5 February 2011: More Snow on the Way

But nothing like last week.

(O’Mahoney at The Patriot Ledger)

So, I need some cheering up…..

This blog is often a place for cheer:

Warmer days are coming. But days are still cold, but all isn’t lost:

(click to see the shot at the original website)

And of course Kim Kardashian always makes me smile:

(click to see the larger photo)

5 February 2011

Woke up this morning; my right knee was slightly achy which means that, yes, more snow is on the way.

But today, I’ll make it to the gym and do something; probably a quick short run and upper body weights.

Stuff

A Right Wing Group is caught in Deception
A right wing group called Live Action is trying to stir up trouble for planned parenthood; the idea is that they sent in some people who are posing as pimps for underage girls. They were caught doctoring the video:

The Young Turks talks about more about their scheme:

Some science
Sam Harris is attempting to, well, perhaps move morality into the scientific realm. I understand why he wants to do that; it appears that many automatically assign to religion things that science doesn’t cover. I don’t quite understand that. But Cosmic Variance weighs in:

The problem of measuring well-being is not simply one of practice, it’s very much one of principle. I know what a breath is; I don’t know what a “unit of well-being is.” The point of these critiques is that there is no such thing as a unit of well-being that we can look inside the brain and measure. I’m pretty sure that’s a problem of principle. Of course, Russell and Jerry and I (and David Hume, and a large number of professional moral philosophers) may be wrong about this. The way to provide a counter-argument would be to say “Here is a precise and unambiguous definition of how to measure well-being, at least in principle.” That doesn’t seem to be forthcoming.

Latter Harris says this:

The case I make in the book is that morality entirely depends on the existence of conscious minds; minds are natural phenomena; and, therefore, moral truths exist (and can be determined by science in principle, if not always in practice).

Taken at face value, this implies that truths about the best TV shows or most delicious flavors of ice cream also exist. My opinion that The Wire is the best TV show of all time is a natural phenomenon — it reflects the state of certain neurons in my brain. That doesn’t imply, in any meaningful sense, that the state of my brain provides evidence that The Wire “really is” the best TV show of all time. Nor, more programmatically and importantly, does it provide unambiguous guidance concerning which new programs should be green-lit by studio executives. The real problem — how do you balance the interests of different people against each other? — is completely ignored.

At heart I think the problem is that Sam and some other atheists are really concerned about the idea that, without objective moral truths based on science, the field of morality becomes either the exclusive domain of religion, or simply collapses into nihilism. Happily for reality, that’s an extremely false dichotomy. Morality isn’t out there to be measured like some empirical property of the physical world, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to be moral or to speak about morality in a rational, thoughtful way. Pretending that morality is a subset of science is, in its own way, just as much an example of wishful thinking as pretending that morality is handed down by God. We have to face up to that temptation and accept the world as it is.

Later, Cosmic Variance mentions the concept of health is similar. Sure, science is heavily used in medicine, and should be. But what does “healthy” mean anyway?

On more technical matters, Cosmic Variance has our back on the recent bit of crackpot attack on mathematics that I talked about recently.

And finally, here is an article about the physics of detecting and measuring dark matter. Upshot: things that don’t interact easily are hard to detect, and there are different ways that these particles can interact. Those with a physics background will understand this better than I do. Still, I am glad that they are putting this stuff out there. When I first took a college physics course, I was most surprised by the fact that the text books explained how some of the experimental apparatus worked; my naive view was that these things were black boxes that…well…worked by….??? Much of experimental science is finding the right way to detect what you are hoping to detect.

4 February 2011 pm

Ronald Reagan Well, his economic record was a bit more complex than modern day conservatives remember. This is what they remember:

Soon after taking office in 1981, Reagan signed into law one of the largest tax cuts in the postwar period.

That legislation — phased in over three years — pushed through a 23% across-the-board cut of individual income tax rates. It also called for tax brackets, the standard deduction and personal exemptions to be adjusted for inflation starting in 1984. That would reduce “bracket creep” since the high inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s meant incomes rose very fast, pushing taxpayers into ever higher brackets even though the real value of their income hadn’t changed.

The 1981 bill also made certain business deductions more generous.

In 1986, Reagan lowered individual income tax rates again, this time in landmark tax reform legislation.

As a result of the 1981 and 1986 bills, the top income tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%.

This is what they forget:

So, despite his public opposition to higher taxes, Reagan ended up signing off on several measures intended to raise more revenue.

“Reagan was certainly a tax cutter legislatively, emotionally and ideologically. But for a variety of political reasons, it was hard for him to ignore the cost of his tax cuts,” said tax historian Joseph Thorndike.

Two bills passed in 1982 and 1984 together “constituted the biggest tax increase ever enacted during peacetime,” Thorndike said.

The bills didn’t raise more revenue by hiking individual income tax rates though. Instead they did it largely through making it tougher to evade taxes, and through “base broadening” — that is, reducing various federal tax breaks and closing tax loopholes.

For instance, more asset sales became taxable and tax-advantaged contributions and benefits under pension plans were further limited.

“What people forget about Ronald Reagan was that he very much converted to base broadening as a means of reducing deficits and as a means of tax reform,” said Eugene Steuerle, an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute who had helped lay the groundwork for tax reform in 1986 and served as a deputy assistant Treasury secretary during Reagan’s second term.

There were other notable tax increases under Reagan.

In 1983, for example, he signed off on Social Security reform legislation that, among other things, accelerated an increase in the payroll tax rate, required that higher-income beneficiaries pay income tax on part of their benefits, and required the self-employed to pay the full payroll tax rate, rather than just the portion normally paid by employees.

The tax reform of 1986, meanwhile, wasn’t designed to increase federal tax revenue. But that didn’t mean that no one’s taxes went up. Because the reform bill eliminated or reduced many tax breaks and shelters, high-income tax filers who previously paid little ended up with bigger tax bills.

Yes, he went against some in his party to do this.

President Obama: this clip is funny:

Personal Stuff
Mano Singham has a thought provoking post about social issues. He noticed that many are openly hostile toward vegans. He hypothesizes why and, IMHO, has a point.

Jerry Coyne talks about something that irritates him:

Driving back from the grocery store last weekend, I suddenly remembered my dumb “rules for life” book, which I hadn’t thought of in at least two decades. And immediately a new “rule” struck me, something that I’d been subconsciously chewing on for a while:

A large number of the people who call themselves “geeks” and “nerds” don’t use the term in a winsome, self-deprecating way. Rather, they use it to imply that “I’m smarter than you are.”

Let me hasten to add that I don’t think everyone who calls themselves geeks or nerds are intellectually arrogant. Just some of them—but not an insignificant number. When I was young, people who fit the “geek” stereotype of somebody interested in things scientific, and also socially inept, would rarely apply these terms to themselves. “Geek” and “nerd” were derogatory terms applied to you by others. But increasingly I see them used as self-branding signs of intellectual superiority. And when people apply these terms to themselves, the words grate on me, precisely as the word “brights”—meaning “atheists”—grates on me.

I had to think about this. After all, I made this photo as a joke:

What’s the joke? Well, I suppose that in some ways, I feel a bit embattled, perhaps in ways that someone who has earned tenure at the University of Chicago might not. Many of those around me have open contempt for nuanced, detailed knowledge; they feel as if their “common sense” (the collection of their preconceptions) somehow trumps that. If something doesn’t make sense to them, it must be BS; for many that includes evolution, climate science, etc. And frankly, the vast majority have never mastered anything remotely intellectually challenging.
Of course many simply aren’t interested in such things either.

So, to me, it feels good to push back at that a bit; I am certainly not a successful mathematician (my publication record is modest) but I am intellectually interested in things. And I’ll let Richard Dawkins finish for me (when he quotes the person who revived New Scientist magazine:

Listen to a Liberal Caller Crush Limbaugh’s Ronald Reagan Delusions

Rush Limbaugh’s Ronald Reagan delusions meet reality courtesy of a liberal caller who takes Rush to school on Reagan’s legacy.

Listen to a Liberal Caller Crush Limbaugh’s Ron…, posted with vodpod

Sport Report – Super Bowl Edition

ColbertNation.com video – Stephen will not be satisfied unless the Reagan tribute at the Super Bowl takes up the full halftime show and the third quarter.

Sport Report – Super Bowl Edition, posted with vodpod

4 February 2011

Workout notes 5 mile walk on the treadmill in 1:03. It was a easy to medium effort; I didn’t get going at all. Minor back stiffness and piriformis tingles.

Economy Jobs report: still not good; here is why:

At a time when corporate profits are through the roof, the Dow is flirting with 12,000, Wall Street paychecks are fat again, and big corporations are sitting on more than $1 trillion in cash, you’d expect jobs be coming back. But you’d be wrong.

The U.S. economy added just 36,000 jobs in January, according to today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Remember, 125,000 are needed just to keep up with the increase in the population of Americans wanting and needing work. And 300,000 a month are needed — continuously, for five years — if we’re to get back to anything like the employment we had before the Great Recession.

In other words, today’s employment report should be sending alarm bells all over official Washington. Granted, unusually bad weather may have accounted for some of the reluctance of employers to hire in January. But even considering the weather, the economy is still terribly sick. (Technical note: The official rate of unemployment fell to 9 percent from 9.4 percent, but that’s because more workers have left the labor market, too discouraged to continue looking for work. The official rate reflects how many people are actively looking for work.)

We have two economies. The first is in recovery. The second remains in a continuous depression.

The first is a professional, college-educated, high-wage economy centered in New York and Washington, that’s living well off of global corporate profits. Corporations continue to make money by selling abroad from their foreign operations while cutting costs (especially labor) here at home.

Oh boy. Something has to change. And no, Republican trickle down economics isn’t the answer.

Weather At long last we know what is causing bad weather: Jesus doesn’t like our politicians. Ok, this isn’t the United States:

A CONTROVERSIAL church group has called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to fall on her knees in prayer in the midst of the looming cyclone crisis facing Queensland.

“It is very sad that this dark chapter in Australia’s history is led by an atheist Prime Minister in Julia Gillard and an openly homosexual Greens leader… both who have no regard for God nor prayer,” Catch the Fire Ministeries said in a statement today.

President Dr Daniel Nalliah said Julia Gillard was not elected by the majority of the Australian people, but rather the personal decision of two power hungry independent MPs who catapulted Ms Gillard to the top job.

“Are we Aussies all paying for that decision? It is very well known that throughout history, in a time of national crisis, kings, prime ministers and presidents of countries around the world have turned to God, irrespective of whether they were Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim and asked for help or at least called the nation to pray for protection and for the victims of the disaster,” Dr Nalliah said.

Dr Nalliah, a former Family First candidate who was asked to leave the party for his controversial views, has already blamed the Queensland floods on Kevin Rudd speaking out against Israel.

At least we aren’t the only “developed” country stuck with wackos.

Speaking of wackos, let’s look at the 2012 GOP field (via intrade):

I don’t know how much stock to put into this; remember the following; Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani were the heavy favorites at this time in 2007; Romney appears to be the person to beat, but remember he couldn’t even beat McCain in 2008 and the fundies won’t like that he is a Mormon. Huckabee: this will come back to haunt him:

Sure, the Republicans will gladly accept his creationism. But my guess is that his piousness will turn the “booze and broads” Republicans off.

Nate Silver gives his “first pass” here along with a chart describing where the candidates fit in.

Republicans: all bark and hairball…..

Really, the title of Robert Reich’s post is a WIN:

Why the Republican Budget Plan is a Hairball.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

The federal budget is $3.8 trillion.

The Republicans have just come up with their plan to cut the federal budget. They’ve found $32 billion of cuts.

Their fiery campaign rhetoric, fierce determination, righteous indignation, and bloviated anger have summoned forth a hairball.

What happened to John Boehner’s $100 billion budget-cutting commitment? What became of Paul Ryan’s big ideas? Where did all the roaring and raging on the right during the 2010 election go?

This is embarrassing.

Psst: for all of the talk of SMALL GOVERNMENT, few really want it. By government cuts they mean cuts for everyone else.
This reminds me of all my right wing Naval Academy classmates: they bitch, moan and howl about taxes…after having gotten a tax payer funded education, drawing a government paycheck and….wait for it…many of them work for defense contractors!

I can’t wait to see the Republican representative come home and say “well, we were in line for X million dollars for this or that, but I said “no thank you, I want smaller government”.

3 February 2011 back to work

Classes resume tomorrow.

Workout notes slow, slow, slow 6 mile run/walk on the treadmill. 10 minutes walk, 50 minutes of 4 run, 1 walk, 5 minute walk, then jogging to get 6 miles in 1:09. Note: I have a manual treadmill that needs time to get warmed up and it was sluggish…and my back was slightly stiff so I didn’t push it. I can get to speeds of 7:00 minutes per mile when I go very hard but I wasn’t able to today.

Stuff to cheer you up

Question: what is this?

Answer: here. More interesting photos there.

It is the lunar new year…the Year of the Rabbit. This video might not embed properly, but if it doesn’t:

Watch it on youtube here. These bunnies are beyond cute.

Science
Here is a bird that uses bait to fish:

(via Why Evolution is True)

Here is the 60 minute BBC production of Science Under Attack. Excellent stuff; the host is Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse:

3 February 2011: the day after and the big freeze

It is bitterly cold right now, -3 F. I’ll probably do a few miles on the treadmill and then head in to work, though the university is closed. I’ll grade, make up lessons and perhaps play with MATLAB and possibly write up another post for the mathematics blog. I had fun with this one, which was about why we need convergence theorems for integrals (that is, the limit of the integrals isn’t always the integral of the limits; this is why one needs to PROVE that one can integrate, say, a Taylor or a Fourier series term by term).

Injury update: my lower back is slightly sore, but not sore enough to keep me from getting in some treadmill miles. My piriformis acted up a bit during the long shoveling sessions, but I found ways to stretch between shovel loads that made it feel ok. The rotator cuff didn’t bother me, either during the shoveling nor at night. And yes, I took zero pain killers.

On to some posts prior to hitting the treadmill

Science
It is an interesting time for science. Right now, our instruments are finding other planets that have the potential to produce life as we know it:

Astronomers have identified 1,235 candidate planets beyond the solar system, including 54 where life might have a chance of gaining a foothold.

Extrapolating from the findings, which are based on observations of bright stars in a tiny patch of sky monitored by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, some 20,000 planets may reside in other regions of the Milky Way where liquid water is stable, says Kepler chief scientist Bill Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. He reported the results, which are based on Kepler’s first four months of operation, at a NASA press briefing on February 2. [...]

Of the 54 candidate planets in the habitable zone, five are roughly Earth-sized, and the other 49 range from twice the size of Earth to larger than Jupiter. The larger planets, which are likely gaseous, might be able to support liquid water and life on solid moons, Borucki says. Some of those moons could be the size of Earth, he adds.

Overall, the Kepler census includes 68 planet candidates roughly the size of Earth, 288 that are a few times the size of Earth, 662 with diameters about equal to that of Neptune and 165 the size of Jupiter. About 30 percent of the candidates belong to multiple-planet systems, with several planets orbiting the same star.

Of course, the key word is potential; the article goes on to point out that we need to do more tests. Still, the potential is amazing.

We also have some interesting findings about life on earth, including new findings about when humans left Africa and the mixing of Neanderthal and homo sapien genes:

And of course, we have the crazy weather patterns that we are seeing in our neck of the woods:

Speaking of snow, what about all those strange snowfall events we hear about?

A: You can find snow in some odd places at somewhat unusual times of the year, and it’s a fortuitous alignment of cold and moisture. It doesn’t signify the coming ice age, nor is it indicative of global warming. In the short term, while it’s an extreme, and climate change is likely to lead to more extremes, you know as well as I do that one extreme doesn’t cut it.

Then there’s always the fact with all of these [events] that they may have happened before, and not all that far into the past. In this CNN world, things get reported quickly. That biases the reporting record [toward the present]. It snows in Miami, you’re going to get tweets and blogs and everybody’s going to know. So you have to filter that these days.

Q: Does that mean we shouldn’t be surprised by these unusual weather patterns?

Interestingly enough, in the first half of November, the snow cover in the western half of Eurasia was well below average. I was starting to think we were headed toward satellite record period lows, and then the last two weeks of the month, just … bam! And North America was low until mid-November, and then it just exploded. If you wait around long enough … I always say the difference is that meteorologists get the instant feedback. Climatologists have to be patient. And you can’t jump to conclusions on the 15th of the month and say, “Oh, we’re going to have a record for the month,” because as soon as you say that, it flips around.

Now somebody was telling me … Phil Jones, poor Phil Jones from East Anglia who made all the news [about Climategate]. Phil and I were talking this morning, and he said that some spot in England had the warmest day on record in November, last month, and the coldest day on record last month.

But that’s the beauty of the climate system. When it gets into a hyperactive state you go to extremes, you go from warmth to cold. As opposed to … you get these periods of zonal flow, where the cold stays where it belongs and the warmth stays where it belongs. But if you get that jet stream in what we call meridional pattern — big buckles — and you can go from one extreme [to another]. [A meridional pattern is an atmospheric system that flows along a meridian, or a large imaginary circle on Earth's surface that crosses both poles.]

Syracuse [in New York] had about 66 inches of snow this month [December] so far. The first day of December they were 63 degrees F with two inches of rain. They just had an amazing month. On TV this morning, they tried to point out that it’s half their winter snow and it’s not even winter yet! Well, climatologically, it’s winter. Syracuse gets impacted by lake-effect snows, and lake-effect snows are most prominent when the lakes are still warm early in the season, so it’s not unusual to front-end load Syracuse’s snow.

Q: Have there been any changes in snowfall or snow cover over the past years?

A: I’ve looked at trends in extent of snow cover. Fall and winter over the 45-year satellite record don’t show a trend in snow cover (that’s snow on the ground, not snowfall). But the spring[s] of each decade, the 70s, 80s, 90s, the past decade, have had decreasing amounts of spring snow cover. In other words, fall snows aren’t coming later from what we’ve seen in the record in recent decades, but snows are melting earlier starting in mid- to late winter and working their way up.

Even last winter, North America had record extensive snow cover in February. Skeptics were out there saying, “Ooh, climate change isn’t so bad.” I said, “Wait until spring.” Spring had the least amount of snow cover on record. We went from the most amount of snow to the least amount of snow cover. For reasons yet to be fully understood … we’re still working on whether the snow packs are thinner going into the spring, whether we’re bringing warm air up into the snow-covered regions earlier, or whether the background is warm enough and primed, because all you need to get is to the freezing point.

That’s the neat thing about snow. It’s not this linear thing — it’s all about the freezing point. We had an incredibly mild winter last year in the higher latitudes, but it was still plenty cold enough to have snow. It was just a little cooler in the mid-latitudes, and that was just enough to make it snow.

Yes, I know that really isn’t deep, but the basic point SHOULD be easy to grasp: a lot of snow in a few days doesn’t mean that the trend will continue and some cold snaps doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t real. That principle should be easy to grasp, but, well…it isn’t for our Republican friends. They don’t do so well with the acceptance of evolution either:

Expect to see more of this as the field of GOP presidential candidates attempt to “out stupid” each other.

About the Democrats: count me out of this movement to support someone other than the President for 2012. Yeah, we have our wackos but at least they are at the margins. The Republicans have become so extreme that even Orrin Hatch might have trouble with reelection. Orrin Hatch, not conservative enough??????

Non-snow post, 2 February 2011

Yes, I know that Minnesota people are laughing at us….

Ok, I lied: one more snow post: Jerry Coyne’s blog has some spectacular photos, including one of snow lightning:

Click on the thumbnail and scroll to the bottom for that shot; there are other good shots there too.
You see: it snows on successful scientists too and not just on mediocre mathematicians.

But I did get a chance to make a perfect score on this Pew News poll. I can understand someone who isn’t a geek missing one question (about the new technology). Of course I am a liberal and am therefore expected to score well.

Politics in Iowa: nice speech about equal rights for gay families:

(hat tip: Legal Satyricon)