The great French landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet was born on this day in 1714. Interestingly, his son Carle Vernet—also a painter—was born on this day in 1758. (The grandson, Horace Vernet was the best painter of the the bunch, although he was born on 30 June 1789.) The Austrian Classical composer Leopold Hofmann was born in 1738. Here is his Cello Concerto in D major:

Physicist Hans Christian Orsted was born in 1777. He discovered that changing electric currents created magnetic fields. This is one of the critical experimental findings in the study of electromagnetism. The sickly dentist, gambler, and all around badass Doc Holliday was born in 1851. Mathematician Guido Castelnuovo was born in 1865. Novelist and playwright John Galsworthy was born in 1867. The great modern composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji was born in 1892. He was gay, but somehow the British government never got around to sterilizing him. Here is his Pastiche on Habanera from “Carmen” which is a lot of fun:

Musique concrete composer Pierre Schaeffer was born in 1910. Basically, he recorded different sounds and then put them together in a kind of aural collage. It is an artistic form that can be tiresome—see, for example, John Lennon’s “Revolution 9.” But in Schaeffer’s hands, it is quite interesting although hardly the kind of stuff you’d want to listen to for long. Here is Apostrophe:

Particle physicist Frank Oppenheimer was born in 1912. And architect Sverre Fehn was born in 1924.

Satarist Russell Baker is 88 today. I like this quote of his, “Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.” Both Lynne Cheney and David Crosby are 72. What a pair! Steve Martin is 68. He’s a smart and funny guy, but try as I might, I couldn’t find any video of him that I liked. Maybe that’s because I don’t think much of him as a stand-up. I always get the impression (and I think this is true) that he despises his audience for laughing at what he thinks of as pretty low humor.

Novelist Danielle Steel is 66. I’m not a fan, but there is no doubt that she is great at what she does. The great cartoonist Gary Larson is 63. Here is one of his brilliant pieces:

Film composer James Horner is 60. Former general Stanley McChrystal is 59. Actor and one of my many crushes Marcia Gay Harden is 54. Actor Halle Berry is 47. And actor Adrian Lester is 45.

The day, however, belongs to the great film director Wim Wenders who is 68 today. He has some annoying habits, but when it works as it does in The American Friend and Paris, Texas it is great art. Here is the trailer for The American Friend, which I don’t think enough people have seen:

Happy birthday Wim Wenders!

I have a question for my colleagues in Canada, “Why do you care about the United States?” I understand that it is kind of hard to avoid the United States. For one thing, as a country, we are kind of like evangelical Christians: we get into everyone else’s business. But still, if I lived in Canada, I would be gleeful to not have to think about my southern neighbor. That is assuming that the United States didn’t go all Canadian Bacon on me.

My great fear is that my Canadian friends find the US interesting in the same way that some members of my extended family enjoy The Jerry Springer Show. I fear this because I’m afraid that this is how the rest of the world looks at us. Whenever I travel, I get that idea. When I went to China last year, my host seemed to be making assumptions about me that I didn’t like. He was very nice—they always are! But I really wasn’t one of these guys who thinks that America is this vast bastion of freedom and China is the ultimate in repression. So rather than pregnant girls who don’t know which of 50 guys knocked her up, the United States offers pretentious twats who think we are superior to the rest of the world when we don’t have a clue what’s really going on in our own country.

But mostly, I’m incredibly bored with this country. Remember the article I wrote this morning about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans think the the federal deficit is increasing? It’s really boring because it is exactly the way things have always been here. I freely admit that we don’t have much of a democracy here. And part of that is due to our political institutions. For example, we make it hard to vote. But mostly, our lack of democracy is the direct result of the people not demanding it. Now, if the people did demand it, maybe the power elite would then push back. That would be interesting. But as it is, it is just as The Class told us back in 1977:

I’m stuck with this country and very probably this government. And it isn’t like I’d be any less of a malcontent if I lived in Canada. But I’d like to think that I would give up on American politics. Unless it is like a drug. Maybe I only think that I’m interested in American politics because it directly affects me. Maybe it is just like I said above: I like the Jerry Springer aspect of it. I really don’t know. And maybe I’m being unfair because I clearly expect better of my Canadian colleagues than I do of myself.

Look: I know you have your Rick Santorums and Sarah Palins. You have your crack smoking mayors. You have your evil oil companies. But are we really the Greatest Freak Show on Earth? Let me check the Magic 8-Ball. Ah yes, “Signs point to yes.”

The great Sweedish physicist and one of the founders of the study of spectroscopy Anders Jonas Angstrom was born in 1814. The angstrom is now a standard unit of measure: about the size of a hydrogen atom. Abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone was born in 1814. Physicist George Stokes, known for his work in fluid dynamics, was born in 1819. Sculpter Gleb Derujinsky was born in 1878. “English impressionist” composer John Ireland was born in 1879. Here is his Piano Concerto in E Flat that is representative of his work. It’s very nice:

Actor Bert Lahr was born in 1895. He is best known for playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

The great director Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899. I was half inclined to give him the day. But there is a problem. As great as Hitchcock was, he is probably the most overrated director in history. It amazes me how much people over-analyze him. When I was an undergraduate, the TA in my film class was working on her Master’s thesis on Hitchcock. I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but now I look back and think, “Really?!” There are so many films and filmmakers one could study, why Hitchcock? I like his work, but it is all very simple popular entertainment. And the man wasn’t careful. The effects in his films are often pathetic. Consider the airplane crash in North By Northwest or the terrible rear projection in The Birds. Unquestionably his greatest film, Psycho is just his attempt to be like William Castle. Don’t get me wrong, I like his work. But deep it ain’t.

Singer Don Ho was born in 1930. Singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg was born in 1951. Here he is doing a very sentimental but perfect pop song, “Same Old Lang Syne”:

And comedy writer Tom Davis was born in 1952. Here he is in 1987 with Al Franken on Late Night:

Double Nobel Prize winning chemist Frederick Sanger is 95 today. Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is 87. Director Paul Greengrass is 58. And CIA agent Valerie Plame is 50.

The day, however, belongs to the “father of television” John Logie Baird who was born in 1888. Unlike most inventions, television was one where a lot of different people and groups were trying to make it happen. That doesn’t make Baird especially great, but it does mean that he was the right man at the right time. Here is a brief video about his invention; it is quite amazing:

Happy birthday John Logie Baird!

Paul Krugman has been wondering what percentage of Americans know that the deficit has been falling fast since 2009. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my father and his girlfriend about five years ago. We were talking about the government and one them said that the federal government would never balance its budget. I noted that it was possible, after all, Clinton had done it. They were stunned. It wasn’t so much that they didn’t believe me (although they didn’t); it was that they had never heard such a thing in their lives.

My point in bring this up is not to mock them. Most people don’t pay attention to politics, although if you had asked them, they would have told you they did. (They watched Fox News every day!) My point is that there is a complete disconnect between what politicians do and what the public sees. Check out this graph of the federal deficit:

The key thing to notice is that when Republicans are in the White House, the deficit goes up; when Democrats are in, the deficit go down. But what is the point of a Democrat taking the political and economic hit for all this fiscal rectitude? That brings us back to Krugman.

After Krugman discussed the issue, Hal Varian of Google put together a customer survey, and the results are not good:

The graph is a bit hard to read, but it indicates that almost 60% of respondents think the deficit has gone up. And 23% think it has stayed the same. So over 80% of respondents are dead wrong. Meanwhile, less than 9% got the question right.

Drilling down into the results, it is more or less what you would expect. Men are more likely to be wrong than women. Although surprisingly, men are also more likely to be right. Women have a strong affinity for the middle position (about the same). People over 65 are the most wrong. Although surprisingly, people between the ages of 55 and 64 are the most right. By region, people in the South are extremely ignorant even by the standards of the ignorant people who took the survey. Of them, 90% thought that the deficit had gotten bigger or stayed the same. People in the Midwest come in at 85%. The West is 80% and the Northeast is 70%. Similarly, people in urban areas are much more likely to be right. The data on incomes is a jumble, but not surprisingly, the wealthiest people are the most misinformed.

The survey is nothing like scientific. What’s more, even with its non-random sample, the error bars are huge because there are so few respondents. But it all makes sense and there is no denying that a huge majority of people think the deficit is rising fast. Part of the problem, of course, is that people are confused about the difference between debt and deficits. And news outlets don’t make the situation any better. But the bigger issue is just that there is a whole industry that pushes the “debt is killing us” line. Those pushing back are the quiet wonks.

The real problem is that liberals are almost as likely to believe this stuff as anyone else. The whole situation leads to the kind of “wise” cynicism that so defines our country’s politics. Liberals don’t defend Obama by pointing out that the deficit is decreasing. They defend him by noting that all presidents explode the debt. Except that they don’t. It is just Republicans. And that is a real problem because Democratic presidents get no credit and Republican presidents get no blame. So tell your friends: the deficit is falling!

Another article that I’ve been waiting to write about is Apple’s theft from their employees. It amazes me that Apple has such a good reputation among young, liberal minded people. They are, in fact, a horror of a company. After all, Walmart may treat its employees poorly, but at least they hire a lot of them. Apple has a small core of employees that its treats about as well as any high tech firm. Then there is most of its American workforce (70%): the Apple Store employees who are little more than minimum wage slaves. And then there is the factory workers outside the country who are treated despicably. And this is all in support of one of the most profitable companies in the world that has been sitting on tens of billions of dollars in cash.

It turns out that working for Apple is even worse than this. Two weeks ago, Matt Yglesias reported on a class action lawsuit against Apple by its own employees at its retail outlets. Because Apple sells very small devices that sell for big bucks, all Apple Store employees are physically searched before leaving the store. I’m sure it isn’t what people have in mind when they think of the “Apple lifestyle.” Yglesias offers an apologia of sorts for this behavior on the part of Apple. But I wonder. After all, people work at all kinds of retail places where there is plenty of cash and those businesses manage to get by without pat downs. But regardless, Apple does it and it is so super keen that young people just love to work in those sterile white rooms.

The lawsuit isn’t about that at all. It turns out that Apple requires their employees to clock out before they are searched. So the minute or two that it takes for the search is something that Apple just can’t afford. And remember: this is a lawsuit. It must be the case that employees have been asking Apple to change this policy and Apple has refused. Remember: Apple has much more cash than it knows what to do with. But paying its employees another 50 cents per day is not one of those things they can use their money for. Yglesias explained the situation:

Yes, they could. But that is not the Apple way. It’s a really vile company and I’m glad that Google and Samsung are kicking its ass. I really do think that Apple’s days are numbered. In 10 years, they could be as irrelevant as BlackBerry. The one thing they have is a good brand. If people knew more about how they operate, that brand would tarnish quickly.

Given the lack of political news, I have the opportunity to get caught up with some older articles that I haven’t gotten to yet. One of them is another article by Kathleen Geier, The Right’s Latest Candidate for History’s Greatest Monster: Jeff Spicoli. For those of you who aren’t so old, Jeff Spicoli is the surfer dude in Fast Times at Ridgemont High played by the young Sean Penn. He is the guy who famously ordered a pizza in history class and when questioned as to what he was doing, said, “Learning about Cuba; having some food.”

It seems that Fox News now has it out for surfer dudes who are collecting welfare. That’s very typical of the conservative movement: get people upset about a justifiably annoying issue that is literally exceptional and totally unimportant on a large scale. It is an issue that I’ve thought about a lot. And I have yet to come up with a way to talk to people about it. It doesn’t seem to matter (for example) that there are only a hand full of surfer dudes collecting food stamps and that they really have no relevance to the issue of food stamps which help millions of people who really are struggling. The surfer dudes make them angry and they can’t let go.

Geier gets to the heart of what is going on, I think. She wrote, “Like hippie punching, hating on the hipsters enables puritanical conservatives to feel morally superior to young people who reject certain bourgeois norms and who seem to be having some fun in their lives.” Now I don’t know about the reasons that these people feel superior. Geier suggests it is that the young people are having fun and the conservatives are not because they are old and bitter. But I’ve seen this same thing coming from young people. What seems to be going on is simple in-group and out-group politics. What they do is wrong simply because it is them. Often what is being done is the same thing. That’s certainly the case when affluent Social Security recipients complain about employable surfers getting food stamps.

The question is why is it so fulfilling. I think it is that feeling morally superior is like a drug. I’ve watched it. Hell, I’ve felt it. There is something deeply satisfying in justified anger. Clearly, neurotransmitters are released. But the effect is short lived and it needs constant tweaking. And that explains why three million people tune into Bill O’Reilly every night. They are getting their moral superiority fix while BillO gets his rage fix. Of course, people get this in a lot of different ways. I think the same thing (to a lesser extent) explains the popularity of the judge and “cops” shows.

I wish I knew a way to get through to these people, but it may be that I am especially ill-qualified in this endeavor. It isn’t that I don’t feel morally superior to others. I most definitely do. But it burns low and constant. Any given outrage story brings out my science training: I look for the error in the reporting. If that doesn’t work, I put it into perspective. Those two tools eliminate 99% of all outrage as I explain to everyone whenever they come to me with one. But apart from all of this learned behavior, I just don’t have the proper receptors for these outrage transmitters. When I hear of someone taking advantage, it just makes me sad. And that’s how I feel about all those outrage addicts who inject it right into their eyes and ears every night. It’s very sad—for them and us.

The great violinist and composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber was born on this day in 1644. I guess he is technically a Baroque composer but his music doesn’t really sound like it. Of course, it also doesn’t sound like Renaissance either. Regardless, it is beautiful stuff. Here is his Mystery Sonata No. 1:

English composer Maurice Greene was born in 1696. He was an organist and you can definitely hear it in his music. Nonetheless, the music is quite nice. Here is one of this “harpsichord lessons” played on the piano:

Lake poet Robert Southey was born in 1774. Occultist Helena Blavatsky was born in 1831. Hitler’s mom Klara Hitler was born in 1860. Apparently, he never got over her death and that’s why he became a despot. Just kidding! You can’t even make a good Nazi joke anymore! The great American mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart was born in 1876. Director Cecil B. DeMille was born in 1881.

The great Hungarian abstract painter Tamas Lossonczy was born in 1904 and only died a couple of years ago at the age of 105. Can you imagine living through that period? Actor Jane Wyatt was born in 1910. She is most remembered for playing Spock’s mom on Star Trek. She is also famous for having the good sense to never marry Ronald Reagan. Independent filmmaker Samuel Fuller was born in 1912. You can find some of his films like Shock Corridor complete on YouTube. Actor Fulton Mackay was born in 1922. And the great actor John Cazale was born in 1935. Here he is in one of my favorite films, The Conversation:

TV director Richard L. Bare is 100 today. He directed The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man.” The great boogieman of the right, George Soros is 83. I read one of his books. He has some good ideas but he is no liberal loon. In fact, I would say he is more or less a New Democrat. But I guess even that is scary to modern day conservatives. Novelist and screenwriter William Goldman is 82 today. I admire his work, but I’m a much bigger fan of his brother James. Still, The Princess Bride and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are both great. Speaking of conservative boogiemen, Willie Horton is 62. Remember this ad the next time someone claims that conservatives used to be reasonable:

And the president of France Francois Hollande is 59 today. I had hoped for more from him but there is no doubting that he is infinitely better than Sarkozy.

The day, however, belongs to one of the icons of 20th century physics Erwin Schrodinger who was born in 1887. There were two primary formalizations of quantum theory. The first was Schrodinger’s, which looked at potentialities in an explicitly statistical way. The so called wave equation tends to confuse people, I think. As a result of it people seem to think it has something to do with the particles and waves. Soon after Schrodinger’s work, Werner Heisenberg came up with a different formalism that used infinite matrices. Schrodinger quickly showed that the two systems were the same. Which version of the theory one uses is almost entirely dependent upon what field you are working in. Physical chemists tend to use Schrodinger. Theoretical physicists use Heisenberg. I think you can guess what I prefer.

Most people know of Schrodinger because of his cat thought experiment. Here it is from the great name’s own pen:

In other words, the cat is part alive and part dead. Schrodinger did not like that interpretation of his work and he never accepted it. There are many alternative interpretations. I don’t see the problem. I think that physicists have a tendency to mistake their theories for reality. The universe isn’t like that. It is a testament to our remarkable brains that we can construct models of the universe. But that is all that they are: models.

Still, there is no doubt that quantum mechanics (like all models of the universe) raised important existential questions. Indeed, both Schrodinger and Heisenberg were mystics. And that makes perfect sense—at least to me. What I don’t understand is how anyone can stare into the vastness of time and space and not marvel at it—at times even getting lost in it.

Happy birthday Erwin Schrodinger!

Regular readers know where I stand on switching parties. It makes perfect sense for Republicans to switch to the Democratic Party. For one thing, the modern Democratic Party really is a big tent. But more to the point: the Democratic Party has moved aggressively to the right. If a Republican had just held onto his beliefs since 1985, he would now be in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. (Similarly, someone like me who fit into the mainstream of the Democratic Party in 1985 now finds himself crammed at the liberal edge of the modern party.) In addition to this, I understand how people slowly move with their parties: humans are social animals and there is nothing surprising or even really bad about this.

But what are we to make of people who were in the Democratic Party for years and one day decided, “That Democratic Party has just gotten too liberal”? I’m not talking about people who have political conversions. I understand that as well. People have blinding insights in which the whole world looks different. Often those insights are idiotic. (See, for example, Christopher Hitchens.) But one rarely hears this. Usually it is simply that they stayed just the same and the Democratic Party got (quickly or slowly) all ultra-liberal.

Think about that for a second. The Democratic Party wasn’t liberal under Johnson when a huge new entitlement program Medicare was started. It wasn’t liberal when Clinton tried and failed to enact healthcare reform that was more liberal than Obamacare. But now! Those liberal Democrats have gone over to the dark side. This is the argument that these people are making. I don’t see the sense in it. These people are moving from a large and expanding ideological pool to a small and shrinking one.

Last week, Louisiana Republican Representative Rodney Alexander announced that he is retiring. He is one of these people. From 1988 to 2004, he was a Democrat. But in 2004, according to Wikipedia, he ran as a “Republican, changing parties on 6 August 2004, only three months before the election and only 30 minutes before the filing deadline, ensuring that no Democrat could challenge him. The move was widely derided as being ‘cowardly’.” You remember 2004: the Abu Ghraib torture that was implicitly (If not explicitly!) sanctioned by the administration; allowing North Korea to get the bomb; and Bush being the first president since Herbert Hoover to have net job losses during a four year term. Alexander had to get in on all of that!

On the New York Times editorial page, Juliet Lapidos noted something very interesting about Alexander’s reason for retiring. He said he couldn’t take the gridlock. Meanwhile, he voted to repeal Obamacare each of the 40 times the useless bill came up. But it is not too surprising that the Abu Ghraib, North Korea, Jobless Recovery guy would also be hysterically opposed to Obamacare. People who move from Democrat to Republican are either crazy or political opportunists or both. I don’t know which one Alexander is for sure (both I would guess), but there is no doubt with his retirement statements, he is a hypocrite.

It is a funny old world. It seems upside down. It is as if the drunk dozing in an alley has more wisdom to offer that the local pastor. (Which may be true!) And that is the sense that I have today, at least in politics. When Eric Cantor starts sounding reasonable, anything seems possible. But it isn’t really that the world is out of balance. Nor is it the case that Cantor is actually being reasonable. As I wrote about just two days ago, the Republican Party has gotten more and more nihilistic ever since Reagan. The critical phrase here is “more and more” because it is indeed getting worse.

Eric Cantor has long been one of the great examples of Republican nihilism. But the Republican Party seems now to have passed him by. Back in April, he put forward a bill that would extend coverage to people with preexisting conditions. The idea was to make the Republicans looks good while harming the overall framework of Obamacare. It would at least have put Democrats in a awkward position. It was a great example of old fashioned political strategy. As much as I may disagree with what he wanted to accomplish, at least he was doing something that might work. The House Republicans would have none of it, however, and the bill was pulled without a vote. Since then, I think they’ve voted for a full repeal of Obamacare another 3 times or something.

Today, I learn thanks to Steve Benen that Cantor thinks that a shutdown of the government is a bad thing. Can you imagine?! According to the National Review, he said:

If it weren’t for the arm rests, I would have fallen out of my chair. Is he actually suggesting that shutting down the government for the purpose of “sending a message” is a bad idea?! The next thing you know, Cantor will switch parties. I mean, this short, two data point trend of Cantor’s seems to indicate that he has some interest in doing something, and that puts him well outside the mainstream of his current party.

Of course, just look at how far expectations have fallen. All Cantor is doing is making political calculations. But that is a big deal. For a lot of the House Republican caucus, doing nothing—with the inevitable result that it will destroy the whole system—is the point of going to Washington! That and stopping abortion and lowering the corporate tax rate. (You know what they say, “To God, every corporate dollar is sacred.”) In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king! Eric Cantor is that one-eyed man.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go find a drunk to discuss some problems in my life.