Surprise! IBEX Finds No Bow ‘Shock’ Outside our Solar System || Universe Today
For years, scientists have thought a bow “shock” formed ahead of our solar system’s heliosphere as it moved through interstellar space – similar to the sonic boom made by a jet breaking the sound barrier. But new data from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) shows that our system and its heliosphere move through space too slowly to form a bow shock, and therefore does not exist. Instead there is a more gentle ‘wave.’
“While bow shocks certainly exist ahead of many other stars, we’re finding that our Sun’s interaction doesn’t reach the critical threshold to form a shock,” said Dr. David McComas, principal investigator of the IBEX mission, “so a wave is a more accurate depiction of what’s happening ahead of our heliosphere — much like the wave made by the bow of a boat as it glides through the water.”
Indo-Pak Update: A Future of Nudges and Hopes || via Meadia
Few bilateral relationships matter more for the long-term stability of Asia than that between New Delhi and Islamabad. But few, too, are as seemingly intractable….
[A recent report by the International Crisis Group on Indo-Pakistani relations] provides some room for the one resource scarcer in the Indus Basin than water, optimism. The legacy media’s coverage of Indo-Pakistani relations usually takes place through the lens of Kashmir, militaries, and terrorism, but, the Crisis Group report emphasizes, there has actually been significant improvement in trade relations between the two countries. The ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government agreed to grant most favored nation (MFN) status to India in November 2011, to be implemented by the end of 2012, a decision that the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) also supported. This decision ‘is not merely an economic concession but also a significant political gesture. Departing from Pakistan’s traditional position, the current government no longer insists on linking normalization of relations with resolution of the Kashmir dispute. India no longer insists on making such normalization conditional on demonstrable Pakistani efforts to rein in India-oriented jihadi groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks and hence suspension of the composite dialogue.’
This matters. Decoupling trade from other contentious issues could have significant consequences. Pakistan’s current trade with India represents only one percent of its total balance, while Indian exports to Pakistan accounted for only 0.93 percent of its total exports. ‘India-Pakistan trade is a win-win situation’, says former Pakistan State Bank Governor Ishrat Hussain. Says a Pakistan economist, Asad Sayeed, ‘Economic growth can take place either through major structural transformation or through trade. Since Pakistan’s economic structure has remained the same for at least the last 40 years, the only way to ensure growth is regional trade and investment.’ Pakistan’s two largest industries, textiles and food processing, are sophisticated enough to compete well in Indian markets, while energy-hungry India would benefit from access to the world’s second-largest coal mines in the Thar Desert in Sindh Province.
Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch? || ribbonfarm
There is a fascinating set of ideas that has been swirling around in the global zeitgeist for the past decade, around the quote that will keep Donald Rumsfeld in the history books long after his political career is forgotten. I am referring, of course, to the famous unknown-unknowns quote from 2002. Here it is:
[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.
Rumsfeld put his finger on a major itch that set off widespread scratching. This scratching, which is about the collective human condition in the face of fundamental uncertainties, shows no sign of slowing down a decade later. But the conversation has taken an interesting turn that I want to call out….
Out of all this scratching, four broad narratives have emerged that can be arranged on a 2×2 with analytic/synthetic on one axis and optimistic/pessimistic on the other. Three are rehashes of older narratives. But the fourth — the Hydra narrative — is new. I have labeled it the Hydra narrative after Taleb’s metaphor in his explanation of anti-fragility: you cut one head off, two emerge in its place (his book on the subject is due out in October). The general idea behind the Hydra narrative in a broad sense (not just what Taleb has said/will say in October) is that hydras eat all unknown unknowns (not just Taleb’s famous black swans) for lunch. I have heard at least three different versions of this proposition in the last year. The narrative inspires social system designs that feed on uncertainty rather than being destroyed by it.
A Big Little Idea Called Legibility || ribbonfarm
James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. [He uses pictures to] graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”
…
Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).
Here is the recipe:
- Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
- Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
- Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
- Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
- Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
- Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
- Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at, as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted by a desire for legibility….
The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.
Why We’re Losing: How free market ideas suffer from being counterintuitive || Reason
People don’t understand the private sector. They don’t like it. Intuitively, it seems selfish. Most people are busy trying to run their own lives. They’re grateful to politicians who want to take charge. It seems intuitive to think that a smart group of planners concerned about the collective good can accomplish more than free people pursing their own interests individually in the private sector. But history is filled with examples of how the solutions politicians propose create new problems without solving the old. Urban renewal wiped out entire neighborhoods without improving cities, mortgage subsidies created a damaging financial bubble, the war on drugs created a prison-industrial complex while barely taking a dent out of drug abuse. The list goes on and on.
The few politicians who manage, often against overwhelming odds, to successfully expand the sphere of private action rarely get rewarded for their trouble. Margaret Thatcher saved Britain—and got thrown out. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) may get recalled for trying to cut the budget and push back against public sector unions. Hong Kong went from Third World to First World in just 50 years because it had economic freedom. But when I went to Hong Kong and interviewed people, they didn’t know why they were prosperous. They just talked about their problems and how government should solve them….
Liberty is counterintuitive. It takes hard work to overcome the brain’s attraction to simple-sounding solutions. It’s not easy to convince people that sometimes the best way for governments to address a problem is to do less, not more. It’s easier to admire the activist or politician who talks about helping the less fortunate than it is to cheer on a hustler who wants to get rich by selling you stuff. Those of us who see expanding the private sphere as the best way to help the most people have an uphill battle in making our case…. Most people see a world full of problems that can best be tackled via wisely applied laws. They assume it’s just the laziness, stupidity, or indifference of politicians that prevents the problems from being fixed. But government is force, and government is inefficient. The inefficient use of force creates more problems than it solves….
Economics is complicated. That’s one more reason to be grateful for the Constitution: With its relatively simple rules, it helps keep government within bounds. Some Tea Party activists understand that, and it’s one reason they call for a return to constitutional, limited government.
But getting the majority of America to sign on to these ideas might require an impending crisis. Looking around the world, the next flashpoint after Greece will probably come elsewhere on the periphery of Europe or in Japan. The populations of those countries are graying—young workers are shrinking relative to the retirees they’ll need to support—faster than America’s. Watching their problems, we will get an advance look at the financial poison we are foisting on America’s young people.
But I’m not sure voters will pay attention. If Americans didn’t learn the folly of central planning from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stagnation of socialist economies around the world, they may not learn about the danger of unsustainable budgets from the catastrophes in Greece, Spain, and Japan….
There is nothing that government can do that we cannot do better as free individuals—as groups of individuals, working together voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under threat of a fine. Without big government, our possibilities are limitless.
But it’s a hard sell. Things continue to get better in a free society, but nobody is out in front of the camera saying, “Yay for the marginal improvements that come with free markets!” It’s not as compelling or newsworthy as a report on someone who goes bankrupt because he got sick. If we are to foster prosperity, we must find better ways to promote the virtues of liberty.
America and the Value of 'Earned Success' || Arthur Brooks (Wall Street Journal)
In the end, I concluded, what set the United States apart from Spain was the difference between earned success and learned helplessness.
Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work. It allows you to measure your life’s “profit” however you want, be it in money, making beautiful music, or helping people learn English. Earned success is at the root of American exceptionalism.
The link between earned success and life satisfaction is well established by researchers. The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, for example, reveals that people who say they feel “very successful” or “completely successful” in their work lives are twice as likely to say they are very happy than people who feel “somewhat successful.” It doesn’t matter if they earn more or less income; the differences persist.
The opposite of earned success is “learned helplessness,” a term coined by Martin Seligman, the eminent psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to what happens if rewards and punishments are not tied to merit: People simply give up and stop trying to succeed.
During experiments, Mr. Seligman observed that when people realized they were powerless to influence their circumstances, they would become depressed and had difficulty performing even ordinary tasks. In an interview in the New York Times, Mr. Seligman said: “We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being. It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”
Learned helplessness was what my wife and I observed then, and still do today, in social-democratic Spain. The recession, rigid labor markets, and excessive welfare spending have pushed unemployment to 24.4%, with youth joblessness over 50%. Nearly half of adults under 35 live with their parents. Unable to earn their success, Spaniards fight to keep unearned government benefits.
Meanwhile, their collective happiness—already relatively low—has withered.
Socialism and Central Planning Still Can’t Defeat Human Nature || The Corner
As we watch Europe’s unfolding debt drama, it’s worth asking a question: If socialism and central planning can’t succeed in Europe, where can they succeed? After all, Europe possessed tremendous advantages when it launched its slow-running experiment in cradle-to-grave welfare statism and post-national political unity many decades ago: historically dynamic economies, educated citizens, relative religious unity (around a lack of belief), a commitment (born out of sorrow and blood) to peace, and military protection provided by the world’s great superpower. The result was something resembling a social-democracy Disneyland, a virtual theme park for believers in nationalized health care, progressive social views, soft power over hard power, and carefully managed democracy.
Yet human nature still prevails, doesn’t it? It turns out that the euro couldn’t turn Greeks and Italians into Germans, that cradle-to-grave welfare benefits have the same impact on the work ethic and productivity of millions of Europeans as they had on millions of Americans, and that “post-Christian Europe” was hardly a more-rational Europe.
We can’t just shake our heads at the Europeans, however, not when our current president looks across the Atlantic and sees not a cautionary tale but instead a model for our American future.
Two kinds of austerity || Washington Examiner
This approach to austerity, also known in the United States as the “balanced approach,” has unfortunately proven a recipe for disaster. In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found fiscal adjustments consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts generally failed to stabilize the debt and were also more likely to cause economic contractions. On the other hand, successful austerity packages resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found this form of austerity is more likely associated with economic expansion rather than with recession….
While the debate over austerity continues, the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that austerity can be successful, if it isn’t modeled after the “balanced approach.” It’s a lesson for the French and other European countries, as well as for American lawmakers who often seem tempted by the lure of closing budget gaps with higher taxes.
Chinese Physicists Smash Quantum Teleportation Record || Wired
A group of Chinese engineers have smashed the records for quantum teleportation, by creating a pair of entangled photons over a distance of almost 100 kilometers.
Quantum entanglement is the mysterious phenomenon where two particles become tightly intertwined and behave as one system — whether they are next to each other on a laboratory bench, or either sides of a galaxy.
The Common Hand || National Geographic
The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to write, dig, remove tumors, pull a rabbit out of a hat. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we concoct would come to nothing but a very long to-do list.
The reason we can use our hands for so many things is their extraordinary anatomy. Underneath the skin, hands are an exquisite integration of tissues. The thumb alone is controlled by nine separate muscles. Some are anchored to bones within the hand, while others snake their way to the arm. The wrist is a floating cluster of bones and ligaments threaded with blood vessels and nerves. The nerves send branches into each fingertip. The hand can generate fine forces or huge ones. A watchmaker can use his hands to set springs in place under a microscope. A pitcher can use the same anatomy to throw a ball at a hundred miles an hour….
Our hands began to evolve at least 380 million years ago from fins—not the flat, ridged fins of a goldfish but the muscular, stout fins of extinct relatives of today’s lungfish. Inside these lobe fins were a few chunky bones corresponding to the bones in our arms. Over time the descendants of these animals also evolved smaller bones that correspond to our wrists and fingers. The digits later emerged and became separate, allowing the animals to grip underwater vegetation as they clambered through it.
Early hands were more exotic than any hand today. Some species had seven fingers. Others had eight. But by the time vertebrates were walking around on dry land 340 million years ago, the hand had been scaled back to only five fingers. It has never recaptured the original exuberance of fingers—for reasons scientists don’t yet know.
Still, there is a great diversity of hands in living species, from dolphin flippers to eagle wings to the hanging hooks of sloths. By studying these living hands, scientists are beginning to understand the molecular changes that led to such dramatic variations—and to understand that despite the outward differences, all hands start out in much the same way.
The Power of “Once upon a Time”: A Story to Tame The Wild Things || Scientific American
“Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But you are ready all the same to take on all of these unknowns, the uncertainties, the ambiguities. You are ready to succumb to the world of the story.
The formulation is as near to universal as they come…. Distance makes possible what immediacy cannot accomplish. And distance is one of the hallmarks, the defining characteristics, of the fairytale—the tale that might be true but, safely, is not.
As for vagueness: that which scares us in real life—the lack of definitions, rules, clearly defined borders and boundaries—is not only unscary but entirely welcomed in the fairytale. The children’s story frees us up to generalize: this could be anyone (even me), and it could be anywhere (even here). But it does so from a safe place. It’s not actually me or here, and so, I can let everything play out as it may and see what happens. I am safely removed, and my mind can operate in peace. I can try out scenarios I otherwise wouldn’t. I can meet and understand people I never would in my everyday life. I can indulge in abstraction and play, engage my curiosity and foster my creativity, and remain the whole time protected by that vague veneer of once. (And not only can I do it, but I am healthier if I do it than not. Literal-mindedness is a hallmark of many a neurodegenerative disease and cognitive disability. Conversely, adults who are taught to imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations—and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity than their non-generalizing counterparts.) The safety valve of fantasy can be switched on and off at will.
Physicists Succeed in Making ‘Impossible’ Gamma-Ray Lens || Wired
Lenses are a part of everyday life—they help us focus words on a page, the light from stars, and the tiniest details of microorganisms. But making a lens for highly energetic light known as gamma rays had been thought impossible. Now, physicists have created such a lens, and they believe it will open up a new field of gamma-ray optics for medical imaging, detecting illicit nuclear material, and getting rid of nuclear waste….
The bending in his group’s experiment isn’t much—about a millionth of a degree, which corresponds to a refractive index of about 1.000000001. However, it could be boosted using lenses made of materials with larger nuclei such as gold, which should contain more virtual electron-positron pairs. With some refinement, gamma-ray lenses could be made to focus beams of a specific energy.
Such focused beams could detect radioactive bomb-making material, or radioactive tracers used in medical imaging. That’s because the beams would only scatter off certain radioisotopes, and stream past others unimpeded. The beams could even make new isotopes altogether, by “evaporating” off protons or neutrons from existing samples. That process could turn harmful nuclear waste into a harmless, nonradioactive byproduct.
Nigeria Burns || Via Meadia
In recent days, gunmen and suicide bombers associated with Boko Haram bombed the offices of several prominent Nigerian newspapers; killed fifteen worshippers at a church in just the latest of many attacks on Christian civilians; bombed the convoy of a prominent policeman (who survived, unlike eleven not-so-lucky guards and bystanders); launched an assault on a police station, were repulsed, only to attack another police station down the road, where they freed a number of prisoners and killed two guards. Gunmen in military uniforms kidnapped and executed five people in eastern Nigeria late last week….
The line between criminal gangs and Islamist militants has blurred in Nigeria. Unemployment is high, especially among young people. Boko Haram is no centrally organized group. Some of its members are part of an anti-West, fundamentalist Islamist insurgency. Others are thugs. Most are northerners, disillusioned by what they consider to be the unfair power southern tribes and leaders hold in the central government. They attack symbols of what they see as oppression: police stations and officers, newspaper offices, politicians. But lawlessness in Nigeria is not all attributable to Boko Haram: There are conflicts over land and resources between communities that do not get along, often divided along religious as well as ethnic and linguistic lines in the middle of Nigeria, where the Muslim north meets the Christian south. Nigeria’s social fabric is stretched very, very thin.
Al-Qaeda bombmaker represents CIA’s worst fears || Washington Post
Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who hails from a middle-class Saudi family, is the top bombmaker for al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch. Only 30 years old, he represents the CIA’s worst fears: a highly skilled terrorist determined to attack the United States.
American officials believe Asiri’s latest bomb was designed to be smuggled onto a U.S.-bound aircraft last month. The nonmetallic device had an advanced detonator and was superior to anything created by terrorists so far….
With the death of Osama bin Laden, Asiri is a key reason that U.S. officials consider Yemen’s al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, to be one of the most significant threats to the American homeland.
“He is highly determined and fully committed to attack America,” said Mustafa Alani, director of security and defense studies at the Gulf Research Center in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. “For al-Qaeda, an attack inside the U.S. is worth 11 attacks outside. It has become their obsession.”
Over the past year, AQAP has taken advantage of Yemen’s political turmoil and seized large swaths of territory in the south. Yemen’s government and the Obama administration have responded with aerial assaults and drone strikes, targeting Asiri and other top operatives of AQAP.
Real Fake Missiles? || Arms Control Wonk
There is a huge discussion about what sort of technological path these ICBMs might represent, if any. Allow me to articulate just one view, which I suspect is the view of at least some people in the intelligence community. North Korea imported Scud missiles from Egypt, then proceeded to build an entire missile program on this technology. North Korean enlarged the Scud into the Nodong, stuck a Scud on top of a Nodong (Taepodong 1) and then clustered some Nodong engines with another Nodong on top (Taepodong 2.)
Now, North Korea has imported the R-27 (SS-N-6) — a better baseline technology that uses more energetic propellants: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).
North Korea has apparently reconfigured the Taepodong 2, sticking an SS-N-6 on top of a cluster of Nodong engines, topped by a smaller SS-N-6-derived third stage (vernier engines only, it seems). North Korea also enlarged the SS-N-6 much as it enlarged the Scud, creating the Musudan IRBM. North Korea may try to replicate the approach it took to Scuds, just with a better technology. So, North Korea may try to either cluster SS-N-6 engines or stack SS-N-6-derived stages on top of one another. One of the big debates we are having now is about what North Korea might be able to squeeze into the 2 m first stage of the new ICBM.
