Since the day after the US presidential election, I've been boring anyone who would
listen with a discussion of the elections of 1824, 1876 and 1888.
2000.12.19
In Israel I got to hook up with a couple of old friends. Anat
Canning took me out to eat in Jaffa
last Sunday night, and one evening I had pizza at home with
Ronit
Strahilevitz and her husband Nir.
I also did a tour of Jerusalem, against my wife's direct orders.
Very interesting. Of course, because of the current mess I didn't
get to see any Muslim sites, but because it was a Friday during
the month of Ramadan, I wouldn't have been allowed in the Muslim
quarter anyway.
Slate: Why
the Fuss Over Condi Rice?.
"I leave you, finally, with the case of Poland.
Also heavily Catholic-I believe the figure
hovers around 99 percent-and also very
traditional, Poland is rarely thought of as a
country notable for its feminist traditions. Yet
at one point this year, Poland, which has
already had a female prime minister, had a
woman as its chief central banker (the
equivalent of the Federal Reserve chairman); a
Protestant for a prime minister (until his
appointment, I didn't even know there were
Polish Protestants); and a Jewish foreign
minister. The Jewish foreign minister,
Bronislaw Geremek, has since resigned, in the
wake of the collapse of the ruling coalition, but
this week was elected chairman of his political
party, a position that may give him another
shot at high office. In the course of a rather
tough leadership battle, the issue of his religion
did not arise.
"Contrast that to Joe Lieberman's appointment
as Gore's running mate, widely hailed by
Americans as indicative of American
tolerance, talked about endlessly as some kind
of breakthrough: If we still have to make such
a fuss over these things, doesn't that show
how far we have to go?"
2000.12.14
Wall Street Journal: How
the Two Parties Turned Into the Coke And Pepsi of Politics.
"[The 2000 election campaign] is also a story of a new kind of
perfection: a political marketplace that more than ever holds the
nation's major parties in a state of equilibrium. The two
campaigns and their parties raised nearly $1 billion for television
advertising, stump appearances, ever-more accurate
tracking polls, focus groups and direct mail. In return,
they became the Coke and Pepsi of politics,
understanding their market so perfectly that they
each captured precisely half of it."
Now, just a minute! Look at this item in Slate's Today's
Papers:
"An inside WP story casts an interesting light on the recent stress
by the Supreme Court and others on the notion of a December 12th
deadline for presidential elector selection. It reports that as of
the end of that day, only 29 states and Washington, D.C. had
certified their elector slates. The reason the paper gets from the
federal officials in charge of such matters? The real deadline,
they say, is December 18th."
2000.12.11
Science News: Chalk reveals
greatest underwater landslide.
"A chunk of a giant comet or asteroid slammed into Mexico's Yucatan
peninsula about 65 million years ago, setting off earthquakes with
magnitudes estimated at 10 to 13. The seismic shock waves generated
meter-high vibrations in Earth's crust all along the east coast of North
America.
"New research indicates that this shaking sent sediment from shallow
waters sliding off the continental shelf. Once the ooze settled, it may
have blanketed a region as large as 3.9 million square kilometers on the
deep ocean floor-an area more than twice the size of Alaska."
2000.12.05
In October I wrote a terribly irreverent piece on
Jack Kilby when he won the Nobel. Here's a more respectful write-up:
Physics Today: Physics Nobel Prize Honors Roots of Information Age.
"The strong push for the miniaturization of electronics motivated Kilby to join TI in
the summer of 1958. His first few months there are now the stuff of legend. As
a new employee, Kilby could not take vacation that summer, and so he looked
for a project to work on. `I had looked at the alternate miniaturization schemes
that were around at that time,' recalls Kilby, `and I concluded that the best thing
TI could make was semiconductors.' His idea: Use semiconductors not just for
transistors and diodes, but also for resistors and capacitors, putting everything on
the same substrate. The bulk resistivity of the semiconductor and its
diffusion-doped layers could be exploited for fabricating resistors; p-n junctions
could provide capacitance. By September, Kilby had made working devices--a
phase-shift oscillator and a flip-flop--from available blocks of germanium, and
within a few months had made ICs from silicon."
Physics Today: The Accelerating
Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty
of the Cosmos.
"One of the most surprising recent results from observational
cosmology is the evidence that the expansion of the
universe is accelerating. If gravity were the only force
acting to alter the expansion rate, then the universe would
be expected to be decelerating or, in the extreme case of a
universe with essentially zero mass, expanding at a constant
rate. Acceleration implies that the cosmological constant
postulated and then discarded by Einstein is in fact not zero."
2000.12.03
I find most of the "fight for the presidency" news pretty boring, except for the
stuff dealing with constitutional law:
LA Times: Scalia
Offers New Theory.
"`Stepping back from the technicalities, [Supreme Court Justice] Scalia is saying that
there's an anti-democratic thrust to Article II of the
Constitution,' said professor Alexander Keyssar...
"This section of the original Constitution gives power to the
state legislatures and the electoral college, `and, in effect, it
leaves out the people. If you follow the logic through, the
implication is we have no guarantee of a right to vote in
presidential elections, which is astonishing,' Keyssar said."
Actually, this was always my understanding of the U.S. Constitution, and I
certainly don't consider myself to be "aggressively conservative."
For some historical context, check out the election of 1824.
