Andrew Jaffe: Leaves on the Line

I've only lived in blue counties in blue states in blue regions (and the even-bluer countries of Canada and the United Kingdom)...

(Map courtesy USA Today)

When I was six years old in 1972, somehow we kids waiting for the bus home from school got to talking about politics -- who our parents would be voting for in the next election. To this day, I remain proud that my parents were the only ones voting for McGovern. He lost, of course, and Nixon had a 61% mandate. Two years later, thanks to Tricky Dick himself (and Woodward and Bernstein), we had the last laugh, at least for a little while.

The pundits have been falling over themselves to find "the" explanation for the Democrats' loss this week. Was it values -- "gays, guns, and god"? Was it better organization headed by Karl Rove? Was it not wanting to ditch a wartime [sic] leader? As usual, all of these things are true -- no single explanation is enough to encompass over 100 million votes.

But now it's obvious that the administration, at least, sees so-called values as foremost: According to The New York Times, Bush to Seek Gay-Marriage Ban in Second Term, Top Aide Says: "Karl Rove said today that the president views a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage as essential to a 'decent' society." This is too far from the idea of freedom, of civil rights, too close to bigotry and prejudice.

In his victory speech, Bush paid lip-service to those of us who voted for Kerry: "When we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America." That spirit of togetherness didn't last long. I hope that the good people in all parts of the country, red and blue, will speak up for the freedom in which we have at least occasionally in our history been able to pride ourselves.

Evolution textbooks row goes to court: "United States: School board in court after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on science textbooks saying evolution was 'theory, not fact'." (Via Guardian Unlimited.)

With their usual linguistic slight of hand, the fanatics formerly known as the Christian Right have managed to conflate the technical meaning of "theory" with its popular meaning of "speculation," thereby putting Evolution on the same footing as the Christian Right's favored (and completely incorrect) interpretation of human origins, whose various names I refuse to mention.

Eighty years after the Scopes "Monkey Trial", I find it hard it to believe this issue hasn't been settled yet.

Bloggercon happened last weekend at Stanford University in the USA. One of the sessions was on Blogging in Academia; I wasn't there, but anyone can listen to it at IT Conversations. The moderator was Jay Rosen, and there are notes on the sessions at his site, and on the blogs One Pilgrim's Walk and JZip. A list of other academics' blogs (including a very few in physics and astro) is at Crooked Timber

As an academic (see the "About" section up top, or my home page), it was a useful summary of the obvious and not-so-obvious issues: How do blogs relate to journal publishing? What takes the place of peer review? How can blogs be used to supplement or replace classroom teaching?

One useful aspect of blogging is that anyone (in a developed economy with access to appropriate resources) can read them -- or write them.

In astrophysics, we've achieved a similar sort of access with a set of archives (originally at Los Alamos, now at Cornell, with worldwide mirrors) that hosts freely-accessible copies of papers and preprints in a variety of disciplines from astrophysics to mathematics and quantitative biology. There is some moderating of submissions, but there is no further set of rules: authors can post papers just after they've been written, after they've been peer-reviewed, or at publication. (And some papers appear only here and are never published elsewhere.) More importantly, access for readers is universal: you don't need a subscription or library access. In a field like astrophysics, essentially everything that will appear in the major journals also appears on the astro-ph archive. There's no included commentary, so, in a distinction drawn by one of the Bloggercon participants, it's still a 'lecture', not a 'seminar.' Conversely, no one wants to read a thirty-page paper with equations and figures in a blog.

But a couple of other questions arise. What about non-academic content? This site is hosted on an Imperial College server, but I've written as much about politics or wine as science. Does this bother anyone out there?

The moderator, Jay Rosen, is a professor of Journalism and made a distinction between 'writing' (which is what he does in his academic papers) and 'writing up', which is, he claimed, what we scientists do; this is at least sometimes true -- and scratching my writing itch is part of why this blog exists. Although this entry isn't such a good example...

Let me know what you think. (And come to think of it, just let me know if you've read this at all!).

Wired News: Science Braces for Second Term

Climate change. The teaching of Darwinian evolution. Stem Cell research and reproductive rights. Industrial waste. Exploring Mars.

Many or most of us scientists disagree with the Bush Administration's policies on many of these and other issues. That becomes a real problem when they start interfering with the flow of ideas among scientists and between scientists and the public. They've been accused of trying to tell scientists what to say (as they did with climatologist James Hansen), stacking committees with administration and industry mouthpieces, and, in a recent report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, more generally distorting information for their own purposes (see also an excellent discussion in the New York Review of Books). Of course, this should sound like a familiar problem in the foreign-policy arena, too.

I live on the very small Osney Island on the River Thames and last night I went to a meeting of the Osney Sustainable Island Group (OSIG). We'd like to take advantage of our location and set up a "micro-hydro" station to produce electricity. But we're only at the beginning: we need to find funds just for a full feasibility study even before we can begin to design the project, much less start building it.

In fact, the goal is more ambitious: we want to become the world's first sustainable island. Or, to put it in more familiar terms: think globally, act locally!

I just learned about Google Scholar, a new search engine devoted strictly to so-called scholarly or academic publishing, apparently replacing the html links used for the usual google ranking with citations (i.e., references).

I'm not yet sure this is better than the ArXiv that I mentioned in this post, or subject-specific search engines such as NASA's Astrophysical Data Sevice (ADS). Of course, google is far broader, but that inevitably makes it harder to find what you're looking for. It seems to lack any obvious way of sorting or sifting through the results; I want to be able to sort by journal, or by author, or most especially by publication date, see the abstract when it's freely available, and I would love goodies like the tree of citations between articles (which is what they're using for ranking anyway, and just the thing that google's software should be good at). Just as importantly, services like ADS allow you to transform the search results into useful forms for bibliographies and citations, which is fantastic when actually writing.

On the other hand, if I needed to find something outside of my field, in statistics or math (or politics or philosophy), this might be a good start, although that's just when I need further "reputation" information about the journal and authors (always a dangerous and subjective thing to ask for).

An aside: typical of academic egotism, the first FAQ is 'How do I find my own articles?' (And of course, that's the first thing I tried, too.)

(Thanks to the Thousand-Faced Moon for pointing me to this.)

The London Evening Standard: Huge rise in cannabis use.

Adam Curry, back in the UK!

I arrived at Paddington Station this evening on my usual commute, to find a cluster of thirty-odd young people, swaying and dancing... silently. Looking closely, they were all listening to headphones, dancing to their own music. Onlookers were befuddled, smiling, snapping pictures with their camera-equipped mobile phones (like my jerky attempt here). A couple of reporters roamed around, taking pictures with higher-tech kit, scribbling in their notebooks, and occasionally breaking the silent trance of a dancer for an interview. Looking yet more closely a few of the dancers' headphones weren't attached to an iPod or a portable CD player, but to a vegetable (at least one aubergine and celery stalk). I'd like to think that this was just a micro flash mob spontaneously generated by a couple of happy dancing teenagers, all the rest (not me and my lame ass) just joining in for the pure joy of movement in the outer silence (inner, too, for the vegetable-phoned participants). The station has never seemed so peaceful.

A detail from Leonardo's "A Deluge." (Courtesy The Queen of England, via The Guardian.)

New York Times Editorial: NASA's Budgetary Gift Horse: With its hands free to redistribute a hefty 2005 budget, the space agency should funnel more resources into its unmanned programs.

Congress ... granted NASA unprecedented authority to move funds about ... to stitch together a viable program within the available resources. That puts a special burden on NASA to make wise choices. In most years, there has been a budgetary wall between the manned space program and unmanned scientific programs.... Now NASA will have great freedom to pillage its scientific accounts to pay for the shuttle or space station or the president's Moon-Mars exploration program, or it can raid one manned program to help pay for another, all subject to final approval by Congress.

One of my earliest memories comes from about 1970, aged four: sitting in my nursery school, staring up at what must have been a tiny black and white television, watching one of NASA's Apollo rockets lift off for the moon. Before that thrill got diverted into science, I'm sure I would have listed "astronaut" at the top of my list of future careers; even today I think I could overcome my natural cowardice for a chance to make it into orbit or beyond.

But manned missions are expensive, dangerous and not particular useful for science. The Space Station is an exercise in international politics and a way of keeping the Military-Industrial Complex rolling in dough. As for the Moon and Mars, well, I don't think anyone is quite sure what made Bush suggest it. Sad as I am to admit it, it's even likely that the money to be spent designing, building and flying an automated robotic mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope (about which more here) could be better deployed elsewhere in NASA's science program such as the Beyond Einstein Program, or, say, feeding the poor or curing the sick. Apparently, astronauts are willing to risk their own lives to upgrade the telescope with a manned mission, but maybe that's not a risk that we, the community of scientists, ought to be even asking them to take.

Recently back from a trip to the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik outside of Munich, Germany, where I talked with colleagues about ESA's upcoming Planck Surveyor mission to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (which we're working on here at Imperial College), and, of course, eat such delicacies as wandererpfandl mit hirschbraten and weissbraten mit weissbier. More on the people, the science (and maybe the food and climate) later.