Einstein's helpers

History: Einstein was no lone genius : Nature News & Comment

The description here of the maths and ideas that Einstein was working on is pretty dense, and it's interesting  to think that even a 100 years later, very few people in any society ever get close to a mathematical understanding of relativity.   We mostly just understand it via popularised picture or story form.

The screening issue

Early Prostate Cancer Cases Fall Along With Screening - The New York Times

I kind of suspect that the doctor in the article who says the anti-screening policy was a bit of an over-correction might be right.  But that's just a hunch.

What a surprise...

Latinos disagree with Republicans on Trump — and a lot of other things - The Washington Post

Polling shows 80% of Hispanics have an "unfavourable" view of Trump.  Way to win back their vote, Republicans.

Capital flows problem

Interesting post from the Lowy Institute blog about some push back against academic economics on capital flows:

The traditional conventional view among policy and academic economists was that capital flows were unambiguously a Good Thing, a beneficial element of globalisation. The policy prescription which followed was that emerging economies should open the capital markets to foreign flows. The promise was that, provided they let their exchange rates float, things would work out well.

The experience of the past two decades has been less benign. The sloshing backwards and forwards of foreign capital has typically been driven by the abnormal circumstances in advanced economies, rather than by macro-policy mistakes in the emerging economies. A policy framework that presumes these flows to be beneficial is irrelevant to the policy challenge the emerging economies face.

Over the past decade, the policy debate has been inching forward to incorporate the inconvenient reality that the flows may be disruptive. Olivier Blanchard, recently retired as the IMF chief economist, has co-authored two papers from his new base in the Peterson Institute. As he did at the IMF, Blanchard continues to strive to bring the consensus policy framework closer to the real world.

One paper argues that capital inflows can push up asset prices in the recipient country, over-stimulating domestic demand in the process. This might seem like an obvious-enough insight, but is the opposite of the conventional academic model on which much policy prescription had been based.

The second paper argues that foreign exchange intervention can be effective in stabilising the exchange rate in the face of excessive capital flows. Again, this contradicts most academic models, which see intervention as futile or distortionary.

I think I posted once about Krugman musing about the value of a more "hands on" approach to capital flows, too. 

Permanent 400ppm probably reached

The final days of sub-400 ppm carbon dioxide - Mountain Beltway - AGU Blogosphere

From the link:

...this week is probably the last time you or me or anyone now alive on planet Earth will ever see concentrations of CO₂ lower than 400 ppm. Ralph Keeling published a short piece about it, here.  Unless something fundamentally changes in our relationship with the atmosphere (such as developing and deploying effective artificial carbon sequestration), the gas’s long-term accumulation will keep rising, and the planet will keep hanging on to a little more heat than it used to the year before. Though “400” is simply a round number with no inherent particular significance in and of itself, passing it for good seems a valid enough reason to pause for a moment and reflect on this massive thing we’re doing to our planet. Every additional increment of CO₂ is likely to be a moderately long lived addition to our atmosphere. Its heat-trapping capacity is a major force driving our climate system into new, uncharted terrain for a long time to come. We depend on our climate. People we will never meet on the other side of the world do, too. Our children will depend on it. Grasshoppers and bluebirds and rattlesnakes and whales depend on it. Fungi depend on it. Grasses depend on it. Coccolithophores depend on it. And though this should be obvious, I’ll go ahead and say it explicitly: to a greater or lesser extent, we depend on them. Everything’s interdependent. We all live downstream – and we’re polluting that stream.

More ISIS commentary I agree with

From Ezra Klein at Vox:

ISIS isn't strong. It's weak. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous, or that it can't hurt us. But we shouldn't pretend these are invincible superterrorists. They're murderers fighting a war that they will lose and we will win. Part of how they recruit young fighters is by pretending that's not true — pretending they have a chance in this fight, that they are strong, that they have the West on its heels. We shouldn't indulge their fantasies. We can mourn their victims without believing their propaganda.

The thing you need to remember about ISIS, says Gartenstein-Ross, is it is not just weak in the West, it's also loathed across the Middle East: "America is unpopular in the Middle East, but if we had ISIS's approval rating, we would see that as a very, very serious strategic problem. They have a terrible brand. So part of what we need to do is simply avoid making mistakes that will let them present themselves as a defender of Muslims. We need to make sure Muslims continue to overwhelmingly reject ISIS."

Rich kid problems

The Atlantic has a lengthy, somewhat interesting, story about student suicide in the rich, high tech town of Palo Alto.

I found this interesting:

In training, they’d learned that one key to heading off copycats was not romanticizing the death, so they struggled to hit just the right tone. They had to avoid turning Cameron into a hero or a martyr without insulting his memory or his devastated family. They had to make a space for the kids to grieve without letting wreath-and-teddy-bear memorials take over the campus. In 2009, to commemorate Jean-Paul “J.P.” Blanchard, the first kid in that cluster to die on the tracks, students had spread rose petals all over the school. Tarn Wilson recalls them as beautiful and haunting but also morbid, and exactly the kind of prop that a depressed teenager might imagine as a backdrop to his own future tragedy.

And this, especially:

In the late 1990s, when she was an assistant professor in Yale’s psychiatry department, Suniya Luthar was doing research at an inner-city school in Connecticut. She wanted to know whether misbehavior correlated more with poverty or with a stage of adolescence. She needed a second school to use as a comparison. An undergraduate student she worked with had connections at a school in a Connecticut suburb that was more upscale, and Luthar got permission to distribute her surveys there. The results were not what she expected. In the inner-city school, 86 percent of students received free or reduced-price lunches; in the suburban school, 1 percent did. Yet in the richer school, the proportion of kids who smoked, drank, or used hard drugs was significantly higher—as was the rate of serious anxiety and depression. This anomaly started Luthar down a career-long track studying the vulnerabilities of students within what she calls “a culture of affluence.”  ....

Convincing people that rich kids are at high risk isn’t easy, she said. But she has amassed the most thorough data set we have on that group, from schools scattered across the country. Luthar’s data come from school districts where families have median incomes of more than $200,000, and private schools where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. Her research suggests a U‑shaped curve in pathologies among children, by class. At each extreme—poor and rich—kids are showing unusually high rates of dysfunction. On the surface, the rich kids seem to be thriving. They have cars, nice clothes, good grades, easy access to health care, and, on paper, excellent prospects. But many of them are not navigating adolescence successfully.

The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm. They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average. Starting in seventh grade, the rich cohort includes just as many kids who display troubling levels of delinquency as the poor cohort, although the rule-breaking takes different forms. The poor kids, for example, fight and carry weapons more frequently, which Luthar explains as possibly self-protective. The rich kids, meanwhile, report higher levels of lying, cheating, and theft.

 I think the lesson is that it's good to be middle class.

Wah wah wah!

So, David Leyonhjelm finds the NRA awesome.   The NRA youtube which he was happy to participate in features many gun owners still torn up emotionally because they had to give up some guns (with compensation) nearly 20 years ago! As well as complete total paranoid bullshizer about what a scary, scary place Australia is because they can't have a gun for self defence.

What a disgraceful bit of propaganda from a Senator who should pack up and live in Texas.

Update:  I should have guessed. The Australian's report on the NRA "documentary" that features Leyonhjelm's interview days it is just a repackaged one from many, many years ago.   So the people whining about their beloved gun losses might by now have gotten over it.  Or not, as Leyonhjelm never has.  The Australian says the video is deceptive in many ways, and even the Bald One is backing away from it to some extent.

A near perfect Krugman column

Fearing Fear Itself - The New York Times

A great bit of commentary here on the Paris terrorist attack by Paul Krugman. 

Dimwits, indeed

On Sunday evening I called ISIS "violent dimwits", so I was pleased to have find some backing for the "dimwit" bit from someone who apparently was their captive:

They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity.

All of those beheaded last year were my cellmates, and my jailers would play childish games with us – mental torture – saying one day that we would be released and then two weeks later observing blithely, “Tomorrow we will kill one of you.” The first couple of times we believed them but after that we came to realise that for the most part they were bullshitters having fun with us.

They would play mock executions. Once they used chloroform with me. Another time it was a beheading scene. A bunch of French-speaking jihadis were shouting, “We’re going to cut your head off and put it on to your arse and upload it to YouTube.” They had a sword from an antique shop.

They were laughing and I played the game by screaming, but they just wanted fun. As soon as they left I turned to another of the French hostages and just laughed. It was so ridiculous.

As for their apocalyptic views:

They are totally indoctrinated, clinging to all manner of conspiracy theories, never acknowledging the contradictions.

Everything convinces them that they are on the right path and, specifically, that there is a kind of apocalyptic process under way that will lead to a confrontation between an army of Muslims from all over the world and others, the crusaders, the Romans. They see everything as moving us down that road. Consequently, everything is a blessing from Allah.

With their news and social media interest, they will be noting everything that follows their murderous assault on Paris, and my guess is that right now the chant among them will be “We are winning”. They will be heartened by every sign of overreaction, of division, of fear, of racism, of xenophobia; they will be drawn to any examples of ugliness on social media.

The writer, a Frenchman, then goes on to argue that France ought to back away from increased bombing, saying that it will only make matters worse.

And, indeed,  it would seem Tom Switzer feels the same way.  

But that's where I would disagree.   I have long suspected that Islamic State simply can't have a future as a successful economic state.  As Switzer writes:

It controls mainly desert in north-west Iraq and south-east Syria. Its gross domestic product is roughly the equivalent of Barbados or Eritrea. It has no navy, air force or ballistic missiles. Its army amounts to about 40,000 soldiers. It is not, contrary to what Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop said, more menacing than Soviet communism during the Cold War. Underestimating terrorism is a mistake, but so too is endowing jihadists with far more capability than they have.

If bombing campaigns can be directed especially towards harming their ability to sell oil or trade in any way, I can only see that helping.   

 

And sorry, libertarians, but Switzer is also right when he concludes that a response to terrorism does involve "anti-terror laws that allow electronic surveillance to track terrorists at home and abroad."

 

In other articles that are a decent counter to the dimwit Right view (hello, Tony Abbott, most Republicans and Rupert Murdoch)  that it's the Greatest Crisis to Western Civilization Ever, I thought this one by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic was good.   Sure, we can expect terrorism to be attempted (or succeed) in the US and Australia because of our (limited) involvement in the Iraqi/Syrian problem.   While I certainly do not want an escalation of that, I can't find it in me to wish that all Western military involvement towards ending the territorial success of IS stop now.   

And finally, The Guardian linked to John Oliver's profane, funny, but accurate  explanation of why IS is doomed to fail.  It may be hard for the French to laugh yet, but mocking IS certainly seems an approach that they won't like.

(Oh, and good luck to the hackers who say they will up their cyberattacks on IS propaganda.  Why has it taken this long?   My only complaint, though is that IS dimwits act like they are in a movie, and I don't care for Anonymous hackers doing the same.)

Maybe not mindless, but still doomed to fail

Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse | Scott Atran | Comment is free | The Guardian


There's parts of this column which are interesting, such as this:

There is a recruitment framework. The Grey Zone, a 10-page editorial in Isis’s online magazine Dabiq in early 2015, describes the twilight area occupied by most Muslims between good and evil, the caliphate and the infidel, which the “blessed operations of September 11” brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden it said: “The world today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, ‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’, with the actual ‘terrorist’ being the western crusaders.” Now, it said, “the time had come for another event to … bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone”. The attacks in Paris were the latest instalment of this
strategy, targeting Europe, as did the recent attacks in Turkey. There will be more, much more, to come.

And this sounds about right, when it comes to explaining the appeal of ISIS to disenchanted young men:

As I testified to the US Senate armed service committee and before the United Nations security council: what inspires the most uncompromisingly lethal actors in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings. It’s a thrilling cause that promises glory and esteem. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: fraternal, fast-breaking, glorious, cool – and persuasive.

But overall, I think he's too pessimistic about how long it can last as a successful, on the ground, movement.

Inappropriate responses

Let's start with the soft Left:   of course some of them make soft headed, inappropriate, or nasty tweets after Islamic terrorism attacks.

But there's something deeply ironic about the likes of Sinclair Davidson and the increasingly dotty Rafe Champion (who has a recent post at Catallaxy with the catchy title: "Naming the enemy: The progressive left as a religion of hatred and division") getting outraged over a Lefty no body wishing Tim Wilson had been a victim in Paris, when their blog threads pretty routinely have comments after any terrorism attack recommending that Mecca be "nuked" as a means of solving all Islamic sourced problems.  Wishing the death of hundreds of thousands of anonymous residents of a city is not worthy of condemnation, apparently.  Being nasty towards a mate:  well, that's different.

Back to the Left again - talking about the situation in Libya and climate change is seen as some silly, opportunistic connection-making by many on the Right.  But as this Vox article makes clear in a very nuanced argument - it may be opportunist, and is capable of overstatement, but it's not wrong to see a likely climate change influenced drought and the subsequent massive displacement of its rural population as one factor that led to the Syrian civil war.  Nor is it silly to be concerned about climate change making the (already barely livable, it seems to me) Middle East an even worse tinderbox for trouble.  As Roberts notes in the article, the Pentagon has been workshopping that for years, already.

And so back to the Right - this time, of the libertarian bent.  I wondered whether wingnuts from America would be quickly having fantasies about how, only if there were people like carrying pistols everywhere in Paris, one of their fellow gun lovers could have done a John McClane and stopped it all.   And yes, of course they were.

Who within Australia would be joining in?   You might have guessed, but yes, David Leyonhjelm, who has form on this, was busy re-tweeting with approval pathetic things like this:

Not only a fantasy prone fixation on guns and how terrorism happens, but hard not to see it as involving an offensive bit of "blame the victim" political gamemanship.   A true jerk.

Update:  Henry Ergas is great at running around and shouting "Radical Islam! - Something must be done!" (see his column in The Australian today), but not so good at explaining what, exactly.  

Ultimately pointless terrorism

The "meta" tragedy of Paris is that it is part of a fight with a bunch of violent dimwits who are too stupid to realise their apocalyptic dreams of global Caliphate don't have a chance in hell of working in the long run.

As the New York Times wrote:

Al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s principal forebear, built its identity around spectacular terrorist attacks because its leaders saw themselves as insurgents seeking to overturn Arab governments that they deemed apostates. Al Qaeda wanted to bait the West into military actions that would destabilize Arab states. The Islamic State, in contrast, has increasingly styled itself a state and, in many ways, behaved like one.

The ideology and motivation behind the change may be opaque for years. Analysts suggest that the messianic and apocalyptic side of its jihadist ideology may have gotten the better of the pragmatic impulse that had previously appeared to guide the group’s expansion. Or, experts say, the Islamic State may be seeking to use large terrorist attacks the way a more conventional power might use an air force as a tool of its defense policy, to retaliate against enemy attacks and seek to deter them.

But, if so, its tactics may be shortsighted, causing redoubled Western attempts to crush the militant organization — even as the spreading Islamic State structure makes those efforts more challenging.

As for the question "why France?" right now, The Guardian noted that country's leading role recently in air attacks on IS that are of the type that may well make a long term difference:

The Isis claim of responsibility for Friday’s Paris attacks referred directly to French aircraft “striking Muslims in the lands of the caliphate”.

Earlier this week, French warplanes attacked oil and gas installations in the Deir ez-Zor area, describing this as part of an effort to destroy Isis infrastructure and undermine its financial resources. President François Hollande also announced the deployment to the Gulf of France’s only aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to support operations against Isis in Syria and Iraq. French warplanes struck their first targets in Syria in late September.

On 8 October, France attacked an Isis training camp in Raqqa, capital of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in north-eastern Syria. It was believed to house foreign fighters, including French nationals, but Hollande denied they were targeting a specific individual.

Le Monde reported that the target was Benghalem Salim, 35, responsible for the reception of French and francophones into Isis. Hollande repeated that about 600 French nationals were currently fighting in Syria and Iraq.

In all, France has carried out about 1,300 sorties in Iraq, with 271 airstrikes destroying more than 450 terrorist targets. Only a few strikes have been carried out in Syria. It is using six Rafale multi-role fighter jets stationed in the United Arab Emirates and six Mirage 2000 fighters deployed in Jordan.

Well, the immediate motivation for the attack is not as unclear as I initially thought.

But get real, IS.   Your arcane and violent medievalist world view has no hope of sustained success against the West, and your apocalyptic fantasies will come to nought, as have hundreds of previous examples of the religious who thought they were acting out the End Times.

If you didn't force millions of the more sensible to flee into Europe,  kill the innocent on the streets of Paris, or insist that the your centuries old feud with another branch of Islam still had to resolved with violence, you might have had a chance of running a desperately poor bit of desert in whatever stupidly repressive way you wanted.  But you've blown that chance.

More spooky action proof

NIST team proves 'spooky action at a distance' is really real

Just get on with it

Machine Being Built to Receive Messages from the Future : Discovery News

I don't know what prompted this recent short story on Ronald Mallett's long standing idea that he could build a machine to receive messages from the future for only $250,000.   Mallett has been talking about this for years.  I'm not exactly sure on what the hold up might be for such a project.   Some rich tech guy should surely be prepared to fund it. Or perhaps, as his Wiki entry explains, the criticisms of Mallett's idea are entirely valid.

Always look on the dark side

Why we shouldn’t be fooled by the fall in unemployment figure | The Australian

Adam Creighton is certainly looking on the dark side today.

I find him a confusing fellow.  He has the usual small government/libertarian fetish against the government paying for things to be done, and hence unless a government is busy downsizing continually and reducing taxes he assumes they are a failure.  On the other hand, in some column or other before, he seemed surprisingly sympathetic to Piketty's take on increasing inequality as being real and of concern.

Overall, I still don't think he is to be trusted.

More filtered flowers

Cool club

Australian life expectancy jumps to new highs | Australia news | The Guardian

Australians born now are expected to live longer than ever before.
Life expectancy for females at birth rose from 84.3 in 2013 to 84.4 last
year, while for males it jumped from 80.1 to 80.3, according to new
figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

There are only six other countries in the world where both men and
women have a life expectancy over 80 years, Beidar Cho from the ABS said
in a statement on Thursday.

Those countries are Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel and Sweden.

“Australia has a higher life expectancy, at both the male and female
level, than many similar countries to ours such as New Zealand, the UK
and the US,” she said.

An alert

Although they have attractive packaging, and are from Canada, which I like to think has clean waters and nice fish, I do not care for Brunswick brand sardines at all.  (Too large, too smelly, needs salt.) 

That is all....

Busy

Update:  no reader has asked, but I tell you anyway:  created by putting a photo of a flower I had taken through some kaleidoscopic filter on an Android app, the name of which I currently forget.   I think the result is pleasingly psychedelic.