CapitalistImperialistPig

Resolution for 2009 - stop procrastinating. I know I'm a bit late on this, but I want to get out my predictions for 2008 before it's too late: 1)Dangerous Hurricanes. 2)Republicans will nominate an idiot (or two). 3)Stocks will fluctuate. 4)Global warming will continue to generate controversy and exercise the nutbag crackpots of the right. 4)Trouble in the Middle East 5)Oil prices will fluctuate 6)Bush will continue to be clueless 7)The LHC will be a big success

What is the evolutionary rationale for risk taking? Is it not a better strategy to play it safe? Like most questions of the sort, the answer to this one is "it depends." Trying to conquer the world is a pretty risky enterprise but something like 8% of all the males in a wide swath of Asia turn out to be descended in the male line (father to son) from Genghiz Khan. Zero of them turn out to be descended from those who failed before reproducing. Risk taking is the engine behind exploration, entrepreneurship, scientific and technical progress, and asking the prom queen for a date. It's also implicated in crime, addiction, financial panics and lousy driving (right up there with talking on cell phones). For most of us, following the herd is more comfortable than striking out on one's own. Physicists ten years ago became string theorists (today probably cosmologists) because that was the thing to do - but those who became string theorists thirty years ago were pioneers. Most...

Kerson Huang, an MIT emitus professor and prolific author of physics textbooks, has written a semi-popular account of gauge field theory: Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields . Semi-popular is his description, and it starts from the fundamentals (Newton's Second Law) but it does include equations, including lagrangians for the standard model. I suppose that a proper reviewer would try to figure out who would benefit from such a book. Certainly there would be a lot lost on anyone who had never seen vector and tensor notation, met a lagrangian, or heard of a group. Huang helpfully notes that those who don't understand the math can just read the words, appreciating the book "just as one might enjoy a foreign movie without the subtitles." Hmmm? In any case, it was a pretty good book for me, a physicist who doesn't remember quantum field theory very well, and learned most of what little he did before the gauge revolution. He does attempt to develop t...

Sean Carroll has posted a few times on Boltzmann Brains, and he has a new entry today Richard Feynman on Boltzmann Brains. The original motivation for considering such things is the fact that the Universe seems to have started with a very low entropy - very low compared to all possible universes. This is fortunate since it allowed the development of all the things that make us possible - galaxies, solar systems, life and evolution. So why, we may ask, was the initial state of our universe so low in entropy. Nobody knows, but Boltzmann, who started the whole business, had an idea: maybe it was a random statistical fluctuation. The so-called Boltzmann Brain Paradox is intended to show that the fluctuation hypothesis is not a profitable assumption. From Wikipedia: This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Chicago is, or at least until very recently was, the most prestigious address in economics. The University of Chicago has accumulated ten of the economics "Nobels" and has had unmatched influence on recent Republican policies. It also played the central role in our current financial debacle. Both deregulation and the explosion in the financial derivative markets trace their roots to Chicago. John Lippert, writing for Bloomberg.com, has a great article on the reaction in Chicago to our current crisis: Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation. It is a stellar article, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the range of current economic thought, and especially to Krugmanites like myself who need to be reminded of the others. The hard core efficient marketeers resisted the bailout and still swear allegiance to Saint Friedman, but others have seen their fa...

Israel slaughtered a couple of hundred Palestinians in Gaza today, many of whom probably actually deserved it. This action was Israel's response to continuing rocket attacks and other provocations from the Palestinians. The aerial attacks, a form of shooting fish in a barrel, have the advantage of not putting actual soldiers at risk, or at any rate, much risk. I predict, however, that they won't be effective in stopping future attacks, nor do I think the Israelis think so - except perhaps for the air forces. Stopping the attacks isn't really the point of course. The point is to make the Israeli public think that the government is doing something and give it the satisfaction of watching somebody else suffer. Unfortunately, the only ways to actually do something all have their own severe problems: exterminate the Palestinians, rule them, or make peace with them. Israel isn't prepared to pay the cost of any of these - yet. The question is how long the current low int...

Tyler Cowen's : GM fact of the day As Mark Steyn pointed out on NRO, GM now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath and Beyond. Here is the link. The Steyn article also offers this: GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. GM's problem is not making bad cars today, it is a casualty of its history. Yet another lesson in excessive debt being hazardous to your health. Of course the same may be said of taking anything Mark Steyn writes as likely to be true.

It's a sad irony that the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt has become the party of racists , yahoos, and know-nothings.

We have now seen a couple of years of a wild run up in the price of oil followed by an equally drastic and even more sudden collapse. So what the heck is going on? David Cohen has a close look in The price is not right . Conventional economic theories do a lousy job of predicting oil prices, it seems, and so does everything else. The short answer: nobody knows. Right now the price of oil is hovering in the mid to high thirties while the marginal cost of production (producing new oil) is in the low sixties. That makes it pretty clear that nobody is going to invest billions in new production unless they are pretty sure that the price will go way up again. If nobody does invest in new production, production will fall and, of course, prices will rise. Oil is one of the most central items in the World economy, so the inefficiency of the market in predicting and thus stabilizing prices is a serious threat to economic stability. Cohen's long article is illuminating but doesn't ...

Kevin Drum reads Noah Millman's look at the structured finance debacle. The really short version: investors lost their minds. With other people's money. Millman's opening paragraph: Indeed, this dark forest is a hard thing to speak of. As readers of this blog may recall, I’ve spent the last several years working in an industry now credibly blamed for bringing on what is almost certainly the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Not only have I been working on Wall Street, but I work in structured finance. While I wasn’t at the epicenter of the crisis – I didn’t put together mortgage securitizations, and I don’t work for one of the big firms – I was certainly using some of the same financial technology, and trading the same products, as the businesses that were at the epicenter. The moral of this story: the market is a ho. Don't trust a ho. Right wing economists especially promoted the notion of the wisdom of the marketplace, but that is at best an exag...

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" ..................A. Einstein The Statistical Mechanic has returned and his first post got me thinking. In physics we always tell the students that if they can't do the problems, they don't understand it. But what if you can do the problems (or least some of them) and you still don't understand it? Many of us among the slow students find ourselves in that fix, and even some smart guys seem to agree. What's the deal with gauge fields, anyway? The gauges of gauge fields turn out to be essential for doing the math of quantum field theory, but they cleverly conspire to remain unobservable. Why should it turn out that nature seems to have this invisible degree of freedom? I have been reading Kerson Huang's book Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields . I will probably review it later.

Bernard Avishai argues at TPM Cafe that the West Bank settlements have got Israel in a box that it can't escape from on its own. Israel's colonies in the West Bank are small, absorb a dispproportionate share of Israeli resources, are a primary obstacle to peace and behave badly. Unfortunately, they are also very difficult to dislodge. No Israeli leader wants to deal with facing down the new Judeans--or can, without destroying Israeli social solidarity. I have written here before about how all fanatics live within concentric circles of support. No matter who wins a majority in the next election, about half of Israeli Knesset members will be from circles which the settlers count on--National Orthodox, Shas, Leiberman's Russians, Haredi--people concentrated in and around Jerusalem, whom the settlers will tell you would be in settlements themselves if they had the guts; people who will nevertheless apply the "values" the settlers stand for to Jerusalem. The problem ...

Paul Krugman fears that the US economy might be on life support for a long time: Life Without Bubbles. Whatever the new administration does, we’re in for months, perhaps even a year, of economic hell. After that, things should get better, as President Obama’s stimulus plan — O.K., I’m told that the politically correct term is now “economic recovery plan” — begins to gain traction. Late next year the economy should begin to stabilize, and I’m fairly optimistic about 2010. But what comes after that? Right now everyone is talking about, say, two years of economic stimulus — which makes sense as a planning horizon. Too much of the economic commentary I’ve been reading seems to assume, however, that that’s really all we’ll need — that once a burst of deficit spending turns the economy around we can quickly go back to business as usual. In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that... A more plausible r...

He said it I believe it that settles it. .................Bumper sticker syllogism There is no arguing with hard core ideologues because, as proclaimed by the above, they aren't interested in facts or logic. Like the bishop who reputely refused to look through Galileo's telescope (at the craters of the moon and the moons of Jupiter) for fear of losing his soul they actively avoid fact and logic. Their style of argumentation is very recognizable when it exists at all: insults, denial, cherry picking and conspiracy theories. Ideologues of that stripe tend to be rare in science because, as Neils Bohr once put it, "we all have the advantage of having written papers that were subsequently proven wrong." Bohr was lucky enough to have lived in a heroic age. That advantage seems to have largely disappeared from theoretical physics these days, since experimental results relevant to the new theories are largely nonexistent. Maybe the LHC will find something good enough to p...

Timing, they say, is everything. Perhaps this wasn't an ideal time for Congress to raise its pay. Jordy Yager has this take at The Hill . A crumbling economy, more than 2 million constituents who have lost their jobs this year, and congressional demands of CEOs to work for free did not convince lawmakers to freeze their own pay. Instead, they will get a $4,700 pay increase, amounting to an additional $2.5 million that taxpayers will spend on congressional salaries, and watchdog groups are not happy about it. So, is Congress overpaid? In the beginning days of 1789, Congress was paid only $6 a day, which would be about $75 daily by modern standards. But by 1965 members were receiving $30,000 a year, which is the modern equivalent of about $195,000. Currently the average lawmaker makes $169,300 a year, with leadership making slightly more. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) makes $217,400, while the minority and majority leaders in the House and Senate make $188,100. $170K doesn...

Via Marginal Revolution , Scott Reynolds Nelson writes on the Panic of 1873, which he sees as not only more severe than the Great Depression, but a more apt model for the present: The Real Great Depression . There are some strong points of similarity. The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period. Financial underpinnings we...

Obama's Science Advisor will be John Holdren, an MIT and Stanford educated physicist from Harvard. Despite his education, I didn't see much "hard science" in his CV. Instead he has concentrated on policy issues: environment and nuclear weapons. Our fair and balanced commenter LM has a post on him that is not entirely laudatory, but, needless to say, didn't seem to include anything on Holdren that I would disapprove of.

Brad DeLong on the Krugman haters: First, there were an awful lot of people who knew in the summer of 2001 exactly what Paul Krugman knew, and I knew--that George W. Bush was a horrible president, intellectually lazy, incurious, suspicious and fearful of expertise, yet convinced that it was his job to be the "decider" and to make decisions based on inadequate information and then never to revisit them--for that would be a sign of "weakness." But they didn't say what they knew. And know they feel very guilty. And one way the guilt works itself out is by denigrating those--like Paul Krugman, like Ron Suskind, like Philippe Sands--who were brave enough to say that the emperor was buck-naked at the time. Second, the right-wing slime machine worked spectacularly well in the 1990s.. And the slimers continued into the 2000s. And a bunch of other people said: "Hey, if it worked for Rush Limbaugh, it can work for me." And so you got the first wave of Krugman-ha...

Many on the left are now bemoaning Obama's so-called "turn to the right." The Republicans have consistently tried to paint Obama as some sort of extreme leftist, but in fact there is nothing in his speeches, writings, or history to suggest that. Few Presidents, if any, have so clearly articulated their point of view before election. For anyone who read his books, or listened to his speeches, or paid attention to those who knew him best, it was always clear that he was anything but a doctrinaire ideologue. None the less, he has an ambitious agenda, and it's one that many on the left should broadly sympathize with. He wants universal health care, and he wants the US to be a respected world leader rather than the neighborhood bully. Those are huge. Most importantly, he realizes that most of the challenges a President faces were unanticipated when he started running for office. For the US today, that means the world economic crisis that George Bush is leaving him. ...

* Don't Trust Me by 3OH!3 The fundamental disease of the current financial system is a well founded lack of trust. By deciding to trust exclusively in the "wisdom of the marketplace" the conservatives have forced a situation where nobody is willing to trust anybody, except the government, which they trust only because there is nobody else left. The repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, which put ordinary banks in direct competition with the investment banks, induced or perhaps even forced them to become hos. The payoff was the goodlife of multihundred million dollar bonuses, and the payback was the collapse of the international banking system. The odd thing is that so much supposedly "smart money" trusted where it should not have - Bernie Madoff, for example. Near the core of these failures, though, was failure of the government, especially the SEC and the Fed, to do their jobs. This was Reagan's "the government is the problem, not the solution" com...

Brad Setzer on the state of play in finance: Today’s Fed statement speaks for itself . The comments are also illuminating - less than 50% are nuts. The take away: Situation still desperate. If we go down in flames it won't be for the lack of the Bernanke's trying. If this latest crisis manages to bring down our current version of capitalism, somebody should put up a tombstone inscribed with something along the lines of "Unregulated Markets are Dangerous to Your Health." Thanks again to Ronnie and George III, and always and especially to Alan.

The AP seems to have gone into competition with the Onion. Despite this laudable entry: AP: Many Insisting That Obama Is Not Black they are losing big time. Some potential follow-ups: George Bush insists he is not Herbert Hoover Crazed scientist insists Moon not made of Green Cheese.

Even if one concedes the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming, there is a case to be made against draconian cuts in carbon emissions. That case, argued principally by conservative economists, rests on the idea that the cost of the required carbon cuts is greater than the cost of the predicted climate change. This is an important and serious argument, and it rests, quite unfortunately, on a pair of quite uncertain projections, namely upon the severity of the the respective effects. Moreover, the costs are upfront costs, to be borne by this generation and the next, but the projected benefits go to our grandchildren, great grandchildren, and their progeny. This case is made, but not well, by our blogging mentor (a distinction I expect he regrets) Lubos Motl. His case is presented as a parable involving a hypothetical house owner and similarly hypothetical structural engineer whose name, Steve Chu, just happens to be shared with the Nobel Physics prizewinner and Energy Secretary de...

Mostly dumb ideas, these days, or at any rate ideas that hardly anybody likes. The Republicans are apparently looking to reboot. Steve Benen at Political Animal is on the case: THE RNC'S THINK TANK.... I've argued a few times since the election that the Republican Party's intellectual bankruptcy compounds its electoral problems. The race to be the "party of ideas" is over; the GOP lost. When one of the top House Republican leaders wrote about the policy vision for the party's future, and listed three failed ideas from the '90s, it only helped reinforce the point this is a party lacking in substance and policy direction. It appears that the party is at least aware of the problem (and admitting you have a problem is the first step). Ben Smith reports that the Republican National Committee is "building a new, in-house think tank aimed at reviving the party's policy heft There is a certain topological obstruction to the project, however. Steve zero...

My families paternal ancentry passes through Minnesota, and I probably still have some relatives there, but those people vote damn funny. Jesse Ventura?? Michelle Bachman????????????

... is frequently not an adequate defense. From the Huffington Post: A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. "They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit." ... "According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, "the Jews." I suspect that the head of the CIA had better intelligence about the actions of Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams and their allies in the press than he did about Saddam's WMDs.

Mainly for doubters of the Standard Climate Model, intended to assess how far up the river (de Nile) you are. (All questions yes or no or don't know/don't care ) (1)CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases warm the Earth? (Y N DK) (2)Human activities are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere? (Y N DK) (3)Measurements prove that the Earth has been warming for over a century? (Y N DK) (4)Human activities contribute to this warming? (Y N DK) (5)Human caused global warming (AGW) is happening but not important. (Y N DK) (6)AGW is likely to increase global temperatures by 5 C or more over the next century if nothing is done to stop it? (Y N DK) (7)AGW is happening but we can't, or shouldn't do anything about it. (Y N DK) (8)AGW is likely to transform our planet in unpleasant or even catastrophic ways. (Y N DK) (9)AGW presents a severe threat to the continuance of human life, or at least to human life at an acceptable quality of life. (Y N DK) My answers: 1. Y, 2. Y, 3. Y, 4. Y, 5...

... may be a terrifically qualified person but this Nepotistic crap has got to stop.

W appears to have retained fairly good reflexes. Secret Service - not so much. ALSO: Now he can say that he too, has been under fire in Iraq.

Galileo famously demonstrated, or at any rate talked about demonstrating the equivalence principle by dropping heavy and light balls off the leaning tower of Pisa. Absent friction, the balls should fall at the same rate and reach the ground at the same time. WB has recently posted a puzzle on this subject. Since I found the puzzle hard, mainly because of what I considered miscelleaneous complications, and because Wolfgang didn't like my solution, I am posting my own more idealized, and hence slightly different, version here. Consider a spherically symmetric matroyoshka Earth, with a very small inner sphere at its center, and a still smaller sphere at the center of it. The total mass of the Earth is M, the mass of the middle spherical shell (not counting the innermost sphere) is m, and the mass of the innermost sphere by itself is m1. Consider the following two experiments: (1) The spherical shell of mass m is separated from the Earth and raised to a distance between its cente...

Michael Griffin is nothing if not a diligent student. He seems to have accumulated seven degrees, including a PhD, an MBA, and four other master's degrees, and is reputedly working on yet another. These qualifications don't necessarily make an ideal NASA administrator, however, and he has lots of critics. The principal criticisms seem to be three: NASA won't have heavy lift capability for nearly a decade or more, NASA has cut back science missions in favor of an unrealistic man on Mars scheme, and NASA has allowed unqualified political hacks to censor its scientists. Most of these problems were in fact foisted on him by Karl Rove's political hackery, and Griffin could argue that he made the best possible defense of NASA's key assets from the White House idiots. Be that as it may, Griffin is now under fire for reportedly being uncooperative with the Obama transition team. The Orlando Sentinel, which keeps an ear close to the ground on space matters, reports this...

Deleted on the grounds that wiser heads thought this was a lousy context in which to complain about grammar and logic.

Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore

Bailouts remain very unpopular with voters, expecially the conservative Southern voters on the wrong side of the last election. That fact, more than ideology, explains the Republican Senators decision to torpedo the Auto bailout. Of course it helps that many have Japanese auto companies in their States that would benefit from the disappearance of Detroit. The politics of resentment play a big role too. The wingnutosphere likes to talk about the Union workers making $73/hr - mostly BS of course, but actual wages and benefits are a bit higher in unionized plants, and costs, mostly legacy costs are significantly higher. The non-union workers in the foreign auto plants are well paid as well, mainly because the companies know that their workers would unionize if they fell too far behind Detroit - but watch them fall after Detroit disappears. In any case, Republicans are expoiting the fact that lots of other people are hurting and resent what they (correctly) see as special treatment fo...

From the stupidosphere, an increasingly popular meme: Bush kept us from being attacked.... OK, by my count the US has suffered a massive foreign attack on our homeland exactly once during the past 196 years. Who was it that was President then? I can't seem to remember, but his initials were "W."

Some Republican moron (Tim Pawlenty, to be specific) is now proposing a balanced budget amendment - a typical dishonest Republican trick for show purposes only. too bad he didn't think of that a bit earlier when his President was running the country into the ground. So far during Bush's Presidency, the national debt has increased by five trillion dollars , not quite doubling the amount run up by all previous administrations combined (5.6 trillion - which in turn was mostly due to Reagan and the slightly less disastrous first Bush) - and he still has six weeks to go. Two trillion of that was run up in the last two years, one and one half trillion this year, and one trillion in the last four months.

Kevin Drum is shocked to hear that multiple choice exams are apparently absent from Europe. Is that generally true of the rest of the world? Arun? Anybody?

I ran some more of Saletan's numbers, and they are definitely non-Mendelian. He gives the following for the X allele frequencies in the various populations: Asians - 52%, European Whites - 42%, African Americans - 27%, West Africans - 16%. From this we can calculate the probable distribution of the XX, XR, and RR expected from random matings and births. For Asians, XX should occur with frequency (.52^2)=27%, RX (.52)(.48)*2= 25%, and RR at (.48)^2 = 23% These numbers differ very slightly from the ones of my table: Race ******* RR *** RX *** XX Asian _____.25__ .50___ .25 Wh Euro ___.30 __.50__ .20 Af Am_____ .60 __.27__ .13 Af Bantu ___.81__ .18___ .01 But the differences are larger for the other groups. Here is the expected table. Race ******* RR *** RX *** XX Asian _____.27__ .50___ .23 Wh Euro ___. 33__.49___ .18 Af Am_____ .53 __.40___ .07 Af Bantu ___.71___ .26___ .03 Compared to random behavior, RR is underrepresented among Asians and European whites, but the opposite trend ...

William Saletan has a new column on why White Men Can't Jump, or more precisely, on the correlation of genes, fast twitch muscle fibers, and race. It turns out that a certain gene, ACTN3 comes in a couple of types, call them R and X, that are linked to the proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers, which in turn are linked to speed. All really fast sprinters, it seems, have the RR type (you get one copy from each parent). It also turns out that gene frequencies for this gene differ significantly from race to race (he uses four "races", Asian, White, African American, and Bantu - never mind the imprecision). From his article you can deduce that those categories assort as follows: Race ******* RR *** RX *** XX Asian _____.25__ .50___ .25 Wh Euro ___.30 __.50__ .20 Af Am_____ .60 __.27__ .13 Af Bantu ___.81__ .18___ .01 Which seems a bit non-Mendelian for the latter categories - I have no explanation for that. Now Asians and white Europeans are all but absent from the lists o...

After praising Susskind's expository skills I find that he leaves me mystified on a crucial point. Maldacena conjectured a correspondence between Anti-de Sitterk space and a conformal field theory on its "boundary." Anti-de Sitter space, as far as I can tell, is a space with Lobachevskian spatial section - a space whose spatial part has constant negative scalar curvature. Susskind illustrates his AdS with Escher's picture of angels and demons on a Poincare disk. (I seem to recall Maldacena doing the same in a Scientific American story). Poincare had noticed (a hundred years or so ago) that he could conformally map Lobachevsky's space on to a unit disk in the complex plane. The infinite Lobachevskian space is mapped onto a finite disk by a transformation that shrinks everything as it approaches the boundary. The problem in my mind is that Susskind speaks of the boundary of the model disk as a real boundary at a finite distance, and treats the apparent shrinking ...

There is a story of a bitter rivalry between tow old Scottish farmers whom we shall call McGraw and McGrew. God decides to show them the error of their ways, so he said to McGraw: "I will give you anything you want, but there is a catch. Whatever I give to you, I will give two of to McGrew." McGraw is torn between his greed and his hatred for McGrew, so he thinks long and hard. Finally he says: "Lord, put out me one eye." Economists are nearly unanimous in their belief in free trade, but the public is much more suspicious. Economists tend to ascribe this difference to the publics failure to appreciate the subtle point of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. Wikipedia illustrates that point with the following nice example: Two men live alone on an isolated island. To survive they must undertake a few basic economic activities like water carrying, fishing, cooking and shelter construction and maintenance. The first man is young, strong, and educated an...

One of the hazards of being the big dog on the block is that everybody blames you. The main victims in Mumbai were Indian, or course, but the terrorist went to some trouble to make sure they killed Americans, Jews, and British. The Indians blame America as protectors and financiers of Pakistan. Historically this is true, but the US alliance with Pakistan has never been a matter of our common allegiance to that old Hebrew War God, nor has it ever been more than a matter of current convenience. In the early years, when India tilted to the Russians in the cold war, Pakistan was a counterweight. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan was the vital staging area for the resistance. With 9/11, Pakistan was a country that needed to be kept on the sidelines of the Afghanistan struggle. Despite tens of billions in US aid, Pakistan has never been an effective ally against the Taliban, nor has it been able to keep its own state from perpetually teetering on the brink of political an...

A lot of planning went into the Mubai terror attacks. What was their strategic objective? Why the torture? Why the deliberately outrageous character of the attacks? Was it just a Columbine writ large, a fit of adolescent pique? I think Daniel Benjamin, writing in Slate, has the key element . In a sense, the victims in India were collateral damage, victims of the struggle for power and contro in Pakistan. The radical elements in Pakistan, including the various terrorist organizations, fear and hate the recent trends of raprochment between India and Pakistan. They, and their supporters in the government, the military, and the ISI have been waging a campaign of terror and assassination in Pakistan but have not been able to capture control. The origins of the attack remain unclear: We know little about the gunmen. Of those identified, all but one are dead. It is difficult to imagine that as few as 10 terrorists—the number cited in most reports—carried out this attack or that they d...

Nick Kristof on micronutrients and IQ . Almost one-third of the world’s people don’t get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness. When a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around the world.

Leonard Susskind is a noted theoretical physicist who is one of the founding fathers of string theory and who has contributed important ideas to particle physics and quantum gravity. He also has a somewhat unusual CV, having spent five years working as a plumber before entering graduate school. When I bought his book, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics, I didn't really have very high hopes for it. For one thing, there was the title - just a bit too self-congratulatory. For another, I had read some of his quotes on string theory, and they seemed redolent of string chauvinism. I am happy to say that these fears proved quite unfounded. To be sure, he isn't a prose stylist at the same level as some other physics popularizers, and he does have this sometimes annoying chip on his shoulder - repeatedly giving into the temptation to dis other physicists: "Einstein pompously declared..." Actually though, it'...

A bit more from Leonard Susskind. In describing hadrons he promotes a very specific and mechanical model of the hadron as a QCD string, with quarks connected by little bar magnet like gluons. Mesons, in this picture have their quark and antiquark connected by a single string of bar magnet gluons while the three quarks of a baryon are connected by a bolo shaped Y of gluon bar magnets. I wasn't completely unfamiliar with this picture but I had always thought of it as more metaphorical than real and concrete. Anybody whose particle physics is more up to date have any thoughts on this? In particular, I hadn't realized that gluons were polar, though it does seem rather plausible. The specificity of the shapes was the most surprising element for me. Is that implied by the linearity of the Regge trajectories?

If it's true, as reported by ABC, that India was warned of the terror attacks both by the US and its own intelligence, then the Indian government has a great deal to answer for. U.S. intelligence agencies warned their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack "from the sea against hotels and business centers in Mumbai," a U.S. intelligence official tells ABCNews.com. Other reports claim Indian police did not even use their own guns against the attackers - perhaps they weren't even loaded, and Indian special forces were many hours away. The same reports make the assignment of blame rather more clear cut as well. It is quite possible that the perpetrators specifically targetted recent Indian - Pakistani cooperation with the aim of increasing tension or promoting war. Relatively few outside observers believe the Pakistani government promoted this attack directly, but Pakistan must now take decisive action against the militants or suffer for their sins.