WHEN AN INVASIVE SPECIES BECOMES A SNACK.

The invasive species this time is the Burmese python in Florida, which might have taken hold as a consequence of Florida Man at the pet store.  "An unexpected predator is raiding Burmese python nests in the Everglades."

Researchers arrived at a python nest to remove the eggs before they hatched and prevent the dispersal of hatchlings. When they arrived, they observed at least four vultures circling the site and actively feeding on the eggs.

The vegetation covering the clutch had been removed, likely by the vultures. Researchers documented at least 17 eggs; three had been displaced from the nest, with only shell fragments remaining.

The remaining 14 eggs stayed inside the nest cavity, all punctured and with their contents exposed or missing, suggesting total or partial consumption by the vultures, according to the case study published in Reptiles and Amphibians, an international journal specializing in herpetology research.

The Lotke-Volterra equations are more than a chalkboard exercise.

Melissa Miller, assistant professor of invasive wildlife ecology at [Florida], told el Nuevo Herald: "We continue to monitor python nests to increase our understanding of Burmese python reproduction, as well as to remove the eggs before hatchling pythons emerge."

"Monitoring python nests allows for observations such as our report of vultures feeding on python eggs. Our observation constitutes the first documented case of a bird preying on a python nest and adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the idea that native wildlife consumes invasive pythons at all stages of their life cycle," she said.

Domestic snakes, 'possums, wildcats, and bears (oh, my!) have also discovered that Burmese python nests come with snacks.

WHY BAYESIAN UPDATING IS A THING.

Reason's Ronald Bailey opens "The Surprising Divide Over What Counts as True" with an example that undermines his thesis, "A new study finds that what people think about facts, authenticity, or coherent beliefs explains why they disagree about what is true."  That's unfortunate in a world where "Truth is whatever version of reality best suits your purpose" has an unhealthily tight purchase on the mind-sets of people who should be more careful.

EDUCATION SO INCLUSIVE NOBODY LEARNS ANYTHING.

I'm reusing an old post title and revisiting an old argument.  "I encourage readers to focus on two words: fifth grade. Perhaps, in suggesting that the state universities send the high schools a bill for each credit hour of remedial arithmetic and writing their students racked up, I was not being bold enough."

Conditions have not gotten any better in sixteen years.  Recently, collegians having trouble with 7+2 = x+6, which can be posed as a first grade arithmetic problem by replacing "solve for x" with "fill in the box" came to our attention.  Dear reader, even the house organ for business as usual in higher education was troubled.  "A ‘Steep Decline’ in Students’ Academic Preparation at UC-San Diego Struck a Nerve."

TRANSCENDING COMPLEXITY.

Physicists Have Mathematically Proven the Universe Is Not a Simulation.  It's unlikely that somebody could program the universe as a simulation for the same reason that it's difficult to write a climate extrapolation model.  "The short form of Steven Hayward's argument is 'in a complex adaptive system it is impossible to capture the behavior of the system without fully describing it in your model.' There's something Cantorian, or perhaps religious about the problem." Add more code, run out of computing capacity.

ZENO'S CRYPTOCURRENCY.

Robert Reich sees two information technology bubbles.  First up, artificial intelligence.  "[It] is worrisome enough as is — its insatiable thirst for energy and water, its capacities to override the wishes of human beings, its potential to destroy the planet." Think about HAL 9000.  Then the crypto-currencies.  "It’s growing because investors believe other investors will keep buying it."  Tyler "Zero Hedge" Durden, who differs with the diminutive former labor secretary on many other things, also raises the possibility of such bubbles.

Every bubble has a story at its core. In 1999, that story was the internet: a transformational technology that would reshape commerce, communications, and culture. Investors saw the future, bid prices into the stratosphere, and assumed profits would inevitably follow. In 2025, the story is artificial intelligence, which carries the same irresistible promise of reshaping industries, creating productivity booms, and unlocking new frontiers. The parallels are hard to miss, along with the current price action.

Both posts note people living near existing or proposed server centers objecting to their presence.

NPR on Tuesday similarly reported that fights over data center construction are happening nationwide, as residents who live near proposed construction sites have expressed concerns about the amount of water and electricity they will consume at the expense of local communities.

“A typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households, and the largest under development will consume 20 times more,” NPRexplained, citing a report from the International Energy Agency. “They also suck up billions of gallons of water for systems to keep all that computer hardware cool.”

Data centers’ massive water use has been a consistent concern across the US. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday that residents of the township of East Vincent, Pennsylvania have seen their wells dry up recently, and they are worried that a proposed data center would significantly exacerbate water shortages.

This is what has been happening in Mansfield, Georgia, a community that for years has experienced problems with its water supply ever since tech giant Meta began building a data center there in 2018.

I'm not sure how much of that processing power is going to solving the problems of the world, and how much is going to solving for the next tranche of cryptocurrency.  Recall that Bitcoin credibly committed itself to offering a finite number of coins, which are mined electronically, in the early days you'd have people leasing some of the processor power on networked desktop computers in return for a piece of the action; these days it's probably a task for a data center with lots of calculating power.

The mining of any crypto-currency is a canonical example of rent dissipation.  At any time there are several mining operations at work attempting to settle the next hash.  "It takes trillions of attempts for the network of miners to find the solution."  And if the algorithm that creates the next coin raises the level of difficulty as the number of remaining coins dwindle, why, we're in Zeno's world, where you can get halfway to the final coin, and halfway again, and half of that halfway, ad infinitum, where the total value of the computing power far exceeds the value to be set free, and yet, the race to create the next coin might go on, despite Bitcoin's creators making the challenge more difficult over time.  "Due to the halving process and increasing prices, miners want to receive as many bitcoins as possible because the supply of new coins is slowly dwindling. Sometime around 2140, no more new bitcoins will be created."

WHAT'S NEXT, MORE BONUS ARMIES FOR HOLDING AFRICA?

When you start fretting about the Mercator Projection, you've probably run out of Third World Problems, or perhaps, you'd rather not deal.  "African Union Wants End to Mercator Projection Map Use Over 'Disinformation'."  For the reasons that anyone with a smattering of geographical knowledge is long familiar with.

“It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” AU Commission deputy chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with over a billion people. The AU has 55 member states.

Such stereotypes influence media, education and policy, she said.

Criticism of the Mercator map is not new, but the ‘Correct The Map’ campaign led by advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa has revived the debate, urging organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which tries to reflect countries’ true sizes.

“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, said. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

Fara Ndiaye, co-founder of Speak Up Africa, said the Mercator affected Africans’ identity and pride, especially children who might encounter it early in school.

It's not that other projections haven't existed.  My grade school political geography book used the Goode homolosine projection with interruptions in the oceans to keep the major land masses together.  The front matter in that book explained the construction of the map as comparable to peeling an orange and keeping the skin flat.  It would not be useful as a map to plot a course from Alameda to Hong Kong by way of Midway, Wake, and Manila.  "On a Mercator projection, a meridian bears true (rather than magnetic) north and it appears as a straight line. On other projections, straight lines pose challenges, particularly where variation of longitude is concerned."  A Mercator projection preserves the orthogonality of east-west and north-south, at the expense of distortion of space away from the equator.  South America and Africa straddle the equator, thus their projection is to a smaller scale than Greenland or Australia.

THEORRHEA WORKS AGAINST SOCIAL SCIENCE.

Reason's "Tom Lehrer Satirized the National Security State From the Inside" connects the dots between Mr Lehrer's work with the National Security Agency and a number of his songs, including Poisoning the Pigeons in the Park.  (And maybe we'll throw in a squirrel or two ...)

The article also includes Mr Lehrer performing a number of songs making fun of mathematics, and social scientists "in an ivory steeple ... away from people ... and do really great tricks ... in the name of sociology."

That performance took place sometime in 1997, as the references to Ted Kaczynski and Andrew Wiles confirm, in a mathematics classroom probably somewhere on the west coast: alas, the resolution isn't quite good enough to illustrate his scribbling of the word "minimum" in the style of a Fourier transformation!  Although Mr Lehrer might have cracked wise about "sliding down the razor blade of life," he stayed in good humor well after he stopped performing.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DOING WHAT THEY DO.

The past few days have brought some interesting weather to Cold Spring Shops headquarters.  A major storm system has been crossing the United States, and on Friday night there were squall lines doing what they do from the Cities all the way to the Gulf Coast.  The line was still strong enough after dark that the storm prediction folks essentially issued a tornado warning along a line from Aurora to Elgin moving east into Chicago.

The consensus forecast was blustery with a risk of severe thunderstorms on Friday, strong winds but no rain or snow on Saturday, and a dusting of snow on Sunday.  Extrapolation models have margins of error.

That's the "dusting" of snow at Cold Spring Shops headquarters on Sunday morning. To the north, Rockford and Belvidere were reporting heavy snow, and it continued for some time east to Marengo and essentially all along Interstate 43 into the southwest suburbs of Milwaukee, with several roads closed account crashes in white-out conditions, and a few neighborhoods reported six inches of snow, which might have been the most snow received in one storm all winter.  None of the forecast models could parse the atmosphere finely enough to capture the locally energetic snow squalls.  "It's a non-trivial avoidable error: are there no tornadoes, one tornado, or several tornadoes in two counties of Iowa, which is one way of thinking about a cell a hundred kilometers on a side and however high the atmosphere is?"  (The area I described is slightly smaller than that 10K km² cell in a forecast model.)

By Monday, the clouds had cleared and the just-past full moon had an opportunity to give that luster of midday until sunrise.

The snow has since melted away, except in the more shaded areas.  This being the time for the equinox, the unsettled weather will continue, with warmth on offer Tuesday and another risk of snow Wednesday into Thursday.

3.14 & 16h

"Steer course two-four-zero" sounds better than "Make your course 1.5π."  That noted, all those radians that crop up in trigonometry do so because the formulas work out that way, even though I have not stumbled across an intuitive way to introduce the concept of radians and then the formulae.

That noted, this weekend brings Selection Sunday, and perhaps something transcendentally tasty is in order.

The Chicago O Scale show will be the following weekend.

CREATE A MIDDLE, SLEEP WITH THE FISHES.

Whenever there is an arbitrage opportunity, there will be people who discover it and act on it.  Sports betting, where for one reason or another, the point spread and all the other derivative securities such as over-under, total points, what have you can change from when betting opens until the game starts.

Middling isn’t a term that many who are new sports betting are familiar with. The opportunity to middle a game is when a point spread or total moves in a game. Bettors can middle a bet when a wager is placed on different sides of the same game.

One of the reasons new sports bettors aren’t familiar with middling is because it involves multiple wagers on a game. Most new bettors are usually just interested in wagering once on a game. A middle opportunity often presents itself to bettors at different times of the week leading up to a game.

Sportsbook operators are very aware that there are bettors looking to middle a game. They often have this in mind when setting and moving lines during the week. That said, there are still middle opportunities.

If the book is being run by the local don, it's not a friendly act to create a middle, if I remember my crime novels correctly.

The Michigan lottery might be a different story.

In 2003, an unusual lottery game, Winfall, was released.

The premise was simple:

• Pick six numbers between 1 and 49

• If you guessed two, three, four, or five numbers, you get a prize in increasing amounts.

• Guess six, you win the $2 million minimum.

If nobody won, the lottery purse went up each week. After 6 weeks, or when the jackpot hit the $5M dollar cap, they did a “Roll Down”.  A Roll Down occurs when winnings are spread downwards to lower tier winners, at 5, 4, and 3 level matches.

The State Lottery made a mistake in all this. They listed the odds of winning that was associated with each combination of numbers.

The math explanation could fill an article itself. But the short version, [party store owner and mathematician Jerry Selbee] studied those winning odds, and the timing of those Roll Downs. He realized that, statistically, a single one dollar lottery ticket was worth more than one dollar in those final weeks.

What happened next might be why the Department of Government Efficiency is so popular.

[Mr Selbee] knew he’d need to bet big to create a justifiable margin. In his first attempt, he bought $2,000 in tickets, which was an uncomfortably large sum for a man who never gambled.

He ended up losing $50. He reckoned this was bad luck and within the margin of error and realized he needed to wager more.

Three months later, the next rolldown was announced. He buys a full $8,000 in tickets. His winnings total $15,700, leaving him a $7,700 profit. From here, things escalated.

Each week his bets soared higher and higher. Some weeks, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. The game required you buy the tickets in person. So when a rolldown was coming, he and his wife split up into two cars and hit countless convenience stores across the state.

The government, with its usual iceberg reaction time, didn’t notice anything strange. The Selbees continued this mission for a full decade without the state noticing. Eventually, a group of students at MIT noticed a flaw in the math too, and started buying up tickets.

And somebody forgot the most important thing to do when you have a good thing going, which is to keep still.  Only after a newspaper broke a story did the Michigan Lottery shut down this game.  "No law was ever broken. A clever man, with a mathematical curiosity, spotted a hole and stepped through it."  And nobody went to lunch at the Fox and Hounds in Bloomfield and was never seen again.

EXISTENCE EXISTS.

If the known universe as we understand it began with a Big Bang, what was before that?

There is no way of knowing that, although the opportunities for speculation, whether aided by prayer or by strong drink, proliferate.

Perhaps, particularly as very deep space anomalies come to the attention of researchers, and researchers look for ways to model those refractory phenomena, perhaps the good old principle of parsimony is there, deep in the math.  "What if the universe had no beginning?"

In the realm of physics, quantum mechanics and general relativity have provided powerful frameworks for understanding the universe. However, these theories have limitations—particularly when describing extreme conditions, like those at the centers of black holes or the beginning of the universe, where gravity becomes extremely strong. Traditional physics considers space and time as continuous, allowing for the possibility of infinitely small points. This, however, leads to mathematical breakdowns at singularities like the Big Bang, where traditional equations produce infinite densities and fail to work.

That's going to be interesting, a theory that squares the existence of black holes, for which we have evidence, with a universe that has always existed, with hints of something much like a big bang.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

We'll start with some common sense as the fall semester will soon start.  "Economics is all about understanding the reality of trade-offs, but politics is primarily about ignoring or concealing these realities." Conceal them at your peril. “Cold swimming pools, chillier offices, and shorter showers are the new normal for Europeans.”

The political season continues to offer comic relief.  "In the Soviet Union, the future was always written, but it’s the past that kept changing."  It's harder to memory-hole unpleasant facts these days.  "In the pre-Internet 20th century, elites could manage the information flow. In the 21st century, they can no longer do so."  Truth will out.  "The media or pundits carrying partisan water for any politician are having their buckets shot full of holes by hundreds of thousands of social media users, who, whether biased or calling it like they see it, are a major part of the news media landscape now."

Democrats are weird.  Anything normal is bad.  Gulp.  "Democrats seem content to remain a Brahmin Left party and see how things work out."  Brahmin bosses, that is.  "The powerbrokers anointed Vice President Harris as nominee, just as they had anointed Biden earlier. Voters were not allowed to have a say, which is ironic since the party is named after democracy itself."  Biden was muscled out, and it was for Our Own Good.  "Claiming Trump would smash norms, they smashed norms."  The current system is lawless.

The ongoing brat fry might disappoint.  "The narrative surrounding Harris' candidacy has largely centered on what she represents demographically, rather than critically examining her track record, policy proposals, or how she might address the pressing issues facing the nation. This imbalance in coverage risks further entrenching a political culture that prioritizes optics over genuine progress."  That is, for arbitrary values of progress.  "The Biden-Harris legacy she has to defend is crippling inflation and 10 million-plus illegal migrants, including terrorists and sexual predators.  Add in her radical leftist past and it’s a recipe for a rout."  Attack her records, her remarks, and her inexperience.  And give her a beer with that brat.  "Too many Americans know Kamala Harris as a hee-hawing ninny with a predilection for hapless Marxist fantasies."

Focus, though, on the prize.  "The thought of a Kamala Harris presidency is truly the stuff of nightmares. It will be a Pandora's box of leftist ills unleashed upon the Republic that will all but guarantee its demise."  It is still possible to lose this election.  Focus.  "The years that Biden and Harris have been in charge of the executive branch have been stained with inflation, waste, incompetence, a tornado of illegal immigration, a series of crises abroad, and, most recently, a dastardly conspiracy to cover up the president’s senility."

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

LCM(13,17) = 221.

For the first time in 221 years, two broods of periodic cicadas will emerge, early in the summer.

In 2024, the Midwest is expected to see the result of two cicada broods in the Spring: one that comes out every 13 years and another every 17 years.

The two broods, Brood XIX and Brood XIII last emerged simultaneously in 1803.

Amazing how that math works, isn't it?  "Central Illinois is expected to be an overlap zone of cicada activity as both Brood XIX and Brood XIII are expected to emerge in the billions."  Those broods generally hatch early in summer, whilst the annual cicadas show up during the dog days.  As will, the way Lotke and Volterra demonstrated, the annual cicada's predators.

[O]ne critter who will miss all the action is the insects’ natural enemy: the large Cicada Killer Wasp.

The cicada killer is one of the largest wasps in the United States, with females growing to a size of 2 inches in length.

The females have stingers their male counterparts lack. They use this stinger to sting and paralyze cicadas with their venom. Then, they carry the helpless insects back to their burrow and lay their eggs among their bodies, according to The Smithsonian.

The paralyzed cicadas remain alive to feed the emerging young.

Entomologists suggest that the long-period cicadas demonstrate a survival strategy expressed in prime-number years as it's harder for a long-lived (by insect standards) predator to crack that code.  I wonder if the life cycles of the annual cicadas and the large wasps also reflect those dynamics.  No doubt any early-hatching predator wasps stumbling across some of those big thirteen or seventeen year cicadas will have a feast for their spawn.  The spawn, growing to maturity, will be disappointed.

We'll see what sort of summer din manifests itself here; there are plenty of tree frogs and the annual cicadas sounding off in August.

MAKE ME SOME PI(E).

The swap meet season is not yet finished, meaning there are other things to do during the sixteenth hour the way the Pi Day obsessives like to celebrate it.

Just contemplate something transcendentally tasty.

Usually the Big Dance is under way by now, this year, though, the selection show is Sunday.  Pizza and green beer, perhaps?

SHOULDN'T FORECAST ERRORS BE POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE?

Extrapolation models built to push policies, whether with respect to climate or to contagion, are useless.  How much more evidence must John Hinderaker offer before advocates of extrapolation models shut up?

It should not need to be said that a model is not evidence of anything. A model is a hypothesis. Like any scientific hypothesis, it is confirmed or refuted by observation. A model that is refuted by observation is worthless. And yet, these models, which have repeatedly been shown to be wrong, are the basis for enormously destructive policies that have been adopted across much of the western world.

Someone pointed out with respect to these data–I would credit him, but I can’t now find the reference–that if it were simply a matter of mathematical errors or inconsistencies, one would expect some models to err on the “hot side” and others on the “cold side” of actual observations. But that isn’t the case: all of the models run hot. That suggest that global warming alarmism is a political, not a scientific, movement.

It is, because pushing frightening things, whether it's body odor, a lack of sex appeal, or The End of The World As We Know It, pays off, until it doesn't.  Perhaps after fifty to sixty years of this sort of doomsaying, while the Worst Case Scenarios of a quarter century ago have not transpired, enough of us have accumulated sufficient evidence to undermine the doomsayers with mockery.

SIX DEGREES OF EMERGENCE.

Why does the six degrees of separation hypothesis hold up?

A recent paper published in Physical Review X by researchers from Israel, Spain, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and Chile sheds light on the mechanism behind this phenomenon. It all comes down to human behavior and the constant balance between the costs and benefits of establishing new social ties.

If we might be able to understand all of the universe as a mathematical expression, should it come as any surprise that there isn't a mathematical economics of the universe?

People naturally seek prominence in social networks, strategically choosing connections that place them in central positions. However, forging new friendships requires effort and maintenance, which comes with a cost. So, individuals in social networks constantly play the cost-benefit game, breaking old ties and forming new ones to achieve an equilibrium that balances their desire for prominence and their limited social budget.

“When we did the math, we discovered an amazing result: this process always ends with social paths centered around the number six. Each individual acts independently without knowing the network as a whole, yet this self-driven game shapes the structure of the entire network, leading to the small world phenomenon and the recurring pattern of six degrees,” lead author Baruch Barzel, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, explains in a statement.

I bet when you look more carefully at the network, you're going to see a power rule in the links to some nodes.

Betweenness centrality essentially gauges how essential a node (or person) is in facilitating connections between other nodes. Imagine you’re friends with both a filmmaker and a film critic you’re central in the connection between these two people. The study adds an innovative twist to this measure by considering the “length” of the path through which an individual connects others, thereby giving a weighted importance to more direct connections.

‘Within this game, every agent continually evaluates whether forming new connections will improve their network influence or if maintaining existing connections is more beneficial. They make these decisions based on a balance between the associated costs and the projected benefits, aiming to maximize their influence within the network.

There might be strategies to add or remove people from your Rolodex, er, network, and yet, there is logic to the emergence of those six degrees.

When the game reaches a point where no individual has anything to gain by changing their existing connections—a situation known as Nash equilibrium—the resulting network naturally exhibits the characteristic of six degrees of separation. This means that any two people in the network could be connected through six or fewer intermediaries, offering a solid explanation for the phenomenon that has intrigued social scientists and the general public alike.

A Nash equilibrium is not necessarily a Pareto optimum, and yet, interacting agents are being led as if by an invisible hand into a network with those six degrees of separation.

STINKING HIPPIES ARE AN EMERGENT EQUILIBRIUM.

Saturday's Power Line "Week in Pictures" included among the amusing headlines, "Mathematics explains why non-conformists always end up looking alike."  Look, you can do sensitivity analysis with evolutionary game theory, but logic and proportion feed your head, even if you've had some kind of mushroom.

While anti-conformists may, at first, succeed in devising their own personal brand of sartorial rebelliousness, it’s followed by an inevitable, if unintentional, synchronization around a single appearance. [Brandeis mathematician Jonathan] Touboul’s study looks at how such people seem to inevitably become synchronized. He suspects that a major influence on the way it happens may be the speed of propagation of styles through a culture.

Not everyone learns about or adopts new styles in the same way. Some follow fashion closely, some go by word of mouth, and some emulate the appearance of well-known individuals they admire. In the latter case, the tipping-point may occur after a mutually-revered celebrity adopts a new fashion.

The modelling is simple enough (two types of individuals, different speeds of propagation of a fashion choice, or a perception that stocks are trading at unsustainably high or unsustainably low price) and yet the outcomes are deterministic chaos.

In Touboul’s simple model, one is either a member of the mainstream or a hipster (no snarky connotation intended), and he explores different hipster-to-mainstream ratios. He also factors in different amounts of time it might take a hipster to detect a new style and respond to it.

Simple as his model is, Touboul has found that experimenting with those two factors produces a surprisingly complex set of behaviors, though synchronization always occurs. Even when he revises his model to allow for more than two types of people, synchronization still occurs.

Often, of course, roles may swap when there are so many hipsters that they become the mainstream. “For example,” says Touboul, “if a majority of individuals shave their beard, then most hipsters will want to grow a beard, and if this trend propagates to a majority of the population, it will lead to new, synchronized, switch to shaving.” An odd sudden swap occurs when the number of mainstreamers and hipsters is roughly equal — everybody winds up switching together between different trends.

The work appears to be in the simulation stage, calibration of the dynamics to such phenomena as long hair or tattoos or skirt lengths, let alone testable implications that might be susceptible to statistical analysis are for future research.

It's likely asking too much at this stage of modelling to capture whether mutations in style or behavior confer evolutionary advantage on adopters of them.

TAKE THAT FAST TRACK TO NUMERACY.

I first flagged Tom Knighton's "If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should" as a candidate Friday short take, but for the material I've been noting, for years, about how equity as dumbing down the curriculum is an evolutionary dead end.  Let's start with Mr Knighton's elaboration.

So rather than step up their efforts to make sure more black and Latino students can get into the accelerated classes, they just did away with them entirely.

Now, I get being cautious about the message you provide kids. They pick up plenty and you don’t want them getting the wrong idea.

Yet what Fernandez has basically said is, “There’s no way you’ll make it in these advanced classes, so we’re just going to make them go away.” There doesn’t appear to have been any effort to address the disparity by raising up those who fall short, only by eliminating the need.

It’s downright pathetic.

It’s also how equity in education tends to play out. It’s never addressed by trying to get black and Hispanic students up to the point where they’re on par with white and Asian kids in a situation like this, it’s simply eliminating the advanced class itself so that the disparity just doesn’t matter.

It’s laziness on the part of the teachers and administrators.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s incredibly difficult to find something that would raise all those kids to that level, especially over the span of the few years a middle school has them.

We'll get to the good news, at the end, that raising kids to higher levels is possible.

Let me first note that recognizing the students who have high academic ability is a more desirable course than throwing them in with the general population.  "None of the above is likely to sit well with the so-called progressives and all their feel-good fads that do nothing to inculcate bourgeois habits in feral youth, whilst killing ambition among young people not yet feral."

A COMMUNIST FAIRY TALE.

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then — though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my paperback edition adds, "A hammer and sickle version of Altman's Nashville, with central committees replacing country music."  There's even a web site providing all sorts of contextual material, should you be so inclined.

I'm going to limit Book Review N^o. 9 to the material I'm more conversant with, namely mathematical economics and political economy, and keep still about the forms of fiction.  When it comes to fiction, give me readable stuff with clear outcomes.  Division of labor is a useful thing, which the characters real and imagined in Red Plenty never could wrap their minds around.  My Chicago Boyz colleague David Foster posted a review a few years ago that fleshes out some of the details, and introduces the dramatis personae.  In the comments are links to all sorts of observations from diverse perspectives, and many of those are technically daunting.

SEX IS BINARY.

Dear reader, we begin thus.  "Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?"  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up.

In my first year of graduate school at Rutgers, I attended a colloquium designed to forge connections between the cultural and biological wings of the anthropology department. It was the early 2000s, and anthropology departments across the country were splitting across disciplinary lines. These lectures would be a last, and ultimately futile, attempt to build interdisciplinary links between these increasingly hostile factions at Rutgers; it was like trying to establish common research goals for the math and art departments.

This time, it was the turn of the biological anthropologists, and the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a lecture for which he was uniquely qualified — infanticide in Chacma baboons. Much of the talk was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior and when it was time for questions the hand of the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, shot up and demanded to know “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” I didn’t know it at the time but looking back I see that this was the beginning of a broad anti-science movement that has enveloped nearly all the social sciences and distorted public understanding of basic biology. The assumption that sex is an arbitrary category is no longer confined to the backwaters of cultural anthropology departments, and the willful ignorance of what sex is has permeated both academia and public discussion of the topic.

That's Skeptic contributor Robert Lynch, and he continues at some length.  The problem might be as simple as a word, "gender," being overused.  When I started messing about with the National Income and Product Accounts and something called "quality of labor," there was a five-way taxonomy of occupations, by sex, age, education, experience, and nature of the work.  Open any economics journal these days, and you see references to "gender," which might be current noodling in the income accounts, or it might be something from the culture studies crowd, and it's likely that saying "quality of labor" gets you scolded.