Jerry Coyne Attacks Jim Al-Khalili and Gets Free Will Wrong Again

Jerry Coyne continues his naive nineteenth century mechanistic materialist denial of modern compatibilist views on free will.  He has launched a determinist attack on Jim Al-Khalili's ideas on free will, whose views I personally agree with.  Jim Al-Khalili is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey and he has hosted several BBC productions about science.  He is currently President of the British Humanist Association.

It is late in the evening and I am tired and about to go to bed.  So I won't write a critique of Jerry's position, but instead I will post a link to one post on this thread on his blog where I think the poster got it just right as a substitute here

He quotes Jim Al-Khalili:

“our actions still determine which of the infinite number of possible futures is the one that gets played out.”

What Jerry fails to understand in his Jihad for determinism is that for modern quantum cosmology only the ensemble is deterministic so we face an "infinite number of possible futures".  That is the wonder of the world we live in.




When I get it together I intend to discuss Jim Al-Khalili's ideas on quantum biology.

Reading a Champagne Label

BEAUMONT DES CRAYÈRES GRAND PRESTIGE BRUT CHAMPAGNE

This weekend we opened a bottle of this champagne. The  Beaumont des Crayères Champagne was born in 1955 when a group of winegrowers from the village of Mardeuil near Epernay, formed a cooperative.  The Grand Prestige Brut is made from; 40% Chardonnay, 40% Pinot Noir and 20% Pinot Meunier grapes.

This Champagne is crisp with powerful apple and citrus fruit notes, pale straw yellow with a lively and persistent mousse.  Overall an excellent Champagne.   We have found that often the best value for money, on a quality to price ratio is to be had from the Champagne cooperatives, beating the big better known Champagne houses hands down.   Not that the Beaumont des Crayères Cooperative is small, with 240 members it produces half a million bottles a year.

"My only regret in life is that I didn’t drink enough Champagne“
John Maynard Keynes

Reading The Label

The main parts of the label are relatively obvious; The name of the brand, Champagne the wine's Appelation d'origine contrôlée (AOC) and an alcohol content of 12%  etc are all shown.  At the bottom of the label a line containing lot of specific content in small print is present:

"Elaboré par Beaumont des Crayères à Mardeuil, 51530, France, CM-826-001 Produce of France"

First is the name and address of the producer, here showing that the origin of the grapes is the village of Mardeuil.  CM-826-001 is the producers Professional Registration Code.  The letters CM denote that the producer is Coopérative-manipulant that is a cooperative of growers who also make and sell Champagne under their own labels.  The first two letter of the code shows the type of champagne producer.  Most of the champagne you will see on the shelves is NM (Négociant-manipulant) meaning it is from a Champagne house.  Here is a list of the two letter codes:

ND (Négociants-Distributeur) – A  company selling Champagne it did not make
RM (Récoltant-Manipulant) – grower producer – A grower who sells grapes to the houses as well as buying grapes from other growers and making his own Champagne
CM (Coopérative-manipulant) – cooperative producer – A coop of growers who also make and sell Champagne under their own labels
NM (Négociant-manipulant) – a Champagne house – Producer who buys grapes in volume from growers to make Champagne
MA (Marque d’Acheteur) – a buyers own brand – A brand name owned by the purchaser such as restaurant, supermarket, wine merchant


If you live in Ontario Beaumont des Crayères is available from the LCBO

The Wicked Witch is Dead

As Berthold Brecht wrote of his character Arturo Ui,  "the bitch that bore him is in heat again "  For Thatcher the bitch that bore her is in heat again with so called austerity policies designed to transfer wealth from the 99% of the population to the richest 1% being rampant throughout the world with heirs like Cameron in Britain and Harper here in Canada implementing them.

As I said to an Argentinian fellow graduate student over twenty years ago now.

"it is a pity we couldn't both have lost the Falkland's war, you would have still got rid of the generals and we would have got rid of Thatcher."

It is a pity that Britain's first woman prime minister will be remembered for the destruction of all civilized norms in her country rather than helping to save it like Argentina's first woman President Cristina Fernandez.

Here is Billy Bragg's Comment on her death:

"This is not a time for celebration. The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing; of why domestic growth is driven by credit, not by real incomes; of why tax-payers are forced to top up wages; of why a spiteful government seeks to penalise the poor for having an extra bedroom; of why Rupert Murdoch became so powerful; of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society.

Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise!"

It is ironic that the mad cow who through her agricultural policies gave the world mad cow disease should die in the throws of dementia.  I will never forgive her for destroying the country I grew up in.

The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics

Over at cosmologist Sean Carroll's blog he is discussing The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics and the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

For what it is worth, I threw in my two penn'orth:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/#comment-81859

Hives the Great Swedish Garage Rockers

My wife recently saw the Hives on the Carson Daily Show.  She was really impressed which really surprised me as normally she is not so much into the punk and related stuff I like but I guess garage may be more accessible.  They are really a great live band I have enjoyed their work for about ten years now (thanks Thierry for recommending them).

I have embedded this video of them performing the same "Go Right Ahead" together with "Insane" from their new album "Les Hives" live at the Camden Roundhouse London last month. 

One reason for posting it is the Roundhouse brings back many memories for me.   A long time ago I saw Pink Floyd there before they became famous and Boring Old Farts. This was when Syd Barrett was still with them and before the mother-fuckers had driven him mad while they were still an interesting experimental band.  I also attended the first secret unannounced London performance of Cream there. It was supposed to be their first public performance but a friend who played base in Geno Washington's Ram-Jam Band saw their real first performance at a Club in High Wycombe a couple of days earlier.  He had played a festival with Pink Floyd and talked to some of the members off stage.  They tried to convince him that their type of music was the "future of music" (shades of Wagner) unfortunately they were partially right.

I remember attending an excellent production of Brecht's stage adaptation of Gorky's Mother at the Roundhouse while I was a student.  The most impressive production I saw at the Roundhouse was the original production of Ballet Rambert's "Cruel Garden" inspired by the life of Garcia Lorca.  I will never forget this performance, my wife and I found it deeply moving.

Anyway for some fun dynamic Swedish garage rock keep on playing The Hives.

A New Year Begins

Well it is New Years Day and the Holiday Season is almost over.   I haven't made any New Years resolutions but I suppose I should have made one to post in this blog more often.

Well what did I do over the Holiday?  We didn't have the normal Christmas dinner of Turkey and all the trimmings.  We had sushi instead and repeated it again for New Years eve.  The holidays provide a good excuse for drinking Champagne.  Over Christmas we had a bottle of Piper-Heidseck Brut.  Then on New Years Eve we opened a bottle of Lanson Black Label Brut.

The Piper-Heidseck was very strongly brut, light coloured with lemony citrus aromas.  The Lanson on the other hand was a darker straw colour, a richer and slightly less brut champagne.  Which do I prefer?  I like them both.



We will be continuing drinking the Lanson tonight with more sushi.

A Happy New Year to every one who makes it to this blog!

Rent Seeking - The Price of Inequality III

I promised to look at Stiglitz's analysis of rent seeking in America and it's implications.  A little belatedly I will try to do that.  Stiglitz defines rent-seeking as “using political and economic power to get a larger share of the national pie, rather than to grow the national pie”.  In Wikipedia  we find this definition "In economics, rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth."

Rent originally referred primarily to rent on land but in modern economics the term has become expanded to newer an wider forms of activity. In another quote from Stiglitz he argues.

"Much of the top-most wealth instead comes because of successful “rent seeking.” Economists use the term “rents” for income derived from owning an asset, rather than from effort. “Rent seeking” refers to attempts to garner a larger share of the economic pie, rather than making the pie larger.
Monopolists, for example, gain their wealth through restricting production — which makes the size of the pie smaller. When we look at divided societies abroad, like so many of the dysfunctional oil-rich countries, we diagnose their problem as an infliction of excessive rent seeking — too much of society’s resources go to attempts to grab a larger share of the oil wealth, too little to expanding the economy. What we don’t realize is the extent to which the United States, too, has become a rent-seeking society."

Stiglitz demonstrates that  have a system that actively redistributes income and wealth from huge numbers of people at the bottom of the pyramid to a tiny number at the very top.  He shows how the financial system is permeated to the core with rent seeking such as the predatory lending in the sub-prime mortgage disaster about which he says:

"the form of rent seeking that is most egregious - and that has been most perfected in recent years - has been the ability of those in the financial sector to take advantage of the poor and uninformed (p. 32). This is because financial companies almost always know more about their product (mortgage, derivative, stock, etc.) then do their customers, and the industry has been able to minimize any regulation or action by the government to even the playing field."

He also deals with a range of rent seeking including in the so-called high-tech areas.  For example in something that should be dear to the hearts of us Canadians he covers the case of the patent troll rip off of RIM.  One aspect of rent seeking he doesn't discuss is organized crime and the Mafia which is typical rent seeking in search of "a piece of the action".


Another big M rent seeker is Microsoft whose rent seeking he briefly touches on.  He doesn't discuss MS's latest rent seeking scam, the extension of it's attempts to extort money over it's alleged and secret  patents that  Linux supposedly infringes, to an apparently successful shakedown of smartphone manufacturers producing Android phones. "Nice little earner you've got there, you could be protected from a very expensive lawsuit if you pay us a percentage".  Come to to think of it Ballmer looks a little like Tony Soprano.

Stiglitz's academic area is the distortion of free markets by information asymmetry and he shows that rent seeking is a consequence of this.

More on The Price of Inequality to come.