My wife and I just got our absolutely free money from the government!  With no deficit implications whatsoevar!  It’s just, like, there, and it’s free, and it produces goodness and we don’t need to pay any attention to what might happen if they just keep printing checks.  In fact, they should do more of this!  Just refund all of our taxes and run the government on credit.  What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, we were going to pay homage to the spirit of our times by spending it on bread and circus tickets, but the circus gets boring after a while, and bread spoils.  So we paid off our car a few months early.  Now we, like, own something.

Still, we’re bad citizens.  We could have done more good for our country by buying consumer goods.  Especially consumer goods that exceed $1200, so we borrow.  But we were selfish, so we eliminated a debt.

Sorry, retailers.  Didn’t mean to hurt you.  Can you forgive me for not stimulating the economy?

OK, that was a filler episode.  They could have compressed it and actually advanced more storylines.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Kerry Howley has lived in Burma and thinks lots of things through. She notes that Oxfam believes that airdropping supplies can actually be counterproductive. She adds that, yes, things in Burma could get worse in the case of intervention:

Burma is isolated, but it is no North Korea; there is ample room for the generals to become more insular by cutting off Internet access and throwing all foreign workers out of the country. This is a country that’s always in crisis, and dozens of well-funded foreign NGOs are operating within Burma at any given time.

One of the illusions that convinced some otherwise well-meaning people to go along with the conquest of Iraq in 2003 was, “Iraq is so bad, how could we make it worse?” But we could. So with Burma. I know almost nothing about the junta that rules Burma. But I know that it’s the junta that rules Burma - that is, that they’ve extended their writ over a preponderance of the territory we think of as Burma, more or less. That is to say, they successfully maintain power.

The junta apparently numbers 19 guys, but 19 guys don’t run a place like Burma by themselves. They’ve got people for that. Cops, soldiers, secret policemen, bureaucrats. And those people have families and friends and hangers-on. Stakeholders. And apparently “regional commanders enjoy a great deal of autonomy in their respective areas.” So they and their retainers and whoever else profits from existing arrangements have a stake in the existing system. And the habits and attitudes of the bulk of the population are the habits and attitudes that enable one to survive under tyranny. It’s not about knocking off that one bad guy and his eighteen friends. There’s a whole set of structures and class interests and cultural patterns, local peculiarities and regional fault lines to cope with. I don’t know much about Burma, but I know that much about any place. It’s hubris to be sure you can start rearranging such a society without a good chance of making it even worse.

Young as I am, I do hates me some uninformed nostalgia, and it’s nice to read the latest Physics Today, where a prominent physicist smacks down somebody who says “Back in your time, you got your tenure track job right out of grad school and didn’t have to worry about tenure as long as you were in the right field! Nowadays it’s so much harder.”

It is true that it’s better to come from a top-ranked department than a lower-ranked department, and reputation is part of it. But reputation is a tricky thing: Often a school that has a great overall reputation has a mediocre physics department, and vice-versa. Or a school renowned for its undergraduate programs may be so-so for grad programs. Or vice-versa. Also, those top-ranked departments aren’t just about branding: They generally have more resources, faculty with better research programs, etc. You’re more likely to do important work if you have ample resources and access to people with good ideas and expertise related to important problems.

And looking back at grad school (where I was in a great department at a school that’s OK overall but certainly not an Ivy), most people did NOT go into academia, even people working with great advisors. Part of it is that not everybody WANTS to be in academia. You can do great work in grad school but decide that academia is not where you want to spend your life. I can think of people whose work was better than mine but who just didn’t feel like going into academia. And now they make more money than me, doing interesting things.

I won’t claim that everything is fair in academic hiring. It isn’t. But to think that we can (or should) go back to some mythical time when anybody working in a good field got a tenured position without difficulty is just plain dumb.

If there is any injustice in the preference for certain fields, the injustice is in how grad students are steered, the advice they get, and the expectations they are allowed to develop. Don’t go into grad school expecting a tenure-track job. In fact, don’t even go in desiring one. I was deeply unsure throughout grad school, and even as a post-doc I perused a lot of industrial ads and went to one or two job fairs. Partly this is because the academic job market offers fewer opportunities than industry (but do not confuse more opportunities with lower expectations!) and partly because, well, this is a tough path. No, I don’t mean that you might not be a good enough scientist. That’s only part of it. It could be that you just plain don’t like this. Check out the other options quite thoroughly, because if you choose academia by mistake, you’ll be miserable and your students will suffer too.

Also, if you are thinking of a tenure-track job, realize that the only people who get tenure-track jobs right out of grad school are either (1) bigger geniuses than you’ll ever be or (2) far luckier than you’ll ever be. Even though some teaching-oriented schools don’t require people to do a postdoc first, they generally prefer people who have put in some time as an adjunct, a lecturer, a visiting assistant professor, or some other position like that. So no matter what sort of school you want to teach at, you’ll probably have to spend some time in a temporary position between grad school and the tenure-track position.

But, back to specialties: I actually think that in your thesis work you should just do whatever you like, even if it isn’t a field that people are hiring a lot of faculty in. The most important thing that you learn in grad school is not your sub-field. No, the most important thing you learn is how to come up with your own idea for a project and get results from it. So do whatever looks interesting to you, no matter how obscure and non-trendy it might be. BUT, if you are interested in a tenure-track job, and you’re in a field where it’s hard to find one, for God’s sake, do a postdoc in a different field! I did it. (Although the leap from light scattering and materials to biophysics is admittedly not a big one.) I’m collaborating on a project with somebody who did it. I took classes from people who did it. The theorist who’s developed good calculation skills can find a new problem in a different field. The experimentalist who knows how to do careful measurements and build a good apparatus can always try a new experiment.

So I don’t think grad students should be steered into only the trendiest fields. But I do think they should be told frequently and loudly that the tenure track is not something they should plan on, and that they shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking that they can get a faculty position if they postdoc in a field where it’s really tough to find faculty jobs. Besides, some industry preparation in grad school can be helpful in academic jobs. I did a project in collaboration with some industry people, and I got to see a different style of science and work on a neat problem that I wouldn’t have thought of if they hadn’t brought it up. It was also helpful when I was going for an adjunct position at a place with an emphasis in applied physics.

Now, somebody will probably say “Hey, you’ve got your faculty job, so you think you can just sit there and tell the rest of us to stop whining?” Well, first, yes, I did get my faculty job, and so I know enough about this path to know that you need to have realistic expectations going into it. Yes, it is easier to get a faculty job if you’re in certain fields. Yes, you probably will have to do a postdoc and/or adjunct position before going to a tenure-track job. Second, as much as I love my job, I don’t consider it the be-all and end-all of professional achievement in science. I just consider it a job that fits well with my interests and inclinations. The academic physics community all too often exalts academic jobs (and academic jobs in research-oriented institutions in particular) over all other jobs, leading to people who are unhappy because of unrealistic expectations and a training path that focused on one goal to the exclusion of all else. Instead of pining for a mythical era when tenure-track jobs were easy to get, we need to look at the Ph.D. as a preparation for a variety of paths.

The grant proposal is done.  It has been sent to our Office of Research and Sponsored Programs for the final approvals to be stamped on it, and some time tomorrow I’ll be submitting.  Hallelujah.

But there is no sleep for me.  Not yet.  Tomorrow I have to get up early for special office hours, then give a midterm.  I’ll sleep after I grade it.

And this weekend?  This weekend I’m breaking out the 20 sided dice and playing Star Wars to celebrate my birthday.  It’s been a long time since I played an RPG, but I think I need some serious geeking out.  Which is a rather odd thing to need after spending a week finishing a grant proposal and grading physics labs (shouldn’t I need to do something cool instead of geeky?) but, well, I feel the need for some geekdom.

* Peter Gabriel mashups, via Ginger’s LJ

* Australian Icebergs, thanks to Kate Nepveu

* Mrs. Offering on her father’s final days

Or at least make damn sure you don’t hand over any money for it.

I just saw Doug Feith on the Daily Show, pimping his account of how he perpetrated the lies that started a bloody war.  Jon Stewart did an interview that was about as tough as a guy like Feith will agree to.  Which is still far better than Feith deserves.  I’m not going to make Jon Stewart carry the cross for all the sins of the media.  He may not deserve to hide behind his “Hey, I’m just a comedian” excuse, but he’s hardly the main problem.  At least he did something other than stenography, which is more than you can say for so many of them.

In a just world, Feith would be in prison, and the profits from his book would be confiscated by a court and handed over to Feith’s victims in Iraq.  Instead, he’s on TV promoting his book.  God help this country, because right now there is no justice, and the absence of justice is what allows these men to continue destroying any hope of peace.  I don’t know whether justice will come before peace or vice versa, but I do know that I want both of them ASAP.

No amount of America firepower could have crushed the North Vietnamese people’s will. It’s true that we made many missteps in waging the Vietnam War, and that we might have achieved a better outcome in the short term had we backed better South Vietnamese leaders, implemented smarter counterinsurgency strategies sooner, and pursued Vietnamization earlier. But the ultimate outcome was ordained long before 1973, and probably long before American combat troops arrived in 1965. Most of the histories I’ve read suggest the die was cast sometime around when the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. We didn’t lose the Vietnam War because of any "stab in the back." We lost because we failed to see the strategic environment correctly, and we chose a war of a time, place and manner that we could not win.

Which led to the following reaction from the "Powell generation":

This narrative came to mean a great deal to the cohort of American military officers who shepherded the services through the post-Vietnam years. They vowed to never again fight a war like Vietnam. These generals embraced the Weinberger-Powell doctrine prescribing when, how and why they would fight. They rejected counterinsurgency efforts and small wars, choosing instead conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features. And they rebuilt the Army with capabilities to fight these wars, marginalizing those who thought about small wars and pushing them into the special forces, civil affairs, military police and intelligence communities. Even during the 1990s, when the Army deployed for peacekeeping operations around the world, these missions remained peripheral.

There are institutional factors at work beyond the skittishness of a Vietnam-chastened officer corps, like the lovely money to be made selling an army geegaws for "conventional wars with defined objectives and familiar features." But I’m content to accept the thesis, not original to Carter, that the post-Vietnam Army leadership attempted to minimize its counter-insurgency capability to avoid getting involved in counter-insurgencies. Then comes the confused or confusing part of Carter’s argument:

On the very next page, Sanchez criticizes the decision to send "unprepared and improperly trained soldiers" into the "guerilla warfighting conditions" of Vietnam. He appears to miss the connection, however, between his misunderstanding of the Vietnam war and the Army’s lack of preparedness for Iraq, which flowed from that deeply flawed view.

The question is what "that deeply flawed view is." I’m inclined to infer that Carter is arguing that it was somehow tragic and blameworthy that the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine-era army eschewed preparation for counter-insurgency warfare in hopes of dissuading policy-makers from launching new counter-insurgencies. In which case, Carter’s argument is daft. (If not, plenty of other people have made such an argument.) The Powell Generation had the right idea: stay the hell out of guerrilla wars.

It’s vanishingly unlikely that an overseas guerrilla war will ever be just, necessary and winnable for the United States. The odds are far more likely that: we will have no right to be there; we will have no need to be there; we will have no way to "win" short of mass slaughter and repopulation with more pliant residents. The US has not made Iraq a hellhole of death, disfigurement, displacement and corruption because it lacked a certain number of civil affairs brigades. These things happened because, as in Vietnam in the 1960s or the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century, we had no business being there, nothing approaching the savvy needed to operate effectively and nowhere near the motivation and expertise on things Iraqi that Iraqis themselves have.

The United States would be far better off, first, re-embracing the Powell doctrine and second, admitting just how unlikely it is that the United States will face a threat that would meet any reasonable just-war test in the foreseeable future. The US would then drastically shrink military spending and reduce its overseas military commitments. The worst thing that the US could do, for ourselves and others, is to add supposed counter-insurgency capability to the existing military, tempting it to more and greater folly.

Via Spencer Ackerman.

In regard to her comments about “hard working Americans, white Americans,” let me just say that Hillary’s speechwriter is a real wizard.

Thank you, I’m here all week.  Don’t forget to try the waitress and tip the fish!

TIME Magazine proves that it’s possible to be even dumber than Bill Kristol. Yes, the humanitarian crisis there is awful. Yes, the regime is awful. Yes, it differs from Iraq and Vietnam in certain respects. Nonetheless, the only way to seriously contemplate invading Myanmar/Burma is if you are dumb enough to think that being wrong is a virtue.

If I type anything else about this I’ll descend into a stream of curse words, so I’ll stop now.

EDIT:  Link fixed.

Note: No post-structural theorists were harmed in the creation of the Art of the Possible post.

But far more important for him is that he now [following an Iranian-brokered ceasefire] keeps his political hopes alive, with elections where his movement can expect to make considerable inroads against his ISCI rivals looming. That was always the prize, and he has taken it.

Now see, I don’t know about that. It seems obvious to me that all of this Iraqi government finally taking on the Mahdi Army hubbub of the last couple months is really about Maliki and his Badr/Dawa backers trying to make sure they’re the ones who get custody of the ballot boxes once the elections get here. If you get to count the votes, winning an election gets a lot easier. So the real question is, who will have effective control of which polling stations on election day. But none of the reporting seems to address this angle. Possibly that’s because I’m completely wrong about what’s going on, but I don’t think I am.

I decided to give my freshmen a taste of real physics.  I offered extra credit to anybody who could give me a useful critique of my grant proposal.  Amazingly enough, two of my students actually rose to the occasion.  Although they couldn’t really dissect the science, they could tell that I wasn’t really explaining why this would be significant for the field, and they told me what I’d need to say to convince them of the significance.  (I guess some people just can’t appreciate the inherent AWESOMENESS of simulating a new technique for optical nanolithography and identifying the necessary molecular parameters.)  They earned themselves some extra credit points for the upcoming midterm.  Prior to this these students flew under my radar, but if this grant gets funded, they’ll be the first ones that I consider for research assistantships.

University of Washington researchers have developed a computer game that folds proteins. Yes, really.

Protein folding is a tough problem. You’ve got this long chain of amino acids, and somehow they come together to take on a particular shape. And they do this every time a cell produces the protein. You’d think that a long chain of molecules would try all sorts of random configurations, but somehow they always form the same pattern. It’s hard to understand why, because all of the molecules are interacting with each other in very complicated ways, so you have to solve an equation that could involve hundreds or thousands of forces. Some computers are having luck folding a few proteins, but it’s slow.

The researchers theorized that people are very good at playing games and picking out the most efficient way to do something. Good gamers intuitively know which traps to avoid. So they designed a game where you try to fold up a molecule into the most stable shape (the one where the forces all cancel and the energy is at a minimum). They tested it on some proteins with known structures, and they got good results. Now they’re trying proteins with unknown structures.

So to all my students, I say “Go and play more video games! Do something useful for science!”

I predict that we’ll start seeing research article titles like “PWNAGE of Matrix Metalloprotease 9 Structure!  SW33T!” by DoneGeneMaster11 et. al.

I’m sure that Claire is dead. Maybe she died after being lured to Jacob’s cabin. Maybe she died in the attack on The Others’ Village and what we saw for the last 2 episodes was her ghost. Or maybe she died in the plane crash and what we’ve been seeing the entire time is her ghost. I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that Claire is as dead as her father. Why else would she be in Jacob’s cabin with her dead father, happy and smiling, unconcerned with the fact that she isn’t with her bay-bee? Truthfully, the past few episodes have been Claire’s best ones since her flashback last season. It’s not that I don’t like the character or the actress, but she’s been woefully underused for a few seasons now. The few times that they gave her good material she did great, but they’ve given her so little. Finally, though, she’s at the center of a big mystery.

Overall, it was a good episode. Very little about Jack and the love triangle, lots of action and mystery on the boat. I was surprised when we learned the boat doctor’s fate this episode. I figured that the mystery of the boat doctor would be one of those things that Lindelof and Cuse would promise to address “in season 5″ and then they forget about it. Keamy is an awesome villain, although I do wish they’d confirm that the thing on his arm is a heart rate monitor rigged to explosives. Also, I hope that Michael and Desmond aren’t forgotten. Desmond needs to find his Penelope, even if he has to kill 200+ suitors to get to her!

The flashbacks weren’t exactly earth-shattering (is it really news that the Island is interested in Locke?), but they were appropriate. The biggest mystery in the flashbacks was the last one, where the black guy named Abaddon talks to Locke. In the flashbacks, Abaddon appears to be working on the same agenda as Richard Alpert, who is one of The Others. However, in another episode we saw Abaddon working with Naomi, the woman from the freighter who landed on the island last season. That would suggest that Abaddon is with Widmore, not the Others. Also, he went to Hurley in the asylum, seeking info. It could be that Abaddon has changed sides, or that Abaddon serves an agenda separate from the Others and Widmore.

Anyway, I liked it. And I am optimistic that next week we will get some awesome action.

I just got an email from the top student from my grad school research group.  He’s now a professor at a very prestigious research university.  And he just emailed me with a research question.

And I think I can solve the problem.

Today at Hit and Run, they link to an article by Steve Chapman regarding McCain and Iran.  I’ve had my issues with some of Chapman’s columns on economic matters, but on foreign policy he makes some points that are as salient now as they were in 2003.

Amid all the war hysteria, it was easy to forget containment worked against Stalin and Mao — both unbalanced dictators with nuclear weapons. They were far more formidable tyrants with dreams of world domination. Yet we managed to preserve our security without pre-emptive war.

For that matter, containment had worked against Saddam Hussein. In the 12 years after the first Gulf War, we kept him in a box, where he was no threat to us or his neighbors. In 2002, he even had to accept the return of United Nations weapons inspectors — who found no weapons of mass destruction because, thanks to our efforts, he had none.

…

The claim is that the Iranians are too crazy to be deterred from using nukes against Israel or giving them to terrorist groups to use against us. One common trait of governments and their leaders is an overriding desire to survive. If Iranian nukes are ever used for aggression, the regime can be sure Iran will be, as Hillary Clinton so vividly put it, “obliterated.”

I tried to raise all of these points in 2002 (no, I wasn’t in the blogosphere back then) and any hawk that I talked to just brushed them aside.  They acted like there was something wrong with me, like I just wasn’t “getting it.”   A lot of Americans have since come to their senses, but there’s a contingent that still doesn’t grasp these basic points, and I fear that they hold far too many of the cards.

Ever worry that it’s a bad idea to beam radio signals into space in hopes of making contact with aliens?  Ever worry that they might take those radio signals as an invitation for some interplantary pre-emptive democracy-building?  Well, fear no more:  If aliens detect our electromagnetic transmissions, the signal they’re most likely to detect is the radar that we’ve been using to search for planet-destroying asteroids.