Category Archives: Blog

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Another speculative bubble

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We may be in a bubble:

Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter.

Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe’s expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.

…

“If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn’t be accelerating,” said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. “It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.”

One reason why this theory still isn’t widely accepted:

One problem with the void idea, though, is that it negates a principle that has reined in astronomy for more than 450 years: namely, that our place in the universe isn’t special.

When Nicholas Copernicus argued that it made much more sense for the Earth to be revolving around the sun than vice versa, it revolutionized science.

Since then, most theories have to pass the Copernican test. If they require our planet to be unique, or our position to be exalted, the ideas often seem unlikely.

This is obliquely tied to the problem of the apparent un-arbitraryness of our universe: a key scientific and philosophical problem for the 21st Century – why is it that the universe seems to be conveniently set up for life.

[via Slashdot][image from Jeff Kubina on flickr]

Blog

The future of banking

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As the current financial crisis unfolds, I’ve been wondering how it will affect me as an individual in the future. Hamish McRae reckons it’ll be like it was in the sixties (but not in a good way 🙁 ):

It is easier in a way to see the situation in a year or two’s time than it is to call the detail of the next few weeks. What we can see is a world where it will be much more difficult to borrow money.

For those who can remember, it will be more like the 1950s and 1960s. Then, if you wanted a mortgage, you had to have built up a deposit in the building society or bank that might lend you the money.

People would open an account with two or three societies and stick as much money as they could in each so that if one would not give them the loan they could try another.

Other interesting speculations on the future of banking can be found in Casino Capitalism, on the BBC’s iPlayer service, available until the 5th of October. One conclusion from that programme is that banks will become more like utility companies, and the idea that banks can be innovative businesses in their own right is wrong – banks should provide basic financial services based on sound risk management (see below).

It’s worth listening to. Also if you haven’t read Charles Stross’ thoughts on the banking crisis, go do so:

…banking is the art and science of risk management. (You have a pot of money. You want to use it to get more money.

Do you lend it to person A, who you figure has a 25% chance of defaulting on the loan but is willing to pay you 1% per month in interest, or person B, who has a 1% chance of defaulting but can only pay you 0.5% per month?

If you picked person B, congratulations: you’re a good banker. If you picked A, you’d better hope there’s a government hand-out in your future.)

[image from Odalaigh on flickr]

Blog

Sarah Palin’s accent

Look, her accent doesn’t bother me.  (It’s the last thing about her that bothers me.) My family includes Minnesotans, so I kind of like her accent. But I’m not the only person who’s been wondering where it comes from. Slate.com called upon a regional-speech specialist, an Alaskan-native scholar, and Frances McDormand’s dialect coach to venture some guesses. Sounds like Minnesota after all:

[Some] have wondered whether her accent hails from Idaho, where her parents are from. But dialect features tend to come from one’s peers, not one’s parents, and Palin spent her childhood in Alaska’s Mat-Su Valley, which is where she got her distinctive manner of speaking. The next town over from Wasilla, Palmer, has a large settlement of Minnesotans—who were moved there by a government relief program in the 1930s—and features of the Minnesotan dialect are thus prominent in the Mat-Su Valley area. Hence the Fargo-like elements in Palin’s speech, in particular the sound of her “O” vowel. (Despite its name, Fargo took place mostly in Brainerd, Minn.) However, even in the area, many people speak a more general Alaskan English, the sort one would find in nearby Anchorage. Palin’s frequent dropping of the final G in -ing words and her pronunciation of terrorist with two syllables instead of three are characteristic of general Alaskan English (and Western English) rather than the specific Mat-Su Valley speech.

As with Donald Rumsfeld, some of Palin’s statements can be rendered as poetry.

[Panel: Diesel Sweeties]

Blog

Dictionary to slaughter cool archaic words

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TimesOnline (UK) is trying to save them:

It may appear agrestic to ask, but The Times is calling on its readers to come to the rescue of words that risk fading into caliginosity.

Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.

[Story tip and panel: Dinosaur Comics]

Blog

Are antisocial kids just cortisol deficient?

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Research at Cambridge University has found a link between delinquent behaviour in children and reduced levels of the so-called stress hormone, cortisol, which “enhances memory formation and is thought to make people behave more cautiously and to help them regulate their emotions, particularly their temper and violent impulses.”

First of all, I find this a little worrying, as it seems to be part of a trend to reduce all psychiatric problems (especially in kids) to phenomena that can be regulated with the correct cocktail of chemicals. Secondly, assuming for a moment that the link is confirmed, is this a recent development? In other words, have low-cortisol brains evolved as a response to an increasingly stressful world, or is the cause environmental?

And thirdly, has anyone thought of doing cortisol level testing on politicians? [story via FuturePundit]