Global Warming Accelerating

When I took calculus in my first college-degree program, the graduate-student instructor didn’t bother to tell the class that a derivative signifies changes in the rate of acceleration. A derivative is not the rate itself, but, rather, the change in the rate—something much more difficult to detect empirically, as in watching an accelerating car. Formulae were the instructor’s focus, as if they constitute ends in themselves. By the time the climate numbers for 2025 came in, scientists could confidently say global warming was accelerating. The rate itself may have been increasing (i.e., a positive derivative), but attention to that by the media would have taken an educational reform as to how calculus was being taught. We think in terms of speed and acceleration. In this respect, we may be deficient in climate change itself as it has been unfolding. More decades than I care to admit had passed by 2025 since I had that course in calculus; only now can I say that I have used the math, albeit theoretically rather than via formulae.

The full essay is at "Global Warming Accelerating." 

Paul Samuelson: The Model 20th Century Economist

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died at the end of 2009 at 94.  Samuelson was credited with changing the academic discipline of economics, according to The New York Times,  ”from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”  Essentially, he redefined twentieth century economics. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Dr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking. His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike would respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates would affect employment, and how tax rate changes would affect tax collections.  He developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate.  Mathematical formuli that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities (derivatives) have come from his work (FYI: derivatives too complicated for outsiders such as the government to understand/regulate were at the center of the financial crisis in 2008).

The full essay is at "20th Century Economist."

The Boys from Brazil

Josef Mengele, an SS physician infamous for his inhumane medical experimentation on prisoners at Auschwitz, is in this film a character intent on furnishing the 95 Hitlers he has cloned with Hitler’s own background. Crucially, Hitler’s father died at 65. So too, Mengele, reasons, must the adoptive fathers of the boy Hitlers. Otherwise, they might not turn out like Hitler. The ethics of Mengele’s task—killing 95 innocent 65 year-olds—is clear. When Ezra Lieberman stops Mengele in his tracks, the question turns to the ethics of killing the 95 boys so none of them will grow up to be another Hitler. This is a much more interesting ethical question, and the narrative—and film as a medium, moreover—would be fuller had the script been deepened to make the question, and thus the ethical and ontological dimensions, transparent for the viewers.

The full essay is at "The Boys from Brazil."