September 2008 Archives
You know things are getting bad for the McCain-Palin ticket when, even before the first VP debate, a columnist from the respected right-leaning National Review is calling for Palin's resignation.
Full of platitudes and scripted responses; falling into all the interviewer's traps. The part about the Bush doctrine was also pretty good. Bush doctrine? What Bush doctrine? Clearly the McCain camp is really trying to put the Bush years behind them--consciously or unconsciously. Delicious:
The latest, greatest toy in our industry called high-energy physics is now mostly working. It is sobering to think that this is almost certainly the single largest scientific endeavor ever undertaken by humankind. More controversially, I suspect that it will retain that status for awhile, unless it somehow turns physics on its head and then flips it back so that all the pieces fall into place better than anyone could ever have imagined.
Evidently I may have misinterpreted the will of God in my previous post--or committed some other grievous offense--for I experienced a bit of a traumatizing experience recently. If you have ever read much Chekhov or seen many of his plays, then you are probably aware of the significant number of uncontrollably ill people that populate his pages. It seems like half the time, the afflicted one is some crazy Russian who can't stop ranting about his heart palpitations. These characters always seemed so absurd that I often doubted that this sort of thing really happened, but then again, Chekhov was a physician.
Sunday night I could not sleep. After returning to Chicago late that night, my heart was inexplicably pounding with an occasional arrhythmia. This extraordinarily uncomfortable feeling only induced an ever building anxiety preventing me from sleeping, which only caused me to notice more and more arrhythmias, until probably 10% of heartbeats were arrhythmic. Feeling understandably concerned about the matter--and unable to sleep--I spent some time Googling cardiac arrhythmias. If you try this out, you'll quickly find out that doing so is rather terrifying. Somehow, though, I was able to calm down and fall asleep.
The next day began fine until midday when I was machining some plastic for a scale model of the Double Chooz outer veto. The incessant grinding of the band saw through plastic did not ease my angst over the mounting arrhythmias and palpitations. When the chest pains hit, I was convinced that I was having a heart attack. As I was heading out the door to go to the emergency room, I talked to my mother who tried to convince me that the episode was merely a panic attack. Apparently my father had similar episodes well over a dozen times: he thought he was going to die, had palpitations, and simply could not relax for hours and hours. Calmed slightly, I felt a little better and went back to work.
As the day wore on, however, I could not concentrate, and I left early. I tried eating dinner with Ben (who was probably totally befuddled by my incoherent state), which worked a little, but I was still periodically beset by pangs of extreme panic. I talked to my parents for awhile, but it became clear around 1:30am that there was no hope of sleeping or avoiding the doom of cardiac arrest--at least in my panic-stricken mental state.
So, I went to the emergency room at the University of Chicago.
While the emergency room is a very good place to go if you think that you are having a heart attack, it is probably the worst place in the world to go if you are having a panic attack. True, they quickly take your vital information and give you an electrocardiogram. But they only do this so that they can correctly determine your position in the line of patients waiting for medical help. And since I wasn't actually having a heart attack, I was stuck at the back of the line.
One nice feature of the ERs on the South Side of Chicago is that they are populated with colorful characters. Between squirming from my rapid arrhythmia and palpitation, and biting my nails from anxiety, I had the pleasure of listening to some local kids jovially chatting about how "motherfuckin' bitch" Y stabbed "motherfucker" X to death a few months ago. The stories of their sexual exploits were equally impressive. It was reassuring to know that they weren't judgmental: if you were a motherfucker already, then murdering someone with your bare hands just made you a bitch. I mean, that's a label that even I could handle.
So after listening to this fascinating conversation in the waiting room for the 4.5 hours between 1:30am and 6:00am, the ER staff finally made it to the bottom of the list. I went through the double doors. My bed was surrounded by those lovely hanging curtains with reassuring prints on them. This one had leaves and twigs. Lovely, I thought, very lovely. As I lay down and the nurse left, I was assailed with the reassuring screaming of the woman to my right. "Lord have mercy! Lord have mercy! My pancreas is killin' me! Doctor I'm dyin'! I am DYIN'" She repeated this for at least 20 minutes because she was one of those annoying patients who keeps coming back the ER with nothing actually wrong with her. The doctors had nothing to do but listen to her scream--and chuckle with their graduate students. On my left I heard the nurses setting up a bowl on the floor so that the patient could both vomit and urinate without ever having to move. Well, this was it, I thought. They have put in the place where people go to die.
The doctors then sent in their first line of defense: the graduate student. Not the graduate student! I didn't need the damn graduate student, I thought, I needed the doctor. But in spite of his lesser experience and presumably his exhaustion at 6am, he was very smart and talking with him and his general cheerfulness was probably the most useful thing that anyone did for me there. He'll be a terrific doctor someday.
After he consulted with his superiors, they sent in the second line of defense: the resident. Apparently neither he nor the graduate student could find anything wrong with my EKG or vitals, but they would to a chest x-ray to double check.
And the final line of defense--the actual doctor--interrupted to ask how tall I was. 6' 1" I responded. She laughed. Tall people aorta problems, she said. Who would have known?
So the grumpy x-ray man wheeled his x-ray machine over and took a film of my chest. The woman started to scream again. A few snippets of conversation drifted in from the doctors and graduate students outside. "Chest x-ray...", "congestive heart failure", I thought I heard. I looked over at my heart monitor and my pulse had jumped from 72 to 85. I was going to die again.
But there was no problem. Everything was normal. I signed the discharge papers. I asked for sedatives or anti-anxiety medication, but they refused. I can hardly remember why. I left at 8:20am. I had been awake for 25 hours.
When I went home, it was still there, that violent palpitating beating of my heart. Exhaustion pulled me to sleep.
I slept all day and went to the Jeff Koons exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was excellent. I wandered aimlessly around Lincoln Park for an hour. I rented a movie from iTunes, trying to calm down. Slowly, very slowly I did. I'm still not calm though. But I won't die. I won't even have a heart attack. In fact, I'm probably in flawless health. After some more cardiological tests, we shall see for certain.
Given the Republican party's perennial obsession with human reproduction and the Christian version of God, it's surprising that no one really connected the dots with yesterday's events (that is, event 1 and event 2). The news outlets were abuzz with talk of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's slightly shady past: a husband who was arrested for drunk driving years ago, a 17-year-old daughter who was pregnant, and an ongoing investigation regarding a suspicious firing of a public official. Some are even speculating whether the fact that she has another child with Downs syndrome and three more children--presumably normal--means that she'll have time to be both a good vice-president and a good mother. With Hurricane Gustav ruining the first day of the RNC convention, and with hurricanes Hanna, Ike, and Josephine lined up to pummel the Southeast, it's pretty clear what God thinks. Sorry Ms. Palin, God just doesn't like you.
Apparently he would have preferred Joe Lieberman.
At least even a wrathful God has a sound sense of judgement.
Thanks to Galen for bringing this review of two hoaxes to my attention. The first is a fraudulent restaurant award sent to the magazine Wine Spectator and published there. The second is the semi-famous Sokal Hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to the postmodern journal Social Text filled with meaningless jargon purporting to show that quantum gravity supports postmodern theories critiquing the objectivity of science. Sokal's intent was to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy and nonexistence of rigor in such postmodernist studies.
The editor of Wine Spectator, Thomas Matthews, criticizes the hoax he experienced by pointing out that it is not feasible for the magazine to fact-check every piece of information it receives. Indeed, doing so would require it to make the baseline assumption that no one with whom it deals can be trusted. The author of the blog entry, Stanley Fish, cites Matthews as stating, "every applicant must warrant 'that all statements and information provided are true and accurate,' and given such a warrant, 'we assume that if we receive a wine list, the restaurant that created it does in fact exist.'” While it would be best if the magazine could check every fact it publishes, this would be extremely tedious. But more importantly, it would probably be unnecessary to do so, because the entity submitting information to the magazine usually has a level of trust which compels him to submit true information.
Unfortunately Mr. Fish attempts to extend this analysis to the Social Text, citing philosopher Simon Blackburn's criticism that when a credible person, such as Mr. Sokal, sends an article to another party, the other party has a legitimate reason to assume that the credible person is not being disingenuous. Fish uses Blackburn's example:
He imagines himself receiving a paper from a “well-regarded historian” who claimed that certain issues in Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy could be clarified by “various facts about Hobbes’s political experiences in Venice.” He would have been able, he says, to assess the political philosophy part of the paper himself, but I “might well have taken Hobbes’s presence in Venice as given” on the assumption that any credentialed historian “would not have developed the point if he hadn’t gotten that bit right.” And, he adds, “I would not have had the history refereed, even if I had known whom to approach.”
This entire analysis falls apart, however, when comparing the nature of the two hoaxes and Blackburn's thought-experiment. The folks at Wine Spectator received a submission that had no superficial signs of fraud. The paper from the "well-regarded historian" has no logical errors or incoherence in the argument. In other words, a person with unlimited a priori intelligence, but no knowledge of certain factual details would not have objected to either as a fraud. The difference with the Sokal Hoax is that, unlike the other two frauds, it was intentionally nonsense, and it fails our criterion involving the person with unlimited intelligence. Indeed, because it was nonsense, the editors of Social Text could not possibly have understood it. In contrast, without a few pieces of factual knowledge the article in Wine Spectator and the essay on Hobbes are superficially legitimate, while the Sokal Hoax is not legitimate in its facts or its logic. The objection that they were correct in trusting Mr. Sokal without any understanding of his arguments is only valid if academic journals are considered merely as publishing "repositories" like the web that will publish anything that they receive (assuming it comes from someone of "status", of course!). Thankfully, most publications--academic or otherwise--insist on having standards of publication. In order to have any standards whatsoever, a publisher simply must understand what the material he is publishing is actually stating. So even if one buys the argument that academics should trust that credible people have checked their facts and are being honest, it is abhorrent publishing practice to publish things that no one in the publication actually understands at all.
This last point, I think, is the point that Sokal was actually trying to make. It's not that the editors of Social Text should not have trusted him. The point is that in order to have any publishing standards or intellectual standards one must first understand the things that one publishes. If Social Text is publishing utter gibberish like Mr. Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", then they are either lazy publishers or their publication or discipline has no intellectual standards. Either way, they are at fault. And either way Mr. Sokal proves his point. We should not fault Mr. Sokal for exposing rampant lack of rigor masquerading as rigor with obscurantism. Nor should we fault Mr. Sokal for misleading people who should have been smart enough to not be misled. They should have just asked a physicist.
