CapitalistImperialistPig

And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (p. 23). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Trump Treasury boy Steve Mnuchin recently opined that taxing millionaires to provide healthcare to poor is "theft." This is a good example of why I find it easy to refresh my hatred of libertarianism, at least in its current incarnation. A cardinal principle of libertarianism seems to be that individuals, at least rich ones, don't owe anybody anything except themselves. I regard this as inimical to the fundamental principle that allows humans to cooperate in groups, the sense of shared destiny and collective responsibility.

Does some form of senile dementia explain Trump's bizarre behavior? It's a tempting diagnosis, but there are also some contrary indications. He seems to have always been a jerk and a compulsive liar with poor impulse control, and he still can work a crowd. I wonder what those who study such things think? Did he used to be able to speak in complete sentences?

An acquaintance shared this story, which I will put in quotes, though it's surely not a precise reconstruction. I had a small check to deposit, so I went to the drive through - I know that you can make a deposit at the ATM, but I'm old, and I didn't want to try to figure it out. I was in a hurry, so I was wolfing down my sausage McMuffin in the car. I sent over the check with my card, and in a bit the girl came back sounding real friendly like. I was, she said, and old and valued customer - a high value customer, whatever the hell that is, and entitled to a private banker. OK, my social security gets deposited automatically, ditto my pension, and every two or three weeks I go to the ATM to take out some cash for this and that. I'm probably not getting the private bit, but I'm damn sure nobody's going to make a living handling my banking needs. So what the hell is a private banker, anyway? I was curious, so I looked it up. It seems that banks are willin...

We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it.(15) She'll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice Remains in danger of her former tooth. (W. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene II) Anybody who thinks McConnell is done with his Trumpcare bill is fooling himself.

I'm a slow learner, so when I work through technical stuff I usually write out and at least try to derive all the equations. My favorite pen for that kind of work is the Pilot Precise V5 . It writes a nice precise 0.5 mm line, dries almost instantly, never skips, lasts a long time, and it's dirt cheap (a dozen for $13.28 from Amazon). I've used a lot of pens, some of them nearly two orders of magnitude more expensive, but I've never found one better suited to my needs (writing equations with lots of symbols, Greek letters, and subscripts.) There is a retractable and refillable version, but I usually use the stick. A true triumph of technology. I got about 200 pages of equations and notes out of one pen.

David Brooks, the least crazy of the NYT conservative columnists, has been bashing the current GOP lately. His latest column accuses them of abandoning conservative principles. Not the critique I would make, but not without merit. But I am not here to praise Brooks. His opening paragraph contains a familiar bit of right-wing BS. There is a structural flaw in modern capitalism. Tremendous income gains are going to those in the top 20 percent, but prospects are diminishing for those in the middle and working classes. This gigantic trend widens inequality, exacerbates social segmentation, fuels distrust and led to Donald Trump. This is the kind of technically true but profoundly misleading stuff that makes otherwise kindly liberals hate Brooks. In fact, nearly all of the income gains have gone to a tiny fraction of the top 20%. It's pretty shocking just how sharp the income needle is. If we look at net worth , the results are even more dramatic. The minimum net worth for...

Apparently at least some of the cometary debris fields the Earth passes through contain several hundred meter sized chunks of the old comet. Collision with one of them would flatten a continent. Whole comets colliding with Earth might destroy almost all life on Earth. But neither of those is the most likely way for humanity to end our hour upon the stage. We are still our own enemy number one. Sixty some years into the thermonuclear age, we still haven't blown ourselves up, but the hazards are growing again, as more nations get the bomb and missiles to deliver it. The world's most dangerous nuclear power is now run by probably its stupidest leader ever, and another major nuclear power is aggressively expanding.

I've started reading Yuval Noah Harari's book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. He opens with some observations on how radically the world has changed in the last century or so. For most of the history of civilization, famine and plague cut huge swaths through populations. About 2.8 million French – 15 per cent of the population – starved to death between 1692 and 1694, while the Sun King, Louis XIV, was dallying with his mistresses in Versailles. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (p. 4). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. This was far from an isolated event. Even higher casualty rates afflicted Finland, Scotland, and Estonia at the time. Dozens of such catastrophic famines killed at similar rates in the much larger populations of China and India. Plague was equally catastrophic. The Black Death killed 25% of the population of Eurasia. The diseases carried by European explorers killed 90% of the population of the Americas and similar pe...

My Google News can reliably be expected to provide me with new feats of athletic prowess, engineering, driving skill or other actions claimed to defy the laws of physics. Unsurprisingly, none of them ever do.* I guess the statement "amusingly illustrates the laws of physics" just lacks panache. *Actually, I can think of an exception: the so called electromagnetic drive. But I'm pretty damn sure that's purely imaginary.

Unfortunately it's not at all uncommon for college students, usually young men, to engage in dumb stunts or pranks that get themselves or others killed. Of course it wasn't smart for Otto Warmbier to decide to swipe a propaganda poster in North Korea, of all places. That offence, which likely would have earned a wrist slap in a civilized country, got him murdered in North Korea. His death, after being returned brain dead from North Korea, provoked a flurry of hysteria from certain right wing sites, alleging that liberals celebrated his punishment and murder. Exhibit A was a Larry Wilmore nightly show in which Warmbier was lambasted for his folly. I looked at it, and it was the most tasteless and nasty thing I've seen from Wilmore, even granting that it was done long before anybody knew Warmbier would die for his offence. To imply that this was some common liberal propaganda effort strikes me as ridiculous though, even if Wilmore happens to be a liberal comic. Wilmore...

I don't watch a whole lot of television, but there are three sitcoms I usually catch, and this being Summer, they aren't available, except as stale reruns. That tends to leave my television cupboard a bit bare for those evenings when, exhausted by a hard day of retirement*, I collapse on the couch. That's especially tough in the Summer when there are no sports on television. I've never watched wrestling, especially not women's wrestling, so I'm not exactly sure why I started watching GLOW, the new NETFLIX series fictionalized version of the story the Gorgeous Ladies Of Wrestling, a syndicated series that ran in the 1980s. My wife and I love it. It's great partly because Alison Brie and Marc Maron, the lead characters, are great, but mostly because the writing is great. The large ensemble of other wrestlers and a few others is also excellent. As in the real GLOW, the "wrestlers" were recruited from wanna be actresses, stunt women, and dancers...

Kai-Fu Lee, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, writes about what he calls The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence. Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the A.I. revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers). Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs — mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too. This transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies that develop A.I., as well as for the companies that adopt it. Imagine how much money a company like Uber would make if it used only robot drivers. Imagine the profits if Apple could manufacture its products without human labor. Imagine the gains to a loan company that could issue 30 million loans a year with virtually no human involvement. (As it happens, my venture capital firm has inv...

Naturally it hides a morally bankrupt core. Right now, the wealthy libertarians who own the Republican Party in the US are engaged in the destruction of Medicaid. Another score for libertarians was the Grenfell Tower catastrophe in Britain. From The New York Times: Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politicians evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residential apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market. Of course, after the disaster, the same libertarians who cheered removing regulations in the name of "cutting red tape" cited the disaster as evidence of the failure of government regulation, and always quick to add insult to injury, blamed the victims for c...

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb Aug 6, 1996 by Richard Rhodes, is a great book, but probably not for the faint hearted. If you have labored under the delusion that humans are rational animals, forget about it. We are sometimes an intellectual species, but a very irrational one, driven by vanity, paranoia and other prehistoric emotions, quite unsuited to life in a world with thermonuclear weapons. The penultimate chapter tells the story of the Cuban missile crisis, and it's pretty terrifying how close some pretty smart people came to utterly destroying the world. This was at a point when both sides had enough nuclear weapons to destroy civilization many times over. We had gotten to that point thanks to the paranoia and other frailties of some of the smartest guys around, including Curtis LeMay, Edward Teller, John Wheeler, and John von Neumann. Only the cool heads of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy narrowly saved the day more than once. It's terrifying to think w...

107 F here today (about 42 C), and it's predicted to get a bit hotter. I'm glad I don't still live in Phoenix - 118 yesterday. Meanwhile, the high Arctic has been just a shade cool for the past 3 months. I wonder if that will impact this year's melt season.

That book you spent some time searching for in the dusty boxes in the garage (on the hottest day of the year) isn't there either. Corollary 1: That book you were thinking of buying - don't - you already own it. Corollary 2: See above. Upside: You know all those ridiculous Greiner-Mueller books you bought but never read? The one on thermo actually has a good explanation of the very point you were mystified about. My apologies Prof's G and M.

Trump still firmly in control in the South. Democrats are getting demoralized.

Well I've done it again - inhaled a 400 page Murakami novel in less that 24 hours. Why can't I read physics books like that? Dance, Dance, Dance concerns the further adventures of the narrator of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, and A Wild Sheep Chase. Here he sets off to find the long vanished girlfriend from Sheep Chase and curious characters enter the picture, including an old acquaintance who has become a famous actor, a thirteen year-old clairvoyant with famous and wealthy but incompetent parents, The Sheepman from Chase, a host of call girls and others who disappear or turn up dead. Because this is Murakami, paranormal stuff happens. Murakami is a terrific writer, and I loved this book despite the fact that I normally have no patience for paranormal goings on. Murakami's formidable erudition on music, culture, and much else combined with his eagle eye for character and setting make this joy, as do his vivid and witty descriptions. Incidentally, his characters, a...

During the 1950s, SAC commander Curtis LeMay and the US Air Force became absorbed in the idea of a preventive war against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had specifically rejected the idea, but LeMay engaged in tactics that some considered designed to provoke such a war, in particular, repeated overflights of Russia with various US spy planes. Such flights apparently cost at least 20 planes and the lives of about 100 aviators - some of whom went to the Gulag. One of LeMay’s US reconnaissance crews remembered flying a B-47 deep into the USSR on May 8, 1954, and taking damage from a MiG-17. The mission made it back to England leaking fuel. LeMay ordered the crew to the US, the pilot, Hal Austin, recalled many years later: [LeMay] said, “I tried to get you guys a Silver Star,” but he said “you gotta explain that to Congress and everybody else in Washington . . . so here’s a couple of [Distinguished Flying Crosses] we’ll give you for that mission.” There wasn’t anybody in the room except ...

Since I've been studying astrophysics, I've noticed that I don't know anything about plasma physics. This prompted me to buy a book on plasma physics, namely: Introduction to Plasma Physics: With Space, Laboratory and Astrophysical Applications by Donald A. Gurnett (Author), Amitava Bhattacharjee (Author). While trying to decide where to shelve it, I noticed that I already had a couple of books mainly about plasma physics, if by "a couple" you mean 6 or 7. This suggests a disturbing possibility to me: It may be that owning a book does not mean you know anything about the contents. Who could have imagined?

The downfall of Oppenheimer has the flavor of a Greek tragedy, but his persecutors were Americans, some naturalized and some born here. From The New York Review of Books: The man who provided the argument and the occasion was William Liscum Borden, a single-minded young zealot who thought he knew why Oppenheimer resisted Air Force demands for hydrogen bombs—“more probably than not,” Borden wrote the head of the FBI in November 1953, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” But neither could have managed Oppenheimer’s destruction without the help of the obsessed H-bomb promoter Edward Teller, who had never forgiven Oppenheimer for choosing another man to run the theoretical division at Los Alamos, who dreamed of replacing Oppenheimer as the protean man of the hour, and who nursed matters forward as he methodically planted seeds of suspicion in the minds of Borden, Strauss, and Air Force generals that Oppenheimer’s “faulty judgment” could be traced to hidden loyalties...

The nuclear hysteria of the fifties was pumped up by some of the smartest US physicists, especially Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and John Wheeler. Of course lots of others, even smarter, saw through it, including Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Rabi. So did Eisenhower, at least to a degree. Unfortunately, logic and reason have a hard time competing with hysteria, especially when politicians on the make, like Symington and McCarthy join the chorus. Eisenhower: This would be a deterrent—but if the contest to maintain this relative position should have to continue indefinitely, the cost would either drive us to war—or into some form of dictatorial government. Such intense anxiety demanded alleviation. Conveniently, there was a scapegoat at hand to slaughter. Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 529). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. That scapegoat was Oppenheimer. Teller's hysteria with regard to Oppenheimer was due in part to humiliation. Oppe...

This week's Nature: Only 1 in 10,000 neurotypical people in the West have AP — the ability to effortlessly, without context, name the note sounded by a violin or a vacuum cleaner (“That's an F-sharp!”). Among those on the autism spectrum, the number rises to 8%, roughly 1 in 13. For people born blind or who lost their sight early in infancy, it is 45%. AP, Ockelford argues, enables children to sound out and tinker with familiar tunes; that experimentation leads to a deep grasp of musical structure. Those are quite extraordinary differences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, children whose first language is tonal (Vietnamese or Mandarin) in this study , and who start studying music at an early age, are much more likely to develop perfect pitch. So absolute pitch is an acquired skill, but one which requires training at a very early age. Four is problematic and eight seems to be definitely too old.

A friend of mine had a pet pit bull who stepped on an ants' nest and got stung. He then proceeded to bite and claw at the nest until the stings either killed or incapacitated him. Donald Trump seems a lot like that. It's no surprise that he's now being investigated for obstruction of justice. Whatever real or imaginary crimes prompted the deceptions of Flynn et. al., Trump's ham-handed attempts to quash the investigations have now put him squarely in the prosecutorial sights. Many have suggested that he wouldn't have taken such a chance unless he had something big to hide. I'm not so sure. It's possible that his aggressive instincts just lead him from one dumb choice to another. Personally, I hope that's not true. I'd like to think that he had a good reason, however evil, for putting the country through all this.

Some idiot decided to take Republican talk of second amendment solutions seriously. It apparently turned out to be a Bernie Sanders fan. Naturally and fortunately, he doesn't seem to have been a very good shot. What a moron. Hasn't he read Julius Caesar?

Gallup has Trump approval at 36% today , tying his low so far. His weekly average is 37%, a new low. Disapproval, at 60%, is also a record. I figure that if disapproval/approval reaches 2 to 1, Republican politicians are going to start heading for the hills, or at least hiding in the bushes. Actual impeachment might require 3 to 1

Clearly, Donald Trump has been sent to humiliate this nation in every way possible. From the NYT: Usually presidents mark their first cabinet meetings with a couple of words and a group grin for the cameras. But President Trump turned the first meeting of his full cabinet, on Monday, into a tribute to himself. Mr. Trump called himself history’s most successful president “with few exceptions,” saying, “We’ve been about as active as you can possibly be and at a just about record-setting pace,” though he has yet to move any major legislation through Congress. On Monday morning, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit became the latest court to block his travel ban. “In just a very short time we are seeing amazing results,” he said. “People are surprised. It’s kicking in very fast.” After 12 minutes of tooting his own horn, Mr. Trump invited his team to jump in. Maybe he’d call on one or two of them before getting down to work? No — everyone on the team was invited t...

Richard V. Reeves, who apparently graduated from Oxford, has an idiotic op-ed in the NYT on class in America, entitled "Stop Pretending You're Not Rich". In it he argues that the top 20% of Americans, with an average family income of $200,000/yr, are a sort of permanent American upper class. Rather than lying with statistics, he is probably just being stupid, but it's a familiar trick. The top 20% includes all the billionaires, centi-millionaires in the top 1% and top 0.01% and they make that äverage statistic pretty meaningless. In fact, only 7% of American individuals, and 17% 0f households, make more than $100,000 per year. The entry level to that top 20% is a lot less than $200K. The roughly 5.6% of households actually making more than $200K/yr are certainly fairly well off, but it's the top 0.1%, with a minimum net worth of around $20 million, and who own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, who really count as rich, and even they are pikers compa...

Landau's theoretical minimum was a test so rigorous that only a few ever passed it. Presumably it tested something like the contents of the famous Landau and Lifshitz series on theoretical physics. Leonard Susskind has been working on his own "Theoretical Minimum" series, and while it is at most an extremely simplified "Theoretical Minimum for Dummies", your humble dummy correspondent found the Quantum Mechanics volume very nice. I probably never used quantum mechanics once during a long career doing mostly atmospheric physics, so I had forgotten a lot. There's an awful lot of quantum mechanics you won't learn from it, but it's very good in presenting the fundamentals in a mathematically sound way. Anyway, he and his coauthor have a new volume coming out on Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory so I decided to order it.

Stan Ulam and Edward Teller invented the approach to making an thermonuclear bomb that turned out to work. Ulam's idea was using the hydrodynamic shock produced by a fission bomb to compress the fusion materials. Teller improved that idea by using the radiation pressure (rather than hydrodynamic pressure) to do the compression. Teller, who had been the tireless advocate of the H-bomb and spent many years on an idea that didn't work, didn't want to share credit. Edward Teller seems to have found it intolerable that someone might share credit for the historic invention on which he had been working single-mindedly for almost ten years; he moved immediately to take over the technical breakthrough and make it his own. After he and Ulam issued their joint report, Françoise Ulam observes, “my impression is that from then on Teller pushed Stan aside and refused to deal with him any longer. He never met or talked with Stan meaningfully ever again. Stan was, I felt, more wounded ...

Trump and fellow idiots have been blasting Comey for "leaking" the contents of the memos he wrote. Dana Gold, writing in Slate: Trump kept up this attack on Friday, taking to his favorite medium to say, “WOW, Comey is a leaker!” Meanwhile, NSA contractor Reality Winner is facing up to 10 years in jail because she allegedly mailed a classified document to the Intercept with evidence of an attack by Russian military intelligence operatives on the U.S. election system. What’s been missing from both of these conversations is a greater focus on what was being revealed, which should greatly influence how we think of and describe those making the revelations. The shared NSA documents revealed that Russia had hacked a voting software supplier just days before the election. Comey’s memo, meanwhile, revealed an allegation that the president attempted to interfere in an ongoing FBI investigation—a charge the president now denies—potentially to the point of obstruction of justice. T...

As calculations by Ulam, Everett and Fermi made it increasingly clear that Teller's design for the thermonuclear bomb (the so-called 'classical super') would not work, Teller became bitterly critical of Los Alamos, and campaigned for his own lab. In fact the failure was Teller’s, Hans Bethe observes, not the laboratory’s: That Ulam’s calculations had to be done at all was proof that the H-bomb project was not ready for a “crash” program when Teller first advocated such a program in the fall of 1949. Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not then available. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the Laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.2138 Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 461). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Kim’s Soviet advisers had proposed the day and time; it matched Hitler’s invasion of the USSR on the morning of Sunday, June 22, 1941.2021 US Ambassador to South Korea John Muccio, tired from a late night playing strip poker with several of the embassy secretaries, cabled the news to the State Department.2022 Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 436). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. Kim's idea - Stalin and Mao were not that eager.

Once master atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs had been revealed the FBI started looking hard for the "other" spy they had reason to believe was at Los Alamos. Suspicion fell upon uber hawk Edward Teller. Teller was a “close associate of . . . Fuchs at Los Alamos.” Mici Teller had traveled to Mexico City with Fuchs and Rudolf and Genia Peierls “in the latter part of 1945.” “The Tellers had Fuchs at their home for dinner when Fuchs returned to this country in 1947.” “Dr. Teller had considerable contact with Fuchs in England in the summer of 1949.” Besides his affiliation with Fuchs, Teller also had recommended for postwar graduate study at the University of Chicago a man with whom he had worked at Los Alamos who “has been identified as a Soviet espionage agent while at Los Alamos.” Teller’s name had appeared on a list of possible espionage recruits that the man had compiled.1983 Teller had traveled to New York during the time periods bracketed in the NKVD cable decode and “made frequ...

Post Comey testimony, Slate has its Impeach-O-Meter at 45%. My personal guess, based mainly on a long life of poor guesses about political outcomes, is more like 65%. Republicans would rather be roasted on a slow fire than impeach, but they are starting to hedge their bets. My feeling is that Trump would have to be an idiot to have done so much stupid stuff to conceal the smoke if there wasn't some fire, but on the other hand, Trump does seem to be an idiot, so who knows.

The Republican National Committee had reportedly asked the Republican Senators to rough up James Comey in the hearing today, but they didn't do anything like that. They tried to offer a bit of cover for Trump, especially as far as making the most generous possible interpretations of his reported conversations, but they were mostly both polite and even deferential - Senatorial, you might say. Either they are determined to make a serious investigation or just haven't figured out yet which way they should jump. John McCain, though, seemed both unclear and out of touch. Some wonder if the 80 year old is all right.

The Brits probably can't make as stupid a choice of their next leader as Americans did, but it won't be for lack of trying. Results, I hear, are only hours away, but speculation is rife that May's attempt to increase her parliamentary majority may fail, and that she might be lucky to wobble weakly back to power. Meanwhile, back in the US, Comey's testimony not only demonstrated why Trump should be impeached but also touched on Hillary's successful self-sabotage, with a clear assist from Bill. What a bunch of dumbasses. HIGHLY PREMATURE UPDATE: Labour - 6 181, Conservatives - 2 166: So far, Labour gets a net gain mostly at the expense of SNP. WC can breathe easy though - the LibDems have already picked up 2 seats and have a firm grip on 5.

Trump seems to have blundered into some kind of showdown between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with Iran and Turkey taking sides with Qatar. Will he blunder away our military base in the Gulf? What a dumbass.

As we read a preview of Comey's testimony, nothing is more striking than the depths of Trump's stupidity and self destructiveness. He might just as well as have had baseball caps printed up saying "Impeach Me."

Steve Hsu leads us to a new paper which finds evidence of recent selection for the polygenic traits height, educational attainment, and "self reported unibrow." Steve is particularly interested in the evidence for selection for genes associated (with educational attainment in Europeans) in East Asians. That selection appears to have occurred during the past 10,000 years. Although the paper is about 84 pages, most of that is figures and tables, with only about 19 pages of exposition. I found it more understandable than Steve's very brief summary. It's probably obvious that selection is important for polygenic traits, since most significant differences are polygenic, but data to date has been sparse. From the abstract: An open question in human evolution is the importance of polygenic adaptation: adaptive changes in the mean of a multifactorial trait due to shifts in allele frequencies across many loci. In recent years, several methods have been developed to d...

1984 all over again. Eric Trump declares Democrats "not even people."

Fun Fact: The mass of a neutron star is about 20% less than the mass of the neutrons and other nucleons that compose it. The difference is gravitational binding energy.

I found this on my Google News page: Ahead of the British election, we want to know: What do you think the UK's place in the world should be? Call us and leave a message: I'm not the sort to call, but it happens that this is an issue I feel strongly about. I believe that the UK's place in the world should be astride the Greenwich Meridian, West of France and East of the Atlantic Ocean. Almost anyplace else would be deeply confusing, though somewhere between Australia and New Zealand might be OK too.

There is something satisfying about seeing the privileged get taken down by their own arrogance, even if they are a bunch of smart/smart alecky high school students. Seppuku, Facebook style: They posted memes about rape and dead children and the Holocaust. They joked that hanging a Mexican child should be called "pinata time." And now Harvard has decided it doesn't want them anymore. According to the Harvard Crimson, the Ivy League university has rescinded offers of acceptance to at least 10 incoming freshman for the class of 2021, following an investigation into the messages they posted in a private Facebook group: A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen. In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat o...

In 1948, people in the AEC starting thinking that we ought to have a way to detect nuclear tests by other powers. Of the three possible methods of detection discussed (radioactive dust in the atmosphere, acoustic, and seismic) only the first could be quickly implemented, and Oppenheimer was convinced that it couldn't work. He and others at that time didn't believe air bursts would leave dust, the radioactive elements having been reduced to atoms. The Air Force had been given the job of doing it, and found a private company, Tracer Labs, eager to take up the challenge. Oppenheimer was shown to be wrong. Shortly after the Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb near Semipalatinsk in September of 1949, the Air Force and Tracer Labs detected the signal, and followed it across the ocean, the US and the UK. Tracer labs was able to pin down the day and nearly the hour of the explosion. Despite independent evidence from intelligence, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and late...

That's actually almost the only good reason I have figured out for buying Statistical Physics: Theory of the Condensed State (Course of Theoretical Physics Vol. 9 , aside from the fact that it seems to be the only volume of L&L that I don't own. I mean Landau isn't even listed as an author, and it's almost 40 years old. Of course there are a couple of other volumes that I only have in German, a language that I can't actually read. TBD

Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris Climate accord is a great victory for the libertarian Republicans - AKA the Koch brothers.