us have used a map server such as MapQuest, Maps.MSN, Maps.Yahoo, MapsOnUs.Com, and so on. Many of these websites offer directions from one place to another place. But Google simply has to be ahead most of the time, and therefore they created
This system not only offers you the regular maps and directions - for example, try to look for our Jefferson labs - but it also brings you the satellite images of the whole planet with which you can play, move them, zoom them in, and zoom them out. For example, you can start with the large building of MIT.
This system not only offers you the regular maps and directions - for example, try to look for our Jefferson labs - but it also brings you the satellite images of the whole planet with which you can play, move them, zoom them in, and zoom them out. For example, you can start with the large building of MIT.
The Toy Cannon in 1972.
There was a jersey retirement ceremony yesterday at Minute Maid Park for Jimmy Wynn, who has been one of my very favorite Astros from the time I sat in the shiny new Dome as a six-year-old (in the center field bleachers, with my glove, anticipating -- in that excitedly hopeful way that kids have -- a home run hit to me).
Wynn was, and still is, one of the humblest stars I ever watched. Even when he was told this past winter during a luncheon with owner Drayton McLane that his number would go into the rafters, he was speechless.
Congratulations to one of the true good guys.
Update: Tom Kirkendall, and via him John Brattain, each discuss in greater detail the Toy Cannon's career.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Last notes on Democracy Fest
-- Arriving at the campus of Huston-Tillotson a week ago Friday afternoon, I proceeded to the media room and got credentialed, met Charlie of Pink Dome (he spoke at the Blogger's Caucus) and saw Seth of Radnofsky2006 again, who took and then posted a photo of me. On Saturday there I bumped into Jim Dean -- literally.
-- the socializing at Threadgill's Friday night was excellent. I met several of the DU crew, many I knew before, some I was meeting for the first time. Good times.
-- I've already posted about the workshops we attended; here's a couple of good reports on ones we didn't -- "What it Means to be a Progressive" and the Civic Action Networks. Around 2 on Saturday afternoon we took a late lunch over at Scholz Garten, and who should walk in with twenty of her entourage but Carole Strayhorn, fresh off her announcement rally. She didn't come by our table to say hi, and I didn't run the gauntlet of "Team Tough Grandma" t-shirted minions. So no blood was shed.
-- The big party was of course the Progressive Express event at Stubb's BBQ. Tickets were sold for $20 just for this event (and those folks didn't get the buffet like we did) and it sold out also. I don't know how many people were there, three thousand maybe; whatever the fire marshal's capacity for Stubb's is, I suppose. The fifteen or so evil DUers gathered at a table upstairs where we could enjoy some air-conditioning and still see and hear, and when Howard Dean came on we pushed outside. A white-haired lady brushed right past us; I heard Mrs. Diddie say, "Molly Ivins, you are a fountain of wonder!" and looked around just in time to see my wife getting kissed on the cheek by her.
-- The Sunday blog breakfast was a happening also. Getting to meet Kos was a treat.
-- Here's a great list of links that roses compiled. And here's the Austin Chronicle's take.
-- We departed a little early to meet a delightful A2Ker and her family for brunch, and with a few minutes to spare beforehand, walked through the Texas State Cemetery. In less than a half hour, we saw the graves of Tom Landry, Barbara Jordan, John Connally, Preston Smith (there are seven other governors of Texas buried there), Bob Bullock, Stephen F. Austin, and the Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston (his tomb is on the left in this picture). Jake Pickle, the long-time Austin Congressman who passed away last Saturday, is now interred not far from Connally and Bullock there on Republic Hill.
-- and on the way home we stopped at the Berdoll Pecan Farm and Store for some of their goodies, which included not just the dark chocolate covered pecan halves but also tomatoes and peaches. This place is worth the drive all by itself. It's on Highway 71, just west of Bastrop, and if you find yourself traveling that way, don't miss it.
-- the socializing at Threadgill's Friday night was excellent. I met several of the DU crew, many I knew before, some I was meeting for the first time. Good times.
-- I've already posted about the workshops we attended; here's a couple of good reports on ones we didn't -- "What it Means to be a Progressive" and the Civic Action Networks. Around 2 on Saturday afternoon we took a late lunch over at Scholz Garten, and who should walk in with twenty of her entourage but Carole Strayhorn, fresh off her announcement rally. She didn't come by our table to say hi, and I didn't run the gauntlet of "Team Tough Grandma" t-shirted minions. So no blood was shed.
-- The big party was of course the Progressive Express event at Stubb's BBQ. Tickets were sold for $20 just for this event (and those folks didn't get the buffet like we did) and it sold out also. I don't know how many people were there, three thousand maybe; whatever the fire marshal's capacity for Stubb's is, I suppose. The fifteen or so evil DUers gathered at a table upstairs where we could enjoy some air-conditioning and still see and hear, and when Howard Dean came on we pushed outside. A white-haired lady brushed right past us; I heard Mrs. Diddie say, "Molly Ivins, you are a fountain of wonder!" and looked around just in time to see my wife getting kissed on the cheek by her.
-- The Sunday blog breakfast was a happening also. Getting to meet Kos was a treat.
-- Here's a great list of links that roses compiled. And here's the Austin Chronicle's take.
-- We departed a little early to meet a delightful A2Ker and her family for brunch, and with a few minutes to spare beforehand, walked through the Texas State Cemetery. In less than a half hour, we saw the graves of Tom Landry, Barbara Jordan, John Connally, Preston Smith (there are seven other governors of Texas buried there), Bob Bullock, Stephen F. Austin, and the Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston (his tomb is on the left in this picture). Jake Pickle, the long-time Austin Congressman who passed away last Saturday, is now interred not far from Connally and Bullock there on Republic Hill.
-- and on the way home we stopped at the Berdoll Pecan Farm and Store for some of their goodies, which included not just the dark chocolate covered pecan halves but also tomatoes and peaches. This place is worth the drive all by itself. It's on Highway 71, just west of Bastrop, and if you find yourself traveling that way, don't miss it.
Let’s dispense with this quickly, shall we?
When Howard Dean speaks, he’s speaking as the chairman of the Democratic Party. The Democrats pay him. If there are Democrats who don’t like what Dean says, then they can stop donating to the party (they ought to have sense enough to keep their disagreements private, but that's tangential).
When Dick Durbin speaks, he’s representing the people of Illinois, to whom he will answer when he’s up for re-election.
When Karl Rove speaks, he speaks as an official with the White House. He is no longer simply an evil-genius-political-operative extraordinaire, he's also responsible for shaping policy and stuff, due to his not-so-recent promotion. The only person he’s accountable to is the President of the United States, who has no intention of asking Rove to apologize.
Karl Rove is paid by each and every American taxpayer. He represents all of us.
When Dick Durbin speaks, he’s representing the people of Illinois, to whom he will answer when he’s up for re-election.
When Karl Rove speaks, he speaks as an official with the White House. He is no longer simply an evil-genius-political-operative extraordinaire, he's also responsible for shaping policy and stuff, due to his not-so-recent promotion. The only person he’s accountable to is the President of the United States, who has no intention of asking Rove to apologize.
Karl Rove is paid by each and every American taxpayer. He represents all of us.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Amsterdam: black hole entropy corrections
Many people who returned from Amsterdam explained that the topic of the subleading corrections to the entropy of black holes (coming from higher order terms in the effective action), black rings, and their relations with topological string theory and various dual descriptions has been the focus of roughly one half of the talks and discussions. It's a category of questions that has attracted a significant part of the theoretical physics community these days.
Analytical structure of S-matrix
I wonder whether a reader will have an answer - or even a complete answer.
Imagine the S-matrix of a quantum field theory. It may have poles. The resonances are always above the real positive semi-axis in the "k_0" plane - by causality - and there are images below the negative semi-axis of "k_0". It would seem very bad if a pole - or a branch cut - were located just below the positive semi-axis of "k_0". Such a pole would look like an exponentially growing resonance, and it does not seem to agree with the "i.epsilon" prescription which reflects the causality of Feynman's propagators, as Nima has also emphasized to me right now.
But what about the poles that are further from the real axis? Is there some constraint that there can't be any poles in the whole two quadrants of the "k_0" plane with different signs of "Im(k_0)" and "Re(k_0)"? Or is the condition simpler in the s-plane where "s" is the Mandelstam variable? What is exactly the condition and how can one prove it? The main reason for this question is that what I've believed is the analytical structure of the M-theoretical S-matrix in 11 dimensions - with a Z_3 symmetry - seems to violate these rules. If you know the answer, thanks in advance.
Imagine the S-matrix of a quantum field theory. It may have poles. The resonances are always above the real positive semi-axis in the "k_0" plane - by causality - and there are images below the negative semi-axis of "k_0". It would seem very bad if a pole - or a branch cut - were located just below the positive semi-axis of "k_0". Such a pole would look like an exponentially growing resonance, and it does not seem to agree with the "i.epsilon" prescription which reflects the causality of Feynman's propagators, as Nima has also emphasized to me right now.
But what about the poles that are further from the real axis? Is there some constraint that there can't be any poles in the whole two quadrants of the "k_0" plane with different signs of "Im(k_0)" and "Re(k_0)"? Or is the condition simpler in the s-plane where "s" is the Mandelstam variable? What is exactly the condition and how can one prove it? The main reason for this question is that what I've believed is the analytical structure of the M-theoretical S-matrix in 11 dimensions - with a Z_3 symmetry - seems to violate these rules. If you know the answer, thanks in advance.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
The new L'Auberge du Lac is very nice ...
... it is certainly now the nicest casino in southwestern Louisiana (and I ought to know; I've driven Mom to all of them in recent years for some slots-o'-fun). We came over here today for her 79th birthday, and now I'm sitting in the Fairfield Inn in Beaumont getting a little business done before returning to H-Town tomorrow.
But as we gambled and then hit the buffet, and I marveled at the Tahoe-like rustic quality of their sprawling, spanking-new facility, I couldn't help but chuckle sadly thinking about how badly the Coushattas just up the road in Kinder were screwed by Michael Scanlon and Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay's butthole buddies.
Those TRMPAC indictments haven't shown up yet, but it's just a matter of time ... =)
But as we gambled and then hit the buffet, and I marveled at the Tahoe-like rustic quality of their sprawling, spanking-new facility, I couldn't help but chuckle sadly thinking about how badly the Coushattas just up the road in Kinder were screwed by Michael Scanlon and Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay's butthole buddies.
Those TRMPAC indictments haven't shown up yet, but it's just a matter of time ... =)
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Dear MasterCard:
Effective May 1, 2005, any compromise of my data will result in a $50 liability for you, the card issuer, owed to me, the card holder.
Cashing the payment check I sent you last month (which you did) shall constitute your acceptance of this agreement. Subsequent security breaches will compound the fee. I will spell out the terms of just how much these fees and related costs will escalate as soon as I find a typeface that is small enough.
Failure to comply with these changes will result in finance charges, compounded monthly and based on the average daily balance of the amount lost to fraud.
By the way, I recently incorporated myself in South Dakota, which means I can now engage in usury as much as you can. Therefore, I have selected an annual percentage rate of 28.7 percent. However, failure to make payments will force me to raise this rate to 73.9 percent, just because I can.
And one more thing. I expect my payment to be on my desk by 12:37 p.m. on the day it's due. I'm usually at lunch at that time, so I will consider it late if it's not there by 11:24 a.m. After that, all the previously listed finance charges will apply. The date the payment is mailed is irrelevant.
Also, given the widespread nature of the security problems, I am going to share information with my fellow consumers. If I determine you failed to secure their private account information, I may be forced to enact the terms specified in this agreement even though you did not violate the agreement with me. Call it universal default in reverse.
More at the link in the title.
I just tapped out that bit about
the forum I attended last night regarding the Halliburton shareholder's protest/police action.
It's here and also at Houston Indymedia, but I can't link to it at the moment because their server is down (as well as their rather odd justifying seems to prohibit paragraphs, so it's hard to read there).
Update: They're live again over there, and Renee Phillips of KPFT has posted her 7 1/2 minute mp3 audio account of the forum. (Clicking on the link starts the audio in your default media player.)
It's here and also at Houston Indymedia, but I can't link to it at the moment because their server is down (as well as their rather odd justifying seems to prohibit paragraphs, so it's hard to read there).
Update: They're live again over there, and Renee Phillips of KPFT has posted her 7 1/2 minute mp3 audio account of the forum. (Clicking on the link starts the audio in your default media player.)
Meme'd
Charles hit me with this dart, and it keeps me from working on a post that requires much thinking (or blogging about the NBA Finals or the Astros) ...
1. How many books do you own?
I don't really know. I have one floor-to-nearly-ceiling built-in bookcase and it's so full that books are crammed on top of books. There's no more room in it, and I have a few books on the coffeetable in the living room and a stack on the floor next to my desk here that looks like it's about three feet tall.
When we moved from Midland, TX to Treasure Island, FL in 1992 we gave away probably a couple of hundred or more to friends and neighbors and the literacy project there (Midland Need to Read, where I had been a tutor). That was a nice library too; an autographed copy of Tom Landry's biography given to me by my younger brother was part of that collection.
2. Last book read.
The Broker, by John Grisham.
3. Last book purchased.
Amy Goodman's Exception to the Rulers, signed by the author. I just offered to trade it to one of my friends, as a reciprocation for the book she's going to send me, so I'm glad she didn't take me up on that ...
4. Name five books that mean a lot to you.
1. See Dick Run. Probably the first book I ever read. Seminal. Seriously, though ...
2. The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. I can still see some of the pages in my mind's eye.
3. Moby Dick. We read it aloud in my eighth-grade language arts class right before school let out for the summer, and I still remember some of Melville's best work from it:
And for my big finish, I'll list 4. A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, and 5. Liars' Club by Mary Karr, because they represent two genres that I enjoy the most, which are historical and biographical topics, and novels with some local flair ('local' in this case defined as any place I've actually lived or visited). I have bios and autobios of LBJ, Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, but also a few of Elmore Leonard's and Jimmy Buffet's books because of that year I spent living in and traveling around Florida.
Mary Karr is about my same age, grew up in Port Arthur, and went to a bunch of the same places my crew went, so I'm kinda surprised we didn't bump into each other at a high school football game or something. I knew girls just exactly like her, though ...
5. Five people to tag.
Sarah, Charles, Joe, Lyn, and Lisa, you're it.
1. How many books do you own?
I don't really know. I have one floor-to-nearly-ceiling built-in bookcase and it's so full that books are crammed on top of books. There's no more room in it, and I have a few books on the coffeetable in the living room and a stack on the floor next to my desk here that looks like it's about three feet tall.
When we moved from Midland, TX to Treasure Island, FL in 1992 we gave away probably a couple of hundred or more to friends and neighbors and the literacy project there (Midland Need to Read, where I had been a tutor). That was a nice library too; an autographed copy of Tom Landry's biography given to me by my younger brother was part of that collection.
2. Last book read.
The Broker, by John Grisham.
3. Last book purchased.
Amy Goodman's Exception to the Rulers, signed by the author. I just offered to trade it to one of my friends, as a reciprocation for the book she's going to send me, so I'm glad she didn't take me up on that ...
4. Name five books that mean a lot to you.
1. See Dick Run. Probably the first book I ever read. Seminal. Seriously, though ...
2. The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. I can still see some of the pages in my mind's eye.
3. Moby Dick. We read it aloud in my eighth-grade language arts class right before school let out for the summer, and I still remember some of Melville's best work from it:
"And he piled up one the whale's white hump the sum of all the rage felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it."
And for my big finish, I'll list 4. A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, and 5. Liars' Club by Mary Karr, because they represent two genres that I enjoy the most, which are historical and biographical topics, and novels with some local flair ('local' in this case defined as any place I've actually lived or visited). I have bios and autobios of LBJ, Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, but also a few of Elmore Leonard's and Jimmy Buffet's books because of that year I spent living in and traveling around Florida.
Mary Karr is about my same age, grew up in Port Arthur, and went to a bunch of the same places my crew went, so I'm kinda surprised we didn't bump into each other at a high school football game or something. I knew girls just exactly like her, though ...
5. Five people to tag.
Sarah, Charles, Joe, Lyn, and Lisa, you're it.
"DeLay Factor", finally
This workshop from the DemFest weekend just past was greatly anticipated, well-attended, and without disappointment.
Panelists Lou Dubose, Chris Bell, Richard Morrison (you already ought to know who they are) were joined by Sue DuQuesnay, whom you may know better as Juanita Jean HerOwnself, owner of The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon.
The two men who have taken on Tom DeLay mano y mano in the past year talked about that experience. Bell is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the filing of the House ethics complaint against the Majority Leader, an action that was heartily discouraged by even Democratic House leaders, but which has slowly revealed the enormous and tangled web of influence peddlers, former House staffers, corrupt children's foundations and PACs and more that The Hammer has spent many years painstakingly weaving together.
Morrison spoke of his campaign in the last cycle which was viewed by everyone but him in the early stages as quixotic, but which resulted in an extraordinarily narrow margin of victory for La Cucaracha Grande.
Both men talked about how it's all about the money. It got DeLay the power he craves so greedily, it keeps him there in his position of influence by intimidation, it has purchased for him dozens and dozens of sycophants masquerading as House Republicans, and will ultimately be his downfall.
Morrison noted that DeLay outspent him by a factor of nearly 7 to 1 in the fall, 2004 campaign. This illuminates the value of having a high-profile Democratic candidate in the next cycle, one that can both raise his own dough as well as draw national funding. Having exposed the Bugman's vulnerability, it also creates a race that the DCCC and others will now target. So if DeLay calculates that he must again raise and spend to the same advantage to be re-elected in 2006, and if Nick Lampson can raise $2 or $3 million compared to Richard's $600,000 ... well, you can do the math.
More importantly even than that, believe it or not, is that DeLay will have considerably fewer dollars to send to his cronies and lickspittles, which means a more level playing field for Dems in House races around the country. With his lawyers still clamoring for payment, with his legal troubles still on the rise, with something stupid coming out of his mouth every time he opens it ...
... there's just a lot of schadenfraude still to look forward to.
On the news over the weekend that KBH wouldn't be running for governor, that CKMcCRS would, and that TRMPAC indictments are imminent, Chris Bell felt like he had hit the trifecta. "I think I'll go to Vegas," he said.
And Juanita Jean? Well, she had to apologize for something she said at the forum, but no, it wasn't for calling anyone a Nazi. Scroll down to the June 20 entry.
I'll have a post-mortem on the weekend including the social events and the get-togethers of kindred spirits and links to some photos "shortly".
Panelists Lou Dubose, Chris Bell, Richard Morrison (you already ought to know who they are) were joined by Sue DuQuesnay, whom you may know better as Juanita Jean HerOwnself, owner of The World's Most Dangerous Beauty Salon.
The two men who have taken on Tom DeLay mano y mano in the past year talked about that experience. Bell is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the filing of the House ethics complaint against the Majority Leader, an action that was heartily discouraged by even Democratic House leaders, but which has slowly revealed the enormous and tangled web of influence peddlers, former House staffers, corrupt children's foundations and PACs and more that The Hammer has spent many years painstakingly weaving together.
Morrison spoke of his campaign in the last cycle which was viewed by everyone but him in the early stages as quixotic, but which resulted in an extraordinarily narrow margin of victory for La Cucaracha Grande.
Both men talked about how it's all about the money. It got DeLay the power he craves so greedily, it keeps him there in his position of influence by intimidation, it has purchased for him dozens and dozens of sycophants masquerading as House Republicans, and will ultimately be his downfall.
Morrison noted that DeLay outspent him by a factor of nearly 7 to 1 in the fall, 2004 campaign. This illuminates the value of having a high-profile Democratic candidate in the next cycle, one that can both raise his own dough as well as draw national funding. Having exposed the Bugman's vulnerability, it also creates a race that the DCCC and others will now target. So if DeLay calculates that he must again raise and spend to the same advantage to be re-elected in 2006, and if Nick Lampson can raise $2 or $3 million compared to Richard's $600,000 ... well, you can do the math.
More importantly even than that, believe it or not, is that DeLay will have considerably fewer dollars to send to his cronies and lickspittles, which means a more level playing field for Dems in House races around the country. With his lawyers still clamoring for payment, with his legal troubles still on the rise, with something stupid coming out of his mouth every time he opens it ...
... there's just a lot of schadenfraude still to look forward to.
On the news over the weekend that KBH wouldn't be running for governor, that CKMcCRS would, and that TRMPAC indictments are imminent, Chris Bell felt like he had hit the trifecta. "I think I'll go to Vegas," he said.
And Juanita Jean? Well, she had to apologize for something she said at the forum, but no, it wasn't for calling anyone a Nazi. Scroll down to the June 20 entry.
I'll have a post-mortem on the weekend including the social events and the get-togethers of kindred spirits and links to some photos "shortly".
CSL-1: better spectra
Update: CSL-1 is not a cosmic string.
A short addition to the discussions about the conjectured lensing by a cosmic string:
They compare the spectra of the two images - CSL-1a and CSL-1b - and show that they're identical at more than 99.9% confidence level.
Meanwhile, Mark Jackson and I have seen the positions of the other potentially lensed objects in the neighborhood of CSL-1 and we were unimpressed by their seemingly chaotic positions; one would expect that they would be kind of aligned.
A previous article was about WMAP and cosmic strings.
A short addition to the discussions about the conjectured lensing by a cosmic string:
They compare the spectra of the two images - CSL-1a and CSL-1b - and show that they're identical at more than 99.9% confidence level.
Meanwhile, Mark Jackson and I have seen the positions of the other potentially lensed objects in the neighborhood of CSL-1 and we were unimpressed by their seemingly chaotic positions; one would expect that they would be kind of aligned.
A previous article was about WMAP and cosmic strings.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
With all the material I have to blog about...
... two or three more lengthy things to say about Dem Fest; a rather flabbergasted report on a public forum I attended this evening about the Houston police brutality visited on Halliburton protestors last month -- with HPD in the room; Frist's flip-flop on Bolton and Durbin's weak-kneed apology for invoking Godwin's Law just today, and the only thing I want to post is:
"Adios, Mofo."
Oh yeah, it seems there are quite a few rumors floating around online that Rehnquist has resigned and no one with official knowledge will admit it.
"Adios, Mofo."
Oh yeah, it seems there are quite a few rumors floating around online that Rehnquist has resigned and no one with official knowledge will admit it.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good
Even though I did not attend this workshop I found its topic and the reports of others to be one of the most fascinating of the weekend.
Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, author and scholar and director on the national boards of the Christian Church and the United Churches of Christ, opened the discussion by saying that progressives need people of faith as equal partners. Progressives and liberals, and by extension the Democratic Party, have been cast as secular by the opposition, and specifically the 'secular left' -- a right-wing frame you hear coming out of the mouths of pastors in pulpits these days -- is considered "weak" in comparison to the conservative, fundamentalist conviction of Christian faith. In order to win the battle of phraseology, progressives need to emphasize the aspects of love in their practice of faith as well as in everyday life, and to contrast it with the "theo-fascists' war against love". Indeed, Brock noted, some secularists tend to feel isolated from the social aspects inherent in the practice of organized religion (in my own Church of Christ upbringing this was called 'fellowship'). In order to mitigate that sense of isolation, they can seek out an "agency" in order to align their associations with their core values; in short, find others who share their beliefs and hang out with them on a regular basis (just as so many of us did this weekend).
Dr. Davidson Loehr had probably the most interesting bio on the panel: Unitarian Universalist minister, author of the forthcoming America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher, former combat photographer in Vietnam, former professional musician. He reminded us again that the left has lost the vocabulary as it relates to nationalism and patriotism, religious conviction, and moral and personal responsibility. His call to action was to reclaim the words like "morals" and phrases like "high ideals" to communicate the goals of progressives. And to likewise use language that casts the opposition unfavorably, just as the Republicans have for so long; for example, the "plutocracy currently being implemented leads to imperialism, and fundamentalism is a natural extension and dangerous ally of the two". Plutocracy, of course, also results in undesirable things like "control of the media, and thereby control of the masses". (Now we just have to dumb this down a bit for the Southerners who haven't gone to college.)
Andy Hernandez, co-author of the Almanac of Latino Politics 2002-2004 and widely respected for his expertise on Latino political strategy, spoke about the fallacy that people cast votes relative to their moral values. We all recall the MSM beating us over the head in the first week of November, 2004 about the 'moral values' voters, right? Well, the statistics are that twenty-two percent of voters in the presidential election indicated they cast their ballot based on 'moral values', and 80% of that 22%, naturally, voted for George W Bush. But in 2000 that number was 35%, and it was 40% in 1996 (and who was elected President in '96, again?). So this choice has actually waned in importance by nearly 50% in two election cycles, at a time when our media is telling us just the opposite. It's important just in terms of one issue -- abortion -- that we begin to say something like this:
"Conservatives aren't pro-life; they're just pro-birth. Liberals are pro-life."
And finally Dr. Paul Woodruff, a professor of ethics at the University of Texas and author of Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue and First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea said that when it comes to ethical behavior, winning is way down the list of priorities. Too much winning, in fact, leads to a swollen head. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. Indeed, as Brittanica conveys, "in classical Greek ethical and religious thought, overweening presumption suggesting impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe" was "the sin to which the gifted were most susceptible". The opposite of hubris is reverence; not religion, not the Diety, but reverence in terms of ethical behavior and integrity. Using the word 'reverence' when progressives speak of caring for the elderly (Social Security), the sick (healthcare), and the environment is an important distinction; one can reap moral value -- i.e. strengthening character -- by losing, for example. And we've had more than enough of that ...
(Aside from me: Boy, I want to hear some Democratic Senator who voted for the war say something like, "I revere the sacrifice our men and women of the armed forces have already made in Iraq, and I feel strongly about this: they have sacrificed enough. It's time for us to bring them home.")
The last postulate on this topic was actually forwarded not in this seminar but by Molly Ivins during our lunchtime forum, where she and Jim Hightower and Glen Maxey and Glenn Smith shared Texas political war stories. She made reference to the "red print" Christians to whom the left can and must appeal.
What are "red print" Christians?
Those of you familiar with the 1970's-era King James versions of your Bibles may recall that the words of Jesus in the New Testament always appeared in red. The New Testament, of course, spoke quite a bit of love, compassion for others, especially those less fortunate, and forgiveness (through the Son of God and his apostles). The Old Testament, by contrast, deals in moral absolutes -- an eye for an eye and so on -- and also speaks about smiting one's enemies and plagues and adultery and sodomy and the consequences of these (usually a painful death).
Sound like any grand old political party you know?
Somewhere there's bound to be some statistics on the percentages of "red print" Christians to the whole, and how many of them don't vote GOP. I would hazard a guess that there are several million votes just in that subgroup that the Democratic Party needs to ask for (and receive).
I'll post about "The DeLay Factor" seminar tomorrow.
Update: Jon Lebkowsky, at his creatively-named Weblogsky, has a report on this seminar as well, and he found a few things I missed.
Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock, author and scholar and director on the national boards of the Christian Church and the United Churches of Christ, opened the discussion by saying that progressives need people of faith as equal partners. Progressives and liberals, and by extension the Democratic Party, have been cast as secular by the opposition, and specifically the 'secular left' -- a right-wing frame you hear coming out of the mouths of pastors in pulpits these days -- is considered "weak" in comparison to the conservative, fundamentalist conviction of Christian faith. In order to win the battle of phraseology, progressives need to emphasize the aspects of love in their practice of faith as well as in everyday life, and to contrast it with the "theo-fascists' war against love". Indeed, Brock noted, some secularists tend to feel isolated from the social aspects inherent in the practice of organized religion (in my own Church of Christ upbringing this was called 'fellowship'). In order to mitigate that sense of isolation, they can seek out an "agency" in order to align their associations with their core values; in short, find others who share their beliefs and hang out with them on a regular basis (just as so many of us did this weekend).
Dr. Davidson Loehr had probably the most interesting bio on the panel: Unitarian Universalist minister, author of the forthcoming America, Fascism, and God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher, former combat photographer in Vietnam, former professional musician. He reminded us again that the left has lost the vocabulary as it relates to nationalism and patriotism, religious conviction, and moral and personal responsibility. His call to action was to reclaim the words like "morals" and phrases like "high ideals" to communicate the goals of progressives. And to likewise use language that casts the opposition unfavorably, just as the Republicans have for so long; for example, the "plutocracy currently being implemented leads to imperialism, and fundamentalism is a natural extension and dangerous ally of the two". Plutocracy, of course, also results in undesirable things like "control of the media, and thereby control of the masses". (Now we just have to dumb this down a bit for the Southerners who haven't gone to college.)
Andy Hernandez, co-author of the Almanac of Latino Politics 2002-2004 and widely respected for his expertise on Latino political strategy, spoke about the fallacy that people cast votes relative to their moral values. We all recall the MSM beating us over the head in the first week of November, 2004 about the 'moral values' voters, right? Well, the statistics are that twenty-two percent of voters in the presidential election indicated they cast their ballot based on 'moral values', and 80% of that 22%, naturally, voted for George W Bush. But in 2000 that number was 35%, and it was 40% in 1996 (and who was elected President in '96, again?). So this choice has actually waned in importance by nearly 50% in two election cycles, at a time when our media is telling us just the opposite. It's important just in terms of one issue -- abortion -- that we begin to say something like this:
"Conservatives aren't pro-life; they're just pro-birth. Liberals are pro-life."
And finally Dr. Paul Woodruff, a professor of ethics at the University of Texas and author of Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue and First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea said that when it comes to ethical behavior, winning is way down the list of priorities. Too much winning, in fact, leads to a swollen head. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris. Indeed, as Brittanica conveys, "in classical Greek ethical and religious thought, overweening presumption suggesting impious disregard of the limits governing human action in an orderly universe" was "the sin to which the gifted were most susceptible". The opposite of hubris is reverence; not religion, not the Diety, but reverence in terms of ethical behavior and integrity. Using the word 'reverence' when progressives speak of caring for the elderly (Social Security), the sick (healthcare), and the environment is an important distinction; one can reap moral value -- i.e. strengthening character -- by losing, for example. And we've had more than enough of that ...
(Aside from me: Boy, I want to hear some Democratic Senator who voted for the war say something like, "I revere the sacrifice our men and women of the armed forces have already made in Iraq, and I feel strongly about this: they have sacrificed enough. It's time for us to bring them home.")
The last postulate on this topic was actually forwarded not in this seminar but by Molly Ivins during our lunchtime forum, where she and Jim Hightower and Glen Maxey and Glenn Smith shared Texas political war stories. She made reference to the "red print" Christians to whom the left can and must appeal.
What are "red print" Christians?
Those of you familiar with the 1970's-era King James versions of your Bibles may recall that the words of Jesus in the New Testament always appeared in red. The New Testament, of course, spoke quite a bit of love, compassion for others, especially those less fortunate, and forgiveness (through the Son of God and his apostles). The Old Testament, by contrast, deals in moral absolutes -- an eye for an eye and so on -- and also speaks about smiting one's enemies and plagues and adultery and sodomy and the consequences of these (usually a painful death).
Sound like any grand old political party you know?
Somewhere there's bound to be some statistics on the percentages of "red print" Christians to the whole, and how many of them don't vote GOP. I would hazard a guess that there are several million votes just in that subgroup that the Democratic Party needs to ask for (and receive).
I'll post about "The DeLay Factor" seminar tomorrow.
Update: Jon Lebkowsky, at his creatively-named Weblogsky, has a report on this seminar as well, and he found a few things I missed.
A few DemFest snapshots
... some suitable for framing, coming up.
And speaking of frames, Jeff Feldman of The Frame Shop led a workshop on that topic Saturday morning. It included an exercise on developing your thirty-second elevator speech for the news of the day (or week). But the seminar I attended prior to that was entitled "Film as an Organizing Tool" and featured excerpts from the new Robert Greenwald documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. As Al Norman, the virtual one-man crusader against Wal-Mart says:
Mrs. Diddie and I split to cover two workshops before lunchtime; she went to "Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good" and I attended "Turning Red States Blue", which was moderated by DFT political director Glen Maxey, political consultant Sandra Ramos, and Dallas County sheriff Lupe Valdez. Maxey's best point was that there is still a majority of Americans who do not vote at all, and his campaigns (Maxey served six terms as an openly gay state representative) typically concentrated on projects to register new voters that involved activities like posting -- or holding -- signs on streets and intersections all over the city of Austin directing people to where to register that day. His GOTV efforts likewise focused not on the frequent voters whose opinions are entrenched but on these first-timers; in calls and GOTV literature they were told when to vote, where to vote, what to bring with them when they went to vote, what to expect when they got to the polling place, etc. Rather than force the virgin voter to look up this data, they tried to make the activity of voting more accessible and less intimidating to people who hadn't done it before (or who hadn't done so in a long while).
Ramos, a veteran of seven congressional campaigns in Colorado last year, six of which were victorious with all of those seats previously held by Republicans, said that the Democratic success she managed was due to having candidates who matched the district, and letting those candidates be themselves. One unique example she cited was the cowboy who simply couldn't blockwalk and canvass for votes; he instead held cookouts and barbecues in every park in the district, and he played his guitar and sang about his campaign message. And Lupe Valdez' best advice was, as a candidate, to find a campaign cause that no one can disagree with and dwell on that. It's counter-productive to spend time talking about issues that are divisive when there are issues that everyone can agree on.
I'm going to devote the next post to Mrs. Diddie's notes on the "Religion" seminar, a post by my friend CitySky who was also in attendance, and some related links.
And speaking of frames, Jeff Feldman of The Frame Shop led a workshop on that topic Saturday morning. It included an exercise on developing your thirty-second elevator speech for the news of the day (or week). But the seminar I attended prior to that was entitled "Film as an Organizing Tool" and featured excerpts from the new Robert Greenwald documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. As Al Norman, the virtual one-man crusader against Wal-Mart says:
Wal-Mart, through its own excesses, has become a caricature of itself--- a cartoon company symbolizing what Sinclair Lewis called the "completest boredom" of America. Wal-Mart is no longer just a store, or even a corporation. It is an icon of uncontrollable lucre, the Orwellian business machine with a greeter at the sliding doors.
Mrs. Diddie and I split to cover two workshops before lunchtime; she went to "Religion, Democracy, and the Common Good" and I attended "Turning Red States Blue", which was moderated by DFT political director Glen Maxey, political consultant Sandra Ramos, and Dallas County sheriff Lupe Valdez. Maxey's best point was that there is still a majority of Americans who do not vote at all, and his campaigns (Maxey served six terms as an openly gay state representative) typically concentrated on projects to register new voters that involved activities like posting -- or holding -- signs on streets and intersections all over the city of Austin directing people to where to register that day. His GOTV efforts likewise focused not on the frequent voters whose opinions are entrenched but on these first-timers; in calls and GOTV literature they were told when to vote, where to vote, what to bring with them when they went to vote, what to expect when they got to the polling place, etc. Rather than force the virgin voter to look up this data, they tried to make the activity of voting more accessible and less intimidating to people who hadn't done it before (or who hadn't done so in a long while).
Ramos, a veteran of seven congressional campaigns in Colorado last year, six of which were victorious with all of those seats previously held by Republicans, said that the Democratic success she managed was due to having candidates who matched the district, and letting those candidates be themselves. One unique example she cited was the cowboy who simply couldn't blockwalk and canvass for votes; he instead held cookouts and barbecues in every park in the district, and he played his guitar and sang about his campaign message. And Lupe Valdez' best advice was, as a candidate, to find a campaign cause that no one can disagree with and dwell on that. It's counter-productive to spend time talking about issues that are divisive when there are issues that everyone can agree on.
I'm going to devote the next post to Mrs. Diddie's notes on the "Religion" seminar, a post by my friend CitySky who was also in attendance, and some related links.
"later today" has turned into tomorrow
... as referenced in the previous post, and work and life is still preventing me from being wordy, so there'll be more "later".
A family friend in Beaumont e-mailed to report that she saw us on C-SPAN (which obviously was the DeLay Factor telecast). I'm just not going to be able to stay undercover much longer, it seems ...
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Diebold) wins a belated Moneyshot Quote of the week for this:
Must get back to the grindstone.
A family friend in Beaumont e-mailed to report that she saw us on C-SPAN (which obviously was the DeLay Factor telecast). I'm just not going to be able to stay undercover much longer, it seems ...
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Diebold) wins a belated Moneyshot Quote of the week for this:
"The White House is completely disconnected from reality. It's like they're just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we're losing in Iraq..."
Must get back to the grindstone.
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Chaudhuri on the Hagedorn "myth"
This short note is closely related to a previous article about the work of Dienes and Lennek.
IMPORTANT NOTE ADDED LATER: Although the topic and the character of the conclusions of the paper by Dienes and Lennek on one side and Chaudhuri on the other side may look similar, there are very important differences that can make one paper completely correct, if they're (or, on the contrary, she's) lucky, and the other incorrect. Please don't assume that the validity of these two papers is equivalent. And please be aware that I believe that these are kind of interesting and well-done papers, otherwise they would not be discussed here.
Back to the original text.
Tonight, it is Shyamoli Chaudhuri who is "dispelling the Hagedorn myth" (incidentally, it was already in 1965 when Hagedorn suggested that at high enough temperatures, open strings merge into a gas of chaotic long closed strings):
IMPORTANT NOTE ADDED LATER: Although the topic and the character of the conclusions of the paper by Dienes and Lennek on one side and Chaudhuri on the other side may look similar, there are very important differences that can make one paper completely correct, if they're (or, on the contrary, she's) lucky, and the other incorrect. Please don't assume that the validity of these two papers is equivalent. And please be aware that I believe that these are kind of interesting and well-done papers, otherwise they would not be discussed here.
Back to the original text.
Tonight, it is Shyamoli Chaudhuri who is "dispelling the Hagedorn myth" (incidentally, it was already in 1965 when Hagedorn suggested that at high enough temperatures, open strings merge into a gas of chaotic long closed strings):
She calculates the thermal free energy - apparently in a different way than we are used to (from Atick and Witten and related works) - to conclude that the exponential growth of the states with the energy does not exist. In section 2.1 she argues that the growth of the number of states with the level does not imply the same growth of free energy as a function of temperature (or the density of states with the total energy). The true growth is slower, she says, making the full expression convergent. Nevertheless, she finds a first order phase transition at the T-self-dual temperature.
Her basic argument similar to the Dienes and Lennek's paper: the correct one-loop torus path integral only goes over the fundamental region of the modular group which removes the dangerous region with small "Im(tau)" and makes, according to her beliefs, the integral convergent for any temperature.
I encourage everyone for whose research and thinking the Hagedorn behavior is important to decide about the fate of the transition without any prejudices. After checking various things, I personally believe that the Hagedorn "folklore" will survive and both of the recent anti-Hagedorn papers are misled. (Chaudhuri is more radical because she seems to believe that the transition would be absent even in type 0 and other strings. It is much harder to isolate an error in the Dienes and Lennek's paper.)
The integral over the fundamental region combined with the summation over the two winding numbers that count how both circles of the worldsheet torus wind around the thermal circle in spacetime may be replaced by a full integral over the upper "tau" half-plane, which re-introduces the dangerous region with small "Im(tau)" and revives the "Hagedorn myth".
Technically, I think that her error is the step from (15) to (16) in her paper where she uses the Hardy-Ramanujan formula, assuming that the excitation of the string is very large, which removes by hand the actual divergence that would, in this calculational procedure, emerge from the thermal tachyon (the ground state of the winding sector "w=1" around the thermal circle in spacetime - in this sector the GSO projection is reversed) - a contribution that she neglects because the Hardy-Ramanujan formula is definitely not applicable for low-lying states such as this thermal tachyon.
This is an error in the approximate calculation; in the exact calculation, as a reader pointed out, there is a wrong factor of "(-1)^w" in equation (25) that breaks modular invariance.
Note that once you admit that the relevant CFT has a thermal tachyon, the discussion simply ends. With a thermal tachyon, the Hagedorn divergence arises from the region with large values of "Im(tau)", not small ones. And this "infrared" region is definitely not removed in string theory. To summarize, I now believe that if one defines the thermal stringy amplitudes in the most obvious stringy extension of the thermal rules of QFT, one finds the thermally wound tachyon whose mass determines the Hagedorn temperature, and at least one of the recent papers is not quite right.
Breakfast blogging
Went down the buffet line this morning with Barbara Radnofsky and Kos.
Kos and Jerome note how vital it is to take our activism offline; that elections aren't won by banging on keyboards, but by banging on doors. And just as elections and politics is local, so are the blogs evolving to reflect regional interests (I've noticed this even in my own posts here). Since our best opportunity to interact with our leaders and potential leaders is on a city and state level, then those issues will be the ones we know best -- and can blog intelligently about. Of course it all expands outward from there, even beyond our country's borders of course.
And by driving the change from the bottom -- just as the GOP did thirty years ago -- then you affect the long-term trends.
Barbara Radnofsky is speaking about breaking down the "babykiller" argument waged against the left by the anti-choice right. If, for example (as I have posted previously in regards to Planned Parenthood) we focus efforts on pregnancy prevention, then everybody can find a common place to agree. It's that old reframing thing ...
More coherent and lengthy postings later on today.
Kos and Jerome note how vital it is to take our activism offline; that elections aren't won by banging on keyboards, but by banging on doors. And just as elections and politics is local, so are the blogs evolving to reflect regional interests (I've noticed this even in my own posts here). Since our best opportunity to interact with our leaders and potential leaders is on a city and state level, then those issues will be the ones we know best -- and can blog intelligently about. Of course it all expands outward from there, even beyond our country's borders of course.
And by driving the change from the bottom -- just as the GOP did thirty years ago -- then you affect the long-term trends.
Barbara Radnofsky is speaking about breaking down the "babykiller" argument waged against the left by the anti-choice right. If, for example (as I have posted previously in regards to Planned Parenthood) we focus efforts on pregnancy prevention, then everybody can find a common place to agree. It's that old reframing thing ...
More coherent and lengthy postings later on today.
Light Milky Cosmic Strings
Have you heard about the excess radiation at the 511 keV line emanating from our galactic center? As announced in New Scientist, two physicists from Ohio argue that the positrons might be produced inside very light superconducting strings, whose tension is near the TeV scale (much lighter than the string conjectured to be relevant for CSL-1 and other recently discussed observations), by electromagnetic induction:
It's a bit confusing if a cosmic string behaves almost just like a regular piece of wire, but their mechanism may be viable under certain assumptions. At least, a new candidate explanation of the strong 511 keV line has been added to the list.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
TRMPAC indictments Tuesday?
Charlie at Pink Dome (who proudly declares that his blog publishes rumor as fact) says that there could be as many as eight indictments associated with the misadventurers of TRMPAC handed down next Tuesday, which is also allegedly the day the Texas Lege will be summoned back into special session by Guvnah "God is my campaign manager" Goodhaiyer. To be fair -- something that comes naturally to me -- June 27 is another date being floated for our state legislators to attempt again the titanic struggle to find a way to fund Texas public schools.
Is it possible to fantasize that we could see Tom Craddick being led away from the dais in leg irons? Dare we dream to see the Speaker of the Texas House frog-marched out of the Capitol?
Be still my beating heart ...
The GOP has passed a mighty wind this weekend in order to try to draw attention away from the one thousand progressive activists assembled in Austin working to counter the very crap they are busily dispensing, with Kay Bailey Hutchison finally getting off the pot and Rick Perry and Carole Strayhorn scheduling their dueling press conferences today. It's possible that Speaker Craddick may trump them all by the beginning of next week.
Is it possible to fantasize that we could see Tom Craddick being led away from the dais in leg irons? Dare we dream to see the Speaker of the Texas House frog-marched out of the Capitol?
Be still my beating heart ...
The GOP has passed a mighty wind this weekend in order to try to draw attention away from the one thousand progressive activists assembled in Austin working to counter the very crap they are busily dispensing, with Kay Bailey Hutchison finally getting off the pot and Rick Perry and Carole Strayhorn scheduling their dueling press conferences today. It's possible that Speaker Craddick may trump them all by the beginning of next week.
Wolfram Publicon - math writing
I have not tested this program of Stephen Wolfram's company yet, but it seems very likely that many people will find it very useful for typing math in a WYSIWYG fashion - it may be the first time when a WYSIWYG program becomes more convenient than the direct typing of the source.
The program is a natural supplement of Mathematica. It is a natural user interface for LaTeX/AMSTeX, MathML, and other frameworks. A free trial is available and many universities may have it for free. My friend sent me a snapshot of his screen. Enjoy!
The program is a natural supplement of Mathematica. It is a natural user interface for LaTeX/AMSTeX, MathML, and other frameworks. A free trial is available and many universities may have it for free. My friend sent me a snapshot of his screen. Enjoy!
Live from the center of the left
This is both the coolest thing and the hottest thing I've done in awhile.
Met some Kool Kidz (that would be you, Charlie and Umpire), met some campaign operatives (that's the obligatory Novak reference, Tim and Seth), got a hotel room that overlooks the cemetery (orbs are floating around all over the place, according to my digital camera), and I'm eating one of those scrumptious Doubletree cookies for breakfast (it's no wonder I'm diabetic, with diets like mine).
Good Christ, it's freaking sweltering outside, even at this hour.
Hm. I see Kay Bailey is going back on her word. That's going to have quite a constipating effect on the GOP bench players. David Dewness and Henry Vanilla (I've heard quite a few Latinos call him that, so I hope it's not racial or anything) have to sit tight for the rest of the decade. Poor them.
Which reminds me; I getta get over to the Capitol and grab a couple of Carole's free hot dogs at lunch today...
My picture's been taken a lot, total strangers have read my media credentials and told me how much they enjoy the blog, and a couple of the pols whom I've met a few times now even recognize me.
Damn, this being the media is the shiznit.
Met some Kool Kidz (that would be you, Charlie and Umpire), met some campaign operatives (that's the obligatory Novak reference, Tim and Seth), got a hotel room that overlooks the cemetery (orbs are floating around all over the place, according to my digital camera), and I'm eating one of those scrumptious Doubletree cookies for breakfast (it's no wonder I'm diabetic, with diets like mine).
Good Christ, it's freaking sweltering outside, even at this hour.
Hm. I see Kay Bailey is going back on her word. That's going to have quite a constipating effect on the GOP bench players. David Dewness and Henry Vanilla (I've heard quite a few Latinos call him that, so I hope it's not racial or anything) have to sit tight for the rest of the decade. Poor them.
Which reminds me; I getta get over to the Capitol and grab a couple of Carole's free hot dogs at lunch today...
My picture's been taken a lot, total strangers have read my media credentials and told me how much they enjoy the blog, and a couple of the pols whom I've met a few times now even recognize me.
Damn, this being the media is the shiznit.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Democracy Fest 2005, Austin
Much has been said, here and elsewhere, about this seminal progressive event taking place in Keep-It-Weird this weekend. I have been granted media credentials (boy, doesn't that make me sound like hot shit, eh?) and will liveblog some events as wireless access allows and others after the fact. The Bloggers Caucus opens the weekend and features appearances by the following candidates and their representatives:
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston attorney and Democratic candidate for the United States Senate seat now held by Kay Bailey Hutchison, who will be represented by her campaign blogger Seth Davidson. Radnofsky has posted recently at Burnt Orange Report and Off the Kuff.com and will also be at our blogger's breakfast on Sunday with Markos and Jerome.
Chris Bell, exploring a run for Governor of Texas, will be represented by operations manager and blogger Tim McCann. Bell has participated in conference calls with the Lone Star blogosphere -- most recently this week -- and will also be on the Saturday panel called "The DeLay Factor" with Richard Morrison, whose campaign against the Bugman last fall rocked the establishment, and Lou Dubose, whose book "The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress" is a fine primer for DeLay watchers.
David Van Os, candidate for Texas Attorney General, will appear at the caucus in person accompanied by Dave Collins, chair of his steering committee. I'm privileged to know Van Os from my earliest days as an activist in connecting to him through the Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party. Van Os is hosting a campaign reception immediately following the Bloggers' Caucus Friday evening from 6:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M. at Nuevo Leon Restaurant, 1501 E. 6th.
John Courage, who is hoping to replace Lamar Smith (R-San Antonio) as Sixth Street's Representative in Congress (CD 21), will be present, as will Andy Brown, an Austin attorney who has announced for HD 48 against Todd Baxter, and also Mark Strama, the Democratic incumbent in a swing district, HD 50. One of the most critical aspects of our caucus will be discussing how we can help secure re-election for strong progressives like Strama who have stayed true to their base while representing close districts.
Judge Charlie Baird was formerly on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and was one of the last Democratic judges elected to statewide office. He is a candidate for the 299th Judicial District Court in Travis County and will be represented at the caucus by Glen Maxey, former member of the Texas House, Democracy for Texas political director and Baird's campaign manager. Judge Baird wants to generate public discussion, utilizing the Lone Star blogosphere, of the possibility of reforming judicial elections in Texas.
And LGRL of Texas will be represented at the Caucus in connection with the upcoming vote on the proposed Marriage Amendment to the state Constitution. LGRL is very interested in working with us Texas blogmeisters to get the word out about the discrimination proposed by the Amendment and its unintended consequences if enacted.
There's more, a whole hell of a lot more, but I'm going to try to dole it out in bite-size pieces over the weekend.
Please stay tuned ...
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston attorney and Democratic candidate for the United States Senate seat now held by Kay Bailey Hutchison, who will be represented by her campaign blogger Seth Davidson. Radnofsky has posted recently at Burnt Orange Report and Off the Kuff.com and will also be at our blogger's breakfast on Sunday with Markos and Jerome.
Chris Bell, exploring a run for Governor of Texas, will be represented by operations manager and blogger Tim McCann. Bell has participated in conference calls with the Lone Star blogosphere -- most recently this week -- and will also be on the Saturday panel called "The DeLay Factor" with Richard Morrison, whose campaign against the Bugman last fall rocked the establishment, and Lou Dubose, whose book "The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress" is a fine primer for DeLay watchers.
David Van Os, candidate for Texas Attorney General, will appear at the caucus in person accompanied by Dave Collins, chair of his steering committee. I'm privileged to know Van Os from my earliest days as an activist in connecting to him through the Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party. Van Os is hosting a campaign reception immediately following the Bloggers' Caucus Friday evening from 6:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M. at Nuevo Leon Restaurant, 1501 E. 6th.
John Courage, who is hoping to replace Lamar Smith (R-San Antonio) as Sixth Street's Representative in Congress (CD 21), will be present, as will Andy Brown, an Austin attorney who has announced for HD 48 against Todd Baxter, and also Mark Strama, the Democratic incumbent in a swing district, HD 50. One of the most critical aspects of our caucus will be discussing how we can help secure re-election for strong progressives like Strama who have stayed true to their base while representing close districts.
Judge Charlie Baird was formerly on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and was one of the last Democratic judges elected to statewide office. He is a candidate for the 299th Judicial District Court in Travis County and will be represented at the caucus by Glen Maxey, former member of the Texas House, Democracy for Texas political director and Baird's campaign manager. Judge Baird wants to generate public discussion, utilizing the Lone Star blogosphere, of the possibility of reforming judicial elections in Texas.
And LGRL of Texas will be represented at the Caucus in connection with the upcoming vote on the proposed Marriage Amendment to the state Constitution. LGRL is very interested in working with us Texas blogmeisters to get the word out about the discrimination proposed by the Amendment and its unintended consequences if enacted.
There's more, a whole hell of a lot more, but I'm going to try to dole it out in bite-size pieces over the weekend.
Please stay tuned ...
The Bogdanoff papers
A fascinating book on the Bogdanoff affair and the rest of physics: click and buy.One of the topics that has not been discussed on this blog yet is the Bogdanoff affair (or Bogdanov, if you use another spelling).
The book is published in French on January 24th, 2008 by Presses de la renaissance. See also the table of contents of L'equation Bogdanov.
Let me remind you: Alan Sokal from NYU became famous because he was able to submit a paper on "Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to a renowned journal called "Social Text" and published by the postmodern social science experts at Duke University. The paper was a continuous flow of nonsense: for example it argued that the value of PI changes with the amount of political pressure and discrimination. It flattered these social scientists and repeated some of their weirdest opinions about the nature of science and its interactions with the society. Although it had to be clear to anyone who has an idea about the world of physics that a physics professor could never seriously write these things, the editors simply published it. Once they accepted his work, Sokal simultaneously published another article that revealed that the paper in "Social Text" was a hoax.
Incidentally, Plato has pointed out that the process of writing lit crit articles has been completely automatized and some of the best postmodern essays today are generated by Postmodernism Generator. Reload and read a couple of them, they are very good.
Later, two French journalists and scientific comedians with Russian names, namely Gritchka Bogdanoff and Igor Bogdanoff (whom the French TV audience knows as geniuses from a certain TV show), published something in "Classical and Quantum Gravity" that many journalists promoted as the "reverse Sokal hoax".Actually, the originator of the conjecture that the paper was another hoax was apparently no one else than John Baez. As of 2005, it seems pretty clear that this widely accepted conjecture - that the paper was a hoax - was not correct and it never had any experimental support; the only point supporting Baez's speculation was that he knew that the Bogdanoff brothers were also a kind of journalists and showmen.
I view such a sociological argument as an irrelevant example of silly discrimination because the journalists have undoubtedly the right to try to learn physics and contribute to it and there is no physical law that could make such attempts completely impossible although most of us feel that such an approach to becomes a physicist is unlikely.
In 2005 it seems pretty clear that the Bogdanoff brothers, although they may be viewed as physics outsiders, honestly tried to study physics and propose and realize an interesting idea and the paper in CQG was also a result of many months of interactions with many physicists who tried to cure the problems of the previous versions of Bogdanoffs' paper.
Baez called it a "reverse" Sokal hoax because the authors are more famous as actors but they successfully submitted a paper on physics. I will discuss the content of the paper later. If you're at a university, you should be able to access the full text of the article (for example via hollis.harvard.edu). A very detailed summary of the affair was written by
You must realize that many points of John Baez are his personal conspiratory theories that were later adopted by the media. But others have written comments about it, too - for example Peter Woit or Jacques Distler. The lesson is pretty serious and ambiguous, I think. However, let me first say that all physicists seem to agree that
- the detailed structure of the paper (and very similar papers published elsewhere) probably makes no sense - at least no one has been able to understand the content of the paper in detail; I am not a new Planck who has been able to identify new Einsteins either ;-)
- isolated pieces of the paper are more or less true - and they were probably copied from other papers
- the brothers have had a financial interest to promote themselves as geniuses because it helps their books (and other things) to be sold well in France and elsewhere - which is at least one of the reasons why they would continue to say that the papers were serious even if they were not
However, the question whether papers like that should be published is dividing the community of mathematical and theoretical physics. Some of the papers of the Bogdanoff brothers are really painful and clearly silly - for example those that discuss the origin of inertia and/or combine the pendulum with the hyperspace. But the most famous paper about the solution of the initial singularity is a bit different; it is more sophisticated.
Let me finally present my summary of the paper.
- They want to resolve the initial singularity of the Universe - a very difficult question
- They open a good question whether the signature of spacetime is allowed to fluctuate
- They conclude that it can
- Near the origin of time, they know that they are in the Planckian regime
- They propose a new relation between this Planckian regime and the "zero scale" regime
- The zero scale regime is described by a topological field theory
- They even define what the right observables should be - and in my opinion, this is one of the punch lines that shows that they're either pretty smart or someone helped them: the observables are replaced by homology cycles on the moduli space of gravitational instantons; are you sure that this won't be the ingenious final explanation of the origin time in the geometric language that we will understand in 2030? I am not sure - it could well be an extension of the ideas of quantum foam from topological string theory
- They show a lot of formulae - many of them apparently being correct basic formulae copied from elsewhere - involving quantum groups, Lagrangians of N=2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states, topological field theory, various index-like invariants etc.
- They thank the right people, including C. Kounnas and S. Majid (a co-father of quantum groups). One of the acknowledgements that could have determined the fate of the paper was thanking to Edward Witten for "some determinant conversations" and it appears in the last sentence; otherwise the paper can't be classified as a string theory paper
Once again, the links between the ideas and formulae do not make sense to me, but it would be much harder for me to show that (and why) this paper is nonsense as opposed to many other papers, including some papers that are also published. (I think that it would be harder for them to write a paper about string theory without knowing anything properly if they wanted to hide that it is nonsense; string theory has much more strict rules.)
Moreover, I really think that they ask many important questions and propose intriguing possible answers. Although they were apparently considered to be weak students, their quality of choosing rather important questions and attach conceivably relevant jargon and formulae could be compared with the quality of some papers written by pretty well-known physicists. Therefore it does not surprise me much that Roman Jackiw said that the paper satisfied everything he expects from an acceptable paper - the knowledge of the jargon and some degree of original ideas. (And be sure that Jackiw, Kounnas, and Majid were not the only ones with this kind of a conclusion.)
I agree with this description although my policy would always be not to accept paper unless I can check that all essential things are more or less correct or at least not stupid in such a way that many people could immediately tell and that the paper will be useful to some people I know. In this particular case, I would probably decline to review their paper as being "not my field of expertise".
These questions about the Planckian quantum cosmology are very attractive and we know too little so that it is inevitable that a paper about them must be fuzzy to some extent. Moreover, such mostly speculative papers always existed somewhere and therefore the situation is not just a result of a postmodern society. The postmodern character of this "acceptable" paper only reflects the fact that we have made very little progress in understanding of the very beginning of the Universe.
Do you think that the signature of spacetime may fluctuate? In what sense can the geometries with different signature (or complex geometries) contribute to the path integral? Is the supershort regime of quantum gravity inherently topological so that the continuous degrees of freedom disappear? I think that these are important questions that may eventually become meaningful, and I also think that such an observation about a paper is usually enough for most of us to justify a paper with some proposed answers to these questions.
Once again, quantum cosmology and the science about the very young, Planckian universe is a rather speculative subject, and in this context, I would expect that the words will come before the formulae. If someone claims to have solved the problem of the origin of time, she or he should explain whether the initial state has to be specified, or whether it is unique. She or he should say what is the full class of the final states into which the initial state(s) can evolve, and how the probabilities (or whatever replaces them) should be calculated. Is the unitarity preserved in one way or another, or is it completely sacrificed? Neither of these questions has an obvious answer and they're more important than some formulae as the Bogdanoffs' paper shows, I would say. Of course that a convincing piece of evidence for one conclusion or another will eventually arise from some formulae but it does not diminish the importance of the qualitative answers.
Some papers seem to pretend that the solution of the difficult questions - such as Bogdanoffs' initial singularity - is a purely technical generalization of the known machinery in physics. I beg to disagree. There is a lot of conceptual ignorance we have about these questions, and the difficult task is not just about removing the apparent infinities of the singularity but also about the right questions that may be asked in this context. This is inevitably a lot of "philosophy" and it must be so.
Technically, their paper connects too many things. It would be too good if all these ideas and (correct) formulae were necessary for a justification of a working solution to the initial singularity problem. But if one accepts that the papers about these difficult questions don't have to be just a well-defined science but maybe also a bit of inspiring art, the brothers have done a pretty good job, I think. And I want to know the answers to many questions that are opened in their paper.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
One Tough Grandma is about to say something
... about her 2006 plans.
Lots of other bloggers are reporting and speculating on this rumor/news.
Here's my take:
1. This has to chap Kay Bailey's ass. Now she has to a) announce her own intentions sooner than she planned in order to avoid being left in the starting gate, or b) continue shilly-shallying and risk looking indecisive.
2. Rick Perry's going to have his hide torn off between now and next spring. And he'll have to spend millions of dollars to try and lock down the nomination, money he could have saved for autumn, 2006.
3. It makes a Kinky candidacy either less likely or more formidable, depending on your POV. Friedman needs something like 50,000* signatures of registered voters who can't have voted in either primary next May, and he has a small window after those primaries to gather them. So if he can get on the ballot -- a tall task, considering how many people will be drawn to a GOP primary with Perry and Hutchison and Strayhorn and a Dem primary with possibly Chris Bell and maybe John Sharp -- he stands a reasonable chance of drawing off that 15 or perhaps 20% of general election votes, giving him kingmaker status.
Dammit, I've got to get to Costco for a case of Orville Redenbacher's ...
*Update: An e-mail to me corrects the numbers of signatures required for an independent candidacy to between 45,000 and 50,000. Holy shit.
Lots of other bloggers are reporting and speculating on this rumor/news.
Here's my take:
1. This has to chap Kay Bailey's ass. Now she has to a) announce her own intentions sooner than she planned in order to avoid being left in the starting gate, or b) continue shilly-shallying and risk looking indecisive.
2. Rick Perry's going to have his hide torn off between now and next spring. And he'll have to spend millions of dollars to try and lock down the nomination, money he could have saved for autumn, 2006.
3. It makes a Kinky candidacy either less likely or more formidable, depending on your POV. Friedman needs something like 50,000* signatures of registered voters who can't have voted in either primary next May, and he has a small window after those primaries to gather them. So if he can get on the ballot -- a tall task, considering how many people will be drawn to a GOP primary with Perry and Hutchison and Strayhorn and a Dem primary with possibly Chris Bell and maybe John Sharp -- he stands a reasonable chance of drawing off that 15 or perhaps 20% of general election votes, giving him kingmaker status.
Dammit, I've got to get to Costco for a case of Orville Redenbacher's ...
*Update: An e-mail to me corrects the numbers of signatures required for an independent candidacy to between 45,000 and 50,000. Holy shit.
Tomorrow's going to be a bad day for the Bush administration
Tomorrow morning, Rep. Walter Jones will announce, along with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, the bipartisan legislation that will call on President Bush to "to set a plan for beginning the phase-out of US troops in Iraq." They might be joined by another conservative Republican, John Duncan of Tennessee, who yesterday called for an end to "a totally unnecessary war".
(The legislation itself sounds kinda mealy-mouthed to me, but it's a long way from where we -- that would be us as well as "Congressman Freedom Fries" -- were just a few months ago. )
Tomorrow afternoon, Cong. John Conyers will open hearings on the Downing Street Minutes, which will be carried live by several out-of-the-mainstream outlets. If you should happen to need to know more about what DSM is, then look here.
Since the so-called liberal media is finally coming off its celebrity trial intoxication, maybe it will cover some real news tomorrow. But even if it doesn't, you'll be able to find out the truth...
... if you just dig a little for it.
(The legislation itself sounds kinda mealy-mouthed to me, but it's a long way from where we -- that would be us as well as "Congressman Freedom Fries" -- were just a few months ago. )
Tomorrow afternoon, Cong. John Conyers will open hearings on the Downing Street Minutes, which will be carried live by several out-of-the-mainstream outlets. If you should happen to need to know more about what DSM is, then look here.
Since the so-called liberal media is finally coming off its celebrity trial intoxication, maybe it will cover some real news tomorrow. But even if it doesn't, you'll be able to find out the truth...
... if you just dig a little for it.
Democracy Fest on C-SPAN this Saturday
Via Karl-T at BOR, Democracy Fest will have a segment aired on C-SPAN this Saturday at about 3:50 CST. One of the breakout sessions I wouldn't miss for the world, "The DeLay Factor", moderated by Lou Dubose and featuring Richard Morrison and Chris Bell, will be the feature.
TiVos ready, set ...
TiVos ready, set ...
Hep-th today
There are quite a few interesting papers on hep-th today and many of us, including Peter Woit, could enjoy them. Some examples:
- hep-th/0506118 by Hamilton, Kabat, Lifschytz, Lowe. They use the example of AdS2 as a prototype for constructing the bulk local operators in terms of the boundary operators. One of their conclusions is that only operators at the points on the boundary that are spacelike separated from the given point in the bulk are used in global AdS.
- hep-th/0506104 by Cornalba and Costa. They argue - well - that the closed time-like curves may be consistent with unitarity for "right" values of Newton's constant - or, equivalently, the angular momentum of the black hole (integer or half-integer). One may imagine that closed time-like curves are OK if their periodicity is a multiple of the wavelength, but it is tougher to preserve these special properties with interactions included. They argue that although the closed curves break unitarity order by order in perturbation theory, the whole result is OK because it is dominated by graviton exchange where the graviton has the right wavelength. It's hard to believe it, but they have some evidence.
- hep-th/0506106 by Nieto. Matroids and M-theory - or M(atroid) theory. Nieto has written many papers about the subject. An oriented matroid is a finite set E of objects together with a function taking values in {-1,0,1} defined for every subset of E with r (rank) elements that is completely antisymmetric and satisfies other properties. Obviously, it is a kind of a discrete counterpart of differential forms or elementary simplices of homology, but how it can tell us something realistic about M-theory is not clear to me so far. Comments welcome, once again.
- hep-th/0506110 by Emparan and Mateos. Virtually all calculations of black hole (or black "object") entropy in string theory reduce to Cardy's formula. They argue that it is possible to interpret this formula geometrically in the bulk using "Komar integrals" that are equal to the "dimension" entering the Cardy formula if one evaluates them at the horizon. Everything is about the 3D BTZ black holes that are kind of found in all calculable examples. The quantity that becomes the "dimension" is typically a squared angular momentum, and therefore the square root - that appears in the Cardy formula - can give you the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. It's still not clear to me whether they argue that they understand why the result must be "A/4G" for all the known examples.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
This is a "Michael Jackson-Free" Zone
Always has been, always will be.
Last night I tried to listen to two things at once: Chris Bell on his conference call with Blogville, Texas and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in person locally.
I had dialed in, we had called the roll, and Tim McCann -- Bell's nearly-a-campaign operations manager -- was discussing the numbers on the House Parties held Sunday. I was proceeding to my seat in the Hobby Center just a few minutes before the program's opening.
And my phone dropped the call. And couldn't get it back up. Unless I went outside.
So your best reports will be found here and here.
I'm afraid I can't even give a good account of RFK Jr.'s discussion of our environmental woes, and they are woeful. He dispenses so much information that I simply couldn't keep up with it all. I noticed a woman a row in front of me taking shorthand, and she quit a few minutes after I did.
Here are a few snips of what I could assimilate:
Consider the devastation of Appalachia by the coal mining companies, whose product spins our country's electricity generators, which results in emissions loading up our breathable air with particulate that's choking our children (the incidence of juvenile asthma is skyrocketing) and causing our planet to warm up like an asphalt parking lot in Houston in June. With July and August on the way.
Consider the pollution of our rivers and lakes, where the fish we catch and eat has so much mercury now that it is dangerous -- approaching deadly -- to continue doing so. Kennedy's own recently-tested blood mercury levels are twice the recommended safe level, and his doctor claims that if he were a pregnant female, the child he would bear would have -- not might, would -- have significant cognitive impairment.
There was so much more -- the Bush administration's hand in all this, with all of the various lobbyists and corporate cronies now writing the laws meant to safeguard our environment for your children in the future. To use only the most recent example, it was revealed that a lackey for the American Petroleum Institute named Philip Cooney was editing the government's reports on global warming to eliminate the blame on the oil companies (and by extension the auto manufacturers for dragging their feet on hybrid vehicles and the Congress for failing to strengthen MPG standards, and on and on).
And then there's the complicity-by-indolence of our corporate media, to say nothing of the right-wing propaganda organs.
Kennedy noted that in his speeches before conservative groups, he gets exactly the same reaction as he does when he speaks at a liberal college campus; the one difference being that members of the mostly Republican audience invariably ask afterwards: "Why haven't we been hearing this before?" And his answer is "Because you're watching FOX News."
Go read this interview for more. And if that strikes a chord, read his book.
Update: Local Pacifica affiliate KPFT will broadcast a recording of RFK Jr.'s speech this Thursday evening, June 16, beginning at 7 pm CST. Streaming link also available there.
Last night I tried to listen to two things at once: Chris Bell on his conference call with Blogville, Texas and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in person locally.
I had dialed in, we had called the roll, and Tim McCann -- Bell's nearly-a-campaign operations manager -- was discussing the numbers on the House Parties held Sunday. I was proceeding to my seat in the Hobby Center just a few minutes before the program's opening.
And my phone dropped the call. And couldn't get it back up. Unless I went outside.
So your best reports will be found here and here.
I'm afraid I can't even give a good account of RFK Jr.'s discussion of our environmental woes, and they are woeful. He dispenses so much information that I simply couldn't keep up with it all. I noticed a woman a row in front of me taking shorthand, and she quit a few minutes after I did.
Here are a few snips of what I could assimilate:
Consider the devastation of Appalachia by the coal mining companies, whose product spins our country's electricity generators, which results in emissions loading up our breathable air with particulate that's choking our children (the incidence of juvenile asthma is skyrocketing) and causing our planet to warm up like an asphalt parking lot in Houston in June. With July and August on the way.
Consider the pollution of our rivers and lakes, where the fish we catch and eat has so much mercury now that it is dangerous -- approaching deadly -- to continue doing so. Kennedy's own recently-tested blood mercury levels are twice the recommended safe level, and his doctor claims that if he were a pregnant female, the child he would bear would have -- not might, would -- have significant cognitive impairment.
There was so much more -- the Bush administration's hand in all this, with all of the various lobbyists and corporate cronies now writing the laws meant to safeguard our environment for your children in the future. To use only the most recent example, it was revealed that a lackey for the American Petroleum Institute named Philip Cooney was editing the government's reports on global warming to eliminate the blame on the oil companies (and by extension the auto manufacturers for dragging their feet on hybrid vehicles and the Congress for failing to strengthen MPG standards, and on and on).
And then there's the complicity-by-indolence of our corporate media, to say nothing of the right-wing propaganda organs.
Kennedy noted that in his speeches before conservative groups, he gets exactly the same reaction as he does when he speaks at a liberal college campus; the one difference being that members of the mostly Republican audience invariably ask afterwards: "Why haven't we been hearing this before?" And his answer is "Because you're watching FOX News."
Go read this interview for more. And if that strikes a chord, read his book.
Update: Local Pacifica affiliate KPFT will broadcast a recording of RFK Jr.'s speech this Thursday evening, June 16, beginning at 7 pm CST. Streaming link also available there.
Computer models and tossing a coin
Is the following story from a different field something that we can learn anything from?
As described in a press release, a team of researchers from Oxford has published a work - one that should have been done a long time ago - in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.
What is their contribution? They were apparently the first ones in the field of climatic biodiversity science who had a great and original :-) idea: to actually test the models. So they imagined that they returned to the 1970s and took 16 current climate models - more concretely, models that predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity - with them, trying to predict the ranges where different species would be found in 1991.
In 90% of the British bird species, the models could not even agree whether their range would expand or shrink. In 10% of cases, the models agreed: in one half of these 10% of cases, the reality (as we know it in 2005) agreed with the models, in the other half, it disagreed. In other words, you could also toss a coin - or even better: ask someone who likes the birds - to make a prediction. The results would be equally solid except that you would save hundreds of millions of dollars.
Better results (75% success rate) are obtained if you choose the "right" subset of the models and decide "collectively", but I don't exactly know whether it is a well-defined algorithm or a joke.
Now, frankly speaking, climate bioscience has never really been a part of the respectable core of sciences (it was always rather a sexy fad), so it should not be surprising when it is identified as cargo cult science or a computer game. But can high energy physics take a lesson from this story?
Difference from high-energy physics
Well, any possible lesson is guaranteed to be very limited. The reason is that we seem to be sure - because of very good reasons - that whatever we know about the past decades in (experimental) physics is explained by the Standard Model and General Relativity. If we took these current theories - the counterparts of those 16 models - to the past, we would almost certainly succeed in our predictions of the past that used to be the future. We think that we have done this gedanken experiment hundreds of times.
But is there something to say about the beyond-the-Standard-Model physics? I think that there is something to say about the principles that are meant to direct our search for new theories, but that are independent of their technical details. This includes the problem of vacuum selection in particular.
For example, one may conjecture that the theory describing Nature should be the simplest theory that allows for the existence of life and satisfies some mild conditions - for example, it contains the last well-established theory as a subset (today, the term means the Standard Model). Or alternatively, another grand principle may say that whatever objects (or terms in the Lagrangian) whose properties we do not understand are fundamental objects and the relevant parameters are determined - or at least we should believe that they are determined - by chance or the requirement that the life exists.
If we returned to the 1960s or the early 1970s - much like the Oxford climate scientists - both of these grand principles would have simply failed. They would have failed to predict some particles and many relations between them. In my opinion, this is an indication that these grand principles are not good enough principles and are likely to be incorrect. Until we actually see some new physics, we must unfortunately rely on these semi-philosophical considerations.
At any rate, one should try to test various choices that have alternatives and various approaches - especially those that are expected to be studied for years or decades - against all past data we actually have. And we should always try to estimate how non-trivial our arguments supporting a certain claim - or even more importantly, arguments supporting a whole direction or paradigm - are.
Obviously, the situation of the climatic biodiversity scientists is much simpler. They should have compared the models with reality a long time ago, conclude that the particular models they had were useless, despite their efforts to make them realistic, and move on. And if no progress in constructing predictable models is made for decades, they should simply temporarily give up and start to think that a quantitative predictable science about their favorite subject is impossible. Our situation is more subtle because it is tougher to compare our thinking with experiments. It is more difficult to show that we are on the right track, but it is also more difficult to show that we are on a wrong track. But these two possibilities should always be studied in a balanced way, I think.
This also applies to string theory where the experiments are replaced by calculations of more concrete examples of something, and these experiments are meant to decide about the fate of more general principles that we want to believe. We have been convinced that the problem of quantum gravity has essentially a unique solution currectly called string/M-theory, and I am still convinced that there is a huge body of evidence that this statement is true if the words are properly defined.
However, being on the right track in the big questions does not imply that we will always be on the right track. The fact that many dualities between string theories and other mathematical structures seem to be obviously correct does not imply that all conjectured dualities are correct. The fact that a particular simple vacuum exists and is consistent does not imply that all proposed vacua - or even all vacua proposed by the same authors - are consistent and exist. We don't seem to ask these questions too often.
Five minutes for a duality
In the mid 1990s, we had the duality revolution. One of the defining features was the following law that Tom Banks explained to me:
As described in a press release, a team of researchers from Oxford has published a work - one that should have been done a long time ago - in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.
What is their contribution? They were apparently the first ones in the field of climatic biodiversity science who had a great and original :-) idea: to actually test the models. So they imagined that they returned to the 1970s and took 16 current climate models - more concretely, models that predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity - with them, trying to predict the ranges where different species would be found in 1991.
In 90% of the British bird species, the models could not even agree whether their range would expand or shrink. In 10% of cases, the models agreed: in one half of these 10% of cases, the reality (as we know it in 2005) agreed with the models, in the other half, it disagreed. In other words, you could also toss a coin - or even better: ask someone who likes the birds - to make a prediction. The results would be equally solid except that you would save hundreds of millions of dollars.
Better results (75% success rate) are obtained if you choose the "right" subset of the models and decide "collectively", but I don't exactly know whether it is a well-defined algorithm or a joke.
Now, frankly speaking, climate bioscience has never really been a part of the respectable core of sciences (it was always rather a sexy fad), so it should not be surprising when it is identified as cargo cult science or a computer game. But can high energy physics take a lesson from this story?
Difference from high-energy physics
Well, any possible lesson is guaranteed to be very limited. The reason is that we seem to be sure - because of very good reasons - that whatever we know about the past decades in (experimental) physics is explained by the Standard Model and General Relativity. If we took these current theories - the counterparts of those 16 models - to the past, we would almost certainly succeed in our predictions of the past that used to be the future. We think that we have done this gedanken experiment hundreds of times.
But is there something to say about the beyond-the-Standard-Model physics? I think that there is something to say about the principles that are meant to direct our search for new theories, but that are independent of their technical details. This includes the problem of vacuum selection in particular.
For example, one may conjecture that the theory describing Nature should be the simplest theory that allows for the existence of life and satisfies some mild conditions - for example, it contains the last well-established theory as a subset (today, the term means the Standard Model). Or alternatively, another grand principle may say that whatever objects (or terms in the Lagrangian) whose properties we do not understand are fundamental objects and the relevant parameters are determined - or at least we should believe that they are determined - by chance or the requirement that the life exists.
If we returned to the 1960s or the early 1970s - much like the Oxford climate scientists - both of these grand principles would have simply failed. They would have failed to predict some particles and many relations between them. In my opinion, this is an indication that these grand principles are not good enough principles and are likely to be incorrect. Until we actually see some new physics, we must unfortunately rely on these semi-philosophical considerations.
At any rate, one should try to test various choices that have alternatives and various approaches - especially those that are expected to be studied for years or decades - against all past data we actually have. And we should always try to estimate how non-trivial our arguments supporting a certain claim - or even more importantly, arguments supporting a whole direction or paradigm - are.
Obviously, the situation of the climatic biodiversity scientists is much simpler. They should have compared the models with reality a long time ago, conclude that the particular models they had were useless, despite their efforts to make them realistic, and move on. And if no progress in constructing predictable models is made for decades, they should simply temporarily give up and start to think that a quantitative predictable science about their favorite subject is impossible. Our situation is more subtle because it is tougher to compare our thinking with experiments. It is more difficult to show that we are on the right track, but it is also more difficult to show that we are on a wrong track. But these two possibilities should always be studied in a balanced way, I think.
This also applies to string theory where the experiments are replaced by calculations of more concrete examples of something, and these experiments are meant to decide about the fate of more general principles that we want to believe. We have been convinced that the problem of quantum gravity has essentially a unique solution currectly called string/M-theory, and I am still convinced that there is a huge body of evidence that this statement is true if the words are properly defined.
However, being on the right track in the big questions does not imply that we will always be on the right track. The fact that many dualities between string theories and other mathematical structures seem to be obviously correct does not imply that all conjectured dualities are correct. The fact that a particular simple vacuum exists and is consistent does not imply that all proposed vacua - or even all vacua proposed by the same authors - are consistent and exist. We don't seem to ask these questions too often.
Five minutes for a duality
In the mid 1990s, we had the duality revolution. One of the defining features was the following law that Tom Banks explained to me:
- If you can't show that a conjectured duality is wrong in 5 minutes, it must be correct.
Because Peter Woit did not have a sufficient capacity to understand an essential point, let me emphasize that the theorem above has been really true in the case of tens of important dualities, and the initial five-minutes-long checks were followed by roughly 10 years of other tests. And the dualities have passed all of them.
Unfortunately, this principle was also applied years after the revolution when it was already incorrect. The dualities between the highly supersymmetric descriptions are most likely to be correct because both sides of the duality are extremely constrained and most likely unique. Together with a couple of checks, this proves the story.
But are we really sure that these dualities generalize to the non-supersymmetric context, for example? Most of the constraints go away and the quantitative precise checks are usually impossible. Virtually all conjectured non-supersymmetric dualities (except a few exceptions in the topological context) are suspicious, and even those that are true may be true only because we define one of the sides to be dual to the other - while other equally consistent definitions may exist, too.
One can't really get a result for free and until one finds the correct theory that can be checked arbitrarily precisely, there is a principle of complementarity between the number of tools and possibilities that may be used to explain XY, and the probability that such a constructed explanation is correct. If we just decide do solve some of our problems by adding many new tools (or many backgrounds), it may help, but unless there are independent arguments, such a move also reduces the probability that the solution is correct. Only if an independent argument - that the probability of the model's being correct drops less than the amount of arbitrary assumptions and players we add - exists, one may talk about progress. Otherwise it's just a confusing violation of Occam's razor.
Hybrid mesons
According to Charles Seife's article in the June 10th, 2005 issue of Science, KEK has discovered two bizarre particles:
- X(3872)
- Y(3940)
Monday, June 13, 2005
Lisa Randall in England
Lisa Randall is promoting her book in England where her advanced popular book, The Warped Passages, has been selling for a couple of days. Click the cover image above to access the book web page on the British Amazon.
But what I definitely want to recommend you is the
- BBC radio interview with Lisa Randall (RealAudio)
Those who are interested in recent Lisa's appearences in the media should also look at
- The Telegraph
- Times Online
- Physics Today (last page)
- New Scientist (new, about gender and science)
- Brockman's page (about Lisa)
- Times Online (with Sarah Baxter)
- Guardian (Education)
Sunday, June 12, 2005
"Freedom Fries" Congressman quits on Iraq
I find myself speechless -- well, nearly -- following the interview with Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina on "This Week" just now.
The Republican Congressman, a member of the House Armed Services committee, the guy who compelled the Capitol cafeteria to rename two of its offerings "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast", will next week send a letter to the White House calling for a 'date certain' withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
When asked on whom he blamed the failures of the Iraq War --and was prodded by Stephanopoulis to blame Rumsfeld, or Bush -- he said:
I cannot say I have ever heard a Republican use the word 'neoconservative' like that.
Rep. Jones apparently came to his change of heart after writing letters to the families of the fallen (and receiving letters back from them), and after attending a funeral for a soldier at Camp LeJeune, who among his survivors left twins he never saw.
The finger's out of the dike, folks.
When a GOP congressman of this man's once-proud conviction jumps off the war bandwagon -- the one, incidentally, Joe Biden is still on -- it's the beginning of the end.
For this war. Thank God.
There's no transcript up yet at ABC News.com, but when there is, I'll post it in the comments.
Update: Congressman Jones, along with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, will announce tomorrow their bipartisan legislation that will call on President Bush to 'set a plan for beginning the phase-out of US troops in Iraq.' A press conference will begin at 10:30 a.m. (presumably EDT).
The Republican Congressman, a member of the House Armed Services committee, the guy who compelled the Capitol cafeteria to rename two of its offerings "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast", will next week send a letter to the White House calling for a 'date certain' withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
When asked on whom he blamed the failures of the Iraq War --and was prodded by Stephanopoulis to blame Rumsfeld, or Bush -- he said:
"I blame the neoconservatives in the runup prior for providing bad information to the administration."
I cannot say I have ever heard a Republican use the word 'neoconservative' like that.
Rep. Jones apparently came to his change of heart after writing letters to the families of the fallen (and receiving letters back from them), and after attending a funeral for a soldier at Camp LeJeune, who among his survivors left twins he never saw.
The finger's out of the dike, folks.
When a GOP congressman of this man's once-proud conviction jumps off the war bandwagon -- the one, incidentally, Joe Biden is still on -- it's the beginning of the end.
For this war. Thank God.
There's no transcript up yet at ABC News.com, but when there is, I'll post it in the comments.
Update: Congressman Jones, along with Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, will announce tomorrow their bipartisan legislation that will call on President Bush to 'set a plan for beginning the phase-out of US troops in Iraq.' A press conference will begin at 10:30 a.m. (presumably EDT).
"Real Texas heroes"
Mrs. Diddie and I arrived about two hours into the event, so we missed meeting some of our fellow blogonians, but we did manage to make the tail end of the program honoring Texas Democratic legislators (plus, the food was good).
Among the pols in attendance were candidates Chris Bell, Nick Lampson and Barbara Radnofsky, US Congresspersons Sheila Jackson-Lee and Al Green, and Texas House members Hubert Vo, Al Edwards, Garnet Coleman, and Melissa Noriega (serving in the stead of her husband Rick, who is completing his tour of duty in Afghanistan).
One of the really marvelous things about being an activist in a city like Houston is the opportunity to meet personally so many of the most important people serving us; people who are not just in the headlines but on the front lines, doing the real fighting.
And next weekend we'll be in Austin for DemocracyFest, and that lineup includes Howard Dean, Congs. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Lloyd Doggett, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, a blogger's caucus and breakfast with Kos and Jerome of MyDD, a seminar focusing on "The DeLay Factor" with Chris Bell, Richard Morrison, and Lou Dubose, and Nathan Wilcox of DriveDemocracy.org and Glen Maxey of Democracy for Texas and many more.
Yes, we'll keep ourselves entertained as well.
I hope all this hobnobbing with the powerful and famous doesn't go to my head ...
Among the pols in attendance were candidates Chris Bell, Nick Lampson and Barbara Radnofsky, US Congresspersons Sheila Jackson-Lee and Al Green, and Texas House members Hubert Vo, Al Edwards, Garnet Coleman, and Melissa Noriega (serving in the stead of her husband Rick, who is completing his tour of duty in Afghanistan).
One of the really marvelous things about being an activist in a city like Houston is the opportunity to meet personally so many of the most important people serving us; people who are not just in the headlines but on the front lines, doing the real fighting.
And next weekend we'll be in Austin for DemocracyFest, and that lineup includes Howard Dean, Congs. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Lloyd Doggett, Jim Hightower, Molly Ivins, a blogger's caucus and breakfast with Kos and Jerome of MyDD, a seminar focusing on "The DeLay Factor" with Chris Bell, Richard Morrison, and Lou Dubose, and Nathan Wilcox of DriveDemocracy.org and Glen Maxey of Democracy for Texas and many more.
Yes, we'll keep ourselves entertained as well.
I hope all this hobnobbing with the powerful and famous doesn't go to my head ...
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Blogs about physics
I recommend the intelligent readers to ignore this message because it is not too serious. Anyway, Google has become pretty good in finding various blogs about interesting topics in physics. You would not believe how many interesting blogs there are, for example
- Richard Feynman blog
- WMAP blog
- LIGO blog
- horrible CERN blog
- string theory blog
- Einstein frame blog
- reference frame -frames
- higher-dimensional blog
- Summers' sociological blog
- Standard Model blog
- supersymmetry blog
- Lorentz violations blog
- compactification blog
- Sidneyfest
- piano man blog
- topological blog
- Ashoke blog
- Lenny Susskind blog
- heterotic blog
- Frank Wilczek blog (sorry, Betsy)
- Giddings blog
- Gubser blog
- Bousso blog
- Lisa Randall talk
- Raman Sundrum blog
- cosmic string blog
- Jacques' anthropic blog (sorry, Jacques)
- friendly Arkani-Hamed blog
- Andrew Strominger blog
- Jacob Bekenstein blog
- Chapline blog
- quasinormal blog
- Hans Bethe blog
- Gerard 't Hooft blog
- Shelly Glashow blog
- Lee Smolin blog (sorry, Lee)
- Maldacena blog
- Vilenkin blog
- Kavli blog
- E10 blog
- exceptional symmetry blog
- University of Boston blog
- Techexplorer blog
- Sean's textbook blog (sorry, Sean)
- black ring blog
- Hagedorn blog
- entropic principle
- Archimedes notes blog
- Hartle-Hawking blog
- Peter Woit's antistringy blog (sorry, Peter)
- complex surface blog
- viscosity blog
- Oreskes' blog
- optical processing blog
- entropy density blog
RFK Jr. speaks here Monday June 13
He'll be in the Sarofim Hall of the Hobby Center for Performing Arts, along with Mayor Bill White, talking about our environmental challenges in a speech called “A Contract with Our Future,” which explains how our natural surroundings are linked to our work, health, and identity as Americans, and how good environmental policy is good for business. He also wrote Crimes Against Nature, whose first chapter is entitled “The Mess in Texas.”
I'll blog more about his talk on Tuesday; for now here's a sample of an interview he did with SierraSummit2005:
Rest at the link above.
I'll blog more about his talk on Tuesday; for now here's a sample of an interview he did with SierraSummit2005:
Planet (editor Tom Valtin): What is the biggest environmental problem we face in this country today?
Kennedy: George W. Bush, without any rival.
Planet: The Sierra Club obviously feels much the same way. But we found during last year’s elections that when we criticized Bush the person, many people—including Sierra Club members—were angered, and consequently less open to our message. How do we oppose the policies without criticizing the person?
Kennedy: I think you have to do both. Winston Churchill said that you have to just keep telling the truth, and telling it, and telling it. And ultimately, people are going to believe it. It can be frustrating, and of course industry and its indentured servants use every method to discredit you, including saying that you’re tree-huggers, or radicals, or against the president. But you have to persevere. There’s a huge systemic problem in our democracy now, which is the endless negligence of the American press and the huge corporate consolidation of the media. That’s the principal threat to American democracy, and it’s an issue that environmentalists have to take an interest in curing. We have to develop outlets and methods of getting our message across to the American public that don’t rely on the mainstream press, which is now controlled by the right wing and giant corporations who are interested not in informing the public but in entertaining us in order to increase their own revenues.
Rest at the link above.
Friday, June 10, 2005
If you haven't read The Rude Pundit's take on Howard Dean...
... then by all means please go do so now.
It's filled with salty sailor talk, so if that sort of thing bothers you, then don't click here.
Here's just a sample:
Believe me, that's not even the best part.
Hands down Moneyshot Quote of the Week (in a week filled with worthy contenders).
It's filled with salty sailor talk, so if that sort of thing bothers you, then don't click here.
Here's just a sample:
Challenged on the Today show yesterday by Matt "Behold My Stubbly Mane That Indicates I Am a Grown-Up" Lauer, Dean picked up Lauer, slammed him on the faux coffee table and whispered, calmly, in Lauer's ear that Democrats are tired of being the bottoms of the political f*** machine. He said, "They have the agenda of the conservative Christians...the Republicans don't include people. Look, they are outside the mainstream." And Dean wasn't afraid to invoke truly inclusive Democratic ideas: "They have used words like quota to try to separate black from white Americans. They did scapegoat gay Americans by putting an anti-gay amendment on it--in 11 states where gay marriage is already against the law. And they are attacking immigrants. Two--two Republican congressmen, Jim Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo, have incredible anti-immigrant legislation. This is not the way America needs to be." Calling out motherf***ers for f***ing their mothers is as brutally truthful as politics gets.
Believe me, that's not even the best part.
Hands down Moneyshot Quote of the Week (in a week filled with worthy contenders).
GOP stooges end the week losing their minds
A FOX News reporter named Brian Wilson went "batshit crazy" in Harry Reid's office yesterday when nobody aknowledged his screamed questions, and again when no one recognized who he was.
House Judiciary committee chairman Jim Sensenbrenner took his gavel and left his own hearing this morning when he didn't like what was being said. That was either before or after he wrote a note to Howard Dean -- after watching the good doctor slice him and dice him on "Today" -- calling the Democratic chairman "delusional", and then asked him to refrain from personal attacks. (!)
There's more, but I'm laughing too hard to finish typing it ...
... OK, I've caught my breath now.
Bush poll numbers hit a new low, the Coingate scandal is bubbling over, five more Marines killed in Iraq today by the so-called weakened insurgency -- no wonder they're losing it.
Now if our side could only convince Joe Biden to keep his mouth shut ...
House Judiciary committee chairman Jim Sensenbrenner took his gavel and left his own hearing this morning when he didn't like what was being said. That was either before or after he wrote a note to Howard Dean -- after watching the good doctor slice him and dice him on "Today" -- calling the Democratic chairman "delusional", and then asked him to refrain from personal attacks. (!)
There's more, but I'm laughing too hard to finish typing it ...
... OK, I've caught my breath now.
Bush poll numbers hit a new low, the Coingate scandal is bubbling over, five more Marines killed in Iraq today by the so-called weakened insurgency -- no wonder they're losing it.
Now if our side could only convince Joe Biden to keep his mouth shut ...
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