Trapped into going to the Symphony

I’ve been trapped into going to the symphony tonight; funny how “our” activities are exactly what my wife wants to do.

But I’ll have some online fun anyway:

Science Avenger links us to this: it is a list of the previous 44 Presidents (43 men in all); each face morphs into the next one.

Animal Camouflage: Surf to Conservation Report and see if you can spot these bats. You should be able to, but they really do blend in well.

Rail and “ready for the shovel” projects: Ray LaHood (who has just been confirmed as Transportation Secretary) says that he is big on rail. Here are probably some things that he is considering:

As the Obama Administration considers spending hundreds of billions to stimulate the economy, a number of rail supporters, from associations (pdf) to think tank writers to state and congressional policy makers – not to mention the incoming White House, advocate making major investments in rail projects.

In December 2008 Transportation For America collected data on transportation “projects ready to go in four months” and “ready to go in one year” – listing almost $20 billion worth of projects. While these projects include bus transit, here in this first post of a series on “Shovel Ready” rail projects, we’re using Transportation For America’s rail data, augmented with our links, to describe rail projects that could become part of the economic stimulus package. Below is a Google Map showing projects ready to go within four months – click the train icons, and on the upper left hand side of the map the four-way directional movement arrows and the ‘+’ and ‘-’ zoom to manipulate the map (for an easier, full-page view with a legend describing the projects see U.S. Regional Rail Projects Shovel Ready Within Four Months).

Surf via the above link to the article to see the aforementioned map and to obtain other links.

How to set up high speed rail: this article argues that it is correct to hub the high speed rail in the cities rather than in the airports:

Okay, I realize that lately some airlines in Europe have actually been supporting HSR and even getting into the biz themselves, like Air France. This is great. What we can’t do, however, is make the mistake of seeing high-speed rail as merely some replacement for short-haul connection flights. Trains [probably] won’t ever be as fast as planes, so it’s critical that we don’t remove from them one of their best advantages over flying: being able to leave and arrive right from the city.

For one thing, this makes things easier for travelers. Airports are generally located in the far-flung fringes of an urban area. The trip to and from the airport after the plane has landed can be long, expensive, and cumbersome for travelers. This is true for drivers and doubly true for users of mass transit. If you’re lucky, the city has a rail transit connection to its airport. If you’re not, get ready to put up with a more confusing bus ride or a pricey cab fare. Even if there is a connection, like the CTA’s Blue Line at O’Hare, those trains are usually neither suited for luggage nor the long suburban distances. It’s much more practical to have our trains arriving and leaving in the cities themselves, where they are well served by local transportation and close to urban amenities and destinations. The UK is looking at having Heathrow be the hub for a national HSR scheme, but Heathrow already has an express rail connection to London, and as part of the plan will be getting an even faster one. I don’t envision the political will ever materializing for something like that in the United States. Transit connections will always be “good enough.”

This also dips into the realm of urban policy. Focusing our tax money on airports will encourage more development in those far-flung suburbs. [...]

Biology and Evolution: is there a gene that enhances aggression and makes some people more eager to punish transgressors? Research seems to indicate that the answer is “yes”:

Individuals with the so-called “warrior gene” display higher levels of aggression in response to provocation, according to new research co-authored by Rose McDermott, professor of political science at Brown University. In the experiment, which is the first to examine a behavioral measure of aggression in response to provocation, subjects were asked to cause physical pain to an opponent they believed had taken money from them by administering varying amounts of hot sauce. The findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition to McDermott, the research team included Dustin Tingley of Princeton University, Jonathan Cowden of the University of California–Santa Barbara, Giovanni Frazetto from the London School of Economics, and Dominic Johnson from the University of Edinburgh. Their experiment synthesized work in psychology and behavioral economics. [...]

The PNAS paper is the first experimental test of whether MAOA-L individuals display higher levels of actual behavioral aggression in response to provocation. A total of 78 subjects took part in the experiment over networked computers (all were male students from the University of California–Santa Barbara). Each subject (A) first performed a vocabulary task in which they earned money. Then they were told that an anonymous partner (B), linked over the network, could choose to take some of their earnings away from them. The original subject (A) could then choose to punish the taker (B) by forcing them to eat unpleasantly hot (spicy) sauce — but they had to pay to do so, so administering punishment was costly. In reality, the “partner” who took money away was a computer, which allowed the researchers to control responses. No one actually ingested hot sauce.

Their results demonstrate that

* Low-activity MAOA subjects displayed slightly higher levels of aggression overall than high-activity MAOA subjects.
* There was strong evidence for a gene-by-environment interaction, such that MAOA is less associated with the occurrence of aggression in the low-provocation condition (when the amount of money taken was low), but significantly predicted aggression in a high-provocation situation (when the amount of money taken was high).

The results support previous research suggesting that MAOA influences aggressive behavior, with potentially important implications for interpersonal aggression, violence, political decision-making, and crime. The finding of genetic influences on aggression and punishment behavior also questions the recently proposed idea that humans are “altruistic” punishers, who willingly punish free-riders for the good of the group. These results support theories of cooperation that propose there are mixed strategies in the population. Some people may punish more than others, and there may be an underlying evolutionary logic for doing so.

Follow the link to read more details.

Hilarious Right Wingers

This is Ted Haggard.

Guess what? He has not only had long term involvement in a homosexual relationship, but he has also paid for sexual favors!

Ted Haggard is in the news again — it seems he has been involved in long term homosexual relationships, and has been abusing his power for sexual favors. Raise your hands if you would never have expected it!

Hey, how come none of you lifted your fingers from your keyboard?

Here’s his latest excuse, and it’s actually a good one.

In an AP interview this month before an appearance in front of TV critics in California, Haggard described his sexuality as complex and something that can’t be put into “stereotypical boxes.”

Hmmm, why can’t these right wing evangelicals understand that other people also have complex sexuality?

24 January 2009: Chilly Thoughts

Workout notes 10 mile run on the treadmill: 1:37:55: 57:28 (6 miles), 1:52 water break, 38:34 last 4 miles. Varied the incline.

Then yoga: I lead the class. There were some groans.

Science I was pointed to these articles by 3-quarks daily.

Here is an interview with an applied mathematician; mostly it is about his books and what he reads.

Here is an article about naked singularities in cosmology. Very roughly speaking, naked singularities are black-hole like objects that don’t have an event horizon; you can exchange information with the center.

Modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. Modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size. Whereas if a star is massive enough, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might halt the collapse. From a size of millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to a pinprick smaller than the dot on an “i.”

Most physicists and astronomers think the result is a black hole, a body with such intense gravity that nothing can escape from its immediate vicinity. A black hole has two parts. At its core is a singularity, the infinitesimal point into which all the matter of the star gets crushed. Surrounding the singularity is the region of space from which escape is impossible, the perimeter of which is called the event horizon. Once something enters the event horizon, it loses all hope of exiting. Whatever light the falling body gives off is trapped, too, so an outside observer never sees it again. It ultimately crashes into the singularity.

But is this picture really true? The known laws of physics are clear that a singularity forms, but they are hazy about the event horizon. Most physicists operate under the assumption that a horizon must indeed form, if only because the horizon is very appealing as a scientific fig leaf. Physicists have yet to figure out what exactly happens at a singularity: matter is crushed, but what becomes of it then? The event horizon, by hiding the singularity, isolates this gap in our knowledge. All kinds of processes unknown to science may occur at the singularity, yet they have no effect on the outside world. Astronomers plotting the orbits of planets and stars can safely ignore the uncertainties introduced by singularities and apply the standard laws of physics with confidence. Whatever happens in a black hole stays in a black hole.

Yet a growing body of research calls this working assumption into question. Researchers have found a wide variety of stellar collapse scenarios in which an event horizon does not in fact form, so that the singularity remains exposed to our view. Physicists call it a naked singularity. Matter and radiation can both fall in and come out. Whereas visiting the singularity inside a black hole would be a one-way trip, you could in principle come as close as you like to a naked singularity and return to tell the tale.

If naked singularities exist, the implications would be enormous and would touch on nearly every aspect of astrophysics and fundamental physics. The lack of horizons could mean that mysterious processes occurring near the singularities would impinge on the outside world. Naked singularities might account for unexplained high-energy phenomena that astronomers have seen, and they might offer a laboratory to explore the fabric of spacetime on its finest scales.

Event horizons were supposed to have been the easy part about black holes. Singularities are clearly mysterious. They are places where the strength of gravity becomes infinite and the known laws of physics break down. According to physicists’ current understanding of gravity, encapsulated in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, singularities inevitably arise during the collapse of a giant star. General relativity does not account for the quantum effects that become important for microscopic objects, and those effects presumably intervene to prevent the strength of gravity from becoming truly infinite. But physicists are still struggling to develop the quantum theory of gravity they need to explain singularities. [...]

Follow the link to read the rest of the article (6 short pages) and see the slides.

Sandwalk: Professor Moran gives a list of those he thinks are good science writers.

1 F in Peoria

It went from a warm (for us) 30′s (yesterday) to today’s 1 F.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen too many warm-weather mathematics jobs advertised.

I’ll try to get in 10 miles of moderate running and then lead a “Yoga for Runners” class. My run will be on “Mr. Treadmill” once again; there is still quite of bit of snow out there on the roads though we haven’t had much new snow.

President Obama: here is his short weekly radio address.

Here is the text:

We begin this year and this Administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action. Just this week, we saw more people file for unemployment than at any time in the last twenty-six years, and experts agree that if nothing is done, the unemployment rate could reach double digits. Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four. And we could lose a generation of potential, as more young Americans are forced to forgo college dreams or the chance to train for the jobs of the future.

In short, if we do not act boldly and swiftly, a bad situation could become dramatically worse.

That is why I have proposed an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to immediately jumpstart job creation as well as long-term economic growth. I am pleased to say that both parties in Congress are already hard at work on this plan, and I hope to sign it into law in less than a month.

It’s a plan that will save or create three to four million jobs over the next few years, and one that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment – the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done. That’s why this is not just a short-term program to boost employment. It’s one that will invest in our most important priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.

Today I’d like to talk specifically about the progress we expect to make in each of these areas.

To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid that lay down more than 3,000 miles of transmission lines to convey this new energy from coast to coast. We’ll save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75% of federal buildings more energy efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes.

To lower health care costs, cut medical errors, and improve care, we’ll computerize the nation’s health records in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we’ll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn.

To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools, building state-of-the-art classrooms, libraries, and labs to improve learning for over five million students. We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students, and triple the number of fellowships in science to help spur the next generation of innovation.

Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so businesses can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located.

I know that some are skeptical about the size and scale of this recovery plan. I understand that skepticism, which is why this recovery plan must and will include unprecedented measures that will allow the American people to hold my Administration accountable for these results. We won’t just throw money at our problems – we’ll invest in what works. Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made public, and informed by independent experts whenever possible. We will launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.

No one policy or program will solve the challenges we face right now, nor will this crisis recede in a short period of time. But if we act now and act boldly; if we start rewarding hard work and responsibility once more; if we act as citizens and not partisans and begin again the work of remaking America, then I have faith that we will emerge from this trying time even stronger and more prosperous than we were before. Thanks for listening.

(hat tip: DemConWatch)

Barack Obama has said something else: he told Republican leaders that if they wanted to get something done, they should quit listening to Rush Limbaugh:

Barack Obama is absolutely right to call them out for continually using the Rush Limbaugh playbook. Do they think that Rush Limbaugh is the savior to their party? If so, they are about to lose some more seats in 2010.

“You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done,” he told top GOP leaders, whom he had invited to the White House to discuss his nearly $1 trillion stimulus package.

One White House official confirmed the comment but said he was simply trying to make a larger point about bipartisan efforts.

“There are big things that unify Republicans and Democrats,” the official said. “We shouldn’t let partisan politics derail what are very important things that need to get done.”

There is a fundamental struggle going on here. Rush Limbaugh with all his oxycotin glory is becoming insignificant to the Republican Party.