CapitalistImperialistPig

Where did Yuri Milner get all that money that he gave away to 9 lucky physicists? Wired has an account . The story appears to be that he is a very successful investor, especially in Silicon valley. It's a bit short of detail in some interesting spots. One excerpt: The message seems clear: Milner may have invested in virtually every social media powerhouse, from Facebook to Twitter to Spotify. He might be the vanguard of an entirely new financial philosophy. He might be the most controversial money guy in Silicon Valley—sought after, feared, and derided in more or less equal measure. But at heart he is just a nice Jewish boy. And it seems he has a Macaroni factory back in Russia.

String Theory, Quantum Computing, and Cosmic Inflation share the distinction of being heavily hyped frontier subjects in physics that have yet to yield a lot of concrete testable results. Thanks to a new physics prize sponsored by Russian zillionaire Yuri Milner , 6 string theorists, 2 inflationistas, and a quantum computer are now rather rich - $3 megabucks each - however. Four of the physicists work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg and Edward Witten. They work on theories trying to tie together the basic particles and forces of the universe, particularly with a mathematical machinery known as string theory. The other winners are Andrei Linde, a physicist at Stanford who also worked on cosmic inflation; Alexei Kitaev, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology who works on quantum computers; Maxim L. Kontsevich, a mathematician at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies outside Paris...

And it seems to be socialized medicine, Israeli style . Speaking today to a small group of Israeli contributors to his campaign, the GOP presidential candidate—and supposed sworn enemy of government controlled healthcare—had kind words for the success of Israel’s healthcare system. When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation” A healthy nation, indeed. With a life-expectancy rate that is the 4th best in the world (the United States is 38th) and a reputation for delivering high-quality care to all of its citizens by utilizing the most advanced medical technology available in a hospital system we can only envy from afar, Governor Romney is right to be impressed with the Israelis’ ability to deliver excellent care while keeping spending down to 8 percent of GDP as compared to 18 percent here in the Unit...

The answer, it seems, is Algebra, or so says Andrew Hacker, writing in today's New York Times. A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I’ve found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn’t... It seems - at least to Hacker - that the main reason kids drop out of high school and college is algebra. Another dropout statistic should cause equal chagrin. Of all who embark on higher education, only 58 percent end up with bachelor’s degrees. The main impediment to graduation: freshman math. The City University of New York, where I have taught since 1971, found that 57 percent of its students didn’t pass its mandated algebra course. The depressing conclusion of a faculty report: “failing math at all levels affects retention more than any other academic factor...

Paul Krugman unearths evidence that European Central Bank Chief Mario Drahi's grasp of economics may be as dubious as his grasp of aerodynamics. Drahi: The euro is like a bumblebee. This is a mystery of nature because it shouldn’t fly but instead it does. So the euro was a bumblebee that flew very well for several years. And now – and I think people ask “how come?” – probably there was something in the atmosphere, in the air, that made the bumblebee fly. Now something must have changed in the air, and we know what after the financial crisis. The bumblebee would have to graduate to a real bee. And that’s what it’s doing. One hundred years ago aerodynamicists didn't understand bee flight, so Drahi's ignorance on that point might be justifiable for an economist. Bees, of course, have had a few hundred million years to master aerodynamic tricks unknown to students of flight a century ago. On the other hand we might hope that he is more up to date on economics. Krugman: The ...

It seems that half the blogs I follow are on to this Nature Scientific Reports article, first linked by Kevin Drum, on the decline and fall of popular music. The authors do some kind of fancy mathematical analysis on the million song database and discover that: Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loud...

... is an economic system with some wonderful properties. Too bad it's so rarely tried.