There Is No Gravity

What the F Yo!?

2008-09-05T09:53:00.002-04:00

xkcd is a marvelously odd and clever comic strip. Today's is perhaps the strangest yet.
"Fuck it. I'm just going to Waffle House." After reading it, I found out that it was a parody of a book called House of Leaves. Never heard of the book, and don't really care to - but the comic still rocks.

Here is my all-time favorite:

"Don't you know? The chances of a random object being a scone are about one in six."

Keep on Truckin'

2008-08-05T14:16:00.004-04:00

Will Wilkinson is a libertarian economist, and sketches out a fairly compelling narrative of how we can save both the environment and humanity from going to utter shit in the future, as so many predict. Mostly he thinks we can just relax and keep on doing what we are doing - things will more or less fix themselves. Now, I am not quite as willing to just stop worrying and love the bomb as Will, but on the whole I think he's probably right. However, I think we need to do some serious work on what I see as the key element of his approach:

b) a well-functioning price system will shift energy consumption to (cleaner) alternative energy sources as prices for historical extracted sources of energy rise;

You guessed it - carbon tax!

On some level I think maybe I just hope this is right, because I don't really see any viable alternatives. Tyler Cowan, however, finds that the logical extension of this thesis to create a few problems of its own.

UPDATE:
Free Exchange finds Mr. Wilkinson's arguments a bit lacking. Mostly they lampoon him for assuming that we do actually have "a well-functioning price system" (this would be a price system in which the negative externalities of energy production, such as CO2-caused climate change, are properly accounted for). What I took away from Will's thesis, however, is that we NEED TO IMPLEMENT a price system such a carbon tax, in order to move forward.

At least one bad idea of Obama's...

2008-08-04T15:01:00.002-04:00

A "windfall profits tax" on oil companies. Bad for a number of reasons, summed up by Megan McArdle (who else!). Besides the fact that consumers are likely to pay for almost the entirety of the tax, it has very broadly negative implications for the entire economy:

And the implications of any "windfall profits tax" are troubling for future growth. If you want an economy that continues to innovate and expand, it is not wise to send a signal to companies that they will be punished for doing too well. Very rarely, after all, do we offer special "windfall losses" tax rebates, where companies that do particularly badly get extra tax loss abatements. Thus, any windfall profits tax functions as a profit on risk-taking. And risk-taking is what the American economy does very, very well. Note that this effect will endure, economy-wide, even if in this particular case the oil companies are able to jam the taxes down onto consumers.

Having stable long-term incentives is very important.

Too Ridiculous for Words

2008-06-13T15:02:00.002-04:00

Oh dear.

You Will Never Think of Hillary Clinton the Same Again

2008-05-02T01:21:00.003-04:00

Once you realize that she is Eric Cartman.

Pornographic?

2008-04-24T11:18:00.001-04:00

This is a ridiculously hilarious image.

McCain's Uphill Fight

2008-04-24T11:13:00.002-04:00

Ross Douthat from the Atlantic wrote an insightful, and to me heartening, account of why McCain will have such a tough time come November:

[McCain's] right-wing critics are making nice with him, his favorable ratings are sky-high, and his opponents are too busy driving each other's negative ratings upward to spend any time (or money, more importantly) putting a dent in his halo. Moreoever, the Democrats' intra-party tensions are bound to diminish once the party picks a nominee: At least some of the Hillary supporters who tell pollsters that they'd vote for McCain over Obama may actually follow through on that pledge, but a lot of today's McCainocrats will come home to the Democratic fold when all is said and done.
Yet even with all this going for him, McCain's poll numbers are bumping up against the same 45 percent ceiling that they've been hitting since December. If the election were held today - a pretty good day for McCain, all things considered - he'd probably lose to Obama, and might lose to Clinton as well. That doesn't mean he will lose, by any stretch, but it certainly doesn't bode well for November.

Guess Who Said This Quote

2008-04-24T11:07:00.001-04:00

Mr Obama is a more skilful politician than most of his predecessors. Mrs Clinton's “We're not bitter” populism is already beginning to grate (when she told a crowd in Pittsburgh that she found his comments condescending, there were loud cries of “No”). And polls suggest that people are much more interested in addressing issues such as economic insecurity and inequality than refighting old battles against the liberal elites. Perhaps this election is not just about who wins the White House, but about whether an entire political era is drawing to a close.

Of course, it's Andrew Sullivan. Wrong. None other than The Economist's Lexington columnist. It's heartening to see that those not in a pro-Obama bubble are seeing the same thing.

People Power

2008-04-21T17:46:00.002-04:00

It's stories like this that give me hope for the world:

South African port and truck workers are refusing to move weapons from a ship that docked in the country on its way to Zimbabwe

Quote For The Day

2008-04-21T14:28:00.000-04:00

Fittingly enough, from Andrew Sullivan:

You know a campaign has gone on too long when Michael Moore starts to make sense.

Income Inequality

2008-04-21T13:56:00.003-04:00

I think this is a really great post about the causes of income inequality in America from Free Exchange

But inequality would have grown anyway for two important reasons. First, through the 1970s and 1980s, technology shifts substantially increased the return to human capital, boosting incomes for college graduates and placing strong downward pressure on middle-income clerical positions. Second, since the 1980s, educational attainment numbers have behaved oddly. More Americans than ever are attending college and getting degrees, but more Americans than ever are also dropping out of high school, despite the large return to education.

So the problem is that education is more important than ever, but fewer people are getting a decent education. It also talks a bit about why many favorite boogey-men (e.g. immigration, trade) just can't be the full answer.

Perspective

2008-04-17T10:29:00.002-04:00

One of Matt Ygglesias' pet peeves seems to be people broadening the politically charged term "middle class" to include those who are actually quite wealthy. I certainly agree with him that some perspective is needed:

I'd forgotten that for months now Charlie Gibson has been asserting that $200,000 is a solid middle-class income, blissfully unaware that just 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more. You could be richer than 96 percent of your fellow citizens, but still just folks to Gibson. Obviously that's not on a par with being bad at bowling or anything on the "out of touch" scale, but it's still disappointing to learn that even our salt of the earth working class multimillionaire television news personalities aren't utterly infallible.

I'm glad it's not just me

2008-04-17T08:22:00.002-04:00

I was worried that I have been having my perspective skewed by reading too much Andrew Sullivan, but I think that rant from one of the (anonymous) normally very temperate, uncommitted bloggers at the Economist:

I’m not exactly sure when it happened, but my will has been broken. I’ve realised that covering Mrs Clinton's campaign without explicitly stating that it has turned into a win-at-all-costs operation fueled by phony outrage, hypocritical proclamations and absurd notions of who is electable and who is not is an exercise in deliberate deception, and I can't do that. Perhaps I am weaker than my colleagues, but a certain fatigue sets in when trying to sort through it all. Mrs Clinton does have substance, and some well-thought-out policy prescriptions, but did you know Barack Obama is an elitist? Never mind that the Clintons largely agree with what Mr Obama said, or meant to say.

The rest here.

Approximating Intelligence

2008-04-07T15:46:00.002-04:00

So I sometimes read a rather interesting blog by a statistician, William M. Briggs, who works on critiquing global warming science through statistical analysis. He's certainly interesting, and I have learned quite a bit from him, but I think he has a tendency to over-analyze things and relies a bit to much on quantitative analysis. Sort of can't see the forest but for the trees. Good science is rarely as exact or as statistically rigorous as people seem to think.

Anyway, in a response to one of his posts, I left the comment below, which I think is an important point to keep in mind.

The passage to which is was responding was:

I’ll write about these topics in more depth later, but briefly: people weight heavily the fact that many different climate models are in agreement in closely simulating past observations. There are two main, and very simple problems with this evidence, which I could have, at the time, done a better job pointing out. For example, I could have asked this question: why are there any differences between climate models? The point being that eight climate models agreeing is not eight independent pieces of evidence. All of these models, for instance, use the same equations of motion. We should be surprised that there are any differences between them.

The second problem I did point out, but I do not think I was convincing. So far, climate models over-predict independent data: that is, they all forecast higher temperatures than are actually observed. This is for data that was not used to fit the models. This means, this can only mean, that the climate models are wrong. They might not be very wrong, but they are wrong just the same. So we should be asking: why are they wrong?

And my response:

I am astrophysics PhD student who runs numerical simulations studying galaxy dynamics. While I have absolutely no direct experience working on climate models, nor do I have any but the faintest idea of the inputs or physics that goes into them, I am quite familiar with the similar numerical modeling techniques that are used in astrophysics calculations. I would like to very briefly address your question of “why are there any differences between climate models?”

The systems I study are actually much simpler than any climate system. I model the mass of galaxies as a simple N-body, collisionless, self-gravitating fluid of point masses- which means that the only relevant physics involved are Newton’s laws that we all learned in high school. Yet different gravitational codes yield slightly different answers. The reason is that there is no analytic solution to the gravitational N-body problem - there are only numerical approximations.

So each code has to make different assumptions on how to best approximate the result. There is the additional constraint that the time it takes to actually perform the calculations on current computers has to be reasonably small (hopefully, less than the time it takes to earn a PhD!). In order to decrease the computational expense, more approximations are used. Obviously, different approximation methods will yield slightly different answers, but all should yield approximately the same result. Since we can’t measure our approximations against the “true” answer (such an answer does not exist), comparing different techniques to make sure they give similar results is the best method we have for checking our codes.

Keep in mind that the system I have described is an extraordinarily simple system. Climate models have many more layers of complexity - and thus approximations - to deal with. Again, there is no “true” answer against which to compare the results of simulations.

So, let me be clear about the very narrow point I am trying to make. You are certainly correct that results from different codes are not necessarily independent pieces of evidence. It is also worrying that the codes are not fitting independent data. Asking why the models disagree with the data and trying to improve them is of paramount importance. However, simply asserting that “the climate models are wrong” seems to me to be missing the point. It does matter how wrong the models are because all we have are approximations and there is no a priori method of determining how good those approximations are. So, the best we can do is make lots of different models using different assumptions and hope they give reasonably similar answers. “Reasonably similar” may not seem quantitatively satisfactory, but it’s the only way we have to do science.

Fair-Minded Words

2008-03-13T08:23:00.002-04:00

This guy just keeps getting classier. Even on abortion, often one of the most divisive and absolutist issues in politics, Obama knows how to hold the center ground and be respectful of those with other opinions. I think his most important attribute is that he just is not looking to pick a fight, unlike almost every other politician in America.

And that night, before I went to bed I said a prayer of my own. It's a prayer I think I share with a lot of Americans. A hope that we can live with one another in a way that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all. It's a prayer worth praying, and a conversation worth having in this country in the months and years to come. Thank you.

We can't trust the government with our money...

2008-03-11T11:19:00.002-04:00

But we can trust them with our lives, safety, security, and privacy? This glaring contradiction is something that has always bothered me when libertarian anti-tax, anti-government conservatives are willing to give the government almost unlimited power to spy on and torture its own citizens. Even if these measures are potentially useful (which I doubt) why should we simply trust our government to employ them responsibly without any oversight?

My New Favorite Blog

2008-03-02T01:20:00.004-05:00

I suppose it's rooted in the self-aggrandizement inherent in being white. After all, there is nothing we love more than ourselves.

Obama and Gay Rights

2008-02-29T21:56:00.003-05:00

This was an important issue about which I did not yet have a satisfactory answer. It's just about the most progressive message I have ever heard from any national politician.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan makes his case that Obama is absolutely the best choice on this issue.

This One Goes Out To Meredith and Sam

2008-02-29T14:37:00.001-05:00

Does this campaign seem familiar to anyone?

In Case You Ever Need an Excuse to Puke: Vegetarian Edition

2008-02-26T09:47:00.004-05:00

Yummy.

Con Chavez Todo

2008-02-25T20:34:00.002-05:00

This is an extremely well-written, even-handed, and nuanced account of Hugo Chavez's politics in Venezuela. It describes:

the often high-stakes and always high-decibel struggle that has raged for years between Chávez's supporters and his critics, with each side fully convinced that it is protecting Venezuelan democracy from the other. Unfortunately, the substance of their competing claims has been largely drowned out by polemics that reduce the country's complex political dynamics to a single question: is Chávez a dictator or a democrat?

This does seem to be a very difficult question. On the whole I probably lean toward dictator - the real test will come when the people try to vote him out of power, and my guess is he will not go gracefully - but I certainly had failed to understand some of his accomplishments.

I found this from Matt Yglesias's blog.

Brecksville Reservation

2008-02-24T10:27:00.003-05:00

Melissa has been letting me use her old Rebel, so I am starting to learn how to use it and trying to take decent pictures. This is my first hike with the camera, and I think I got a few good pics.

and now... It's The Arts

2008-02-23T09:19:00.003-05:00

In this quite unexpected but amusing article, the Economist opines:

Staggering, awe-inspiring deficiency [in the arts] perhaps deserves even greater recognition than the handful of prizes doled out today. It is the vital second front in the battle against creative mediocrity.

They've got a point. I have found that in most of my abortive artistic endeavors, I have never really had the talent necessary to be worse than mediocre.

On the subject of art

2008-02-20T21:41:00.002-05:00

I just haven't been able to get this image out of my head for the last week or two. From Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish.

Freaking Amazing

2008-02-20T21:24:00.003-05:00

More here. Again, from Patrick Appel at the Daily Dish.

That's all I have to say about that

2008-02-20T20:55:00.002-05:00

Got this from Patrick Appel, who is doing a great job standing in on Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Deadly Seriousness meets Utter Ridiculousness

2008-02-19T12:21:00.001-05:00

Flags.

I would, however, like to mention that I fully support the right of Kosovo to secede, as I support the right of all people everywhere to their absolutely fundamental right of self-determination. This is a topic on which I could rant for quite some time, but I will defer that for another time.

The Laffer Curve

2008-02-19T12:07:00.003-05:00

Tax cuts do NOT pay for themselves. It is entirely possible that they are a good idea anyway, but not because they raise tax revenues.

Besides, I always thought this argument was a bit odd since one of the objectives of conservatives is to reduce the size of the government - that smaller government in and of itself is a good thing. So why would we want to raise more tax revenue to expand the government?

No Free Lunch

2008-02-16T18:40:00.001-05:00

It seems that low-calorie sweeteners just might be too good to be true.

Torture

2008-02-15T14:40:00.005-05:00

Andrew Sullivan has been posting quite eloquently about torture lately, very strongly making the case that it is absolutely and utterly abhorrent under any circumstances.

When you hear a banal phrase like "stress position", and hear people dismiss it, remember that everything is in the doing. And when human beings are given total control over others, they are capable of great evil. Sane and civilized societies do not give permission for such things. And they do not make excuses for them. And when they discover they have been done, they investigate and prosecute those who broke the law.

A couple more for good measure.

It's a shame about John McCain - his opposition to torture was one of his greatest virtues.

All Rolled Into One

2008-02-11T18:26:00.001-05:00

This post (by who else but Megan McArdle) has a little of everything:

A tax, on the other hand, makes people better off by letting consumers choose whether they want to use more efficient bulbs; turn on fewer lights; or to cut their carbon consumption somewhere else. But efficiency regulations are easier to pass because the non-cash costs are invisible

I do not pretend that Obama is perfect, but he is much less likely to favor increasing regulatory authority; his solutions tend to focus on transparency and simple rule changes rather than massive new apparatuses for extending state power.

Hitting the Nail on the Head

2008-01-29T12:36:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan is a vocal, passionate, and intelligent supporter of Barack Obama. And I think this is exactly the reason, more than any other. It's not just the brilliant rhetoric, the appeal of post-racial politics, or even his detailed policy proposals - although I like all of these things about him. The man's philosophy of government is as brilliant as it is rare.

In politics, detailed policy positions certainly do matter. But style, instincts, integrity, and philosophy matter a great deal as well. These are the areas where Hillary Clinton patently fails, and where Obama succeeds - or at least has a chance of succeeding - in a way that few politicians ever have. I'd also point out that I think that none of the Republican candidates come anywhere near the mark on these fronts either.

This One Is For Melissa

2008-01-24T08:37:00.000-05:00

Megan McArdle posts twice on the ridiculous aggression that sometimes occurs between meat-eaters get around vegetarians/vegans. Shit is whack yo.

Muhammed is His prophet

2008-01-16T19:46:00.000-05:00

This is a great piece in the Atlantic from a few years ago about the Koran and it's textual history.

Words do matter

2008-01-05T22:23:00.000-05:00

Which is why I am voting for Obama.

Obamamania!

2008-01-05T00:30:00.000-05:00

Obama is my choice for President. Both because of his general centrist, non-confrontational, hopeful, consensus rhetoric, but also because of many of the details of his policies.

As far as I am concerned, no one makes the case for Obama better than Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic. This long feature essay brilliantly expounds the reasons why Obama has the chance to change American politics like no one in a generation. These two blog posts from Iowa caucus night are great little feel-good pieces that can't help but get you inspired. In a lot of ways, the fact that Obama even has a chance makes me love America. He's got lots of other good stuff, besides just the posts I linked to.

I have seen a lot of different analyses of the details of who voted for whom and why that matters, and turnout and whatnot but here is probably the most succinct, important version - and it looks great for Democrats!

OBAMA!

The Best Paragraph She's Read All Year

2008-01-04T21:34:00.000-05:00

That is how Megan McArdle describes this bit from Tyler Cowen. Two of my favorite very smart people.

The paragraph in question is extremely elucidating. I am not entirely sure I understand exactly the reasoning behind the first points about lowering costs - I'd like to see the evidence for these. But the final sentence is brilliantly succinct.

[A single-payer health care system] would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off.

As in most things, reasonable people can disagree on which is the preferable alternative, but all should concede that this fundamental tradeoff exists.

The rest of Tyler's paragraphs are well worth reading as well.

Self-Molestation for Science

2007-12-19T23:08:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting post on Free Exchange. It's written quite abstractly, and I don't think it's a particularly eloquent statement of the point it is getting at, but it's thought-provoking nonetheless.

So the post itself discusses some of the cultural biases inherent in interpreting economic theory.
It discusses an example where economics theorists were dissatisfied with the conclusions of on branch of economics theory, and so chose to rely instead on another. It argues, quite correctly, that this choice to change theoretical frameworks is a situation where the economist in question has to make a fundamentally biased choice - there is no definitively correct answer.

However, I was disappointed to see that the author did not make what I thought was the obvious leap to broaden the discussion to science in general, because this is what all scientists in all fields are forced to do every day. The very fact that we don't know everything (and thus have jobs!) implies that there is no definitely correct theoretical framework, and that each scientist much make biased choices about the framework in which he operates. The point the author is trying to make, I believe, is that while not quite as simple and clear-cut as many people think science is supposed to be, it actually is - or at least can be - a good thing. The essence of good science is good judgment. While we can certainly look at the existing evidence to help us determine the most likely theoretical framework, and we can change our minds as more evidence becomes available, scientists are forced to make a number of choices about what they personally think is the most likely scenario in the face of imperfect evidence. But if we didn't have to make such choices, we could not progress. It is important that there always be competing ideas - the trick is to design the institutions of science so that over time it becomes clear which is the correct idea, and for scientists to be ready and able to switch their thinking. I suppose this is what the dramatically inclined might refer to as a paradigm shift.

Anyway, science is a fundamentally human endeavor. We come to the knowledge of truth about the universe through the efforts of people - often petty, jealous, obstinate, greedy people. Papers are published not simply to righteously expound upon newly discovered truth, but to further careers, impress funding agencies, stroke egos, and all sorts of other selfish, undignified reasons. But still, this ugly process does serve the point for which it is intended - to uncover truth. The point the blog post comes so close to making well, is that in the same way that market economics turns the greedy, selfish profit motive into a public good - namely the creation and distribution of wealth - the institutions of science are able to turn the distinctly human motivations of scientists into a useful, successful quest for knowledge.

Tack on another six months

2007-12-19T08:08:00.001-05:00

Megan McArdle obviously does not want me to graduate.

Drawing Correct Conclusions

2007-12-14T22:17:00.000-05:00

I suppose that this officially makes me the biggest nerd on Earth, but I just found a link to free economics textbook on my favorite blog, Free Exchange from The Economist. I started reading it tonight, and my intent is to try to read it pretty much cover to cover.

Subprime Reporting

2007-12-12T17:57:00.000-05:00

By this point, I am sure everyone has heard of the "Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis" and how stupid pundits are screaming about the end of the world. Well, as usual, it ain't.

If you are anything like me, you've been seeing this story floating around for months now, and kept a vague interest in it because it seems kind of important and interesting, but have been utterly frustrated by the fact that most of the coverage barely even attempts to actually explain what is going on. Reporters constantly mention things like "Collateralized-Debt Obligations (CDO's)" and then briefly mutter something about this being an obscure, complicated financial instrument. I have even found this to be the case in my favorite magazine, The Economist (although I found this an interesting article on risk-assessment), which as its name suggests has much better business, finance, and economics coverage than almost any other major news outlet.

So, imagine my excitement when I found this brilliant little interactive feature linked from Matthew Yglesias' blog that will give you a pretty good idea of what a CDO is in about 2 minutes. Then, based on the comments from that blog post, I read this very interesting article which does a much more thorough explanation (it's long and not for the faint-of-heart, but I dig this shit).

The summary, as best I understand it, goes something like this: First, banks loan out a crapload of mortgages. Then, they bundle them together to sell to someone else. However, they divide the sale up into "tranches" where the highest tranches pay out first and have the lowest risk, and the lowest tranches pay out only if the higher tranches pay out, and so have a higher risk. That all makes perfect sense and is not where the trouble lies. The problem is that no one wanted to buy the lowest tranches - so these then got bundled together and re-tranched - this re-tranching is what makes a CDO. So again, the highest CDO tranches pay out first and were thought to be low risk, and all the risk was thought to lay in the lowest tranches. But since the CDO is composed entirely of high-risk assets, even the highest tranches of the CDO are pretty risky. But apparently, no one figure that out until now. So banks and others are holding onto these highest CDO tranches, having been told that they are low-risk, but since all they are composed entirely of high-risk assets that are not paying out, they now are not worth shit and people are losing a shit-ton of money. Since most of the CDO's not paying out are based on 'sub-prime mortgages', we have the infamous 'Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis'.

H-E-Double Hockey Sticks!

2007-12-11T10:19:00.002-05:00

I certainly have serious disagreements The Weekly Standard, especially their 'war can fix all problems' mentality, but sometimes they can be quite smart and funny. Check out this hilarious parody of Mitt Romney's religion speech.

I should mention that I found links to both this and the article I posted yesterday from Matthew Yglesias' blog.

You Can't Beat the Market!

2007-12-10T21:07:00.001-05:00

Most of my blog posts are going to simply be me linking to really interesting things I read on the web. Here's first, from Portfolio Magazine.

It's a profile piece about a stock broker who realized that his entire profession is a giant exercise in peddling bullshit. Basically, his job was to take people's money and make them feel good about it.

What, at least to me, is more interesting is the idea behind why stockbrokers are full of shit - the efficient market hypothesis. Basically, you can't beat the market. Nobody can. If you could, so could everyone else, in which case they would. But everybody can't beat the market... because everybody IS the market. So therefore nobody can beat the market. Pretty slick, eh?

UPDATE: It seems my favorite blogger, Megan McArdle, took note of the article - several times!