CapitalistImperialistPig

It seems that economics students are the sluts of (at least)the UK University system. So it might come as a surprise that economics undergraduates have been found to be the most promiscuous students on campus. A survey of 4,656 undergraduates found that economics students had nearly five sexual partners since starting university, compared to less than two for those studying environmental science. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2209275/Economics-students-promiscuous-campus.html#ixzz27pWKRQIR Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook Physicists aren't mentioned in either top or bottom five, but I'm pretty sure they are too busy with problem sets for sex.

Joe Polchinski takes up the subject of black hole firewalls in a guest post at Sean Carroll's place. I won't try to summarize his whole argument, except to say that one point is that several things generally believed to be true about black holes turn out not to all be mutually consistent. The most annoying thing about black holes is that break down of space time at the classical singularity - call it the causal vacancy - my apologies to anyone who thought this might be a Jo Rowling post. The second most annoying thing is the (classical) non specialness of the horizon, which Polchinski calls the "No drama" hypothesis. Firewalls violate that idea. I also like that Polchinski throws a bone to my favorite crackpot theory: Actually, over the years many people have suggested that the black hole geometry ends at the horizon. Most of these arguments are based on questionable dynamics, with perhaps the most coherent proposal being Mathur’s fuzzball, the horizon being repla...

For most of the past month or two most polls have shown a very narrow lead for Obama over Romney. Two polls have been outliers: Rasmussen and Gallup. Rasmussen typically gave Romney a paper thin lead and Gallup showed mostly ties. Readers of the Drudge report never saw anything but these two polls. Now than most polls including Gallup show Obama widening his lead, it looks like Rasmussen or nothing for the Drudge crowd. If these circumstances continue to election day, some large group of voters is in for a real shock.

I think there has been a regrettable blurring of the line between "Wonk" and other members of the cognoscenti. Even Kevin Drum doesn't seem to see a lot of difference between say "Wonk" and "Nerd." The political press is a big problem of course, since they think than anybody who can count on more than four fingers is a Wonk, when properly the term is reserved for those who actually have some policy knowledge - though usually the numeracy required is minimal. Of course there are Wonks, like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman who do know the difference between ordinary and partial derivatives. Math nerds or geeks, on the other hand, really do know the difference between trivial and non-trivial fiber bundles, but might not know anything about economics, say. Steve Landsburg would be a good example here.

Recent research has revealed that our galaxy is surrounded by a huge halo of hot gas. Carl Franzen September 24, 2012, 5:00 PM 5545 Scientists using NASA’s orbital X-ray space telescope Chandra have discovered that our own Milky Way Galaxy has a massive halo of superheated gas surrounding it, the agency announced on Monday. It’s difficult to conceive of just how large the hot gas halo is, but NASA notes it could extend more than 300,000 light years out from its center, and have a mass equivalent between 10 billion suns and 60 billion suns, or just as many or more than all of the stars in the Milky Way itself, at a temperature “a few hundred times hotter” than the surface of our Sun (between 1 million and 2.5 million kelvin). The source has not yet been clearly identified, but is suspected to be Fox News.

Lubos has a long, interesting post about black hole firewalls . I won't pretend to understand the details but the critical question seems to be whether the semi-classical quantum gravity is a good description at the horizon. As it happens, these kinds of ideas find me a sympathetic listener, since they go along well with my favorite crackpot idea: that black holes don't really exist. There are lots of reasons for that notion being crackpot, like the experimental fact of black hole existence and several independent theoretical reasons, but what I really mean is that I don't believe in the singularity at BH centers or that horizons are likely to be non-special. The Lumonator has links (see above) to the relevant papers as well as a few terse comments.

It's no secret that the NYT's Charles M Blow doesn't like Romney . Me either, but why do so many say stuff like: I have no personal gripe with Romney. I don’t believe him to be an evil man. Quite the opposite: he appears to be a loving husband and father. In my opinion, even pretty evil people are not utterly without redeeming qualities. But the fact Hitler loved his dogs and was considerate of his secretaries doesn't exactly save his character. We have evidence that Romney was a bully and a punk as a teenager and as a young adult, a fairly nasty piece of work as a private equity operator in his thirties, and an unprincipled politician ever since. Behaving well toward his immediate family is not enough. Blow has rethought his analysis: One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man. Or among the mos...