Extra Credits
Published on 30 Sep 2018To understand the power and the challenges of the quantum computer, we have to spend a little more time watching the intense debates between Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein about the Uncertainty Principle. Can we really know the energy of a photon?
Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/
A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.
Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
October 3, 2018
Quantum Computing – The Einstein-Bohr Debates – Extra History – #3
October 2, 2018
It’s time to “fix” the Nobel Prize system, because reasons
Tim Worstall on the demand that the Nobel prizes be awarded more “equitably”:
We have a nice example of the standard left wing perniciousness here with this complaint that the Nobels have to be changed because reasons. The pernicity being that instead of doing the honourable thing – go off and create your own – the demand is that an extant part of society be coopted into the Borg and run as those who didn’t create it insist. We do rather see this all around society, don’t we? Google’s search functions must operate as the social justice warriors insist, Facebook and Twitter must not allow anyone not on message to ever say anything publicly, Nobels must be awarded for environmental sciences. And to women. And groups. And as we insist, dammit!
Why Nobel prizes fail 21st-century science
After all, something that’s been around a century and more, gained vast repute by being so, cannot be allowed to continue untamed, can it? That would just be so conservative! Leave this sort of thing alone and people might even think the nuclear family is a pretty good idea. Or clans, tribes, or something.
But many now question this deification of scientists and believe Nobel prizes are dangerously out of kilter with the processes of modern research. By stressing individual achievements, they say, Nobels encourage competition at the expense of cooperation. They want the system to be changed.
Because you didn’t build that, after all. Clearly, the entire society should be awarded prizes for contributing. Just as is true with any form of financial capital, so with human. We all contributed, all should gain the baubles. Filtered through the pure and just who are the nomenklatura, obviously.
September 26, 2018
Quantum Computing – Electron Boogaloo – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 23 Sep 2018Today we’re exploring one of Albert Einstein’s most controversial papers: his ideas on the photoelectric effect, which describes light as quanta (discrete packets of energy) instead of a classical wave. This new understanding of light helped Niels Bohr create a new model of the atom.
Credit to Alisa Bishop for her art on this series: http://www.alisabishop.com/
A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.
Support us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon
September 20, 2018
Quantum Computing – The Foundation of Everything – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 16 Sep 2018Is light a particle? Is light a wave? Let’s take a look at Thomas Young’s famous double-slit experiment — creating those really super funky interference patterns you might remember from your high school physics classes.
A tremendous thank-you to Alexander Tamas, the “mystery patron” who made this series possible. We finally found room in our busy production schedule to create and air this series alongside our regularly scheduled, patron-approved Extra History videos. A huge thank you to the multiple guest artists we got to work with, to Matt Krol for his skillful wrangling of the production schedule and keeping everyone happy, and to our Patreon supporters for your patience and support.
QotD: Parenthood
What know I about 3 am feedings, Spongebob Squarepants, day care pickups or those special moments when one finds oneself on one’s knees, covered in vomit, as one’s darling child wails uncontrollably? I mean, it all sounds horrible, but I expect that it would be even worse to live it, fighting tears of exhaustion and a post-partum pouch.
[Incidentally, current parents should note that y’all are not doing a good job of selling this child-bearing thing to those of us who are as yet non-reproductive. You know, if you actually succeed in communicating all of the dreadfulness of your parental lives to us, as so many articles currently seem intent upon doing, your social security benefits are going to look pretty darn sad in thirty years or so. But I digress.]
Jane Galt, “Focus on the family”, Asymmetrical Information, 2005-02-18.
September 18, 2018
QotD Breastfeeding
I threw out the baby books that I had been given after the first week of breastfeeding. All those promises/warnings of “don’t be surprised if you experience multiple orgasms while nursing”. Hey, I was always up for multiple orgasms which was no doubt why I had three children in four years but the reality is only a dominatrix could think that the initial stages of breastfeedings could produce an orgasm. Even after the extreme pain vanished there was never the slightest chance of orgasm which leads me to speculate that other people have a much more bizarre sexual life than I could possibly imagine. And if the books were will filled with such utter rot about breastfeeding; I wasn’t willing to chance the rest.
Kate “The Last Amazon”, “When Biology is Destiny”, The Last Amazon, 2005-03-02
September 17, 2018
“Nazis on Drugs” – Wehrmacht & Meth – Wunderwaffe?
Military History not Visualized
Published on 17 Aug 2018There some over-blown claims out there that the “Blitzkriege” were mainly achieved due to the use of Meth (Pervitin) and that historians had ignored this issue. Is it true or false? In this video we take a look at Pervitin, the Wehrmacht, the early German victories aka “Blitzkriege” and various aspects. Was Pervitin a Wunderwaffe? Was the Wehrmacht on Meth? How long was it used? And some aspects.
September 12, 2018
QotD: Origins of India’s caste system
In India, the notion of Hindu culture as a giant conspiracy by Aryan invaders to enshrine their descendants at the top of the social order for the rest of eternity perhaps struck a little too close to home.
But Reich’s laboratory has found that the old Robert E. Howard version is actually pretty much what happened. Conan the Barbarian-like warriors with their horse-drawn wagons came charging off the Eurasian steppe and overran much of Europe and India. Reich laments:
The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas — suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages.
Much more acceptable to Indian intellectuals than the idea that ancient conquerors from the Russian or Kazakhstani steppe took over the upper reaches of Indian culture has been the theory of Nicholas B. Dirks, the Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology at Columbia, that the British malignantly transformed diverse local Indian customs into the suffocating system of caste that we know today.
Now, though, Reich’s genetic evidence shows that caste has controlled who married whom in India for thousands of years:
Rather than inventions of colonialism as Dirks suggested, long-term endogamy as embodied in India today in the institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millennia.
This is in harmony with economic historian Gregory Clark’s recent discovery in his book of surname analysis, The Son Also Rises (Clark loves Hemingway puns), that economic mobility across the generations is not only lower than expected in most of the world, but it is virtually nonexistent in India.
Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.
September 6, 2018
Trans-partisan planning
At Coyote Blog, Warren Meyer offers a plan to address man-made climate change, pitched to avoid being dismissed as “typical” of one or the other side:
While I am not deeply worried about man-made climate change, I am appalled at all the absolutely stupid, counter-productive things the government has implemented in the name of climate change, all of which have costly distorting effects on the economy while doing extremely little to affect man-made greenhouse gas production. For example:
- Corn ethanol mandates and subsidies, which study after study have shown to have zero net effect on CO2 emissions, and which likely still exist only because the first Presidential primary is in Iowa. Even Koch Industries, who is one of the largest beneficiaries of this corporate welfare, has called for their abolition
- Electric car subsidies, 90% of which go to the wealthy to help subsidize their virtue signalling, and which require more fossil fuels to power than an unsubsidized Prius or even than a SUV.
- Wind subsidies, which are promoting the stupidist form for power ever, whose unpredictabilty means fossil fuel plants still have to be kept running on hot backup and whose blades are the single largest threat to endangered bird species.
- Bad government technology bets like the massive public subsidies of failed Solyndra
Even when government programs do likely have an impact of CO2, they are seldom managed intelligently. For example, the government subsidizes solar panel installations, presumably to reduce their cost to consumers, but then imposes duties on imported panels to raise their price (indicating that the program has become more of a crony subsidy for US solar panel makers, which is typical of these types of government interventions). Obama’s coal power plan, also known as his war on coal, will certainly reduce some CO2 from electricity generation but at a very high cost to consumers and industries. Steps like this are taken without any idea of whether this is the lowest cost approach to reducing CO2 production — likely it is not given the arbitrary aspects of the program.
These policy mess is also an opportunity — it affords us the ability to substantially reduce CO2 production at almost no cost.
September 5, 2018
Mind Your Business Ep. 1: Breaking the Mold
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 4 Sep 2018Join host Andrew Heaton as we profile the stories of interesting entrepreneurs from around the country for FEE’s newest series, Mind Your Business.
In this episode, we’ll meet Jeremy Umansky. He’s a chef with a true passion for unusual food and his unique brand of cuisine is making a big splash in the culinary world.
September 4, 2018
Debunking claims from The Technology of Orgasm
Alex Tabarrok linked to this paper [PDF] examining the claims that have long since become embedded in academia but appear to have no factual basis at all:
You know the story about the male Victorian physicians who unwittingly produced orgasms in their female clients by treating them for “hysteria” with newly-invented, labor-saving, mechanical vibrators? It’s little more than an urban legend albeit one transmitted through academic books and articles. Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, the authors of a shocking new paper, A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, don’t quite use the word fraud but they come close.
The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines is one of the most widely cited works on the history of sex and technology. Maines argues that Victorian physicians routinely used electromechanical vibrators to stimulate female patients to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria. She claims that physicians did not perceive the practice as sexual because it did not involve vaginal penetration. The vibrator was, according to Maines, a labor-saving technology to replace the well-established medical practice of clitoral massage for hysteria. This argument has been repeated almost verbatim in dozens of scholarly works, popular books and articles, a Broadway play, and a feature-length film. Although a few scholars have challenged parts of the book, no one has contested her central argument in the peer-reviewed literature. In this article, we carefully assess the sources cited in the book. We found no evidence in these sources that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. The success of Technology of Orgasm serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.
I was not surprised when I ran a quick search for the cover of the Maines book (embedded above) and the vast majority of images returned were NSFW.
September 1, 2018
The legal tangle around the Trans-Mountain pipeline approval process
Jay Currie suspects the process has been intentionally complicated to the point that there may not be a way out for this government:
What the Court essentially asked was, “Did the Federal Government consult enough?” and then concluded, “No, not enough.”
How much is “enough”? That is a question which this decision really does not answer. And I suspect it does not answer it because there is actually no answer which is even close to true.
In a normal process a reasonable level of public consultation would be reached when the public has been given an opportunity to comment on the matter at hand. Which is a bit vague but there is case law which fleshes out what such an opportunity might look like.
However, once environmentalists and First Nations are engaged it is not at all obvious that merely having the opportunity to comment is sufficient. Unlike a rezoning application, an application to build a pipeline (or, realistically, virtually any other large undertaking) creates the opportunity for First Nations to talk about everything from ancient hunting rights, to sacred grounds, to former village sites, to disruptions to present First Nation culture and so on. Having the environmentalists involved ensures that the relatively easy solution of simply paying the First Nations’ people for their consent, is off the table. That solution will be denounced by the enviros as cultural genocide and worse.
All of which creates, and might arguably have been intended to create, a Gordian knot when it comes to considering major projects. Consultation becomes an endless task and one which has no defined parameters. The decision today indicates that an extensive consultation process is not enough but it does not indicate what might be enough.
Delightfully, the shareholders of Kinder Morgan – which owns TransMountain – voted today to sell the project to Canada’s feckless Federal Government for several billion dollars.
I suspect the CEO danced a little jig relieved that he no longer had to guess at how far consultations have to go. But Canada is stuck with a completely dysfunctional system which is being exploited by environmentalists and First Nations to prevent infrastructure from being built. That will have to be fixed.
August 31, 2018
Experimental strip farm demonstrates why strip farming was eventually abandoned
Tim Worstall uses an article in the Guardian about a National Trust experimental replication of medieval farming patterns to point out exactly why modern farms do not use them:
Plan of a fictional medieval manor. The mustard-coloured areas are part of the demesne (owned by the lord), the hatched areas part of the glebe (reserved to support the parish priest).
Illustration from William R. Shepherd’s Historical Atlas, 1923 via Wikimedia Commons.
The proof of the inefficiency is in the presence of that lots more wildlife. We’re trying to grow food for humans to eat recall. So, more wildlife eating off the same earth is less food for humans. We have more butterflies around? That’s nice, but that does mean more caterpillars munching on those now not for humans crops. Hen harriers? Great, but they’re eating the mice and the voles living off those crops. Land that’s growing wildflowers isn’t growing grain or veggies for us, is it?
Sure, it’s nice to have hen harriers, great to have wildflowers. But their very existence on this land shows that this method of farming is less efficient at doing the job of farming – growing food for us. Which is why we abandoned this method of farming of course. Under the simple and basic pressures of trying to gain more output from our inputs. And yes, land is, obviously enough, an input into farming.
And if we’d like to have flowers and harriers? Then we should be using the most efficient farming methods on those areas we do farm so as to leave more space, more land, for the pretty things we’d also like to have. That is, prairies of glycophosphate drenched wheat for us, the other 30 or 50 or 70% of the land left alone for them. And the more chemicals we use on our bit the smaller that bit devoted to us is going to be.
The very fact that we’ve more wildlife as a result of this inefficient farming method shows us that we must be using the more efficient industrial methods. You know, to save the wildlife?
QotD: Victim mentality
Does feeling like a victim make one behave more or less selfishly? Imagine that an individual feels wronged by an everyday event: An executive sees a colleague receive a promotion that she feels she deserved instead; an academic finds out that he is once more assigned to a tedious committee, whereas his colleagues seem miraculously spared; an author is about to send off a manuscript when a computer glitch erases weeks’ worth of work, and she is penalized for missing her deadline.
As these individuals contemplate their unfortunate lot, how motivated would they be to help others? One could imagine that individuals who have received the short end of the stick would be especially motivated to help others, to redress other wrongs, or to make themselves feel better with the warm glow that comes from doing good. In this article, we make the opposite prediction: We propose instead that feeling wronged gives people a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes — and to avoid negative ones — that frees them from the usual requirements of social life. Whereas individuals typically contend with a strong norm of benevolence that encourages helping and curbs egoism, we propose that wronged individuals, because of their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.
[…]
Our research has shown that people who have just been wronged or reminded of a time when they were wronged feel entitled to positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly. They no longer feel obligated to suffer for others and therefore pass up opportunities to be helpful. By contributing to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness, this research points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein thus has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism in people who feel wronged, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering-to-selfishness suggested by our research.
Emily M. Zitek, et. al., “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010-02.
August 30, 2018
“This is simply drivel. And it’s the standard Green Party phantasm written out again”
Tim Worstall is not impressed with a new study out of Finland which recommends that the United Nations become much more involved in organizing and directing the lives of everyone on the planet … for our own good, of course:
We’ve another of those pieces of environmental drivel on offer to us. Here it’s the considered opinions of some Finnish knownothings on what is necessary to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The basis of which is that we should all prepare to be rather poorer. No, not because the Earth is running out of stuff to make us richer but because our Finnish knownothings are recommending that the UN take charge of things and forcibly make us poorer.
This is perhaps not the correct manner of running the global economy.
[…]
That’s all entirely drivel, of course. Capitalism doesn’t depend upon cheap fossil fuels nor even cheap energy. It’s just an economic system in which we have private property. Including the value added belonging to the people who own the property which adds the value. That’s really all it is too. Profit belongs to the people providing the capital – this is definitional by the way. For that’s what we define profit as, that part of the returns from an activity which go to those who provide the capital.
There is absolutely nothing at all which requires that energy, or any natural resource, be of any particular price nor level of price. All we are saying when we recommend capitalism is that the system seems to work better when those who make a profit get to keep it. Our economic definition of profit being when value of output is greater than the costs of inputs. Who gets those profits is definitional about capitalism. Any and every economic system is trying to produce profits. Because any and every economic system is trying to add value to inputs, trying to create value.
[…]
There’s a remarkable lack of reasoning as to why international trade needs to be limited or regulated. If we’re facing more expensive energy then we should be doing more of it, not less. But then perhaps those doing bio- and physics don’t know that Adam Smith pointed out we’d do better getting the wine from Bourdeaux rather than growing the grapes in Scotland. Or even that David Ricardo launched an entire subset of economics with his observation that trade uses fewer resources than non-trade. I mean, it is possible that they’re just ignorant of the most basic points here, isn’t it?
They’ve also not grasped that good life and economic growth part at all. No one actually producing economic growth – defined, as always, as an increase in the value being produced – does so in order to produce economic growth. They do it in pursuit of their definition of the good life. Economic growth is simply the aggregate of all those people trying to make their own lives better, their pursuit of that good life. The inverse is also true. If we leave people alone to pursue their own versions of the good life then economic growth is what we get. Our bio-p types seem unaware of the laissez faire argument. That we all get richer faster if left alone to our own visions of life?
Now, if this was just a few blokes in the Far North muttering to themselves among the trees of future toilet roll this wouldn’t matter. But this is serious advice to the United Nations? It’s about to become art of how world governance works? Dear God Above, what have any of us one to deserve this?
Try this for example:
A key problem with carbon pricing has been that states, federations, or unions have not implemented it on a sufficiently high level, fearing industrial leakage to less environmentally-regulated countries. For this reason, many economists and politicians hope for global carbon pricing. But if we return to the four examples above, energy, transport, food, and housing, we can see that it would be highly unlikely that even global carbon pricing would guide economic activity in the right direction – at least with sufficient speed and breadth. As a policy tool, carbon pricing lacks the crucial element of coordinating a diverse set of economic actors toward a common goal. Individual actors would have an incentive to decrease carbon emissions, but they would still compete through their own business logics; there would be nothing to ensure that any one business logic would support the transition to sustainability on a systemic level.
Everyone on the planet economises on their carbon emissions because emissions are now more expensive. This does not work to coordinate everyones’ actions about carbon emissions? These people never have considered the role of the price system in coordinating human activities, have they? Not heard a single beanie about Hayek, the Pretence of Knowledge and all that?
