Awesome

Sucessfully defending one's thesis is an incredible rush. It feels unbelievable.

If you can follow it up with a happy hour, a bar crawl, and dinner with family at Buddakan, by all means, go for that too.

D-E-F-E-N-S-E!

T minus 12 hours. nervous as hell. really wish i was blogging about football.

War cheerleader looks around and has an idea

I had a hard time getting through Goldberg's column. Goes something like....

Iraq was a mistake, but I still hate you liberals!

There is a treat near the end though if you hold your nose and stick through it.

I've mentioned what I think of people like Goldberg, who realize (ummm 4 years late) that it was a mistake to authorize war powers for Iraq....but the idea of having Iraqis vote on us staying or going sounds like a pretty valid exit excuse to me. Besides the Iraqis like voting and they haven't had an election in like 8 months.

It's time to sleep more when....

So it took a lot of work to get my thesis written (even somewhat late). I haven't gotten a lot of sleep this week.

When do you know it's bad? When you print out the cover page for your thesis, the very first page of the embodiment of 5 years of work, and you stare at it for 50 seconds, and finally realize that its a "DISSERTATION", not a "DISSERTAION". (I think spell check didn't flag it because it was in all caps?)

Anyway I caught that one. Barely. I'm so afraid of what else I may have done.

Problem for another day. Time to go to bed.

Ok one more...then back to work

Via the Carpetbagger.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, today:

QUESTION: Just a simple question: Are we winning [in Iraq]?

SNOW: We're making progress. I don't know. How do you define
winning?

What's with this Zen shit? You don't put 100,000 troops in a war zone without a goal. Winning is accomplishing that goal. Now quit fucking with us and answer the question.

Kinda messed up...

What's wrong with this?




Screen capture from WaPo.com

Stress Monkey

So my written thesis is due immenently, and I think it still needs work. I don't know how my committee feels about not have the written the requisite 2 weeks in advance, and I'm not happy to have to ask them.

Then I get this foutune cookie with dinner:

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

On any other day I would have thrown that out and said "What the f*** does that mean?". Today though, it's pretty clear. Scary.

More science philosophy

There's a tendency to think of scientists as egghead intellectual types, even among themselves. I'm going to differ though. It seems to me that intelligence isn't remotely a success trait in science. Sure you need enough to get by, but it rarely makes or breaks you. The best scientists have a combination of two things: intuition and perseverance. Intuition is all about knowing what research will be useful, solvable, and interesting. It's having a good feel for worthwhile managable projects. Perserverance is a matter of dedication and the ability to work through the unanticipated issues that invariably pop up. Combine those two traits with a smidge of innovation or creativity and you've got ispiration. Intelligence can't compete with inspiration, it's not even close.

Explain this to me... or I could just call it like I see it

Andrew Sullivan links to Fareed Zarkaria's article in Newsweek offering up that "If Fareed is giving in, you know it's beyond serious."

Now I'm going to get a little cruel here on the conservative warrior-types, both those who have been drinking the kool-aid and those still swilling it. Why is it that sudden converts to the school of "hey, things are fucked up!" have so much more credibility than people with the foresight to say "whoa, this is gonna get fucked up!" I mean, does actually being wrong and then later changing sides somehow make you wiser? I can see how nobody likes a pessimist, but to give extra weight to the opinion of someone who has been wrong about a life-and-death matter for years? I just don't get it. Let me rephrase...

It's great when the war cheerleaders put down their pompoms for a second to take a look at the scoreboard. Whether that person eventually comes to that conclusion that the reason we're woefully behind in this contest is because the coach calls bad play after bad play after bad play, or because he took us to the wrong stadium from the start doesn't matter. I'm not trying to diminish the value of that awakening by splitting hairs: knowledge and insight are wonderful things. Converts, I'm happy to welcome you to reality (happier than you'll be when you finally see it), but I want you to remember something. The reason I'm not interested in your revelations is because inside, at the core of your being, you're still the same ditzy cheerleader you were last week, month, or year. People like you brought this clusterfuck to pass, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I don't expect you to have the grace to shut-up, but at least put away the megaphone. You're embarrassing.

I hope I didn't lose anyone on the metaphor.

(PS: since I linked to Sullivan, it's only fair to say: he's one too. It's time for him to stop make-believing that changing anyone on our end will fix Iraq.)
(PPS: apologies to actual cheerleaders)

Playboy's 10 favorite political blogs*

Check them out here.

They certainly run the ideological spectrum. There's the uber-Democractic DailyKos and the uber-Republican Powerline . As a pornographic magazine, it's not surprising they gave a shout-out to the internet's biggest Libertarian watering hole (Hit&Run), but it is a little surprising that their top choice is run by a gay man (not exactly their demographic). For that matter, they also cite Pandagon, a highly PC intellectual feminist site. God only knows what Pandagon thinks of getting traffic from Playboy.

*There are other types of blogs out there more in tune with Playboy's interests. Playboy surfs them for the articles.

Karma vs the afterlife

Watch me rip off Andrew Sullivan's entire post:

If Hastert Stays ... the GOP could lose 50 seats, according to an internal poll. And if he quits? Maybe they didn't ask that question. One aspect of this is worth further noting. The base of the GOP has been fed homophobia and gay-baiting for years now. It was partly how Rove won Ohio and the presidency. Gay-hating is integral to their machine. Now, the very homophobia these people stoked and used is suddenly turning back on them. Part of me is distressed that the GOP could lose not because of spending recklessness, corruption, torture, big government, pork, and a hideously botched war ... but because of a sex scandal which doesn't even have (so far as we know) any actual sex. But part of me also sees the karmic payback here. They rode this tiger; now it's turning on them. And it's dinner time.

It's nice to see the beginnings of accountability, even if it's for the wrong sins.

Karma's a bitch, but it's got nothing on the Christian dogma of Final Judgement. Maybe you believe in a judgemental afterlife? How do you suppose these same people will try to explain the difference between coersion and torture to God? I'm no angel, but at least I stack up well against Congress.

Quikies

Knee-deep in thesis, so I'll keep this short. Writing a thesis tends to put one in a bit of a wierd mood. It's a strange state of mind, with sort of a manic, organized chaos of thoughts. Almost like juggling. I don't know if I'll agree with anything I write here later, but hey, writing it down's the best way to find out. (Besides, maybe if I expunge the wierdness here I can focus more rationally on the thesis.)

In addition to the data in my woefully disorganized lab notes, there are a good number of doodles, stray thoughts, and profane expressions (a lot of experiments just don't work). One of these was clearly meant to be optimimistic and get me through a bad time.

Yea though I walk through the valley of science, I shall fear no data.

I still like that one. It has long been my mantra that the role of a scientist is to worship science and the role of an engineer is to make science your bitch. For those not biblically inclined, the original quote goes something like "Yea though I walk through the valley of Death, I shall fear no Evil." Now don't get me wrong, I like science, and 5 years of research has given me a very healthy respect for scientists. So I don't equate science with death, or bad data with evil. The quote was more meant to boost faith in my abilities as a scientist, because the truth is: some days I'm a scientist, and some days I'm an engineer.

But for the record: when an engineer has business in the valley of science, he really ought to drive a car instead of walking.

A late irony

After invading Iraq because we thought Saddam had weapons not allowed by the Geneva conventions, Congress has now given the president the authority to define torture differently than described in the Geneva conventions.

Poor beautiful (quaint) Geneva. From reason for war to casualty of war.

Why waterboarding is wrong...

It amazes me to have to write this, but a lot of conservative types out there don't understand why we shouldn't be torturing people. Here's my rundown, and since I tend to use torture and waterboarding interchangably, I'll explain now. It's my view that any form of "coersion" which causes people to prefer being dead is probably torturous.

OK, I'll try to keep this simple. Torture is bad because:

1. It's sadistic and cruel. It's a crime against humanity and God.
2. It's a bad strategic decision in our ideological war on terror. Each person in this world can chose to align with us, with terror, or with neither. When we run around waterboarding people, it doesn't really endear us to the world. The way to win an ideological war is to have a better ideology.
3. It's a bad strategic decision militarily. A lot of people bring up the issue that if we waterboard others then it's likely our POWs will be waterboarded. I don't want to diminish that argument, but mostly the people who advocate torture aren't worried about ever becoming POWs. So let me put it this way. Torturing captives makes people less likely to surrender. Instead, we should be doing everything possible to encourage our enemies to surrender. WWII would have been a lot harder if Italy had stood it's ground and not turned on the Germans. In the first days of the Iraq war, the Iraqi army was surrendering in droves. Those are strategic victories that we won because our enemy would rather surrender than fight. On the other hand, if our emenies come to expect four years of secret detention and torture, maybe next time they'll fight to the death. That's a strategic loss.

I'll note in passing that many have argued torture is ineffective. I don't care for that argument myself(because my gut response to something not working is to figure out how to do it better), so I'm not going to advance it. Another passing note is it's bad to allow the government that kind of power, but the libertarian argument can be shelved for another day.

There are so many good reasons to oppose torture/waterboarding/etc, and yet so many still support it. Who would have thought Americans wanted so badly to torture people?

PS: The repeated claims that "the US doesn't torture" despite evidence to the contrary don't help our global stature.

Says McCain

Conservatives came to office to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. But lately we have increased government in order to stay in office.

And, soon, if we don't remember why we were elected we will have lost our office along with our principles, and leave a mountain of debt that our children's grandchildren will suffer from long after we have departed this earth. Because, my friends, hypocrisy is the most obvious of sins, and the people will punish it.

John McCain finds the balls to criticize his party while speaking to Tories, but not to Americans.

RNAi visits Stockholm

Quick shout-out to Fire and Mello, the nobel prize winners (in medicine), for their discovery of RNAi.

RNAi stands for RNA interference, a process in which cells regulate expression at the post transcriptional level by using compementary oligonucleotides to degradate mRNA.

It's both less and more complicated than it sounds, but the upshot is the discovery enables "gene silencing", the ability to tune down the expression of a protein within cells. Proteins are the main functional units that make up cells, some being able to turn them down at will is very powerful tool. Medically, it enables a wide variety of new treatments for targets as diverse as AIDS, Cancer, or genetic diseases. Other benefits include the ability to design tissue specific expression and the silencing of genes for fundamental studies.

The field is less than a decade old and has vast potential to not only open up other areas of discovery, but also to save and improve lives. To have gotten as far as it has this quickly is a major testimonial to the power of the field, but it also speaks well of the scientists who developed, shared, and promoted the technology. A worthy award.

Blog News Priorities

OH MY GOD, A REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN SENT INDISCRETE E-MAILS TO AN UNDERAGE MALE PAGE!!!

Oh, also Congress just legalized torture and tore a corner off the Magna Carta.

OH MY GOD HE SPONSORED LAWS AGAINST CHILD PREDATORS!! HE'S A HYPOCRITE AND MAYBE GAY TOO!

Which issue strikes you as more threating to the republic?