Those Darn Coercion Engineers

Halloween came and went this year without too much fuss. Normally it's a sort of national holiday around here (S.F.), but this year was pretty subdued. I still get a kick out of watching the Chinese kids in the neighborhood. The recent arrivals try to copy the old vets and when they get a handful of candy for their efforts... From the hour before sunset until an hour after, even Broadway gets turned over to the kids. The ladies from the strip joints set up on the sidewalk with a witches' hat and a big bag of candy and even a chair or two for Mom to rest a second.

The first three links are about science in its various forms. Number one is a humorous montage fron the NYT. Number two is the chemistry of coffee, something we all know about. Number three is about China's new supercomputer. I'm sure the powers that be will afix blame on the janitors' union or some such. On the other hand, we might be on better ground with less deal makers, lawyers, and media pundits,and a few more working engineers. I don't know how it is in your neighborhood, but here, the Bay Bridge still hasn't been fully repaired from the damage done in the '89 earthquake. We have plenty of studies, court cases, artistic visions, political action committees with their attendant back room deals, and of course the taxes to support each one, but the city always seems to be a few dollars short when it comes time to send a welder out to do some actual work. While politicians' refusal to break the flow of easy money in order to fix something may seem unrelated to China's computer, the systemic rewards for blowing smoke instead of accomplishing something aren't.

• Unpopular Science. Whether we like it or not, human life is subject to the universal laws of physics.
• What's inside a cup of coffee: ...3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid
  When scientists pretreat neurons with this acid in the lab, the cells are significantly (though not completely) protected from free-radical damage. Yup: Coffee is a good source of antioxidants.
• Supercomputer unveiled in China: The record-breaking performance was measured by the LINPACK benchmark, a system designed in the early 70s to test how fast a computer can solve a dense system of equations. And the score? 2.5 petaflops -- "flops", being a measure of floating point operations per second, and "peta" meaning a thousand trillion.

Next are some links to economic matters. Again we have references to the two tiered nature of the law. Bank error: sorry, here's the bill. Your error .. can you spell tuchis, cuz we own yours.

• Inertia You Can Believe In: The U.S. is facing another predictable financial crisis -- two actually, one having to do with a trillion dollars in underfunded public pension liabilities, and the other having to do with the current or looming insolvency of a large number of cities, counties and states -- with the same inaction as before.
• The Paperless Society: And now it turns out that banks' aggressive entry into the paperless world is merely just another example of their abandonment of due diligence generally. Sufficient capital? - bah, just some quaint concept from the 30's. Borrower's credit worthiness? - out-dated, narrow-minded notion from our racial dark-ages.
• Banks Put Economy Underwater: Banks are claiming that these are just accidents. But suppose that while absent-mindedly paying a bill, you wrote a check from a bank account that you had already closed. No one would have much sympathy with excuses that you were in a hurry and didn’t mean to do it, and it really was just a technicality.

Now we have a bit about why the current administration seems to be in for such a drubbing tomorrow. I realize it's not directly related, but in a way it is. If you ignore your base because you know better, if your policies benefit the very institutions you were elected to trim back, and if you have majorities in both houses and still can't do better than wimper, you're toast. This isn't to give any kudos to Bush, quite the opposite. We seem to have Bush redux on most of the matters that count, along with the same arrogance.

• And only where it's due: Further, it's the height of arrogance to suggest that parents are not positioned to question, let alone have a say in, how their schools are run. We're supposed to simultaneously praise parents for being concerned about their children, wanting better schools, involving themselves with their children's schools, etc., but they are to be dismissed as know-nothings the second they question the goals of the system's top bureaucrat?

After linking the above, I thought about the Tea Party. Are they really bottom-up orgs? Some of their members might think so, and more power to them. Are they just another instance of the coercion engineers selling a Trojan horse to the rubes? Stay tuned, we'll know soon enough. Since we're on the subject of coercion engineers, the last three links are on the media.

• The Internet Diet: The same anxieties that we have about the Internet, the ancient Greeks had about the new technology of writing. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates famously declare that poetry has no place in the perfect state. As Carr explains, this attack may seem a little out-of-nowhere unless you understand that poetry was Plato's stand-in for the oral tradition of Greek thought.
• A Little Horse Would be my Paradise: It is fitting that Bruno should encompass also the shifty question of what constitutes exploitation. A reality television celebrity chooses to be exploited, often to extremes; society hasn't yet an answer for these--people whose individual actions become our collective embarrassments.
• Politicians Are Fighting Mad, at the News Media From New York to Alaska, the 2010 campaign season has been rife with hostile and downright bizarre encounters between candidates and the news media.