The Better Angels of our Nature

Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election on November 4 naturally leads many to think of the first president from a young party founded in 1856 partly on abolishing slavery.  Obama quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in his acceptance speech saying that “we are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”  I find myself thinking of the end of the Great Emancipator’s speech which finishes with the hope that we will again reflect “the better angels of our nature.”

 

This victory is historic because of the color of the winner’s skin, his strange Muslim name, and his youth, but I am hopeful that it will accomplish something more important than those historic qualities.  Barack Hussein Obama has an opportunity to take us beyond the culture war that has caused so many political problems over the past twenty years.  Hillary Clinton, John McCain, George W. Bush, John Kerry and most other leaders of both parties became politically active in opposition to or support of the Vietnam War.  Obama is not motivated to refight the battles of forty years ago.  He made his admiration for John McCain’s Vietnam service clear from the beginning of the campaign.  Though he ran many negative ads, those ads did not generally attack McCain personally.  He may have an opportunity to work pragmatically with both parties to find the best solutions to our problems.  After eight years of a president who seemed only interested in pleasing the 49% of the electorate who voted for him, it will be refreshing to have one who wants to represent all Americans.

 

Obama’s lack of executive experience has been a concern about him from the beginning of his campaign.  I have often said that I wish he had become governor of Illinois before running for the White House.  We have found out at great cost the danger of electing someone to the Presidency who does not have experience at the national level.  George W. Bush came into power in 2000 having been governor of a state with one of the weakest executives in the country.  Though he had a disciplined and motivated staff, they seemed more interested in winning more power for Republicans than in actually governing the country.

 

I do not think that Barack Obama will be that kind of president.  He has surrounded himself with advisors who are respected by both major parties, and the evidence from the financial crisis suggests that he will listen to them.  George W.  Bush is an ideologue who seemed to want the presidency initially so that he could avenge the loss of his father to Bill Clinton in 1992.  Obama is a problem-solver who is interested in results for the country.  Even if you think he only wants to help Democrats, I think that he sees the path to success for his party to be in helping the country get out of our current foreign and domestic messes.   He will create a long term majority for Democrats if he can show that his is the party that governs from the middle where most of the electorate is.  No one runs for president who does not desire power.  The sacrifices a presidential candidate must accept for themselves and their families are unacceptable to anyone who does not have enormous ambition.  The kind of candidate we want is one who sees his or her personal success being tied to pragmatic success for the country.  I think that Barack Obama is that candidate.  He has an ability to inspire us to do what is good for the nation even when it might be politically difficult.  He is willing to listen to opposition opinions and make decisions after thoughtful consideration.  If we give him a chance to govern, I think we will be proud that we elected this man president.

Approaching Dirt

So, I turned 41 yesterday. My two year old brings me an electronic photo frame. I like it. Look out dirt, I'm catching up with you. Earlier this summer I was talking with a boy who sometimes lives across the street. He was playing with a Tonka dump truck like the one I had many years ago.
Me: When I was your age, I had a dump truck like that.
Him: I'm six. Were you ever six?
So I beat him to death with my walker.

Homecoming

So, who's making the trek to north Mecklenburg County? Pam and I will not be going -- California's a long way away and das Kind still needs supplemental O2 on flights. It's too bad. I went to graduate school with one of DC's physics profs (John Yukich), and wouldn't mind catching up with him and the rest of the department.

Not your father's Cushman

Seen on reason.com, why does the Richland, SC sheriff's department need this? I suppose if there aren't any innocent bystanders within a mile downrange, then it's safe (for wildly inaccurate values of "safe"). I guess Sheriff Lott is finally gonna git them Duke boys.

Politics and gaming, oh my!

An aspersion has been cast. Or if you had the sage for biology, an asparagus has been cast. The comments are worth scrolling through. Politicians should be more careful about disparaging geeks. If Sen. Clinton had had a Hero Systems or Rolemaster player among her advisors, they might have gotten the math right in the primaries.

Are we Alone?

Well, time for me to put up another big-question post.

Fermi's Paradox has fascinated me for years, and an interesting in MITs Technology Review has reminded me of the topic. The interesting point of Nick Bostrom's article (registration required) is that he hopes that we find no signs of life on Mars. Bostrom suggests that there must be some bottleneck that explains why the galaxy (and the universe) is not teeming with life. He calls this restriction the Great Filter. If that problem is behind us, then there is a good chance our civilization will survive for a long time, while if it is ahead, then our chances of survival must be minuscule.
He concludes that:
If--as I hope is the case--we are the only intelligent species that has ever evolved in our galaxy, and perhaps in the entire observable universe, it does not follow that our survival is not in danger. Nothing in the preceding reasoning precludes there being steps in the Great Filter both behind us and ahead of us. It might be extremely improbable both that intelligent life should arise on any given planet and that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space.
But we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past if Mars is found to be barren. In that case, we may have a significant chance of one day growing into something greater than we are now.

I found this an interesting way to think about the problem.
Even thoughI love Science Fiction and stories about galactic civilizations and alien species, the Fermi Paradox leads me to conclude that we are alone or nearly so.

It's Alive!

So, after almost a year away from semi-regular blogging, I have finally gotten around to resuscitating my personal blog at The Awe of Understanding (which is tied to our family domain which won't get it's much needed face lift until the summer).

Why am I telling you this? Well I just wrote a piece that I'd like your feedback on, if you are so inclined. It's called "Specious and Insidious". I would cross-post it here, but I'd like to start building some "viewership" over there and would also like to keep any comments you might like to leave active on the home site.

Of course, I'd welcome any comments on any other piece you see there (most of them date from 2007 and before, but they aren't completely time-sensitive.) Nathan Roberson '92 and I had quite a debate about recycling a couple of years back that might interest. And I would also love feedback on the style, layout, design, or any other aesthetic element that you may have an opinion about.

JoCo show

Cross-posted from my livejournal -- my write-up on the Jonathan Coulton show in Chicago, 5/3/08.


This was our ... fourth time(?) seeing JoCo with Paul and Storm, so we've pretty much got it memorized now. The previous shows were all at Schuba's though, while this one was that the Lakeshore Theater, which is a bigger venue -- about 350 capacity, and it was sold out. In fact, he mentioned on his blog that all 3 of his recent Midwest shows were sold out. Yay!

Stuff that was new and different:

(1) He rickrolled us! He did Mr. Fancy Pants using the Zendrum like at his December show, but this time he had "Never Gonna Give You Up" programmed into it, so in the middle of the song he essentially rickrolled the audience. I'm glad that joke's not dead yet, cause it still makes me lol.


http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZfUfpyeyPx4

(2) He performed "Flickr" live with a screen behind him projecting the original video (not the Spiff one, although that would've been cool too). Here is "Dwyer rockin' out on air guitar":



(3) They did "First of May" in the encore of course, as the show was on the 3rd of May. So yes, technically outdoor f*$%ing had started 2 days previously, but who's counting. They also did "Sweet Caroline" in the encore, which I gather has become a regular thing. Here's "First of May" from our show: (lyrics definitely NSFW)


http://youtube.com/watch?v=UTUS0Mgl1ZE

The Idiot’s Lantern

Continuing to post on shallow topics in the midst of others’ heavy political discourse, what TV shows are people watching these days? Any can’t-miss shows on the TiVo? Lost, perhaps? Battlestar Galactica? (ahem) Doctor Who? *Cyndi and Jim immediately see through Valerie’s thin ruse of listing the show she’s obsessed with third* Looking forward to the return of Mad Men? Excited about Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse or still pining for Firefly? Comment about it!

If there’s interest, I or others could initiate an open thread after a new episode of whatever-it-is airs for water cooler discussion and the like.

For our part, other than the aforementioned Who and its slutty stepsister Torchwood, we are currently working our way through the BBC show Life on Mars which starred John Simm. We have been TiVoing Galactica but haven’t actually gotten around to starting the new season yet. And we are still laughing our asses of at Scrubs and at Neil Patrick Harris in How I Met Your Mother.

Global Warming. Why are we asking the wrong questions?

I was reading this blog post from David Brin recently, and started thinking about this issue again (his discussion of climate change is in the second half of the post). Especially look at the 9th and following comments after the post ("The wheels are coming off the global warming bandwagon..."). Brin slaps the guy down pretty hard, and I understand his frustration. It is amazing to me that there are intelligent people who are still arguing about whether we are affecting the climate.

I am not an expert in climate science (no one person really can be) but virtually every credible source agrees now that we are affecting the temperature of the planet. My favorite book on the subject is Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. He lays out the arguments pretty fairly, including the problems climate models have with clouds and the effect of contrails. Most of the energy companies are even seeing the light and making plans for a low-carbon energy future (there was a YouTube recording of a BP meeting where the chief scientist of BP was talking in reasonable terms about climate change, but I can't find it now).

All the debate about whether global warming is happening is a distraction from the important policy questions we should be asking:

1) What are the best case and worse case scenarios for the effect this change is going to have on our civilization? How much CO2 is too much?
2) How much will it reasonably cost for a certain reduction in CO2 and other greenhouse gases?
3) How much can we do with current technology to curb the problem? Do we need to invest more in engineering or research?

These are just a few of the many questions we should be asking instead of having debates about whether the problem is real.

What do you guys think?

Logos and flashbacks

So I'm doing my lunchtime web crawl and come across this (may not be safe for work):
http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-original-lo.html which reminds me of this (same warning applies)
http://www.oddee.com/item_86090.aspx
which reminds me of the big brouhaha over Davidson's Sesquicentennial logo change involving a red bar with a white diamond under the V. We paid consultants with a five figure sum for that one, back in '88. That was when Harry Broome wrote a letter suggesting DC could have held a contest for the student body to choose a new logo. Well, while it may have been dumb to shell out that sort of money, at least we didn't get anything worth posting on the aforementioned sites.

Maybe I used too many monkeys...

Jim thought this post from my livejournal account was worth cross-posting here. Sort of a summary of live music/comedy that we've seen recently.

We got Kids in the Hall tickets! We weren't really planning to go. We wanted to get tickets go see Flight of the Conchords, who are in Chicago on May 14th, but they sold out in presale, I think; we failed utterly. Jim went online looking for tickets from a broker and failed to find anything for less than about $180 per ticket. Then he says, "Hey, here's Kids in the Hall tickets for face value!" So we bought them. The month of May will be bringing teh funny: We are going to see Jonathan Coulton on May 3rd, which I think will make our 4th time seeing him, and now the Kids in the Hall on May 29th.

Other shows we've been to in the last year or so:

Josh Joplin (with Garrison Starr opening) -- I really liked Garrison Starr live (I think I described her as Amy Ray meets Kelly Clarkson, which totally worked, believe it or not), so I bought a couple of her albums, only to find that she was better live than recorded. Josh Joplin was dressed as a beatnik (with a kerchief! seriously!) and was sort of a spaz live, but very good nonetheless.

Michael Penn (with The Last Town Chorus opening) -- Michael Penn is one of those singers who sounds effortlessly perfect live. He was clearly very uncomfortable with the between-song banter thing, which I thought was funny given how many years he's been at this. He instead solicited banter, recipes, old wives' tales, and political discourse from the audience.

The Decemberists (with Laura Veirs opening) -- we went to the "The Short of It" night from their "The Long and the Short of It" Tour, where they were planning to do all their really long epic songs the first night and then their shorter songs the second. It was a great show, but they cancelled all of the rest of the tour right after we saw them.

Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm (several times) -- Because we love them utterly. Jim got to go up on stage at the last show to do the "Message Redacted" voice for "Chiron Beta Prime," which he was very pleased with. Ranked up there with his participation in Penn & Teller's bullet catch when we saw them in Vegas.

Julia Sweeney, "Letting Go of God" -- I really can't say enough about how good this show was -- hilarious and thought-provoking and touching. Good especially if you are an atheist but I think even an open-minded religious person would appreciate it. Julia actually has a lot of affection for the church in spite of her beliefs. She's coming out with a DVD of this show at some point, which I can't wait for.

We're Number Three!!!

Yes, I am claiming the Davidson men's basketball team is #3 in the nation. First off, ignore the regular season -- games before March don't count. Now look at the tournament results. How many points away from Kansas was every other team? Points add, so if A loses to B who loses to C, C absorbs A-B and B-C. Now let's look at the results:

Kansas = 0
Memphis = -1/2 [yeah, they lost by 7, but in overtime, so -1/2]
Davidson = -2
Mississippi State = -1/2 - 3 = -3.5
The rest of the South bracket - 18.5 or lower since Memphis usually romped
The entire East bracket = -18 or lower, since UNC got blown out by Kansas
The entire West bracket = -1/2 -15 = -15.5 or lower, after UCLA's 15 point loss.

So obviously Davidson was the third best team in the tournament and those supposed losses to Duke, UNC, and UCLA in the regular season Never Really Happened.

I am also available for political campaign analyses and budget estimations.

Two Recommended Books

Rainbow's End, by Vernor Vinge
Vinge is best known as a proponent of the idea that humanity is approaching a Singularity where our scientific progress creates a self-evolving machine intelligence which enables a feedback loop of technological expansion.
His other novels are set the in far future, while this one is set perhaps twenty years from now. Vinge is super at extrapolating current technological trends in plausible ways, while also giving us engaging characters and action. The world he describes lets everyone construct their own virtual reality and superimpose it on the real one. It is also a world in which medical science has made amazing discoveries, but some diseases remain uncured creating a roulette of medical cures depending on your condition.
The main character is a poet who is cured of Alzheimer's among other physical ailments and finds himself with a restored body in this new world. He becomes caught up in an international plot that would kill most of humanity.
I highly recommend this book.

Quantico, by Greg Bear
This is the latest novel by my favorite hard science fiction author. Quantico is set in the very near future, and as the name suggests it revolves around the FBI. I would call this a horror story about what is possible for terrorist groups with the acceleration of genetics in the past ten years. A young FBI agent, his partner, and his father investigating the possible use of anthrax end up discovering a far more frightening possibility for modern criminals.
As with Bear's other books, his characters are smart and well-defined. If you are familiar with his other work this is a good book, but if you have not read Greg Bear, I would start with Eon, The Forge of God, or Darwin's Radio.

Is the Democratic mess handing the White House to McCain?

Every day, the Democratic nomination fight seems to get nastier. Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns are good at taking offense at everything the other (or their surrogates) has to say. I don't see any way for Hillary to get the nomination at this point and I consider that a good thing. The question is whether she is spoiling a golden opportunity for Democrats to take the presidency, which Republicans have dominated since the 1960s. I am of two minds about how to interpret this dogfight for the nomination while McCain gets to snipe from the sidelines.

On the one hand, the biggest complaint against Obama is that he doesn't have enough experience to be President. Clinton rightly points out that he has not yet faced the Republican Slime Machine (tm). Is she doing him a favor by allowing issues like his religion, his pastor, and his leadership qualities to be brought up? Its possible that getting some of these stories out now will make them "old news" by the time McCain's campaign tries to flog Obama with them in the fall.

On the other hand, McCain and his people can say: "See, even Democrats have problems with Obama." He also gets months to raise money while the Democratic candidates (who used to have a huge advantage) spend their money beating on each other.

As a Democrat, I am saddened to see my party so divided that in a recent poll, a number of Clinton and Obama supporters said they would support McCain in the fall if their candidate loses. If he were the McCain of the 2000 election, I might agree with them, but I am a lot more suspicious of the 2008 version.

Go Wildcats!

What an exciting run for Davidson Basketball in the NCAA Tournament! Their resilience and heart were amazing to watch as they played teams that were much bigger and better-known. Stephen Curry was named the most outstanding player of the region even though Davidson lost to Kansas in the regional final.

Even in their final game, they had a chance to win at the end. Davidson was down five with the ball, and I noticed Curry standing clutching his shorts as they inbounded the ball. He was clearly exhausted, but he still caught the inbounds pass and hit a three-pointer to cut the lead to two. After the Davidsdon defense held Kansas without a good shot at the other end, Curry brought the ball up himself with sixteen seconds left. Double-teamed by two bigger Kansas players he passed to Jason Richards, the senior point guard, for a desperation three as the game ended.

Curry did not have the kind of game he did against Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin. He missed seven threes in a row in the second half. Still, the game was called pretty tight, which kept Kansas from simply overpowering the Davidson players. I felt like the whole team ran out of gas at the end. They turned the ball over much more than they did in the other three games, and often Kansas players were able to outfight them for rebounds.

If you are a fan of basketball, the Box Score of the Georgetown games has to be one of the strangest things you have ever seen. The Hoyas shot 63% overall and 55% from three point range and lost!

It would have been very interesting if Davidson had won. I would have been faced with my favorite sports team since I knew what a basketball was (North Carolina) against my alma mater in the final four. It would have been a fun problem to decide who to support.