Halloween

The wife and I are invited to a Halloween party tonight. There will likely be dancing. 

My dancing career was quite short. In high school and college I didn't dance for fear of looking like a fool. People pointed out that it didn't really matter how anyone looked and I was missing out on a lot of fun. I was unconvinced. 

In one of my first jobs out of college I went on a pub crawl with a bunch of coworkers many of whom were attractive older (than me) married women. We ended up in a bar dark enough so you couldn't really see anyone else. Bizarre Love Triangle was being pumped onto the crowded dance floor. Three of these women came over to where I was standing and without negotiation dragged me onto the dance floor and began dancing. The sense of outright terror I would have normally felt was muted by the alcohol. Bizarre Love Triangle is one of those songs that has zip in the way of musical subtlety -- it is impossible not to understand how to move one's body in time with the music. Aside from being married, the women around me were senior to me at work (and in many cases way smarter.) I felt no need to impress anyone. In a single moment I felt years of repression fall away. I was free! I was flying! I was dancing!

For several years I would go dancing regularly, sometimes at parties, but on several occasions going out to a club with a group of friends. I always took the necessary safety precaution of getting drunk first. Those were good years and I allowed myself to believe that I could dance. 

At some point I was in a well lit not-so-crowded bar with one of my brothers. I recall that we were dancing with two girls who didn't seem to want to talk with us after the music stopped. I hadn't really felt the music to be honest. Walking home from the bar my brother turned to me and said, "What was that?" 

"What was what?"

"That arrhythmic lurching thing you did? Did you pull a hamstring? People were just staring at you." 

At that point I underwent a spiritual and emotional contraction so rapid that I felt it physically. My joints lost substantial range of motion, my muscles became slow and sludgy. I felt like I had put on a dark heavy cloak of humiliation.  Ever since then most attempts at dancing have been abortive unpleasant endeavors. Some part of my brain screams "No!" exactly out of sync with the music. My body feels slow, oversized, awkward and out of place. The music always too complicated for me to keep up with. The loss isn't that I don't get to do something I used to love doing, but that watching other people dance makes me realize that I've allowed fear to reclaim a place in my psyche. 

In addition all I can think of are terrible, terrible costume ideas. So far I've got: Nevada, porridge, Ari Fleischer and homotopy invariance.

Surely you can't be serious.

Warning: Political Rant.

One of the items in the McCain Campaign RSS feed was a link to this opinion piece from the Washington Post decrying the possibility of the Democrats sweeping all three branches of government in the upcoming election. Right, because we all know how badly things went when there was a single party controlling all three branches of government from 2002 to 2006. 

Certain points in the article depend on what you accept as true. For example the article asserts that "green" tax structures and regulations will be enacted. If, like me, you believe concerns raised by environmental scientists are legitimate, then tax structures and regulations aimed at getting people and businesses to limit greenhouse gas emission are good things. 

Other points in the article seem to simply ignore the past eight years. For example the article presents concerns about raising taxes. Given that the country is ten trillion dollars in debt -- roughly $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country -- I don't see how the next president could not raise taxes regardless of party affiliation. The article also voices concerns about the possible expansion of government.  Hello? Department of Homeland Security? Illegal NSA wiretaps? 

If you wanted fiscal responsibility and small government, was voting Republican in the last two presidential elections the right thing to do? No, it wasn't. And I don't think it is the right thing to do this election either. 

I'm sure you've all seen this already.

Congratulations, you've been pre-approved!

If one were to attempt to discern the state of the world by reading my mail instead of, say, newspapers, one would quickly conclude that the economy is positively bursting with health, so much so that  sound business plans include lending a relatively poor graduate student enough cash for him to live the rest of his days like a king  in a place not subject to extradition treaties with the US.

Yesterday I went through the accumulated junk mail on my desk and marveled at the credit card offers. They all start off by congratulating me for not being up to my eyeballs in debt. Then they shift to a conspiratorial tone, "We can tell you aren't part of the hoi polloi so for a short time we're prepared to offer you a pre-approved super-deluxe debt maximizer with an initial limit set to 2.5 million dollars. Act now!" The irony is that the reason I'm such an appealing customer is that I haven't already signed up for the super-deluxe debt maximizer. The offers always go to the shredder, although I am tempted to sign up and include the following letter with my application.

Dear Sir or Madam:

Your offer comes at a most crucial moment for me. I have had trouble making my mortgage payments recently and am worried that I shall default. An infusion of 2.5 million dollars will ensure that I pay off my mortgage in full, thus allowing me to stabilize my financial situation, and pay off your generous loan of 2.5 million dollars

Is it true that if my house is paid off I wont lose it if I enter bankruptcy?

Sincerely 

- Questionable Borrower

A crude examination of the economy

It is amazing to watch the S&P 500 and Dow dive in value -- breathtaking really. As a kid someone once told me that owning stock in a company was like owning a piece of the company, but that the stock price reflected the perceived value of the company.  If this is the case, then everyone has perceived that the value of the 500 largest companies has dropped substantially in the last week. But no one would say that the average worker has suddenly become less skilled or that it was an extremely bad week for factory equipment rusting. The obvious conclusion is that the price of stock is determined at least as much by the anticipated price of the stock in the future, and that people invested not because they thought the S&P (for example) was of value, but because they thought investing would make them wealthier. In this naive view, one would anticipate that the demand for places to invest money alone drove up prices of stock.  It makes me think of the Golgafrinchams walking around with leaves stuffed in their track suits because they decided leaves were of value. 

Even though everyone seems to be changing their mind about the value of the stock, the value of the underlying companies is still more or less the same, right? At the end of the Cryptonomicon one of Neil Stephenson's characters argues quite persuasively that wealth was misunderstood. Real wealth was not gold or jewels, but people themselves. 

Title

After lunch today I walked into a Starbucks on campus and bought a cookie and a tall coffee. As I left, I walked past a student with her back to me. Over her shoulder I saw the PowerPoint presentation she was writing. In that typical huge PowerPoint font that is readable from ten feet away I saw the title of the slide -- "Consequences of Obama winning the election". The first bullet point was "Rise of the left party". It disturbed me that this bullet point was obvious and devoid of meaning unless you have a knee-jerk view of "the left party". One of my jobs is to educate undergraduates and my goals are twofold. Professionally I am responsible for helping them learn calculus. Personally I want them to develop sufficient analytical skills to form defensible positions on the issues that affect the world we live in. In particular I want them to vote this November and to choose a candidate based on these positions rather than choose based on knee-jerk views of political parties.