The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) is sponsoring a conference on Grand Cayman Island, an excellent way to lure a lot of intelligent and very busy people to come spend some time together talking about foundational questions. They also have a truly interesting blog.
Furthermore, the beach at night is a good place to think about cosmological mysteries, even though it can be very windy, as Alan Guthdiscovered!
If you use Twitter, I strongly suggest that you start following LaBlogga, aka Melanie Swan. I just started, and I already feel more intelligent than I was yesterday.
Now, off with my computer and back to the fresh air! (Since I’m not invited to this particular conference, getting some beach time is the most intelligent thing for me to do here.)
…of Leonardo’s helicopter — John Graham-Cummings’s The Geek Atlas sounds like a fascinating travel guide. To quote its description at O’Reilly Books:
With this unique traveler’s guide, you’ll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world’s largest science museum, watch Foucault’s pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them.
Why have you locked up A Sea-Spell? Where are you hiding The Blessed Damozel? You own but are not displaying two of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s best and most famous paintings.
I understand that wall space is scarce with the Fogg Museum closed, but there is no excuse for keeping these two off display when you are devoting a room in your "pre-1900 western art" space to truly horrible "art" by somebody who wasn’t even born until the 1960s.
This very morning, a Congressman named Michael Capuano put his energy, brains, and Somerville accent to work on a few of the banking types who made this big mess we’re in. What a pleasure to hear him.
One of my favorite bits I truncated for the post title: “I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks. And they say the same thing. They’re sorry, they didn’t mean it. They won’t do it again. Just let ’em out!”
For more from his tirade, though this is still an informal transcript, keep reading.
By a show of hands, how many of your banks engaged in purchasing or investing in credit default swaps? In CDOs? Special investment vehicles — those off-books or somehow unregulated off-books activities. All or most of you engaged in the activities that created this crisis in my opinions.
Every one of those activities, but especially the SIVs — I believe they’re illegal.
We’ve had no prosecutorial action in the last administration. The new administration has a little time to figure this out. How can any regulated bank have on its books something that’s unregulated that for all intents and purposes does the same things the bank does. I hope to hear that answer in court someday.
You come to us today on your bicycles, after buying Girl Scout cookies, and helping out Mother Teresa. Telling us, “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean it, we won’t do it again. Trust us. “
I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks. And they say the same thing. They’re sorry, they didn’t mean it. They won’t do it again. Just let ’em out!
Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most of the people in my constituency to take? That you’ve learned your lesson?
And it’s all the same people doing this. The same people who created SIVs, who created CDOs, who created credit default swaps, that never existed a few years ago. You created the mess we’re in.
And now you say sorry, trust us, and by the way we don’t even want the money. Interesting. No one’s ever come to me and said you must take billions of dollars.
If you don’t want the money, you can give it back. You just have to come up with the capital…
America doesn’t trust you any more.
I get a lot of money to put in banks. I don’t have one single penny in one of your banks. I don’t want my money to go into credit swaps and CDOs and making humongous bonuses.
Until that changes, I don’t believe anything will change. Until you change the people who brought you into SIVs.
Who was the brilliant person who came and said: Let’s do credit default swaps? Find ’em. Fire ’em. Tell me you fired them.
Get out of CDOs. Start loaning the money that we gave you and get it on the street.
Don’t say: Oh, well we’re not using that money for bonuses. C’mon! Money is all of a sudden not fungible in your entity. It’s fungible everywhere else, but not in your entities.
Get our money out on the street. And if you don’t want to give it back, don’t come here and tell me you can’t. Yes you can, as long as you live up to the requirements that are put on you now.
In the new world, that you created, we have to clean up. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the remainder of my time.
Thanks to TPM for the pleasure of hearing Capuano telling the big banks what I would have liked to tell them. But he did it better. By the way, I’m proud to say he is MY Congressman.
Wow, what an iPhone can do. It can capture the crescent shape of the planet Venus in a sky still blue and pink and green with twilight.
And an iPhone can motivate Frank Wilczek to start taking photographs for just about the first time since I’ve known him.
You hear a lot about how new technology “empowers” people, but somehow when I hear that, I think of other people, people much less savvy than (ahem) we are.
I am really enjoying seeing more of the world through Frank Wilczek’s eyes now, including a photo of what I look like to him.
Though I wouldn’t have minded more photos of me in my twenties!
“The reason that wild boars cause the greatest material injury is that the wild boar’s centre of gravity sits at the same height as the car’s front end. The impact is strongest where the car’s most expensive components are housed,” explained a researcher.
The obvious remedy is to drive off the road, as far as necessary, to try to collide with a regular deer instead. This solution is chosen by 6 out of 7 in Sweden, where last year’s accident toll included 5,118 with elk, 2,462 with wild boars, but 30,982 with deer.
We just got a TV the day before Thanksgiving, after more than a decade without one. In the two months since then, we have probably watched a total of ten hours on it, about five of them 30 Rock.
But watching the inauguration of Barack Obama on CNNHD, even with my laptop by my side, I can see that TV gives a different and somehow communal experience of news events, quite unlike the hunt-and-peek solipsist patchwork of (for instance) my TV-less website surfing on Election night.
In Wikipedia, there’s a policy we call WEIGHT — basically, an article should represent fairly all competing viewpoints, but without giving such undue weight to unusual views as to imply that these viewpoints are widely supported. In TV, there seems to be a policy that we might call DRAMA — for example, to give enormous over-weight to any person or event that generates exciting footage.
I can’t say I’m sorry to be watching hour after hour of the inauguration of Barack Obama. But I like it that I can keep working as I do so.
One of my Dortmunder favorites, Don’t Ask, starts with Dortmunder in a traffic-stuck frozen fish truck but lurches him forward into the theft (more than once) of an 800 year-old femur disputed by two angry countries.
More Westlake wonders, all of them suitable to keep you happy on airplanes, even when jostled by turbulent weather or children…
Newswoman Sara Joslyn goes to work at notorious tabloid and runs afoul of murder mystery while working on stories of century-old twins, a star’s honeymoon, and a “body in a box”; romance as a bonus with great police intervention which I’m restraining myself from describing.
Sara Joslyn again, now working for cute boss Jack at a trendy New York magazine called Trend, re-meets some of her tabloid pals in Branson country-western land and gets tangled up in an even more tricky mystery.
Begun in 1986 and/or 1990, according to its preface, this book recounts a struggle carried out by one angel and one demon against God’s plan for the end of the universe. Remarkably similar in its premise to Gaiman and Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990), which I also love, this book takes a different pathway, both darker and funnier, to — but of course I don’t want to spoil the ending.
I am now regretting I never wrote Westlake any fan mail — this blog post must now suffice. He was a true craftsman whose work made the world better, not least by making us laugh.
…The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus’ Old New World. It is also, in a real sense, much bigger… Our fundamental equations do not live in the three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively) infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. It will take us much more than a century to homestead that New New World, even at today’s much-accelerated pace…
In the next five years, policy-makers around the world will embrace economic theories (e.g. those of Richard Layard) aimed at creating happiness. The Tower of Economic Babble is rubble. Long live the new, improved happiness economics! …
Here are other short samples from just a few more of the best:
I will see the development of robots that people will want to spend time with. Not just a little time, time in which the robots serve as amusements, but enough time and with enough interactivity that the robots will be experienced as companions, each closer to a someone than a something. I think of this as the robotic moment…
…If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital…I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism’s own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient….
…Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they’d do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they’d do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials. The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion…
…the thing that we think of as “us”,can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don’t suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced…
…There seems to be a Malthusian principle at work: information grows exponentially, but useful information grows only linearly. Noise will drown out signal. The moment that we, as a species, finally have the memory to store our every thought, etch our every experience into a digital medium, it will be hard to avoid slipping into a Borgesian nightmare where we are engulfed by our own mental refuse…
…Having been forced to choose a single game changer, I have turned away from the fascinating scientific developments I might like to see, and will instead focus on the one game changer that I will hopefully never directly witness, but nevertheless expect will occur during my lifetime: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population…
I join Lawrence in hoping that his prediction won’t come true.
