CapitalistImperialistPig

I'm sure that Yale and similar institutions are mostly filled with bright students, and that they can get a good education there, but they also seem to be damn good at inculcating asshole-ness. Here is the normally bright and frequently perceptive Matt Yglesias: A summer intern who's just finished up her third year at Yale doesn't have any kind of particular credentials, but we know that she probably has very good SAT scores and sounds like an exceedingly normal person. A young woman who got a 1600 on her SATs and has been spending the past three years working at 7-11 and watching Open Yale Courses videos sounds like a huge weirdo. This screams pretentious asshole on so many levels it overflows my outrage buffers. I'm not sure how good Yale's weirdo filters are, but their wealth and privilege filters are very effective - and that's what Yglesias is really talking about. I doubt that many people learn much from Open Yale, which appears to be just a certain ...

To a man with a hammer, it is said, everything looks like a nail. For a man (I have one particular man in mind here) with a little knowledge of control theory, a number of things start looking like hybrid autonomous systems. Like people, for example. Such systems have some key weaknesses, which can be traced back to their switching hybrid character. In particular, while a whole bunch of individual behaviors may be well regulated, when the switching character of the hybrid system is accounted for, instabilities can develop. I trace a number of our characteristic human failings to the fact that the some of our control systems are being driven outside their design parameters. More on this later perhaps. I had addiction in mind. Interestingly enough, some of these problems can be ameliorated with a procedure based on computing Lie Derivatives of the appropriate function at some critical control points. So do you suppose that our brains have built in Lie derivators somewhere?

From time to time I push the Next blog button. This is usually a mistake .

People, and Governments, do a lot of dumb things to fool themselves into thinking they are doing something other than what they are actually doing. I've probably mentioned before how idiotic I think it is to protest against the Keystone pipeline. Preventing the pipeline from being built will not prevent the Athabasca tar sands from being exploited or reduce global carbon emissions. It will, in all likelihood, increase them by the amount of energy required to transport the oil across the ocean. Via Marginal Revolution, Valery Karplus writes in the New York Times about the similar stupidity of CAFE standards on fuel economy. Her studies, and those of her MIT colleagues, indicate that reducing emissions through CAFE standards costs the economy at least six times as much (likely more) than a similar reduction achieved through higher energy taxes. The way to reduce carbon emissions is to tax carbon emission (or extraction). Every other way is just a gimmick to avoid revealing the ...

Via Alex Tabbarok at Marginal Revolution , this nice video of two quadcopters playing catch with an inverted pendulum. The inverted pendulum is a classic problem in elementary control theory (a fact I recently learned in my Coursera " Control of Mobile Robots " class).  Juggling an inverted pendulum with flying robots is a classic case of hybrid control - in effect, various separate control algorithms cooperatively managing the overall control problem of catch and balance while managing not to collide with each other or anything sol id.  This sort of hybrid automaton is exemplified by robots (or people, or animals)with complex behaviors.

One uncomfortable image I can't get out of my head is that of the Indian villages and cities made bone-yards by England's industrial revolution and export of cheap textiles to India. I think we can see the outline of the next bone-yard (hopefully virtual) here in the US. The disintegration of the American college and university system is likely to proceed much faster than anyone is now guessing. I expect 30 or 40 per cent of American colleges to vanish in the next twenty years. The enrollment of the Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC), which was zero less than two years ago, is already in the millions - 15-20% of total US post secondary education. The first courses have been accepted for college credit. I have now taken courses from several MOOCs and the overall experience, to me, is superior to conventional classroom learning - despite or perhaps because of the 40,000 students in one of my classes. This is going to be an area of truly turbulent change.

Another terror attack in India , and it's at least plausible that it has it's roots in Pakistan. So what is India to do? It could perhaps foment terrorism in Pakistan, but chances are it wouldn't even be noticed in the vast mass of Pakistani on Pakistani terrorism. It does seem clear, though, that Indian counter terror efforts have two left feet. Governmental incompetence is a continuing theme.