QUESTION FOR OCCASIONAL OBSERVER

Occasional Observer has a long and very interesting comment regarding the device of a Discharge Petition as a way of breaking the deadlock in the House.  I found this detailed explanation of why such a manoeuvre would likely fail.  Would you, Occasional Observer, take a quick look at this and comment?  I am not nearly as knowledgeable about this as you seem to be, and I would be interested to know your thoughts.  Thanks.

MY OWN PERSONAL COCKAMAMIE SOLUTION TO THE CURRENT CRISIS

Everybody else has offered solutions to the crisis of government we now confront, so why not me?  The central problem appears to be John Boehner's unwillingness to risk the loss of his position as Speaker of the House.   Matt expresses a widespread wonder about why Boehner wants to keep a job that seems to give him so much grief, but there it is.  So we must craft a solution that will enable him to keep his Speakership and his seat in Congress, at least for another term.  Here is what I suggest .

President Obama should hold a meeting with Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Chris Redfern.  Chris Redfern?  Who on earth is Chris Redfern?  Glad you asked.  Chris Redfern is the Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party [Boehner represenmts Ohio's 8th CD.]   Obama should then offer Boehner a choice:

If he allows a clean one year Continuing Resolution and a clean Debt Ceiling rise to come to the floor of the House, where both will pass, then Nancy Pelosi will guarantee that Boehner keeps his Speakership, so long as there are at least seventeen Republicans who will stand with Boehner in any Tea Party challenge to his position.  How can she do this?  Simple.  When a vote is forced on the Speakership, if Boehner has a majority of the Republicans behind him, she will withdraw her name at the last moment, all the Democrats will vote "Present," and Boehner will win a majority of the votes cast , giving him the Speakership.  If Boehner cannot win a majority of the Republicans, enough Democrats will vote for him to elect him Speaker.

Meanwhile, in the Ohio 8th, a furious tea Party challenge to Boehner will immediately arise.  [Boehner has represented the district for twenty-one years, and ran last year unopposed.]   If Boehner loses the Primary, he can run as an Independent, and Chris Redfern will throw the support of the Democratic Party of Ohio to his support, pretty much guaranteeing that he will win.

If Boehner refuses the deal, then Obama will ignore the debt limit on 14th Amendment grounds and invite Boehner to impeach him, confident that it will be impossible to get two thirds of the Senate to vote for conviction.

MY GRANDNIECE EMILY

I have linked before to the blog of my grandniece Emily, who is studying math in Budapest.  Here is another of her posts on her classes.  This one is the best description I have ever read of what it is actually like to study serious math.  You can find it here.  I would admit her to my doctoral program in a shot, if I ran one. 

Let me say just a word about this subject, with reference to Michael Llenos' comment yesterday.  There is an enormous difference between those of us who can, with hard work, master some bit of serious math, and people like Newton or Einstein or John von Neumann, who actually make the stuff up brilliantly.  At one point in my career [mid-seventies] I studied Game Theory rather seriously, eventually teaching a graduate course in which I went through von Neumann's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Game Theory [that every  mixed-strategy two-person zero-sum game has at least one solution], complete with a full-scale proof of L. E. J. Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem.  That is hard stuff, but I did it more by brute force than by any real mathematical insight.  By contrast, my old friend Robert Ackermann once told me that the great Russian-English mathematician Besicovitch could "see" objects in n-dimensional vector space.  He would "look" at such an object [say, an n-simplex] and rotate it in his imagination until he could see that something was just true of it.  Then he would go about the tedious business of actually producing a proof of what he could immediately intuit to be true.

Of all the things I cannot do [such as throw a curve ball or play the viola well or tap dance], there only two that I really would give a great deal for.  One is some facility with foreign languages and the other is the sort of formal mathematical intuition that Besicovitch and von Neumann and the rest had.  Lord, it must be wonderful to have that ability!

Meanwhile, I can read Emily's blog and enjoy vicariously her engagement with real math.

Set report: John Green talks about filming, fans & more!

Photo: Post-Gazette

The Pittshurgh Post Gazette wrote an article about fans on the set and talked to John. He apparently revealed he will be joining them in Amsterdam. Check out the article below!

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They came carrying hardcover books, freshly ripped pieces of notebook paper and the occasional pocket-size U.S. Constitution.

If a student has the copy of the historical document signed by someone famous, she or he gets bonus points. And, as confirmed by the knot of teens outside the Church, writer John Green more than qualifies, as do actors Shailene Woodley, Ansel Elgort and Nat Wolff.

Word that "The Fault in Our Stars" had landed at the church spread through Instagram, Twitter, texts and talk among middle and high schoolers walking along the road.

Students who skipped or postponed dinner and homework and waited into the darkness met the author, a publishing and vlogging rock star. One declared, "This is, like, the best day of my life."

Mr. Green, 36, signed everything politely pressed into his hands, begged off photos due to a quickie lunch break around 8 p.m. but later returned for selfies with his fans. 

Clad in jeans and Harry Potter Alliance T-shirt, he efficiently volunteered to hold each phone at arm's length, smiled for every picture and thanked everyone for their support before turning back into the church.

Yes, he has clearly done this before (earlier that afternoon, in fact) and will be doing it for a long time to come, based on the popularity of the novel and, now, anticipation for the 2014 movie.

"This is totally consuming and has been since it came out, which is the best problem I've ever had in my life," he told the Post-Gazette.

Sitting on a padded wooden pew near a side entrance to the church, under the green felt bulletin board announcing "Parish News", Mr. Green fielded questions in hushed tones as filming continued elsewhere in the building where the characters of Hazel and Gus meet at a support group.

In a (mild spoiler alert) tweak to the novel, they run into each other on the elevator, and she then goes into the restroom to compose herself. But readers need not fear that the book, about whip-smart lovestruck teens who happen to have cancer, is being mangled.

"When people really love a book, what they want to see is the book come to life. They want to see the book visually, and I'm sympathetic to that desire. I felt that desire about books that I loved, I felt that about 'Harry Potter,' I felt that about 'Revolutionary Road,' I felt that about a huge variety of books.

"But, you know, my hope is that it can be a good movie, not that it can be a good visualization of a book," he said, adding that some details on the page can seem hokey or ridiculous on screen.

"That said, the screenplay -- in my opinion at least -- is just phenomenally faithful to the book. Almost every line of dialogue in the movie is from the book. It's very, very faithful."

Josh Boone is directing the screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who adapted or wrote "The Spectacular Now" starring Ms. Woodley and "(500) Days of Summer."

With weekend breaks to return to Indianapolis, his wife, their 3-year-old son and 3-month-old daughter, Mr. Green has been in Pittsburgh for almost the entire shoot and will join the production when it heads to Amsterdam for a few days later this month.

"Usually book writers are on the set for one or two days. I'm lucky to have a really great relationship with Josh the director, and he's the kind of relaxed, laid-back, confident guy who doesn't need to worry about that stuff," he said.

"And hopefully I'm the kind of writer who doesn't butt in. I don't want it to be my movie. I don't know how to direct a movie."

After all, he didn't immediately appreciate the brilliance of Ms. Woodley when she sent him "a very, very long email, 30 pages long or something" about the book, her passion for it, how important it was to find a way to get the movie made and how much she longed to play Hazel.

His response? " 'That's very sweet, but I'm not a casting director.' I probably would have been a little bit nicer to her if I'd understood what an incredible genius she is," he said, then backtracked that maybe he was a little more polite.

After watching her audition tape for Hazel, a 16-year-old whose thyroid cancer damaged her lungs, he immediately contacted Mr. Boone and producer Wyck Godfrey.

"Is it going to be helpful if I get on the phone? Should I email her, can I text her, do you have her phone number? Can I fly out to L.A. and hang out with her? What do I need to do to make it happen? She was just amazing; she's so talented."

When he later saw Ms. Woodley paired with Mr. Elgort, he picked up the phone and again asked, "How can I help?"

Just as many readers now think of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter or Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, they will picture the youthful stars as Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters, a handsome charmer who downplays his "little touch of osteosarcoma."

"The good thing from my perspective is they both take that responsibility very seriously. ... They both love the book and they want to honor it and honor the story," said Mr. Green, who shot a cameo for the movie.

The story is set in Indianapolis and will stay that way, with locations doubling for the city 300-plus miles away and even for a bit of Amsterdam.

The challenge, however, was finding flat terrain in hilly Western Pennsylvania, but Mr. Green bought the illusion.

"When I saw both Hazel and Gus' houses, I just felt like, wow, this is the house I imagined. It was surreal. Hazel's house looked like it could have been next door to my house, which is where I set Hazel's house in my book. That was really cool."

He had been familiar with Pittsburgh thanks to his wife, Sarah Urist Green, a contemporary art curator. She curated the show "Andy Warhol Enterprises" for the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2010, and that meant trips here to The Warhol Museum.

But it was the reputation, experience, professionalism and size of the crew in Pittsburgh, along with the tax incentive, that landed the project here.

Mr. Green sees the relationship between writer and reader as two halves of a whole.

"It takes two to make it work. It takes the writer putting the right words on the page, but it also takes a reader who's reading generously, reading thoughtfully, paying attention. We all know that there's different ways to read newspaper stories, there's different ways to read novels.

"They read them distractedly, they read them with a chip on their shoulder, they read them with a bias, they go into them angry. For whatever reason, my readers have been so generous to this book and have read it with such kindness, and that's made all the difference."

Ask the teens on the sidewalk what they love about the novel, and heartfelt sentiments tumble out like emotional endorsements for a book jacket: "So moving ... inspirational and written so well ... feel very connected with the book ... very relatable for teens ... a universal love story." A few confessed to sobbing in Spanish or literature class when they came to the end.

David Happe, 14, lives "a five-minute run from here," he said, late Thursday in explaining how he had managed to score all the key autographs -- even when his dad appeared inquiring about homework and insisting he stop home for a bit. David had arrived by 4:30 p.m., when Ms. Woodley greeted a small band of early birds, and later got the writer plus Mr. Wolff and Mr. Elgort to sign their names.

For girls, the actor who plays Gus inscribed their books with "To Rachel [or Alyssa or Grace]" with a heart and then Ansel E., while Mr. Wolff, whose Isaac is losing his sight and fickle girlfriend, also sprinted over when summoned by the teens.

Some current or former cancer patients will turn up as fellow support group members, and fears that Mr. Green was co-opting their story proved unfounded. "The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and I'm so grateful for that."

In a world of teen superheroes and vampires who are invincible or immortal, "TFIOS" is remarkable. "I can't remember the last time we had a movie where pretty much all the central characters are living with serious disabilities," Mr. Green said.

But readers appreciate that the story allows sick people to have full, rich lives. "You are still a complicated person, you're still capable of the same love and joy and grief that anyone is."

Via @317lindquist | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Laura Dern advocates for childhood cancer

Laura Dern at the 2013 L.A. Loves Alex's Lemonade charity event. | Photo: alexslemonade.org

On Saturday, Laura Dern attended the annual L.A. Loves Alex's Lemonade charity event, which raised more than $500,000 for the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.

Laura will play Hazel Grace's mother, Frannie, in TFIOS. She is a strong supporter of Alex's Lemonade, a nonprofit organization that raises money and awareness of childhood cancer. Alex's Lemonade give most of their donations to childhood cancer research for new treatment and cures.

Laura has been an advocate for childhood cancer for a long time. She got involved with Alex's Lemonade after her son told her about the organization in the third grade. They were awestruck by the fact that it was created by 4-year-old Alex, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

It is great that a strong advocate of childhood cancer is involved in TFIOS. 

Laura shared this picture of the event on her Twitter account:

At @LALovesAlexs with @Jaymelemons We love this organization and event SO MUCH!!!

Read more about Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation here.

ANOTHER RESPONSE TO ANOTHER COMMENT

Tsung-Yun offered an interesting comment on my own reply to Magpie and Howard Berman, and I should like to take a little time to clarify what I was driving at.  Here is a part of Tsung-Yun's  comment:  "[First quoting me]  My own guess is that were [Freud] to return now and discover what could be done with brain scans and MRI's and CT scans and the rest, he would be thrilled and delighted. The one thing he absolutely would not do is retreat into literary theory or ideological critique as a sanctuary protected from the latest advances of hard science."  Then his [her?] comment:  "I find this comment to be puzzling. In an earlier post on the Sokal hoax and analytic philosophy of science, you affirmed a Kuhnian stance with regard to the social construction of scientific facts and the groundlessness of the positivistic conception of scientific progress. Here, you seem to be criticizing literary studies for refusing to accept neuroscientific progress. The achievements of cognitive neuroscience in the decades since Freud's death do not warrant a physically reductionist philosophy of mind, which seems to be what you're suggesting (please correct me if I'm wrong). Reductionism - e.g. identity theory or functionalism - is both dangerous and demonstrably false."

First, let us be clear that I was trying to describe how Marx and Freud themselves actually went about their work.  In the case of Freud, I was speculating about how he would respond to recent work in neuroscience, were he alive today.

But underneath these historical and biographical observations was a more general point, and that is what I wish to talk about here.  I have enormous respect for serious thinkers who spend a great deal of time -- perhaps even their entire lives -- working hard at the details of the subject they are interested in.  Marx spent endless hours in the British Museum reading the periodic field reports of the Parliamentary Factory Inspectors.  [I have read some of those reports, and they give us a fascinating window into the reality of factory work in the first decades of the nineteenth century.]  Freud spent a lifetime, as I pointed out, seeing patients six or eight hours a day.

I really do not think one can speculate philosophically about complex subjects like capitalist economics or psychoanalytic treatment of neuroses or the neurophysiology of the brain without immersing oneself in the latest research on the matter.  What would we think of someone who watched a bit of a baseball game on TV and then started to pontificate about the Ontological Significance of Sport, remarking along the way that the part of a baseball game that he liked the best was the halftime show?  Or the aesthetician whose mother took her to a Fourth of July performance of the 1812 Overture by the Boston Pops and thought that was enough background to offer opinions about the ideological significance of modern performances of classical music?  We would mock them, and we would be right to do so.

At the moment, I am reading The Art of Being a Parasite by a French biologist, Claude Combes [which, my sister says, has the best illustrations she has ever seen in a scientific book.]  Parasites are not exactly a sexy subject, but they are fascinating and important if one wants to understand how living things actually flourish and develop.   Just as an example, a billion years ago, give or take, a little bacterium made its way into a primitive ancestor of a cellular creature [a Eukaryote, as Biologists say], looked around, decided it was a nice place to live, and set up light housekeeping.  When the cellular organism reproduced, the bacterium did also and each of them went along for the ride.  Fast forward one billion years, and almost all animals, plants, fungi, and such like have these mitochondria [as they are called] inside each cell, serving as the source of the chemical energy that fuels life.  This is pretty big deal stuff, but that is not what Combes talks about, for the most part.  He goes on at length about little buggers that parasitize bivalve mollusks and such like beasties [complete with diagrams.] 

Every page of Combes' book rests on lifetimes of research that he and vast numbers of other biologists have done, research without which we would simply not know in any detail how living things actually function.  You don't have to be a research scientist to think philosophically about the nature of life or about the status of scientific theories.  But you do have to know a very great deal of real hard science before you pop off on those subjects.  Sokal was ridiculing people who had no hesitation pontificating about those things when they could not even recognize an obvious send-up masquerading as a serious discussion.  That really is the equivalent of not knowing that there are halftime shows in football, not in baseball

A WAY TO REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT

By all reports, there are enough Republican members of the House of Representatives ready to vote for a clean Continuing Resolution so that with the support of the Democratic members, such a raise would have no trouble passing.  But John Boehner is clearly fearful that if he allows such a bill to come to the floor of the House, he will lose his Speakership.  Now, the position of Speaker of the House is not a party office, like Senate  Majority Leader.  It is a Constitutional office, voted on by all members of the House.  To be elected Speaker, one needs an absolute majority of all votes cast, not counting abstentions by those voting "present."   In return for bringing a clean CR to the floor, the Democrats could make a deal with Boehner to abstain, or alternatively throw enough votes his way, to guarantee his reelection as Speaker.  Hell, they could even make a deal not to challenge him for reelection in his District.  They could make the same deal for a raising of the debt limit.

Just a thought.