The Stiftung tells interesting tales of how courtier self-interest conflicts with party interest.

Me, I’m dealing with a situation that I’m not yet prepared to blog about, not even with oblique debt ceiling analogies, except to note that while I thought it would be a nightmare it has turned out to be a chance to really show my worth and earn some respect, and learn that I have more friends than I realized in this business.

The most reliable media outlet around is reporting that NASA has discovered an arrogant alien species that likes sarcasm and passive-aggressive language. Methinks I would enjoy interacting with them.  My cow-orkers, of course, would hate it, because B people hate being around A people (let alone A+ species), but I’d love it, because I’m an A person.

OTOH, if they have hipsters, I might have to return to earth, because I’m just not prepared to deal with somebody who can hold forth on why some obscure band can only truly be appreciated if you are able to perceive the ultrasonic harmonics and the transverse vibrations of the sound in the 5th and 6th dimensions.  I’d punch them in their green beer guts bearing t-shirts with ironic messages in the ultraviolet.

Have you ever heard of a situation in which a person at a research university already has a grant, then begins a collaboration with a person at another school, and uses their grant to buy out part of that person’s teaching load?  (Assume that the second school is a place with a heavy teaching load.)

I’m not asking this question because I’m looking to get onto that sort of gravy train.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to, but I suspect that such opportunities are rare so I’m not beating the bushes for this unicorn.  Rather, I ask because I actually have seen this situation–twice!–and both cases had some very particular characteristics.  I’m trying to make the case to somebody that they should not over-estimate the availability of these opportunities and base plans or expectations on the availability of such a plan.  Indeed, even a colleague who is far more optimistic and much better-connected than I am has been unable to land on that gravy train, because his situation lacks the characteristics of the two cases I’ve seen.  (I shall reveal what those characteristics are in another post, but I’d be surprised if you were able to guess accurately.)

Note that I’m NOT referring to a situation in which two people from different schools wrote a grant together and one or more of them got part of their salary covered from it.  Nor am I referring to a case in which two people began a collaboration and one of them used an existing grant to cover some supplies or other research expenses for the collaborator.  I am specifically referring to a situation in which (1) one party has a grant before the collaboration begins and (2) that party uses the grant specifically to cover part of a collaborator’s salary.

We don’t have to limit this to any particular funding agency or any particular country, but FWIW I’ve seen this happen twice with NSF grants.  NSF is generally not happy to cover release time for faculty.  This makes it all the more surprising that I have seen 2 people get release time supported from somebody else’s grant for a collaboration that began AFTER the grant had begun.  Though, I should caution that the people in question had a very large grant, so for all I know they were doing this out of the overhead and hence had fewer (or at least different) rules to abide by.  OTOH, I mentioned above that I know a very optimistic, well-connected guy who has not been able to land on that gravy train, and this guy is well-connected to people who have very big grants.

Anyway, I shall reveal in a future post what unique characteristics applied in those 2 situations, but for now I’m curious if any of our readers have seen such a thing.

Hey, Economist:  You know that whooshing sound you just heard?  That’s the point sailing 50,000 feet above  your head.

RELISHING their country’s reputation as the graveyard of empires, Afghans are proud of having vanquished all the foreign armies that have ventured onto their soil. Yet the Soviet army, the most recent, was not exactly defeated: it withdrew in 1989 because it had wearied of an unpopular war that it struggled to justify to the people at home. Nearly 25 years later, America and its allies risk a similar failure of nerve and will.

If the Afghans are willing to fight until their enemy has no desire to fight, then of course they’ve defeated their enemies.  You don’t have to actually kill every enemy soldier and smash up every enemy tank in order to win a battle.  You just have to get the enemy to retreat.

I don’t know who will go into Afghanistan next, but whoever they are, they will eventually retreat in frustration.

The person who can invent popcorn that tastes as good as movie theater popcorn smells will be a trillionaire. Ditto for the cardiologists who repair the ensuing damage.

Remember last summer when some commenters would ask me if my office politics rants were elaborate analogies for the debt ceiling?  To my surprise, it was in fact an analogy for the debt ceiling.  All of those maneuvers have led us to a situation where we might actually jump off a cliff.  I kind of doubt it–I think that we’ll take a different path, but some people are adamantly insisting that the cliff must remain an option.  Of course, they don’t view it as a jump off a cliff, but trust me, it is.  It is simply unacceptable to make the cliff an option.  It says something about professionalism (or lack thereof) that we’re even willing to think about jumping.

I didn’t realize last summer that we would find ourselves on the edge of a cliff, but I knew that some of the players were the sort who might just take us over a cliff if one presented itself.  Alas, here we are, with white-knuckled hands gripping the armrests, praying that the drivers don’t go over the cliff.

So, yes, commentariat, you were right.  My office politics fortune cookies are elaborate analogies for the debt ceiling.

For some reason I’m going through nostalgia for the 90’s and grad school.  Goddamnit, where’s my time machine?  Anyway, whenever I think about the 90’s, I think about the day that the 90’s ended.  No, not Jan. 1, 2000.  The good times ended 9/11/2001.  Sure, there were ample signs before then that the best times of the 90’s were over, but none of us understood how well and truly over until 9/11.  And I just re-read this thread while procrastinating from a stack of grading.  Goddamnit, a lot went crazy then.  Whatever theory you subscribe to about the anthrax attack, whoever you think did it with however much (or little) help as you care to posit, it’s pretty clear that 9/11 set them off.  Whether it was a cynical ploy to capitalize on 9/11 or a crazy guy who decided to use his stockpile when the world went crazy, 9/11 was almost certainly why that person used it when he did.

Also, a good point is made in comment 4 of that old thread:  The media got really tweaked out over the DC sniper.  Now, I was on the other side of the country, in a particularly stressful part of grad school, and at the start of wedding plans when all of that happened, so it wasn’t the #1 thing to ping on my fear-o-meter, but in retrospect they sure seemed freaked out by it.  As minor as it ultimately was (while murder is always tragic, 11 deaths in a metro area of millions is miniscule), it happened in the heart of Mordor, in the shadow of Barad-dur.  And all of the stenography corps trembled.

If the anthrax hadn’t happened, and if the sniper hadn’t happened, I wonder what sort of country we’d be.  If, after 9/11, somebody could have reached out to the crazy guy who did the anthrax (whoever he may be), or could have narced on the sane order-follower (if you believe that theory), I wonder what would have happened.  And if the sniper had not done it, if somebody had gotten to that troubled man to help him, I wonder what might have happened.

Bruce Schneier outlines one of those great moments in TSA capers.

A blogger who grew up in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is rather mystified by the way that many North Americans use “socialism” to mean “like Western Europe.”

As long as we’re going over strange usages, consider “republic” and “democracy.”  I won’t presume to put words in Clarissa’s mouth, but I somehow doubt that she would characterize the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as being republican in the same way that the “republic, not a democracy!” ranters would use the word.  For that matter, I doubt that my friends from the Islamic Republic of Iran would refer to their country of birth as being republican in the sense that Benjamin Franklin had in mind.  Despite that, there are people who insist that the word “republic” has a very, very specific meaning that is diametrically opposed to “democracy” and is the epitome of freedom.  Perhaps in their usage, but there’s this funny thing about words, whereby a word can have more than one usage, and you usually have an easier time communicating if you at least acknowledge that there are other usages.

I’m not saying that we’re obligated to use the same dictionary as the rest of the world (we don’t even use the same units of measurement as the rest of the world) but at least we should be aware that not everybody uses these words in the same way that some of us do.

I’m reading freshman essays.  That should tell you everything you need to know about my mood.

Despite that, I concur with the statement offered by academics at schools of every tier:  “A lot of our undergrads are much better than our grad students.”*  I am teaching an advanced course that has at least one grad student in it**, and the grad student is nowhere near the top of the class.  Google for gradflakes, my friends.

*I note, however, that nobody has ever said this at my graduate alma mater, aka U Can Study Buzzed.

**It is actually fairly common for grad students to take courses with seniors.  Back in the day, I took an elective course that was offered at the undergrad level, because there was no graduate course offered on that topic, and I hadn’t studied the subject as an undergrad.

The President of Yemen has officially left.  His deputy is of course in charge, and in the interests of looking forward rather than backward he is immune from prosecution.  Still, he’s out of power.  Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.  Good to know that the Arab Spring continues in some form.

Here’s hoping that Bashar Assad has to return to practicing medicine.

One theme of Weis and Hickman fantasy novels, one that carries into much of D&D, is that there must be a balance between good and evil.  Inevitably, those who seek to eradicate evil become overly proud and power-hungry and try to purify the world by force.  This is of course a very important point, but is neutrality the best answer to it?  It is one thing to be indifferent between the oppression of the Kingpriest of Istar and the oppression of the Dragon Highlords of Takhisis.  Same shit, different day.  It is quite another thing to be indifferent between the good God Paladine (whose human incarnation as Fizban is truly awesome) and the evil Goddess Takhisis.  I mean, Paladine himself didn’t seem to be such a big fan of the Kingpriest.  What’s wrong with saying that Good is better than evil, and that self-righteousness is Evil rather than Good?  What is defensible about indifference?

In our world, it’s one thing to decide that the self-righteous leaders of organized religion are no better than Satan and his works.  It’s quite another thing to be indifferent between the Quaker peace activists and Blackwater, or church homeless shelter volunteers and banksters.

I have believed, perhaps naively, that frequent televised debates are a good thing for political campaigns.  All of this air time given to the candidates should at least partially (no, not wholly) mitigate the advantages of those with more campaign funds.  And since I believe that it is a bad thing to have candidates so beholden to donors, I naturally do want to reduce the need for campaign fundraising.  No, I have no illusion that we can eliminate money from politics, but there’s a difference between eliminating a problem and at least partially reducing its effects.

However, I find the Republican debates unsatisfying.  I’ve watched hardly any of them, but I’ve read the summaries, and I wonder how much good they really do for the process.  Yes, I’m aware of the argument that democracy* is inherently pathological, but not all pathologies are created equal.  Aside from having some more sane people on stage (and in the audience), what would help make these debates useful?  Indeed, it’s worth noting that the comparatively sane Jon Huntsman fared poorly, and Gary Johnson was never even invited.  Or am I not paying enough attention and hence missing the virtues of these  debates?

*And I use this term in the broad sense, if anybody starts a “Republic, not a democracy” argument based on 18th century dictionaries I will tell you to piss off.

The Navy, in collaboration with Northrop Grumman, is testing a drone that will fly and make decisions without a pilot. There’s nothing that could possibly go wrong with this scenario.

So far they insist that the drone will not make lethal decisions on its own, but you know it’s only a matter of time.  Am I the only one who thinks that every single Northrop employee should be forced to watch all of the Terminator movies several times over?

Also, how long before a pacifist hacker creates a virus called First Law?

UPDATE:  The Onion highlights a related issue.

Today in biophysics we talked about minimum principles.  Mostly it involved entropy and free energy.  In the last part, though, I switched gears and presented some of the ideas from this paper on minimum principles in neurobiology.  The short version is that if an engineer were to sit down and design a brain, he or she would want at least 3 things:

1) Minimize the time it takes a signal to move from point A to point B.

2) Maximize the number of connections that can be made, since connections are how electronic devices do things.

3) Minimize the total length of wire used, since using more wire means more signal decay and more complexity in construction.

It turns out that all 3 constraints require that 60% of the brain volume be made of wires.  And, lo and behold, 60% of a mouse’s brain is wiring.  I first learned about this six years ago at an APS March Meeting session on opportunities in biophysics.  And I thought it was almost as cool as the West, Brown, and Enquist model of the vascular network.

Sometimes the award tells you something about the winner.  Other times, the winner tells you something about the award.

I’m thinking about more than one situation.

I usually use Mathematica as my calculator, especially when explaining homework in office hours.  I can refer back to variables and quickly make graphs or manipulate symbols.  So while going over homework with students in my biophysics class, I pull up Mathematica and one of them says “Is that just like Matlab?”  My eyes bugged out.  A biology major who knows Matlab?  This is the subject of my interdisciplinary hopes and dreams.  So I asked what she uses Matlab for.  “My boyfriend is a mechanical engineer and I have to do his homework for him.”  My reply was “Your boyfriend should do his own homework, and if you’re a biology major with Matlab skills you should be working in my research group.”

Alas, she’s a senior and about to graduate, so too late to take her on as a research student.  Still, a biology student who just kind of picked up Matlab programming and saw that it just made sense, with no formal training, is the sort of person that a lot of us would like to talk to.  I’m glad that her boyfriend is lazy, because she has developed some useful skills.

Contrast this with my discovery yesterday in biophysics:  I gave them an activity in which one step required that they calculate the derivative of a*x^2-b*x.  I know that calculus isn’t a prerequisite for the course, but they’re all juniors and seniors and the biology department requires them to take a quarter of calculus.  Alas, most of them could not remember it.  I don’t fault them this time–they’re in a program that doesn’t reinforce what they learned in calculus, so they can’t be expected to remember it.  However, if they can’t remember any calculus a lot of the papers from Biophysical Journal , PLoS Computational Biology, Biomedical Optics Express, and Journal of Theoretical Biology (to name just 4 of my favorite journals) will be over their heads.

UPDATE:  I told my freshmen a redacted version of this story, emphasizing that the girlfriend has developed some valuable skills and now she should go use them, as a hint that they should also be sharpening their skills.  Two guys high-fived when they heard that the girlfriend was doing homework for the boyfriend.  I had to give them a lecture pointing out that the girlfriend is employable now and the boyfriend isn’t.

If I could do this, I would become the boss just so that I could give my enemies the grossly disproportionate resources that they feel entitled to.  When pressed by my bosses, I would offer their various politically convenient excuses, shrug and say “Whaddaygonnadoaboutit?” and then get myself the go-ahead for scorched earth reallocations.

I’m seeing a very direct and explicit case of “They did the job well, and did it according to the specifications of the person other than me who is actually responsible for this thing, but they didn’t do what I asked them to do.”  I wish I could say more than that.

It is news to nobody that professional physicists have tremendous self-confidence.  The implications of this were driven home to me today in noticing the timidity of some students.  For starters, I said at the beginning of class “The graded homework is at the front of the room for you to get.”  A guy comes up and says “Does that mean I can take my homework?”  I said, in the calculated demeanor of a lovable grouch that I try to project, “What else would it mean?  If I say you can get it, that means you can get it.”

Later, somebody said “The homework problem asks for the direction of this vector.  Does that mean you want the direction the vector is pointing in?”  My answer again was “Well, what else could it mean?”

Now, I understand that they are timid.  I’m not here to rant about kids these days, at least not this time.  There are a lot of things that we do that beat timidity into them (e.g. emphasizing counter-intuitive things to destroy their confidence in their intuition and ability to interpret things).  Also, while some schools socialize students to be go-getters (e.g. University of Special Connections, my alma mater), this school socializes students rather differently.  So my calculated loveable grouch delivery of “What else could it mean?” is to try to get them to think and present themselves differently.

Some of this is career skills, but I think it also goes to the heart of much of theoretical physics.  There’s a style in theoretical physics that says “I may not be able to construct a detailed model, but I know that the answer can only depend on these variables, and there’s only one way to combine those variables that gives the right units (or lack of units) and/or has the right scaling in a limiting case.  So the answer must be proportional to this, no matter how the details work out.”  Making that statement requires a tremendous amount of confidence.  What sort of pompous ass feels that he can ignore details, assert that only a few things can possibly matter, and then combine the variables to get the units right and declare that the answer must be right?  Who can be so confident that they can assert that nothing else could matter besides a few variables?

Experimentalists have a bit of a similar thing.  They may not project the egos that theorists project (though God knows some of them can be insufferable), but doing delicate and indirect measurements requires confidence that you understand your chain of cause-and-effect that leads from the delicate phenomenon you care about to the readout on your instrument.  Yes, experimentalists are cautious about checking every link in the chain of instrumentation, but it still requires a lot of confidence to say “Watching the fluctuations of the light scattering from a diffusing particle must give us information on the viscoelastic properties of the medium.”  Or “If I get too many events where a nucleus jitters slightly, after I’ve checked the shielding and background level, it must be because a sub-atomic particle hit the nucleus.”  No matter how carefully they check their laser and detector and every wire in the setup, they have to have huge confidence about the physics to go from flickering light to viscosity, or from vibrating nuclei to subatomic dark matter particles.  And yet they do it.

A 24 hour Wikipedia blackout was enough to defeat the RIAA and MPAA.  Now we see where power lies.  Imagine what would happen if Wikipedia, Facebook, and Youtube were to join forces and blackout together?  Now THAT is a terrifying trio to contemplate!

Meanwhile, Anonymous has flexed its muscles, albeit to less impressive effect.  Still, it is good to live in an era in which an army of avenging anarchist hackers takes on governments, corporations, and drug cartels.  I feel like some awesome prophecy is being fulfilled.