Miscellany

No substantive blogging from me — I’ve lost my laptop and need to get a new one, with all the crapola that entails. (Speaking euphemistically here; it wasn’t “lost,” it was stolen. Story later.)

In the meantime here’s a video from Barack Obama, supporting Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. (Via Jezebel.) Savage is a well-known sex columnist, and Obama is President of the United States, so it’s a newsworthy pairing in its own right. But this is an important message for every teenager, or for that matter for every person. The campaign is aimed primarily at LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered) kids, who are very commonly bullied and ostracized in school. But bullying isn’t right no matter who the target is. It does get better, as you grow up and figure yourself out and find supportive communities. It shouldn’t ever be bad in the first place, so we have to do what we can to change the cultural acceptance of harassment.

At Science Not Fiction, Malcolm MacIver reports on Roombots — robots that can assemble themselves into different pieces of “furniture,” depending on the demands of the situation. Meanwhile, in the middle of a lecture on Marx, Brad DeLong mentions that Aristotle long ago pointed out that the drudgeries of everyday life would prevent most people from becoming true lovers of wisdom. Too much time cooking and cleaning made it hard to curl up with a good philosophy book. In Aristotle’s time, the solution was clear: have your slaves do the dirty work while you contemplated deep thoughts. But he was smart enough to realize that there was another possible route to carving out free time: automation. In the Politics (c. 350 BCE) he writes:

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves.

This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that

“Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus”

as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.

I suspect Aristotle would have been quite tickled at self-reassembling robots.

Here’s a local issue that reflects a very common set of problems: the Los Angeles subway system. Such as it is. Namely, embarrassingly inadequate. Our aspirations to be considered a world-class city on the level of New York, Paris, Tokyo or London are severely restricted by the difficulties people face in getting around without a car. Or with a car, for that matter, given the traffic.

But there’s no reason it has to be like this. At any given moment, some concerned group of citizens will be agitating to improve the situation. Right now such a group is Get L.A. Moving. They’ve put together an amazing proposal for a serious subway network that would utterly transform the city, while respecting the natural contours of the existing urban environment. Click for bigger versions.

Looking at a map like this is a bittersweet experience — comparing what could be to what is. Of course it would be very expensive; they estimate about $35 billion, which doesn’t sound so crazy when spread over a number of years. Times are tough — but that’s exactly the reason why pie-in-the-sky plans like this should be taken seriously right now. There’s no better way to stimulate the economy than to pour massive amounts of money into legitimate infrastructure projects; you create jobs, but you also create value that lasts for many decades to come. Not to mention decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels, which hopefully doesn’t need to be justified.

Also — how cool would it be to have one of these babies crawling along underneath Sunset Boulevard?

In the back of my mind, the real obstacle to building a subway system in a mature city was that you couldn’t really imagine shutting down long stretches of busy streets for months or years at a time. But you don’t have to; modern tunnel-boring technology does it all underground.

Some will object that LA just isn’t dense enough to support a subway system; our attractions are spread out rather than localized to squares. That’s an utterly backwards attitude; build the subway, the density will come. With nice weather 340+ days a year, this is the perfect city in the world to have a mass transit system connecting a bunch of pedestrian-friendly outdoor plazas.

Of course, then everyone would want to come live here. So maybe it wouldn’t be ideal. But it would still be a good idea for the economy and the environment; so I’m willing to sacrifice.

The Center for Inquiry is a great organization — their mission is to “foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values,” which sounds like a good idea to me. They sponsor a number of activities including lectures, education, conferences, and research. I’ve given talks at the local branch, and it’s a great thrill to meet with such an engaged and enthusiastic audience.

And they’re in a bit of trouble. As a non-profit, they rely on donations, and their major donor seems to have mysteriously disappeared. About $800,000 of their annual operating budget is suddenly gone.

We’re not going to make up for that with a few appeals on the internet, but we can help them adapt during a tough time. Consider donating, even if it’s just a few bucks.

I’m reading an interesting new book, Bursts by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It’s just released today, but I scored an advance copy by virtue of sharing the same publisher. The basic idea is simple: human behavior obeys power laws! That is, things we occasionally do tend to be clustered together, rather than simply occurring with uniform probability. I can’t vouch for either the truth or usefulness of the claims put forward in the book; we all know that power laws can be slippery things. But the stories related along the way are pretty amusing. (And there’s a very spiffy web page.)

I’ll admit that I jumped right to a chapter in the middle that relates the correspondence between Einstein and Theodor Kaluza in the year 1919 and thereabouts. Kaluza had just come up with the idea that electromagnetism could be unified with gravity by hypothesizing an extra dimension of space — a scenario now known as Kaluza-Klein theory, which underlies all the contemporary excitement about extra dimensions of space. Many crackpots like to assert that our contemporary system of scientific publishing is overly ossified and hierarchical, and that a modern-day Einstein would never be appreciated; the truth is close to the opposite, as back in those days you really needed endorsement from someone established to get your papers published. So Kaluza wrote to Einstein, who was originally enthusiastic about the idea, and they had a flurry of correspondence. Eventually (as I now know) Einstein cooled on the idea, and Kaluza left physics to concentrate on pure mathematics. A couple of years later, after getting nowhere with his own attempts to unify gravity and E&M, Einstein turned back to Kaluza’s approach, and wrote him again, offering to present his paper to the academy.

The book’s interest is actually in the “burstiness” of the correspondence — a flurry of letters back and forth in 1919, then silence, then the conversation resumed in 1921. I was struck by this paragraph, relating the growth of Einstein’s celebrity after the eclipse expedition of 1919 provided evidence supporting general relativity.

[Einstein’s] sudden fame had drastic consequences for his correspondence. In 1919, he received 252 letters and wrote 239, his life still in its subcritical phase, allowing him to reply to most letters with little delay. The next year he wrote many more letters than in any previous year. To the flood of 519 he received, we have record of his having managed to respond to 331 of them, a pace, though formidable, insufficient to keeping on top of his vast correspondence. By 1920 Einstein had moved into the supercritical regime, and he never recovered. The peak came in 1953, two years before his death, when he received 832 letters and responded to 476 of them.

Can you imagine what Einstein would have faced in the email era? One thing is for sure: he was a champion correspondent. He composed approximately 14,500 letters, more than one per day over the course of his adult life.

Not for the first time, Einstein makes me feel like a slacker.

Groups of people with whom I disagree (so many, many groups…) should not hand in their census forms. That way they will be under-represented in official figures and basically count less. And do you really want to be in the government’s database when the black helicopters come?

Just kidding. Only two days left, hand in your census forms! Even people I don’t like.

Here are the opening sentences of Chapter Five of my book:

When most people hear “scientist,” they think “Einstein.” Albert Einstein is an iconic figure; not many theoretical physicists attain a level of celebrity where their likeness appears regularly on T-shirts. But it’s an intimidating, distant celebrity. Unlike, say, Tiger Woods, the precise achievements that Einstein is actually famous for remain somewhat mysterious to many people who would easily recognize his name.

And now we can add, “and some achievements should really stay mysterious, thanks just the same.”

The Laffer Curve is a simple idea: a government can’t raise taxes forever and expect to increase revenue along the way. Eventually you’re taking so much in taxes that people don’t have any reason to earn income. The argument is simple (and correct): if you have zero tax rate you get zero tax revenue. If you raise taxes just a bit, nobody will be discouraged from working, and you will collect some amount of revenue; therefore, the curve of revenue versus tax rate starts at zero and initially rises. But if the tax rate is 100%, nobody has any reason to work, and your total revenues will be back at zero. By the wonders of math, there must therefore be a maximum of the curve somewhere in between 0% and 100% tax rate.

An important question is, where are we on the curve? The notion of the Laffer curve has been used to justify all sorts of tax cuts, under the assumption/claim that we are to the right of the maximum, so that cutting taxes will actually increase revenues. Serious economists generally don’t believe this holds true in the U.S. right now, but the lure of the idea is undeniable: lose weight by eating more ice cream!

Via Marginal Revolution, here’s a study by Mathias Trabandt and Harald Uhlig that tries to get it right. Obviously they have models that make various assumptions, and I have no idea how realistic those assumptions are. They study the U.S. and several European countries, and find that Denmark and Sweden are just a bit on the wrong side of the curve for the specific case of capital income taxation. For the most part, however, tax rates lie to the left of the maximum. In the U.S., especially, we are significantly on the left. Here is the graph for labor taxes:

The vertical line is our average tax rate; the curves represent different model assumptions. They estimate the U.S. could increase revenues by about 36% by raising taxes. That obviously doesn’t necessarily imply that we should — but we could.