There is evidence for the existence of a natural nuclear fission reactor on Earth two billion years ago based on the nuclear waste found in rocks of that age. Candidates can be asked if they accept such evidence and what they think of the implications of the fact that the waste did not move with repect to the surrounding rock (in particular, the implications for nuclear waste disposal).
On the other hand, it might make more sense to ask them general questions about the scientific method. For example, they might be asked what a control group is or what the difference is between Type I and Type II errors.
A Description of the Thompson Campaign
Fred Thompson is jogging for President.
Examples of Implicit Contracts
The New York Times reports on “implicit contracts”:
The concept of “implicit contracts” was developed in a landmark 1988 paper by the economists Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence Summers. Their subject — hostile corporate takeovers — seems far from cyberprivacy, but it is not. Shleifer and Summers showed that increases in share price following takeovers were not due to gains in efficiency, as the defenders of those buyouts claimed. There often were such gains, but they were not the source of the profits. The profits came from reneging on implicit contracts — like the tradition of overpaying older workers who had been overworked when young on the understanding that things would even out later. These contracts, because implicit, were hard to defend in court. But the assets they protected were real. To profit from them, buyout artists had only to put someone in place who could, with a straight face and a clean conscience, say, “I didn’t promise nothin’!”
I can think of two more examples of implicit contracts:
The tradition of discriminating against immigrants on the understanding that the next generation or two would benefit. The tradition of hiring university presidents on the understanding that they would not mention some lines of inquiry in public.
Identifying a specific example of the latter will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out
From Goodbye, Cruel Jews:
Some persons here have posted remarks offensive to Jews, remarks that no one would have regarded seriously if not for the Jews, as they stridently identify themselves, calling for banning and lynch mobs and denunciation of the posters whose words have offended them. They have made it very clear that they are willing to destroy this site, to make it a barren no-man's-land where no civil discourse can survive, unless the persons they charge with antisemitism are silenced and driven out.
I know that these Jews will continue to conduct their hate campaigns with impunity as well as self-righteousness, because the people in charge of this site regard them as friends, but they are false, treacherous friends, willing to destroy the site that has befriended them.
And these same persons, these Jews, have not only continued their malicious attacks on me, but others, also Jews, have joined their Hate Squad, solely on the grounds that they are Jews and have been offended by someone, and thus arrogate to themselves the right to hate and insult a person who has done them no harm and no offense.
“Stand not upon the order of your going but go at once!”—William Shakespeare
“There will be many a dry eye here when you leave.”—R. A. Lafferty
Neither Snow nor Rain nor Heat nor Gloom of Night Stays These Couriers from the Swift Completion of Their Appointed Rounds
Not!
Your carrier is instructed not to attempt delivery when there is a heavy accumulation of snow or ice on sidewalks, steps or porches. If conditions prevent your carrier from reaching your mailbox, you may consider meeting the carrier upon delivery or arrange to pick up your mail at your local post office.
They sold the building with the inscription anyway.
Darkness and … Darkness
During the heyday of totalitarianism, totalitarianism crept into the work of people who intended to oppose it. For example, in Darkness and the Light by Olaf Stapledon (seen via The Long View) there was a discussion of two possible futures for humanity: one in which totalitarian thugs triumph (Darkness) and one in which the forces of gentleness win (Light). In the Light section, the World Federation has a little problem with those Americans. It seems that the Americans insisted on keeping capitalism. The President of the World made a compromise offer:
The World Government could now afford to be generous. He therefore proposed, with his Government's full assent, a temporary arrangement allowing the Americas economic autonomy within the Federation. The World Government reserved the power of constant inspection of American industry and would not permit any infringement of the rights of the workers, as laid down in the preamble to the constitution of the Federation. Certain kinds of industry were excluded from capitalist enterprise entirely, such as armaments and the great means of expression. These, and education, were to be nationalized under the American state, subject to final control by the World Government. It also reserved a power of veto on any industry which it regarded as undesirable from the point of view of the world, and it might order American industry to produce some particular kind of goods needed by the world. Such work might be subsidized by the World Government.
Translation: We'll let you live … provided you're neutered and lobotomized.
I wasn't surprised when the civilization was taken over by localvores. (BTW, why do the advocates of human cooperation oppose any specific instance of large-scale cooperation?) I was even less surprised when their reaction to a crisis was to restrict human action even further rather than extend it.
Some Things Don't Change
In ancient Egypt, the best expert advice was to spend lots of money on an expert:
Gen 41:33 Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt.
In modern America, the best expert advice is to spend lots of money on experts:
About three dozen experts on energy and climate, along with prominent figures in other fields, have sent a letter to all members of Congress, President Bush and the presidential candidates, proposing a roughly tenfold increase in federal spending on energy research.
The goal, they say, is to accelerate advances in nonpolluting energy technologies to limit climate risks and security problems related to the fast-growing global demand for oil and particularly coal, the fossil fuels that produce the bulk of carbon dioxide emissions linked to global warming.
The letter, sent Sunday, calls for at least $30 billion a year in spending to promote sustained research akin to the Apollo space program or the Manhattan Project.
People still fall for it.
Control Group Needed
A poll carried out on “112,000 freshmen from 236 colleges in Fall 2004 and of 15,000 from the same group as juniors in Spring 2007” indicated the group became marginally more liberal. I doubt if college had anything to do with that. Judging by election results, the general public moved in the same direction.
The Economics of Interstellar Trade
One obvious possibility is trade in information and services since different planets will have different cultures and might be best at different things. (ObSF: The Dorsai series.) It might start out as free (gratis), but the people downloading movies from the Movie Planet might prefer action-adventure movies to artsy stuff and the people downloading programs from the Software Planet might prefer understandable user interfaces. Eventually, they will get around to paying for the extras.
Trade in material resources might also be possible. System X might have a high ratio of sunlight to planetary mass and System Y might have the opposite. In that case, it makes sense for them to trade atoms for photons. (The atoms can be sent by spaceship and the photons by laser.) In particular, the planets of a red dwarf might have the atoms needed to support a population in the quadrillions but might not have the energy to do so. On the other hand, Sirius might have the energy to support an enormous population but might not have any planets.
Interstellar colonization might be set off in reaction to a sunlight monopoly in the Solar System. A colony around Alpha Centauri can match the amount Big Sunlight can sell and a colony around Sirius can exceed it by a very large margin. On the other hand, Big Sunlight might try maintaining the monopoly by shooting at colonization ships.
Of course, Sirius might also become a monopoly. Most of the starlight emitted within 5 parsecs of the Sun comes from Sirius. If Sirius exploits its monopoly, there will be attempts to bypass it by starting colonies near Vega or Arcturus.
I think we have a plot as well as a background …
The best part is that this revives the Golden Age SF cliche of putting colonies near first-magnitude stars.
Are Alpha-Ray Lasers Possible?
Since α rays are bosons, it should be theoretically possible for α rays to stimulate more α-ray emission. If it's possible to do that in the real world, it would be possible to have compact sources of nuclear power. What's even more important, it might even be possible to accelerate α decay, so we don't have to wait “500,000 years” (a ridiculous figure, but that's a different rant).
On the other hand, this seems obvious enough for it have been researched, so I guess it didn't pan out.
Ninety Candles
It's Arthur C. Clarke's birthday.
What Do Countable Ordinals Look Like?
I've been wondering what countable ordinals look like when graphed as relations. You can think of a countable ordinal α as an order relation >α such that there is a one-to-one order-preserving function f from the natural numbers to the ordinals less than α. In other words, n >α m if and only if f(n) > f(m) for all natural numbers n and m. You can also think of relations on the natural numbers N as subsets of N × N. It's possible to graph the corner of that near the origin.
We start with ω, the supremum of 0, 1, 2, …. In this case, we can use the usual ordering of the natural numbers:
As you can see, it is extremely simple.
Next, we look at 2ω, the supremum of ω, ω + 1, ω + 2, …. In this case, we identify the even numbers 2n with the ordinals n and the odd numbers 2n + 1 with the ordinals ω + n:
Each half of this has a uniform period.
Then we look at ω2, the supremum of 0, ω, 2ω, …. Here, we use the standard method of constructing a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and ordered pairs of natural numbers. For example, 0 is identified with 0ω + 0; 1 and 2 are identified with 1*ω + 0 and 0*ω + 1, respectively; 3, 4, and 5 are identified with 2*ω + 0, 1*ω + 1, and 0*ω + 2, respectively; etc.:
This looks periodic, but the periods expand linearly with the number of periods from the origin.
We continue with ωω, the supremum of ω, ω2, ω3, …. In order to come up with an ordinal corresponding to number n, we first express it in binary. We then start with ordinal 0 and go through the binary expression from the most significant bit to the least adding one at each 1 and multiplying by ω at each 0. For example, 42 has a binary expansion of 101010. It is easy to see this becomes ω3 + ω2 + ω. The graph is:
Here, the periods expand exponentially with the number of periods from the origin.
Finally, we look at ε0, the supremum of ω, ωω, ωωω, …. In order to come up with an ordinal corresponding to number n, we take its prime factorization. Multiplying two numbers is equivalent to adding to ordinals. The ordinal corresponding to the nth prime (in which 2 is the first prime, 3 the second, etc.) is ω to the ordinal corresponding to n. Since 1 is the product of no primes, it corresponds to ordinal 0. (As a result, the graph has (1,1) at the origin instead of (0,0).) As an example, let us considers the ordinal corresponding to 42. 2 becomes ω. 3 becomes ωω. 4 becomes ω2. Since 7 is the fourth prime, it becomes ωω2. 42 is 2 * 3 * 7 and the corresponding ordinal is ωω2 + ωω + ω. The graph is:
This looks like a humanly-incomprehensible jumble. On the other hand, someone more ingenious than I am might be able to devise something clearer.
I'm not going to touch Γ0 and larger ordinals for now. In any case, ω1CK is too large to be graphed in this manner.
You can find a review of the ordinals displayed above in the chapter “Birthday Cantatatata…” in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
These ordinals are displayed using JavaScript on my other blog. I would appreciate bug reports from my readers.
Addendum: There was a bug in the original program for ε0. It has been fixed.
Principals?
David Hazinski, the sort of academic who gives intellectual snobs a bad name, wrote (with emphasis added on this blog):
But unlike those other professions, journalism — at least in the United States — has never adopted uniform self-regulating standards. There are commonly accepted ethical principals — two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals is voluntary. There is no licensing, testing, mandatory education or boards of review. Most other professions do a poor job of self-regulation, but at least they have mechanisms to regulate themselves. Journalists do not.
That should be “principles,” not “principals.”
<Cheap_shot>
Discussions of standards are more impressive when you can spell.
</Cheap_shot>
Addendum: Attentive readers might have noticed a spelling error or two on this blog. That clearly means I should not set myself up as a standard. On the other hand, I don't recall doing so.
Addendum II: The spelling error has been corrected on the original site.
Your Mother Wears Army Boots!
Not in Iran.
Why Israel Is Leaving Socialism Behind
If Glenn Greenwald's figures are any indication, it should be obvious that Jews with working brains have been leaving the United States for Israel.
Addendum: Irony alert! While looking for comments on the above, I noticed that the relevant post on MuzzleWatch has closed comments after just a few hours.
Addendum II: I just realized the poll results resemble those from the polls showing that most Hispanic-Americans want a crackdown on immigration.
Addendum III: I also just remembered one of the most famous poll results ever.
Extraterrestrial Investors?
Megan McArdle has a series of posts defending the Efficient Market Hypothesis—the theory that human beings cannot consistently beat the market. On the other hand, there is Warren Buffett, who has a reputation for doing so anyway.
So… If human beings cannot consistently beat the market … would Warren Buffett be an extraterrestrial? (He might be a Monoid from the planet Functor.)
Maybe his remarks on taxes or population control are intended to soften us up for the invasion…
What If the Earth Were Flat?
Ilkka Kokkarinen has a speculation on the effects of the world being flat:
I wonder what life and things would be like if Earth was flat and infinite in all directions, so that no matter how far you went, there would always be new geography and people and cultures living there. To sidestep the question where all these people came from, let's say that there is always a finite number of people, but there are so many (and that they expand so fast) that from where you start, you would never reach the edge even if you travelled in the speed of light. What would international politics look like in this world, since for example any possible "U.N." or alliance between nations could ever include only an effective zero percent of all nations? Would there be massive migration of individual people constantly going on, with the hope that logically there must be something much better out there somewhere? What would life be like for talented people in various fields, since they knew that there are countless people out there who are even more talented in that field, and somewhere out there everything they can do is obsolete?
Effectively-infinite populations should erase the obscurity trap, in which nobody uses a potentially-important technology because you can't find experts in it and nobody tries to learn it because you can't get a job in it. In a very large society, hobbyists can jump start nearly anything.
Increases in population size can affect moral standards. At present, in a world of a few billion humans, there are plausible-sounding calls for the currently most-powerful nation to right every wrong (e.g., “We can stop the Darfur famine.”) and plausible-sounding claims that picking and choosing between wrongs to right is hypocritical. I suspect that on an infinite plain, similar ideas would be regarded as obvious nonsense.
A Suggestion for the Hollywood Left
Make a movie based on Tolkien's Akallabêth. It's based on a contemporary classic. It's about a plausible analog to the Gulf wars that goes awry. The story isn't that detailed, so it's possible to add a few more details that should remind people of current events.
Don't go too far, at least in those parts analogous to events that have already occurred. Any analog to the present should occur before the human sacrifices start.
Bosses Who Think They're Giving Orders
A few months ago I blogged that some corporate executives appear to think that intellectuals agreeing with them are simply obeying orders. There's a more recent example of a similar phenomenon. Dan Bartlett, a former White House communications director, thinks that we wingnut bloggers were obeying his orders:
That’s what I mean by influential. I mean, talk about a direct IV into the vein of your support. It’s a very efficient way to communicate. They regurgitate exactly and put up on their blogs what you said to them. It is something that we’ve cultivated and have really tried to put quite a bit of focus on.
Ed Morrissey has a response:
Also, I wonder if Bartlett has an explanation for the blogospheric response to Harriet Miers, Dubai ports, and most of all immigration that fits in with his "regurgitation" model.
Bartlett's claim resembles leftist ideas on how conservatives think to such an extent that I suspect that Dan Bartlett is a leftist who “sold out” and became what he thinks is a typical conservative.
Somebody Didn't Get the Memo
That's the only explanation of the first panel in the second row of this Cectic comic strip.
Liberals Are Becoming Capitalists
The following reminds me of the “If you ignore me, you're violating my rights!” school of modern liberalism:
The Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation, has allowed and endorsed Ad Block Plus, a plug-in that blocks advertisement on web sites and also prevents site owners from blocking people using it. Software that blocks all advertisement is an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software. Many site owners therefore install scripts that prevent people using ad blocking software from accessing their site. That is their right as the site owner to insist that the use of their resources accompanies the presence of the ads.
Are advertisements aimed at people trying to ignore them worth anything? I'm reminded of Usenet trolls trying to evade killfiles.
Is Google Secretly Funding Nukes?
Google's RE<C initiative probably did not start last week but was going on for some time now. Could it have anything to do with two announcements of possibly-cheaper nuclear reactors?
Time to Sell Google?
According to Winds of Change, it might be time to short Google:
Google got a lot of publicity from their latest RE<C renewable energy initiative, but my first reaction upon hearing it was "short the stock." Companies are not good at everything; indeed, they tend to be good only in rather narrow spheres. When you start hearing a company claim otherwise, be cautious. If their claims seem unbelievable or are explicitly based on nothing (except ego or "we have a lot of smart people here") - run. The last company to sell that line was Enron.
I'm worried about a different aspect: Why don't they mention nuclear energy? I've looked at their press release and the web site describing this initiative but saw nothing about nukes. After all, nukes are even closer to competing with coal, and they're likely to retain any advantage even if the population grows. (BTW, when they say “cheaper than coal,” are they including the cost of the land occupied by solar collectors?) They don't even criticize nuclear, leaving that to fans. Are there debates behind the scenes we don't know about?
It's possible to make a case that nuclear energy “isn't necessary.” If Google rejects nuclear energy on that ground, it's as though they had a mouse infestation problem and controlled it by acquiring brown cats, yellow cats, and gray cats. (Black cats aren't necessary.) Black cats might not be necessary to control mice, but if they're excluded, one might wonder what other superstitions are being taken seriously.
But wait, there's more. At the “Googleplex” of company restaurants, we find the following:
They took me to Pure Ingredient Cafe, which, in the words of the Google Cafe Map, is "a journey towards pure, clean, additive and chemical free food and beverage." Like the other cafes I visited, Pure Ingredient was a smallish cafeteria open to any Googler who felt like stopping in for a bite. It was the day before Thanksgiving, the trays sparkled in the bright colors of the Google logo and a line of hungry cyberproles formed just after noon.
I'd be really dubious about investing in a supposed tech firm where people can use the phrase “chemical free food” without laughing. It would be like voting for a Creationist.
In possibly related news, Scientific American ran an article on raising smart kids. It's very important to prevent them from believing that having brains excuses one from using them.
On the other hand, given my recent track record, it might turn out that Google has a nuclear-research arm after all and the “chemical free food” is only served to journalists.
The Political Wars on Science
Much has made recently of a supposed “conservative war on science” with the global-warming controversy as a centerpiece. The right side of the political spectrum has responded with the traditional “I know you are but what am I?” and claimed there's a “liberal war on science” with the IQ controversy as a centerpiece. I am very dubious about both sides.
On the one hand, there are theoretical and empirical reasons to believe global warming is both anthropogenic and significantly deleterious and there are also theoretical and empirical reasons to believe group differences in measured IQ are both genetic and important. On the other hand, there were theoretical and empirical reasons to believe similar ideas in the past (for both sides) that turned out not be the case. In addition, some of the most fervent advocates for the claims are would-be totalitarians, which makes adopting the ideas much riskier than skepticism.
That Monolithic Pro-Life Movement
The two most fervent pro-lifers running for President this year are Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. Do they agree on anything other than abortion?
Where Did Conservatives Get the Idea that Immigrants Are a Fifth Column?
They got it from liberals, of course. For example, liberalrob (a commenter on this post of Megan McArdle):
Leaving aside the estimated 12 million poor who successfully came over our impervious borders at the current moment (that'd be a pretty respectable army if some bright boy gave them all guns, wouldn't it?), let me borrow a phrase from our current Vice President and say that that is pre-9/11 thinking. No, the angry poor don't currently have a massive armada of ships poised to invade our shores. That doesn't mean they might not get one. Look how close Osama is to getting his own atomic bomb; if things fall his way in Pakistan, he just might.
………
And all it takes, really, is the right guy (or gal) to come along and organize those people, equip them minimally, whip them into a frenzy of righteous indignation at their mistreatment, and point them in the right direction. Maybe it sounds preposterous to you that that keeps John Bowe awake at night. It has something of a racist "fear of the brown people" feel to it, I agree; but it also has a kernel of truth to it. Desperate people are susceptible to demagoguery, and few are more desperate than these exploited workers.
On the other hand, it might make more sense to call their bluff. It was a bluff when they warned of a “long hot summer” full of urban riots if Reagan were elected. It was a bluff when they threatened to make the country ungovernable if Bush were re-elected. It was a bluff when they claimed the Israeli crackdown on Palestinians would intensify the terrorism.
The “root cause” of fifth-column activity is the belief that the Establishment will back down in response to intimidation. If it doesn't the fifth column will disappear.
The Problem with Ron Paul
The problem with Ron Paul is that his isolationism (discussed here) is annoyingly consistent. A standard liberal thinks “Yankees go home” is a legitimate slogan and “Mexicans go home” is bigotry. A standard conservative thinks the opposite. Ron Paul apparently thinks everybody can go home.
On the other hand, what if your ancestry is partly from one area and partly from another and you'll have to be dismembered to go home? That might explain the support Ron Paul has gotten from opponents of “race mixing.”
Disasters Are Getting Smaller
According to an Oxfam report:
From an average of 120 disasters a year in the early 1980s, there are now as many as 500, with Oxfam attributing the rise to unpredictable weather conditions cause by global warming.
………
The number of people affected by disasters has risen by 68 percent, from an average of 174 million a year between 1985 to 1994 to 254 million a year between 1995 to 2004.
In other words, a typical disaster used to affect nearly 1.5 million people but now affects only around half a million.
What could explain this pattern of more but milder disasters? Could Oxfam be counting smaller disasters? No, that couldn't be it. They are unselfish and they are believed by people wearing “Question authority” buttons so they must be accurate in all respects.
Addendum: Dailypundit points out another math problem here:
Well, lessee. First, an increase from 174 million to 254 million is an increase of 46%, not 70%. (The idiots simply divided 174 by 254 to come up with that ridiculous number.)
A Downside to Having a Thanksgiving Meal at a Restaurant
A small child in the next booth pointing at my head and saying, “That man has no hair on top of his head!”
This was not a unique occurrence.
A Fable for New Urbanists
The Coyote blog post on city planning reminded me of the “New Urbanism” movement. New Urbanism was largely based on Jane Jacob's criticism of compusory suburbanization zoning laws. I think the the following story (grepable version here) is apropos:
A friend, whose family was slightly more affluent than my own in its time, had been condemned to endless piano practice despite the fact that she was virtually tone deaf. Painstakingly, she memorized enough piano compositions of one sort or another to complete the course and then never ceased to bewail the fact that she had not been allowed to have dancing lessons, for it was dancing that she had really wanted to learn.
I said, “At least you won’t make your mother’s mistake with your own daughter.”
“Certainly not,” she said fiercely. “Whether she likes it or not, my daughter is going to dance.”
Explaining the Flynn Effect
It looks like utter fools are refusing to have children:
Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers - and a voice calling her Mummy.
But the very thought makes her shudder with horror.
Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet.
Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible "mistake" of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time.
He refused, but Toni - who works for an environmental charity - "relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery.
Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.
At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet".
The descendants of the rest of us will thank you.
This might be enough to compensate for below-average birth rates at the other end of the bell curve.
A Data-Compression Speculation
It's a well-known fact that efficient data compression programs produce results that resemble random data. What happens when random data is decompressed?
Know Nukes
It looks like nuclear reactors aren't as dangerous as we thought (seen via The Brothers Judd:
This hard-line stance was partly rooted in history. On Aug. 6, 1945, a US bomber dropped an atomic bomb code-named Little Boy over Hiroshima. The bomb detonated at an altitude of 600 meters (about 2,000 feet), directly above the center of the city and the resulting fireball, generating temperatures in excess of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, swept away all of downtown Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people. Three days later, a second atom bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, killing 70,000.
The more recent meltdown at the reactor in Chernobyl in 1986 reminded the world of the dangers of the atom. The incident was referred to as "nuclear genocide," and the press wrote of "forests stained red" and of deformed insects. The public was bombarded with images of Soviet cleanup crews wearing protective suits, bald-headed children with cancer and the members of cement crews who lost their lives in an attempt to seal off the cracked reactor with a concrete plug. Fifteen years after the reactor accident, the German newsmagazine Focus concluded that Chernobyl was responsible for "500,000" deaths.
………
To answer these questions, the Japanese and the Americans launched a giant epidemiological study after the war. The study included all residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who had survived the atomic explosion within a 10-kilometer (6.2-mile) radius. Investigators questioned the residents to obtain their precise locations when the bomb exploded, and used this information to calculate a personal radiation dose for each resident. Data was collected for 86,572 people.
Today, 60 years later, the study's results are clear. More than 700 people eventually died as a result of radiation received from the atomic attack:
- and 250 died of radiation-induced heart attacks.
- In addition, 30 fetuses developed mental disabilities after they were born.
Such statistics have attracted little notice so far. The numbers cited in schoolbooks are much higher. According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, 105,000 people died of the "long-term consequences of radiation."
Will the people who blocked development of nuclear power apologize?
Declare Victory and Retreat
No. That's not a strategy for Iraq, that's the strategy of of people who claimed that research on embryos derived from human fetuses was necessary. As long as they're retreating, we don't have to shout that that part of the ESC research that was necessary could be done on stem cells from animals. (We should whisper it in order to let them know we can counterattack if the retreat stops.)
Some of the opponents of ESC research will also have to retreat since some of them are opposed to life extension in general. I doubt if there are that many of them.
Two Degrees of Separation
I'm sure you've heard of Six degrees of separation. I'm just two degrees away from RMS and Serge Brin:
P.S. Richard Stallman is not the most famous computer scientist who knows me. Serge Brin, co-founder of Google, had two courses from me as an Undergraduate. I definitly wish I had gotten involved with
Google early early on since its a good product and it would be nice to be able to contribute to my bank account in this way.
Bill Gasarch and I were both members of the The Science Fiction Forum at Stony Brook in the 1970s.
The Nitwit Interpretation Lives!
The Nitwit Interpretation of quantum mechanics—that you can prevent events from having a definite existence by refusing to perceive them—(discussed here and there) turned out not to be a straw-person argument; it's being put forth apparently seriously by alleged scientists:
The good news is: the longer the universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, Mr Krauss believed.
The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock.
Mr Krauss and colleague James Dent pointed to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy.
These measurements might have reset the decay clock of the "false vacuum'' back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, said Mr Dent and Mr Krauss.
They have a little bit of a point in that the absorption of photons from an event will have an effect. On the other hand, it doesn't make a difference if those photons are absorbed by human eyes or by dead matter.
Addendum I: Britain is trying to save the universe.
Addendum II: James Lileks has additional comments.
Addendum III: The Nitiwit Interpretation came from an alleged science reporter and not the scientists themselves.
I'm Reminded of Dayenu
TJIC's discussion of events in Iraq:
Defeat the Baathists? Check.
Find, try, and hang Hussein? Check.
Shut down Iraq as a rogue nation with WMD capabilities? Check.
Lure Al Quaida forces to Iraq, and defeat them? Check.
Discredit Al Quaida through the region? Check.
Scare Quadaffi into coming in from the cold? Check.
Do it all while experiencing effectively zero combat losses? Check.
Achieve Friedman-defined “formal political reconciliation” ? Uh…I dunno…maybe? What does that even mean?
QUAGMIRE ! QUAGMIRE ! FAIL ! FAIL !
reminds me of the Passover hymn Dayenu:
How many levels of favors has the Omnipresent One bestowed upon us:
If He had brought us out from Egypt, and had not carried out judgments against them--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had carried out judgments against them, and not against their idols--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had destroyed their idols, and had not smitten their firstborn--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had smitten their firstborn, and had not given us their wealth--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had given us their wealth, and had not split the sea for us--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had split the sea for us, and had not taken us through it on dry land--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had taken us through the sea on dry land, and had not drowned our oppressors in it--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had drowned our oppressors in it, and had not supplied our needs in the desert for 40 years--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had supplied our needs in the desert for 40 years, and had not fed us the manna--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had fed us the manna, and had not given us the Shabbat--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had given us the Shabbat, and had not brought us before Mount Sinai--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had brought us before Mount Sinai, and had not given us the Torah--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had given us the Torah, and had not brought us into the land of Israel--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
If He had brought us into the land of Israel, and had not built for us the Beit Habechirah (Chosen House; the Beit Hamikdash)--Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!
Come to think of it, a unified kingdom with a Temple lasted only one generation so I suppose a “formal political reconciliation” wasn't exactly achieved.
More Bullbleep on Depleted Uranium
According to a recent article in The Guardian on alleged health problems caused by depleted uranium:
It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. 'There wasn't no fence at the back of the plant,' remembers Ciarfello. 'Inside was a big open ground and nobody would chase us away. We used to play baseball and hang by the stream running through it. We even used to fish in it - though we noticed the fish had big pink lumps on them.'
Today there are lumps on Ciarfello's chest - strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch. 'No one seems to know what they are,' he says. 'I've also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I'm constantly fatigued and for years I've had terrible pains, deep inside my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I've got a heart condition.' Ciarfello's illnesses have rendered him unable to work for years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.
I then started looking to other descriptions of the same research and found the following:
During the 1960s and ‘70s an estimated 5 tonnes of uranium was emitted into the environment, in a residential area of Colonie, NY, USA. Local residents are concerned that they were exposed to airborne particulate, and have campaigned for a health study. The current research could provide valuable baseline data for such a study.
The researchers led by Professor Randall Parrish collected hundreds of soil and dust samples last July, with the help of local residents and Dr John Arnason of SUNY at Albany. Soils and dusts have been examined using scanning electron microscopy, and reveal micrometer diameter uranium-rich particulate (invisible to the naked eye). These particles may be resuspended and inhaled. The samples have also been analysed by mass spectrometry, revealing contamination several hundreds of times greater than background near source, and trace contamination 35 cm below surface and as far afield as 5.8 km.
Can you see what is wrong here? At a density of 2.8 g/cm 3 and a concentration of 4 ppm of uranium, there are over 400 tons of natural uranium less than 5.8 km from the plant up to a depth of 35 cm. If they could identify that trace contamination, the plant must have been in a uranium-free area in the first place.
The Good Side of Red States or the 1950s
According to a recent study:
Perhaps most surprising, the Virginia study found that adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later. Many factors play into a person's readiness for sex, but in at least some cases sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble, the researchers say.
Does that mean that everybody who ridiculed the red-state hypocrites (or 1950s hypocrites) on the grounds there is a higher teen birth rate in red states (and there was a higher teen birth rate in the 1950s) should apologize?
Wait a moment … The higher teen birth rates turned out to be due to married teens. Are the non-delinquents mentioned above also more likely to be married?
On the other hand, this might merely mean that having a sexually-active twin will produce delinquent behavior.
Can Outsiders Make an Impact on Science?
Yep.
Note that he was not crushed by a jealous Physics Establishment. If The Powers That Be don't take your theory seriously, it's not because you're an outsider.
He was exceptional in two ways. He was older than the usual ground-breaking researchers and was outside the academic world for a while. Those two facts might go together. I have noticed that mathematicians who make discoveries at relatively advanced ages (Sylvester, Kronecker, Hausdorff) have often spent a decade or two outside of mathematics research. Maybe a fresh look is what's needed and such a fresh look can be regained.
It's Slow Light
It's now possible “to halt light and bottle it”:
A FUNDAMENTAL law of physics says that nothing can go faster than light, which zips along at around 300m metres a second. But light can also travel at a more leisurely pace, slowed, for example, by air or water. This week a group of researchers led by Ortwin Hess of the University of Surrey, in England, announced a plan to stop light completely and store it, using materials that possess some odd properties. If the plan works, halting and hoarding light in this way could eventually lead to better computers.
If only Bob Shaw were still alive.
A Brief Note on “The Outsourced Brain”
David Brooks has attained a state of nerdvana (as Dogbert would put it):
I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way Amazon links purchasing Dostoyevsky to purchasing garden furniture. And when memes are spreading, and humiliation videos are shared on Facebook — I’ll be there, too.
I am one with the external mind. Om.
It is a bit eerie how one of the most preposterous cliches of Golden Age science fiction—that of human minds merging into one Overmind—is almost coming true.
What! No Lawsuits?
Those flying imams will have to contend with another precedent:
Robert Byrd, chief of transit police for the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, said passengers on Train No. 108 out of East Chicago told the ticket collector they believed a man on the 6:46 a.m. train was dressed strangely and acting suspiciously.
The man was described as wearing a head piece with a box on the front of it. Passengers said the box had wires sticking out of it. Other wires led down his arm, they reported.
………
The man explained that he was Jewish and was in the middle of reciting his daily morning prayers when the South Shore crew tried to question him.
The box on his head did not contain wires, he said, but rather, leather straps which bind the box to his head. More leather straps bind another box to his arm.
If there were no lawsuits in this case …
A Cabinet in Search of a President
It looks like the Republicans have a marvelous cabinet available, but I'm not sure if any of them would be a good President:
Secretary of State: Newt Gingrich Secretary of the Treasury: Ron Paul Secretary of Defense: John McCain Attorney General: Rudy Giuliani Secretary of Commerce: Mitt Romney
I suppose I must support Thompson for President; I can't think of an appropriate cabinet post for him.
Gibberish Equations in a Spoof Article
I'm sure many of my fellow right-wing technophiles have come across discussions of a spoof article purporting to show that global warming could be attributed to benthic bacteria with further flames on how many of us wingnuts were taken in (gloating here, annoyance here and there, and whining here). Much of the discussion is about how the spoof should have been obvious because the alleged mathematical formulas in the article were complete gibberish.
I happen to be an expert on gibberish equations. Those formulas looked like they might have been the result of careless editing in TeX. For example, if somebody who doesn't know what he's doing is told to make sure the first character in the formula $$A + xyz\over abc - 42$$ is in a calligraphic font, he might turn the formula into $$\cal A + xyz\over abc - 42$$ which will become:
This resembles the formulas in the spoof article.
Another way formulas can turn into gibberish is if they are converted to MathML but happen to be in the Symbol font, a Mathematica font, or Dingbats. (I've seen it happen.)
Addendum: It should not be too difficult to create a hoax that appeals to the prejudices of the most fervent believers in global warming.
Wait a moment … It's been done.
Why Left-Wing Bloggers Frequently Use Foul Language
Gateway Pundit is discussing the fact that left-wing bloggers are far more likely to use foul language than right-wing bloggers (according to one estimate, by a factor of 18). I suspect it's for the purpose of ensuring they aren't quoted by the right wing.
There is the alternative theory that they regard foul language as part of an exorcism ritual. Say a vulgar word for a body part or a biological function and conservatives will melt, just like the Wicked Witch of the West.
An Interesting Fact
According to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:
According to the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), the average radioactivity per short ton of coal is 17,100 millicuries/4,000,000 tons, or 0.00427 millicuries/ton. This figure can be used to calculate the average expected radioactivity release from coal combustion. For 1982 the total release of radioactivity from 154 typical coal plants in the United States was, therefore, 2,630,230 millicuries.
Thus, by combining U.S. coal combustion from 1937 (440 million tons) through 1987 (661 million tons) with an estimated total in the year 2040 (2516 million tons), the total expected U.S. radioactivity release to the environment by 2040 can be determined. That total comes from the expected combustion of 111,716 million tons of coal with the release of 477,027,320 millicuries in the United States. Global releases of radioactivity from the predicted combustion of 637,409 million tons of coal would be 2,721,736,430 millicuries.
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown.
(seen via a comment on Depleted Cranium).
I Smell Organic Fertilizer
There's an odor coming from a report from The National Alliance to End Homelessness (according to The New York Times). They're claiming:
Although they make up 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless on any given day, the National Alliance report calculated.
Let's see. We have a not very believable claim that plays to stereotypes of dysfunctional vets in a field with a past history of bullbleep claims. This comes from essentially just one organization but it started a meme that's been going around the blogosphere at the speed of tachyons. This looks like an orchestrated campaign. Blog entries decrying this alleged scandal are a dime a dozen and I want to know who's supplying the dimes.
To think some people think the right wing has a well-oiled “noise machine.” I didn't even hear about the latest campaign by the right-wing noise machine until it was covered by left-wing blogs.
On the other hand, we must recall that the left was right about lead, which is associated with severe brain damage and voting for Democrats.
To make matters worse, even if it is debunked it will resurface at odd times over the next year.
Addendum: Don Surber, as an actual veteran, has more authoritative comments.
Addendum II: M. Simon has some comments on who isn't supporting veterans.
I'm Okay, You're Not So Hot
According to late-breaking news:
While confidence in government has increased modestly in recent years, the public is increasingly suspicious of itself; in the most recent Pew Values Survey, fewer than six-in-ten (57%) say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions, a seven-point decline over the past decade and a much steeper 20-point decline since 1964.
This might mean that 57% of Americans think they're smarter than the median … unless it means that 57% of Americans get up each morning, look in the mirror, and say “You idiot!”
Credit: I lifted the title of this post from here.
I Think Something Is Missing
News of a study comparing marijuana users who didn't use tobacco with those who used both weeds is starting to go around the blogosphere. I noticed the researchers (at least as far as the abstract is concerned) apparently did not divide non-marijuana users into tobacco using and non-tobacco using groups. To quote from the abstract:
Participants A total of 5263 students (2439 females) aged 16 to 20 years divided into cannabis-only smokers (n = 455), cannabis and tobacco smokers (n = 1703), and abstainers (n = 3105).
Outcome Measures Regular tobacco and cannabis use; and personal, family, academic, and substance use characteristics.
………
Conclusions Cannabis-only adolescents show better functioning than those who also use tobacco. Compared with abstainers, they are more socially driven and do not seem to have psychosocial problems at a higher rate.
Since most of the pot users in the study also used tobacco, it looks like the combined characteristics of both kinds of pot users was probably worse than pot abstainers in general. It might be worthwhile to check if the ability to notice problems like the above is correlated with drug use or absence of drug use.
In case anybody was wondering, I was in college during the drug experimentation era, but I was in the control group.
Couldn't They Pick Different Games?
My first reaction was the same as Paul Hsieh:
I don't think I'd do well at either half of chessboxing.
My second reaction was that I might do slightly better at scrabble-sumo-wrestling.
Instead of Foundation
Apparently, Paul Krugman wanted to be Hari Seldon:
Asked to name his great inspiration, he says: Isaac Asimov's Foundation series--a tale of super social scientists who can accurately pinpoint laws of mass social behavior that allow them to predict, and manipulate, all of human civilization and future history. "That's always what I wanted to be," saith the economist turned pundit. Good luck with that project, Dr. Krugman.
If only he'd read The End of Eternity (also by Asimov) instead. In The End of Eternity, all of history is planned by the Eternals, planners who really are all-wise because they have time travel and can see what the effects of their actions will be, … and they still manage to make a mess of things:
“Any system like Eternity which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.”
Another attempt at being Hari Seldon?
Some of the commenters to the Reason article mention that Al-Qaeda is Arabic for Foundation. That shouldn't surprise us. The career of Mohammed is easier to understand if you think of him as a Hari Seldon of the seventh century—trying to create a system that will lead to a Second Empire ….
A Right-Wing Moby?
In 2004, Moby suggested that leftists might infiltrate right-wing web sites:
"You target his natural constituencies," says the Grammy-nominated techno- wizard. "For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.
That explains the reactions I've gotten when I mention that I'm a reactionary wingnut who's in favor of relaxed immigration laws and actually believes Darwin's explanation of the fact of evolution. Infiltration hasn't been effective at injecting leftist memes into conservative minds. It has been effective at closing the minds more tightly.
In 2007, Half-Sigma got the same brilliant idea:
So the key to infiltrating Daily Kos is to pretend to be a liberal. After you establish your liberal credibility by bashing Bush, big corporations, and perhaps alluding to some grand conspiracy involving Haliburton, you can then slip in an heretical comment. Half of politics is group identity rather than actual policies.
That explains the reactions some people have gotten when they mention that they're leftists who are in favor of nuclear energy. Infiltration hasn't been effective at injecting conservative memes into leftist minds. It has been effective at closing the minds more tightly.
By the way, when I tried searching for the phrase “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you're an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion,” I got far more hits on Ask.com or Yahoo than on Google. Hmmm … It looks like Google's new motto is “Don't be inclusive.” Maybe they were threatened by a SLAPP.
Humans and Really Really Large Numbers
The following conundrum can be found at Overcoming Bias:
3^^^3 is an exponential tower of 3s which is 7,625,597,484,987 layers tall. You start with 1; raise 3 to the power of 1 to get 3; raise 3 to the power of 3 to get 27; raise 3 to the power of 27 to get 7625597484987; raise 3 to the power of 7625597484987 to get a number much larger than the number of atoms in the universe, but which could still be written down in base 10, on 100 square kilometers of paper; then raise 3 to that power; and continue until you've exponentiated 7625597484987 times. That's 3^^^3. It's the smallest simple inconceivably huge number I know.
Now here's the moral dilemma. If neither event is going to happen to you personally, but you still had to choose one or the other:
Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?
I'm reminded of the well-known saying “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A ratio of 3^^^3 is an extraordinary claim and I'm not sure the evidence needed to establish it can be stuffed into human minds as presently constituted.
Given that any such ratio is currently dubious, one part of the claim or the other is bound to be less certain. I can think of two possible back stories for the decision:
We can establish the Union of Dust-Free Socialist Republics that will prevent a calculated 3^^^3 dust specks if we only torture just one dissident for fifty years. We have an anti-dust vaccine ready, but an article in The Journal of Really Dubious Medical Research claims that after it has been used 3^^^3 times, an Alien Space Bat will be attracted to human civilization. It will then kidnap somebody to torture for fifty years.
In the first case, we should stop the torture and in the second case, we should stop the dust.
The really disturbing part
The really disturbing part of the above reasoning (to this Platonist mathematician who's unwilling to be expelled from the Cantorian paradise) is what it implies about axioms of infinity. If human beings are unable to think properly about very large finite numbers, consider how much more we are unable to comprehend infinite numbers …
I'm reminded of the saying “This is not mathematics. This is theology.” (about the more abstract parts of mathematics). There's also the following passage from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.
It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very big, so that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.
On the other hand, if there's anything to Roger Penrose's speculations, maybe we are able to think in terms of infinity … which doesn't explain why thinking in terms of very large finite numbers is so difficult. Maybe the MIPS are infinite but the IO is limited. Maybe after the Singularity, we'll be able to absorb the data needed to make a decision. Maybe I've been using the term “maybe” too often in this paragraph.
One possible way to rehabilitate axioms of infinity is to think of them as establishing the consistency of finite mathematics. A consistent system cannot yield its own consistency but it can prove the consistency of simpler axiom systems, especially when a model of the simpler system is embedded. So the axiom of infinity will establish the consistency of finite mathematics and the power-set axiom will establish the consistency of finite mathematics plus the assumption of the consistency of finite mathematics, etc.
Addendum: If something similar to the above defense of the theological type of mathematics were applied to religion itself, I'm sure it would be regarded as a threadbare excuse at Overcoming Bias.
Real Biodiversity
The overwhelming share of biodiversity on this planet is found among bacteria (seen via BoingBoing). So why are we worried about spotted owls and snail darters?
We have trouble trying to get rid of Staphylococcus bacteria deliberately because bacteria can evolve faster than anything we can currently throw at them. I doubt if we can do anything more by accident.
Much of environmentalism is simply eukaryote chauvinism, the idea that the Ecology depends on passenger pigeons instead of on invulnerable
bacteria.
The Bad Philosophy Still Lives
The bad philosophy I discussed a few years ago (“if you don't remember it, it didn't happen”) is still influencing doctor's decisions.
The good news is that now they feel guilty about it.
Not Entirely Believable
If this article (seen via Daniel Drezner) is to be believed, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has just invented psychohistory:
To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.” What’s more, Bueno de Mesquita’s forecasts were much more detailed than those of the more traditional analysts. “The real issue is the specificity of the accuracy,” says Feder. “We found that DI (Directorate of National Intelligence) analyses, even when they were right, were vague compared to the model’s forecasts. To use an archery metaphor, if you hit the target, that’s great. But if you hit the bull’s eye—that’s amazing.”
Saaay what? If they claimed 75% accuracy, I would applaud a model that can achieve that much in such a fuzzy subject. At 90% accuracy, I wonder if anybody has actually looked at the data. At 97% accuracy, I begin to smell a disinformation campaign.
On the other hand, anybody opposed by Mearsheimer and Walt can't be all bad.
For more information on the reliability of expert predictions, see this article (also seen via Daniel Drezner).
If We Plunder the Moon …
… the Moon will become a lifeless, barren wasteland where nothing can grow!
We might also run into problems with the Sulva liberation movement.
One of the comments on the Guardian article mentioned this article, which claims:
However, as we have seen, such a civilization has only a very narrow window of opportunity in which to transition from a civilization wholly dependent upon planetary energy and material resources, to one able to utilize the thousandfold greater resources of the entire solar system. This is because of the rapid onset of peak oil and global climate change, which in turn swiftly terminates high energy planetary civilization. Once such a civilization falls it can never be restarted again, as the easily exploitable hydrocarbon resources, as well as necessary metals and minerals, are gone.
The hydrocarbon energy available to a planetary civilization is analogous to the yolk of an egg: just as the yolk offers a newly emerged creature needed energy to break out of the egg and get established in the wider world, so too does a planet's hydrocarbon energy deposits provide an emergent technological civilization the boost it needs to leave its birthworld and establish itself in its solar system. It offers a very brief window of opportunity to allow a species to develop the technologies and techniques to bootstrap itself off of its planet of origin. Once out into space, a civilization can take advantage of the thousandfold greater material and energy resources found across the solar system. Meanwhile the birthworld can rest and regenerate from its difficult birthing.
Speaking as a science-fiction fan, I'm always interested in news from alternate universes. Here we have a post from an alternate universe with no uranium in it.
Yes. Subs!dies Is a Four-Letter Word
I was considering putting NEI Nuclear Notes on my blogroll. I don't think I'll bother now. There just might be a case in favor of loan guarantees. They can be considered to be regulation insurance. If a government stands to lose money (that might be used to buy votes) if it passes preposterous regulations, it has an incentive not to do so. (If any of my readers can figure out a better way to stop regulations before they start, I'd like to know what it is.)
On the other hand, it is a very bad idea to try defending subsidies in general. Such subsidies will usually either go to the obsolete or to the latest fad.
The Red Sox Won the World Series Again
Now can we have our fusion-powered aircars?
We're obviously living in a science-fiction future …
Failed Predictions?
The Wikipedia page on failed predictions (seen via BoingBoing) contains a couple of prediction that I don't think are complete failures:
- "The basic questions of design, material and shielding, in combining a nuclear reactor with a home boiler and cooling unit, no longer are problems... The system would heat and cool a home, provide unlimited household hot water, and melt the snow from sidewalks and driveways. All that could be done for six years on a single charge of fissionable material costing about $300." –- Robert Ferry, executive of the U.S. Institute of Boiler and Radiator Manufacturers, 1955.[citation needed]
- "Self-operating [vacuum] cleaners powered by nuclear energy will probably be a reality a decade from now." -– Alex Lewyt, president of vacuum cleaner company Lewyt Corp., in the New York Times in 1955.[6]
In the case of the first prediction, we're getting there. As for the second prediction, a vacuum cleaner plugged into a wall socket with a nuclear power plant at the other end is powered by nuclear energy.
A Disturbing Speculation
There's a plausible speculation that modern science and economic growth was set off by literalism. Does this mean that the fundamentalists who insist on a literal interpretation of religious texts are not actually idiots?
On the other hand, those religious texts were written when every copy required the skin of slaughtered animals and somebody to develop writer's cramp. It was easier to write things in a compressed manner (remember that the better the compression scheme, the more the compressed data resembles random noise) and pay a corps of explainers to get the data into other people's heads.
On the gripping hand, it can be a grave mistake to treat compressed data as though it were uncompressed.
On a Thirty-Year Tape Delay
This article sounds like it was recycled from similar predictions made thirty years ago with only the year numbers changed.
The Blue Moon Shines Again
One sign that you're looking at a rare phenomenon is that the first few examples of it you find are the same. For example, I earlier blogged about a rare instance of an organic food being more nutritious than a “conventional” food. There's some evidence that organic tomatoes are richer in antioxidants than overfertilized tomatoes. Yesterday, I came across another apparent example of a healthier organic food with evidence. It also turned out to be high-antioxidant organic tomatoes:
4. Ketchup: For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake. About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.
Hmmmm…
But wait, there's more. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that means the Reagan adminstration was right when they called ketchup a vegetable. (On the other hand the Times article was written by Tara Parker-Pope, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. Maybe she's a mole distributing Reaganite propaganda from the belly of the beast.)
I won't more than mention that the same article also discusses organic milk, potatoes, peanut butter, and apples but can only cite the usual bullbleep.
The Future Site of Anarchotopia
There's a giant floating island in the Pacific Ocean consisting of plastic waste. My future home!
The mascot of the new nation will, of course, be Oscar the Grouch.
We'll have to invest in defense. Greenpeace is getting interested. Maybe the French will sell us a nuke or two …
Having It Both Ways
Let's see. Leftists usually complain that hawks are excessively masculine (example here). This is sometimes combined with a stereotype of conservatives as rural, uneducated, fundamentalist Christians. So when there's a group of us wingnuts who are urban, bookish, and neither fundamentalist not Christian, the obvious complaint is that … neocons (or whatever the latest term is) aren't masculine enough:
It sometimes crosses my mind when spending time with certain friends that there seems to be an inverse relationship between the intensity of their hawkishness and the extent to which they scan as traditionally masculine, and that this is particularly true for those Jewish-American men who continue to suffer from what the early Zionists thought of as the pathologies of the diaspora. Thankfully, such men today make up just a fraction of the American Jewish population, but you can still find them, intense thinkers who are prone to spilling things on themselves and getting winded after half a mile on a bicycle.
I was about to call the combination (complaints about both an excess and a deficit of masculinity) a non-falsifiable argument until I realized that there was no actual argument. I guess it's a non-falsifiable irrelevance.
I suspect that the greatest ire on the left is found when they see somebody who is a counterexample to their usual irrelevant stereotypes. If they ever see, for example, somebody disagreeing with them who is both a Ph.D. and a professional soldier, they'd probably accuse him of treason or something …
Another Look at a Piece of Racist Propaganda
One occasional argument put forth by members of the “World Church of the Creator” (example here) is that their organization should be taken seriously because:
No; you're an obvious idiot. There are millions of intelligent people that share my views, and none of us is a troll (if I get the meaning correctly). I haven't posted anything just to make you angry. Ben Klassen, the founder of the World Church of the Creator, was a Florida state legislator and inventor of the electric can opener. What have YOU ever invented? All I see you do is spew recycled insults. Go back to watching MTV,
little boy.
Wow.
Our side: nuclear weapons. Their side: electric can openers. (If it were pop-top cans, I'd be more impressed.)
Meanwhile, according to a recent poll:
Tin opener wins worst gadget award
The electric tin opener is the worst household gadget invented, according to a new poll.
Its failure to always complete the task in hand is the main reason for its ranking, while the appliance's high breakdown rate was another reason it topped the survey.
It looks like there's a problem or two with Aryan physics …
The Council of Fulfilling Right-Wing Stereotypes of Liberals
The Council of Europe has declared creationism to be an assault on human rights. What that means, of course, is that fundamentalists have an additional reason to think that a target has been painted on them.
There are several reasons this was a terrible idea. First of all, this will tend to prevent fundamentalists from acknowledging their opponents have any case at all. Making such an admission will now be regarded as betraying their allies.
Second, science is reliable only because it is criticized. Science runs on criticism and any law that might turn off the criticism will make it unrealiable.
Third, if this goes through it might act as a precedent for more dubious actions. After they back the only leading theory explaining the fact of evolution, they might then back theories with the same political allies even when the evidence is strong but not conclusive (e.g., that anthropogenic global warming is a crisis). Once that goes through, they will back similar theories with almost no evidence in their favor (e.g., that “organic” foods are healthier than the allegedly-conventional kind). This might even be followed by legal backing for theories at the same end of the political spectrum with strong evidence against (e.g., that the collapse of the World Trade Center was an inside job). We must beware of the slippery slope.
Fourth, since when do politicians have any special expertise on paleontology in the first place? They might be right in this case, but only by coincidence.
Future Job Opportunities
There might be jobs for bartenders in the 24th century. Paris Hilton has signed up for cryonic suspension.
So if you know how to mix a pan-galactic gargle blaster …
How to Tell the Think Tanks from the Hacks
It looks like the commonest term for “regulatory capture” (discussed here) is “rent-seeking.” Since it's likely any hack would be allergic to discussions of rent-seeking behavior, a think tank which mentions the term very often is almost certainly not corrupt or even lazy enough to pass on press releases. Think tanks that mention the term moderately often are unlikely to be corrupt but might be lazy. A think tank that mentions the term rarely should be regarded as on probation. (This is not something I would have expected but maybe they're trying to avoid offending hedge-fund managers.) As for alleged think tanks that never use the term “rent-seeking,” the less said the better.
Why We Need Think Tanks
There's a discussion of “stereotype threat” going on at Mixing Memory. In a comment, agnostic wrote:
All the elite schools had Jewish quotas (not to mention the vile caricatures of their group in the larger culture) -- but rather than wimp out, Jews formed "de facto Ivies" like CUNY that beat the snot out of Harvard, etc., in math competitions, did respectably in Nobel Prizes, yadda yadda yadda.
This is also a huge counterexample to the claim that sheer lack of numbers will cause members of the underrepresented group to shy away in a non-trivial amount. How many eminent Jewish physicists and mathematicians were there before 1900? Not many. What about by 2000? Tons. This is a good "reality check."
In response, in another comment, Tyler DiPietro wrote:
I agree with agnostic completely. In fact I would extend his hypothesis to include martyrs like Larry Summers. When driven from academia by the all pervasive cult of political correctness, they should emulate Jews and start their own universities. Don't roll over like a wimp, YOU GET OUT THERE AND KICK SOME FEMINAZI ASS!
That's what think tanks are for.
Now all they need is some students …
The Missing Card in the Denialist Deck of Cards
I'm sure many of my fellow wingnuts have encountered The Denialist Deck of Cards, a paper giving examples of the commonest anti-regulation arguments from alleged corporate shills. The paper missed an argument: the prediction that regulation frequently produces “regulatory capture,” in which the businesses being regulated are able to write the regulations in such a way as to produce or preserve an oligopoly. Regulatory capture was mentioned (under 9 of diamonds), but only as a perfidious tactic to twist regulations already being passed and not as an argument against starting to regulate.
This might be due to the assumption that the right wing consists of corporate shills. Corporate shills will be unlikely to mention regulatory capture. This might give us a way to find out which think tanks are real and which are fake. If a think tank mentions regulatory capture it is probably real.
Let's see … If we search on the website of The Cato Institute (an organization that's probably real), we find 12 “regulatory capture” hits. If we do a similar search at The Center for Consumer Freedom (an organization that might be bogus), we find no such hits.
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