CapitalistImperialistPig

I have frequently mentioned that modern genomics strongly supports the idea that race is fundamentally a social construct.  What that means is is that most human genetic diversity is not linked to conventional ideas of race.  It doesn't mean that conventional ideas of race are unimportant or imaginary.  Social constructs have great power - another couple of social constructs one might mention are money and nations.  Your inferred race has great power to affect your life and life prospects. Probably the most usual way race is identified is by skin color.  Of course there are a number of dark skinned peoples in the world who aren't especially related: Africans, Australian natives, Melanesians, and some South Asians.  It's also true that Africans as a group have more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. However, ancestry related differences are not imaginary.  About one third of the humans, mainly from Europe, the Middle East and par...

... and can you blame them?  All they wanted was for Robert Mueller to do their job for them, and he didn't. Tough luck Nancy.  Just impeach the bastard.

Time and space are central not only to our common sense, but also to physics and philosophy.  The title phrase is excerpted from the very short surviving fragment that is our oldest writing of Greek philosophy, by Anaximander of Miletus.  Rovelli's examination of time is based on modern physics, but it leans heavily on ancient philosophy as well, with Aristotle, Augustine, Husserl, Kant, Hegel, Reichenbach, and many others making appearances.  Paul McCartney, the Grateful Dead, and the Mahabharata also get quoted.  Most chapters start with a quote from one of Horace's Odes. So what is the nature of time?  Rovelli's first exhibit is due to Aristotle, who saw time as the ordering of events. Aristotle is the first we are aware of to have asked himself the question “What is time?,” and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change. Things change continually. We call “time” the measurement, the counting of this change.  Rovelli, Ca...

George Johnson has a nice obituary for Murray Gell-Mann , who until his death yesterday at age 89 was probably the greatest living physicist.  He was a giant of the golden age of particle physics.

Not Proust, but cosmology. We seem to have lost about a billion years of our history.  Recent careful measurements of the age of the universe have produced a puzzle.  We were pretty sure that the Universe was 13.8 billion years old, and we had two kinds of evidence for that, both stemming from measurement of the expansion of the Universe.  The Planck space telescope's measurements of certain standard rulers, the so-called baryon acoustic oscillations, provided standard rulers and measurements of distant supernovae and galaxies provided so-called standard candles. Now, however, a very careful new analysis combined with new data seems to show a Universe about a billion years younger than previously thought, or, rather, two conflicting estimates of that age.  Unless there's some major error, and the measurements were very carefully done, we have a problem with our basic model, the Lambda CDM model, which combines dark energy and cold dark matter. Some details in t...

at the hands of the sciences, engineering, and capitalism triumphant. Myth or reality? According to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the field of humanities includes, but is not limited to, the following subjects: Modern languages Classical languages Linguistics Literature History Jurisprudence Philosophy Archaeology Comparative religion Ethics History, criticism and theory of the arts Art and music left tangible evidence in the prehistoric record tens of thousands of years before we had writing and concrete evidence of history and philosophy, but the surely the impulses behind them are ancient as well.  The Western tradition in philosophy, science and history all have their origin in ancient Greek civilization.  Philosophy and science show their first traces in works of the Milesians: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who seem to have sought for naturalistic explanations for the phenomena of the world. Philosophy's greatest...

Game of Thrones.   Not me, but every major supplier of streaming media.  How can they make the magic money machine crank out viewers again? It's a bit presumptuous of me to have a strong opinion, since I only watched a couple of episodes, but hey, presumptuous ought to be my middle name.  In my defense, I did read four of the books before I gave up after concluding that (a)the series wasn't getting anywhere, or at least not fast enough to hold my interest, and (b)George R R Martin was a sadistic sicko. But back to the topic: what were the secrets of the success of GOT?  My guess: sex, violence, nudity, sadism, and a multithreaded plot of enormous scope.  And dragons.  And other monsters. Of course nobody should be confident that that's what the viewing beast will want next time, but those are timeless themes.  My favorite set of books in the SVNSP department is the John Carter of Mars series, though unfortunately it has already been made into a f...