Barton Gellman's Time piece on right-wing militias is chocked full of great reporting. One item of reportage really jumps out: the Holocaust Museum shooter, James von Brunn, had plans to target presidential adviser David Axelrod.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting - Barton Gellman - Right-wing politics - Holocaust Museum - James von Brunn
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Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, IAC CEO Barry Diller took the stage for a fireside chat with our own Michael Arrington. They covered a lot of topics, but the first thing Diller keyed in on was the most important: net neutrality.
“All of you have to get out there and start arguing for this strongly,” Diller emphatically said. He clearly feels very strongly about this topic. “It is the lives of you all and the people coming after you — we have to protect that,” he continued.
He noted that some Republicans are in opposition to the idea of net neutrality on the grounds that they don’t want government rules on anything. “It’s absurd,” Diller said. “We have to unleash the FCC,” he continued noting that they were bogged down with typical bureaucracy.
Diller said that the FCC has to help get broadband Internet much more developed in this country. He noted that the U.S. is 16th in the world with regard to broadband. “It’s shameful,” he said noting that we’re the leaders in technological innovation.
He then talked a bit about search neutrality. “I want search to remain as neutral as possible,” he said. He said he was worried that Google is starting to get more vertically integrated. He admitted that he had a vested interest in search neutrality as he owns a lot of content — and also Ask.com. Though, the latter, he isn’t exactly bullish about.
Ian Condry introduces five graduates of the Comparative Media Studies Program—Aswin Punathambekar, Xiaochang Li, Jing Wang, Orit Kuritsky, Ana Domb —in this final panel, who share their views and experiences about the international/global dimension of the program. ‘Comparative’ can be interpreted across time—media through history, media in times of transition or across media—across platforms, across kinds of technological connectivity. Condry asserts that storytelling and other kinds of social practices are no longer constrained “within a ‘silo’ of media,” but continue to move across media forms. Reinforcing the notion that the world has gotten closer through communication technology, a common theme throughout the discussion is the view that “the local is the new global.” Concerns that globalization would be akin to the “Americanization” or “Westernization” of the creative output have been replaced by a new understanding that media is something everyone participates in, even as it moves around the world undergoing changes along the way. National boundaries no longer exclusively define location, but allow participants to see and change the output with a new objectivity and perspective. “Living within and through difference,” as Punathambekar describes it. The fascination lies in watching as local media become global media then become local media again. Kuritsky provides an example of mainstream English-language lifestyle programs becoming the common language in cable channels throughout the world; Domb uses tecno brega, music from northern Brazil, to show how local musicians create “centers out of the peripheries,” inserting themselves into the mainstream music scene; Punathambekar describes how the local Indian movie scene in Bombay became the global phenomenon known as “Bollywood;” Wang uses her civic media project, NGO 2.0, to show how grass-roots organizations can gain mainstream media attention. Underlying the local-global dialogue is the importance of how the Comparative Media Studies program can continue to incorporate these changes into the program, to encourage the collective and collaborative nature of the global-international dialogue.While the primary purpose of last week’s post on the laws of physics underlying everyday life was to convey information like a good blog post should, there was another agenda as well: to test the waters. This is an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, but I wanted to get a better idea for how it’s perceived in the outside world. I honestly wasn’t sure whether there would be more of “you arrogant physicist, we don’t have any idea what the laws are” or “you moron, why are you wasting our time with this self-evident crap?”
So much for that ambiguity. Responses, for example at Fark and Reddit but even here in our very own comment section, displayed a greater than average internetitude, defined as a tendency to not read the article, set up straw men, and miss the point. But at least the direction of disagreement was fairly uniform. The issue under discussion is important, so it’s worth taking the time to counter the three most common arguments, from completely silly to almost-sensible.
1. Are you serious? There’s so much we don’t understand: turbulence, consciousness, the gravitational N-body problem, photosynthesis…
To which my years of academic training have prepared me to reply: duh. To conclude from my post that I was convinced we had a full understanding of any of those things represents, at a minimum, a rather uncharitable reading, given that no one in their right mind things we have such an understanding. Nevertheless, I knew people would raise this point as if it were an objection, which is why I was extra careful to say “We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness, or a cure for cancer, or predicting the weather, or how best to regulate our financial system.” And then, at a risk of being repetitive and boring, I added “Again, not the detailed way in which everything plays out, but the underlying principles.” And for emphasis there was something about “the much more jagged and unpredictable frontier of how the basic laws play out in complicated ways.” Nevertheless.
The distinction I’m drawing is between the laws underlying various phenomena, and how the phenomena actually behave, especially on macroscopic scales. Newtonian gravity provides an excellent example of the difference: we certainly know the laws underlying the behavior of gravitating particles in the Newtonian regime, but that obviously does not mean we have a complete solution to the N-body problem, or even a qualitative understanding of how large collections of particles behave. It’s the difference between knowing the rules by which chess is played, and being a grandmaster. Those are not the same thing. In particular, taunting “you’re no grandmaster!” is not actually a refutation of the claim that I know the rules of chess. My claim was that we know the basic equations governing the behavior of matter and energy in the everyday regime — not that we have a complete understanding of every observable phenomenon.
It is of course completely legitimate not to care that we know the basic underlying laws. You may not think that’s interesting, or very important. That’s fine, I certainly wasn’t making any claims at all about priority or importance or interestingness. But it should still be possible to understand the claim I was making, and judge it on its own merits, such as they are.
Let me just emphasize how non-trivial the claim is. First, that there is such a thing as an “underlying” set of laws. That is, that we can think of everyday objects as being composed of individual pieces, such that those pieces obey laws that are the same independently of the larger context. (Electrons obey the same equations of motion whether they are in a rock or in a human heart.) That’s the reductionist step. Again, for people who enjoy taking offense: this is not to say that the reductionist description is the only interesting one, or to imply that the right way to attack macroscopic problems is to reduce them to microscopic ones; only that the microscopic laws exist, and work, and are complete within their realms of validity. And second, that we know what those laws are. There’s nothing in the everyday world that is inconsistent with Standard Model particles obeying the rules of quantum field theory, plus general relativity to describe gravity. Amazing.
2. We don’t even understand gravity! And the Second Law of Thermodynamics! And quantum mechanics! (Magnets! How do they work???)
Unlike the previous objection, this one is not correct-but-misplaced, it’s just wrong. But it’s wrong in an interesting way. We actually do understand gravity: it is described by Einstein’s general relativity. Not deep down at the quantum level, of course, but that’s very far from the world of the “everyday.” You might try to make some profound epistemological claim that we don’t really understand gravity, we just have a set of rules that it unambiguously obeys. Fine; I would argue that this isn’t an especially helpful distinction in this case, but in any event it’s beside the point. What I meant was that we have a clear set of rules that are unambiguously obeyed. That’s also true for the Second Law — it was explained by Boltzmann. Sure, we have to invoke a low-entropy boundary condition at the Big Bang, but guess what? The Big Bang is not within the realm of our everyday experience. Even the collapse of the wave function, which comes closest to a true mystery, doesn’t qualify. For one thing, wave function collapse isn’t something you see happening in your kitchen on an everyday basis. But more importantly, we do have a theory that describes what happens, handed down to us by Bohr and Heisenberg. You might think that this theory is unsatisfying and incomplete, and I would be extremely sympathetic. But it fits all the data we have. I’m not trying to make a deep philosophical point about the meaning of “understanding”; just noting that things obey laws, and in the everyday regime we know what those laws are.
3. You’re too presumptuous. New physics might be required to understand consciousness, or wave function collapse, or…
This comes closest to an actual argument, and I wish that the entire conversation could have focused on relatively sensible points of this form. But ultimately, I don’t buy it, not even close. Take consciousness as an example. Obviously there are a lot of things about the workings of the human mind that we don’t understand. So how can we be so sure that new physics isn’t involved?
Of course we can’t be sure, but that’s not the point. We can’t be sure that the motion of the planets isn’t governed by hard-working angels keeping them on their orbits, in the metaphysical-certitude sense of being “sure.” That’s not a criterion that is useful in science. Rather, in the face of admittedly incomplete understanding, we evaluate the relative merits of competing hypotheses. In this case, one hypothesis says that the operation of the brain is affected in a rather ill-defined way by influences that are not described by the known laws of physics, and that these effects will ultimately help us make sense of human consciousness; the other says that brains are complicated, so it’s no surprise that we don’t understand everything, but that an ultimate explanation will fit comfortably within the framework of known fundamental physics. This is not really a close call; by conventional scientific measures, the idea that known physics will be able to account for the brain is enormously far in the lead. To persuade anyone otherwise, you would have to point to something the brain does that is in apparent conflict with the Standard Model or general relativity. (Bending spoons across large distances would qualify.) Until then, the fact that something is complicated isn’t evidence that the particular collection of atoms we call the brain obeys different rules than other collections of atoms.
What would be a refutation of my claim that we understand the laws underlying everyday phenomena? Easy: point to just one example of an everyday phenomenon that provides evidence of “new physics” beyond the laws we know. Something directly visible that requires a violation of general relativity or the Standard Model. That’s all it would take, but there aren’t any such phenomena.
A century ago, that would have been incredibly easy to do; the world of Newtonian mechanics plus Maxwell’s equations wasn’t able to account for why the Sun shines, or why tables are solid. Now we do understand how to account for those things in terms of known laws of physics. I am not, as a hopelessly optimistic scientist from the year 1900 might have been tempted to do, predicting that soon we will understand everything. That’s an invitation to ridicule. Indeed, we know lots of cases where the known laws of physics are manifestly insufficient: dark matter, dark energy, electroweak symmetry breaking, the Big Bang, quantum gravity, the matter/antimatter asymmetry, and so on. We might answer all these questions soon, or it might take a really long time. But these are all rather dramatically outside our everyday experience. When it comes to everyday phenomena that are incompletely understood, from consciousness to photosynthesis, there is every reason to believe that an ultimate explanation will be obtained within the framework of the underlying laws we know, not from stepping outside that framework. An impressive accomplishment.
Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. Because they scan all tweets being sent out for all kinds of semantic data, you no longer have to explicitly tag things with hashtag, is their stance. For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway.
TweetBeat scans over 90 million tweets a day to find the most interesting topics, but only shows you the best tweets about those topics. They do this by identifying the influencers for any given topic. And again, they scan the tweets themselves for semantic data. They also look at signals such as how often a tweet was retweeted or replied to.
With TweetBeat you can ”follow live in real time the most interesting things are saying about any realtime event,” the company says. But you can also pause things and replay tweets from a specific moment in time. There’s a nice slider tool to track when a topic was heating up. And if you connect your Twitter account (which you don’t have to), you can easily retweet or reply to anything you see on the service.
Here’s the TweetBeat page for TechCrunch Disrupt. And check out the leaderboard.
Timothy Noah, writing on wealth inequalities on Slate, lays out some astonishing facts about just how much of America’s wealth is owned by the mega-rich:
I noted that in 1915, when the richest 1 percent accounted for about 18 percent of the nation’s income, the prospect of class warfare was imminent. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation’s income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington’s mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren’t the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?
One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know we’re living in a time of growing income inequality, [Paul] Krugman told me, but “the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is.” The ignorance hypothesis gets a strong assist from a new paper for the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science: “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time.” The authors are Michael I. Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist (and blogger) at Duke. Norton and Ariely focus on the distribution of wealth, which is even more top-heavy than the distribution of income. The richest 1 percent account for 35 percent of the nation’s net worth; subtract housing, and their share rises to 43 percent. The richest 20 percent (or “top quintile”) account for 85 percent; subtract housing and their share rises to 93 percent. But when Norton and Ariely surveyed a group whose incomes, voting patterns, and geographic distribution approximated that of the U.S. population, the respondents guessed that the top quintile accounted for only 59 percent of the nation’s wealth.[Emphasis added]
Sickening, huh? If you threw up a little in your mouth as you read that, I think you’re in good company. SOCIALISM NOW!
Read more of Theoretical Egalitarians: Why income distribution can’t be crowd-sourced (Slate)
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What is true, and this is part of what can frustrate folks, is that over the past 20 months, we made a series of decisions that were focused on governance, and sometimes there was a conflict between governance and politics. So there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done.
I could have had a knock-down, drag-out fight on the public option that might have energized you and The Huffington Post, and we would not have health care legislation now. I could have taken certain positions on aspects of the financial regulatory bill, where we got 90 percent of what we set out to get, and I could have held out for that last 10 percent, and we wouldn’t have a bill. You’ve got to make a set of decisions in terms of “What are we trying to do here? Are we trying to just keep everybody ginned up for the next election, or at some point do you try to win elections because you’re actually trying to govern?” I made a decision early on in my presidency that if I had an opportunity to do things that would make a difference for years to come, I’m going to go ahead and take it.
Next, Obama tackled finreg:
I just made the announcement about Elizabeth Warren setting up our Consumer Finance Protection Bureau out in the Rose Garden, right before you came in. Here’s an agency that has the potential to save consumers billions of dollars over the next 20 to 30 years — simple stuff like making sure that folks don’t jack up your credit cards without you knowing about it, making sure that mortgage companies don’t steer you to higher-rate mortgages because they’re getting a kickback, making sure that payday loans aren’t preying on poor people in ways that these folks don’t understand. And you know what? That’s what we say we stand for as progressives. If we can’t take pleasure and satisfaction in concretely helping middle-class families and working-class families save money, get a college education, get health care — if that’s not what we’re about, then we shouldn’t be in the business of politics. Then we’re no better than the other side, because all we’re thinking about is whether or not we’re in power.
Read the whole thing here. It’s long, but worth it.
