CapitalistImperialistPig

In the old days we used to get hundreds of trick-or-treaters. A hundred or so from the local neighborhood and later in the evening van loads of twelve or fifteen kids from somewhere or other. The neighborhood has aged, so there are fewer local kids, and at 8:30 PM I have yet to see a vanload. Maybe they found greener pastures. This is a disaster, since I bought enough candy to induce diabetic comas in a couple of elementary school classrooms, or maybe a whole school, and, so far, at least, I've seen less than two dozen kids. I've been giving out four fun size candy bars per kid. I should have made it twelve. I will stay open until 9 - where are you van kids?

Has the human run his race? The picture in art, science, and politics isn't encouraging. Sculpture reached its apex somewhere between 500 and 2500 years ago. Music, painting, and literature all topped out at least 150 years ago. Attempts to go beyond the works produced then either produced disasters like Ulysses or throwbacks like abstract art. Physics was the glamor science of my youth, but it hasn't produced anything notably new for almost 40 years. Chemistry has been reduced to a computer exercise in quantum mechanics. Biology is still mining the last gems of the DNA revolution, but the end certainly looks in sight - it's hard to imagine any more great revelations. Cosmology may have gotten us almost as close to the beginning of everything as we can hope to get. What about the supposed mystery of consciousness? My guess is that there won't turn out to be much there there. Robots (today) and earthworms will turn out to have a little bit of consciousness, ho...

I was driving home from the dentist when a campaign poster caught my eye. "Taxation is Theft" it proclaimed, along with the name of somebody whom I assume was running for something not mentioned. I could make a pretty good guess that he was affiliated with the Libertarians. They seem to have a predilection for this kind of metaphor made incarnate. Nobel economist and Libertarian icon Milton Friedman used to say that the draft was "slavery." Others on the fringe are not immune. Communists and Anarchists are known to propound that "property is theft." Right-wing cartoons of Obama liked to portray him as a monkey, and others compared the Affordable Care Act to Hitler's genocides. These abuses of language and thought exploit some point of resemblance to equating the phenomenon in question with the despised counterpart. If somebody steals your wallet by force or stealth, that's theft. Taxation also compels you to surrender some of your mone...

He assigned the bomber his target list. Essentially every person targeted by the bomber had been targeted by Trump lies and abuse. Trump wasn't alone, of course, all his lies were repeated and amplified by Fox Lies and the right-wing radio and social media freak shows - but something said by the President carries a lot more moment than the even the rantings on Fox. Trump is not innocent in the Pittsburgh and Kentucky murders either. Despite his Jewish Son in Law and family, he has trucked often in anti-semitic and other racist tropes, as well as giving comfort to various Neo-Nazi groups. Equally important, he devotes his public speech to dividing Americans and fulminating hatred among them. Trump, though is anything but sui generis . He is the organic product and natural culmination of the modern Republican Party as created by Richard Nixon, Roger Ailes, and Lee Atwater - a party created out of racism, fear, and envy. Maureen Dowd notes that Ailes, whose other poisonous creat...

When stars of moderate mass start to exhaust the amount of hydrogen in their core, the core has to heat up to keep the fusion rate high enough to balance the pressure of the gas above it. As the core begins to exhaust all its hydrogen, burning ignites in a shell above the core of helium ash. This causes the overall luminosity, or brightness, of the star to increase, the overlying volume to expand, and the atmosphere of the star to cool - the star ascends the so called red giant branch, becoming brighter, cooler (and consequently) redder. Many find this intuitive, but there is one strange thing - why should the interior of the star becoming hotter make the exterior cooler? Our friend the virial theorem, which says that 2K+U = 0, where K is the kinetic energy and U is the gravitational potential energy, might have something to say. The interior getting hotter, and the star consequently expanding, increases both K and U, since U becomes less negative. Consequently K for the outer re...

The RW conspiracy sites were quick to claim that the bombs sent to prominent targets of Trump were some kind of left wing false flag plot, and parts of the so-called mainstream media were quick to pick it up. What little we know about the arrested suspect strongly argues against this notion - never very credible to anyone with a functioning brain. Not that fact and logic are likely to dissuade any of the inhabitants of Trumpistan.

There is more than one way to explain this, but one of the deepest relies on the Virial Theorem. The Virial Theorem says that the kinetic energy of a system of particles (atoms, stars, or galaxies) bound by gravity, and in suitable equilibrium, is equal to -(1/2) times the gravitational potential energy. This powerful idea explains a lot of things about stars and galaxies, one of which is why when the center heats up, the surface cools down. Thus, the Sun today is both redder and brighter than it was a couple of billion years ago. Let us see how this idea applies to a planet like ours with a warming surface. the kinetic energy of a molecule is given by (1/2)*m*v^2 and its gravitational potential energy is given by -m*M(r)/r, so virial equilibrium implies that (on average) v^2 = M(r)/r. When the lower layer of the atmosphere heats up, the kinetic energy per molecule increases, the layer expands, the average molecule moves up, and M(r)/r decreases (potential energy becomes less neg...