25 January 2011

What I did today: I presented a proof that the Borel sets are measurable. This is part of the “stuff I should have learned in graduate school” project; it is amazing that I was so dense back then.

I’ll have more to write about on that blog; I’ll have some more theoretical analysis stuff and some thoughts on how students learn.

Reading Here is yet another “what constitutes a species” problem post, which includes a cool photo of an exotic leopard.

Politics
Some are tired of Sarah Palin. I am not. Frankly, I think she represents what most current Republicans stand for; therefore I hope she wins the 2012 GOP nomination and squares off against President Obama. Leonard Pitts explains why I hope this (and no, it isn’t the “because she will be easy to beat” reason). Here is a part of it:

Mrs. Palin, if Obama is an idiot for reading a prepared speech off a teleprompter, what are you for reading notes you’ve inked on your hand like a school kid who failed to study for the big test?

In the Fox interview, you scored Obama for supposedly expecting Americans to “sit down and shut up” and accept his policies. But when asked when the president has ever said that, you couldn’t answer. Obama, you sputtered, has just been condescending with his “general persona.”

I found that a telling moment. See, ultimately what you represent is not conservatism. Heck, I suspect that somewhere, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are spinning like helicopter rotors at the very idea.

No, you represent the latest iteration of an anti-intellectualism that periodically rises in the American character. There is, historically and persistently, a belief in us that y’all just can’t trust nobody who acts too smart or talks too good — in other words, somebody whose “general persona” indicates they may have once cracked a book or had a thought. Americans tend to believe common sense the exclusive province of humble folks without sheepskins on the wall or big words in their vocabularies.

I don’t mock those people. They are my parents, my family elders, members of my childhood church. I honor their native good sense, what mom called “mother wit.” But if it is insulting to condescend to them, it is equally insulting to mythologize them.

More to the point, something is wrong when we celebrate mental mediocrity like yours under the misapprehension that competence or, God forbid, intelligence, makes a person one of those “elites” — that’s a curse word now — lacking authenticity, compassion and common sense.

So no, this is not a clash of ideologies, but a clash between intelligence and its opposite. And I am tired of being asked to pretend stupid is a virtue. That’s why I’d welcome the moment of truth your campaign would bring. It would force us to decide once and for all whether we are permanently committed to the path of ignorance, of birthers, truthers and tea party incoherence you represent, or whether we will at last turn back from the cliff toward which we race.

Or, put another way: I want this country to decide if “average is good enough”.

: Jon Stewart shows Fox News = Nazi Reference Channel

Fox News: all lies, all the time.

: Jon Stewart shows Fox News = Nazi Reference C…, posted with vodpod

25 January 2011

Workout notes With Lynn. Yoga, then 3 mile run (2.3 miles, conked out, then .7 miles more; 10:10, then 4 reps of 0-1-2 at 9:30, then 7 minutes more), 12 minutes elliptical, then 2 miles of walking at 25:40 walking on the treadmill (some hills).
Yoga was ragged, my knee doesn’t quite straighten all the way nor does it bend all of the way.

I am getting stronger but I have a long, long, long way to go.

What I am doing: my latest blog post on Lebesgue integration and measure theory.

Posts
Here is an advance in number theory (not my area, but interesting nevertheless):

For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. Many mathematicians added major pieces to the puzzle, but all of them fell short of a full theory to explain partitions. Instead, their work raised more questions about this fundamental area of math.

Emory mathematician Ken Ono is unveiling new theories that answer these famous old questions.

Ono and his research team have discovered that partition numbers behave like fractals. They have unlocked the divisibility properties of partitions, and developed a mathematical theory for “seeing” their infinitely repeating superstructure. And they have devised the first finite formula to calculate the partitions of any number.

“Our work brings completely new ideas to the problems,” Ono says. “We prove that partition numbers are ‘fractal’ for every prime. These numbers, in a way we make precise, are self-similar in a shocking way. Our ‘zooming’ procedure resolves several open conjectures, and it will change how mathematicians study partitions.”[...]

On the surface, partition numbers seem like mathematical child’s play. A partition of a number is a sequence of positive integers that add up to that number. For example, 4 = 3+1 = 2+2 = 2+1+1 = 1+1+1+1. So we say there are 5 partitions of the number 4.

It sounds simple, and yet the partition numbers grow at an incredible rate. The amount of partitions for the number 10 is 42. For the number 100, the partitions explode to more than 190,000,000.

“Partition numbers are a crazy sequence of integers which race rapidly off to infinity,” Ono says. “This provocative sequence evokes wonder, and has long fascinated mathematicians.”

By definition, partition numbers are tantalizingly simple. But until the breakthroughs by Ono’s team, no one was unable to unlock the secret of the complex pattern underlying this rapid growth.

Economics: what you know about “socialist Europe” isn’t necessarily so:

One simple indicator is the fraction of prime-working-age adults — that is, 25-54 — that are, in fact, employed. Why focus on that age group? Because employment rates for the young are strongly affected by things like student aid policy, while those for the over-55 set are strongly affected by retirement policy; so if you want to know how many of the people who really should be working are managing to find jobs, the 25-54 sample is useful. Here’s America versus the cheese-eaters over the years:

n the 90s, with US employment surging while France (and much of Europe) was having trouble creating jobs, there was a lot of talk about the European employment problem. By the eve of the current crisis, however, the European job picture had changed a lot for the better, while even a business-cycle recovery didn’t seem to do much for US jobs.

Read on and see another graph comparing the EU to the US.

Religion: well, just read:

Authorities have charged a South Carolina woman with felony animal cruelty, saying she hanged her nephew’s pit bull from a tree with an electrical cord and burned its body because the dog chewed on her Bible.

Animal control officers said Monday that 65-year-old Miriam Smith told them she killed a female dog named Diamond because it was a “devil dog” and she worried it could harm neighborhood children. Authorities said bond wasn’t immediately set for Smith, who remains jailed in Spartanburg County after her weekend arrest.
[...]

Hmm, the DOG is of the devil?

At least I like the Ad…

24 January 2011 (PM)

Workout notes I might be getting a quad/hamstring imbalance. Sometimes when I do the stretch in which you stand on one leg, grab the ankle of the other leg and draw your foot up to your butt (ideally), the hamstring in my bent leg starts to cramp.

Note: I sometimes do it both ways: note that the foot can be grabbed by the arm on the same side or the opposite side.

So, what am I going to do about it? I’ll probably have to add hamstring curls and an exercise such as this one:

Personal photos
Spot the Dork, 2011

Hint: I am dressed for indoor running and am wearing a blue shirt…toward the middle.

Spot the Dork, 1973

I am number 64 in both photos; we wore old orange Johnson High jerseys. Note how lumbering I look, though I am about to engage in a gang tackle. I’ve never been graceful in my life; note the long pad on my lower right shin; I had broken my fibula a couple of months earlier.

Politics
From Gov. Pawlenty:

Great trailer, Governor! When does this come out on DVD??

Hey, Republicans think that reality should correspond to movies so this will probably play well with the base.

Economics
Paul Krugman uses the idea of baby-sitting coops to explain certain kinds of economic problems.

Of course, many will be closed to economic facts because it doesn’t fit their fantasies:

Something really strange has happened to the debate over economic policy in the face of the Great Recession and its aftermath — or maybe the real point is that events have revealed the true nature of the debate, stripping away some of the illusions. It’s a bigger story than any one point of dispute — say, over the size of the multiplier, or the effects of quantitative easing — might suggest. Basically, in the face of what I would have said is obviously a massive shortfall of aggregate demand, we’re seeing on all-out attack on the very notion that the demand side matters.

This isn’t entirely new, of course. Real business cycle theory has been a powerful force within academic economics for three decades. But my sense is that the RBC guys had very little impact on public or policy discussion, simply because what they said seemed (and was) so disconnected from actual experience.

Now, however, we’re seeing a much more widespread attack on demand-side economics. More than that, it’s becoming clear that many people don’t so much disagree with the idea that demand matters as find it abhorrent, incomprehensible, or both. I fairly often get comments to the effect that I can’t possibly believe what I’m saying about monetary or fiscal policy, that no sensible person could believe that printing money or engaging in deficit spending will increase output and employment — never mind that all I’m saying is what Econ 101 textbooks have been saying for the last 62 years.

So what’s going on here? [...]

He makes a point about Say’s law and then makes a second point:

Second, the reasons so many people find the notion of inadequate demand abhorrent are, in part, bound up with notions of morality. I’ve been writing a bit about monetary morality in the context of inflation and the gold standard; but this goes deeper than policy. It’s becoming clear to me that a substantial number of writers on economics find the whole idea that the economy can suffer because people are too thrifty, insufficiently willing to spend, deeply repugnant. I’m the sort of person who finds the notion that sometimes virtue is vice and prudence folly interesting; but it’s clear that a number of people find that notion just plain evil. The world shouldn’t be like that — and therefore it isn’t.

See: if something violates a moral sensibility of a conservative, then it can’t be good and the principle can’t be true! Further on:

It’s kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement [Keynesian economics], one that accounts very well for the world we actually see, and yet it’s being thrown away because it doesn’t go along with ideological preconceptions. Once that sort of thing starts, where does it stop? The next thing you know, the theory of evolution will get the same treatment. Oh, wait.

In other words, the hard headed, hard core trickle down types are the creationists of economics! That is a good way to view Republicans, isn’t it? Global warming isn’t real because, well, God is in charge? Evolution is false because it is unbiblical.

I had an argument with a Republican yesterday; he denied global warming as a hoax that corrupt scientists were pushing because, well, they were mean in some e-mails, (true, but it didn’t falsify their claims), Mars was going though a warming trend (true, but irrelevant; solar activity had nothing to do with it) and that it is cold and snowy right now!

Anyway, if want such rabble to elect you in a primary, well, Gov. Pawlenty’s reality show trailer ad will probably do the trick.