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For those of you who care, I have always thought of myself as a Kosovarian.

Closing the DNC Race

Dave Johnson, over at Seeing the Forest, has me wondering - might Simon Rosenberg be a better choice than Howard Dean?

Links

Let's get started:

mydd.com is a reliable Good Read, for the nuts and bolts of progressive organising. Check out this story on the importance of contesting every single race.

Crooked Timber has a link I want to archive, on the structural importance of unions in electioneering. The more they get screwed into the ground, by Republican hardball tactics, the more hosed the Democrats become.

Lastly, Fafblog is awesome. I admit, the first time I read the blog I thought the authors were retarded or something - but they grow on you.

On the Road to Damascus

So there I was, 1997, on the bus to the Golan Heights and making small talk with the Norwegian astrophysicist. It turns out he had a friend who had just received his PhD in computational chemistry. "That wouldn't be Kenneth Ruud, would it?" I ask, off the cuff. It would indeed. The world of chemical theory is small & incestuous, and gossip travels fast.

I need a theme for this blog, some organising principle. Something snappy, hot, wild, interesting:

UNIONS

That ought to do it. Leave my Kaufax Award at the side door...

Jan Linderberg, World's Smartest Man

My big presentation went over well yesterday, plasma seems to be a crowd pleaser. One never knows about these things; I could just as easily have provoked the eye-glazing response. The key seems to lie in getting the audience to participate, to ask questions, but that leads to an epistemological conundrum: are they asking questions because they are interested or are the interested because they are asking questions?

Here's a brain teaser for you - the typical physicist does not appreciate how miraculous it is, that the singlet state exists. If you think about it, the anti-symmetric superposition is more surprising and less intuitive than the existence of irrational numbers.

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Ain't it the truth - as soon as you figure out what's going on, what's going on goes and changes.

Let's try something new. Head on over to Michael Berube, he's always a good read. MLA out of Iraq!

Howdy Howdy

A pattern emerges: I log on and post every other day. What a cool fact to discover about myself!

In my undergraduate days, the psychology department lay firmly under the thumb of the Behaviouralists; in retrospect, much of the education served up was in fact inoculation against the siren song of the Freudians. Six of one, half dozen of the other, but I did learn that cognitive dissonance is specious nonsense - which it is, progoganda aside - while the Truth lies with attribution theory. As much as we like to think that we know ourselves intimately, in fact we make our ways through life as best we can - and are constantly discovering new aspects of ourselves through the process of observation. QED.

Ice Storm

Shore has been a funny old winter. I woke up this afternoon to the sound of rain on the rooftop, a freezing rain that shattered into ice as it struck the ground. That leads, as night follows the day, to sheets of ice on the road. I thought it the better part of valor to hole up and polish my guns than to attempt the drive down from the mountaintop.

Barking at the Moon

Ooh! Ooh! I have a project - Michael Berube suggests that we all get blogs and start barking at the Democrats to *DO* something about the road this country is headed down. I have just done the first, and have been doing the second for ages; all that remains is to learn some HTML so that I can direct people over to michaelberube.com and let them read it for themselves.

Wetting my Whistle

Test the first - get something up & running, so that I can discover tomorrow whether I remember how to get back.