CapitalistImperialistPig

What we know about physics can be summarized in very compact form. Classical electrodynamics is a subject that remains of immense practical importance as well as foundational for the modern field theories of particle physics and relativity. The equations that describe it can occupy less than a fourth of one of these lines of text. See, e.g., the tensor and differential form versions of Maxwell's equations in this Wikipedia article. Chad Orzel recently wrote a post on teaching so-called Modern Physics , which is conveniently summarized as the physics discovered between 1899 and 1950. In particular he makes the case for teaching the history of the discoveries. His point is that you can learn a lot from understanding how the laws of physics were discovered and why we believe them - but read Chad's version, he's a good writer. The alternative method, and it's also used a lot in physics, is to just write down the equations and then develop the mathematical techniques ...

Paul Krugman: Izabella Kaminska has a thought-provoking piece on the real effects of technology on wages, in which she argues that much recent innovation, instead of displacing manual workers, has displaced high-paying skilled jobs. As it happens, I sort of predicted this 20 years ago, in a piece written for the Times magazine’s 100th anniversary (authors were asked to write as if it was 2096, and they were looking back.) I argued then that menial work dealing with the physical world – gardeners, maids, nurses – would survive even as quite a few jobs that used to require college disappeared. As it turns out, big data has led to more progress in something that looks like artificial intelligence than I expected — self-driving cars are much closer to reality than I would have thought, and maybe gardening robots and post-Roomba robot cleaners will follow. Lawyers, pathologists, translators are all getting heavily hit, but I suspect that robotics is getting much closer to being an equa...

Temperatures in the high Arctic are finally nearly down to normal after having spent the previous three months 5 C or more above normal. There are still almost two months of hard winter up there so Santa may not want to break out his swim suit for a bit. In the Antarctic, sea ice extent is at record lows for the satellite era, while the Arctic is nearing sea ice max at levels barely above record lows for the date.

As early as the mid-third century BC, the Indian emperor Ashoka erected large stone pillars or signboards in Kandahar, Afghanistan, as well as in other cities, on which he displayed edicts on how good behavior or the Buddhists’ dharma could be spread. He counseled his subjects that “piety and self-control [exist] in all philosophical schools. But the most self-possessed are [those people] who are the masters of their tongues. They neither praise themselves nor belittle their fellows in any respect, which is a vain thing to do. … The correct thing is to respect one another and to accept the lessons of each other. Those who do this enlarge their knowledge by sharing what others know.”66 Starr, S. Frederick. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (p. 81). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. Of course the fool is immune to advice.

H. R. McMaster is the real deal. He's a soldier scholar who is used to telling truths to power.

A Chinese visitor to Samarkand in the century before the Arab invasion wrote in his notes the following observation on young people there: “All the inhabitants [of Samarkand] are brought up to be traders. When a young boy reaches the age of five they begin to teach him to read, and when he is able to read they make him study business.”1 Another Chinese visitor, equally astonished, observed that young Central Asian men were not allowed to participate in trading trips abroad until they were twenty, prior to which time they were expected to be absorbed in study and training.2 These observant contemporaries enable us to understand something very important about the lost world of Central Asia before the Arab conquest: the high level of literacy that prevailed there. The mass destruction of books and documents carried out by the Arabs leaves us particularly dependent on the reports of outsiders like these. Starr, S. Frederick. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Ara...

Eleven hundred years ago, Central Asia was the intellectual and cultural center of the world. It's cities were the wealthiest in the world, and mathematics, astronomy, architecture, art and literature had a golden age of enlightenment. No city was richer than Balkh, in what is now Afghanistan. To approach Balkh today is a sad experience. Where ancient visitors reported on vineyards, citrus groves, and fields of sugar cane, there is only sagebrush and dust, relieved by an occasional hollyhock in the lower-lying areas. Similarly, far to the north in Central Asia, the vast reaches of Khwarazm in Uzbekistan and Dehistan in Turkmenistan were once alive with castles surrounded by farmland but are today bleak deserts, utterly devoid of plant life. Starr, S. Frederick. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (p. 35). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. The Balkh river, which once supported cargo boats to and from the Oxus and Aral...