21st Century Britpop

On a couple of occasions over the last few years I’ve found myself taking a day-long car trip through the UK. Each time I’ve listened to Radio 1, or perhaps one of the local radio stations, and I’ve been struck by the difference between the US and UK music scenes. Here in the US, I’m not sure that thee is a recognizable “US scene” any more: the markets have ben sliced, diced, segmented, targeted, and effectively isolated. Crossover? Not a lot. But in the UK it feels to me that there is still a recognizably British sound, style, gestalt, whatever.
So I’m driving along, listening to the music, and eventually I stop at a motorway services for some food. And I wander through the W.H.Smiths shop, picking up a bottle of Lucozade and a Formula 1 magazine, and checking out the cut-price audio CDs that are on sale. And twice now I’ve found myself buying a CD by a UK artist that (a) I don’t really know, (b) hasn’t broken out in the US, and (c) feels like an archetypically British act. And each time I’m been delighted.
Last year I bought the Oasis “greatest hits” collection, Stop The Clocks. How could I not own any Oasis? Never mind. This time, I found myself looking at Robbie Williams Escapology. Former boy-band member, darling of the football crowds, consummate show-off…. Anyay, I bought it, and I was blown away. A bit uneven, but really good stuff. And this weekend I followed up by getting Rudebox, which is even better. The collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, “She’s Madonna”, is simply wonderful. Highly recommended.

Who will I discover next time, I wonder?

The Pains

John Sundman.
John Damien Sundman.
John Compton Sundman.
John. F. X. Sundman.
Who is this man of mystery? I haven’t seen him since early in 2005, when he and I had dinner with Dan Dennett and Doug Hofstadter. But 19 years earlier, we had been an unbeatable team working together at Sun, first on PC-NFS and then the 386i. While I stayed at Sun, John followed a strange journey which ought to be documented some time (but not by me). Two oddly compelling books emerged along the way: Acts of the Apostles, in which I felt that I and all my friends had been sucked into John’s fantasy, and Cheap Complex Devices, in which I felt that a computer’s fantasy had been sucked into my brain. I bought several copies of each to give to friends.
Now comes the latest from John: The Pains. You can read it online, or buy it in dead tree format. Or both. (No Kindle version yet – sigh.) Like Acts of the Apostles, it is set in the mid-80s. No, delete that. It defies easy classification, which is the way I like my novels these days. (Oops – I just classified it as a “novel”. My bad.) Just jam your headphones on, crank up Fig.15 by Human Sexual Response, and read it. When you get to the last chapter, switch the music to Leonard Cohen. (John: what’s the playlist for this piece? I’m serious.) You’ll be glad you did.

Why I'm not an American

A couple of my expat-Brit friends are becoming US citizens this autumn. They’re not giving up their UK passports; that’s not necessary any more. Dual is cool. It’s so much more convenient to enter the EC on a British passport and the US with a US one; and you get to vote and serve on juries too! And they ask me how long I’ve been a “Green card” holder, and I tell them (27 years), and they’re incredulous. Why haven’t I got US citizenship? It’s no big deal: a bit like carrying both a Visa and an Amex card, or joining the United Airlines and British Airways frequent flier programs, or owning a PC and a Mac. It’s no big deal; it doesn’t mean anything.
Well, yes, for me it does. It’s very simple. I don’t feel that I can, in good conscience, affirm any kind of allegiance to a country in which I am, politically, a pariah. Sure, I live and work in the United States, but so what? People live and work all over the world, often in countries where they wouldn’t dream of becoming citizens. If I hadn’t come to the US back in 1981, I’d probably have gone to work in Saudi Arabia. I’m sure that there are many delightful Saudis, and I’d have many friends and colleagues there – but would you swear allegiance to a barbaric, misogynistic theocracy? Me neither.
OK, so America doesn’t burn schoolgirls to death in the name of “modesty”, and when it kills its criminals, it does so in private with technology rather than in public with a sword. But it’s still the case that most Americans don’t believe that I could be a citizen. Remember Bush senior?

“No, I don’t know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.”

But that was over 20 years ago; surely things have improved. Hardly. Here’s Joan Smith in The Independent:

In a closely-fought Senate contest in North Carolina, the Democratic candidate reacted with fury and a libel suit when her Republican opponent wrongly implied she was an atheist. Instead of shrugging off Elizabeth Dole’s accusation, Kay Hagan responded as though she’d been branded a paedophile. […] Hagan isn’t an atheist. So what? I’m not a Christian and I’d be mildly offended if someone suggested I was, but I wouldn’t respond as though I’d been called an axe murderer.

Of course, Smith is writing in Europe – specifically, in the UK – where attitudes are different:

In this country, we have Cabinet ministers who are relaxed about saying they dont believe in God, and being an atheist is no bar to getting elected. In the last census, just over 8.5 million people (15 per cent) said they had no religion, and almost 400,000 showed what they thought about the question by declaring themselves Jedi Knights. In France, a poll last year suggested that almost a third of the population describe themselves as atheists. In the Czech Republic, almost 60 per cent say they have no religion.

This isn’t a party political thing, you know. OK, most of the paleo-Christians vote hard right, but even Barack Obama has called for “Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill” to provide “an injection of morality in our political debate”, as though non-believers were incapable of contributing on a moral issue. Check that… OK, yes, Obama said:

…because I do not believe that religious people have a monopoly on morality, I would rather have someone who is grounded in morality and ethics, and who is also secular, affirm their morality and ethics and values without pretending that they’re something they’re not

So he doesn’t want people pretending to be religious, which would be fine if it were not for the fact that such honesty would be political suicide. Smith again:

Atheists are the most despised people in the US, way ahead of Muslims, homosexuals and Jews, according to research by the University of Minnesota. They are regarded as “a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public” and almost half the country wouldn’t vote for an atheist as president. Godless Americans – there were 29.4 million of them (14 per cent) in 2001 – deserve much better than this.

I’m glad when American atheists raise their voices in protest against the bigotry of many religious Americans. I’m encouraged when they point out how unacceptable it would be if a typical rant by a Christianist were directed instead against Jews. I’m happy to help them, and to support things like the AHA campaign. But as long as most Americans view me as an alien, I think I’ll stay that way.
PS Yes, I know that Hagan dropped her libel suit as soon as she thrashed Dole. I think she was only really worried that she might get booted off MySpace. (They do that to atheists, you know.)

"We are not amused"

Leave it to the Queen to ask the obvious question:

The latest Occam’s razor award goes to Her Majesty the Queen. In the unlikely surroundings of the London School of Economics, she last week cut to the quick. Describing the credit crunch as “awful”, she tapped a gilded economist on the proverbial shoulder and asked: “Why did nobody notice?”

Aha, ahem, said the director of research, Professor Luis Garicano. He had clearly been briefed to chat about the weather, corgis and perhaps the Grand National. He had certainly not expected an upper cut to the jaw. Monarchs are not supposed to ask leading questions, even when the nation is screaming for an answer.

With his vocation suddenly on trial, the professor stammered, “Someone was relying on somebody else,” adding, as if in moral afterthought, “and everyone thought they were doing the right thing.” It was the authentic cry of the blame-shedder down the ages. It wasn’t us, ma’m, we were only obeying orders and collecting salaries.

UPDATE: In today’s Guardian, Professor Garicano rejects the suggestion that he was blind-sided, and insists that he was glad of the opportunity to discuss the crisis with HRH. Unfortunately he only succeeds in confirming our impression that, whatever they may have believed or feared, most academic economists simply failed to speak out. Note the way in which he tries to hide his apology by juxtaposition with an even more heinous bunch of absentees:

But we economists and academics should have been louder in our warnings and more proactive in suggesting solutions. Particularly problematic and subject to a serious rethink are the short-term and one-sided incentives prevalent in the financial industry – and the failure by those who took the risks to bear the risks. The public is right to be outraged.

Hmmph!

Entropy and evolution

PZ fisks the creationist’s old chestnut about evolution violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The bottom line:

To spell it out, there’s about a trillion times more entropy flux available than is required for evolution. The degree by which earth’s entropy is reduced by the action of evolutionary processes is miniscule relative to the amount that the entropy of the cosmic microwave background is increased.

Of course the creationist’s argument was always stupid (hint: closed system), but it’s nice to quantify the stupidity. And the comments are delightful; for example, Matt Heath:

Exactly! If you read discussions of extra-terrestrial life (say Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot) “life” is more or less defined as “that which locally pumps away entropy” (at least if we treat machines as extensions of the life forms that built them). So, for example, if we found a planet with oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, whatever was replenishing them (however odd to us) would be worth of the name “life”.

I really like that definition of life. Concise, measurable.
UPDATE: Jason Rosenhouse has a nice follow-up piece, in which he notes “… that the second law plays only a rhetorical role in creationist argumentation. They are happy to use the language of thermodynamics, but they never do the calculations that would be necessary to make a proper argument.”