You know, of course, Bucky is a Republican….

“a book about “ants”"

My GOP Dream Ticket

Just saying….

23 January 2011

Yes, this is a big game around here. I haven’t a clue as to who will win…either game.

Workout notes 2 miles on the track (about 32 minutes), 3 mile walk on the treadmill (38:55; 26:44 hill for the first 2 and 11:49 for the last one), 1 mile elliptical. I did this with Lynn.

Note: I’ve been off of NSAIDS and Tylenol for a few days and I feel stiffer. I really need to hit yoga again. I was stiff when I woke up; the piriformis feels fine; shoulder is slightly sore but didn’t wake me up with night pain. I’ve had a little bit of pain in the inside part of the knee; nothing serious.

I don’t know why this is on my mind…

22 January 2011; Later in the Day

Workout notes This morning’s activities (lifting, 4 miles running, 2.5 elliptical) wiped me out; I am NOT in race ready shape; not even close. I’ve got so much building up to do. But I am getting stronger. But I’ll have to stretch several times a day while my body adjusts.
I am off of all pain killers and those were masking my “everyday” soreness.

I am not overtraining as my workouts are getting better.

Posts
I’ve downloaded some MacTeX software for my MacBook Pro; this is to help me write mathematics papers and to help me with my mathematics blog.
For the record: I am finishing up a couple of papers to submit for publication and I am attempting to relearn the real analysis that I had, well, “forgotten”; ok, I am trying to learn what I never really understood the first time around. The topics so far: Lebesgue integration and Lebesgue measure (the usual measure and “outer” measure.

For the non-mathematics types who have had a course in calculus: in elementary calculus, you learned how to integrate functions over an interval. The idea is that the definite integral was a “Riemann sum”: you chopped an interval up into small intervals and approximated the area between the graph of the function and the x-axis by small, thin rectangles. As the rectangles got thinner, your areas approached the true area. Now to actually evaluate the integral, in many cases, you could use anti-differentiation; this was a “trick that worked” to calculate that integral.
Lebesgue integration involves chopping up the interval into more sophisticated sets (sets that aren’t merely intervals); this allows you to integrate more functions; enough said for now. Yes, I’ve greatly oversimplified this, and the mathematicians will tell you that you get better “convergence properties” with Lebesgue integration. This latter statement only makes sense if you’ve had a real analysis class, at least at the undergraduate level.

Education The NSF has picked up an article that I had talked about earlier. The idea is that one of the best ways to learn something is to attempt to recall it; the process of retrieving the information actually assists in learning. I followed this thread on facebook and some of the comments were depressing; evidently many, many people simply do not understand that there is a difference between being entertained and actually learning something difficult. The latter is, well, hard work and not always fun (though it can be at times). In short, watching “Mr. Science” and doing some “gee whiz” experiments is not going to turn you into a scientist. Reading popular science books won’t teach you the real stuff either.

Don’t get me wrong; I love popular science books as it gives me an idea of what areas are of interest to working scientists and a rough idea of what they are attempting to do. But that does not mean that I UNDERSTAND their work; not by a long shot.

Politics
President Obama talks to OFA supporters about his upcoming State of the Union address:

Some Democrats (that I respect) have worries that the President is nearing a “what is good for corporate America is good for all of America” position. Sure, I want our businesses to thrive; no businesses means “no jobs”. But the corporate bottom line shouldn’t be the “be all”, “end all” of our policies:

But what’s American “competitiveness” and how do you measure it? Here are some different definitions:

— It’s American exports. Okay, but the easiest way for American companies to increase their exports from the US is for their American-made products to become cheaper internationally. And for them to reduce the price of their American-made stuff they have to cut their costs of production in here. Their biggest cost is their payrolls. So it follows that the simplest way for them to become more “competitive” is to cut their payrolls — either by substituting software and automated machinery for their US workers, or getting (or forcing) their US workers to accept wage and benefit cuts.

— It’s net exports. Another way to think about American “competitiveness” is the balance of trade — how much we import from abroad versus how much they import from us. The easiest and most direct way to improve the trade balance is to coax the value of the dollar down relative to foreign currencies (the Fed’s current strategy for flooding the economy with money could have this effect). The result is everything we make becomes cheaper to the rest of the world. But even if other nations were willing to let this happen (doubtful; we’d probably have a currency war instead as they tried to coax down the value of their currencies in response), we’d pay a high price. Everything the rest of the world makes would become more expensive for us.

— It’s the profits of American-based companies. In case you haven’t noticed, the profits of American corporations are soaring. That’s largely because sales from their foreign-based operations are booming (especially in China, Brazil, and India). It’s also because they’ve cut their costs of production in the US (see the first item above). American-based companies have become global — making and selling all over the world — so their profitability has little or nothing to do with the number and quality of jobs here in the US. In fact, it may be inversely related.

— It’s the number and quality of American jobs. This is my preferred definition, but on this measure we’re doing terribly badly. Most Americans are imprisoned in a terrible tradeoff — they can get a job, but only one that pays considerably less than the one they used to have, or they can face unemployment or insecure contract work. The only sure way to improve the quality of jobs over the long term is to build the productivity of American workers and the US overall, which means major investments in education, infrastructure, and basic R&D. But it’s far from clear American corporations and their executives will pay the taxes needed to make these investments. And the only sure way to improve the number of jobs is to give the vast middle and working classes of America sufficient purchasing power to get the economy going again. But here again, it’s far from clear American corporations and their executives will be willing to push for a more progressive tax code, along with wage subsidies, that would put more money into average workers’ pockets.

It’s politically important for President Obama, as for any president, to be available to American business, and to avoid the moniker of beiing “anti-business.” But the President must not be seduced into believing — and must not allow the public to be similarly seduced into thinking — that the well-being of American business is synonymous with the well-being of Americans.

Paul Krugmann: “me too”:

Sigh. So it appears that President Obama is going to make “competitiveness” his main economic theme. To be fair, he could (and may well) do worse. But this is hackneyed stuff, and involves a fundamental misconception about the nature of our economic problems.

It’s OK to talk about competitiveness when you’re specifically asking whether a country’s exports and import-competing industries have low enough costs to sell stuff in competition with rivals in other countries; measures of relative costs and prices are, in fact, commonly — and unobjectionably — referred to as competitiveness indicators.

But the idea that broader economic performance is about being better than other countries at something or other — that a companycountry is like a corporation –is just wrong. I wrote about this at length a long time ago, and everything I said then still holds true.*

The hopeful interpretation of Obama’s embrace of the idea that he’s the CEO of America Inc. is that it might help fend off right-wing attacks on government action as a whole, helping him sell the need for public investment of various kinds. On the other hand, as Robert Reich says, this could all too easily turn into a validation of the claim that what’s good for corporations is good for America, which is even less true now than it used to be.

Note: this gets us back to a political issue and campaigning. I admit that I am not an expert in economics. But when President George W. Bush was in office, I really didn’t have confidence in him because I didn’t see him as highly intelligent and I didn’t see him as understanding the lives of the non-wealthy. I didn’t see him as being deliberately mean; I honestly believe that he was well intentioned.

On the other hand, I see President Obama as being smarter and having a better grasp of the challenges that everyday Americans face. That is why I have a bit more trust in him. What this means is that if he pushes for a policy that President Bush would have pushed for, I’ll be far more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, I don’t have the economic expertise to properly evaluate the policy’s potential BUT I have more trust in President Obama’s judgment than President George W. Bush’s. Note: I had more trust in President George H. W. Bush than I did in the second President Bush.