CapitalistImperialistPig

A couple of days ago, Eli Lake assured us that Putin, despite his maneuvers, would not not invade Ukraine. My reaction at the time was, to borrow from Hermione, "What an idiot!" Not because I thought it was particularly likely that Putin would invade, but because I thought it was particularly stupid for a supposed intelligence insider to publicly make such a claim, and even stupider for his supposed sources to tell him such a thing. No sooner published than Putin deploys troops strategically in Crimea. Lake's rejoinder? Oh my gosh, US spies were wrong! On Thursday night, the best assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—and for that matter most experts observing events in Ukraine—was that Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine. Less than 24 hours later, however, there are reports from the ground of Russian troops pushing into the Ukrainian province of Crimea. It’s hardly a full-blown invasion. But it’s not quite the picture U.S. analysts were p...

Several decades of listening for signs that somebody out there is try to talk to us have come up empty. There are a lot of theories as to why that might be so, starting from the obvious possibility that civilizations able to communicate with us don't exist. On the other hand, they might have been observing us for a while and concluded that we are too violent or boring to be worth talking to. Or maybe we are some cosmic nature preserve/zoo. Or our name hasn't yet come up for a membership vote in the Galactic club. In any case the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) no longer looks that promising. A lot of people think that we should now settle for SETL - the Search for Extraterrestrial Life. For one things, the prospects are looking up - not that we have found any hints, but we have new tools that allow us to look in some plausible places and a raft of plausible places to look, both inside the solar system and beyond. Within the Solar System Mars is not quit...

We are rapidly gaining skill in genetic manipulation. In addition to such high priority goals as creating better athletes and prettier people, what are the prospects for smarter and healthier people? Steve Hsu has some thoughts and quotes on the former: .. I think there is good evidence that existing genetic variants in the human population (i.e., alleles affecting intelligence that are found today in the collective world population, but not necessarily in a single person) can be combined to produce a phenotype which is far beyond anything yet seen in human history. This would not surprise an animal or plant breeder — experiments on corn, cows, chickens, drosophila, etc. have shifted population means by many standard deviations (e.g., +30 SD in the case of corn). ... I think we already have some hints in this direction. Take the case of John von Neumann, widely regarded as one of the greatest intellects in the 20th century, and a famous polymath. He made fundamental contributions ...

The revival of extinct dinosaurs was the key idea in Michael Crichton's fantastically successful book and movie franchise Jurassic Park. We don't seem likely to be able to do that in real life any time soon, or perhaps ever, but it happens that active efforts to reverse more recent extinctions are not only plausible but underway. The advantage of these more recent extinctions is that we have a good chance of recovering their actual genetic code. The NY Times magazine has a nice story on the efforts underway here. Brand became obsessed with the idea. Reviving an extinct species was exactly the kind of ambitious, interdisciplinary and slightly loopy project that appealed to him. Three weeks after his conversation with Flannery, Brand sent an email to Church and the biologist Edward O. Wilson: Reconstructing the the DNA code of an extinct species is actually the easy part. The harder part is fabricating, editing, and achieving the reproduction of the actual physical DNA ...

In the comments to the previous post, rrtucci points out that that when a researcher needs to know something, he/she doesn't read chapters 1-8 to get to something that's needed from chapter 20, but just goes directly to 20. Now I'm no researcher in astrophysics, but I'm also not a complete stranger to many aspects of physics. Anyway, I noticed myself making exactly that kind of mistake in trying to understand some some aspects of stellar function. That is to say, I opened some astrophysics books and repeatedly found myself falling asleep somewhere in the first chapter or two when some aspects of transforming from from one spherical coordinate system to another, or some other such point irrelevant to my quest was being explained. I attributed this failure to persevere to senile loss of concentration, but stupidity would have been closer to the mark. So I turned to the chapter on the point in question and found that it wasn't hard at all to understand.

On occasion I read the postings of formerly obscure expert on the history of refrigeration , who got his 15 minutes and then some when he published an anti-MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) tirade. His latest is entitled Higher education is not available à la carte . To which I say, WTF not? When I go to my local breakfast shop, they usually don't tell me that the tomatoes are a group requirement, and that I have to eat them whether I like it or not. Professor Rees, PhD, RE: But rip faculty research out of the equation and the quality of the entire product will suffer. Take me, for instance. I teach a research methods class for both undergrads and graduate students. Don’t you think I’ll do that better if I actually have time to do research? More importantly, if Duke students are willing to pay $60,000/year to have access to faculty who do actual research, what does this tell you about the quality of higher education at an institution where professors don’t have time to do an...

Warren Harding was elected President in 1920 and appointed Albert Fall, Senator from the eight year-old State of New Mexico, as Secretary of the Interior. Fall wrested control of the supposed Naval Oil reserves from the Navy (Naval Officers objecting were posted to remote locations) and leased them to a couple of oil men in return for enormous bribes by the standards of the day. Harding died as the scandal widened, and Fall went to prison. Harry Sinclair, of Sinclair Oil, one of the bribe payers, did a brief jail term for contempt of Congress, but none of the bribe payers was convicted of their part in the actual crime. The money for the bribes, it turned out, had also come from the Federal government's coffers. Republicans like Fall were not the only recipients of bribes - so were some prominent Democrats, including the early front runner for the Presidential nomination.