Several months ago, in the heat of the republican primary, Yahoo news asked the candidates: Mac or PC? McCain’s response was revealing… and disturbing.

Neither. I am an illiterate who has to reply on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now come some even more impressive quotes in an interview with the New York Times.

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

…

Mr. McCain said he did not use a BlackBerry, though he regularly reads messages on those of his aides. “I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail,” Mr. McCain said.

I know the internets are confusing and all, but I’m frankly a bit baffled by this. He needs help “getting on”??? To read newspapers? Hard to imagine that there’s not a computer he could use somewhere, already attached to the internet, and probably even with the browser already installed. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have to learn how to set his DNS servers in order to read the New York Times. Is it typing the URL that’s difficult? My grandmother, by the way, who is more than a decade older than McCain, seems to have figured this out just fine, even without a campaign staff to help.

The level of cluelessness here is deep — not only does he admit that he’s completely illiterate, he demonstrates a basic lack of familiarity with the terminology (he also mentioned that his staff shows him Drudge, because “Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge.”), much like his colleague Senator Ted “series of tubes” Stevens, opposer of net neutrality.

And it’s important. At the risk of stating the obvious: Internet policy has direct relevance for our most fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, privacy, and democratic access to information. Computing is increasingly critical to our increased understanding of the Universe, financial markets, and disease. The internet and social networking tools are rapidly revolutionizing the way we interact with each other, citizen’s access to and engagement in government, and government accountability. These things are central not only to innovation and the global economy, but to 21st century democracy in America and the world. It’s really hard to see how you can fully appreciate these issues if you don’t know the most basic things about operating a computer. Leadership matters.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a twitter account. (He also hired one of the Facebook founders to start his myBarackObama site, which has clearly been responsible for a good deal of his internet fundraising and organizing.) He gets it.

As mentioned yesterday, I just gave a public lecture about dark energy.
I think the lecture went well. As Jamie said in the comments below, it was literally earthshaking.

Seriously, it seems I have learned out to control the movements of the earth’s crust. I had just finished a rather long leadup about what the universe is made of (from the pre-Socratics through to R&B bands) to introducing dark energy, had just mentioned the 1998 supernovae results on the accelerating universe, and showed my personal favorite graphic about dark energy, which I think I found several years ago in a google search —
and read the label of this lovely substance. Right after the words came out of my mouth, “Dark Energy, it Stinx, but it Rocks!”, the earth started shaking.

Yes, indeed, there was a 5.6 magnitude earthquake, just about 25 miles from where I was speaking, right in the middle of my talk. Right at the punchline. A bit of chaos ensued (doesn’t dark energy always have that effect on people?) but eventually I reigned them all back in with a witty remark and carried on.

Really, I swear I planned that. Can’t wait for the video.

UPDATE: the video is now available! The excitement occurs during minute 34.
“Dark Energy: a discovery so revolutionary, that it shook the earth.”

For those of you in the bay area, I will be giving a public lecture at SLAC (in Menlo Park) tomorrow, mostly about Dark Energy and what the universe is made of. Familiar topics to our regular readers, but hopefully it will be fun. The lecture is at 7:30 tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, in the Panofsky Auditorium at SLAC — intended for a general audience with no particular knowlegdge of the contents of the Universe. The folks at SLAC created this appropriately halloweenie poster for the talk (click to get the whole thing). A bit more information, including maps to SLAC as well as links to past lectures in the series (held bi-monthly) can be found here.

So, I’ve been in the throes of grant proposal writing, which as far as I can tell is the worst part of becoming a professor. As such, I’ve been ignoring as much of my email as humanly possible for the past week. Until I got an email from David Weinberg this afternoon, announcing to the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) mailing list the arrival of a new web-based galaxy classification project, Galaxy Zoo. The project was started by some scientists with SDSS, including Alex Szalay and Bob Nichol, and others. They had a press release today, and it’s already been covered by the BBC and was picked up by AP, so I think the website has gotten a bit hammered in the first day.

The basic idea here is to harness the collective eyes and brains of the internet to visually classify galaxies by morphology. It turns out that galaxy mophologies are in some ways a lot easier to classify by eye than by computer, just like faces and other complex images. This is one reason that now that surveys include millions of galaxies, morphology studies have not been as popular as other classification schemes based on colors or spectral types. Apparently, galaxy zoo to the rescue!

Here’s the first thing I learned: looking at pictures of galaxies is a lot more fun than writing proposals to the NSF to get funding to think about galaxies.
(Dear Galaxy Zoo: if I don’t get a CAREER grant this year, I blame you!)

There were tools to do this before, and I actually have managed to (finally) look
at a bunch of these Sloan galaxies over the past few years (I’m a theorist who’s never been observing, and normally I only look at fake galaxies in my computer — or real galaxies labeled by just a couple of variables like luminosity and color instead of their infinite structural variety). But the fact that galaxyzoo gives you a goal for looking at each galaxy makes it totally addictive. Plus galaxies are just pretty awesome looking! Even better, each galaxy has a link directly back to the SDSS Sky Server, which has tons of other info about the galaxy, like a spectrum where available, 5 band magnitudes, etc.
Personally, I found myself compelled to look at this information when perplexed about how to classify something. What’s it’s color? Is it star forming? What’s is redshift? All there. (Really, it was all there in the Sky Server before, but this is a pretty cool interface to it because you start by wondering.)

It turns out there’s a lot of cool stuff in the Universe. In just a bit of classifying, I found a couple of cool galaxy interactions (click for more info):

A galaxy that to me looks like the cartwheel galaxy with bad seeing:

My main gripe about the site is that they’ve made the classification pretty simple,
just allowing for 3 types of spirals, counterclockwise, clockwise, and edge on
(none of which are really different types in the classical sense), elliptical galaxies, and mergers.
What was I supposed to do with the cartwheel?
And what about this bloby guy, which has whopping H-alpha and OII emission and the mysterious zwarning “NOT_GAL”? Clearly has no structure but I just couldn’t bring myself to call it an elliptical.

Or these very nebulous beauties:

I kept wishing for a button that said “This one’s interesting” or allowed me to choose from a menu, including things like “close pair“, “blobby star forming thing“,
“scoop of neopolitan ice cream” or “i’ve got a green crayon“.
In all seriousness, I understand the simple scheme, but it does seem like there’s a lot of potential here from a lot of eyes that won’t be realized with it. I wonder whether a lot of this won’t come from the classification statistics, though, i.e., probably many of the interested objects will have less consistent classifications than normal ellipticals or spirals.

To be honest, I think I have exactly the wrong amount of knowledge to do this task effectively as designed — I overanalyze it and think I must know what’s going on, but am clearly just a clueless theorist. Turns out we’re still trying to explain the two most basic parameters.

Anyways, go check it out. A Universe of galaxies awaits at your fingertips!

From Paul Kedrosky, via Rebecca Blood, an excellent challenge:

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that if all knowledge about physics was about to expire the one sentence he would tell the future is that “Everything is made of atoms”. What one sentence would you tell the future about your own area, whether it’s entrepreneurship, hedge funds, venture capital, or something else?

Examples: An economist might say that “People respond to incentives”. I had an engineering professor years ago who said all of that field could be reduced to “F=MA and you can’t push on a rope”.

There’s lots of good and diverse responses out there…

People power culture with the tools they have at hand.
The future is built by the curious — the people who take things apart and figure out how they work, figure out better ways of using a system, and explore how to make new things fit together in unexpected ways.
The only freedom that can never be taken away from us (and hence our only area of true control) is our response to a situation.
The Secret to Existance is Movement.
Whatever else you do, don’t skimp on backups or fire extinguishers.

This actually relates to a project I’ve been thinking about a bit, which maybe I’ll say more about later. Anyways, here’s my summary of the Universe in a sentence.

The Universe began, about 13.7 billion years ago, as a hot, dense soup of elementary particles, and has been expanding, cooling, and clumping ever since.

Readers, what’s your sentence? (Not limited to physics, of course!)

Want to elaborate on the great science at the Frontiers of Science symposium, but since Mark beat me to it, first just a few things on this week’s election results.

First of all, I am delighted to have cast an historic vote for the first woman Speaker of the House, this fabulous woman with San Francisco values (who is now second in line for the presidency!)

Second, among many other positive outcomes of the election results, I am really looking forward to the tenure of what I hope will be our new chair of the Committee on Government Reform, Henry Waxman. He is currently the ranking minority member of this committee, which has authority to investigate any federal program and anything with federal policy implications, and will likely take the reigns in January when the house leadership changes unless there’s some shakeup. In addition to lots of other great stuff he’s done, Waxman is responsible for leading investigations on the state of science under the Bush administration. You can see some of this work on the office’s Politics & Science webpage. He’s also been all over Halliburton and other corruption scandals, so that should make things interesting.

On a semi-related note, Andrew Baker suggested to me today that the new democratic leadership might take this opportunity to reinstate the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. For 23 years, this nonpartisan agency provided congress with “objective and authoritative analysis of the complex scientific and technical issues of the late 20th century” — until funding for the agency was abolished by Newt Gingrich’s 104th congress.

The Office of Technology Assessment occupied a unique role among the Congressional information agencies. Unlike the General Accounting Office, which is primarily concerned with evaluation of ongoing programs, and the Congressional Research Service, which provides rapid information on legislative topics, OTA provided a deeper, more comprehensive, and more technical level of analysis. Through eleven Congressional sessions, OTA became a key resource for Congressional members and staff confronting technological issues in crafting public policy.

As Andrew suggested, “this might be a good moment for scientists to push this: making sure that Congress operates with the highest standard of information dovetails nicely with the push to make sure Congress operates with the highest standard of ethics.” Since I’m sure a lot of CV readers would support congress thinking more deeply about issues in science and policy, and I’d be curious to know what the sentiment is on this.

In other science-related election news, Science has an update on what the election has done for intelligent design (in their words, it “received a drubbing”).

The only downside of the recent news about the Secretary of Defense resignation is that I fear jokes based on Rumsfeld-isms will become less funny (I, too, have used the known knowns and unknown unknowns in talks).

From the Scientists and Engineers for America commercial contest, two great reminders to vote for science:

If you are interested in a little Election Day reflection on the state of voting in this fair democracy, I’d recommend checking out this HBO documentory on hacking the vote.

By the way, this won’t work for tomorrow if you don’t know already, but if you are in California, you may be interested to know that you can now become a permanent absentee voter. Makes life easier for those of us who travel all the time, and even better news, it avoids whatever newfangled vote-eating computer game your precinct might have cooked up for you.

And from SEED magazine, a bit of election-day science on what entices us to vote:

In a study conducted online the night before the 2004 election, 146 Ohio State University undergraduates were told to imagine themselves voting from one of two perspectives. Some saw themselves as a third party would—as if they were watching a movie of themselves going to the polls. Others were told to use a first-person perspective—as if they were experiencing voting through their own eyes…The study found that 90 percent of those who had visualized themselves from an outsider’s perspective reported voting, while only 72 percent of those who imagined voting from a first-person perspective did.

Anyways, Happy Election Day! Via Pharynglia, a bit of extra motivation to cast your ballot. If you’ve got a few more minutes, watch Keith Olberman’s special comment — “This country was founded to prevent anybody from making it up as they went along.” And then get yourself to a ballot box.
Here’s hoping for a real balance of power change this week.

via my friend Marla (who recently wrote the only astronomy article I’ve ever seen in the Nation) comes this SFGate caption describing a new Hubble Space Telescope image of the antenae galaxies, the Brad and Angelina of colliding galaxies:

Is that a red giant or are you just happy to see me? A new Hubble image gives the sharpest view yet of the two Antennae galaxies, which are shown here basically having unprotected sex. The merging galaxies smash together, causing billions of stars to be born, mostly in clusters.

This must be more of those San Francisco values speaking.

The more detailed, PG-rated version of the caption can be found at the Hubble Site.

I have heard variations of this line so many times over the years that I lost count long ago and certainly don’t remember half of them. As familiar as it is, my internal reaction to it is never totally simple. It is clearly often meant as a compliment, I’m glad that I don’t look like your average concept of a physicist [nerdy white guy with funny hair?], and in fact one of the things I like about what I do is that I defy expectations every day just by showing up at work. But there’s of course so many stereotypes (about, depending on what’s said, science, gender, looks, style, age, personality, smarts and their various correlations) in variants of that statement that it’s hard to even know where to start.

But all that aside, I got a new one recently: “You seem too relaxed to be a physicist.” Now, that’s probably just because I took my first real vacation in years, and a proper time on Kaua’i followed by a move to a wonderful city will make anyone seem relaxed — people who know me well would hardly say that “relaxed” is my general demeanor, and I’m sure it won’t last. But I was surprised to hear that it was perceived by someone as the anthesis of being a physicist.

Actually, the one I have been getting most often recently since I acquired my new professorial title is “You look too young to be a professor”. Now, although I am 10 years out of college and older than these young humanities whippersnappers who show up to teach fresh from defending, since the average time that a professor spends on a faculty (or some combination of them) is probably of order four decades and I’ve been here a month, this isn’t too surprising of a comment. Regardless, I still haven’t come up with a witty comeback. Any suggestions?

(for me) … in particular, two, to CV and to CA, specifically my beloved bay area, where I’ve now been for about a month. Although this blog is now embarrasingly populated with Californians, at least we all still travel enough to keep it interesting.

I found the whole job search and transition utterly distracting, not only from blogging here but also from spending my dreamy hours websurfing. But now that I have a new job, which is quite likely at least twice as demanding as my old job, I’m sure I’ll have more time for blogging. =) (Really, so far I haven’t figured out how people find the time to do anything once they become professors, and I’m not even teaching yet!) At the very least, I don’t think I’ll have to search for a job for at least 7 years, which is a very refreshing feeling.

In the case of the other return, to the bay area, so far it’s been wonderful. My stint in the midwest made me seriously crave some topography, so I’m living in one of San Francisco’s hilliest neighborhoods, just a couple of blocks from this lovely corner (top pic), with this view (bottom pic) from my home office/dining room. When you spend a decade thinking you won’t find a job in the city that you want to live in (as many of us in this line of work do, through 5+ years each of grad school and postdocs), it’s pretty fantastic when it actually works out.

More on life as a new professor soon.