CapitalistImperialistPig

Once upon a time the people of a community decided to establish a monastery in order to give glory to God, provide edification for the populace, and give young men with no regular occupation a place to hang out. As it turned out, the community did well, and the monastery was run by clever people, and the young men who had hung out there grew old and some of them left part of their money to the monastery. Ever since the invention of wealth, men have striven to accumulate it, and some have accumulated rather substantial piles thereof. These accumulations tend to be curtailed by the great ineluctables of death and taxes. Not so for the monastery. The community had arranged for it not to pay taxes and it did not die, but its friends did, often leaving it their spare cash in so doing. When an early donor left it half his cash and his library, they renamed the monastery "The Monastery" in his honor. Centuries passed. Wise management, death, and no taxes inflated its wealth, u...

McClellan's revelation's ( http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1107/6994.html ) of Bush's lies and deceptions to get us into to Iraq are not news to those of us in the reality based community. They probably won't have much effect on the Kool Aid drinkers either. What they do offer, besides vindication, is some forensic evidence on the mind of Bush. The impetuosity, arrogance, stubbornness and incuriosity aren't news either of course, but one bit that caught my eye was that about Bush's talent for self-deception, imagining or pretending, for example, that he couldn't remember if he had used cocaine.

Sean Carroll has a new post at http://cosmicvariance.com/ and a new article in Scientific American about the direction of time. I had a couple of questions, but comments don't seem to be working (or visible) so I will just ask and see if anybody has any ideas. (1)Sean makes much of the fact that a random initial state is very different from the extremely low entropy state from which our Universe apparently started. Doesn't Loschmidt's paradox force us to thing the same thing about any preceeding state? If the state of (say) one million years ago is randomly chosen from those that could give rise to the present, isn't it overwhemingly more likely that it was of much higher entropy than the present state? Exactly as much more likely, in fact, as that the state one million years in the future will have higher entropy than the present. (See e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschmidt's_paradox ). (2) Sean points out that the number of microstates doesn't cha...

Via Dr. M., Danny Hillis has a remembrance of Richard Feynman and his time at Thinking Machines corporation. It's chock full of genuine Feynmania: Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded. After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific ...

Yet more evidence that Hillary has used the Imperius curse on Paul Krugman

. . . gums to chew, before they dump you in the stew. I am a bit of a bibliophile, or perhaps bibliomaniac, but when I contemplate the approaching footsteps of mortal doom I can't say that I worry about which of the top 1001 novels I haven't read. So I probably am not in the target audience for 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die . Come to think of it, though, is anyone? Hungry authors must eat, of course, and if inspiration fails, maybe putting together a long list of books obscure and un is one way to fill the pages. I suppose that I have read a couple of thousand novels in my lifetime, though my input has declined dramatically in the last forty years. I'm just not that big a reader of novels. I certainly don't dislike novels, in and of themselves. War and Peace , Anna Karenina and a few others are permanent pieces of my mental furniture. A good novel, like any good relationship, is a substantial psychic investment, and it's costly when it goes wrong. You can...

I'm talking about Ted Hagee's God, of course. Ted, you might recall, is the Texas preacher whose endorsement John McCain gratefully accepted a few months back, though the McBushster is having some second thoughts lately. The problem is that old sermons of Haagee keep surfacing. Hagee's God, like the God of big time preachers Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, is a potent but inarticulate guy with a penchant for expressing his opinions via weather, earthquake, and international terrorism. Aside from hating Catholics, Ted's God also really hates Gay parades, so, hearing that one was planned for New Orleans, he sent a hurricane to devastate the much of Louisiana and Mississipi. Hagee's God also wanted to tell the Jews to move to Israel, so he sent them (and the rest of the world) Hitler. So, Big Guy, what happened to those old time Biblical plagues of, say, frogs or maybe even grasshoppers? Too boring? Or have you lost your touch with these? I seem to reca...