Chinese New Year
HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111one

Life is interesting to say the least. Sunday morning I attempted to apply for unemployment insurance (UI) and was prompted to enter my last day at the office which is coming up this Friday. Sadly the Department of Labor's website won't let me enter a date in the future much to my chagrin and that means this Friday I'll have to submit my claim upon arriving at home.

Saturday night I received an irresistable offer. Let's just say that if things actually become worse and I'm unable to keep my head above water then there are going to be changes in my life so I can keep on living. Hate to phrase it like that but some people, i.e. my little sister (a Schrödinger's gentle reader since i don't know if she does or does not read heptapod.org), think I'm still suicidal. Still I want to ensure that I have my act together rather than be a burden. Just want to say that even if I am able to land on my feet and hit the ground running there's still a very strong chance that I'd just do it anyway.

At the moment I feel like a stick-in-the-mud. Despite the fact I'm optimistic there's a certain kind of lingering inertia that cautions me against procrastination. I've got shit that I want to do and I want it done soon because I want my life.

Procrastination's flabby hands have a firm grip upon me. Still I'm able to go online and browse stuff. Sunday morning I was reading about the 2009 economic forecast and. quantum mechanics. For your edification and to pad out this edition of heptapod.org I will be providing links in addition to brief, selected quotes to intrigue you towards edification, gentle reader.

• The economists estimate that the economy - staggering under the credit crunch and one of the worst housing busts this nation has ever seen - will continue to shrink by 0.1% in the first quarter. It will then start growing again, but sluggishly. GDP growth is forecast to hit about 2.5% by the end of 2009, below the U.S. economy's long-term annual growth rate of about 3%.
• The only effective remedy is politically impossible, because not one person in a hundred has any clue about the economic realities. The remedy is to tap the land rent of the country for public revenue. That would halt the speculative escalation of land prices. It would finance the baby boomer demographic transition. It would eliminate the federal budget deficit. It would prevent interest rates from rising too high, and reduce the demand for excessive monetary expansion.
  • This was written back in 2004! Fred Foldvary and The Progress Report.
• Jagow: And one of the predictions that surprised me a bit was what you said about China, that its growth will go to zero percent? It's, what, 8 percent, 10 percent now?
  Karsbol: Yeah. I don't think the Chinese authorities will, at any point will come out and say GDP growth was zero percent. They will make up figures, there's no doubt about that. But at least we will probably see indicators telling us that growth was, is back to zero percent. The whole miracle of the Chinese economy was really based on the U.S. consumers going into debt buying cheap stuff from China. And they don't have any Plan B.
  • An interesting, if short, article.
• Here is just a sample of how scary the situation looked in the United States in November 2008: Total employment was down 2.4 million jobs from a year ago and there were 788,000 more in the workforce. November's job losses were the worst since 1974. Steel capacity utilization was down to 50% from 85% the previous year. Auto sales were off by 206,000 cars and down 36%, including imports. U.S. automaker sales were off 44% from a year earlier. A normally bad year for that industry is down 10%.
• When the crowd of 1,600 people at the annual Executives Club Economic Forecast Luncheon were asked whether they believed this recession would be over by the end of the year, barely a hand was raised. And when the timing was stretched to the end of 2010, only about 20 percent of the audience thought the economy would be back on track by then.
  • ohshi-
• The bottom line to all this is that economic freedom leads to the most prosperity. Don't restrict labor and capital other than to prevent coercive harm to others. Don't tax labor or enterprise. Get public revenues from rent and pollution fees. Let the market handle the money and banking. True free trade and enterprise are good; decentralized and market-based governance works best. As Henry George said, economics and ethics are one. The environment and the economy are one. Good governance and economics are one. Share rent, charge for damage, don't steal wages.
  • Fred Foldvary and The Progress Report.
• Home values never went up, only the prices. By lowering the interest rate like they did is basically like printing money and giving it to everyone. Throughout our history this has been done and always has the same results. The ability for you to buy a higher loan increased, not the value of the property. No one's income went up, in fact many are going down. 2001 prices here we come.

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been at least thirty years since my last confession. On Sunday I was reading Wikipedia as if it was a legitimate reference. If it helps reduce the number of Novinas I will be tasked with, I did vandalize some pages.

• You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.
• Kashlinsky and his team claim that their observation represents the first clues to what lies beyond the cosmic horizon. Finding out could tell us how the universe looked immediately after the big bang or if our universe is one of many. Others aren't so sure. One rival interpretation is that it is nothing to do with alien universes but the result of a flaw in one of the cornerstones of cosmology, the idea that the universe should look the same in all directions. That is, if the observations withstand close scrutiny.
• It's a video about quantum entanglement. 1m9s. Delicious pseudoscience.
• The really big idea in Quantum Mechanics is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which states that the more carefully you measure one variable the more uncertain you will be about its corresponding partner variable. Imagine you were to use very precise lasers to measure the position of an atom, well the more precisely you know the position, the less knowledge you will have of its momentum. This is exactly analogous to ordinary waves. If you create a standing wave on a rope for example, you know exactly its frequency and wavelength, but it doesn’t make sense to even ask where the wave is because it is everywhere. Now imagine sending a single wave pulse along a taut rope, in this case you will have a fairly good idea of its position, but measuring its frequency is now problematic. Waves inherently predict the uncertainty principle.
• Ψ stands for the wave function
• There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.
• If the market can go up because of two exclusive events, and you want to know the total probability that the market will go up, you add the probability for the two events. For example, if on the condition that interest rates are lowered by 2 points or by 3 points the market will go up, the probability that the market will go up is the sum of the probability of the interest rate being lowered by 2 points or by 3 points.
• Quantum mechanics is necessary for the description of nature on the atomic scale, but Newton's laws do fine for baseballs. Somewhere along the continuum from quantum to classical, the two descriptions must merge. Starting from the quantum end and noting that energies depend upon some quantum number, one would anticipate that for high enough quantum numbers, the quantum treatment should merge with the classical. This idea of the merging of the quantum and classical is called the "correspondence principle"

Okay, I'm burned out and want to finish what I'm reading before I pursue the rest of my day.

One tough thing is keeping the pace of being optimistic despite everything that seems to be pointing towards complete global collapse. More positively I'm arguing that's simply being overdramatic without being grounded in reality, black swans aside.

Still a thought occured to me on Sunday. Just a personal fear that things might end up being like Miracle Mile. Hardly the specter of nuclear war under whose sensational shadow I have lived for most of my life only experiencing a brief respite between 1988 and 2001. I don't want to end up like Harry and finally realizing happiness at the last minute.