CapitalistImperialistPig

On this week's episode of The Big Bang Theory Leonard is upset because Penny is having a football party and he hasn't been invited. He decides that she is afraid of being embarrassed by him in front of her friends. After wangling an invite, he undertakes some intensive football education, but ... I guess I shouldn't have had that kind of problem since we always went to football games as a family when I was little, and I played football in high school for two years. Coincidentally, or not, we won the state championship for two years when I was in high school. Coincidentally, or not, those two years were the two I didn't play... I played offensive tackle. Offensive tackles are the brainiacs of football, at least in the NFL. This is because they have to be able to remember complicated footwork and blocking patterns even after having their brains shaken like a maracca a few dozen times a game. I was a lousy offensive tackle. This was because I didn't bother learning th...

Via the comments at Sean Carroll's site, I found this . It induced a seriously threatening case of uncontrollable ... well, you'll see. The operating principle: consistently change just one letter in one word in the Harry Potter novels. A sample: "Yes, yes. I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Harry Potter." It wasn't a question. "You have your mother's eyes. It seems only yesterday she was in here herself, buying her first wang. Ten and a quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wang for charm work." "Your father, on the other hand, favored a mahogany wang. Eleven inches. "

Tyler Cowen's 100th birthday retrospective (2005) on Ayn Rand is about what one would expect: he begins with some incisive observations but somehow manages to muddle through to silly conclusions. His best non sequitur: The true take-away message is a reaffirmation of how the enormous productive powers of capitalism -- the greatest force for human good ever achieved -- rely on the driving human desire to be excellent. There are a few competitors for the role of "greatest force for human good" I should think. Let's start with technology, art, science, agriculture, trade, government, law and education - most of which look to be essential enabling institutions for capitalism. The "driving human desire to be excellent" is one of those phrases (redolent perhaps of "the lilt of a driving dream") that I can' seem to get to play any rhetorical role beyond self-satire. The pursuit of excellence may well be relevant to art and sport, but it looks a l...

Why is US healthcare so expensive compared to the rest of the world? Mostly it's because we pay a lot more for the same services. Ezra Klein has a lot of helpful charts. How about a routine office visit? In Spain that only costs $15, $31 in France, or $32 in the Netherlands. In the US, the tab would range from $59 to $151. How about some lipitor for your high cholesterol? These kind of price differentials exist across the board. So why are insurance companies so bad at controlling costs compared to European governments? The answer is probably complicated, but one reason might just be the amount of friction they introduce into the system. Doctors in the US need big staffs, mainly to handle the interface with various payers and insurance companies. Whatever the reasons, its clear that we are doing some things very wrongly. It seems unlikely that the health care bills being considered will change that much, but universality needs to come first. Once that is accomplished, we wil...

Via Marginal Revolution, a glut of Ayn Rand links here: http://www.bookforum.com/blog/4635 Some of this efflorescence is due to two new biographies, some may be due to the recent wacko takeover of the GOP.

We know, of course, that conservatives don't like evolution or AGW. Brad DeLong reminds us that they don't like Einstein's relativity either: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/11/hoisted-from-the-archives-why-are-conservatives-at-the-american-spectator-so-scared-of-albert-einstein-june-16-1997.html

I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.................Albert Einstein, as quoted in The Strangest Man - the title itself due to Neils Bohr. Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac mentions that Dirac's undergraduate education was in electrical engineering, but even so he wasn't introduced to Maxwell's equations until well into his graduate education at Cambridge - a reminder of how different the world of physics was in the 1920s. Three years later, in Copenhagen, Dirac invented creation and annihilation operators for the description of the quantum electromagnetic field. One needs to be rather strange indeed to be the strangest man in an institute of theoretical physics, but Dirac filled the bill. Very likely, he fitted somewhere in the autistic spectrum. Fans of The Big Bang Theory might imagine an utterly taciturn version of Sheldon, except with much narrower interests. There were many tragic aspects of his lif...