I’m at a small conference on biomedical optics.  The code at these conferences is to not reveal specific conversations or presentations, so I won’t do that.  What I will say is that when people can write down arcane symbols and get a machine whirring and make a flash of light and then see through skin, see things that were too small to see before, reveal the presence of hidden toxins, or make a tumor glow green so the evil thing can be cut out, is that not magic?  If somebody can administer a drug, then shine light on your skin so that a tumor dies (photodynamic therapy) is that not so different from a magician administering a potion and then waving a wand to heal your ailment?

It’s just plain exciting to see this stuff and realize that we live in an era of magic that would impress even Gandalf.

The only reason that so many Americans are unemployed is that 9.5% of Americans can’t explain where they see themselves in 5 years.

The people who organized the brilliant Comic Con counter protest against Fred Phelps should go to NYC and organize a counter-protest against the idiots protesting the Ground Zero Mosque.  It would be a sight to behold, I’m sure.

A proclamation from Dr. Thoreau:

As a duly-appointed blogger at UO, and as a professor of evil fiziks, I hereby declare that

Whereas dhex is awesome, and,

Whereas dhex is the only URKOBOLD blogger to not threaten to wither my taint, and,

Whereas dhex coined the term “Generation Veal”, which continues to yield parmesan-covered goodness in my blogging, and,

Whereas I am a blogger who enjoys Rachel Maddow AND also has a sense of humor about things,

Therefore, I proclaim that on this day, the Twenty-Seventh of July in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Ten, the phrase “beckmaddowian axis” is allowed into the UO lexicon, except under such conditions as disallowed by Mr. Henley.

That is all.

Discussion from the left and the right [link added] of how conservatives need to start acting like grown-ups.  I especially like this from the Salon article, regarding the downside of having to run against (and crush) Palin in 2012:

But if you think it’s bad now, wait until you see what happens if the plurality of NN attendees see their wish granted. Palin has already demonstrated a disturbing willingness to frame even minor political squabbles in terms of “tyranny” versus “liberty,” and to make her a major party’s presidential candidate would only do more to throw the spotlight on that sort of incitement. Perhaps, as Kevin Drum prays, the GOP would then, “go down to such an epic defeat that they finally get some sense knocked into them.” But in the meantime, we would be facing a long, protracted campaign in which both a major political party and the mainstream press would treat violently anti-democratic positions as existing within the confines of reasonable political discourse. We’ve already had quite a bit of that over the past few years; accommodating and encouraging it could potentially make things much, much worse.

Not to mention the possibility, however remote, that she could win.  Hey, stranger things have happened.  I’d rather not roll the dice on that one, no matter how weighted they are.

Also, this from TAC:

The Cult, as we know, is where people believe the President is more than just the leader of the Executive Branch of government, as embodied in the Constitution. They believe he embodies all their hopes and dreams and personifications and can also win wars and stop oil spills in a single bound.  It the Cult that led to the Clinton-bashing years of the right from 1992-2000 where, despite accused of murder, theft and rape, Clinton is still an important figure politically whose wife is Secretary of State while the Right suffers from lack of new ideas because activists, think tankers, pundits and writers spent most of their time, money and energy on hunt for the White Whale rather than offering coherent critiques on Clintonism.  (The exact opposite took place in the last decade as the Right spent most its time acting as the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard.) Sadly, the same phenomenon is happening again and the fact Obama is half-black make such attacks even more difficult because the boundaries are even more narrow.

I want a responsible, mature Republican President, and I want one sooner rather than later.  Partly because I don’t want the Democrats to have too long of an uninterrupted stay in power (a long run in power is the sort of thing rarely ends well) but mostly because I suspect that a Republican President will be elected in the next decade (probably not 2012, though) and when that happens I want that Republican to be a responsible grown-up.

The non-academic blogosphere is taking notice of tenure.  Whenever people talk about tenure and the alternatives, the question always comes up “Why not multi-year contracts that provide some stability and moderate security but also accountability?”  Hey, I’d gladly sign off on that.  I don’t really believe in tenure as anything virtuous.  Give me a multi-year contract for some mix of teaching, research, and service, and a higher salary to compensate for the loss of a chance at permanent security, and I’ll go for it.

There are two reasons why this won’t happen:

1)  Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security?  Yeah.  See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery.  Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return.  A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn’t provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay than is currently on offer.  Take away tenure, and not only do you pay more for the people that you ultimately hire for full-time positions, you also have to pay more for all of the grad student TA’s and research assistants and postdocs and adjuncts who are trying to claw their way to a full-time position.

Why, pray tell, would the administration go for that bargain?

Put it this way:  Suppose that tomorrow the NBA drastically reduced salaries.  A lot of college kids would still be willing to play basketball, but they might also want to spend more time studying, even at the expense of practicing, because the expected return from practicing basketball would go down relative to the expected return from studying.  Schools could still get student athletes, but they couldn’t get as many student athletes who are willing to utterly forsake the “student” part.

2)  The choice in academia isn’t between tenure and long-term contracts.  It’s between tenure and cheap part-timers with no security.  Why convert my position to a multi-year contract with higher  pay when they could wait for the next 2 retirements and replace them with cheap part-timers?  And keep just enough tenure-track positions around so that the people earlier in the pipeline are willing to accept low wages in exchange for a shot at life-long security.

That’s not to say that tenure-track positions will disappear completely.  Although part-timers are often excellent (not always, of course, but the same could be said for certain tenured people on my hallway), they don’t usually get involved with student advising, student activities, research with students, curriculum development, service, etc.  Now, some of these tasks could be assumed by full-time specialists or administrators, but not all of them, and they’ll still need a “farm team” of permanent faculty to train for some of these roles.  So, the future of academia is a smaller and smaller corps of tenure-track faculty being groomed as management trainees and a larger and larger cohort of cheap part-timers.

One might say “OK, you make the case for keeping some full-timers, but why give them tenure?”  The answer to that is “See Point 1 above.”

Now, in the academic blogosphere, as soon as the topic of teaching vs. research gets thrown into the mix, somebody invariably asks “Why not full-time faculty positions that are teaching-only, with no research expectation?”  The answer is that many schools have a few of these, and often even give these people some form of job security.  Usually they have titles like “Lecturer” or “Senior Lecturer” or “Lecturer with Security of Employment” or whatever.  However, in general these positions are rarer than the tenure-track positions OR the adjunct positions.  Why?  Because the tenure-track faculty do the research that brings prestige (and may or may not bring money), and the part-time adjuncts are cheap.  The full-time lecturers aren’t as cheap as adjuncts and aren’t as prestigious as tenure-track faculty.

So, tenure won’t disappear.  It will just shrink.  And that’s a shame, because I’m confident that I could do an excellent job that would justify the higher salary associated with a multi-year contract.

ADDENDUM:  To the extent that all the “We need to get more Americans into grad school!” talk is actually grounded in evidence of “not enough” American grad students, perhaps the suckitude of the long training path and the low odds of winning the tenure lottery are contributing to that?  Yeah, yeah, grad students aren’t fully informed of what they’re getting into, but even if they have only partial information, the worse it seems the fewer people they’ll find to play that game.  Getting rid of tenure will not scare everyone away, but it will reduce enrollments.  The system will have to pay more for trainees in order to persuade them to pursue advanced degrees.

To over-simplify a bit, this is a speech by a black woman who discusses resentments that she had, and an episode in her life in which she ultimately learned to see the commonality between her struggles and those of a poor, rural, Southern, white couple.  If you were to tell me that a white guy took this speech out of context to make political hay, I would guess that you’re talking about some white guy who wants everyone to know that racism is not the real problem these days*, and won’t somebody think about poor rural whites?  I’d expect to hear the white guy holding her up as an example and asking people to stop talking about race.

I must admit that if I had read the speech before this story broke, I never in a million years would have predicted the subsequent course of events.

*My own take on this is, perhaps not surprisingly, somewhat squishy:  The color of money certainly matters more than most other colors, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only color that matters.  Nice, green cash may be the best thing to have, but if you get stopped by a cop you’ll want some white skin as well.

Oakland is doing the utterly predictable, and contemplating factory farming of a taxable crop.  When politicians view something as a revenue source, they want more of it, and they are prepared to get in bed with any businessman who can make that happen.  Most significantly, if it’s a source of tax revenue they are perfectly happy to provide security for those businessmen, which means that you get the sort of businessmen who don’t have their own street gangs and hitmen.

This isn’t about drugs.  It’s about taxes.  If tomorrow somebody decided to tax fennel (which grows like weeds in much of SoCal) city councils would be falling all over themselves to approve large-scale fennel farms.

One downside of moving is that the cable company, which I already hate for giving us unreliable internet service, keeps flaking on appointments and yet has the gall to try to persuade us to sign up for more services.  Even my wife, normally much nicer than me, is being rude with them, and I begin every phone call with “So help me god, if you try to sell me phone service I will cancel right now!”  I truly hate Charter with the white hot heat of a thousand suns.  So, let us consider this debate:

Charter Communications is the best argument in favor of deregulation to end the local monopoly status and let in more competition.

vs.

Charter Communications is the best argument for better regulation to protect consumers from getting screwed.

vs.

Screw it, just get Directv and DSL or one of those laptop attachments from the cell phone company.

vs.

Keep the subscription so we can paintball the cable company truck whenever they finally show up.

Discuss.

My brother was unexpectedly diagnosed with a congenital heart malformation and is going into surgery in a few days.  As befits a man who used to comment here as “Idi Amin’s Last Meal”, he’s keeping a good sense of humor.  Upon hearing that Dick Cheney is officially becoming an undead creature, he said that we should do for Cheney what they did for the vampires in the Twilight saga and create a team for him:  Team Dick.  He also suggested a t-shirt that says “Gitmo” in the same font as the titles of the Twilight novels, and a picture of Cheney above it, with pale skin and sharp teeth.

Also, my brother’s disease is actually in a blood vessel, not the heart itself, and blood vessels are just a series of tubes.  So, really, this is just internet shit.  And I TOTALLY know internet shit.  So he’ll be fine.

UPDATE:  My brother informs me that when he signed consent forms Ted Stevens was brought in to explain that his vascular system is a series of tubes.  My brother also notes that, as long as we’re talking about Alaska politicians, who would have thought that Mike Gravel would be the most level-headed Alaska politician on the national scene?

Cheney’s heart condition may necessitate an interesting implanted device:

Everything is implanted in the chest except for the batteries, which are worn on a vest much like a hunting vest.

When he wears the battery pack on his chest, he’ll look like this:

Also, this device won’t necessarily keep him alive.  It might just keep him undead.  Which, yeah, we already knew.

One potential oddity is that most patients who have the device have neither a pulse nor a conventional blood pressure, and must carry medical documentation saying that the lack of a pulse does not mean they are dead.

Doctors considered doing a heart transplant, but Cheney would only consent if the organ was harvested from the mightiest hero to ever live, after the hero was bested in a duel and then sacrificed during a new moon as cultists writhed and danced around the altar, so that Cheney could absorb the life-force of this hero and thereby augment his powers.  Doctors weren’t sure if the hospital ethics board would approve that procedure, and nobody really wanted to see naked Republicans writhing around an altar, so he opted for the biomechanical suit instead.  When the mechanical device fails, he plans to infuse his spirit into a suitable new vessel and continue his evil plans.

Today at lunch, I was chatting about Murphy’s Law with somebody.  I noted that I always carry a small collapsible umbrella in my laptop case, as a precaution.  I then said that if I ever stop carrying that thing around, it will rain.

On a lark, I left the umbrella in my office this evening.  When I walked out the door of the building, I discovered that it was raining.  And it NEVER rains in LA during the summer.

To rescue my fellow Angelenos from drought and wildfires, I am going to get rid of all of my umbrellas.

This evening I went to the first part of a workshop on some new teaching tools.  Normally I’d stay away, but it focuses on tools for teaching some really cutting-edge and modern science  (instead of the usual “Here’s a hip new tool for teaching the same old stuff!”) and a friend really wanted me to go, so I went.  The first evening was just a couple hours setting the stage, followed by dinner; tomorrow is more intensive.

Strangely, tonight’s event was NOT about the tools.  It was just to get us thinking about our pedagogical philosophy.  Now, this wasn’t the usually fire-breathing fundamentalist sermon on how we are so wicked and can only be redeemed through a saving knowledge of interactive pedagogy.  It was a mild and unobjectionable discussion to get us thinking about how to reach our students.  These guys:the usual physics education reformers::Episcopalians:Fundamentalists.

Still, what struck me was that even these guys, mild as they are, display a key feature of the kool-aid drinkers:  The science was secondary to the educational philosophy.  The science promises to be really interesting, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lead with it.  They had to lead with the philosophy.  As I continue to think about what it is that really marks somebody as a “kool-aid drinker”, I think that it’s when the subject matter no longer comes first.  When the primary factor that drives them as a teacher is no longer a deep passion for the subject, but rather a commitment to a theory of learning.  Don’t get me wrong, there are great teachers who haven’t drunk the kool-aid but care deeply about connecting with the students and have a well-thought-out approach to learning as learning.  However, these people still respect the subject for what it is and would never compromise it, would never treat it as secondary.  Their educational philosophies and the needs of their students are important to them, perhaps even equal in importance to the subject, but if you talk to them you can will always see the passion for the subject.

So I guess that’s what the “kool-aid” is about:  It’s about adopting a new idea, and treating whatever it is that you do (teaching or something else) as a way of adhering to the idea, rather than treating the idea as  something that helps  you do what you do.

Before I give our commentariat a chance to bash libertarians on economics, the least I can do is try to derail you away from that by providing a nicely distracting thread title! 

Bruce Bartlett links to a roundup of studies on whether tax cuts actually lead to spending cuts, i.e. does “Starve the Beast” really work?  Perhaps they do in the very long run, if mounting deficits eventually become so big that they provoke the budgetary equivalent of Armageddon.  However, for those who prefer a small policy change in the short term to a drastic policy change in the aftermath of a distant crisis, the evidence surveyed suggests that tax cuts may actually lead to borrow-and-spend rather than spending cuts.  If taxes are low, then people only feel the benefits of spending but not the pain (yet), so where is the disincentive to spend?

Before I was a libertarian I was a liberal, and the one constant for me in all ideological stages, being a math-oriented person who went to the bank with my grandfather to deposit my paper route earnings starting when I was 12, was that however much you spend, you should tax accordingly.  I see the case for a small deficit in bad times and a small surplus in good times, but overall they have to match.  An argument can be made for high spending and an argument can be made for low spending, but an argument cannot be made for taxing less (on average) than you spend.  In the long run, it will catch up to you.  In the short term, it divorces causes from effects and costs from actions and thereby distorts policy in unsustainable ways.  If you want legislators to spend less, instead of starving the beast you should spank the beast, i.e. make sure that people feel both the costs and benefits of spending, so that policy is influenced accordingly.

While I often suggest that there isn’t enough difference between the parties on policy, there is clearly a difference between the movements.  And this sums it up nicely:

When conservatives argue, they say, “my position is the really conservative one.” When liberals argue, they often still say, “my position isn’t too liberal, don’t worry.”

I think this explains why it is that although both sides have their kooks, one side calls its kooks “the Real Americans” and the other side mostly sneers at its kooks.  Why this continues to be so continues to perplex me, but there it is.

Shorter Ross Douthat: Alternate-worlds science-fiction is fun!

I invite our readers to discuss these propositions:

The California Prison Guards Union is the best argument ever made in favor of libertarianism

vs.

The California Prison Guards Union is the best argument ever made in favor of campaign finance regulations.

While some libertarians are in favor of campaign finance regulations (I support the principle but I have qualms about how well it can work, so put me in the “lukewarm support”  camp), most are opposed, so these propositions are to some extent tension, if not necessarily in conflict.  However, I think these propositions can unit our readers in agreeing that the California Prison Guards Union is evil.

If this turns into something interesting, maybe I’ll make it a regular feature.

Regarding the marijuana ballot measure, it appears that support is strong among whites and opposition is strong among minorities.  At first this surprised me, given that minority communities are the ones most impacted by the insanity of drug enforcement.  On the other hand, that sort of thing cuts both ways.  If prohibition exacerbates the pathologies associated with drug abuse, then the least advantaged communities that are impacted the most by prohibition will understandably have the most negative view of drugs.

On the cynical side, given the history of racial fears being used to stoke prohibitionist sentiments, I suppose it’s probably for the best if white people don’t associate this legalization effort with dark-skinned people.  I feel ugly writing that, but the ugly history is real.  Opium was associated with “the heathen Chinese” when it was first banned.  The racist crack/powder sentencing disparity came from fears of black people on crack.  Early drug warrior Harry Anslinger said the following regarding marijuana:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

“…the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”

“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”

So, yeah, there’s an ugly history here.  Racial fear-mongering created the drug war, the drug war then ravaged minority communities, and we’re living the ugly legacy of it.  I’d like to hope that this ballot measure can pass and begin the healing, but maybe there’s other healing that needs to happen first before we can get a majority of the electorate behind reform.  Still, I wish more people (of every race) realized that prohibition benefits the street gangs AND the abusive SWAT teams.  It benefits terrorists AND crooked cops.  It benefits every ugly character out there, no matter which side of the law they claim to be on.  I support legalization because I want to see crooked cops and gang-bangers and terrorists and smugglers and mafiosi and every public official on the take standing in line at the soup kitchen.  I hate the SWAT teams that Radley Balko reports on just as much as I hate the drug lords, and they will ALL go bankrupt if we end prohibition.