Deleuzean Potato

Left Friday evening. Got back this afternoon. It was just the cast and Connor. But it was a very productive weekend. I'm not much on details, as most of what went on should stay there. There was nothing specifically show related; most of what we did was a matter of getting the cast together. Which we did.

You're fucking kidding me, right?

GOP Students Launch complaint Web site

How about this for an idea? How about me and a couple of my liberal friends get together and set up a similar site to complain about our conservative professors?

Of course, this is nothing new. I'm just getting really pissed off at this sort of thing. Part of it's that I'm in a really pissy mood right now as a result of an op-ed in yesterday's Maroon. More on that, hopefully.

So I did indeed make it to DOC Saturday night; the only bit of non-work I've had since the quarter started. One funny thing happened. We ended up sitting in the front row. We took up the entire row. Before the movie, Sara and Sebastian got up, held hands, and started twirling in the space between the front row and the screen. Sebastian let go, and Sara fell on the floor. It was pretty funny, and elicited applause from the audience.

I have no other way to describe my reaction to this. I wish things like this were publicized more; maybe more people would realize the utter rediculousness of the whole relgion thing.

Couple Charged in Possible Exorcism Death

Off to DOC, to see Lost in Translation with friends. I need the break. Maybe I'll have an opinion about something when I get back.

Had a workshop for the Cenci last night, which has been officially renamed "Beatrice." It went well, except that we didn't finish blocking the whole show, like we planned. But we all seem to have a much better grasp on the scope of the project now.

Highlights include:

• [I fart, loudly]
  Mark says: "That's art."
  Evan says: "With an F."


• [Several so-called "Your Mom" jokes are thrown around during the night]
  Connor says: "This play has got a particular relevance to Mark."

I've been bad at blogging this past week. I blame it on all the work I've been trying to catch up on.

A bunch of us went to Santorini in Greektown for dinner tonight. A few things happened:

• There were two groups that went to Greektown separately. One group had six, the other group had 10. The smaller group left first, and arrived first.


• I was in the later group. We got to the restaurant, and the other group was still waiting for their table. We put ourselves on the list. About five minutes later, they had a table for us: two tables next to each other; one for six, one for four.


• The other group was offended at this. They left.

I think the reasoning was it would be a long time before anything with 10 seats next to each other would open up, but six would have a much shorter wait. Still, I can feel for the other guys. Good food, though.

The campus newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, published an opinion article Friday about Dean's new take on religion. Maybe they'll eventually get it onto the website. The author, John Lovejoy, retains his usual obnoxious writing style. The argument here is that Dean is being insincere and politically oportunist. My thought is, of course Dean is. I don't think it's going to do him any good, and I don't think he should be doing it. See my last post for more on that (although I need to put up a post eventually explaining why I think that way). But every other politician does that too. In fact, I would even argue that Lovejoy himself does it.

There's a bit more to the article that I mean to take issue with. The plan right now is to get a responce in Tuesday's issue. More on that as it develops.

This was passed on to me by the Campus Freethought Alliance.

Here's a nice quote:

Americans tend to minimize not only the secular convictions of the founders, but also the secularist contribution to later social reform movements. One of the most common misconceptions is that organized religion deserves nearly all of the credit for 19th-century abolitionism and the 20th-century civil rights movement. While religion certainly played a role in both, many people fail to distinguish between personal faith and religious institutions.

One might try to argue that there did exist such reformers that were quite relgious, and that perhaps that their personal relgiosity might have motivated them to the reformation causes they championed. But I should point out that all these causes are purely secular causes. Abolitionists weren't trying to save souls; they were trying to make this life better.

I'm sure there's more to it than that. My point is that the only proper justifications for anything in American politics are secular.

UPDATE: More here.

Went to my first classes of the new quarter today. I'm feeling much better about everything by now. My Art History professor mentioned Jackson Pollock today, which is a pretty good excuse to point at this: Scientific American: Order in Pollock's Chaos [ INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ], from December 2002.

The short story is that two Physicsists analyzed Pollock's work, and decided that it displays fractal patterns. They also analyzed the the fractal complexity as a function of scale (within a painting) and over time (from one painting to another. You have to pay to read the entire article, which sucks. But it's a good read.

CLARIFICATION: they did analyze Pollock's work for complexity as a fuction of scale, and they found that the complexity of a given work was constant over a scale of 1 to 10mm. They contrasted this with a non-Pollock drip painting, in which they found that the complexity varied over the same scale.

Finally made it back to Chicago earlier this evening. I'm already behing quite a bit in one or two classes. Hopefully I'll be able to get a handle on things.

Kevin Drum has a couple of posts up dated January 5: one titled "Academic Leftyism" and one titled "Original Intent." (To give full credit, the Academic post is commenting on yet another blog post).

I read through both posts, and the comments associated with the first. I consider both issues to be pretty important, and I have somewhat planned on addressing them eventually in this forum. I don't have time, and I don't have my thoughts organized yet, so I won't say anything just yet. But look for it soon. Maybe something will set me off about one or the other.

Two issues arose during my debacle Sunday night at LAX. The first might be limited to ATA. The second probably holds for most of the industry.

1. As I mentioned, my original reservation was for a flight from LAX to Midway with a connection in Indianapolis. Midway is ATA's main hub. Indianapolis is a secondary hub. In theory, I don't see anything unusual with such a booking existing. Obviously, I'd expect a direct flight from LAX to Chicago to exist. And it did. Still nothing wrong with that. It's a busy weekend, and we booked my tickets somewhat late. So I'm not too surprised to see the direct flight full before I got my tickets. The weird part was who was on the direct flight to Chicago: there were at least a dozen travelers that had a reservation for LAX to Indianapolis with a connection at Midway. The obvious thing to do would be to have all those people trade seats with each other. No need to have all these people making a connection and taking up extra seats on a flight, when there's a perfectly good direct flight to their final destination leaving at the same time. Especially on a busy weekend. Eventually the ATA employees at the gate figured this out and made the necessary changes in reservations for most of us in that situation. But I'm still baffled that this sort of thing would even be an issue at all. Particularly in an industry like the airline industry. I can't think of a good reason why ATA would want to book connections like that.

2. My bags went out with my original flight. When I rebooked my flight for tomorrow, my bags had already left for Indianapolis. I assume that they have reached Chicago by now, that being the last thing they were told to do. I called ATA's baggage office at Midway to ask about them. The guy there couldn't tell me if my bags were there or not. He said there were "hundreds" of bags at that office. I'm not concerned, and I would be surprised (at rather annoyed) if my bags aren't there, but it got me thinking. UPS employs a barcode tracking system for every item they ship. I'm pretty sure FedEx does the same, but not as certain as about UPS. Every time the package changes hands, or is loaded onto a plane or truck, they scan the barcode with a hand-held scanner. The signal is immediately sent to their central database that the package has moved a step on its way to the recipient. The customer is given a tracking code, and can use that code to access the database from the internet, and see where their package is. My question is, why aren't the airlines doing that? Even better, why isn't the Federal Government mandating that the airlines do that? It seems to me that such a move would both help better ensure customer satisfaction (making the airline more competitive) and help better organize security (making the government happy).

I have other issues with airport security. I'll try and get to those eventually.

Things to do:

• Find out about the baggage: done.


• Confirm reservation for flight tomorrow: done.


• Try and change to an earlier flight: not possible.

Not much else to do today. My professors all emailed me back by this morning. They all pointed me towards all the course information they have at this point. Alas, I can do nothing until I actually get to Chicago. So we'll just hang out here for the rest of the day.

Generally, I'm pretty fortunate when it comes to air travel. For instance, I've spent the last two and a half years of my life flying back and forth between the Los Angeles area and Chicago every three months. And in all that time, the only hang up even remotely annoying was my own fault. And even then, there were times when I probably was luckier than I should have been. The list of flights includes LAX-ORD on Sept 16, 2001 and MDW-LAX the first night of the Iraq war (which was also the first or second night of the first Orange Alert enacted). Both of those flights serve as a nice comparison for this flight.

Winter Quarter started today/yesterday (Monday). I wasn't nearly as well organized on plane flights as I should have beeen. So by the time I gave my dad ideal flight dates, there was very little left on Jan 4th. He booked the best he could, which was a red eye flight, arriving at Midway at 7:45 Monday morning. Plenty of time for me to get to class at 9:30.

So we hear the announcement of an Orange Alert in effect until Jan 4. It's also insinuated that LAX is of special concern. So the airport goes under martial law for the rest of the holiday travel season. So private cars aren't allowed to park at the curb. Nothing we didn't see the first trip out to Chicago, just after Sept 11th. That time, private cars weren't even allowed anywhere near the airport. We had to park at Lot C and take a shuttle bus to the terminal. This time they're allowing private cars on the premises. They're not allowed at curbside, but they can park in the parking garage. And LAPD is stopping cars and inspecting them. So we figure my dad will just drop me off at Lot B or C, and I'll take the shuttle to the terminal, just like before. Then we don't have to worry about the horrendous back-up of traffic. That turned out to be a good idea. The check in line at ATA was over an hour long (at 8:00 at night). The line for the x-ray machine wasn't too bad, and the security checkpoint itself had no line at all. So nothing to complain about so far. I made it to the gate with plenty of time to relax.

There was one issue, though. My flight went to Indianapolis, where I had to then transfer to Chicago. Nothing wrong with that just yet. But remember this part: my bags are on that flight. Also note that there is direct flight to Chicago leaving about 30 minutes before my flight. Now, there's a pretty good explanation for that. It's easily imagineable that the direct flight was full of people going to Chicago before I got there. That explanation won't hold up, as later events will reveal. First, both of the flights were delayed. Eventually to 2:30 AM (my flight) and 3:25 AM (direct flight). Now there were many people on the flight to Chicago that were going to be missing connections in Chicago. So the ATA people called them up to the desk by final destination, to determine an alternate route if possible. The first final destination they called was Indianapolis. That's not good planning on the part of ATA.

Their solution for the people going to Indianapolis was, surprisingly enough, to put them on my flight. I realized that this meant there would be a seat open for me on the direct flight to Chicago. I figured that would put me in Chicago an hour earlier than my current flight, IF there was a connection in Indianapolis for me. And it wasn't clear that there would be. So at 1:50, I was able to get myself a spot on the flight to Chicago.

We got around to boarding that flight. They boared us by final destination (I think that was a good idea, because I suspect that flight had become severely overbooked over the course of the day), starting with Chicago. So I got on. The bunch of us settled as we awaited the rest of boarding. But there was no one else. I hadn't slept at all yet (I needed to be paying attention), so I started to doze off. Finally, at 4:00, an attendant made an announcement that the FAA had deemed the weather over Chicago too dangerous, and that the flight was canceled.

That left two options: ATA had several flights open all day Wednesday, or they could try looking on another carrier. I was able to get to the front of the line to book a flight for Wednesday. As it turned out, they announced 10 minutes later that no one else had anything before then anyway.

So I missed class this morning, and will miss class again tomorrow and Wednesday mornings. I should be in Chicago, but I'm stuck in California for a couple more dates.

More complaints about air travel logistics to come later, maybe.

I now have comments. Thanks to Jess for the suggestion. I ended up going with HaloScan.

David Horowitz has a lovely piece in this morning's LA Times:

Russia was the breadbasket of Europe until progressives seized power that year and instituted policies to "share the wealth." For the next 70 years — until socialism collapsed — Russia was a net importer of food, always on the brink of famine.

That's probably the most blatant part, but the whole thing appears to be an attmept on his part to equate "progressivism" with Communism. Unfortnately, any reference I have to progressivism as an historical movement is securely packed away at the moment. But give me a couple of days, and I'll even be able to talk with actual, self-describe progressives.

Hey, look. He even manages to get in a quick swipe at academia and the media:

But thanks to a politically corrupted media and educational system, their pigheaded pursuit of socialist fantasies goes on.

PS: If anyone reading this knows how to set up comments, can you email me? Thanks.

UPDATE: Comments now exist. I removed my email address.

Every May, the University of Chicago hosts the world's largest scavenger hunt. Upon arriving, I quickly became engulfed in the insanity. Last year, I got involved with the Federation of Independent Scavenger Hunt Teams (FIST). The first year in their currrent manifestation, the movement adopted the name Lush Puppies. My first year they simply added a new moniker onto the name, resulting in the Lush Puppies mark II: FIST. Last year, with me now involved with movement, we adopted Deleuzean Potato as the new moniker for the year. So the full title of last year's team was the Lush Puppies mark II: FIST deux: Deleuzean Potato.

The reference is to a moderately obscure (in my mind, at least) French philosopher named Gilles Deleuze. It worked out to be much more appropriate than I originally could have imagined. The guy who came up with it explained enough of it for the rest of us to get the joke. Then it was a joke that no one but the FISTies got (with the exception of one girl on the Pierce team). The most superficial manner of appropriateness is that Deleuze was French. Last year's Hunt was just after the first major Iraq-induced wave of French-hating, so there were several French references made (most importantly, any reference to time in the list was made using the French Revolutionary Calendar).

But there are a couple of things about Deleuze himself and his theories that made it appropriate. Deleuze's major theory was about something he called a rizhome. I actually haven't sat down and read up on any of this, so I can't really do it justice. I'll try. Hopefully I won't do too bad a job at it. The (very) rough idea is that society is one large social network. Individuals are nodes in that network. Those nodes are the rizhomes. It was supposed to describe the team in that each member of the team was supposed to be a rizhome. And of course, the same applies to bloggers. Each of us is a node in a larger social network.

If I horribly butchered that, please feel free to correct me. I'll post any corrections I recieve, and give credit. (Actually, I'll probably just go double check everything myself, and repost a better explanation).

I've switched some things around; nothing major. This is what insomnia does to you.

Actually, I like things better this way. The Galileo "quote" needed to be used more as a slogan than as a title, and putting the Deleuze reference into the title itself emphasizes the meaning.

"Epur si muove" = "And yet it does move" (Latin)

The (apocryphal) story goes, after Galileo was forced to sign a confession and recant his Coperican views, he uttered this under his breath. As I noted, apocryphal. But relevant to my project.

It's a reference to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It's a long story how I came to know anything about him, but it's very appropriate. Not tonight, though.

The January 2004 issue of Discover Magazine had a pretty good article called, "Internet-Era Democracy." That's another one of the factors more closely motivating this project of mine. I'm having problems linking to the website right now; I'll link to the article when it works again.

Brought to you by The Nocturnal:

America is a divisive place these days. One sector of society feels besieged by malevolent foreign powers, bent on destroying their way of life. Another sector sees an inured public idly standing by as government and corporate interest persistantly chip away at civil liberties. The tone of the discourse is angry, self=righteous, frustrated, militiant, and dissonant.

(from Chicago Project 2: the Cenci)

I'm frustrated. I may not be able to affect anything with this new project of mine, but at least I have a place I can scream at. Maybe someone will listen.

UPDATE: Remembered how to use HTML. Reformatted accordingly.

By way of introduction, I'm a third-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I'm concentrating in Physics. As a result, I'm going to try and give my blog a science flavor. But I'll try and keep things relevant to the state of our great Republic.

...to the Deleuzean. Hopefully I'll get things situated quickly. But first, some introductions and explanations are in order.