25 January 2011

What I did today: I presented a proof that the Borel sets are measurable. This is part of the “stuff I should have learned in graduate school” project; it is amazing that I was so dense back then.

I’ll have more to write about on that blog; I’ll have some more theoretical analysis stuff and some thoughts on how students learn.

Reading Here is yet another “what constitutes a species” problem post, which includes a cool photo of an exotic leopard.

Politics
Some are tired of Sarah Palin. I am not. Frankly, I think she represents what most current Republicans stand for; therefore I hope she wins the 2012 GOP nomination and squares off against President Obama. Leonard Pitts explains why I hope this (and no, it isn’t the “because she will be easy to beat” reason). Here is a part of it:

Mrs. Palin, if Obama is an idiot for reading a prepared speech off a teleprompter, what are you for reading notes you’ve inked on your hand like a school kid who failed to study for the big test?

In the Fox interview, you scored Obama for supposedly expecting Americans to “sit down and shut up” and accept his policies. But when asked when the president has ever said that, you couldn’t answer. Obama, you sputtered, has just been condescending with his “general persona.”

I found that a telling moment. See, ultimately what you represent is not conservatism. Heck, I suspect that somewhere, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are spinning like helicopter rotors at the very idea.

No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and persistently, a belief in us that y’all just can’t trust nobody who acts too smart or talks too good — in other words, somebody whose “general persona” indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their vocabularies.

I don’t mock those people. They are my parents, my family elders, members of my childhood church. I honor their native good sense, what mom called “mother wit.” But if it is insulting to condescend to them, it is equally insulting to mythologize them.

More to the point, something is wrong when we celebrate mental mediocrity like yours under the misapprehension that competence or, God forbid, intelligence, makes a person one of those “elites” — that’s a curse word now — lacking authenticity, compassion and common sense.

So no, this is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That’s why I’d welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race.

Or, put another way: I want this country to decide if “average is good enough”.