Hopefully Interesting

I've been having some thoughts about how the economy is regulated and the design of the institutions doing it that I've been meaning to put down in a blog post.  So here goes. I haven't read Ben Bernanke's memoirs myself and maybe I should but I've been reading various economic bloggers reactions to them.   Here is an example.  One thing that stands out to many people is that during the financial crisis the Fed was so preoccupied with the banking system that they essentially forgot that they were also the agency in charge of steering the macro economy at large, trading off between inflation and unemployment and so forth. "Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." It's easy to see how this could happen.  In addition to trying to steer the macro-economy the Fed is in charge of bank regulation and that was generating an enormous amount of work in 2007 to 2008.  As the subprime crisis hit bank after bank went to...

I should have put this up a few days ago but I was somewhat distracted starting my new job at  RightHand Robotics .  There are some pretty cool videos on our front page.  But on to a curated list of nifty things I found on the internet in the last month! Nature has a good list of some interesting unsolved mysteries in physics and cosmology. There are a lot of nifty things that can only be made in microgravity like foamed metal and antibiotic crystals.  Now we can add metal glasses to this as well. A lot of the time we think of conservatives as being in favor of "original interpretations" of the Constitution and liberals as being more supportive of the "living constitution" approach.  There are good reasons for that but it's worth remembering that many of the things that the Black Lives Matter protesters and others criticize about how our criminal justice system handles police immunity were "judge created law" as conservatives usually put it.  T...

Whenever we send a probe to Mars we spend a lot of effort scrubbing it to make sure that there aren't any terrestrial microbes hitching a ride to the red planet.  There's a lot of sense in doing that.  Scientists are curious as to whether Mars has any native life.  If we spread earthly bugs to Mars then it might be hard to tell if whatever we find had its origins on Mars or Earth.  But I wonder if the cat isn't already thoroughly out of the bag. Way back in '84 some scientists found a meteorite that they realized had initially come from Mars.  Some larger rock had hit Mars 17 million years ago and this future meteorite had been blasted out of the crater so hard it actually left Mars altogether.   For a very long time it orbited the sun until eventually, 11,000 years ago, it managed to land on Earth. All well and good but you'd think that any rock being blasted off a planet would be pretty thoroughly sterilized in the process.  Some years after the...

Here's  some speculation that Tesla's new Model X is mostly about developing an automated electric taxi. James Lind  pioneered medical trials in figuring out that limes can prevent scurvy.  But by 1911 the measures used to fight scurvy had become ineffective without anybody realizing it because they changed how the lime juice was prepared without checking to see if it was still effective.  Nobody knew what vitamins were and nobody was going to give someone scurvy and then see if the new preparation cured it. But in more optimistic news, this month the United Launch Alliance completed 100 satellite launches in a row with no failures.  Considering that this is rocket science and that somewhat more than one out of every 20 satellite launches fails that's really impressive.  So happy 100! In other space news that doesn't actually take place in space The Martian came out and I loved it.  It captured most of what I loved about the book, was really p...

I recently read a blog post   talking about the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics: The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular. Jai then goes on to list a bunch of examples which it would probably be worth your while to read through but that's the important part there.  It's a thing I had noticed before in a few places.  Here's a short passage from Debt: The First 5000 Years: In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that "natives...

An alternate possibility is to locate a colony on the surface of another planet. Most recently, the case for colonizing the surface of Mars has been argued by Zubrin [1996]. However, at least compared to the benign environment of Earth, the surface of Mars has several disadvantages. It has a low atmospheric pressure, low temperatures, and high exposure to cosmic radiation, and, while it is not a zero-gravity environment, it is not yet known whether the roughly one-third Earth-normal gravity of Mars is sufficient to avoid the bone decalcification and muscle tone loss experienced by astronauts in microgravity. So let's colonize Venus  (pdf) Here's a blog on art at Burning Man .  Here's some more . Sort of makes me want to go. There was a recent quiz  on Vox to help people figure out how much their political beliefs influence their factual beliefs.  I'm reminded of  this . This  huge photo of Pluto is gorgeous.   This  has a lot of good p...

Criminal justice reform is a big issue for me so I'm glad someone has gone to the trouble of reading all the things the various presidential hopefuls have said about it and giving the digested version here.   And relatedly, a group associated with Black Lives Matter has released some generally good and necessary proposals for police reform.   Here's a take on them I'd endorse.  But here's a post on how a citizen review board is harder than it seems I'd also endorse, for reasons I went into here  and here . If we want to be sending missions to Mars or thinking about colonizing the Moon we really have to learn how humans respond over the long run to gravity that isn't Earth normal or free fall but we haven't been researching this even though we should . Remember that post I did on electric rockets ? Someone on the internet was nice enough to give a lot of details about the various sorts that are being built now. I'm sure we've all noticed ...

You might have heard of a company named vGo .  They make telepresence robots and have had some success selling them, though they haven't grown much recently.  Well, we (Vecna) bought them . So, the Tories have announced some new economic policies including replacing assistance to the poor with a higher minimum wage.  That's sort of odd for a conservative government.  The general consensus among economists is that raising the minimum wage within reasonable bounds tends to help poor people overall at the expense of a modest increase in unemployment.  Policies with drawbacks are always uncomfortable  and some on the left have argued that there isn't actually any disemployment effect.  But some on the right have argued that a loss of jobs is actually a good thing because it disproportionately affects foreigners.  That view was not uncommon when minimum wage laws were first being proposed but I can only find one person baldly advocating that view ...

Birthplace of democracy: • Voters overwhelmingly say NO • Legislators do opposite • Voters overwhelmingly approve https://t.co/ySvRiV6bsa — Daniel Lin (@DLin71) July 14, 2015 In my  recent post on Greece  I was a bit cynical about the idea of public opinion but evidently I wasn't cynical enough.  But maybe cynical is the wrong word because democracy is hard.  How on earth are the Greek voters supposed to understand all the issues surrounding the acceptance of the EU deal?  I certainly don't.  I suspect that nobody actually has a good idea about it. So Greeks just saw they that in retrospect their lives hadn't gone very well under the previous administration and so voted in someone else.  And if you're facing potential leaders whose performance you can't judge in detail then replacing them when things go badly is the only sure way to make sure they'll be interested in things going well for you.  That might not be fair to politicians who pres...

Thinking Out Aloud is a blog I've subscribed to for a while and they recently summed up the whole reason I read them in an utterly excellent post .  Seriously, go read it! Now that you're finished I'd only add that perhaps a lower number of officials per capita in places like China or Russia can actually encourage vesting those officials with more arbitrary power.  If you're going to force your officials to operate within the narrow confines of written law it seems like you're going to need more review and with few officials that becomes harder to afford.

So Greece voted "no" last Sunday.  It's not really clear what this means other than that Greece will not be agreeing to the terms of its creditors.  Terms' whose deadline had actually expire before the vote was held. It's easy to understand the Greek position.   Syriza didn't do anything, as far as I can tell, to cause the huge debt that Greece had racked up - that was all the fault of previous governments.  There's also the issue of aggregate demand .  When the government stops demanding as many goods and services then a smaller number of goods and services get made, at least in the short term.  In other works the Greek economy would shrink.  And of course a shrinking economy would make it even harder for the Greeks to repay their debts.  If Greece had its own currency then they could offset this as most countries outside the Eurozone which have engaged in austerity have done but sadly Greece is not in that position. Way back when the Euro wa...

I work with robots professionally and a lot of what we do at Vecna is trying to make robots harmless.   Noticing obstacles and avoiding them.  Not running into people and not even letting them think we might be about to run into them.  That sort of thing. But other people have robots that behave differently and there's been a bit of activity recently.  It's been sort of cool.  BattleBots, a TV show about robots fighting in an arena, has recently come onto the air and you can see all the fights here .  The actual shows have a bit more team background which is sort of filler but also makes the fights a bit more dramatic. However, the drama on BattleBots is nothing compared to the gauntlet that was thrown down recently.   Megabots is a group that's sort of trying to start something like BattleBots but instead of 250 pound remote controlled hunks of metal with buzz saws they're imagining 9000 pound piloted paintball wielding robots.  To drum u...

I guess  this  is a pretty good description of why I signed the  giving what we can  pledge The active ingredient in effective altruism was always supposed to be making it harder to trick yourself into feeling like you’re helping unless you actually are. - this was part of how I interpreted Eliezer’s post  The Unit Of Caring . Money is something that definitely helps a quantifiable amount, and giving away money isn’t much fun, so by limiting your contributions to money you have sort of a commitment mechanism so that you know you’re actually helping instead of just signaling helping. A very good data visualization of the cost of World War II. There was this big competition for robots trying to complete an obstacle course and do various tasks.  But what people were really interested in was all the  robots falling down  trying to complete it. Remember how I was  all excited  about HP using  memristors  for their big new p...

Followers of this blog may remember some previous posts I'd made about new non-volatile memory that looked like it could also fulfill the same role that RAM does now.  That is, it's reasonably dense and fast and so could be used as the working memory of your computer but also doesn't lose the information it holds when you turn off the power. Well, yet another type of memory with these properties has been in the news recently.  The stuff is called NRAM after "nanotube."  The nanotubes in the name are the same carbon nanotubes that people talk about making a space elevator  with if they can be made long enough and in sufficient bulk.   People have been trying to make transistors out of nanotubes for a while and they work but there's a big problem with manufacturing them at scale.  You make a big silicon chip with conventional techniques with a bunch of pads on it which you want the nanotubes to stick to.  You wash it with a solution containing the t...

There was an article in IEEE Spectrum recently about insurance and driverless cars.  It was basically talking about how you'd expect the manufacturer of the driverless control to take over the job of insuring the cars when they operate in driverless mode because they're big enough to and they have more information than anyone else.  The price of this would probably be part of the cars price.  It occurs to me that if insurance for a car's automated and manual modes become separated and if the automated insurance is bundled then this will be a force pushing for 100% automated roads if driverless cars take off. Now, clearly this would be a major hit for the insurance industry and all those people whose livelihood depends on insuring vehicles are going to be putting pressure on politicians to stop these forces from affecting them somehow.  I'd expect a major push to require all cars to have manual driving insurance whether the car has a manual mode or not.  But...

Remember  Philae, that robotic probe that the Rosetta mission dropped onto that comet?  It turns out that harpooning comets is tricky as this rather cute  xkcd comit sequence  explained and Philae bounced a few times after landing and came to rest in a shadowed cleft where it couldn't power itself (pictures of journey and cleft here ).  Scientists had hoped that as the comet got closer to the sun the increased light would be enough for Philae to power itself up and resume communications.  Luckily that's exactly what happened .  It looks like Philae is working well enough to give us all the measurements we wanted as it passed near to the sun.

For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th...

Someone made a map of all the languages of Europe arranged by lexical distance.  Looking at it you might wonder why English is considered Germanic but apparently our grammar is distinctly Germanic despite the number of French words we've absorbed. A lot of the time I tend to just look at the income tax when thinking about progressive or regressive taxation but this blog post  reminded me that there are a lot of good and services that have specific taxes attached to them and they tend to disproportionately be things consumed by poor people.  A lot of other good stuff there too. Some Italian scientists basically just sprayed some spiders with water that had carbon nanotubes in it and found that they made silk  stronger than any known material .  That's mad science for you. Remember those bright spots on Ceres?  As Dawn gets closer we're getting  better pictures .  It's looking for like ice. Our robot made the news ! There's this thing cal...

I noticed The Tech , MIT's student newspaper has a front page article on a call for MIT to divest from fossil fuel companies and various faculty members weighing in.  There was some back and forth in it but the thing that I think is most important about divestment wasn't mentioned by any of the participants.  To put it baldly: divestment doesn't accomplish anything. Now, US universities have about $415 billion dollars in investments between them.  The ten biggest oil companies have a market capitalization of 1,800 billion between them.  So you might think that all universities divesting could lower the stocks of the gas companies by 20% or so.  Except the denominator you want is actually all the money everyone is investing in all stocks, or about $65 trillion .  So without the investments of the universities you'd only expect their stocks to go down by half a percent. In economics there's something called the efficient market hypothesis which is sort...

The most exciting stuff over the last month has probably been everything that's happened in genetic engineering via a tool called CRISPR, described in detail  here .  This technique has apparently only been around for a couple of years but it's making big waves.  In the  blog post  where I heard about this some scientists in the comments were predicting that we'd see this used on humans soon and sure enough it seems that the rumors were right and some scientists had  altered non-viable embryos . In other genetic engineering news, some scientists have altered rice  to preform photosynthesis in the more efficient way that corn does Oh, and some people are hoping to use CRISPR to turn elephant embryos into Woolly Mammoths too. In Mars news there are apparently  belts of glaciers  running around the planet.  Also this is a really pretty mineral vein formation . And elsewhere in space, this person did a very good job of putting all th...

See also parts  I ,  II ,  III ,  IV , and  V . Chemical rockets would be really nice if they were just a bit more energetic.  The energy that goes into pushing the propellant out comes from the propellant itself, so there's stuff you can do to minimize the transmission of heat from the propellant to the rest of your engine.  That helps you get around some of the problems of rockets where you  heat up the propellant  from outside.  And the fact that you're still basically using heat means you don't have to suffer the efficiency losses that happen turning heat to electricity when you use an  electric rocket .  But what sort of reactions are there that we might cause in our propellant that are higher energy than chemical reactions?  I think you've all seen the post title and know that I'm about to say "nuclear." Now I should make sure to say that unlike the other categories I've mentioned nobody is actively working...

See also parts  I ,  II ,  III ,  IV ,  and  VI . We've covered a bunch of ways of moving ships around in space by shoving stuff out their backs.  But there are some ways of moving around in outer space that actually don't involve the rocket equation at all.  When you fly in a plane on Earth you can push around all that nice air that surrounds you in your environment in order to fly.  Well, you can if you have a plane.  It's very convenient in terms of not having to carry around huge amounts of fuel.  There isn't any air in space but that doesn't mean that space is entirely featureless either.  There are basically three things I know of that you can push off against in order to go places in space: the light of the sun, the solar wind, and planetary magnetic fields. The principle behind solar sails is pretty simple.  You still have sunlight in space and it's very bright too, at least within Earth's orbit.  By Einst...