CapitalistImperialistPig

The armored knight has dominated human combat probably since somebody first figured out how to slap on boiled leather armor. The immense advantage of armor, especially when combined with the mobility conferred by putting him on horseback meant that one of these guys could dominate and appropriate much of the earnings of dozens or hundreds of his fellows. Technology has caused the value of the armored knight to fluctuate a bit, but in his current incarnation, as F-35 pilot, his equipment alone costs the full annual salary of almost ten thousand of his fellow citizens (as much as $350 million apiece for the Navy's F-35C). His day may be ending though. The problem is that the pilot not only adds a lot less value than he used to, but that he is becoming the weakest link in the weapons system. His eyes have long since been supplanted by longer range radar and his acceleration tolerance is far below that of steel and solid state electronics. He is bulky and fragile, and his job mig...

Brookings has computed ratings for colleges and universities by value added. The top three four year schools are Caltech, Colgate, and MIT. Harvard, Princeton and Yale are somewhere below the top twenty.

Sunni and Shia have been fighting it out for more than a millenium, but the current conflicts in Yemen and Iraq owe a lot to US interventions in both places. One may wonder why the f*** we seem to be on both sides of this shit storm. (Shia in Iraq, Sunni in Yemen). Whom, if anyone, benefits from that?

An ally, in one perhaps cynical definition, is someone you can't trust enough to call a friend. Pakistan has been that ally since it's inception. Pakistan was largely the creation of one man, Muhammed Ali Jinnah , and its rationale for existence was to prevent Muslims from having to live in a country with a Hindu majority. In that respect, as in many, it has failed, with the Muslim population of the subcontinent now divided among three countries: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, with with Pakistan having roughly 2/5 of the total. Husain Haqqani, scholar, journalist, and former Pakistani ambassador to the US, has written an history of US Pakistan relations, and its title could also be its summary: Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding Both the US and Pakistan have been seriously deluded in what they have expected from each other, but Pakistan probably takes the bigger hit in the early going. Margaret Bourke-White, the ...

The Nineteenth Century was the century of European hegemony. Europe and it's colonies dominated the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. The old powers of Islam and China were diminished and crumbling. Europe itself had mostly been at peace for nearly 100 years, with only localized wars. The First World War was not only an immense catastrophe in itself, but a crucial trigger of the further cataclysms that followed: the Communist Revolution and the Second World War. At the end of the war, three empires had been swept away and all of Europe was devastated in ways from which it would never recover. Margaret Macmillan's The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 traces the origins of that war in the circumstances, power politics and human folly that led to it. What if is the question that marks the beginning of practically every intellectual inquiry, and history is a wonderful source of such. There can hardly be any doubt that the war itself was a colossal blunder. Na...

Joshua S. Bloom's What Are Gamma Ray Bursts is the second book in the Princeton University Press Frontiers in Physics Series. It shares the same concise and compact format as the earlier volume on the First Stars and Galaxies in the Universe, together with the same annoyingly small type face. It's also very reasonably priced. Gamma Ray Bursts, first discovered as a side effect of a program to monitor the nuclear test ban treaty, are extraordinarily intense and very brief, with the duration of the gamma ray pulse being anything from less than a second to several seconds. During this time they are thousands of times brighter than a quasar and millions of times brighter than a supernova or a galaxy. Bloom traces the history of our understanding of this phenomenon, and discusses the physics believed to be involved in the phenomena. There are still many uncertainties, but it is generally believed that there at least three different types of GRBs. The so-called soft gamma r...

Well, it's official. Bee is now a celebrity physicist. George Johnson in the NYT: Earlier this year, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist in Stockholm, made the jarring suggestion that dark matter might cause cancer. She was not talking about the “dark matter” of the genome (another term for junk DNA) but about the hypothetical, lightless particles that cosmologists believe pervade the universe and hold the galaxies together. Though it has yet to be directly detected, dark matter is presumed to exist because we can see the effects of its gravity. As its invisible particles pass through our bodies, they could be mutating DNA, the theory goes, adding at an extremely low level to the overall rate of cancer. We know her better as proprietor of the blog BackReAction.