Not Dead Yet...

I was recently involved in an exercise simulating an attack by a crazed gunman, which I coped with by locking my door and continuing work. Eventually, though, soldiers in body armor with fake machine guns rousted me out. Because I had a real world broken foot, I was evacuated with the simulated casualties and taken to triage. There I was evaluated and tagged with a ticket proclaiming me Dead/Dying - an especially serious stress fracture, I guess. I kept the souvenier, but I'm not actually dead yet, though I do expect to be travelling and posting very lightly for a couple of weeks.

I have noticed that I seem to have at least occasional readers from five or six continents, and I figure you probably didn't all get here by mistake - though I could be wrong. Anyway, if anybody would like to say something about themselves and why you read my stuff - if you do that is - I would like to hear about it. If you want to share what you like or hate about this site, the subjects I write about you like or not and why, well that would be great too.

Burgery in Progress!

Econ Prof Steve Landsburg recently waxed wroth about internet trolls who spend time refuting arguments others never made. Since I think that the gentleman himself tends to indulge in that sort of rhetoric whenever his mind turns to Paul Krugman - pretty often - I thought it only fitting to honor him with the eponymn. It only took a couple of days before he provided us another example: a veritable (Lands)burgery in progress.

The subject of this particular burg is the following graph due to Paul Krugman.

Bear in mind that Krugman is responding to those who said government spending exploded after Obama took office, is explicitly considering only the time after the fall of Lehman (Sept 15, 2008), and is considering all government (federal, state, and local) spending. Krugman points out that there is no explosion of spending in 2009, despite the ramp up of countercyclical programs like unemployment insurance.

Next the critique:

Now, what I’m seeing here is something like a 25% increase in spending under the Bush/Obama policies of the past four years. Which makes me wonder exactly what it would take to count as a surge in Krugman-land.

Notice how the "Burg" has changed the subject from Obama to the mythical President Bush/Obama, and the time period from the last two years to the last almost five. This is textbook burgery, but he isn't done. It seems that some people noticed his change of subject. What to do? Pivot and change the subject again! This time to federal spending only, which, as Krugman has mentioned, has surged in the stimulus and other programs - a surge which has largely been matched by the collaspe in expenditures by state and local governments. Bravo: the Burgmeister is still master of his domain.

If you go to the source at the St. Louis Fed you can gin up a thirty year history of federal spending, which shows a steep but roughly linear increase in the 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, a levelling off in the Clinton years, and an exponential increase beginning with Bush II and continuing to present.

First Miner Up!!

Finally some good news from somewhere.

Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler

Wolfgang accuses me of not knowing much about Nietzsche or Hitler. Perhaps not, but I know a little, and I can google. In particular, he thinks I misunderstand the Nietzschean superman. Let's review a bit of what he said in Zarathustra:

The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student's rag.... When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a "Master," when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?...

"The Blond Beast" was another Nietzschean epithet idolized by him and borrowed by Hitler. The "Lords of the Earth" was an FN expression that occurs frequently in Mein Kampf. Nietzsche also prefigured Hitler's "final solution." From The Will to Power:

A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world weary. The annihilation of the decaying races. Decay of Europe.-The annihilation of slavish evaluations.-Dominion over the earth as a means of producing a higher type.-The annihilation of the tartuffery called 'morality.' The annihilation of suffrage universel; i.e. the system through which the lowest natures prescribe themselves as laws for the higher.-The annihilation of mediocrity and its acceptance (The one sided, individuals – peoples;

Hitler went to the Nietzsche museum and posed for a picture with the bust of the philosopher, but his biggest intellectual inspiration was not Nietzsche, but his friend Richard Wagner. Wagner and Nietzsche shared a hatred of the Christian and Jewish religions, and a profound misanthropy, but Nietzsche did not go along with the full virulence of Wagner's antisemitism, and he broke with Wagner partly over that. After his insanity, though, his pro Wagner and violently anti-semitic sister Elizabeth became his literary executor, thereby contaminating some of his work.

From Wikipedia:

It has been observed that In 1932, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche received a rose bouquet from Adolf Hitler during a German premier of Benito Mussolini's 100 Days; in 1934 Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg visited her again, presenting her with a wreath for Nietzsche's grave with the words "To A Great Fighter"; in the same year the Führer posed for a photo gazing into the eyes of a white marble bust of Nietzsche, and was presented by Elisabeth with Nietzsche's favorite walking stick.[26] There can be no doubt that Italian and German fascist regimes were eager to lay claim to Nietzsche's ideas, and to position themselves as inspired by them. In Heinrich Hoffmann's best-selling Hitler as Nobody Knows Him (which sold nearly a half-million copies by 1938) the caption of the photo of Hitler with the bust of Nietzsche read, "The Führer before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized two great popular movements: the National Socialist of Germany and the Fascist of Italy."[27]

David Hasselhoff - Your Car is Ready

Google has the robo-car almost ready to go.

I can't wait.

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.

The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

Riding Rockets: Book Review

If you've ever felt the pull of the romance of space travel, Riding Rockets by R. Mike Mullane is a book I heartily recommend. Mullane was a West Point graduate and Air Force aviator with 134 combat missions in Vietnam when he applied to be an astronaut. He was a flight test engineer, not a pilot, and his astronaut class was the first to include mission specialists selected from flight engineers and civilian scientists.

Mullane's book is a darn good read for entertainment and an even better one for information. Military aviators aren't exactly famous for opening their brains for the world to view, but his book is strikingly candid and revealing. One of my favorite parts is his story of his childhood obsession with space and his devotion to Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestelle's Conquest of Space. I also fell under that spell and tried my hand at building rockets and making rocket fuel - as a hole burned into our basement ceiling once testified. Mullane, though, had the dedication, talent, and diligence to make it happen, despite a need for glasses that kept him out of pilot training.

The military astronauts, as portrayed by Mullane, are ferociously competitive, fun loving denizens of the planet he calls Arrested Development. The first hard decision he had to make as a NASA employee, he says, was what to wear to work. West Point and a military career meant never having had to make that decision before. Nor had he ever inhabited a workplace that included the female of our species. Political incorrectness came naturally to him and he quickly managed to offend the more hardline feminists in his class, notably Dr. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

There are many amusing stories here, both Earthbound and orbiting, and some that are downright hilarious. There is also terror and tragedy, and anger. Much of the anger is directed at NASA mismanagement. That mismanagement, as he saw it, made the astronauts job incredibly frustrating and, at a higher level, led to the destruction of Challenger and Columbia.

Flight into orbit is not a dangerous job, and it's not a very dangerous job - it's an incredibly dangerous job. Even in an optimally designed rocket, the passengers put themselves on top of several million pounds of highly explosive fuel for a trip to a place where nature has a lot of ways of killing them. The space shuttle was not that optimal design. It was both underdesigned and overpromised, both circumstances the result of trying to do too much with too little money.

There were at least three grave design flaws in it. First, it lacked a robust escape module. This fact killed the Challenger crew and possibly killed the Columbia crew. Second, the solid few boosters and the external fuel tank were in positions where debris from them could destroy the orbiter. Such an accident killed the Columbia and very nearly killed the Discovery. Hot gases that penetrated the solid fuel booster O-rings blew up the Challenger.

As often happens, these severe design flaws were not enough by themselves to kill the Shuttles. That also required a reckless disregard of the evidence of problems by the NASA management.

Distilled Frenzy

. . . the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back............... J M Keynes

A Hitler might be Nietsche distilled, but nowadays the madmen tend to rely on distilled Beck.

Byron Williams, Oakland freeway shooter.

I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.

The "Burg"

Steve Landsburg:

The Internet seems to have bred a peculiar subspecies of troll that cheerfully devotes enormous effort to refuting arguments nobody ever made. While they seem to have infinite time to construct these pointless rebuttals, these troll-types seem to have no time at all in which to actually digest the arguments they think they’re rebutting. They start with a guess as to what someone else might have said, and seem all but incapable of entertaining the notion that they might have guessed wrong. Is there a name for these people? “Crank” and “troll” are too general. If it were up to me, we’d reserve the word “Bozo” for this purpose, but it too is already in more general use. We need a new word! Give me your suggestions!

Well, since you did ask: in light of the many pixels he has wasted refuting arguments Paul Krugman never made, I suggest the eponymn "landsburg," or just "burg" for the word he seeks.

LOL

From the Lumonator:

It's organic and carbon is cheaper than silicon because you don't have to deconstruct anyone's microprocessors or artificial breasts to get the stuff.

Lubos is talking about solar panels made of rubrene and being funny, but in fact silicon, despite being quite a bit less abundant in the larger universe than carbon, is several hundred times more abundant in the Earth's crust than carbon, and dirt, or at least sand, cheap. Nice pure crystals for optimal solar panels are not so cheap to manufacture of course.

As a person who has recently considered equipping my house with solar panels I do have to say that efficiency can be an important concern. My roof has a limited amount of real estate suitable for mounting solar panels, so to get the optimal amount of energy I need high efficiency panels even here in relentlessly sunny New Mexico.

Unions and Merit Pay

Many of the usual suspects are taking a crack at the question of why teachers unions oppose merit pay and what can be done about it. Here, for example, are Megan McArdle, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and Bryan Caplan.

To me, they mostly miss the point - though at least one commenter is more astute. Caplan gets my cluelessness award:

I don't doubt that unions tend to oppose merit pay, but the reasons are unclear. Profit-maximizing monopolists still suffer financially if they cut quality; the same should hold for unionized workers. Why not simply jack average wages 15% above the competitive level, and leave relative wages unchanged?

Or to put the puzzle another way: Once you've secured a raise for all the workers in your union, why prevent employers from offering additional compensation for exceptionally good workers?

Megan:

Unions are set up to minimize frictions and maximize benefits for the bottom 55%. That's how they work everywhere--in schools, and out. That's how they have to work. No amount of cajoling, no number of white papers, is going to change that.

And Matt is more focused on the what than the why:

Take, for example, the hot issue of teacher compensation. The traditionalist view is that teachers should get paid more for having more years of experience and also for having more degrees. The reform view is that teachers should get paid more for having demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores. This is an important debate, but I think it’s really not an ideological debate at all. I think the only reason it’s taken on an ideological air is that unions have a view on the matter and people do have ideological opinions about unions in general. But if we found a place where for decades teachers had been paid based on demonstrated efficacy in raising student test scores, then veteran teachers and union leaders would probably be people who liked that system and didn't want to change to a degree-based system. Because unions are controversial, this would take on a certain left-right ideological atmosphere but it’s all very contingent.

Most of the above misses the point. The most fundamental characteristic of the union is embedded in its name - unity is the whole point. Anything that pits member against member undermines that unity. Unions, consequently, are not about to like merit pay.

That doesn't mean merit pay is a bad idea, or that it can't be implemented in a form that is relatively palatable to teachers. I favor a sort of collective approach, where a whole school gets a merit grade and individual teachers have a say in allocations. In particular, this will give teachers an incentive to improve or get rid of incompetent colleagues and try to imitate the best.

China Syndrome

After decades of explosive economic growth, China is feeling its oats and starting to throw its weight around. No more Mr. Nice China seems the order of the day, so it issues threats against any US action to reduce our massive trade deficit, reasserts old claims to Indian territory, and beats up on Japan.

The West, and the world, made a gigantic bet that if China were brought into the world economic and political community it would learn to play nicely - whatever that means. China has changed itself from a decrepit socialist basket case into an marvel of state capitalism, but it has kept the same old Communist Party apparatus in firm charge. The leaders decided to abandon the Party's rationale for existence but kept the power. That totalitarian grip is evident in the paranoid and vicious reaction to the selection of Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Peace prize.

So why, exactly, did the US and the world tolerate and encourage the emerging superpower and allow themselves to become so dependent on it? Short term thinking and stupidity played their role, of course, but so did a belief in a kind of Magical Capitalism. Milton Friedman and his followers were convinced that capitalism had this magical power to spread freedom. I don't think that they are necessarily completely wrong, but they overestimated its power. Secure in that magical belief, we outsourced our jobs and mortgaged our country to China. Lenin (or was it Marx) would say that we sold them the rope to hang us with.

About Curvature

What is curvature? We have an intuitive notion that some curves are curvier than others, so how have mathematicians sorted this out?

I have been reading The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis. It turns out that the notion of curvature, and in particular, Ricci curvature, is fundamental to all the considerations therein. From my deeply shallow and mostly forgotten studies of general relativity I recalled that the Ricci tensor was (a) an index contracted Riemann curvature tensor and (b) an essential component of the Einstein tensor. Neither bit of intellectual flotsam gave me any significant insight into what Ricci curvature really was.

For me to understand something, I need to have a mental picture that can be expressed in familiar notions. The simplest notion of curvature is that we associate with a circle. We have an intuitive notion that a smaller circle is “more curved” than a larger one. We can make this notion precise in terms of the reciprocal of the radius of the circle – if the circle has radius R, its curvature is 1/R.

So what about ellipses, hyperbolas, and random curvy lines, still operating in the Euclidean plane? Again, we can see that this kind of curve, unlike a circle, seems to be more curved in some places than others. Can we fit a circle inside such a curve? It turns out that there are infinitely many curves tangent to a given plane curve at a point, but we can find a “best” one – the so called Osculating (or kissing) circle – the circle that stays closest to the curve near the point in question. I should mention that we are sticking to sufficiently smooth curves here, that is, curves without any corners or gaps – (twice continuously differentiable, to be technical). The curvature of that plane curve is then defined to be the reciprocal of the radius of that kissing circle.

Things get a bit more complicated if we go to three (or more) dimensions. Suppose we have a curve embedded in a two dimensional surface – one like the center of a saddle, for example. Imagine yourself with an ant’s eye view from the center of the saddle (or a person’s eye view from the top of a mountain pass). If you look one direction, the world curves up, but in another, it curves down. It’s obvious that lots of circles could be fitted – and a sphere that fit well in one direction, wouldn’t fit in the other.

So does such a surface need infinitely many “curvatures” to describe it, one for each direction? Fortunately not, if the surface is sufficiently smooth. If so, two principal curvatures suffice. At each point of the surface, one can draw a normal line (or perpendicular) to the surface. If we now imagine cutting the surface with planes containing the normal in every possible way, each plane will slice the surface into a unique plane curve which will have an osculating circle with a center on the normal line. Count curvatures as positive if they lie on one side of the surface (the inside for closed surfaces like spheres) and negative if on the other. The maximum such curvature is one principal curvature and the minimum, the other. Their product is the famous Gaussian curvature. The most remarkable thing about the Gaussian curvature (see link) is the fact that it turns out to depend only on the way distances are measured on the surface, not upon the way the surface is embedded in higher dimensional space. This result is one of the foundational notions of differential geometry.

Are we there (to Ricci curvature) yet? Not quite, but another gas station or two ought to do it.

As we go to still higher dimensions, more ways to curve become possible. Recall that for the two–dimensional surface we took a bunch of planar slices through the surface to get the two principal curvatures and the Gaussian curvature. We can do something analogous in higher dimensions, though for technical reasons we need to operate in the tangent space and its exponential map – concepts which I won’t try to explain – but try to think of the operation as a kind of best approximation to slicing up the space itself. Each slice is a bit of 2-D (2–dimensional) surface, and the sectional curvature is the Gaussian curvature of that 2-D surface. If we know all the sectional curvatures at a point, we know all about the curvature at that point.

Consider the unit vectors tangent to the manifold at a point (unit vectors in the tangent space). For each such unit vector in n dimensional space, there is an n-2 dimensional family of planes containing that unit vector. If we compute the average sectional curvature for all the planes containing the unit vector A, we get Ricci(A,A), the Ricci curvature in direction A. Since the Ricci tensor Ricci(A,B) is bilinear and symmetric, if we know Ricci(A,A) for all A, we can compute Ricci(A,B) for all A and B.

Needless to say, I have left out a lot. I haven't made clear the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature, and I haven't mentioned that you really need the full Riemann tensor in more than three dimensions. I'm counting on the mathematically literate among my readers to catch the more egregious errors.

Religious Threats

Many think that the threat of having Sharia imposed upon us by Muslims is serious enough that we must deal with it by expelling them, but let's remember that's not the only religious threat we face.

If the Episcopelians manage to get control of the country, we will all be forced to worship the Queen of England, or, if prediction may be ventured, even Prince Chuck.

Catholics are far worse. They worship a former Nazi who made his bones running the Inquisition - yes that Inquisition - and covering up clerical child abuse. On the positive side, if we ran them out of the country, we would lose some real loser Supreme Court Justices - not you Sylvia. On the negative, depending on how strictly affiliation was judged, my family and I might have to go back to Ireland, or somewhere.

How about Mormons? They are a native religion of America, to be sure. A few words on that subject: Glen Beck, Orin Hatch, and the White Horse prophecy.

If we let the Jews take over - the stuff they haven't already, I mean - and impose their religious laws, say goodby to cheese burgers and Rubens. Ditto the Hindus.

Of course if they throw the Jews out, there goes the rest of my family.

And let's not even mention Baptists and Evangelicals.

So what religions can America safely tolerate? Unitarians, I think, and maybe Buddhists.

Reality Vision

The Social Network is an excellent movie, but it shouldn't be mistaken for reality. Some who have investigated have found some major holes in the factual structure created by writer Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher's movie. Check for example Luke O'Brien or Nathan Heller in Slate. Heller, who lived a couple of rooms down from Zuckerberg when they were both freshmen, recognizes neither Zuckerberg nor Harvard in the movie:

I recognized their Harvard, but only from Love Story and The Paper Chase, not my experience.

Heller didn't like the movie, but I did and most critics seem to agree. Perhaps the real Harvard and real Zuckerberg are more compelling, or maybe not. The trouble is that a clearly biographical movie that gets a lot of facts wrong is a kind of crime against reality. I'm ambivalent about the result.

Of course maybe fellow Harvies like O'Brien and Heller need to defend their territory. Or maybe Zuckerberg or some other insider will write their version sometime.

State of the Nation

Paul Krugman tells us a lot about where we are today.

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”

True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

There's more. Read it.

A Good Word For Rick

Josh Marshall has a good word for Rick Sanchez.

Sanchez may have been all the things Stewart and friends called him, but he did, it seems, occasionally ask tough questions. Jon Stewart, on the other hand, famously tosses softballs even to guests he pillories when they aren't on stage.