Overqualified

A new link for the sidebar. I don't even know if it's updating anymore, but Joey Comeau is brilliant in a dark and scary kind of way.

Science!

So I'm wandering through my favorite liberal elitist grocery store, helping a friend of mine with a perennial search for unscented organic grass-fed free-range shampoo, and I run the above bottle, with an actual scientific-type equation on it, and two things immediately jump out at me. (a) It's almost certainly irrelevant to the shampoo. The equation in question is an expression for the energy of a particle with a magnetic moment mu in a magnetic of strength B. It's a dot product, and it's negative, because the energy is minimized when the magnetic moment and the magnetic field are aligned, which is when the dot product itself is maximized. (b) It's trademarked. Now, I'm not an expert in trademark law by any means, but this equation, in this form, with this notation (and even in this nice, seriffic font) appears in textbooks and scientific papers and who knows where else, millions of times over. It's a pre-diluted trademark. Maybe it's pre-diluted shampoo, too, though I suppose that's unlikely.
We didn't buy it.

O-ba-ma

So I went down to the National Mall for the inaugural, and I'm glad I did. Partially I went as a way of making up for the fact that I didn't do any celebrating on election night itself -- I live within walking distance of U street in Washington, DC, and I could hear some of the cheering, but I didn't go out.
So, the inaugural presented me with another chance to be part of this history, however slightly, and share the moment with a bunch of other people.
Getting down there was straightforward, the various choke points didn't present any serious obstacles, and I found a place just west of 7th Street, within easy sight of one of the jumbotrons, and from where I could see the Capitol itself, as well. I could even make out movement from time to time, using my binoculars.
It was awesome. The crowd was warm and friendly, strangers chatted and joked amicably, and we all cheered mightily when Mr. Obama made any kind of appearance on the TV. I liked the speech, and in particular enjoyed his promise to put science back into the policy-making apparatus. It's a pleasant change indeed to have a President who thinks, who understands the uses of rationality, and who can deliver his speechwriter's words with grace and fluidity.
The experience reminded me very much of the optimism of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and we knew that the world had been transformed for the better. Like then, the Obama administration will surely have its problems and stumbles, and make mistakes, and irritate vocal core constituencies of the Democratic party, but still, it's hard not to think that here, again, has been a decisive transformation for the better.
It's also a fine lesson in the ability of the United States to reinvent itself. Really, there aren't a lot of countries where a member of a marginal minority could rise to such high office. When will Germany have its first black leader? Or for that matter, its first leader of Turkish ancestry? What about France? Even the UK, more of a melting pot than most European countries, and quicker to abolish slavery than the US, has a ways to go on that score.
Thinking of historical rather than geographic parallels, Obama reminds me of Canada's Pierre Trudeau -- he, too, was a member of a historically-marginal national minority, young, intelligent, and hopeful. And more than that, he didn't come from the Quebec political scene, just as Obama, though obviously sympathetic to it, does not himself come from the Civil Rights leadership.
Of course, Trudeau had his demons, too. But for now, I'm happy to just savor this unfamiliar sensation of optimism.

The Pleasures of Complexity

In the spirit of the connectedness of things, an interesting coincidence has occurred. The first item is the appearance on newsstands (and with a surprisingly small web presence) of a journal called World Affairs. I picked one up, because I'm the kind of policy-wonk wanna-be that does such things, expecting neocon apologetics and Great Power nationalism. The introductory essay speaks admiringly of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and there's a regular column by Christopher Hitchens, so I figured this would probably be primarily a forum for the folks who supported the concept of an Iraq war, but had in mind a better-planned, more humane war featuring a quicker and happier ending, prominently featuring the secular dreams of Hanan Makiya and Ahmed Chalabi, and were simply astonished, not to say mortified, when the incurious Mr. Bush and his technocratic defense secretary botched their historic opportunity. Who could possibly have known?

Well, I must say that I was very pleasantly surprised. The first issue of the journal seems to grasp the complexity of the world, as I might have guessed had I myself been less hasty and carried on down the author list at least as far as George Packer. Even the article about academics and the war declines to demonize Noam Chomsky. I am, generally speaking, a big fan of grasping the complexity of the world. It can be paralyzing, that complexity, and it's sometimes just an excuse for inaction, but it seems to me that, generally speaking, erring on the side of greater understanding is likely to serve us well in the long term.

The second item of the coincidence is an article in The New Republic, a book review of Jacob Heilbrunn's "They Knew They Were Right", about the rise of the neocons. And yes, the review begins by addressing the vital question, "do we really need another one of thses?". But that's not the interesting part, the interesting part is that the author of the review (Mark Lilla) mentions that he was, once upon a time, the editor of "The Public Interest", which, we are reminded that this journal was founded on more or less the same principles as the current incarnation of "World Affairs" -- to grasp the complexity, to address it empirically, to be grounded in reality (as distinct from ideology) in the debate of these issues.

So there's nothing new under the sun, I suppose is one lesson. It's interesting that the Lilla review describes the neocon trajectory as being reactionary (Lilla takes great pains to strip this term of its pejorative connotations and tries to use it descriptively) and in search of simplicity, so much so that its practitioners came unmoored from the world as it is, but "World Affairs" seems to me to be the complement to this, a reaction to the excessive ideological narrowness of American political discourse, and an attempt to appreciate the breadth of complex issues. Not as a call to inaction, at least not so far (there's only been the one issue), but as a service to the body politic.

Does this mean complexity enthusiasts like me are now reactionaries? As Robert Anton Wilson is supposed to have said, it only takes twenty years to go from a liberal to a conservative, without changing a single idea.

We The Robots

There's a new link on the right-hand pane there, under "Links I Like", to the webcomic, "We The Robots". I really like the artistic style of this webcomic, they're all somber grays and gray-themed versions of other colors, the sort of thing you'd get if you did watercolor painting on gray paper. You don't have to imagine, you can go look. Feel free to mouse over the header bar while you're there. It's a small treat, but a treat nonetheless.
I have already forgotten where I found out about this, although it was only a few days ago. Might have been the Comics Curmudgeon, might have been bOING bOING.

John Hockenberry on the media, via BoingBoing

See, this is why I like the inter-connectivity of the web. John Hockenberry, independent-minded reporter who I learned about from his bio, has some ruminations on the state of television news.
Here's the bOING bOING link, and a direct link.

Urban Garlic

Still tinkering with the blog settings. I've decided to identify myself as "Urban Garlic" -- it's a handle (or is it a nick?) that I use in a lot of places, and have for several years. I'm not sure if I'm the only one doing that, or not. Also I finally found the time-zone setting and got it right.
I picked the name because it had the word "urban" in it, and generally speaking I like cities better than their absence, and because it was a weak pun on "herb and garlic," which was the default salad dressing flavor before "ranch" came along.
I recently discovered that the urban dictionary says it's slang for marijuana. That wasn't what I had in mind, and since nobody seems to have heard of it at all, I think the danger of confusion is very low, both in the sense that people are unlikely to be confused, and that if they are, it's unlikely to be dangerous.