Fire at Fullerton

I had another post planned for today, a sciency one. But that one will have to wait. Last night was just too interesting not to record. What I was trying to do was meet Andy (I hope you doesn't mind being mentioned, Andy) downtown for the outdoor movie in Grant Park. It was "Roman Holiday." Here is what happened on the way.

I'm waiting to cross the street by my El stop, and someone says to me, "They were on their way to deliver the bridge, but they ran out of gas."

I say, "They what what?"

He points. "The truck ran into the bridge there. So I said, you know, they tried to deliver the bridge..." Sure enough, a semi is wedged under not-quite-elevated-enough El tracks. The cab went under, but the top of the trailer is crumpled backwards, and a cop has closed down the lane. I laugh even though I know I shouldn't, and go up. Just in time to miss my train, but never mind, there'll be another in a minute.

I discover an insect in my shirt. We'll elide that bit.

I make conversation with a couple of women, who did not see me trying to get the bug out of my blouse. (The one who did went to the other end of the platform.) They're trying to figure out whether they need to change trains later. The answer is "yes."

We get on the train. It passes over the stuck truck. A few stops later, they change trains -- I stay put. Except neither train goes anywhere. For a long time. We get a couple of apologetic announcements from the conductor. And then: "This train is gonna be out of service." We all transfer to the other line. I say hi to the women from the platform, and borrow a phone from one of them, make a call about the change of plans, receive a call (she was surprised!) and then the plans change again. This train will be turning back half way, the PA system says unintelligibly. There will be a shuttle bus. The passengers are all talking to one another now, trying to figure out what he said, what they'll have to do. I wonder if that train I missed made it through.

We all get off a few stops later. It is now pouring, so I have my doubts about the movie. But I wait for the bus with everyone else, under the shelter of the tracks. I'm kind of enjoying myself, actually. This train load of people is really starting to bond, now. Everyone's speculating. An old black lady is furious.
Most people seem to think someone has fallen or thrown themselves on the tracks again. They have no patience for anyone whose suicide interrupts their commute. Someone says, "Fire on the Brown Line." The bus comes, destination unmarked, the driver as clueless as we are.

It's the most crowded bus I've ever been on. I get a seat, but most people have to stand in the aisle. The old black lady tells off a young man. He triest to defend himself, but she won't let him get a word in. He stands. She sits. Still scolding.

Off we go. Three high school girls in halter tops are getting a lecture from a dorky white man abot the importance of going to college. They are laughing at him. I'm on his side. I make the cover of my Electromagnetics book more visible. I think they've just finished some kind of summer program, and he must have been one of the instructors. Later he gets off and I think they're trying to read the street name, out the window next to me, so I tell them. But no, they're trying to see a purse in a shop window. Now I feel dorky. I hide the E&M book a little.

There's a leak in the roof above me. As the rain starts coming down for real, the older man (Korean?) next to me and the younger guy sitting behind me both try to block it somehow, but it's futile. All I can do is laugh helplessly. I think I'm going to get a lot wetter tonight. The older man asks me where I'm getting off, tells me he doesn't know how this works and will take his cue from me. That's even funnier.

We don't have much choice in the end. Everyone gets off at the same place, and gets on the Red Line. We're dispersed, though. On this train, I see a familiar face -- I think. I smile. I went on a date with him in October. But he looks blank. Maybe it's not him?

A few minutes later he says my name (slight mispronunciation, which I don't correct.) I answer to it. He apologizes for not getting back to me. I really don't mind. More interestingly, he saw the fire on the brown line. It was at Fullerton, he says. The flames were "pretty high."

He thinks I should walk instead of trying to get the train back to my stop. Since the train back to my stop never comes, I end up taking his advice. It is not raining anymore, but I have to wade some puddles in my sandals.

I can't find Andy at the stop we agreed to, but then I can't get up onto the platform without paying again either. There's some looking for pay phones and begging for mercy from the CTA person so that I can check the platform, but I can't find him. I hadn't had great hopes anyway. He'd been planning to come in on the Brown Line.

It is 9:00 when I get to the park -- an hour an forty-six minutes later than originally planned. The movie was scheduled to start at 8:20, but there seems to have been a rain delay. Audry Hepburn is still asleep in Gregory Peck's bed. I borrow a cell phone from a nice guy at the chair rental place and this time Andy answers. He's in cab, on his way home. But after all that, no way I'm not going watch rest of the movie. I sit on a plastic bag and pull out a piece of graph paper, and while I watch I write down most of the details I've described above. Afterward the people who run the projector are talking about how small the audience was. They assume it was because of the rain, but I tell them about the fire at Fullerton. They ask me what I was writing, and I tell them that too, including the URL for "this little website I've got."

I try to catch a bus home, and the driver tells me to take the El. "Yeah, that line's running. I just took it, didn't I?" He's right.

I can't see any fire damage at Fullerton, although I do see workmen standing around on the tracks. The truck is gone at my stop, too. The ride home is uninteresting, except for a girl sitting next to me, sketching the people on the train.

Happy Birthdays Rebeccas!

My sister Rebecca's birthday was yesterday. My mother Rebecca's birthday is tomorrow. This is the first time I'm not there to celebrate with them, but I used a whole phone card talking to the younger Becca yesterday. She just got back from a trip to Wisconsin, of which the highlight was the Spam Museum. "Put on hard hats and frocks, everything you'll need to participate in the simulated SPAM production line. While you're at it, catch a glimpse of the SPAM Ballet. Don't miss this once-in-a-lifetime photo opportunity." No, that is not a joke. Yes, they have a display which just loops the Monty Python sketch.

Also, briefly noted:

-Today is Greg Maddux Day in the state of Illinois. "'His 300th win is a testament to his talent, determination and dedication to his team and to the sport,' the governor said. 'The State of Illinois is proud of his accomplishment and the legacy he's building.'" There will be ceremonies before today's game -- which Mark Prior is pitching. It will really suck if they lose on Greg Maddux day, so I hope Prior's got his control back. We only have a one-game lead in the wild card race. Go Cubs!

-The Chicagoist tells me that I am missing a lot of fun this weekend:
A folk music garage sale, the Illinois State Fair including the butter cow, which is mentioned in that one episode of the West Wing, The Wizard World Comic Fest including appearances by Joss Whedon, and -- this is the one I'm really going to get in trouble for -- a radio station "block party" featuring Modest Mouse and Death Cab for Cutie. And I'm passing? What's wrong with me? (But I did go bowling on Friday, and I'm going to a bar for the folk music night, and I'm actually getting some stuff done.)

-Finally, I was listening to NPR this morning, and was seriously creeped out by these song lyrics. Okay, I'm not going to take up gardening after all. Ever. And I am going to start eating a lot more spicy food. And I will continue to avoid both aspirin and sunscreen. And also, gonna flirt more. So I am not like the person in this song at all? Okay? At all?

Lake Michigan

Every day at dusk I run a few miles along the lake. Now that I've been here almost a year, I've seen four seasons' worth of sunsets. And it's true: each one is different. You'd think by now I would have internalized that cliché, but no. The changes keep taking me by surprise. Some part of me still thinks that after a couple hundred evenings on this same stretch of beach, I ought to know it. I haven't grown used to seeing things I've never seen before.

I never bring a camera, but every single day I have reason to wish I had. Fleeting effects of light, tableaus of beach goers. Before I come back, they'll be gone. But because I'm running, I move past before the scene changes, and so I perceive a series of snapshots, or possibly paintings.

First -- the residential street where I live, brick and trees and decorative windows. I can tell when I'm getting near the lake because the houses grow more expensive. Usually around eight there's a cop standing at this end of the street. I don't know what he's doing there, but sometimes I wave.

Then I can see the water, across a little stretch of public park. If I have started my run early, and it has been a particularly fair day, the lake will be two completely saturated hues of irridescent blue-green. I like to think the word "ultramarine" was invented to describe the deeper shade, which belongs to the deeper water, out toward the horizon. The nearer distance has a little more gold in it, because the sand shows through. Both colors are flecked with reflections, sunlight scintillating off the surface. But if it is cloudy, the water will only be a metallic green and gold. Or if it is twilight, then it will be any of a thousand shades of pale purple. All of this is the more remarkable since it is so startlingly transparent, clearer than my windows, when examined close up.

The sky is always tastefully color-coordinated, of course. You can see a lot of sky when there is nothing but water between you and the edge of the world. In the evenings the sun picks out the tops of the clouds in white, and the backdrop glows translucently, greenish gray or lavender. Then the clouds burn down to embers, and the light is orange.

After the sun goes down, the sky is still orange. Or really, sodium yellow, 584 and 589 nanometers. That's the color of Chicago's streetlights, which prevent night from ever quite falling. There's always a blush behind the skyline of the city.

I know it washes out stars, but it's such a perfect velvety setting for the buildings themselves, which seem to be made out of light, crystalline, otherworldly, when all you can see are their shining windows... Or the brightly lit spires (radio antennae) rising from the top, in the case of the Hancock building and the Sears tower. They are meant to be beacons, after all.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let us say it is still daylight, as I get to the end of my street and catch my first glimpse of the water and the sky and the city. The views I am describing come later, further along. At first I just satisfy the suspense -- what color is the water? -- and then turn my back on it, and keep running. Through a series of small parks bordered on one side by sandy beach. Usually there are children here. Sometimes family reunions, grilling out. Occasionally a wedding party, posing on the rocks. Or a less formal couple, leaning against one another and looking at the view. Kids and parents playing catch or flying a kite. I love how trite these scenes are, sort of multi-cultural Norman Rockwells. It's good for a person to see a little innocent pleasure every day, helps ward off cynicism.

There are always other runners. I run a little faster if a fellow jogger is nearby. There will be volleyball players on the beach, probably, and bicyclists, and inline skaters. And some people who have come to just sit outside and read, especially around the fountains.

I leave the park, pass the sailing club's boathouse. At this time of day, the boats will be heading in. All white sails, dyed by the setting sun to match the clouds.

Now I cross a little bridge onto a (man made) grassy penninsula. In the little sandy cliff across from the bridge, some species of bird has made a honeycomb of bird-house sized holes. They don't seem to be living there any more, but in the spring, you could watch them bustling in and out.

We also have ducks, and gulls of course, which remind me of the sailboats, when they're in flight. Sometimes they just bob on the lake in flocks. Once they settled on the soccer field, and I was unable to resist running through them, scattering them in three dimensions. They settled again on the field behind me.

Back in June, I was attacked on three separate occasions by birds I couldn't even see. They came at me from above and pecked at my head, and were gone before I figured out what was in my hair. I hope they were protecting a nest, rather than trying to build one. Then yesterday I noticed some other species -- starlings? -- swarming the way gnats swarm, above the trees. (Oh yes, we have gnats too. So many that sometimes they end up in my eyes and my mouth. You can't see them from a distance, but you can see other joggers react. Suddenly their faces contort and their arms wave for what appears to be no reason at all, as though they were having spasms. I was puzzled and amused the first time, until I ran into the same swarm... Then I was not puzzled, and found it a little less amusing...)

I'm becoming more familiar with lots of local wildlife, in fact. We also have fish, of course, big ones visible just under the surface, which people catch from the very tip of the penninsula. They stand on the haphazardly arranged concrete blocks which border the whole thing. These are graffiti'd with declarations of undying devotion, bad poetry, names and nicknames and dates, so you have something to read while waiting for a bite.

And among these artificial boulders a little further up lives a family of raccoons. I've seen them so many times now that I can tell the little ones have grown. They're just coming out for the night when I get there. Rabbits like the dusk too, of course. That's when they feed, I remember from Watership Down, "silflay." There are almost as many of them as squirrels.

When Andrew was here we saw, a little further from the lake, a baby possum. At first I wasn't sure it was really so young. I've never really seen on that close up before. Not ten feet away, watching us, from a tree. But later we saw a full-sized one, and then a whole family of them, so I know that one was really a possum pup, and not just unusually adorable. Huge eyes. I'm not usually out late enough for possums. (We also saw a pure black squirrel, which impressed Andrew enormously.)

He came with me on a run and naturally it poured. I run in the rain, if at all possible. Sometimes the puddles cover the tops of my shoes and my socks get wet. Everything sticks to me. I'm careful not to wear white. Any men foolhardy enough to be out in weathter like that will simply take off their shirts. I'm sure one of them, once, was running more slowly than he had to so as not to leave me too far behind... When I caught him, I said, "Nice weather, huh?" He laughed, sort of self-mocking, and I ran past.

Of course, stormy days involve the risk of lightning, but the reward is worth it: when the sun falls beneath the cloud layer you're almost guarenteed a rainbow. My understanding of the physics is that you're most likely to see rainbows when the sun in on the horizon anyway, which may account for the inordinate number that I've seen this year. The sun sets in the west, so the rainbow appears to the east, over the lake, one end passing behind the Chicago skyline.

All of this is so valuable to me that I keep running well into autumn. Forty degrees, I'm fine. It's only when my hands begin to chap and my nose turns numb and I can't see because of the hair blowing in my face and the paths ice over that I finally admit defeat for the winter and switch to reading books on the stairclimber.

I was more grateful for spring, this past year, than I can ever recall having felt before. I planned myself a longer route, all the way to the end of the path by the lake.

Flannery O'Connor, Richard Feynman, and Jon Stewart

Here's my problem: I've got contradictory heroes.

Today Santi links to a Flannery O'Connor blog. Regularly updated quotes. Now I have to admit I haven't read any Flannery O'Connor, although I've been meaning to ever since Carol said I should. But anyone Santi calls a saint and Carol recommends, I know is probably going to go onto my heroes list. As I read the quotes, I'm mentally putting her right next to Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Graham Greene in the "Religion and Reason" subheading. (Dava Sobel, Jill Paton Walsh, Rene Descartes, and T.S. Eliot and Thomas Aquinas are cross-listed in this section as well.)

But Andrew links to a commencement speech given by Alan Alda, on the subject of Richard Feynman. Now Richard Feynman is also a hero of mine, in the "Science and Creativity" category. See also Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, Freeman Dyson, Robert Wilson, Johannes Kepler, Enrico Fermi, Erwin Schroedinger, Thomas Edison, Paul Erdos, G.H. Hardy, Kurt Goedel, Galileo, etc. Cross listings include Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Isaac Asimov, and Ben Franklin.

Thinking of commencement addresses, and of links I'd been meaning to include here at some point, made me think of Jon Stewart's speech at his alma mater, William and Mary. (Incidentally I've applied to William and Mary twice. I feel a funny kind of loyalty for it. The first time I couldn't afford to go though it was my first choice by far, and for grad school... It was a very close thing, but in the end I think Chicago won me.) Some time ago someone (now I can't remember who) also provided me with a link to this fantastic interview he did on Larry King Live. Now Jon Stewart is also one of my heroes, in the "Humor and Truth" category. Terry Pratchett, Gary Trudeau, Joss Whedon, Aaron Sorkin, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, James Morrow, Connie Willis, Tom Stoppard, the Coen Brothers, even Kevin Smith.

Now here's the thing: Flannery O'Connor would hate Kevin Smith. Don't you think? I mean, he made the movie "Dogma" so pretty much everyone in the first category is going to hate him. (And okay, it's not my favorite movie either. But even in that movie I love his stupid characters. That's what the Coen Brothers do too. They make me laugh at, and love, the most flawed people. Okay, that's what everyone in this category does, with maybe the exception of Swift, who is crankier.)

And don't you think that Richard Feynman, who was a fairly militant atheist, would dislike Flannery O'Connor?

And really, just picture Jon Stewart interviewing James Clerk Maxwell. I didn't know Maxwell, but he was a Cambridge "mathmo" right? On the Daily Show, I'm betting he'd come off like the biggest nerd in the entire universe.

Sometimes I feel like all of these people, and all of the people from the other subheadings -- it's a long list -- are just having shouting matches in my head all of the time, and when I open my mouth, there's no telling which voices will come out... (And hardly any of them are female!)

I don't feel like I've reconciled these different approaches to life at all, really. I wonder if I ever will? But I would rather live with the conflict, I think, than have any of them fall silent.

Congratulations, Greg.

Greg Maddux won his 300th game today.

In the interviews I'm hearing now, he sounds more like Eeyore than ever. Paraphrased: "Why did you leave after five innings?" "I wasn't pitching very good." "When did you start thinking about three hundred wins?" "When I got to two-ninety-nine. I didn't want to get ahead of myself." "You didn't do any curtain calls?" "Well, it was their park. It didn't seem right."

We love you Greg. Thanks for coming back to the Cubs, so Chicago can share this with you.

Bush's Blog

It all started with this article in the Onion. "CIA Asks Bush to Discontinue Blog"

They mention a URL in the story -- http://PrezGeorgeW.typepad.com/. So my friend Andy went to see what was there. As you do. Turned out it was an unclaimed address. So Andy claimed it.

Or as the blogger for the Guardian put it:"What makes it even funnier is that the Onion guys weren't sharp enough to set up George W's pretend blog at Typepad, so Andy did it for them." (You know you're internationally famous when foreign newspapers refer to you by first name only.)

Bush's campaign also has a real blog, which is almost as funny. It claims that Republican party throws better parties. Now this seems counter-intuitive, but it's exactly what Bush's background qualifies him for.


(Andy also notes that his hypothetical Cubs hard hats were available even before Wrigley Field started falling down, at "teamhardhats.com". Where else? Incidentally, Mayor Daley thinks the Tribune, which owns the Cubs, should have more editorials about this, so today they gave him one. Remember - Daley is a Sox fan.)

Car-ticles

This blog is already too Chicago-centric. I'm really going to resist the temptation.

Instead I'll dig something whimsical and scientific out of my bookmark archive: traffic waves.

"Why had I never noticed all the 'traffic fluid dynamics' out there? Once my brain became sensitized to it, I started seeing quite a variety of interesting things occurring. Eventually I started using my car to poke at the flowing traffic. Observation eventually leads to experimentation, no? There are amazing things you can do as an 'amateur traffic dynamicist.' You can drive like an 'anti-rubbernecker' and erase slowdowns created by other drivers."

I don't really drive, but I find this fascinating, and for a couple of years now I've found myself thinking about it every time I'm stuck on a slow-moving street.

This is a part of Bill Beaty's extensive and endlessly diverting Science Hobbyist site. The "anti-skepticism" articles make it a little harder to take him seriously, and the corresponding links to "paranormal phenomena" put me all out of patience, but his other essays and experiments are delightfully enthusiastic, imaginative, and appealing.

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Okay, just a little more politics and baseball. Did you know that apparently Cubs fan John Cusak is dating potential first daughter Alexandra Kerry?

I'm no good at resisting temptation.

UPDATE: I can resist this even less: Alan Keyes vs. Barack Obama? What an interesting race that will be. My mom, long-time Keyes fan, may yet disinherit me...

Supporting Evidence

Anyone reading through an aggregator will notice, but for those who aren't -- I added some quotes re-wrote some stuff in this post about Obama. If you're interested in the subject, it's a better essay now.

Adding to my Blogroll

My friend Andrew Gray points out that the title of What's the Matter with Kansas (which I reviewed here)has been changed for the benefit of foreigners who've never heard of Kansas. Same text. No additional explanatory forward.

Look, if I'm explaining "Chicago has two baseball teams," the least they can do is label Kansas on a US map.

(Andrew also points out that tonight is a "blue moon". So go do something you don't normally do.)

And my friend Santi has a blog, in which he invites us to "Scat to the Pensees"

Both of them are on the blogroll now. Also, did you notice that Blogspot is now promoting infrared sensors and photodiodes on the banner above? I think I'm sort of proud. (I do realize there are other services that don't have ads, of course, but I trust the ones that do to stay in business longer...)

I've become an Illinois Politics Blog

Readers from other parts of the world may not know that from 1955-1976, Richard J. Daley was Mayor of Chicago, and that since 1999, his son, Richard M. Daley, has filled that office. The name "Daley" is all over the city, on almost every public building. This dynasty is part of what makes Chicago politics so interesting to me (along with the famous "machine" and the rumors of mob ties and the rivalries between different neighborhoods.) These readers also might not know that Chicago has two baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox. Cubs are North Side, Sox are South Side. They don't compete directly, as they belong to different leagues, but nevertheless Sox fans will say their favorite team is "The Sox and whoever's beating the Cubs" and Cubs fans will wear "Sox suck" shirts.

Mayor Daley is a Sox fan. In Chicago, this means a lot more than the fact that he's a Democrat. (Everyone's a Democrat!) So with that context, you can appreciate the humor of this item from last year, via Andy:

In an effort to get a leg up on his four opponents in the hotly contested race for 44th Ward, attorney Dean Maragos is distributing 15,000 refrigerator magnets with the Cubs' 2003 schedule. The magnets bear the Daley and Maragos campaign logos, with the slogan, "The Best Team for the 44th Ward."

The giveaway implies two things that are not true because Daley is a die-hard Sox fan who wouldn't be caught dead at Wrigley Field, and he is not endorsing Maragos. He's supporting Tom Tunney, whom he recently appointed ward alderman.

... "We view the use of the mayor's logo as an endorsement," said Daley's deputy campaign manager Julian Green.

...He added, "No one should be worried about the mayor's allegiance. Clearly, the mayor is a Sox fan."

Incidentally, Tunney won.

I also think it's funny that according to my friend Tomasz, who went to the Cubs game yesterday (Cubs 10 Phillies 7, hooray!) there were lots of people wearing hard hats. Just as Andy suggested. (That links to a Sun Times article because the Chicago Tribune owns the Cubs...) No women wearing beards, though, they only do that when Matt Clement pitches -- as he did today.

And finally, I should update you all: Jack Ryan finally dropped out of the race on Thursday. I realized I never mentioned one of the more surreal aspects of the case, which non-Chicago readers may not have known: the woman he divorced was Jeri Ryan, who played Seven-of-Nine on Star Trek, Voyager.

Fluorescence

So, now we're sending laser light into my little rubidium vapor cell, which looks like an empty glass tube. Doing this makes the rubidium gas glow brightly -- in the infrared range, so it still looks like an empty glass tube.

Today was about trying to focus a laser on the center of the cell, and then trying to focus the invisible glow on my little APD ("Avalanche Photo-Diode"), a light-detector which is connected to an amplifier, which is connected to an oscilloscope. If we set the laser to scan through a range of frequencies, the glow blinks on and off, as the laser hits the "resonant" frequency and then scans past it. On the 'scope, the little dancing dot draws two nice big peaks when the glow is "brightest" (but still invisible), and smaller peaks for less intense spectral lines. It's still a kick for me to see any theory actually work, especially in an aparatus that I built. Part of me never really believed in quantum mechanics, and spectral lines, even after seeing them in undergraduate labs. Subconsciously I must have assumed there was some trick to it. But this, I set up -- I know for a fact that it's not a special effect.

But I must admit it's not really the oscilloscope view which I find most convincing, even though it produces these text-book peaks. It's watching the cell wink which actually excites me. I say that this glow is infrared, invisible... But we have an infrared viewer. And if you look through it, there it is! A bright line of glowing gas, inside my empty cell. I can see the beam narrow when I put in a lens to focus the laser. I can see it flash as the laser scans frequencies. I can see it reflect off the post that's holding another lens, and I can see it cast shadows that aren't there in the room light. It's beautiful and uncanny. Of course I'm willing to believe in quantum mechanics after seeing something like that... Flickering "spectral" lines that can be seen as a green glow only if one looks through this special crystal viewing device... I'm half willing to believe in ghosts!

But even so I can't believe that anything I've built actually works.

Why I like Barack Obama

(NB -- I've added a bit to the bottom of this one.)

(Update -- I'm just going to keep tweaking this post when I think of something else to say... I've added some links this time.)

I just posted an abbreviated version of this in the comments at Byzantium's Shores and decided it ought to be a whole post. In spite of what I just said about not posting so frequently.

Obama's Convention Keynote Adress solidified my support. Here's why:

My favorite thing about him is that he doesn't pander. I have yet to hear him make any impossible promises, which habit has been a problem for several of the other convention speakers. Health care is a hard problem, and even if you could get enough Republican support to actually pass any of these universal insurance plans, it would take years to actually get it working as well as the Canadian or UK systems, about which Canadian and British people complain constantly (though they prefer their own to the US system.) Job creation isn't that easy, and cloned-embryo stem cells, moral issues aside, won't provide the miracle cure that Ron Reagan described.

As far as I can tell, Obama doesn't make claims like that. Nor do his speeches consist of restatements of the party line on the high profile issues. At the debate I saw, when the others piled on an abortion question to make it clear that they had absolutely no doubts on the subject, he saved his time to talk about death penalty reform, which he was involved in, in the Illinois Senate. You may remember that Illinois placed a moratorium on the death penalty pending investigation. As a civil rights lawyer, Obama was well-suited to participate in that process. He is not categorically anti-death-penalty, and I am, but I respect that he didn't pander to me either. Similarly, though he has consistently opposed going into Iraq, he repeatedly tells pacificist Democrats that he sometimes supports wars. I'm surprised this sort of thing hasn't cost him more votes. But apparently it wins them -- after all, it worked on me.

My second favorite thing about him is that he doesn't demonize his opponents. This is my main problem with Howard Dean. He thinks Republicans are brain-eating aliens. Whereas Obama says:

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Now that's what I call a uniter, not a divider. Mentioning "worship" is another example of not pandering to your base, by the way. His references to religion put off one strongly left-wing friend of mine before the primaries. He seems much more sincere about it than most Democrats. (I really wish atheistic politicians were allowed to simply call themselves atheists. Its Obama's honesty that I like, not his actual beliefs. But atheists aren't allowed to be honest -- because other people like the beliefs.)

My third favorite thing about him is that he talks about moral duties when other Democrats only talk about rights. This is sort of the same thing as not pandering, in the sense that people want to hear about rights rather than duties, most of the time.

When he said "Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we’re all connected as one people. If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child." I really expected him to start quoting John Donne. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

And I liked "The people I meet — in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks — they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead — and they want to." for the same reason.

My fourth favorite thing about him is that he knows and cares about the rest of the world, outside of the US. His father is from Kenya. He spent part of his childhood in Indonesia (and more of it in Hawaii.) He's got perspective. I trust him to care about people who live in other countries, and people who are new to this country.

My fifth favorite thing about him is that lives in Illinois, and his mom's from Kansas, and I believe he knows the sort of people that I know. It's not so much that I like midwesterners, as that I don't want people who don't like midwesterners representing me.

My sixth favorite thing about him is his charisma. Although I feel guilty, liking him for such a shallow reason.

My seventh favorite thing is that he speaks clear, correct, articulate English, without sounding pretentious.

My eighth favorite thing about him is his résumé. Editor of the Harvard Law review, civil rights lawyer in Chicago, and a solid state senate record.

I also like that he'll add some desperately needed racial diversity to the Senate, but I think it's unfair that he's going to be expected to represent an entire race, as well as my state. It's unfair to him in the same way this is unfair.


UPDATE:

After watching Edwards' speech last night, which struck me as empty all limp generalities and rhetorical tricks, I had a good-humored argument today over whether Obama's was any better. After all, he didn't exactly lay out an agenda either, except in the same general "poverty bad; veterans good" sense. I asked myself what it is, exactly, that I want from these speeches. After all, they can't really wonk out on national television. Anyone who wants to read a budget proposal can probably find that material themselves. So what do I expect them to do on television? What did Obama do that Edwards didn't?

I've decided what I want is for politicians to get up there and explain to the people why they can't have everything they want. I'd like them to explain the political realities to people who live in insular communities, and don't understand what their tax breaks/public works project/social services would mean in terms of sacrifices that other communities would have to make. Some civics lessons, a tutorial on deficit spending, and sincere efforts to make competing interests understand one another's points of view. I want my politicians to get up in front of everyone and say, "It's more complicated than you think!"

This comes back to "don't pander." Edwards just told people what they wanted to hear. Obama generally doesn't. As I said, I think his emphasis on responsibility in the DNC speech is a part of what made it so good.

But there are better examples. For instance, he got in a little trouble the other day for acknowledging that there's not much difference between John Kerry and George Bush on Iraq, for instance -- that's true. There's not much choice now but to appeal for help and keep trying to rebuild. There's presumably a large difference between what Kerry would have done in March of 2003 and what Bush did, but we can't undo it now. It's true, but none of the other Democrats will say it.

Some more quotes I like:
On foreign policy: "To begin with, we must confront the immediate challenge involved in returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people. Although I loudly and vigorously opposed the war in Iraq, I understand that it was an American commitment, not a Republican one. --- Closer to home, the United States has a powerful interest in sustaining democratic reforms in Latin America. We must restore the United States’ reputation as a defender of democracy in this region. [Who talks about this?] --- And, in every region, we must remember that our armed forces cannot impose democracies." And this whole speech. "I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars."

On crime: "In America, we teach that when a criminal has done their time– they’re free to return to society. But that is not the reality. Ex-offenders are subject to any number of hurdles, particularly with respect to employment and housing. Though some of these provisions are offered as protection from violent criminals, they too often restrict non-violent ex-offenders as well." [on the passage of a crime package he sponsored, which also mandated videotaped interrogations and record keeping for the purpose of detecting racial profiling.]

On the economy (soundclip): "All of us at some level believe in free trade. --- But what we do expect that our government is going to make sure that people are at the forefront of this government's thinking when it comes to world trade." [proposing replace tax advantages for moving jobs with tax cuts for those who keep them in the US -- "You don't have to be protectionist to say that that's got to change."]

On politics:"A century and a half ago, two Senate candidates from Illinois set an admirable standard for campaigning with a series of debates that captivated the attention of the entire nation. --- To do these issues justice, we owe the people of Illinois more than glib TV ads and rehearsed sound-bites. " [proposing Lincoln-Douglas style debates with Jack Ryan]


Obama is outrageously popular, all of the sudden, so maybe nuance will catch on.

Generalism: Science and the Humanities

(NB I have re-written the later part of this entry)

I oughtn't update so often -- I don't want to set up unrealistic expectations. I don't think I can keep up an every day or every other day pace forever.

Nevertheless, I want to comment on this:

Tim Burke on "The Limits to Generalism"

...and Burke's blog doesn't allow comments. Also I want to draw other people's attention to the piece.

Burke is a historian who seems to be interested in a lot of the things which interest me. Plus he writes well, and I mostly agree with his conclusions.

He went to a conference on autonomous software agents, hoping to learn something about simulating societies, and got lost in the computer jargon. Since he generally believes our elaborate system of academic specialization is unnecessary, this was a discouraging experience. He says "I repeatedly extoll the virtues of generalism, but it cannot do everything. The sinking feeling I repeatedly had during the conference was knowing that to even get to the point where I grasped the substantive difference between different algorithms or formalisms proposed by many of the researchers at this conference, where I could meaningfully evaluate which were innovative and important, and which were less attractive, would take me years of basic study[...]" I read this wondering how hard it would be for me to understand (I've had a couple of classes in this stuff, as electives) and thought again that it was just as well I'd studied the sciences, because it seems much easier for a scientist to be to understand the humanities than vice versa. I like the idea of generalism too.

But then Burke acknowledges that asymmetry (natural because the whole purpose of the humanities is to generate "broadly comprehensible and communicative insights rather than highly technical ones.") and adds an important caveat: scientists who actually try to publish in the humanities often read selectively and shallowly, "cherry-picking material from anthropological scholarship they like and ignoring contradictory work."

He specifically accuses Jared Diamond of this (although without vitriol) and points out that computer scientists did something similar in the early days of AI enthusiasm: "Some scientists tend to forget that on a series of crucial issues, skeptics in the humanities were closer to the truth for decades than scientists, most notably in the early debate between philosophers of mind, neuroscientists and computer scientists working on artificial intelligence about how easy it would be to create AI."

I read this part as a sort of (unwitting) response to this paper I wrote, in which I was rather hard on the modern humanities:

"However, one can never do an experiment to discover whether a book is good. In history, one can always hope to turn up evidence for or against a theory by more closely examining primary sources, but this doesn’t help when all of the sources are well known, and one must decide among different interpretations. [...] The modern scholars do not attempt to weed out the best and worst ideas from among this huge crop as their forbearers did among the smaller number of ideas within their culture. They do not go through this exacting process of examination and judgement. How can they? What standards would the modern scholars use? There are no objective grounds on which one can declare Nietzche wrong and Monique Wittig right, and no consensus, anymore, on subjective grounds."

I went around while I was writing this, trying to provoke all of my humanities friends into argument. I wanted them to defend their disciplines. I was very annoying about it.

Tim Burke here gives me exactly what I was looking for -- a very good defense. Tackling philsosophical and historical questions with the scientific method is one thing; trying to apply the scientific method to fields where you can't hope for repeatable experiments (or masssive amounts of statiscally representative observational data, uninfluenced by the process of observation, as in astronomy) is simply sloppy thinking.

I wrote my essay right after reading a book called "The New Humanists" to which Jared Diamond contributed, along with a lot of those AI optimistic computer scientists Burke mentions. I said these were scientists who "poached subject matter from the humanities". I also said, "Famously, physicist Alan Sokal was driven by this impatience to hoax the academic journal 'Social Text' by submitting a paper about socially constructed science, which he designed to be flattering to biases of the academics (who claim to be unbiased) and deliberately filled with factual errors and intentional nonsense. It was accepted, published, and praised. This story seems to me to show that other scientists have the same problem with the modern humanities that I do, and that it is a real problem, not just a grudge. Unfortunately, there is no obvious solution to the lack of standards, since few would really wish to go back to the sometimes bigotted criteria we discarded."

Burke "replies": "Alan Sokal’s hoax hit a real target, but if you want to think and write about problems like the nature of existence and knowledge, or about why and what a cultural work means to its audiences, sometimes you really are going to have to go into deep waters that require a complex conceptual framework."

This point is well-taken, and my description of humanities scholarship as a lot of differing opinions with no way of deciding between them, doesn't take into account the value of "semantics arguments" which do have productive results -- clear ways of thinking and speaking about a topic, without which there really is no hope of consensus or a conclusion.

There's another good point, in answer to my essay, that Burke didn't raise, but which has been impressed upon me by a couple of history-of-science seminars, a conversation with a librarian friend, and the experience helping to edit a paper outside of my field... I say, "In history, one can always hope to turn up evidence for or against a theory by more closely examining primary sources, but this doesn’t help when all of the sources are well known, and one must decide among different interpretations," but fail to acknowledge the amount of work that "closely examining primary sources" actually invovles, or the real importance of it. It's so easy for us to forget, to re-write the past, because the truth is buried in a mountain of trivia. Mining this mountain for real information is back-breaking labor, in a figurative sense, but the truth is more valuable than gold. Without that kind of excavation, people can be made to believe anything. It's "1984" and history has always been what the people in power say it is...

I think I'll have to re-write that part of the essay. My original point was that it used to be objective science versus subjective humanities, but now the humanities are neither. It seems frustrating to me that they don't come to objective or subjective conclusions. But perhaps the point isn't to come to conclusions. Perhaps "descriptive" is more important than "deductive" in this context. I think I have been insufficiently appreciative of the value of simply looking at the world and describing it. In one sense, that's a trivial task, just stating the obvious. But just because something might be obvious if you looked, doesn't mean there's no value in recording it -- you won't ever look at most of these documents, these time periods, these cultures. You can't. I'm tempted now to think of humanities scholars as latter-day Lewises and Clarks. They'll explore metaphorical continents for me and report back, because I haven't got enough lifetimes to explore for myself. And if they come back telling different stories, well, that's what always happens when you send multiple parties of explorers. One may find mountains full of monsters and the other peaceful jungle people. The continents are big, and even if they weren't, eyewitnesses rarely agree. That doesn't mean their testimony isn't important.

Oh, and one more thing--

Burke says, "Theoretical physics would be far enough away in every respect that I might not ever reasonably expect to understand it, let alone do it, given that much of it cannot even be translated from its mathematical conception into broadly communicative prose. At that point, you have to have enough faith in the entire system of knowledge production to just say, “I trust you to do what you do, and to do it how you do it”"

I don't think theoretical physics should be that way. I'm sure Tim Burke could understand it, at least as well as I do, if the physicists would only learn to write...