CapitalistImperialistPig

In my experience, feeding the birds can be a good deal more expensive, Mary Poppins/Julie Andrews notwithstanding. I started modestly, with a bit of nyjer seed for the finches, in one of those cylindrical mesh feeder that only finches can access. I wanted to expand to other songbirds, though, so I got another type of feeder, one of those shaped like a birdhouse, but surrounded by a coarse grill to keep the doves out. Hah! The stupid songbirds promptly began push much of the seed out onto the ground, thereby attracting an enormous mob of doves. I hope they get a commission. I took my problem to the bird seed store, who promptly recommended a solution of sorts. For slightly less than $200 I could get a pole type apparatus upon the top of which could be placed my bird feeder (itself having cost $60 or so). Underneath the bird feeder would be perched a platform surrounded again by a dove excluding grill. So far, I'm not buying it. Maybe I can just get a cat with a taste for d...

Via Steve Hsu, J D Jackson, he of the dreaded but inevitable (green, red, or blue) E&M book and problem sets, has died at age 96. Steve tells this story of an encounter when both were at Berkeley: When I entered graduate school at Berkeley I asked to place out of the required course in advanced electrodynamics, which was taught by Jackson using his famous book. I had lecture notes from the course I had taken at Caltech from Mark Wise, which also used the book. Jackson borrowed the notes for a few days, looked through them carefully, and returned to me a short list detailing topics in which my education had been deficient. I was to study those topics, but was excused from the course. Jackson's dissertation supervisor was Weisskopf, and his doctoral students included Gordon Kane and Chris Quigg.

All societies that I have looked at do some kind of regulation of gender roles. In nearly every traditional society women have been relegated to roles with fewer political, economic, and social rights. The global crusade for women's rights has severely upset those traditional roles and consequently caused a lot of turmoil: reportedly, the issue that first incited the Ayatollah Khomeini public outrage was women getting the vote in Iran's parliament. It's a motivating factor in virtually every right wing movement, from Tennessee to the Middle East to India. Globally and in the US, men are feeling under attack. In the US, at least, men are losing ground in economics, social prestige and even life span. One aspect of this is the decline in traditional "strong back" type jobs on farm, factory, and more generally. The other aspect is the opening up of traditional prestige jobs in the professions and business to women. Of course I'm not trying to argue that t...

The NYT editorial board points the finger at Saudi Arabia as the prime exporter of the brand of radical Islam that animates ISIS, al Quaeda, and other extremists around the world. Saudi Arabia has frustrated American policy makers for years. Ostensibly a critical ally, sheltered from its enemies by American arms and aid, the kingdom has spent untold millions promoting Wahhabism, the radical form of Sunni Islam that inspired the 9/11 hijackers and that now inflames the Islamic State. The latest chapter in this long, sorrowful history involves tiny Kosovo. With a population of only 1.8 million people, Kosovo has sent more of its young people per capita than any other country to fight and die in Iraq and Syria. Since 2012, some 314 Kosovars have joined the Islamic State, including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children. Even Belgium, widely seen as a hotbed of extremism after the attacks on Paris and Brussels, lags behind it in the recruitment rankings. The Saudi Monarchy has ...

If forecasts for the next week verify, most of the snow in Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, and Siberia will be gone next week. Much of the snow on the Arctic ice cap will also melt. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice area and extent are tracking at record lows. From Arctic Sea Ice Forum (Jim Pettit): ADS-NIPR Extent: 10,880,319 km2 (23 May) Down 3,062,188 km2 (21.96%) from 2016 maximum of 13,942,507 km2 on 29 February. 7,702,864 km2 above record minimum extent of 3,177,455 km2 (16 September 2012). Down 43,644 km2 (-.4%) from previous day. Down 317,590 km2 (-2.84%) over past seven days (daily average: -45,370 km2). Down 1,413,128 km2 (-11.55%) for May (daily average: -61,440 km2). 1,126,654 km2 below 2000s average for this date. 708,050 km2 below 2010s average for this date. 436,128 km2 below 2015 value for this date. 1,007,308 km2 below 2012 value for this date. ... CT Area: 9,896,835 km2 (24 May [Day 0.3917]) Down 3,024,523 km2 (23.41%) from 2016 maximum of 12,921,358 km2 on 29 March [Day...

You have five books on a subject, but you still don't understand it. Your next move should be: (a)Give up and try something else. (b)Read (or reread) the books. (c)This time do the problems. (d)Buy another book. (e)Buy two more books. (f)b through e above.

“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both” ― Milton Friedman As it happens, I think that Friedman's famous dictum has more the character of a "great truth" in Bohr's sense* than of an ordinary truth, but to the extent that it's true Cuba is moving slowly toward freedom. In this respect it is following in the footsteps of many formerly or in some cases, still officially Communist countries like Vietnam, China, and others. From Henry Graybar's Slate story, entitled Bartenders are winning, but Doctors are losing : The growth of the Cuban private sector over the past two decades has created some serious imbalances between skills and pay: A bartender with some generous foreign customers could make more in tips in a weekend than a doctor, each of whom is employed by the Cuban government, does in a month. A new reform could exacerbate that iss...

The Countable California Hotel has an countably infinite number of rooms, which is handy, because an infinite number of guests showed up one night. The clerk on duty put the first guest in room 1, the second in room 2, and so on. When the manager showed up the next morning, he discovered the clerk's bad mistake. He knew that an infinite number of new guests was showing up tonight, but that since it was the Countable California, some of the guests might check out, but none of them would ever leave. "The bellhops will be busy moving luggage today," he said. How did he solve his problem?

18 “Bring them here to me,” he said. 19 And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. 20 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 21 The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children.... Matthew 14 : 18-21 The Banach-Tarski Theorem is the mathematical equivalent of a free lunch. It says that with the aid of a natural appearing and frequently indispensable assumption about set theory (The Axiom of Choice), one can decompose a solid sphere into component parts and reassemble them to make two spheres each identical to the original. I have no reason to believe that it has anything to do with dark energy except for that free lunch bit.

Americans generally don't appreciate how advantageous it is to have a President who is actually smart. From Politico: HAVANA — In Cuba, just having a news conference is news. President Barack Obama jokes that he likes news conferences and wants to do more of them, and let them go on longer. That tends to be less the case at the White House than abroad, when Obama’s trying to make a point about a repressive regime by turning to the news media. He did it in China in 2013 by giving a New York Times reporter a question to President Xi Jinping right after the government in Beijing had kicked out a reporter from the newspaper. He did it in Ethiopia last year, when he forced the journalist-jailing prime minister to stand next to him for a long news conference during which Obama talked about the country’s record on human rights and held forth on American politics. Monday afternoon here in Havana, he did it to Raúl Castro, right in the Revolutionary Palace, letting him be pressed with ...

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”..................Lord Palmerston On the other hand, he also said: I hold that the real policy of England... is to be the champion of justice and right, pursuing that course with moderation and prudence, not becoming the Quixote of the world, but giving the weight of her moral sanction and support wherever she thinks that justice is, and whenever she thinks that wrong has been done. Of course Palmerston is probably not totally reliable guru for foreign policy, but these two pithy quotes do supply some food for thought for every strategic champion of justice. The first is a fact of life that every successful US President has mastered. It means that in foreign policy it is often necessary to not only let bygones be bygones but also to sometimes sup with the devil and even go to baseball games with him. Commenter (or perhaps commenta...

I've been looking at new cars. I thought I should apply algebraic mathematical reasoning to the task, so here is a short glossary for mathematicians: Automorphism: The process of exchanging your old car and bank account for a new one. Inner Automorphism: The process of turning oneself inside out in order to get into the new car. Group: The collection of people you wish to transport. Subgroup: The subset of the group that will actually fit into the car. Cyclic subgroup: Those who didn't fit in the car and so must peddle. Ideal: The car you could have bought for a lot more money. Abelian Group: Those who need a car because they commute. Left Coset: Where the commanding officer/driver sets in the US. Right Coset: Analogous location in UK & a few other benighted realms. Isomorphism: The car that's just as good as the old car except for costing a lot more. Homomorphism: This term is deprecated as possibly offensive to some. Lagrange's Theorem: A notorious mo...

From The Hill: President Obama has signed legislation striking outdated racial terms such as “Oriental” and “Negro” from federal laws. Obama signed the bill without fanfare on Friday along with six other pieces of legislation, the White House said. ... Thanks to the new law, references to the term “Oriental” will be replaced with “Asian American” and the word “Negro” will be changed to “African American.” The new terms are apparently considered less potentially offensive. On the other hand, the old terms are also more generic, since they don't single out American citizenship. Google offers: Ne·gro ˈnēɡrō/ dated offensive noun 1. a member of a dark-skinned group of peoples originally native to Africa south of the Sahara. And: o·ri·en·tal ˌôrēˈen(t)l/ adjective 1. of, from, or characteristic of East Asia. "oriental rugs" synonyms: eastern, Far Eastern, Asian, Asiatic; literaryorient "oriental cooking" 2. (of a pearl or other jewel) orient. But ...

Meaning my back yard is covered with an inch or so of frozen water - hail. Of course snow doesn't really happen very often at Christmas in Las Cruces, but neither do big thunderstorms in May. Meanwhile, snow in the Arctic continues under heavy attack.

One drastic proposal for for saving the Arctic ice is to dam the Bering strait. By limiting the heat and water flow in this would putatively preserve the ice. Besides being a very challenging engineering task, this would have other huge and likely unpredictable consequences. On the positive side, it would permit rail and perhaps road traffic between the US and Russia as well as supporting trans Arctic sale of Russian oil and gas, as well as other trade. The normal annual flow through the Bering strait is about 1 Sverdrup (10^6 m^3/s), or about the combined flow of every river in the world (or so I'm told*). So there could be hydroelectic potential too. I am in no way condoning or endorsing this idea - it looks pretty damn dangerous. *For comparison, the number one river, the Amazon, is about 20% of this, and the number 2, the Congo, is 4%. The biggest North American rivers, the Mississippi and the Saint Lawrence, are about 1.6% each.

I don't hate the rich because they have Mercedes S-600's and I don't. Even though the S classes are really comfortable cars for oversized people like me. No, I hate the rich because they have S classes and private jets*. Aside from these unworthy and petty jealousies, though, it really makes me furious when the rich and super rich oppose programs that benefit the poor and middle class. A significant fraction of the super rich devote large tax free expenditures to trying to undermine and destroy public education, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that benefit the middle class and poor. It is an outrage that they are allowed to do this with tax free dollars, and it's a scandal that they do it at all. The Democrats really need to run people who will confront these problems and commit to attacking them. JK - I don't really hate people for that, even though I am jealous. I'm serious about the rest of the post though.

Fish have them too, says Jonathan Balcome in the NYT. He makes a good case for some fish being pretty smart, and having stress response similar to our own. At low tide, frillfins hide in rocky tide pools. If danger lurks — a hungry octopus, say — the goby will jump to a neighboring tide pool, with remarkable accuracy. How do they avoid ending up stranded on the rocks? A series of captive experiments dating from the 1940s found something remarkable. They memorize the tide pool layout while swimming over it at high tide. They can do it in one try, and remember it 40 days later. So much for a fish’s mythic three-second memory. And big brained manta rays appear to recognize themselves in mirrors - a feat matched only by the brightest mammals. Some fish even use tools, and others recognize friendly divers and will come over for strokes. That could spoil my dinner.

Sean Carroll has written a new book, The Big Picture , which has gotten pretty good reviews from a lot of people including Bee - whom I will count as the equivalent of all the Neal DeGrasse Tyson's and others summoned for the Amazon reviews. I used to be a regular reader of his blog, but I thought he was getting a bit stale recently. Anybody else read it? Should I? UPDATE: Barry Lower's Review in Science (Summary) The 20th-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars characterized the aim of philosophy as "to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." This is also physicist Sean Carroll's aim in his new book, The Big Picture. He sets out to show how various phenomena, including thought, choice, conscioussness, and value, hang together with the scientific account of reality that has been developed in physics in the past 100 years. He attempts to do all this without relying on specialized...

It's getting hard to find any part of the Arctic not scheduled to get torched in the next 7-10 days. First the Beaufort and Chuckchi and then the Barents, Kara, and Laptev seas get the blowtorch treatment. The Central Arctic Basin may also see a bit of melting. Greenland gets torched at the rate of 10-15 C above normal, not enough to get the central highlands melting, but the southern edges should get a light toasting. The Bering and Okhotzk are history. The Canadian Archipelago and Hudson will also get lightly browned.

The Cranbrook Ratio*, named for the Fifth Viscount Cranbrook, is the ratio of relevant factual information to strength of opinions held. *Oddly, but perhaps appropriately, John Phillips-Thomas, Fifth Viscount Cranbrook, discoverer of the Cranbrook Ratio, is no relation to Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, also Fifth Viscount Cranbrook. This is due to the former Lord Cranbrook being a purely fictitious invention, unlike the latter, who not only seems to actually exist but also to be rather accomplished. The resemblance was, and is, purely coincidental.

Possession of some prime numbers is illegal in the United States:

Choose your parents wisely. That's at least partly because of genetics. A new study of 300,000 individuals reported in this week's Nature found 74 variant loci associated with educational attainment. From the Abstract: Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample1, 2 of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We identify 74 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with educational attainment are disproportionately found in genomic regions regulating gene expression in the fetal brain. Candidate genes are preferentially expressed in neural tissue, especially during the prenatal period, and enriched for biological pathways involved in neural development. Our findings demonstrate that, even for a beh...

Over the next week, the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean is projected to see temperatures 10 C (18 F) warmer than normal, with widespread melting. Meanwhile, Alaska, the coast of the Yukon and Northwest Territory and Western Siberia will all see temperatures up to 15 C (27 F) warmer than normal. Snow cover will be decimated. Both surface melting and the disappearance of snow decrease albedo, resulting in more absorption of solar energy. Barring a major change in the weather, we are primed for a major Arctic melt - but it is still pretty early.

A nation isn't just land and laws, it also requires a mythology. To be glued together as one, people need excuses as to why they are exceptional. Consequently, it's customary to trace one's ancestry to others who can be imagined to be more glorious. Thus the Romans traced themselves back to Troy, Spanish aristocracy traced itself to the Visigoths, and the Nazis to the conquering Aryans, whom they imagined to look a lot like themselves. The word Aryan was the name the Vedic peoples of India gave themselves, and was also used by Persians as an autonym, whence the modern word Iran. Its European roots date to the discovery that Persian and Sanskrit were closely related to most of the modern languages of Europe. Originally a linguistic term for the languages we now call Indo-European, it took on a racial implication under the influence of white people's desire to convince themselves that they were superior to everyone else (the inconvenient fact that those original Ary...

There is no doubt that Antarctica is not warming as fast as the rest of the globe. It's not entirely clear whether it is warming at all. The small or nonexistent warming in Antarctica is consistent with most global warming models. Some parts of the continent are clearly warming, while others are not, or not warming as much. Wikipedia has a good summary of the state of scientific opinion: Changes in the average temperature of the Antarctic continent has been the subject of various measurements. The trend differs at different locations on the continent.[3] These trends have been labelled as "contradictory" in some accounts.[4][5][6] Observations unambiguously show the Antarctic Peninsula to be warming. Some trends elsewhere on the continent have shown cooling,[7][8][9] while others show show warming over the entire continent,[10] but overall trends are smaller and dependent on season and the timespan over which the trend is computed. Climate models predict that tempera...

Not entirely, of course, but there is a certain amount of evidence of genetic predisposition to political outlook, especially liberalism vs conservatism. Some of the latest such evidence comes from Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS). Such studies are useful when you have large sample sizes and traits that are believed for other reasons to be hereditary but controlled by a large number of genes. Height is the classic example. Our adult heights are closely related to those of our parents, but no single gene, nor even small group of genes, can explain the relationship. The genes we inherit are a mix of those of from our parents, but our inheritance is not randomly assorted, gene by gene. Instead, we inherit chromosomes, each containing thousands of genes, which consist of at most a few chunks from father and a few from mother, so that genes that started out close together on a chromosome are very likely to stay together. GWAS look for variant sections of DNA whose inheritance...

The snow in the north-west Arctic, that is. A big blast of warm air, a blow torch in Arctic parlance, is projected to ravage the snow cover in Alaska and north west Canada this week, and it won't stop at the ocean front, which should also get a good dose of melting. So far this year has been a bad year for the Arctic ice, but, as always, weather will have the final say. Prospects for a record melt look good (or bad, if you happen to be a polar bear), though. UPDATE: And yesterday: UPDATE 2: another 99,000 km^2 lost today (5/9)

Alex Tabbarok reports the latest in unAmerican activities: An economist doing algebra. Flight from Philly to Syracuse goes out on the tarmac, ready to take off. The passenger sitting next to me calls the stewardess, passes her a note. The stewardess comes back asks her if she is comfortable taking off, or she is too sick. We wait more. We go back to the gate. The passenger exits. We wait more. The pilot comes to me and asks me out of the plane. There I am met by some FBI looking man-in-black. They ask me about my neighbor. I tell them I noticed nothing strange. They tell me she thought I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper. I laugh. I bring them back to the plane. I showed them my math. It’s a bit funny. It’s a bit worrisome. The lady just looked at me, looked at my writing of mysterious formulae, and concluded I was up to no good. Because of that an entire flight was delayed by 1.5 hours. Trump’s America is already here. It’s not yet in power th...

Now that Baby Berlusconi, AKA Baby Hitler, AKA Donald Trump, seems certain to be the Republican nominee, I am getting worried that he could be elected. Hillary is a weak candidate, and I have spoken to a lot of people who really should know better who plan to vote for Trump. Perhaps no presidential candidate in history, or at least in recent history, has displayed such colossal ignorance of and utter contempt for the Constitution. Many of these people are college graduates. You would think that they might know something about history, but they clearly don't.

I not exactly religious, but I did ask God if he would let me live long enough to finish the books I'm reading. He didn't answer, but I think I might have heard him laughing.

Plenty of opportunity for mischief, as Juliet found out. In California a dispute has broken out over what the Indian subcontinent should be called in the school curriculum . The more generic "South Asia" is popular among scholars and others who prefer not to offend Pakistanis, but Hindu activists here and in India are determined to be offended. The name has an ancient history, deriving from the Sanskrit word "Sindhu," but referred originally to the Indus river, a river which is now mostly in Pakistan. Apparently the Persians were the the first to apply it more generically, referring to the people of the Indus river. Greeks and other colonial invaders adopted the term, but it wasn't the only word used for the whole land until fairly recently. Much or all of India has often been known as Bharat, one of the official names used in the Indian constitution. If there were no Pakistan, very few would object to calling the subcontinent by the ancient name, but the...

I was watching Broadway and film actress Michelle Williams on the Colbert late show the other day, and he started asking her about her childhood. She grew up, she said, in the wilds of Montana, so he asked if she grew up riding horses - she did. When he asked her specifically where in Montana, she got evasive - it's not so wild anymore, she said, big box stores and all that. Anyway I looked her up and sure enough, she was born in that very same Montana town I was - Kalispell. Now I was born a bit more than twice as long ago as she was, and I too grew up with horses, sometimes, but I go back fairly often and and I remember civilization coming a bit earlier. The McDonalds and the WalMart were there when she was born, I think, though the Costco is more recent. It's true, I suppose, that a lot of population growth and suburbanization has occurred in the last twenty years, but I'm almost sure that football had replaced gunfights as the Friday night entertainment even befor...

Where are the concepts"anger" and "yellow" represented in the brain? A new Nature article reports some results on activation of brain regions in subjects listening to stories suggesting that there are specific regions in the brain in which such concepts are represented. Interestingly enough, there is a fair amount of consistency between individuals in where general concepts are represented, suggesting, but hardly proving, that there might be a fair amount of pre-wiring. The sample of individuals tested was neither large nor cross-cultural, though.

One of the perks of being an old NM resident is that I can take University classes rather cheaply. I took Playwriting and Human Genomics this semester, and they were pretty fun. Looking around for next semester. The math department has a graduate course in Measure theory, which I really should know more about, just for vanity purposes - Measure is my name after all. On the other hand, it does sound a bit boring, and I'm not sure if I really care that much about Lebesgue Integration. Astronomy offers a graduate course in Galaxies, which might be fun, but the problems might be hard. Suggestions?

...We will keep your resume on file in case hell freezes over. It's been game over for Bernie for a while, but he seems to be beating the polls and if he miraculously pulls out a victory, it could increase his clout at the convention. UPDATE: Cruz sees the arithmetic and folds. Bernie wins. Clinton continues to limp toward the nomination. It's going to be a pretty depressing election, with Baby Hitler representing the Repubs and a very uninspiring Hillary Clinton for the Dems. If Bernie wins Cali and a few more, Hill is really going to look sickly. UPDATE II: And then there was one - bye, bye Kasich.

For somebody who knows relatively little mathematics, I have a hell of a lot of math books. That is all. OK, maybe not quite all. My son, who is both wise and occasionally acerbic, once said: "I think you have so many books because you want to convince people that you are smart." I thought about it for a while, and replied: "No, I think I'm trying convince myself that I'm smart." Or maybe just feed the fantasy that I will someday understand all that stuff.

The evidence that the Earth's "Big Five" extinction events were triggered by the enormous volcanic events that created the so-called Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs) continues to accumulate. The most catastrophic of these, the end Permian extinction, killed most of the species that existed at the time. It was long suspected that it was tied to the epic Siberian Traps volcanism (think many millions of Mount Saint Helens eruptions) and new geochronological evidence makes the evidence of simultaneity far more precise. So why were these eruptions, which large as they were, were confined to relatively small portions of the globe, so catastrophic for the whole planet? The big culprit seems to have been carbon dioxide, with an assist from sulfur dioxide. The sulfur dioxide caused as sharp global cooling, lasting only a few years, and extreme acid rain. The CO2 triggered multi-millenium long global warming and ocean acidification, producing anoxic oceans that killed most sea ...

OK, I don't get premium cable, so I might have a slightly narrow point of view, but I'm going with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend . Rachel Bloom collected a couple of best actress awards for her portrayal of the title character, an intellectually brilliant lawyer (Harvard and Yale) who has just made partner at her high-powered Manhattan law firm, but realizes that she is utterly miserable when she runs into her (ten years ago) summer camp boyfriend Josh, who is about to move back to his boyhood home in West Covina, CA. She impulsively quits and moves to West Covina. The show is an occasionally dark musical comedy about the stalking that ensues, enlivened by characters sometimes breaking into song. The best thing about the show is its funny and frequently penetrating wit, intelligent but not pretentious. The humor is a bit on the raunchy side, but when I compare it to say, the equally raunchy but relentlessly dumb "Two Broke Girls" comparisons fail. Bloom and her co-produce...

If history is a guide, Republics usually fail when an oligarchy seizes control. Oligarchies are not stable though, for a few reasons. One is that the oligarchs start competing with each other. Linked to that is that they disregard the health of state in their competition. The populace also becomes tired of paying the bills for oligarchs. Popular dissatisfaction, combined with oligarchical competition often leads to civil war and ruin. The American oligarchy is now led by Charles Koch, who controls nearly all of the Republican party apparatus - nearly all of the congressional Republicans suck at the Koch teat and swear fealty to his program. A competitive oligarch, Donald Trump is challenging his rule and seems certain to get the Republican nomination. Of course his actual policy program, to the faint extent that he has one, is little different from the Kochs, but he is a challenge to their power. The games begin.