CapitalistImperialistPig

I suppose there is a sort of Anna Karenina principle for scientific error: every correct scientific argument is the same, but every erroneous argument is erroneous in its own way, but there are some general strategies: put in some correct stuff, put in some related equations but at the critical moment equate some things that aren't actually equal or derive something from an inappropriate equation. Above all, though, make your argument complicated, so that it's really hard to see exactly where you went wrong. In this last respect I can't say that ex-Professor Motl's Post is a model, because he's really quite clear in his argument and it's pretty obvious exactly where he goes off the tracks in his calculation of climate sensitivity. Of course he does emit a lot of smoke after that point, but it's way too late too hide the dirty deed by then. To set the scene, let's remember that CO2 causes planetary warming by increasing the outgoing impedance to radiativ...

At least if checking the truth of what you say isn't a priority. Not quite free, though, it seems. According to the following link, it seems that Koch industries, a privately held oil and otherwise diversified conglomerate has spent almost $50 million funding the climate denial industry . It seems that the Koch brothers have funded most of the usual rascals in the climate change racket: Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Moncton and so on. You can contribute to their cause by buying ...such well-known consumer brands as Dixie cups, Brawny and Quilted Northern paper products, Stainmaster carpet, CoolMax and Lycra.

I made the mistake of drinking coffee tonight and couldn't sleep. Trying to understand math usually works, so I started thinking about the famous formula: exp(i*x) = cos(x) + i*sin(x) It seemed to me that that equation combined simplicity and great beauty. So how to understand it? If you realize that exp(i*x) lies on the unit circle in the complex plain at angle x wrt the real axis, it's obvious, but how do you get to that? Comparing the power series works, but somehow appealing to the full machinery of differential calculus seemed like a cheat too. I wanted to understand it in more fundamental terms. Suppose you multiply a real number a by the imaginary unit i. If you think of a as a point a distance a to to right of zero on the real axis, i*a is a similar distance up the imaginary axis. Similarly, the point a + i*b can be reached from zero by going 'a" to the right and then up 'b'. It thus lies at an angle arctan(b/a) from the real axis at distance sq...

I grew up in the Catholic Church and have mostly positive memories of it. I was an altar boy and was never abused by any of our priests nor did I have reason to suspect anybody else was. Some of the nuns were a bit physically abusive, its true, but given the absurd costumes they had to wear, its hard to really blame them. The big problem with the Catholic Church is its organizational structure: it was patterned on the Roman Empire of Constantine, and wound up with most of the vices of that organizational structure. The Pope was only responding to the character of that institution when he chose to deal with the sexual abuse scandal with secrets, lies and a cover up. The time has come to move the Church a bit closer to the twenty-first century. A good way to start would be with the Pope's resignation, replacement by a term limited (ten years?)Pope elected by all Bishops - themselves elected by the congregations for limited terms. One of the problems with the current lifetime election...

The Washington Post won the undying enmity of the American right by occasionally reporting some facts, including those that led to the exposure of the crooked doing of Nixon and friends. In recent years, that same Post has labored tirelessly to make amends, mostly by getting rid of competent reporters and replacing them with right wing hack columnists, but I suspect they labor in vain - except for the fact that liberals and other people paying attention now hate them even more than the conservatives do. Robert Samuelson has long been the Post's economics columnist. Aside from an undergraduate degree in political science and longevity, his qualifications for that post seem to be that: (1)He has the same last name as a famous economist, and (2)He reliably spouts the Republican talking points of the day. Brad DeLong and Menzie Chinn are not amused.

I wouldn't want to get Shephard Smith in trouble with his employers, but is he one of the under appreciated ironists of our time or what? Interviewing the ex-fiancee of the leader or the newly arrested militia/terrorists, the dialog went a bit like this: Ex f: He thought the government was try to take away his freedoms. Shep: His second amendment rights? Ex f: He loved his guns, he was afraid to lose them. Shep: Has he always been like this? Ex f: Yes, but especially since Obama was elected. He thought he might be (or bring?) the Anti-Christ. Next, with the retired FBI conspiracy guy: FBI: They believe the government is conspiring against them, is going to take their guns. Shep: Where do they get these ideas?

I was watching Peggy Noonan vs. George Will on ABC's This Week compete in the Most Pompous Gas Bag event. I think I have to give the nod to Will for his cocksure spouting of self-inconsistent nonsense, but Peggy certainly deserves some sort of honorable mention for her buffoonish tone of psuedo-profundity. Jake Tapper, btw, wasn't at all bad. He paid attention, brought up some useful points, and asked reasonable questions. I'm still looking forward to Christiane though.

It took almost a half century of development for computer chess programs to reach and top the level of the strongest human players, with a specially built IBM supercomputer beating then world champion Gary Kasparov in 1996. In the end, the decisive factor was not software but increasing hardware speed. Computer processing power has continued to increase, and quite modestly priced computer chess programs running on personal computers can now thrash world champions. The world's other premier intellectual game, Go, has proven a tougher nut to crack. When IBM's Deep Blue was beating Kasparov, the world's strongest Go programs were still getting huge handicaps (11 stones) from strong amateur children and losing. That's not quite the case any more - they now occasionally beat strong professionals at slightly more modest handicaps (7 stones). I recently purchased a new copy of The Many Faces of Go 12 , one of the strongest computer go programs, and I have the impression ...

Motl, in comments, has erected a pyramid of hokum that he claims is isomorphic to the call for AGW action. To wit: ...a pyramid of roughly a dozen of assumptions and all of them need to be true at the same moment for the final conclusion to be justifiable: you need warming to exist, to continue in the future, to be caused by CO2, you need the economy to be able to reduce CO2, to make a difference, and so on. His notion is the justification that these are independent constraints that are both of dubious truth and necessary to warrant action to prevent anthropogenic global warming. There are really only three points (a)human activity is increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere, (b)increasing CO2 increases temperature, and (c)how much? The first two of these are proven beyond reasonable doubt, and don't depend on statistical arguments. The first depends only on measurement and logic, and the second on the validity of the laws of physics. The third is difficult and the relevant lines ...

Via Sullivan we get This experiment from Dan Arielly. It seems that your particular monkeys are just doing what comes naturally. Given a choice between spending a token to get their absolute favorite food or spending it to have a choice from a buffet of options, capuchin monkeys will opt for variety. In fact, they'll even eat a less-preferred food from that buffet when the favorite food is on it. They choose variety for variety's sake. ... The implications of this simple experiment shed some light on consumer behavior, Ariely said. Earlier work on variety-seeking has found that people eat 43 percent more M&M candies when there are 10 colors in the bowl instead of just seven. "People choose variety for variety's sake," Ariely said. "They often choose things they don't even like as well just for the variety. We knew about this, so the interesting thing was to figure out how basic it is." Pretty basic, apparently...

As the American Conservative movement is increasingly consumed by the genies it let loose, more than a few conservatives are beginning to wonder what happened. David Frum's wife, Danielle Crittenden: We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I've never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate -- once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up -- prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now. An Andrew Sullivan reader looks at and doesn't like how a conservative Catholic site reacts to the latest revelations about the pope's role in the pedophilia coverup: Something snapped in the Bush years, though. The whole organization (led by Neuhaus) descended deeper and deeper into neocon unr...

Lumo has an odd posting on confidence testing. He makes much of the fact that if you multiply a bunch of probabilities close to 1 (say 0.95) times each other you can get a number that's close to zero. This may not be a big shock to those who remember how to multiply. His purported point (I suppose) is that if you have some proposition the truth of which depends on the truth of n independent proposititons each of which is known with probability p, then the we presumably have confidence p^n in the composite proposition. The question, of course, is who is supposed to have reached such a composite conclusion? The Lumonator includes a link to a supposed offender but I searched the linked post in vain for any hint that that was the case. My guess is that LM is blowing smoke, as is his wont. The actual case in climate science is more nearly the opposite of the situation he seems to be implying. There are multiple lines of nearly independent evidence each of which points to ant...

Economist Mario Rizzo managed to attract intense derision from Brad DeLong for this: Why am I tipping the cab driver whom I shall not see again? I tip cabdrivers very small amounts... they really don’t do anything more than drive... they don’t know where things are... there are now all sorts of surcharges... even a tax to support the inefficiently-run mass transit system that I am not taking.... I would really like to not tip.... I often do simply because drivers sometimes say nasty things to you if they don’t get a tip. It is a failing of my psychological make-up to let that bother me. Am I being selfish?... I am not being selfish any more than the driver who wants a tip. The real issue is for me: Is this the best use of my money?... You are not a bad person if you don’t tip taxi drivers much or at all. Just be prepared to tell the voice in your head that it is wrong. And don’t let any possible cab-driver annoyance spoil your day. Brad thinks this makes him a psychopath but this coul...

Pedophilia coverups seem to be a specialty of the Sith Lord .

Health care reax from someone who purports to be an economist but is actually living in an alternate reality: What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them. h/t Andrew Sullivan I only quoted the parts that weren't totally dishonest - merely deranged.

It was deep in the dinner party and and conversation had degenerated to denunciation of farmed salmon. "I only eat wild caught salmon," said D. It happened that B and C had similar feelings about the provenance of shrimp. It proved a popular cause. Until E added: "I only eat wild caught cattle."

Ever since economists startled me by dissing tournaments, I have been fascinated by their ubiquity and utility as well as their potential for waste. Of course the whole panoply of life is a tournament of sorts, but let's consider one that was important in the development of the modern world: the invention of aircraft. We have wanted to join the birds in the air at least since ancient times, but no real progress was made on making machines fly until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not at all coincidentally that was the same time at which another great tournament was picking up speed - the industrial revolution. In the late 1790s, Sir George Cayley, 6th Baronet, Member of Parliment, and prolific inventor turned his attention to flight. His experiments were models of ingenuity, and he discovered many key principles of lift and flight. He designed and built the first successful manned glider and created the basic aircraft design that is used today. It took more than another c...

Looking back at my history with physics books, e.g., 8,9, and 10 below and so many others, I can see that I would have been a lot better physicist if I had paid more attention. Of course it would have helped if I had been smarter too ... First, a really important book that I haven't read all of: Darwin's Origin of Species . Despite having read only about half I can assure you that no book has had greater influence on me except maybe Newton's Principia of which I have read zero... You can tell a book is really important if you don't need to read it for it to be a big influence. I promise I did read all the rest of these books carefully though, or at least most of them... (1) Godel, Escher, and Bach and Metamagical Themas by Douglas Hofstadter. So many ideas connected into one big idea. (2) Wonderful Life and several other books by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould is frequently blinded by his prejudices but he's a very fine writer and even his mistakes are instructive....

Tyler Cowen has been propagating a most influential books meme . His own choices are so serious and intellectual that one might be tempted to suspect a hint of pretension if it were anybody else. The only thing remotely disreputable on it is Ayn Rand in non novelistic garb, though on a reader's prompt he was forced to admit that Fisher's Sixty Memorable Games belonged there. The comments contain lists from mostly lesser mortals, and a few more get propagated here and here and here . The problem with such lists, if you can call it that, is that we tend to use them to try to show off - even if we are trying to be honest. My guess is that that doesn't make them much less revelealing. Most of Cowen's listers seemed to include some Any Rand in their lists, though some claimed to have outgrown it. I will stick with what the late Paul Samuelson said about Alan Greenspan - "You can take the boy out of the cult, but you can't take the cult out of the boy." ...

Andrew Sullivan has been following the latest Roman Catholic sexual abuse scandals in Germany and makes a good case that the Pope is in it up to his navel. Among many other crime of omission, it seems that he heard evidence of child rape by a priest, concealed that evidence from the proper authorities, and made it possible for the priest to rape again. Here he quotes Hans Kung, a leading Catholic theologian: In his 24 years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, from around the world, all cases of grave sexual offences by clerics had to be reported, under strictest secrecy ("secretum pontificum"), to his curial office, which was exclusively responsible for dealing with them. Ratzinger himself, in a letter on "grave sexual crimes" addressed to all the bishops under the date of 18 May, 2001, warned the bishops, under threat of ecclesiastical punishment, to observe "papal secrecy" in such cases. In his five years as Pope, Benedict XVI...

Steve Landsburg reaches genuinely creepy heights in his latest attempt at sensationalism . Witness his title: "In Praise of Genocide" and excerpt below: ...But as the world stands today, I suspect that cultures are worth very little at the margin (that is, we could stand to lose any one culture without missing it very much). There’s only so much you can assimilate in a lifetime, and to a considerable extent, time spent in contact with one culture is time not spent in contact with another. So I’m not sure why the adjective “genocidal” is so often taken to be pejorative. I’m also not sure there’s any point to condemning some mass murderers more fervently than others, but if we’re going to play that game then I’m inclined to count genocidal intent as a mitigating circumstance. I really need to stop reading this weirdo - but he is my libertarian archetype.

Why did it take so long for humans to have the Industrial Revolution? is the question asked over at the Marginal Revolution. What do you mean say I? Thirteen point seven-five billion years isn't **that** long. Apparently, though, Tyler and friends interpreted the question slightly differently since they quickly fall to geopolitical and economic speculations. Like other similar questions, e.g., "why did it take so long to" (a)develop agriculture", (b)evolve a technological species, or (c)get some free oxygen on the planet, the most interesting thing is not the answer, which nobody knows, but the reasoning involved in the deduction. I guess I'm not too impressed with historical/economic factors argument. My prejudice is to believe that the central fact was preceding scientific revolution of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others. Not only were the laws of physics extremely useful for the designers of mechanisms, but probably even more influential was ...

It could be argued that economics began when the first human had the idea to squirrel away some nuts for the winter. Of course squirrels had been doing so for a long time and ants forever, but we are talking people here. We gather or produce in order to consume, but the act of deferring some consumption for the future turns out to have profound consequences. That act of saving is the basis for all the elaboration of human society beyond the hunter-gatherer band. Most importantly, saving turns out to have a potentially multiplicative effect if that saving is used produce the means for greater future production. That multiplicative effect acts first of all through technology. If we don't spend all of our time gathering food, we can spend some of it making tools which allow us to gather food with less effort, and potentially save even more. For a couple of million years, simple tools were as far as technology could take us. Our peripatetic life style limited our saving to more ...

Andrew Sullivan on our problem with Israel . Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world. Petraeus was so disturbed by a recent trip to the Middle East that he asked a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen, and asked that the region be made part of his command: In my reading of the Israeli reaction to the Biden dust up it seemed that the dominant meme was "the US should mind its own business." That is indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished. Please and pretty please. All that we need to do is stop sending them several billion dollars each year, stop selling them weapons on any basis other tha...

I guess you can never overestimate how flagrant these guys are willing to be. How do you spell "quid pro quo?"

Today is Pi day, so my Google tells me. Pi is one of those truly mysterious and magical numbers - *the* mysterious and magical number, in fact. Can we conceive of a universe in which Pi is, say, 22/7? Going to a non-Euclidean geometry wouldn't be good enough, I think, because we would want Pi to be constant as well... For the clebration, I'm planning to make mine apple, though rhubarb would be nice if I could get it...

For me, Ronald Reagan's name on Smithsonian Institution restrooms would be more than honor enough. More than any other person, Reagan is responsible for the deficit mess we find ourselves in today. As it is, we appear to be stuck with him on the Capital's airport and other assorted junk. The nut jobs who worship him want to put him on the $50 bill, however. Historian Sean Wilentz, Writing in the New York Times, explains why we should keep Grant right where he is. RONALD REAGAN deserves posterity’s honor, and so it makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major building there are named for him. But the proposal to substitute his image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the Civil War...

Gravity presents some new wrinkles for entropy. Even the classical version has a surprise. John Baez has a very nice discussion of the fundamental details . If you weren't careful, you might think gravity could violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Start with a bunch of gas in outer space. Suppose it's homogeneously distributed. If it's big enough, it will start clumping up thanks to its gravitational self-attraction. So starting from complete disorder, it looks like we're getting some order! Doesn't this mean that the entropy of the gas is dropping? Well, it's a bit trickier than you might think. First of all, you have to remember that a gas cloud heats up as it collapses gravitationally! The clumping means you know more and more about the positions of the atoms in the cloud. But the heating up means you know less and less about their velocities. So there are two competing effects. It's not obvious which one wins! Baez proceeds to do the calculations for a...

It now seems almost an Israeli tradition for Netanyahu to subject visiting US leaders to some sort of ritual humiliation or other. Whether this feeds some constituency of his or just his ego, he seems to have calculated that the American government is too weak to effectively respond. The Americans who are paying attention, I suppose he imagines, are mostly Jews or Christianist apocalypticists who will follow Israel blindly. No doubt a lot of American Jews dislike seeing the US disrespected, and more are dismayed by the increasingly fanatical settler movement that celebrates Baruch Goldstein and the One Shot, Two Kills snipers as heroes, but they are still going to be safe supporters no matter what. The Christianist millenialists, by contrast, celebrate every outrage, since their dearest hope is for war and Armageddon. For now the calculation must hold, but for how long, I wonder. What if the Bible Belt Christianists were to revert to a historically more standard anti-semitism? Wha...

"Am I my brother's keeper?" might be considered the central question of Judeo-Christian morality. Opinions, as they say, differ. Perhaps the majority of Americans might say "It depends." Libertarians say "No" and Randites "Hell no!" It seems that rural Mayan villagers are at the opposite (and biblically endorsed) pole. ...most people think actions that lead to harm are worse than omissions (i.e. not doing something) that lead to harm. Think of a doctor killing a patient with a lethal dose, as opposed to letting them die by not administering a life-saving drug. ... Most people match this pattern of responding but so far most participants have been from urban, technologically advanced cultures. Now Marc Hauser and his colleague Linda Abarbanell have translated these kinds of moral scenarios and taken them to a rural Mayan community in the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico. The rural Mayans showed the usual bias for seeing harm caused deliberat...

So how much has mankind benefitted from economic progress? Less than we might like to think. The invention of agriculture seems to have triggered a general decline in human health and loss of four inches or so in stature, probably due mainly to an inferior diet, but also perhaps to the more arduous nature of agricultural existence. Domestication of animals brought in a flood of new diseases, and greater population density facilitated epidemic spread. The general decline in stature didn't really turn around until the twentieth century. For most of humanity, progress has usually been a bummer. The bad effects can be traced to the fact that economic "progress" triggers increases in population until Malthusian effects grind us down. Because we were originally were adapted to Darwinian competition in a much different world, we are not well suited for either the modern diet or lifestyle. The only known or plausible way to escape the Malthusian trap is limitation of popul...

From Tyler Cowen . Adam asks: If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be? Cowen's choices are rather droll: How about the real rate of return on capital? The risk premium? The percentage of the population which dies in war each year? He's not ready to assume that their biology is similar, but they are bound to be capitalists, right? Does anybody know the answers to any of these questions for Earth? Maybe for the last one. I'm far from sure that statistics are very relevant unless you know some other things about the underlying variables. But what kind of information about an alien culture would tell us the most? Suppose that you have an hour to look through what appears to be an abandoned alien city. What would you look for to learn about the inhabitants? (Try to name five things).

President Obama is going around bashing insurance companies, and the usual suspects are rushing to their defense. The defenders of the insurance companies have a point in that it seems a bit unfair to blame them for doing what is their job to do: maximize profits. Crocodiles eat the unwary and so do health insurance companies - that's their nature. Life, though isn't fair, and it also isn't fair that the insurance companies benefit from a ridiculously organized health care system that wastes trillions and is dangerously unstable. The insurance companies badly want to prevent change in the system which would decrease their monopolistic and other profits, and consequently have spent tens of millions to do so. By doing so, they have chosen to be the enemy, and the leader's duty is to defeat, and if necessary destroy, that enemy. The insurance companies pretended to be on board with reform, so they also get a charge of duplicity. I won't shed any tears for those crocod...

Paul Krugman reports that the Republicans are strongly pushing the idea that we have high unemployment because we have unemployment benefits. No doubt there are some Americans prepared to buy into this mean spirited and economically unsound idea, but if the Republicans want to fight it out on this ground, I say bring it on. I think entirely too many Americans have seen hardworking friends, neighbors, relatives or themselves spit out of the economy to buy into this latest nastiness of the right. Sure, there are a few people who would rather collect unemployment than work, but the rules make that fairly difficult, at least for very long. So how about replacing unemployment benefits with a government sponsored job corps, in the fashion of Roosevelt in the 1930's? No doubt the Republicans would love that idea.

The big winners were pathetically grateful. The lines and jokes were merely pathetic. Unfortunately, the Academy apparently could not find actual actors to read them. The scripted lines were awful, and most of the time the delivery was awful as well. Maybe teleprompter reading wasn't covered in acting school. My personal award for best actor in a role delivering Academy scripted crap would have to go to Ben Stiller. It was almost like he actually knew something about comic timing - unlike, say, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin. He also wins for best costume and makeup.

Let me depart for the moment from my traditional practice of abusing Steve Landsburg to note that I quite liked his post on countable and uncountable numbers. He briefly discussed the countability of the integers and rationals and presented Cantor's proof of the uncountability of the reals. One of his commenters asked the following: Imagine that you run the front desk at a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms. Imagine further that all of the rooms are occupied. A man shows up in the lobby and asks for a room. Can you give him a room? The answer is yes of course, but it should keep your bell boys busy. Interestingly enough, it's hardly any more trouble to accomodate a countably infinite number more of guests. Still, you have to say that the manager who let this deplorable situation arise made a big mistake. How should he have run his hotel so that he didn't have to move an infinite number of people each time some more guests showed up? What if he had an unc...

Nicholas Carr wonders if Google is making us stupid . I think his theme is that the instant info gratification provided by Google and the interwebs generally has decreased our attention span to point that we can't think deeply any more - but I didn't actually have the patience to read the whole article... Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for somethi...

Sometimes it’s useful to try to define our terms. Consider an isolated system, such that we have both a macroscopic description (mass, temperature, pressure, etc) and a microscopic description in terms of the microscopic constituents (molecules, whatever) and that each microscopic description can be encoded as a point in gazillion dimensional phase space – one dimension for each microscopic degree of freedom. In general a given macro state will not correspond to a unique micro state, and in fact we can think of an “ensemble” of micro states each of which would correspond to the macro parameters as sort of a blob of fluid in phase space. The log of the volume of fluid (or number of all possible microstates) corresponding to the given macro state is the entropy of that state. (We divide up the volume of the phase space into a bunch of mini volumes, the number of which becomes the number of states) In a very concrete way, the entropy of the macro state represents what we don’t know ...

Scott Patterson, author of "The Quants" was on the Daily show and he and John Stewart managed to blame physicists and mathematicians for the great financial meltdown. What crap. If you look at the education of the guys who were actually running AIG and the big five investment banks you find lawyers, MBAs, a Finance PhD, and a couple bridge players, pilots and baseball players, but how many physicists? I couldn't find any. I'm not saying that the real quants were completely innocent, but the really bad decisions seem to have been made by those who couldn't, or wouldn't take the trouble to understand the risk models and their limitations.

---> *with apologies to MR and TC Despite the disapproval of economists, tournaments are a ubiquitous feature of economic life. The big bopper of tournaments is life itself – Richard Dawkins has pointed out that we all are ultimately just vehicles for our genes to compete in the big tournament of evolution. Tournaments exist at subtler scales as well. One small but important tournament venue is our own brain. One of its most crucial functions is choosing among alternatives: should I take a nap, or go to the party? Should I have Brussels’ sprouts and ginger ale or beer and pizza? Should I exchange pawns or try to maneuver my knight to the kingside? It’s a crucial feature of this type of decision that intermediate values are not useful. The proverbial mule who fails to choose starves between the two haystacks. No decision is worse than any decision. Many neural systems have features that enhance this sort of all or nothing behavior: after a buildup of potential, an irrever...

This story ought to scare the crap out of any rational person. A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Big releases are thought to be behind the dramatic warming of the PETM , a mass extinction event. On the positive side, recovery from that only took about 200,000 years. Via Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias .

Entropy began as a puzzle. If heat was energy, why was there always some heat wasted when one tried to turn it into mechanical energy? The heat engine was perhaps the master invention of the industrial revolution, but it posed both theoretical and practical problems – I will only worry here about the former. Realization that heat was a form of energy, and computation of the mechanical equivalent of heat, generalized the concept of conservation of energy. This was codified in the First Law of Thermodynamics. That inevitable wasted heat energy in every heat engine showed that this could not be the full story of thermodynamics, though, and investigation of the properties of the waste heat led to the concept of entropy, and the Second Law. Like pressure and temperature, entropy was a state variable, but its interpretation was obscure. Its fundamental property was that it was non-decreasing. In particular, it could be constant in a reversible (quasi-equilibrium) and adiabatic (no hea...

OK, economists keep telling me that tournaments are inefficient, and I think they may be right, but I can't seem to get one to give me a cogent argument. So I asked my buddy Captain Imperio. CImP, as I call him, doesn't know anything about econ or tournaments, but he does know how to use the interwebs, so this is what he came up with: People love tournaments. Economists, not so much. Why not? Consider a certain idealized economic activity, widget manufacture, for example, and that widgets are an item in demand by a great many. By the nature of things, there will be a certain amount of variation in skill at widget manufacture, and the more skillful will crank out more widgets and make a better living than the less skillful. Net income for widget makers will be smooth function of skill, the less skillful will find other ways to make a living, and the number of widgets produced will tend ins invisible handy way to the number demanded by society. Suppose, on the other hand, t...