CapitalistImperialistPig

I have a sneaking fondness for that old expression, but not for the actual 1 cent coin. It's somehow optimistic to think that even in the age of twitter, thoughts might actually be worth something. The coin, though, is simply a pain. It costs 2.4 cents to produce them and they are essentially a pure nuisance rather than facilitator in commerce. Our Canadian neighbors have decided to get rid of the darn things , according to Andrew Sullivan, and bravo to them. Canada will withdraw the penny from circulation this year, saving taxpayers about C$11 million ($11 million) annually and forcing retailers to round prices to the nearest nickel, the government announced in its budget [Thursday]. We should do the same of course. And while we are at it, the Nickel is another bad deal - they cost about 10 cents to produce. A dime for your thoughts?

Andrew Sullivan finds this gem: "[A]ny and all criticism of Israel not only can be but must be antisemitic. It is either subjectively antisemitic, in that it consciously and intentionally furthers the goals of the campaign; or it is objectively antisemitic, in that it unconsciously and unintentionally does the same thing. The distinction, if there ever was one, between the two, is now meaningless. Either way, the result is the same: Those who seek to slaughter the Jews en masse are brought a step closer to their goal," - Benjamin Kerstein , Pajamas Media . The most fanatical elements of a movement seek to Force everyone to choose sides, since they think that that will make their side victorious.  Thus Jews who dare to criticize any act of Israel's government or it's citizens, no matter how heinous, are singled out for the most vicious abuse as self-hating Jews.  Other critics are anti-semites, effectively indistinguishable from the Nazis. I don't thi...

Spectacular images of the large scale circuitry of the brain .  Big surprise: it's nearly as simple as we can imagine - an orthogonal 3-D grid (locally rectangular). This suggests that we now know more or less how to design a realistic electronic brain.

You should see him dunk!

Muscles are pretty efficient at turning energy into motion. Apparently efficiencies as high as 70% can be achieved. To the naive former student of thermodynamics this may be a bit of a puzzle. Don't we recall that the ideal efficiency of a heat engine is given by Kelvin’s formula for the efficiency of a reversible Carnot engine: e =1-T/T’ If we apply that rule to muscles, where temperatures are nearly uniform, it would seem to imply that thermodynamic efficiency must be near zero, which is a lot less than 70%. It might appear that our biological systems are troubling the second law of thermodynamics. Of course, physicists know that the second law always wins, so clearly our analysis has a flaw. That flaw is that muscles are not heat engines, and they don’t exactly extract heat from one heat reservoir and transfer it to another. Instead, they extract energy from excited molecules (ATP) and transfer it to less excited molecules. E. T. Jaynes pointed out that Gibbs seems to...

The Mega Million's lottery is estimating its next jackpot at a nominal $500 million, with a cash value of $359 million - before taxes, of course. That's real money by most people's standards. More to the point it's at least approaching the point where it makes sense for a well-heeled investor to buy every possible ticket to guarantee a win - at a cost of $175,711,536. Of course if a bunch of people do this, you will have to split the prize with them as well as any lucky bit players there might be. I'm not to clear on the relevant tax laws, but it's at least plausible that your investment might be deductible. I'm only in for a buck, but I like my odds, since I've already lost several times before ;)

Andrew Sullivan says: And the responsibility for this lies with the Obama administration who have shown no talent, zest or intelligence in explaining and selling their core domestic achievement. I don't get it. Obama has made so many mistakes on this issue. Few worse than saving most of the real provisions for 2014.