Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Donald Trump and the crisis of elite impunity

  The Russia scandal is about more than collusion. It's also about the corruption of America's elites.

  But I think I know why Trump thought it was okay to do what he did - why he could get away with it. The reason is a culture of elite impunity, where business and political leaders face absolutely no accountability for misdeeds. And it's a culture that Brennan and many political elites like him have fostered, and from which they have personally benefited.

  It's much bigger than collusion. It encompasses many decades during which political officials have evaded accountability for broken laws and illicit foreign contacts, and business and corporate elites have skirted punishment for outright fraud. It's a problem that, ironically, Trump hammered home in the campaign: that there's a different set of rules for elites than for normal people. It just happens that Trump knows that because he, for decades now, has been taking advantage of elite impunity.

  And unless critics are willing to target the problem of impunity, a problem in which some of them may be implicated, stuff like the Russia scandal will just keep happening, again and again.

• Why rural Americans why are so pissed off

  Hint: it's not about the economy

  Wuthnow's work resulted in a new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America. He argues that rural Americans are less concerned about economic issues and more concerned about Washington threatening the social fabric of small towns and causing a "moral decline" in the country as a whole. The problem, though, is that it's never quite clear what that means or how Washington is responsible for it.

  . . . I'm not sure that Washington is doing anything to harm these communities. To be honest, a lot of it is just scapegoating. And that's why you see more xenophobia and racism in these communities. There's a sense that things are going badly, and the impulse is to blame "others."

• Baumberg's The Secret Life of Science

  Exposing the pressures faced by modern researchers, a nanoscientist calls for change .

  Science may be growing fast, but it is not growing evenly, with growth rates in countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Korea hovering at around 10% per year, whereas those in North America, the European Union, and Japan are increasing at less than 2%.
  ...
  The ideas that Baumberg hopes to provoke with his book aren't scientific ones but new ways of thinking about how to fund and incentivize scientific research so as to produce the most benefits for the most people. What he sees as the inefficiency of the current system clearly irks him, and yet, he also recognizes that simple metrics and top-down managerialism can have pernicious effects.

  And from the publisher:

  The Secret Life of Science is a dispatch from the front lines of modern science. It paints a startling picture of a complex scientific ecosystem that has become the most competitive free-market environment on the planet. It reveals how big this ecosystem really is, what motivates its participants, and who reaps the rewards. Are there too few scientists in the world or too many? Are some fields expanding at the expense of others? What science is shared or published, and who determines what the public gets to hear about? What is the future of science? Answering these and other questions, this controversial book explains why globalization is not necessarily good for science, nor is the continued growth in the number of scientists. It portrays a scientific community engaged in a race for limited resources that determines whether careers are lost or won, whose research visions become the mainstream, and whose vested interests end up in control.

• Mirror Neurons and the Pitfalls of Brain Research

  He describes a number of anomalies that are inconsistent with mirror neuron theory. You'll have to read the book for the details, but I'll just mention one of his points that made me laugh. When a man sees someone kicking another man in the balls, it doesn't prompt him to mirror the kicking behavior; it prompts him to display a very different behavior, to cringe and protect his own groin. Hickok acknowledges that anomalies don't necessarily prove a theory wrong, but in this case the sheer number of anomalies is cause for concern and should lead us to explore alternative explanations.

• Why trying to be too efficient will make us less efficient in the long run

  Edward Tenner explains the efficiency paradox

  Platform efficiency is wonderful, and I'm not at all condemning it, but one of the unfortunate consequences is that it has tended to attract investment capital away from much harder things. It's much easier to make a small fortune with a platform-based startup than it is, for example, to develop a more efficient battery. I came to believe that because these physical and chemical enterprises take so much longer, are so much more expensive, are so much messier, and so they're less attractive to investors. That's one negative side of platform efficiency.

• The cashless society is a con - and big finance is behind it

  Banks are closing ATMs and branches in an attempt to 'nudge' users towards digital services - and it's all for their own benefit

• Python has brought computer programming to a vast new audience

  The language's popularity has grown not merely among professional developers - nearly 40% of whom use it, with a further 25% wishing to do so, according to Stack Overflow, a programming forum - but also with ordinary folk. Codecademy, a website that has taught 45m novices how to use various languages, says that by far the biggest increase in demand is from those wishing to learn Python. It is thus bringing coding to the fingertips of those once baffled by the subject. Pythonistas, as aficionados are known, have helped by adding more than 145,000 packages to the Cheese Shop, covering everything from astronomy to game development.

• Google company history

  "Google Was Not a Normal Place": Brin, Page, and Mayer on the Accidental Birth of the Company that Changed Everything

  A behind-the-scenes account of the most important company on the Internet, from grad-school all-nighters, space tethers, and Burning Man to the "eigenvector of a matrix," humongous wealth, and extraordinary power.

• The mathematical art of juggling: using mathematics to predict, describe and create

  Mathematics has the power to describe, predict and create patterns, a power that is very well demonstrated in the pattern- rich world of juggling. In this paper we examine a simple method of describing juggling patterns using mathematical notation, and then use this notation to predict new juggling patterns. We conclude with a demonstration of how mathematics has been used to create beautiful patterns that did not exist before these mathematical methods had been used, and how mathematical names are now used by jugglers worldwide - a powerful demonstration of mathematics advising the arts.

• The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama

  WEST BANK: What a One State Reality Looks Like

  As of December 2015, there are 6,335 million Jews in the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and 6,561 millions non-Jews.
  In the combined areas of Israel, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, Jews no long represent the majority.
  

• Who Really Stands to Win from Universal Basic Income?

  It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that's the giveaway.

  The realization that a universal basic income is useful but insufficient for the country's long-term socioeconomic health - that you can't just wind up a machine and let it run - may cause attrition among some supporters who admire the model precisely because it seems to mean that no one will have to deal with stuff like this again. It may also dampen the scheme's sunny political prospects, since a healthy U.B.I. would have to be seated among other reforms, the sum of which would not be cost- or interest-neutral. This doesn't mean that it's not a practical idea. It means only that it's not a magic spell.