Monday, March 16, 2020

Why is toilet paper vanishing from supermarkets?



FOX BUSINESS - You might notice something unusual, not to mention unfortunate, next time you try to stock up on bathroom supplies at your local grocery store.

Not just the bare shelves where hand sanitizer and cleansing wipes were plentiful only a few weeks ago, but the empty aisles where toilet paper usually abounds in quantities from single rolls to packages of more than a dozen.

Some are even adorned with signs limiting the number of purchases per customer.

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Such caps have become a trend in the U.S. and Canada after supermarkets in the United Kingdom ran out and grocery stores across Australia hired security guards to make sure the rules are followed.

What's the reason for the run, especially when toilet paper isn't known to have any virus-blocking properties?

One is reason is that people are going to extremes because of conflicting messages, Steven Taylor, a clinical psychologist and author of "The Psychology of Pandemics," told CNN.

"On the one hand, [the response is] understandable, but on the other hand it's excessive," Taylor, a professor and clinical psychologist at the University of British Columbia, told the TV network. "We can prepare without panicking."

The novel coronavirus has scared many Americans because there is little information -- and there isn't a vaccine yet. When people hear conflicting messages about the risk, it affects how they cope and how they prepare, Taylor said.

The second reason: They aren't receiving clear direction from the government.

Many are watching what's happening in Europe and clinging to their own knowledge on how to best prepare for a mass quarantine. Although the United States has said it wouldn't consider such a measure, people still believe it's a real possibility.

Social media has heightened the tension, as have visits to stores where other shoppers are stockpiling with abandon.

With the shelves of many retailers across the country remaining empty for over a week, consumers are buying in bulk so that they won't need to come back for some time.

"People, being social creatures, we look to each other for cues for what is safe and what is dangerous," he said. "And when you see someone in the store panic-buying, that can cause a fear-contagion effect."

Finally, purchasing products in bulk gives people a sense of control over their situations, releasing some pent-up anxiety.

"People become anxious ahead of the actual infection," Taylor said. "They haven't thought about the bigger picture, like what are the consequences of stockpiling toilet paper."

As of March 14th, the United States has 2,195 reported COVID-19 cases with 49 confirmed fatalities. Worldwide, more than 130,000 people have been infected, and more than 4,900 have died.

Sunday, November 10, 2019

This Is Why The Speed Of Gravity Must Equal The Speed Of Light

Ripples in spacetime are what gravitational waves are, and they travel through space at the speed of light in all directions. Although the constants of electromagnetism never appear in the equations for Einstein's General Relativity, the speed of gravity undoubtedly equals the speed of light. Here's why. - EUROPEAN GRAVITATIONAL OBSERVATORY, LIONEL BRET/EUROLIOS
Ethan Siegel Senior Contributor Starts With A Bang Contributor Group 
Science - The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

If the Sun were to spontaneously cease emitting light, we wouldn't know about it for about 8 minutes and 20 seconds. The light that's arriving here on Earth, right at this very moment, was emitted from the Sun's photosphere a finite amount of time in the past, and is only being seen now after a journey across the 150 million km (93 million miles) separating the Sun from the Earth. If the Sun were to go dark right now, we wouldn't find out until the light stopped arriving.

But what about gravitationally? If the Sun were spontaneously (somehow) removed from existence, how long would Earth remain in its elliptical orbit before flying off in a straight line? Believe it or not, the answer to this must be exactly the same amount of time as it was for light: 8 minutes and 20 seconds. The speed of gravity not only equals the speed of light to an incredibly precise degree observationally, but these two constants must be exactly equal theoretically, or General Relativity would fall apart. Here's the science behind why.

Newton's law of Universal Gravitation has been superseded by Einstein's General Relativity, but relied on the concept of an instantaneous action (force) at a distance, and is incredibly straightforward. The gravitational constant in this equation, G, along with the values of the two masses and the distance between them, are the only factors in determining a gravitational force. G also appears in Einstein's theory. - WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER DENNIS NILSSON
Before General Relativity came along, our most successful theory of gravity was Newton's universal law of gravitation. According to Newton, the gravitational force between any two objects in space defined by just four parameters:

1/ The gravitational constant of the Universe, G, which is the same for everyone.

2/ The mass of the first object, m, which experiences the gravitational force. (By Einstein's equivalence principle, this is the same m that goes into the laws of motion, like F = ma.)

3/ The mass of the second object, M, which attracts the first object.

4/ The distance between them, r, which extends from the center-of-mass of the first object to the center-of-mass of the second.

Keep in mind that these are the only four parameters that are allowable in Newtonian gravitation. You can perform all sorts of calculations from this force law to derive, for example, elliptical planetary orbits around the Sun. But the equations only work if the gravitational force is instantaneous.



The orbits of the eight major planets vary in eccentricity and the difference between perihelion (closest approach) and aphelion (farthest distance) with respect to the Sun. There is no fundamental reason why some planets are more or less eccentric than one another; it's simply a result of the initial conditions from which the Solar System formed. However, if you were to somehow turn 'off' the gravitational effects of the Sun, the planets wouldn't fly off instantaneously, but rather the inner ones would fly off first, followed by the outer ones, as the gravitational signals from the Sun only propagate outwards at the speed of gravity, which ought to equal the speed of light. - NASA / JPL-CALTECH / R. HUR

This might puzzle you a little bit. After all, if the speed of gravity is only equal to the speed of light, rather than an infinitely fast force, then the Earth should be attracted to where the Sun was 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago, not where the Sun is right now, at this particular instant in time. But if you do that calculation instead, and allow Earth to be attracted to the Sun's past position rather than its current position, you get a prediction for its orbit that is so thoroughly wrong that Newton himself, with quality observations going back less than 100 years (to the time of Tycho Brahe), could have ruled it out.

In fact, if you used Newton's laws to calculate the orbits of the planets and demanded that they match modern observations, not only would the speed of gravity have to be faster than the speed of light, it would have to be a minimum of 20 billion times faster: indistinguishable from an infinite speed.

An accurate model of how the planets orbit the Sun, which then moves through the galaxy in a different direction-of-motion. If the Sun were to simply wink out of existence, Newton's theory predicts that they would all instantaneously fly off in straight lines, while Einstein's predicts that the inner planets would continue orbiting for shorter periods of time than the outer planets. - RHYS TAYLOR

The problem is this: if you have a central force, where a bound particle like (for example) the Earth is attracted to the Sun but moves around the Sun (orbiting, or propagating) at a finite speed, you will only get a purely elliptical orbit if that force's propagation speed is infinite. If it's finite, then you don't just get a radial acceleration (towards the other mass), but you also get a component that accelerates your particle tangentially.

This would make orbits not only elliptical, but unstable. On the scale of a mere century, orbits would shift substantially. By 1805, Laplace had used observations of the Moon to demonstrate that the speed of Newtonian gravity must be 7 million times greater than the speed of light. Modern constraints are now 20 billion times the speed of light, which is great for Newton. But all of this placed a great burden on Einstein.


One revolutionary aspect of relativistic motion, put forth by Einstein but previously built up by Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and others, that rapidly moving objects appeared to contract in space and dilate in time. The faster you move relative to someone at rest, the greater your lengths appear to be contracted, while the more time appears to dilate for the outside world. This picture, of relativistic mechanics, replaced the old Newtonian view of classical mechanics, but also carries tremendous implications for theories that aren't relativistically invariant, like Newtonian gravity. - CURT RENSHAW

According to Einstein, there's a big problem, conceptually, with Newton's gravitational force law: the distance between any two objects is not an absolute quantity, but rather is dependent on the motion of the observer. If you're moving towards or away from any imaginary line you draw, distances in that direction will contract, depending on your relative velocities. For the gravitational force to be a calculable quantity, all observers would have to derive consistent results, something that you cannot get by combining relativity with Newton's gravitational force law.

Therefore, according to Einstein, you'd have to develop a theory that brought gravitation and relativistic motions together, and that meant developing General Relativity: a relativistic theory of motion that incorporated gravity into it. Once completed, General Relativity told a dramatically different story.

An animated look at how spacetime responds as a mass moves through it helps showcase exactly how, qualitatively, it isn't merely a sheet of fabric but all of space itself gets curved by the presence and properties of the matter and energy within the Universe. Note that spacetime can only be described if we include not only the position of the massive object, but where that mass is located throughout time. Both instantaneous location and the past history of where that object was located determine the forces experienced by objects moving through the Universe. - LUCASVB

In order to get different observers to agree on how gravitation works, there can be no such thing as absolute space, absolute time, or a signal that propagates at infinite speed. Instead, space and time must both be relative for different observers, and signals can only propagate at speeds that exactly equal the speed of light (if the propagating particle is massless) or at speeds that are below the speed of light (if the particle has mass).

In order for this to work out, though, there has to be an additional effect to cancel out the problem of a non-zero tangential acceleration, which is induced by a finite speed of gravity. This phenomenon, known as gravitational aberration, is almost exactly cancelled by the fact that General Relativity also has velocity-dependent interactions. As the Earth moves through space, for example, it feels the force from the Sun change as it changes its position, the same way a boat traveling through the ocean will come down in a different position as it gets lifted up and lowered again by a passing wave.



Gravitational radiation gets emitted whenever a mass orbits another one, which means that over long enough timescales, orbits will decay. Before the first black hole ever evaporates, the Earth will spiral into whatever's left of the Sun, assuming nothing else has ejected it previously. Earth is attracted to where the Sun was approximately 8 minutes ago, not to where it is today. - AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY

What's remarkable, and by no means obvious, is that these two effects cancel almost exactly. The fact that the speed of gravity is finite is what induces this gravitational aberration, but the fact that General Relativity (unlike Newtonian gravity) has velocity-dependent interactions is what allowed Newtonian gravity to be such a good approximation. There's only one speed that works to make this cancellation a good one: if the speed of gravity equals the speed of light.

So that's the theoretical motivation for why the speed of gravity should equal the speed of light. If you want planetary orbits to be consistent with what we've seen, and to be consistent for all observers, you need a speed of gravity that equals c, and to have your theory be relativistically invariant. There's another caveat, however. In General Relativity, the cancellation between the gravitational aberration and the velocity-dependent term is almost exact, but not quite. Only the right system can reveal the difference between Einstein's and Newton's predictions.

When a mass moves through a region of curved space, it will experience an acceleration owing to the curved space it inhabits. It also experiences an additional effect due to its velocity as it moves through a region where the spatial curvature is constantly changing. These two effects, when combined, result in a slight, tiny difference from the predictions of Newton's gravity. - DAVID CHAMPION, MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY

In our own neighborhood, the force of the Sun's gravity is far too weak to produce a measurable effect. What you'd want is a system that had large gravitational fields at small distances from a massive source, where the velocity of the moving object is both fast and changing (accelerating) rapidly, in a gravitational field with a large gradient.

Our Sun doesn't give us that, but the environment around either a binary black hole or a binary neutron star does! Ideally, a system with a massive object moving with a changing velocity through a changing gravitational field will showcase this effect. And a binary neutron star system, where one of the neutron stars is a very precise pulsar, fits the bill exactly.

When you have a single object, like a pulsar, orbiting in space, it will pulse every time it completes a 360 degree rotation to a fortuitously aligned observer. If you place that pulsar in a binary system with another dense, massive object, it will move quickly through that space, exhibiting both the effects of gravitational aberration and velocity-dependent interactions, and their inexact cancellation allows scientists to discern the relativistic predictions for this system from the Newtonian ones. - ESO/L. CALÇADA

A pulsar, and in particular, a millisecond pulsar, is the best natural clock in the Universe. As the neutron star spins, it emits a jet of electromagnetic radiation that has a chance of being aligned with Earth's perspective once every 360 degree rotation. If the alignment is right, we'll observe these pulses arriving with extraordinarily predictable accuracy and precision.

If the pulsar is in a binary system, however, then moving through that changing gravitational field will cause the emission of gravitational waves, which carry energy away from the gravitating system. The loss of that energy has to come from somewhere, and is compensated by the decay of the pulsar's orbits. The predictions of pulsar decay is highly sensitive to the speed of gravity; using even the very first binary pulsar system ever discovered by itself, PSR 1913+16 (or the Hulse-Taylor binary), allowed us to constrain the speed of gravity to be equal to the speed of light to within only 0.2%!

The rate of orbital decay of a binary pulsar is highly dependent on the speed of gravity and the orbital parameters of the binary system. We have used binary pulsar data to constrain the speed of gravity to be equal to the speed of light to a precision of 99.8%, and to infer the existence of gravitational waves decades before LIGO and Virgo detected them. However, the direct detection of gravitational waves was a vital part of the scientific process, and the existence of gravitational waves would still be in doubt without it. - NASA (L), MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR RADIO ASTRONOMY / MICHAEL KRAMER (R)

Since that time, other measurements have also demonstrated the equivalence between the speed of light and the speed of gravity. In 2002, chance coincidence caused the Earth, Jupiter, and a very strong radio quasar (known as QSO J0842+1835) to all align. As Jupiter passed between the Earth and the quasar, its gravitational effects caused the starlight to bend in a fashion that was speed-of-gravity dependent.

Jupiter did, in fact, bend the light from the quasar, enabling us to rule out an infinite speed for the speed of gravity and determine that it was actually between 255 million and 381 million meters-per-second, consistent with the exact value for the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) and also with Einstein's predictions. Even more recently, the first observations of gravitational waves brought us even tighter constraints.



Illustration of a fast gamma-ray burst, long thought to occur from the merger of neutron stars. The gas-rich environment surrounding them could delay the arrival of the signal, explaining the observed 1.7 second difference between the arrivals of the gravitational and electromagnetic signatures. This is the best evidence we have, observationally, that the speed of gravity must equal the speed of light. - ESO

From the very first gravitational wave detected and the difference in their arrival times at Hanford, WA and Livingston, LA, we directly learned that the speed of gravity equaled the speed of light to within about 70%, which isn't an improvement over the pulsar timing constraints. But when 2017 saw the arrival of both gravitational waves and light from a neutron star-neutron star merger, the fact that gamma-ray signals came just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal, across a journey of over 100 million light years, taught us that the speed of light and the speed of gravity differ by no more than 1 part in a quadrillion: 1015.

As long as gravitational waves and photons have no rest mass, the laws of physics dictate that they must move at exactly the same speed: the speed of light, which must equal the speed of gravity. Even before the constraints got this spectacular, requiring that a gravitational theory reproduce Newtonian orbits while simultaneously being relativistically invariant leads to this inevitable conclusion. The speed of gravity is exactly the speed of light, and physics wouldn't have allowed it to be any other way.

Ethan Siegel

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Thursday, June 13, 2019

Google's San Jose expansion will drive huge rent increases, advocacy group says

A look at downtown San Jose, as taken in May 2017. The area Google is eyeing to build a massive campus is to the left.
By Jody Meacham – Reporter, Silicon Valley Business Journal - Jun 12, 2019, 1:53pm PDT Updated Jun 12, 2019, 6:18pm EDT

The additional housing demand created by Google’s planned downtown San Jose expansion would exacerbate the local housing crisis and raise local rents by hundreds of dollars per family annually, says a report published today by Working Partnerships USA.

The labor-affiliated think tank, which has long called for a stronger commitment from Google to mitigating adverse effects of its downtown plans, considers a $900 million housing investment from the company in San Jose “feasible” based on commitments it has made in the area around its North Bayshore development in Mountain View.

“With a reasonable investment in housing across levels of affordability, Google could prevent these impacts and avoid replicating Silicon Valley’s pattern of housing underproduction, mega-commutes and displacement,” Robert Kleinhenz, research director at Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics, which was commissioned by WPUSA to do the report, said in a press release.

Eddie Truong, head of government relations for The Silicon Valley Organization, formerly the chamber of commerce, criticized the report for making too many assumptions, including omitting the likelihood of a recession, and said it was premature.

“There currently isn’t a finalized Google project,” he said. “(The report) is all speculation about impact on housing prices that is really not rooted in any reality.”

Anil Babbar, public affairs vice president for the California Apartment Association, also faulted the report’s reliance on assumptions to predict conditions a decade away. “We're expected to make significant policy decisions on a lot of assumptions that I simply can't verify or make sure they're accurate.”

SPUR's San Jose director Teresa Alvarado defended the city's efforts to address the housing crisis so far and questioned a report assumption that future downtown employees would all be new. "A majority of Bay Area Google employees already live in the South Bay," she said.

The San Jose Downtown Association’s Rick Jensen issued a statement saying the approved memorandum of understanding"between the City of San Jose and Google makes clear that both parties are taking active steps to combat displacement and create affordable housing. Furthermore, there is a robust community engagement process through the Station Area Advisory Group (SAAG), which includes Working Partnerships. The SAAG will have the opportunity to review and provide feedback on any community benefits agreement.”

Based on its data, Working Partnerships' report estimates rents in Santa Clara County Jose would rise about $235 million annually — about $765 per apartment — without a commitment from Google “to significant housing production.”

San Jose’s share of the annual rent increase was pegged at $127.4 million a year, five times the $24.8 million it estimates the city would receive in annual property taxes. Avoiding those rent increases would require subsidizing 5,284 affordable housing units plus 12,540 market-rate units, according to the report.

Thursday, May 23, 2019

The case against Huawei, explained


China’s biggest phone maker is in deep, deep trouble, and we still don’t have a clear picture of why

By Russell Brandom May 22, 2019, 9:06am EDT

This morning, ARM announced that it was cutting ties with Huawei, in the interest of “complying with all of the latest regulations set forth by the U.S. government.” It’s a catastrophe for Huawei’s device business, halting its access to current and future chip designs and coming on the heels of similar breaks from Google and Microsoft. Huawei is in deep, deep trouble, and we still don’t have a clear picture of why.

Security experts have been warning about Huawei for more than a year, but it’s only in the last week that those warnings have escalated into an all-out trade blockade on the company’s US partners. There’s never been a full accounting of why the US government believes Huawei is such a threat, in large part because of national security interests, which means much of the evidence remains secret. But it’s worth tracing out exactly where the concerns are coming from and where they could go from here.

THERE ARE REAL AND SERIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT HUAWEI PROVIDING CELLULAR NETWORK GEAR
The first wave of concerns about Huawei had more to do with cell towers than cellphones. Huawei is one of the main suppliers for network infrastructure (basically, the hardware that your phone connects to), alongside Ericsson and Qualcomm. As carriers raced to build out 5G networks, lawmakers rushed to keep Huawei hardware out of whatever was being built.

HUAWEI’S DEVICE BUSINESS HAS BECOME COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN A BROADER FIGHT OVER 5G

There was never any hard evidence of backdoors in Huawei’s cell towers — but, as hawks saw it, there didn’t need to be. As a hardware provider, Huawei needs to be able to deploy software the same way Apple deploys iOS updates. But as long as there was a pipeline from Huawei’s China headquarters to cell towers in the US, there would be a strong risk of Chinese surveillance agencies using it to sneak malware into the network, whether they did it with Huawei’s help or by hacking themselves into the middle. As intelligence agencies saw it, the risk was just too great.

That might not seem fair, but it’s at least a logical response to a real concern. Cell networks are a very tempting target for espionage, and China has a long history of this kind of spying.


THE BAN ON LICENSING ANDROID AND OTHER COMPONENTS SEEMS MORE LIKE A TRADE ISSUE, NOT A SECURITY ISSUE

But what’s happened over the past week goes a lot further and doesn’t make quite as much sense. The order handed down on Friday bans US companies from doing business with Huawei, which resulted in Google and a string of other companies cutting ties. But that rule has to do with what US companies sell, not what they buy. Because Huawei doesn’t sell phones in the US, the most popular Huawei products affected would never be shipped here.

As a result, it’s hard to see the latest action as protecting any national security interests. Revoking Huawei’s Android license doesn’t matter for US network equipment, nor does Huawei’s access to ARM chip designs. Instead, it feels like Huawei’s device business has become collateral damage in a broader fight over 5G.

By hastily invoking emergency powers, the White House has largely avoided making a public case for why the blacklisting was necessary — a move that’s already causing political damage. Still, the simplest explanation is that Huawei has behaved too badly to be trusted after years of quiet intellectual property violations and trade secrets theft.

But if that’s the problem, it could set a troubling standard for other Chinese companies in the future, particularly given the broad scope of the executive order. It made sense to target the infrastructure ban at Huawei since it was the only Chinese company that could plausibly build network infrastructure for the US. But if the concern is predatory behavior by Chinese companies, there are lots of other outfits that could be exposed. The same Corning glass that’s shipped to Huawei is being shipped to Xiaomi; the same Intel processor in Huawei’s MateBook is in lots of Lenovo laptops, too. The question is how far the White House wants to push its case and how China will respond.

For more, watch the video above.

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

How I learned to stop worrying and rediscover the ancient philosophy of Stoicism

Seneca the Younger (Wikimedia)
The great insight of the philosophy of Stoicism: Shaping your character is the only thing under your control

GREGORY LOPEZMASSIMO PIGLIUCCI - MAY 19, 2019 5:00PM (UTC)

Your twenty-five-year college reunion was supposed to be fun. Instead, it turned into an exercise in inadequacy. Your classmates Aziz and Saliah are still together, ever since their first date during sophomore year; your marriage lasted less than five years, leading to financial trouble and an insecurity about romantic relationships that persists to this day. Steve, your former roommate, has maintained his athletic physique while your potbelly has only grown, a charming accompaniment to your thinning hair. And your roommate’s business major propelled him to the C-suite, while you've stagnated in middle management of a company whose products you don’t even believe in. Everywhere you look, you see success, but when you face yourself in the bathroom mirror after the cocktail hour, you can’t help but feel like a failure. No wonder I’m unhappy, you think. It’s because my life is bad. Everything is awful.

The Best Bet for Happiness

There are many things that we want and events we want to happen. We want to lose weight, get a raise, be liked by the people around us. Yet for many of us, these desires never materialize, and we’re left feeling inadequate, frustrated, and stuck. And it can get worse—for all of us. Things we specifically don’t want actually do happen, ranging from trivialities (getting stuck in traffic) to more serious events (illness and aging). Getting what we don’t want can be just as painful as not getting what we do want, and often more so. However painful this is, we keep on placing the same bad bets, staking our happiness and well-being on things outside our control through a cosmic roll of the dice.

What if we were able to train ourselves to desire only things that are firmly within our control? Then, in a very real sense, we’d always get what we want, and never get what we don’t want. Our happiness would never spill, since the cup of our desires is reliable and holds firm.

The fundamental question, then, is: What is in our complete control? What’s the sure bet?

Betting on Character: Why Stoicism?

The unreliability of obtaining certain goals—such as wealth, health, and other people’s praise—is one of many common problems. Often, even when we’re lucky and achieve these ends, we’re still left wanting. Had our fictional protagonist gone to his reunion a successful executive with a family and a still-boyish figure, he would likely still have found room for complaint.

Many of us can see this in our own life. We eat great food without even noticing the taste. When we do savor it, the pleasure quickly fades and is forgotten. We have to shift positions to remain comfortable on a nice, new sofa, which will become stained and worn with time. Status is nice when we get it, but we’re often left wanting more. We get a new car that we love at first, but soon take for granted. We may succeed in starting a business, but protecting our assets and growing the company cause us to lose sleep. We can be head over heels for our romantic partner today, but may grow irritated by their habits with time. Many of the things we pursue don’t satisfy — and can’t provide lasting happiness.

Even if we achieve the objects of our transient desires, it doesn’t guarantee we will use them well. What determines their good use is the character of who’s using them. People with poor character put external advantages—money, fame, the U.S. presidency—to bad use. Those with good character will use what they have, no matter how limited, for the benefit of themselves and others. If they endure hardship, or if the cosmic dice roll snake eyes for them, a good character will help them persevere.

Here is the great insight of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism: Shaping your character is ultimately the only thing under your control. So in order to exploit your good luck and cope with the bad luck, it is necessary to be a good person. Through a combination of rational introspection and repeated practice, you can mold your character over the long term.

Betting on your own improvement is a guaranteed win with the biggest payoff.

Meet the Stoics

Stoicism is a Greco-Roman philosophy that began around 300 BCE with Zeno of Citium (modern-day Cyprus). Zeno was a merchant who lost all of his goods in a shipwreck and arrived in Athens with a few drachmas in his pockets. He heard the keeper of a bookshop reading some philosophy and became intrigued by the subject, so he asked the shopkeeper where he could find a philosopher. He was told to follow a man who just happened to pass by, Crates of Thebes. Zeno listened and became Crates’s student. Eventually, Zeno founded his own school, which came to be known as the Stoa, because its members discussed philosophy under a public colonnade called the Stoa Poikile, or painted porch.

During the last century BCE, Athens declined as a political power and cultural capital of the ancient world, and Rome took up both mantles. Shortly after, many of the prominent Stoic philosophers became active in the capital of the Roman Empire. The four major ones, whose writings survived to this day, are Seneca, a Roman senator and advisor to the emperor Nero; Musonius Rufus, a renowned teacher; Epictetus, a slave-turned-teacher who was Musonius’s student; and Marcus Aurelius, one of the few philosopher-kings in history.

Stoicism dwindled as a formal school of philosophy by the third century CE, but Stoic ideas continued to influence a number of important thinkers throughout the history of the Western world, from Paul of Tarsus to Augustine of Hippo, from Thomas Aquinas to Descartes, from Montaigne to Spinoza. In the twentieth century, Stoicism inspired a family of schools of effective psychotherapy called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), starting with Albert Ellis’s rational emotive behavior therapy in the 1950s. The ideas of Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, and others have also inspired a vibrant movement of new Stoicism in the modern day, attracting people from all over the world, who want to find a better way to live their lives, and to become full members of the human community.

The Very Basics

Stoicism’s basic tenets can be distilled into three major topics: live according to nature, three-disciplined practice, and the dichotomy of control.

Live according to nature

“What should we do then? Make the best use of what is in our power, and treat the rest in accordance with its nature.”

—Epictetus, Discourses I, 1.17

The Stoics thought that the best way to live our life, to make it count and derive meaning from it, is to live according to nature, particularly human nature. How do we determine what this means, in practice? By studying three interrelated topics: “physics,” “logic,” and “ethics.” Each of these three terms had a much broader meaning in ancient times than it does today (hence the scare quotes).

By physics, the Stoics were referring to the study of all the natural sciences, as well as metaphysics—the understanding of how the world hangs together. Logic included what it does today, that is, the formal study of reasoning, as well as psychology and even rhetoric more broadly—everything you need to think and communicate well. Ethics was not limited to understanding right and wrong, as it largely is today, but was more broadly construed as the study of how to live with meaning.

To decide how best to live (ethics), one has to understand how the world works (physics) and reason appropriately about it (logic). Which brings us to the idea of living according to nature. The most important aspects of human nature, the Stoics thought, are twofold: that we are social animals (and are then deeply interdependent with other people) and that we are capable of reasoning-based problem solving. So to live according to nature means using reason to improve social living. Or as Seneca put it, “Bring the mind to bear upon your problems.”1 This aspect of Stoicism sets it somewhat apart from other forms of self-help, which focus more on making you feel better. Stoicism tackles this and goes beyond it by helping the practitioner, and the world around them, be better.

The three disciplines

How, then, do we live according to nature? The Stoics, and Epictetus in particular, translate this into living by practicing three disciplines: desire, action, and assent.

The Discipline of Desire teaches us what is best to want (or to avoid): What should our goals be? Where do we channel our energy, time, and resources? The Discipline of Action shows us how to act in the social sphere: How should we behave toward others? And the Discipline of Assent helps us arrive at correct judgments about obstacles that life throws at us: Should we be angry at this person? Should we indulge in that pleasure?

Stoicism is roughly one-part theory and nine parts practice. The Stoics were very clear that understanding the philosophy (not that difficult) without putting it to use is a waste of time and energy. Epictetus said, “If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?”2

The dichotomy of control

The dichotomy of control is the central concept in Stoicism. What is it? Put simply, it’s the idea that certain things are under your control, while others are not. This may seem obvious—and it is—but from this observation stems the foundation of our practice: that we should focus our energy and resources on affecting what we can control, and turn away as much as possible from what we can’t. This, as you may suspect, is much more easily said than done. There’s a crucial difference between understanding something, which we can do by reading and reflecting on it, and internalizing that same thing, which can only be done with repeated practice.

# # #

Excerpted from "A Handbook for New Stoics: How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control" © Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez, 2019. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, The Experiment. Available wherever books are sold.

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

The Psychology of Inequality


“Every year he regifts himself to me.”
By Elizabeth Kolbert - January 8, 2018

Researchers find that much of the damage done by being poor comes from feeling poor.

In 2016, the highest-paid employee of the State of California was Jim Mora, the head coach of U.C.L.A.’s football team. (He has since been fired.) That year, Mora pulled in $3.58 million. Coming in second, with a salary of $2.93 million, was Cuonzo Martin, at the time the head coach of the men’s basketball team at the University of California, Berkeley. Victor Khalil, the chief dentist at the Department of State Hospitals, made six hundred and eighty-six thousand dollars; Anne Neville, the director of the California Research Bureau, earned a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars; and John Smith, a seasonal clerk at the Franchise Tax Board, earned twelve thousand nine hundred dollars.

I learned all this from a database maintained by the Sacramento Bee. The database, which is open to the public, is searchable by name and by department, and contains precise salary information for the more than three hundred thousand people who work for California. Today, most state employees probably know about the database. But that wasn’t the case when it was first created, in 2008. This made possible an experiment.

The experiment, conducted by four economists, was designed to test rival theories of inequity. According to one theory, the so-called rational-updating model, people assess their salaries in terms of opportunities. If they discover that they are being paid less than their co-workers, they will “update” their projections about future earnings and conclude that their prospects of a raise are good. Conversely, people who learn that they earn more than their co-workers will be discouraged by that news. They’ll update their expectations in the opposite direction.

According to a rival theory, people respond to inequity not rationally but emotionally. If they discover that they’re being paid less than their colleagues, they won’t see this as a signal to expect a raise but as evidence that they are underappreciated. (The researchers refer to this as the “relative income” model.) By this theory, people who learn that their salaries are at the low end will be pissed. Those who discover that they’re at the high end will be gratified.

The economists conducting the study sent an e-mail to thousands of employees at three University of California schools—Santa Cruz, San Diego, and Los Angeles—alerting them to the existence of the Bee’s database. This nudge produced a spike in visits to the Web site as workers, in effect, peeked at one another’s paychecks.

A few days later, the researchers sent a follow-up e-mail, this one with questions. “How satisfied are you with your job?” it asked. “How satisfied are you with your wage/salary on this job?” They also sent the survey to workers who hadn’t been nudged toward the database. Then they compared the results. What they found didn’t conform to either theory, exactly.

As the relative-income model predicted, those who’d learned that they were earning less than their peers were ticked off. Compared with the control group, they reported being less satisfied with their jobs and more interested in finding new ones. But the relative-income model broke down when it came to those at the top. Workers who discovered that they were doing better than their colleagues evinced no pleasure. They were merely indifferent. As the economists put it in a paper that they eventually wrote about the study, access to the database had a “negative effect on workers paid below the median for their unit and occupation” but “no effect on workers paid above median.”

The message the economists took from their research was that employers “have a strong incentive” to keep salaries secret. Assuming that California workers are representative of the broader population, the experiment also suggests a larger, more disturbing conclusion. In a society where economic gains are concentrated at the top—a society, in other words, like our own—there are no real winners and a multitude of losers.

Keith Payne, a psychologist, remembers the exact moment when he learned he was poor. He was in fourth grade, standing in line in the cafeteria of his elementary school, in western Kentucky. Payne didn’t pay for meals—his family’s income was low enough that he qualified for free school lunch—and normally the cashier just waved him through. But on this particular day there was someone new at the register, and she asked Payne for a dollar twenty-five, which he didn’t have. He was mortified. Suddenly, he realized that he was different from the other kids, who were walking around with cash in their pockets.

“That moment changed everything for me,” Payne writes, in “The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die.” Although in strictly economic terms nothing had happened—Payne’s family had just as much (or as little) money as it had the day before—that afternoon in the cafeteria he became aware of which rung on the ladder he occupied. He grew embarrassed about his clothes, his way of talking, even his hair, which was cut at home with a bowl. “Always a shy kid, I became almost completely silent at school,” he recalls.

Payne is now a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has come to believe that what’s really damaging about being poor, at least in a country like the United States—where, as he notes, even most people living below the poverty line possess TVs, microwaves, and cell phones—is the subjective experience of feeling poor. This feeling is not limited to those in the bottom quintile; in a world where people measure themselves against their neighbors, it’s possible to earn good money and still feel deprived. “Unlike the rigid columns of numbers that make up a bank ledger, status is always a moving target, because it is defined by ongoing comparisons to others,” Payne writes.

Feeling poor, meanwhile, has consequences that go well beyond feeling. People who see themselves as poor make different decisions, and, generally, worse ones. Consider gambling. Spending two bucks on a Powerball ticket, which has roughly a one-in-three-hundred-million chance of paying out, is never a good bet. It’s especially ill-advised for those struggling to make ends meet. Yet low-income Americans buy a disproportionate share of lottery tickets, so much so that the whole enterprise is sometimes referred to as a “tax on the poor.”

One explanation for this is that poor people engage in riskier behavior, which is why they are poor in the first place. By Payne’s account, this way of thinking gets things backward. He cites a study on gambling performed by Canadian psychologists. After asking participants a series of probing questions about their finances, the researchers asked them to rank themselves along something called the Normative Discretionary Income Index. In fact, the scale was fictitious and the scores were manipulated. It didn’t matter what their finances actually looked like: some of the participants were led to believe that they had more discretionary income than their peers and some were led to believe the opposite. Finally, participants were given twenty dollars and the choice to either pocket it or gamble it on a computer card game. Those who believed they ranked low on the scale were much more likely to risk the money on the card game. Or, as Payne puts it, “feeling poor made people more willing to roll the dice.”

In another study, this one conducted by Payne and some colleagues, participants were divided into two groups and asked to make a series of bets. For each bet, they were offered a low-risk / low-reward option (say, a hundred-per-cent chance of winning fifteen cents) and a high-risk / high-reward option (a ten-per-cent chance of winning a dollar-fifty). Before the exercise began, the two groups were told different stories (once again, fictitious) about how previous participants had fared. The first group was informed that the spread in winnings between the most and the least successful players was only a few cents, the second that the gap was a lot wider. Those in the second group went on to place much chancier bets than those in the first. The experiment, Payne contends, “provided the first evidence that inequality itself can cause risky behavior.”

People’s attitude toward race, too, he argues, is linked to the experience of deprivation. Here Payne cites work done by psychologists at N.Y.U., who offered subjects ten dollars with which to play an online game. Some of the subjects were told that, had they been more fortunate, they would have received a hundred dollars. The subjects, all white, were then shown pairs of faces and asked which looked “most black.” All the images were composites that had been manipulated in various ways. Subjects in the “unfortunate” group, on average, chose images that were darker than those the control group picked. “Feeling disadvantaged magnified their perception of racial differences,” Payne writes.

“The Broken Ladder” is full of studies like this. Some are more convincing than others, and, not infrequently, Payne’s inferences seem to run ahead of the data. But the wealth of evidence that he amasses is compelling. People who are made to feel deprived see themselves as less competent. They are more susceptible to conspiracy theories. And they are more likely to have medical problems. A study of British civil servants showed that where people ranked themselves in terms of status was a better predictor of their health than their education level or their actual income was.

All of which leads Payne to worry about where we’re headed. In terms of per-capita income, the U.S. ranks near the top among nations. But, thanks to the growing gap between the one per cent and everyone else, the subjective effect is of widespread impoverishment. “Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America . . . has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower,” he writes.

Rachel Sherman is a professor of sociology at the New School, and, like Payne, she studies inequality. But Sherman’s focus is much narrower. “Although images of the wealthy proliferate in the media, we know very little about what it is like to be wealthy in the current historical moment,” she writes in the introduction to “Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence.”

Sherman’s first discovery about the wealthy is that they don’t want to talk to her. Subjects who agree to be interviewed suddenly stop responding to her e-mails. One woman begs off, saying she’s “swamped” with her children; Sherman subsequently learns that the kids are at camp. After a lot of legwork, she manages to sit down with fifty members of the haut monde in and around Manhattan. Most have family incomes of more than five hundred thousand dollars a year, and about half have incomes of more than a million dollars a year or assets of more than eight million dollars, or both. (At least, this is what they tell Sherman; after a while, she comes to believe that they are underreporting their earnings.) Her subjects are so concerned about confidentiality that Sherman omits any details that might make them identifiable to those who have visited their brownstones or their summer places.

“I poked into bathrooms with soaking tubs or steam showers” is as far as she goes. “I conducted interviews in open kitchens, often outfitted with white Carrara marble or handmade tiles.”

A second finding Sherman makes, which perhaps follows from the first, is that the privileged prefer not to think of themselves that way. One woman, who has an apartment overlooking the Hudson, a second home in the Hamptons, and a household income of at least two million dollars a year, tells Sherman that she considers herself middle class. “I feel like, no matter what you have, somebody has about a hundred times that,” she explains. Another woman with a similar household income, mostly earned by her corporate-lawyer husband, describes her family’s situation as “fine.”

“I mean, there are all the bankers that are heads and heels, you know, way above us,” she says. A third woman, with an even higher household income—two and a half million dollars a year—objects to Sherman’s use of the word “affluent.”

“ ‘Affluent’ is relative,” the woman observes. Some friends of hers have recently flown off on vacation on a private plane. “That’s affluence,” she says.

This sort of talk dovetails neatly with Payne’s work. If affluence is in the eye of the beholder, then even the super-rich, when they compare their situation with that of the ultra-rich, can feel sorry for themselves. The woman who takes exception to the word “affluent” makes a point of placing herself at the “very, very bottom” of the one per cent. “The disparity between the bottom of the 1 percent and the top of the 1 percent is huge,” she observes.

Sherman construes things differently. Her subjects, she believes, are reluctant to categorize themselves as affluent because of what the label implies. “These New Yorkers are trying to see themselves as ‘good people,’ ” she writes. “Good people work hard. They live prudently, within their means. . . . They don’t brag or show off.” At another point, she observes that she was “surprised” at how often her subjects expressed conflicted emotions about spending. “Over time, I came to see that these were often moral conflicts about having privilege in general.”

Whatever its source—envy or ethics—the discomfort that Sherman documents matches the results of the University of California study. Inequity is, apparently, asymmetrical. For all the distress it causes those on the bottom, it brings relatively little joy to those at the top.

As any parent knows, children watch carefully when goodies are divvied up. A few years ago, a team of psychologists set out to study how kids too young to wield the word “unfair” would respond to unfairness. They recruited a bunch of preschoolers and grouped them in pairs. The children were offered some blocks to play with and then, after a while, were asked to put them away. As a reward for tidying up, the kids were given stickers. No matter how much each child had contributed to the cleanup effort, one received four stickers and the other two. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children shouldn’t be expected to grasp the idea of counting before the age of four. But even three-year-olds seemed to understand when they’d been screwed. Most of the two-sticker recipients looked enviously at the holdings of their partners. Some said they wanted more. A number of the four-sticker recipients also seemed dismayed by the distribution, or perhaps by their partners’ protests, and handed over some of their winnings. “We can . . . be confident that these actions were guided by an understanding of equality, because in all cases they offered one and only one sticker, which made the outcomes equal,” the researchers reported. The results, they concluded, show that “the emotional response to unfairness emerges very early.”

If this emotional response is experienced by toddlers, it suggests that it may be hardwired—a product of evolution rather than of culture. Scientists at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, outside Atlanta, work with brown capuchin monkeys, which are native to South America. The scientists trained the monkeys to exchange a token for a slice of cucumber. Then they paired the monkeys up, and offered one a better reward—a grape. The monkeys that continued to get cucumbers, which earlier they’d munched on cheerfully, were incensed. Some stopped handing over their tokens. Others refused to take the cucumbers or, in a few cases, threw the slices back at the researchers. Like humans, capuchin monkeys, the researchers wrote, “seem to measure reward in relative terms.”

Preschoolers, brown capuchin monkeys, California state workers, college students recruited for psychological experiments—everyone, it seems, resents inequity. This is true even though what counts as being disadvantaged varies from place to place and from year to year. As Payne points out, Thomas Jefferson, living at Monticello without hot water or overhead lighting, would, by the standards of contemporary America, be considered “poorer than the poor.” No doubt inequity, which, by many accounts, is a precondition for civilization, has been a driving force behind the kinds of innovations that have made indoor plumbing and electricity, not to mention refrigeration, central heating, and Wi-Fi, come, in the intervening centuries, to seem necessities in the U.S.

Still, there are choices to be made. The tax bill recently approved by Congress directs, in ways both big and small, even more gains to the country’s plutocrats. Supporters insist that the measure will generate so much prosperity that the poor and the middle class will also end up benefitting. But even if this proves true—and all evidence suggests that it will not—the measure doesn’t address the real problem. It’s not greater wealth but greater equity that will make us all feel richer. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the January 15, 2018, issue, with the headline “Feeling Low.”




Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Previously, she worked at the Times, where she wrote the Metro Matters column and served as the paper’s Albany bureau chief. Her three-part series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” won the 2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest and the 2006 National Academies Communication Award. She received a Heinz Award, in 2010, and won the 2010 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. She is the editor of “The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009” and the author of “The Prophet of Love: And Other Tales of Power and Deceit”; “Field Notes from a Catastrophe;" and “The Sixth Extinction,” for which she won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. In 2017, she received the Blake-Dodd Prize, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Friday, May 17, 2019

Coding, mathematics and philosophy

For illustrating
We can teach math and philosophy without coding, but we can’t teach coding without mentioning mathematical logic and computational language.

That seems to be reasonable! However, students will not immediately perceive the coherency and system in their work if they study mathematics and philosophy. And to actually understand the concepts - the coherency and system, they should spend more time and work hard, so they should be rather researchers than students. Mathematics and philosophy are two wide fields, so they are usually separated into distinct majors by profession. In that case, we cannot perceive what the logicality and coherency that the mathematics and philosophy support.

Otherwise, some first topics of a coding class, such as statements of condition (if...else) or loop (while...do), confirm the coherency and logicality, which a small or big program will crash if it lacks the concepts. And then the command lines exactly execute in buffer of a structured system which is often called as operating system. Clearly, the students can practice and perform their logical thoughts on such a system, and to do better, they need to understand the system on which they are interacting.

In addition, the concept of function, procedure or class in the programming perfectly makes a style of inheritable structure, which is an important feature of coherency and system. Similarly, with the incredible development of the intelligence system, people can create a system which can become an entity with logical, coherent ability beyond. We might not care what and how such systems are developing, but everyone including philosophers or mathematicians should study and understand a little of the programming. I am sure that is actually interesting.

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