Mindless Philosopher

Kurtz writes:

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from Obama’s native country on attempts to cash in

I was really hoping that Kurtz had confused Hawaii with a nation…

The defense went swimmingly! I’m so happy that so many people came:

Right after the group picture I shouted for joy and executed a secret plan that was about two years in the making: jumping in the fountain!

Of course, I probably should have taken my cell phone out of my pocket first! Well, at least it didn’t take me long to get the mindless professor role down pat :)

Thank you to everyone who made getting a PhD in four years possible — I couldn’t have done it without you!

Dissertation is being bound.  Parody is written (see below). Now I just need to defend the darn thing (tomorrow!).

Closer You are to Done

I’m trying to tell you something about voters
And what makes some of them party floaters
The best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to make me take inference more seriously,
There’s just one truth after all

Procrastination is a monster that’s insatiable
And rigor has a call that’s hard to hear
I pretend that my fear is just writer’s block
and keep watching DVDs til two o’clock
Now I’m asking for your signatures

I went for a doctorate, they made me climb a mountain
While watching townie children play in the fountain
There’s more than question you can answer
That will get you out the door.
The less you seek the source of imperfections,
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.

On the road to a doctorate of philosophy
I tried to split my life between Princeton and DC
Never could sit still or waver from life’s purpose
Visited Hong Kong and Thailand, Petra and Darwin’s tortoise
I spent four years learning how to frame problems, wrote my thesis
Now I’m free!

[Chorus; instrumental]

I stopped by the dbar at one a.m.
To drink four pints of ginger ale and visit all my friends
I awoke with renewed spirit to finish a thesis section
As soon as I’m done working on this election
…which one should take precedence?

I went for a doctorate, they made me climb a mountain
While watching townie children play in the fountain
We go for a doctorate, we do climb that mountain
We watch townie children who play in the fountain
We go to Chicago, we stress out over generals
We read up on Arceneaux, and fake our way through orals
There’s more than one question you can answer
That’ll get you out the door
The less you seek the source of imperfections,
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.
The closer you are to done.

Done! Let me know if you find typos as I have one week to squash them.

Now I just need to come up with a good song parody (to keep the trend going)…”Closer to Fine” has been stuck in my head. The academic references have obvious parallels (esp. since I finished in 4 years); more coincidentally, the fountain reference is also relevant since this is the view from outside the Politics dept:

Enjanerd and Ian got married yesterday! The reception (including touch football) was great, but even better was the ceremony: nerdy, short, hilarious, and touching all at once. Bravo to Sonny for a great approach to my two brilliant friends’ nuptials.  I captured some of on my Android phone, but before I even bothered to upload it today, I saw that Enjanerd’s videographers had already posted the video to Youtube:

QED! Mazel Tov to the Petouies!

Someone needs to teach Peter Wallison the difference between elitism and meritocracy because he seems to have some trouble with the concepts in his op-ed today. He argues that a government agency is elitist because they would require potential consumers of complex financial instruments to take a quiz (or “questionnaire”) first. However, the last time I checked, passing a quiz on finance only required knowledge, perhaps via a hobby in stocks, not a Harvard MBA. In fact, Wallison’s own elitism is on display when he claims that only the “educated” would be able to pass the quiz (in contrast to “ordinary Americans” who would not).
Plus, if the point of run-of-the-mill disclosure laws (which Wallison favors) is to make sure that consumers know what they are buying; thus, optimizing public policy to ensure that consumers actually do know what they are buying is a good thing.

• My facebook-recorded prediction was 43-29-28 (D-Mc-Mo), which turned out to be off by a bit, but not embarrassing. The final numbers will probably be 49-27-24. Hey, at least I got the tens digit correct.
• Nate says McAuliffe’s numbers look like Dean’s from Iowa 2004. I disagree — they look more like Clinton’s from Iowa 2008. Clinton actually had a lead in that race (as did McAuliffe) — Dean never had a solid Iowa lead.
• Ed Kilgore thinks the results spell trouble for McDonnell and I’m inclined to agree. If Deeds can beat Moran in Arlington County, he clearly can develop broad-based support.
• I disagree with Ed that the WaPo endorsement wasn’t everything — it was. Check out the polls before and after the day of the endorsement (May 22). That endorsement allowed Deeds to corral the momentum and the anti-McAuliffe vote. For voters who wanted an experienced state legislator running Richmond instead of a fat cat outsider, WaPo forcefully directed them toward Deeds.
• Well done VA Board of Elections for getting 60% of the vote in within the first hour after polls closed!
• Turnout (probably just shy of over 300,000) decimated predictions and the 2006 primary turnout of 155K. Go VA Dems!

[This blog post is adopted from an email conversation with Chicklet. Coincidentally, one of Google Wave’s features is to convert an email to a blog post with just a couple clicks. Disclaimer: I’m not a Google employee so I know nothing about Wave but what’s in the media; however, I am currently working as an independent contractor on a Google project.]

I mentioned to Chicklet that I thought Google Wave looked cool, and certainly others agree. She responded that she might find it appealing if she knew what Wave actually was. So after watching (some of) the Google I/O video, here’s my attempt at explaing Wave briefly:

Wave is basically one step closer to bringing the whiteboard to virtual communication. Think of it as shared docs in email/IM. Here’s an example of what it does well: at Woody Woo, when they bring speakers they post a blank list with 15 slots for students to sign up for a discussion with the speaker. First 15 to sign up get into the seminar. Email can’t replace this functionality because (for one thing) you can’t know how many slots are left (without manually counting reply-all emails). Also, if you don’t have conversation threading, people’s inboxes flood.

Wave solves this by combining email and shared docs. Basically the admin would send out an editable email with 15 slots and the recipients would be able to edit it. (It tracks changes so you could tell if Doug erased Amy’s signup.) And of course all the edits are in one “wave” so no inbox flooding.

The challenge for Google, I think, will be interoperability. What happens when only 5% of your social/business network uses Google wave. Does each edit of a wave with MS Outlook user flood the inboxes of the outside users? Is Wave worthless to you if only you use it?

Google appears to be trying to solve the adoption problem by having Wave appear on public sites like blogs where comments become wave-y. That should help non-adopters see the benefits of wave without changing their behavior. I also think people who (like me) have their gmail window open all day will quickly adopt wave as their inbox and gradually utilize its more advanced features.

Of course, all this assumes that Wave lives up to its hype.

You can read Enjanerd’s take on the 2009 WaPo Hunt here: great fun had by all. Yesterday, Chu and yours truly extended one puzzle’s theme. We conversed over supper (at Jaleo) sans the second banned letter of Gene’s Donny Sobel essay. The largest challenge was our confabs to the servers, where we were usually unsuccessful. (You try to order food and use only four [and a half] vowels in your vocabulary!) When we engaged each other, however, our speech generally followed the rules of our game. (Proper names were also troublesome.) Perhaps others around us observed our sentences’ odd rhythms, but we hardly cared. Truly a cool endeavor, but one we probably won’t repeat often.

Before I leave for Jordan/Egypt tomorrow, I better post the pics from my last adventure: the Obama Inauguration! Here’s my story:

The night before the big day, Chu and I attend a party where the subject of “how to get on the Mall” comes up. Anne mentions that given the location of Chu’s apartment (north of Pennsylvania Ave) crossing the parade route might be tricky. But we look at WaPo’s map and see that there’s a “pedestrian crossover” right my Archives-Memorial. So no problem; but, just in case we decide to wake up earlier…

…at the nearly-inhuman hour of 5:15am. CNN already shows people streaming onto the mall. We head out by 5:50, and are at the 7th and D checkpoint by 6:10am. Supposedly, the checkpoints open at 8am and while there is a massive crowd ahead of us, it’s not too bad. Well, 8am comes and goes and nothing happens. We get news that a water main break had delayed our entrance. (Thanks, DC government!) At 9am, the gates finally open, to much cheering, but people quickly realize that there just aren’t enough guards to check people! Imagine 2,000 people trying to go through 4 airport-security lines. It takes a while. And we’re getting word from Anne, who woke up much later but smartly avoided Pennsylvania avenue, that she’s on the mall no problem, without even being searched by security! It’s pretty clear that despite all of these people waiting at 7th and D to get on the Mall that this is really a parade checkpoint (a distinction no one seems to have deemed worthy to tell us citizens). So at about 9:20 we bail…or try to. By this point, we’re packed in like sardines, and even exiting to the west is really difficult. People have gotten so frustrated that they think that we’re trying to cut them even though we’re moving away from the front of the line. I can only imagine how much trouble there would have been if it had actually been cold instead of the balmy 35 degrees. Anyway, we finally get out and start heading north (away from the mall), then west (parallel to the mall) as quickly as possible.

Avoiding the white house mess, we start heading south at 19th street. And now that I can actually start to enjoy the day, I start taking pictures. We get on the mall with relative ease, and stop on the hill on the Capitol side of the Washington monument. Yes, this is far away from the action, but we wanted to be able to exit the Mall easily as well. And we had a nice view of a jumbotron. We arrived on the Mall around 10am, as they were wrapping up a replay of the Lincolm Memorial concert.

We were all ready for the inauguration ceremony to begin…but then, nothing happened. The procession of elected (and unelected, and formerly elected, and appointed) officials took forever. They didn’t start speaking until around 11:45pm, which made me wonder how they were going to swear Obama in at noon?! The actual inauguration program was incredibly short, so pretty soon we had…

President Obama!

We got home so smoothly that we had turned on the TV to see that Obama’s congressional lunch hadn’t even started yet. (They were quite behind schedule!) After a relaxing afternoon, we got all dolled up for two unofficial galas: the Pennsylvania State Society Gala and the Google party. On our way to the parties, we took the Metro — I always love seeing the tuxes and evening gowns on mass transit:

The Pennsylvania Gala, at the Ritz Carlton was fairly fancy. Senator Spector gave a standard speech, and then Sharon Stone stepped up to the podium for the highlight of the evening. She gave one of the most incoherent and slightly drunken speeches I’ve ever heard. When the audience started snickering out her, she literally “Shhh”ed the crowd (multiple times!) and said “Don’t make me come out there!”

The Google party was much “hipper”. The dance floor was packed. They had cool exhibits on the walls. Celebritties were plentiful (though we didn’t attempt to speak to any of them): Meryl Streep, Sen. Kerry, Ben Affleck. The best part was Wii Bowling! Although Chu and I were beaten my two more experienced young ladies, the Wii served as a great way to meet people without forced mingling. Oh, how I love Google.

And that was it! Hope around 12:30am, January 21, i.e., the first day of the new administration!