Ethel the Blog
Observations (and occasional brash opining) on science, computers, books, music and other shiny things that catch my mind's eye. There's a home page with ostensibly more permanent stuff. This is intended to be more functional than decorative. I neither intend nor want to surf on the bleeding edge, keep it real, redefine journalism or attract nyphomaniacal groupies (well, maybe a wee bit of the latter). The occasional cheap laugh, raised eyebrow or provocation of interest are all I'll plead guilty to in the matter of intent. Bene qui latuit bene vixit.

The usual copyright stuff applies, but I probably won't get enraged until I find a clone site with absolutely no attribution (which, by the way, has happened twice with some of my other stuff). Finally, if anyone's offended by anything on this site then please do notify me immediately. I like to keep track of those times when I get something right.

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"When they say, 'Gee it's an information explosion!', no, it's not an explosion, it's a disgorgement of the bowels is what it is. Every idiotic thing that anybody could possibly write or say or think can get into the body politic now, where before things would have to have some merit to go through the publishing routine, now, ANYTHING." - Harlan Ellison JOLLY OLD PALS Other stuff of mild interest to some: unusual literature scientific software blog physical oceanography glossary computer-related tutorials and texts Wednesday, September 27, 2000 COCKBURN ON MR. GRAVITAS Alexander Cockburn - author of a recent book entitled Al Gore: A User's Manual - does Dick Cheney in a Counterpunch piece (via drat fink). As for the gravitas and deep thinker mythos: "Cheney's often mistaken for a deep-thinker," says a longtime Republican staffer on the Hill. "He's not. He's just a plodding thinker. His long pauses and deliberate mannerisms disquise the paucity of his political philosophy. It wasn't that Cheney concocted reasons to vote against the ERA or the South African sanctions. He actually bought into the pr. He truly believed that the ERA was going to force women into combat and men's bathrooms. He really believed that Nelson Mandela was a programmed tool of the Kremlin who would turn Johannesburg into a black Havana, after purging the country of all whites, if he ever got out. We called him Cheney the Credulous. But always behind his back. He had an explosive temper." One can only feel sorry for campaign staffers when Shrub and Dick simultaneously lose their tempers at strategy meetings. On Dick's ten-cent tours of the war room in the Pentagon: Cheney presided over an open-door policy at the Pentagon--for defense contractors and big contributors. "Clinton rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to Hollywood starlets," quipped one House staffer. "But Cheney let Lockheed execs play around in the war room." But in Cheney's defense (so to speak), it's much more likely than not that the Lockheed execs were former DOD employees enjoying the warm glow of nostalgia that comes from returning home. On Cheney decisively handling the real opposition during the Gulf War: Cheney's most decisive action in the Gulf War had little to do with mustering support and everything to do with covering up the fact that Iraq's army of conscripts posed little threat to US forces. The cat was let out of the bag by Gen. Tk Dugan, chief of the Air Force, who, on the eve of the war, told a Pentagon reporter that the Iraqis posed little threat and that US was basically doing the bidding of the Israelis. Cheney fired Dugan immediately. On yet another reason Cheney was such a brilliant choice, as well as why the phrase "big endians and little endians" is remarkably appropriate: Cheney's nomination effectively mooted any RNC plans to attack Gore on playing footsie with the Chinese. In 1993, Halliburton secured a multibillion dollar joint services contract with the Chinese National Petroleum Company to develop and operation oil and gas fields and pipelines in the PRC. The deal was greased by the late Ron Brown and former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. I'd be remiss not to put in another plug for Cockburn and St. Clair's refreshingly eclectic Top 100 Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century list. posted by Steven Baum 9/27/2000 02:06:00 PM | link MUSIC NOTES Amazon's jazz section is most interesting today. The features include: a special Bill Frisell page features 41 minutes worth of live performances in RealAudio format (recorded in June at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle) the just-released 2 CD Sun Ra set The Great Lost Sun Ra Albums: Cymbals & Crystal Spears containing a couple of albums intended for but apparently never released on Impulse records in the early 70s an audiophile (XRCD) format version of the Bill Evans Trio's classic Sunday at the Village Vanguard posted by Steven Baum 9/27/2000 01:35:38 PM | link CONCORD COALITION ON THE SURPLUS All the way back in February the Concord Coalition published a piece entitled The Truth about Entitlements and the Budget that warned people about acting like children around a Christmas tree over the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) project of a budget surplus of $4.2 trillion for 2001-2010. To begin with $2.3 trillion of this is accounted for by the Social Security trust fund surplus, leaving $1.9 trillion. That's still a pretty big number, but there are further problems: To begin with, there is the assumption that legislated caps on future discretionary spending will be carried out to the letter. CBO is obliged to make this assumption because the baseline must reflect current law, and the caps are law. Carrying them out, however, would require huge programmatic cuts that few leaders in either party seriously propose and that almost no budget watcher believes will happen. CBO of course realizes this, and so has begun publishing an alternative baseline in which discretionary spending grows with inflation after 2000. This one change shrinks the projected cumulative on-budget surplus from $1.9 trillion to $838 billion. Then we need to factor in the fact that this number assumes that the budget will spend no less on discretionary spending in real dollars in ten years than it does now. This would leave discretionary spending reduced from a 6.3% share of the economy today to 5.3% in 2010. Discretionary spending can be split into two parts: defense spending, which both candidates are proposing to increase (one much more than the other); and non-defense spending, which is at its lowest level as a share of the GDP since 1965 and which most budget wonks agree will eventually grow again as fast as the population and the real economy. Then we get to the baseline assumptions for economic growth. The projections are based on an assumed 2.3% rate of productivity over the next decade. To put this in perspective, productivity has grown at an annual rate of 2.6% since 1996 and at a rate of 1.6% over the last quarter century. While it's easy for those heavily involved in and punch drunk with the "new economy" (that's supposedly qualitatively different than anything in previous history) to think that the current baseline's going to last forever, the economists came up with the phrase "business cycle" (about which an interesting discussion can be found in the Anarchist FAQ) quite a long time ago to describe a very real phenomenon. (The "new economy" schtick isn't terribly new, either, as even a cursory reading of economic history will demonstrate.) With this sort of thing in mind, the CBO also came up with a "pessimistic" scenario in which productivity grows at its historical average rate and also in which health benefit spending will increase 1% faster than in the baseline scenario (the latter of which is much more realistic given the continual increases in health spending over recent decades). This scenario changes the $838 billion surplus into a deficit of $2.9 trillion. Even if we phony it up with the Social Security surplus we still get a deficit of $1.1 trillion. It should also be noted at this point that none of these projections assume either tax cuts or new spending programs. It should also be stressed (in the words of the CC report) that: ... this is not a worst-case scenario. As CBO explains, its pessimistic scenario merely assumes that "the economy reverts in many respects to its situation before 1996." In other words, it wouldn't take an event like a major war to return the budget to deficit-financing and trust-fund squandering. It wouldn't even take a major recession or market crash. All that's required is for the future to be average. They go on to say that someone should run a projection based on less than average economic conditions like, for instance, the stagflation of the 1970s, which was mostly caused by the combination of a large increase in the price of oil and the large debt accrued waging the Vietnam conflict. Well, we're already getting the oil price increase, and we're getting a bit too close (at least for my comfort) to attempting to turn Columbia into another Vietnam, largely because we'll never spend that much money or effort trying to cut off the demand side of the equation for obvious political reasons. Well, there is that other ("L"-word) solution to that particular problem that's unfortunately spelled P-O-L-I-T-I-C-A-L S-U-I-C-I-D-E. But what can you expect when even most self-proclaimed liberterians waffle on legalization or even decriminalization? At least George Soros is on the job. posted by Steven Baum 9/27/2000 09:55:57 AM | link Tuesday, September 26, 2000 GEOCACHING Geocaching (via Slashdat) is a worldwide treasure hunt thing where people use GPS to hide and find things. Upon finding the site, the first thing that came to mind was a series of back-page magazine ads from the 70s whose schtick was some liquor company burying a case of their finest in various remote places scattered about the planet. They gave vague clues about where each case could be found in the ads. Unfortunately for me, I found alcohol at right around that time and have no other memories (of that ad campaign, everything else is more or less still there). Well, I was going to offer a vintage bottle of 1998 Anchor Christmas to anyone offering any more information on the matter, but entering the string "hide whiskey advertisement" at Google obtained a summation of the matter via none other than Cecil over at the Straight Dope. The project was started by the folks behind Canadian Club. When the project was first launched in 1967, the cases were planted in exotic locales like Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Angel Falls in Venezuela. In the beginning Hiram Walker did not seriously expect anyone to actually go and look for the stuff. The Mt. Kilimanjaro case, in fact, was not discovered until the mid-70s, when a Danish journalist stumbled over it while on an expedition searching for lost children or some such thing. And it was actually a couple of promotions: The original promotion concluded in 1971, but was resurrected in 1975, or thereabouts. In the second version it was intended that most of the cases would be found eventually, so they were generally hidden somewhat closer to hand, e.g., near the reputed site of the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona, in Death Valley, and so forth. The depositing of the case was coupled with heavy regional advertising to stir up the interest of the locals. Consequently most of the cases didn't stay hidden very long. The box in Arizona was found in about a week; a case hidden atop a skyscraper in New York, a much less hospitable locale, eluded searchers for 13 weeks. The punch line? The Hiram Walker people finally tired of the "Hide-A-Case" campaign, and retired it in 1981. In all, 22 cases were hidden during the period 1967-1981; 16 were found in fairly short order and a few others may have drifted in since. Sure, it was all a silly gimmick, but Canadian Club advertising to my mind has never been as memorable since. Bring back the hidden cases. The Straight Dope was a classic when I started reading it on dead trees over 15 years ago and remains so. Cecil's one of my all-time favorite wiseasses and his motto reflects that: "Fighting ignorance since 1973. (It's taking longer than we thought.)" posted by Steven Baum 9/26/2000 02:33:11 PM | link EDUCATION RECESSION? The Myth of the Texas Miracle in Education by Walt Haney begs to disagree with the daily press releases about someone having supposedly worked miracles in Texas with his bare hands and gumption. It's quite long and detailed, so you might want to skip right to the Summary and Lessons section and refer back to the other sections to fill in the gory details. Another interesting document that details attempts at education reform over the last couple of decades and puts them into the context of political and pragmatic realities is Richard Elmore's The Politics of Education Reform. Probably the most important thing to keep in mind vis a vis Texas is that the reform of the horrific Texas education system had its substantive start the mid-1980s with the publication of the Perot Commission Report. A lengthy and substantive summary of the political machinations and actual accomplishments over the next decade is available in The Emerging Model of Public School Governance and Legal Reform: Beyond Redistribution and Privatization by James Liebman and Charles Sabel. To get to the details about Texas search for "perot" and start with that paragraph. posted by Steven Baum 9/26/2000 01:44:32 PM | link FISCAL REALITIES Perspectives on the Budget Surplus by Alan J. Auerbach and William G. Gale is required reading for those believing anything either party has to say about the budget surplus over the next decade. The abstract: This paper provides alternative measures of federal budget surpluses over 10-year and long-term horizons. Official baseline budget forecasts are based on a series of statutory requirements that may be at variance with reasonable expectation. More plausible notions of current policy toward discretionary spending, taxes and retirement trust funds imply that surpluses over the next 10 years will be substantially smaller than the baseline forecasts indicate. Properly accounting for long-term imbalances in social security and the rest of the budget implies that, under plausible definitions of current policy, the federal government faces a long-term shortfall. The document is available in PDF format. posted by Steven Baum 9/26/2000 01:22:20 PM | link Monday, September 25, 2000 ONE-LINER OF THE DAY In a Boston Globe column about Ted Kennedy and Robert Bennett locking horns over an increase in the minimum wage (guess who's saying what?), David Nyhan also includes the reponses of Kennedy's GOP and Libertarian opponents in this year's election on the matter. He then ends the column with a line about how they're going to do against reformed alcoholic and now deformed foodaholic Ted: The only foe who can bring King Ted to the ground this year is Old King Cholesterol. As to the minimum wage debate, the following graph provides a picture worth quite a few words as well as a link to an article detailing the lack of the devastation predicted to follow the last increase: posted by Steven Baum 9/25/2000 02:31:20 PM | link BLOODY GITS So I get bored last night and make the mistake of watching NBC's Olympics coverage. Not only do I get the predictable load of "dreamy dream-dream" and "someone they knew died in the last century" bullshit, but crass jingoism and barely-concealed racism joined in on the festivities. During the women's 10 meter diving finals, we're treated to the announcers telling us how the American won despite the Chinese divers marching up the ladder and performing dive after dive like machines - a real triumph of gumption, fast food and the freedom to choose any of 3,000 brands of deodorant over mindless automatons. That's right, the American woman came straight to the diving venue out of an arcade, wearing her baseball cap backwards, baked an apple pie, and scurried on up that ladder to perform the best series of dives of the night after undergoing absolutely none of the endless hours of practice drudgery those barely human yellow automatons were forced to go through. NBC probably got a corporate stiffy when the winner turned on the tear fountain during the post-victory interview even before the dumbass interviewer recited a list of her dead ancestors, ailing living relatives, and personal injuries over the last couple of decades. The winner did take a bit of the shine off the "rugged American individualist vs. automaton" theme when she immediately launched into the religious litany template chanted by an increasing number of athletes during their post-competition interviews. One of the many things I really admire about Lance Armstrong is that he avoids that sort of thing in both interviews and his book. A clue as to why might be found in the fact that the father that left when he was young was a religious fundamentalist. I'm quite pleased to hear that NBC's ratings are down (to the point where the sponsors have demanded and received an extra minute's worth of ad time every half hour), and pity anyone who wastes any more time than I have viewing their travesty of a mockery of a sham of a presentation. posted by Steven Baum 9/25/2000 10:31:07 AM | link REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS The journal Reports on Progress in Physics provides thorough reviews of currently active research topics in physics. The reviews are generally written such that the archetypal "educated layman" can extract useful information even while ignoring the equations. I've selected several from recent years that can help you get beyond recent headlines if you so desire. "Detection of gravitational waves," L. Ju, D. G. Blair and C. Zhao, Vol. 63, 2000, pp. 1317-1427. This review begins by introducing the concept of gravitational waves, and discusses their significance. Section 2 discusses sources of gravitational waves, giving estimates of signal characteristics and signal strengths. Section 3 presents an overview of gravitational wave detection and the critical issues of data processing. In the fourth section the physics of resonant-mass gravitational wave detectors is discussed in some detail, covering all areas from antenna materials to transducers and the quantum limits to measurement. This section reviews the major operating antennas in the existing worldwide array but also discusses the prospects for achieving substantial increases in sensitivity in the future. The fifth section presents the concepts and designs for laser interferometer gravitational wave detectors. Large-scale devices will be in operation in the first decade of the twenty-first century and should eventually be certain of detecting a known class of gravitational wave source. At their predicted sensitivity, space interferometers will be able to detect numerous known galactic sources of gravitational waves and also will be able to detect black hole mergers that are thought to have occurred as primordial galaxies merged and grew in the early universe. "Extra-solar planets", M. A. C. Perryman, Vol. 63, 1999, pp. 1209-1272. Other techniques being used to search for planetary signatures include accurate measurement of positional (astrometric) displacements, gravitational microlensing and pulsar timing, the latter resulting in the detection of the first planetary mass bodies beyond our solar system in 1992. The transit of a planet across the face of the host star provides significant physical diagnostics, and the first such detection was announced in 1999. Protoplanetary disks, which represent an important evolutionary stage for understanding planet formation, are being imaged from space. In contrast, direct imaging of extra-solar planets represents an enormous challenge. Long-term efforts are directed towards infrared space interferometry, the detection of Earth-mass planets, and measurement of their spectral characteristics. "Non-baryonic dark matter: observational evidence and detection methods", Lars Bergstrom, Vol. 63, 1999, pp. 793-841. The evidence for the existence of dark matter in the universe is reviewed. A general picture emerges, where both baryonic and non-baryonic dark matter is needed to explain current observations. In particular, a wealth of observational information points to the existence of a non-baryonic component, contributing between around 20 and 40% of the critical mass density needed to make the universe geometrically flat on large scales. In addition, an even larger contribution from vacuum energy (or cosmological constant) is indicated by recent observations. To the theoretically favoured particle candidates for non-baryonic dark matter belong axions, supersymmetric particles, and of less importance, massive neutrinos. The theoretical foundation and experimental situation for each of these is reviewed. Direct and indirect methods for detection of supersymmetric dark matter are described in some detail. Present experiments are just reaching the required sensitivity to discover or rule out some of these candidates, and major improvements are planned over the coming years. "Archaeological dating using physical phenomena", M. J. Aitken, Vol. 62, 1999, pp. 1333-1376. A review is given of the science-based techniques that have been used to establish archaeological chronologies from the million-year range down to the historical period. In addition to the discussion of nuclear, atomic and chemical methods indication is given of the way in which the Earth's magnetic field and perturbations of the Earth's orbital motions are useful in this. "Accelerator mass spectrometry and its applications", L. K. Fifield, Vol. 62, 1999, pp. 1223-1274. The state of the art in accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is reviewed. The review is divided in two parts. The first covers the general methodology, followed by its specific elaborations for the commonly measured long-lived isotopes such as Be10, C14, Al26, Cl36 and I129, as well as other isotopes with emerging applications. The second part considers the very wide spectrum of applications that now employ AMS, and groups these according to research area rather than isotope. The period up until late 1998 is covered, with an emphasis on post-1990 developments and literature. "The nonlinear physics of musical instruments", N. H. Fletcher, Vol. 62, 1999, pp. 723-764. Musical instruments are often thought of as linear harmonic systems, and a first-order description of their operation can indeed be given on this basis, once we recognise a few inharmonic exceptions such as drums and bells. A closer examination, however, shows that the reality is very different from this. Sustained-tone instruments, such as violins, flutes and trumpets, have resonators that are only approximately harmonic, and their operation and harmonic sound spectrum both rely upon the extreme nonlinearity of their driving mechanisms. Such instruments might be described as `essentially nonlinear'. In impulsively excited instruments, such as pianos, guitars, gongs and cymbals, however, the nonlinearity is `incidental', although it may produce striking aural results, including transitions to chaotic behaviour. This paper reviews the basic physics of a wide variety of musical instruments and investigates the role of nonlinearity in their operation. "The new astrometry", J. Kovalesky, Vol. 61, 1998, pp. 77-115. First, the main objectives of astrometry are presented and the most important features or phenomena that intervene in the measurement of positions of celestial objects are shortly described. Then, the two classical astrometric techniques that are still very much used, especially since the invention of CCDs, transit instrument and astrophotography, are described. The third section is devoted to the application of interferometric techniques to astrometry, in optical and in radio wavelengths. In the fourth section, it is shown how much precise time measurements are important in modern astrometry, in particular for ranging to the Moon or planets, and in studying pulsars. Then, astrometry from satellites is presented describing the Hipparcos satellite and its results, and the applications of the Hubble Space Telescope. Finally, after presenting the new needs of astrophysics for more accurate astrometry, a description of two major projects, GAIA and SIM, and of a few other smaller satellites that may be launched during the next decade is given. "Quantum computing," Andrew Steane, Vol. 61, 1998, pp. 117-173. The subject of quantum computing brings together ideas from classical information theory, computer science, and quantum physics. This review aims to summarize not just quantum computing, but the whole subject of quantum information theory. Information can be identified as the most general thing which must propagate from a cause to an effect. It therefore has a fundamentally important role in the science of physics. However, the mathematical treatment of information, especially information processing, is quite recent, dating from the mid-20th century. This has meant that the full significance of information as a basic concept in physics is only now being discovered. This is especially true in quantum mechanics. The theory of quantum information and computing puts this significance on a firm footing, and has led to some profound and exciting new insights into the natural world. Among these are the use of quantum states to permit the secure transmission of classical information (quantum cryptography), the use of quantum entanglement to permit reliable transmission of quantum states (teleportation), the possibility of preserving quantum coherence in the presence of irreversible noise processes (quantum error correction), and the use of controlled quantum evolution for efficient computation (quantum computation). The common theme of all these insights is the use of quantum entanglement as a computational resource. posted by Steven Baum 9/25/2000 10:17:03 AM | link Sunday, September 24, 2000 REALITY INVERSION OF THE DAY Paul Krugman's Wag the dog editorial in today's (9/24/00) NYTimes offers an interesting contrast between the hysterical accusations of the Shrub camp and their toadies and the real world. The Shrubsters latest desperation ploy to prove that Al Gore is a modern-day pinocchio involves his comment that an expensive human drug costs only a third as much if prescribed by a vet for a dog. It turns out that while this is true for wholesale prices, the real number is somewhere between a third and a half for retail prices. GASP! IS NOTHING SACRED! IT STARTS WITH LIES, BUT IT DOESN"T END UNTIL WE'RE OVERWHELMED BY THOUSANDS OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY RINGS!!! Meanwhile, the Shrub continues to pull out four one-dollar bills at campaign stops and say that he plans to use only one of those bills for tax cuts. The real number - according to the Shrub campaign's own numbers - is more like a third or, in real numbers, about $450 billion. As Krugman puts it: Just to revisit the arithmetic one more time: Let one dollar bill represent $100 billion of projected surplus. If we put Social Security and Medicare in "lock boxes," the remaining surplus amounts to $18 - of which $16 will be used up by Mr. Bush's tax cut. And Mr. Bush has promised new spending that is more than twice, though less than three times - hey, I don't want to be inaccurate! - as much as the money he actually has left. Gore has thus far promised only $400 billion in tax cuts as opposed to Shrub's $1.6 trillion, although both are basing such things on overly optimistic budget surplus projections. So who's the evil nanny boo-boo liar? Says Krugman: So Mr. Gore got the details wrong but represented the basic situation correctly; Mr. Bush also got the details wrong but fundamentally misrepresented the situation. And that's not the only difference. Mr. Gore told his story once, and didn't repeat it after the details were questioned. Mr. Bush continues to tell his story even though it is demonstrably inconsistent with the numbers his own campaign has put out. posted by Steven Baum 9/24/2000 10:54:38 PM | link

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