Lazy Saturday Morning 22 November.

Workout notes: I’ll be a slug this morning: maybe the 9 am yoga class followed by an hour of easy walking. I have a 4 mile running race on Sunday and I want to see how I do.

The course (for the Peoria Turkey Trot) is actually just a bit short: you start on a road and go up a huge hill; the first 2 miles or so are pretty much uphill. Then you go screaming down the hill (still on the road) and back to where you started. This loop is about 3.1 miles or so. Then you get on the edge of a large complex of soccer fields and run on the grass for about .7 miles. By then your quads are pretty much trashed.

Ironically, your time is about what your time for a 4 mile road course would be; the shorter distance is compensated for by the hill and the grass.

Anyway, I’d like to check out where I am in terms of fitness, and that means that I should probably take it easy today.

Assorted Items

Civics Quiz: I posted a link to the quiz on the Daily Kos. Needless to say, the Kossacks are doing pretty well. I’d love to see a contest between us and, say, the Freepers or the Dittoheads (we’d wipe the floor with them).

Obama’s President Elect Addresses

Here are the first two:

Science and Mathematics
Yesterday I attended a physics seminar on the Large Hadron Collider. This was a slightly more specialized talk than the public one the day before. There were lots of fascinating things there; one of the more fascinating topics was gravity: why is it so much weaker than the other forces (on the order of times weaker!). I was told that the spin of the graviton made it mathematically feasible to model gravity in such a way that most of the force extends beyond our space-time continuum into another, geometrically small dimension (the spins of the other particles would have those other forces acting in our dimensions). They also told me that candidates for these other dimensions could be compact manifolds or orbifolds.

More Cosmology

Here is a good TED talk on the large scale structure of the universe (e. g., the patterns that the clusters of galaxies make). Note that the simulations produces these sorts of structures given the estimated conditions at the big bang.

Some Mathematics
Here is the “knot not” video; this describes one of my research areas.

Economics

Robert Reich talks more about the bailout; he notes that some of the bailout programs really don’t do much other than help the investors who made bad investments. He also notes that bailing out GM might have a more positive impact on the economy than some of the bailouts of banks.

The Street’s view of the world is fundamentally flawed. Banks are important to the economy because they’re financial intermediaries. They connect savers with investors and borrowers. This is a vital function, but there’s nothing magical about it. At any given time the world contains a vast pool of money that can be put to all sorts of uses. Financial intermediaries simply link the pool to the uses.

To be sure, savers need to believe that intermediaries are trustworthy; otherwise, savers will prefer the underside of their mattresses. That’s why governments regulate intermediaries, insure deposits, and do whatever else needs to be done to make savers feel safe. What governments and societies fear most are “runs” on banks — panicked efforts by depositors to pull their money out all at once, before banks can possibly collect the money from all those who have used it to borrow or invest. That’s what happened in the 1930s.

But the current panic on Wall Street is not a “run” in this sense. It has almost nothing to do with banks’ roles as financial intermediaries. It’s about money that’s been lent to or invested in the banks themselves, in order to profit off of the banks’ profits. Lehman’s demise cost many investors and creditors lots of money, to be sure, but they were investors and creditors in Lehman, not in the real economy.

He then talks about how GM has a much greater impact on the economy as a whole:

In fact, there may be more reason to do the reverse. GM has a far greater impact on jobs and communities. Add parts suppliers and their employees, and the number of middle-class and blue-collar jobs dependent on GM is many multiples that of Citi. And the potential social costs of GM’s demise, or even major shrinkage, is much larger than Citi’s — including everything from unemployment insurance to lost tax revenues to families suddenly without health insurance to entire communities whose infrastructure and housing may become nearly worthless. I’m not arguing that GM should be bailed out; as I’ve noted elsewhere, GM’s creditors, shareholders, executives, and workers should have to make substantial sacrifices before taxpayers should be expected to sacrifice as well.

Anyway, there is much more there. This is one reason I love the internet: you get a free, front row seat for a seminar by an expert!

Religion and society (via 3quarks daily): does religion actually make a society more moral? There is no evidence that it does.

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.” [...]

Gee, that is a shock, isn’t it. Of course it isn’t. Now I must wonder if the link between religious belief and society dysfunction is a mere correlation or it is causation: do people in troubled societies turn to religion because of their troubles, or does the religious beliefs themselves lead to the troubles? I also wonder about this as well: I’ve seen studies that show that dumber people have more trouble getting through life and that, well, dumber people tend to be more religious. So, is the measure of how religious a society is really more or less an ignorance detection?