Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong
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For Your Procrastination: Haven't Gathered Up One of These in a While...

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Recent Links:

  1. Stephen Mihm: Steel History Shows How America Lost Ground to Europe: "Spoiler alert: Unfair trade practices of foreign nations had nothing to do with it..."
  2. Belle Waring: Young Man Has Crisis While Europe Stumbles Into War: "I read Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, and it is really the best thing ever. You should all read it, and unlike all the other books I’m thinking of, it’s not eleventy billion pages long..."
  3. Sophia Besch: The End of Little Germany?: "Germany has long enjoyed the luxury of pretending to be something it is not: a small country. Now that a new government has finally been formed, Germany must start thinking of itself as the major economic player it is, and behave accordingly–preferably before new ministers settle into old routines..."
  4. Vachel Lindsay: The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race
  5. Brian Faler: 'This is not normal': Glitches mar new tax law: "Rep. Richard Neal.... 'We’re not going to willy nilly into this with, all of a sudden, a technical corrections bill that has not been sufficiently aired', he said. 'There needs to be an acknowledgment that this was done in haste and that there were many mistakes'..."
  6. Valerie Wilson and Janelle Jones: Working harder or finding it harder to work?: "Demographic trends in annual work hours show an increasingly fractured workforce..."
  7. Greg Leiserson: Presentation: U.S. Inequality and Recent Tax Changes: "the recently enacted Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will likely increase disparities in economic well-being, after-tax income, and pre-tax income..."
  8. Ann Marie Marciarille: The Smoking Gun That Is a Swiss Flag: "Collusion... between Michigan's Allegiance Health and Hillsdale Community Health Center... to derail acute care facility competition in treating cancer, heart,and orthopedic patients.... Svvy colluding parties signaled their territorial allocation by the exchange of a Swiss flag. As the Swiss flag traditionally stands for freedom, honor, and fidelity, I'm thinking they may have gotten their signals crossed..."
  9. James Poniewozik: @poniewozik: "I know you can never truly know until you're tested, but I believe if an asteroid were hurtling into the Earth I would throw my body in front of it and punch it back into space..."
  10. Megha Rajagopalan: This Is What A 21st-Century Police State Really Looks Like: "Far from the booming metropolis of Beijing, China is building a sprawling system that combines dystopian technology and human policing. 'It’s a kind of frontline laboratory for surveillance'..."
  11. Peter Foster, James Crisp, and Gordon Rayner: Brussels accused of 'outrageous' attempt to turn Northern Ireland into EU province by rejecting British compromises: "A senior EU diplomat involved in the talks said it would be 'putting things upside down' to give equal weight to the UK’s preferred options. 'The UK wants its "Narnia" options spelled out in greater detail, but we are still waiting for the proposals from dreamland', the source added, in a reference to CS Lewis’s fantasy novels..."
  12. Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1995): Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (0393035069)
  13. Andrew Sprung: Medicare for (almost) all, brought to Earth: "Medicare Extra wouldn't be 'Medicare for All' but within a few years, it would be 'Medicare for Most'..."
  14. Stefanie Stantcheva: Prisoners of the American Dream: "With inequality increasing, many around the world might assume that Americans would want to close the income gap by instituting a more progressive system of redistribution. But the opposite is true: Americans’ perceptions of privilege, opportunity, and social mobility contrast markedly with views elsewhere..."
  15. Tony Yates: The Petro and the Assignat: "The French government... auctioning off parcels of church land... so to raise money beforehand the government printed tokens called “Assignats” that could be used to bid for land later. Once it became clear that these tokens were selling, it was a small logical step to keep printing and selling the tokens. The problem was that the printing was out of all proportion to any realistic schedule of land auctions..."
  16. Jianbo Chen, Le Son, Martin J. Wainwright, and Michael I. Jordan: Learning to Explain: An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Model Interpretation: "We would like to find out which k words make the most influence on the decision of the model in a specific review. The number of key words is fixed to be k = 10 for all the experiments. We use both automatic metrics and human annotators..."
  17. David Weigel: Nationalism—and heckling—take spotlight at conservative conference: "At this year’s conference, in place of discussions of how to reach out to nonwhite voters, speakers, including Trump, spoke about keeping immigrants out..."
  18. Wikipedia: Fortran - Wikipedia: "While the community was skeptical that this new method could possibly outperform hand-coding, it reduced the number of programming statements necessary to operate a machine by a factor of 20, and quickly gained acceptance..."
  19. Matthew C. Klein: Europeans should stop whining about their appreciating currency: "They should whine less and encourage better fiscal policy instead..."
  20. A.O. Scott: In ‘The Young Karl Marx,’ a Scruffy Specter Haunts Europe: "I’m not suggesting that this is a lapse on Mr. Peck’s part. On the contrary, the way his film deals with family matters and gender relations is an aspect of its precision and a measure of its insight. The great virtue of “The Young Karl Marx” is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history..."
  21. Paul Krugman: It’s Baaack, Twenty Years Later: "This paper is an exercise in self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement..."
  22. Ron Amadeo: Android Wear is getting killed, and it’s all Qualcomm’s fault: "This weekend will mark two years since Qualcomm's last smartwatch chip was announced..."
  23. Marko Kloos
  24. Amazon: Kindle: Your Notes and Highlights
  25. Greg Clark (2001): The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution: "Here I argue that there was no significant break in 1770 from the earlier world. That break only occurred later in the nineteenth century. Instead the Industrial Revolution was most likely the last of a series of localized growth spurts stretching back to the Middle Ages..."
  26. Sami Mahroum: The AI Debate We Need: "Rapid advances in artificial intelligence and related technologies have contributed to fears of widespread job losses and social disruptions in the coming years, giving a sense of urgency to debates about the future of work. But such discussions, though surely worth having, only scratch the surface of what an AI society might look like..."
  27. Ryan Haemann: The FDA’s Regenerative Medicine Framework is a Big Win for Gene Therapies - Niskanen Center
  28. Matt Taddy: The Technological Elements of Artificial Intelligence
  29. Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven W. Webster: Negative Partisanship: Why Americans Dislike Parties ButBehave Like Rabid Partisans: "One of the most important developments in American politics over the last 40 years has been the rise of negative partisanship—the phenomenon whereby Americans largely align against one party instead of affiliating with the other..."
  30. Victoria Baranov et al.: Maternal Depression,Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Large Randomized Control Trial
  31. Michala Iben Riis-Vestergaard et al.: The effect of hydrocortisone administration on intertemporal choice: "Hydrocortisone increases subjects’ preference for the small, soon reward. The effect is specific to receiving hydrocortisone 15 min before the task..."
  32. Ogged: Else: "A few weeks ago, I was telling my wife that my guess is that about 20% of Americans would be ok with bringing back slavery. She thought that was way too high, but she was forgetting about the University of Chicago!..."
  33. Ogged: Time To Dust Off Your McCardle-Hating Shoes: "A world of chummy incompetence... develop[ing] in real time, with people you've known, or known of, from back in the day..."
  34. Joel E. Cohen (1995): How Many People Can the Earth Support?
  35. Tim Duy: Stick To The Forecast: "For now, though the Fed doesn’t care about your pain.... The bigger picture... is the economic forecast–which continues to point to gradual rate hikes...
  36. Alexandra Scaggs: B.R.E.A.M. (Bonds Rule Everything Around Me): "But the final effect of the US tax bill on corporate credit remains unclear, mostly because it depends on what companies do with the cash raised from selling their bond holdings..."
  37. Derek Lowe: Things I Won’t Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride=
  38. Noah Smith: Must-Reads of 2017: Monopolies, Sexism and Economics: "Economics is still reckoning with the aftermath of the Great Recession, inequality and problems of its own making..."
  39. Kaili Joy Gray: Author: [Sarah Palin: It’s Obama’s Fault My Drunk Son Punched His Girlfriend, For America(https://wonkette.com/598047/sarah-palin-its-obamas-fault-my-drunk-son-punched-his-girlfriend-for-america)
  40. Joseph Weldon Bailey
  41. Matthew Yglesias (2009): Lyndon Johnson in New Orleans, October 1964
  42. Clifford Durr
  43. Virginia Foster Durr
  44. Frederick Marryat
  45. Marc Schmitt: The Art of the Scam: "This administration has eagerly taken down the guardrails intended to protect individuals from the worst predators...rule[s]... that required investment advisers to act in the interest of their clients... protect students from worthless for-profit colleges... requiring that employees receive the tips that are intended for them..."
  46. Aphrodite of Knidos
  47. (1971): Supreme Court, 6-3, Upholds Newspapers on Publication of Pentagon Report
  48. Gravlax
  49. Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne
  50. Mondel Chocolates
  51. Nisha Chikhale: Firms matter: Where you work is important to what you earn | Equitable Growth: "Hours and wages both contribute to earnings declines for displaced workers, but the types of firms where they eventually found jobs matters as well..."
  52. Alexander Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen (1992): The Public Choice Theory of John C. Calhoun
  53. Mike Rothschild and Joe Stiglitz (1976): Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information
  54. Hal White (1980): Using Least Squares to Approximate Unknown Regression Functions on JSTOR: "We provide general conditions under which OLS yields a well-defined _least squares approximation) to an unknown function..."
  55. Amanda Bayer and Cecilia Elena Rouse*: Diversity in the Economics Profession: A New Attack on an Old Problem: "Implicit attitudes and institutional practices... contribut[e]... at all stages of the pipeline..."
  56. Primitive Technology
  57. Black Dirt
  58. Carl Zimmer: Author: [This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html): "A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant... made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents..."
  59. John Holbo (2010): If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then. — Crooked Timber: "Bryan Caplan... is a wonder to behold.... In the 1880’s... women... should regard themselves as (rationally) sacrificing liberty, a lesser value, for love of libertarianism, a higher value and separate jar of pickles altogether..."
  60. Ezra Klein: Trump’s 2018 State of the Union made his presidency look small: "Twitter makes Trump look big. The presidency makes him look small..."
  61. Paul Krugman: Trumpfrastructure Is a Scam
  62. 2010: Throwing Milton the Red Over the Side...: "Now Douglas Holtz-Eakin—who really does know better—says that Uncle Milton and Uncle Irving were wrong..."
  63. Dan Davies: "You know the enemies of the people by this sign: when you ask really basic questions about detail, they get nasty..."
  64. James Kwak: Hey Democrats, the Problem Isn’t Jobs and Growth
  65. 3Blue1Brown: But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction
  66. IndieWeb: Webmention
  67. Brent Simmons: Replies and @-mentions
  68. Brent Simmons: inessential: Why Micro.blog is Not Another App.net
  69. Brent Simmons: Micro.blog
  70. Kevin Drum: I Have Finally Seen a Good SOTU Response Speech: "Joe Kennedy’s SOTU response, but I feel like I have to at least mention it. I’ve long been of the opinion that (a) it’s impossible to give a good SOTU response, and (b) it should be done in front of an audience. Well, Kennedy..."
  71. Scarce: Stormy Daniels Casts Doubt On Her Own Denial Of Affair With Trump: "'Is any of it true?', asked Kimmel. 'Define "true"', she replied coyly..."
  72. Alan Beattie: Brexit disarray finally brings UK business out fighting: "Looming deadlines have now caused companies to increase their pressure on government..."
  73. William Patry: The Constitutional Clause: "On August 18, 1787, three proposals were made to include intellectual property rights within the enumerated national powers.... Pinckney 'to secure to authors exclusive rights for a limited time.' James Madison made two alternative proposals..."
  74. John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire: "There is no 'compact' conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide..."
  75. Jim Efstathiou: The U.S. Is About to Get Real Cold Again. Blame It on Global Warming: "Less Arctic ice has been linked to more winter cold snaps. Extreme positions of jet stream ‘mean more extreme weather’..."
  76. Hoang Nghiem: Which was more technologically advanced, the Roman Empire or Han China? - Quora
  77. Karl Marx (1852): 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
  78. (2000): Email: Communism: An Assessment
  79. D.R. Tucker: The Arc of the Moral Universe Must Bend Towards Impeachment: "Not removing Trump from power—choosing to shirk Constitutional responsibilities because of the inherent difficulty of an impeachment effort—would be the equivalent of allowing cancer to go untreated because of the inherent difficulty of chemotherapy. This cannot go on. Our country cannot bear this level of madness..."
  80. Izabella Kaminska: A conversation about how public transport really works: "Walker’s core thesis—that urban geometry must be respected at all stages of public transportation development — still holds true. Worryingly, it’s also the key reality still ignored by those seeking to disrupt the world’s transport systems..."
  81. R. J. Littman and M. L. Littman (1973): Galen and the Antonine Plague 2.J. F. Gilliam (1961)**: The Plague under Marcus Aurelius
  82. Procopius of Caesarea: The Secret History: "Xii. Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in Human Form..."
  83. Praise be darkness, and creation unfinished: John Scalzi: Ursula K. Le Guin, the spiritual mother of generations of writers: "Nearly every lover and creator of science fiction and fantasy can give you a story of how Le Guin, through her words or presence, has illuminated their lives..."
  84. Mike Konczal: How Ideology Works: "You can’t fully understand what happened unless you see the way these elements empower each other. Rodgers’s call to take them piece by piece gets us further away from seeing this..."
  85. Wikipedia: Michael Beschloss
  86. Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda, eds.: Famine in European History
  87. Pranab Bardhan: Gujarat model of hate is evident everywhere: Economist
  88. Leonard Susskind: Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Mind?: The Cosmological Constant
  89. Josh Marshall: Party Taxonomy: "Our politics begin to make sense when you realize that the GOP is two parties: Party A, a rightist, ethno-nationalist party similar to rightist parties in Europe and Party B, a center-right pro-business party that is distinct from but controlled by Party A..."
  90. Facebook: (51) The Ludwig von Mises Institute and Racism
  91. *J. Vernon Henderson, Tim Squires, Adam Storeygard, and David Weil *: Global Distribution of Economic Activity: Nature, History, and the Role of Trade: "24 physical geography attributes explains 47% of worldwide variation and 35% of within-country variation in lights [at night]..."
  92. Noah Rothman: Stark generational divide over Trump in the GOP: "Mostly over the acceptability of loose morals and reckless antagonism for its own sake. The kids are against it..."
  93. Karl Smith: The Future of U.S. Mining and Manufacturing is Bright: "The dynamic nature of the U.S. economy and the resource wealth of North America combine to produce a natural export machine. That machine hasn’t been in operation, not because we lack the capacity, but because we are so wealthy that most of the world can’t afford U.S.-made products..."
  94. Ryan Hagemann: The Coming Age of Genetics is Now Coming-of-Age: "These technologies aren’t on the far-flung horizon; they’re at our front door.... Science... described how gene therapy techniques have already begun improving the lives of those with cancer and heritable genetic diseases..."
  95. John Quiggin: A taxonomy of never-Trumpers: "The smallest group... those who have remained politicaly conservative.... By 2020, it will probably be an empty set. That obviously raises the question of what will remain of the conservative movement when and if Trump is defeated..."
  96. Wikipedoa: Abundances of the elements
  97. Justin Klosky: (88) How to Fold a Fitted Sheet in 30 seconds
  98. James Pogue: The GOP’s Biggest Charter School Experiment Just Imploded: "ECOT grew up... with the support of state politicians and national GOP power brokers... in many ways... served as a model.... Now, the same districts ECOT pulled its funds from are scrambling to find a way to take in its former students..."
  99. P.Z. Myers: "Spaceship building is never going to be a selectively advantageous feature—it’s only going to emerge as a spandrel, which might lead to a species that can occupy a novel niche. And that means that spaceship builders are only going to arise as a product of chance, which will mean they’re going to be very rare..."
  100. Liz Hipple: Can the financial benefit of lobbying be quantified?: "Carpenter and Libgober estimate that banks that commented on the proposed rules had stock market returns of between $3.2 billion and $7 billion more than they would have had if they hadn’t participated..."
  101. Bridget Ansel: Dinner table entrepreneurship on both sides of the Atlantic | Equitable Growth: "kids who grow up with entrepreneurial fathers are more likely to start a business in the same industry and be more successful at it..."
  102. Daniel Shaviro: Greg Leiserson on dynamic scoring: "I think...insufficient adjustment for the massive tax planning opportunities that the act has encouraged and that we will be reading about in the newspapers within a year or two, if not sooner..."
  103. Bridget Ansel: Weekend reading: “lobbying and entrepreneurship” edition: "A new working paper by... Daniel Carpenter and Brian Libgober... quantify[ing] the benefits of lobbying for businesses..."
  104. Ezra Klein: Government shutdown: this a perfect example of Trump-era governance: "Taken in its entirety, the 'shithole shutdown' is the perfect encapsulation of governance in the Trump era: dysfunction and chaos driven by anger and fear toward America’s changing demographics, and the congressional GOP’s cowardly acquiescence to Trump’s ever-shifting demands..."
  105. Matthew Yglesias: Worth noting: "Congressional GOP is: 1) Sufficiently committed to Trump to back a partisan purge of the FBI on his behalf. 2) Doesn’t trust Trump to conduct a legislative negotiation with Chuck Schumer..."
  106. Kim and Kanye name their new baby Chicago West
  107. Jen Kirby: The sex abuse charges against USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, explained - Vox: "Gymnasts he abused are telling their stories. They damn more than just the doctor..."
  108. Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeirad: The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War: "The great lesson of California, the harbinger of America’s political future... there is no way that a bipartisan path provides the way forward..."
  109. Tressie McMillan Cottom: In An Age Of Wicked Problems, Beware Of Simple Solutions: "Wicked problems... bring out the shysters... 'thought leaders'... who profit from selling certainties in uncertain times... elixirs for all that ails us..."
  110. Peter Orszag: Extraordinary Stress and Pessimism Take a Grim Toll: "Low-income Americans report significantly higher levels of daily stress than high-income Americans do. But Graham also notes that the type of stress they typically experience is especially harmful to health, because it seems to be outside the individual’s locus of control..."
  111. Christopher Pissarides and Jacques Bughin: Embracing the New Age of Automation: "Rapid advances in automation and artificial intelligence... worried about a jobless future and sky-high levels of inequality. But the large-scale technologically driven shift currently underway should be welcomed, and its adverse effects should be managed with proactive policies to reinvest in workers..."
  112. Andy Weir: Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space (Ep. 31)
  113. Tyler Cowen: Oumuamua and the Fermi paradox: "Given the Fermi paradox, shouldn’t we assume a fairly high probability this is in fact some form of alien contact or display?  It’s like when you are expecting a package from UPS and then finally the doorbell rings..."
  114. Douglas Almond, Kenneth Chay, and Michael Greenstone: Civil Rights, the War on Poverty, and Black-White Convergence in Infant Mortality in the Rural South and Mississippi: "The benefits of the 1960s Civil Rights legislation extended beyond the labor marker and were substantially larger than recognized previously..."
  115. Ankaret Wells: Unrolled thread from @AnkaretWells: "Twitter, let's talk historical definitions. If someone is arresting women for being too poor, too old or too weird, that's a WITCH HUNT. If instead they are arresting men for being part of a powerful network with too much money and influence, that's a KNIGHT TEMPLAR HUNT..."
  116. Brent Simmons: Evergreen RSS Reader
  117. David Scheer: Bridgewater's Steinberg Killed in Plane Crash With Family: "[Bruce] Steinberg, his wife Irene, and their sons William, Zachary and Matthew were aboard the single-engine plane when it crashed in the northwestern province of Guanacaste shortly after takeoff..."
  118. Wikipedia: OODA loop - Wikipedia: "Observe, orient, decide, and act..."
  119. Glen David Brin (1982): The Great Silence: The Controversy Concerning Extraterrestrial Life
  120. Jennifer Rubin: With Bannon gone, we can see Trumpism for what it really is: "Trump has long been about Trump, a cult of personality with ample helpings of racism, xenophobia, protectionism and nativism. His only 'genius' is in manipulating and conning those looking to justify grievances (usually based on race)..."
  121. Wikipedia: Anunnaki: "Although the names of the Anunnaki in Hurrian and Hittite texts frequently vary, they are always eight in number. In one Hittite ritual, the names of the old gods are listed as: 'Aduntarri the diviner, Zulki the dream interpress, Irpitia Lord of the Earth, Narā, Namšarā, Minki, Amunki, and Āpi'..."
  122. Malory Ortberg: I don't understand the Wars of the Roses: "I’LL SAY IT AGAIN: MINIMIZE YOUR BURGUNDIAN INTERLUDES, MAKERS OF PERIOD DRAMAS..."
  123. Greg Grandin: The Death Cult of Trumpism: "Through racism and nationalism, Trump leverages tribal resentment against an emerging manifest common destiny..."
  124. Malory Ortberg: Marcus Aurelius Prepares For The New Year: "I, Emperor of Rome, son of Marcus Annius Verus, heir to Hadrian, know, on some level, that just “drinking more water” isn’t magically going to fix everything, that eventually when it comes to drinking water you experience diminishing returns, and that it’s not going to suddenly clear up my skin and make me the sort of person who gets cheerfully out of bed at gallicinium, ready to face the sunrise..."
  125. Leslie Hook: California fights back against Trump’s federal agenda: "Mr de León says... unusual times call for unusual measures: 'When you have an occupant in the White House who is a clear and present danger, not just to the state of California, but to the entire United States and the entire world — this is not an ordinary moment in our nation’s history'..."
  126. Elizabeth Kolbert: The Psychology of Inequality: "Researchers find that much of the damage done by being poor comes from feeling poor..."
  127. Branko Milanovic: What these early-20th-century scholars got right about 21st-century politics: "Hobson on inequality, Weber on democracy and demagoguery, and Marshall on migration..."

  • Live from the Gilded Age: Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth..."

  • Live from American History: Abigail Adams* (31 March - 5 April 1776): Letter to John Adams, : "Braintree March 31, 1776...

  • Live from the State with the Extremely Strong Democratic Bench: Alexei Koseff: Feinstein denied Democratic endorsement in CA Senate race: "Delegates at the California Democratic Party convention... the veteran lawmaker... received only 37 percent...

  • Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: So former Minnesota Congressman and Gingrich henchman Vin Weber was one of Putin's stooges in his attempt to keep Ukraine undemocratic and far from western Europe. This is somewhat of a surprise. But not too much of one. The rule of thumb is becoming: don't be surprised by anything somebody still a member of the Republican Party today will do or has done: Allegra Kirkland: Who Was In The Fateful Meeting That Rick Gates Lied To Mueller About?: "Just this month, Gates lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and to the FBI about what transpired during a spring 2013 meeting...

  • Live from "Spukhafte Fernwirkung": Yoon-Ho Kim (1999): A Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser: "This paper reports a 'delayed choice quantum eraser' experiment...

  • Live from the Grove of Cognitive Philosophy Academe: Horsing around by reading the very wise and clever Scott Aaronson: The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine, instead of doing work this morning, has led me to be thunderstruck by an excellent insight of his: Newcomb's Problem is, in its essentials, the same as the problem of Self-Locating Belief, and the solution by Adam Elga: Defeating Dr. Evil with Self-Locating Belief makes as much sense as a solution of one as the other. (I think it makes enormous sense as a solution to both, but YMMV.) As Scott puts it...

  • Live from Spooky Action at a Distance: Question: Don't decoherent branches of an Everettian wave function recohere every time somebody runs a quantum eraser? In what sense is testing the existence of decohered states "hopelessly impractical"? Sean Carroll: Beyond Falsifiability: Normal Science in a Multiverse: "(3) There exist tests that are possible to do within the laws of physics, but are hopelessly impractical...

  • Live from Tarantinoland: Jules Winnfield: Pulp Fiction: Ezekiel 25:17. "'The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men...

  • Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Trump is meaner in rhetoric than the orthodox Republicans, but not meaner than them in their lack of concern for the well-being of Americans: Jonathan Chait: Obama’s Gone, So Republicans Stopped Sabotaging the Economy: "During the Obama era, Democrats frequently believed, but only rarely uttered aloud in official forums, that the Republican Party was engaged in economic sabotage...

  • Live from Monticello: Humans... can be thought of... as rational beings, as rational_izing_ beings, and as debating beings.... Jefferson is that he was outsized and gigantic in all three of these aspects: Thomas Jefferson (1981): Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII: Manners: "It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether catholic, or particular...

  • Live from Rant Central: Charlie Stross has had it with you people—those of you people who abandon worldbuilding and the exploration of possible human civilizations different from ours in the future direction for spectacle, and warmed over Napoleonic or WWII stories in fancy future dress: Charlie Stross: Why I barely read SF these days: "Storytelling is about humanity and its endless introspective quest to understand its own existence and meaning...

  • Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: America is resisting Trump’s authoritarian and ethnic grievance onslaught. The rural south, Midwest, and mountain and desert west is not. And those who resist it are being read out of the Republican Party. Max Boot is a little too optimistic here: Max Boot: America is resisting Trump’s onslaught. Just don’t get cocky: "if Trump ruled in Italy in the 1920s, Argentina in the 1950s or Venezuela in the 2000s, he would undoubtedly be a dictator by now...
  • Live from the Bronze Age: The Hittite view of Minoan/Mykenaean civilization: Martin West (2001): Atreus and Attarissiyas: "There are many Homeric names in -eus...
  • Live from Pseudoscience Land: I must say, I do wish I could read this. I know that it is obvious that the Moon is in the Eleventh House, and that Jupiter and Saturn are aligned in the First House opposite the sun. But the rest?: Johann Kepler 1608): von Wallenstein Horoscope: "Cast for Albrecht von Wallenstein when he was 25 by the astronomer Johannes Kepler...
  • Live from the Cryptocurrency Bulls' Self-Made Gehenna: Who is holding 1.6B dollars of TetherCoin—and an additional 100M dollars each day of the past week—and why?...
  • Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: David Brooks picked a bad moment to go all anti-anti-Trump contrarian.: "But there will never be a good one, will there?... And am I wrong, or wasn't Brooks's "affable, if repetitive" the party line for the late second term Alzheimers-afflicted Reagan?: Steve M.: NO MORE MISTER NICE BLOG: MARC THIESSEN'S DEFENSE OF TRUMP IS EVEN MORE EMBARRASSING THAN THE ONE BY DAVID BROOKS...
  • Live from Global Warming Gehenna: An interesting—and unusual—weather pattern. With more energy the climate can occupy more states, and transfer of cold air straight down the prairie from the arctic to the gulf coast is definitely a state of the system...
  • Live from... Europe's Twentieth Century Gehenna: Reading Dennis Showalter (2005): Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century http://amzn.to/2D7QNOq https://www.amazon.com/dp/0425206637/. And I find myself wondering: Why didn't Hermann Hoth request Rommel for his team in Russia for Operation Barbarossa?..."

  • Comment of the Day: RW: Disrupting Education: "'Will we ever create tech (even for a few subjects) that will work as well as good one-on-one tutoring?'...

  • Comment of the Day: Meno: Disruptive Technology and Education: "The main example of "disruptive" technology Rogoff gives in education is replacing live lectures with filmed ones. Quite obviously this is 1940s technology...

  • Comment of the Day: Robert Waldmann: Fiscal Policy: "I think that Jared Bernstein puts much too little emphasis on caveat 2b—the FOMC...

  • Comment of the Day: Ethan: LIVE FROM GLOBAL WARMING GEHENNA: "We used to call it 'Global Warming'. Later we called it 'Climate Change'. I have long preferred to call it 'Excess Solar Energy Trapped in the Bio-sphere'..."

Books:

Economic History:

  • Wednesday Economic History: NIkola Tesla: It is traditional to talk about Thomas Alva Edison. The most famous inventor in the world, "the wizard of Menlo Park", New Jersey, registered more than 1000 patents and founded 15 companies—including what is now called General Electric. But that story is too well-known. Let’s talk about Nicola Tesla instead...
  • Live from the Gilded Age: Andrew Carnegie (1889): Wealth: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth..."

March 11, 2018 at 13:22 in #equitablegrowth, #weblogging | | Comments (0)

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