CapitalistImperialistPig

I recently spent some fun time in New Orleans.  It was my first trip to Louisiana, so I thought I might read up a bit.  High on the list of recommended books is Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men , so that was my first, and since it's pretty long (656 pg) it took several evenings, etc. It has some structural similarities to a couple of other books I've been thinking about lately, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  In each case the story is told by a narrator but the central character, part man and part myth, is often offstage. That central character in ATKM is Willie Stark, a thinly disguised simulacrum of Huey Long, the Governor and later Senator.  The narrator, Jack Burden, is a troubled, cynical, and difficult child of privilege who nonetheless rejects family money.  After various failures (a PhD dissertation abandoned almost complete, a rejected proposal, a failed marriage) he finds work as a reporter and starts covering...

Notes for a review of She Has Her Mother's Laugh.    Case studies in catastrophic misunderstandings. It seems plausible that people had some ideas about how progeny resembled parents in prehistoric times, but those ideas were oversimplified and often quite wrong.  Aristotle thought that fathers were solely responsible for the children's ancestry, for example. At one point, the royal families of Europe, and the Hapsburgs in particular, thought that blood determined heredity, and in order to maintain the purity of their royal blood, only married other royals of their own family.  Because all of us harbor some deleterious recessive genes, this kind of strict endogamy is a good recipe for concentrating them, and over the generations the Hapsburgs lost their health, their fertility, and their minds, in the process promoting the decline and ultimate collapse of the Spanish empire.  The damage done by the sangria pura doctrine didn't stop there.  It was also i...

New York City's most elite high school recently admitted less than 1% black students in its most recent class, from a city which is 25% black.   30% of the 2019 class at Harvard identify as Asian, compared to about 6% of the US population. Both groups are complaining about being discriminated against.  The Asian group claimed that admission for them required higher grades and SAT scores than other students.  Those representing the black students claim that the admissions tests are unfair to black students. The problem, obviously, is that there are two often conflicting standards for fairness: admission by best performance or admission by proportional representation.  NYC is still using a performance based system, while Harvard and many other elite colleges try to work a sort of compromise. There seem to be legitimate arguments for each approach.

Galaxies may or may not have a social life.  Many, like our Milky Way, live in groups of a few dozen.  Others are loners, and still others live in clusters of hundreds or thousands.  Loners and group members tend to be actively forming stars, and consequently have the large, extremely bright young blue stars that only live for a few millions or tens of millions of years.  By contrast, most of the galaxies in large groups, especially the big elliptical galaxies, aren't forming stars, haven't for  perhaps a few billion years or so, and consequently have only old, red, and small stars - they are red and dead in the professional parlance. We know why, in a sense.  They lack the cold molecular gas clouds where stars form, and instead, are embedded in hot ionized gas at a million or so kelvins.  However, this presents another puzzle.  Galaxy clusters typically have one or more of the very large cD ellipticals at their center.  Their large gravity...

Paul Krugman used those words to describe the plight of rural America , and other parts of the world with similar problems.  It's not just rural America, though, it's in the cities too.  In rural America it's the continuing advance of mechanization that's making farming, the occupation that formerly employed most of the human race, a job that can be done by a few.  This trend has been going on for over a century, but in the middle of the twentieth century factory jobs replaced the farming jobs with better paying ones, but now those factory jobs are largely gone too. The powerful and uncontrollable economic forces are crushing much of the newly created global middle class.  In my opinion, it can only get worse, as both unskilled and skilled jobs go increasingly to automation and robots. Right now the US is continuing to see a flurry of job creation, but there is little sign that many of these jobs will be high quality or good paying ones.  For many workers, o...

Supernaught mentions that Sabine H. is suing Lubosh.  Lubos had previously mentioned it.  The provocation is the stream of criticism and insults directed her way since she criticized a new super-collider. I've been on the receiving end of some of the Lumonator's attacks, and it's not pleasant.  The trouble is that Motl has no sense of proportion or propriety.  He isn't content to attack your logic and knowledge, but seems compelled to go after your species, phylum, gender, education, family, etc. I still think, however, that using the courts in scientific battles is a really bad idea.  I'm not sure how Hossenfelder will fare in EU courts, but I think she would have a hard time prevailing in a US court.  She did make herself a very public figure in this debate by writing a New York Times OpEd against the collider, and US courts have a tendency to say that once you have become a combatant, you are fair game.  The exception would be if some of Lumo's ...

A variety of technological devices have fueled discovery through time, but two closely related technologies have done most of the heavy lifting: microscopes and telescopes.  Variants on these two technologies have exposed the world of the small and the world of the large.  In biology, they have revealed the workings of the cell and the molecular engines that make them work.  In physics and astronomy the atom, the nucleus, and the world of the planets stars and galaxies have been revealed. For the past century and one half, our most powerful microscopes have relied on acceleration of particles, so much of the work depends on virtual rather than real photons.  Is the LHC our last, best microscope? Sabine H. and like minded colleagues would like it to be, and they have some good arguments, but I can't agree.  I suppose that my opinion is driven mostly by emotion, but I just hate the thought of giving up on our long, amazingly successful journey "inward bound" t...