CapitalistImperialistPig

Resolution for 2009 - stop procrastinating. I know I'm a bit late on this, but I want to get out my predictions for 2008 before it's too late: 1)Dangerous Hurricanes. 2)Republicans will nominate an idiot (or two). 3)Stocks will fluctuate. 4)Global warming will continue to generate controversy and exercise the nutbag crackpots of the right. 4)Trouble in the Middle East 5)Oil prices will fluctuate 6)Bush will continue to be clueless 7)The LHC will be a big success

What is the evolutionary rationale for risk taking? Is it not a better strategy to play it safe? Like most questions of the sort, the answer to this one is "it depends." Trying to conquer the world is a pretty risky enterprise but something like 8% of all the males in a wide swath of Asia turn out to be descended in the male line (father to son) from Genghiz Khan. Zero of them turn out to be descended from those who failed before reproducing. Risk taking is the engine behind exploration, entrepreneurship, scientific and technical progress, and asking the prom queen for a date. It's also implicated in crime, addiction, financial panics and lousy driving (right up there with talking on cell phones). For most of us, following the herd is more comfortable than striking out on one's own. Physicists ten years ago became string theorists (today probably cosmologists) because that was the thing to do - but those who became string theorists thirty years ago were pioneers. Most...

Kerson Huang, an MIT emitus professor and prolific author of physics textbooks, has written a semi-popular account of gauge field theory: Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields . Semi-popular is his description, and it starts from the fundamentals (Newton's Second Law) but it does include equations, including lagrangians for the standard model. I suppose that a proper reviewer would try to figure out who would benefit from such a book. Certainly there would be a lot lost on anyone who had never seen vector and tensor notation, met a lagrangian, or heard of a group. Huang helpfully notes that those who don't understand the math can just read the words, appreciating the book "just as one might enjoy a foreign movie without the subtitles." Hmmm? In any case, it was a pretty good book for me, a physicist who doesn't remember quantum field theory very well, and learned most of what little he did before the gauge revolution. He does attempt to develop t...

Sean Carroll has posted a few times on Boltzmann Brains, and he has a new entry today Richard Feynman on Boltzmann Brains. The original motivation for considering such things is the fact that the Universe seems to have started with a very low entropy - very low compared to all possible universes. This is fortunate since it allowed the development of all the things that make us possible - galaxies, solar systems, life and evolution. So why, we may ask, was the initial state of our universe so low in entropy. Nobody knows, but Boltzmann, who started the whole business, had an idea: maybe it was a random statistical fluctuation. The so-called Boltzmann Brain Paradox is intended to show that the fluctuation hypothesis is not a profitable assumption. From Wikipedia: This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Chicago is, or at least until very recently was, the most prestigious address in economics. The University of Chicago has accumulated ten of the economics "Nobels" and has had unmatched influence on recent Republican policies. It also played the central role in our current financial debacle. Both deregulation and the explosion in the financial derivative markets trace their roots to Chicago. John Lippert, writing for Bloomberg.com, has a great article on the reaction in Chicago to our current crisis: Friedman Would Be Roiled as Chicago Disciples Rue Repudiation. It is a stellar article, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the range of current economic thought, and especially to Krugmanites like myself who need to be reminded of the others. The hard core efficient marketeers resisted the bailout and still swear allegiance to Saint Friedman, but others have seen their fa...

Israel slaughtered a couple of hundred Palestinians in Gaza today, many of whom probably actually deserved it. This action was Israel's response to continuing rocket attacks and other provocations from the Palestinians. The aerial attacks, a form of shooting fish in a barrel, have the advantage of not putting actual soldiers at risk, or at any rate, much risk. I predict, however, that they won't be effective in stopping future attacks, nor do I think the Israelis think so - except perhaps for the air forces. Stopping the attacks isn't really the point of course. The point is to make the Israeli public think that the government is doing something and give it the satisfaction of watching somebody else suffer. Unfortunately, the only ways to actually do something all have their own severe problems: exterminate the Palestinians, rule them, or make peace with them. Israel isn't prepared to pay the cost of any of these - yet. The question is how long the current low int...

Tyler Cowen's : GM fact of the day As Mark Steyn pointed out on NRO, GM now has a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath and Beyond. Here is the link. The Steyn article also offers this: GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. GM's problem is not making bad cars today, it is a casualty of its history. Yet another lesson in excessive debt being hazardous to your health. Of course the same may be said of taking anything Mark Steyn writes as likely to be true.