Category Archives: Economics

Economics, Mathematics, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Merging Lanes

11 Comments

You’re probably shifting out of your lane too soon.

Driving back from Yosemite on Thursday, Caltrans had shut down the right three (out of four) lanes on I-5 in Castaic. We lost one lane at a time, and the first merge was the slowest. Each next one sped things up, until we were all in a single lane, and moving at a reasonable speed. Part of the problem was that much of the traffic in the right lane was trucks (we were already in the left lane when the backup started). It added about twenty minutes to the trip time.

Business, Economics, History, Mathematics, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Industrial Revolution

9 Comments

Why didn’t the Romans have one?

Before I read it, the first thing I thought was this: “How are engineers to do experiments and calculations without any concept of the experimental method, and without anything close to the mathematical tools that are available today to any fifth-grader?”

As he notes, they didn’t have Arabic numerals, they didn’t have zero, they didn’t have negative numbers, or complex numbers. They had no higher math, and no way to get to it with their numbering system. One of the foundations of the industrial revolution was the invention of calculus, and understanding of physics, including thermodynamics. That was all happening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The other thing that was happening was the invention of capitalism in the coffee houses of London and Amsterdam (which wouldn’t have happened had coffee not become a thing in the wake of opening the New World). It’s not clear how, even had Rome not fallen, how they would have ever had those foundations.

[Update a while later]

Link is fixed now, sorry.

Business, Economics, Space

Virgin Galactic

2 Comments

Lost in space.

I’d have never put a dime into this company.

[Update a while later]

In comments, some people seem to think that this is reflective of a fundamental problem with suborbital tourism. It is not. It was a problem of management and design decisions. There is a market for suborbital tourism, but neither of the only two companies offering it are properly tapping it. It’s tragic that XCOR couldn’t survive. It only needed a small fraction of the money that’s been wasted on Virgin Galactic.