The Fascinet

Ouch.

M. took me out to see former poet laureate and 2008 Pulitzer winner Robert Haas last night.

You may ask what he poetry sounds like, and it's rather easy to do so. As I told M., "It's poetry written by a hippie English professor." M. asked my why I was so mad, and I said I wasn't, I was bored. If she didn't want an honest appraisal of the poetry, then she shouldn't have asked what I thought.

Jesus Christ, he liked Bob Dylan.

His mendacious verse was bloodless. This is because poetry is an art form, and by "art form" I mean a kind of entertainment. Poetry written today, like all too much fiction written today, is a kind of entertainment produced for an vanishing audience. This isn't because the audience has abandoned the art form, it's because the art form has abandoned the audience. It's produced by English professors for English professors, and it is therefore crap.

How much can a poem say that was written by someone who went to college after high school, went to grad school after college, and taught English after grad school with no break?

Nothing at all.

He has no experience, no life, no vitality, and never did.

His poetry proved it.

The only interesting poems he read were his translations of Czesław Miłosz.

He had a life, he had character, and that he shows you why you do your best to avoid having them yourself.

I was agreeing with someone recently about the problem of counting on the adversarial system to arrive at truth, probably in response to a rash of recent articles discussing how essays and argument are the sincerest form of democracy. I don’t necessarily disagree. All this goes along well with the rather crazy notion of the democratization of knowledge through triangulation of viewpoints on the interweb. I’d like to talk about this a bit below, but let’s just start with a quotation.

Here’s how Wm. C. Hannas depicts the postwar writing reform situation in Japan in Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma:

It was not until the Second World War that the Japanese once again began to take seriously the idea of reforming their writing system. The explanation usually given by the Japanese is that reform was forced on Japan by occupation authorities as part of the allied plan to democratize society. There is some truth in this, although it seems more likely that those most responsible for the writing reforms that began in 1946 were the Japanese themselves. American impact in this area, it seems, has been exaggerated by Japanese who were both for and against reform, the former as a shield for their own agenda and the later as a bogeyman to discredit reform.

The American involvement is mainly in choosing anti-Nationalists to run the education department, with a little extra backstory.

Now, Hannas is himself making an argument, taking a side, and so maybe his telling is biased toward what he wants to convince us of (that writing reform in East Asia is both desirable and inevitable). The only person I trust less than a source with a known bias is one that pretends to have none. However, this does sound a lot like how truth gets bend in politics: something that’s convenient for both sides becomes accepted, something that’s inconvenient to both sides is ignored. What’s really happening is lost to politics, to democracy.

So, we do find that argument serves democratic politics, but we also find that it perverts, distorts and obscures facts that benefit no one. This not only means that truth is not served by argumentation, the essay, and democracy, it also means that argumentation makes democracy less efficient since decisions—in the case above, writing reform—are made on the wrong basis, with flawed rationales.

And so, democracy fails us.

Again.

Another wonderful conference popped into my inbox this morning: Academic Globalization. We already pay kids a grand to teach a three credit hour course (less than half of what each of their students pay to sit in it), we already import vast numbers of Indians and Chinese to teach the courses.

Of course, unversities have a lot to learn from businesses. The Indians used in call centers have been coached in nice, intelligible Mid-Western accents, and they're never brought to the US and paid slightly less than a Mexican doing lawcare. University lecturers need to know even less than the product support kids, so the bright provost could even save money there.

That's the kind of university I want to run.

Big knowledge is big money.

( 2nd Symposium on Academic Globalization: AG 2008 )

All sorts of weird immigration news.

The most importantis that the H1-b program filled up in "a day." The first week was to be treated as if it were a single day. The USCIS (whatever happened to the INS? Someone got paid a lot of money to change those initials) doesn't know how many more applications it has, but its more than the 65,000 normal H1-b applications and the 20,000 hypocritical ones for people holding advanced degrees from American universities. First the hypocritical H1-bs will be selected by lottery, then the remainder will be put in a lotter with the normal H1-bs. The advanced degrees don't usually fill up so fast, and this upset Y. very much, although they've decided to extend the OPT from the J1, giving her extra time, she probably qualifies for a "rock star VISA," and we have other options.

I was hoping that this would make things easier for me by limiting the number of kids allowed in country to become professors. But, no, they can get a J1 for five years, and after that they're all good green card candidates.

There's more, with NPR and the WSJ having stories on the other side of the immigration spectrum that don't conflict, but certainly show that reporters like to write about data with some hamhanded editorializing thrown in.

I am now getting rejection letters from places I don't recall applying to.

For shits and giggles: these are the chances that you'll get n interviews (exactly) or you'll get up to n offers, but get at least one, using relevant numbers for a job search in physics, assuming everyone is equal.



There's a 36% chance you'll get no interviews and a 77% chance that you'll get no offers.

You'll average 2 interviews and no offers.

My plan has always been (before I started applying for tenure track positions, before I learned I'd jobless at the end of June), if I had not secured a position by the end of the workshop, I'd start looking at industry. The main reason was because of the different timeframes involved: colleges are really slow, businesses are much faster.

I'd broken the rule for a national lab job, because these things are rare and who knows what the hell their monetary situation will be like next week.

So, I started by sending out my resume to the companies I'd targeted eleven years ago when I went to grad school. I've also looked at some places in town, because I'd like to avoid moving if at all possible. That should be another advantage to industry, on top of a reasonable salary instead of a five-figure pittance.

One place I've applied talks about opportunities in its "Science and Technological Development" center. The webpage title is as interesting as it sounds: "STD Opportunities!"

With an advertisements like that, I don't see who wouldn't apply.

Some things freak me out.

Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French wrote a song "I Want Barack"--and I hope he was paid for it--that just scares me. After following the link on alt.punk saying, "This may be as punk as it gets! :-)" I orginally thought it was just a banal campaign song.

I was disappointed, because this guy is a decades-long friend of the guy who's song led me to write, "['Funny Uncle Sam'] is what you're looking for in a political song. It's
clever and catchy, and the analogy is an offensive juxtaposition. Plus, it will really annoy most people who agree with its sentiments." That is, he knew how punk it could get.

Saying how great Obama is, how the Republicans just want "more of the same," or whatnot is tired. The line "We need a leader that will save our souls," is not.

The Second Coming isn't politics, it's religion.

It's religion at its scariest.

It's amazing how well books from the sixties like Counter Insurgency: Theory and Practice predict things going on, today. Take this article from today's WSJ:

"Moqtada al-Sadr came very close to establishing a state within a state inside Iraq, much like Hezbollah had done in Lebanon."

"In 2005 and 2006 Sadr expanded his territorial reach, using his militia to expel Sunnis from their Baghdad neighborhoods and massively infiltrating the Iraqi police forces."

"In areas under his control, Sadr set up extrajudicial Sharia courts to administer justice against Iraqi Shiite 'heretics.'"

"The Mahdi Army militia also established its own security checkpoints in Baghdad and across the south..."

"This militia took over petrol stations, skimming funds to finance its own operations."

[Next day, observations:]

Ooops! I thought this died, not posted.

Anyway, the point here is, what did al-Sadr do wrong? (Other than, possibly, being only a figurehead; the question passes down to the real leaders if that's true.)

Firstly, he tried what the above book calls the "short-cut revolution." Ignore the party organization, ignore most of the rhetoric. Just start with terrorizing the population. Stage one, random violence. Stage two, arbitrary targeted violence, such as violence against women drivers.

Although it's faster, it's riskier.

But the breaking point was that he tried to establish a state-like entity before he had a real security apparatus. This restricts the asymmetry in an insurgency severely, requiring the insurgent to make good on his promises, and propaganda becomes ineffective.

It's also possible that his recruiting propaganda was based on American newspaper reports that said that the U.S. public wanted to withdraw from Iraq immediately. This would lead someone reasonable to assume that the U.S. wouldn't commit more forces to the country, both requiring local militias to stabilize and protect communities and protecting them from U.S. reprisal.

Then, Bush being unreasonable, more troops were sent and asked to take a more active role, undermining recruiting.

Also, if the insurgents demands were security and the counterinsurgency seems willing to give it, that will undermine the propaganda of the former. This is too specific a propaganda platform for an guerrilla.

More proof that a world run by highly motivated, educated and intelligent people would be better designed, just like a college campus:

Today's workshop is in a detached lecture hall at a major research university (letting students into the main building would be unhygienic). It has two entrances, let's call them port and starboard, with aisles on either side, connecting at the bottom and the top. The seating is theater-style, with several terraces, each with a long bench and a individual seats. The aisles are therefore steps.

It has handicapped seating for two at door level (about half way up) and a handicapped bathroom.

The thing is, the handicapped seating is port-side and the handicapped bathroom is starboard side. In the cold, rain, or (here) the extreme, murderous heat. So, if you're in a wheelchair or walk with braces, you have to get up and hobble around the entire building to even enter the bathroom, as the bathrooms on the other side have a smaller than standard sized entrance.

[Edit: I just went to the bathroom and noticed that the non-handicapped accessible latrine is labeled handicapped and the handicapped one is not. And, if there's a sign that says so, it must be correct. Bureaucracy saves the day!]

It's amazing. As I was walking around last night, I was in high spirits.

How could you not be when you've had the idea to write Murder as a Religious Experience* and were wandering aimlessly thinking up chapter titles like "War as Absolution: The Crusades" and "Faerie and the Warpath: Comparative Barbarisms," and other things that could get you into trouble?

Then, asleep, I had a dream that a place that interviewed me had texted me an offer. Horrible nightmare, really. But, when I got to work late at 8:15, the special e-mail box that I use only for jobs and grants said, "(1 unread)."

There might, I thought, be something to this precognition shit after all.

No such luck.

Some vacuum parts manufacturer had somehow gotten ahold of it and decided it would be great to tell me how wonderful his products were.

Then, I got straight to work at filling out these receipts for people.


* Yet another book I'll never really write, rather like Dating for Scientists and Engineers: A Modern Approach.

I thought I was unwarrantedly bitter about the drawn-out, unresponsive selection process at universities.

But it seems a lot of people still have issues from high school.

I've scribbled up a couple of pages of "A Mathematical Analysis of My Sister's Dating Philosophy," but like the last time I worked on it, the hard part isn't writing it, the hard part is typing it up.

However, there is one result that won't appear in the finished version. It's based on stories that are not related to my sister's, but rather on conversations with friends. "Why did my husband (boyfriend) sleep with her? She's nowhere near as good looking as me!" Women have a very good idea of their relative attractiveness (strangely, a much better idea of women's relative attractiveness than men have), and so the observation is usually right.

The reason isn't some other factor like differences in the women's personalities or the need of some really dirty sex (in fact, the women cheated on [being the women I know] are usually much more adventurous than their husbands or the second woman).

The reason is simply the relative worth of the second woman on the meat market is low enough that the men don't feel the need to actually keep this second woman and that the second woman doesn't feel she has better options. In fact, she'll probably persist until he agrees to sleep with them.

It's not that he likes it, it's just that it's not worth the trouble to not fuck them.

Nothing will stop your husband from fucking ugly hags.

Just accept it. It's part of life.

I have always believed, since I made it up last night, that the concept of torque was first discovered by Tomás de Torquemada, and thus named after him. It turns out this is not the case, and the nomenclature is simply serendipitous. My favored account is simply ahistorical.

This means that I cannot introduce the concept in first year physics classes talking about thumbscrews.

Or does it?

I remember a clever classmate who read about Lamarckian Evolution in his high school biology textbook, where it was introduced to be refuted (it was, obviously, also my high school biology textbook). He insisted that the process of handing down acquired traits was part of evolution; that is, a giraffe who stretches his neck out on a rock so that he can reach just a little bit higher will have children whose necks are just a little bit longer than their peers, even without stretching them on rocks.

He remembered reading it in his high school biology textbook, and so it must be true. Right?

So, I could introduce torque in my physics course with a three sequence cartoon of everybody's favorite Grand Inquisitor routinely torturing someone on the rack, and as he was cranking it up, he could get the idea, complete with thought balloon and an excited expression: "Hey! Hef! Hef! r-cross-F! I can torture freshmen until Kingdom Come!" Then, even though the last panel is crossed out with a big red X, some percentage of bright people will believe that rotational dynamics is based upon the genocidal excesses of the late and post-Reconquista eras of the Iberian Peninsula.

It is also ahistorical because the Spanish Inquisition neither used thumbscrews or the rack: these tortures were considered far too progressive by the Papacy.

Hanging people upside down and flushing gallons of water up their noses had saved souls for a thousand years, and would save souls for another thousand to come.

I've just been asked to organize an invited session for a weird cybernetics-related conference with heavy topics like "peer reviewing."

The whole academic world seems to be imploding.

There are huge industries in the history of the university and even book-long internal debates about the best way to educate the kids. It won't be long before people start bitching about their favored method of peer reviewing.

Welcome back to the dark ages.

( Weird Shit )

Well, I've been asked to take a pay cut because my boss has less money than he thought, and neither he nor I are getting any more.

The American Physical Society is really concerned with the general funding situation, as detailed earlier, and they have a way you can help by filling in an on-line form.

I don't know how much good these things do. If I were a congressman, I'd laugh at the form letters because they're so insincere, but maybe they do something.

That isn't quite true. I was asked if I preferred to take a pay cut and work through June or keep my current salary and work until May (about seven weeks difference). We only have one grant application left that starts funding before August. In my line of work, the lab is more valuable than the vacation time (which I should go ahead and use, I have a hundred billion hours stored up), and although I have a reasonable shot at something else for the summer, I think the guarantee that I'll have on-line journal access, deposition and measurement equipment, and a parking space (that I've already paid for, and they don't refund, even if they take the pass from you) is more important.

I haven't told Y., yet. D. e-mailed me after I visited her in her lab for the last time, today. I'll be driving her around looking for apartments tomorrow, and she starts her new $90k job on Monday. I'll wait until next Friday, at least, to say anything.

I've applied to Twenty-six positions for the fall at 25 schools. If I don't start getting interviews after the workshop I'm hosting in mid-March, I'll have to start lobbying for a job in industry.

I'll give instructions on how to help me with this elsewhere. I won't say how, here, but be assured that you can!

It's amazing how many candidates' statements I can neither agree nor disagree with.