CapitalistImperialistPig

A favorite libertarian fairy tale concerns some guys on a desert island, one of who is so productive that he produces more than all the others combined. In my version, I speculate on how this could happen. The one guy may have happened to find a marvelously productive pool, teeming with fish, crabs and other food, while the others are forced to forage in the mean desert landscape. The question of the fairy tale is about the ethics of the others ganging up to tax Mr. Productivity. I won't bother with that nonsense, but I'm pretty sure that I know how primitive hunter gatherers would deal with it. They would ask him to share, and if he refused, conclude he was a psychopath and kill him. Of course things get more complicated in civilized society, so that option for dealing with the pool squatter's modern counterpart, Martin Shrkeli, is neither useful nor permissable. His squatter rights derive from laws that were intended to promote competition to provide generic drugs ...

It's probably some kind of commentary on human nature that a fair number of great songs have been written about drugs. They range from cautionary tales like Ed Sheerin's The A-Team , to frank love songs like this classic Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane performance at my 26th birthday party. A recent chart topper is The Weekend's paean to cocaine, I can't feel my face. I hate drugs, but I love the music.  I feel the same way about Wagner.

It seems that our brains are not our only body parts with a clock. In fact they are ubiquitous at the cellular level. Evidently circadian rhythms developed pretty early in evolution and were strongly conserved. We know something about this partly from studies of caffeine . From Rachel E. Gross's story in Slate: Caffeine was already known to alter the circadian clock in red bread mold, green algae, fruit flies, and sea snails. But humans were liable to be a little different. For the first half of the study, published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, researchers at the University of Colorado–Boulder measured how caffeine influenced the circadian rhythms of five human caffeine consumers over 49 days. Perhaps you already expected that there would be an effect on humans, and if so, you weren't wrong. It also seems possible that the various clocks in the body might get out of sync after multi-time zone travel. The way caffeine works on cells in the body might be ...

The climate of the Earth has exhibited both dramatic changes and implausible stability over the last several billion years. We have good reason to think that the Sun was a lot dimmer 4 billion years ago, but we had liquid water even then. We have had icy periods like the ice ages and relatively cool periods like today and much warmer periods too, but we have stayed in that liquid water, life supporting range. So what factors have controlled and varied that climate while keeping it in the habitable range? It's clear that there are several such factors, but in his 2009 Bjerknes Prize lecture to the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Richard Alley argued that the paleoclimate record overwhelmingly supports the notion that atmospheric CO2 is the big knob in that control system. He supports his argument with extensive data and logic. No one has yet figured out how to explain the climate of the planet without invoking the importance of the CO2 greenhouse. More recently, A Lacis, et....

I know it's early, but I'm an old guy and you never know what the future will bring. For the same reason, I don't think there is much point in making resolutions for 2016, so I'll make some for a year that could make a difference in my life: 1959, my junior year of high school. (a)Leisure activities: stop reading all those crappy science fiction novels and concentrate on something important: chasing girls. (b)Sports: Don't play football again this year unless they let me have a glamour position like quarterback. Defensive lineman doesn't cut it. Basketball - continue basketball but shoot more and pass less. Work on my mid range jumper. Track - Do you know what girls are doing in the Spring? It's not watching track, especially field events like shotput, javelin, and discus. Lifeguard training might be good. (c)School activities: Science club - no, they can find a new VP; Chess club - puulleeeze!; Drama might be a good choice, lots of girls there. Sp...

From Wikipedia In philosophy, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term "qualia" derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːlis]) meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind"). Examples of qualia include the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett (b. 1942), American philosopher and cognitive scientist, regards qualia as "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".[1] Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous...

After a down blip last month, the current El Niño has strengthened again and at 2.37 standard deviations is the third strongest on record, after the Super El Niños of 1983 and 1997, each of which topped 3.0 SD. We should have El Niño conditions continuing into (Northern Hemisphere) winter, at what level we shall have to see.