Better to burn a city than curse the darkness

John Dolan agrees with Lucy.

Heinlein quote excuse

No Stork Involved, but Mom and Dad Had Help

I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?

White Wedding

10+ points for a title that I found much more hopeful than the actual article turned out to be: Japan Embraces Shotgun Weddings

Cox-Zucker

From Peter Woit

Earlier this week I learned from my colleagues one obscure piece of mathematical culture that I had been unaware of. Physicists have the famous story of how Bethe and Gamow brought in Alper as co-author to improve the author list, but it turns out that mathematicians have a somewhat different story of this kind. At lunch one eminent algebraic geometer started snickering when someone (using standard terminology) brought up the well-known ring associated to an algebraic variety due to David Cox. At this, it was pointed out that Cox was co-author of a famous paper with Steven Zucker, and the story goes that this came about because Cox had decided once he heard of Zucker that a Cox-Zucker paper just was asking to be written. A supposedly authoritative source on the internet claims:

Cox and Zucker were admitted as grad students to Princeton in precisely the hope that they would someday collaborate. This kind of forethought is why Princeton is Princeton.

Defining a better sort of crazy

Randall Parker details how health insurance corporations are screwing over individuals with costly diseases in order to save money. In the comments, I wrote that it's not a good idea "tick off thousands of terminally ill patients with nothing to lose in a land of liberal gun ownership laws."

But instead we get human detritus like von Brunn. Something is clearly wrong with the dangerous wackos in today's America.

Math and Physics

V.I. Arnold (he solved Hilbert's 13th problem) has an essay about the dastardly French and the Bourbaki school of teaching algebraic mathematics instead of geometric mathematics. Instead of the determinant of a matrix being an expression of the volume of a parallelepiped, it is a monstrous algebraic algorithm for most students. Why does the determinant show up as the Jacobian in calculus? The algorithm-proselytes will never know. Instead of a Group being understood as a transformation, it's defined by a set of axioms that provide no intuitive hook (but are immediately understood as properties in the transformation view).

Greiner's "Relativistic Quantum Mechanics" strikes me as a marvelous attempt to bring clarity to the complex subject of relativistic wave equations, but it is entirely algebraic. His clarity is achieved by working out the algebra in detail rather than leaving it to exercises (good exercises, however, are sorely lacking from the book -- the problems he calls "exercises" don't seem to be anything of the sort). The approach is algebraic because equations trump concepts. Klein-Gordon is presented as a simple analogue to classical relativity. Replace momentum in the standard E^2 = p^2*c^2 + m^2*c^4 equation with momentum operators, and everything we want to know magically appears by manipulating the equations back and forth.

While this does parallel the history of the physics well enough, I'm not impressed. Physical models, when complete enough for textbooks anyway, should be presented as a set of core concepts which we seek to model through our equations. Making the equations the central aspect and the models a side-effect strikes me as a good way to lead the science off into dead-ends. A geometric approach -- using the equations to describe our models instead of vice-versa -- might be an antidote.

The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology

Stories like this one are what give the grand science of applied phrenology a bad name:

Cornell University librarian and graduate student Phil Davis successfully submitted a manuscript full of nonsense and credited to pseudonymous authors at The Center for Research in Applied Phrenology to The Open Information Science Journal (TOISCIJ). He chose the journal "[a]fter being spammed with invitations to publish in Bentham Science journals earlier this year."

Debt

How would a sane Federal Government behave in a scenario of inevitable public debt default? It might increase borrowing, since the money would never need to be paid back. It would attempt to bolster confidence in U.S. bonds in order to extract the last ounce of capital before the collapse.

Sound like what's going on now?

I agree, it's crazy talk to think of the people at the top actually planning to default.

But how many sane people really think that we're going to pay all the money back? I imagine that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in the White House.

How long would the game last? Ponzi schemes naturally last until interest payments surpass borrowing. That moment is probably inevitable for the U.S. government. Maybe it's not a Ponzi scheme and we won't default when we get there. But I wouldn't bet on it.

Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co.

Once again, people in silly garments decide a case in a silly manner.

Yes, no sane country allows judges to take millions from donors and then preside over their cases. But we already have a remedy for that: state legislatures creating rules for recusal.

The two words "due process" in the Constitution are not sufficient to create a framework setting out detailed standards for a judge's recusal -- and the majority opinion doesn't attempt set out such a standard. Brave new world of new lawsuits, here we come.

Visiting Relatives

Half-Sigma, "Virginia Dare" brand extract means that my Aunt is racist, right?



False alarm, here's the Obamaccino: