As an addendum to my attack on Anthony Lane, let me link to this example of a fairly valid nit to pick. I cannot think of a good reason not to change Luke's last name when "hiding" him. Given how easily Obi-Wan relinquishes the quasi-history of Anakin Skywalker, I can only suspect that Obi-Wan wanted to make sure that Luke would be "found" before too long, would reemerge and save the galaxy, &c. Giving him a name that will raise questions about his past might help do that, and make sure that the New Hope of the rebellion doesn't spend his entire life farming moisture as a schlubb on Tattooine.

There is no connection other than the fact that they share a blog, but Professor Gary Lawson also has a guest-post at the Right Coast defending (with the early Republicans) the right to impeach judges whose opinions one finds egregiously wrong. I remember thinking it odd when somebody pointed out that while police officers enjoy only qualified sovereign immunity for unconstitutional acts they commit on the job, judges sitting in their chambers get totally immunity for egregious judicial rulings, no matter how counter-constitutional and disastrous. This isn't to say I agree with Professor Lawson, but I do think it should be an open question why one ought to compound that immunity to liability with immunity to Congressional supervision too.

Julian Sanchez asks for five books that I am vaguely embarrassed not to have read. I am ashamed of very little where reading material is concerned. I am promiscuous, moody, neglectful, but fundamentally addicted. But I am sure I can come up with five books it causes me a mild twinge of embarrassment or social disapproval not to have read, and perversely enough, I will admit it here.

Watership Down: The book was recommended to me by two trusted bloggers; I've checked it out from the library twice; I almost bought it at a used bookstore but forgot the author's name. Nonetheless, I've never finished it, or even made significant headway. This isn't because I didn't like it, or even because I got bored. I just, sort of, didn't happen to find myself picking it up and reading it. I am also vaguely embarrassed that my books seems to choose me more often than the other way round.

Anarchy, State, Utopia: I'm not so much embarrassed not to have read this as I am embarrassed that I didn't even know whether I had read it or not until I went to check my booklist. I feigned familiarity with enough of it to assign it and lead discussion for a reading group this semester, and I have certainly read nontrivial bits and pieces of it, but at this point, I can't even remember which ones. I was the one guy in Hum 132 who thought Philosophical Explanations was an incomparably deeper book.

The Return of the King: The vague embarrassment pretty much describes itself. I promised a friend, sometime in middle school, that I would read one book on his recommendation if he would read The Three Musketeers. He fulfilled his part of the bargain (and has now even read Louise de la Valliere, which I couldn't manage). I welched.
A Treatise on Human Nature or An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I'm embarrassed to say that if I ever were going to catch up on my Hume, I don't know where I'm supposed to start.

Incidentally, the obsessed will notice that Jacob Levy appears in Julian's comments to reveal, inter alia, that he has never read the Iliad.

Who's next? I will pick a different crew than I did last time. Phoebe? Amber? Co-bloggers?

UPDATE: I notice now that I overlap (on Utopia) with Will Wilkinson and on Hume with Matt Yglesias.

Today was the first day I went in to lab formally. But before all that, at seven in the morning, I thought it would be a good idea to pick up some quadrille paper (surprisingly, the cheapest the drug store had) for notes on whatever Heaven deemed I should come across, and as per my true character, suffered a minor existential crisis while I was at it:

My graph paper has two-fold degeneracy with respect to rotation in three dimensions. What a nightmare: imagine taking a sheet off of the pad of graph paper, and that the sheet is such that there are three holes evenly spaced along the left edge, and the lines that mark the quadrille, on both sides of the sheet, are even with respect to the edge of the paper on all four sides. There are exactly two rotations I can make to the sheet in three dimensions such that it looks precisely the same. Students of quantum mechanics have long been bedfellows with this flavor of hell: two rotations, two-fold degeneracy.

But thank God for those three holes on the left. Suppose there were none: the problem balloons up to four equivalent states (the pad was roughly 8.5x11), four-fold degeneracy. Imagine now that the sheet of paper was, in fact, not rectangular, but square: eight fold degeneracy. And now, consider if the paper were, in fact, not square, but round!

These are the demons that haunt me late at night.

It's useful to note, however, that this wouldn't be a problem if I were a good mathematician. Mathematicians, as far as I can tell, do the only thing that a reasonable individual can think to do: not care. They have fancier names for this sort of thing: modulo, or congruence. That is to say, modulo three, four and seven really are pretty much the same number because the leave the same remainder when divided by three. Thus, my pragmatic math friends (and even the not-so-pragmatic ones, I suppose) would roll their eyes, sigh the sigh they find themselves heaving all too often, and say "Sudeep, it's the same thing modulo rotation."

I, of course, would blatantly miss the point, and point out that mathematicians, while clever enough to come up with tools (yea, entire field of mathematics) to magick this whining pain at the back of my mind out of consideration, are indeed not at all biologists.

I've written about this before, how it's murder for the crystallographers out there if you're a protein who insists on repeating yourself. But it's not restricted to being a crystallographer. You'll have to be a fairly cunning geneticist if you're planning on solving the problem with redundancy (degeneracy, if you will) in gene function. This is, of course, all to say the following: suppose a cell turns red at a certain time of day, and you want to know what gene in the genome of the cell makes it turn red at this time of day, so you go ahead and systematically delete all the genes in the cell's genome one at a time (you'd like to get it down to one gene). This is a perfectly fine approach if you've reason to believe that there's only one that's responsible for this function. Suppose, in actuality, that there are two genes that do precisely the same thing -- you would have to delete both in order to get a cell that doesn't change color. Thus, if you'd have to do n deletions to get every gene in the genome, you'd be required to do n*(n-1) deletions (n-1 deletions in the background of each of the n original deletions) to get both genes deleted (you don't know which two genes they are). The list grows even more three-fold degeneracy, four-fold, &c, keeping in mind that a generous estimate for a eukaryotic genome is on the order of thousands of genes. There's no generalizable, clean solution to this kind of mess.

…not to mention mapping the genome. But that’s another mess entirely.

But I don’t mean to sound elitist in the respect: clearly, repetition is a nightmare, not just for physicists, biologists, and the denial-loving mathematicians in the crowd. Young adolescents know the joys of hearing a lecture again and again over, people on a bad date will realize with a startle the painful awkwardness of a precise conversation revisited. Indeed, even a bowl of petunias may or may not have something to say about things like these. And of course, anyone who's tried to memorize villanelles, various and sundry rondos, or sing songs about Jesus remembering why you’re not as big a schlub as he thinks you may be (particularly if Seussmayr has anything to say about it) will probably recognize the pang of panic upon repeating something that sounds oddly familiar one more time than what sounds reasonable, looping onwards and upwards into performance oblivion, over, and over again.

Those who haven’t, of course, should try.

As I am at work, I'd actually like to make sure that my employers understand that anything posted on this blog that is potentially offensive (to the undertrained palate, say, or the rare soul with a deep antipathy to Nabokov) is directly attributable neither to Will's list of employers, lovers, readers, or cohabitants nor to the authors, but to small and somewhat vicious wood elves.

Before starting work today it occurs to me to make the requisite disclaimer. The views of the authors of this blog are just that-- the respective views of the authors; they should not be attributed to those who study with, live with, love, or employ them.

Luigi Vitrone's Pastabilities - I so desperately wanted to like Pastabilities restaurant, in Wilmington's obviously shrinking Little Italy. The owner and chef, an affable looking native of Brooklyn, spent his time alternatively in front of his stove and talking to the guests. The ingredients were good and honest - my linguine puttanesca boasted home made pasta complemented by tart capers and sweet pancetta, while a dish of eggplants was smothered in milky, mild, mozzarella. Alas for good intentions. The tasty pastas were far too heavily sauced, good ingredients or not - home made pasta especially, it seems to me, can't stand up to anything more than a light salad dressing like coating. And in part because of Wilmington's utterly baffling lack of people out and about, some parts of the meal were not as fresh as they could have been. Unfortunately, for example, parmesan loses its savour even minutes after being grated. The cheese pastabilities offered, however, counted its freedom from solidity in days rather than minutes, picking up unwelcome flavours from the fridge all the while. I can't say I had a bad meal here. But it wasn't at all what it could have been, given Mr. Vitrone's evident skill and taste. Actually, I couldn't help thinking that if only the man had some customers to cook for, things might turn out better. But he doesn't. So they don't.

Deep Blue - Apparently, anyone eating out in Wilmington on an expense account eventually gets taken to Deep Blue. Since I was lucky enough to be dining with a law firm, I made my own trip to the fish specialist on a relatively busy Wednesday lunch. I can't say that there was anything disappointing, particularly, about the meal. The rockfish on offer was obviously fresh, my grilled octopus a fulsome bite, and a dessert of chocolate and peanut butter torte indulgent. But one could never quite shake the feeling that Deep Blue's cuisine was a sort of slightly shoddy fascimile of already dubious trendy New York cooking - rather like what you get when you make a copy on an older Xerox. That sweet torte, for example, was delicious until you realized that there was no decorous way through the overly thick dark chocolate layer that seperated the peanut butter from the ganache below - since I no longer feel any need to walk on eggshells around law firms, I drove through the formidable obstacle with a swift stab of a fork, but one wonders what someone less gluttonous or with more to lose might have done. And while I've heard of dousing finished dishes with spicy, green olive oil, I've never quite seen as much deployed as was splashed on the already buttery mashed potato bed for the fish. It turns out that generosity is not always the way forward. You kind of hope that amid all this clumsy mimicry, Deep Blue would have made the same slips when it came to the price. And yet, mysteriously enough, there the New York analogy was quite perfect. In any case, I'm sure Wilmingtonians, as I'll be proud to be for a year, are happy to have Deep Blue around. But they, and I, could be happier.