CapitalistImperialistPig

Climate change in the past is more the rule than the exception. Earth and life have survived many changes in climate. Human civilization developed in a highly special period though - the last ten thousand years has been a period of exceptionally stable and (for humans) benign climate. Modern humans first emerged between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene, a period of turbulent and frequently hostile climate. It's rapid and drastic climate changes may well have prevented our ancestors from developing agriculture. These climate changes have been far from benificent from the standpoint of existing species. Large scale reductions in territory and mass extinctions have been common. It's highly plausible that several of our brother species of humans met their ends in this way. The most recent ten thousand years, the Holocene, hasn't been like that. Stability and very gradual change have been the rule. Until the last 100 years. The rapid and unprecedented ...

According to the tale, a famous ship captain was noted for keeping a small chest, always carefully locked, in which he kept a small, secret notebook. Each day he would carefully scrutinize the notebook, replace in the chest, and carefully lock it. The key never left his person. Because the captain was so successful in every endeavor, many wondered about the contents of the secret notebook, but he declined all efforts to get him to share. When he died, full of honors and at a ripe old age, his first mate was quick to grab the key and open the chest. With pounding heart he opened chest and notebook. There he read: "left is port, right is starboard." MKS electromagnetic units are an abomination in the sight of the universe. That is all.

Kevin Drum posts the following: Over the past couple of weeks, I've noticed that my distance vision is a little fuzzy. Time for new glasses, you say, and you're probably right. But here's the odd thing. I keep all my old glasses, and last night I tried them all on just to see if an older prescription worked better than my current glasses. What I discovered was a little strange. Right under my TV I happen to have two LED clocks. One uses red LEDs and the other uses blue LEDs. With my current glasses, the blue LEDs are sharp and the red LEDs are fuzzy. But when I put on glasses that are a few years old, it changes. The red LEDs are sharp and the blue LEDs are fuzzy. The difference is quite noticeable, not a subtle thing at all. Anyone know what this is all about? Naturally some of his commenters got the correct answer, but you should try to solve it without looking (zillions got wrong answers, of course). Hint: there are two parts to the answer, one involving physics, ...

After its crushing defeat of France in 1870, the newly united nation of Germany became the most important European power. It's long rival France, was now smaller, weaker and less economically dynamic and was not only beaten but profoundly isolated due to the long enmity with Britain and Russia, and Bismark made it his business to keep France weak and isolated. The other power, the Austro Hungarian Empire, was ally. Kaiser Wilhelm II fired Bismark, and made Alfred Tirpitz head of his navy. Together they embarked on an ambitious ship building program designed to be able to confront Britain on the high seas. This, together with some other slights and rivalries deeply angered the British, who countered with their own ship building program. Meanwhile, the Kaiser's new Chancellor let the old treaty with Russia expire. France exploited the moment to settle its differences with both Russia and Britain, forming the so-called Entente Cordial. [British Prime Minister] Lloyd Geor...

Florida's pinhead governor apparently issued a "secret" order that State officials not mention the words "cl****e ch***e" or "gl***l wa****g". This despite, or perhaps because no State is more threatened by rising sea levels. From Steve Benen's story : Everyone had a good laugh the other day when an official from Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration tried to get through a legislative hearing on emergency preparedness without using the words “climate change.” But before the story fades from view, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the substantive question behind the humor. At issue is a FEMA requirement that states develop a “climate-change plan” in order to receive preparedness dollars. This became literally laughable in the Florida example – Scott’s chief of emergency management said the state will eventually have a hazard-mitigation plan with “language to that effect.” So why would someone purportedly elected to safeguard the interes...

Where today the international community sees failed or failing states as a problem, in the age of imperialism the powers saw them as an opportunity. China, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, all were weak, divided, and apparently ready to be carved up. So was Morocco, which was becoming increasingly anarchic by 1900. The death of the strong and capable Sultan Hassan I in 1894 had left it in the hands of a teenager, Abdelaziz. “He is not bad looking, but podgy and puffy; good features and good clear eyes,” said Arthur Nicolson, stationed there as a British diplomat. “He didn’t look unhealthy, but like a boy who ate too much.” 50 Abdelaziz proved unable to keep control of his subjects. While his administration grew increasingly corrupt, powerful regional leaders asserted their independence, pirates attacked merchants along the coasts and bandits raided caravans in the interior and kidnapped the rich for ransom. Late in 1902 a rebellion threatened to topple the whole rickety regime. Macmillan, ...

There is a whole lot of stupid in the world, and local density enhancements exist, but some still struggle against the tide. James J. Krupa talks about teaching evolution at the University of Kentucky. Some students take offense very easily. During one lecture, a student asked a question I’ve heard many times: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” My response was and is always the same: We didn’t evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. One ancestral population evolved in one direction toward modern-day monkeys, while another evolved toward humans. The explanation clicked for most students, but not all, so I tried another. I asked the students to consider this: Catholics are the oldest Christian denomination, so if Protestants evolved from Catholics, why are there still Catholics? Some students laughed, some found it a clarifying example, and others were clearly offended. Two days later, a student walked down to the lectern after c...

Shouldn't you first have your genome edited for clarity and errors? The CRISPR/Cas system seems to be making that possibility real. CRISPR (and writing out the acronymn likely won't help you understand it) is a prokaryotic immune system that works by editing the genomes of potential virus enemies, but its editing capabilities can be used for other purposes - see discussion in the Wikipedia link given above. In fact they already have been used to edit out a deleterious gene in mice. People too carry some nasty genetic diseases, and the possibility of editing them out is being aggressively investigated by top genetics laboratories. Of course, if you are going to be editing genes to eliminate congenital blindness or Tay-Sachs disease, maybe you should take the opportunity to stick in some genes for high intelligence, good looks, athletic ability, etc., etc. The age of gene customization is (nearly) on us, and that means that future humans will have some more powers previousl...

I have a finch feeder outside the window where my computer sits. Most of my customers are the Texas lesser goldfinches, which weigh about 10 grams, or roughly the weight of two nickels, which is how much money I have left to rub together after buying their food. They eat little nyjer seeds, which they shell and eat with phenomenal efficiency. They are my personal parasite class, and I feel guilty if I let their feeder sit empty. It's quite amazing how much these tiny creature eat, though. I'm a member of the parasite class myself, since I don't work for pay, and live off my pension and savings. I tend to think of the rentier class as parasites too, so it annoys the heck out of me when one of their members, like Willard R., inveighs against the people who get Social Security and other government benefits.

Some of the same people who confidently counted Netanyahu out are predicting that the Ted Cruz Presidential campaign is DOA .

The relatively new nation of Germany was eager to take its place among the colonial powers. What Weltpolitik actually meant in terms of concrete policies was another matter. As Field Marshal Count von Waldersee, who commanded the European forces suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, wrote in his diary when the idea first started to circulate widely: “We are supposed to pursue Weltpolitik. If I only knew what that is supposed to be; for the time being it is nothing but a slogan.” 30 It did seem, though, to imply that Germany acquire its fair share of colonies. [German historian and nationalistic prophet] Treitschke certainly argued so. “All nations in history,” he said in his lectures, “felt the urge to impress the stamp of their authority on barbaric countries while they felt strong enough to do so.” And Germany was now strong enough; its high birth rate was evidence of German vitality. Yet Germany was cutting a poor figure by comparison with Britain and other empires: “It is therefore a v...

How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? By Abraham Loeb This is intended to be a short introduction to the interface between cosmology and astrophysics governing the first galaxies and stars. Allegedly it is aimed at the undergraduate with a science background or the non-specialist scientist, but I found the level of presentation rather uneven. What kind of student, I wondered, would need to have the terms "star" and "galaxy" defined but still be able to decipher "Polarization is produced when free electrons scatter a radiation field with quadrupole anisotropy Q?" This short book packs a lot of information into it, though I'm not sure that I agree with the title. It's mostly not about those events but rather about the modeling of the growth of cosmological density perturbations which ultimately gave rise to those stars and galaxies. This is a technical book, with lots of equations, but derivations of those equations are mostly absent or ex...

The manifold blunders that led to World War I have filled many a book, but in Margaret McMillan's version, the Kaiser gets first place. He was apparently intelligent, even intellectual, but he was also a nitwit, utterly lacking in the character of a a good leader. He was lazy and impetuous, and lacked perspective, judgement, and self-restraint. Combine grandiosity with lack of common sense and many evils promptly follow.

I have been criticized, and indeed mocked, for suggesting that personal pique could play a major role in international affairs - in particular, Netanyahu's repeated disrespecting of the American President. Margaret MacMillan, in her examination of the causes of World War I, pays some attention to the human factors which led to the gradual deterioration of relations between Britain and Germany, including rude and angry letters between their respective sovereigns, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Queen Victoria (his grandmother). Official quarrels of little import became magnified by annoyed public opinion. Samoa, for example, was a crisis that need not have happened because no great national interests were at stake. Yet it proved unnecessarily difficult to resolve because of public agitation, especially in Germany. “For even though the great majority of our pothouse politicians did not know whether Samoa was a fish or a fowl or a foreign queen,” said Eckardstein, “they shouted all the more ...

Winston Churchill: We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us. Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29). The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Kindle Locations 1332-1336). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Large galaxy clusters are typically embedded in a cloud of ionized gas at a temperature of roughly 100 million K. At these temperatures, many of the electrons are moving at more than escape velocity, so do all the electrons run off? Some do, of course, leaving the cluster with a net positive charge. But what the combined gravitational force of tens of trillions of solar masses of stars, gas and dark matter cannot do, the combined unbalanced electrical force of a few kilograms of electrons finds easy peasy. Electrons escape until the unbalanced electrical force holds them bound. A similar effect results in a net charge for the Sun. X-ray emission from Abell 1689. The X-Ray emission comes from the hot (10^8 K or so) plasma that constitutes 1/2 or more of the baryonic mass of the cluster.

Some, including some Palestinians, think that in light of Netanyahu's racist campaign, international pressure will force the Israelis to negotiate some rights for Palestinians. IF anyone doubted where Benjamin Netanyahu stood on the question of peace, the Israeli prime minister made himself clear just before Tuesday’s election, proclaiming that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch. Then he decided to engage in a bit of fear-mongering against Palestinian citizens of Israel in hopes of driving his supporters to the polls. “The right-wing government is in danger,” Mr. Netanyahu announced on Election Day. “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” But Mr. Netanyahu’s victory is actually the best plausible outcome for those seeking to end Israel’s occupation. Indeed, I, as a Palestinian, breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear that his Likud Party had won the largest number of seats in the Knesset. This might seem counterintuitive, but the p...

Today's quiz: Why are extremely large stars of a million or so solar masses thought to have been possible in the early universe but not today?

Don't try to argue with people who think 95% is a minority, or other crazy people. It will only annoy them and waste your time.

Netanyahu defied his optimistic liberal critics (and the last pre-election polls) to score what looks like a major comeback. It's still not clear that he will retain power, but it look much more likely than it did a few days ago. Netanyahu disavowed the so-called two-state solution to the Palestinian question during his campaign, despite having previously signed up for it. Since that two-state idea is pretty much the only thing the international community has considered, it invites the question, "What now?" I only see two alternatives: either one-state, with one person, one vote, or apartheid, with the Palestinians remaining a virtually imprisoned people with no say in their future. I am pretty sure that neither Netanyahu nor most Zionists would accept the implications of a democratic one-state solution. Palestinians might not like it much either. Are there other alternatives?

I never much liked the phrase "white privilege." Most of the time what we are really talking about is racial discrimination against non-whites. How would one go about curbing "white privilege?" Train police to assault white people? Encourage fraternity morons to sing anti-white songs? Condemn racism! Punish unjust discrimination. Those actions might accomplish something. Blathering about privilege mostly just confuses and annoys.

I ordered Mathematica via your blog and got a great deal on Mathematica 10.

Velocity in km/s is numerically nearly equal to its value in parsecs/megayear. (1 km/s = 1.04 pc/Myr) Fact is handy for navigation, as well as for things like realizing that a constant Hubble parameter of 70 km/(s Mpc) implies an age of 14 Gyears for the Cosmos. (Hubble parameter isn't really constant, but current value is close to the mean). The fastest moving bodies in the solar system (say a long period comet at the moment of solar impact) travel at about 600 km/s, and the nearest stars are less than 2 parsecs away. At that speed, the trip would take roughly 1/300 of a Myr, or 3300 years. Hey, it beats driving.

The gift of men , in Tolkien's universe, is death. The better life gets, though, the less welcome the gift becomes. Searching for immortality, through magic or religion, is one of the oldest themes in history. The radical advances in average human lifespan that we have seen in the last 100 years have been achieved mostly through science and sanitation, and so science now looks like the most promising venue for further life extension. I suppose it's natural for the most favored to resent "the gift," and if you have a few hundred million rattling around in your pocket, why not give the alternative a shot. You will probably want to know that Google is on the case : Excerpt: Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life. The easy technical problems of life extension have been solved, or nearly so. Control disease, avoid catas...

And bindings. Not many publishers turn out good technical books in physics, astrophysics, and mathematics. Until recently, I would have said Cambridge University Press, Princeton U P, and Springer. This was before Springer decided to embrace sucketude and start putting their books in cheap, crappy bindings. I have quite a few Springer books, and the older ones are well bound and open flat. The newest ones have stiff, cheap, crappy glued bindings, and won't open flat and stay open. I hate that. Cambridge U P is the gold standard. Lots of good books, mostly affordable prices, and nice bindings that open flat. Princeton is also very good. Authors would do us a favor by avoiding Springer - at least until they recover their senses. Based on what I've read elsewhere, Springer seems to be committed to crap all the way. Unfortunately they still publish some important stuff.

Reading Wilczek's book, see previous post , with it's extensive analogies to superconductivity, awakened some long slumbering interest in condensed matter physics. I took a couple of courses in solid state physics when I was in graduate school, but I was a lousy student and didn't learn anything, or at least not anything much. I think my teacher was not so hot either. I add this mainly because I remember that he was famous for never answering the question you were trying to ask. At one point he made a long series of lectures prominently featuring some three index symbols that seemed to be some sorts of wave functions - but we, myself and the other grad students could never figure out what the indexes were. A couple of attempts at asking ended in his usual bafflingly obscure non-answers. So we spent the rest of the semester sitting in stunned silence. Anyway, I ordered Mahan's Condensed Matter in a Nutshell , partly on the odd chance that I might learn something, b...

The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek's book is aimed at the public, but it has a lot that I, a physicist whose experience has been distant from particle physics, found revealing and insightful. His themes are the modern version of the ether, which he calls the Grid, the origin of mass, and the unification of physics. At the center of these is the standard model, which he likes to call the Core, and especially Quantum Chromodynamics, or QCD, his contribution to which won him the Nobel Prize. It's focused squarely on the underlying ideas though there are a small number of those personal anecdotes that enliven many popular accounts of physics. His seem chosen to illustrate physics more than personality. One I liked was his account of how he baited Murray Gell-Mann (the inventor of quarks) by telling him that he was working on improving Feynman's Parton Model, which had been formulated to explain the results of prob...

There was something about the sheer effrontery of how Hillary announced that she had had a minion classify her emails into personal and official, and had the so-called "personals" deleted that really pissed me off. It was so damn Clinton. If Nixon had done that, he's probably still be President. I'm moving close to the anyone (er, any Democrat) but Clinton camp.

The net has been atwitter recently with rumors that Vladimir Putin is sick, dead, or deposed . These are based on the thinnest of evidence, but nonetheless disquieting. Rumors are swirling today about the possible illness — or even death — of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mainstream media outlets have reported that he may be sick. Social media jokers used the hashtag #ПутинУмер ("Putin is dead") to speculate that he will be buried topless — a reference to his fondness for posing for bare-chested photos — or that he couldn't possibly die, because "it's not profitable." Putin is almost certainly going to re-emerge in a few days looking none the worse for wear. But this isn't the first time rumors of this kind have caught on — and the fact that he can't cancel a couple of meetings without causing a frenzy of speculation hints at a deeper truth about Russia, and the state of Putin's regime. These rumors stem from fear and uncertainty about wh...

Brad and Lubos are insulting each other. The subject is the sleeping beauty problem, my stripped down version of which goes like this: Sleeping Beauty knows probability, but can't remember being awakened. A fair coin is tossed, and if it comes up heads, SB is awakened only on Monday. If tails, SB is awakened on both Monday and Tuesday. Each time she is asked to say what the probability is that the coin was head. She doesn't know what day it is, so what should she say the probability is that the coin was heads? To cut to the chase, Brad is right and Lumo wrong. The point is that even though the two branches are equally probable, the tails branch is sampled twice as often as the heads branch. Consequently, two out of three times she is asked, she will be on the tails branch. Heads, 1/3, tails 2/3. One could make the point a bit starker by reducing the number of awakenings in the heads branch to zero or increasing the number of awakenings in the tails branch to ten. SB ...

It's not dead, and we have no idea how to kill it. We can, however, suppress a lot of discrimination. But I want to talk about the Oklahoma U SAE misadventure, where a bunch of frat brothers got caught on tape singing a racist chant. It was offensive, disgusting, and racist, but I don't really think it was much about deeply racist attitudes in the US or even OU. It was mostly about a bunch of boys behaving badly, something bunches of boys are famous for doing, especially if they happen to be SAEs. It has actually been documented that adolescent stupidity doubles when they are assembled in groups, and male SAEs, in my experience, are self selected for immaturity. This was not a "hate crime," but abuse of free speech. Many people were offended and some may have been frightened, but the main victims are the perpetrators and especially any innocent frat brothers they may happen to have. Their chapter was closed, they were turned out of their housing, and some have...

Many of the debates I have had here with Lee concern the effectiveness of predictions based on ad hoc models. If I understand correctly, Lee always dismisses these, sometimes saying that they are no better than astrology. There are other kinds of models, of course, like Newton's celestial mechanics, that are precisely predictive and well tested, and I'm pretty sure we agree on these. Astrology is an interesting case. It has a definite model, with lots of history and data, and it's based on celestial mechanics - sort of. It holds that our fates are written in the stars, or rather, in the positions of the planets among those stars. It has a couple of flaws, the first being that it is based on an obsolete conception of the planets as gods in the Indo-European pantheon, when in fact they are just balls of rock and gas. The second and quite fatal flaw is that it is utterly refuted by the data. Our fates have an utterly negligible correlation with the positions of the pl...

Sean Carroll (the cosmologist SC, not the biologist) talks about the big mysteries: ...the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of consciousness. He includes a short clip of Ed Witten discussing the mystery of consciousness. He thinks it's a tough one, but this was the first time I had heard him speak, and that was pretty interesting in and of itself. He definitely doesn't sound like the guy next door. It might be that I'm just too dumb to appreciate how mysterious consciousness is, but I don't share the kind of mystical feeling about it that guys like Witten, Scott Aaronson, and Roger Penrose have. For one thing, I doubt that human consciousness is very different from animal consciousness. I used to have a baby turtle that needed to eat live food, and I fed it meal worms that had been kept in the refrigerator. For the most part they went softly into that good night, but sometimes they managed to escape and warm up, sometimes turning in...

Stephanie Wood interviews Terry Tao: Terry Tao is one of the world's greatest mathematicians and many peoples candidate for smartest man in the world. Some excerpts: One of the world's greatest minds is playing with a toy pony. He presses a plastic stethoscope into the soft toy's body, feigns a pony cough. "Is he sick or is he well?" he asks. "You don't know? Want a second opinion?" Terence Tao - Terry, as he's mostly known - is sitting on a leather sofa in his Los Angeles living room, thin, bare-footed and bespectacled, talking to his three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, just home from a birthday party. It's hard to be intimidated by a man playing with a toy pony. Tao was a famous prodigy. When he was nine, Tao commenced part-time studies in mathematics at Flinders University. By the time he was 16, he'd finished his science degree. He got his masters when he was 17 and his PhD at Princeton University at 20. His two brothers, on...

Kevin Carey writes about the future of the MOOC in the NYT: Over the course of a few months in early 2012, leading scientists from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T. started three companies to provide Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. The courses were free. Millions of students signed up. Pundits called it a revolution. But today, enrollment in traditional colleges remains robust, and undergraduates are paying higher tuition and taking out larger loans than ever before. Universities do not seem poised to join travel agents and video stores on the ash heap of history — at least, not yet. The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the...

Prediction is difficult, especially of the future, as Neils Bohr or Yogi Berra may have said. Via Lee, who pointed me to a blog post by Arun, which mentioned but didn't link to his source, apparently this column by Ross Douthat , which links to this Edge conversation between Nobelist Daniel Kahnemann and Historian Yuval Noah Harari. I recommend that you skip the commentary (including this one) and go right to the original. Arun attempts to debunk Harari, or at least some excerpts he found in Douthat, but I wasn't persuaded. Douthat was more impressed but mainly seemed afraid of the threat to his religion. Despite having already told you to read the original, and not rely on summaries by people (like myself) less bright than Harari and Kahnemann, I will now summarize what I think are Harari's main points: (1)The changes we will see in the next 50-100 years are much more revolutionary than those of the last 100 years, mainly due to intelligent but not necessarily co...

Annoying whine deleted.

The relatively quick arrests in the Nemtsov killing would appear, at least at first glance, to argue against Kremlin involvement. TBD. MOSCOW — Russian news agencies said Sunday one of the suspects in the killing of leading opposition figure Boris Nemtsov has admitted involvement in the crime. Judge Nataliya Mushnikova said that Zaur Dadaev made a statement confirming his guilt, according to the reports. They did not specify his alleged actions. Dadaev is among five suspects detained in the Feb. 27 killing, when Nemtsov was shot while walking on a bridge near the Kremlin. Another man, Anzor Gubashev, was charged in the killing, and a hearing for three other unnamed suspects was under way, court spokeswoman Anna Fadeeva said earlier Sunday.

You know that cute galaxy you saw in the NASA travel posters? Out at z = 1.8 redshift? (A few billion light years away). Were you planning to visit? Well you can forget it. It's already gone. Over the the cosmic horizon. Already separating from us at more than the speed of light - so you can't send a message either. Oh, we will still get light from it for a while, but none of that light will come from its cosmic (co-moving) now. All the light (or anything else) we will ever get from it has already been emitted. Of course that assumes that the dark energy really is an effective cosmic constant, and that the universe will continue (has continued) to accelerate its expansion. That galaxy, and all the others except for our local group will gradually fade out to infinite red shift over the horizon. But it's still not too late to book a trip to more or less anywhere in the local super cluster.

I was slow to pick this up, but I finally figured out that Wolfgang's reason for leaving was not the post I cited in the comments, but this one: Scott Aaronson and Andrew Sullivan on Gaza. If I may recapitulate the bidding, Cynthia asserted that the strength of the Israel Lobby in the US was due to the large number of Jewish Billionires, Wolfgang called her a Nazi, I chided him for preferring insult to fact and noted that the Israel Lobby had a large fundamentalist Christian component after which Wolfgang bailed. Apparently he thinks any discussion of the existence of an Israel lobby is proof of Nazi sympathy.

Over the past few years technologies have been developed that make editing the human germ line a real possibility. The designer baby is clearly in our headlights. Stephen Hsu has a highly relevant story. A few excerpts from the MIT Technology Review article: Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late? ... When I visited the lab last June, Church proposed that I speak to a young postdoctoral scientist named Luhan Yang, a Harvard recruit from Beijing who’d been a key player in developing a new, powerful technology for editing DNA called CRISPR-Cas9. With Church, Yang had founded a small company to engineer the genomes of pigs and cattle, sliding in beneficial genes and editing away bad ones. As I listened to Yang, I waited for a chance to ask my real questions: Can any of this be done to human beings? Can we improve the human gene pool? The position of much of mainstream science has been that such meddling would be...

I think I've made it pretty clear that I don't like any of the prominent Republican Presidential candidates, and there are some that I actively despise. So I've spent a lot of energy trying to convince myself that Hillary would be a good President, and I'm not doing that well. Aside from the fact that she is too old, too greedy and too Clinton, there is that Clinton knack for unforced errors. Frank Bruni, a pretty reliable liberal and feminist, has a more in sorrow than anger meditation on her latest misadventure , the private emails she relied on as Secretary of State. They know what the caricature of them is and they play right into it. They’re familiar with the rap against them and generously feed it. And they tune out their critics, at least the ones they’re not savaging. Although they’ve long been derided for a surrender of principle when they’re on the hunt for donations, their foundation has raked in money in a manner that opens them up to fresh, predictab...

Via Marginal Revolution : Ms Schneider reckons that more than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/ms-schneiders-china-estimate-of-the-day.html#sthash.lePDQVZ9.dpuf

For Lee, who came up with the description. My stance, such as it is, is that the two should stop killing each other and make peace. I don't have any better ideas as to how this can be accomplished than anyone else, but the alternatives look pretty grim to me. Lee suggested that it was "my stance" that enraged Wolfgang, but if you check the record here: Our Israel Problem you will see that the statement that he called "delusional" was the well documented fact/claim that Israel has taken a lot of Palestinian land by force and fear. He could have either justified those seizures or tried to deny them, but he chose to insult and run - what Lee called a "rational response." However, I do have a lot of guilt about chasing Wolfgang off. That guilt is based on feeling I have that what really angered him was my saying that the people most responsible for Israel were both Austrians, Hitler and Herzl. That was a nasty, nationalist comment and I regret it. ...

I'm thinking of Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore, and Art Laffer. They are the reliable mouthpieces of what former President George H W Bush called "Voodoo economics," and their popularity is undiminished by a record of confident predictions that turned out to be absurdly wrong. The important point is that their economics is narrowly tailored to the convenience of the super rich zillionaires who finance the right-wing propaganda institutes. Paul Krugman gives them a few swats here. Jonathan Chait does insults better than almost anyone; in his recent note on Larry Kudlow, he declares that The interesting thing about Kudlow’s continuing influence over conservative thought is that he has elevated flamboyant wrongness to a kind of performance art. And Chait doesn’t even mention LK’s greatest hits — his sneers at “bubbleheads” who thought something was amiss with housing prices, his warnings about runaway inflation in 2009-10, his declaration that a high stock market is a v...

Generally speaking, scientists are only slightly more likely to become celebrities than plumbers and electricians. The most obscure movie actor is usually celebrated a good deal more than the most famous scientist. Bee has an blog post entitled Are pop star scientists bad for science? I don't think it's at all up to her usual high standard, mostly because she doesn't consider how scientists become celebrities, and wastes a lot of words on silly fantasies, like imagining that deGrasse Tyson commented on a paper of hers. The scientists she mentions, Einstein, Sagan, Feynman, Hawking, and deGrasse Tyson are interesting but rather diverse examples. Einstein, the transcendent genius of his age, became famous because his theories revolutionized our understanding of time. Like Newton, he was a legend in his own lifetime almost solely because of his work. Sagan, Feynman and Hawking were and are very important scientific contributors, but like deGrasse Tyson are famous not f...

Political murder is a hallmark of the Putin era. Balazs Penz has a rundown for Bloomberg.

It's Rumelia, of course. Rumelia is our Roomba vacuuming robot. She is maddeningly inefficient in her vacuuming patterns, but she does love those places I never vacuumed before I had a robot - under the couch, under desks, under any heavy piece of furniture. That's where we will probably find her - out of juice and asleep.

Lumo points out that Nemtsov was a physicist before politics. Michael Birnbaum, writing in The Washington Post, notes that the location of the assassination, Red Square, is always blanketed with a heavy security presence. How could the murder have taken place and escaped the notice at the doorstep of the Kremlin? Authorities announced they were investigating a slew of possibilities, none of which included what Putin critics said was a primary suspect: the Kremlin itself. Many in the opposition reasoned that, at minimum, the security services that blanket Red Square must have had advance warning of Nemtsov’s fate. One can at least imagine that a highly placed security official plotted the crime just to discredit Putin - but the near certainty of being caught would be a big deterrent.