CapitalistImperialistPig

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.

By Mark Robert Rank The titular paradox is poverty in the USA, the largest and one of the richest countries in the world.   Compared to other rich countries the USA has much more and worse poverty than almost any other.   Professor Rank dissects the causes and has some suggestions, few if any of which would fly with the modern Republican Party. Rank proposes what he calls the structural vulnerability hypothesis.   That means that political policies and economic circumstances punish the poor and make it harder to escape poverty.   Bad schools and bad neighborhoods promote poverty and make it hard to escape.   The US ranks high on the inequality scale and low on the social mobility scale. Rank argues that a major driver of poverty in the US is blame the victim thinking, the idea that if persons are poor, it is their own fault.   Much poverty can be traced to lack of social capital: education, other saleable skills, disability, poor health, or access to ...

By Graham Allison 2500 years ago, the Greek Historian Thucydides wrote: ““It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Allison, Graham. Destined For War. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. These words have proven prophetic. Allison and his colleagues have analyzed a series of changes in the balance of powers in the world and found that they have often led to war, perhaps most catastrophically in the early Twentieth Century when the rising power of Germany ultimately led to the First world War and its aftermath, including the Second World War.   Today it is the rise of China, which has now become the world’s largest economy and is in the process of becoming a military superpower which poses the threat.   Neither Thucydides 2500 years nor the Allison much more recently believed that war was truly inevitable, however.   Rather, it is the missteps of leaders and nations that lead to war, and Allison believes that if we ar...

  What is GPT doing … By Stephen Wolfram This is a short book which combines an description of how GPT, the revolutionary new AI technology shaking the world, works with an advertisement for some Wolfram products designed to augment GPT.   His description is pretty good but I couldn’t really follow his explanation of the crucial “transformer” component, the attention blocks.   ChatGPT was able to give me a better account. Wolfram pointed out some key failings of GPT.   It can’t really do deductive chains of any substance.   For example, ask it to compute 3^73 and it comes up with an absurdly wrong answer, off by a factor of roughly 10^34.   I tried giving it some hints, including using logarithms.   Again, it confected a plausible looking deductive chain and an answer only off by a factor of ten or so. Wolfram then argues that supplementing GPT with some deductive system like Wolfram language would have more capability.   Of course lots of...

 I coaxed GPT-3 into writing this ditty on Brexit.  Those who know assure me that GPT-4 would have done much better. Amidst the Isles, a tempest doth arise, A nation's fate hangs in a balance dire, As Brexit looms, the future's shadow lies, And discontentment rages like a fire. The voters spoke, a cry for sovereignty, To cast aside the shackles of the EU, But little thought was given to the gravity, Of severing ties with a union so true. Now chaos reigns, uncertainty abounds, As negotiations flounder and stall, And fears of economic downturns, Cast a pall over the land once proud and tall. The border issue, an unyielding thorn, With Ireland caught in the crossfire's aim, And many wonder if the day will dawn, When peace is shattered, and war becomes flame. The Scots and Welsh, their patience wears thin, As England stumbles on a solo path, Their voices drowned amidst the Brexit din, Their hopes and dreams lost in the aftermath. And yet, one man seems immune to the strife, His...

 I was surprised and a bit taken aback by DJT's indictment today. I hadn't even had time to put the champaign on ice. So what to do if he fuels up Trump Force One and makes a run for Moscow or Riyad?  Let him go or escort him back.  I lean toward letting him go.  Let him be caught in the ruination of Mordor when Putin goes down.

  I first encountered Anaximander in a course I took in Ancient Greek philosophy, and I didn’t have the sense to be impressed.  Only four brief lines of his work survive, and to me they were utterly mysterious: All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity; they give to each other justice and recompense for injustice in conformity with the order of Time. Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander (p. 79). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Neither my textbook nor my professor pointed out that these rather mysterious lines contain a profound idea – the notion of natural law, the idea that the phenomena of nature are due not to the whims of this god or that, but the operation in time of natural laws, or necessity. This was a profound innovation.   All previous explanations of rain, storms, thunder, lightning and other phenomena seem to have attributed them to the actions of gods and spirits.   Anaximander’s idea thus began a ...

If you haven't  sampled ChatGPT yet, I recommend it.  Deep neural networks and the new technology of transformers are producing a technological revolution that is likely the biggest one yet.  ChatGPT and its relatives can write you a sonnet, a coherent summary of the role of sheaves in algebraic geometry, or a computer program in Python or other languages.  A related technology can produce plausible images of persons, monsters, or imaginary landscapes based on a few words of prompting text.  Yet another can take a minute or so of anyone's speech to produce hard to distinguish speech in the speaker's voice. Would you like to hear the Silmarillion as if read by J. R. R. Tolkien?  It can probably be done.  

  A former English major decides to take some trips down Interstate 80 in the company of geologists.  I 80 runs from Teaneck, New Jersey, to San Francisco, a journey of 2901 miles.  Annals is a title borrowed from one of the founding documents of geology, by James Hutton: “ To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders undistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.” McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World (p. 77). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. Science is always a detective story, but in geology it finds its purest form. McPhee’s book is about the stories those rocks reveal and the geologists who read and tell them.   The interst...

Hunter-Gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian.  Civilizations and agricultural societies generally, tend to be hierarchical.  Why so? One possibility is that the greater productivity and fertility of agricultural societies means that they are always bumping up against the Malthusian bound, the maximum population the land and technology can support.  Peter Turchin has explored this idea in his books, including War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires . He documents how Europe has suffered a repetitive cycle of depopulating wars, followed by peace and a rapid expansion of population until individual farmers have been forced to ever smaller farms or more marginal farmland until the society has become broadly impoverished, at which point widespread wars break out as adventurers and the desperate seek more land at the expense of others. These wars depopulate both losers and winners. Of course the other horsemen of the apocalypse who also do their part. But I...

Svante Pääbo is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the work described in this book. As a student in Sweden Pääbo conceived the dream of decoding the genome of ancient humans and Neandertal Man. This book is the story of that dream, that quest, and all that went into building the scientific institute and international collaboration that achieved that goal thirty years later. Like James Watson’s famous book  The   Double Helix , this is an inside look at how molecular biology is done at the very highest level. Much has changed in biology in the half century plus between these accomplishments and much has stayed the same, but for anyone who wants to know how science really works, here is the story, laid out in compelling detail. We also get a detailed look at the personal life of the author. Pääbo’s thirty year dream culminated in the publication of the Neandertal genome. So what did it take to achieve it? When the author began his quest, methods fo...

  Helgoland is windswept and relatively barren island where Werner Heisenberg repaired to contemplate the puzzles of quantum phenomena, and, ultimately, to invent quantum mechanics.  At this point quantum theory was already a quarter of a century old, invented by Max Planck in 1900 and further developed by Einstein, Bohr, and others but only very special and simple cases could be solved. A method of general application did not exist.  After weeks of intense mental struggle he found an answer in the behavior of tables of numbers, tables that would become the matrices of matrix mechanics. Carlo Rovelli, himself an important physicist, tells that story in the first chapter of his book Helgoland, as well as the struggles of Heisenberg and others to understand what he had found.   In quick succession the English Physicist Paul Dirac and the Austrian Erwin Schrodinger found apparently quite different but completely equivalent formulations of quantum mechanics.   All...

 THE ROMAN REPUBLIC: A Very Short Introduction by David M. Gwynn The history of the Roman Republic is a popular and relatively familiar subject, the setting of numerous movies and several Shakespeare plays.   That history made a deep impression on the Republics that arose in the Renaissance and on the founders of the United States.   A small and rather nondescript city in Italy somehow conquered the entire Mediterranean world over 700 years or so and then destroyed itself in an orgy of internal strife. Like the founders of our Republic, citizens of the world’s republics today should ponder the lessons of Rome’s successes and catastrophic collapse. David M. Gwynn’s brief history is much more interested in the internal dynamics of the Republic than in Rome’s battles and wars.   The armies of the Republic were initially citizen armies, led by the Senatorial classes and manned by small citizen farmers.   After Rome deposed its Kings, power was initially wiel...

 Andrew Knoll tells the story of Earth, its formation, its changes over time, and especially, the story of the interaction of life and geology over that time.  Few if any are more steeped in that story or have contributed more to unravelling it.  The early Earth was not much like Earth today and we could not have lived on it.  Once the crust cooled enough to solidify and for water to condense and form oceans, there were oceans and probably relatively few and small bits of land.  There was no oxygen, so nothing for us to breathe.  A steady stream of potent UV radiation would have made it impossible for land plants and animals of today to live even if there had been oxygen. Nonetheless, the first signs of life appear in the oldest rocks only about a billion years after the planet formed.    How these were found and identified is one of the great detective stories of natural science, and it is told well here.   The subsequent evolution of cyan...

I just reread Dune, after a half century or more.  Naturally I didn’t remember much, though a few items like the gom jabbar test had stuck.  Herbert created an interestingly different world in Arrakis, the desert planet that was the only source of the crucial spice that conferred both long life and certain psychic powers. Our aristocratic hero, Paul Atreides, is plunged into a world of conspiracy and assassination from the start.   I, as an ancient, probably feel significantly more cognitive dissonance about a world where people still fight with swords and knives despite the fact that interstellar travel has been mastered.   Their quaint efforts at breeding better humans also have a comically antediluvian quality. Villains are caricatures of villainy and the mentats, supposed deep thinkers, are more than a bit slow on the uptake. So far as I can tell, the native desert dwellers of Arrakis, the Fremen, are loosely based on Bedouin desert nomads of our own planet...

There is an unregulated toxic gas in our atmosphere, and it is slowly killing us all.  Its effects are similar to ionizing radiation, through the same chemical pathways, and it attacks all the key components of our cells - lipid membranes, proteins, and DNA.  No feasible methods are known for cleaning our air of it and still providing us with breathable air. That gas is oxygen, and it constitutes roughly 21% of our atmosphere.  The catch, of course, is that we can't live without it and a whole lot of it.  Its toxicity was first revealed in its effects on underwater divers breathing pressurized air.  Prolonged breathing of concentrated oxygen produces unconsciousness and  inflammation and destruction of the lungs.  We do much better with lower concentrations, but there is no safe level.  Many believe that it is the principal mechanism of human and cellular aging.  How does it do its damage?   Respiration, using oxygen to extract ener...

Slan might be the first science fiction book that I ever checked out of a library – at any rate, it’s the first one I remember checking out.  Supermen are one of van Vogt’s favorite themes and Slan might have been is first.  It’s my latest read in the classic SF jag I’ve been on lately.  I found the intervening decades had wiped out all knowledge of the characters and plot and the only imagery I retained was the hero’s ability to use his super strong muscles to climb buildings by clinging to the tiny chinks between bricks. Slan opens on a scene in a world where the Slan are fiercely and murderously persecuted by the majority humans, and a mother and her nine-year-old son have been detected by Department of Security who are closing in.   Non stop action continues for several chapters with catastrophe and narrow escapes abounding. The Slan have a number of superpowers and are accused of monstrous crimes.   Given the late 1940’s date, parallels to the Holocaus...

 It is a curious fact that evolution on Earth seems to have been paced and constrained by Geological tectonics.  The bilaterians which constitute large scale animal life on Earth could not have arisen without copious oxygen in the atmosphere, which, in turn, took some extraordinary geological events - especially the Sturtian and Varanger snowball Earth episodes. One of many curious and fascinating ideas to be found in  Oxygen: The molecule that made the world (Popular Science)  Kindle Edition by  Nick Lane     (Author)  

  Not too long after I started this book I realized that I had read it before, but so long ago that I couldn’t remember a single character or plot point – except for the finale.   So it was pretty much new to me.   I thought that it was a lot better book than Foundation. There was a complex plot, a certain amount of suspense, and even some science about stars and the galaxy.   It was published 71 years ago, so the novel technology introduced is mostly either overcome by time or just magic.    It’s not possible to write interstellar fiction without a hefty dose of magic, but Asimov confines his wishful thinking to fairly modest dimensions. Logical coherence is not big priority in either plot or background.   Humankind has figured out how to suppress nuclear weapons with some kind of force field but has not managed to clean up the radioactive debris from a nuclear war a thousand years ago that still dominates continents. Society has regressed to fe...

Autonomous killer robots aren't just science fiction anymore, and a lot of people would like to ban them. A recent major conference in Geneva failed to agree though.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/world/robot-drone-ban.html I don't think that the prospects are very good, at least partially because it's a ban that would be very hard to enforce.  Killer robots don't need a vast industrial base like nuclear weapons.  They can be built in modest warehouses using cell-phone brains and other widely available components.  Those that proved decisive in the recent war over Nagorno-karabakh were built by Israel and Turkey, and lots of others are in on building them, notably the US, China, and Russia.  Another obvious reason for skepticism is that they appear to be a military game changer, probably as big a one as the tank and the machine gun.  Nagorno-karabakh proved that they can be devastating against tanks and entrenched troops, as well as logistics....