Gerbil Goods

As Todd Purdum said in that Vanity Fair piece, Sarah Palin's political appeal is rather strongly linked to her "obvious fertility." Politicians like that come with an intrinsic sell-by date, beyond which -- unless they've managed to get themselves elected to high office -- they have, for all practical purposes, expired. I would put Palin's sell-by date at around 2014, when she'll turn 50, though with some care she could probably extend it as far as 2016.

However, Fred Barnes's notion that she can "win Alaska's lone House seat in 2012 and oust Democratic senator Nick Begich [sic] in 2014. A term in the House and another in the Senate--nothing would do more to groom her for the White House than this and transform her into the best Republican candidate for the presidency in, say, 2020, when she'd be 56," is absurd. Why would anyone be interested in her when she's 56?

Meanwhile, Douthat -- who was, infamously, one of the first to back her for veep last May -- has a column about how Sarah Palin was roughed up by the media. The column is rather silly on the merits, with a moment of the Douthatic sublime:

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology.

If you're going to misrepresent statistics to support your pet themes, you should at least put some effort into massaging them so that they seem to say what you want them to.

Tangled up in (red and) blue

Liberals and libertarians often argue that criminalizing abortion would do more to drive the inevitable abortions underground than to decrease their number. There's also a widespread belief that e.g. the Catholic church's anti-contraception attitude indirectly increases the number of abortions by causing more conceptions. Such arguments are usually irritatingly aprioristic, and (in the last case) somewhat unhinged; as Ross Douthat said at the time:

[Will Saletan] makes it sound like the long shadow of Humanae Vitae and the
malign influence of the Quiverfull movement are a big part of America's abortion problem. But if religious-conservative objections to contraceptive use were actually a big part of the cultural background to our abortion and out-of-wedlock birth rate, you'd expect to see some actual evidence of it.

I'm very sympathetic to Douthat's argument (see also here) that the data lend no support to any of these claims. Of course, I don't think they support his claims either -- it's extremely difficult to separate causation from correlation in abortion data because, e.g. out-of-control teen pregnancy rates correlate with poverty and religiousness; poverty sort of correlates with religiousness; places where abortion clinics are sparse, or abortion laws restrictive, tend to be places where people strongly disapprove of abortion; etc. Nate Silver makes this point very nicely with a set of graphs here. The only inference I feel like I could possibly draw from the data is that ceteris paribus, those who disapprove of abortions are less likely to abort, and even this seems a little iffy. (It is consistent, however, with Margaret Talbot's old NY'er article on the far-reaching differences between "red sex" and "blue sex.")

I think that in cases like this a more productive approach than running regressions is to conduct detailed case studies of the kind that Atul Gawande did in the NY'er about Texan healthcare. The debate will, um, shift aimlessly back and forth until someone lays a steady hand on the tiller.

Private Universities as Charities

Yglesias rehashes a familiar argument:

If you want to give money to an educational institution, [my emphasis] do some research and find a charter school in your metropolitan area that’s obtaining good results with a demographically unfavorable group of kids. Or find help our a regional public college of little repute that provides valuable educational services and could really use the money. Sure, if your checkbook is fat enough to finance a research endeavor that could make a major contribution to discovering an HIV vaccine or something it might make sense to invest in a world-famous university.

The correct response -- viz. that Harvard is not primarily an "educational institution" -- was given at some length by Sean Carroll last year, before the endowments went bust:

But there is one misimpression that people seem to have, that might as well be corrected before any hasty actions are taken: the purpose of Harvard is not to educate students. If anything, its primary purpose is to produce research and scholarly work. Nobody should be surprised that the gigantic endowment isn’t put to use in providing top-flight educational experiences for a much larger pool of students; it could be, for sure, but that’s not the goal. The endowment is there to help build new facilities, launch new research initiatives, and attract the best faculty. If it weren’t for the fact that it’s hard to get alumni donations when you don’t have any alumni, serious consideration would doubtless be given to cutting out students entirely. [...]

Don’t believe me? Here is the test: when was the last time Harvard made a senior tenure offer to someone because they were a world-class educator, rather than a world-class researcher? Not only is the answer “never,” the question itself is somewhat laughable.

The implications of this defense for charitable giving should be understood. A lot of institutions in the fine arts are supported as charities; Harvard etc., seen primarily as research farms, are equivalent institutions in the humanities and sciences. A great deal of research in astronomy and pure mathematics, as well as most of what goes on in humanities departments (one should note that lots of Pulitzer Prize winning writers teach at Harvard, Princeton, etc. as a day job), is "worthwhile" because a small minority of the populace values the results. Such activities used to be funded by the patronage of aristocrats, and later by that of industrialists hungry for culture. This is, if you think about it, the only sustainable form of funding: such activities aren't profitable; besides, the public isn't interested in astronomy or poetry, and it's unfair to use their tax dollars to fund such frivolities.

On the other hand, the public does care about education, feeding the poor, curing AIDS, etc.; therefore, these are sensible enterprises for the government to run, and charitable giving serves largely as a figleaf for the state's more egregious failures. In an ideal world, the government would make sure that people weren't starving and that kids were able to attend a good college; however, it would still make sense for research universities to be sustained by charitable giving. In the real world, of course, there are lots of government failures and charitable giving to feed the poor is arguably necessary, but it's still reasonable for rich people who are interested in the arts and sciences to endow universities and museums.

Besides, as Carroll says,

Students will always keep applying to those places and trying to get in, because the aura of intellectual attainment produced by precisely those scholarly accomplishments will always act as a powerful draw. Such students are by no means making a mistake; the intellectual atmosphere at such places truly is intoxicating, and if nothing else the interaction with your fellow talented students can be a life-changing experience.

This is related to why overzealous attempts to recruit underprepared students to Ivy League universities are misguided. Nobel Laureates are, by and large, good at teaching classes on Chaucerian irony or quantum field theory to well-prepared students; however, remedial classes are best taught by people who are good at teaching, and don't end up at Harvard.

Let them be fed cake

Thus Grover Cleveland, anticipating modern wingnuttery:

After a drought had ruined crops in several Texas counties, Congress appropriated $10,000 to purchase seed grain for farmers there.[92] Cleveland vetoed the expenditure. In his veto message, he espoused a theory of limited government: "[...] the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people. The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow-citizens in misfortune. This has been repeatedly and quite lately demonstrated. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood."

I.e. the government should let people starve, because to do otherwise would be unjustly to deprive other people of an opportunity to feel good about having been charitable.

No arms, and very few legs [tasteless]

I was recently introduced to the genre of no-arms-and-no-legs jokes. Here are some good ones off the internet (multiple sites):

1. What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs on a pile of leaves?
Russell

2. What do you call two guys with no arms and no legs hanging around your window?
Curt and Rod

3. What do you call a girl with no arms and one leg shorter than the other?
Eileen

And here's my contribution to the genre:

4. What do you call a girl with no arms and no legs who was maimed in the Rwandan genocide?
Tootsie

---

Oh, while on the topic of tasteless jokes, an addendum -- one of the most brilliantly tasteless jokes I know.

Mother. [to blind daughter] Close your eyes and count to twenty and you'll be able to see.
Daughter. Mommy I still can't see.
Mother. April Fool!

I got this one from W.H. Auden's essay "Notes on the Comic," in The Dyer's Hand.

My Sotomayor Problem

She seems generally OK if lackluster. However, this clown inadvertently dredges up a powerful argument against her:

As a woman, a Latina, a person who has faced a life-long serious illness
(diabetes),

But, like, that defeats the whole purpose. Supreme Court justices are supposed to live and be liberal forever. I'm sure the disease isn't life-threatening as of now, but surely it pushes her life expectancy below 90.

Women and Warm Guns

I was going to shut up about that Stevenson-Wolfers paper, "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," because I'm skeptical that subjective happiness as reported on surveys is capturing anything meaningful. Predictably, however, the media won't let go and there's an annoying-as-fuck op-ed by Douthat in today's Times about how this means that we've got to encourage motherhood. The original paper itself is interesting but is being wildly overinterpreted. A few disconnected observations:

• The data starts in 1972, which doesn't predate the women's movement. In particular, it isn't obvious that it would extrapolate linearly to the 1950s or the 1930s. It's possible that there was, for whatever reason, a spike in female happiness in the 1960s that has slowly been fading ever since.
• The conclusion that there's a "new happiness gap" opening up is unsubstantiated. Women are roughly as happy now as men to within reasonable error bars.
• That women are in the 49th rather than the 52nd %ile of happiness, does not obviously call for a policy response. If women were earning 98% as much as men, how many people would you see whining about a gender gap?
• The European data are pretty flat. Yes, the slope is negative, but it's also tiny.
• The authors suggest a plausible objection to the use of long-term trends in subjective happiness even if subjective happiness is treated as useful -- "It has been recognized that an individual’s assessment of their well-being may reflect the social desirability of responses and Kahneman (1999) argues that people in good circumstances may be hedonically better off than people in worse circumstances, yet they may require more to declare themselves happy. In the context of the findings presented in this paper, women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and have thus deflated their previously inflated responses."
• Another result that one ought to keep in mind -- "we disaggregate the fertility results to consider trends in happiness separately among single parents and married parents, and, to account for the duel burden of working parents, between employed parents and non-employed parents. Once again, we see similar trends in happiness across these groups, casting doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood, or work-family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women." This fact is hard to account for on the basis of generic "traditionalist" theories.

Ugh

This is mildly distressing:

One of the many fascinating details to emerge from Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest ‘objectivists’, meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title ‘Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification’. He and Wales first encountered each other on an internet forum Wales had established in 1992, which offered a ‘Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy’ and described itself as ‘the most scholarly of all Objectivist discussions available on the networks’. Other early contributors to Wikipedia learned about its existence through the community of online objectivists, and it was this bond as much as anything that drove the project forward in its initial stages.

The Lit-Crit Defense of God

An effective way to discredit ideas in the humanities for being sensible is to associate them with the Enlightenment; there is always something bad -- colonialism (hence exploitation, the overuse of colons and subordinate clauses, etc.), property rights (hence the notion of authorship*, the fencing-in of emotions and couplets, the decline of enjambment, the advent of preposterous corsets), both of the above (the Enclosures; the desire to colonize, fence in, and rearrange the known universe; the widespread interest in physics; the obsession with water-clocks and gardens; the Industrial Revolution) -- about the Enlightenment that you can associate your target with.

This family of objections is not a recent or an academic one; it dates back to Blake ("London"), and persists through Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Dickens (e.g. Hard Times) to a mid-20th cent. poet like A.R. Ammons in "Corsons Inlet." Yeats condemned the "modern" attitude as

A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye.

(You don't have to be Yeats to parallel saints and drunkards, Bertrand Russell famously said around the same time that "From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes.") On the whole, though, Romantic poets are satisfied with grumbling about reason as such. What's different about the academics is that they use ideas like the "theory-ladenness" of observation to claim that all coherent theoretical wholes, including the saint's and the drunkard's, are equally valid from a rational point of view. At least, that's what Stanley Fish does in his Times blogpost today:

Let’s say (to give a humble example from literary studies) that there is a dispute about the authorship of a poem. A party to the dispute might perform comparative analyses of the writings of rival candidates, examine letters and personal libraries, research the records of printers and publishers, look at the history of reception, etc. [...] But suppose, you think (in the manner of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) that the idea of the individual author is a myth that emerges alongside the valorization of property and property rights so central to Enlightenment thought? [...] I am not affirming this view, [...] I am just observing that there are many who hold it, and that for those who do the evidence provided by printers’ records or letters or library holdings will not be evidence at all; for they do not believe in the existence of the entity — the conclusively identified individual author — it aspires to be evidence of.

Fish goes on to say that this is how religious people think about religion so religious people are deconstructionists and religious belief is justified. Of course, religious people are not deconstructionists by and large, and nor is Fish, really, with regard to scientific truth or at least the more humdrum parts of it. (Would he throw a baby off a cliff? Why not? What's different in kind about evolution?) A closer literary analogy to the average religious moderate is a critic who believes in authorship in all cases except when the author is John Keats, but insists that Keats is "a site transversed by meanings neither he nor any other so-called “individual” originates." Which would be muddled if it weren't so transparently dishonest.

---


* This association is true. Voltaire and Swift had strong feelings about pirated editions.

A question about twin studies

A relatively obvious objection to twin and adoption studies -- I feel like I've seen this mentioned from time to time but don't remember where -- is that adoptive families don't really have much socio-economic variation, esp. in terms of education, settledness, marital status etc.; in samples without a lot of environmental variation, the remaining differences are genetic because that's all they could be; therefore, twin and adoption studies don't prove any general claims about heritability. This argument strikes me as correct if you grant the premise, so either citing adoption studies is disingenuous or the premise is false. So my question is whether anyone (Dice? Grob? James?) knows of studies testing the premise that adoptive families are all alike.

Lepore on Poe

I'm an admirer of Jill Lepore's stuff in the New Yorker. Her new piece on Poe is a tour de force of the postmodernist punning style, which works beautifully here because (1) she's writing about Poe, who was obsessed with riddles and puns, and (2) the prose is smooth enough that you can skate right past some of the puns. This bit, for example [my emphases]:

Jupiter tells a spooky story: Legrand has discovered a strange beetle and, ever since, has been puzzling “a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate—de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gitting to be skeered.” (Poe’s racism ran very deep.) Jupiter is the gothic tale-teller inside “The Gold-Bug,” not unlike Juniper, the gothic-tale-writing baboon of “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” In both stories, Poe divested himself of what he considered to be the darker side of his own authorship.

“The Gold-Bug” is a tangle of puns, many of them, as the literary scholar Marc Shell has pointed out, having to do with currency. Legrand has found a bug the color of gold. “De bug is a goole bug,” Jupiter says. In other words, a ghoul bug. It looks as if it were made of gold. It is not. “Dey aint no tin in him, Massa,” Jupiter says. There’s nothing in him—no tin, and no gold, either. Legrand has also found a parchment, made of goatskin, kidskin. It contains a map showing where a treasure was buried on the island by the pirate Captain Kidd. This pun Legrand himself has to figure out, in order to find the buried treasure. (Kidd’s map, in this sense, is itself a guide to Poe’s tales. Is Poe kidding or not?)

Animal Spirits, Vegetable Math

Benjamin Friedman, in the NYRB, on what's wrong with behavioral economics:

The more important question is whether what Akerlof and Shiller have offered in Animal Spirits amounts to "a theory" in the sense that it could stand in place of the current theories that they criticize for being based entirely on rational responses to economic motives. There is a difference between a series of ideas about different aspects of economic behavior and an integrated account of macroeconomic fluctuations. Akerlof and Shiller are surely on the right track in pointing to elements that are missing from today's conventional models, and in arguing that incorporating them into mainstream macroeconomic analysis would help. But they have neither done this nor shown others how to.

In fact, it's worse than that. Here's Friedman a few paragraphs earlier:

[F]or purposes of macroeconomics—the study of the economy as a whole—most of the standard models do not admit the possibility of unemployment. The reason is not that no one knows unemployment exists. Rather, no one has figured out how to allow for it within the confines of sufficiently simple mathematics; and faced with the choice between excluding unemployment and sacrificing analytical simplicity, most macroeconomists have opted for the former.

But "Opted" suggests they had more of a choice about it than I think they did (or do). Tractability is essential; without it, you have laundry lists of effects that you can't quantify, like Akerlof and Shiller. On the other hand, if the price of tractability is complete irrelevance, that's problematic too. What makes people think macroeconomics is solvable?

Are admissions officials actively anti-Asian?

Yglesias cites "expert" (in this case, propagandist) Kevin Carey saying that "It’s clear that, given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent." MY continues: "But the quota system appears to have merely re-emerged with Asian-Americans as the victims. And nobody talks about it, though the discriminatory mechanisms are only slightly more subtle."

There are two issues here that need to be kept distinct. The first is whether Asians and middle-class whites are losing out at the expense of minorities, legacies, broken-family cases, etc. The second is whether Asians are discriminated against relative to whites of similar socioeconomic status.

I continue to be somewhat skeptical that the second kind of discrimination is rampant. The data from SAT scores is not well-controlled for socio-economic effects, nor is it controlled for whether students were legacies or athletes. If there is evidence that it's appreciably harder for middle-class Asian students to get into college than for middle-class, non-legacy, non-athletic, whites, I haven't seen it. From anecdotal experience -- the people I knew at college, for instance -- I would consider the claim fairly implausible.

A universal characteristic of quota systems is that they lead to a large disparity in abilities between the limited group -- Asians, in this case -- and the non-limited group, especially at second-tier institutions. If Harvard got the very best of everybody, you wouldn't see this disparity there even if they had a quota system. However, as you moved down the pyramid, you'd see the quality of Asian students exceeding that of white students; the distributions would completely separate at some point, as they do for international students at second-tier grad schools. I would have expected Amherst (roughly 9-12 on most people's lists) to show signs of this disparity, but I never saw any. There were no bimodal distributions with an "Asian" peak; neither the summa list nor the PBK list was abnormally heavy on Asian names; etc. There were, on the other hand, a disproportionate number of international students -- a group that was openly discriminated against in the admissions process -- graduating summa.

It might be that one has to move further down the US News list to see this effect clearly, or it might be that the apparent bias against Asians is an artefact of Asians belonging disproportionately to categories that gain nothing from affirmative action (relatively few athletes, legacies, etc.). If the former, this provides an upper bound on how serious the effect is (one shouldn't lose sleep over Asians who should've gotten into Dartmouth ending up at Cornell); if the latter, that brings us to the general question of whether affirmative action is justifiable. I think it is, in principle, though most institutions do a mediocre job of implementing it.

(Should note, btw, that this is all about Asian-Americans. Admissions for foreign students are an entirely different story, given that colleges are unfamiliar with most of the high schools, grading systems, etc. involved.)

Specter

Unlike Nate Silver, I think Specter's move is a biggish deal, because he will have to pander to Democratic interests to avoid a primary challenge from the left. Specter's potentially pretty vulnerable in a Democratic primary, as Silver says:

Specter can't be too cute about this, or he might have primary problems on the left. The Republican nominee is probably going to be Toomey, who will be an underdog against any sentient Democrat. Why should the Democrats settle for a Liberdem when they can probably get Pennsylvanians to elect a mainline Democrat along the lines of Bob Casey?

This being so, it seems like (a few random "principled" stands aside) Specter will have to become substantially less conservative, at least over the next few months, than he has been -- probably less so than Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, and others who are tolerated only because they represent very red states. This has two interesting implications:

1. It's not true that "the Senate's fortunes will still be determined by a group of about a dozen moderate senators from both parties" -- they will be determined by a group of moderate Democrats. The implicit justification for the Blue Dogs' "bipartisan" meddling was that they needed to make compromises to get the moderate Republicans on board. Specter's move removes this justification; henceforth the Blue Dogs will have to assume the responsibility for holding things up.
2. The moderate Republicans are almost nonexistent. Mike DeWine and Lincoln Chafee lost in 2006; John Warner and Chuck Hagel retired in 2008; Ted Stevens, Gordon Smith, and Norm Coleman lost in 2008; and now Specter's a Democrat. Most of these were consistently to the right of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and consistently to the left of all other Republicans, so there's now a large ideological gap between SnoweCollins and the rest of the Republican Party. I'm curious to find out how this situation develops.

Conscience Claws

Thus Karl Rove:

"It's cultural aggression," former Bush adviser Karl Rove told FOXNews.com, adding that policy changes that "inject government" into moral matters -- like the conscience clause -- will have "enormous consequences."

(The conscience clause "allow[s] physicians and other health care providers to refuse to provide medical services that conflict with their faith or conscience." The conscience claws are tearing feebly at Rove's greasy heart.)

What-the-bleep watch

Mark Taylor -- a professor of religion somewhere -- has a Truly Awful op-ed in the Times today on how specialization is bad and the idea of the department should be abolished. His suggestions for restructuring universities:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Note the skilful manipulation of the web metaphor. I'm impressed by how swiftly and seamlessly he goes from the internet and Santa Fe theory to "cross-cultural."

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

I must say this prospect fills me with horror at an aesthetic level -- "I'm a professor of Time. I don't know none of that Space stuff." Besides, Taylor doesn't seem to get the rationale behind specialization, which is that there's an internal coherence to certain bodies of knowledge, e.g. physics, that has very little to do with what they're ostensibly about. This coherence is useful because it helps you see that some problems are like other, apparently unrelated, problems, which saves a lot of effort. E.g. percolation is like the onset of magnetism, which is like the vulcanization of rubber, and many of these problems -- because they're percolation-like -- can be solved by similar techniques. The original percolation problem is not particularly interesting in itself, but this is often the hallmark of a good problem to study -- most problems of actual interest are messy and intractable as posed.

I'm strongly in favor of people from different disciplines talking to each other: some very puzzling geology problems are physics problems in disguise, some physics problems have solutions that come from chemistry, and everyone needs mathematicians from time to time. But this sort of collaboration presupposes that there are physicists, mathematicians, geologists, etc. to start with. If, instead, everyone knew a mass of logically disconnected information -- everything about water, say, from creation-myths to chemistry -- no one would ever have fruitful connections to make or tools to make them with.

I don't know how far this extends to the humanities because a lot of the disciplinary boundaries are new and ad hoc, but surely it does to some extent. "Duns Scotus's use of citations" (Taylor's stock example of triviality) is in fact emblematic of the differences between medieval and modern notions of scholarship, and therefore of wider differences between medieval and modern approaches to knowledge; this sort of difference is interesting if one is trying to get a handle on e.g. Dante or Chaucer, and someone like Duns Scotus is presumably a better case to study because he's simpler, without all the irony and the literary devices.

Btw, I agree with one of Taylor's points, viz. that universities admit grad students in unreasonable numbers as a cheap way of filling TA slots. This isn't an easy problem to fix, however, and I'm not aware of any useful ideas.

Addendum on IL place names

The fabled water tower at Gays, Illinois:

Illinois Place Names

The concentration of ugly place names in Illinois is remarkably high: consider Rantoul, Mattoon, Centralia, Du Quoin, Kankakee, Teutopolis, Danville, Normal, Peoria, Tolono, Mcleansboro, Vandalia, and Oblong. Admittedly some of these are funny, but the majority are just hideous.

Upper-class tweets

... or not. Just to point out that I'm now on Twitter as excitedstoat. The one-sentence post is a surprisingly difficult genre. (A bit like the old Note messages from sponsor... "your forebears were eaten by four bears" etc.)

The many uses of insects

Michael Berry points out a pretty unexpected & neat application of physics.

In one of his lovely films, David Attenborough showed insects floating on a sunlit pond, and pointed out their curious shadows: unlike more familiar shadows, these underwater ones have bright edges. The reason is that surface tension bends the water near where the insects float, and the light is sharply focused by these curved surfaces. This prompted a systematic study of bright shadows, including the similar ones cast on the bottoms of rivers by little whirlpools on the surface. In these shadows, the light focuses onto a ring. That was in 1983.

The paper was noticed by Michael Gorman, a physicist at Houston. It inspired him to make a plastic lens of unusual shape, whose function is to mimic whirlpools with their ring focusing. He surprised me by announcing that he had patented this construction with the hope of profiting from it. For example, angioplastic surgeons were interested in shining a powerful laser through a tiny version of the lens, at the end of an optical fibre, and with the ring focus bore holes through blocked arteries. (At my time of life, this application is close to my heart.)

Pundit, smarten thyself

Kristof, in his predictably inane column on "how to raise our IQ":

The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective I.Q. by as much as one billion points.

I wonder if he realizes that by this logic we ought to be engendering enormous quantities of children, mentally retarded or not.

Mark Liberman at LanguageLog periodically grumbles about the fact that no one ever cites standard deviations, and a mean without a standard deviation -- or some other measure of the width of the distribution -- contains no useful information. Kristof's editorial provides a good example of what this is about.

By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group.

Depending on the sample size and the variance this could be marginal, massive, or entirely insignificant.

Public-spirited pigs

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens:

Bounder by is a bullying windbag and Gradgrind has been morally blinded, but if they were better men, the system would work well enough that, all through, is the implication. And so far as social criticism goes, one can never extract much more from Dickens than this, unless one deliberately reads meanings into him. His whole 'message' is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

He elaborates on this later, in one of his more enduring insights:

A 'change of heart' is in fact THE alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug [...] two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. [...] The central problem--how to prevent power from being abused--remains unsolved.

Of course, phrasing the question like that exposes you as a system-fixer; for the moralist, the question is how to make people not want to abuse power. Or something like that -- I'm a system-fixer, and it's surprisingly difficult to talk about this matter in a non-question-begging way. Julian Barnes says,

Dickens was a change-of-heart man, Orwell a systems-and-structures man, not least because—as these essays confirm—he thought human beings recidivist, and beyond mere self-help. "The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved."

This is largely right but subtly off in the opposite direction. The claim isn't that people are generally recidivist, which is too strong; but rather, as Orwell says in "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," that

Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that EVERYONE will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability SOMEONE will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up.

T.S. Eliot -- in his monarchist, top-hatted period -- was a change-of-heart guy, and this comes up rather unexpectedly in his letter (as editor of Faber) rejecting Animal Farm:

After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm -- in fact, there couldn't have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

Seeing that Orwell wrote extensively on this topic and Eliot read him, this is evidence of how dense Eliot got in middle age, or how hard it is for moralists and revolutionaries to understand each other, or both.

Dept of Bad Optics

John McCain, still pouting (as he was for four years after 2000), no longer has any time for Hispanics because they didn't vote for him. The part of the story that caught my eye, however, is this:

The meeting in the Capitol's Strom Thurmond Room on March 11 was a Republican effort led by Sens. McCain of Arizona, John Thune of South Dakota, and Mel Martinez of Florida to reach out to Hispanics.

Which is a lovely bit of tone-deafness.

Rwanda as Israel

This is an interesting -- and obviously correct -- insight:

According to Gérard Prunier, everything conspired to turn Congo into a kill zone: a dying dictator; the end of the cold war; Western guilt; and a tough, suspicious, postgenocide, Israel-like Rwanda, whose national ethos, simply stated, was Never Again.

The parallel goes further:

On the Rwandan side, immigration officers at a freshly painted cubicle-like border post peck away at computers, the smartly dressed worker bees of a regime that has made enormous strides fighting poverty, corruption and AIDS. The streets are safe. The street lights even work. It all adds up to a small miracle, especially remarkable because of Rwanda’s recent genocide, its overpopulation and its notable lack of resources. The drive to the border takes you past one denuded hillside after another, unmistakable proof that this packed little country is definitely not a land of plenty.

And on Rwanda's current aggressiveness:

His sharpest barbs are reserved for Rwanda’s current leaders, who in his pages lie, betray, plunder and kill, massacring tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, in vicious revenge attacks. He even asserts that Rwandan death squads were reputed to carry special little cobbler’s hammers in their backpacks to “silently and efficiently smash skulls.”

I have a theory about this.

I don't know who writes Will Saletan's headlines, but (a) it's probably a single person, maybe Saletan himself, going by their stylistic consistency over a period of two years or so, (b) aren't they stunningly awful?

Shades of Gay [The heterogeneity of homosexuality]
Dish Respect [The political crackdown on IVF embryo screening]
Brainchild Abuse [Bad uses of good technology]
Vaginal Innard Course [Donating a kidney through your vagina or rectum.]
Night of the Living Dad [Software, soldiers, and the future of ghosts.]
Tip of the Juiceberg
No Chubby for Old Men
Miss Conceptions
Original Skin
Crap and Trade, Revisited
Denial of Cervix
Fetal Subtraction

...