Galactic Interactions

I’ll be joining the faculty of Quest University in Fall 2010

Posted on December 21st, 2009 — permalink

Last week, I flew out to Squamish, BC to interview for a faculty position at Quest University. Two days after I returned, they called me to offer me the job, and I accepted it. Next summer (July 2010), Alyson and I will be moving to Squamish, and starting next Fall, I’ll be a Tutor of Physics at Quest. As far as I can tell, this is my dream job.

Although there have been moments where I questioned this, I have long considered it my calling to teach at the college level at a small liberal arts college. Eight years ago, when the only offer I had was at a large research University, I thought I could make that work— and I almost did. Two and a half years ago, after the quashing of the notion that I could stay forever at a research University, I thought I was never going to be able to work at my true calling, and I took up a (enjoyable and rewarding) backup plan. Half a year ago, when booted out of my backup plan, I despaired that I would ever be able to do anything but “just make money”.

So why do I think Quest is my dream job? I sent out applications to 14 small colleges, 13 of which were in the US, a couple of months ago. I didn’t apply to large research universities at all this time around. However, I’m in that awkward position of being somebody who’s 13 years past his PhD and not a superstar. It’s hard for colleges to hire somebody like me because they have to figure out if they should evaluate me for tenure straightaway, and, crucially, because there is a tremendous oversupply of extremely capable and extremely well-resumed young physics PhDs out there that they can hire for less money. The competition is stiff, and since my realistic and non-superstar resume was competing with extrapolations from very high-end post-docs, I knew it was a long shot. However, even at the beginning, I could tell that Quest was a different sort of place from even most of the small liberal arts colleges. And, I believe it was some of those differences that both made the place so attractive to me and made me “hireable”.

The two single most important things about Quest are this. First, it’s a small liberal arts undergraduate college (enrollment currently in the 200’s, with a target of 600 to 800 in the next five years). (It turns out that while small, secular, independent liberal arts colleges are all over the place in the USA, Quest is unique in Canada.) Second, it’s a new college. Indeed, it’s only had students for three years, so nobody has graduated from there yet! What’s more, not only is it new and thus free of the notion that “we’ve always done things this way here”, but it was also deliberately founded with the best modern understanding of what really makes for a great undergraduate education.

Like Colorado College, Quest operates on the block plan. Students take only one class at a time, and they completely focus on it for three and a half weeks. I don’t have much direct experience with this myself (the closest I’ve been is teaching introductory astronomy over the course of five weeks at Vanderbilt during the Summer term), but I have talked to a number of people who find that they like this model of coursework far better than the traditional “scattered attention over a semester” model. And, given my own tendency to get into something and to want to hyperfocus on it, it appeals to me.

When I was sending out applications, I had to edit my “statement of teaching philosophy” a bit. Originally, I had a statement to the effect of “modern physics educational research has shown that straight lecturing is not an effective way to teach physics courses”. I realized that that statement might directly offend people on the committees that would be reading my applications, and stated it more cagily. (”Much recent research into physics and astronomy education has shown that the most effective use of class time comes when students actively engage the material.”) Quest, however, contained more or less the same original statement in their job advertisement. This was clearly a place that “gets it”. When I visited Quest, I was quite impressed. The faculty members I met with were dynamic and intelligent, and truly cared about undergraduate education as their primary creative endeavor. They were high on the institution, and they were high on their students. Indeed, I was also impressed with the students I met, both in the “sample class” I taught, and when I chatted with a few of them and some others afterwards during lunch. I would say that I was even more impressed by these students as a group than I was by the students at Pomona I met with when I applied there several years ago— previously, that was the group of students I’d met during job interviews who impressed me the most. (Of course, the most impressive undergraduate students I’ve worked with over the years include Jessica Hodges, James Schlaerth, Naved Mahmud, Jonathan Stricker, Andrew Collazzi, Anders Jensen, and Cameron Pittman… i.e. the ones who’ve done research with me!) (When I interviewed at Vanderbilt nine years ago, I met some graduate students, but I didn’t teach a “sample class”, nor did I meet any undergraduates.)

Quest also doesn’t do tenure. Many would view this as a disadvantage. And, indeed, I can fully appreciate the value of the perk of having a permanent assured job. But, I’ve been on the other end of tenure, and anybody who read my blog a few years ago knows that I suffered greatly because of it. A friend of mine once said that she didn’t know anybody who went through the tenure process without having it f–k them up severely. While many point to the “deadwood” problem as the “flaw” of tenure, David Helfand (the current president of Quest) said what I also think— that that problem is overblown, and is only something like a 10% effect. The real problems of tenure is that it limits academic freedom for pre-tenure people. I don’t know that that is such a severe problem in the sciences, but you can easily imagine how in any department the young, bright, and dynamic faculty may have to constantly censor themselves to avoid torquing off a powerful ego in their department. Heaven knows that I didn’t manage keep my mouth shut, and freely offended several senior professors in my department… and I still believe that had I received an NSF grant, I would have had no problem getting tenure at Vanderbilt, because there were enough other senior professors who agreed with the things I was saying. However, tenure did put tremendous stress and pressure on me, and that stress and despair undermined my research productivity my last few years at Vanderbilt. All in all, by the end, for me, the tenure system had nothing but negative effects while I was at Vanderbilt. As long as Quest does real faculty evaluations that really evaluate whether they are doing what they’re supposed to be doing well (and I believe that it will do this), I’m just as happy to be shut of the whole tenure system.

Indeed, I suspect the lack of tenure made it much easier for Quest to consider me than it would have for other colleges. They didn’t have to look at somebody 13 years out from his PhD with six years experience teaching at the University level and think about tenure clocks or any of that. I’m just one more contracted Tutor. (Oh, and, they call them Tutors there in order to emphasize that our role is not to “profess”, but to enable and aid the students in learning how to think and how to learn.)

A lot of colleges and Universities include a “writing across the curriculum” initiative. When I learned during my final interview that Quest is trying to start a “quantitative reasoning across the curriculum” initiative in addition to this, I almost fell over under the “this must be too good to be true” response. I’ve long bemoaned that Universities understand the value of writing while missing the equally important value of quantitative reasoning.

Because Quest is not only a new University, but a small University where faculty have no choice but to teach some courses outside of the “straight and narrow” of their fields, I am very sure I’ll be able not only to challenge myself by teaching some of their Foundation classes, but that I’ll be able to create new and interesting courses that might transcend what you’d fine at a “normal” Physics department. I’m not just thinking about an undergraduate fluid mechanics course (which one student at lunch asked for while I was visiting), but I may one day before long get to teach a class about the science found in Tom Stoppard’s plays…. It’s all opportunity, it’s all exciting future.

When I left Quest this last week, I felt that this was the place where I was supposed to be. It almost made me think that perhaps there was some Plan at work, that I taught at a research University for six years not because I went where I had the offer (instead of to the sort of place I thought I really wanted to teach), but because it was preparing me while Quest University was in the process of being created. (I don’t really believe that; if you are lucky, it’s not a mystical force, but it’s merely because, in the words of Spock, “random chance seems to have operated in [your] favor”.) I was very excited when they called me on the phone to offer me the job, and the only reason I didn’t accept it on the spot was that my wife was napping, and I did want to check in with her before accepting a job that was going to include a move to western Canada.

I still don’t know everything I’m going to be doing during the first half of 2010, but next Summer I’ll be moving to Squamish, and next fall I’ll be a Tutor in Physics at Quest University.

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“Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy” — archived on the web

Posted on December 15th, 2009 — permalink

I give regular talks in a series entitled “Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy” as part of MICA’s public events. These talks are in Second Life, so people from all over the place can come to them.

if you’ve missed them, and want to catch up on them, at the site above slides from most of my talks are archived, as well as MP3 files of the audio in many cases. However, there are now three of the talks online that have been recorded fully in video. Of course, it’s not the same as being there, since you can’t ask questions and interact, but it might give you a sense of what goes on at these things.

The first one is a talk about how we know that Dark Matter exists that I gave several months ago; this talk is online at PookyMedia.

More recently, Geo Meek has recorded my most two recent talks, and there is now a Dr. Knop Talks Astronomy channel at livestream. The two talks online there are one all about redshift (the Doppler shift, gravitational redshift, cosmological redshift), and my talk a few days ago about black hole misconceptions. Special thanks to Spike McPhee (aka Paradox Olbers) for supporting this latter effort!

Joe Bob Says Check It Out!

(Update: it looks like the black hole talk is not online at livestream yet, as of 2009-12-15 13:40. However, I believe it will be before too long.)

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The REAL Christmas Story— ART Production Dec 11-13

Posted on December 10th, 2009 — permalink

Come by and see Avatar Repertory Theater’s 2009 Christmas production, entitled The REAL Christmas Story. This production includes three short plays written by members of the troupe.

In The Christmas I Met Santa, we find out how one Christmas changed everything for one little boy. In that show, I have a non-speaking role, and others have lines… but I say more than anybody with lines. How can this be? Come and find out! In He Remembers It Well, a reporter sent on a banal Christmas assignment finds out that even the silliest of assignments can be quite interesting. In And It Was Christmas Day, YADF (Your Average Dysfunctional Family) provides the sort of catharsis you need in order to face your own family during the holidays….

The productions will be in Second Life at the George C. Dove Theater in Rockcliffe University’s region. Productions are on Friday at 5pm PST, Saturday at 3pm PST, and Sunday at 2pm PST. Remember that a Second Life account is free!

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Climategate is a tempest in a teapot, but it may lead to worst tempests

Posted on December 6th, 2009 — permalink

The Tennessean has been publishing numerous letters to the editor and editorial columns talking about how “climategate” supposedly shows that anthropogenic global warming is a fraud. It’s extremely frustrating. That conclusion can only be drawn from a deep misunderstanding about how science works and the language of scientists used in the e-mails, but sadly it seems that newspapers are interested more in presenting “both sides” than getting to the truth of it. Today, there is an egregious column from David Lipscomb professor Richard Grant repeats the same tired arguments global warming denialists have already been using, and completely misunderstands the impacts of the supposed revelations from the leaked University of East Anglia emails.

It’s very frustrating myself to watch this happen. The people who are trumpeting about this are ignorant about science. When I read the excerpts from the emails that are supposedly the smoking gun about climate change being a fraud, I do not see anything extremely alarming. What’s more, even if I did, the evidence for climate change has not come completely from the University of East Anglia; it has come from all over the place. If it hadn’t, scientists would not be accepting it as strongly as they do! And, yet, the newspaper coverage of this is covering the scandal, the controversy… it does not seek to illuminate the truth of the situation, to explain what is really going on. And, this of course lends fuel to the politicians who are exploiting global warming denialism for their own ends. (To be fair, there are also politicians who exploit the fact of human-caused global warming for their own ends! That doesn’t make the conclusions wrong, however.) It is sad to me to see so many in our population being manipulated in a way that will allow us as a society to act in ways that may very likely cause us tremendous pain in future decades.

Here is the text of a letter to the editor I wrote to the Tennessean in response. I don’t know if it will get published; I hope it does, of course, because many more people read the Tennessean letters to the editor than this blog.

The numerous letters and columns that have been written suggesting that “climategate” undermines conclusions about anthropogenic global warming are all getting it very wrong. There are two important points.

First, no matter what the researchers said when venting frustrations in private e-mail, their final actions in what data was published showed no misconduct. Nothing was suppressed, nothing was fudged. The impact of the supposedly revealing emails is vastly overstated by those who deny man-made global warming.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, even if we throw out all of the climate data and conclusions from the researchers in question, the conclusions still stand. This is an important point about how science works. Cold Fusion generated a lot of headlines in the 1980’s when first reported, but ultimately didn’t stand because no independent scientists could reproduce the results. With climate change, there are multiple independent teams who have data that all point to the same conclusions. Even if something were to cast doubt on conclusions of the University of East Anglia, that does not in any way affect the independent data of the USA’s NOAA, for example.

The climate change data is still robust. The leaked emails only show informal communication using the jargon scientists use, and normal human frustration with how obstinate so many seem to be against accepting the fact of man-made global warming. Given how science works, these emails do not in any way undermine those conclusions. It is only at our peril that we use these leaked emails to further political ends.

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The problem with lawyer-driven society in a nutshell

Posted on November 30th, 2009 — permalink

This post on Boing-Boing includes the following quote that summarizes the pathological extreme of lawyer-driven society, a pathological extreme that we see too often in our current society:

The reason given was that the potential liabilities involved haven’t been settled by a definitive SCOTUS ruling. Which is absolutely true, of course. Just as it is true that the risk of exploring the pyramids hasn’t been conclusively settled until we’ve proven that we won’t be attacked there by golden unicorns.

In my (admittedly limited) observations, corporate lawyers (which, I believe, represent the vast majority of legal work out there— far more than Perry Mason style courtroom lawyering) exist to do two things.

The first thing they do is try to write contracts and other similar things that grab absolutely as much control for their employer as possible. When dealing with other corporations, they have to battle other lawyers, but when dealing with individuals who can’t afford their own phalanx of lawyers, they usually write egregious things like “Terms of Service” on software and severance agreements that include terms nobody who believes in the principles of the United States should agree to, but that we all agree to as a matter of course all the time just because it’s become standard operating procedure.

The second, less sinister but just as harmful, thing that they do is sit around and play paranoid. They think of where their company might get into legal trouble, where there might be liabilities, and then they advise their company on policies that will hopefully avert any such potential liabilities. Here, they’re doing their job; they’re telling companies what could go wrong. The problem is, just as with our reaction to fears of terrorism, in our society we tend to hear about these things going wrong, and squeeze off all sorts of expression and creativity out of paranoia. Or, if sometimes those things do really go wrong, seemingly undermining my calling them “paranoia”, they don’t really evaluate the cost of the downsides of policies that stop that thing from going wrong again.

Yeah, lots of the things lots of us do, and lots of the things it would be really neat for companies to do, could potentially expose them to all sorts of liabilities. And, yeah, it’s useful to have lawyers around to tell them what the laws really are (since, alas, we live in a society where it takes years of training to understand the laws) and where things might go wrong. But then, sometimes, you have to be willing to take risks. Sometimes, you have to say, yeah, there’s no case law that says we’ll be safe if we do that, but let’s try it anyway because the potential benefits could be great.

Too often, though, we don’t do that.

Kind of odd for me as a not-risk-taker to be saying this, but I’ve seen this happen enough times that it just makes me sad that we’ve taken what should be a service— the advice of lawyers about the state of the law— and have turned it into a gigantic ballast that prevents us from flying.

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*Horrible* service from Sprint; receive text messages, risk getting signed up for additional billing.

Posted on October 31st, 2009 — permalink

I noticed on my Sprint cellphone bill that there was an additional $10/month charge for some mobile alert thingy. I believe it’s been there for a few months. This happened before, a year or so ago, and it lingered then; a different thing.

I called the Sprint service folks to get this removed and figure out what happened. Well, it turns out that if you receive a text message from one of these services, and you open it up, you might automatically get signed up for the service. Yes! That’s just ridiculous. I asked if that could be blocked, and the guy told me he could block all text messages. It turns out that there is no way to receive text messages without risking being signed up for random third party services just by opening that text message. He tried to disclaim any responsibility for Sprint for this, because it’s a third party, but of course Sprint is doing the billing for it (and I’m sure Sprint gets some cut for doing the billing). It’s just crazy that Sprint isn’t able to block this kind of crap without blocking out all text messages.

My wife and I hardly ever use text messages; our plan doesn’t even include any free ones, as we only send a couple a month. Now, we’ll be sending (and receiving) none….

This may be enough to make me eat the $400 fee it will take to terminate my Sprint service early, if I figure out that there’s another cellphone service provider that doesn’t have something stupid like this. Sprint did refund me for the last three months of billing for this service; I’ll give them that much. But a service that lets you receive text messages which can get you signed up for additional billing just by opening that text message is an insecure service; I don’t care how helpful any given customer service representative is, that’s a broken company and a broken service.

ADDENDUM: Can you tell I don’t use text messaging much? So there is this thing called “Premium Text Messaging”, which is the cellphone equivalent of 1-900 numbers. Some legit, probably, the vast majority probably scams like the one we had. It seems that some mobile providers can block just premium text messages without blocking all text messages (i.e. messages from your friends). I cannot figure out if you can do that with Sprint, as they’re very unclear on their website. The customer service guy I talked to certainly wasn’t clear; he said he was blocking all text messages. When I asked if there was a way to avoid getting signed up for services without having to block all text messages, he said no. That implies to me, in retrospect, that there’s no way to block all premium text messages without blocking text messages altogether; you’d think he’d have said something about it when I asked that question. My next task will be to figure out which companies are able to block all premium SMS without blocking all SMS.

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The Moon in “Heroes” is VERY different from our Moon.

Posted on October 25th, 2009 — permalink

My wife and I tend to watch TV shows a year after they come out; we rent the DVDs from Netflix and watch them then. We’re right now working our way through the third seasons of Heroes. If you’ve watched even the first season of Heroes, you know that Eclipses are a Big Deal and somehow cause or affect superpowers in humans. Well, there’s another total solar eclipse coming in Season 3. Here’s a screenshot (also showing a vapor ring left behind as Nathan Patrelli took off flying at high speed) of the moon about to eclipse the Sun:

OK, first, the good. Yes, the Moon is apparently about the same size as the Sun in the sky. (Yeah, the Sun looks a little bigger, but that’s probably because of the glare. There’s about to be a total eclipse, so they’ve got to have about the same apparent size. In any event, the size is close.)

Now, the bad. When the moon is that close to the Sun in the sky, it is a tiny, tiny, tiny, very thin crescent, basically a new moon. You will not see it at all, until it starts to actively block out the Sun. The reason for this is that since they’re so close to each other in a sky, it’s almost a straight line from the Earth to the Moon to the Sun. The distance to the Moon is much less, so the Moon is between us and the Sun. Thus, the side lit up by the Sun is the far side of the Moon from us.

Yet, here, instead of an almost-new moon, we see an almost-half-full moon! For half of the moon to be lit by the Sun when we see the two right next to each other in the sky, the moon would have to be at about the same distance from us as the Sun…. Well, it’s not quite half, so it’s a little closer, but we’re talking inside the orbit of Mercury here. And, for the Moon to look as big as as the Sun when it’s that far away, it will have to be physically almost as big as the Sun!

In our Universe, the Moon is a satellite of the Earth, about 1/4 the diameter of the Earth, and orbiting the Earth. The Sun is about 100 times the diameter of the Earth. The reason they look about the same size in the sky is because the Moon is so much closer.

From the evidence in the image above, however, the Earth of the Heroes Universe is very, very strange. They orbit a binary “star” system, including the Sun and the Moon… although the Moon is not a satellite of the Earth at all, but a binary partner to the Sun. However, the Heroes Universe Moon is an extremely bizarre object, for despite being so large, it does not shed any light of its own in the optical. It’s clearly not a large gas cloud, for you can see by looking at it that it’s a solid object with “seas” and craters and all of that. So, it’s something that has somehow managed to be as big as the Sun without triggering fusion inside to make it glow.

Wow.

Well, given that all these superpowers work, we already knew they were operating under different laws of Physics, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

My only fear is that people watching the show don’t realize that the producers are being very clever here in showing us that the Moon is a gigantic object that is nearly as far away as the Sun, very different from the case in our own world. I fear that some people watching might either think that the producers of the show have done the typical Hollywood thing and made a boner of a mistake, or may think that it’s entirely reasonable to see a near-half Moon right next to the Sun in the sky. I hope in upcoming episodes there will be dialog between the characters that more clearly reveals the nature of their Moon as a star-sized object close to the Sun.

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Howard Barker’s 13 Objects — global performance October 20 and 21

Posted on October 15th, 2009 — permalink

Howard Barker is a celebrated British playwright. On October 21st, there will be an international celebration of his works entitled 21 for 21. Participating in this celebration will be Avatar Repertory Theater, the virtual theater company of which I am a part. We’ll be putting up a production of his play 13 Objects: Studies in Servitude.

This is one of those things that makes it very clear that virtual worlds are not just computer games. These 13 short plays are all interesting and challenging, and vary all over the place in tone. Some of them are funny, some of them are grim, some of them are surreal, and all of them give you various different things to think about. It’s being directed by Joff Chafer, a faculty member at Coventry University. The cast is a sundry group of people from all of the USA, the UK, Austrailia, and New Zealand. It includes at least three former professors (two of whom were English professors, one of whom was perversely a professor of physics & astronomy…), a former Opera singer, and a couple of people who have performed and continue to perform professional theater in real life.

The design of the sets for all 13 plays follows a run-down, semi-post-apocalyptic theme. The objects in the sets were all constructed by famed former Second Life builder Arcadia Asylum, famous for her “hobo” type builds. Near the stage, there will also be “installations” for each of the 13 short plays, present through October 20 and 21 (and probably available even before then). You’ll see the sets, and hear recordings of the voices of the actors who will be performing on those sets.

This play will be free to attend. If you have a Second Life account, drop by; the show will at this spot in the Coventry University sim, at 4PM PDT (23:00 UT) on Tuesday October 20, and 2PM PDT (21:00 UT) on Wednesday, October 21. If you don’t have a Second Life account, consider getting one! They’re free; visit www.secondlife.com, ignore the gratuitously flash-heavy front page, and click on the big orange “Join Now” button to create an account.

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First impressions of Leiden

Posted on October 4th, 2009 — permalink

I’m out in Leiden for the next three days for the AMUSE Workshop. AMUSE is an evolution of MUSE, a software framework for integrating various different modules of stellar modeling together. So-called “N-body models” model the orbits of lots (”N” being a large number) of stars orbiting around each other as a result of their mutual gravity. They’re great as far as they go, but they aren’t all of the physics. If the timescale of your simulation goes on long enough, eventually you’re going to have to take into account stellar evolution– the fact that more massive stars live shorter lives and go supernova, spewing most of their mass out into interstellar gas. If you’re dealing with dense systems (think the Galactic core, or globular clusters), you have to take into account “strong interactions” between stars, which most N-body codes don’t handle by themselves. And, if the systems are really dense, you may have to take into account mergers of stars, which involves hydrodynamics. Additionally, there is gas in galaxies, which also involves hydrodynamics.

Traditionally, all of these different areas are modeled separately. Sure, there is definitely some overlap between N-body codes and few-body strong-interaction codes. However, the goal of MUSE was to make it possible for people who write disparate simulations to link them together for a more realistic simulation that needs to take into account multiple systems.

All of which is why I’m here. But the real reason I want to write this is to just dump my first impressions of Leiden:

• This is a very bike friendly city! There are paths for bikes and motorized scooters, bike lanes, and massive bike parking lots all over the place. And you see huge numbers of bikers riding around. But very few of them are wearing helmets.
• The Dutch language is much more mystifying to me as an American than either French or Spanish. Now, yes, I did study French all the way through junior high and high school, so I’m not coming at French as a complete ignorant. But I certainly find Spanish names easier to wrap my brain around than Dutch names. However, it’s not as hard as Sweden, where the collection of letters that form street names just would not stick in my brain with the linguistic substructure I’ve built in there all my life.
• Trash! There is litter, and there are piles of trash, all over the streets.

Update 2009/10/06: It turns out that the trash was a transient thing. October 3 is an annual festival that Leiden celebrates for its liberation from Spain a few hundred years ago. That festival can go on for days and culminates on October 3. I was seeing the aftermath of Saturday night’s festivities when I arrived on Sunday, October 4. I happened to arrive on exactly the worst day for trash in the streets…!

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“Other Peoples’ Liberals”

Posted on October 2nd, 2009 — permalink

As I listen to the Hollywood Elite fall all over themselves defending Roman Polanski, saying how awful it is that he’s been apprehended for the 30-year-old crime of rape of a 13 year old (perhaps not involving physical force, but certainly involving drugs and coercion), I’m reminded of a term I use, “Other Peoples’ Liberals”. This is related to the term “Limousine Liberal” (or even, at times, “Marin County Liberal” if you happen to live in the right place, although that’s too broad a brush).

These are the folks who drive SUVs because they have a “legitimate” reason, but decry the fact that so many people drive cars with low gas mileage and destroy the environment. This is Dianne Feinstein, a staunch gun control advocate but who had a concealed carry permit; when confronted, she said she needed it for her protection. This is parents of a friend of mine who was one of the most out gay people I knew. He said that they were all for gay rights in the abstract, but were not happy to find out their son was gay. This was the father of a women I knew in high school, who was all for racial equality, but who expressed some objections when she was dating a black man.

These are people who are all for tolerance and environmentalism, as long as it doesn’t require them to disturb their own back yard.

In a word, hypocrites.

To be sure, it’s not at all an exclusively liberal thing. It seems that a few months can’t go by without our finding out about the extreme illicit sexual adventures of an extreme outspoken conservative “family values” politician. Rush Limbaugh was all no-tolerance on drugs, until all of a sudden he’s up on drug charges. Excessively wealthy executives are for the unregulated free market and treat “socialism” as the dirtiest word ever, until all of a sudden their bank is failing and they need government bailouts to survive.

High standards of behavior that everybody else must be held to, but which are clearly too strict when applied to you.

Hypocrisy is universal. As is the ability for people to be able to overcome cognitive dissonance and justify their own bad behavior, and to come to the defense of the people they have chosen to celebrate, even when they themselves or those they celebrate have violated things they would otherwise speak out against vociferously.

We just need to recognize it for what it is, even when the subject is somebody who’s produced challenging art and that has been celebrated for that art.

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