CapitalistImperialistPig

55 million years or so ago, the Earth got darn hot for 150 K years or so. Probably due to CO2. Anyway, a bunch of species went extinct, but others just got smaller. I can see that happening with our current warming episode. I picture a future with tiny people - I imagine them as looking a bit like hobbit sized versions of David Brooks or Lumo. The tall descendants of basketball players and my line will have gone extinct. The human species might bifurcate in two, the peaceful descendants of liberals and hippies living above ground and eating flowers. The conservatives will have moved underground, out of sight of Sun and Moon, and will be called Morlocks, or if you want them to rhyme with the flower people, the Eloi, just call them Luboi.

CERN finds a big oops . Maybe those neutrinos aren't so fast really. Did you check the cables, Dave?

Suppose you live in a country with deflating prices – a country where prices keep going down. This might seem like a good idea, but as with much in economics, there is a downside. Suppose you have some savings. In a deflationary regime, banks tend not to pay much, or maybe any, interest, but if you just hang on to that cash, or maybe even just stick it under your mattress, it has the prospect of buying more tomorrow than it can today. This creates an incentive to save, which conversely, is an incentive not to spend. If nobody is spending, demand evaporates, businesses start closing their doors, and the result is recession or depression. This is the regime Europe has imposed on Greece, and Japan has imposed on itself. In Greece, add the threat of default and exit from the Euro zone, and Greeks have a huge incentive to take their money out of Greek banks and put it almost anywhere else, in a German bank or under the mattress. If you are a creditor, like Germany, deflation has a b...

Every once in a while, David Brooks reads a book and comes up with a new theory of America. These theories are usually worth the amount of high quality thinking he has devoted to them, that is, not much. The latest is The Talent Society . Brooks reads that half of the women in the US under 30 are having babies out of wedlock, and decides that this is the badge of a new spirit of independence and a society in which everyone's talents can be exploited to the fullest. The amount of evidence he brings to bear on this is, uh, zero, but hey, he had a column to write. It's not that there aren't other theories out there, for example that the poor and lower middle class have been shattered by the economics of a society which gives more and more to the rich and less to everybody else. That theory not only has some evidence to back it up - especially the distribution of out of wedlock births by economic status - but also doesn't fit the current conservative fantasy story.

Via Kevin Drum, the story of the stuff long term memories are made of. It seems that the archives of memory must be constantly tended at the molecular level, and the archivist is a molecule called PKMzeta. What does PKMzeta do? The molecule’s crucial trick is that it increases the density of a particular type of sensor called an AMPA receptor on the outside of a neuron. It’s an ion channel, a gateway to the interior of a cell that, when opened, makes it easier for adjacent cells to excite one another. (While neurons are normally shy strangers, struggling to interact, PKMzeta turns them into intimate friends, happy to exchange all sorts of incidental information.) This process requires constant upkeep—every long-term memory is always on the verge of vanishing. As a result, even a brief interruption of PKMzeta activity can dismantle the function of a steadfast circuit. If the genetic expression of PKMzeta is amped up—by, say, genetically engineering rats to overproduce the stuff—the...

Basketball is an arena where big talents tend to be identified early - sometimes before junior high school. Jeremy Lin was not exactly invisible in high school - he was High School Player of the year in California - but he was lightly recruited out of high school and was a star a Harvard, which, unfortunately, is a bit like being the best actor in Abilene. The NBA usually drafts enough college players to fill three leagues each year, but Lin wasn't one of them. He did manage to get on an NBA team, where he saw little action in his first season. After being waived a couple of times, he got on with the New York Knicks, where he once again occupied the far end of the bench. Until nine games ago, when he got his very first NBA start. Since that time, he and the previously hapless Knicks have exploded, winning eight of nine, and Lin has been putting up superstar numbers. I saw him play for the first time today (on television) and he once again played like a champ, scoring 28 point...

Peter Thiel undoubtedly has made some clever investment decisions, notably co-founding Pay-Pal and buying in on Facebook very early. According to Wikipedia, he also seems to have managed to blow most of seven billion in some currency market speculations, but most of that may have been other people's money. Newsweek columnist Niall Ferguson begins his drooling paean to Thiel like so: Damn. Peter Thiel is smarter than I am. The list of people smarter than Niall Ferguson is a not a short one, but what really impresses him is that Thiel is really rich. He is also pretty impressed that Thiel is a libertarian, and has some thoughts on how the world ought to be organized. Ferguson seems to be an economic history professor at Harvard , perhaps the beneficiary of some affirmative action program to hire more right-wing Brits. Ferguson interviewed Thiel: I ask him why he thought that for the past 30 years innovation has been so narrowly concentrated in technology and finance, with misera...