Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

I just discovered an interesting new physics blog:  Cocktail Party Physics.  Interestingly, most of the writers seem to be science journalists rather than researchers, which means they might just have a shot at making this stuff interesting to the layperson.  And, judging from the cocktail recipes on the sidebar of the blog, they might be the sort of Fiziks Types that the URKOBOLD can reach some sort of accommodation with.

David Montgomery, Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Only 34 percent of Texans polled in a University of Texas survey approved of Bush’s handling of the presidency, with just under 10 percent approving “strongly.’’ By contrast, 55 percent disapproved, with 38.7 percent strongly disapproving.

Awesome

Via Poliblog.

Why is the Lord blessing the Ravens today? This makes me angry with God.

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild!"

Bernardine Dohrn, 1969

"But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause."

Michael Goldfard, 2009

But that’s moral equivalence, Jim!

Yes. Yes it is.

Goldfarb link via Greenwald.

I hate to root against Radley, but the humor value of Norv Turner winning a Super Bowl would be too great. Plus, you gotta love those powder-blue unis.

Man, the Lord sure is blessing the Arizona Cardinals so far.

By Thoreau

I just heard some reporter on a cable news network saying that even though Israel can’t stop every rocket or suicide bomber, they can at least destroy Hamas’s will to use rockets and suicide bombers.

Um, yeah, because when a weaker unconventional force motivated by generations-long grievances gets attacked by its enemies, their first thought is “Shit, maybe this isn’t worth it!”

To whatever extent the Palestinians are indeed fanatics (some certainly are, but many aren’t) you can’t destroy a fanatic’s will by attacking him.  However, if you harm enough powerless civilians you can tip them from rational self interest (keeping their heads down and trying to stay out of the fight) to fanaticism (or at least some level of support for fanatics) by convincing them that their rational strategy is hopeless.

I cannot bring myself to take a side on this.  They both started it at some point, and a rich country of 300 million people ought to have more important things to worry about than the fate of some tiny strip of desert contested by various groups of people with historical and religious claims.  At least Iraq has oil.  I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to fight a war there, but at least I can see why people might give a shit about it.  Yeah, yeah, Israelis and Palestinians are fighting for their homes, and even the shittiest home is still your home, but why should we give a shit about it, let alone place substantial economic, military, and diplomatic resources behind one side while dangling the occasional bit of aid before the other side if it pretends to behave?

By Thoreau

Tin foil hat?  Check.

Affinity for medieval mythology and costumes?  Check.

Proficient in self-defense?  Check.

Mr. Torvald Alexander has officially earned a decoder ring!

(Hat-tip to Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles.)

I’m proud to report that my friend Kerry "The Female Filibuster" Howley has been denied entrance to Burma on account of the apparent danger she poses to their scuzzy regime. I’m sorry it screwed up her travel plans, though.

A year ago today, my friend and fellow blogger Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq. Hilzoy has a few thoughts.

Leon Hadar applies the economic concept of "recognition lag" to American foreign policy.

The following "Idiot Watch" item from Sic Semper Tyrannus:

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, ‘Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?’ To which I replied, ‘If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?’ He smiled knowingly and nodded,
‘That’s why we ask.’

Some of the others are funny too, though most of them are "too good to check."

By Thoreau

It’s subscription only, but if you happen to have access to a university library, the latest issue of Nature Methods has several awesome articles on the development of optical microscopy techniques that overcome the diffraction limit.  Translated into layman’s speech, they explain how people are developing microscopes to see things smaller than any microscope could see before (at least when working with visible light).  Before this work was done, the conventional understanding of the laws of physics said it must be impossible.  But some stubborn people made it possible, and now biologists are using these tools.

If you want to know what the theoretical limit is for the speed of one of these techniques, keep your eyes peeled for my article in an upcoming issue of Biophysical Journal.  (And expect another article to come out later this year, showing how resolution factors into these trade-offs, and some surprising results on resolution, speed, and image processing algorithms.)  If you want to see some theoretical models of ways to apply these techniques in lithography, come see one of my students give a talk at the APS March Meeting.

When I give talks on this, a question usually comes up about how far we can go with this, and the questioners usually ask about scenarios that I really don’t think are possible.  And I always tell them that I don’t think their scenarios are possible based on our current understanding and tools.  But then I add that 10 years ago everybody thought that the stuff I’m showing was impossible, so who knows?  Hell, a mere 5 years ago, before I started working in this field, I was teaching optics for photographers, and in the lecture on the resolution limit of a lens I would say that what I’m showing them in that lecture is one of the few timeless results that is unlikely to be supplanted by new technologies (as opposed to, say, the lecture on how a CCD detector works).  And now I’m working on beating the diffraction limit.  So who knows?

Rob Donoghue has a nice appreciation of novelist Donald E Westlake, who died just before the turn of the year.

By Thoreau

Some Connecticut lawmakers are talking about bailing out newspapers.

1) Is there any business that won’t be able to insist that it must be kept alive at the expense of the taxpayers some future generation who will have to shoulder the cost of this borrowing? Once you bail out the rich guys who made bad loans and/or invested a shitload of money in securities based on those bad loans, you’re pretty much obligated to bail out everyone else, since just about anybody looks sympathetic compared to the wealthy dumbasses who participated in the crisis.

2) Who will bail out my little nephews in the future when all the government borrowing catches up with us? Will somebody please think about TEH CHILDREN! THIS IS A CRISIS HERE! THE CHILDREN ARE IN CRISIS!!!11! SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING QUICK TO SAVE THEM!!!! THERE ARE WMD IN IRAQ AND IF WE DO SOMETHING RIGHT NOW WE’LL BE GREETED AS LIBERATORS!!!!

Sorry, got my Hank Paulson hysteria going, and since Paulson hysteria is remarkably similar to our national mood in 2002, I sort of crossed the streams. So, nobody think about marshmellows.

3) If every industry of any significance owes its survival to state intervention, might this have some unhealthy social, political, and economic consequences down the road?