Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

OK, having praised the things that I now appreciate Goldstein (2nd edition) downblog, let me temper that by praising other books.

A while back I got Jose and Saletan’s book.  I have read bits here and there but have never had time to sit down and study it properly.  The language is different from what I’m used to, very geometrical.  On the other hand, I very much like Hand and Finch’s book.  Not as popular, and I admit that parts seem a bit sparse (not that Goldstein’s bombastic prose is anything to write home about, in certain parts), but they do a nice job of retaining the best of the classic style while introducing more geometrical intuition without lots of geometrical formalism.  Really, they have given me more elegant insights than Goldstein.  In a course for first-year grad students, as opposed to specialists, I think that’s appropriate.  My goal for next summer is to really study that book in detail, and I believe that after I do that I will be ready to tackle Jose and Saletan or even Arnold.

So, what is Goldstein good for?  Goldstein is a good book to study after quantum mechanics, because if you really know quantum the lesson you’ll take from Goldstein is “Wow, it all fits together!”  Goldstein’s book (2nd edition, mind you, I’ve never studied the 3rd, with those new co-authors) is actually the least classical of the graduate-level classical mechanics books.  It’s a book about how close you can get to quantum mechanics in classical mechanics.  It might not be presented as such, but that’s a big part of what you come away with when reading it.  Jose and Saletan, or Hand and Finch, OTOH, are actually books on classical mechanics that would be useful for people doing modern research in classical physics (e.g. chaos, soft materials, fluids, all fields where the geometrical and topological insights are important).

As much as I appreciate much of the stuff in Goldstein, I do wish that the community had embraced a more geometrical book sooner.  Would you believe that some schools actually have junior-level classical mechanics as a prereq for quantum mechanics, on the grounds that you’ll see the symbol H in classical mechanics?  It’s silly, because in just about every undergraduate quantum book the Hamiltonian is an energy operator.  Yes, there are deep connections between classical and quantum mechanics, as shown in Goldstein, but those connections require more sophistication than you can get from any undergraduate book on classical mechanics, given the (appropriately!) low-level treatment of Hamiltonian mechanics in those books.  All I can say is that the people who came up with that prereq spent too much time reading Goldstein and not enough time taking a broader view of classical mechanics.  Mind you, I think that Goldstein is a great co-requisite for graduate-level quantum, but Taylor, or Marion and Thornton, or whatever, is not a terribly useful prerequisite for undergraduate quantum, unless the mechanics course gives really heavy emphasis to oscillations.

Finally, requests for authors of advanced classical mechanics books:  Special relativity shouldn’t be in your books.  Your chapters can’t really do justice to it, and it’s too much of a diversion.  Special relativity should be in E&M books.  If you absolutely must spend time on special relativity, make the chapter shorter, tell the reader that you assume they already know it, summarize the fundamentals in a “If you don’t know these things, go read Unit R of Moore’s Six Ideas” sort of way.  Then expand the part where you treat (or show the difficulties in treating) special relativity in a Lagrangian or Hamiltonian formalism, and follow up with a derivation of classical mechanics.

Also, do more continuum mechanics.  No, no, not the stuff that Goldstein did, which was just quantum field theory in disguise.  For undergrads, I am thinking elasticity and/or hydrodynamics.  God knows that physics undergrads don’t see nearly enough of this.  I personally dislike Taylor’s treatment of these topics, but at least I give him credit for trying.  For grad students, do your “field theory” chapter on something like solitons, in keeping with the prominent role of nonlinearity in modern classical mechanics.  On this I salute Jose and Saletan’s effort.

By Thoreau

There has been some blogospheric discussion of libertarianism and democracy lately (e.g. here).  I haven’t read all of the leading intellectual lights of libertarianism, so I can’t quote for you what some libertarian philosopher wrote in some tome.  What I can say, based on interactions with lots of self-described libertarians, is the following:

1) Most libertarians that I have interacted with do agree that, for all of its flaws, democracy is a system that provides the possibility of regular, non-violent turnover among officials.  It also provides a way for the pissed-off masses to response to their leaders (not always with the effects that they’d hope for, mind you) without violence in the streets.  Looking around at the rest of the world, that is not something to be dismissed!  Even if you want nothing to do with politics, it is usually easier to avoid having anything to do with politics if politics can be conducted without (too much) unrest in the streets or the occasional coup or what have you.

2)  That said, a not-insignificant number of libertarians will still grumble about the crapitude of democracy.  A few of them might indeed like the idea of an “enlightened despot”, but most seem like the sort who would grumble about the crapitude of just about any political system.  (They are, after all, libertarians.)  In many cases, their basic point is that a democratic government can still be oppressive.  This is largely an argument to be suspicious of any political system, but not really an argument against democracy and in favor of something else.  It is, at its most useful, a rejoinder to those who defend some policy with “But this is what the people voted for!”  To be honest, though, I find arguments between “This is what the people wanted” and “The majority can still violate my rights” to be rather tiresome.   Just about everybody who is on the side of the majority seems happy to invoke it for as long a they are on the side of the majority.  This includes libertarians!  For instance, we often say “The people of the state voted in favor of medical marijuana and that should be respected!”  And just about everybody who is opposed to the majority seems happy to remind us that minority rights matter.  (See, for instance, the way that Team Blue and Team Red supporters say that filibusters are either an anachronism or an essential tool against oppression, depending on which party controls the Senate.)

Still, yes, it is always helpful to remember that the majority can be wrong, and in an immoral way.

3)  I think that many people beyond the libertarian fringe should be sympathetic to critiques of excessive democracy.  Given that we should have elections, does that mean that every high executive office in a state should be filled by an election, like California does?  Of wider relevance, should sheriffs and district attorneys and state attorneys general be elected or appointed?  What about judges?  What about ballot measures?  I, for one, think there’s a strong argument to be made for fewer elections of these sorts.  While appointed sheriffs, district attorneys, attorneys general, and judges can be susceptible to all of the same flaws as their elected counterparts, on the margin I suspect that the pressure to favor toughness over mercy, to use discretion to the disadvantage of the unsympathetic, to err against the unsympathetic when dealing with gray areas, is greater when they are elected.  I’m less bothered by the election of administrative officials in positions like, say, Water District Board or whatever (especially in small towns, where I assume that the citizen scrutiny can be better), but for anything involving criminal justice I want to keep the key players at least one step away from electoral politics.  Nobody should ever be put in the position to ask themselves “If I drop the charges/end the investigation/dismiss the charges because the cops have botched the case, will I be crucified at the polls?”

Likewise, government by ballot measure doesn’t work terribly well (see: California).  Some of it can be traced to pathologies in putting certain questions before the public, but there’s also the fact that ballot measures are hard to revisit or revise.  It’s OK to have a few things locked in, to provide a steady framework, but then you need to leave most of the other things on the table to be revised as needed.  At the very least, ballot measures should be harder to initiate, harder to pass (more than just 50.001%), and easier to overturn (e.g. a supermajority of the legislature).

4)  Some libertarians would go farther and argue for the virtues malapportionment in a federal system as an essential check on the majority.  I am less than thrilled with a system that gives a several hundred thousand Vermonters or Wyomingites the same say as tens of millions of Californians or even Texans, but I concede that at least some element that is not entirely based on state size is a reasonable proposition in a federal system.  A domestic policy proposal that is only popular in a handful of states should probably be handled (in many cases, though not all) by those states rather than by the federal government, even if the proposal enjoys support from a large number of people.  However, I see this as more of a practical “laboratories of democracy” argument than as any sort of deep principle by which Vermonters and Wyomingites are better custodians of freedom than Californians and Texans.  (Though, to be fair, California and Texas have worked hard to demonstrate that they shouldn’t be custodians of, well, anything.)  I also see it as a plausible argument for at least some degree of malapportionment, but not necessarily a gross degree.

5)  Related to the tension between federalism and democracy, there are libertarians who will argue that Senators ought to be chosen by state legislatures rather than the general electorate, as was the case before the 17th amendment.  I disagree with them, for reasons that I will elaborate on, but I concede that the idea has some points in its favor.  The cost of a Senate campaign is astronomical, and there is a “laboratories of democracy” argument for stronger links between state legislatures and the federal government.  In some ways, there might even be a sort of progressive argument, on a kind of “think globally, act locally” basis, for having some portion of the federal government elected by local officials rather than state officials.  If you want the Air Force to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber, your best hope for achieving that scenario is to put the School Board in charge of the Air Force.  A granola activist has a better chance of winning election to a city council than a State Assembly, let alone the US Senate.

My main reason for disagreement, however, is that I don’t think the checks and balances would be as secure with an appointed Senate in the modern era.  How many other democratic countries have second chambers that wield powers that at least match and often exceed the lower house?  Answer:  Very few.  Of those with second chambers that are at least comparable in power to the lower house, how many are appointed rather than directly elected:  Answer:  Even fewer (and I’m not counting Iran’s appointed upper house of theocrats as a good example to point to).  An appointed second chamber would not, in the modern era, retain the democratic legitimacy to challenge the President or the House.  Popular legitimacy, while hardly a guarantee of good policy, seems necessary if a second chamber is to function in a role that is, in practice, equal to the more popular chamber.

6)  There are, of course, a handful who would argue that suffrage should be limited to property owners, or at least that property owners (or people with some other measure of wealth) should have a greater say.  Um, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the wealthy are already good at getting their say in public affairs in this country.  Fortunately, it seems like only a small minority of libertarians advance that argument.

By Thoreau

Classical mechanics is wasted on the young.  Right now I’m teaching a computational physics course, and I’m gearing up to explain the Euler-Cromer method for solving differential equations.  There’s a nice article out there that shows that energy conservation in this method follows from Liouville’s Theorem in classical mechanics.  I know that Euler-Cromer is also analogous to leapfrog algorithms for solving partial differential equations, so I started reading up on leapfrog methods.  After reading the part of Numerical Recipes where they show the stability of leapfrog methods, I realized that there’s a Liouville-type theorem lurking behind that result.  When I was young, I didn’t appreciate Goldstein nearly as much as I do now.  I knew that the formalism was deep, but I found it annoying that all of the examples were basically elaborate versions of the harmonic oscillator or the Kepler problem.  I knew why that was (because almost anything else is too hard to be done by hand) but the lesson I took away was that the formalism is deep but not easy to apply beyond a few cases.  Now I see the deep ideas behind the formalism in all sorts of places, and while I still wish I’d had more variety in the examples I’m mostly just glad that I got to learn the formalism.

I’d love to go on sabbatical and take a classical mechanics course that uses Arnold, or Abraham and Marsden.

By Thoreau

I have occasionally noticed math books with jokes in the index.  I can’t remember which book it is, but I once paged through a book in which the index had an entry for something like “exaggeration” or “blather” and listed pages 1-500.  And I could swear that there’s a similar joke in Brown and Churchill’s book on complex variables (though a quick perusal of the index turns up nothing).  However, while paging through the second edition of Numerical Recipes, I noticed an index entry for “Steak, without sizzle” on page 818 (where they say that “…to summarize these methods without some, at least introductory, Bayesian invocations would be to serve a steak without the sizzle, or a sundae without the cherry.”  A further look at the index shows no entry for “sundae”, but an entry for “cherry, sundae without”.

If I ever write a book, I must find a way to get the words “Santorum” and “URKOBOLD” in the index.  Or at least cheezburger (spelled that way).  Or maybe “Astley, Rick.”

By Thoreau

Somebody whom I know in meat space made a comment a few days ago that suggested he knows about the blog.  I never would have picked him as one to read this blog, and I was surprised and concerned about pseudonymity, so I acted confused and changed topics.  But, if he knows, well, then I should know, rather than evading.

So, to you, if you’re reading this:  I’m the guy you call “the straight shooter.”  (And no, this has nothing to do with firearms.)  It’s me.  You got me.  And, for the record, the pseudonym was chosen on a total whim one day, and does not indicate any sort of ideological commitment.  If you read this, say something to me in person.

By Thoreau

My main, belated thought on the execution of Troy Davis is that although the appeals process prior to an execution is a very long one, it is remarkably hard to get appeals courts to give serious consideration to strong evidence of innocence.  We saw this in Davis’s case, we saw it in the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham, and we are seeing it in the case of Hank Skinner, where Texas has fought very hard for a very long time against testing evidence that could very well exonerate him.  The courts spend a very long time going through the  motions before an execution, but they seem remarkably uninterested in the most important issue of all in a death penalty case:  Is this guy really guilty?

I understand that there are good reasons why appellate courts spend most of their time on questions of law and procedure rather than questions of fact.  I understand that division of labor, and I am not a lawyer and I know how much lawyers roll their eyes at non-lawyers who opine on the law on the internet.  I am not going to opine on whether appellate courts should examine potential evidence of innocence that comes to light after the trial, or if they should remand the examination of that evidence to a lower court, or somebody else, or whatever.  Lawyers can say better than I can which sort of court is most qualified to examine that evidence with the care that it deserves.

What I will say, as a person who is subject to the law, whose friends and loved ones are subject to the law, who pays for the administration of the law, and who allegedly has some say in the system on Election Day, is that if there is no mechanism to get the system to give serious consideration to strong evidence of innocence, then what is the point of having such a lengthy appeals process?  They spend a great deal of time deliberating before an execution, but they are not willing to actually change the outcome based on strong evidence of innocence.  To me, the most damning aspect of the system is not that it sometimes makes mistakes, and it’s not even that mistakes sometimes slip past the appeals process as well.  No, what is most damning is that the system is determined to not consider evidence of mistakes.

Anybody who interacts with a bureaucracy on a regular basis knows that the length of a process often has little/no connection to the quality of the process.

There are many reasons for this.  The general scarcity of mercy in our system is one aspect, and I suspect that beyond the direct mechanisms leading to this there are also second-order effects, whereby over time the system erodes whatever sympathies its participants might have for the innocent.  Even in a system of laws there are still areas for discretion, still hard questions on which a judge must exercise, well, judgment.  A system that has no place for mercy will not give merciful verdicts on discretionary matters.

There’s also the general clogging of the system.  At the federal level we can lay some of the blame on the  political process.  I understand the reason for ideological battles over appellate court nominees, but remember that your average district court judge is not spending most of his/her time on hot-button cases involving privacy rights for illegal aliens getting taxpayer-funded abortions.  (For the record, I will take whichever side pisses off more people in that kulturkampf-laden hypothetical.) For that matter, even appellate court judges spend most of their time on tedious cases.  Refusing to confirm judges, from either party, means that real benches stay empty and real cases get delayed with real consequences for real people.  And when those real people finally get to court, how thorough will the process be?

But state courts can be similarly clogged, and they don’t (usually) have as many partisan battles over judicial nominations.  We can also blame the Drug War (I’m always ready to blame the Drug War!) for a lot of that clogging of the system.  We can blame bad budgets to some extent, but this problem existed before the downturn that started in 2008, and the associated effects on public budgets.  Mostly, though, I think we can blame it on the fact that the system isn’t really built for mercy or justice.  It is built to process cases.

By Thoreau

So, Anwar Awlaki is dead.  The fact that he’s a US citizen does not make this any morally worse, in my eyes. I object when people are killed because they are people, not because of the country listed on their passport.  There are things to be said about the citizenship  issue, and I will get to them below, but I think there are other points to be made first, that will put the citizenship issue  in context.

In the logic of war, if it is reasonable to fire on people  driving tanks, then it is not much of a leap to drop bombs on the building where the orders are given to the people driving the tanks.  Is it any less reasonable, then, to fire on a person who does a shooting spree on US soil, or fire on a man trying to detonate a bomb?  And if it is reasonable to fire on the spree shooters and bomb throwers, is it unreasonable to fire on the man directing them?  And if it is reasonable to attack any of these men, because of the violence that they are doing to others, does it make any sense to forebear simply because one of them has a US passport?  Indeed, the man who consciously decides to go out and direct others to engage  in violence seems more morally reprehensible than the poor schmuck who got conscripted into driving that tank, or even the dumb 18 year-old who volunteered to drive the tank because liars in shiny buildings said something about freedom.

Taken on their own terms, each of the leaps in the paragraph above is reasonable.  If we accept the use of violence in one context, in the name of defending against violence, then each small step can also be defended, and it isn’t clear where it ends.  One perfectly reasonable  response to that problem, one that I am quite sympathetic to, is a complete or near-complete rejection of violence.  In this ostensibly Christian-majority culture, that sort of stance shouldn’t draw as many sneers as it does.  But, even if one doesn’t wish to go that far, even if one accepts the logic of war in some instance, one can still accept the practical need for bright lines.  It’s not that something just slightly on one side of that line is substantially better or worse than something a tiny bit to the other side.  It’s that without the bright line, you can keep pushing forever and pretty soon something that was sold as a tool against guerrilla armies in remote places without law becomes a tool for the Drug War.

The question of how to fight people who plot from places where Interpol can’t just call on the local cops, often adopting guerrilla tactics abroad and plotting attacks on our  soil, is a hard one.  The approach of the past 10 years  is to call it war, which allows a lot of things that could never be done by the cops (or, maybe not), except when the rules for war get in the way, and then they declare that an alleged child soldier accused of throwing a grenade at a soldier on a battlefield is somehow violating the rules of war.  This approach, with rules of war when convenient and otherwise just the say-so of The Decider, knows no bounds.  I have  occasionally heard (and sometimes even contemplated) proposals for a third category, something between war and criminal justice, something with its own rules, but I fear the blurring of lines that would be necessary.

And so the stance I keep coming back to is that the bright line should be between war and crime.  Either send in the soldiers (bound by all the laws, traditions, and treaties that govern them) or send in the cops (bound by all of the relevant laws and Constitutional provisions).  And if that means that sometimes a bad guy isn’t caught, or at least isn’t caught for a while, well, that’s far better than what can happen if lines keep getting blurred and blurred and blurred some more.  As things stand now, what bright  line will prevent them from sending drones to fire missiles at smugglers about to cross the border from Mexico?  And when they cross that line, what will prevent them from firing missiles at alleged drug  houses?  Be  honest here.  If an especially brutal crime boss intimidates enough witnesses, and the cops declare that they simply cannot build a case against him within the confines of the law, don’t you think they’d go there?  I don’t expect to see drones firing missiles at drug houses tomorrow.  But in 2021, when Rick Perry is elected to his second term*, who knows?

Compared to the dangers of blurring lines, what would the danger be if Anwar Awlaki were captured, brought to the US, and tried for whatever it  is that he’s accused of?  Yes, capturing him would have been more complicated than firing a missile, and perhaps he would have remained free for longer, but so what?  Summary execution of murder suspects would be easier than putting them on trial, yet we have the trials.  There are reasons for that.  We accept the risk of a murderer going free, because the risks in a system without trials is far worse.

Also,while I’m not saying that it would be OK to abandon the law if Awlaki were more dangerous, let’s consider what we’re really up against here.  He was allegedly a spiritual advisor to the failed underwear bomber, and he was allegedly a spiritual advisor to a man who went on a shooting spree.  A dangerous man, but his body count is well below that of a typical drug cartel boss or US President.  Somehow, though, drug cartel bosses are captured and tried, despite operating in equally lawless places and having far more resources for bribery, blackmail, intimidation, and revenge.

And so, having noted that we need lines and law, I return to the citizenship issue:  If Awlaki weren’t a US citizen, I would still say that he should have been tried.  I don’t think that the drone strike on him was any more problematic than any other drone strike on a moral level.  On a legal level, well, I’m not a lawyer, and in the past 10 years I’ve been assured that all sorts of awful things are legal.  But I do know that on a psychological level, US citizenship is (not surprisingly) a big deal for most people in the US.  And they just launched a drone strike on a US citizen.  A psychological line has been crossed.  A psychological line may not be an intellectually or legally significant line, it might exist only in the mind, but decisions are made in the mind.  And that line has been crossed.  And that is why I fear what might happen next.

*In this scenario Romney is nominated in 2012 and loses, and then Rick Perry, being the guy who’s been in line for a while, is the 2016 GOP nominee.

By Thoreau

1) It is fascinating to deal with a person who talks a lot about work-life balance but is incapable of comprehending that people who make less money and have less prestigious jobs often have weekend hours that they can’t get out of.  This becomes a problem when trying to make plans, and I have to keep explaining that one of my wife’s jobs is in retail and it’s hard to predict which weekends she will have to work.  Especially when I have to explain it over and over again.

EDIT:  Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is that so many discussions of work-life balance come from a very elitist angle.  Having a wife with a decidedly non-elite job drives home to me how elitist some of the assumptions are in these discussions.

2) I don’t have a problem with people who use Apple products.  I don’t even have a problem with people who hate on Windows (because, um, yeah).  I do, however, have a problem with people who decide to take their Apple Cult mindset to the next level and explain that all problems can be solved if we think about whatever we’re discussing in the same way that the iPhone designers did.  It was bad enough when they were telling me that my take on Life, The Universe, and Everything would change if I had an iPad and the right apps.  Now everything has to be like Apple’s design teams.  *Sigh*  I’m going to buy this guy a turtleneck for his birthday.

By Thoreau

Ah, Massachusetts candidates!

In the town hall of 250 people — with his oversized debt clock as a backdrop — Romney addressed perceptions and concerns that he is “a flip flopper.”

“In the private sector,” he said, “if you don’t change your view when the facts change, well you’ll get fired for being stubborn and stupid. Winston Churchill said, ‘When the facts change I change too, Madam.” What do you do?”

That’s different from what he said a week ago, when he said he doesn’t change positions.

I will say of Romney what I often said of Kerry:  It may very well be that when everything is put in context and all of the nuances are recognized, there is indeed a consistent narrative.  Still, a bit of clarity never hurt anybody, you know?

Hat tip to The Heretik.

By Thoreau

Details are still sketchy about the Evil Fiziks Type who was arrested in Massachusetts for a plot to blow up the Capitol building (I’m still waiting to hear the Tea Party’s response), but we do know that the FBI provided fake explosives, and that the whole plot revolved around toy airplanes.  A few months ago, it was noted that an Al Qaeda plot resembled a Magic: The Gathering card, and commenter The Innominate One said:

Maybe we could get the DOD and the terrorists to just play-act all the fighting with action figures, thereby saving much money and avoiding suffering.

So, yeah, toy airplanes seem about right.

Preliminary reports suggest that this guy actually had a lot of initiative and did not need his hand held by the FBI, but preliminary reports are often wrong.  If he really did actively try to hurt people without help from others, if the FBI really was in a passive role, well, yes, lock him up.  But we know how these things so often go.

Here’s my movie plot threat:  Some savvy terrorist, somebody who isn’t a loser, decides to pose as a loser to mess with the FBI.  The undercover agents provide fake explosives, but he refuses to go ahead with the plot until they field-test the explosives to prove that they provided the real thing.  So they get some real explosives and field-test them.  Once he’s satisfied that the explosives are real, his backup team surprises and kills the agents, they take the explosives, and do a real terrorist attack.