Jonathan Birge

From the I Think I Just Threw Up in my Mouth a Little Bit Department:

The senate just voted to go ahead with the $300B mortgage bailout. As usual, it was accompanied by much self-righteous chest thumping from our ever generous politicians:

“What better gift on independence could we give the American people than a sense that this, their Congress of the United States, can come together, despite political differences, and craft legislation to make a difference for our country,” Dodd said.

The government is using taxpayer money to bail out mostly greedy, dishonest people who lied on mortgage applications to buy houses they couldn’t afford (many of them second investment homes) and this is Dodd’s idea of celebrating the spirit of American independence? It’s all Orwellian DoubleSpeak to me. They’ve even “branded” this as “Protecting the American Dream.” Since when is the American Dream for responsible people to be forced to pay for the mistakes of real estate speculators?

This isn’t about helping the poor, who are an ignorable voting bloc. This is about posturing politicians buying votes with welfare for the middle class. They try to make it sound more respectable than it is by spinning it as a bailout of people who were “swindled” by loan originators, many of whom apparently didn’t fulfill their basic obligation to act both as loan officers and surrogate mothers to their customers.

I say this having narrowly escaped personal destruction at the hands of these evil corporate raiders myself. When I bought a house several years ago, I believe my loan officer not only had the temerity to take me at my word when I told them I had a job, but they never once stopped by the house to see how I was doing. It was almost like the whole thing was just business to them, and I got the distinct impression they weren’t willing to take any responsibility whatsoever for my decisions, even though I’d been in their office for almost a half hour, which pretty much made me family in my book.

If our corporate conglomerates do not take a personal interest in our well-being, then who will? Our friends? Do we expect our parents to teach us things like being responsible with money and eating in moderation? Fortunately, John Kerry is brave enough to fight for us by having lobbyists craft legislation that he will generously have his own staff submit to the Senate which will allocate other people’s money to this pressing problem.

Maybe this bailout is not so much worth getting upset over as a single event, but it is a depressing reminder of how low our culture has sunk, as reflected in the moronic demagoguery we put up with from our elected officials. It’s not so much that they are cynical enough to “solve” our mortgage crisis with such shortsighted foolishness, but that we, as a country, are stupid enough to buy it. The next time we get an asset bubble, how many of us are going to do the responsible thing? What kind of message does this send regarding the need for individual fiscal responsibility? Is this the psychology of a nation of people you’d expect to successfully compete in the world?

The Democrats have nothing to be proud of here. They are a long way from the days of FDR. Before, when the country hit a rough spot, progressive thinking dictated that we’d engage in tax-funded public works. Before, in times of war, we’d pinch pennies and buy savings bonds. Now, when we encounter a rough patch during a war, we send out $600 checks against borrowed money and squander tax money on private bailouts.

I think I’m going to cheer myself up by maxing out my credit card and buying a pet monkey. If bread and circus is how we’re going to play this, then I damn well want a fucking circus.

(P.S. Sorry, Mere, but I couldn’t get any traction on gluten-free diets. I’m trying.)

The latest fad in the scientific publishing world is open access e-journals. In my field, for example, the Optical Society of America’s Optics Express has become one of the most popular journals, despite being only a decade old. The journal is basically a peer-reviewed website; people submit self-produced papers in either Word or LaTeX form, and those that are accepted are made directly available in PDF form on the website for free download. In theory, this democratizes access to the scientific literature, and increases the distribution of knowledge, but it comes at a cost.

In order save money, the OSA foregoes the cost of typeset articles produced by a professional editor. The optics literature is now awash with junk produced in Microsoft Word. Much of it looks like it came from a project put together by a second grade class, except with slightly more equations. Word was never meant for mathematical typesetting, and the results are abysmal and amateurish. Even though it doesn’t technically affect the content, we should take some pride in the presentation of our work. At best, poorly produced papers are inefficient to read, and at worst, they contribute a subtle psychology that says that sloppy work is acceptable and that what we do is not worth the effort to present well.

[The lack of typesetting in Optics Express helps keep the publication charges around $1000 for most articles. As pointed out PlausibleAccuracy below, not all OA journals are author typeset. For example, the Public Library of Science has beautifully produced articles. However, they charge more than twice what the OSA charges to publish.]

In any case, this brings us to the most problematic issue: The way most open-access journals work is by charging an arm and a leg to the authors for publication. Not only does this limit the people who can publish to those with sufficient funding, it also puts the journal in a position of conflicted interest. As professional societies struggle financially, they are under pressure to accept more papers to bring in cash. With open-access, they make money by accepting papers. With closed journals, they make money by producing good journals.

As I understand it, Optics Express is actually a profit center for the OSA. They cannot possibly be objective about peer review when each rejection costs them thousands of dollars. In the end, editors have a lot of power; I recently reviewed a paper for a ultrashort pulse measurement technique that would not work for the majority of cases one would encounter in practice. I pointed this out, and recommended the article be significantly redone. Next month, I found it in Optics Express, virtually unchanged.

So, we’ve democratized the consumption of information at the expense of the democratization of its production. Do you want the best ideas to be published, or the widest distribution of marginal content? I’d argue that society is best served by making sure the best ideas are published, even if it means having to charge for access to those ideas.

While ensuring that people in developing nations are not denied access to information for want of money sounds noble, should we not also be worried about bad science being published for want of money by the publisher, or good science not being published for want of money by the scientist? In fact, perhaps we shouldn’t even be all that concerned that somebody who can’t afford a $25 journal article is not be able to read about a $250,000 laser system. I know that’s harsh, but there is a certain logic to it: if you can’t afford the journal article, you probably can’t do much with the knowledge.

I do agree with the principle of free access, but only if it’s done with integrity. Ideally, journals should be handled by foundations, with publication and distribution paid for by an endowment to be used only for that purpose. At the very least, there should be no overt financial incentives or disincentives to publication for either party. The primary concern should be the quality of the publications, not the political correctness of its distribution.

I’ve been wondering about the following: When somebody says “think about the color blue” you cannot help but have an image of blue (or something blue) pop into your visual cortex no matter how hard you try otherwise. Moreover, the thought apparently triggers rather similar neural patterns to those excited if you were actually seeing it. But if somebody says “think about raising your right arm” your arm does not shoot up. If motion is caused by the brain, initiated by thought, and my thoughts are not entirely in my control, why is it that I am nonetheless in total control of my physical movement? There must be some pretty interesting machinery to insulate our normally chaotic thoughts from our motor control system so that we’re not constantly smacking people whenever our subconscious mind wants to.

Last week the dollar began to recover in value as the Bush administration finally started making serious noise about a strong dollar policy. Now, right on the heels of that display, the Saudis finally agree to up production.

Both events were a bit long in coming, at least relative to the reasons stated by each party. The Bush administration claimed it was (finally) worried that imports would become too expensive if the dollar were allowed to continue its slide. They didn’t seem concerned the past several years as the dollar slowly dropped a third in value. After all, it was their policies that caused it. Similarly, the Saudis have been fighting production increases all the way as oil has quadrupled in value. But now $140 is the magic number where they start to care?

It leads one to think maybe the two capitulations are connected. After all, high oil prices hurt America. A devalued dollar hurts the Saudis, as oil is priced in dollars. Priced in Euros, for example, the Saudis aren’t raking it in as much as it would seem. Given how much they trade with Europe, the dollar’s fall has offset a lot of the increase in the price of oil, especially given that they probably have a lot of production costs that are priced in other currencies, squeezing them from both directions. So, we prop up the dollar to help them, they increase production to help us. Given the connection between the Bushes and the Saudis, maybe the two governments finally addressing these longstanding problems at the same time is not a coincidence. Nor, perhaps, is it a coincidence that this coincidence happens during a presidential campaign.

Didn’t see that coming, did you? I think this one is especially appropriate for the time, as well as needed balance to the last post:

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand in the window
As the tears scald and start.
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.

(W.H. Auden)

Let’s just be honest: this whole primary has both race and gender playing far more of a role than anybody wants to admit. Enough so that it’s a bit scary for the future of our union. Some of this is the inevitable Balkanization that goes along with hard times, and of course most of it is that identity politics are clearly going to come for the fore in an election between the first viable black and female candidates. While it’s clear from exit polls that race and gender are playing a large role, there are so many variables in play that it’s not even clear what the net effects are. Maybe “black community support” (I believe that’s the accepted euphemism) has helped Obama as much as white racism has hurt him. Likewise, while it’s fair to say that Hillary has dealt with a lot of sexism, it’s also certainly true that her chromosomal configuration has gotten her a lot of votes from women who would never otherwise go against an Oprah fatwa. After all, it’s not like Hillary and Obama differ noticeably enough in policy to register more than a few percentage points of difference otherwise. In fact, the only thing most Hillary supporters dislike about Obama is that he is just one too many liberal dreams come true for one electoral season. It’s a politically correct embarrassment of riches, and so the race is decided by a convoluted calculus of reverse/forward-racism/sexism in every possible permutation (and there are six, for those keeping score).

Obama knows well enough to not point out the obvious subtext beneath so many of the results, if for no other reason than he knows any voters who are shallow enough to vote for her in the primary just because she’s a woman will most certainly be willing to vote for him in the general because he’s not entirely white. So long as he doesn’t point our their soft bigotry in the first round, he can count on it in the second. The beauty of identity politics is that while it doesn’t withstand any mention, it doesn’t need it. You don’t have to reach out, you just have to have your picture taken. One of the big mistakes I think Hillary made was playing the gender card, no matter how indirectly. Most people are perfectly willing to be biased as long as you don’t ask them to be. His far better grasp of this unspoken dynamic is probably why nobody saw Obama crying for a second about racism when Hillary won a completely improbable proportion of the votes in West Virginia. He was happy to leave things be at the networks’ polite referral to her win as due to her “highly favorable demographic of middle class white voters,” even though everybody knows that to be code for “racist ignorant hicks.” I’d probably even give West Virginia the benefit of the doubt of simply liking Hillary better if they didn’t run up the score so obscenely. When a state full of people who can’t even decide whether or not they are Republican or Democrat swing 60-40 in a primary between nearly identical candidates, you can fairly, if not politically correctly, assume that there is something going on other than an intelligent appraisal of domestic policy. I’m sure the picture of Obama in a turban transits West Virginia’s sole fiber optic cable far more often than her health care policy PDF.

Just keep repeating the words “post-racial, post-racial, post-racial” and hope nobody will notice the buck naked emperor.

For a group that is so focused fairness and justice, Democratic leaders seem to have a really shaky understanding of at least one of them. From watching their tortured machinations in trying to handle the Florida and Michigan primaries, the nation is learning a lot about the way Democratic politicians think, and might help explain what they mean when they speak of “social justice.”

In my book, fairness and justice are distinct. In general, justice is hard to define; Plato wrote a very long book trying to do so. In this context, however, I believe justice simply means keeping your word. Even if it results in unfairness (as all decisions in life ultimately do). Fairness is an observation, whereas justice is a course of action. When Florida’s democratic leadership foolishly and arrogantly decided to go against their word and move up their primary, it was unfair to their citizens, because it meant–as they should’ve known–the disenfranchisement of their voters. The damage was done then. The just thing to do is keep the rules intact and not seat the delegates. The unfairness of this, and I agree it is, is something the voters of Michigan and Florida should take up with the perpetrators of it. If an organization sets up a rule, and all parties agree to it, you have a contract. A just society honors its contracts, plain and simple. Considerations of fairness may inform which contracts we choose to enter, but not on whether or not we keep to them.

The fact that the Democrats consider keeping promises, following rules and dealing with the consequences of one’s actions completely secondary to weakminded attempts at making everybody feel happy and entitled is very telling of their leadership. It’s also emblematic of the kind of thinking that is often behind their efforts towards social “justice.” To wit, there are a lot of parallels between Democrats’ baby-splitting solution to the Florida and Michegan delegates, and their proposed bailouts of mortgage-holders. Sure, everybody will be happy in the short term, but what kind of precedent does it create? Why follow rules when there are no consequences for them?

Of course, the Republicans may be worse; these days, it seems, they are utterly unjust merely as matter of convenience to themselves. What a great choice we have.