Generation Then and Now

First, a must-read from the the "on-line only" New Yorker:

• An interview with Bill Ayers

on election day. Just for reference, Ayers is 63 and is not a "baby boomer". He was born in 1944, and is part of a generation often confused with Boomers because they were so active in the 1960s. He offers a pretty amusing insight into the vortex that was one part this year's Presidential campaign.

Second, the "Generation WE" video that Mrs. Pion pointed out to me:

Comments below the fold.

Where to begin.

Probably with the hypocrisy of complaining about federal deficits and closing with a call for a multi-billion dollar government handout to fund innovative solutions to our over-depenence on fossil fuels. Most entertaining. Why not Just Do It, like some entrepreneurs have done when it was time to create cell phones or hybrid cars? (Yes, I know why not, and I support that goal and that mechanism. What I reject is the sales pitch that does not expose the hard choices to be made.)

Along that same line, maybe I should start with the throw-away line in the video about health care for all. If you are ignorant of what it costs now, and ignorant of how it is funded now, you will never survive the battle to replace hidden taxes with public ones, or hidden socialism (via surcharges on insurance-paid care) for open socialism, and might even buy into the fantasy that a $5000 deduction will allow every American to get full health insurance coverage.

Or with the line about 1/3 getting diabetes, as if it is an unavoidable health risk rather than a result of a diet full of sugar -- from soft drinks to "energy drinks". Kid, if you are too fat to fit comfortably in a regular school desk (an increasing problem at my college), you are putting your own health at risk. Don't pretend that a reduced life expectancy is your parent's fault for taking you to the fast-food restaurant you begged to visit as a child.

Or maybe with those silly remarks about polluted water and an environmental disaster. Kids, wake up and smell the Cuyahoga. You can't? That is because it got cleaned up by those self-absorbed Boomers and their parents (after we nagged them into paying for it). You kids have no idea what polluted water looks like. Rivers rarely catch fire any more. And Pittsburgh? The buildings are white again, now that coal-burning plants only emit CO2 rather than soot and CO2.

Or maybe with links to a pair of articles in the Chronicle, on stupidity: part 1 and, in particular, part 2 that addresses teaching the "digital natives". The assumption that this particular generation is better informed and more tech savvy is brought into question by someone else who shares my criticism of a consumer culture on campus that has not considered it important to prepare this allegedly prepared generation for the digital world. Guess what, kids? We can find Wikipedia too, but we know enough that we can tell when what is there is crap. Our faculty know better than to interrupt class to send a text message, but apparently the kids paying to learn something have yet to learn to profit from what they are paying for.

I do agree with them about education. That generation did get screwed out of an education as good as the one I had, but it's not really the Boomer's fault that people weren't willing to pay a professional's wages for a teacher. A fair fraction of young Boomer women still saw teaching as a worthwhile profession, but many more found a wide range of professions open up to women as a result of the Women's Lib movement. The people who tolerated a massive decline in teacher quality were from the Greatest Generation. (At my alma mater, by the late 70s, teachers were drawn from the bottom of the entering freshman class. I have the data to prove it. I really need to blog about them, but put it off while trying to get a newer set of similar data.) It was the Greatest Generation that came up with the New Math and Look Say, producing poorly educated students who would end up being your teachers and parents. (No one seems to notice that the noted "terrorist pal" is a Professor of Education at a quality university.) Parents who put up with it when their kids went to school only made it worse, but how were they to know? And what could they do about it? Well, they could teach their kids the way mine did. I learned more at home than in school until some time about the middle of high school.

Yet nowhere in that video did I see a call for the top half of the graduating class to go into K-12 education. Or a call for discipline and structure in schools rather than acceptance of any and all behaviors. Nope, just the usual enabler nonsense that shifts the responsibility for learning away from the learner. Look kids, Obama didn't get where he is today by waiting for something to happen, by waiting for someone to teach him how to become President. Stop blaming older people the way my generation did for decades, and do something about improving yourselves. It is possible to learn things on your own. They are called books. You can even get them elecronically, via Kindle. (Mrs Pion loves her new Kindle.)

Or maybe with claims about political involvement. Yes, reports are that young voters turned out in record numbers (from a student newspaper), but only by increasing turnout from awful (48% in 2004) to merely bad (between 49 and 54%). The national average was about 61 to 64%, right up there with 1960 and 1964, but probably above 1968. Sorry, kids, but the older folks still beat you to the polls. We'll have to wait a few months for real demographic details, but not exactly the "unprecedented numbers" they push at the end of the video.

Or how about starting with the assertions about how bad the economy is. Worst ever? Try my parent's generation, from the trailing edge of the so-called Greatest Generation, born just a bit too late to fight in all but the last days of WW II, they were born just in time for the Great Depression. Just in time that they became teenagers at a time when you couldn't even buy tires for your car (seriously) and grease was recycled to be made into explosives. (There was a time when throwing away grease was practically an act of treason.)

Environmentalists? Drive by a college apartment complex after the Thursday to Monday weekend and tell me how much recycling you see. The dumpsters are overflowing. The families in my neighborhood recycle. The college kids usually don't, unless the garbage can gets too full.

Worried about war? Sorry kids, but none of you was ever at risk of getting drafted, and you were never asked to sacrifice anything (not even taxes) for either the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. Worried about debt? The federal deficit during WW II was something like half of the GDP. They printed money, gave it to war workers and soldiers, then borrowed it back from them (because they had nothing to buy) and printed even more money. Ever hear about War Bonds?

Really worried about the Federal Deficit or tax increases for the wealthy? Use this here internet thingy to read some of the blog articles on CNBC. One guy argues, quite convincingly, that deficits are really good for people under 30 (because growth opens up new jobs in new industries, while recessions are bad for recent graduates, as I can also tell you from experience), and that higher taxes on top income brackets are good for young workers too (since those taxes might encourage highly paid Boomer employees to retire early, opening up lines of promotion for younger staff). Lest you doubt the author's (Wall) street cred, he writes for Jim Cramer. I suppose he could even add that his generation can always pass the debt on to their kids, just as the Greatest Generation (Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush I) passed it on to us, where a Boomer tried to pay it off (Clinton) only to have another one (Bush II) build it back up to pass on to an inter-generational President (Obama was born in 1961, at the end of the Boom, which ran from 1946 to 1964). Passing on the national debt is part of our traditional American Family Values.

Or maybe with the hubris of "control our nation". No, let's end there. Let's end with the fantasy of taking control just the way Boomers did between 1968 (when this video could have been made if anything cheaper than an AMPEX deck with 2" tape had existed) and 1992. Or the common cause shown by the politics of Bill Clinton and George W, or the world view shared by W and Gore. The reality is that there are just about as many right wing young voters as there are progressives. The big difference is that this generation is tolerant of some things that their parents rejected, such as racial integration, but that does not narrow the wide range of opinions about guns or gays or drilling within view of Spring Break at Panama City Beach. (I wonder if there will be a battle in 25 years between a candidate who enlisted in 2001 and served in Iraq and one who had "other priorities". Probably, unless the attack politics of 2000 and 2004 really did get killed off in 2008. Time will tell.) In the meantime, real change will only take place if the progressives of "Generation WE" join forces with the progressives of every other generation, as many of them did with the Boomer named Obama, and make that change happen.

Why not work together? If you are in Generation WE, that means you are, after all, a child of the Baby Boom generation. All you need to do is get your parents to work with you the same way we got our parents to do something about pollution and, eventually, Vietnam. Effective politics is about coalitions, not confrontations. Remember, Vietnam went on longer than it needed to because confrontations within the Democratic Party (in which Bill Ayers played an important role) put Nixon in power. Or didn't they (we) teach you that in school?

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Tuesday was a gray day.

Not rainy, just overcast and gray.

Today the sky was clear and blue.

A good omen?

And I don't think it was my imagination that quite a few students had a spring in their step that one doesn't normally see at this point in the semester, a time when slogging through the last weeks of school seems to be the norm.

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The President is ...

Based on this story among others ... What they will be saying tomorrow morning in West Virginia and some southern red states:



I first thought of this scene because of two stories posted on 538 about what people were telling campaign workers canvassing for Obama. I'll have to dig up the links later. (Here they are: canvassing in western PA and calling in VA.)

If I had anything to do with Saturday Night Live, I would SO be figuring out a way to do a skit recreating this scene in Grant Park tonight or Inauguration Day in January. Whatever.

But it is not just this scene that connects to the irony of present day. The central story in this movie is that the highly prejudiced townfolk come around to accepting a Black Sheriff because he is a competent and calm leader in a time of panic. Given a choice between losing their town and discarding their prejudices, they chose to save their town. To save their country. To ignore appeals to their baser instincts, appeals that used to get them to vote against their best interests. To look to the future of One America, working for a Better America.

Read Entire Article......

Future Career in Physics?

A correspondent asks the following lightly editted question:

I am located in [the midwest], and have just started attending [mid-tier Midwestern University]. My current major is Computer Science and Engineering (most likely computer programing), and I have also been extremely intrigued by Physics. I listen to Audio books about physics, Einstein, QM, etc.

My question is, how is the job outlook for Physics? I've been reading that the salary is very good, $50k - $100k, although it's a damper if you can't find those jobs! I am interested in possibly changing my major to Physics, although am unsure as to how hard it will be to find a job -- especially doing something I like rather then the only thing I can get.

What would your opinion be? I just have no real information that I can find about the long-term accessibility to Physics compared to Computer Programming. Thanks for your time in reading this message.

Thanks for the question, and thanks for the confidence in my side role as an Academic Advisor. I get questions like this quite often. I already gave a fairly specific answer by e-mail, but figured part of it also belonged here in the blog.

First, I wish everyone luck in finding their way to a job that they enjoy. I'm not sure I should recommend my approach, because it has had some elements of a random walk to it, not to mention what could only appear to be spectacular good luck at various key points along the way. But what can I say? We are all the product of a sequence of decisions. One decision I considered might have put me in on the ground floor of what became the computer animation industry, but I found it just as rewarding to have a (physics) student who ended up working there, not to mention others who have made real contributions to this nation. I love my job, even when it is tiring, hard work, and frustrating.

My (hopefully good) Advice:

If you are a fresh new freshman, as it sounds, it is too early to decide. Now is the time to take the core science classes for a computer engineering major and find out what you are good at. Those core classes are generally the same classes that a physics major would take. You don't really have to make a decision right now. The entire difference between one major and the other might be made up by as little as taking one extra class next fall.

[I looked at the major requirements for Midwestern University and they are quite similar to Wannabe Flagship, the school my students transfer to. Their computer engineering students take the same three calculus courses and the same two physics courses that physics majors take. Ditto for freshman chemistry. The only real difference is that physics has a freshman "what is cool about physics" class, while computer engineering has a "what is cool about EE" class and a programming class. This is true for many universities, not just his school and Wannabe Flagship. There are, however, significant exceptions where physics majors take a different physics sequence than engineers. There it might cost you a semester or even two if you didn't switch majors before starting physics.]

Take those calculus and physics classes, and the programming classes, and learn it for life. Are you good at problem solving? Do you like the lab? Are you good at programming? Is programming so much fun that you write your own games and sims, wasting enough time on that stuff that you forget about everything else? (Like my brother, who needed to retake physics because of the uber-cool sim code he wrote that semester?) Or do you really get into 3-D calculus and all of the sophisticate mathematics of partial differential equations that has to be second nature if you want to get into the physics of quantum mechanics? Or do you want to work on gadgets, making some tricky experiment work?

If you were my advisee, I'd suggest you rip into those classes and get back to me in May (or, more likely, next November) after you have three semesters of calculus, two of physics, and some programming behind you. Then we can really talk. Or we won't need to talk, since by then you might know exactly what you really want to do.

Getting Information:

First, you should have lots of information available to you. Most universities have some kind of career center for academic advising and/or job placement. They would have current statistics for placement of grads from your specific university in the specific majors you are considering. You can also find national statistics for physics from the AIP (American Institute of Physics) and for CS from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery for the programming side) or IEEE (for the computer engineering side).

Side thought:
The updated national rankings of graduate programs from the National Academy should be out soon, along with the annual job info updates from the AIP. The former only comes out every decade, so it is a big deal. Need to go look for it.

The salaries you quote seem very high for a BS in physics, since they are high for median new-hire salaries for engineering degrees. That might be a reasonable range for a PhD in physics, but that is after some years of experience in graduate research. No one gets hired for $100,000 right out of college.

In any case, no one should pick a career based on the salary alone.

Stu: "I want to be a chemical engineer! They make lots more money than other engineers!"
Prof: "Did you know that they have to take a year of inorganic chemistry followed by another year of organic chemistry, in addition to the one year of physics and two years of calculus every other engineer takes?"
Stu: "Oh. No"
Prof: "And that all has to be done before the start of their junior year classes in chemical engineering."
Stu: "Never mind."

Stu: "I want to be a pediatrician. I love kids."
Prof: "Do you like kids when they are crying because they are sick or even dying?"
Stu: "Doctors have to treat sick children?"
Prof: "That is where the money is."
Stu: "Oh."

Engineering and physics and programming are all hard work. Hard work can be fun, or it can be a drag. Money can make up for it being a drag, but many students who are just in it for the money will struggle with motivation when faced with the years of hard work that must be put in before you get that first internship, let alone a job.

Job Outlook:

I would never trust anyone's guess on the job outlook for any major, certainly not mine. Even the professional placement officers have been wildly wrong at times. Like most of the time. The market was good when I started college. Four years later, when I got my BS, we were headed into a recession and jobs were tough to get in the areas that hired my undergrad major. I went to grad school, which paid a living wage, but there I learned the market for PhD faculty was nonexistent and would remain bad for a decade. And, I might add, many of the jobs in physics today concern application areas that literally did not exist when I got my degree. Cell phones? An iPod with more permanent storage than an entire weapon's lab computing center? You don't guess about the future, you create it. And, lately, many PhD physicists were working in the financial industry; many of them are soon going to be out of work, either living off of their profits or looking for a job somewhere else.

In the past, only exceedingly practical majors like civil engineering have been fairly recession proof. We build roads and bridges even during the Great Depression, so there was usually a way to get by if you could work in that area. Now, what will the market be like four years from now? Who knows. But if it is any good at all, it will be driven by the kinds of things we don't see much of right now. I can't say with alternative energy program will take off, but one of them will. There will be work in those areas as an engineer, applied physicist, or programmer if you are the best prepared person for the job and ready to work harder than the other girl or guy.

So my advice is to learn everything you can from your classes, find what you like, find what you are good at, and pursue a career that requires skills that you have and enjoy doing for 10 or so hours a day. All technical careers are hard work for the money, so you better like what you are doing.

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Palin prank call

This is just too funny.



I simply can't believe it isn't faked. Could it be that easy for professional con men (i.e. radio hosts) to get past the people screening calls for a future VP?

Among the positives would be that there is a CKOY (CKOI?) station near Montreal, but among the negatives would be the utter absence of any mention of this in a google search of the station's web site. A US station would promote the heck out of a coup like this if it was real. I think it more likely that the comedy group linked from the video did both sides of the call.

Only the mainstream media will know for sure ... so I will hold off publishing for now.

OK, they do. Saw this report from the BBC, so I'll publish this now. Note that there is an audio interview with the prankster at the bottom of the BBC article.

Read Entire Article......

Bouncy Bouncy

As a physicist, I can't resist the analytical approach of the work of baseball analyst Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com. Below is a graph of data from his projections from mid July through Thursday, October 30, five days before the vote. Although this might pass as his "prediction" of the outcome, my interest today is in the dynamics of this function. We can all look at the last few days of polling and the final - actual - poll about a week from now.


The curves indicate the projected electoral vote count from his analysis (more on that below the fold) with a few key dates flagged on the graph. The red arrow near the middle is the day Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's VP choice. The green brackets on either side span the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively, while the green band with red lines indicates when the four debates took place. The VP debate (2nd of the four) is shown with a longer line.

You can clearly see the "bounce" from some of those events, but it seems to be delayed by a week or two. I don't know how much of this is the time it takes to execute a poll, how much is due to the damping factors Nate has in his model, and how much is due to the time it takes human beings to process information.

By the way, the now-infamous Katie Couric interviews started airing on September 24, just a few days before the first Presidential debate, so it really can't be separated from those other events.

What interests me is that large delay between what have been identified so far as 'critical' events and the response of the dynamical system. An engineer would probably say there is a lot of 'lash' in the system. If so, is there really any justification for all of the money spent on insta-polling right after a debate or a convention? Doesn't look like it to me.

The "bounce" that Obama got from his convention started before the convention (all that lead-up talk?) and continued on for at least two weeks, right through the Republican convention and beyond. The short-lived bounce that McCain got from his VP pick and his convention (one week going up and then one week going down) was also delayed by at least one and maybe two weeks. (For reference, the tick marks on my X axis are 14 days apart.)

You can certainly see that the electorate has settled in after the last debate, with only small statistical fluctuations over the last month. Of course, these are people, not a mechanical system, so only time will tell what they will actually do and what changes might occur between now an election day. However, it is also true that a lot of those people have already voted.

Nate Silver's analysis

Read his FAQ for details.

I've been following Nate's work with great interest. His Monte Carlo technique for simulating the results of an election are common in the world of physics, where they are used to simulate physical systems ranging from quark-gluon interactions to atoms in a lattice (such as a silicon chip) to the flow of radiation during the explosion of a nuclear weapon. His maps (see below for a sample) are based on the analysis of individual states, but his overall prediction of the electoral vote count summarized above comes from a simulation. He produces 10,000 "elections" by a Monte Carlo process, picking a possible result for each state based on the odds that it will vote for a particular candidate (as determined by his analysis of all polls in that state, their interaction with national polls, and a projection toward election day). This incorporates the inherent "fuzziness" of the poll numbers, which each come with a substantial sampling uncertainty.

This is a very powerful technique, since it replaces individual interpretation of those uncertainties on a state-by-state basis with the blind sledgehammer of massive statistical sampling. This method has proved extremely effective in experimental physics, particularly experimental high energy physics, for predicting what reactions will look like in a new detector and determining if the needle of a new particle can be found within the haystack of normal events.

The one caveat, of course, is GIGO. Nate is not a pollster, he is an analyst of polls. His results are only as good as the polls themselves, despite his attempts to have his model learn about and account for the individual characteristics of those polls. But how can he (or even a pollster) account for my decision this evening to blow off someone from the U of Iowa polling about my attitudes about the election because I didn't feel like giving them a quarter hour of my time? Must drive them nuts.

Techy detail update:

• Explanation of the trend-line adjustment from 6/28
• Correcting for the "house effect" from 8/25
• Changing the "half life" of a poll from 11/1

My quick guess is that his half life is responsible for some of the 'lash' in the response of his model to the driving force of various campaign effects, but that the rest is due to processing time by the electorate. Even with the trend-line adjustment of a given pollster's data, his model requires some some time to reflect sudden changes in the views of voters. Although this might hide last-minute changes, all of the raw poll data are shown for any given state along with his model's analysis of those data, so you can draw your own conclusions about, say, Pennsylvania.

Finally, for reference, the projected electoral map from Thursday is shown below.


This projection, and all of the data in the graph at the top, comes before his final fine-tuning of the model to include a 2-week half life.

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Bless her Heart

Thanks to The Thomas for this one ...

In amongst a lot of political blather, 'Rachel' writes about her First Chemistry Exam Results. This is quite long, so it all goes below the fold.

Some may say a B is not bad, but it is bad when you should have had an A and the reason you don’t have an A is because you are a pathetic, ridiculous, quantum singularity of a dumbass.

Two of the three questions I missed? Want to know what they were? Do ya? Ready to lose every shred of respect you may possibly have had for me? SIGNIFICANT FIGURES. ....

But like I said, it’s all relative. They say this is a weed-out course and they ain’t kidding. Professor gave us the scoring breakdown, and dude. Kids. Put down the bong and hit the books.

Total number of students: 192.
Average test score: 61.2%.

There were 25 A’s, 31 B’s, 20 C’s, 37 D’s, and 79 F’s.

Observation 1: Sig figs.
If you get the significant figures wrong, the patient dies or the bridge falls down. However, if that is all you get wrong under test conditions, you'll probably get an A once the HW and other exams are all taken into consideration and do just fine in your eventual career.

Observation 2: Grade distribution.
That failure rate is a pretty familiar situation. [I think I've mentioned before that 30 to 40% of my students fail intro physics, mostly for the reasons related to study habits and basic math skills.] Their previous classes, either basic college courses or high school classes, did not require any independent study because they had lots of homework time in class plus extra credit opportunities and a curve. Much of this is due to the fact that HS teachers are simply not allowed to fail more than a few students, if that, so any kid smart enough to go to college has never been at risk of failure in HS. The standards in college are different, however, once you get past the HS courses we teach in college. See my blog about what needs to be said during Orientation.

Observation 3: Political intro.
Rachel carries on at length wondering, among other things, why David Letterman thought that a badly run campaign might be warning us of a badly run government: "is he actually comparing a campaign to the presidency?" Sure. A campaign is a lot easier than the Presidency. If your management skills can't handle that part (and managing their respective campaigns is the only major management experience either McCain or Obama have had), it is sort of like not being able to handle intro chemistry when you want to be a Physician. Weed them out, sooner rather than later. If Snowflake (see below) can only resort to attacking the other kids (say by spoiling their lab experiments, as sometimes happens) rather than improving her own performance, we really don't want her as our doctor. Or President.

More recently, 'Rachel' writes about the Second Chemistry Exam Results

That’s not a typo. MORE THAN HALF THE STUDENTS FAILED THE TEST. And yet a score of 88 is not an A. Boo!

I understand the concept of a weed-out course, I really do. I understand that if you curve it, people will stay in who maybe shouldn’t stay in. I get it. But for the pity of St. Pete! I still am annoyed! Mostly at self but whatever.

I still have an A in the course overall because each test is only 10% of the total grade, and I’m averaging high 90’s in homework and lab. So I’m kinda making chem my bitch. She’s coy, though. Elusive yet attainable.

But these kids in my class, good Lord, these kids. I pity whoever is paying their tuition. In lab Friday, they were all discussing the test scores. None of them got higher than a 70 on the test. One girl said she got a 49, and she was all kinds of distressed. I shit you not, here is an actual quote from this girl, which she said with a truly flabbergasted look on her face:

“I don’t understand it! I studied for four hours!!!! God, what does it take to get a passing grade?”

Oh, honey. You adorable little snowflake, try four solid days, 8 hours each. This isn’t high school, in case you haven’t noticed. I bet your Daddy noticed when he paid your tuition bill, and I bet he’ll be very excited when he sees your grades. What a sound investment you are.

Observation 0:
I also quickly learned that whenever I was annoyed at a particular class or instructor, I was really annoyed at myself.

Observation 1: Weed out course.
If you curve it, people will stay in who will end up standing over you in the Emergency Room wearing a name tag that says "MD" on it that only know half of what a doctor is supposed to know. Or you will end up driving over a bridge that was designed by someone who needed extra credit or curved grades to become an engineer. (Since the failure of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota was due to a design error, this last possibility might hit closer to home for some people.)

Observation 2: Studying for a week.
The correct approach is neither cramming for four hours [?!?!] the night before the test or 32 hours over a week, it is to study regularly and diligently for 1 to 2 hours every night, including weekends, every week for that 3 credit class. The key is retention of this prerequisite material, both for the long term (years) and so that you don't have to cram for three weeks for the final exam because you forgot everything from exam 1 and exam 2 in the meantime.

Observation 3: Lots more politics.
But then Rachel tries to assign motives to these rich kids who don't have to work their way through school, or even work to pay for their car or phone, as if the majority of parents/voters from wealthy suburbs are all liberal Democrats - and misquoting Sen. Obama along the way.

I told her I’m the youngest of four and my parents started with nothing themselves and that I never expected them to pay for my education or anything else once I turned 18, and she gazed at me like I was speaking Chinese.

What the hell? Have 18-year-olds these days never heard of “a job”? Or of “taking night classes for 10 years”? Or of “going into assloads of debt because no one’s holding your hand but it’s worth it because then you are the boss of your own self which is pretty awesome”?

Gah. Honestly, it just boggles my mind, how much people take it for granted that someone else is going to take care of the hard stuff for you, not to mention why you’d want them to. I’ve been on my own since the day I graduated from high school and frankly, this is the main reason I get so magnificently resentful of shit like what Obama said about “spreading the wealth”, and about how so many liberals think that anyone who’s against spreading the wealth is just a greedy fucker who wants to hold on to the things he or she was “given”.

First, Obama was talking about cutting your taxes, Rachel, so you would have more money to spend (spread around) on things like your education. You should read what he actually said, which is quite different from what various prevaricators and spin-meisters have implied that he said. [You can read it at the bottom of this article.] Less in taxes from working families means more money in the consumption part of the economy, so more money that can flow into the hands of self-employed small business owners like yourself. The argument is not about whether there should be a tax cut, it is about whether the tax cut should go to millionaires or to the middle class. The argument is not about whether government should redistribute wealth, it is about whether it should transfer it from poor to rich (as has been the case recently) or from rich to poor - or from future taxpayers to today's taxpayers. It is about whether "supporting the troops" means buying a yellow magnetic ribbon while borrowing money from your grandkids, or paying taxes to pay for their well-earned benefits.

Second, the entitlement mentality you write about is, in my experience, most common among wealthy students from the (mostly) Republican suburbs. They are the ones who talk about supporting our troops but scream if someone asks them to pay even one more dollar in taxes to actually support those troops, and then call it Socialism when you "give" those veterans a bigger GI Bill package to "spread the wealth". I never see it among the working class students at my CC. They are too busy working and studying to get ahead to whine like Ms. Snowflake. Too much to even figure out if FICA plus income plus sales plus property taxes adds up to a larger fraction of their income than it does for Donald Trump.

You see a very different picture at a community college, with a mix of suburbanites and working students and returning students, than at a university where they teach chemistry to 200 students at a time. It might seem odd, but the guy who works a full time job before coming to my class is always wide awake, prepared, and fully engaged. The guy who can't quite get out of bed for a class at noon, coming in a half-hour late and sometimes falling asleep in his afternoon class, isn't working nights. No, he lives at home in Exclusive Suburb and doesn't have a job.

Finally, read what Obama actually said rather than the sentence fragment that made it into the news:

The correct, complete quotation from Obama regarding "share the wealth" is

"But what’s happened is that we end up – we’ve cut taxes a lot for folks like me who make a lot more than 250. We haven’t given a break to folks who make less, and as a consequence, the average wage and income for ordinary folks, the vast majority of Americans, has actually gone down over the last eight years. .... I just want you to be clear – it’s not that I want to punish your success – I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you – that they’ve got a chance at success too.”

... snippage ...

“And I do believe for folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who’s things are slow and she can barely make the rent."

Obama said, "My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

Emphasis added. Notice that he is saying that giving an N billion dollar tax cut to 5% of Americans is unlikely to generate as much business for someone like Joe the Unlicensed Plumber as giving that N billion dollar tax cut to 95% of Americans. More money for small business owners rather than more money for a few CEOs.

Anyone who thinks the few persons whose business profit (not revenue, not the value of the business, profit) exceeds a quarter million dollars a year are fellow members of the working class is getting conned, big time.

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Holiday Catalogs!

Monday, Oct 21, marked the arrival of the first Holiday Catalog of the season ... that I noticed.

Today, three more arrived. I sense a trend.

Remember last year?

Should I repeat the exercise this year?

I'm worried that I missed some earlier this fall, messing up the data collection process, but it could be that they held off because of (a) the massive election mailings or (b) the economy or (c) I did not notice the first ones because of the massive election mailings.

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But the Answer was Right!

The cry of the Lucky Equation Grabber.

Not a relevant issue when the solution was wrong.

I grade the solution, not the answer.

This is a physics class, not a lucky guess class.

You can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but (as I wrote in the comments in a related thread over at Becky Hirta's) if you wanted to take the class from someone who doesn't care if you learn the physics, you went to the wrong place.

You need to be over at Wannabe Flagship where they give multiple choice tests and let kids use a crib sheet for F=ma and the other 100 equations you can derive from it, one for each possible problem on the exam.

They also don't notice that two algebra errors resulting in a correct answer equals two errors, not zero errors. I do.

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Paying for College - An Anecdote

Dr. Crazy wrote a fantastic article Friday on Paying for College. Her comments on a NYTimes article about some poor family struggling to put two kids through private schools after losing a big part of their 100 k$ income. [At least that is what the article implied; it could be that was their post-layoff income.] I'm sure it is a strain on them, but if their two kids actually got a quarter million dollar's worth of education, I'm sure they will pay those extra loans off in no time. Maybe.

But I don't think any of my students would be particularly sympathetic to someone who chooses to pay $32,000 and $29,500, respectively, for each year of college. One, in particular, probably finds these folks to be whiny elitists. Compare the following:

One child is attending a college with only 1000 students, total. Fewer than lived in one dorm where I went to college and got a degree of outstanding qualtiy. Fewer than we admit each year as FTIC freshman college students at Ishkabibble CC. Yet, despite the serious financial load, the article made no mention at all of the kids helping out by working.

Another child is attending my CC. He has a problem, too. He is assigned to me for advising for next semester (his second in college, a critical point in his education) and contacted me about an appointment. I proposed one convenient slot, in the hour before one of his classes meets, but he can't make that one because he works from 6 AM to 2 PM every day, getting off work just before heading to his afternoon class. Yeah, that makes it pretty tight. Fortunately, there is one day when we can get together between his afternoon classes and his evening classes.

I hope the first kid appreciates what he is getting. The second one can only take 9 hours of a classes because of his work schedule, so he doesn't even qualify as a full-time student for financial aid (or as one of our FTIC statistics.)

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Clue for sale

So I teach two main classes: first semester physics and second semester physics. Rather obviously, passing first semester is required before you can take the second semester. Right?

Early registration is starting for the spring semester, and the second semester classes are filling up. So what do I see?

Several students who have registered for the second semester who have yet to pass (even with a D) an exam in the first semester course.

Hello?

Your wonderful optimism is messing with our planning process.

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Quantum Crypto

Nice little article from the BBC today about a practical realization of quantum cryptography.

• Read it here

I particularly liked the line where they conclude that maybe God does play dice!

I don't have the time to write much more, but I will add one thing. Over many years, the most amazing thing about quantum mechanics has been the way it has passed experimental tests of the most arcane predictions. I say that not only because these tests confirm some rather odd physics, but because simply doing them at all has taken truly outstanding skill on the part of experimental physicists.

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10/09/08 07:06:05.04030201

OK, it only works with an American calendar system, but all sorts of fools push numerology of some sort based on some strange premise.

So at a few minutes after 7, when this is scheduled to appear, we'll have a countdown date and time.

Let's just hope the markets don't crash - again - at that moment.

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Take Off Our Shoes - For the Economy!

During tonight's broadcast of "Countdown", Keith Olberman made the following statement during a discussion with Chris Kofinis (at about 2:21 into the 5:43 clip on the MSNBC web site concerning the second half of #5 in the countdown):

Well it's also, it's what do these two things [suspending his campaign and dealing with the economy, when it was as much a crisis last week as this week] have to do with each other. If he'd said "Well, look, to avert any further crisis we need to all take our shoes off" it would have made as much sense as "we're going to postpone a debate"
[my approximate rendering, not an official transcript]

Did you get it? I did.
"Shoes for Industry!" Firesign Theater, circa 1970.

The idea (originally from "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers" if I recall correctly, although I'd have to dig out some vinyl to know for sure) is that the only way to improve the economy in the bizarre post-war world inhabited by George Leroy Tirebiter is to take off your shoes and turn them in to the government ... thereby creating jobs to replace those shoes.

Shoes for Industry! Shoes for the Dead! Shoes for Industry!

Hi, I'm Joe Beets.

What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar, and the free mule you've been dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes.

(pause)

Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone, and more of it too. So do your part, Joe. Join with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes. For Industry!

This is heard as a radio or TV ad in the background of the story, but is frequently referenced elsewhere -- like when the student at More Science High complains that he would really rather take off his shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute.

My favorite line from that album concerned Commie Martyrs High School where "there are no classes in our society, or in our school".

"Shoes for Industry" is available on the album "Shoes for Industry!" as track 12 on disc 1.

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Yankee Stadium

Today is the last game at Yankee Stadium. Only time will tell if abandoning that hallowed ground will mean hard times for the NY Yankees. Many of us can but hope that it will! (Has Notre Dame struggled in football because they remodeled their stadium? Only Touchdown Jesus knows that for sure.) Where I grew up, there were two kinds of people: fans of the Detroit Tigers or one of the teams in Chicago, or jerks who were fans of the Yankees just because they won a lot of games.

But this is a time for nostalgia, so here is my contribution. I've never been in the place, but back in the early summer of 1967, on a circuitous return home from Expo 67 in Montreal, my Dad made a point to navigate past various landmarks in NYC. That included driving around Yankee Stadium.

From the outside it was more impressive than Tiger Stadium (originally knows as Briggs Stadium), which looked more like a run-down factory. Yankee Stadium at least looked like an out-of-date office building, if your office building had a giant black sign around the top. Since plenty of NYC buildings did have an ostentatious sign on them (as did the GM building in Detroit), it fit right in.

My other Yankees memory is of going to Detroit for a ball game sometime in the early 60s to see the Tigers play the hated Yankees. To a kid, that shutout loss (1-0? 2-0?) was a boring nightmare. I think I would have appreciated watching masterful pitching (I think it was Whitey Ford on the mound) a bit more if my present-self could have talked to my then-self.

The key bit of trivia during the broadcast of tonight's game (not to mention the all-day pre-game show on ESPN) has been the price of tickets back in 1923 when the stadium opened. I used the info on Robert Sahr's inflation info site to do the conversion: It is a factor of about 12.5.

So that $1.10 paid for a grandstand seat in 1923 should be about $14 today, which is just enough to get into the bleachers at today's prices. You have to more than double that to get into the nosebleed section of the upper grandstand, and fork over about ten times that to get into the "mid priced" grandstand seats.

And that 15 cent program would be $2 in today's money. What a joke! But then I'll bet it wasn't a glossy color production either.

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Arrrrr

Pirated around the office today ...



Gotta love the cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, conic sections, and his skills in calculus (both differential and integral), but if you need something more sublimely ridiculous:




Nothing quite takes the edge off of Annoying Administrative Actions like the Llama Song.

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Parsing Politics

Yesterday's speech (you can find the text here, as well as many other places) by Gov. Palin contained lots of errors (such as the lie that Obama's 5% tax cut for working families was actually a tax increase rather than almost twice as big as the cut promised by McCain) that were so glaring they were identified in an AP story almost as soon as the speech was given.

But I want to single out something that said more by what was omitted than by what was said - and it goes to the heart of the "Rob America First" energy policy that McCain is promoting. Palin said

We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.

Notice that she didn't say "American companies" anywhere in there? No? That is because significant amounts of off-shore and Alaskan oil is produced (and thus owned and sold) by foreign companies such as British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and Statoil (Norway). We might "need" those resources, but those foreign companies will sell our resources to the highest bidder.

The McCain campaign wanted you to think that she was putting America First, but she is really advocating giving away our grandchildren's oil at today's low prices for the short term profit of her state and oil speculators. You can learn a lot if you listen and read carefully.

Here is another example from today's news.

As reported today on CNBC, my home for investment news:

Axelrod told reporters aboard Obama's campaign plane that the Republican National Convention speakers had distorted the Democratic candidate's record and ignored his resume. He also suggested that John McCain's running mate was only parroting what she'd been told.

"There wasn't one thing that she said about Obama or what he's proposing that is true," Axelrod said.

"She tried to attack Sen. Obama by saying he had no significant legislative achievements. Maybe that's what she was told."

That statement drew strong reaction from McCain's headquarters.

"For the Obama campaign to suggest that she is simply being told what to do is offensive and takes our country backward," communications director Jill Hazelbaker said.

So Jill is implying to us that Palin knowingly made false statements about Obama's legislative achievements, one of which was an extremely significant bill to limit the spread of nuclear weapons that he pushed through in a bipartisan effort with Indiana Senator Richard Lugar? Knowingly making false statements is what is known as LYING, so did McCain's spokesman decide that it was better to have Palin be known as a liar than as a parrot? Not really. Jill didn't actually say that Palin was not being told what to do, she only said that suggesting it is offensive to her as the communications director.

Yeah, it was a strong "reaction", but don't ever confuse a "reaction" with a "denial". Since the McCain campaign did not actually DENY that Palin was told what to say (which would be odd given all of the stories yesterday about how she was being coached and prepared for the speech), we can take this non-denial as proof that Palin was told what to say and someone else (maybe the communications director?) was responsible for those lies.

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Thoughts on the Palin Speeches

The Highlight:
As they all gathered on stage after the speech, particularly an uncomfortable looking Levi and his preggers GF, all I could think was "biggest shotgun wedding ever". Man that guy looked like a moose caught in headlights. A million tabloid dollars for his thoughts! (And that might be his best job opportunity right now.)

The other highlight was reminding us of Harry Truman. Truman was VP for less than three months before the President died and put him the position of negotiating the partition of Europe, where many still argue that he gave away 1/4 of Germany by splitting it in half rather than quarters. But, oddly enough, she forgot to mention that the "haberdasher from Missouri" had been a US Senator from Missouri for a decade before he became VP. That national experience was crucial when he had to step onto the world stage without even knowing the US had an atomic bomb that was almost ready to be used. Even with all that, Sarah Palin is no Harry Truman. She didn't even have a passport until last year? Sheesh.

But I really liked how she spent more than 10 minutes talking about her family and only a few minutes lying about Obama's strong position in favor of going after Al Qaeda rather than fighting someone else's civil war as McCain preferred to do while bin Laden rebuilt his organization, and a few more lying about his tax plan and tap dancing around McCain's massive deficit plan. Others spent much more time lying about the Democratic ticket, so that was a plus. Otherwise, it was strong on insult and weak on specifics. It seemed like her only comment on foreign policy was that we should "Drill Baby Drill" so it would not matter if Russia captured the pipeline in Georgia.

Russia: We're going to invade the Ukraine.
Palin: We'll drill for oil off of Florida. Fixed you!

But the highlight was talking about bring back small government. Based on her huge goverment in Alaska? And not raising taxes? Gov. Palin pushed through a HUGE TAX INCREASE on oil that all of us are paying at the gas pump. That windfall is why her state has a budget surplus, not vetoes or good management.

You see, I have a good ear for numbers and order of magnitude. Last night I heard something about her executive experience that just did not make sense for a state with less than 700,000 residents. Their budget is what? They have how many state employees? The state budget of the state of Alaska totals more than $16,000 per person. The US budget is almost half that, only about $9100 per person, and that is while supporting an army fighting a war in Iraq! Even the most bloated "elite eastern government" like the one Rudy Guiliani ran is a fraction of that. Delaware? Delaware has 25% more people than Alaska, but only 30% of its budget. Delaware spends less than $4000 per person, less than a quarter of the gargantuan, bloated budget Palin brags is "limited".

How can the residents of Alaska afford the taxes to pay for all of that government? They don't have to. We pay the taxes down in the lower 48, and Alaskans each get $1500 of it, in cash, to spend as they wish.

Once the media get past the hypocrisy of family values that saw John McCain "forget" about his adopted child when posing for a family portrait on the People magazine cover and Lieberman tap dancing as fast as he can to avoid answering a question about Palin being ready to deal with Russia on Day One, maybe they will get to pocketbook issues like Palin raising the price of our gasoline to pay for the bloated budget in Alaska - and then pretending Alaskans had to sacrifice to pay for the Bridge to Nowhere themselves.

Finally, I'm sure everyone noticed that one of the speakers broke the rule about attacking family members with a snide attack on Michelle Obama's patriotism. So much for that promise of civility from the McCain campaign.

PS -
If you want to see Republicans hoisting themselves on their own petards, be sure to see a rerun of tonight's (Wednesday 9/3) Daily Show. Most. Brilliant. Use. Of. Clips. Ever.

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Storm Surge

UPDATE (9/9/2008):
There is an awesome (silent) video from the BBC showing the storm surge as Ike made landfall in Cuba. It is one thing to read about it, quite another to see the spray from a breaking wave rising above a 5-story apartment building and a half meter ? high wave running down a street and smashing into a house. Also see picture number 6 on this photo page.

The live news coverage of Hurricane Gustav has included video from an NBC affiliate showing waves breaking over a levee on the Industrial Canal, an area where there were failures during Katrina. The MSNBC web site has a Reuters photo showing the area in a viewer that makes a link rather useless, but the BBC has an AP photo showing this area:

• Waves breaking over the flood wall

This is a great picture because it illustrates one of the main improvements made after Katrina. (It also shows that the surge is at treetop level in the canal.)

Analysis of the failures after Katrina by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the US Corps of Engineers showed that many levees failed even though the water level from the storm surge was below the top of the levee. Why?

The surge itself is not much more than a steady rise in the water level, although it can be as rapid as a flash flood on a river. This would be a static equilibrium problem familiar to any student of physics and calculus. [The force on the wall is found by multiplying the water pressure times the area of the wall. Since the water pressure increases with depth, you need to do an integral to add up the forces on the wall that try to push it sideways, or the torque that tries to rotate it about its base.] At least one wall failed during Katrina because its foundation was not strong enough to withstand those static loads even when the water was a foot or so below the top (as it is in this picture).

However, there are also dynamics at work here. The wind produces waves that pound on the wall and break over it. Water landing on the back side of the wall can erode the dirt holding the wall in place. Weaken that foundation, which resists the loads on the wall, and it can slide sideways or tip over, or both. Notice that the wall in this picture has a concrete footing, like a sidewalk, where the water will land if/when waves (or even the storm surge itself) go over the top of the wall. This dissipates the energy of the falling water, which can then run gently off down the sodded levee below rather than erode the base of the wall.

Imagine the difference between running a hose full blast on a sidewalk and running it on your garden or lawn for a day or two. The sidewalk will still be there, the garden will not. Now imagine it was a fire hose rather than a garden hose, and you will see the problem when Katrina drove 6 foot waves over a levee while the storm surge itself was still below the top of the levee.

PS -
Another picture from that same set shows the other side of a Weather Channel standup out in the storm. The secret to getting a steady shot of the reported being buffeted by the wind is to have a small camera man being held by what looks like a retired offensive lineman. I guess if you can bench press 400 pounds, you can hold onto anything in any wind!

Historical Context

Although this NOAA picture is not as clear as the news photo, this photo of a breach of a flood wall due to Katrina shows only grass, rather than a concrete roadway, on the back side of the wall. However, this wall was an outright engineering design failure of the foundation, not a result of overtopping. In the bottom half of the picture, you can still see the levee and floodwall that was pushed, intact, about 30 feet sideways into the Lakeview neighborhood by the water pressure. Metairie (on the left) was dry because water levels never reached the top of the wall.

I thought I should also point out that this famous picture does not show water pouring into the city as was frequently stated in the news. Anyone paying attention will notice that it shows water flowing back out of the city, into the canal! Water was flowing OUT of the flooded areas during the time they were desperately trying to close the breech in the levee with helicopters dropping giant sand bags, not in.

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The Palin Spin

What an inspired choice! As we discussed at work today, Gov. Palin has lots of experience dealing with junior hockey referees as a Hockey Mom, which is perfect preparation for dealing with Putin. Even better, I now learn that she has never thought much about Iran or Iraq (despite the impending deployment of her son), so she can look at it with fresh eyes right after getting brainwashed by Cheney's team.

But that's not why I'm blogging. I'm blogging because Dan Barlett, now paid by CBS to act as a mouthpiece for George Bush and the Republican party, said tonight that Sen. Biden will have to be careful to not be too tough on Gov. Palin in the VP debate because she is a woman.

Apart from being positively insulting to women in general, does Bartlett think that Putin would "play nice" just because our President was a former beauty queen, should she have to take over in January if something happened to McCain's health due to the stress of the coming campaign?

She has a ways to go to prove that she is anything more than an older Paris Hilton with a good campaign slogan, a big hairdo, and an assault rifle. She is certainly no Golda Meir (who was active in national government for decades before becoming Prime Minister) or Margaret Thatcher (ditto), and I can already hear Sen Biden saying "I know Hillary Clinton, and you are no Hillary Clinton".

It was also clear that Bartlett was already concerned about her limited knowledge of world affairs in the way he compared, unfavorably, preparing her for the VP debate to preparing then Gov Bush for his Presidential debates in 2000.

McCain looks as desperate now as Mondale did in 1984.

Notes Added:

Apparently the way she cut taxes on Alaskan citizens was to increase the price of oil to the rest of us by raising the oil extraction tax collected by Alaska. According to this article, Gov Palin's plan transferred SIX BILLION DOLLARS from our gas tanks to Alaskan citizens in just the past year.

Unlike Obama or McCain, she took a publicity photographer along with her when she visited wounded troops overseas: see this photo from the Wiki commons obtained from the state department of military affairs while it is still there.

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What a bunch of whiners

Isn't politics about who is more popular in an election?

Isn't it about being able to excite people and get them to come to a rally and vote for you?

So why is it a bad thing when your ideas can convince 75,000 people to cross the country on their own to attend a political rally, as the Republican "somebody says" folks feeding talking points to the media claim?

Oh, I know why. It's a bad thing because your own candidate can't do it.

The Republican Party is whining about Obama drawing a big crowd because their own candidate can't do it. In fact, lots of party members and elected officials are doing all they can to stay away from him.

And they are muttering about him being a "celebrity" because that is the closest they can get to calling him what is in their Nixon and Karl Rove infested minds: an Uppity N*****. Why do I say this? Because the Republicans thought celebrity was just fine when they picked Ronald Reagan to run for office. And because John Sidney McCain III came home as a huge celebrity (I remember his return from an NV POW camp) and that celebrity status played a huge role in all of his campaigns. Even today he exploits it, playing the POW card whenever he gets in trouble. If being a celebrity actually disqualified you for public office in the Republican Party, they would never have nominated Ronald Reagan and would have dumped McCain back when he became well known as one of the Keating Five - who worked for the fat-cat bankers against the interests of their working-class depositors.

So when they complain about how many people showed up, on their own, for Obama's speech, they are just admitting that he is a great political leader and that they can't even come close to getting that many people to listen to McCain - even when they pay their expenses to go to their own convention.

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Happy Birthday, Bro!

Had a wonderful time celebrating your 55th birthday today.

Sang "Happy Birthday" at about 9:30 and had a fantastic chocolate cake with chocolate frosting - not to mention infused with raspberry liqueur - as part of the long distance celebration. Yummy.

You see, a coworker (and namesake!) shares the same birth date, and we try to do it with style in our part of the building. That goes double when that date falls during the insane, mind-numbing first week of classes, as it does this year.

Oh, and we hope you were amused by the gift and its wrapping. Mrs. Pion was really on the ball when she spotted it at one of many absurdly eclectic shops in town. The wrapping was my idea, but I'm sure you figured that out.

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If I was writing the speech ...

I would have Hillary hold up a coat hanger and ask the PUMAs out in the audience "Is this what you want?"

McCain could not have made it clearer that his vision of the future is a return to illegal and unsafe back-alley abortions, simply to punish young women for their sin. As if he has the right to cast the first stone.

But it is actually worse. If he got his way and made every fetus a protected human life from the moment of conception, every woman who had a miscarriage would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter and those who smoked or drank might be considered guilty of voluntary manslaughter or third degree murder.

With that focus, maybe the PUMAs would no longer be tossed softballs by interviewers when they pretend that a true Hillary Clinton supporter would celebrate a McCain victory. My conclusion is that every last one of them must be a racist.

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Ready to Rock!

So the cycle begins again!

One sign is the release of Beloit College's list of the mindset of the class of 2012, as I was reminded in a recent IHE article that picked off their favorites.

Mine was:
20. The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
because they might get drafted to fight there against Russia.

But the real sign is that I have a tall stack of syllabi ready and other materials ready for Monday, the last pre-semester meeting is over, my adjunct is all set to do a great job this fall, and my only remaining task is to verify rosters one last time before Monday.

Oh, yes, and finish cleaning my office.

I started cleaning my office, so it now looks like someone's front yard when Clean Sweep comes to visit, but never got past stage 1.

But it looks like the semester will be fun. The economy has brought me some really good students (entering physics as a freshman with AP calculus) along with some promising older students, even if one of them last took calculus before the first one was born. Time to get the game face on and remember Jumpin' Jack Flash. I've already put the Basics idea to work, not only in my classes but as a meme for some others. It has been well received, so thanks to everyone who provided feedback on that subject. And I see some academic-politics storm clouds on the horizon. No great year can lack those.

On a closing note, my second fave from Beloit was

34. Pee-Wee has never been in his playhouse during the day.

The one about the Hubble Space Telescope would have been up there if Astroprof hadn't already reminded us that the Hubble has been up there for 18 years and has now completed more than 100,000 orbits

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First Adjunct Job

This is the rather belated completion of a belated posting following up the comments I posted on Dean Dad's blog addressing questions from a poster looking for a first job as an adjunct. (You should also look at the comments on the IHE version.)

I pointed the poster to my "jobs" articles, but I thought I should pull out the ones that I think are of greatest relevance.

1. Part 3, on types of jobs.

You may think you know what academia is all about, but most students (such as the person wrapping up a PhD at Big Name University) have only seen a tiny (and rather elite) slice of it. The starting point is to have a vague idea of the differences between where you went to school and the 4-year or 2-year schools you want to work at.

2. Part 5, on getting a CC job

One of the themes in my article that also showed up in the discussion in Dean Dad's blog is the importance of teaching experience. It's great that this person is thinking about how to get an adjunct job a year before seeking it, but I think that person should get at least a single good class worth of experience before leaving Big Name U to head west for a job.

I mean, the only thing you might need to do to get an adjunct job is call or drop by the relevant department office this week. Seriously. I think we just covered one of the sections for majors a day ago, and I am sure there are still some classes being taught by Professor Staff or Ms TBA. We don't quite go beating the bushes near the homeless shelter (that disheveled teacher in surfer shorts is a fulltimer), but that is a common snarky suggestion directed at the Dean at this time of year.

That said, the time to get your name in the hopper is when the full-time sections are set and the adjuncts are getting lined up. This could be anywhere from late spring to early summer depending on how well managed the college is.

3. An article about my CC students

I'll repeat that my students may not be typical. We are a largish CC that feeds a large university with the sort of programs (such as engineering) that attract a significant number of students to us who need to take calc-based physics or organic chemistry. But our students are different, in aggregate, from the ones who start as freshmen at Wannabe Flagship. The key point is that there are really good reasons for the interview questions about reaching "different types of learners", and that you will be more successful if you know something about the student body of the school you want to work at. More successful at getting the job, but also more successful in the job.

If you want to know more about the CC environment, there promises to be a lot of interesting information in a special report from the National Center for Education Statistics about community colleges. (I have not had time to read it yet, but the Feds collect every bit of statistical data you can imagine.)

Those, and the links in "Part 5" to the resources at the Chronicle and IHE as well as other blogs, should get you started.

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He Hate NBC Sports

10:30 AM EDT - while NBC was covering the Olympics "live"

Usain "Lightning" Bolt wins the 100 m gold medal in a World Record time of 9.69 s despite celebrating his victory over the last 15 m of the race! (Or is it actually faster to turn your body sideways to the wind?) What would have happened if he had run through the finish? It might have been as legendary as the 1968 long jump by Bob Beamon in Mexico City, where he broke the old record by 55 cm (almost 2 feet). That jump was so long that they couldn't use the official measuring device. Its scale was too short.

5:55 PM EDT - Advertisement for the 8 pm broadcast

Tune in for the 100 m, which might be the fastest ever.

Yeah, I think they could be right about that, since they have the result on their own website with a photo gallery showing his celebration nearing the line.

UPDATE: 11:30 PM EDT - Race shown on NBC

What is particularly annoying is the way NBC deliberately keeps the schedule a mystery, even when we know (from the official Chinese site) the exact time an event will run live and can get the official results within seconds of the end of an event. NBC has a fancy web site that will tell you what might be on each channel sometime in a three or four hour window. You would never guess that they might actually have a plan for the night's coverage or that the WWW can be updated in real time if a schedule has to change.

UPDATE: Commenting on the race.
I have to agree with the commentator that Bolt might have run a 9.59 if he had not cruised through the last 6 strides (which is what, 60 feet?). That would have put it in the "all time greatest" territory with Beamon. Beamon took the long jump record from 27 feet to 29 feet, skipping 28. Taking the 100 m record from 9.7 to 9.5, skipping 9.6, would be in the same territory. Michael Phelps, as impressive as his effort has been, is not in that territory. After all, he did not set a world record in every one of his events, as Mark Spitz did, and the one he missed was an individual event. Worse, he had to wear a swim cap and a $600 swim suit to do it. [Note: Follow that link for the photo. Mark Spitz is now an OLD MAN! Guess that fits my theory that most great athletes mature earlier and age earlier. Certainly was obvious at my 25th HS reunion.]

And I see that Dix got rid of those silly blue Nike arm covers that were supposed to reduce wind resistance. Memo to Dix: Your hair is a bigger source of aerodynamic drag at around 30 mph. You needed a Nike swim cap more than you needed those arm covers.

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Identical Times by Phelps

When looking at the start info for tonight's (actually tomorrow morning's) 200 m Men's Butterfly competition, I noticed that Michael Phelps had equaled his own Olympic Record (set in his preliminary heat) when swimming in the semifinal round. Both were done in 1:53.70, which is 113.70 seconds. Identical to better than one part in ten thousand!

I thought it might be amusing to look at the splits to see just how evenly paced those two swims actually were.

The line labeled "Pace" gives the time needed to swim each 50 m segment.

	50 m	100 m	150 m	200 m
8/11	26.12	55.44	85.01	113.70
Pace	26.12	29.32	29.57	28.69
8/12	25.89	55.32	84.95	113.70
Pace	25.89	29.43	29.63	28.75

The consistency is amazing. He must have a clock running in his head that is accurate to the tenth of a second.

I find it interesting that the last length is faster than the previous two. They really do save energy for that final leg of the race, at least in these preliminary races where the only goal is to finish high enough to move on to the next race and when you might have other races coming up within 12 hours, or a championship race within the past hour. In this case, his second competition in the 200 m butterfly was at 11:10 am, while his world record in the 200 m freestyle had been at 10:16 am.

For that matter, let's make a note of the info from his 28 March 2007 world record set in Melbourne, Australia. After all, the odds are high that the winner of the Gold medal will set a new world record. [Updated: Yep, but just barely. I have added his 13 August 2008 world record to the table.]

	50 m	100 m	150 m	200 m
2007	25.26	53.62	82.87	112.09
Pace	25.26	28.36	29.25	29.22
2008	25.36	53.53	82.75	112.03
Pace	25.36	28.17	29.22	29.28

Interesting. His pacing is quite different when everything is on the line. In this case his last leg is only slightly faster, and slower than the second leg. He puts a lot more energy into the first half of the race, then hangs on to the finish. [Updated: Look at how similar these times are! When they showed the line for the WR pace during the race, he was right on it. And you can see why he was disappointed at his finishing time. As the commentators noted, he started to tie up and slowed down in the last 50 m rather than being slightly faster as in his race at last year's World Championship. A split of 29.21 would have put him solidly into the 1:51.xx territory.]

Note 1:
The first 50 m is always fast because of the huge advantage that comes from launching yourself off of the starting blocks.

Note 2:
This issue of pacing is not so different as it is for a race horse, where my analysis of the 2007 Kentucky Derby (here and here) showed that the horse pulling away at the end of the race was not speeding ... the others were slowing down. I didn't bother looking up the splits for the come-from-behind victory of the US over the French in the Olympic 4x100 m relay, but that might be what happened on the final leg of that race.

Note 3:
I decided I should link to his Wikipedia entry as well as the Beijing Olympics entry up at the top, and discovered that he also has his own website complete with a personal logo (he has a P.R. firm?), studly professional photos, and a version in Chinese!

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Last Week of Peace

It won't be long now.

As I wrote in a comment on another blog this morning, this is the last week of peace before the landing craft beach themselves in front of the dorms and apartments, disgorging the product of our public schools like Russians into Georgia. Or maybe that would be Sherman into the US state of the same name.

So much for the bucolic days and quiet streets so typical as the summer semester fades away to the quietest weeks in any college town.

We can already see the warning signs: Budget rental trucks and U-Haul trailers. One by one they appear, like Navy Seals clearing the beaches of obstacles or my great^N uncle's cavalry unit scouting the way for Sherman. It won't be long before they appear in waves.

I'd like to know how many cops are on vacation this week. I'll bet its a lot, since it will be nothing but overtime during the week of parties that lead up to the first week of hangovers in class. That all gets compounded by the start of public schools, as all of the Mommy Vans hit the road to carry Child Too Precious to Ride the Bus to school before going home and then to work. Three trips where there was only one trip the week before.

It really is amazing to experience every year. Its part of the rhythm of life. I should think about what periodic function best describes the exponential decay into calmness after the end of spring semester and the phase transition into madness when the kiddies arrive. Probably not far from the result when a square wave drives a simple circuit, but it needs a big overshoot at the start and a modest one for spring finals so it needs some coupled elements.

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Opening Ceremonies (Free Tibet)

I guessed right: CNBC had a live shot of the stadium behind their Beijing staff at the auspicious hour of 8 - and the sky simply lit up with fireworks. (It looked like this picture from later in the show.) Only live shot in the US, I think! The NY Times is liveblogging from the Olympics, a sure sign that they aren't own by GE. You can also follow what is going on with the feeds, schedule, and photo gallery at the official Olympics web site.

Obligatory science comment and spoiler: one of the performances about the history of China will demonstrate movable type printing. Oh how I love artsy sciency performance art!

If "drum solo" doesn't strike fear into your heart, the ceremonies got rolling with 2008 drummers each with a chinese drum (fou) made of a clay pot. (picture and picture and picture) We'll have to see if the TV broadcast can reproduce that audio experience.

The fireworks I saw on CNBC were part of this show. (picture) The BBC story today on the start of the ceremonies shows the pollution level has fallen so it is merely at "almost OK for a developing country" levels - but that was before all of the fireworks!

(They have a great page that follows the pollution status of the city with a picture taken of the skyline each day from the same location. If you scroll through the pictures and correlate visibility with the pollution level given in the caption, you will see that describing it as "fog" is totally bogus. On "foggy" days it is high, on clear days it is low. Maybe someday the Chinese will learn what they learned in London when they got rid of coal-fired stoves in every kitchen, that the famous "London fog" was just good old smog.)

That said, I can't wait to see the 29 fireworks "footprints" cross the city to the stadium, apparently (from the description on the official site) as the lead-in to the start of the performance. I think I heard CNBC say that 35,000 fireworks costing almost 1% of the ceremony cost (hence almost a half million dollars) will be used for the show. That is a lot of air pollution!

Hopefully, all of that spectacle will not overshadow the Chinese support for the tragedy in Darfur and the oppression of Tibet. Your fear level has to be really high to have to arrest people who are praying.

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63rd Anniversary of Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (One of these years we need to take a vacation across the Pacific that includes both Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, to see both ends of that war.) The city that is now a thriving metropolis and home to the factory that built the car I drive was destroyed in a few seconds on 6 August 1945.

I knew one of the people in the photo recon plane that took the famous film of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, so that event means a bit more to me than it does to everyone in my generation who grew up under the threat of nuclear war.

One thing that many people don't know is that we NEVER TESTED the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima. (The test we performed in late July 1945 was for the bomb later dropped on Nagasaki.) This has important political /science consequences in today's world.

There is no need to test a uranium weapon.

The design of the "Little Boy" was simple and was invented independently by a Russian (Flerov) and the team (given their many nationalities, I hesitate to call it an "American" team) that put together our plans in the summer of 1942. The physics behind this is not trivial, but the calculations provided in the Los Alamos Primer show how easy it was to use the basic facts of nature and deduce that a gun (literally a gun, I was once told the exact model used) would provide enough velocity to push together the two sub-critical pieces of U-235 without the chain reaction starting prematurely. All we had to do was purify uranium, separating out the rare U-235 isotope from the U-238 isotope (which is called "depleted uranium" when it is used to make bullets and anti-tank weapons). Anyone who has pure U-235 can make a bomb.

That bears repeating. ANYONE who has enough pure U-235 can make an atomic bomb comparable to what destroyed Hiroshima. They don't have to test it. (The reputed fizzle of a North Korean weapon's test was almost certainly for a plutonium-based weapon, which is much trickier to design and does require testing.)

Eliminating excess U-235 that might fall into the hands of someone less responsible than the USSR or the USA is, therefore, a big deal. This is why the US has been burning Soviet U-235 in its reactors since a major initiative began in 1993. [It was important enough that it started under GHW Bush, was implemented by Clinton, and might have been the only major Clinton foreign policy program retained by GW Bush.] It is also why the enrichment of uranium by the Iranians is a big deal, and also is why obtaining "yellowcake" (which is not enriched) had squat to do with a WMD program in Iraq even if the report had not been a total fabrication.

However, the difference between taking natural uranium that is 0.7% U-235 and turning it into "enriched" reactor-grade uranium (around 3% pure, a factor of 5) or turning it into weapons-grade "highly enriched" uranium (probably around 99% pure, a factor of 140 or so) is significant. It takes many more resources (or a lot more time) to do the latter. The scale of such a facility (and its energy requirements) makes it easy to identify, but the only way to know its objectives is to inspect it. That is why the IAEA has always played such a major role in controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes' book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" for anyone interested in this subject. Not to name drop, but Robert Serber (who gave the lectures summarized in the Los Alamos Primer) told me it was an accurate description of what went on during the Manhattan Project.

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Famous Physicist Dies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died late Sunday (3 August 2008) at his home.

Given the quasi-autobiographical nature of his early books, I should have guessed from The First Circle (the first of his books I read) that he had a scientific background but only learned that he had been trained in physics and mathematics in the obit from the BBC.

The First Circle is the story of a scientist who gets to live a very nice life in the part of the gulag reserved for people who could be of some use to the state. (They not only live better than in the real gulag, but they probably live better than most Soviet citizens at the time.) It raises very interesting questions about the moral choice involved in trading comfort and the technical pleasures of working on something as cool as the very first "voice print" machine when that machine will only be used to send someone to his death in the gulag. The book is loosely based on his own experience, since part of his time in the gulag was in just such a place.

At the time I read it, some chemistry major friends of mine faced that sort of choice when it came to taking a high-paying job working on chemical weapons like napalm. One wonders what was going on in the mind of the man who worked simultaneously on weaponized Anthrax and an Anthrax vaccine - and apparently ended up using that bio weapon against people in his own country.

I recommend the book to any scientist. The wiki article identifies the real people who were the models for the characters in the book.

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Surviving a Fall

Girl falls 14 floors down chimney, saved by pile of soot. Her only injury was a broken hip, and it was guessed that she had fallen headfirst down the chimney and landed on her back.

No problem (with a bit of luck), but a good physics problem.

One "floor" is usually about 10 feet or about 3 m, so she fell about 140 feet or about 42 m, plus or minus.

Her maximum speed at impact would be sqrt(2 * 9.8 * 42) = 28.7 m/s, which is about 64 mph or about 100 kph.

Her actual speed will be much less, for two reasons. One would be any friction impact with the sides of the chimney, and the other would be air drag, which would be significantly increased by being inside a restricted area. It is more difficult for air to flow around an object when it has to squeeze into the gap between here and the walls of the chimney.

Her maximum deceleration at impact would be 42/0.6 (or 140/2 if working in feet) = 70 Gs (70 times the acceleration of gravity), which is a survivable impact under the right conditions.

Update:
Two other news stories(AP and New York Times put the height at about 180 feet (almost 55 m), which would increase the deceleration to about 90 Gs. That really is lucky.

The Times says the building has 13 stories (so they probably skip one floor and count 10, 11, 12, 14) plus a 25 foot chimney. That would be about 155 feet, not counting the roof height, but you also have to include the basement. However, that story also says "several feet" of soot, and that would have been after she landed and compressed the ash. Two feet is probably a lower limit on the distance to stop.

The Times said the chimney had an "opening of about five square feet", which would only be 27 inches square or 24" by 30". That must be wrong. She could easily touch the walls in that case, and would have trouble landing on her back. Their (innumerate?) writer probably meant "five feet square". That would leave room to rotate your body but increase drag due to restricted air flow around her body. (See my earlier comments above.)

It is kind of cute that we don't need to find the velocity to calculate the rate of deceleration. Both calculations use Vf² - Vi² = 2*a*X, so we have 2*g*Y = -2*a*X, so a = -g*(Y/X) with Y=distance fallen and X=distance to stop.

A good reference point for surviving collisions are the numbers used for crash testing of automobiles. NHTSA uses about 55 Gs at the chest as a fairly conservative limit on the acceleration your body can take in a crash. The LD50 number (the acceleration that will kill half of a population) is thought to be closer to 80 Gs with a torn aorta as the cause of death. [Your body stops but the heart keeps moving, tearing off the major blood vessels that are still attached to your body. IIRC, something like this is what killed Princess Di, who died of internal bleeding.] I say "thought to be" because accelerometers often measure values like 100 Gs in racing crashes where the driver walks away, although those drivers are in a form-fitting seat rather than landing in a pile of soot.

The acceleration of this girl on landing would be reduced because there were other forces acting on her as she fell, but she was extremely lucky that she landed in a way that applied the forces to parts of her body that are less vulnerable than her head. Breaking her hip absorbed energy that would have done greater damage if applied elsewhere.

Safety hint:

A 30 mph car crash without a seatbelt or airbag is like jumping off of the roof of a 2-story house and landing face first on the padded dash of an automobile that is lying in the yard.

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Finally

The Obama campaign is just now getting around to politely pointing out that a certain LIAR^* has been making false statements for over a week now. Sadly, so-called journalists have played those lies for free on the grounds that they were controversial^** rather than a flat out lie.



I'm glad they are not going to roll over and take it, but they have been a bit slow to react. Maybe they have been waiting for enough sound bites to show up so they won't have to air the lies again in the process of debunking them. That won't work in the final weeks of the campaign.

Now if they would only get some national talk-TV spokespeople who can point out that no one ever called Reagan "presumptuous" (UPPITY) for looking more presidential than the actual President at the time. It's not like Obama can help the fact that he is competent and has outstanding leadership skills that rival those of President Reagan. Sorry, J Sidney McCain III, you can't "presume" that you are owed coverage when you can't even lead your own campaign without having the campaign correct your mistakes, saying that you don't speak for your own campaign on Social Security tax policy.

As for calling Obama "arrogant" (UPPITY) or "elitist" (UPPITY), has no one noticed the "arrogance" of McCain to assert that he knows more about winning the War on Terror than anyone despite supporting a losing strategy against Al Qaeda since late in 2002? (How arrogant does he have to be to think he has shown us he can win a war, or that the President will actually make specific tactical decisions rather than the generals? Does the man think he is a cross between Napoleon and Eisenhower, leading our troops into the Pakistan tribal areas on horseback?) If McCain is such a military expert, where was he when Bush fired Gen. Shinseki for speaking the truth?

The next version appears to claim Obama is "out of touch", which is pretty funny coming from a man who does not know the difference between Sunni and Shiite, a crucial detail when dealing with the different sides in the Iraqi civil war, despite his many visits to the region - and might not know the difference between Persian and Arab given the way he talks about Iran.

One thing is clear: the McCain campaign told the media to pay careful attention to Obama's trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, watching for any blunders he made, as the cornerstone of their summer campaign. I think they were shocked to see Obama welcomed by cheering troops and perform flawlessly on the world stage while their own candidate made repeated mistakes - like not knowing the tax policy of his own campaign. Since they can't imagine a world where intelligence and articulating ideas matters more than race, they can only see "celebrity" as an explanation. When they say that, they seem to forget that McCain would not be a serious candidate if his role in a previous round of bank collapses had not been overshadowed by his celebrity status as a survivor of torture in North Vietnam.

^*I am willing to concede the possibility that the Republican candidate for President was and is completely IGNORANT of the facts on the ground when he approved his false advertisements and made false public statements, but ignorance (on his part as well as that of the key staff who will run the government for him) is even worse than lying.

^**I think it was Andrea Mitchell on NBC who set a new low for "journalism". Rather than simply report what she knew about whether Obama wanted cameras along during another visit with wounded troops as a simple fact, having been physically present during the trip to the Middle East and Europe, she repeatedly prompted a campaign staffer to point out the lie for her. What has happened to the media when a reporter is afraid to report her own observations?

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