CapitalistImperialistPig

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana The arrow of time has been understood for 100 years says Lumo , except, apparently, in the Caltech Cosmology department. Forgetting that for a moment, is it understood by Motl? I find him a bit hard to understand when he's in his rage against the heathens polemical mode, but he and I have been in this rodeo before, so I'm just going to say that he seems to utterly miss the point in his critique of Sean Carroll and colleagues. The problem Sean addresses, and the Lubos tries to sweep under the rug, is that of how a direction of time emerges from time symmetric laws of microphysics. Boltzmann was perhaps the first to struggle with this, and his answer was the so-called H theorem. Loschmidt pointed out that his proof in fact assumed something equivalent to what he was trying to prove. Lubos discusses a more recent attempt by Weinberg to prove a quantum field theoretic version of the H theorem. I couldn't really follow...

Neutrino - thanks for the correction on the lapse rate. Do I get part credit for the average lapse rate being between the wet and dry adiabatic lapse rates? Stratospheric cooling is a complicated subject, but the dauntless Captain Imperio will attempt to oversimplify it. Think of this as a tale where our hero (the stratosphere) maintains a radiative quasi-equilibrium with three heat reservoirs: the Sun (hot), the Earth below (a little warmer than our protagonist), and space (damn cold). The ozone in the stratosphere absorbs heat from the Sun, mainly in the form of ultraviolet radiation, but infrared and visible play a role as well. It radiates heat to space, almost entirely in the form of infrared, and it receives some infrared from the Earth. Stratospheric temperature is determined by the balance of those processes. While UV absorption is done by ozone (O3), infrared absorption and emission is the province of the greenhouse gases, especially CO2. If stratospheric ozone is depleted (as...

My latest attempt to oversimplify greenhouse gas physics. On a cold day, we put on a jacket and a hat. They don’t change the amount heat our bodies produce or the balancing amount we release into the atmosphere, but they do make the path for heat to escape more insulating, producing a larger temperature difference between our skin and the atmosphere. The effect of greenhouse gases is very analogous – they don’t change the amount of heat emitted or the temperature at which it is emitted, but they do change the temperature back where the Sun’s heat is being absorbed – at the surface. In a similar fashion, greenhouse gases insulate the planet. they don't change the amount of heat the planet absorbs from the Sun, and they don’t change the amount of heat the planet radiates. That amount has to balance the energy absorbed from the Sun. They do change the atmosphere's impedance to heat flow, thereby changing the temperature difference between the places where solar energy is absorbed ...

Glenn Greenwald is a relentless crusader for civil rights and the Constitution and hence a national treasure. The flip side is that he is a moralist and a scold who never seems to have a happy thought - except possibly at the misery of one of his enemies. Joe Klein would not exactly make my list of saintly Americans, but I wouldn't put him in the Heydrich, Cheney, Umbridge class either. Glenn Greenwald has a stricter standard. Here he is doing a tag-team hat dance on Joe Klein's head with Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog. You want to watch out for those beach parties. Time's Joe Klein was at a beach party last weekend and was confronted about his recent, vague statement that "there are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection." The person doing the confronting was Aimai of NoMoreMisterNiceBlog -- who also happens to be the granddaughter of I.F. Stone (which ends up being relevant to the co...

Arun and Lee are discussing certainty in the comments, and I would like to expand on a couple themes they have introduced. First Lee: I guess my point is that it seems like I have determined my strongly held beliefs, the things I feel certain about, through a completely rational process. I feel very definitely that I’ve read the expert opinions, critically analyzed the available information, carefully considered the alternatives, and have come to an independent and correct decision as to what is right. I think I’m more the norm than the exception in this feeling. However, things like religion, politics, moral values, economics, and a whole host of other things that I feel very strongly about are not very amenable to experiment and/or are too complex to model with any degree of accuracy. It doesn’t seem to me that there can be any real expert opinions in these areas; there can just be opinions. So why do I feel so certain about the correctness of my beliefs when there is no particularly...

One reason I thought Bush should have been impeached was his decision to let low level soldiers take the rap for the crimes he and Cheney commissioned. Now it looks like Holder and Obama are looking to do the same thing with abuses perpretrated by the CIA - holding the low level torturers soley responsible for the crimes of Cheney, Yoo, Addington and Bush. Some hack from Duke's so-called "Law School" was on NPR trying to explain and defend this outrage this morning. What an incoherent fraud. His logic - Congress wrote the law in such a way that anyone who relied on a justice department opinion could not be prosecuted, so that Yoo, who wrote that opinion, has a perfect defense in relying on a justice department opinion. Steve Inskeep asked an obvious question "So if Yoo had said murder was OK, it would have been OK?" The puke from Duke evaded the question.

Who can resist the tragic tale of a fabulously wealthy tech entrepreneur who managed to lose all but the last few million through a series of borrowed money bets on risky real estate? The NYT builds a three part story on the decline of the super-rich on John McAfee's misadventures, claiming that it represents a vast turnaround in the fortunes of the super-rich as a class. That may make for a more dramatic title ("Rise of the Super-Rich Hits a Sobering Wall") than "How I Lost $96 Million in Real Estate") but is it real? The real numbers don't exist yet for the decline in fortune of the top 0.01% and the top 1%, but the guesses cited in the article look more like a speed bumps than a wall. Between 1973 and 2007, the share of the national income garnered by the richest 0.01% went from a bit less than 1% of the total to 6% of the total - from roughly 90 times the average to 600 times the average. The great recession of 2008-2009 has knocked that back to so...

Bullying is a subject of persistent interest to victims, former victims, and parents of children who are bullied or seem likely to be bullied. The editors of SLATE like it too. Their latest article is this one: Bullies. They can be stopped, but it takes a village. Bullies, it seems, are pretty shrewd in picking their targets – they pick on the weak, those who can’t or won’t mount effective resistance. Personality, social isolation, and physical characteristics are all potential victim markers. In the first Harry Potter book, Harry is routinely terrorized by his large and thuggish cousin. The cousin’s parents tolerated and encouraged this bullying, a circumstance that is all too common in real life, where parents and teachers look the other way or even encourage the bullying. Harry is a very unlikely victim though. Brave, resourceful, athletic, proud and charismatic, he is an almost perfect bully repelling force. Being possessed of some of Voldemort’s dark powers could hardly hurt eithe...

One of the enduring puzzles that the universe presents me with is this: why are so many people willing to pay so much for people to lie to them? To be sure, it's a bit more obvious why people pay to have someone lie for them, but people do have to pay with their time and sometimes cable subscription fees to get Fox News (and other sources of systematic misinformation). I guess that self delusion remains one of our most potent recreational drugs.

"Death Panels" are often considered to be absurdly hypothetical, but let's not forget who brought us the real life versions: George Bush and the Texas Republican Party , acting, of course, on behalf of the health care establishment. The link is to the column of Steven E. Landsburg in Slate. Of course it wasn't quite a panel of the sort the WSJ imagines, since medicine was hardly the point. Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.

Niall Ferguson demonstrates that he can't figure out when to stop digging .

I am the sort who reads prefaces, introductions, and acknowlegements. I think that I do this not out of conviction, but our of a certain dimwitted compulsiveness, because the time spent is rarely rewarded. In some cases, authors use an introduction to say things best left unsaid. Imagine, for a minute, that Jo Rowling had begun HP and the Philosopher's Stone with a few pages noting that she wasn't describing a real person or a real society and that novels, especially fantasy novels, were fiction, more precisely called lies. It might not have inflicted a fatal wound on Harry, but I can't imagine that it would have helped. Rowling avoided that mistake. Ursula K. LeGuin, in The Left Hand of Darkness , was less wise.

I'm a bit addicted to libertarian bashing. Perhaps this is a reaction to my own struggle to resist the pull of the dark side - but this time I want to step aside in favor of a libertarian who takes on aspects of his own belief system. That would be laudable in and of itself, but when Mark Thompson manages to do so in Monty Python quotes, one must bow in awed wonder. A sample: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Hat Tip to Tyler Cowen .

...managed to bring a bit of tragedy to grandiosely reclusive eccentricity. Hugh Hefner can't quite manage farce. Alex Tabarrok takes a look at the life of a Hefner girlfriend - he only reads the economics parts, of course, e.g.: One key sentence "In fact, Girlfriends were not allowed to become Playmates because Hef had found that they tended to flee the Mansion as soon as they collected their $25,000 Playmate cheque." If you follow the link to the book review in the Telegraph you can find some boring details: ...First, there was a strict curfew, so unless you were out with Hef, you had to be back in the hutch by 9pm. ...you had to live in the extraordinarily dingy Playboy mansion, where all the furniture was falling apart, the mattresses were stained and the carpets were covered in dog poo. ...

Worried that your five year old isn't getting introduced to the really important stuff in kindergarten? Maybe you need to give her some of these particle physics plushies . H T Tyler Cowen.

The CEO of Whole Foods may have forgotten where his bread is buttered - or confused his base with the Republican Party. I know that I will be doing my best to refute that notion.

In the middle 1970s, the top 0.01% of income earners (the top one in 10,000) collected slightly less than 1% of the total income. That amounts to not quite 100 times as much as the average American. Via Brad DeLong, the latest numbers take them all the way up to collecting 6% of the total, or 600 times the income of the average American. The very rich have good reason to love Reagan and Bush. No wonder they can afford to hire hacks like Will Wilkinson to spread counterfactuals about the matter.

A few Republicans have publicly recoiled from their party becoming the party of lies and hysteria, but they are the exception. Most have embraced it. The die was cast for them at least as early as the Bush administration, probably by the time of "whitewater." Paul Krugman notes this from the New York Times from January, 2008: Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false The lies themselves are what astound me. The birth certificate and the "death panels" are not plausible lies or even obscure ones, they are preposterous "Earth is flat" types of lies. A tiny bit of research suffices to refute them, but they are pushed endlessly by a large chunk of the media and right wing politicians.

Adam Smith's most memorable phrase may have been the "invisible hand" of free market economics. Free markets, he argued, allocate resources with maximal efficiency. The centuries since have provided ample evidence for his idea, and the current century in particular has clearly demonstrated the limitation and inefficiencis of centrally planned economies. So what are the enemies of the free market? The most important one is government. As Smith recognized, merchants will do their best to recruit the government to suppress competition and guarantee them large profits. It's only slightly ironic that the most successful manipulators of government have been those who shout most loudly in favor of "free enterprise." David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch is, as I have previously mentioned, a long catalog of such abuses. Enron was the pioneer in getting state utility regulations turned into direct pipelines from taxpayer's wallets to its own, but plenty of o...

I am increasingly convinced that the main quality one needs to be a conservative is the ability to believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. How else to explain the repeated examples of people who fear that government involvement in health care will threaten their Medicare? Or the apparently quite serious editorialist in Investors Business Daily who proclaimed that Steven Hawking could never have survived under the Bristish system of totally nationalized health care, since he would have been denied care because of his disability. Hello! How much do you think any investing advice you might get from that publication would be worth?

Or so Brad DeLong sets out to demonstrate at considerable length. He persuaded me. The starting point: Is James Fallows allowed to be this snarky? "Black, and very, very lucky." - James Fallows: have had my disagreements with Niall Ferguson, as chronicled several times -- here, here, here, and here. But I had thought they were simply on the merits -- how to interpret the financial and strategic tensions between China and America, whether there was any serious historical parallel to be drawn between the rising China of Hu Jintao and the rising Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm. (Ferguson said Yes; I said No.) Everything about such discussions is conditioned by Ferguson's constant reminders that he is a professional academic historian and therefore deserves deference for whatever historical connections he sees. This morning in the Financial Times he once again shows off the insight that professional training can bring. The essay on American politics begins: President Barack Obam...

How about the God of Israel? Maybe so, says Robert Wright . She didn't fare better than Lady MacDuff, though, once the monotheist PC police got through with her. One oft-claimed difference [between the pagan gods and Yahweh] is that whereas the pagan gods had sex lives, Yahweh didn’t. “Israel’s God,” as Kaufmann put it, “has no sexual qualities or desires.” It’s true that there’s no biblical ode to Yahweh that compares with the Ugaritic boast that Baal copulated with a heifer “77 times,” even “88 times,” or that El’s penis “extends like the sea.” And it seems puzzling: If Yahweh eventually merged with [the Canaanite god] El, and El had a sex life, why didn’t the postmerger Yahweh have one? Why, more specifically, didn’t Yahweh inherit El’s consort, the goddess Athirat? Maybe he did. There are references in the Bible to a goddess named Asherah, and scholars have long believed that Asherah is just the Hebrew version of Athirat. Of course, the biblical writers don’t depict Asherah a...

Gregory Clark worries that robots will take all our low skill jobs, and that it will mean more taxes for the favored few: No, the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator. The battle will be over how to get the economy's winners to pay for an increasingly costly poor. This is a prospect to strike terror into the heart of the dumbest libertarian. Patrick Appel makes the error of reading Ryan Avent and Will Wilkinson. Alas, pooling their ignorance does not manage to produce a wisdom of crowds effect. Ryan Avent brings his powerful analytical mind to bear: The ranks of the unemployable will only grow over time, [Clark] says, potentially leading to a world in which the bulk of the population sits around idle, supported by the few skilled workers who are still smart e...

From the NYT, a nice article on our sense of self and its vulnerability to brain injury. Doctors have known for nearly 100 years that a small number of psychiatric patients become profoundly suspicious of their closest relationships, often cutting themselves off from those who love them and care for them. They may insist that their spouse is an impostor; that their grown children are body doubles; that a caregiver, a close friend, even their entire family is fake, a duplicate version. Such delusions are often symptoms of schizophrenia. But in the last decade or so, researchers have documented similar delusions in hundreds of people who are not schizophrenic but have neurological problems including dementia, brain surgery and traumatic blows to the head. A small group of brain scientists is now investigating misidentification syndromes, as the delusions are called, for clues to one of the most confounding problems in brain science: identity. How and where does the brain maintain the “...

Right wing radio and television, aided and abetted by a significant portion of the Republican Party, continue to spread the most preposterous lies about the proposed insurance reform bill. Most of these lies are so absurd that they appear humorous to sensible persons: euthanasia, killing disabled children, and even grinding up people for food. Meanwhile, the people spreading these lies have organized disruptions of public meetings, threatened congressmen with death, and waved Nazi signs and slogans. The usual idiots and fanatics are happy to jump on the bandwagon. For a looney tunes sample, check out our old buddy . He thinks security guards breaking up a fight are thugs assaulting a citizen and that keeping tracking of the misinformation others are putting out is "police state tactics." One of his commenters is cheerleading for the right wing thugs to add assassination to their tactics.

David Cay Johnston's Free Lunch is a catalog of outrages so infuriating that I can't stand to read more than one or two chapters at a time. The Enron chapter is a reminder of the degree to which George Bush was the creature of Ken Lay and Enron. Lay built Enron largely by buying and paying for Texas politicians, and Bush was a prime beneficiary. Lay and his minions lavished money on an politician whose only credible political asset was his name and played key roles in making him first Governor and later President. It's also a reminder of the degree to which the Bush administration was a criminal conspiracy, even separate and apart from his actions and inactions in the international arena. Lay's money bought him more than access. He told Bush whom to appoint to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and got what money paid for: a FERC that totally ignored its responsibilities and instead concentrated on covering up the crimes of Enron, even after those crimes had...

Tyler Cowen reads R. Preston McAfee on editing an economics journal : Pretty much 100% of kooks are theorists; you won’t meet a, say, physicist or physician with a Great Economic Idea that involved running regressions or doing lab experiments, although occasionally there is a table illustrating a correlation between some economic variable like lawyers or fluoridated water and per capita GDP. This surprises me. The physics crackpots crackpot physicists I have known have been all too eager to run regressions - lying with statistics is still the cheapest game in town. I also wondered what an economics "lab experiment" looks like. Bear Stearns, perhaps? It also occurred to me that at Caltech an economics prof is likely one of the untermenschen, and a reflexive swipe at physicists is perhaps obligatory.

One of our most fundamental notions is our concept of self. Somehow the billions of neurons and trillions of synapses synthesize a "self" out of their connections and operations. For neuroscience this presents a difficult challenge: how do the many systems and subsystems of the brain cooperate to produce a unified concept of self? I don't know the answer, and I'm pretty sure neuroscientists don't either, but I have an analogy. Internet computer games like Altitude need to seamlessly integrate the worlds of multiple players scattered all over the world. Each player has a copy of the "world" of the game, complete with terrain, other players, projectiles the players are firing at each other. Each player is controlling an aircraft and constantly inputting commands to speed up, slow down, fire projectiles, etc. The "worlds" are not exactly the same, since each player has a priviledged position on his own game map, but the game would fall apart...

The Republicans seem to think that they can effectively oppose health care reform by harassing, intimidating, and shouting down Congressmen trying to talk to groups of their constituents. This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls. For example, in one incident, right-wing protesters surrounded Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and forced police officers to have to escort him to his car for safety. This growing phenomenon is often marked by violence and absurdity. Recently, right-wing demonstrators hung Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-MD) in effigy outside of his office. Missing from the reporting of these stories is the fact that much of these protests are coordinated by public relations firms and lobbyists who have a stake in opposing President Obama’s reforms. These tactics are straight out of the facist playbook. By deliberately obstructing citzens and government offici...

Kevin Drum talks about Paul Krugman talking about "speculation based on private information." It's easy to make a buck if you know the winning numbers for the lottery before you buy your ticket - unless everybody else does too. Krugman: crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins. Even before the crisis and the bailouts, many financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view. And they’re still at it. Consider two recent news stories. One involves the rise of high-speed trading: some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have been using superfast computers to get the jump on other investors, buying or selling stocks a tiny fraction of a second before anyone else can react. Profits from high-frequency trading are one reason Goldman is earning record profits and likely to pay record bonuses. On a seemingly different front, Sunday’s Times reported on the case...

Andrew Sullivan is just one of the myriad free marketers who does: $20 a gallon is about the only thing that could unleash the genius of the market in energy innovation. And nothing else will really do anything to abate climate change. Bring it on! Well a lot of technology will be economically feasible if gasoline reaches $20, but I don't believe that markets create innovation. What they can do is offer an arena in which known ideas can attract the resources that permit implementation. The notion that markets innovate or foster innovation is almost entirely an ignorant superstition. This doesn't diminish the importance of free markets. Without free markets Steve Jobs' brilliant ideas would have been strangled at birth by the dead hand of Microsoft.

A number of prominent scientists have been notoriously secretive. This secrecy seems to have been inspired both by the fear that others would steal their ideas and that they themselves might be proved publicly and embarrassingly wrong. Bee has a clever post suggesting that they had the right idea. Her point is that infant ideas may need some coddling and protection before they go out into the rigors of intellectual debate. Too much information can choke off creativity. This principle is not new. A lot of brilliant ideas were had by people who had limited knowledge of the state of the current science. Feynman and James Watson remarked on it. A closely related notion is a key principle of "brainstorming." No one is permitted to criticize the ideas created during the initial phase. So go ahead and keep your big idea secret until you are ready to spill the beans. Of course you might get scooped by someone more forthcoming. Clearly the rules need to be slightly different for data...