Tammy and Tommy debated again last night.

We'd gone out to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery to hear physicist Sean M. Carroll give a talk about the universe. The universe might give birth to baby universes. Who are you to say it doesn't? And time — time is a very obvious concept, he said, before portraying time in a way that was quite weird. These cosmologists, such comedians. You can read this: "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." Here he is on "The Colbert Report" trying to get a word in while Stephen Colbert anxiously strives to make sure it comes out funny. I thought Carroll's solo explanation of everything was highly amusing. It's all about entropy. From the Big Bang on, it's movement toward entropy, and even when things become more complex — producing all the detail of the world we live in now — it happened along a path from less entropy to more.

We walked home, talking about and reframing the discussion. The moderator — a Madison media character — fielded questions from the brainy audience and inserted a question of her own: What do you have to say to these people who won't believe in global warming? Politics. Always politics in Madison. It's our own special brand of entropy. Meade and I blabbed about such things. Did Carroll say that we only "remember" the past because, since it had less entropy, we have the sense of knowing what it was, like when we see a broken egg — Carroll had a lot of PowerPoint slides of eggs — we know the egg of the lower entropy time — a whole egg — but there are many diverse possibilities for the egg's higher entropy time — scrambled, quiche, rotten — and so we can't "remember" it?

Home, I said, "You must want to watch the baseball game" and Meade said "I want to watch the Tammy and Tommy debate!" Both of these things, along with President Obama on "The Daily Show," were preserved on the DVR. So we watched Tammy and Tommy, and that was pretty funny too. The moderation was hilarious. They'd ask a question and Tammy and Tommy each had a couple minutes to answer. Then they'd declare a 6-minute period in which Tammy and Tommy could talk about anything, interact in any way, hog the time, interrupt, be as polite or impolite as they saw fit with absolutely no intervention from the moderators.

Tommy got all impassioned and began many sentences with "Ladies and gentlemen." He assiduously refrained from calling Tammy Tammy. She was "my opponent." And the message was: Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent is incredibly, unbelievably liberal. Tammy seemed nervous but never broke from her prim, schoolmarmish demeanor, as she repeated the message about Tommy: After he was governor, he became a lobbyist and made a lot of money.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it's a simple decision. What irks you worse: liberals or rich guys?

Now, back to your regularly scheduled entropy.

"Yet the walls still have to be guarded by independent bloggers who bear a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom..."

"... and while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, you want us on that wall, you need us on that wall," blogs Professor Jacobson dramatically, but I think he really means it.

He's talking about Don Surber's quitting blogging after 7 years: "I am exhausted. It was simply too much work."

Via Instapundit, who says: "I’m still around. But I suppose it’ll get me too, someday. But today is not that day!"

For me, the secret has always been the intrinsic reward. Read "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."

Jacobson talks of "feeling that your blog is all that stands between the Great Mainstream Media-Nutroots Conspiracy and the abyss can create imagined pressure." That's extrinsic. I'm all about intrinsic. I'm not trying to write anything other than as part of a process of being interested in things. It's just the opposite of entropy.

But Surber writes a lot of columns. I suspect he's simply discovered that he'll write better if he concentrates his writing on columns, which require a different rhythm.

Stephen Pinker opines on conservative bioethics: "The Stupidity of Dignity."

In TNR:

The sickness in theocon bioethics goes beyond imposing a Catholic agenda on a secular democracy and using "dignity" to condemn anything that gives someone the creeps. Ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep a decade ago, the panic sown by conservative bioethicists, amplified by a sensationalist press, has turned the public discussion of bioethics into a miasma of scientific illiteracy. Brave New World, a work of fiction, is treated as inerrant prophesy. Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.

Things I bought at Border’s today and why.

1. Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison. Because I read this article by Herbert Muschamp in today’s NYT, I remembered reading about this film before, and now it’s out on DVD. Because it’s got a sticker on the front with a quote from Errol Morris saying “Haunting, Mysterious and Incredibly Beautiful. A definitive work of art” and I love Errol Morris and am a sucker for art as long as it doesn’t trigger any of my many objections. Even though Muschamp wrote:

Already a cult classic, the movie is a time capsule of the postmodern obsession with decrepitude. What a space saver! Just pop this disc in the player and you'll have all the putrefaction you could ask for. Watch the Master Narratives Crumble! Entropy Now! Pomo's Greatest Hits!

2. The Four Complete Historic Ed Sullivan Shows Featuring The Beatles and Other Artists Including The Original Cast from "Oliver!", Cab Calloway, Cilla Black, Frank Gorshin, Soupy Sales, Gordon & Sheila MacRae, Tessie O'Shea, Myron Cohen, Mitzi Gaynor, Allen & Rossi, and many more ..." Because I love a historic mishmash that is likely to give me all sorts of weird mixed feelings of delight, anxiety, regret, nausea, horror, and general sublime awareness. Because tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the first of the four shows and the DVD empowers the consumer to mark the occasion. Because I want to rethink how I felt when I was thirteen and had to face the reality that not everyone was as much in love with The Four Seasons as I was. (Oh, how sadly they have fallen out of the culture! A search for "Four Seasons" in Amazon did not show them at all on the first page of a list that began with: The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World...Ever!, Sex and the City - The Complete First Four Seasons, Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long, and Montbell Ultralight #2 Sleeping Bag.)

3. The audio version of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi." Because years ago I learned how to solve my terrible insomnia problem by listening to spoken word. Audio books last years for me, because I can only hear a couple minutes a night. Because I think the elements of the story involving animals and floating in a lifeboat will harmonize well will sleeping and dreaming. Because I've listened to "A Short History of Nearly Everything" for the past year and some aspects of it are not harmonizing well with sleeping and dreaming (e.g., Yellowstone is a supervolcano due to erupt and destroy life as we know it, a large asteroid could suddenly kill us all something like a second after we became aware of it).

4. Sam Kashner's "When I Was Cool, My Life at the Jack Kerouac School." Because there's the adorable Sam Kashner on the cover wearing what William Burroughs called "suspenders of disbelief." Because I opened the book up at about twelve different places and read one sentence and every sentence passed my personal test of goodness (some combination of specific/surprising detail and an arrangement of words that charms me in some way ("I graduated 'in the Earth Horse Year,' whenever that was.")).