fraserphysics

It's a good article about an important subject. Also thanks for the link around the paywall (We dropped the W. Post when Bezos brought in that Brit to run it).

My theory is that the chicken tax makes big pickups etc. the most profitable thing US car companies can make. So they focus on that and relegate everything else to the margins. I suspect that worldwide there will be many more electric sedans than pickups and that, as the article suggests, the US auto industry will end up like the UK auto industry.

I don't know how societies set "primary goals". After spending 15 years in a tenure track -- tenured position, I thought setting goals well was important.

I take pleasure in how mathematics and science help me understand the universe better than I understood it before I studied the fields. I believe that my understanding has helped me contribute to society.

Yes! US agriculture (Mostly a red state industry) needs potash. Google AI says that most potash comes from (in order) Canada ("is the primary global exporter and supplies nearly 80% of U.S. imports"), Russia, Belarus, China, and "smaller volumes are supplied by countries [...]".

If I were king of Canada, I would restrict supplies of such materials needed by red states.

I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)

That seems like a good idea to me. No matter what the owner says, I would want to know about the incident if I were providing liability insurance on the vehicle.

Sort of related. Across the street from my cousin's house in Portland, OR, a car ran over the curb and into landscape features that knocked off the car's bumper and license plate. The perpetrator then backed up and drove away. My cousin's doorbell camera caught it all. Police are not interested, saying no one can prove who was driving. Who needs a license plate reader when you can get a license plate?

The second law of thermodynamics implies that one must spend energy as work to move thermal energy up a temperature difference. So the net effect of an air conditioner is to increase the total amount of thermal energy.

For a long time I've been reading that the closure of Hormuz is going to constrain consumption soon. I understand the economic theory that reducing supply of an inelastic commodity greatly increases the price. The article says that inventories have insulated us from high prices so far. I am surprised by how large and effective those inventories have been. And I am surprised that futures prices are not higher. Can anyone here suggest explanations?

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.

When I worked at Los Alamos, the head of counterintelligence was a former CIA ops guy. He seemed warm and intelligent; just an all around good guy. In presentations, he explained that his job at the CIA was to exploit that appearance to ruin people's lives. He said his approach was to gain the trust of a mark, and then provide him with what ever was required to get him to betray things he loved. The presentations were effective, enlightening and spooky.

So, I agree: All spies are bastards.

This article was in Springer's The Mathematical Intelligencer in 1980. The next article in that volume was "Strange Attractors" by David Ruelle. When I read Ruelle's article in the early 1980s, I noticed Knuth's article. By the time I got to writing my third paper on strange attractors in 1988, I was using TeX.

Helium will leak out of some structures that hold methane. Shale will trap methane and let helium escape. Layers of salt trap both. Thus horizontal drilling and fracking to recover oil and methane from shale produces very little helium.

Tracy Kidder's father and grandfather (Henry M. and Henry M. Jr.) were partners in the law firm that's now Seward and Kissel. My great grandfather was a partner in the firm when he died in 1935. I've heard that everyone liked and admired my great grandfather. The Kidders took care of his descendants for the next say 65 years. In 1977 when I got a Bachelors degree in Physics, HMK Jr. wrote a will for me. We met at the Seward and Kissel office to get it signed and notarized, and HMK Jr. took me to lunch at a fancy club downtown. After some martinis, he told me that there'd been two generations of losers in my family, and that everyone thought with my degree in Physics, I could pick up the mantle.

Then he said that he wished his son, Tracy, had an interest in real science like me. When I asked what Tracy was doing, Henry described a silly project of hanging out with computer engineers.

I enjoyed "The Soul of a New Machine" when it came out. I always hoped that I could meet Tracy someday. I guess not. He did great work, I hope his father learned to be proud.

Thank you for articulately describing an ugly part of the world of science that I've seen over the last 40 years. I appreciate your "There but for the grace of God" thought. If I were a bigger star, I can only hope that I would have behaved better than some of those big stars.