The Fascinet

Books to be donated to the library tomorrow without prior notice:

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases [Not useful]
Becoming Human [What happens when anthropologists act like creationists]
Double Duce [These things are never the same when you're an old man]
Peace-Weavers and Shield Maidens
MASH [Not going to read it again]
The Science of Good and Evil [Tried to read several times; couldn't]
The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw [Probably should keep, but won't]
The Villain's Guide to Better Living [Tongue and cheek; not a guide for a real villian]

Chimpanzee Politics {Duplicate]

People often say, "How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?" Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don't understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed. The second is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of preindustrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask

--Fareed Zakaria


I should mention that one of the reasons we get the quality of Indian immigrants to the United States that we do is that whole castes are effectively banned from education and employment due to affirmative action policies. This is good for us in some regard,* terribly bad for India.

* Indians seem highly likely to work for the government. This is worrying to me, because an identifiable category of people who are as likely to work for the state as not seems to argue against their economic integration.

In the case of Indians, it's likely to be the relative prestige of working as a bureaucrat in a high regulated economy, but such attitudes can't help but infect their children.

Current rate for marrying an illegal Irish immigrant in California for the green card: $30,000.00.

You get a $15,000.00 bonus for gay marrying a Malay.

I understand why people are upset a criticism. I'm upset at criticism. I don't see why you'd seek someone's blog out and call his criticism Orwellian (and therefore, a fascist, twice removed) just because he thinks your ostentatious prose interferes with rather than aids communication of your ideas.

Oh, well. I was saying that I wanted a flame war to help my spelling, and someone came by just to bitch!

It's past 5 pm on June 30^th, I'm out of work and I don't have an offer sheet in front of me: the Shit and Enemies Lists are in effect.

I did talk to someone on Friday, and he said that I'll have an offer on my desk next week, but that's immaterial.

I have a dull knife and a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy.

This sort of idiocy usually comes from sociology departments:


“We found that human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations, like home and work” said Albert-László Barabási, Distinguished Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) at Northeastern University.


But, apparently, it took a three year, million and a half dollar grant to prove that people tend to go home after work and to the same grocery store every night will get you a cover story in Nature.

Thank you, Distinguished Professor Dumbass.

It's amazing how illiberal and repressive the rest of the world has become.

Since Brigitte Bardot was fined $23,000.00 for her distaste for Islamic dietary ritual, I won't review the Halal Chinese restaurant I went to last night, for fear of extradition to Europe and torture in France for my insensitive ways.

Missed this. Some STS instructor decided to sue Dartmouth* because her students didn't buy into her line.

Is this really just advertising for her book in progress about her experience at Dartmouth? Probably.

It's a shame the reporters in the video mistakes STS for science.


* I'm not sure about the Gawker b/g, but it's got a bunch of links.

So, the last interview did me no good. I'm on the streets in thirty days. I've got a couple of ideas of what to do when I'm down and out. The first is to hop trains across the country, barge into physics departments, and give the selection committees and the new hires swirlies.

Then, I'll draw some interweb monster comics, like so:





The first is a modification of the second when I got a theme for it. The theme lets me use the second as a cute, intermediate form.

Anyway, I'll have plenty of time to draw monster comics in swirly prison.

Something always breaks.

At MIT, the crack is free.

Went on an interview on the Great Plains last week. Like I’ve said before: I’ve done the math, and that puts me between the 60th and 70th percentiles of applicants—except that at least one place I applied didn’t have 120 applicants, they had 600, so that I may rate a little higher than I thought.

Many of you haven’t been on an academic interview, and I’m not sure if it is the same from discipline to discipline. I expect it’s similar. So, I’ll talk about this interview. In some ways the previous one was better planned, and I planned to tell you about it then, but I’m so lazy that I can’t even be assed to fuck off.

This time I flew in on the morning of my interview. This meant that I had to be that guy on the airplane wearing a tie. On the way back, it was camo shorts, a funny hat and a bandolier, but since I was going to give my presentation before I got to the hotel, I had to wear my clothes all day. I didn’t get to look my best: starch or no starch, a shirt that’s been sat in for three hours looks like you pulled it out of a pile of dirty laundry. Actually it’s worse if you starch it.

I won’t talk about the pants.

After I arrived, I got to hang out with the department chair for a couple of hours. He took me on a tour of the campus and out for barbeque. I was surprised that out on the plains they had Carolina barbeque a few block from campus. The campus apparently owns an unmarked baroque building near there. It looks rife for conspiracy theories.

Then, I gave my lecture. It was surprisingly well attended for the last day of finals. All academic interviews require a research lecture, about half seem to require a teaching lecture (at the previous interview, I gave an hour long presentation on Newton’s Second, complete with a Torquemadean interrogation of three students). Instead of a straightforward “this is what I did” lecture, I gave a complicated “this is what I’m going to do, and this is why I’m the man to do it” lecture. It could have been better. I’ve never given a lecture that couldn’t have, though.

Then, I went to the hotel for an hour or so (in the middle of a rather dead part of downtown) before dinner.

The most important thing to realize is that an academic interview is all about table manners. You’ll be eating meals with people who get a vote on whether to recommend you to the dean, so chew with your mouth closed and get those elbows off the table.

The next day was the gauntlet. The academic interview includes individual and group meetings with a large chunk of the faculty (if not all of it) and the dean and the VP of research and so on. Each person wants to do something different with you. Some guys want to make jokes, some guys want to hear about (or more about) what you do, some guys want to talk to you about what they do, and some guys want to collaborate, then and there. You do this for about two thirds of your time there—usually a full day. I don’t know about you, but by about 11:30 am I never want to speak again.

Then, they set me free. I was lucky. The provost got stuck in a storm when coming back from a conference, and they said he likes to talk and talk, and when he done with that, talk some more.

My spelling's slipping again.

Ouch.

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

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

Jesus Christ, he liked Bob Dylan.

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

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

Nothing at all.

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

His poetry proved it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, democracy fails us.

Again.

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

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

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

Big knowledge is big money.

( 2nd Symposium on Academic Globalization: AG 2008 )