Musings

A letter of note

2012-01-31T16:59:00.000-05:00

From a former slave to his former master. Read through and enjoy the grim humor.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Lies!

2012-01-30T22:29:00.000-05:00

“They are awful,” she said. “Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lost him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.”....Brewer’s father had in fact died of lung disease in California in 1955, a decade after WWII ended.

2. Claremont McKenna College

Claremont McKenna College, a small, prestigious California school, said Monday that for the past six years, it has submitted false SAT scores to publications like U.S. News & World Report that use the data in widely followed college rankings.

3. Former Yale football coach Tom Williams

...Tom Williams, had invented parts of his résumé, including a supposed Rhodes candidacy that he had dropped two decades earlier in favor of a chance at a professional football career ...

Finnair goes Bollywood!

2012-01-30T19:09:00.000-05:00

(Via S.M.) Finnair surprised passengers with a Bollywood number:

Better than any Hedge Fund!

2012-01-28T08:55:00.000-05:00

A stint in the Senate produces better returns than any hedge fund.
Mitch McConnell (R-Ky)
2004: Net Worth: From $1,734,029 to $4,410,999
Rank: 41st in Senate

2010: Net Worth: From $9,839,049 to $44,587,000
Rank: 10th in Senate

Some Money is Greener than Others

2012-01-28T08:31:00.001-05:00

Over on CIP's blog, Cynthia points out:

Our tax code is custom made for wealthy people. Earned income vs. investment income is the crux of the issue. Consider a bright middle class kid whose family scrimps and saves all their after tax income to give the kid a good education. Then the kid goes on to benefit society, maybe a doctor, teacher, scientist, etc. The investment made by his family in his education is taxed at earned income rates: fed income, state tax, local tax, payroll tax. The kid pays 40-50% when all is totaled up, for benefiting society.

Then, take a rich kid who drinks his way through school, his family realizes he’s a loser, so they buy him some Brazilian government bonds paying 10% interest, maybe with money that’s never been taxed in a trust or an offshore account, and he leads the idle rich lifestyle of tennis, golf and vacationing year round. His income is taxed at 15%.

So I guess our system favors loafers over people who benefit society.

(via dailykos) Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post:

“The issue I think that’s going to play out this election is that question of Warren Buffett’s secretary,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said Wednesday on CNN. “We want her to make more money, we want her to have more hope for the future. . . . [But] this notion that somehow the income that Warren Buffett makes is the same as a wage income for his secretary, we know that’s not the same.”

In other words, it’s not just that the rich are better than the rest of us but also that their money is better than our money.

PS: http://www.politicususa.com/en/elizabeth-warren-mitt-romney

Lawrence O’Donnell asked Elizabeth Warren about Scott Brown’s statement that Mitt Romney is in an income category that people don’t understand. O’Donnell asked Warren if she understood Romney’s income category, and she answered, “Yeah, actually, I think I do understand it, and that is that Mitt Romney pays fourteen percent of income in taxes, and people who get out there and work for a living pay twenty five, twenty eight, thirty, thirty three percent. I get it. Mitt Romney gets a better deal than any of the rest of us, because he manages to earn his income in a way that has been specially protected for rich folks. I think that’s wrong.”

Japanese Snow Song

2012-01-27T20:30:00.001-05:00

This Japanese song about the snow seems to be very popular in schools from the US to Macedonia. (Thanks to A for telling me about it.)

USA

Macedonia

Food for thought

2012-01-25T19:58:00.002-05:00

Just how many digital crumbs should you leave for a Google to follow?
Sara Marie Watson in The Atlantic.

Bradley Horowitz, Google's Vice President of Product for Google+:
Until now, every single Google property acted like a separate company. Due to the way we grew, through various acquisitions and the fierce independence of each division within Google, each product sort of veered off in its own direction. That was dizzying. But Google+ is Google itself. We're extending it across all that we do -- search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube -- so that each of those services contributes to our understanding of who you are.

Sara Marie Watson writes:

“To me, the result of this consolidation that gives me cause for concern is the fundamental integration of my entire digital life. When you start pulling together email data with browser data, that really begins to paint a near-complete picture of a life lived on the internet. It's not just search terms, not just circles of friends. It's every last digital scrap of me.”

Industrial Ecology

2012-01-24T19:42:00.000-05:00

A free market can fail to maintain the ecology needed for a manufacturing firm to thrive. At least, that is what I understand from this.

Krugman: Manufacturing firms often stand or fall not just on their own merits, but because they do or don’t have a surrounding cluster of related firms that are suppliers or customers, provide a ready pool of suitable labor, and so on.

Vintage Glenn Greenwald

2012-01-23T08:45:00.000-05:00

The scary thing is that he is right!

"The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole."

Epicurious Cake

2012-01-22T20:04:00.000-05:00

Recipe for Pineapple Upside Down Cake adapted from Epicurious.

If you're tempted to try, read the comments on Epicurious first. It certainly baked in less time than advertised.

Just out of the oven, and before turning it upside down:

The final product:

Shri Dakshinamurti

2012-01-22T11:54:00.000-05:00

@Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, Saylorburg, PA.

Sky at 600mm

2012-01-21T17:28:00.000-05:00

300mm + x2

I think this is Jupiter.

And this certainly is the Moon.

Nutcases are everywhere

2012-01-21T14:17:00.003-05:00

Will the Secret Service arrest this guy? Send him to Gitmo? Or is that reserved for Musalmans only?

Haaretz

NEW YORK - The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

PS: My great sympathy for Israel from my younger years has been slowly eroding, and lately, much more rapidly. If Israel drags us willy-nilly into a war against Iran, then I too will start viewing Israel as a dangerous threat to world peace that must be defanged, and if that can't be done, then it needs to be abolished - become a UN protectorate or something, but it must lose its sovereignty. I don't think any Islamist government, even a nuclear Iran, presents such a threat to world peace.

PPS: Chemi Shalev spells out the damage.

Strange Planet

2012-01-21T11:59:00.002-05:00

Our wondrous universe. (Discover magazine blogs).

How not to feed your kids in Norway

2012-01-21T09:51:00.000-05:00

I had had a better impression of Norway than this.

SOPA and PIP

2012-01-18T11:18:00.003-05:00

Google today:

Many websites today are engaging in an awareness campaign about two pieces of pending U.S. anti-piracy legislation -- SOPA (The Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (The Protect IP Act). The problem with these acts is that if this legislation passes, the primary requirement on the World Wide Web will be censorship-compliance.

Read more here.

See Daily Kos, too.

PS: Read Glenn Greenwald, too, the corruption of America's political class is on clear display.

PPS: Just how bad SOPA is:

The provision in question would force search engines, advertisers, banking and financial firms and even Internet service providers to de-list websites accused - not proven, but simply accused - of copyright infringement. The provision even includes language that would allow the Justice Department to force ISPs to falsify DNS records so as to prevent users from being able to even locate a suspect site. That's bad... particularly for Internet users who are completely uninitiated. But for the rest of us who aren't members of Congress, two brilliant Firefox add-ons provide ingenious workarounds.

Nalanda

2012-01-17T19:10:00.000-05:00

Dailykos story on the ancient university at Nalanda.

Hergé : Tintin in America - 1931-32

2012-01-17T19:05:00.000-05:00

Commentary by Hergé on the US of A, around 1931-32, beneath the fold.

India's crisis of malnutrition

2012-01-15T09:52:00.002-05:00

Shankkar Aiyar.

There is more shame. With four of 10 children under-5 underweight, India does worse than much maligned sub-Saharan Africa where only 22 per cent of the kids are underweight. India also has a higher proportion of children under five who are underweight, who suffer from wasting and who are stunted due to malnourishment, than in the dark region of Africa. And this has been the case for some time now. Consider the names of some of the countries (UNICEF data) who score better than India: Albania, Algeria, Bhutan, Cameroon, China (if you thought this was about scale), Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and even Myanmar!

The co-relation between poverty, malnourishment, primary school enrolment and school drop-outs had been recognised way back in the seventies. It was also very clear as early as in the eighties that state intervention in the form of income and food support was critical. Soon after MGR introduced the mid-day meals scheme for school children in 1982, it was clear (and later certified by the World Bank) that the intervention helped curb malnutrition and encouraged enrolment. Indeed, the first calls for a national scheme came up at the meeting of the National Development Council in 1985. And Manmohan Singh would remember this because he was then the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and Rajiv Gandhi the chairman. Yet it took till 1995 for the Centre to announce a national scheme and another 10 years for the scheme to be universalised finally in 2004 for all students. And that also happened only after the intervention of the Supreme Court.

Mind you, this is not about spending or resources. Countries with lesser resources, but a more committed bureaucracy have done it. And as early as in the eighties, the World Bank and UNICEF had concluded that it cost less than $10 per child per year to address malnutrition. Consider the arithmetic of costs for required intervention. Assuming India has currently 160 million children in the 0-6 age group, what would it cost to feed all of them? Do the math and think. Is the cost beyond the capacity of a trillion-dollar economy?

Catching on to the scam

2012-01-14T01:35:00.001-05:00

Concluding a very negative review of a horrid Turkish play, running in the "Under the Radar" international festival in New York, Claudia La Rocco notes:

According to Under the Radar’s Web site, the play “was only performed once in Istanbul, due to protests by a fundamentalist newspaper.” It’s interesting to note just how often such tales of suppression are used in marketing materials at international festivals, as if they were badges of honor. (This work was too controversial for its narrow-minded native land, but you, sophisticated audience member, can support censored art!)

Veggies!

2012-01-11T20:16:00.001-05:00

Sis. has a sort-of-theory about the unhinged nature of Pakistani public life - "they do not eat enough veggies".

Today, about the American Midwest, A. G. Sulzberger writes of his difficult experience of being vegetarian there (NYTimes)

Even though the region boasts some of the finest farmland in the world, there is a startling lack of fresh produce here. This is a part of the country — and there’s no polite way to put this — where the most common vegetable you’ll see on dinner plates is iceberg lettuce.

So those worrying about "What's Wrong with Kansas?" have their answer :)

----
In another NYTimes article, Mark Bittman notes that Americans are eating much less meat.

The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.

and notes:

We still eat way more meat than is good for us or the environment, not to mention the animals. But a 12 percent reduction in just five years is significant, and if that decline were to continue for the next five years — well, that’s something few would have imagined five years ago. It’s something only the industry could get upset about. The rest of us should celebrate. Rice and beans, anyone?

All I can say is - three cheers!

Anything is better than Fox News

2012-01-09T23:04:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Levine,a lecturer in American studies and English at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has an Op-Ed in today's New York Times in which he advises unemployed or underemployed Americans to find a career in China. He talks about how he finds life in China, and among other things has this to say:

There are problems here, of course. China is a nation that unapologetically rejects Western democracy — and yet I am surprised to find that Chinese citizens and the news media have as much freedom as they do. For my money, CCTV News English, a channel offered by China’s major state television broadcaster, is more fair and balanced than Fox News.

Tintin - the movie

2012-01-07T19:15:00.003-05:00

Tintin the movie is true to Tintin the comic. Steven Spielberg has done a great job. Tintin fans, enjoy!

What IQ Tests Test

2012-01-05T20:40:00.000-05:00

This paper (PDF) by Ken Richardson is worth a read.

My favorite passage:

The IQ test is predicated on a simple biometric model of intelligence. Although essentially uncharacterized, the model assumes a domain-general computational function with population variance arising in simple parameters like ‘capacity’, ‘speed’ and ‘efficiency’ (Jensen, 1998). Likewise, problem-solving ability across individuals varies with those parameters irrespective of the problems’ history and current context.

However, alternative theorists, from Binet (see Zenderland, 1998) to contemporary developmentalists, have maintained the need for more ‘psychological’ models of cognition. These include recent ‘ecological’ (e.g. Wozniak & Fischer, 1993) and sociohistorical perspectives (e.g. Cole, Engestro ̈m, & Vasquez 1997; Richardson, 1998; Wertsch, del Río & Álvarez, 1995). In these perspectives, advanced cognitive systems evolved for coping with highly changeable, unpredictable circumstances, especially those that arise—or, indeed, are created—in social contexts (Donald, 1991). These are not dealt with by stereotyped computational mechanisms but by distilling the abstract informational structure (i.e. knowledge) peculiar to each problem domain. Such representations can then be used as ‘psychological tools’ to generate processes unique to the problem, but informed by that knowledge structure. Intelligent performances are thus based on an interaction between the ‘structure’ of the current problem and developed representations (i.e. knowledge), rather than stereotyped ‘reasoning processes’ that merely vary in speed or efficiency.

An important aspect of this perspective is that the complexity of structure of problems is vastly amplified in humans by being embedded in socially cooperative activities (Donald, 1991). In general, these are organized and regulated by socially evolved ‘cultural tools’. Cultural tools include historically evolved patterns of co-action; the informal and institutionalized rules and procedures governing them; the shared conceptual representations underlying them; styles of speech and other forms of communication; administrative, management and accounting tools; specific hardware and technological tools; as well as ideologies, belief systems, social values, and so on (Vygotsky, 1988).

In sum, cultural tools prevail as the very means of human existence in any society. In sociohistorical theory, the forms of these cultural tools become internalized in individuals as the dominant ‘psychological tools’ (Vygotsky, 1988). Culture is thus more than mere clothing on human cognition, and forms of intelligence are more than something merely ‘valued’ by a culture, as both Gardner (1983) and Sternberg (e.g. 1999) suggest. Rather, culture is constitutive of its form and function—the ‘technologies of the intellect’, as Olson (1986) calls them. As Cole put it, ‘The structure of thought depends upon the structure of the dominant types of activity in different cultures’ (quoted by Luria, 1976, pp. xiv–xv). In addition, culture incorporates an already self-variegating, adaptable, cognitive system into a further system of variegation. In consequence, sociocognitive variation is both fundamentally different from, and vastly greater than, variation in a simple quantitative trait (and for very good evolutionary reasons). Generally speaking, this means that intelligence differentiates both ‘horizontally’ and ‘vertically’: horizontally, in variegating qualitatively, like languages or the products of the immune system; vertically, in the sense of degree of developed acquisition of specific cultural tools.

The IQ test collapses this rich and complex variegation in human cognition into a single scale as follows. In societies organized through hierarchical divisions of labour, different social classes will (by definition) utilize the different ‘cultural tools’ of society to different extents. Parents will thus vary in the degree to which they are cognitively enfranchised in the use of different cultural tools, so that their children will be prepared for acquiring them to varying degrees (and with different degrees of importance and emphasis—see below). Yet IQ tests, the items of which are designed by members of a rather narrow social class, will tend to test for the acquisition of a rather particular set of cultural tools: in effect, to test, or screen, for individuals’ psychological proximity to that set per se, regardless of intellectual complexity or superiority as such.

I must say that this comes a close second:

"The assertion that IQ measures human intelligence in any general sense, or that the source of variance in IQ scores is primarily cognitive in nature, remains unsubstantiated after decades of investigation. The hypothetical ‘general ability’, or g, remains as inscrutable as the ‘vital forces’ once thought to distinguish living from non-living things."

TEDx talk by Michael Wall

2012-01-04T22:35:00.000-05:00

TEDxHONOLULU - Michael Wall - Groovin' Together: Adventures in Interactive Creativity

One reason why this talk is featured here is because it uses (towards the end of the second minute) a picture from this blog.

Three legs of the stool - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

2012-01-01T23:54:00.000-05:00

Consider this to be a continuing reply to libertarians:

During the Indian Constitutional Debates, B.R. Ambedkar said something like this (this source contains obvious typos)

The third thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life. These principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are not to be treated as separate items in a trinity. They form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy. Liberty cannot be divorced from equality; equality cannot be divorced from liberty. Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.

Libertarians focus only on liberty. The last clause is also often overlooked. The fact is that there can be the rule of law only if most people voluntarily follow the law. (As the experience of the Prohibition in the US showed, there is no police force, no justice system that keep a law which a large number of people don't want to follow.)

Why Libertarianism doesn't work

2011-12-29T12:16:00.002-05:00

On dailykos.com

Mahatma Gandhi's laissez-faire!

2011-12-28T16:35:00.000-05:00

Alan Campbell Johnson, in "Mission with Mountbatten", reports in his entry for December 26th, 1947:

On the ultimately decisive economic front the Government has added to its own burdens by its blind and bland acceptance of Gandhi's policy towards decontrol. The Mahatma's approach to economics is unashamedly pre-feudal, and he has converted the doctrine of laissez-faire beyond the dreams of Adam Smith into what is little less than a branch of metaphysics. We now have the spectacle of a Government trying to create a modern State and depriving itself of the power to tackle food-hoarders and price-ring profiteers save through appeals to their social conscience, the one commodity in which they are totally lacking. The decontrol policy has been opposed by Mountbatten as well as by all responsible Civil Service advisers without exception. It is the outcome solely of the Government's awe of Gandhi. It is causing almost at once a vicious spiral of inflation, and will involve an extra eight crores of rupees on Civil Service salaries alone to meet the rise in prices. Altogether it is estimated that some one hundred and ten crores of rupees will need to be pumped in to meet the cost of Gandhi's economic ideas. Sugar and salt have both rocketed up to one rupee eight annas a seer - the rise in the price of salt being no less than five hundred per cent.

Effect of redistricting in New Jersey

2011-12-28T11:28:00.000-05:00

After every census, the congressional districts are redrawn to take into account the changes in population. The 2012-2021 map for New Jersey is here, also displayed below. As a result, I lose my ex-physicist Democratic representative, Rush Holt (district 12) and instead get Republican Chris Smith (district 4). Unless there is a chance of getting a decent Democrat elected, there goes my interest in my Congress representative.

Representative Christopher Smith
Liberal Action Score: 22/100
Conservative Action Score: 55/100

Representative Rush Holt
Liberal Action Score: 92/100
Conservative Action Score: 3/100

Dark clouds swirl around the Indian economy

2011-12-28T09:33:00.002-05:00

Read about it here.

How Ayn Rand Helped Make the US into a greedy, selfish nation

2011-12-23T19:41:00.000-05:00

Via Praveen Swami on twitter.

A demagogue, in addition to hypnotic glibness, must also be intellectually inconsistent, sometimes boldly so. This eliminates challenges to authority by weeding out clear-thinking young people from the flock.

Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism

2011-12-14T23:13:00.001-05:00

Rajiv Malhotra's book.

PS: Introductory video.

The Higgs at last?

2011-12-13T11:42:00.005-05:00

Dorigo.

PS: Strassler

PPS: Gibbs Read this one for sure.

Higgs news

2011-12-12T12:03:00.001-05:00

Everyone in the particle physics community is waiting for tomorrow's status report from CERN.
Lots of good blog posts, so am simply linking to them:
Conway
Dorigo
Jester
Strassler
Woit

PS: Carroll

S Gurumurthy on the Indian Retail Sector

2011-12-06T07:40:00.002-05:00

The best argument I've seen so far for being cautious in reforming the retail sector.
Quote:

The ongoing debate on the FDI in retail is intolerably superficial at times. For a rational debate, the fundamentals of conflicting alternatives must be understood. Here are some basic truths about conventional Indian retail. For thousands of years, retailing in India has been local community business - selling retailers and buying households being familiar with each other. Even now Indian retailing is mostly neighbourhood, relation-based business.

There are 15 million retailers in India, including hawkers and pavement vendors. This translates to the greatest retailer density anywhere in the world - more than one retailer for 8 Indians! {This should be 1 retailer per 80 Indians } In contrast, China, more populous than India, has less than a twelfth of India’s retail density; just 1.3 million retailers - one for 100 Chinese. { With the numbers as given, this should read 1 retailer per 1000 Chinese. The number cited, 1.3 million, is also likely to be wrong.}

In India, one retailer does not stock all needs of all customers. Several neighbourhood retailers - hawkers, roadside vendors, bunks and kirana shops - taken together stock and meet all their needs. The Indian retail business is estimated at $400 billion. {e.g., Wiki} Of which the share of corporate is now 5 percent; the rest 95 percent is handled by traditional retailers. The wholesale-retail trade in India has evolved as part of its social milieu over millennia, organised and linked by local relations. According to an FCCI study, food - read agriculture - accounts for 63 percent of retail trade. Here, some 74 million strong small farmer-wholesaler-small retailer combine - a social inheritance of generations - works, not hierarchically, but laterally through neighbourhood relations.

Some 58.8 million small-marginal farmers from 6.8 lakh villages sell their produce at 47,000 haats/shandies to some 15 million wholesalers-retailers. It is the largest decentralised business in the world. They all operate within a radius of 16 km of where they are. Yet, only 40 percent of the food produced is traded; the balance 60 percent is barter-shared by social relations within villages. This [60 percent] sharing and [40 percent] trading keeps rural India alive.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on the FDI in retail [June 2009] says that traditional retail employs 40 million people; and finds the corporate retail claim to 20 lakh job “highly exaggerated”. The Committee is right. Walmart, with $422 billion global turnover, employs just 2.1 million people.

That is, with more than India’s retail business in its balance sheet, it provides less than 5 percent of India’s retail jobs! So the organised retail’s proven job potential is less than 1/20 of the performance of traditional retail. Where from did Anand Sharma get his maths that the FDI in retail would generate 10 million jobs then?

This stentorian noise for the FDI in retail makes four claims. One, the organised retail would avoid the huge - `50,000 crore - waste of farm products due to lack of efficient supply chain; two, with middlemen eliminated the farmers would get better prices; three, Walmarts and Tescos would procure farm products and export them like they do from China, which traditional retail cannot. Four, it will yield more employment.

The claim about employment is bogus. What Walmarts and Tescos could not do elsewhere, they would not do here. The next claim, namely, like in China, Walmarts and Tescos would ramp up India’s exports ignores the basics of Indian and Chinese economies. China’s domestic consumption is low, just 35 percent of its GDP; the balance 65 percent is its exportable surplus. It has built this huge surplus over decades. India with a high domestic consumption of 58 percent has no such exportable surplus. Actually, it is sensible for Walmart to bring in goods from China, made cheaper by cheap yuan, into India.

Already Chinese goods are outselling Indian goods in India. India’s annual trade deficit with China, now $20 billion, is estimated to reach $278.5 billion by 2014! Far from making India prosperous, Walmarts and Tescos may impoverish it.

The claim that the FDI in retail will eliminate middlemen and enrich farmers is not borne out by facts. See the record of Tesco, the largest retailer in the UK, in contrast. It “exploits small farmers in the UK and worldwide”; “hastens their replacement” with monoculture plantations; “poses serious risks for developing country farmers” who have traditionally supplied to local street markets.

Further, “rather than growing their produce and taking it straight to a market, they have to deal with a chain of middlemen, supermarket’s standards of uniformity in shape and size, risking rejection of lot of their produce”. Farmer-friendly FDI in retail is contradiction in terms.

The campaign that the FDI in retail would prevent waste by efficient supply chain management ignores two vital facts. One, the national highway forms only 2 percent of India’s road network, but handles 40 percent of the road traffic! The other roads can handle only trucks smaller than 20’; and link only local markets.

Walmarts and Tescos can’t build roads. The government has to. If it does, Walmart or Tesco are not needed. Two, on storage, a recent MIT paper says that as “demonstrated by the case study in rural India, the solution to food storage needs to be a bottom up approach. Communities need to be identified where the people have access to fresh food that is currently wasted and who are willing to put in the time to store it properly. Farm cooperatives are potential candidates.”

So, bottom up society, not topdown Walmarts or Tescos, is the answer.

Finally, the debate on the FDI in Indian retail misses out the most crucial point. Not only Indian retail, the whole of Indian economy functions more on relations, less on contracts. That is why 60 percent of the farm produce is socially shared. The trade in the rest are based on neighbourhood relations. When contracts replace human relations, it yields not “market economy” but “market society”, where even families function on contracts.

Margaret Thatcher once said: “There is no such thing as society. There are individuals and families. That is all.” But, the experience of the US/West has proved that traditional families cannot survive without functioning traditional society. As the US Bureau of Economic Research had foreseen in 1970s, now family functions have been effectively taken over by corporates and the State! Unbridled market first dismantles the relation-based society, then disturbs families, to yield a purely contract-based ‘market society’ finally.

The relation-less retail model of Walmarts and Tescos fits the contract-based US/West. But, of late, even in the West, debate on “market economy” vs “market society” has begun - “market society” being derided as Anglo-Saxon. QED: The real issue is not the FDI in retail, but what does the Indian Government, economists and elites want in India finally? A relation-friendly “market economy”? Or, a relation-less “market society”?

India: Foreign Direct Investment In Retail

2011-12-03T22:45:00.035-05:00

A political storm was unleashed in India when the government announced its decision to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in the retail sector in India (the decision has been put on indefinite hold). This decision would allow Walmart and its equivalents to enter the Indian market.

What struck me is the very poor quality of the debate. Putting aside the ideology of "free markets", it was not clear at all what the problems are, and how FDI will help solve them. A fact-based presentation of what problems may be solved (and what new problems may be created - I'll provide an example) will be useful in deciding what the right policy is.

The first question that occurred to me was - why hasn't the Indian corporate sector replicated Walmart on its own? Is it a lack of know-how? Is it a lack of capital? If so, yes, FDI can help with both. If there were other structural issues (e.g., poor transport infrastructure, intermittent electricity), I don't see how FDI in retail solves that problem. So: what are the impediments to large-scale corporate retailing and how does FDI solve them?

Regarding capital, the global pool of capital is no doubt deeper and cheaper than the India-only pool. But supposedly there is a lot of money to be made in increased efficiencies in the Indian supply chains. So why is capital a problem? The ideology of the free market says that Homo economicus will find and exploit such opportunities. I suspect that perhaps the real money is to be made only after market power has been accumulated, and to accumulate such power requires tolerating many years of losses while driving most the competition out of business, and so the need for deep foreign pockets. Concentration of market power cannot be good. The usual response is that Walmart has competition in the US, and so market power concentration is a false fear. But actually, Walmart has no effective competition in its market segment, AFAIK. Successful retailers try to be upscale of Walmart. So I have a open question there: does the claimed supply chain efficiency arise from simply from concentrated market power?

FDI advocates make an argument about the losses that occur in India's agricultural supply chain, that FDI will help fix that. Perhaps, but then I don't understand why the whole retail sector needs FDI, it is the food sector that does. Why are we talking about FDI in all of retail, if the agricultural sector is where the problem is?

Let us focus just on the food sector then. The FAO commissioned a study on world-wide food loss (losses from the farm upto the retail store) and food waste (losses at retail and consumer). The 2011 report is available as a PDF file. From the report, it is clear that the South and Southeast Asia region has a problem with post-harvest, processing and distribution - in various categories such as grains, oil seeds, fresh produce, etc., the percentage losses are larger than in other regions such as Europe or North America.

Note that overall, the food losses per person per year are smaller in South and South East Asia than in Europe or North America. The numbers from this report are also cited on Wiki. For instance, food loss+waste in Europe per capita per annum is 280 kg (loss=190kg, waste=90kg) while in South and South East Asia it is 125 kg (loss=110kg, waste=15kg). But clearly there are efficiencies to be had. (A statistic that would have been truly useful is the waste&loss normalized to production to provide an absolute measure of efficiency. )

Chapter 4 of the FAO report deals with solutions to the problems of food waste and loss. A useful exercise for FDI advocates (and those opposed to it) would be to go over those solutions and point out where FDI would help, and where really other reforms are necessary.

Lastly, let me illustrate that the corporate supply chain may simply move food loss into food waste, and so not really improve matters. The FAO report, mentions, for instance,

Large quantities on display and a wide range of products/ brands in supply lead to food waste in industrialized countries. Retail stores need to order a variety of food types and brands from the same manufacturer to get beneficial prices. Consumers also expect a wide range of products to be available in stores. A wide range of products does, however, increase the likelihood of some of them reaching their “sell-by” date before being sold, and thereby wasted. When shopping, consumers expect store shelves to be well filled. Although certainly beneficial for sales statistics, continually replenished supplies mean that food products close to expiry are often ignored by consumers. This is particularly difficult for small retail stores.

This, to me, is an example where the manufacturer has achieved efficiencies of scale, but the retailer necessarily has wastage; and I don't see how India avoids it if it follows the OECD model.
---
There is also an article in the Hindu newspaper, about the experience of retailers in China. Even with FDI, Chinese firms dominate, but the article points out that Chinese barriers to foreign firms are different from those in India. Also, there is anecdotal evidence in the article that farmers do not get higher prices (contrary to the claims of Indian FDI advocates), that farmers are driven off the land and that small retailers are driven out of business - which may not matter in China where industrial employment is increasing rapidly, but will matter in India unless there is employment growth in other sectors.

All of these things need to be weighed and if the government has indeed looked into all of this, it needs to publish its findings - in order to know whether the proposed FDI policy is good, or merely driven by ideology, politics and the need to be seem to be doing something.

PS: I recognize that changes in the retail sector may be
a. necessary, and/or
b. inevitable.

These changes affect the economically most vulnerable people in India. Isn't it the government's job to ease them through this transition rather than introducing change as a shock?

Job creation

2011-12-02T04:16:00.000-05:00

Nick Hanauer tells us what ought to be obvious - jobs are created by consumers buying from businesses.

Note to the President

2011-11-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

Via Yahoo:

Doctor Reinvents Calculus!

2011-11-20T13:51:00.002-05:00

(Hattip Bee).
"Clueless doctor sleeps through math class, reinvents calculus… and names it after herself."

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/12/07/ncbi-rofl-clueless-doctor-sleeps-through-math-class-reinvents-calculus-and-names-it-after-herself/

Pepper spray techniques

2011-11-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

Cosmic Variance shows us how it is done in University of California, Davis.

Statistical Analysis of the OPERA experiment

2011-11-18T09:49:00.002-05:00

This one (sticky) blogpost will serve for accumulating everything related to the statistical analysis of the OPERA experiment (that found faster-than-light neutrinos).

PS: There is a rumor that OPERA has repeated its experiment with very short pulses of protons and the faster-than-light result persists. If the rumor is true, then everything under the fold is irrelevant to the issue of whether OPERA is right or wrong.

PPS: OPERA confirms its result! See Tommaso Dorigo for a discussion, waiting for the pre-print to show up.

PPPS: the updated pre-print is here. Almost all the objections that had been raised about the original preprint have been addressed. If there is an error, it is inaccessible to the remote observer. The way forward is to repeat the experiment elsewhere.

Unstick-ing this post.

PPPPS: Further comments from Tommaso Dorigo.

{Last update: Nov 18, 1:07 PM}

A lot of commentators on the OPERA experiment explain the faster-than-light neutrinos in terms of exotic new physics. Another set of commentators seek an explanation in neglected relativistic effects arising from the earth's motion, the gravitational field, in the synchronization of clocks using satellites, and so on. These set of authors I completely ignore.

The set of commentators of interest to me, whose papers I've tried to gather in the links below, accept the veracity of the OPERA data, but challenge its statistical interpretation. If I was a physicist, I'd belong to this school of thought.

Notes:

The OPERA experiment simply assumes that the neutrino detection rate is proportional to a time-delayed version of the proton rate. Several authors have pointed out that even a small effect at the leading and trailing edges of the pulse can eliminate the superluminal effect. Various proposals are made. For instance, when turning up and turning down the proton current, the beam geometry varies slightly from the steady state configuration of the beam. The graphite target that the proton beam hits has a lot of energy deposited and heats up considerably, possibly changing its density, and hence the collision rate. And so on. Various statistical tests of the fundamental assumption that OPERA makes are proposed, but I think without the actual data from the experiment, can be nothing but inconclusive.

External links that have a bearing on the statistical analysis:

arxiv:1109.4897, Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam,The OPERA Collaboration
Why OPERA’s claim for faster-than-light neutrinos is not wrong, John P. Costella.
arXiv:1109.5727, A possible statistical mechanism of anomalous neutrino velocity in OPERA experiment?, Robert Alicki
arXiv:1110.0239, A simple explanation of OPERA results without strange physics, Gilles Henri
arXiv:1110.0595, Is there a neutrino speed anomaly?, Juergen Knobloch (also arXiv:1111.3284)
arXiv:1110.3783, A potential issue for the OPERA neutrino velocity measurement, Antonio Palazzo
arXiv:1110.4781, Narrowing of the neutrino light curve in the OPERA experiment, Maurice H.P.M. van Putten
arXiv:1110.4805, Some light on "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam", I. Area, X. Prado
arXiv:1110.5275, About Statistical Questions Involved in the Data Analysis of the OPERA Experiment, H. Bergeron
arXiv:1110.6291, Comment on OPERA neutrino velocity measurement, Pierluigi Frabetti, Leonid Chernenko (also arXiv:1111.3116)
arxiv:1110.6408, Possible Origin Of The Neutrino Speed Anomaly Reported By OPERA, Shlomo Dado, Arnon Dar
arxiv:1111.0282, Statistical model uncertainty and OPERA-like time-of-flight measurements,Oliver Riordan, Alex Selby

My stuff:
Nov 6: Workbooks 3 & 4. These suggest that an excess of neutrinos at the edges of w[t] may invalidate the OPERA results; a deficit is not so important.
Nov 5: A simulation in Mathematica.
Nov 4: Workbook 1, with fewer events. The variance increases more than expected.
Nov 4: Workbook 2: A second idealized example.
Nov 3: (corrected, expanded) Workbook 1: The numbers from a simple idealized example (PDF)
Nov 3: A simple model (PDF)

Ayn Rand

2011-11-14T08:35:00.000-05:00

National Public Radio, on the influence of Ayn Rand on current politics.

Excerpting one instance from there:

Recently, House Speaker John Boehner channeled Rand when he said, "Job creators in America basically are on strike."
....
This idea that Boehner put forth in a recent speech before the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., could have come straight from Atlas Shrugged.

Businesses, Boehner said, need to be set free. Instead, "they've been antagonized by a government that favors bureaucrats over market-based solutions. They've been demoralized by a government that causes despair, when what we really need is to provide reassurance and inspire hope in our economy."

Boehner uses the language of slavery when he says, "We need to liberate our economy from the shackles of Washington."

The problem with Boehner's (and all the other examples in the NPR piece) is that corporations are doing very well.

In other news, the latest figures for corporate profits

Corporate profits in the second quarter grew to $1.467 trillion annualized-up from $1.455 trillion in the fourth quarter (previously $1.476 trillion). Today's report includes annual revisions. Profits in the second quarter rose an annualized 3.3 percent, following a 39.9 percent surge the quarter before (previously 35.2). The upward revision to the first quarter is due to a downward revision to the fourth quarter. Profits are after tax but without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments. Corporate profits are unchanged on a year-on-year basis, compared to up 2.8 percent in the first quarter. Growth in profits is extremely volatile over recession/recovery periods and is slowing from the spike in late 2009 and early 2010. The recent peak in year-ago growth was 115.9 percent for the fourth quarter of 2009.

and

The new figures indicate that corporate profits accounted for 14 percent of the total national income in 2010, the highest proportion ever recorded. The previous peak, of 13.6 percent, was set in 1942 when the need for war materials filled the order books of companies at the same time as the government imposed wage and price controls, holding down the costs companies had to pay.

There have been 10 years when corporate profits as a share of national income exceeded 13 percent — 1941, ’42, ’43, ’50, ’51, ’55, ’65, ’66, 2006 and 2010. In eight of those years, the economy, as measured by real gross national product, grew at a rate of greater than 6 percent.

The exceptions were 2006, when real growth was just 2.7 percent, and 2010, when it was 3 percent.

Fundamentalism, American style

2011-11-13T12:17:00.000-05:00

In today's New York Times, "Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?", Harold Bloom notes that:

The 19th-century Mormon theologian Orson Pratt, who was close both to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, stated a principle the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never repudiated: “Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the kingdom of God.”

Aatish Taseer dissects Arundhati Roy

2011-11-11T22:59:00.003-05:00

The man is simply brilliant!

Ida: Sorry! So, we’ve talked about Noon, we’ve talked about Pakistan and your father, what about India? You’ve said some pretty harsh things about a certain writer cum activists on the Left–no names!–who, we in the States, kind of like. She seems, in an environment of rapacious capitalism, to be a friend of the poor and marginalised. What possible objection could you have to her?

Aatish: None except that I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty. They are beautiful to her–the poor–beautiful, benign and faceless. And that is exactly how she wants them to stay. Let me say also that it is not the poor who animate her politics. Oh, no! The people who get her into the streets are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions; when India wins the cricket and she sees them celebrating, her skin crawls; she wants, more than anything, to do these people down. And it is her overwhelming hatred of them that allows her to be a friend of movements that are seemingly far apart. The jihadists, the Maoists, the Kashmir movement, the anti-development people…they’re all her friends. Anyone who can prove a credible threat to the future of India is a friend of that woman. I would go so far as to say she has a prurient fascination with the enemies of India. And where do they love her? In Pakistan, and in the faculty rooms of Europe and America. No surprise there.

Also, this business of pretending she’s a lone voice in the wilderness. What rubbish! At least have the good grace to admit that not one thing she says is provocative or new; it is perfectly banal. And we know how well the universities Europe and America reward this bogus cant!

October snow

2011-11-02T23:20:00.000-04:00

The storm of October 29 left this snow:

The Saudi Menace

2011-11-01T19:21:00.002-04:00

Madanjeet Singh

Blurb: Wahabism, with enormous Saudi petrodollars at its disposal, has wrought havoc worldwide. The writer travels back to Kashmir, Kerala, Lahore, and Indonesia of some decades ago to get a measure of the tragic and vicious effects — and hopes resilient, multilayered secular cultures will be able to fight back.

Last words

2011-11-01T07:51:00.000-04:00

Last words of Steve Jobs: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Miss USA 2011

2011-10-30T09:13:00.001-04:00

Miss USA 2011 is apparently from around here.

Rangoli 2011

2011-10-27T00:45:00.000-04:00

Courtesy my niece:

Full set

Bergeron on OPERA

2011-10-26T08:41:00.000-04:00

Via Tommaso Dorigo, http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.5275

About Statistical Questions Involved in the Data Analysis of the OPERA Experiment
Authors: H. Bergeron
(Submitted on 24 Oct 2011)

Abstract: The authors of the OPERA experiment [arXiv:1109.4897] claim that "the measurement indicates an early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum". In this note we analyze the statistical aspects of the experimental results presented in [arXiv:1109.4897], assuming that no hidden experimental bias exists. Due to statistical constraints, we show (through two different methods) that the experimental data presented in [arXiv:1109.4897] do not permit to conclude unambiguously with the existence of a superluminal behavior of neutrinos. The problem lies essentially in the interpretation of the data and not in their veracity.

Neutrinos on the brain - redux

2011-10-25T20:05:00.001-04:00

Readers of this blog may have noticed that ever since the OPERA collaboration announced finding neutrinos that travel faster than light, I have been scratching my head about something. Here, in the simplest possible terms is what I'm thinking about.

I’m pursuing a signal processing problem, not a physics problem. So, I’ll omit all of the physics.

Imagine a source emits a signal like the following.

The horizontal axis is time in nanoseconds.
The vertical axis is the intensity of the signal in arbitrary units.

The signal travels a precisely measured distance (731278.0 ± 0.2 meters), where it encounters a detector.

Here, a brief physics note is needed. Since the original signal has been transmuted along the way from electrically charged protons into electrically neutral, weakly interacting neutrinos, it is not possible to measure the signal in the same way as it was measured at the source. The detector instead detects a discrete set of events, the rate of events at its peak is about 1 event per nanosecond. (Overall, some 8000 events are detected.)

It is stipulated that the signal has not spread at all, and is in exactly the same shape at the detector. It is stipulated that the rate of detecting events is on the average proportional to the signal intensity. It is stipulated that the original signal, and all of the detected events at the detector are timed very precisely, with a root mean squared error of about 7.4 nanoseconds or better.

To measure the time of flight of the signal, it is necessary to precisely place a time-delayed version of the signal with respect to the detected events. I've tried to crudely depict that below. The little blue x's are the detected events marked on the time axis. The signal is shown with two different time delays below it. One "fits" the detected events better than the other.

The OPERA claim is that they can place the original signal on top of the detected events with a standard error of 6.9 nanoseconds. Moreover, as it turns out, the resulting time of flight is less than that of an equivalent light signal by 60.7 nanoseconds.

I believe that the underlying problem of measuring a time delay is one of edge detection. While there are "features" in the signal, the two crucial edges are the leading and trailing edge of the signal, and that is where about 10% of the overall detected events lie. Or to put it another way, here are neutrino events at one edge, binned in (number of events per 50 nanoseconds). Can you imagine placing the edge of the signal here with the claimed precision? It may be possible, but I need to convince myself of it.

PS: on the same scale, the edge looks like this:

A how-to and a how to?

2011-10-25T00:53:00.000-04:00

First - a how-to do something:
Second - a question about how to do something.

Suppose you have a curve plotted in a paper - you have the PDF, and you want to extract coordinates of this curve. E.g., this, from the OPERA paper, the proton probability distribution function from the first extraction.

Well, you can read in a particular PDF page into Photoshop, eliminate everything but the curve, and save it in Portable Bitmap Format. If you follow the link, you'll see the format is very simple. You can write an easy program can extract the (pixel) coordinates of the curve. But wait, you can import the portable bitmap file into Mathematica, and then Mathematica has the pixel coordinates of each pixel. You can export these from Mathematica, too, as a text file.

There are two clean-ups you need to do:
1. Convert from pixel coordinates back to the original scale
2. The curve is often a few pixels thick and so to have a well defined function y = f(x), you need to do some pixel removal. You can do this writing your routine in Mathematica, or operate on the text file.

Here is the plot of points I extracted from the interesting part of the curve above (my y-scale is a little different because of a different normalization).

Mathematica provides an Interpolate function that accepts as input a list of points. Here is the function f=Interpolate[List].

I suppose this is as good as one can do without the original data set.

----
Let's give the positive definite function plotted above a name, w(t).

The OPERA paper computes a product,

L(δt) = ∏ w(t_j + δt) where the t_j are the timestamps of the neutrino events.

One wiggles δt around to find the maximum of L(δt).

Now, the leading and trailing edges of the w(t) are very small, interpolation can give zero or even negative values, which throws off the computation of L(δt) considerably. (If you think of using Logs, you get large negative terms that perturbs the sum Log(L(δt)) considerably - or even not real numbers, when w(t) extrapolates to negative values.)

Is the only way to deal with these to put in some smooth analytically defined function for the edges, while using the numerically interpolated function everywhere else?

Auditors' contribution to the fiscal crisis

2011-10-21T09:23:00.001-04:00

Floyd Norris has written in today's New York Times that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was harshly critical of 27 of 61 of the Deloitte & Touche's audits that it inspected, over three years ago.

They should have drilled into allowances for loan losses, and they should have been especially alert for signs that the banks were playing games when they sold loans. Auditors should have carefully reviewed how the banks were valuing their mortgage-backed securities and loans that they planned to sell.

So, why are we learning it only now?

The Sarbanes-Oxley law that established the board included provisions to protect the public images of audit firms. If a board inspection found problems with the quality control systems, that was to be kept confidential unless the firm did not move to fix the problems over the following year. Then the release could be delayed while the firm tried to persuade the board to keep the information private. If that effort failed, the firm could appeal to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Only then could the report be made public. So in this case, it took 41 months from the issuance of the report — more than three years — for Deloitte’s clients to learn of the problem.

Another problem:

In theory, the board can put a firm out of business, but since the demise of Arthur Andersen reduced the Big Five to what some call the Final Four, there is general agreement that going to three would be unacceptable. So while the board can credibly threaten to close down a small firm that does a dozen or two audits each year, no such threat would be credible for Deloitte or one of the other three major accounting firms.

Contempt for regulators is nothing new in the auditing world....

Sneak Peek at Adobe's Image Deblurring

2011-10-18T22:41:00.003-04:00

Rajan Parrikar sent this my way:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2011-sneak-peeks/max-2011-sneak-peek-image-deblurring/

Neutrinos on the brain-12

2011-10-18T22:20:00.000-04:00

(PDF) An attempt to understand the statistical error in the time-of-flight estimate in the OPERA experiment.

I'd rather stay up and finish this, but....

Neutrinos on the brain-11

2011-10-18T18:25:00.000-04:00

Tommaso Dorigo tells us about the ICARUS collaboration's refutation of the OPERA superluminal neutrino result.

Joke

2011-10-16T19:32:00.002-04:00

Neutrinos on the brain-10

2011-10-16T09:34:00.000-04:00

C.I.P. points to this article from Technology Review. There is a discussion of a claim by Ronald van Elburg that the motion of GPS satellites is not factored into the time of flight calculations at OPERA.

My reply is that per this note the GPS satellite designers have thought of all of that. A key excerpt:

The concept of coordinate time in a local inertial frame is established for the GPS as follows. In the local Earth-Centered Inertial frame, imagine a network of atomic clocks at rest and synchronized using constancy of c. To each real, moving clock apply corrections to yield a paper clock which then agrees with one of these hypothetical clocks in the underlying inertial frame, with which the moving clock instantaneously coincides. The time resulting from such corrections is then a coordinate time, free from inconsistencies, whose rate is determined by clocks at rest on the earth's rotating geoid.

Neutrinos on the brain-9

2011-10-12T19:50:00.000-04:00

Two pieces worth reading:
1. Tommaso Dorigo
2. Matt Strassler

Neutrinos on the brain-8

2011-10-09T22:44:00.000-04:00

From -7.

Eyeball transformations and fit to exp(exp) format of the right edge of the proton pulse from Extraction 1 in the OPERA paper.

Having the analytical form enables me to verify that the maximum likelihood computation used by OPERA is sensitive to the edges of the pulse. I do not understand their standard error computation (not that it is wrong; I just don't understand it.) I also think that perhaps the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test would have been a better tool for estimating the delay. If I get my hands on Mathematica in the next few days, maybe I can do something.

Here is a reconstruction of the proton pulse (blue line; without the features on the plateau) and the neutrinos events at the edges (orangish squares). Also the events flipped (green triangles). The time scale is nanoseconds.

It seems that the flipped events fit with a similar standard error as the original ones (σ = 8-10ns).

Let me try to explain.

This depicts (orange dots) a histogram of the neutrino events detected at various points in time. The black square curve represents the proton pulse. You slide it around to get a "best fit" to the neutrino events, and the amount you need to slide it is the estimated time delay (that turns out to be 60ns too small).

Let's call the proton curve W(t). Then OPERA computes:

P(δt) = Product( W(t_i + δt) ), where t_i are the neutrino arrival times. The neutrino events are rather sparse, less than 1 per nanosecond; the proton pulse is composed of billions of protons per nanosecond. So we're not curve-fitting here; we're computing a probability of this sequence of events taking place, assuming that it is perfectly proportional to the proton pulse.

In the three positions of W depicted, from left to right, P is somewhat positive, P is at its maximum, and P is zero. If you examine how P reaches its maximum as you slide W along, the graph below (the y-axis scale arbitrarily chosen) depicts it - it is a Gaussian with σ ~ 8ns - (which is where from the standard error estimate comes from, I believe.)

With the data that I have, I find adding or removing just one neutrino event from the edge shifts the maximum by 5-6ns.

I also find that the maximum is just as sharp for the green triangles from the diagram above as for the orange squares. P(δt) cares really about edge data, and the leading and trailing edges have sparse statistics. That is why I think Kolmogorov-Smirnov which compares cumulative probability distribution functions and is not so sensitive to details of the edges would be a better estimator.

The edge sensitivity is easy to see; for small δt

ln(P(δt)) = Σ ln ( W(t_i + δt))
(using W_i for W(t_i))
= Σ ln(W_i) + δt Σ W'_i/W_i + 1/2 δt² Σ ( W"_i/W_i - (W'_i/W_i)²

What contributes to the variation in P are the regions where W'/W and W"/W are significant, which are the edges.

Haha!

2011-10-08T15:21:00.000-04:00

CIP reports hearing:

At the end of the last century America had Bob Hope, Johnny Cash, and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Jobs, No Cash, and No Hope.

Delusional!

2011-10-07T01:32:00.002-04:00

RIP, Steve Jobs!

2011-10-06T20:08:00.002-04:00

Neutrinos on the brain-7

2011-10-02T21:04:00.003-04:00

OPERA and CERN were kept in sync. by using GPS in the "common view time transfer mode". The synchronization was verified by using a clock that was moved. Much is being made of the problem of relativistic corrections to the moving clock. But perhaps that is not so important.

The common view time transfer mode is explained here by NIST.

An approach that builds and improves on the one-way technique is common-view time transfer. This technique allows the direct comparison of two clocks at remote locations. A generic common-view setup is illustrated in the figure. In this technique, two stations, A and B, receive a one-way signal simultaneously from a single transmitter and measure the time difference between this received signal and their own local clock. The data are then exchanged between stations A and B using any convenient method (email, FTP, etc.). {No moving clocks needed!}

The time difference between clocks A and B is calculated by taking the difference between simultaneous R - A and R - B clock difference measurements. If the travel times to the receivers are exactly equal, then the two receivers can synchronize their clocks with an accuracy that does not depend on the characteristics of the transmitter or the transmission medium. Fluctuations in the delays between the single transmitter and the two receivers also cancel exactly if they are completely correlated. This ideal situation cannot be realized in practice, but the method works well even if the two paths are not exactly equal, provided that they are nearly equal and that fluctuations in the two delays are highly correlated. Since the path delay is usually affected by various environmental parameters (such as ambient temperature), the common-view method generally works best if the distance between the receiver stations (the baseline) is small relative to the distance between either receiver and the transmitter. {The stations were about 730 km apart, the GPS satellites are 20,000km above the earth's surface.}
This geometry tends to ensure that the delay fluctuations (caused by the atmosphere for example) in the two paths will be highly correlated. One disadvantage of the common-view technique is that a means of exchanging data between the two stations must be available. {Not a problem here.}

NIST also says:

The accuracy of common-view GPS is better than for one-way since the stability of common-view is better, and also only a differential calibration is required between the two receiving stations. A differential calibration is made by carrying a portable GPS receiver between the two stations. This provides information on the difference between the delays of the receiving equipment at the two stations. An absolute calibration of the equipment delays at each station is not required. The accuracy of common-view time transfers is typically in the 1 to 10 ns range. The NIST Global Time Service provides traceable time calibrations using GPS common-view.

PS:
As far as I can tell, the "portable time-transfer device" does not actually involve a moving clock. If I understand the reference "ADVANCED GPS-BASED TIME LINK CALIBRATION WITH PTB ́S NEW GPS CALIBRATION SETUP" by Thorsten Feldmann, Andreas Bauch, Dirk Piester, Michael Rost, Elizabeth Goldberg, Stephen Mitchell, and Blair Fonville" findable on the web, the issue is as follows:

Suppose you have two clocks A and B that keep time to a very high precision. You have a common external time standard, the GPS signal, too. The problem in figuring out the offset between A and B, which arises because A and B are different equipment and so have different antenna, antenna cable, receiver delays, etc.. So to measure the offset between clocks A and B, you use the same device R at both places, transported carefully so as not to change its physical properties during transport. This device R also works off the same external standard - the GPS signal - and presumably has a common delay relative the GPS signal at both locations. Moreover, the clock difference between this transported device R and the clocks A and B is measured using the same time-interval counter which is transported with R. This way you have eliminated as much as you can the variations due to equipment. If you eliminated them perfectly, you measure, then the difference between clocks A and B is simply the difference between A&R minus the difference between B&R - all the offsets due to R simply cancel.

So it is not the case that the syncing of CERN and OPERA clocks involved syncing the OPERA clock with a portable atomic clock, and then moving the atomic clock to CERN, and comparing with the CERN clock, with all the special and general relativistic effects that would affect the moving atomic clock in difficult-to-measure ways.

Neutrinos on the brain-6

2011-10-02T20:15:00.000-04:00

Some more curve-fitting.

The trailing edge of the proton current follows the exp(exp()) form, as expected, though the fit is slightly less impressive than on the leading edge.

OPERA did not attempt to fit a pulse to the neutrino events. Instead if you think of the neutrino events as occurring at times t₁, t₂, t₃, etc. (less than 1 per nanosecond on the average from the 10,000 nanoseconds of pulse), and the shape of the proton pulse to be W(t), then OPERA computed

W(t₁+δt)*W(t₂+δt)*W(t₃+δt)*...

and found the δt that maximizes the product.

This requires both the leading and trailing edges to line up.

The value of having an analytical expression is only that one can more easily do a simulation. Of course, I'll be missing the features in the plateau of the pulse, but then, I think they are mostly irrelevant.

I might add diagrams later to make all of the above points clear.

On hyperaccomplishment

2011-10-02T11:16:00.000-04:00

James Atlas has an amusing op-ed in today's NY Times. Excerpts beneath the fold.

A BROCHURE arrives in the mail announcing this year’s winners of a prestigious fellowship to study abroad. The recipients are allotted a full page each, with a photo and a thick paragraph chronicling their achievements. It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking.

Let’s call this species Super Person.

...“It’s a huge industry,” Mr. Breyfogle says. “Harvard has a whole office devoted to preparing applicants for the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.”

....Mr. Breyfogle is also on the alert for résumé stuffing. “They’ve worked at an orphanage in Katmandu, but it turns out it was over Christmas break,” he gave as an example. “It’s easier to be amazing now.” All you need is money.

....
In the end, the whole idea of Super Person is kind of exhausting to contemplate. All that striving, working, doing. A line of Whitman’s quoted by Dr. Bardes in our conversation has stayed with me: “I loaf and invite my soul.”

Isn’t that where the real work gets done?

Neutrinos on the brain-5

2011-10-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

There are three main lines of attack on the OPERA "faster-than-light" neutrino measurements:
1. Physics issues
2. Measurement issues
3. Data analysis issues

IMO, the data analysis is the least likely to have mistakes. Measurement issues, are for example, C.R. Contaldi's issues with the synchronization of clocks between CERN and Gran Sasso. The real killer, however, is the Cohen-Glashow argument, that superluminal neutrinos, weakly interacting though they are, must shed energy rapidly; so much so as to make some OPERA observations impossible.

Peter Woit points out a slew of papers finding exotic ways to justify the OPERA results.

hep-ph is chock-a-block with papers purporting to explain the OPERA results, using theoretical models of varying degrees of absurdity.

Perhaps Sabine Hossenfelder has it right, in her tweet:

Explanation for OPERA result: A 5th force connecting the GPS with the collective physicists' subconsciousness begging for unexplained data.

Neutrinos on the brain-4

2011-09-29T22:37:00.001-04:00

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562

New Constraints on Neutrino Velocities

Authors: Andrew G. Cohen, Sheldon L. Glashow

(Submitted on 29 Sep 2011)

Abstract: The OPERA collaboration has claimed that muon neutrinos with mean energy of 17.5 GeV travel 730 km from CERN to the Gran Sasso at a speed exceeding that of light by about 7.5 km/s or 25 ppm. However, we show that such superluminal neutrinos would lose energy rapidly via the bremsstrahlung of electron-positron pairs ($\nu\rightarrow \nu+e^-+e^+$). For the claimed superluminal neutrino velocity and at the stated mean neutrino energy, we find that most of the neutrinos would have suffered several pair emissions en route, causing the beam to be depleted of higher energy neutrinos. Thus we refute the superluminal interpretation of the OPERA result. Furthermore, we appeal to Super-Kamiokande and IceCube data to establish strong new limits on the superluminal propagation of high-energy neutrinos.

Neutrinos on the brain-3

2011-09-29T19:47:00.000-04:00

What I'm trying to do with curve-fitting is to convince myself that the following is plausible, or figure out that it is not.

Suppose you were given the following plot of points:

You are told that this is a (very sparse) sample of the leading edge of a pulse - it is going to plateau off at around 50 events/50ns beyond 400 ns for the next 9000ns or so) and that you want to fix the time of some feature of this pulse (its start, or the position of maximum slope, or position of half-peak-height, or some such) - to within 10 nanoseconds.

Suppose you're given the trailing edge, too, in a very similar form.

Next, you are told that this pulse is probably directly proportional to the following curve, time-shifted by some unknown amount.

This second curve is the shape of the proton current averaged over a million pulses, that was used to generate neutrinos at CERN. The turning on of the current serves as a definite time marker for this curve. Neutrinos are generated at each instant at the target at CERN proportional to the height of this curve, and travel in an unknown time to the OPERA detector under the Gran Sasso mountain. There, some miniscule fraction are detected (the first set of points). Of course, you can synchronize clocks between the two sites, recording the exact when you detected each neutrino. You don't have corresponding time label on the proton, though, all you know is which one of the million pulses it was in.

You are able to fix the position of the bunch of points to within 10 nanoseconds, and also determine how much you have to shift the second curve for the best fit. You then account for all the delays in detector, electronics, etc., and remove that from the time-shift. What you're left with is the time of flight delay from CERN to Gran Sasso, which turns out to be shorter, by 60 nanoseconds, than the computed time of flight of light. (You can't use a light beam to directly measure the time of flight of light because the neutrino path is through 730 kilometers of rock).

Neutrinos on the brain-2

2011-09-29T00:49:00.008-04:00

My previous post demonstrated that the proton curve was of the form:

y = c * exp( - exp( -a * x + b ))

Specifically, my eyeball fit was

y=exp(3.58)* exp( - exp( -0.0061*x - 2.9201))

Let me use t (for time) instead of x, and p(t) for the proton pulse as a function of t,
and rearrange it a bit:

p(t) = exp( c + d * ( 1 - exp( -a * ( t - t0 ) ) ) { for t ≥ t0 }

The inner (1-exp()) is the current in a L-R circuit turning on, starting at time t0, creating a magnetic field.
The outer exp() is the proton spill increasing exponentially as the magnetic field turns on.

Suppose I shift the time t0 to t0+m.

p(t) = exp( c + d * ( 1 - exp( -a * (t - t0 - m ) ) )
≡ exp( c' + d' * ( 1 - exp ( -a * (t - t0) ) )
with

d' = d * exp( a * m )
c' = c + d * ( 1 - exp ( a * m ))

Notice the problem this presents for us. Given samples of a pulse of this form, I want to do a curve fit to find the starting point of the pulse, t0. But the starting point t0 cannot be determined from the fit because I can redefine the constants and move t0 around.

For the proton curve, I have a physical start of time, when the current turns on the kicker magnet. For the neutrino pulse however, this is fatal, I do not have a good physical start - it is the physical start that I want to determine (and that yields this strange faster-than-light puzzle).

PS: If I know exactly when the neutrino curve lifts up from zero, I can fix t0. But this is unfortunately where the statistics are the worst. There is definitely a greater than 60ns ambiguity in where the neutrino curve lifts up from zero. And if I knew t0, then I umambiguously know whether neutrinos are superluminal or not.

PPS: Or fit the neutrino curve howsoever, draw it and see where it kisses 0, and that tells you the timing, reparametrize -- you need good statistics at the upper portions of the curve, and I bet you still have more than 60ns ambiguity of the origin of time.

PPPS: Of course, I have yet to show that three other curves follow this very model. But I'm not after certainty just yet; my obsession will clear if I think I know why OPERA measured what it did. If I have 50+% of the correct required reasoning, I'll be more than happy.

PPPPS: On a ten nano-second clock, the neutrino curve will look something like this (entirely made up,
except for the sum across 5 clock ticks matches the binning result)

0,0,1,1,0,   (2)

1,0,1,2,1,   (5)

1,0,0,1,2,   (4)

1,2,4,2,2,   (11)

0,1,3,2,2,   (7), etc., you get the idea.

The rest of the series is:

(6),(16),(14),(31),(27),(25),(31),(31),(32),(23),(37),(33),(48),(50),

(44),(35),(29) 

PPPPS: Next steps:
1. Digitize the three other edges, check whether they follow this model. Assuming yes, then:

2. Find an industrial-strength curve fitter and fit the protons and neutrinos to this model.

3. Estimate the error of estimate of the neutrinos - see if it swallows the 60ns that OPERA found.

4. To be determined.

Neutrinos on the brain

2011-09-28T21:55:00.001-04:00

The OPERA faster-than-light-neutrinos has become a bit of an obsession. But I have made a little progress.

1. I believe (and the last link in my previous note agrees) that it is the leading (and trailing) edge of the pulse that carries most of the timing information.

2. Here are the four leading and trailing edges from Extractions 1 & 2, from the OPERA paper.

3. One can open the PDF paper in Photoshop, zoom in till it starts pixelating, and measure x,y coordinates on the diagram with the "Info" window. One measures the x,y coordinates along the axes for calibration, and then along the red proton curve and for the neutrino points, puts it all in a spreadsheet, and reconstruct the original curve. My spreadsheet is downloadable here. In it I have the reconstructed the leading edge of the First extraction, i.e., the upper left of Fig. 12 from diagram above.

4. One wonders what kind of curve is the red proton curve? Just by eyeballing, taking logs, etc., I have found that the curve is very well approximated as

y = c * exp( - exp( -a * x + b ))

The log-log curve is shown here, with four of the points removed, that correspond to the leading tail.

Superposing the original curve and the fitted one, I get this (purely eyeballing and experimenting).

5. I wonder whether there is a theoretical basis for the form of curve I found for the proton pulse.

The inner exponential is probably the response of a L-R circuit to a square pulse; so, e.,g it could be a magnetic field turning on. It is the physical origin of the outer exponential that is unclear to me - does the proton current turn on exponentially as the magnetic field turns on?

6. With that form of curve, I may perhaps do a least-squares fit to the proton curve and also see how well the neutrino points fit; and have a good estimate of the error. If I find anything interesting, then I'll have to digitize the other three curves and see what ensues.

The OPERA experiment has a standard error of around 10ns, and the effect they find is about 60ns, i.e., a 6-sigma result is claimed.

PS:

7. I neglected to put it up, but my eyeball fit is y=exp(3.58)* exp( - exp( -0.0061*x - 2.9201)).
(The x coordinate is time).

8. On the right side, the dying side of the pulse, the L-R circuit and magnetic field are decaying (for t > b) as exp(-a * (t - b)), and the proton pulse should die like c * (1 - exp( exp(- a* (t - b) ) ). I think I have that right. The problem with this interpretation is that in 7., my magnetic field turns on at x=-479, rather than -800 or so.)

Tomorrow is another day, maybe I will find the time to do a more calculated and less eye-ball fit.

OPERA numbers

2011-09-28T07:58:00.008-04:00

From the OPERA experiment that found faster-than-light neutrinos:

Width of the proton extraction: 10,500 ns
Protons per extraction: 2.4E13
Extractions per cycle: 2
Total neutrino events : 16,111
Total Protons delivered: 9.34E19

CNGS Beam Run 2010 (29 April - 22 Nov): Total 4.04E19 Protons on Target
CNGS Beam Run 2009 (27 May - 23 Nov): Total 3.52E19 Protons on Target
CNGS Beam Run 2008 (8 Jun- 3 Nov): Total 1.78E19 Protons on Target

Slide 15/84 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384486/
Slide 13/84 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384486/
Slide 13/84 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384486/
Slide 42/84 http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1384486/
http://proj-cngs.web.cern.ch/proj-cngs/

Deduced numbers:

1. Number of extractions: 3.89E6
2. Probability of neutrino event per extraction: 4.14E-3
3. Probability of neutrino event per proton: 1.724E-16
4. Summed up over all extractions, average protons/ns = 8.9E15
5. Summed up over all extractions, the average neutrinos detected/ns = 16111/10500 = 1.5

Plot from OPERA:(http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897)

Notice the y-axis is binned as Events/150ns.

PS: recent comments on OPERA's work
1. Jon Butterworth http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2011/sep/24/1
2. John P. Costella http://johncostella.webs.com/neutrino-blunder.pdf -- confirms the intuition that the edges are what are important. By his eyeballs 919 neutrino events at the leading and trailing edge of the pulse give most of the statistical significance. (If the pulses were perfect square pulses, then only the leading and trailing edges can give timing information.)

PS: I don't buy Costella's arithmetic, however.

Faster than Light Rumors

2011-09-23T22:45:00.000-04:00

If you want to know about superluminal neutrinos, read Tommaso Dorigo.

The danger of wildlife in my backyard

2011-09-20T09:02:00.000-04:00

The danger of having wildlife around mainly comes from humans. I will explain this in a few easy steps.

1. The wildlife - there's deer of course, and now turkeys

2. Wild life is huntable.

e.g., see this NJDEP page on wild turkeys.

3. Ordinarily, towns have laws which prohibit firing of guns within the township limits. But those laws are at risk because of the Republicans, who want to pass laws that disallow all such laws. So, my yard could become a hunting ground.

This is what has already happened in Florida:

MIAMI — The signs — “No Guns Allowed” — are being stripped from many Florida government buildings, libraries and airports. And local ordinances that bar people from shooting weapons in their yards, firing up into the air (think New Year’s Eve) or taking guns into parks are coming off the books.

The state has spoken, again, on the matter of guns, and this time it does not want to be ignored: since 1987, local governments in Florida have been banned from creating and enforcing their own gun ordinances. Few cities and counties paid attention, though, believing that places like Miami might need to be more restrictive than others, like rural Apalachicola, for example.

But this year the Legislature passed a new law that imposes fines on counties and municipalities that do not do away with and stop enforcing their own firearms and ammunition ordinances by Oct. 1. Mayors and council and commission members will risk a $5,000 fine and removal from office if they “knowingly and willfully violate” the law. Towns that enforce their ordinances risk a $100,000 fine.

To comply with the law, cities and counties are poring over their gun ordinances, repealing laws and removing gun-related signs. In Palm Beach County, that means removing ordinances that bar people from taking guns into county government buildings and local parks and from firing guns in some of its most urban areas. In Groveland, that means they can now fire their guns into the air to celebrate. And in Lake County, firearms will soon be allowed in libraries.

At a national level, the gun lobbyists are trying to remove the States' ability to regulate firearms.

Seeking reparation for 9/11

2011-09-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

The Independent of U.K. reports:

A Lloyd's insurance syndicate has begun a landmark legal case against Saudi Arabia, accusing the kingdom of indirectly funding al-Qa'ida and demanding the repayment of £136m it paid out to victims of the 9/11 attacks.

The Brighton-based Lloyd's 3500 syndicate, which paid $215m compensation to companies and individuals involved, alleges that the oil-rich Middle Eastern superpower bears primary responsibility for the atrocity because al-Qa'ida was supported by banks and charities acting as "agents and alter egos" for the Saudi state.

The detailed case, which names a number of prominent Saudi charities and banks as well as a leading member of the al-Saud royal family, will cause embarrassment to the Saudi government, which has long denied claims that Osama bin Laden's organisation received official financial and practical support from his native country.

Palestine 1896

2011-09-18T15:17:00.000-04:00

Supposedly the first film shot in Palestine. Whether it is or not, still interesting.

Darwin and Economics

2011-09-18T11:26:00.000-04:00

Just a week or so ago, I began thinking, in a shallow way, that perhaps the insights from evolution are required for economics. Just as random variation and natural selection can provide the illusion of intelligent design, perhaps it can also produce the illusion of the rational actor, upon which so much of economics depends.

Anyway, in today's NYT, Robert H. Frank provides yet another way that Darwin lends insight into economics. The insight is understanding the forces that leads individuals in a a group to behaviors that are detrimental to the group, and to themselves. Excerpts beneath the fold.

WHO was the greater economist — Adam Smith or Charles Darwin?

Since Darwin, the pioneering naturalist, never thought of himself as an economist, the question seems absurd. Yet his understanding of competition describes economic reality far more accurately than Smith’s. Within the next century, I predict, Darwin will be seen by most economists as the intellectual founder of their discipline.

Smith is renowned for his “invisible hand” theory. According to his modern disciples, it holds that unbridled market forces harness self-interest to serve the common good. Darwin understood that individual and group interests sometimes coincide, as in Smith’s framework. But Darwin also saw that interests at the two levels often conflict sharply. In those cases, he said, individual interests trump.

A spectacular example from nature illustrates his point. The massive antlers of bull elk are often four feet across and weigh more than 40 pounds. Why so big? Darwin’s explanation began with the observation that bull elk, like males in most vertebrate species, take more than one mate if they can. If some succeed, others end up with no mate at all, making them the ultimate losers in the contest to pass along their genes. So bulls fight bitterly for females, and mutations coded for larger antler size help them win. That arms race has produced the gigantic antlers we see today.

As a group, bulls could better escape from wolves in densely wooded areas if their antlers were smaller, yet any individual bull with relatively small antlers would never win a mate. So bull elk are stuck with unwieldy antlers.

...{Darwin} understood that competition often favored traits that brought misery to all, and he knew animals like elk could do nothing about it. But human beings, who face similar conflicts, have better options.

...............

Today, though, markets are far more competitive than ever, just as conservatives maintain, but they’re also hugely more wasteful. The apparent paradox is resolved once we recognize that market failure stems from the very logic of competition itself. As Darwin knew, when individual and group interests diverge, competition not only fails to promote the common good, it also actively undermines it.

The modern marketplace is rife with individual-versus-group conflicts like the one that spawned outsized antlers in bull elk.

TED: Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth?

2011-09-18T09:45:00.001-04:00

Grasping at straws...

2011-09-17T23:02:00.000-04:00

It may be that "the major carbon repository in Earth is probably the mantle, rather than the atmosphere or biosphere, but it is the least well understood," Walter told OurAmazingPlanet. "The mantle reservoir might affect the global cycle over Earth's history."

From here. The grasping at straws part comes from the wild hope that the solution to our global warming problem somehow lies in harnessing the mantle.

Epigenetics

2011-09-17T16:33:00.003-04:00

For plants at least, genes are not destiny.

There apparently is significant variation in which genes express themselves and how and when.

Politics

2011-09-17T16:18:00.001-04:00

US Congressional candidates that I support - needless to say, all Democrats.

1. Rush Holt (incumbent, NJ district 12, my representative)
2. Bill Foster (seeking the Illinois 11th district seat)
3. Manan Trivedi (seeking the Pennsylvania 6th district seat)

Holt and Foster are ex-physicists; Manan Trivedi is a physician and also has the blessings of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam.

I think this is the extent of my support for the 2012 elections, unless you find me some more ex-physicists. :)

Trivandrum Rising

2011-09-17T16:07:00.002-04:00

A blog. This article is on the Vizhinjam Port Project.

Trump as a counterindicator on gold

2011-09-17T11:21:00.002-04:00

Amusing story.

Oh, brother.

When a self-promoter like The Donald jumps on a bandwagon, you know it's getting a little old. For all his big reputation, Trump's career over the past two decades is littered with the wreckage of high-profile deals he cut at the peak of each boom. Think: Trump Taj Mahal casino (bankruptcy, 1991). Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts (2004). Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009).

Or the "Trump International Hotel & Tower," a luxury condo development in Fort Lauderdale planned and built in happier times.

News that Trump is backing gold comes after the metal has already skyrocketed in price. Gold has so far jumped nearly 30% so far this year, and more than 500% in a decade.

What's next?

What goes up...

2011-09-16T08:31:00.005-04:00

What goes up, may come down. Here is the historical real price of gold, as per Paul Krugman:

Of course, there are some secular trends now that were not there in the 1980s- namely the increasing buying power in the gold-hungry countries of India and China. So when the price of gold eases, it will probably stabilize at a higher real price than the 1985-2006 average. I suppose.

The Portents

2011-09-14T06:52:00.001-04:00

Republican Bob Turner won a Congressional by-election in a heavily Democratic district in New York, running on the theme that this was a referendum on President Obama.

This points towards the Republicans gaining the Presidency, retaining the House and perhaps taking the Senate in 2012. There is already a Republican Supreme Court.

Why this is a bad idea: the short version by CIP, or the long version by Mike Lofgren.

I predict an overall end to the New Deal, beginning 2013, and another lost decade for the American middle class.

PS: It is so unstoppable, all I can suggest, is put your head down and work hard to climb out of the middle class. Yes, that is unrealistic; but it is more realistic than trying to divert a hurricane.

Graeber on the origins of money

2011-09-14T00:48:00.000-04:00

At Delong, or at CIP.

Crudely: Gifts, credit, debt came first, money and barter followed.

In the shadow of Saturn

2011-09-09T21:34:00.000-04:00

NASA picture.

Is our universe asymmetric?

2011-09-08T19:16:00.002-04:00

CIP highlighted a paper just out,< in which the researchers look at how fast the universe is expanding in different directions, and find an asymmetry. How they examine this is by looking at the data from 557 type1A supernovae. These supernovae are well-calibrated "standard candles" which means that we know their intrinsic brightness. Their observed brightness, and their redshifts tell us how far away they are and how fast they are receding from us. Well, they find an asymmetry. The link that CIP provided gives a better description than my two sentences above.

My purpose in writing this post, apart from drawing your attention to this, is to merely note that one can get to the Union2 compilation of the 557 supernovae (though better follow reference 15 in the arxiv paper that CIP links). Their positions in the sky are given by right ascension and declination. One would wish that the sample of supernovae used was reasonably uniformly distributed in the sky. I don't know what systematic errors in finding the asymmetry are caused by them not being so. Simple histograms produced in Microsoft Excel are shown below. A uniform distribution in the sky would produce a uniform distribution in right ascension (think of it as longitude) and a cosine (zero at +/-90 and maximum at 0, think of it as latitude and think of the diminishing area of a sphere in successive bands of latitude).

PS: Using http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/forms/calculator.html
I think the direction of the axis of symmetry (314,28)(galactic coordinates) from the paper is equivalently
Right Ascension: 13:38:33
Declination: -33:51:26
which you can locate on the graphs above.

If Obama purchased a car

2011-09-08T18:45:00.000-04:00

If President Obama were to purchase a car, especially if it were from a dealer who was Republican, Obama's starting bid would be Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price.

The difference between two Presidents

2011-09-07T09:07:00.000-04:00

It is Thomas Friedman, but on the other hand there is Bush-bashing, who can resist.

Why has this been a lost decade? An answer can be found in one simple comparison: How Dwight Eisenhower and his successors used the cold war and how George W. Bush used 9/11. America had to face down the Russians in the cold war. America had to respond to 9/11 and the threat of Al Qaeda. But the critical difference between the two was this: Beginning with Eisenhower and continuing to some degree with every cold war president, we used the cold war and the Russian threat as a reason and motivator to do big, hard things together at home — to do nation-building in America. We used it to build the interstate highway system, put a man on the moon, push out the boundaries of science, teach new languages, maintain fiscal discipline and, when needed, raise taxes. We won the cold war with collective action.

George W. Bush did the opposite. He used 9/11 as an excuse to lower taxes, to start two wars that — for the first time in our history — were not paid for by tax increases, and to create a costly new entitlement in Medicare prescription drugs.

Stalled

2011-09-05T23:26:00.002-04:00

Shot at 1/5000 sec, so these look as though their engines have stalled.

This fellow was really far away. The full frame is mostly sky, this is a heavy crop. Put here only as a memento.

A World of Hurt

2011-09-02T22:48:00.010-04:00

From CalculatedRisk

Thought for the day

2011-08-30T08:34:00.001-04:00

From RJ Lipton's blog (included in the blog list on the left) this quote from Martin Grötschel (2003):

that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later—in 2003—this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms!

Tirukkural

2011-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Here.

Sustained and courageous effort enables man to see Fate turn its back and flee from the field.

Forbes: Why Amazon can't make the Kindle in America

2011-08-23T23:31:00.000-04:00

Forbes: Well worth reading, thinking about, and acting upon.

“So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.”

Dowd, Obama, Frost

2011-08-22T08:43:00.000-04:00

Maureen Dowd had this in the NYT:

Obama was truly stung by his budget experience with John Boehner. And now, Senator Tom Coburn, whom Obama called “not only a dear friend, but also a brother in Christ” at February’s National Prayer Breakfast, tells a town hall in Oklahoma that Obama’s views are “goofy and wrong,” and that the president wants to “create dependency” because “as an African-American male,” he had received “tremendous benefit” from government programs.

There is no way to sell the idea that being a black man in America gives you tremendous benefit.
How does Obama feel after his brother in Christ painted him as something akin to a welfare queen and an affirmative-action president?

Let us take today’s lesson from Frost, who deliciously wrote in “The Lesson for Today”:

I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat,
Won’t know exactly what I mean by that.
I mean so altruistically moral
I never take my own side in a quarrel.

US Health Care

2011-08-21T12:51:00.002-04:00

An examination of the problem at dailykos.com.

World-view

2011-08-18T06:04:00.002-04:00

Cartoon, at abstrusegoose.com

A little puzzle

2011-08-17T21:59:00.004-04:00

Dr. N.K. sent me a little puzzle.

Construct the Fill of a set of points by drawing all the lines (extending to infinity) using every pair of points in the set. Thus the Fill of three non-collinear points is the triangle with the 3 points as vertices and the edges extended to infinity. The Fill * Fill of three non-collinear points is the whole plane.

The question is: what is the Fill * Fill of four non-coplanar points? Is it all of space (Euclidean 3D space)?
Answer beneath the fold.

The Fill * Fill of four non-coplanar points is not all of space, you have to exclude four points. If you take one point to be the origin and the three other points to define vectors a₁, a₂, a₃. These three vectors form a basis, and any point can be expressed as

{x₁,x₂,x₃} ≡ x₁ a₁ + x₂ a₂ + x₃ a₃

In this notation the four excluded points are:

{½, ½, ½ }
{-½, ½, ½}
{½,-½, ½ }
{½, ½, -½}

PS: more detail

Who am I?

2011-08-16T12:09:00.001-04:00

1-10% of me (depending on how you count it) was blown away by this in the New York Times: (emphasis added). No doubt, some large part of me already knew this.

"As they look beyond the genome, cancer researchers are also awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom."

“We are massively outnumbered,” said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.