Gas Prices

UPDATE II:

Fred Clark's post is a lot more like the one I would have written, if I'd written a post about this, including speculation (not his, quoted from a
book by James Howard Kunstler) about how cities will have to change:

"Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class."

...
"The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially."

For some reason, I find these scenarios a lot more plausible than the world we actually live in. I keep expecting civilization as we know it to end any day now, but maybe it won't be an apocalypse after all... Or can you have a really slow apocalypse?

Anyway, I'm glad we're planning to go to Europe now, because according to this guy, "The commercial aviation industry, already on its knees financially, is likely to vanish."

I really believe this stuff is going to happen. How can it not? More technological miracles will save us? We've already had more than our share of miracles. It can't continue forever. I just wonder how much of the change will be in my lifetime?

UPDATE:

John Scalzi has blogged about this topic in much greater depth. This is the kind of post I probably should have written, if I'd felt like I had time. Only my version of it would have had a lot more stuff about how the suburbs as we know them may be doomed, and how that is probably a good thing. And then I might even have speculated the changes the automobile has caused to our social lives -- how many more people we meet, how that's changed dating and marriage and the whole concept of the extended family. I might have talked about how strange Western society is compared to the kind experienced by the vast majority of the world today, and by everyone, historically... And I might have speculated about the value of plastic rising so that the stupid little fake jewels you see on clothes everywhere today could someday be as valuable as the real thing. (Imagine taking a handful of plastic jewels back in time. Only kings and queens would wear them.)

But for a more realistic and informative summary of the subject, you should probably read Scalzi's post.

---

Boy am I not an expert on this subject. But I can remember a lot of hand-wringing a couple of years ago when they got above $2 a gallon in Seattle. Now the Shell Oil by my house wants $2.59...

I get the impression that, adjusted for inflation, the prices are still nowhere near what they were in the seventies and early eighties. But that was an artificial crisis, oil witheld, not an oil shortage. And they're higher than I can ever remember, and hardly anyone's reacting, the way I remember people reacting in the past.

With all the talk about "peak oil" I have to wonder -- how do we know the prices are going back down this time? I mean eventually, there is going to be less and less, and it's going to get more and more expensive.

It's inevitable, and our society will have to change. Aside from producing fewer SUVs I mean. (Thanks for the link, George.) Our cities will have to change...

What will happen? And is it starting now?

.

Reference Works

Just a list. (I've linked to a couple of these before.)

The Encyclopedia Mythica
The Internet Classics Archive
The Encyclopedia of Arda (Tolkein's world)
A Jehovah's Witness Jargon File
The Original Jargon File
A Catholic Encyclopedia
A Jewish Encyclopedia
An Encyclopdia of Philosophy
A cooperative encyclopedia project
A cooperative guide to the galaxy
Mathworld
Project Gutenberg
Bartleby.com (lots of reference works)
The Skeptic's Dictionary

There. That ought to keep you all busy for a while.

.

Chicago

Chicago
Carl Sandburg


Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Bulding, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
sweating, pround to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

.

Chicago Skyline

Via Byzantium's Shores and via the Chicagoist I see Chicago's skyline has been named fourth greatest in the world, by some people who took it upon themselves to name these things. They judged purely on number of floors, and not aesthetic quality, obviously.

Ken's moving into the apartment that I too will eventually be occupying, soon, and we've decided we want Chicago art, so I've been looking at skyline pictures, lately. Check out some of the posters I want to buy.

(I actually asked the photographer about a poster-sized print of this picture of Wrigley field too, but it sounded expensive.)

.

Optical Illusions

Today's blog entry is brought to you by Ken, who is always finding the coolest links. I really ought to let him take over here.

These make your head spin. You're not drunk; they're optical illusions. My favorites are the Buffy-themed set.

Most of these are static (however they may appear) and work in print-out form too, but here's one which is designed for a screen. The creators have all sorts of theories about what it says about brain hemispheres, but I am skeptical. I think it's just neat-looking.

Ken also brings us a follow-up to the Einstein jokes, a whole page of geeky groaners. Enjoy.

.

Eugenics and Politics

An article that's worth reading about the connection between the politics of the 1930s and '40s and the political issues today: The Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade.

Before and even during World War II, a large part of mainstream society accepted the notion that whites were superior to other races, that Nordic whites were superior to other ethnicities, that aristocratic families were superior to poor people, as not only self-evident, but proven, by recently invented IQ tests and other new "scientific" methods. When birth control was new and Darwin's ideas not that old, a lot of people believed that the world would be a better place if only the poor and the dark-skinned and the handicapped could be stopped from breeding, and the aristocrats encouraged. A lot of the people who believed this were aristocrats themselves, and had political power. Some of them continued to believe it after the war. And they all were in favor of the sexual revolution, and the liberalizing of the laws that went with it.

It's worth keeping in mind, as those liberalized laws are debated today, what the original proponents thought that they would accomplish by passing them.

Details and documentary evidence are in that paper. I know that the author is credible and her research intensive, because she's a lawyer with a distinguished history of public service, and also my mother.

.

Jokes with Einstein

Chad Orzel links two flash cartoons: jokes with Einstein and the sequel, jokes with Einstein 2. As one of the comments on his post says: just don't tell anyone if you find either of them funny...

.

The End of the World-- uh, the Quarter

Lots of real life stuff going on as Northwestern's academic term ends, so blog entries may continue to be boring. We've got important people coming to review how we used our research funds and hold lots of meetings and conference presentations, so Ken's got long hours in the lab right now, trying to put together things we can show them and things our advisor can say. I'm at the very edge of all this activity, as the experiment I've been working on is not funded by these people and is therefore on hold until after all this is over. But I've been given a few assignments, making parts of a poster about our project as a part of the general "isn't our lab impressive?" push. And, of course, there's a dozen papers I'm supposed to read... And one more thing to write, for my quantum optics class. I just finished homework and grading. So now I should work on the talk I'm supposed to give.

Also booking things for the wedding, and then the trip to Europe. I can officially announce the wedding date as July 11. Small, immediate family service at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. I am in process of picking out poetry. Ken's letting me hog the fun on that. Meanwhile, if anybody knows any train-accessible, internet-bookable campsites in the Loire valley for less than thirty Euros a night, please let me know. That's the last reservation we have to make.

It's nice that we've bought all this camping gear now, because, as those who know me will know, I confidently expect the apocalypse any day now. Civilization seems very fragile to me. Now, when it happens, we've got shelter and beds and huge backpacks we can live out of. We are both assured by two quizilla quizzes (this one and two) that we stand an excellent chance of surviving. Especially if the threat comes from zombies. Don't laugh, the government considers zombie threats to be terrorism. Good thing Ken's seen every zombie movie ever made, and now we have this book.

Remember -- you have to destroy the brain.

.

Virtual Communities

I know at least a few of my readers are fellow alt.fan.pratchett veterans, and so will know all about the social dynamics of internet communities. About flame warriors and trolls and vampire threads, about inside jokes, meet-ups, and very real friendships and even marriages that are born in text only.

Some of them have also done IRC, and also know about flooding, and being kick/banned by the channel op, which is the natural result, about moderated and unmoderated channels, about /msg and /dcc, about lurking and joining topicking.

Some may have done fidonet, dial-up BBS, AIM, mailing lists... I've done all of that except the dial-up BBS, but I've got The Discovery Channel Bulliten Boards (alas, now vanished, as far as I can tell) and the Prodigy message boards too. And personal webpages. And public profiles. And now I've got a blog, besides posting comments to other people's.

So for those, like me, who remember when some of the slang in the jargon file was invented, who sometimes think in acronyms... I present a link which, unlike most of the others here, you may actually not yet have seen. Via Teresa Nielsen-Hayden an interesting essay on designing social software.




And, as an aside for people who want to use social software to communicate top secret information, a link I just found while browsing the Jargon File: a biography of Alice and Bob. Remember them?

.

February Poem

With thanks to Carol, who gave me the book Sound and Sense (by Laurence Perrine) in which I found this -- short, since last month's was so long:

There's the wonderful love of a beautiful maid,
And the love of a staunch true man,
And the love a baby that's unafraid--
All have existed since time bean.
Bust the most wondeful love, the Love of all loves,
Even greater than the love for a Mother,
Is the infinite, tenderest, passionate love
Of one dead drunk for another.

Be Afraid!

Via GirlHacker I discover "The Truth About Splenda"- it's made with chlorine!

Wanna hear an even bigger scandal? Table salt is made with chlorine too. That's right. The food industry has been covering up the dark truth - salt is sodium chloride. Worse, unlike the Splenda molecule, the salt molecule ionizes easily, separating into sodium and cloride ions, both viciously reactive. Sodium in its pure form is explosive - we work with it in the lab (industrial uses!) And clorine is deadly.

This reminds me of the dihydrogen monoxide scare. (Everything on that website is true, and yet your government is doing nothing to protect you from DHMO.)

Similar scares about canola oil abound (refuted here) along with soy products, and all kinds of over-the-counter medicines.

And because I haven't linked to them yet, here are snopes and the alt.folklore.urban archive, which are worth a visit whenever something on the internet makes you scared of your food, or anything else that used to seem harmless.

Something to Prove

UPDATE: Several of my favorite bloggers have, not surprisingly, said things that I agree with on this subject.

Physicist Michael Nielsen points out that even if women were on average "worse" (a poorly defined concept) at math and science, it wouldn't preclude the possibility of there being more highly qualified women than men -- and vice versa, of course. His point is that we all have lousy statistical models in mind.

Historian Tim Burke makes the related point that Harvard, in particular, could easily achieve gender balance without compromising standards at all. It needs only a few brilliant women to do so, and they surely exist, and Harvard could surely recruit them. If it wanted to.

Physicist Chad Orzel comments that most of the advice given to women about career success applies to men too, and as a veteran of many seminars, I can confirm it. This includes the advice about blending career and family, which is never easy for anyone.

And artist/physics student "Pyracantha" has two somewhat sad posts about her own reaction to comments like this (last month and this month) which is mostly a deeply rooted fear that they are true, and she is doomed to failure. And that in itself accounts in large part for the shortage of female physicists.

---

I never know exactly what to say about the whole issue of women in physics. Usually when I do say something, I regret it later. But now I have a couple of links I really want to publicize.

So as long as I'm blogging about it, let me just summarize a couple of thoughts briefly.

1) I admit part of me fears it's true, that women really do suck at math and science and computers.

2) But I've mostly been able to convince myself that's crap by getting this far.

3) Lawrence Summers is not courageous for saying that women may be bad at math, and it is not censorship or thought policing to disagree with him. What he says is what most people seem to believe, and have believed for a long, long time, including many women. And someone says it to the press every couple of years. So the best description isn't "courage," it's "conventional wisdom."

(And lots of things that people believed for a long, long time aren't true.)

4) My main theory about why there are so few women in my discipline is that women have more to lose from being nerdy and antisocial than men. This is more the fault of their mothers and their magazines and their female friends than of men. I blame the feminine subculture, and the fact that women mostly believe they can't do it, so why try?

5) Which is not to say that there's no discrimination of any kind. For the most part nowadays, it's just male physicists being condescending. (Historically, it was more about forbidding women access to education outright.)

I really don't believe in any theories of biological inferiority. First of all, because I believe that math and science and logic really are universal. I think aliens would have to discover the same laws we do. If aliens can understand, then women, with really insignificant biological differences, certainly ought to be able to. And secondly because I don't believe biology is destiny anyway. I think hormones influence moods, but I think moods are irrelevant to math. And finally, see above re: "getting this far." I can understand math, and I'm female, so it's not biological. QED, as far as I'm concerned. (Although I've heard everyone's favorite response to this, about statistical outliers. It so happens I know I am not exceptional. I remember what it felt like to hate math and fail at it.)

Now, the links:

Why aren't there more women in physics? For most of the same, complex reasons that there aren't more women in computer science.

If it were really biological, wouldn't it be the same in other countries? (That graph seems hard to argue with, to me.)

But then how can we account for the difference in test scores? Easily. This month's Scientific American shows that stereotypes are almost always self-fulfilling prophesies. (Which is just another reason standardized tests are meaningless, in my opinion.)

Links like that really cheer me up, some days.

Parking and Property Rights

The hot topic on the blogs I read these days is the ethics of claiming parking spots you dug out of the snow.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out an Ebay auction (look quick) selling an authetic parking control system. And Tim Burke ruminates on the role of government in our daily lives.

Usually, he says, government doesn't recognize these spontaneous social contracts.

Chicago's Mayor Daley is an exception, however. See commentary by Tribune columnist and blogger Eric Zorn and the University of Chicago Law Department.

I myself just dug out my very first parking spot a few weeks ago. It was Ken's car, but I had missed my work out, and after all, I ride around in it all the time. I felt compelled to earn my place in the passenger seat. And after I was done (it took an hour, in the cold and blowing snow), I felt entitled to claim that place on the street, as well.