Political Commentary

More On Delaware Indoctrination

From John Leo:

“Hundreds of pages, without exception, are about how to indoctrinate students,” school of education professor Jan Blits told the campus student paper, the Review. “What’s surprising is how open they are about it.” Blits acquired the papers from the residence life program by simply asking for them. Kathleen Kerr, the director of residential life for the university “was so proud of the program she just handed them over,” he said. Blits, head of the university’s chapter of the National Association of Scholars, and another professor at the school of education, Linda Gottfredson, have been cooperating with FIRE to get the story out. Gottfredson said: “Residential Life has the whole person and they try to change beliefs – the heart and soul of a person – which is exactly what totalitarian institutions do. This is a national issue and FIRE is not finished.”

Yes, of course they’re proud of the program. They’re just upset that anyone else sees anything wrong with it. After all, why should they have any shame in teaching students “correct” thoughts? Isn’t that their job as educators?

Such self righteousness is how totalitarians get to be totalitarians.

Economics

Bad Economic News

…for those looking for bad economic news. Productivity is surging:

The Labor Department reported that productivity — the amount of output per hour of work — jumped at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the July-September quarter. That was double the 2.2 percent rise in the second quarter and represented the fastest surge in worker efficiency since 2003.

At the same time, wage pressures eased with unit labor costs dropping at an annual rate of 0.2 percent, the best showing in more than a year.

I blame George Bush.

General Science

Lumpy Planet

Everyone (well, OK, not everyone, but most people interested in this kind of stuff) is familiar with “mascons” (mass concentrations) on the moon, that cause perturbations and instability in the orbits of objects around it. Interestingly, though, the earth’s gravitational field isn’t all that symmetric, either, based on results from the GRACE satellites. I think that it’s kind of amazing how sensitive these detectors are:

The concept is simple. The two satellites, each about three metres long, follow each other in identical orbits roughly 400 kilometres above the Earth and 210 kilometres apart. Microwave instruments measure the distance between them, precisely enough to detect variations smaller than one percent of the width of a human hair.

“[It’s as though] you have two automobile-sized things, one in Los Angeles and one in San Diego, and you’re measuring the distance between them to the size of a red blood cell,” says Watkins.

As one satellite and then the other passes through wrinkles in the Earth’s gravity field, they speed up or slow down slightly, shifting the distance between them. By measuring these tiny yo-yos, scientists can calculate the gravity field that produced them, mapping the entire Earth about once a month.

But the dispersions are much smaller, relative to the size of the body, so it doesn’t create the same levels of perturbations that can result in instability. Pretty cool graphic.

Political Commentary

A Question For Kevin Drum

…whom I’ve met and, despite our many political differences, usually seems a sensible individual.

What is a “wingnut”? Everyone at his site seems to toss the term around as though it’s obvious that some is and some ain’t, and who they are (sort of like “neocon”).

And what criteria were used to relegate the blogger nominees in this post to that category? For instance, how does Glenn Reynolds make the cut?

Am I one? If so, why?

Economics

More on Specialization

Rand observed that “one of [his] biggest mistakes in life was not recognizing early that the most effective way to achieve my goals would have been to get wealthy first, then to apply that wealth toward them”. The basic economics point is that if you earn as much money as possible by specializing in what the economy will pay you the most for, you can often hire a specialist to do far more good with the money you made than you could have doing the good personally.

Another way to state this is doing nice things is fun; nice is an economic good. So if you want a pleasant job, other people who like pleasant jobs will compete and drive the price down until the low pay makes it unpleasant enough to clear the market.

This makes Bill Gates’s career change to spend his fortune a global tragedy worse than the monetary damage of Hurricane Katrina. He is likely to be much closer to average in his ability to make the world better by giving, compared to making the world better by making better software and operating systems.

The salary offered to you for different occupations summarizes what the economy values most from you. Accountants and lawyers may seem less useful than teachers and engineers, but that is a fallacy of confusing the average value of a teacher–which may be very high–to the market price of a teacher which will be much lower if there are lots of people who want to be teachers.

Technology and Society

Ultra Capacitors

This technology seems to be moving along pretty well, and it’s one of the revolutions that will constitute a major solution to our energy problems.

This approach allowed the engineers at Standard Oil to build a multifarad device. At the time, even large capacitors had nowhere near a farad of capacitance. Today, ultracapacitors can store 5 percent as much energy as a modern lithium-ion battery. Ultracapacitors with a capacitance of up to 5000 farads measure about 5 centimeters by 5 cm by 15 cm, which is an amazingly high capacitance relative to its volume. The D-cell battery is also significantly heavier than the equivalently sized capacitor, which weighs about 60 grams.

I’ve probably told this story before about innumeracy, even of physics students, and the inability of some to think through a problem. When I was teaching an E&M lab in college, we were doing experiments with capacitors, and someone came up and said, “The lab instructions say to use a microfarad capacitor, but this one says MFARAD instead of (greek letter mu–the symbol for micro)FARAD. I assume it means megafarad. Don’t we have smaller ones?

I explained to him that the largest capacitor I’d ever seen (this was in the late seventies) was a quarter farad, and it took a truck to deliver it. Did he really think that he was holding something in his hand with four million times that capacity?

The article is also a good tutorial on capacitors in general, for those unfamiliar with how they work. The way that I like to think about this is that the positive charge accumulates on one plate, and the negative on the opposite one. They are held in place by their mutual attraction (being opposite charges), but cannot combine because of the insulation gap represented by the dielectric. The more accumulated charge, the higher the attraction (and field force) and accompanying voltage and potential energy. When the plates are allowed to connect to each other through an external circuit, the charges flow toward each other and create current (and power). The breakdown voltage is the voltage at which the gap can no longer restrain the attraction between the two groups of charge, and they jump across it to meet their destiny. This is to be avoided.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, link was slightly mangled (though usable) before. Fixed now.

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