Cosmic Variance's Sean Carroll on the arrow of time

I've been reading Sean Carroll's posts on Cosmic Variance, not realizing until now that he's a research associate at my alma mater. I guess blogs really are infested by amateurs destroying our culture of knowledge ...

Sean's presentation is pretty readable for the interested layperson ...

Sean Carroll: Why Is the Past Different From the Future?

... In such a universe, everything we think we "remember" ... about the past is ... a mistake.

Dinosaur skeletons arose spontaneously out of dirt.

It's been a busy road to reading material like Sean's. It started when I came across this comment in Wired  last February:

Even the best theories to explain how entanglement gets around this problem seem preposterous. One, for example, speculates that signals are shot back through time. Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.
- Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer

As near as I can tell Lucas was simplifying a bit. The complete absence of free will (aka. life in God's movie or the Tralfamadorian perspective) goes back originally to Newton (determination by mechanics) then to Einstein (determination by time slice perspectives) and returned with the transactional interpretation of QM. The good news for the non-Calvinists among us is that the evidence (as I read of it) favors the non-existence of independent reality over the kind of absolute determinism where not only dinosaurs arise from dirt, but all of space and time arise spontaneously and (seemingly) coherently.

So what does all this have to do with Carroll's talk? Well, it seems plausible that the "arrow of time" has something to do with predetermination or non-determination and that it should also have equivalences in both cosmology and quantum mechanics. Here's Carroll's conclusion about where time comes from in the view cosmology - it involves the infinite multiverse ...

...If the universe lasts forever but has no equilibrium
state, we naturally obtain an arrow of time.

It’s crucial that the way in which the multiverse
creates more entropy is to make universes like ours...

Further I cannot go! So where does the arrow of time come from in QM? I'm imagining at the moment that it comes from decoherence...*

* Ok, how did I know that "Decoherence, Quantum Measurement and the Arrow of Time" existed? I didn't, of course. I hypothesized that the arrow of time emerges as a universe of infinite possibilities collapses as the past interacts with it -- an idea that's appeared in at least one science fiction story I've read. I knew decoherence is the technical term used for the interpretation of QM most consistent with this model, so I searched on "decoherence" and "arrow of time". Easy. (The alternate explanation, of course, is that the conference didn't really exist until I thought of it, which led the quantum chaos of the past to collapse.... :-)

Sex offender madness, Minnesota version

A few weeks ago I commented on the lunacy of MySpace's sex offender identification process. I know something about the way these matching algorithms work, and in the MySpace environment the test will have a low sensitivity and a low specificity. A substantial portion of those they identify will be false matches, and they'll miss most offenders.

When I ended my comments I predicted we'd see the authorities treating these lists as real, so that a false match by MySpace may mean a visit from the police. That was an easy one ...

Minnesota asks MySpace for list of sex offenders: 

... On Tuesday, Swanson became one of a number of state attorneys general to ask MySpace for the names of sex offenders from the 7,000 it says it has identified and expelled from its popular social networking website...

The best we can hope for is that MySpace is massively sued.

GOP: party of the stone age candidate

Throughout most of human history, the leader was probably the surviving male with the highest testosterone levels as manifested by jaw, shoulder, and voice. The GOP is electing the candidate best suited to the stone age....

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Rep. Zack Wamp (R-Tenn.), one of Fred Thompson's boosters on the Hill, recently suggested the actor/senator/lobbyist would make a good president, in part because of his speaking voice.

"He has a commanding voice," Wamp said. "He has a commanding presence. He makes people feel secure. He makes us feel confident."

Sen. George "Macaca" Allen (remember him?) apparently feels the same way. (via Steve M.)

Former Sen. George Allen is bullish about former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the actor who hasn't even gotten into the 2008 presidential race yet....

...He likened Thompson's voice to that of a "modern-day Rex Allen," drawing a reference to a now-deceased cowboy actor.

... On a related note, interest in Mitt Romney's appearance is apparently still high among conservative political observers, with the Politico's Roger Simon applauding Romney for having "shoulders you could land a 737 on."

This, of course, follows Bill O'Reilly praising Romney's jaw and hair, and NewsMax celebrating the former Massachusetts governor's "sensational good looks."

We are primates, most regrettably. This can work, humans are programmed to follow people who look and sound this way. Alas, it's not the stone age any more. That's the way of the cliff.

Liberating public goods from the NTIS - radical

The National Technical Information Service charges absurd amounts for data that's part of the public domain, including various data sets used in healthcare. A small company has noticed that there's an opportunity here ...

Marginal Revolution: The private provision of public goods

...Public.Resource.Org takes non-copyrighted documents that the federal government charges the public for and puts them into the public domain. Not much is available now but the service wants to make available for free all of the millions of documents, videos and other material from National Technical Information Service. To build their library Public.Resource.Org are asking people who want a government document to buy it through their service. They will then make the document available to everyone else for free....

Currently the web site lists dozens of $100 healthcare videos that nobody with free will would be interested in. They don't list code sets yet, it may be the ones I'm thinking of are not truly owned by the feds ...

Polonium - an update

Slate features excerpts from a book on the "Sasha" Litvinenko murder:

Who killed Alexander Litvinenko? - By Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko - Slate Magazine

.... Whoever chose polonium to kill Sasha did so because the chances of its ever being discovered were close to zero. It could not be easily identified chemically: the toxicology lab found only low levels of thallium, a minor contaminant of polonium production. Polonium was unlikely to be detected by its radioactivity, since common Geiger counters were not designed to detect alpha rays. Polonium is perhaps the most toxic substance on earth: a tiny speck is a highly lethal dose, and one gram is enough to kill half a million people. But it is absolutely harmless to a handler unless it is inhaled or swallowed. Most important, polonium had never been used to murder anyone before, so practically no one in the expert community—toxicologists, police, or terrorism experts—would have been looking for it or expecting it. It was sheer luck, plus Sasha's phenomenal endurance, that it was found. He had received a huge dose. Had he died in Barnet Hospital within the first two weeks, his death would have been attributed to thallium, meaning that anyone could have given it to him.

The irony is that once it was detected, polonium became a smoking gun. No amateur killer—even one awash with money—could have used it...

....Within hours of Sasha's death, HPA radioactivity hunters identified and closed off several contaminated sites in London, including Itsu, the sushi restaurant on Piccadilly where Sasha met Mario Scaramella, and the bar in the Millennium Hotel where he had tea with the Russians. As the investigation progressed, they added dozens of other places to the polonium map; the eventual list included offices, restaurants, hotel rooms, homes, cars, and airplanes in several countries. Hundreds of people all over Europe showed varying degrees of polonium contamination, spreading from the epicenter of the "tiny nuclear bomb" exploded in London. When the dust settled, the investigators had a pretty complete understanding of how to read the map. As the Scotland Yard liaison officer told Marina, "We know exactly who did it, where, and how."

Here's the quick summary:

1. Putin ordered Litivenko killed.

2. Lugovy was part of the hit, but there were two poisoning attempts. The second one might have involved someone else.

3. Polonium is actually quite a reasonable murder weapon.

4. Litvinenko knew nothing.

5. Russia adores Putin.

Hmpph. Polonium still seems to be a ridiculous murder weapon. Surely there must be equally undetectable poisons that wouldn't point so clearly to Putin. The motive still makes no sense to me, unless one assumes Putin is batty.

Perhaps the most credible explanation is that Putin ordered Litvinenko killed by Polonium because Putin's even battier than Bush. Bush has proven that you can be a leader loon; we have to be ready to assume Putin's no better.

Lesson for healthcare IT

What the history of the electric dynamo teaches about the future of the computer. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine

... More recent research from MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson has shown that the history of the dynamo is repeating itself: Companies do not do well if they spend a lot of money on IT projects unless they also radically reorganize to take advantage of the technology. The rewards of success are huge, but the chance of failure is high. That may explain why big IT projects so often fail, and why companies nevertheless keep trying to introduce them.

Brynjolfsson recently commented that the technology currently available is enough to fuel a couple of decades of organizational improvements. Even if technology stands still—it will not—there are already big changes stored up for us.

Optimal value from healthcare IT investments may require very different ways of delivering services, with quite different professional roles.

DeLong's plan for healthcare reform

A few months ago I wrote about how I think health care reform will one day turn out:

Grodon's Notes: Health care financing: the 80/20 questions are the only questions

....

1. Everyone residing in American will have the second option. Always. I call this the "HMO from Heck Solution".
   
   
2. The first (class) option will be available in a number of ways. Some will get it via risk sharing plans. Some will pay cash. Some will buy it on the gray market ... or the black market. I call this the "Libertarian Solution".
   
   
3. Five years after this choice is available, after development costs have been recovered and competition has arisen, the specifics of the choices will change. The "first class" choice will now become the guaranteed "second class" choice and it will be "cheap". There will, however, be a new, better, very expensive, "first class" choice.
   
   
4. There will be a huge amount of spending on luxury experiences associated with health care and on "alternative" therapies -- none of which will have any impact on outcome.
   
   
5. Innovation, invention, chaos and harm will be far greater in the Libertarian world than in the HMO from Heck world. It is the Libertarian world that will crush costs and convert the "First Class" option into the cheap and universal "Second Class" option.
   
   
6. NIH research funding will shift to favor development of solutions that provide 80% of value for 20% of the cost -- rather than the current disposition to the "best possible" solution.
   
   
7. Once people wrap their heads around this, and that will take a while, they'll decide having the "HMO from Heck" isn't the worst thing in the world....

Today I'm reading Brad DeLong's proposal. I think the mixture of single payor with huge MSAs and backup catastrophic coverage is fascinating, and consistent with the evolution to the above ...

1. 20% Deductible/Out of Pocket Cap: The IRS snarfs 20% of your family economic income. 5% of it is an increase in taxes (but that replaces your and your employer's current health insurance premiums). 15% of it goes straight into your Health Savings Account. That HSA is then used to pay all your family health bills. If your expenses in a year are less than what's in your HSA, the balance is rolled into your IRA (or, if you prefer, returned to you with your tax refund check).
   
   
2. Single-Payer for the Rest: If your HSA is emptied and you still have more health bills that year, the federal government pays them. The main point, after all, is insurance: if you fall seriously sick, you want right then and there to be treated whether or not your wallet biopsy is positive.
   
   
3. Sin Taxes: on Tobacco, Gorgonzola, Three-Liter Bottles of Liquid High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Tanning Clinics (Melanoma), et cetera: Sin taxes (and, perhaps, someday general revenues) pay for an army of barefoot doctors and nurses and mobile treatment vans roaming the country, knocking on doors, and providing preventive and other long-run lifestyle services for free: Let me examine your prostate. Mind if I check your refrigerator and tell you how to eat healthier? Have you exercised today? I'm a Pilates instructor, and we could do a session now? Are you up on your immunizations? Anybody here have a fever and need antibiotics? Come on out to the van and I'll clean your teeth." The idea is to make the preventive care cheaper-than-free, to insure that nothing with a high long-run benefit/cost ratio gets left undone because people would rather get a bigger check the next April to use to buy an HDTV.
   
   
4. A Lot of Serious Research on Best Public-Health, Chronic-Disease, and Hospital Practices: Made easier, of course, by linking the payment records from the health branch of the IRS to hospital records to the wirelessly-transfered logs from the barefoot doctor vans.
   
   
5. That's it. No deduction for employer-paid health expenses. No insurance companies.

In my real job I sometimes get to listen in on how the giants of capitalism think health care reform will play out. They are all very fond of libertarian solutions with minimal roles for governent and giant MSAs, but they have more than the MSAs in common with DeLong. They also think the insurance companies are going to go.

Personally, I think the insurance companies will take a long time dying, but it's intriguing that so many different players have them in the crosshairs ...

Sorenson, Kennedy and the third Sachs' Reith lecture.

This is another post in a continuing series on the BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world. The MP3s are no longer legally available but the BBC has put the transcripts online.

The first lecture was rather good, though several of the comments were pompously silly. Is immortality worthwhile if it means being mocked forever?

The second lecture, in China, spent too much time managing the tender sensibilities of the host nation. This was probably politically wise, but it made for a dull speech. I was starting to get tired of the Kennedy references, but I was about to change my opinion.

The third took place in Sachs' home base - Columbia University's Earth Institute. There was no need to worry about the sensibilities of the insensate American government of course, so the material was quite a bit sharper. I was particularly impressed by Sachs discussion of fear and human nature:

... Two deep aspects of human psychology are crucial here. The first is that human beings hover between cooperation and conflict. We are actually primed psychologically, and probably genetically, to cooperate, but only conditionally so. In a situation of low fear, each of us is prone to cooperate and to share -- even with a stranger. Yet when that trust evaporates, each of us is primed to revert to conflict, lest we are bettered by the other. Game theorists call this strategy "Tit for Tat," according to which we cooperate at the outset, but retaliate when cooperation breaks down. The risk, obviously, is an accident, in which cooperation collapses, and both sides get caught in a trap in which conflict becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that all-too-real nightmare, we end up fighting because we fear that the other will fight. This fear is confirmed by fear itself. Wars occur despite the absence of any deeper causes...

In responding to a comment Sachs discussed the nightmarish indirect impact of 9/11 ...

... September 11 was an extraordinary event, clearly without being banal about it. It opened up the possibilities for much worse than we could have imagined, much worse about us. It led to an end of introspection for several years, to bellicosity, to faith in the military approach, to the idea that we could bludgeon them all - after all we are the world's sole superpower.

Future historians, I suspect, will treat 9/11 as in some ways analogous to an assassination that has a certain (in this case considerable) direct impact, but a potentially much larger indirect impact. Will America's post-9/11 psychotic break be one day seen as the beginning of the end? It is miraculously mysterious to me that we have not had another significant attack -- for that, I think, would have been a fatal blow to America's fragile psyche.

The most remarkable part of the lecture, however, was the presence of Theodore (Ted) Sorenson in the audience. Mr. Sorenson is 79 years old, but he evidently has one of those lucky minds that by virtue of brilliance and biology resist entropy. Of course he must have prepared in advance, but even so ...

... SUE LAWLEY: We have, as you mentioned, during the course of your lecture, Jeff, we have Theodore Sorensen - Ted Sorensen - sitting on the front row there, lawyer and writer who was Special Advisor and speechwriter to President Kennedy. I wonder, having heard everything you've heard this evening, sir, whether you'd care to say something?

THEODORE SORENSEN: That's very nice, thank you. It's been an extraordinary experience for me to sit here tonight and listen to such a wise and wonderful lecture, with so many references to a speech given forty-three years ago, and I'm sure if President Kennedy were alive and here tonight he would be moved and touched as I am to think that that speech of his, that basic message of his forty-three years ago is now going out through these BBC lectures all over the world. Since I know a little bit about the speech that you frequently cited, I wonder why…

SUE LAWLEY: Can I just say, did you write it?

THEODORE SORENSEN: Oh I never acknowledge that. President Kennedy was the author of all of his speeches. (LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE) Or I, or what I should say in answer to that question is, 'Ask not'. (LAUGHTER) So my recommendation to you, Jeff, when you make this lecture again, is to cite two other parts of that speech. One is a passage where President Kennedy said, 'The world knows America will not start a war. This generation of Americans has seen enough of war.' Haven't heard that recently! The second was where he not only asked for a re-examination of our relations with the Soviet Union, but praised the Soviet people for the enormous contribution and sacrifice they made in World War Two, which no-one had ever done before, and the Soviets rather resented it, and it was one of the ways that he reached Khrushchev. Seems to me we live in a world where the people of Islam have been rejected and humiliated for generations, and if someone took the time to praise their contributions to civilisation over the centuries, that might help.

(APPLAUSE) [jf - this applause went on for a decently long time]

JEFFREY SACHS: Don't you think we have the makings of another speech coming? (LAUGHTER) I think it is so astounding that President Kennedy's and your speech was not only so brilliant that it gives shivers when you read it or listen to it, but it literally worked within weeks. It did exactly what it was meant to do: it changed history. This is an astounding, astounding truth, and it's an astounding accomplishment of, of this man before us tonight. It's just amazing.

And thus I came to change my opinion of Kennedy/Sorenson's 1963 speech, an oration that Sachs feels saved modern civilization. His case is persuasive, and so I now understand Sachs weaving the speech throughout the 2007 Reith lectures.

Whatever Kennedy's many (many) flaws, he assembled an astounding group of people, and he drew upon the best parts of America in a way we cannot imagine today. We seem, by comparison, a shriveled and brittle people. We have no choice, however, but to imagine that there is a road back for this country and for the world.

There are two lectures still to go.

Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud

This morning our last modern pencil sharpener broke. We have only one that works now. It's twelve years old, I remember coming across it in the campus bookstore. Even then reliable sharpeners were hard to find, so I bought several. Only one survives. It was made in Germany. We're going to mention it in our will, it may be worth a fortune thirty years from now. By then billionaires will employ artisans to craft beautiful objets d'art that sharpen pencils, and the rest of us will be using our teeth.

We tossed the broken one in the garbage. Alas, the can was broken. Well, that's almost reasonable. One year in a house with our 3 kids would even have weakened a German garbage can. No surprise this one broke.

We can't replace it. There are no more square, tough cans that use standard cheap trash bags. There are only round cheap things that use exotic bags that will only be sold for the next six months.

Our two DVD/VCR combos limp along. One has a broken DVD player, the other a broken tape player. There's no point in replacing them -- the replacement would only last three to six months then it would break. We won't replace our crummy old toaster, because the modern modern alternatives won't last more than a few weeks.

How to explain this emergent conspiracy of globalized incompetence and occult inflation? Clearly the answer is related to Krugman and Hilton [1] and the reelection of George Bush. The American consumer is simply overwhelmed, unable to process and cope with the complexity of the new age. Consumers are repetitive and consistently making very poor choices, and the market is responding to the frailty of the consumer.

I'm hopeful that a correction is coming. It's too late for we boomers to get our heads around the new world -- we're too old and slow. We can, however, retreat into "grumpy old person" buy nothing, replace nothing stasis -- and that will give the young more leverage. It's up to their minds to absorb the new rules, and reboot the marketplace.

Go for it kiddies, we gomers are depending on you!

[1] BTW, I'm seriously starting to feel sorry for Ms. Hilton.

Scientific American demonstrates how to eliminate web traffic

I wanted to link to a SciAm article I have at home. I had some things to say that seemed interesting (to me). A win-win for SciAm and me, especially since they charge for archival access.

Problem is, every time I went to the page Camino/Firefox pegged my CPU at 100%. Scientific American was featuring a BASF (German pharmaceutical company) animated ad that kills Gecko clients (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape, etc) - at least on OS X.

I've now disabled all web advertising display using Camino 1.5's quite excellent built-in blockers. So Scientific American's blunder will disable entire classes of advertising. Perhaps the responsible ad agency should take notice too.

I wonder how many thousands of people have been locked out today (especially if this impacts Firefox/Win as well) how many have responded by enabling full ad blocking, how many won't return to the SciAm web site, how many are reconsidering the value of their SciAm subscriptions...

It takes only one blunder of this magnitude to cost a web site months of work.

I'd try sending them feedback, but of course I'm not going to bother accessing their web site now. In any event, any corporation capable of this type of mistake probably omits the feedback link. Eliminating feedback helps reduce annoying customer interactions.

This is pretty much a universal rule by the way -- any entity, whether human or corporate, that does really dumb stuff is very unlikely to allow feedback. It's pretty much two sides of the same coin.

What a waste.

Paris Hilton and Paul Krugman - together?

I have only a very vague idea of who Paris Hilton is or what she does, but even I know she's famous, rich, likes drugs and seems able to absorb punishment almost as well as Mick Jagger. So I was able to enjoy a witty, funny and vastly entertaining essay in Salon  ...

We'll always hate Paris - Clintra Wilson -Salon Life

If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, Paris Hilton, for all her frailness and vulnerability, is a huge, flaming meteor that can penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, bypass all weather completely and destroy millions of lives wherever she happens to feel like plummeting...

...Paris Hilton charges $200,000 to show up at a party for 20 minutes...

... (Just to give this price tag some sense of proportion, in 2004 the average per capita annual income in Iraq was $422. So it would take the average Iraqi over 20 years to earn one minute with Paris Hilton, or around 24 Iraqis one year to divide and share that one minute with Paris between them -- which would just be a complete waste of money unless they could use that one minute to swallow all her jewelry and handbag and shoes.)

Paris has come to embody the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness -- she's the blonde whom we punish, because we understand her crimes. We don't really understand all the crimes of the administration -- congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights.

Those are too legally complicated. While we were busy ogling Lindsay's drug binges, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Britney's shaved head, our leaders larded us with misinformation, illegally invaded another country, murdered we-don't-even-have-any-idea-how-many innocent civilians (not to mention independent journalists), stole a nation's oil, tortured enemy prisoners, quietly bankrupted our economy and our international moral standing in service to the short con of military Keynesianism, effectively built Dick Cheney his own private Praetorian Guard, and ushered in the most serious threat to American freedom in our history: the very real threat of despotism.

God, that is depressing. Hooker! Where's the hooker?

Which leads to the Krugman connection:

... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit...

...Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”...

So you see, Krugman and Hilton are together. Ok, sort of connected - by their inverse relationships to a dysfunctional media serving a disinterested populace.

Ok, so my morals are declining ...

Paul Krugman blogs on TPMCafe. Ok. Posts

Ok, so it's not a blog, but Krugman has been posting on TPM Cafe. Alas, the "posts by" page does not itself have a feed.

Take this comment, for example:

... Anyone who thinks that neoclassical economics says that everyone gains from free trade, and that you have to reject the assumptions of the field to raise concerns, obviously doesn't know anything about the subject: ever since Stolper-Samuelson 1941 we've known that trade can easily hurt large numbers of people, so the question is always an empirical one. A dozen years ago I thought the effects were small, but that was based on the numbers, not a judgment in principle. Now I've revised my views up, because the numbers are bigger...

I haven't read that anywhere else, and I pay attention to this stuff (layperson attention of course, I'm not an economist). Stolper-Samuelson, eh?

I suspect Krugman's NYT contract may limit what he can do, but this is good stuff all the same. I hope the TPM Cafe people are thinking about how to add a feed to user post history ...

Can we fix the media? Krugman on the debates

Paul Krugman is worried.

Lies, Sighs and Politics - Krugman - New York Times

.... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)...

Where I grew up, in Montreal, we had a terrific variety of pastries, and even a few places with good coffee. Mostly though, we had great pastries. I assumed the whole world was like that. Then I moved to the states. My fellow Americans, we have crummy pastries. Yes, better than 20 years ago, but still only mediocre.

Why?

Because, mostly, we don't demand anything better. Consumers don't know enough to raise their standards, so progress is very slow.

So goes the media. It's hard to know if things were better once, but on the whole the performance of the American media is frighteningly bad. It seems, however, to be at the level Americans expect.

That's what scares me. America reelected Bush/Cheney. The current crop of GOP candidates are largely Bush clones. It could happen again.

The breaking of modern physics: space with non-zero energy

I came across this older article via a blog comment. Shame that this article doesn't have a date on it (a common web page error), but I think it's probably from 2006. It's not news, but I liked the overview of what it's meant to find that empty space has non-zero energy (or equivalently, non-zero mass):

Edge: THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO: A Talk with Lawrence Krauss

.... The energy of empty space had to be precisely zero. Why? Because you've got these virtual particles that are apparently contributing huge amounts of energy, you can imagine in physics, how underlying symmetries in nature can produce exact cancellations — that happens all the time. Symmetries produce two numbers that are exactly equal and opposite because somewhere there's an underlying mathematical symmetry of equations. So that you can understand how symmetries could somehow cause an exact cancellation of the energy of empty space.

But what you couldn't understand was how to cancel a number to a hundred and twenty decimal places and leave something finite left over. You can't take two numbers that are very large and expect them to almost exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space....

... every measure we've made right now is completely consistent with a constant energy in the universe over cosmological time. And that's consistent with the cosmological constant, with vacuum energy....

... because of this energy of empty space — which is so inexplicable that if it really is an energy of empty space, the value of that number is so ridiculous that it's driven people to think that maybe, maybe it's an accident of our environment, that physics is an environmental science — that certain fundamental constants in nature may just be accidents, and there may be many different universes, in which the laws of physics are different, and the reasons those constants have the values they have might be — in our universe — might be because we're there to observe them.

This is not intelligent design; it's the opposite of intelligent design. It's a kind of cosmic natural selection....

... Right now we're floundering. We're floundering, in a lot of different areas.

...Fundamental physics is really at kind of a crossroads. The observations have just told us that the universe is crazy, but hasn't told us what direction the universe is crazy in. The theories have been incredibly complex and elaborate, but haven't yet made any compelling inroads.

... On the largest scales, when we look out at the universe, there doesn't seem to be enough structure — not as much as inflation would predict. Now the question is, is that a statistical fluke?

... when you look at CMB [cjf: osmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.

The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is imply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales...

Space isn't what it once was. We used to think space separated things, but now we know it doesn't. If you collapse the probability wave on an electron in Kansas, then the probability wave on its entangled partner 200 billion light years away collapses at the same "time". (The catch being what is meant by time in this context.)

Physics isn't what it once was. Physicists seem a bit demoralized, and stunned. I don't blame 'em at all. This reality looks less plausible all the time.

iPhone: inferior to the (defunct) Samsung i500

I watched Apple's sensational iPhone ads with my wife last night. I drooled over the images, even though I know they're faking a theoretical optimum experience that won't be real for at least another year -- and then only with a WiFi connection.

I couldn't fool myself completely however. There was only one instance of data entry. The user's fat fingers entered a search term, which miraculously rendered without a typo (how many tries did that take?).

Emily scoffed. She ripped my aging Samsung i500 out of my hands a few months ago, and she's constantly doing stylus data entry (Graffiti One, not that Bizarro clone known as Graffiti Two/Jot) on an ultra-tough compact clamshell that fits in pocket or purse and survives recurrent abuse.

Sigh. I know she's right. As much as I want an iPhone, it will be only five times better than my loathed RAZR. It won't be half as useful as the long abandoned i500.

One day the consumer market will mature enough that the i500 will be reinvented with superior technology and a viable business model. In the meantime I'm looking forward to my iPhone, but I know it's only second best.

That is the problem of an efficient marketplace; it's too "clever" to make the kind of products space aliens like my wife and I want.