Musings

...fire in the sky

In educating myself this spring about education, I was aghast to learn that American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains. – Nicholas D Kristof in the NYT

The IQ-metricians would have conniptions over this, because IQ is supposed to be largely genetically determined and fairly constant - hardly seasonally variable! I applaud anything that upsets IQ-metricians.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Much more, here

PS: Some more quotes which are shocking. Remember the spike in oil prices?

. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

Is America any kind of democracy anymore?

By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

{emphasis added; the US GDP is about $14 trillion.}

There is a good photograph in here somewhere, just have to figure it out. (In fact, looking at this at full size, suggests a telephoto landscape picture may be in order.)


Using crop-zoom (since I have a lot of pixels), maybe something like this?


Or maybe something like this?


Will have to think some more.

PS: I need a cow in the photograph as a point of interest, I think.

PPS: Here's something else:

Here only because of the color.

On slate.com, the bloviator Christopher Hitchens holds forth on Iran. Some of the actually meaningful stuff is here:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form.
....
[The author of the book makes the point]

In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ... [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.

Well, I have news for Hitchens. American citizens, when referring to the myth of the freedom of the press as it applies to the mainstream media, refer to their Uncle Colbert, and laugh at it. We are told it has had a salutary influence.

A reminder (transcript is here)


Key quote: "But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

The Egg Problem

Continuing some thoughts:

1. One might argue: since every splattered egg presumably arose from a whole pristine egg, there are exactly as many splattered egg states as there are whole pristine egg states. True, as long as the only degrees of freedom are egg parts; but in the splattering, information is lost in sound and heat and so on, and that is what causes the huge number of initial splattered egg states that do not evolve into whole pristine eggs compared to those that do.

2. There is the old problem - how likely is it that all the molecules of air will find themselves in the half of the room that you are not in and you are at risk of suffocation? Since a room may have 10^28 molecules, the probability is (1/2)^(10^28).

Suppose the probability of a splattered egg turning into a whole pristine egg is similar. That is, one part in 1,000,....(10^27 zeroes, roughly).
The age of the universe in seconds is 1,000,....(17 zeroes roughly).
The volume of the visible universe in cubic seconds is 1,000,... (85 zeroes,roughly).
Large as these numbers are, they are absolutely dwarfed by (the denominator in) the probability (1 followed by 10^27 zeroes). Even if each cubic centimeter of the universe tried to randomly assemble an egg once each second, it would still take essentially 10^27 universes to produce an egg.

Well, our universe found a more efficient way. Briefly, it has life processes running off the free energy gradient between stars and outer space. You can think of it as heat engines, if you like, that do work, in the ways Carnot sought to quantify. Our earth alone has produced a gazillion eggs, and our universe maybe a great many more. The thermodynamic sort of randomness is not the fastest way to get things done. Our existence means there are more powerful self-organizational principles at work. It may also be that these principles, while perhaps most strongly visible in the workings of matter on the atomic scale and above, have their analogs at all scales of the universe. Establishing that would be a more fundamental discovery, in my opinion, then the sterile multiverse.

Via Woit:

Sean Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he explained to the audience that “the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”

...“the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”

Since the microscopic laws of physics are (effectively) time-symmetric, all that I come up with is that there are far fewer initial conditions where splattered eggs unsplatter than where splattered eggs remain splattered. This is a fact independent of cosmology***. Whole pristine eggs do not arise from a process of unsplattering, other methods are far more probable.

I need to broaden the question - "explain a universe in which eggs and observers like myself can arise", before there is a mystery. It remains a mystery. But it is an even deeper philosophical mystery as to how postulating an infinite number of other universes so that the asymmetry in initial conditions can somehow be erased*** constitutes an explanation.

*** The fact that there are far fewer initial states that lead to splattered eggs unsplattering than initial states where splattered eggs remain splattered is simply a matter of counting and so remains true in each universe in the multiverse.

------

Believe it or not, Sean Carroll now has Feynman's old desk at Caltech!