CapitalistImperialistPig

Matt Yglesias dares to wander into Tolkien territory and quickly shows his Nube status. By that standard, the most relevant J.R.R. Tolkien passage comes from Appendix A of the Return of the King: There were three unions of the Eldar and the Edain: Lúthien and Beren; Idril and Tuor; Arwen and Aragorn. By the last the long-sundered branches of the Half-elven were reunited and their line was restored. It helps to recall here that Eldar is another word for elf and Edain is another word for human. Tolkien is saying here that there were two human-elf pairings in the backstory to the Lord of the Rings. One between Lúthien and Beren and another between Idril and Tuor. Both Arwen and Aragorn are descendants of one of these pairings. So when they get together in the course of the series, they reunite the half-elven lines. What a nube. Eldar is not just another word for Elf. The Eldar are the high elven who have lived in the land of the Valar. And Edain is not just another word for human....

A couple of prominent string theorists were ungracious enough to use the acknowledgments section of their paper to complain about their summer salaries. Peter Woit has the story . Physics, and particle physics in particular, has long enjoyed the privilege of rather generous, albeit declining, public support. It's worth remembering why that happened. It's because science, and especially physics, won World War II. Radar and the bomb made for good publicity. For decades, physicists could get up and say you need to support us or we will fall behind in this crucial technology of war. I'm not quite sure when that stopped being true, but could anybody believe it today? Is there any reason to believe that string theory, holography, and ADS/CFT are likely to be any more relevant to the average taxpayer than the study of Byzantine erotica? Yes, there are many questions about the Universe that it might be nice to answer, but do any of them have significant technological or mili...

One of the most mysterious things about the Universe is its apparent comprehensibility. After a few millenia, or a few hundred millenia of tinkering, we seem to have come up with a cosmogony and a theory of almost everything that explains a whole lot of the Universe and how it works. Twenty-five years ago we might have said everything. It would not have surprised our ancestors of a few centuries back if other planets, stars and galaxies had turned out to be made of utterly different stuff than us. But they aren't. Or at least the parts we see aren't. Even black holes turned out to be predicted by the theory of a guy who thought in terms of trains and elevators. The stars in those newborn galaxies of ten billion years ago turn out to be made of the same stuff that we are - the same quarks and electrons, the same chemical elements, that exist here and now. The first clear hint of stranger stuff came just about the time - 70 years ago - when the human race had pinned down a ...

Tyler Cowen applies economic theory and tells us: How and why Bitcoin will plummet in price I think that there may be more things under the Sun than are dreamt in his theory...

They say Ted Cruz is preparing to renounce his Canadian citizenship. I assume that means he's keeping his Cuban citizenship warm. That will still leave him one place he can go for government health care.

Chris Huhne thinks that the victims of climate change could sue the perpetrators ( It won't be long before the victims of climate change make the west pay ). He makes a case that starvation and war in the Sahel are the fault of climate change. While climate change may play some role in recent droughts in the Sahel, and hence his claim isn't precisely utter nonsense, it's so close to being utter nonsense that it really ought to offend any thinking person. Huhne is peddling a sort of dim-witted moralism that hurts his cause more than it helps it. In the first place, the Sahel has been tough forever. In the second, starvation probably has a lot more to do with population growth -- due largely to that other evil Western invention, modern medicine -- than with climate change. He has the following paragraph: The science also opens up the possibility that the victims of climate change could begin to take international legal action against the countries responsible, particularly...

Arun has been writing about an incident in which some Indian diplomatic official was arrested and strip searched as part of an investigation of alleged human trafficking. I haven't bothered to learn the details of the case, mainly because I'm pretty sure that it would turn out to be some combination of a couple of very familiar themes: cops behaving badly and/or diplomats behaving badly. Whether or no, it seems to have become a cause celebre in India, where it is perceived as either a deliberate insult to their national honor, or, perhaps worse, an abuse out of negligent contempt. I tend to go with more of an "American Hustle" type of theory - overzealous police with big game in sight and an itchy trigger finger. For my purposes here, neither the details nor even the facts really matter, however. Once a real or perceived slight has occurred, it can become an excuse to rally the citizenry for war or maybe just somebody or other's political campaign. Once up...