In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

This is an unusual time for music, as for everything else.  Since large gatherings are basically a no-go, concerts and tours have ceased.  How much this matters to any particular music fan will vary.  If your musical tastes lean towards the pop flavor of the month, with big stage shows and backup dancers and whatnot... um, you know whose blog this is, right?  You know I'm a bona fide hipster, right?  Like, I look down on the musical tastes of other hipsters for being too "pop."  That's how hipster I am. Anyway, are you old enough to remember the great music industry freak-out over Napster?  Napster was the first major file sharing protocol that allowed people to exchange mp3 files of unlistenable audio quality.  (See?  Hipster.)  The music industry decided this was the end of everything.  'Cuz, I guess when I was a kid, going to the library, checking out a record and dubbing it to an audio cassette was totally different.  Sl...

The Devil Makes Three, "Chained To The Couch," from their self-titled album.

You may notice a recurring theme here.  There is a mathematical distinction between your individual risk regarding coronavirus, and the current expectation of societal damage.  Your reaction, as a rational  individual, should be tempered by that mathematical distinction.  To the degree that it is not, you are not reacting rationally.  See the Buchler-Gekko rule, and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.  Put more simply, calm down.  That doesn't mean this isn't very, very bad, but at an individual  level, calm down.  The distinction is a difficult one, unless you are accustomed to thinking in economic terms and dealing with paradoxes like the collective action problem, the tragedy of the commons, problems of preference aggregation like Arrow's impossibility theorem, and all that kinda wacky stuff with which I spend my professional life.  It is, however, necessary. Anyway.  Rationality amid a crisis is hard.  It is vital....

Chris Whitley, "Alien."  This is a live version, accompanied by his daughter, Trixie.  Chris has been gone for a while, but since this was recorded, Trixie has turned into one of the bright, shining stars on the music scene.  Sometimes, the child of a musical genius doesn't quite live up to the parent.  Sometimes, the child becomes something else entirely.  Trixie has become a true artist and visionary.

OK, it's time.  Jonas Hellborg & Shawn Lane, with Jeff Sipe, "The House Stands Still:  In The House," from Zenhouse .  I was going to have to post this sometime.  Let's just get it up today.

The end scene from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight  may be a bit overplayed at this point, but it really was a good movie.  Basically, Batman lets himself take the fall for a bunch of chaos, and lets the public image of Harvey Dent stand because Gotham needed that image rather than what Dent became-- Twoface.  Batman served the greater good by letting himself be seen as the villain.  Hated, hunted and ultimately sent into isolation and despair because the alternative was the dismantling of the image of Harvey Dent, and with that, everything that Dent had accomplished, and everything that his image could accomplish.  As someone who detests lies, I have my issues with the resolution, but there is something interesting and important about Batman's decision at the end of The Dark Knight .  He doesn't care at all how he is seen.  He doesn't care about glory or public fealty.  He wants what is best, and he is willing to be despised as the villain, k...

Multiply this out:  1/3 probability of infection with a 2% mortality rate.  That's a 0.67% chance of dying.  For any individual, low, but for any set of sufficient size, the probability of at least one death gets high.  How high?  Do the math.  Any one person's probability of survival, baseline, is 1-(.02)(1/3)=.9933.  Probability of zero deaths with 104 people?  Raise that to the 104th power.  Sorry, my blog editor doesn't have an equation editor.  Probability of zero deaths drops below .5 at 104 people. What prompts this?  Rand Paul tested positive for coronavirus.  More Senators will, and if you do the math-- 100 Senators, odds are close to 50/50 that at least one Senator will die.  Actually, that's just baseline.  Senators are old.  Their odds of dying, given infection, are higher than 2%, so Senators will die.  House?  435.  If we stuck with a 1/3 infection rate and 2% mortality rate, the pr...

As promised, I'm continuing with some odd selections for the science fiction posts amid the coronavirus pandemic.  Today, we'll have a look at a particularly unusual choice.  John Scalzi is one of the most prominent authors in science fiction today, but for a discussion of a pandemic, his obvious books would be the Lock-In  series.  Those are good books, and in fact, I have assigned the first book in that series to my students when doing my science fiction thing.  I recommend those books, but I have something else in mind for today. Scalzi's current trilogy-- The Collapsing Empire , followed by The Consuming Fire , and we are awaiting the release of The Last Emperox -- is a distant future space opera about, well, an empire that is collapsing.  Here's the deal.  The empire in question is called "The Interdependency."  It spans a bunch of systems that are mostly space stations and domes on otherwise uninhabitable rocks, and really only one inhabit...

Abigail Washburn, "Chains," from City of Refuge .

Amid the COVID-19 spread and associated economic catastrophe, it may be easy to dismiss this, but it matters.  Why?  Coronavirus dramatically changed the 2020 election.  Trump was headed for an easy second term, either through legitimate or illegitimate means.  Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee (go away , Sanders), and Trump's political position is now deeply imperiled.  And bluntly put, Biden is old.  Whomever he selects has a high likelihood of taking the oath of office before 2024.  This matters. Back in October of 2019, I wrote a veepstakes post, because why not ?  I posed the following rule.  No matter who the eventual nominee was, that nominee would never select a white male.  From the vantage point of October, 2019, putting it in those stark terms could have come across as rather crass.  And yet, this week, Joe Biden announced that his vice presidential nominee will be a woman.  Nothing coded, no wink-wink-nudge...

Great American Taxi, "Tough Job," from Reckless Habits .

It may be a bit early for this, but I'm going to post it sometime.  I may as well post it today.  Miles Davis, "Madness," from Nefertiti .

I guess... I'm not voting this morning.  As you no doubt know, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine sought a postponement for today's primary due to COVID-19, amid many other measures currently being taken to promote social distancing.  However, the judge ruled against postponement, and DeWine is doing it anyway. I'll leave it to others to comment on the epidemiology here, as well as the law.  For legal matters, as always, turn to Election Law Blog .  The answer is vote-by-mail.  It works, but the transition is hard. What is more concerning, though, is the fact that the postponement is occurring in violation of a court order.  There are no good answers here.  Nevertheless, anyone worried about November, and a power grab, should be worried about a postponement that occurs in violation of a court order.  DeWine is, in my assessment, acting in good faith.  I really don't like this precedent, though.  If election administration doesn't get its act ...

Are you following business news?  I don't mean the stock market.  (Today).  Supply chains.  They are facing serious disruption.  This is a big deal.  This weekend, I'll write about John Scalzi's "Interdependency" trilogy.  Scalzi is a really good writer, and even his lesser books are a lot of fun.  My default recommendation right now might be Lock-In , which is about the world after a pandemic.  I'll probably do a post about that in the not-too-distant future, and I have assigned that book to my students.  For this weekend, though, I have some things to say about his current trilogy.  It is about an interstellar empire connected by "The Flow," which is like a hyperspace river system, or... kind of.  It's weird.  Anyway, what happens when The Flow starts to collapse?  If every system within The Interdependency is... interdependent, and those supply chains break down, badness ensues. Weekend comments forthcoming....

As promised, this morning we'll have a look at a book that isn't normally one I would cover.  Feed , by Mira Grant (really, Seanan McGuire), was the first in a trilogy of books that were fun, but didn't really nail everything, and leaned a bit too much into witty banter to cover for some sloppy writing.  Nevertheless, in some ways, the first book is a good book to recommend for this particular moment in time. It's about society after the zombie apocalypse.  It's about the normalization of the post-zombie apocalypse. And it takes place during a presidential primary. So here's the basic set-up.  Various medical unfortunateness...es?  The plural of "unfortunateness."  They happen.  There's a cure for cancer!  And... the common cold!  (Cue ironic commentary.)  When they combine, badness ensues.  Kellis-Amberlee is the resulting bug.  Zombies are the result.  Society sort of collapses, and part of that collapse is that in...

I promise, I didn't write about Feed  simply as an excuse to post Zappa today... but it would have been sufficient justification.  Frank Zappa, "Zomby Woof," from Over-nite Sensation .

Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in a while, your blog could miss something. Please, don't do the Ben Stein thing to me.  It wasn't funny the first time, and it certainly isn't funny now, after having listened to that "joke" for 34 years.  Stop it.  Seriously. Anyway.  Where was I?  Not too long ago, I was devoting virtual ink to posts about democratic backsliding, in the terminology of Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, along with presidential forecasting models, which seemed headed for a generic-R victory in 2020.  My conclusion?  A probable Trump reelection, and even if Trump lost, there would be court battles, votes thrown out on the flimsiest of "fraud" claims in order to keep him in office, and generally speaking, we weren't likely to be headed for a clean election. And now?  The country is a different place, even from a week ago.  The economy is in the process of shutting down.  I...

"Your Cheatin' Heart."  It is a classic.  Today, I'm going with a somewhat unusual take by one of the all-time great guitarists-- Martin Simpson, from Grinning In Your Face .

Doug Wamble, "The Bear and the Toad," from Bluestate .  The "bear" part, at least, is obvious.

For everything, a novel.  This weekend, I think it will be time to discuss Mira Grant's Feed , which is actually the first book in a trilogy, but I'll just give an overview of Feed , and the world, along with some commentary about what lessons we might take.  "Mira Grant" is actually a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, but whatever.  Anyway, Feed  is about a post-zombie apocalypse world in which everyone is cloistered in their homes, terrified of infection, and it takes place during a presidential primary.  And the main character is a blogger with delusions of significance. Hey!  I have, like, a real job, 'n stuff. Anyway, I'm not generally a fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, and there are many problems with Feed , but it seems worth discussing this weekend.  Coming soon, to an insignificant blog near you.

Sanders won't drop out.  Over at PredictIt , shares of a Sanders nomination are currently trading at 4 cents on the dollar.  One penny below... Hillary Clinton!  Seriously. In 2016, I analogized him to The Black Knight from Monty Python & The Holy Grail for his intellectually deficient inability to recognize that he has already lost.  It's over, and all he can do is bleed on Biden.  Which is ironic, since Biden is the one whose eye explodes on stage, but whatever. Anyway, here's this, while I avoid irritating tasks that attempt to eat up what passes for a professor's spring break.

Take a breath.  You don't need a mask, unless you are already ill and trying to avoid spreading it. The Buchler-Gekko Rule:  The point is, ladies and gentleman, that math, for lack of a better word, is good.  Math is right.  Math works.  Math clarifies, cuts through... See, also, the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear. I advise people to keep calm and do the math.  If I were a Brit, I'd say something about carrying on, but too many people are carryin' on crazily.  Try this. I don't like Kansas, so I'm going with CSNY.  I taught myself guitar listening to Stephen Stills. Anyway, my campus just shut down.  Now I get to learn how to set up on-line teaching.  Yay.  Then again, my commute time is going to be awesome, and the big question will be whether or not my cat attempts to give guest lectures.  Pay no attention to her, kids.  She refuses to keep up with the journals!  (I won't tell you what she does wit...

A deadly virus is spreading.  We don't know how large the death toll will be.  Let's deal with what matters.  Money.  Because you come to my blog for warmth and that touch of human kindness, right?  Just not the touching of one's face.  Stop that.  Now you want to touch your face, don't you? So, that stock market.  Crazy, right?  For reference, on February 19, the S&P was at 3386.  A couple of days later, it started the COVID Collapse.  Friday, it dropped to 2972.  That's a lot of money that disappeared.  And I do mean, "disappeared."  Nobody stole it.  It just vanished into everyone's imaginations.  We collectively decided that it simply doesn't exist. And since liberals hate money and think that money is EEEEVIL!!!, that must be a good thing, right?  Have fun trying to buy your groceries with hugs, particularly in the COVID-19 era. Anyway, there were also two pretty significant spikes. ...