The Coddling of the American Mind

The cover story in the September issue of The Atlantic is titled "The Coddling of the American Mind." The opening sentences:

"Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense."

The article explains microaggressions and trigger warnings – two concepts now common on campus.

Here is another article on this topic from The Atlantic, by a different author:

The Rise of Victimhood Culture

Here are some thoughts on this topic by Megan McArdle, whom I've quoted on this blog before:

How Grown-Ups Deal With 'Microaggressions'

And here is a local Vermont story about trigger warnings on campus:

Public reading of a fictional description of a rape sparks debate over freedom of expression at arts college

Our world is changing. I'm not sure for the better.

UPDATE: Although the Atlantic article does not mention this, the title of the article must be a reference to this 1987 book by Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.

Adam Smith on Happiness

If you have 12 minutes, this is an interesting interview of Russ Roberts about his book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlUHoKEBMrU&feature=youtu.be

Prof. Roberts' book is about Adam Smith's book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which preceded his more famous book The Wealth of Nations. Interesting stuff. Click here for the Amazon entry about Russ Roberts' book.

Russ Roberts is an interesting guy himself. I have blogged about him on my work blog here and here.

UPDATE 1/01/16: I bought and read Russ Roberts' book. Good book. It's about Adam Smith's ideas about how we seek the approval of, and seek to avoid the disapproval of, the people around us.

Also, Russ Roberts' podcasts at EconTalk are interesting. He has done weekly interviews since 2006. In 2009 he did a series of six interviews with Dan Klein on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Click here for part 1.

Lean In

While I had not heard until yesterday about Duck Dynasty (see my previous post), I have heard from multiple sources about Sheryl Sandberg's new book Lean In. I haven't read the book, but I've watched Ms. Sandberg's TED talk which I'm told captures the essence of the book.

Her theme is that women today have plenty of career options, an improvement over previous generations, but women still aren't realizing their potential. It must be somebody's fault. Well, actually, she thinks it's everybody's fault, including women themselves.

Not everyone agrees. Here is a Wall Street Journal book review:

Do as I Do, Not as I Say

The reviewer agrees with Ms. Sandberg that women (on average) have different ambitions than men (on average). Unlike Ms. Sandberg, however, the reviewer doesn't necessarily see this as a problem.

Another view about Ms. Sandberg comes from Penelope Trunk, who once worked in the high-tech industry like Ms. Sandberg. Ms. Trunk, now a farm wife, co-founded Brazen Careerist, her third startup. Brazen Careerist (sounds like "leaning in," doesn't it?) is "a career management tool for next-generation professionals." From her home on the farm she provides executive coaching. Bio here.

That background gives Ms. Trunk a unique perspective on this topic. The blog post at the first link in the preceding paragraph is well worth the time to read. Read the comments, too. The conversation in the comments draws out Ms. Trunk, and she explains more fully why she feels the way she feels. Some of the comments are very insightful, others are quite moving.

Ms. Sandberg has two degrees from Harvard and is a protégée of former Harvard University President Larry Summers. Susan Patton is another Ivy League educated woman who has been in the news recently because of her advice to women.

Ms. Patton was the first woman in her family to go to college. In 1973 she entered Princeton University in only the fifth co-educational class in the school's history. In 1977 she graduated as Class President. Today she runs her own consulting firm specializing in marketing and human resources, including executive coaching. She lives not on a farm but on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Bio here.

Ms. Patton recently wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian: "Advice for the young women of Princeton":

Forget about having it all, or not having it all, leaning in or leaning out — here’s what you really need to know that nobody is telling you.

Her message was that finding the right man to marry is important to happiness, and that college is the best hunting ground.

Well, Ms. Patton's letter is controversial, to put it mildly. Here is a collection of responses on the Daily Princetonian. Here is a column on the Huffington Post by a woman who was "dumbfounded" by Ms. Patton's letter. Here is Ms. Patton's response on the Huffington Post.

Ms. Patton graduated from college the same year I did. Surely women who graduated from college more recently don't feel that way, right? Not so fast. Here is a column by a recent Dartmouth graduate who supports Ms. Patton's message:

Find a Man Today, Graduate Tomorrow

Here are two more well-educated women who support Ms. Patton's message:

Jean Kaufman, aka neo-neocon
Megan McArdle

All of the above links are about what women think. Are men allowed to have opinions? Probably not. Even President Obama is in trouble for recently expressing his opinion that the attorney general of California is an attractive woman. What was he thinking??

Nevertheless, at some risk, I offer these observations from a happily married man with a son and two daughters, all in their 20s and out of college:

1. Women do not all think like men, and women do not all think like each other. Vive la différence!

2. Feminists are intolerant of this kind of diversity.

Men have been thinking about what women want for a long time. Does modern culture provide a better answer than Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century?

UPDATE 10/20/13: Here are more views on the theme of this blog post by two eminent women.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Last March she wrote this column for The Atlantic magazine:

What 'Lean In' Misunderstands About Gender Differences

Dr. Sommers' column supports an observation I made to Nancy some years ago: Men helped create our modern world where women have more choices about how to live their lives. Our reward is to be criticized for the choices women make.

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. On 10/08/13 she participated in a Janus Forum debate at American University on "Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture?" Her debate opponent was Prof. Jane Flax of American University. Interestingly, both women have PhD's from Yale. Christina Hoff Sommers attended the debate and wrote about it:

Comet Camille Paglia comes to AU and talks gender

Follow the link at the end to read Dr. Paglia's opening comments. They are thought-provoking. There's even a Vermont connection!

Duck Dynasty

Am I the last person in the country to hear about the apparently popular TV reality show Duck Dynasty? I only learned about it yesterday. I had come across a link to a short April Fools video by MidAtlantic Farm Credit called Cluck Dynasty. I knew that MidAtlantic Farm Credit had a significant concentration of loans in the poultry industry, but I had no idea what their video was all about. A little research turned up the first link in this paragraph which is where the photo came from. Mystery solved.

This incident prompts me to share a few thoughts about modern culture. This is the first of two posts today on this subject.

What does Duck Dynasty say about modern culture? Maybe the times they are a-changin', ever so slightly.

Modern culture often belittles traditional values such as family, religion and commerce. Modern culture doesn't understand guns or hunting, and a lot of the time it doesn't understand agriculture. Modern culture is all about diversity—except for issues of class or gender where diversity in thought, income or wealth is unwelcome.

Now consider this quote about Duck Dynasty:

A God-centered, traditional family that hunts is now explosively popular across the country and among the younger generation. (source)

Wow. And did I mention that this entrepreneurial family has created considerable wealth from modest beginnings?

While Duck Dynasty came from Louisiana, other surprises are coming from Britain. First there was the wildly popular Downton Abbey, which deals with a fictional aristocratic family far removed from the real family of Duck Dynasty. Unlike anything else in recent popular culture, Downton Abbey actually gives a balanced treatment of the upper classes. See this recent op-ed column in Forbes magazine:

Down On Downton: Why The Left Is Torching Downton Abbey

And now there are the new British dramas “Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” which Virginia Postrel writes about on Bloomberg:

How Mr. Selfridge Created the Modern Economy

A quote:

When the British drama “Mr. Selfridge” debuted on PBS this week, American viewers saw two things rarely on display in contemporary popular culture: a businessman hero and, more remarkably, a version of commercial history that includes not just manufacturing but shopping.

This is wonderful. Our society would benefit greatly from more respect in modern culture for business, commerce, and entrepreneurship.

I once heard Virginia Postrel speak at a conference in Burlington and I was impressed. What she has to say at the link above about feminism is interesting. And she is a Princeton graduate. The topics of feminism and Princeton lean right into my next post...

A look back at 9/11 and blogging

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Those attacks helped fuel the rise of blogs.

In April 2002 we visited New York City. It was the first time I had ever been in New York City except in airports and train stations. We went specifically to see Ground Zero. (And also the play QED at the Lincoln Center starring Alan Alda as Richard Feynman.) It was after returning from that trip that I discovered blogs, as I wrote about in this post.

In that post I wrote about two bloggers, Megan McArdle and Glenn Reynolds. Both are now well known bloggers. Megan McArdle blogs at The Atlantic. Glenn Reynolds blogs at Instapundit.

Megan McArdle started blogging in November 2001. She joined Mindles H. Dreck on a blog called Asymmetrical Information. (Mindles H. Dreck is undoubtedly a pen name. I don't know anything about him or her.) Dreck started the blog in October 2001. From Dreck's first post on 10/2/01: "About me: I'm in the money management business. My offices are a few blocks from the former World Trade Center. Like many 'warbloggers' I read, my proximity to this historic event is one of the reasons I'm recording my thoughts." (source, scroll to bottom)

Ms. McArdle's first posts were on 11/23/01, under the pen name Jane Galt. From one of her posts that day:

Now to introduce myself. I am, it seems, the epitome of our new century. I'm 28, just graduated from one of the top business schools in the world, and just had my job offer rescinded by a management consulting firm. In the interim, I have obtained a job with a construction company working on the WTC disaster recovery site. No, I don't work on "the pile" (as it is known here, despite the fact that they are already working below ground level) -- I work in a trailer across the street, doing everything from handing out security passes, to database design, to typing letters. Unfortunately, I can't offer any great insights, or even good gossip, about the site -- first, because they don't tell me anything, and second, because relating what I do hear could cost me my job. So no great insights. But possibly interesting trivia.

In my post referenced above I quoted from her blog post on 4/27/02 when she wrote about having been at the WTC recovery site for seven months, and asking "do you remember?" about things that had happened during those seven months.

Glenn Reynolds starting blogging in August 2001, one month before 9/11. His blog took on a new focus after 9/11. He recently looked back at that experience. Start with this short post that he published last night. Then read this article at knoxnews.com posted yesterday: Attacks gave rise to Instapundit blog. And finally watch the 5 minute video by Glenn Reynolds at the bottom of the knoxnews article.

From the knoxnews article:

In an August video marking the 10th anniversary of his blog, Reynolds said, "The beauty of blogging goes on, as the kind of technology that made it possible for me to start Instapundit makes it possible for people to do all kinds of independent punditry and journalism today."

And that may be the most unintended of consequences of the terrorists whose aim was to strike fear in the hearts of Americans.

P.S. Happy birthday, Brian!

UPDATE 9/12/11: Megan McArdle posts some thoughts about the events of 9/11/01. "Without 9/11...I would not have started blogging."

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, is an excellent biography of Albert Einstein (1879-1955). Einstein was the most famous physicist of the 20th century. He is best known for his Special Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1915). The Special Theory led to the famous equation E = mc² and the atomic bomb. The General Theory led to our current understanding of the outer universe, from its origin in the Big Bang to quasars and black holes.

Einstein also made important contributions to the other revolutionary physics theory of the 20th century: quantum mechanics. In fact it was for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect, not his work on relativity, that he was awarded the 1921 Nobel prize. But Einstein never became comfortable with the implications of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics leads to the conclusion that at the atomic and subatomic level, our world is not deterministic. It is probabilistic. Einstein famously wrote in 1926: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice."

Einstein and the second best known physicist of the 20th century, Niels Bohr, famously carried on a debate about the meaning of quantum mechanics for as long as they lived. For more about Bohr and quantum mechanics see my series of posts in 2008 about the play Copenhagen.

Einstein lived in Germany and Switzerland until he later emigrated to the United States. He earned what we would now call a bachelor's degree from Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, after which it took him two years to find a job! And then it was not a teaching job as he was hoping for, but a job as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1903 Einstein married. It was while working at the Swiss Patent Office, and before he earned his PhD, that Einstein wrote a series of revolutionary papers in 1905, two of which are noted above.

Einstein was married twice. He had three children with his first wife, a daughter before they were married and two sons after they were married. (Little is known about the daughter. She may have been given up for adoption and likely died as an infant.) He and his first wife separated in 1914 when Einstein moved to Berlin to accept a university professorship. (Just as World War I was starting!) The two boys remained with their mother in Zurich. Einstein remarried in 1919. His second wife tolerated his many affairs better than the first wife did.

Einstein was born Jewish but he did not think of himself as Jewish until the Nazi movement arose in Germany. Einstein was a professor in Berlin 1914-1933 but emigrated to the United States in 1933 when the German government passed a law barring Jews from teaching at universities. He was a supporter of the creation of Israel.

Although Albert Einstein signed the famous letter in 1939 to President Roosevelt that launched the Manhattan Project, Einstein was not himself directly involved in the development of the atomic bomb. In fact, he was excluded as a possible security risk because of his German background and political views. Einstein was a pacifist (he later regretted signing that letter) and he favored socialism. But he opposed communism and all forms of totalitarianism. He was a nonconformist in both science and politics, as well as his personal life.

Was Einstein religious? In 1929 he wrote: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." By "lawful harmony" Einstein meant the laws of science, which he spent his life trying to better understand.

The Salmon of Doubt

Douglas Noël Adams liked to tell people that he was born in Cambridge, England, in 1952 a few months before Watson and Crick made their famous discovery there and that his initials were DNA. Alas, he died all too young at the age of 49 in 2001.

Douglas Adams is best known for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His last book, The Salmon of Doubt, was published posthumously. It is a compilation of materials found on his various Macintosh computers. The last quarter of the book is an unfinished novel that might have become another book in the Hitchhiker series or another book in his series of Dirk Gently detective novels, no one is quite sure. "The Salmon of Doubt" was Adams's working title for this unfinished novel, and is a spoof on the Salmon of Wisdom in Irish mythology.

The rest of the book consists of a wide variety of materials. For example, we learn that Adams's favorite author was P. G. Wodehouse. From page 67 in the paperback edition:

He's up in the stratosphere of what the human mind can do, above tragedy and strenuous thought, where you will find Bach, Mozart, Einstein, Feynman, and Louis Armstrong, in the realms of pure, creative playfulness.

Sounds like Adams himself. We also learn that Douglas Adams was a friend and fan of Richard Dawkins, who wrote a "keening lament" when he heard that Adams had died in the gym of a heart attack: "I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met." This lament was published in the British press and is republished in The Salmon of Doubt as the Epilogue.

The Salmon of Doubt includes a fascinating talk that Douglas Adams gave in 1998: "Is There an Artificial God?" (p. 126) That talk relates to the theme of reality that I have blogged about here, and it deserves a post of its own.

Richard Dawkins gave the eulogy at the funeral for Douglas Adams. In the eulogy, Dr. Dawkins quoted liberally from Adams's talk "Is There an Artifical God?" Both the eulogy and the lament mentioned above are available online here.

Caring for Your Introvert

An interesting column from the March 2003 issue of The Atlantic: "Caring for Your Introvert" by Jonathan Rauch.

That column was one of the most popular pieces ever posted on The Atlantic, as noted in this follow-up interview with Mr. Rauch in February 2006: "Introverts of the World, Unite!"

What's the difference between an extrovert and an introvert? Extroverts are energized by talking with other people. That tires out introverts. Extroverts are bored by solitary thinking, while introverts thrive on it. No one is completely at either extreme, of course, but people often have definite tendencies in one direction or the other.

The second page of the interview gets into some interesting subjects, like geeks. It also mentions how introverts typically don't enjoy making small talk about the weather. I agree with that, and would add another topic: sports. Small talk about sports permeates our society, but it is often of little interest to an introvert.

So if you are an introvert, keep your chin up. There's nothing wrong with you, and you are not alone!

The Language God Talks

Herman Wouk wrote the best historical novels ever about World War II: The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. They are exciting and gripping stories, yet factual and complete. Highly recommended. These two books were also made into two minseries, available on DVD.

It turns out that while writing those books Herman Wouk had several conversations with one of my heroes: Richard Feynman. I didn't know that before, but learned it from a new nonfiction book that Herman Wouk just published: The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion. The title of the book comes from Wouk's first meeting with Feynman: "...[Feynman] said as we were parting, 'Do you know calculus?' I admitted that I didn't. 'You had better learn it,' he said. 'It's the language God talks.' "

Wouk and Feynman were contemporaries, both born in New York City—Wouk in 1915 and Feynman in 1918. Both of their families were Jewish, and from the same city in Russia. Yet they did not meet until mid-life. The Language God Talks is dedicated: "To the memory of our fathers, Abraham Isaac Wouk and Melville Feynman, who emigrated from Minsk and gave us our lives in America."

Feynman turned his back on religion at about age ten. Wouk embraced religion in his 20s. The book is a "debate" that Wouk has with his good friend Feynman about science and religion. Feynman must have made quite an impression on Herman Wouk, because Feynman has been dead for 22 years, and Wouk is still debating with him.

Feyman once said in an interview: "The stage is too big for the drama." Meaning: the universe is too big a stage for human drama to be anything special. Wouk wrote The Language God Talks to dispute this statement.

Wouk never did learn calculus (although he tried), and he quotes a Jewish microbiologist who is also a Torah scholar as describing calculus as "His [God's] other language" (my emphasis). Wouk ends the debate with the word teiku (the question stands), and these words: "...forgive me, friend Nobel genius, you're as ignorant of religion as I am of calculus."

Even though Herman Wouk may be ignorant of calculus, The Language God Talks contains a good overview of science. For religion and the "struggle for good and evil" (Feynman's words for the human drama), Mr. Wouk draws on his World War II novels with their underlying theme of the Holocaust. How could a good and gracious God allow the Germans, an advanced people, to do such evil?

Herman Wouk's answer was in War and Remembrance, in a sermon by his character Aaron Jastrow in the Theresienstadt ghetto. The title of the sermon is "Heroes of the Iliad," but Jastrow (and Wouk) find the answer not in the Iliad but in the Book of Job. The sermon is reprinted and explained in The Language God Talks.

One additional interesting connection that I learned from The Language God Talks is that another person whom Herman Wouk talked to when he was writing his World War II novels was Dr. Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science at UVM from 1955 to 1991. I had not heard of Dr. Hilberg, but according to Wikipedia, he was "widely considered to be the world's preeminent Holocaust scholar." Mr. Wouk visited Dr. Hilberg at UVM and spoke at his retirement party in 1991. Dr. Hilberg lived in Williston until his death in 2007.

You can read the first few pages of The Language God Talks here:

Is God a mathematician?

Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a science fiction novel about viruses. It's both deep and funny, the ironic humor starting with a main character named Hiro Protagonist.

A discussion of the title: Hiro: " 'This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?' Juanita shrugs. 'What's the difference?' " (p. 200)

Themes include computer viruses, biological viruses and viral ideas, all interconnected from ancient Sumerian mythology to a futuristic virtual reality called the Metaverse. Language is a key theme, beginning with the Biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) and continuing to the modern concepts of DNA (the language of biology) and the binary language of digital computers.

The book is also full of thrilling action and unforgettable characters, such as Y.T. (Yours Truly), a 15-year old girl with a high-tech skateboard and Attitude.

Neal Stephenson is both an entertaining author and a deep thinker. Over on my work blog, I have mentioned another book by Neal Stephenson that is about a near future world where nanotechnology is ubiquitous: The Diamond Age. His magnum opus is Cryptonomicon, which I have also read, but not yet blogged about. All highly recommended.

Snow Crash was published in 1992, before the Internet and World Wide Web became widely popular. (The first popular web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993.) Note that Neal Stephenson is apparently a friend of Jaron Lanier, whom I wrote about last month: You Are Not a Gadget (see the Update).

You Are Not a Gadget

The book You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier is a fascinating counterpoint to some earlier posts on this blog.

Jaron Lanier is a technologist, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, who has come to question where our current technology is taking us. He asks the following basic, related, philosophical questions:

1. Are humans special?
2. What is the proper relationship between the individual and the group?

Jaron Lanier argues that humans are special, and that our current technology is problematic because it emphasizes the group to the exclusion of the individual.

This is the opposite of Stephen Wolfram: "...there is nothing fundamentally special about us [humans]." (A New Kind of Science, p. 844) It is the opposite of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near (movie due out Sept. 1, 2010). I think Jaron Lanier's position is the opposite of most technologists. For a few examples, see any of my earlier blog posts with the label "reality" (and follow the links). I briefly mentioned Jaron Lanier in my first post on the reality question.

Jaron Lanier argues that our current path of technological design (e.g., Web 2.0) is leading us into a "new religion" (p. 32) that he calls cybernetic totalism where humans are slaves of technology instead of the other way around. He believes "that cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business." (p. 119) And especially bad for human creativity.

In contrast to cybernetic totalism, Mr. Lanier posits humanism and "an idea of progress that is centered on enriching the depth of communication instead of the acquisition of powers." (p. 179)

This book is not just about computers. Here are a few of the other interesting topics woven into this book:

• music
• advertising
• economics and money
• evolutionary biology
• language
• how the sense of smell is different from vision and hearing
• cephalopods

In the case of cephalopods (octopuses, squids and cuttlefishes), he is fascinated with how they communicate by morphing, something that humans can't do.

For more information about You Are Not a Gadget, see:

Jaron Lanier's web site about the book
Staying Human in a Tech-Driven World, a talk by Jaron Lanier at Zócalo Public Square at about the time the book was published in January 2010 (the talk is 54 minutes, followed by 18 minutes of questions and answers)

You Are Not a Gadget was published in 2010. Reviews:

Wall Street Journal 1/12/10 (Instapundit)
New York Times 1/14/10
Washington Post 1/14/10

UPDATE 6/04/10: In the Acknowledgements, Jaron Lanier writes "Superspecial thanks to early readers of the manuscript," one of whom was Neal Stephenson. I write about Neal Stephenson in this post: Snow Crash.

A Beautiful Mind

The award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind is about the life of Dr. John Nash, a mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel prize in economics for his work in game theory. The movie is about Dr. Nash's struggle with mental illness (paranoid schizophrenia). It is also a love story between Dr. Nash and his wife Alicia.

It's a wonderful movie, very moving. I recommend it. But do not think that it is all literally true. Differences between the movie and reality are discussed here. For example, the movie highlights the love between Dr. Nash and his wife as the one steady thing in his life, neglecting to mention that they were divorced from 1963 to 2001, when they remarried.

While the movie leaves out some important facts, such as the divorce, it invents others. For example, the two most moving scenes in the movie—the pen ceremony tradition at Princeton and Dr. Nash's speech at the Nobel prize ceremony—are both fictitious, completely fabricated by Hollywood (see this link).

Dr. Nash won the Nobel prize in 1994 for work done in 1950-1953, before he was married to Alicia in 1957, before the onset of his schizophrenia in 1959 (later in life than depicted in the movie), and even before the Nobel prize in economics was established in 1968. Dr. Nash shared the Nobel prize with Dr. John Harsanyi and Dr. Reinhard Selten, who did work in the 1960s that built on Dr. Nash's earlier work. Click here for a good, brief discussion of their various works that led to the prize.

The Nobel Prize web site is a wonderful source of information about Nobel Prize winners. For Dr. Nash they have the following resources:

Autobiography
Prize Seminar (good discussion of the math)
2004 Interview (discusses the movie, among other things)
Photo Gallery
Other Resources

The autobiography is fascinating. A piece of trivia from it: he had a choice of attending graduate school at either Harvard or Princeton. He chose Princeton because "the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous since I had not actually won the Putnam competition." (Several top scorers in the Putnam competition win a monetary prize, but only one winner is awarded a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard, the alma mater of William Lowell Putnam.)

UPDATE 9/26/10: I found this cartoon about Nash and Feynman amusing (source):

It's funnier if you've watched the movie A Beautiful Mind and if you know a little about Richard Feynman.

Ender's Game and Blogs

When did blogs get started? In an earlier post I mentioned that I discovered blogs in April 2002. The World Wide Web was invented in 1990. According to Wikipedia, the term "weblog" was coined in 1997 and "blog" in 1999. Personal blogs began to be popular around 1999, and political blogs gained popularity after September 11, 2001.

Before all of that, the 1985 book Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, included something very much like today's political blogs.

Ender's Game is about Andrew "Ender" Wiggin and his older siblings Peter and Valentine. Ender, who is at Battle School, and Peter and Valentine, who are at home, use "desks"—which sound just like today's notebook PCs. Peter and Valentine communicate via something that sounds exactly like today's e-mail.

(My earliest use of anything like today's e-mail was in 1994 when Brian's Cub Scout Den exchanged e-mails with my cousin David Porter at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and we all thought that was pretty novel and cool. We were using the Compuserve internet service at the time. My e-mail address was 74001.2030@compuserve.com. It wasn't until later that we could use names before the @ symbol.)

More significantly, Peter and Valentine use their "desks" to post anonymous articles on "nets," in an attempt to influence world opinion. Sounds just like today's political blogs!

Valentine wrote under the name "Demosthenes" while Peter wrote as "Locke." The earliest blog that I encountered, in April 2002, was the blog of Megan McArdle, then blogging under the name of "Jane Galt." Interestingly, in August 2002 she wrote about the downside of blogging anonymously, and referred to an anonymous blogger named Demosthenes. I don't think Ms. McArdle knew about the connection to Ender's Game, but Demosthenes did.

Ender's Game is an excellent book and I recommend it. It is about a lot more than "nets."

UPDATE 9/26/10: From xkcd:

Megan McArdle Quotes Feynman

Megan McArdle has blogged several times about ClimateGate. It's been interesting to watch the progression of her thinking, from sympathetic to one side of the issue to sympathetic to the other side.

It isn't something that immediately grabbed her attention (she blogs mostly about economics). She didn't blog about ClimateGate until 11/23, the day after I blogged about it, and then only in response to questions from her readers ("ClimateGate"). At this point she sees nothing to make her question the science of climate change.

In her second post on 11/25 ("The Real Problem With the Climate Science Emails") she begins to see the issue.

On 11/27 ("More on ClimateGate") she links to a hilarious video—a spoof on the scientific peer review process. Highly recommended.

Her skepticism grows with a post on 12/1 ("Climategate III: The Mystery of the Missing Data").

On 12/2 she links to a number of other online discussions ("ClimateGate Link Farm") and another hilarious video, this one by Jon Stewart ("Mental Health Break").

Finally on 12/9 she gets it ("ClimateGate: Was Data Faked?"). In this post Ms. McArdle quotes extensively from Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" speech to show why she is concerned.

I think Ms. McArdle gets it exactly right in this post. The concern is not that the establishment scientists deliberately set out to deceive the rest of the world in a grand conspiracy. The concern is a "subtler kind of bias that we indisputably know has led to scientific errors in the past." The concern is that the establishment scientists ignored Feynman's first rule of science: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." Did they fool first themselves, and then the public, into believing a bunch of hooey?

Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle is one of the bloggers I occasionally read online. I'm going to introduce her in this post, because in the next post I want to talk about something she recently wrote. Megan McArdle was the first blogger I ever encountered.

The first time I ever visited New York City was in April 2002 with the family (except Brian). One highlight of the trip was the play QED at the Lincoln Center starring Alan Alda as Richard Feynman. Another highlight of the trip was a visit to Ground Zero.

What does this trip to NYC have to do with Megan McArdle? Following is a quote from an e-mail that I wrote to Geoff on 4/27/02 after returning home from that trip:

"I discovered something new yesterday—blogs. Have you heard of blogs before? It's short for weblog, basically an online journal. Anyway I discovered yesterday a blog by a 20-something woman who has worked for the past seven months with the cleanup crews at the WTC. Here's what she wrote about Ground Zero:

http://www.janegalt.net/archives/000701.html

"Here's how it starts:

So I've been sitting on the WTC site for seven months now, and it occurred to me today that it no longer looks like a grave. And though I know that there is, as the book says, a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up, it still makes me sad that it now looks like nothing more than the largest construction site in the world.

Every so often those of us who came in that first week play a game of "Do you remember?"

"And it goes on from there at length. Having just been there two days before this blog was posted, and having seen basically a big hole in the ground surrounded by construction trailers, it was quite moving to read this."

I recommend reading the whole post (link above). Do you remember?

That blog post was written by Megan McArdle, then blogging under the pen name of Jane Galt. Ms. McArdle now blogs under her own name for The Atlantic, mostly about economic issues.

Another blogger that I sometimes read online is Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds). An interesting and easy way to become better acquainted with both bloggers is to watch this interview of Megan McArdle by Glenn Reynolds. They start out talking about managing personal finances and then extend the discussion into managing the finances of the federal government. Good stuff.

Next post — Megan McArdle Quotes Feynman.

Dan Brown and Galileo

Like many other people, I enjoyed Dan Brown's bestselling novels Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code (the latter has sold 80 million copies so far). They are a fun read, but my advice is to be cautious about thinking that they accurately present historical facts. Here are two examples from Angels & Demons.

A secret society known as the "Illuminati" figures prominently in Angels & Demons. In the book, the Illuminati started in Rome in the 1500s as a group of scientists and others who were opposed to the teachings of the church, and one of their most prominent founding members was Galileo. Well, that's according to the book. According to Wikipedia, the Illuminati had nothing to do with either the church or Galileo, was founded in Bavaria (Germany) not Rome, and was founded in 1776 — 134 years after Galileo died. [But, of course, the Illuminati would have taken care to make sure that the Wikipedia article is misleading, right? Silly me.]

The second example takes more explaining, but is I think more interesting.

In Angels & Demons, the protagonist, symbologist Robert Langdon, finds an important clue in a fictitious text by Galileo which is kept in the library at the Vatican. While reading this fictitious text looking for the clue, Langdon comes across a section on planetary orbits (p. 211 in my paperback edition):

Elliptical orbits. Langdon recalled that much of Galileo's legal trouble [with the church] had begun when he described planetary motion as elliptical. The Vatican exalted the perfection of the circle and insisted heavenly motion must be only circular.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is the way it was.

I think Galileo got in trouble with the church because of his text titled "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems." The two systems were the ancient Ptolemaic system in which everything orbited the Earth, and the newer Copernican system in which all the planets, including Earth, orbited the sun. Galileo's "Dialogue" favored the Copernican system, which angered the church. The church favored the Ptolemaic system, where the Earth is at the center of everything.

But there's more to the story. Galileo in fact argued for circular orbits, not elliptical orbits. The irony is that Galileo should have known better. While it is true that planetary orbits were circular in the Copernican system (as in the Ptolemaic system), Kepler had discovered some 23 years before Galileo published his "Dialogue" that planetary orbits were elliptical. Galileo knew about Kepler's work, and even corresponded with Kepler, but did not believe that planetary orbits were elliptical.

Here are some relevant dates:
1543 Copernicus published his theory
1601 Tycho Brahe died, Kepler got his data
1609 Kepler's laws of planetary motion
1632 Galileo's "Dialogue"
1687 Newton's laws of motion and gravitation

I mention Brahe (pronounced brah-hee) in this chronology because it was his astronomical data that Kepler used to discover the laws of planetary motion. Kepler's first law of planetary motion says that planetary orbits are elliptical. But Galileo ignored Kepler, and went back to the earlier Copernican theory of circular orbits around the sun, which we now know was wrong.

I mention Newton because it was his laws which provided a mathematical proof for Kepler's laws. Kepler had derived his laws empirically—from observational data, without any underlying mathematical framework. Newton provided the mathematical framework.

I think it is common knowledge that the trouble between Galileo and the church was about whether the Earth or the sun was at the center of things. I don't think it is so commonly known that Galileo argued for circular orbits when he should have known from Kepler's work that planetary orbits are elliptical.

If it hadn't been for the war...

The previous post about Freeman Dyson relates to something else I've been thinking about recently.

I am currently listening to "Biology: The Science of Life," a set of lectures from The Teaching Company. (Highly recommended. Biology is much more fascinating than I had realized.)

I'm only a few lectures into the course, but one name that keeps coming up over and over again is Francis Crick. Freeman Dyson tells a story about Francis Crick at the end of the online article that was the subject of the previous post:

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Briefly, both Dyson and Crick were British physicists. They met for the first time in 1945, before World War II ended. Dyson was 21. Crick was 28, and had spent his 20s working for the British government in the war effort. Crick was depressed, because the war effort had taken six years out of his physics career. For a scientist, one's 20s are often a period of high productivity that sets the foundation for one's professional career.

At the time Freeman Dyson thought: "How sad. Such a bright chap. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would probably have been quite a good scientist."

But Francis Crick didn't give up. And he didn't return to physics, either. He changed disciplines to biology. Together with James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA just eight years after the end of World War II. (Nobel prize 1962.) Francis Crick continued to make many important discoveries in biology until his death in 2004.

Freeman Dyson in his own words

I've mentioned Freeman Dyson a couple of times recently — in the previous post and last March. Here is Freeman Dyson in his own words (August 8, 2007):

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

He first talks about the importance of heretics. Feynman would have agreed.

Then he talks about three heresies:

1. "All the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated." Dyson does an excellent job of briefly describing all the various aspects of global warming, from polar ice to topsoil.

2. "The wet Sahara." Dyson says the Sahara was wet 6,000 years ago; that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide might bring back such a climate; and that this might be a good thing. In this part of the paper, he writes about the philosophical differences between naturalists and humanists.

3. The third heresy is not about global warming. It is about global dominance. "The United States has less than a century left of its turn as top nation." He has some good thoughts for today's young people.

Freeman Dyson begins this paper with a story about the famous astronomer Tommy Gold, and he concludes with a story about the famous biologist Francis Crick. It is a good read, and I recommend reading the whole thing.

Elton John and Billy Joel

Elton John and Billy Joel are performing together in a series of concerts this year, called their "Face 2 Face" tour. We saw their concert in Gillette Stadium (where the Patriots play) in Foxboro, MA on July 18th. They have toured together before; Billy Joel said it was 15 years ago to the day that they last performed together in Foxboro Stadium (it was a different stadium then).

The wild tailgate party before the concert:

The weather was perfect, and the crowd was enthusiastic but well behaved. The stadium holds 68,000 people. While there were no people in the sections behind the stage, the rest of the stadium appeared full and there were many people seated on the field. So I'd say there were close to 68,000 people there.

The rest of the photos are from Nancy's cell phone. I didn't take my camera into the stadium (should have, everybody else did). We had seats in the 105 section. Binoculars were useful (good idea, Nancy). I figured we were about 150 yards away from the stage:

The stage had elaborate lighting effects:

The audience danced and sang along with many of the songs. The photo below is looking away from the stage, and is illuminated only by the lights from the stage. It's late in the show, and everyone is on their feet:

The concert ran from a little before 8:00 to around 11:00. No warmup, and no breaks. Grand pianos and other band members went up and down through the stage floor as needed. When Elton John and Billy Joel played together, their two grand pianos were "face to face." It was a good performance. See below for the setlist.

We were lucky. EJ and BJ played at Wrigley Field in Chicago both before and after their performance at Gillette Stadium (7/16 and 7/21). But since then Billy Joel has become sick with flu-like symptoms and two performances in New York have been canceled (Buffalo on 7/24 and tomorrow--7/27--in Albany).

Here is the setlist from the concert:

Elton John/Billy Joel (solo)
Your Song
Just The Way You Are

Elton John/Billy Joel (bands)
Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me
My Life

Elton John set
Funeral For A Friend
Love Lies Bleeding
Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)
Levon
Madman Across The Water
Tiny Dancer
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Daniel
Rocket Man
Philadelphia Freedom
I'm Still Standing
Crocodile Rock

Billy Joel set
Prelude
Angry Young Man
Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)
Allentown
Zanzibar
Don't Ask Me Why
She's Always A Woman
Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
River Of Dreams
We Didn't Start The Fire
It's Still Rock'n'Roll To Me
Only The Good Die Young

Elton John/Billy Joel (bands)
I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues
Uptown Girl
The Bitch Is Back
You May Be Right
Bennie And The Jets

Elton John/Billy Joel (solo)
Candle in the Wind (original version)
Piano Man

Many in the audience left the stadium after the concert singing Piano Man.

Music in the Meadow

Stowe Performing Arts is putting on four outdoor concerts this summer in the Concert Meadow at the Trapp Family Lodge. We attended the first concert, a performance by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, on July 5th. Nancy's cousin Bonnie joined us. It rained early in the day, but cleared up nicely for the concert:

A nearly full moon rose to our left during the concert:

The theme of the concert was "The Lake Effect," and every song had a water theme. This was in recognition of the quadricentennial celebrations this year of Samuel de Champlain's voyage and discovery of Lake Champlain in 1609. Some of the songs were Waves of the Danube, Russian Sailors Dance and selections from South Pacific. Afternoon became evening:

The concert closed with the 1812 Overture and Hands Across the Sea, with fireworks:

After all, it was the Fourth of July weekend!