19 January 2011

Workout notes I got to the Riverplex late (5:20 am) but had time for squats (20 x 45, 10 x 135, 10 x 185, 10 x 135 Smith, 10 x 135 free), sit ups (105; 7 sets of 15 from inclines 9 to 2), back, rotator cuff, hip hikes, then 3.11 miles of running in just under 31 minutes. I used the treadmill XC program (number 3) but had to dial back the last hill interval. Next time, I do all of it.

But I didn’t sleep worth a darn last night; I was just all antsy, surly and upset over…well….over nothing important at all.

Getting in front of a math class made me feel a whole lot better; I feel like myself when I am teaching math or doing math.

Posts
That Wiley Coyote finally gets the roadrunner and…

(hat tip: Mano Singham)

Science: here are the top ten retractions from 2010; note that not one has anything to do with climate science. (hat tip: Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

Economics
Here Paul Krugman shows the results of the stimulus bill being too small; note that the growth rate of the actual GDP roughly matches the growth rate of the potential GDP; we are starting from too low of a point. Hence the DERIVATIVE of the difference is zero whereas it needs to be positive. There is a potential calculus one problem here.

In this post, Krugman takes on the GOP talking points on the economy and notes:

The point is that the real world looks a lot like the one Keynes and Friedman envisioned, in which the demand side drives the business cycle. Why should anyone be determined to throw away 75 years of economic thought, to believe that these appearances are deceiving?

Earlier he says:

But what does the other side believe? Someone, I don’t know who at this point, sent me to this post by Robert Murphy, which is the best exposition I’ve seen yet of the Austrian view that’s sweeping the GOP — and I mean that sincerely, never mind the puerile insults aimed at yours truly. As regular readers know, I’m a stylized-example kind of guy, and Austrians tend to prefer lots of words instead; but in this case Murphy does offer a little story that is, in a way, a counterpart to my story about the baby-sitting coop (although my story was based on an actual real-world example).

So what is the essence of this Austrian story? Basically, it says that what we call an economic boom is actually something like China’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, which led to a temporary surge in consumption but only at the expense of degradation of the country’s underlying productive capacity. And the unemployment that follows is a result of that degradation: there’s simply nothing useful for the unemployed workers to do.

I like this story, and there are probably other cases besides China 1958-1961 to which it applies. But what reason do we have to think that it has anything to do with the business cycles we actually see in market economies? [...]
Oh, and what evidence is there that the economy’s capacity is damaged during booms? Investment rises, not falls, during booms; yes, I know that Austrians take refuge in cosmic talk about the complexity of production and how measured investment may not show what’s really happening, etc., but where’s the positive evidence of what they’re claiming?

Emphasis mine.

Note that the Republican mind thinks in terms of non-falsifiable slogans; that is why there are relatively few scientists in their ranks. So they don’t NEED positive evidence to back up their theories; if an observable is somewhat consistent with their slogans, it is good enough for them.

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