Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

In the words of another famous Republican actor, don’t talk to the chair.  Talk to the hand.

By Thoreau

The world of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem novel would make an excellent RPG setting.  What little “magic” there is would be easy to adapt to almost any system:  New Matter is just technology, and the abilities of Incanters and Rhetors would largely manifest as do-overs, both from a storytelling perspective and a dice-rolling perspective.

By Thoreau

Greenwald has said almost everything that needs to be said about  the  decision to not prosecute anybody for torture, from the lowliest order-follower to the highest order-giver, even for incidents where  people died.

I just want to add a few points:

1) If we want to momentarily pretend that we were all born yesterday, I suppose  that one could argue that there are just so many ambiguities in the law and it’s all terribly complicated and everybody was acting in good faith.  That isn’t true, but let’s momentarily pretend that it’s true.  In that case, the only way to even attempt to justify a decision not to prosecute  is if that decision is followed by an immediate press conference at which the President says “Our laws have been inadequate.  Horrible things were done that must not be done again.  I call for Congress to immediately enact legislation that closes the gaps that the Attorney General identified in our current set of laws.”

Have you seen such a press conference?  I haven’t.

2) The one thing that this decision guarantees is that it will happen again.  If people know that they can get away with something, they WILL do it again.  For all we know, it’s happening right now.  When the only people going to jail are the whistleblowers, how much confidence can you have  in the system?

And, in fact, we do know that torture in some form has happened under Obama.  If nothing else, we know that Bradley Manning was tortured, being kept naked and in an isolation cell with “suicide prevention” restrictions that also limited his sleep.  If you don’t think that’s torture, go talk to John McCain.

3) Barack Obama, you don’t deserve a second term.  Romney doesn’t deserve a first term, of course, but you also don’t deserve a second term.

In other words, this November, no matter who wins, we lose.  It’s Alien vs. Predator.

By Thoreau

In an ideal world, both major candidates would lose to a Glenn Greenwald write-in candidacy.  Of course, that won’t happen.  In this world, only one of them will lose.  What lessons would you like each party to take away if it loses?  Here are my answers:

Team Blue: You lost because you didn’t deliver much of that change stuff you talked about.  Instead, you shielded the elites from accountability in just about every way conceivable.

Team Red: You lost because your team is infected with teh crazy and you couldn’t be bothered to say to them “Dudes?  Seriously? Seek professional help.  Now.”

I’m not saying that either side will take that message away, but that’s what I’d like them to take away.

What’s your preferred take-away from a loss?

By Thoreau

At lunch today I had a wide-ranging conversation with two biology professors.  One of them studies very practical things of great importance to human health.  The other studies marine invertebrates.  I asked a naive question about something in genetics, which led them onto a tangent about the immune system, and then they somehow got onto something about invertebrate immune systems and neither knew the answer.  Then the guy studying human health lamented that it’s a shame that people only want to fund human health, because humans are just one animal among many and a lot of important ideas start off in the study of other organisms.  So, basically he was saying that somebody should fund his colleague.

At that point, he segued into a discussion of a weird phenomena in certain mammals, something that protects them from a problem that plagues a lot of human patients.  (I don’t want to give away his big idea.)  But his lament was that it’s hard to get money to study some wild animal’s weird habits.  Even if he made the case for studying it as a model organism, in order to start working effectively with this organism he’d have to draw on whatever knowledge base is out there on this animal, and wildlife biology just doesn’t get that much funding.  That’s not to say that nobody studies it, but it’s a small community and if he started posing really probing questions about the very specific thing he’s interested he’d eventually reach the limits of what is known.  That in itself is not objectionable–science always involves studying the unknown–but in order to make progress he’d have to study the animal more broadly than he could propose in a study for human health purposes.  So, basically, he wishes there was more funding of basic biology so that medical researchers would have access to more literature and more collaborators when they want to study a human health problem in an unusual model organism.

I won’t say that physics funding is easy to get (it isn’t) or that we aren’t drawn to trendy stuff (we are), but physics does seem to be a bit more accommodating of those who want to study something “just because it’s there.”  A physicist can study, say, formation of rings in coffee cups (I’m not making this up) by pointing out that there’s complex hydrodynamics and phase changes and pattern formation and people will say “Yeah, those phenomena show up all over the place, go ahead, study it.”  Even if nobody ever uses the results directly, we’ll certainly find a use for people whose training involves measurements and simulation of phase changes and hydrodynamics.  Physicists (and the people who fund them) seem to sort of get that.  Physicists and the people who fund them seem to get that even if measuring electroweak effects in transitions in Rb ions never produces a new technology, the people who got trained on that project now know how to do ultra-precise measurements of optical phenomena, and there are lots of industries that care about that.  (Where do you think the atomic clocks in the GPS system come from?)

Or, to give an example at the interface of biology and optics, optogenetics is a big deal these days: People can make cells express certain genes that make ion channels light-sensitive.  It’s a great tool for studying ion channels.  And where did that come from?  Well, one of the key molecules, halorhodopsin, was first studied in extremophile bacteria that thrive in really salty conditions.  The other one, channelrhodopsin, comes from algae.  Somebody had to study these organisms and build up a knowledge base to tease out what these molecules do.  Only then could somebody else come along and make use of them in biomedical research.

So, somebody should fund wildlife biologists to do basic studies of the animal that my friend is interested in.  The specific phenomena studied by the wildlife biologists might not be directly useful, but the general knowledge base about that animal’s physiology and habits will be tremendously important when he studies it at a model organism for a problem in human health.

By Thoreau

I finally started reading Jim’s posts on Twitter, and I second him:  This article from TAC is a good response to a lot of GOP rhetoric on jobs.

By Thoreau

A science blogger wants to talk about safety training that doesn’t insult intelligence and actually helps make people safer. I’m pretty sure that designing such training would be seen as useless by the people whose main concern is ass-covering.

By Thoreau

Today, I was part of a delegation of people from my university, visiting a company interested in hiring science and engineering interns.  I was the only person in the delegation who actually interacts with students.  The administrative folks started talking to the company’s HR folks, trying to figure out what sort of relationship we’d need to establish between some office on our campus and somebody in their company.  Finally, I said “Look, I have a lot of good science and engineering students in my classes, let me collect resumes from the best ones and pass them on, and if you like them you hire them for internships.  We can sort out credit for cooperative learning or senior project or whatever once we know what they’re doing, but let me first just get you the resumes from the best ones, and you interview whoever looks interesting and decide if you want any of them.  Otherwise there’s no point in hammering out agreements.”

HR took this remarkably well.  I’m used to administrative offices thinking that the rest of the organization works for them.  It was refreshing to meet HR people who were happy to hear a proposal to cut to the chase and get the right people in front of hiring managers.  If this were a university, the paper-pushing offices would be explaining to me that I work for them.  This company’s HR folks seemed to understand that the most important thing was getting the right people into their R&D team ASAP.

Amazingly enough, the other university folks took it pretty well too.  I later learned that they were not really sure what to do, and when I proposed to just get resumes from top students they were relieved to hear that something would actually come of this visit.

By Thoreau

I’m not a particle physicist, so these speculations should be taken with huge grains of NaCl.  That said, the latest Nature has two articles on the future of experimental particle physics, and I want to opine.

The biggest problem in particle physics is that, so far, the Standard Model (SM) seems to work.  I know that the Higgs has not yet been shown to follow the SM, but there’s no strong statistical evidence for SM violations either.  This is a problem on 2 levels:  The most obvious is the “Um, what do we do now?” issue.  The other is that we know that there are some real phenomena not contained in the SM: Dark matter, dark energy, gravity, neutrino mass, and the fact that there’s far more matter than anti-matter.

My hunch is that building bigger and still bigger particle accelerators is unlikely to help us resolve these mysteries in the short to medium term.  Instead, I suspect that we need to do two things:

1) Focus on particle astrophysics and particle cosmology (i.e. the detection of particles from space) and observational cosmology.  With the exception of matter/anti-matter asymmetry, all of the mysteries on that list are rooted at least in part in astronomical observations.  Everything we know about dark matter and dark energy comes from astronomical observations, the first suggestions of neutrino mass came from solar observations, and much of what we know about gravity comes from telescopes.

In a particle accelerator we create things and see what they do.  When we observe the heavens, we are opening ourselves up to more surprises.  We are in a rut, so it’s time to look at the universe and let it send us the signals.

2) At the other extreme, test fundamental assumptions in tabletop experiments, i.e. experiments that fit in a large room rather than requiring a particle accelerator ring that completely encircles Geneva.  Tabletop studies of gravity have extended to micron length scales and can rule out regions of parameter space for alternate theories of gravity (though I doubt they’ll be testing string theory in any tabletop experiment).  Quantum optics experiments have tested tenets of general relativity.  Quantum information theory continues to test, challenge, and expand our understanding of quantum mechanics.  My understanding is that some high-precision spectroscopy is at the point where it can study electroweak interactions.

I don’t think anybody will figure out dark matter in a quantum optics experiment, but we are stuck in a rut so we need to revisit our fundamental assumptions.  Quantum mechanics began with somebody trying to understand thermal equilibrium between light and matter.  At the time we already had a perfectly good theory of light (Maxwell’s equations) and thermal physics was focused on things explicable by collisions between hypothesized atoms.  Nobody had any idea that the marriage of these two inquiries would lead to an exquisitely precise theory of the subatomic world.  I believe that if enough smart people spend their time probing the foundations of relativity and quantum mechanics and probing fundamental interactions via indirect means, some insight will emerge and shock us all.

Now, obviously we already have lots of observational cosmologists and lots of particle astrophysicists sitting in mines or Antarctic stations looking for particles from the sky.  Obviously we have lots of smart people doing tabletop physics.  And I don’t think we should shut down particle accelerators.  I’m just saying that for decades they have chased after higher and higher energies and everything predicted by their theory has been more or less validated (so far), but the particle accelerators have not yielded anything to explain the other mysteries, and the theories constructed to wed the validated SM with those other observations are complex, speculative, and largely unsupported.  Perhaps it is not wise to try to build a bridge between SM phenomena and unexplained phenomena.  Instead, we should look harder at the unexplained phenomena, and look at the foundational assumptions that would be used (or bent) in any theory bridging the two sides.

By Thoreau

This article from yesterday’s LA Times business section is just another example of the oft-repeated observation that corporations often wind up getting tax rebates rather than paying taxes.  There’s something deeply wrong.  And for a kicker, the article notes that CEO compensation sometimes exceeds a large company’s tax liability.

Despite my outrage over this, I want to explore an idea, one that I am not at all convinced of, and one that you, dear reader, are almost certainly opposed to:  Cutting corporate income taxes.  Again, let me emphasize that I am not committed to this idea, indeed I am probably opposed to it, but in exploring it I want to make a few points about how individuals get money from the system.

When a corporation makes money, there are a number of things that it can do with that money:  For instance, it can reinvest the money in the company.  This is a laudable use of the money–we desperately need innovation in this country.  Well, not innovation in financial instruments (we already have quite enough fancy derivatives), but we certainly need technological innovation, not so much for shiny flashy things as for more mundane things like resource efficiency (it isn’t always about shiny hybrids, sometimes it’s just about pipes that don’t leak) and better healthcare (it isn’t always about multi-million dollar machines, sometimes it’s about better cleaning products and procedures).  Anyway, re-investment in innovation is good.

A corporation can pay out a dividend.  That is a perfectly fine thing.  Of course, that income goes to individuals and should be taxed like any other income, a point that Warren Buffett has often made.

A corporation can also give money to its top managers, either via cash or numerous different perks.  For legal and accounting purpose these are treated as business expenses, but, really, it’s just another way for the people who run the business to get money out of it.  There are numerous loopholes that the rich exploit to not pay taxes on their income, but the bottom line is that it’s income and it should be taxed like any other income.

And, of course, people can make money by investing in a corporation and then selling their stock when the company turns a profit and the stock consequently appreciates in value.  These capital gains are taxed less than wage and salary income, again, a point made by Warren Buffett.

So, here’s what I’m getting at:  I am happy to see businesses profit (if that profit is earned honestly, of course).  I am happy to see them reinvest.  Building a profitable enterprise and reinvesting to sustain it is a good thing.  Taking income from it for consumption*, OTOH, is a different matter, and there are long-standing reasons why we tax personal income and tax it progressively.  Consequently, I wonder if it might make the most sense to just tax corporate profits when they go to individuals, whether as dividends, capital gains, executive salaries, or executive perks.

Mind you, I haven’t really argued against corporate taxes, I’ve mostly just argued for putting the emphasis on high-income individuals.  Still, I think this is worth pondering.

*Yes, I am aware that income can be saved, and there are reasons why savings for retirement, health expenses, and education can get special tax status.