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According to this article, party balloon suppliers are facing a shortage of the key input helium.

I have only an amateurish understanding of anything related to science, but I do remember learning that helium is the second most common element in the universe. So, if we’re really running out of it, and this shortage is not merely an artificial one, it seems to me that the remedy would involve travel to other parts of the universe–maybe just within the solar system, but it would still mean quite a bit of work. On the other hand, it might spur on the creation of an interstellar economy. That would be cool. Although I doubt party balloons will sufficiently justify the costs of it.

(Also, the word shortage is confusing because it has two meanings: the everyday usage of “not much of the stuff”, and the economist’s usage, which means a failure of supply and demand to equilibrate properly, usually due to some issue with the price mechanism. The point is, in the economic sense, you could have almost zero quantity of the good and high demand and still not have a shortage, if the market is operating efficiently.)

And once again, I remind you that my knowledge of science is purely from things I happen to read and things I vaguely recall from school. If anyone with actual knowledge in relevant fields reads this, feel free to comment.

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It appears that everything we know is wrong. The speed of light can be broken. The New York Times reports:

“According to scientists familiar with the paper, the neutrinos raced from a particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, where they were created, to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy, a distance of about 450 miles, about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam.”

Probably, it will turn out to be a mismeasurement. But it just might mean that the speed of light isn’t the ultimate limit scientists thought, which would have major implications for physics. Although, I guess it might also be the case that the hard-and-fast limit is just c + 60 ns, which wouldn’t buy us much.

But for now, allow me a few minutes of pretending that Star Wars-like light-speed space travel is possible.

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Yesterday, I read a bizarre article in the WSJ by Stephen Moore. He asked the question “why do Americans hate economics”, and answered it thus: “Because too often economic theories defy common sense.”

Now, this is certainly true. Some economic ideas are counterintuitive. But, Moore concludes that this is the fault of macroeconomists, specifically Keynesians, who are misleading people with their crazy, counterintuitive ideas. He then goes on to discuss various controversial economic phenomena such as “crowding out“, “Ricardian equivalence” and other ideas that most Keynesians have easy responses to.

Perhaps the most egregious line is the association of Henry Wallace’s 1930s-era agricultural price support program with mainstream Keynesianism. Really, though, the whole article is full of half-truths and insinuations.

But never mind the specifics just now; what I want to focus on is the fact that Moore appears to assume that things which are counterintuitive must therefore be untrue. Well, there are lots of confusing concepts in other sciences. For example, is light a particle or a wave? According to this logic, it’s neither. It’s a big glow-y thing, because that’s what common sense tells us.

It’s possible that a whole branch of economics is mistaken. There are many examples in history of a whole scientific field being deluded and unwilling to listen to the correct explanation. Ignaz Semmelweis was considered a kook by his medical colleagues because he thought doctors ought to wash their hands. It can happen. I’m just saying that the burden of proof rests with Moore’s side in this argument, and I don’t get his assumption that something that doesn’t make immediate sense to the layman is automatically wrong.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman, Noah Smith and David Glasner all have good responses to the Moore article. I like it when smarter people than me agree with me.

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It strikes me as ironic that at the end of a week in which David Brooks was denounced by Conservatives for a column he wrote, the Conservatives also have been unwittingly arguing for one of Brooks’ old ideas: “National Greatness Conservatism“. There’s quite a bit of chatter on Breitbart sites and the like about how the end of the space shuttle program is another symptom of Obama not believing in “American exceptionalism”. Even the guy filling in for Glenn Beck yesterday was talking about it.*

If you ask me, this is where the Nationalistic part of the Party really shows up. They don’t really hate government, they only want a government that aggrandizes American superiority. They will never want to cut Space spending, and they sure as hell will never cut the closely-related Military spending.

Personally, I think both are of tremendous importance, but the Space shuttle program needed to be ended. Human beings have a difficult time in space, and I personally believe that the near to mid-future of space exploration lies, as it should, with remotely controlled machines, like the Mars rovers etc.

*I’d like to provide you with a link to a transcript of this show or something, but I’m dashed if I can find it. It seems to be impossible to get at anything on the Glenn Beck site without taking a loyalty vow to the Esoteric Order of Glenn Beck.

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Airplanes can change the weather, according to a new study. It’s not a major effect, but it appears they can marginally increase local precipitation.

This is the sort of thing I find fascinating, for I cannot help thinking that people will gain greater understanding of the various ways we can manipulate the weather in the coming decades. I suspect that one of the ultimate effects of the climate change issue will be not having “no impact”, but rather people discovering new ways of changing the weather patterns. (I know weather and climate are different things, but they are nonetheless related.)

Of course, this might not always be a good thing; as people will probably think they know more than they do, and end up making costly mistakes. It reminds me of early efforts at economic manipulation, when policy makers were doing things to the economy that often had the opposite of the anticipated effect. Obviously, economies and weather patterns are both very complicated systems.

But then again, I may just be crazy. That’s a theory many of my friends propose when I mention this.

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It seems that using the internet makes our brains demand more rapid stimulation, according to a study. And, it goes on to explain, this has negative effects on some mental abilities.

I don’t know about the science of it, but i do some times feel that using the internet has a decidedly negative effect on my attention span. I sometimes wonder if using the internet ironically makes me less able to blog effectively. To come up with interesting things to write about, I read and multi-task quite a lot to find interesting topics, and I can’t help but feel it has something of a detrimental effect on my ability to actually think critically about the issue, which is the primary reason I blog.

The internet is invaluable for gathering information, of course, but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m equipped to handle it. (This Dilbert comic puts it rather well–in the first four panels, that is.)

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A private Danish rocket was launched yesterday, a move towards the goal of private spaceflight. You can read the details of it here. Generally, I’m all for this kind of thing, but one line in that article gave me pause:

“The goal of Copenhagen Suborbitals, which has been running full-steam since 2008, is to launch people into suborbital space — and to do it on the extreme cheap.”

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I see there’s a new study out saying that brain structure plays a role in determining if a person is a Liberal or a Conservative. It’s a scientific study, so that conclusion is, of course, heavily qualified. But it would explain why people so easily and for so long have fallen into these two-party systems.

I heard about this story not long after reading the article “I can’t believe my best friend is a Republican” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. She writes that her Republican friend:

“[H]as her beliefs challenged constantly. She is more well-read and educated in her politics than most of the liberals I know. Too many liberals I know are lazy, they have a belief system that consists of making fun of Glenn Beck [I’m guilty–Mysterious Man] and watching “The Daily Show.” Shouldn’t their beliefs be challenged, too?” [Emphasis mine]

Question: how could it happen that a person is “more educated in her politics” than other people are and yet the other people are still correct about politics and the “more educated” person wrong? Is this not what the author is implicitly saying, since she herself is a liberal, and therefore would believe liberalism superior to conservatism?

Maybe my liberal brain can’t handle it.