CapitalistImperialistPig

Lumo weighs in on the Fed. As it happens, I share some of his concerns about being too quick to cut interest rates, but I'm more interested in some of his logic: I want to say one more thing: a strategic, political observation. Friends of the U.S. are much more likely to hold the U.S. dollars while the U.S. enemies have a much higher probability to bet against the U.S. currency. By weakening the currency, the Fed effectively helps the enemies of the U.S. financially while it punishes its friends. It is a very bad evolution for the American (and not only American) strategic interests. I wonder how likely that is. Sure, some people always bet on the home team, but I have my doubts that that plays a big role in the thinking of of the BOC or Saudi Arabia. Clearly, they both have an interest in a strong dollar, but does it go beyond political and economic calculation? I have my doubts. And that goes double for the trading desks at Goldman-Sachs et al.

I was sitting at the bar of a local bistro when an old acquaintance happened to come up. After a bit the the usual small talk (football, politics, string theory) he got this real serious expression on his face. "I've got a tough choice to make Cap," he says. "I happened to help this guy out of a very tight spot, and in gratitude he wanted to offer me a reward." So what was the problem, I wondered. "It seems that he wasn't just any guy," says OA. "He turned out to be a Genie." Maybe I snickered a bit here, because he rushed on: "He told me that he was empowered to offer me a choice. He said he could offer me one of three second class superpowers. I was suspicious of course, but I parried by asking him what a first class superpower was. He gave me a haughty stare for a second, and then went on: 'Your first choice would be a permanent purse. Any time you reach your hand in, you can pull out a one ounce solid gold coin.' ...

One little bit of the Prez's SOTU that I caught talked about doubling the budget for fundamental physics research. Is this restoration of the high energy physics funds that were cut? Something only for 2009?

My thoughts upon reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful , by Sean B. Carroll In the middle ages, says Prof Carroll, Europeans started eating with two knives, using one to spear their food and another to cut it. This redundancy opened an opportunity for one knife evolve to be more specialized for spearing, while sacrificing the cutting function. This division into knife and fork was followed by many more in sufficiently posh dining facilities - a veritable Cambrian explosion of cutlery. A similar redundancy made room for arthropod specializations. Early arthropods had so-called biramous, or forked limbs, lots of them, but each fairly similar to all the others. Each consisted of a lower, leg-like limb used for walking, digging, or swimming, and an upper gill branch, used for absorbing oxygen. The most dramatic arthropod changes have taken place in those who moved onto land. In the case of insects, only six legs have been retained, but many others have been converted to other uses: mou...

A good weekend for the O-man and South Carolina - for Edwards, not so much. I think Edwards is done - done in by the press, done in by the haircuts, but mostly done in by being in between a charismatic candidate and the powers that be. It would be hard to claim that our political process is likely to pick the best candidate or even a good candidate - but pick it does. Edwards had good positions on the issues, but clearly lacked the magic touch. One thing I don't see mentioned much, but that affects me, is the way he got taken to the cleaners by Cheney in 2000. I don't like any of the Republicans, but with any luck the worst of them could be gone after Florida.

Thomas Dent asks: Is this a reason to discard the theory?[ that contains Boltzmann brains]. The best reasons for discarding a theory are: it doesn't make testable predictions, or it makes such predictions but they are wrong. Try to stick that in your Boltzmann brain and see what it says. LM: Dear pig, please, avoid these off-topic, superficial, uninformed, pig-like, Woit-like clichés that have been parroted by your likes about 1,000 times. They are well below the level required at this blog. Predicting a lot of Boltzmann brains is surely a prediction, whether folks like you understand it or not. Nevertheless, this prediction can't be used to eliminate a theory. If you have nothing to say about this particular problem and if you (clearly) misunderstand all these questions completely, please shut your mouth or keyboard. Next time I will do everything I can do ban your domains because I don't want this garbage to grow here. Go to Daily Kos or Woit blog or another place that i...

Trying to read a little molecular biology again, I become aware of some habits of mind that unsuit me for the pursuit. I went through the citric acid cycle today, and found a couple of problems: my physicist brain wants to drill down to understand how everything works - why one molecular configuration has just so much more energy than another, and my stupid brain can't remember the names (much less molecular conformations) of all those intermediates.

Olivia Judson's latest New York Times column/blog called The Wild Side talks about "hopeful monsters." The term was introduced in the 1930s by a geneticist called Richard Goldschmidt. He was interested in the question of how radical changes in morphology evolve. As an example of radical change, he gave flatfish — the flounder and its relations. These are descended from fish with the usual fishy symmetry: the same left-right symmetry that we have. Larval flounders have it, too. But as adults, flounders have a profound asymmetry — one side has been completely flattened. What’s more, they have deformed, twisted skulls, and an eye that has migrated from one side of the face to the other. It’s as though you had both eyes on the same side of your nose. How did they get this way? Goldschmidt speculated that big changes like this could be caused in one step by a mutation acting on the developing embryo. Most such mutations, he suggested, would produce individuals that were pla...

Thanks Khris.

Haloscan comments seem to be screwed. Apparently new one can't be seen from other computers - but I can see them here. Not sure what is going on. More later.

Joementum and Johnny Mac think we've already won in Iraq. General Petraeus is not so sure: Gen. David Petraeus, however, appeared on NBC this morning and rebutted the declarations of mission accomplished and said that he’ll need at least another Friedman Unit before he can make a judgment: We think we won’t know that we’ve reached a turning point until we’re six months past it. We have repeatedly said that there is no lights at the end of the tunnel that we’re seeing. We’re certainly not dancing in the end zone or anything like that.

A public intellectual, so far as I can tell, is an English teacher with an audience beyond the immediate family. Stanley Fish is our nation's most famous English teacher and writes a frequent column/blog for the New York Times, so I have on rare occasions sampled his stuff. Today's contribution is Against Independent Voters. So what exactly does Mr. Fish have against the indies? Mostly he just resents the fact that they get so much attention. We’re in that season now when we hear the same things being said over and over again, and nothing is said more often by political pundits than this election (it doesn’t matter which one) will be decided by independent voters. Accompanying this announcement is the judgment – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – that this state of affairs is to be welcomed, even encouraged: it’s good that the independent voters are making themselves heard and forcing candidates to think outside their partisan boxes. He doesn't like this, and he espec...

The Fed and most mainstream economists, not to mention your friendly stock hustler, continue to say we aren't really in a recession, and probably won't be. Chronic bears, like yours truly, think that we hear whispers of the apocalypse amidst the cheery chirping. A rather loud whisper was heard this morning when Asian stock exchanges plummeted. A softer but still ominous hint comes from this Michael A. Fletcher story in the Washington Post. It seems that: An unusually large share of workers have been out a job for more than six months even as overall unemployment has remained low, a little-noted weakness in the labor market that analysts said threatens to intensify the impact of the unfolding economic downturn. The hollow core of the Reagan-Bush-Greenspan phony economy of borrow and spend is increasing exposed. The Republicans and their minions in the press are determined to stick the public with the bill, and no doubt they will succeed at least in part. UPDATE: Department...

My thoughts upon reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful , by Sean B. Carroll Where should we look for the well laid plans that sculpt mice and men so differently? Well in the genome, of course, but there we meet a problem. Men and mice each have about the same number of genes, about 25,000. The conundrum gets worse. The genes are not only the same in number, but for most purposes they are the nearly the very same genes, producing very similar proteins. The answer to this and many other puzzles of development, form, and evolution seems to be that it's in the switches that turn those genes on and off. If we think of the genes as the keys on an old fashioned player piano, the switches are the piano roll. It's the sequence of switching that orchestrates the notes into the symphony of development. For the most part, man and mouse are built out of the same cell types and tissues - different architectures built out of the same old Lego blocks.

Glenn Greenwald continues his dissassembly of Joe Klein and the examination of his entrails. Klein's problem is that he has a habit of misremembering history in a way that makes his part in it look less inglorious than it was. Unfortunately for Joe, the internet remembers what he wrote, and Glenn is annoyed enough and diligent enough to track down the details and hang him by them.

Reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful , by Sean B. Carroll Some unicellular creatures called dinoflagellates are remarkable for their ability to change shape and mode of existence in response to environmental conditions. Their shape changing skills are nothing compared to those of a more familiar cell, however. Each human (or mouse, elephant, or frog) cell has the instruction set for turning itself into a blood, bone, brain, or skin cell. The story of how they manage these feats is the tale of embryonic development, and it is a remarkable tale indeed. When people set out to build something, we gather parts from afield, and bring them together in carefully (in my case, usually not carefully enough!)planned sequence and pattern, but an embryo assembles itself from the inside. The method is both elegant and instructive. First, the egg and early embryo establish a set of internal coordinates. These internal coordinates are specified in terms of chemical gradients, and are initially ...

Wall Street had a pretty bad week but the bad news just keeps on coming. The latest tremor seems to be the prospect of a downgrade of bond insurers . The money involved is huge - trillions. Kevin Drum summarises in the link. Paul Krugman's column today has some insights into the bigger picture. The US has been playing a very familiar game, living high on the hog on borrowed money, and this story always ends the same way. Mexico. Brazil. Argentina. Mexico, again. Thailand. Indonesia. Argentina, again. The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years... To be more precise, some in the US have been living high, most of the rest of us are just getting by, but Cheney's Halliburton options are doing quite well, thank himself very much. Bush and his Congress has been spending like crazy though, and so have American consumers. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke looked at the phenomenon in his previous life and observed that it was OK though, because: The global o...

Charles University is the oldest university in central and eastern Europe, founded in 1348, so more than twice as old as William and Mary or Yale. It has a host of distinguished alumni, including several Nobel Prize winners, famous historical figures, Novelists Karel Kapek Čapek and Franz Kafka as well as Nicola Tesla, Ivana Trump and Lubos Motl . Einstein and Mach appear on the faculty list. (Though the place never entered my consciousness before the last named alum beat the crap out of me for dissing the joint). Another student there was Johann Josef Loschmidt , who was the first to determine the number of molecules in a cm^3 of air, and made other contributions to Chemistry. He was a friend of Boltzmann's and contributed to the clarification of the foundations of statistical mechanics, notably through posing Loschmidt's Paradox , which is deeply connected to the Boltzmann Brain problem. (This is kind of a second indignity at the hands of history, since not only should Avog...

Bobby Fisher, the last chess genius, has died. He was a strange and tormented figure, the prototypical genius whose insanity took over at the moment of his greatest triumph. Rest in peace.

My new model universe for Arun et. al. Consider a rectangular box, containing ten molecules. Here the ticks of the state change clock occur whenever a molecule passes from the left side to the right or vice versa. At some point we drop a partition down the middle and find that there are eight molecules on the left side and two on the right. We denote this macro state by (8;2). What is the most likely predecessor state (PS)? Once again, there are just two possibilities: (9;1) and (7;3). There are 9 ways for the (9;1) state to go to the (8;2), but only three for the (7;3), so can we conclude that the (9;1) is the most likely PS? No, because the two states are not equally likely. There are only 10 ways to make a (9;1) state but 120 = (10x9x8)/(3x2) ways to make the (7;3) state. No bit of probabilistic hocus pocus is complete without Bayes theorem, so, let A be the event that the initial state is (9;1), B that the initial state is (7;3), and C that the final state is (8;2). P(A)=10/1024, P...

Arun wants some justification for my claims in the Boltzmann's brain post ( Ludwig's Revenge ). ...pure statistics seems to imply that entropy should increase in the past as well as the future. I definitely don't follow the argument. Physically, if a low entropy state most likely arose from a high entropy state, then we should see a lot of that happening around us. We don't... Both physically and statistically, a state of given entropy is much more likely to have arisen from a state of lower entropy (even though the number of states of high entropy which could have had a fluctuation to lower entropy is enormous, the probability of such fluctuations is even smaller - e.g., statistical partition functions wouldn't exist without that - the sums would diverge.) Consider a simple universe consisting of ten distinguishable bits, with an evolution law such that at each time step exactly one randomly chosen bit is flipped. There are a total of 2^10 = 1024 such states, of ...

Dennis Overbye, writing in the New York Times, has a nice article today on the so-called Boltzmann brain problem in cosmology. It's a new incarnation of a familiar problem in statistical mechanics and the physics of time, the problem that pure statistics seems to imply that entropy should increase in the past as well as the future: it's a priori more probable that the present is a momentary fluctuation rather than part of a long history extending into the past. Overbye, like cosmologists, recognizes that this way madness lies - the question is what to do about it. It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see ...

Wherein Captain Imperio meets evo devo (Hat tip to Changcho) Modularity is the law in biology, and indeed in the universe. Somehow those ancient Greeks rightly guessed that the world was made of universal tinkertoys. The funny thing is that it works at seemingly every level. Everything is made of atoms, and atoms are made of even fewer and simpler parts: electrons, protons, and neutrons, each of which is identical to all the other members of its species. At larger scales are stars and their solar systems, which assemble to build Galaxies, which in turn form clusters. Above and below, we can't quite be sure - though protons and neutrons are made of quarks. But this post is about life, because I have started reading Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science Of Evo Devo And The Making Of The Animal Kingdom by Sean B. Carroll. All the life we know inhabits one planet around one star, and it, like everything else, is made of atoms, but there is a lot more to its modularity. All tha...

One plausible road to climate catastrophe would be a rapid rise in sea level. The IPCCs most recent report estimated a maximum sea level rise of a couple of feet this century, but put in a huge caveat: meltdown of Antarctica and Greenland was not figured in for lack of adequate data. Data is trickling in, and the signs are ominous . Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates. It has become much more plausible that the century's sea level rise might be measure in meters rather than inches. This would be catastrophic for several countries and devastating for coastal cities in much of the world. Note to denialists everywhere: clap harder.

Re: Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories (Paperback) by F. William Lawvere (Author), Stephen Hoel Schanuel (Author) Even genius has its limitations. Stupidity is not thus constrained. Unfortunately, I keep demonstrating the second half of the couplet. For some time I have owed Arun a response on his question, but have delayed out of feelings of guilt: Did you get much beyond Brouwer's theorems? A funny thing happened when I tried to do Exercise 1 in the Brouwer's theorem chapter. I hit a pole in my stupidity quotient. I am convinced that it is pretty easy, but every time I thought about it, my brain found a good reason to be somewhere else. So for a couple of months I just stopped. I finally decided to just go on, and have worked about the next dozen or so exercises in Article III, but that's as far as I've gotten. It is a very good book, but I'm unable to take any of the ideas and apply meaningfully to anything outside the book, and so am...

Our onetime blogging mentor and occasional critic Luboš Motl is doing some greenhouse warming calculations. This is good, since Lumo is a much cleverer fellow than the AGW critics that he likes to listen to, and he can hardly help but learn some important things by doing the math himself. In particular, he has now calculated the logarithmic dependence of the temperature change on the CO2 concentration. This is all to the good, as I said, but I would like to focus on one little mistake he made, not because it’s very important, but because it’s symptomatic of the flaws in his reasoning about AGW in general – he simply hasn’t mastered the relevant facts. Another reason I bring it up is that we clashed before on the same subject, and at that point I didn’t bother to understand exactly why he was wrong, and didn't follow up on his mistake. What he does is assume that he can calculate the distribution with height of CO2 molecules based on the Boltzmann distribution for the CO2 molecule...

Iris Fry's book The Emergence of Life on Earth: A Historical and Scientific Overview is a detailed but non-technical account of attempts to explain how life emerged from non-living material. I have posted a number of articles on the book and closely related subjects here . I liked the book a lot, and much of the material was new to me, even though I have long been interested in the subject. Fry is a clear and careful writer, and there are endnotes enough for any scholar - the book includes a sixteen page bibliography. At first I was a bit suspicious of her historical and philosophical point of view, but in retrospect, it is an excellent vantage point. Although a good portion of the book is "ancient history," that is, prior to 1953 and the molecular biology revolution, the majority is focussed on the developments since. She excels at concisely presenting the perspectives and starting points of major investigators, and they are highly various. Like the fabled blind men of ...

For physics students of my generation, there were three new General Relativity textbooks: Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler; The Large Scale Stucture of Space Time , by Hawking and Ellis, and Gravitation and Cosmology by Weinberg. Each became an instant classic. Hawking and Ellis is a somewhat specialized and advanced treatise but the others were wide ranging texts with lots of cosmology in them. Thirty-five cosmologically eventful years have passed since then, and there are a few new and notable books on GR and cosmology on my bookshelves, but perhaps this is a good time for Weinberg's forthcoming new book (listed for May, 2008) Cosmology . Weinberg has a lucid and penetrating style and is a prolific and graceful writer of both classic textbooks and popular science, not to mention a Nobel Prize winning physics god. I haven't seen or ordered his new book yet, but the prospect looks inviting. Besides G&C he has previously written a terrific popular book on cosmolo...

Blogs by people who know something are great, and the blog world is valuable, especially if it pushes a story forward. But the blogs of people who simply write what they are thinking are not particularly valuable. ....................James Collins, who has written a new novel ( Beginner's Greek ).

Wolfgang has a post from a couple of months ago on an interesting puzzle. I think it has something to do with the way SIVs and CDOs are valued.

Following up on some links provided in the comments by Kurt L., I looked at some oddities in the New Hampshire vote count. All the NH ballots are paper ballots, but about 80% are counted by Diebold optical scanners, while the rest are counted by hand. Now here is the oddity: percentagewise, obama does much better on the hand counted ballots and Hillary does much better on the machine counted ballots. The percentage discrepancies for other candidates are all smaller. Similarly, on the Republican side, Romney does much better on the machine counted ballots, while Huckabee, McCain, and Paul all do better on the hand counted ballots. Is it just coincidence that the two machine candidates, Hillary and Mitt, got a little boost from the machine counters? The referenced links have detailed data by candidate, town, and counting method.

With Bush and the Neocons, Paranoia may be the only rational response. UPDATE: Critique and response. From the comments, WB says: This story names only one name in an official position: "assistant secretary of state for European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of state for political affairs". So why do you have Bush and NeoCons in your one-line post? The post I linked to mentions no names, but it does have four secondary links, which I will call A, B, C, and D in order of their appearance. Secondary link B links to a tertiary link, and quotes from it. No names appear in the tertiary link quote either, but it did reference an unnamed high official. Following that, secondary link B claims that the official in question is Marc Grossman, a Clinton appointee. It goes on to mention a number of other officials allegedly involved or on the fringes: Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle, and Eric Edelman, all of whom are former very high Bush admi...

26 % of the votes in and it's starting to look pretty bleak here in Obamaville. Confident predictictions of a crush seem out the window. At this point, any victory for Obama will be great, but it's starting to seem unlikely. For Hillary, living to campaign again seems certain. A grim prospect of Hillary vs. McCain and another Republican President looms. UPDATE: Hillary wins. The Bradley effect wins. Bush's war wins. The bullshit pollsters lose big. I suspect Edwards is done, but this is a season for surprises, so who knows. Did Hillary benefit from the universal media prediction of her demise? Probably. Did she benefit from a sympathy vote? Who can guess? Did she benefit from New Hampshire contrariness? Maybe. Is the race now wide open? I think so. UPDATE II. Curiouser. All pre-election polls showed Obama with a substantial or even huge lead. Exit polls showed him winning more narrowly. But Hillary wins decisively. The Bradley effect? What kind of voti...

The toughest problem in defining a general theory of life is the paucity of examples. That statement sounds like an oxymoron - isn't life famously diverse? Man, elephant, mouse, carrot, redwood, mushroom, coral, sponge, and bacterium seem pretty darn different. At the molecular level, however, they aren't. The most essential machinery at the molecular level is almost exactly the same. They all use the same genetic code, and the same basic mechanisms for the most basic operations of life. These commonalities, and the patterns of both commonalities and differences constitute the most dramatic proof of the fact of common descent. However all that common machinery came into existence, it all seems to have existed in the most recent common ancestor of all known Earthly life. Despite a large number of apparently contingent and arbitrary elements in life, exceptions are not known. Proteins and complex sugars have definite chiralities but we don't know of any fundamental r...

The Republican Debates It's just possible that I have a slight prejudice here, but were the Republican candidates a bunch of scuzzy old whores or what? Ron Paul excepted, of course, but every time he said something intelligent, the stupidocracy, led by Romney, shouted him down. Giuliani is the sleeziest, and McCain is the oldest, but Romney valiantly tried too. Pretty much the whole message of these louts (Ron Paul - you should keep better company) is fear mongering. The Islamic bogeyman poses an "existential threat" says the McCainbot - (I prefer to think that the real John McCain is being held prisoner somewhere, while this dopey Republibot campaigns). Pull - f*****g -leeze! The entire Islamic world has little technology, little military power, and is largely allied with our ruling Republicrooks. The country does face some serious threats - the disregard for our constitution, the erosion of individual liberty, the destruction of the economy by Republican borrow and...

Glenn Greenwald gleefully assembles the just pre-Iowa predictions of our fearless punditocracy. A true Christmas in January for all the Joe Klein, Glenn Reynolds, Mike Allen, etc. haters of the world. A small sample: Joe Klein, Time, December 31, 2007: Huckabust Des Moines Just when you think the Republican presidential race can't get weirder...Mike Huckabee holds a press conference here to announce that he'd just made a last minute decision not to air a negative TV ad slamming Romney. That sound you hear rumbling out of Des Moines appears to be a monumental implosion. There is much, much more from the wing-nut crowds.

Every year Edge asks the Dyson family and a few dozen notable others some philosophically tinged scientific question. This year the question was: "What have you changed your mind about?" Your humble correspondent is much too humble to be among those interrogated, but I have heard of many of them, and one or two have even deigned to address me on occasion. Some of the notables have blogs: PZ Myers, Sean Carroll (the Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll, that is), and John Baez. It turns out that most of the things these people change their minds about are pretty boring. Richard Dawkins used to think some theory of peacocks tails was wrong, but now he doesn't. PZ Myers works on problems slightly different from those he started with. Lots of others claim to have changed their minds about things quite some time ago, but I suspect that they were always heretics - I'm thinking Rovelli and Smolin for example. Emboldened by these bits of mundania, I started thinking abou...

The current US economy is highly dependent on the willingness of the big international dollar holders - China, the Gulf States, Russia, Japan, and others - to lend us money at cheap rates. So far, this has been a dubious financial decision for them, since the decline of the dollar means that they keep losing money. Brad Setser takes a look at some historic parallels. They aren't entirely encouraging. Surprising enough, owing a lot of money has a way of weakening your status and bargaining position. For the present, and for the foreseeable future, we are addicted to that cheap Chinese and oil exporter crack. The only things likely to improve our international standing are cutting back on our oil use and balancing the budget.

I have been an Obama supporter for some time, so naturally I'm gratified by the Iowa result. Being the sort of conflicted individual that I am, I'm also a bit nervous. Is he ready? Are we making a mistake in throwing out Hillary? Wouldn't we be better off with the more liberal Edwards? Conventional wisdom says Edwards is likely done. Hillary is poised on the knife edge, but still leads New Hampshire and national polls. There is reason to be a bit cheerful about Huckabee's victory as well. He is the second most authentic Republican candidate and not quite as scary as Ron Paul. The phony Romney and his money went down, and the ultra scary Giuliani finished fifth. McCain and Huckabee now look likely to duke it out, though Romney and Giuliani probably can't be counted out yet - and Paul could still make some big noise in libertarian New Hampshire. It should stay interesting for at least another five days.

Every university worth its ivy has a college or school of liberal arts, but how many colleges have a college of conservative arts? This is an extreme example of American academia's left-wing bias. In simple fairness that needs to be remedied, and correcting that terrible injustice is the primary mission of Reagan Memorial University. Because entrance to RMU is purely on a merit basis (if you've got the cash, you merit admission), some remedial courses in basic conservative principles are offered. Liberals are admitted too, of course, but they will be promptly mugged, ergo ... Basic preparatory work consists of principles of illogic, rationalization I, lying, cheating, and stealing. More advanced techniques are covered in the upper division courses - ballot tampering, vote suppression, and the ever popular torture but we don't call it torture. The college of Conservative Arts is the capstone of RMU, but other traditional disciplines are represented as well. We also...

Bush has been exceptionally stingy with pardons and commutations so far, but it looks like it might be time to fill the old pardon pen inkwell. Thomas H Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, the bi-partisan co-chairs of the 9/11 commission, have written an op-ed in today's New York Times bluntly accusing the CIA and White House of obstructing their investigation. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation. There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the adm...

You, says David Levy, can be replaced. You, here, would be pretty much everybody.

Comments upon reading Iris Fry's The Emergence of Life on Earth Chapters 9-11 Which came first: the chicken or the egg? That is the fundamental question in the origin of life. Evolution manages to kick this can down the road a bit: the chicken and egg evolved together from earlier egg layers which in turn evolved from more primitive reproduction schemes. We even have samples of the more primitive reproduction schemes around to encourage us. The discovery that life processes could be reduced to biochemistry, together with the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis positing a reducing atmosphere for the primeval Earth, encouraged origin of life researchers to believe that organic chemistry might naturally produce the molecules of life. However, developments from 1960 to the nineteen-eighties put a couple of severe dampers on such optimism. First, and probably most grievously, explication of the mechanisms of heredity and metabolism revealed an intrinsic complexity that seemed guaranteed to preve...

It seems that the Lumonator is publishing a book. Unfortunately, it appears that it will be in French. Maybe Peter Woit can be talked into reviewing it.