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From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Lost Edisons
by Steve Sailer
December 06, 2017Should white men be blamed or thanked for inventing most of the technology that makes our lives better?
A new study by Stanford economist Raj Chetty exploiting his unique access to your old 1040 tax returns argues that the massive gaps in inventiveness (as measured by patents) seen among the races, the sexes, and the regions of the country represent a tragic case of what he calls “Lost Einsteins: The Innovations We’re Missing”:
High-scoring black kids and Hispanic kids go into innovation at incredibly low rates…. There must be many “lost Einsteins” in those groups—children who appear to have been similarly able at a young age to their white and Asian peers but who never got a chance to deploy their skills.
By the way, it’s unclear why Chetty’s study of inventors is entitled “Lost Einsteins” rather than “Lost Edisons.” Chetty, who sometimes seems not all that familiar with his adoptive country, appears to have gotten the European scientific theorist Albert Einstein (who, although he once worked in a patent office, was not much of an inventor) confused with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (whose name is on 1,093 U.S. patents).
Read the whole thing there.
Here, by the way, are Chetty’s slides, his paper, and an NYT article.
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From a couple of my comments on earlier threads regarding patent innovation at the global level.
https://www.ft.com/content/dbb3bc26-413b-11e7-9d56-25f963e998b2
At a global level, engineering and technology seems to mostly be California versus East Asia, with the former skewed towards software and the latter towards hardware. Of course, at many of the top companies in Silicon Valley, anywhere between 30-50% of the workers in technical roles are of East or South Asian descent.
I'd like to see a metric measuring usefulness.
50 years ago this might have been a reasonable metric, but it is not today. A more reasonable approach is to say, "hey, what are the most important inventions of the last X years?" and see where they originated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=zSU5MFPn6Zk
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-europe-lost-its-tech-companies.html
The video above is from a recent Steve Hsu post about the decline of engineering and tech in Europe, in the face of competition from California and East Asia, which between them basically have software and hardware cornered. We generally tend to think of STEM in the aggregate, but when you break out out the TE part from that, it’s pretty amazing how two regions, California and East Asia produce so much of the modern day software and hardware that power our lives.
An HBD meme repeated from time to time is that mathematical ability tends to be highly conducive to value creation, which probably explains why the Japanese for instance are fairly adept at producing things that us Americans want to spend our hard earned money on.
You're probably too young to remember, but the Asian thing used to be their amazing business management skills rather than their amazing innovative ability. That was always a lie. Japanese productivity was/is based on unpaid work done by company employees. Long hours and sacrifice in return for scraping ahead of the next guy. It's the same today in Asia and in SF.
The question you ought to be asking yourself isn't why Asia is so great but why Europeans stopped trying to compete. Once you figure out the answer, it'll give you a different perspective on "value creation."Replies: @Anonymous
Come on, everyone knows Edison was a predator who capitalised on real inventors inventions. Ask the descendants of N. Tesla.
Tesla’s whole career wasn’t nearly as impactful as, say, the phonograph, to name just one Edison invention.
Also, Tesla was wrong and Edison was right. Direct current is superior to alternating current in virtually every way (including and especially over long distance).
AC makes the grid much harder/impossible to significantly upgrade, made the task of rural electrification much more difficult, is the reason it’s difficult or impossible to transmit across national borders, and, ironically, is a major source of cost and complexity in renewable energy and electric cars.
Every time you plug in an applicance with a bulky/heavy brick on the power cord, make sure to thank Mr. Tesla.Replies: @James Speaks, @Jack D, @Thirdeye
Anybody remember The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind? Short recap: a kid in Africa went to the local library and figured out how to build a functioning windmill generator out of spare parts. Well done, African kid. But for a while, the western media acted like this guy had discovered cold fusion. I first saw him being groveled at by Jon Stewart. He went on to do a TED talk and got a free ride to Dartmouth.
Building a windmill is a cool project for a kid to do, but it’s been done before, to put it mildly.
https://www.snopes.com/william-kamkwamba/
Acquaintances traveling Africa report a mixed bag: they'll engage someone for a repair which gets done with surprising industry and innovation, but local machinery languishes for want of simple repairs.
There are bright, able Blacks. I went to school with them. I’ve worked for them.
My elementary school was 30% Black; my high school 70% Black. A bright, able White kid only has to avoid the ne’er-do-well “dysfunctional tenth” among Whites to think about where his talents lie and what his adult future might be. A bright, able Black kid has to avoid the ne’er-do-well “dysfunctional duo-quintile” among Blacks.
Chetty’s “never got a chance to deploy their skills” is risible, dangerous bullpuckey. Has this slob not noticed the zillions spent by a feckless White America on proving the equalitarian fantasy?
Since we’re on the topic of engineering and technology, I wonder if Raj Chetty is aware of the rise of Shenzhen as the Silicon Valley of hardware, which seems to me to be potentially one of the major transformative developments of the 21st century, akin to how the Japanese suddenly seemed to rise up the ranks of industry post World War 2, but on a much larger scale potentially given China’s significantly larger population.
The above documentary from last year provides a fairly interesting glimpse into the burgeoning hustle and bustle that is Shenzhen. Given the increasingly global society we live in, and as Steve alluded to in his article about increasing competition from Asian immigrants, the problem of trying to funnel more black and Hispanics kids into tech and engineering given both domestic competition from East Asian Americans as well as the rise of places such as Shenzhen seems somewhat Utopian.
As someone pointed out in an earlier thread on SAT math scores, Asian Americans are slightly more likely to score above a 700 on the SAT math than African Americans are likely to score above a 500. This delta could very well be even higher once you disaggregate East Asians from South and Southeast Asians!
My guess is that although smart whites from the middle of nowhere in the US are overlooked at times, America as a whole by virtue of obviously being significantly ahead in its developmental curve relative to China probably does a fairly well job of human capital utilization. If we broaden the analysis that Steve and Raj seem to be doing to the global level, one could argue that funneling quantitatively adept Chinese kids into the growing tech ecosystems in places like Shenzhen represents significant potential value add for our global society at large!
Please immediately link a document that explicitly provides the data you're citing or don't make such ignorant comments again.
(That said the estimate you stated could be close to true)
I doubt you're an employee of the CollegeBoard.
As Steve has noticed, Chetty’s previous studies have tended to seem dense and unobservant but more or less on the right track; this one just seems wrong headed and destructive.
The way they identify high scoring students (to make the claim that high achieving blacks and women are underrepresented) is just by taking the top 5 percent of scorers on the 3rd grade standardized math test. That is…not a good way of identifying really smart kids.
The study of mathematically precocious youth took kids who scored in the top 3% in 7th grade (by which time IQs are much more stable and predictive of adult ability) and then gave them the SAT. The kids in the top quartile on the SAT were much more likely to get parents later on than the kids in the bottom quartile (out of the top 3% kids, so everyone was pretty smart.) In other words, there’s a big difference between a kid who is in the top 0.75% in math ability in 7th grade and kid who is just in the top 3%, in terms of whether they get a patent eventually or become a published scientist or whatever. But you can’t get a nice diverse group of kids who score in the top 0.75% in 7th grade on a well designed test the way you can for the top 5% in 3rd grade on a really low reliability test.
There’s also the issue of course of mechanical and spatial abilities that are correlated with IQ but aren’t being directly measured, but probably make a difference for inventiveness. But those abilities probably are even more undiverse than math, given everything we know about the world. Tinkering around in your basement and building stuff is pretty much the most white guy thing in the world.
Tired of the propaganda, Sailer. Your worship of the patent is ridiculous. Patents are ideas that don’t all have equal value neither do they all get utilized.
Anyway, technology is advancing at a frantic pace to drive consumption rather than to meet need. Haven’t you noticed that most people use innovation in a maladaptive way? Haven’t you noticed the obese and bleary-eyed tech zombies out there? Wouldn’t it be more innovative to coordinate the harmonious, efficacious use of innovation?
Quality of life is in decline as is intellectual development in any field that doesn’t drive innovative profit making. And you, Sailer, are merely a drone, mindlessly driving us ever closer to techtastrophy!
Case in point: Haven’t those robotic Japanese patent-holders stopped breeding?
Chetty’s Urban Achievers theory is absurd on its face, although even if one does buy into it wholeheartedly it implicitly includes the completely damning implication that blacks and Latino are just not very good at parenting or as educators.
And as others have noted, societies where latinos and those of African descent make up the majority aren’t exactly killing it on the innovation front either for some reason. The Atlantic piece on this was insanely bad and relies entirely on the Magic Dirt theory rather than considering that people in upper income households are most likely smarter and produce smarter kids than those in the bottom half, thereby providing a pretty easy way to understand the ‘innovation gap.’
I think he’s very clever- its filled with diversity Pokemon points. If only whitey didn’t keep minorities down, we’d have black ‘Michael Jordan” level” inventors. I can see the guest show host, corporate diversity speaking fees and genius grants rolling in now.
As isteve readers have noticed, the left/globalists care little about reality. The real important thing is to blast their ‘truths’ through the megaphone.
Sad thing is it continues to work.
Yeah Chetty’s argument might seem superficially interesting, given that he argues even when you adjust for math scores, there are significant racial or socioeconomic disparities, but I agree that his thresholds are too low. In the NYT article, for socioeconomic class and gender he uses top 5% as the cutoff for high math scores and for race he uses top 10%. Also as you point out the relatively young age at which these kids are tests also affects the reliability of the test results.
Here’s a Steve Hsu post addressing the Study of Mathematically Precocious students you mentioned.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2016/09/smpy-in-nature.html
And from another one of his posts…
The key takeaway is that even within the top 1% of students, there are significant differences in expected life outcomes. Someone at the 99.9th percentile is qualitatively different from someone merely at the 99th percentile and someone at the 99.99th percentile even more different still! Given this fact, to use a 5% or 10% threshold seems fairly naive, but uh of course I’m just an uneducated layman.
Minority brains rotting in the class room.
Weren’t these students already filtered by some threshold on a math test though? If I’m understanding Chetty correctly, he’s arguing that even when you adjust for math scores, there are racial gaps in patent rates. I think the main issue is that of testing students in the 3rd grade and of using relatively low thresholds at 90th or 95 percentile to determine who qualifies as a high math scoring student. I think it’s possible that you may have missed the main thrust of Chetty’s argument here Steve?
The salient point about Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, Elias Howe, Isaac Merritt Singer etc etc – all those men who by native genius, strength of innovation and strength of character made America great, is that they all came from fairly humble stock.
The ‘immigration-in-extremis’ which characterised modern London is part ‘justified’ on the spurious grounds that it ‘increases innovation’.
The high scoring blacks and Hispanics tend to go into industries that allow them to exploit their race for economic gains.
How many blacks/Hispanics are involved in blockchain/Bitcoin/ethereum/etc? Very very few. In fact, I am surprised we haven’t seen the latest flavor of “this is racist because no blacks are in the field of…” articles.
Perhaps, the key features that underlies ‘genius’ in the technological/breakthrough sense of the word are 1/. An insatiable curiosity about the world, and how it works, 2/. An obsessive, single-minded, determined, hard-focussed drive to accomplish your goals.
Both traits were, or are, favoured in white European man.
Nvm, skimmed the paper. Sample of 430,000 NYC school children, out of whom 452 became patented inventors.
That he finds disparities exist even when accounting for math score amongst these students seems superficially interesting, as I stated above, but low threshold and low testing age probably explain some of this I’m assuming.
Although a 3 to 1 ratio for white vs black per capita rates of patenting seems low and may likely be explained by some of the factors you mentioned regarding NYC public schools, the absolute %s are inflated by the fact that blacks and Hispanics make up a larger percentage of the NYC public school pool than they do nationwide. Also from the paper…
I’m sorry. This is just ‘effing stupid.
When i see “Lost Einsteins or Edisons” i think someone is finally talking about something real–the huge loss of talent we’ve had in the Western world because of “the culture” telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to “lean in” or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there’s no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty’s churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting … waiting … waiting … waiting … to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i’d watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.
While this is true, it doesn't seem to have done so much damage to low-fertility Japan and China, but then they do have an extra 5% IQ.
I wonder how much the diversity tax and the post-60s rise in crime has affected the shed-tinkerers of the US and UK? I tend to presume that Steve Jobs didn't have to worry too much about his garage being burgled.
~4 kids, average genotypic IQ ~110- High IQ woman gets married off at relatively young age to middling IQ local man.
~4 kids, average genotypic IQ ~110The new way:High IQ successful professional man marries high IQ successful professional woman from his work/social circle
~1.5 kids, average genotypic IQ ~125Due to the sharp falloff of the bell curve away from the mean values, the latter scenario actually has a higher chance of producing a >140 phenotypic IQ offspring.The new way also reduces the average IQ society-wide because everyone else can do the Idiocracy thing, but as I said, if the criterion is solely which is better at producing geniuses, then what we have now is better.
"If all those super-smart Jews had lived, we'd be building shopping malls on Alpha Centauri right now!"
And Goldman Sachs would be doing even better, no doubt.
Using Edison in this article instead of a far more accomplished inventor like Nikola Tesla is not that different from Google returning mostly black inventors when one types in American inventors.
Really, the online Tesla cult is a very silly business....Replies: @Steve Sailer
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
Read the actual argument Chetty makes. He argues that even when you account for math score, blacks and Hispanics are under-represented. Of course, his sample of 430,000 NYC public school students probably isn’t representative of the country at large, 3rd grade test scores probably aren’t super reliable compared to testing at later ages, and his threshold of top 10% when looking at race probably isn’t fine grained enough. That SMPY found clear differences in life outcome even within the top 1% of scorers suggests that using a threshold of top 10% is probably a bit naive.
And yes, the 3rd grade math is a poor indicator. A top 10% threshold is a mediocre threshold.
But my main point is just that it's the same old same old HBD unaware tripe. There are big differences between people even beyond math scores. Male\female personality differences and the innovation gap that will obviously go with them is so blatantly obvious that we now have to beat people over the head not to notice it. (And for the record AnotherMom has her own individual patents, while my patents are all owned by my former software company employer.) There are racial differences in personality and creativity beyond IQ and even math IQ.
Fundamentally if we want innovation--like so many other nice things--we should stop obsessing over why the non-innovative are not innovating and instead stop the campaign against the innovative actually breeding and forming the next generation.
It is another instance of taking data and twisting the results to serve an anti-American agenda.
Einstein was in fact an inventor although obviously not as prolific as Edison.
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
“Einstein” and not “Edison” is sort of the modern day synonym for “genius” – people say “He’s real Einsten” . No one says “he’s a real Edison” .
Einstein invented many concepts, incl an explanation for specific heat, the photoelectric effect, an explanation for the E=mc^2 term (which was known but not considered relevant), and, oh yes, the notion that time is not constant.
He had extensive experience in his father's and uncle's electromechanical mfg plant, and possibly invented many physical things that are lost to the ages.Replies: @dearieme
Also interesting is the Leo Szilard signature. What future Manhattan project whizzes did in their spare time? If all those resources, human and other, hadn't been needed to blow shit up, we'd all be driving Mr.Fusion flying cars by now.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/leo-szilardReplies: @Jack D
no, that was invented by two Swedish college kids (Von Platen and Munters) as a class assignment in 1920. See US patent 1609334
Not only that, but their apparatus was actually only a refinement on the Edmond Carré invention of 1850, which did require moving pumps and valves. They added hydrogen gas.
Not only that, but Carre's machine (admittedly the first to be PRACTICAL for producing commercial refrigeration, see US Patent 30,201), was not really new, either. British beer brewers were doing it in ther prototyping workshops, in the early 1820's. Carre introduced the use of ammonia, which your RV reefer of today, still uses. Carre's machine was producing hundreds and hundreds of pounds per day.
A Scotsman came up with the seminal lab demonstration in the 1750's
The real lost Einsteins and lost Edisons are the boys who are being systematically forced out of math and science by female teachers who are determined to make sure that at least half of the students to get good grades are girls.
After my son had spent a semester in the sixth grade, I was told that he was a “C” student in math. This seemed unlikely to me, so I arranged to meet the teacher. Oh, it’s true, she assured me; she said that she divided the grade into tests, homework and work done in class, and my poor son was a “C” student in every area.
So, I asked her to describe a typical test. “Well,” she said, “the students have to solve 30-35 problems.” And how many problems does my son solve correctly? I asked. “Oh, he gets all the answers correct,” she replied.
Full stop.
So how does he get a “C”? “Well, you see, he needs to show his work.” (It’s a penmanship exercise.)
And what about homework? “Well, he gives correct answers, but he needs to keep his homework in a neat notebook, with a table of contents.” (Clerical task.)
And what about in class work? “Well, your son seems to spend a lot of time looking out the window; he doesn’t listen after the first time I explain something.” (Failure to worship female teacher with full attention, and properly socialize with other students.)
Anyway, long story short, my son is now working on his math PhD, having been admitted to both the #1 and #2 grad schools in the world.
How many other boys have been told by female teachers that they just don’t have what it takes to succeed in math, like good penmanship and good clerical skills and good social skills? How many lost Einsteins and Edisons are there?
"The real lost Einsteins and lost Edisons are the boys who are being systematically forced out of math and science by female teachers who are determined to make sure that at least half of the students to get good grades are girls."
My unconfirmed suspicion for years has been that male students are steered away from STEM majors, and women are being steered toward STEM majors at my local Podunk Tech. I would not have guessed dubious grading practices as early as grade school to accomplish the same thing.
Other candidates for "lost Einsteins and lost Edisons" may be the remnant of talented White kids in majority Black schools who succumb to the dysfunctionality of much of Black culture.
What can you expect from someone recently washed up upon our shores. Frenetic Chetty Bank Bank is about making bank in the USA economic zone where he currently squats. Check out his resume. He moves from East Coast university to West Coast university and back every three years.
The unpleasant truths here are his own.
http://www.rajchetty.com/chettyfiles/cv.pdf
Wha? via wiki
George Mason University economist Tyler (let them eat beans and dhal) Cowen has described Chetty as “the single most influential economist in the world today.”[15]
The way they identify high scoring students (to make the claim that high achieving blacks and women are underrepresented) is just by taking the top 5 percent of scorers on the 3rd grade standardized math test. That is...not a good way of identifying really smart kids.
The study of mathematically precocious youth took kids who scored in the top 3% in 7th grade (by which time IQs are much more stable and predictive of adult ability) and then gave them the SAT. The kids in the top quartile on the SAT were much more likely to get parents later on than the kids in the bottom quartile (out of the top 3% kids, so everyone was pretty smart.) In other words, there’s a big difference between a kid who is in the top 0.75% in math ability in 7th grade and kid who is just in the top 3%, in terms of whether they get a patent eventually or become a published scientist or whatever. But you can’t get a nice diverse group of kids who score in the top 0.75% in 7th grade on a well designed test the way you can for the top 5% in 3rd grade on a really low reliability test.
There’s also the issue of course of mechanical and spatial abilities that are correlated with IQ but aren’t being directly measured, but probably make a difference for inventiveness. But those abilities probably are even more undiverse than math, given everything we know about the world. Tinkering around in your basement and building stuff is pretty much the most white guy thing in the world.Replies: @Jack D, @Chebyshev
Of course, the kids in SMPY (SAT over 700 before age 13) are overwhelmingly NOT black. Blacks are as rare as hen’s teeth in SMPY (in my daughter’s year I don’t recall seeing any, but as you can imagine, Asians galore). Now you could turn this around and say whitey is doing something to those poor black kids to turn them from 3rd grade geniuses to 7th grade dullards. But the SMPY studies provide a hint – the overwhelming # of SMPY members come from intact families, something in short supply in the black community. It takes a village to raise a child but it takes a mom and a dad to raise a genius.
You have to understand that most patents nowadays are not issued to basement inventors but to big corporations who are accruing patent portfolios as protective armor against patent trolls and as a bargaining chip against other big corporations. Giant Corp A and Giant Corp B fight huge patent wars with each other and either end up making or losing billions on a flukey jury award or else they cross license each other’s patents and keep everyone else out of their industry.
So nowadays patents tell you more about the financial and legal environment of a business than about actual innovation.
Those patents aren't being issued to the little guy - even if they were, their patents could be busted by a well heeled corp. They are being issued to the big guys that are patenting just about everything they and even buying up old patents - that's what Nathan Myhrvold (the smartest guy at Microsoft) has done.
So later down the line when a small company creates something even vaguely like some patent they are holding - they get sued into oblivion or forced to pay a fee to some patent troll corporation.
So as a indicator of innovation, its worthless today.
Take Silicon Valley, it's pretty much ceased being innovative in hardware and is mostly software industry focusing on data mining, spying on people via different mediums(like Amazon's Echo) manipulating people on social media - which they designed to be addictive as crack to younger people. Basically stuff that steals people likes and dislikes, then messes them up.
You could drop a nuke on Silicon Valley today and it wouldn't adversely impact the country at all.
I guess Chetty didn’t see Hidden Figures. Minorities do most of the inventin’, they just never get credit for it until someone makes a movie 50 years later.
Once you separate TE from SM and identify a high-performing TE group, you are no longer distinguishing based on M ability. There are major cultural differences around work between Europe and Asia/SF. Part of the difference is, for example, long working hours in Japan, but part of the difference is European shift away from commercialism to curiosity. No doubt, from your perspective, making marginal improvements in smartphone-related technologies that cause a bunch of Americans to buy new phones is somehow great beyond the bucks flowing into Asian pockets, but I don’t see it so much. The use of the term “value” in “value creation” obscures the rather pedestrian focus of a lot of TE activity.
You’re probably too young to remember, but the Asian thing used to be their amazing business management skills rather than their amazing innovative ability. That was always a lie. Japanese productivity was/is based on unpaid work done by company employees. Long hours and sacrifice in return for scraping ahead of the next guy. It’s the same today in Asia and in SF.
The question you ought to be asking yourself isn’t why Asia is so great but why Europeans stopped trying to compete. Once you figure out the answer, it’ll give you a different perspective on “value creation.”
Some questions really answer themselves, don’t they? Perhaps Prof Chetty likes keeping his job and being widely published.
On a vaguely related note, would it be possible to arrange for Yan Shen and Jack D to get their own room somewhere? Then they could prattle on and on about the astonishing superiority of Asians and Jews, respectively, and the rest of us could enjoy some more productive discussions.
One difference is that Einstein was clearly a natural genius (unless you believe those stories that he stole everything; even then, how did he know what to steal, unless he was that smart?)
Edison is at least as much the product of environment and will, and would have been the first to tell you so. He was a “surprise” baby with an experienced and patient mother who homeschooled him and directed his talents. Much of what he invented was low-hanging fruit conceptually, and completed after marathon efforts of trial-and-error.
He also had the gift of salesmanship.
Tesla was almost certainly much smarter, IQ-wise, than Edison. But Edison was street smart. The same might be said of Salieri and Mozart.
Even if you live in a foreign country awhile, and speak the language fluently it can still be hard to have a real understanding of that country.
If you are a smart black or hispanic then there is non real incentive to be an innovator. You simply get average grades, apply to an investment bank or law firm and get given a massive salary for being window dressing. I don’t think people realise how easy it is for these people.
This is a fantasy.
About 9% of those in management occupations are black. Financial managers are less likely to be black (7%) than managers generally. About 4.4% of all lawyers are black. The black share among physicians is 7.5%, among engineers is 5%, among non-academic psychologists is 5.8%, among computer programmers is 7.6%, and among pharmacists is 10%. Yolanda Washington, Rph, is not paid a 'massive salary' to fill your bloody prescription at Walgreen's.
Michelle Obama was politically connected and working as an apparatchik in industries with large compliance costs. When she left the University of Chicago Hospitals, her position was eliminated.
For a biographical squib which teaches differently see that of Lawrence Mungin (who had a BA and LLB from Harvard). He was paid a handsome, not massive, salary as an associate at the BigLaw firm of Katten Munchin (about $96.000 a year) He ended up practicing solo in South Carolina. Lots of people flame out of Biglaw, so that's not all that surprising. Mungin was unusual in that he was sold on the idea of slapping them with an anti-discrimination suit which had little merit. (There was no question he was a competent lawyer; he was just a bad fit for the firm he was in, and likely for BigLaw generally).
The thing about patronage and privilege is that it's restricted to the few.Replies: @LondonBob
Roseanne Roseannadanna says: Thanks a lot, Jane! A Mr. Richard Feder from Fort Lee, New Jersey sent me this Christmas poem that says…
I say: Thanks a lot, Steve! A Mr. Rag Chetty from New Delhi, India is an anti-White celebrity media whore who wants to pour more non-European foreigners into the United States. Mr. Chetty joins a long list of non-Europeans who are pushed by the corporate media in order to propagandize in favor of anti-White race replacement in the United States.
Rag Chetty knows that the Democrat Party needs to ramp up its White Female Voter numbers to begin the final destruction of the Republican Party. Chetty also knows that anti-White propaganda is the only organizing political propaganda that will motivate the non-European Voter Base of the Democrat Party.
The evil scum who run the Republican Party refuse to explicitly campaign for the White Core American vote. White Female Voters want someone to fight for them and their family and the evil scum in the GOP ruling class are selling multiculturalism and mass immigration.
I will be glad when the pro-plutocrat, pro-transnational corporation Republican Party tax bill is passed. After Trump signs that turkey of a tax bill, then the different factions of the GOP will get back to the GOP Civil War over immigration.
Immigration will either kill the GOP or save the GOP. Got it?
Do Asians invent much? My impression is that they’re rather rigid thinkers and hemmed in by culture and tradition not to be the nail that stands proud of the board. They seem more likely to take something someone else invented and make it better by micro-sizing it, speeding it up, aggregating it into a robot, etc. This is useful and productive but not really inventing/innovating.
I recently bought a Xiaomi air purifying machine (bad air here in Asia). It's from a big Chinese company.
It's awesome! Super cheap, effective and looks good to boot. Can control via wifi and has multiple speed settings.
Great example of what Asians are good at -- taking existing technology, lowing cost, maybe combining tech in new ways.
Nothing in the Xiaomi air purifier was invented in Asia:
- HEPA filter -- nope
- Electric motor -- nope
- Wifi -- nope
- Chip that controls the gadget -- nope
- Plastic -- nope
- Laser for particle sensor -- nope
Make no mistake -- I value Asian contributions to engineering, cost-reduction and miniaturization. But "invention" it ain't.
For example, 91.4 percent of Asian innovators were born outside the United States. Similarly, more than half of the Hispanic population represents immigrants from South and Central America. Four out of six respondents identifying as Black (out of the total respondent pool of 923) were immigrants from Africa.
Sucking up all the talent around the world. Brainissaries. Like how Ottomans took the best of Greek boys.
But Hindus don’t merely mean to serve the empire but takeover from the Anglos and even the Jews.
Thus, the Planet of the Apu. They got the numbers. Close to 1.4 billion, that 400 million is close to the entire population of Angloworld. Hindus means to send them out to colonize Anglo world. And to do this, Hindus are key allies of Jews.
Chetty projects the caste complexity of Indian social system on the US. For him, Estate is the new caste.
If Jews gave us a Talmudized secular culture, Hindus are giving up secular Brahmanic vedas. So, real estate is the new Karma and Dharma. To rise up the rankings in the next generation, you need ‘magic dirt’.
His yammering is more updated theories on reincarnation than innovation.
By the way, Chetty must know that 99% of successful people are applicators and practitioners, not innovators. Those successful Hindi doctors innovated nothing. They just practice medicine.
But I guess writing about invention and ‘Einstein’ is more ‘cool’.
It’s like Gladwell telling us that Africa is filled with untapped Einsteins. For some reason, only whites can tap this great resource, just like only whites know how to suck out oil from the Middle East.
A more amusing piece would be the edge blacks have in iconic value. Maybe Mexicans and Chinese and Hindus don’t have Isiah Thomas and Wilt Chamberlains and Biggie the rapper cuz they didn’t grow up in Detroit or some such place.
Safer to write about soil than blood.
PS. Blacks are very innovative with stuff like ‘twerking’, knockout games, flashmob looting, various forms of cussing, and etc. And some of them are very lucrative. Some rap moguls got tons of cash.
I’m puzzled how these two things can both be true. How was he able to tie the patent holders to his database of anonymous tax returns?
The real interesting story behind all the nonsense Chetty work is this massive breach of ethics, why the private data of Americans was unethically given away by the government, but maybe a hacker-of-Chetty in turn can find the Trump family tax records or something. Go out and do it, Russians! :pReplies: @Steve Sailer, @The Z Blog
OT: Actual headline in the Washington Post today.
Despite Trump, federal employee morale improves under Trump
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but the whole “Tesla vs Edison” thing is sure to get my eyes rolling.
Tesla’s whole career wasn’t nearly as impactful as, say, the phonograph, to name just one Edison invention.
Also, Tesla was wrong and Edison was right. Direct current is superior to alternating current in virtually every way (including and especially over long distance).
AC makes the grid much harder/impossible to significantly upgrade, made the task of rural electrification much more difficult, is the reason it’s difficult or impossible to transmit across national borders, and, ironically, is a major source of cost and complexity in renewable energy and electric cars.
Every time you plug in an applicance with a bulky/heavy brick on the power cord, make sure to thank Mr. Tesla.
Even if we had stayed with DC (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s ) it would have been 110 volts (the Edison standard) and your laptop or phone or whatever would still need a converter brick to bring it down to low voltage.
OTOH, Tesla's scheme to send free electricity everywhere thru the air was nuts and could not have worked, although it did form the basis for radio. It's one thing to send a signal thru the air (that works great) but sending useful power that way is a whole different thing.Replies: @advancedatheist, @snorlax, @Karl
AC power still has advantages for electro-motive applications. State-of-the-art locomotive traction motors have been AC since the early 1990s.Replies: @syonredux
All this talk about software/Silicon Valley/East Asia. What is/has been invented in the last couple of generations that impacts people or the world? Certainly not software or these so-called technology companies of Silicon Valley. The vast, vast majority are inconsequential and supported by ponzi-like financing schemes. If Apple/Facebook/EBay/Google/SnapChat/Alibaba, etc. disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t make a difference to anyone or anything. Windows 95 is more than sufficient for the personal and commercial needs of most people. A Nokia or Motorola flip phone is more than sufficient for 99.9% of people and when one considers that about 250,000 patents and counting involve cell phones, one can appreciate the extent to which we’re tilting at windmills at this stage.
The infrastructure and hardware supporting all this software–the chip makers, processors, etc.–to be sure, there greatness and genius lies, but the software is becoming more and more frivolous and luxurious.
I see three meaningful technological “jumps” in the past couple of generations. Energy, medicine and agriculture. Transforming the US from an oil/gas dependent country into independent is by far the biggest change in the world this past decade. Nothing else is close, and it’s hilarious no one talks about it or appreciates how it’s changed the geo-strategic underpinnings of the future. When you consider that fracking technologies and techniques are only now just being exported globally, big changes are in store.
Too medicine–drugs/medical diagnostics–has had massive leaps in the last couple of decades. The engineering and software geniuses at GE Medical, Baxter and Siemens are the true innovators and matter to people in the most fundamental ways.
Finally, agriculture and especially, GMO-related offerings are more important to people’s daily lives than Facebook or Apple could ever hope to be.
Interestingly, most of these three “jumps” are flyover happenings.
Edison is at least as much the product of environment and will, and would have been the first to tell you so. He was a "surprise" baby with an experienced and patient mother who homeschooled him and directed his talents. Much of what he invented was low-hanging fruit conceptually, and completed after marathon efforts of trial-and-error.
He also had the gift of salesmanship.
Tesla was almost certainly much smarter, IQ-wise, than Edison. But Edison was street smart. The same might be said of Salieri and Mozart.Replies: @JollyOldSoul, @advancedatheist
Much of what he invented was low-hanging fruit conceptually, and completed after marathon efforts of trial-and-error.
In retrospect 99.99% of inventions can be thought of as somehow obvious. Aren’t we all pretty much idiots for not inventing Facebook or Google? Virtually all inventions require copious calculation and experimentation. They seldom spring from the mind of the inventor in fully working form.
Lost Edisons and Einsteins? Those two men had two of the greatest minds in all of human history. You can some comparable mind just a few times a century, at best. You could nuke half the planet and be pretty damn certain you hadn’t lost any “future Einsteins and Edisons.”
If you tallied up the top 100 scientific and engineering minds from every century for the last thousand years how many of them would be black or Hispanic, either from countries where they were a majority or from those where they are a minority? Precisely zero.
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
When i see “Lost Einsteins or Edisons” i think someone is finally talking about something real–the huge loss of talent we’ve had in the Western world because of “the culture” telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to “lean in” or some such crap.
Very few of even the smartest childless women will ever be as successful or make as much contribution to the world as the smart sons they could have had. That’s just biology. Too bad more of them don’t understand that. Somewhere along the way, for some stupid reason, “procreation” became a dirty word.
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
Meh, Chetty is a non-White immigrant. His agenda is clear.
Hispanics and blacks don’t invent anything in their own ethnic-majority countries. Why would things be different in the USA?
Nonsense like this advances the interests of Chetty’s group at the expense of Whites in the USA.
All this anti-White stuff is about power for non-White groups. Plain as day to me now.
This is slightly OT, but Steve touches on something of interest to me. Stupid people naturally view human history in terms of icons. Chetty is not stupid but is following or pandering to stupid people in this instance and he shouldn’t do that.
There was an actual historical Albert Einstein who really was a great physicist and who immigrated to the USA and became a naturalized American citizen. But when people refer to “Einstein” they are not referring to that person. They are referring to “really smart scientist”. The same way that Shakespeare is an icon for “author” and Mozart is an icon for “musician”.
People think fo scientists who are really smart people who invent lots of gadgets, so by “Einstein”, Chetty actually means “Edison”.
More OT, Europe and North America between roughly the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth century were really anomalous historically in that smart people were generally left to do their thing, instead of being shut up in monasteries or some equivalent or killed. Also, innovation has slowed in the last fifty years (yes there have been studies showing this). Why this is happening is an interesting and important question. I don’t know what Chetty is getting at.
Yeah, this.
I recently bought a Xiaomi air purifying machine (bad air here in Asia). It’s from a big Chinese company.
It’s awesome! Super cheap, effective and looks good to boot. Can control via wifi and has multiple speed settings.
Great example of what Asians are good at — taking existing technology, lowing cost, maybe combining tech in new ways.
Nothing in the Xiaomi air purifier was invented in Asia:
– HEPA filter — nope
– Electric motor — nope
– Wifi — nope
– Chip that controls the gadget — nope
– Plastic — nope
– Laser for particle sensor — nope
Make no mistake — I value Asian contributions to engineering, cost-reduction and miniaturization. But “invention” it ain’t.
Agree. Also, in the US at least, patents are no longer about innovation, that would be racist. If you fill out the forms, pay the fee and go through process, pretty much anybody can get a patent for pretty much anything.
So nowadays patents tell you more about the financial and legal environment of a business than about actual innovation.
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
“the huge loss of talent we’ve had in the Western world because of “the culture” telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to “lean in” or some such crap”
While this is true, it doesn’t seem to have done so much damage to low-fertility Japan and China, but then they do have an extra 5% IQ.
I wonder how much the diversity tax and the post-60s rise in crime has affected the shed-tinkerers of the US and UK? I tend to presume that Steve Jobs didn’t have to worry too much about his garage being burgled.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
Szilard also invented and patented the (drum roll please) nuclear reactor.
Einstein invented many concepts, incl an explanation for specific heat, the photoelectric effect, an explanation for the E=mc^2 term (which was known but not considered relevant), and, oh yes, the notion that time is not constant.
He had extensive experience in his father’s and uncle’s electromechanical mfg plant, and possibly invented many physical things that are lost to the ages.
He patented the Atomic Bomb, with the patent assigned to the Admiralty. He spent a lot of time on the British effort to get Roosevelt's notoriously sluggish and disorganised administration to start an atomic bomb project.
Edison wasn’t a minority – why should he be remembered?
Maybe Chetty is the Jordan Peele of economics, coming up with the product that Jews fall over themselves to fund and publicize. Nazi-hunting TV show and Stepford lynching movie from Peele, black and Mexican Einsteins from Chetty.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
Very interesting drawing; apparently an absorbsion/refrigeration (chiller) design using heat alone to move the refrigerant w/o pumps or motors. I’ve long wondered why something like this isn’t in more common use, especially for solar a/c, although I’ve seen commercial units (Hitachi) advertised.
Also interesting is the Leo Szilard signature. What future Manhattan project whizzes did in their spare time? If all those resources, human and other, hadn’t been needed to blow shit up, we’d all be driving Mr.Fusion flying cars by now.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/leo-szilard
Home scale heat driven refrigerators still exist for places that are off the grid (the Amish buy them too) but they are not economical either in terms of purchase cost or running cost vs. mechanically driven units so they are as rare as steam cars or gas lamps. Probably the high purchase cost is in part due to low volume production - a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit:
https://www.lehmans.com/product/dometic-gas-refrigerators/Replies: @Anonymous
Tesla’s whole career wasn’t nearly as impactful as, say, the phonograph, to name just one Edison invention.
Also, Tesla was wrong and Edison was right. Direct current is superior to alternating current in virtually every way (including and especially over long distance).
AC makes the grid much harder/impossible to significantly upgrade, made the task of rural electrification much more difficult, is the reason it’s difficult or impossible to transmit across national borders, and, ironically, is a major source of cost and complexity in renewable energy and electric cars.
Every time you plug in an applicance with a bulky/heavy brick on the power cord, make sure to thank Mr. Tesla.Replies: @James Speaks, @Jack D, @Thirdeye
Transformers require AC. Power losses over great distances require high voltage/low amperage, whereas work at the consumer end requires high amp/low volt. DC can’t do that.
Tesla’s whole career wasn’t nearly as impactful as, say, the phonograph, to name just one Edison invention.
Also, Tesla was wrong and Edison was right. Direct current is superior to alternating current in virtually every way (including and especially over long distance).
AC makes the grid much harder/impossible to significantly upgrade, made the task of rural electrification much more difficult, is the reason it’s difficult or impossible to transmit across national borders, and, ironically, is a major source of cost and complexity in renewable energy and electric cars.
Every time you plug in an applicance with a bulky/heavy brick on the power cord, make sure to thank Mr. Tesla.Replies: @James Speaks, @Jack D, @Thirdeye
In order to transport electricity over a long distance it needs to be at a high voltage but in order to safely use it in the home, it has to be at a much lower voltage. In the 19th century, there was no easy way to step DC current up and down. High voltage DC power lines only became practical because of much later electronic inventions. It’s very easy to change the voltage of AC power using simple 19th century technology transformers. Edison’s DC scheme would have required power plants every few blocks (and thus at the beginning only dense cities were wired – Edison’s first project was lower Manhattan).
Even if we had stayed with DC (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s ) it would have been 110 volts (the Edison standard) and your laptop or phone or whatever would still need a converter brick to bring it down to low voltage.
OTOH, Tesla’s scheme to send free electricity everywhere thru the air was nuts and could not have worked, although it did form the basis for radio. It’s one thing to send a signal thru the air (that works great) but sending useful power that way is a whole different thing.
Tesla didn't have a company like Google run by people who bought into his fantasies, though. I wonder if the people who run Google in our time think they have gotten their money's worth by hiring Kurzweil.
But converting between DC voltages is nowadays a long-solved problem, and modern switching circuits are even more efficient (and can be miniaturized and mass-produced many orders of magnitude better) than AC transformers.
That this wasn’t the case a century ago doesn’t do us any benefit. The AC power grid is like asbestos insulation, the Spanish-American War, narrow streets with little parking in major cities, Aral Sea irrigation projects, lead-glazed tableware, the 1986 amnesty, the de facto standardization on IBM-compatible PCs, taping over the master recording of Super Bowl I, etc.
All rational decisions made because at the times they were made the benefits seemed to clearly outweigh the (monetary and opportunity) costs, but ended up creating massive unforeseen costs that far outweighed the real or alleged benefits.
Sure, it seemed like the right decision at the time, and arguably even was the right decision at the time by Keynes’ reasoning (in the long run we’re all dead, but on the other hand DC switching hardware would’ve advanced faster in DC-verse), but from our perspective in the present day it ended up being a trillion-dollar mistake.
What was definitely the wrong decision in Edison and Tesla’s era was going with AC over DC at point of use as well as for transmission. If we had DC point of use it would greatly simplify many electronics and appliances, and more importantly would’ve allowed transparently and gradually replacing the legacy AC grid with a modern DC grid (and, before that, newer improved-capacity/efficiency AC standards) once modern switching circuits became available. As things are, 30 years from now the grid will probably be all-DC except at the point of use, which is truly absurd.
As far as laptop DC converters, the Apple chargers (for example) actually first ups the voltage (to 380V DC), accounting for most of the unit’s bulk, before reducing the voltage to a variable level depending on the rate the laptop is drawing power. Inside the laptop are numerous additional switches which power different components at different voltages.
If we had a DC grid (or DC point of use) system, it would’ve been possible (in the last half-century) to do this sort of on-demand voltage switching within or at some point before the electrical outlet. So no, you wouldn’t still have bricks on your cords. You’d also be able to charge your phone in 5 minutes, or Melon Usk could charge his Edison at the maximum possible rate from a regular wall outlet.
Tesla’s role in the AC-vs-DC debate was historically-significant, but hardly, in retrospect, worthwhile or worthy of adulation.Replies: @The Alarmist, @Jack D, @Anonymous
as far as I know, Con Ed is ==still== delivering high-pressure steam through pipes, in lower Manhattan.Replies: @JMcG, @Buffalo Joe
Edison is at least as much the product of environment and will, and would have been the first to tell you so. He was a "surprise" baby with an experienced and patient mother who homeschooled him and directed his talents. Much of what he invented was low-hanging fruit conceptually, and completed after marathon efforts of trial-and-error.
He also had the gift of salesmanship.
Tesla was almost certainly much smarter, IQ-wise, than Edison. But Edison was street smart. The same might be said of Salieri and Mozart.Replies: @JollyOldSoul, @advancedatheist
The people in the Alt Right who accuse Einstein of plagiarizing his ideas from white men can’t seem to get their messaging straight if they also claim that his ideas don’t work. By implication these white men would also have gotten things wrong, so what does that say about their intelligence?
http://web.ihep.su/library/pubs/tconf05/ps/c5-1.pdf
It seems that some French and also some Russians physicists openly question Einstein priority in formulating the special relativity theory (SRT). French papers on the subjects are virtually unknown in the anglophone world. However in my opinion Einstein both expanded and tightened up the work of Poincare though all ideas are already in Poincare’s papers. As far as the general relativity theory (GRT) there is the question whether Hilbert took some result from Einstein or vice versa. Several years ago Max Planck Institute decided that it was the first case, however there are very strong arguments that it was Einstein who lifted an equation from Hilbert.
There is however one solid proof of Einstein plagiarizing later in his career. In 1927 Einstein’s publication “Zu Kaluzas Theorie des Zusammenhanges von Gravitation und Elektrizitat” the editor Madel forced Einstein to write acknowledgement: “I was informed by Mr. Mandel that presented by me results are not new. The whole content of my work can be found in O. Klein 1926… paper”. Question is why he was permitted to publish it in the first place? Furthermore later it was found that in the 1926 letter to Ehrenfest Einstein wrote “Klein’s work is beautiful and impressive…”, so clearly he was familiar with Klein’s work before publishing his 1927 paper.
Till the end of his life he denied a prior knowledge of Poincare and Lorentz works. However in English publication of his famous 1905 paper in early 1920s he acknowledged that the transforms he derived were done before him by Lorentz. There is one possible indication that something was lifted directly from Poincare. Poincare uses mathematical argument and strictly mathematical notion that a given transform forms an algebraic group. The same statement w/o a proof is in Einstein 1905 paper. Poincare was famous and accomplished mathematicians who actually studied mathematical algebras such as groups which at that time were not really commonly known to physicist.Replies: @Anonymous
In other words, Einstein got ahead by putting in the elbow grease. Our universities are filled with scholars who don't read the new work in their own field, and who thus fall behind in the race for innovation. Whether you keep up is more a matter of temperament than genius, however. Einstein couldn't find work as a physicist during the time period when he was making his original mark in physics, so he had something to prove to the world and a reason to push himself hard.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
True, but it’s the only Einstein invention I’ve ever heard of. Hell, I have more to my credit and I make no claim to be as clever as Albert.
Even if we had stayed with DC (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s ) it would have been 110 volts (the Edison standard) and your laptop or phone or whatever would still need a converter brick to bring it down to low voltage.
OTOH, Tesla's scheme to send free electricity everywhere thru the air was nuts and could not have worked, although it did form the basis for radio. It's one thing to send a signal thru the air (that works great) but sending useful power that way is a whole different thing.Replies: @advancedatheist, @snorlax, @Karl
Ray Kurzweil’s career in the last 20 years as a fantasist about the singularity invites comparison with Tesla’s later life. Both of these men came up with some real, feasible inventions early in life; but by middle age they ran out of those kinds of ideas, and they drifted off into science-fiction woo-woo land, telling reporters about all the super-inventions they could create if someone would just give them enough money.
Tesla didn’t have a company like Google run by people who bought into his fantasies, though. I wonder if the people who run Google in our time think they have gotten their money’s worth by hiring Kurzweil.
One downside of eliminating Latin from the public schools was the disappearance from popular knowledge of the logical fallacy “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”
My elementary school was 30% Black; my high school 70% Black. A bright, able White kid only has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional tenth" among Whites to think about where his talents lie and what his adult future might be. A bright, able Black kid has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional duo-quintile" among Blacks.
Chetty's "never got a chance to deploy their skills" is risible, dangerous bullpuckey. Has this slob not noticed the zillions spent by a feckless White America on proving the equalitarian fantasy?Replies: @stillCARealist, @Lurker, @Eagle Eye
How much is a “duo-quintile”?
OT: The last few days, Takimag has not been loading correctly in Chrome on my Mac. That happened again in clicking on Steve’s link to his latest piece at Taki’s. Out of curiousity, I put in that link on Safari and Taki’s came up looking normal with the three column format, etc.
I had been assuming that hostile hackers had been going at it against Taki’s, but maybe this is all a case of browser anomalies. Perhaps Taki’s code developed some bug that Chrome chokes on? Or perhaps it is due to the Adblocking extension I have in Chrome.
Anyone else run into this?
Dan Quayle to the United Negro College Fund: “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
Bill Gates was supposedly searching for the African Einstein. Wonder what the status of that search is?
Chetty could have skipped his whole stupid study on this topic – there’s no need to hunt for geniuses one by one (especially if they don’t really exist). Once you know the mean IQ and standard deviation of a population and the # of members in each group, it’s a trivial mathematical exercise to determine the number that will exceed a certain threshold. If we call it say IQ145+ which is real genius territory, for an Ashkenazi Jewish population this is only maybe 2.x SDs out from the population mean so there is still a fair amount of daylight under the bell curve. Same for Asians except their 2.x is a little higher than the Jewish 2.x but there are a lot more of them. For a white population, it’s 3 SDs where the line is getting awfully close, but there are a whole lot of white people in the US in relation to the # of minorities (at least there used to be) so you still get a goodly amount of geniuses. For blacks, it’s 4 SDs where the line is fast approaching zero. The # of actual black geniuses that you see (very few) is neither more nor less than what the models would predict. If you drill down and look at the few blacks who score over 750 on the SAT (there are only a couple of hundred each year vs. tens of thousands of Asians) you’d find that they are mostly either African-Africans or half white or both (like Obama) and the number that are purebred American slave descendants like Moochelle is close to nil.
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html
https://www.unz.com/isteve/new-york-terrorism-open-thread/#comment-2060795Replies: @Jack D
The dearth of inventors from the Deep South is interesting.
The Deep South has a strong tradition of whisky/whiskey distilling which, one would think, would foster strong traditions of innovation and science.
I wonder just how significantly the Deep South has been affected by brain drain.
I wonder if white flight has been occurring in the Deep South since ’65 (that’s 1865 not 1965).
Both traits were, or are, favoured in white European man.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Brutusale
True. Edison is reputed to have said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”.
As Steve says, Chetty’s map of where inventors grow up is pretty much what you would expect … but there are some oddities. Like WTF is going on in the corners of Utah and Colorado? Or Lake of the Woods Minnesota?
Aerospace was located in the South by Johnson not merely for economic and demographic considerations. As the Earth is a sphere, velocity of a point near the equator is greater than is that of a point closer to the poles. This boost is added to the rocket’s own self-developed velocity to give it escape velocity.
Since the Earth is approx. 25,000 miles around, a point on the equator is traveling at roughly 1042 miles per hour. At 28.5 degrees north, the velocity of a point at Cape Canaveral is 915 mph.
Also, I recall having read that IQ in the third grade is not the ideal predictor of adult IQ because it is prior to an individual’s having developed their formal operational mode of thinking. Since adult Blacks are less likely to develop formal operational thinking, third grade testing will skew heavily towards black equality. Maybe Chetty should have based his study on the results of IQ tests taken by high school sophomores or juniors. I may be wrong about this and would appreciate informed feedback.
OT – Concerning the latest woman to come out against Roy Moore on Monday in the WaPo,
Apparently she kept a scrapbook of the movie tickets from her dates with guys from 1981. And she listed Roy Moore as one of them. In 1981 she would have been 18 and Moore in his 30’s.
Last night on twitter several people pointed out that one of the tickets in her 1981 collection has the word “child” printed on it,and thus appears to have been issued to a child.
So why would an 18 year old girl get a “child’s” ticket?
Look for yourselves. This is clearly an organized hit job. It’s not a very good one, but if the media won’t tell the public they might get away with it. If some MSM outlet ran this today, Moore would soar in the polls. But they won’t.
Ok, I assume Steve is ironically not stating the obvious that the author of this article is pandering to academic promoters by claiming that blacks and browns’ talent is not being utilized(because racism) and using (((Einstein’s))) name as the quintessence of technological innovation, even though his field of work was the most abstracted of theory. Maybe the photoelectric effect explanation had some practical significance down the line, I don’t know. The author is pressing all the right buttons, of course! We see that he “gets it” and will be safe for an administration position.
Regarding all the Asian patents supposedly coming out, yeah sure, but there are patents and there are patents. There are a trillion frivolous patents for one integrated circuit, for one transistor. Whabam
IMHO, Jack D does not prattle on and on about the astonishing superiority of Jews, and he deals gently with the, to my mind, way too frequent posts about The Joos did this and The Joos did that.
It’s telling that the New York Times’ piece, for all its conventional idiocies, doesn’t mention Ahmed “Clockmed/Clock Boy” Mohammad. This is another sign that the Left has quietly walked back its infatuation with Ahmed as the basic fraudulence of his “clock” became evident. (Evident, if not to the science-illiterates who staff the mass media, then to a few people they trust who know a thing or two about electronics.)
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/lost-einsteins-innovation-inequality.html
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
Actually, if the goal is solely to maximize the number of geniuses then the current system of assortive IQ mating is probably better, even though it results in fewer above average children overall. Consider:
The old way:
– High IQ successful professional man (say 125) marries his average IQ secretary or below average IQ local debutante.
~4 kids, average genotypic IQ ~110
– High IQ woman gets married off at relatively young age to middling IQ local man.
~4 kids, average genotypic IQ ~110
The new way:
High IQ successful professional man marries high IQ successful professional woman from his work/social circle
~1.5 kids, average genotypic IQ ~125
Due to the sharp falloff of the bell curve away from the mean values, the latter scenario actually has a higher chance of producing a >140 phenotypic IQ offspring.
The new way also reduces the average IQ society-wide because everyone else can do the Idiocracy thing, but as I said, if the criterion is solely which is better at producing geniuses, then what we have now is better.
My elementary school was 30% Black; my high school 70% Black. A bright, able White kid only has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional tenth" among Whites to think about where his talents lie and what his adult future might be. A bright, able Black kid has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional duo-quintile" among Blacks.
Chetty's "never got a chance to deploy their skills" is risible, dangerous bullpuckey. Has this slob not noticed the zillions spent by a feckless White America on proving the equalitarian fantasy?Replies: @stillCARealist, @Lurker, @Eagle Eye
Sounds like that could be turned into a plea to transfer more resources from the white population.
Also interesting is the Leo Szilard signature. What future Manhattan project whizzes did in their spare time? If all those resources, human and other, hadn't been needed to blow shit up, we'd all be driving Mr.Fusion flying cars by now.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/leo-szilardReplies: @Jack D
The amount of resources that we devote to making thing that kill other people (or defend us against being killed) is staggering but the world is a dangerous place so I don’t know that we have any other choice.
Home scale heat driven refrigerators still exist for places that are off the grid (the Amish buy them too) but they are not economical either in terms of purchase cost or running cost vs. mechanically driven units so they are as rare as steam cars or gas lamps. Probably the high purchase cost is in part due to low volume production – a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit:
https://www.lehmans.com/product/dometic-gas-refrigerators/
They had no moving parts and tended to last longer than regular ones, but they heated up the kitchen more than regular ones, and if the burner became clogged with dirt could put out carbon monoxide and kill people in the home. Because houses were not very well sealed up that was almost unheard of, but it happened once or twice, and now the Servels have a bounty on their lives by a corporate entity afraid of being sued.
They were a triple bitch to fix if they did go bad, as well. The gas/water mixture that made them work was kept secret and only a few self taught engineer/repairmen were able to service the actual system itself. While there were no moving parts, corrosion and chemical action would eventually give the system a "heart attack" and repairs were almost as involved as cardiac bypass surgery: the system had to be depressurized, evacuated, the clogged pipe located, cut out and a new one welded in, then the system recharged with distilled water, ammonia and hydrogen in secret proportions. There are still a few people that do this, using homemade "heart lung machines" with anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen cylinders and regulators. They charge a lot of money, by the way.
The Amish, missionaries, and rural cabin vacationers still use this type of fridge, and while new ones are made, a few old timers still swear by the vintage Servel. (Whirlpool, or maybe it was Frigidare, made a very few of these as well: in Europe, Electrolux was the vendor.) It has a few quirks, such as needing to be perfectly leveled, and it needs to be operated in an area with ventilation and its burner kept clean and adjusted properly.Replies: @Jack D
My stepfather who is high up on the science side of Big Pharma says the same thing.
Fertility is a function of the proportion of Alpha men able and willing to impregnate!
I mostly agree with this: most so-called “innovation” is really just nest-feathering at best.
I disagree somewhat about what the most meaningful technological jumps of recent history are. I would nominate the semiconductor, DNA, lasers and nukes as pretty much the only really significant technological innovations of the past three generations (and none of them is more recent than 1960!). The rest is details: the more or less inevitable consequences of the foregoing or of even earlier foregoing. A lot of other things were and still are significant: internal combustion, polymers, electricity, etc., they’re just older innovations. The above four are the only recent ones.
And even for the big four above, the DNA discovery hasn’t really led to that much actual benefits yet (GMOs have so far been mostly a damp squib) though it seems to have potential; nukes’ significance has been mainly in a negative, destructive sense (though one could argue that the Great Power nuclear deadlock has made the world more peaceful).
Agree.
Those patents aren’t being issued to the little guy – even if they were, their patents could be busted by a well heeled corp. They are being issued to the big guys that are patenting just about everything they and even buying up old patents – that’s what Nathan Myhrvold (the smartest guy at Microsoft) has done.
So later down the line when a small company creates something even vaguely like some patent they are holding – they get sued into oblivion or forced to pay a fee to some patent troll corporation.
So as a indicator of innovation, its worthless today.
Take Silicon Valley, it’s pretty much ceased being innovative in hardware and is mostly software industry focusing on data mining, spying on people via different mediums(like Amazon’s Echo) manipulating people on social media – which they designed to be addictive as crack to younger people. Basically stuff that steals people likes and dislikes, then messes them up.
You could drop a nuke on Silicon Valley today and it wouldn’t adversely impact the country at all.
There was an actual historical Albert Einstein who really was a great physicist and who immigrated to the USA and became a naturalized American citizen. But when people refer to "Einstein" they are not referring to that person. They are referring to "really smart scientist". The same way that Shakespeare is an icon for "author" and Mozart is an icon for "musician".
People think fo scientists who are really smart people who invent lots of gadgets, so by "Einstein", Chetty actually means "Edison".
More OT, Europe and North America between roughly the mid-seventeenth and mid-twentieth century were really anomalous historically in that smart people were generally left to do their thing, instead of being shut up in monasteries or some equivalent or killed. Also, innovation has slowed in the last fifty years (yes there have been studies showing this). Why this is happening is an interesting and important question. I don't know what Chetty is getting at.Replies: @kihowi
The same people who don’t understand specialization. They think scientists are like they are in cartoons: generic geniuses who know everything about everything.
Remember a few weeks ago when Steven Hawking announced he thought that AI was going to kill everybody real soon now?
How the hell would he know? He’s not a specialist in artificial intelligence. He’s not even a coder. He’s a physicist. He knows as much about it as I do.
The same goes for Albert Einstein quotes about anything that’s not physics, like religion or peace.
Don’t say that though, people will get really offended and demand to know who you are that you dare to question the great one.
People need their saints. If you take real saints away from them, they’ll make new ones.
After my son had spent a semester in the sixth grade, I was told that he was a "C" student in math. This seemed unlikely to me, so I arranged to meet the teacher. Oh, it's true, she assured me; she said that she divided the grade into tests, homework and work done in class, and my poor son was a "C" student in every area.
So, I asked her to describe a typical test. "Well," she said, "the students have to solve 30-35 problems." And how many problems does my son solve correctly? I asked. "Oh, he gets all the answers correct," she replied.
Full stop.
So how does he get a "C"? "Well, you see, he needs to show his work." (It's a penmanship exercise.)
And what about homework? "Well, he gives correct answers, but he needs to keep his homework in a neat notebook, with a table of contents." (Clerical task.)
And what about in class work? "Well, your son seems to spend a lot of time looking out the window; he doesn't listen after the first time I explain something." (Failure to worship female teacher with full attention, and properly socialize with other students.)
Anyway, long story short, my son is now working on his math PhD, having been admitted to both the #1 and #2 grad schools in the world.
How many other boys have been told by female teachers that they just don't have what it takes to succeed in math, like good penmanship and good clerical skills and good social skills? How many lost Einsteins and Edisons are there?Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @JackOH
A7, Good for you. It is always the best policy to stay closely involved in your child’s education. My grandson, in 4th grade who they suggested stay back a grade, is taking 7th grade math at the middle school. Sometimes, actually most times, you have to push the system.
Steve, Einstein was privileged.
IJ, Ahmed actually invented time, as the clock is so mundane. And please remember that blacks are great at inventing excuses.
I understand his argument.
And yes, the 3rd grade math is a poor indicator. A top 10% threshold is a mediocre threshold.
But my main point is just that it’s the same old same old HBD unaware tripe. There are big differences between people even beyond math scores. Male\female personality differences and the innovation gap that will obviously go with them is so blatantly obvious that we now have to beat people over the head not to notice it. (And for the record AnotherMom has her own individual patents, while my patents are all owned by my former software company employer.) There are racial differences in personality and creativity beyond IQ and even math IQ.
Fundamentally if we want innovation–like so many other nice things–we should stop obsessing over why the non-innovative are not innovating and instead stop the campaign against the innovative actually breeding and forming the next generation.
How many blacks/Hispanics are involved in blockchain/Bitcoin/ethereum/etc? Very very few. In fact, I am surprised we haven’t seen the latest flavor of “this is racist because no blacks are in the field of...” articles.Replies: @Bugg
Exactly. High achieving blacks and Latinos have zero incentive to leave cushy government, corporate and academic careers to go out and possibly starve and fail by starting something completely new. Part of innovation is going into business for yourself and that has none of those guarantees. Look at someone like Eric Holder and his various family members. They are somewhat outliers as Carribean, but the point holds. Many of them went to graduate school in various fields, but none of them despite their academic success in the very NYC public schools Chetty looks at sought to go into business for themselves. And given the risks, under a basic cost benefit analysis aided by affirmative action, why would they bother? Huge companies cannot wait to hire them, they’ve made their way up the greasy pole of government work, or fallen back on leafy quadrangles. Yet this is lost on Chetty.
The Edison/Tesla rivalry is the lamest fad yet from the teenage corner of the internet.
As I’ve said before, the most guaranteed way to make a fortune is to enable young white people to feel smarter than everybody else (especially their ancestors) without having to do any any mental work.
Cheering on one inventor and booing the other guy is as taxing as attending a prowrestling match. But to a generation brought up on TED, Bill Ney and “top ten most badass scientists” youtube videos, that’s what science is.
In real life of course, famous inventors all had a gift for pr, produced a mix of real science, kookiness and hot air, and used underhand tactics from time to time. But it’s really nerdy to look at things that way and wouldn’t get any views.
Anyway, technology is advancing at a frantic pace to drive consumption rather than to meet need. Haven't you noticed that most people use innovation in a maladaptive way? Haven't you noticed the obese and bleary-eyed tech zombies out there? Wouldn't it be more innovative to coordinate the harmonious, efficacious use of innovation?
Quality of life is in decline as is intellectual development in any field that doesn't drive innovative profit making. And you, Sailer, are merely a drone, mindlessly driving us ever closer to techtastrophy!
Case in point: Haven't those robotic Japanese patent-holders stopped breeding?Replies: @RUSH Limbaugh, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Most people use technology for entrainment which is good
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
Can’t be that great because we’re not using it. No moving parts is such a huge advantage that there must be some whopping great negatives to it.
Patents mean less and less in a world where intellectual property protections don’t happen. Customer support will count for more.
As noted, most patents today are churn.
I’d like to see a metric measuring usefulness.
For a group of people who deny the existence of race and racial differences, the Left twists themselves into awful pretzels trying to explain how noticeable racial differences aren’t caused by race and are really caused by X (X usually being the amorphous term “racism”).
Most of the time I think they’re just trying convince themselves.
I couldn’t understand why 2 days had passed and you still hadn’t written about this article! Ah, you were saving it for Taki. An excellent response to Chetty that, unfortunately, like all your other responses, he need never answer.
Both traits were, or are, favoured in white European man.Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Brutusale
It’s hard to have an obsessive, single-minded, determined, hard-focused drive to accomplish goals when, by nature and society’s instruction, you’re only supposed to have an obsessive, single-minded, determined, hard-focused drive to be known only for your race.
Even if we had stayed with DC (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s ) it would have been 110 volts (the Edison standard) and your laptop or phone or whatever would still need a converter brick to bring it down to low voltage.
OTOH, Tesla's scheme to send free electricity everywhere thru the air was nuts and could not have worked, although it did form the basis for radio. It's one thing to send a signal thru the air (that works great) but sending useful power that way is a whole different thing.Replies: @advancedatheist, @snorlax, @Karl
There were ways of converting between DC voltages even in Edison and Tesla’s day; running a motor which in turn drove a generator at a lower or higher voltage, or temporarily converting to AC and then back to DC. These methods carried a moderate (but by no means prohibitive) efficiency disadvantage, so it’s understandable, given the free market, why AC won out at the time.
But converting between DC voltages is nowadays a long-solved problem, and modern switching circuits are even more efficient (and can be miniaturized and mass-produced many orders of magnitude better) than AC transformers.
That this wasn’t the case a century ago doesn’t do us any benefit. The AC power grid is like asbestos insulation, the Spanish-American War, narrow streets with little parking in major cities, Aral Sea irrigation projects, lead-glazed tableware, the 1986 amnesty, the de facto standardization on IBM-compatible PCs, taping over the master recording of Super Bowl I, etc.
All rational decisions made because at the times they were made the benefits seemed to clearly outweigh the (monetary and opportunity) costs, but ended up creating massive unforeseen costs that far outweighed the real or alleged benefits.
Sure, it seemed like the right decision at the time, and arguably even was the right decision at the time by Keynes’ reasoning (in the long run we’re all dead, but on the other hand DC switching hardware would’ve advanced faster in DC-verse), but from our perspective in the present day it ended up being a trillion-dollar mistake.
What was definitely the wrong decision in Edison and Tesla’s era was going with AC over DC at point of use as well as for transmission. If we had DC point of use it would greatly simplify many electronics and appliances, and more importantly would’ve allowed transparently and gradually replacing the legacy AC grid with a modern DC grid (and, before that, newer improved-capacity/efficiency AC standards) once modern switching circuits became available. As things are, 30 years from now the grid will probably be all-DC except at the point of use, which is truly absurd.
As far as laptop DC converters, the Apple chargers (for example) actually first ups the voltage (to 380V DC), accounting for most of the unit’s bulk, before reducing the voltage to a variable level depending on the rate the laptop is drawing power. Inside the laptop are numerous additional switches which power different components at different voltages.
If we had a DC grid (or DC point of use) system, it would’ve been possible (in the last half-century) to do this sort of on-demand voltage switching within or at some point before the electrical outlet. So no, you wouldn’t still have bricks on your cords. You’d also be able to charge your phone in 5 minutes, or Melon Usk could charge his Edison at the maximum possible rate from a regular wall outlet.
Tesla’s role in the AC-vs-DC debate was historically-significant, but hardly, in retrospect, worthwhile or worthy of adulation.
FWIW, Tesla lived out his days in a building that still ran an internal dc grid. Poetic justice, or cruel fate?
Switchmode voltage changing supplies are more efficient than AC transformers (actually, they use transformers internally themselves) in small sizes, but when one gets to large utility sized transformers they are still more efficient than a switchmode converter, and less expensive. Large switch mode high power conversion is complicated and uses lots of expensive semiconductors: standard line (50 or 60, occasionally 25 or 400 Hz in industry or marine, rail or airborne use) frequency transformers are just copper and an electrical steel core.
Even third world countries can build electrical distribution transformers, albeit not quite as efficient as the best ones used in the US and Western Europe today. By contrast, the large DC-DC step up and down converters that would be needed are dependent on big semiconductor fabs and require a much higher level of expertise to design.
I have many electrical books written in the 1920s to the 1950s showing DIY constructors such as farmers and radio hams (then as now a notoriously cheap bunch) how to build electrical transformers of all kinds, including ones designed to be connected to 4150vac distribution lines.
Before about the mid-1960s, high power DC-AC conversion at any efficiency was just not possible. There were schemes that used mercury thyratrons and such like, but motor generator sets with less than 75% efficiency at best were common until the 1970s. Indeed I worked in an electronics plant that had two old synchronous motors belted to each other at a 5/6ths ratio to supply plant 50 Hz power for production test of export products as late as 1997.
AC power has another huge advantage over DC: large motors are generally of the synchronous type and both much more efficient than DC motors, with commutators, and are inherently speed controlled by the AC line frequency. Otherwise, regulators and governors requiring calibration would be required to expect a motor to turn at any particular speed.
Consider what was then the common phonograph. You want the record to turn at a constant 33 1/3 rpm? With AC motors this was easy, it was simply a matter of calculating the mechanical ratio of motor speed to platter speed with gears, drive wheel sizes, or belt pulley sizes. DC turntables would have needed a Rube Goldberg regulator arrangement.
An interesting aside: Uniquely, Japan uses either 50 or 60 Hz power, depending on where in Japan you are. So, Japanese turntables had to be able to run on either 50 or 60 Hz AC, so they did use DC, via solid state silicon diode rectification, to turn the motor. But in lieu of a complicated phase lock loop and frequency standard, they used the line frequency to control speed in an ingenious way. The platter was cast with tone rings with four bands, with teeth so that at 33 or 45 rpm, the teeth would appear to stand still with a neon strobe light that ran off the AC line. This was at 50 or 60 Hz, but exactly one or the other, anywhere in Japan (or anywhere else). There was a DC voltage control the user set with a knob so that one of the four lines would appear to stop when s/he had it set to exactly the right speed. Since the range was somewhat limited, in practice, you didn't really have to know which of the four was supposed to stop: when one did you were good to go. (A toggle changed the DC range from the 45 rpm voltage range to the 33 rpm voltage range. They did not really overlap.)Replies: @Jack D
It seems that Europeans trend more toward breakthrough innovations; Asians excel at perfecting innovations.
See my reply to Jack D above.
Building a windmill is a cool project for a kid to do, but it's been done before, to put it mildly.
https://www.snopes.com/william-kamkwamba/Replies: @bomag, @Father O'Hara
Yeah, the clapping can get a little too loud.
Acquaintances traveling Africa report a mixed bag: they’ll engage someone for a repair which gets done with surprising industry and innovation, but local machinery languishes for want of simple repairs.
Well, they did both live in New Jersey.
Somewhat heterodox Jewish British New York historian and public intellectual Tony Judt once wrote semi-appreciatively of the Midwestern American College Town.
It seems to me that Judt’s animus against the nearby “heartland of the old Ku Klux Klan” and the “insularity and prejudice of the [Texas] hill country” is not that dissimilar to that of the post-Puritan progressives of New England and the Bay Area. So I guess that means Judt assimilated to WASP values.
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2010/07/neal-stephenson-on-puritans-and.html
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/05/27/america-my-new-found-land/
You're probably too young to remember, but the Asian thing used to be their amazing business management skills rather than their amazing innovative ability. That was always a lie. Japanese productivity was/is based on unpaid work done by company employees. Long hours and sacrifice in return for scraping ahead of the next guy. It's the same today in Asia and in SF.
The question you ought to be asking yourself isn't why Asia is so great but why Europeans stopped trying to compete. Once you figure out the answer, it'll give you a different perspective on "value creation."Replies: @Anonymous
Same way gdp is over relied upon
Edison disagrees:
I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. –TAE
People overrate the intelligence of creators to cover up their own laziness.
I said nothing about blacks and Hispanics. Save your replies for someone who did.
Edison rejected the idea of a soul. So in this case, I’d say you’re right and he’s wrong. But I’ll take his word on innovation and invention before yours.
That’s also one of the things that works against Edison in terms of popular culture. We have this romantic image of the scientist/inventor as a kind of lonely visionary. Edison, in contrast, was about relentless work. There’s a problem to be solved? Gather a team of smart guys and start finding solutions. In order to solve this problem we need someone with a thorough grounding in mathematics? Hire that Francis Robbins Upton kid that Hermann von Helmholtz thinks so highly of.
The most important axiom of modern liberalism/leftism:
All races and genders are biologically identical to the point there is no distinction between them whatsoever.
Most abundant evidence:
The naked eye can see the differences in outcome.
Most logical conclusion:
Let the oppression Olympics begin. Let the hunt for the missing Einsteins begin in ernest.
I hadn’t written this yet but for months had been playing with the sentence: “Henry Ford has been born a million times over in China: in every case, he was either identified as potentially disruptive and murdered along with all his neighbors, or he kept his mouth shut.” Whenever Chinese propaganda is wheeled out to offer a nonwhite counterexample of historical innovation, we are generally shown attic-bound curiosities from a tolerated, eccentric uncle. That’s a problem because the essential quality of Western innovation is disruption. Asians from Haifa to Vladivostok see disruption the way we see pedophilia.
I have to say I prefer Chetty’s magical reasoning:
There must be innovators among cultures of incuriosity and militant conformity. There must be. There must be blind aerobics instructors with daddy issues near where I live. There must be piles of cash that left a bank without anyone noticing and then they must have gotten themselves lost on my route home from work. It must be nice to be graded and advised the way a rigorous scientist like Chetty was.
Go ahead, bury your head in the sand. Edison has been dead for a long time now. The biggest auto maker in the world is Japanese, every single electronic gadget in your house is made in China (even if it has an American name on it), when the FBI wants to crack a phone they call the Israelis, etc. but go ahead and pretend as if it’s still 1896 and Singer (not (((Singer))) is building cutting edge technology… sewing machines.
Tesla was not an American in anything but the legal definition of the word. And Edison has a formidable list of inventions on his CV: the quadruplex telegraph, the carbon microphone, the phonograph, the fluoroscope, etc. And then there’s Edison’s role in developing the industrial laboratory (to some, his greatest contribution to science).
Really, the online Tesla cult is a very silly business….
“For example, try going to Google right now and searching for “American inventors.” The top ten results will be Edison, Alexander Graham Bell”
Bell was born and raised in Scotland and London and lived a part of his life in Canada. If people think he’s an American, that’s really a sad commentary on US public schools in general.
This is one of Steve’s best Takimag columns for the year. The thing is, he appears to be equating Chetty with Malcolm Gladwell–someone intently serious on not noticing the various societal trends that one should be noticing.
For instance:
“High-scoring black kids and Hispanic kids go into innovation at incredibly low rates…. There must be many “lost Einsteins” in those groups—children who appear to have been similarly able at a young age to their white and Asian peers but who never got a chance to deploy their skills.”
This sounds similar to Gladwell’s observation in Outliers, where if only black kids were given access to computers at an early age as Bill Gates, over time they would reach their maximum potential and the US’s tech community would benefit from previously untapped resources. So apparently Chetty, as his influence on the mainstream becomes more pronounced, is slowly becoming a clone of Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Nothing to see here, and for heaven’s sake, stop noticing things that you shouldn’t!’
In terms of which nations have valid claims.....Scotland obviously has priority; that's where he was born and lived the first 18 or so years of his life.After that, the USA (where he lived the bulk of his life). Canada comes in third.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
If you are a smart black or hispanic then there is non real incentive to be an innovator. You simply get average grades, apply to an investment bank or law firm and get given a massive salary for being window dressing. I don't think people realise how easy it is for these people.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco, @Forbes
In England, at least, ‘local councils’ seem to the big ‘prestige’ employers.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, everyone’s favorite self-described queer POC “physicist” fighting racism with science, seems to feel that white men definitely need to be blamed and also rants that Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, the children of Alton Sterling (surprisingly no mention of Trayvon), and many other POC could have been another Einstein or Edison, if only racist white police had not killed them or their parents.
https://medium.com/@chanda/what-is-the-plan-for-including-tamir-rice-in-stem-15c1d7a912e
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
Not as consequential, either.
Yes, but a genius in a specific category: theoretical physics. No one is ever going to put Einstein in the Technology Hall of Fame with Edison, Watt, Frank Whittle, Goddard, Jack Kilby, the Wright Bros, etc
That’s what Steve is objecting to. Chetty is talking about a type of genius that Einstein did not possess.It’s as though someone writing about literary genius decided to call his article “Searching for Beethoven.”
RE: the “Genius: one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” quote,
That’s also one of the things that works against Edison in terms of popular culture. We have this romantic image of the scientist/inventor as a kind of lonely visionary. Edison, in contrast, was about relentless work. There’s a problem to be solved? Gather a team of smart guys and start finding solutions. In order to solve this problem we need someone with a thorough grounding in mathematics? Hire that Francis Robbins Upton kid that Hermann von Helmholtz thinks so highly of.
clayton christensen would say that asians are great at continuous innovation, but not at discontinuous innovation.
OT. A federal grand jury has indicted Garcia Zarate on charges of being a felon in possession of a fire arm and as an illegal immigrant in possession of a fire arm. Please note the charges are brought by a grand jury. Also, George Gascon, DA for San Francisco called Trump’s tweats about the Kate Steinle verdict the “tweats of a mad man.” Whatever. Article available on SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle web paper.
This talk of ‘Einstein’ is like getting way ahead of the game.
Suppose there’a s bunch of fat lazy slobs lying around eating junk food. You want to make them healthy. You need to emphasize the basics of proper eating and exercise. It would make no sense to fret about how to turn them into Olympic weightlifter, NBA star, boxing champion, or top soccer player.
The problems of black education is so dire(read Fred Reed’s latest column) that it’s downright surreal to worry about not enough blacks becoming Einsteins. I mean, WHO CARES when it’s difficult just to make them come to school, not cuss and beat up teachers, get into endless fights, and steal stuff.
If a patient is dying, you try to save him. You don’t worry about why he isn’t about to become a billionaire.
At this point, never mind the Albert the physicist. It’d be good enough for blacks to be like Fat Albert, the jolly Negro who, though grossly obese, gets along with people. He doesn’t add but he doesn’t take away.
And that should be the starting point when it comes to blackness. The main problem is character and morals, not genius and brilliance. Blacks fail at basic morality. And Libby dibbers allow blacks to indulge in fantasies like BLM. Libby dibbers are neurotic themselves. They fear black crime and institute tough jail times and policing to bring back cities. But this made them feel ‘guilty’, so they assuaged their guilt by allowing hysteria about Trayvon and BLM. The result? Obvious.
What blacks lack is a culture of trust, made all the worse by rap music being the central expression of blacks. What is rap about? It’s about black calling each other bad words and threatening murder. And it’s about women as ‘skankass hos’, and black ‘biatches’ are love being ho’s. If they can’t beat white girls in looks, they can beat em by acting super slutty and skanky and shi*.
Blacks need to be taught to get along with each other better. Blacks hate and attack one another. But since they are too ashamed to admit such barbarism in their midst, they project all the blame on Whitey. The Nasty Coates got mugged by black kids? It be whitey’s fault.
Such lack of accountability, trust, basic honesty, decency, and etc. has made a mess of the black community. Indulging blacks is bad stuff because they are more naturally prone to self-centrism, egotism, narcissism, megalomania, and psychopathy. The last thing you wanna tell someone with rapper-mentality is that he is soooooooo awesome and correct all the time, sheeeiiiit.
I think there is something to be learned from Coen brothers. They started out as clever-smart-ass but got better and more mature over the yrs and even made some masterworks.
Teamwork. I think maybe one reason why so many directors flamed out was because they didn’t have a support system or spirit of teamwork. This was made all the worse due to the Auteur theory that elevated the director to the status of AUTHOR at the expense of everyone else.
The reason why so many old Hollywood directors had long careers was they had a sense of limits. They were directors, professionals, craftsman. They worked constructively with others. But with the rise of Auteur theory, the new generation of directors got so full of themselves and had to be PERSONAL and TRUE all the time. Some(those with self-restraint) could do wonders in this mode, but others just got self-indulgent. Like Coppola with APOCALYPSE NOW, Cimino with HEAVEN’S GATE, Depalma with some of his nuttier projects, Peckinpah who just self-destructed, Terry Gilliam with his Welles-Fellinisms.
Auteur theory made the role of director greedy and egotistical. Even Scorsese nearly self-destructed with the monstrous NEW YORK NEW YORK. Miracle that he survived and did great work later.
In contrast, Coen brothers both stoked and checked each other’s ego. There was mutual support but also mutual criticism, easier to take cuz they grew up together. Granted, if both brothers are crazy(like with the Whacko Matrix brothers, now sisters or whatever), they could feed each other’s worst tendencies and flame out too. But teamwork and trust seemed to have done wonders for the Coens. Neither got TOO BIG FOR HIS BRITCHES about being some super auteur… like Robert Altman who wasted so much of his talent on self-indulgent projects.
And this advantage of teamwork is reflected in their films. Generally, the lone characters end badly in their universe. Think of Barton Fink in the end. Or the atomized characters in BLOOD SIMPLE.
In FARGO, the couple that trust and support one another stay together and happy whereas the more obsessively independent characters end up badly. And their selfishness undermines teamwork, like between the Buscemi and the silent thug. O BROTHER guys survive as a team. In contrast, the atomized individuals in NO COUNTRY all end up dead or in bad straits. And what is most frightening is a sense of loss of community where borders are broken in terms of nation, culture, values, codes.
SERIOUS MAN has some really messed up characters, but the core theme is familial unity. The Jewish guy faces one crisis after another but pulls it altogether for his son’s Bar Mitzvah. The Asian guy plays corrupt but he’s doing it for for the good of his son, for family. The crewcut ‘nazi’ father takes his son hunting. There is a strong father-son bond between them. And as flawed, corrupt, compromised, or dangerous as these characters are, their sense of family bond gives them compass in life, a sense of continuity. And the fat blob of a brother would be lost if not looked out by his younger brother.
Such sense of togetherness, teamwork, trust, and bond would do good for all communities. And it is what blacks need most. Why worry about Einstein when blacks can’t even follow the simple advice of Marvin Gaye in ‘What’s Goin On?’
OT: More tales of the joys of our coming Asian oligarchy.
https://nypost.com/2017/12/06/sec-slaps-tiger-cub-hedgie-husband-for-improper-sharing/
Inventing is just a way to show off. Men, and apparently nerdy white men, need to show off in order to get the attention of women. Ulitmately that is the heart of it.
AnotherDad
Parental involvement in education has never been more important. If parents are not aware of what is going on in their child’s classroom, then their child is more at risk of being ignored, left behind or short-changed. Other parents are in the room, talking with teachers, assessing other children as potential competitors with and socialization aids to their own child.
This Just In:
Thomas Edison’s lab assistant’s great-granddaughter’s cousin claims to have found incontrovertible proof of sexual harassment. Ergo, all light bulb and phonograph royalties revert to her estate, and all public displays of the Edison name are to carry the Asterisk (*) of Guilt and Shame. Nikola Tesla’s descendants could not be reached for comment.
*Uneducated rayman
It seems there is good circumstantial evidence that Einstein plagiarized at various points of his career. However, according to French physicists C. Marchal Poincare relativity theory was plagiarized by German mathematicians from Gottingen in June 1905 and Einstein was merely the front man who was made to publish it under his name because German mathematicians did not want to risk their reputations. It was a part of French German competition and pissing match in all possible areas including science that eventually culminated in the WWI. Only later Jewish and Zionists media apotheosized Einstein and since then the cult of Einstein was kept alive and one can easily imagine that a major cleansing of archives also took place.
http://web.ihep.su/library/pubs/tconf05/ps/c5-1.pdf
It seems that some French and also some Russians physicists openly question Einstein priority in formulating the special relativity theory (SRT). French papers on the subjects are virtually unknown in the anglophone world. However in my opinion Einstein both expanded and tightened up the work of Poincare though all ideas are already in Poincare’s papers. As far as the general relativity theory (GRT) there is the question whether Hilbert took some result from Einstein or vice versa. Several years ago Max Planck Institute decided that it was the first case, however there are very strong arguments that it was Einstein who lifted an equation from Hilbert.
There is however one solid proof of Einstein plagiarizing later in his career. In 1927 Einstein’s publication “Zu Kaluzas Theorie des Zusammenhanges von Gravitation und Elektrizitat” the editor Madel forced Einstein to write acknowledgement: “I was informed by Mr. Mandel that presented by me results are not new. The whole content of my work can be found in O. Klein 1926… paper”. Question is why he was permitted to publish it in the first place? Furthermore later it was found that in the 1926 letter to Ehrenfest Einstein wrote “Klein’s work is beautiful and impressive…”, so clearly he was familiar with Klein’s work before publishing his 1927 paper.
Till the end of his life he denied a prior knowledge of Poincare and Lorentz works. However in English publication of his famous 1905 paper in early 1920s he acknowledged that the transforms he derived were done before him by Lorentz. There is one possible indication that something was lifted directly from Poincare. Poincare uses mathematical argument and strictly mathematical notion that a given transform forms an algebraic group. The same statement w/o a proof is in Einstein 1905 paper. Poincare was famous and accomplished mathematicians who actually studied mathematical algebras such as groups which at that time were not really commonly known to physicist.
"utu" is a fucking liar. At least accuse a great mind of being a plagiarist in public, and not behind a screen name.
Here are actual physicists discussing the relativity priority issue:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativityReplies: @kihowi, @utu
A good countermeme for us would be the lost Elon Musks.
How many future Elon Musks were brutally hacked to death by blacks in South Africa? How many never got to be born because their parents were necklaced?
Elon Musk is just about singlehandedly re-starting the space travel program. If his stuff pans out and we get a man on Mars, think about it. So much human achievement that we would never have had if he had been one of the many many Souh African Whites who were killed for no reason other than their being White.
I’m not sure I buy the hype on him, some people think he’s a huckster and I don’t know enough to say. But in the popular culture is is a symbol of cutting edge ingenuity and technological progress. It’s good propaganda to remind people how easily we could have missed out on him.
The white population of South Africa is similar to that of Francophone Belgium. They're affluent but not exceptional with real incomes on the order of those in Spain. The homicide rate in South Africa is horrid, but it still accounts for just 4% of all deaths (and is a phenomenon which tends to be concentrated in places like the Johannesburg slums).Replies: @Anonymous, @27 year old
> the massive gaps in inventiveness (as measured by patents)
i’m so old, I can remember that the USPTO has, in recent years, CONSIDERABLY tightened up its stance on “patentable subject matter” and on “patent denied because the invention ‘would have been obvious’ to a POSITA” {“person of ordinary skill in the art”}
We had many decades of a US Supreme Court which was fundamentally uncomfortable about allowing grants of patents – an openly said so in its written decisions. They hated that US COnstitution provision almost as much as they hated the Second Amendment.
First the Americans allowed trial lawyers to grab control of the medical system.
Then they graduated to allowing trial lawyers to decide when an engineer’s work-output should be declared to be public property.
57 Jack D > a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit
A thousand dollars extra, is quite a small price to pay for a refrigerator that will last forever because it has zero moving parts, and also allows you to live far away from people who read the New York Times
Einstein invented many concepts, incl an explanation for specific heat, the photoelectric effect, an explanation for the E=mc^2 term (which was known but not considered relevant), and, oh yes, the notion that time is not constant.
He had extensive experience in his father's and uncle's electromechanical mfg plant, and possibly invented many physical things that are lost to the ages.Replies: @dearieme
“Szilard also invented and patented the (drum roll please) nuclear reactor”.
He patented the Atomic Bomb, with the patent assigned to the Admiralty. He spent a lot of time on the British effort to get Roosevelt’s notoriously sluggish and disorganised administration to start an atomic bomb project.
Even if we had stayed with DC (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s ) it would have been 110 volts (the Edison standard) and your laptop or phone or whatever would still need a converter brick to bring it down to low voltage.
OTOH, Tesla's scheme to send free electricity everywhere thru the air was nuts and could not have worked, although it did form the basis for radio. It's one thing to send a signal thru the air (that works great) but sending useful power that way is a whole different thing.Replies: @advancedatheist, @snorlax, @Karl
50 Jack D > (BTW, parts of NYC still had DC only house current up until at least the 1940s )
as far as I know, Con Ed is ==still== delivering high-pressure steam through pipes, in lower Manhattan.
Drudge:
Oh noes! The Democrat Sinister Master Plan is proceeding apace! I know, I know: Dems are gonna say “our guy had to go, now your guy has to go,” triple bankshot, etc., etc., etc.
There are billions of neurons in Asia that could be put to productive use.
If you want to know what cultures produce inventors, look at the ones that had high-craft cultures before the modern era. Japan was a high-craft culture. Europe was a collection of high-craft cultures.
You get a high-craft culture when you get X minimum percentage of its citizens who are usually gifted in visual-spacial and mechanical skills, and when that culture’s economy has progressed to the point where craftsmen are able to earn a good enough living that they can have more than 2 children per family, and thus begin to increase their descendants in a Malthusian manner. This increases the total amount of high-performing visual-spacial and mechanical genes in each generation, and therefore increases the potential numbers of craftsmen and inventors with every new generation. You can’t get a homegrown industrial revolution without this process happening. You won’t have enough talented people to create it otherwise.
Africa has never been a high craft culture, therefore it does not produce inventors. This is not a surprise.
Or obsessively watch birds or angle for fishes etc.
If you are a smart black or hispanic then there is non real incentive to be an innovator. You simply get average grades, apply to an investment bank or law firm and get given a massive salary for being window dressing. I don't think people realise how easy it is for these people.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco, @Forbes
You simply get average grades, apply to an investment bank or law firm and get given a massive salary for being window dressing. I don’t think people realise how easy it is for these people.
This is a fantasy.
About 9% of those in management occupations are black. Financial managers are less likely to be black (7%) than managers generally. About 4.4% of all lawyers are black. The black share among physicians is 7.5%, among engineers is 5%, among non-academic psychologists is 5.8%, among computer programmers is 7.6%, and among pharmacists is 10%. Yolanda Washington, Rph, is not paid a ‘massive salary’ to fill your bloody prescription at Walgreen’s.
Michelle Obama was politically connected and working as an apparatchik in industries with large compliance costs. When she left the University of Chicago Hospitals, her position was eliminated.
For a biographical squib which teaches differently see that of Lawrence Mungin (who had a BA and LLB from Harvard). He was paid a handsome, not massive, salary as an associate at the BigLaw firm of Katten Munchin (about $96.000 a year) He ended up practicing solo in South Carolina. Lots of people flame out of Biglaw, so that’s not all that surprising. Mungin was unusual in that he was sold on the idea of slapping them with an anti-discrimination suit which had little merit. (There was no question he was a competent lawyer; he was just a bad fit for the firm he was in, and likely for BigLaw generally).
The thing about patronage and privilege is that it’s restricted to the few.
IIRC he is using maths scores at quite a young age (10?) to identify “potential Einsteins”. But the Black-White test gap increases with age.
Japan and Germany rose so quickly after the war because of massive tax cuts. The Germans focused on marginal rates and the Japanese focused on loopholes.
How many future Elon Musks were brutally hacked to death by blacks in South Africa? How many never got to be born because their parents were necklaced?
Elon Musk is just about singlehandedly re-starting the space travel program. If his stuff pans out and we get a man on Mars, think about it. So much human achievement that we would never have had if he had been one of the many many Souh African Whites who were killed for no reason other than their being White.
I'm not sure I buy the hype on him, some people think he's a huckster and I don't know enough to say. But in the popular culture is is a symbol of cutting edge ingenuity and technological progress. It's good propaganda to remind people how easily we could have missed out on him.Replies: @Art Deco
How many future Elon Musks were brutally hacked to death by blacks in South Africa?
The white population of South Africa is similar to that of Francophone Belgium. They’re affluent but not exceptional with real incomes on the order of those in Spain. The homicide rate in South Africa is horrid, but it still accounts for just 4% of all deaths (and is a phenomenon which tends to be concentrated in places like the Johannesburg slums).
The way they identify high scoring students (to make the claim that high achieving blacks and women are underrepresented) is just by taking the top 5 percent of scorers on the 3rd grade standardized math test. That is...not a good way of identifying really smart kids.
The study of mathematically precocious youth took kids who scored in the top 3% in 7th grade (by which time IQs are much more stable and predictive of adult ability) and then gave them the SAT. The kids in the top quartile on the SAT were much more likely to get parents later on than the kids in the bottom quartile (out of the top 3% kids, so everyone was pretty smart.) In other words, there’s a big difference between a kid who is in the top 0.75% in math ability in 7th grade and kid who is just in the top 3%, in terms of whether they get a patent eventually or become a published scientist or whatever. But you can’t get a nice diverse group of kids who score in the top 0.75% in 7th grade on a well designed test the way you can for the top 5% in 3rd grade on a really low reliability test.
There’s also the issue of course of mechanical and spatial abilities that are correlated with IQ but aren’t being directly measured, but probably make a difference for inventiveness. But those abilities probably are even more undiverse than math, given everything we know about the world. Tinkering around in your basement and building stuff is pretty much the most white guy thing in the world.Replies: @Jack D, @Chebyshev
Right, like there are probably many kids who are tall and quite athletic, but who don’t like playing basketball because they don’t like contact or they’re lazy, and never play for their college team.
My understanding is that there were other scientists who got close to formulating the notion of relativity before Einstein, but Einstein was a very bright guy who kept up with all the cutting-edge scientific papers in his field, and because of this, he was always one jump ahead of the others in putting all the pieces together. In other words, he worked harder and faster than the others at putting together the foundation he needed to build on top of it.
In other words, Einstein got ahead by putting in the elbow grease. Our universities are filled with scholars who don’t read the new work in their own field, and who thus fall behind in the race for innovation. Whether you keep up is more a matter of temperament than genius, however. Einstein couldn’t find work as a physicist during the time period when he was making his original mark in physics, so he had something to prove to the world and a reason to push himself hard.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
> He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts
no, that was invented by two Swedish college kids (Von Platen and Munters) as a class assignment in 1920. See US patent 1609334
Not only that, but their apparatus was actually only a refinement on the Edmond Carré invention of 1850, which did require moving pumps and valves. They added hydrogen gas.
Not only that, but Carre’s machine (admittedly the first to be PRACTICAL for producing commercial refrigeration, see US Patent 30,201), was not really new, either. British beer brewers were doing it in ther prototyping workshops, in the early 1820’s. Carre introduced the use of ammonia, which your RV reefer of today, still uses. Carre’s machine was producing hundreds and hundreds of pounds per day.
A Scotsman came up with the seminal lab demonstration in the 1750’s
When i see "Lost Einsteins or Edisons" i think someone is finally talking about something real--the huge loss of talent we've had in the Western world because of "the culture" telling smart white women not to be wives and mothers producing smart white babies but to "lean in" or some such crap. And then adding insult to injury by replacing them with ever more black and brown deadweight that must be dragged around.
That is a real issue. (And there's no doubt the tedious Yan Shenish Asian triumphalists have more and more to crow about because of it.)
Instead Chetty's churning out some cloyingly stupid piece on how there are all these black+Hispanics rocket scientists out there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... to burst forth but for white racism. If i wanted to imbibe that fantasy i'd watch some stupid (((Hollywood))) movie.Replies: @Yan Shen, @Anonymous, @Moses, @YetAnotherAnon, @biz, @Stan Adams
I’ve heard similar laments about all the loss of all those high-octane Jewish neurons that were snuffed out in the Holocaust.
“If all those super-smart Jews had lived, we’d be building shopping malls on Alpha Centauri right now!”
And Goldman Sachs would be doing even better, no doubt.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Einstein_Refrigerator.png
He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts. It is said that Einstein used the skills he developed while working in the patent office to apply for the patents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
"Einstein" and not "Edison" is sort of the modern day synonym for "genius" - people say "He's real Einsten" . No one says "he's a real Edison" .Replies: @James Speaks, @Jeff Albertson, @dearieme, @kihowi, @syonredux, @Karl, @Karl
> He and his student Szilard invented a refrigerator with no moving parts
no, that was invented by two Swedish college kids (Von Platen and Munters) as a class assignment in 1920. See US patent 1609334
Not only that, but their apparatus was actually only a refinement on the Edmond Carré invention of 1850, which did require moving pumps and valves. They added hydrogen gas.
Not only that, but Carre’s machine (admittedly the first to be PRACTICAL for producing commercial refrigeration, see US Patent 30,201), was not really new, either. British beer brewers were doing it in their prototyping workshops, in the early 1820’s. Carre introduced the use of ammonia, which your RV reefer of today, still uses. Carre’s machine was producing hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ice per day. Several units were smuggled past the Union Blockade into the Confederate States
A Scotsman came up with the seminal lab demonstration in the 1750’s
One can always count on the least meritorious diaspora parasite to feel good about what we Israelis have accomplished through actual struggle.
More like lost Aeronautical Engineers such as Saint Trayvon of the Skittles.
Suppose there'a s bunch of fat lazy slobs lying around eating junk food. You want to make them healthy. You need to emphasize the basics of proper eating and exercise. It would make no sense to fret about how to turn them into Olympic weightlifter, NBA star, boxing champion, or top soccer player.
The problems of black education is so dire(read Fred Reed's latest column) that it's downright surreal to worry about not enough blacks becoming Einsteins. I mean, WHO CARES when it's difficult just to make them come to school, not cuss and beat up teachers, get into endless fights, and steal stuff.
If a patient is dying, you try to save him. You don't worry about why he isn't about to become a billionaire.
At this point, never mind the Albert the physicist. It'd be good enough for blacks to be like Fat Albert, the jolly Negro who, though grossly obese, gets along with people. He doesn't add but he doesn't take away.
And that should be the starting point when it comes to blackness. The main problem is character and morals, not genius and brilliance. Blacks fail at basic morality. And Libby dibbers allow blacks to indulge in fantasies like BLM. Libby dibbers are neurotic themselves. They fear black crime and institute tough jail times and policing to bring back cities. But this made them feel 'guilty', so they assuaged their guilt by allowing hysteria about Trayvon and BLM. The result? Obvious.
What blacks lack is a culture of trust, made all the worse by rap music being the central expression of blacks. What is rap about? It's about black calling each other bad words and threatening murder. And it's about women as 'skankass hos', and black 'biatches' are love being ho's. If they can't beat white girls in looks, they can beat em by acting super slutty and skanky and shi*.
Blacks need to be taught to get along with each other better. Blacks hate and attack one another. But since they are too ashamed to admit such barbarism in their midst, they project all the blame on Whitey. The Nasty Coates got mugged by black kids? It be whitey's fault.
Such lack of accountability, trust, basic honesty, decency, and etc. has made a mess of the black community. Indulging blacks is bad stuff because they are more naturally prone to self-centrism, egotism, narcissism, megalomania, and psychopathy. The last thing you wanna tell someone with rapper-mentality is that he is soooooooo awesome and correct all the time, sheeeiiiit.
I think there is something to be learned from Coen brothers. They started out as clever-smart-ass but got better and more mature over the yrs and even made some masterworks.
Teamwork. I think maybe one reason why so many directors flamed out was because they didn't have a support system or spirit of teamwork. This was made all the worse due to the Auteur theory that elevated the director to the status of AUTHOR at the expense of everyone else.
The reason why so many old Hollywood directors had long careers was they had a sense of limits. They were directors, professionals, craftsman. They worked constructively with others. But with the rise of Auteur theory, the new generation of directors got so full of themselves and had to be PERSONAL and TRUE all the time. Some(those with self-restraint) could do wonders in this mode, but others just got self-indulgent. Like Coppola with APOCALYPSE NOW, Cimino with HEAVEN'S GATE, Depalma with some of his nuttier projects, Peckinpah who just self-destructed, Terry Gilliam with his Welles-Fellinisms.
Auteur theory made the role of director greedy and egotistical. Even Scorsese nearly self-destructed with the monstrous NEW YORK NEW YORK. Miracle that he survived and did great work later.
In contrast, Coen brothers both stoked and checked each other's ego. There was mutual support but also mutual criticism, easier to take cuz they grew up together. Granted, if both brothers are crazy(like with the Whacko Matrix brothers, now sisters or whatever), they could feed each other's worst tendencies and flame out too. But teamwork and trust seemed to have done wonders for the Coens. Neither got TOO BIG FOR HIS BRITCHES about being some super auteur... like Robert Altman who wasted so much of his talent on self-indulgent projects.
And this advantage of teamwork is reflected in their films. Generally, the lone characters end badly in their universe. Think of Barton Fink in the end. Or the atomized characters in BLOOD SIMPLE.
In FARGO, the couple that trust and support one another stay together and happy whereas the more obsessively independent characters end up badly. And their selfishness undermines teamwork, like between the Buscemi and the silent thug. O BROTHER guys survive as a team. In contrast, the atomized individuals in NO COUNTRY all end up dead or in bad straits. And what is most frightening is a sense of loss of community where borders are broken in terms of nation, culture, values, codes.
SERIOUS MAN has some really messed up characters, but the core theme is familial unity. The Jewish guy faces one crisis after another but pulls it altogether for his son's Bar Mitzvah. The Asian guy plays corrupt but he's doing it for for the good of his son, for family. The crewcut 'nazi' father takes his son hunting. There is a strong father-son bond between them. And as flawed, corrupt, compromised, or dangerous as these characters are, their sense of family bond gives them compass in life, a sense of continuity. And the fat blob of a brother would be lost if not looked out by his younger brother.
Such sense of togetherness, teamwork, trust, and bond would do good for all communities. And it is what blacks need most. Why worry about Einstein when blacks can't even follow the simple advice of Marvin Gaye in 'What's Goin On?'Replies: @Issac
Nobody wants to save that dying patient. The black cohort is simply a political lever by which one gains moral height without expending much effort. As others have mentioned, Chetty uses the low ability minority cohorts to produce anti-white antipathy and thereby empower his own higher function minority cohort.
i'm so old, I can remember that the USPTO has, in recent years, CONSIDERABLY tightened up its stance on "patentable subject matter" and on "patent denied because the invention 'would have been obvious' to a POSITA" {"person of ordinary skill in the art"}
We had many decades of a US Supreme Court which was fundamentally uncomfortable about allowing grants of patents - an openly said so in its written decisions. They hated that US COnstitution provision almost as much as they hated the Second Amendment.
First the Americans allowed trial lawyers to grab control of the medical system.
Then they graduated to allowing trial lawyers to decide when an engineer's work-output should be declared to be public property.
57 Jack D > a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit
A thousand dollars extra, is quite a small price to pay for a refrigerator that will last forever because it has zero moving parts, and also allows you to live far away from people who read the New York TimesReplies: @Jack D, @oldfarmerbrown
No moving parts is not the same as lasting forever – things still corrode, burn out, etc. – see the hot water heater in your basement. Old fashioned (non-self defrosting) mechanical refrigerators are incredibly durable themselves.
An inclination toward invention, strategic thinking, and novel solutions would also serve an impoverished kid well when trying to escape an urban ghetto, for example.
Would MacGyver be stuck by circumstance?
In unrelated news, French students score top place in PIRLS.
(Just kidding.)
The Post got the right answer.
It’s not only about sex. Boredom is also a factor.
One of the reasons why I memorized the calendar was to give my mind something to do in the moments when I had no other intellectual stimulation.
If I’m, say, sitting in traffic, and whatever’s playing on the radio is boring me to tears, then I can look at the license plate of the car ahead of me and turn it into a date.
Out of the number 938, I can make at least four dates – Wednesday, September 3, 2008; Sunday, March 9, 2008; Sunday, March 8, 2009; and Monday, August 3, 2009.
I can also make four months out of it – September 1938, August 1993, August 1939, and September 1983. The first days of Sept. ’38 and ’83 were Thursdays; the first day of Aug. ’93 was a Sunday; the first day of Aug. ’39 was a Tuesday.
Off the top of my head, I know that 2008-09-03* was the day before John McCain accepted the Republican presidential nomination; that the famous “peace in our time” fiasco came in Sept. ’38; that World War II began the day after the last day of Aug. ’39; and that the Korean airliner was shot down by the Soviets on 1983-09-01.
If there is a woman alive who would be impressed by any of this, I have yet to meet her. But at least it keeps my mind busy.
*My preferred format for dates.
https://twitter.com/warplanefeed/status/936877609085890560
Beautiful Burbank Broad Fastening Bolts On P-38 Fuselage In 1944:
https://twitter.com/DaiIyHistory/status/935874038609711104
http://web.ihep.su/library/pubs/tconf05/ps/c5-1.pdf
It seems that some French and also some Russians physicists openly question Einstein priority in formulating the special relativity theory (SRT). French papers on the subjects are virtually unknown in the anglophone world. However in my opinion Einstein both expanded and tightened up the work of Poincare though all ideas are already in Poincare’s papers. As far as the general relativity theory (GRT) there is the question whether Hilbert took some result from Einstein or vice versa. Several years ago Max Planck Institute decided that it was the first case, however there are very strong arguments that it was Einstein who lifted an equation from Hilbert.
There is however one solid proof of Einstein plagiarizing later in his career. In 1927 Einstein’s publication “Zu Kaluzas Theorie des Zusammenhanges von Gravitation und Elektrizitat” the editor Madel forced Einstein to write acknowledgement: “I was informed by Mr. Mandel that presented by me results are not new. The whole content of my work can be found in O. Klein 1926… paper”. Question is why he was permitted to publish it in the first place? Furthermore later it was found that in the 1926 letter to Ehrenfest Einstein wrote “Klein’s work is beautiful and impressive…”, so clearly he was familiar with Klein’s work before publishing his 1927 paper.
Till the end of his life he denied a prior knowledge of Poincare and Lorentz works. However in English publication of his famous 1905 paper in early 1920s he acknowledged that the transforms he derived were done before him by Lorentz. There is one possible indication that something was lifted directly from Poincare. Poincare uses mathematical argument and strictly mathematical notion that a given transform forms an algebraic group. The same statement w/o a proof is in Einstein 1905 paper. Poincare was famous and accomplished mathematicians who actually studied mathematical algebras such as groups which at that time were not really commonly known to physicist.Replies: @Anonymous
“It seems there is good circumstantial evidence that Einstein plagiarized at various points of his career.”
“utu” is a fucking liar. At least accuse a great mind of being a plagiarist in public, and not behind a screen name.
Here are actual physicists discussing the relativity priority issue:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativity
Where did you acquire your skills of eristic?
Lots of nations want a piece of Bell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell#Legacy_and_honors
In terms of which nations have valid claims…..Scotland obviously has priority; that’s where he was born and lived the first 18 or so years of his life.After that, the USA (where he lived the bulk of his life). Canada comes in third.
In other words living in the US for Bell would be akin to say, a spy from another nation or someone from the Russian Mafia coming to the US in middle age to look after his overseas holdings, so to speak.Replies: @syonredux
“Read the actual argument Chetty makes. He argues that even when you account for math score, blacks and Hispanics are under-represented. ”
Yes, I’m sure a paid shill like Raj Chetty is being scrupulous trying to maintain ceteris paribus, right? Surely, he is going to be honest while trying to maintain an argument that his lefty paymasters want to hear.
Yes, Chetty scrupulously controlled all of the variables and -surprise surprise- came to a conclusion that all the lefties already believe…the ones who happen to pay him.
Mute inglorious Miltons…
In terms of which nations have valid claims.....Scotland obviously has priority; that's where he was born and lived the first 18 or so years of his life.After that, the USA (where he lived the bulk of his life). Canada comes in third.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
Not exactly. Bell lived til maturity in the UK (therefore he is a Briton first and foremost). He also lived a large part of his life in Canada. Technically he lived less than half his life in the US. And of course, he never officially became a US citizen. Much like Sir Charles Chaplin of the UK, US, and Switzerland.
In other words living in the US for Bell would be akin to say, a spy from another nation or someone from the Russian Mafia coming to the US in middle age to look after his overseas holdings, so to speak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Watson
So, of the competing claims.....Scotland gets the lion's share....and then the USA and Canada....Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
Lower 40% in my observation, although I’ll defer to a real statistician if there’s a better way of naming that.
38:
https://twitter.com/warplanefeed/status/936877609085890560
Beautiful Burbank Broad Fastening Bolts On P-38 Fuselage In 1944:
https://twitter.com/DaiIyHistory/status/935874038609711104
Lurker, that’s exactly how I think Chetty will be read by the diversitarians. This garbage talk by dubious academic hustlers has no end.
Edison kind of invented inventing as an organized, ongoing institutional activity.
Really, the online Tesla cult is a very silly business....Replies: @Steve Sailer
Tesla is great, but his name didn’t begin with E, so Chetty couldn’t have gotten Einstein confused with Tesla the way the two E Names got him mixed up.
I remember reading in the introduction pages of an old DIY manual, many many moons ago, that ‘all men are by instinct builders’. That struck me as a very wise and salient observation. All men are by instinct builders – the book was written at a time when Britain was still monolithically white, so perhaps the observation applied to whites only.
But perhaps the point is that the well known male love and fetish for collecting tools etc taps into a deeper instinct, the hardwired ‘caveman’ instinct for knapping flints etc. Of course, out of this arose culture and all that flowed from it, working in wood and metals, agriculture etc etc – the desire, surely the font of *all* technological progress – to fuse hand and brain to better one’s condition.
Tesla worked for Westinghouse, not Edison.
"In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor, who had been overseeing the Paris installation, was brought back to the US to manage the Edison Machine Works, a manufacturing division situated in New York City, and asked that Tesla be brought to the US as well.[42] In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States.[43] He began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an overcrowded shop with a workforce of several hundred machinists, laborers, managing staff, and 20 "field engineers" struggling with the task of building the large electric utility in that city.[44] As in Paris, Tesla was working on troubleshooting installations and improving generators.[45] Historian W. Bernard Carlson notes Tesla may have met company founder, Thomas Alva Edison, only a couple of times.[44] One of those times was noted in Tesla's autobiography where, after staying up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner SS Oregon, he ran into Batchelor and Edison who made a quip about their "Parisian" being out all night. After Tesla told them he had been up all night fixing the Oregon Edison commented to Batchelor that "this is a damned good man."[41] One of the projects given to Tesla was to develop an arc lamp–based street lighting system.[46][47] Arc lighting was the most popular type of street lighting but it required high voltages and was incompatible with the Edison low voltage incandescent system, causing the company to lose contracts in cities that wanted street lighting as well. Tesla's designs were never put into production, possibly because of technical improvements in incandescent street lighting or because of an installation deal that Edison cut with an arc lighting company.[48]
Tesla had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Working_at_EdisonBut that doesn't help the Tesla Cult much, seeing as how Edison invented stuff like the phonograph long before he ever heard of Tesla...
Building a windmill is a cool project for a kid to do, but it's been done before, to put it mildly.
https://www.snopes.com/william-kamkwamba/Replies: @bomag, @Father O'Hara
Well,in Africa,when they say they’re going to do something with”spare parts,”it usually means some dudes genitals!
The white population of South Africa is similar to that of Francophone Belgium. They're affluent but not exceptional with real incomes on the order of those in Spain. The homicide rate in South Africa is horrid, but it still accounts for just 4% of all deaths (and is a phenomenon which tends to be concentrated in places like the Johannesburg slums).Replies: @Anonymous, @27 year old
‘4% of all deaths’
In comparison to a raging HIV epidemic with something like 30% of all blacks infected, of course it looks ‘small’.
You get a high-craft culture when you get X minimum percentage of its citizens who are usually gifted in visual-spacial and mechanical skills, and when that culture's economy has progressed to the point where craftsmen are able to earn a good enough living that they can have more than 2 children per family, and thus begin to increase their descendants in a Malthusian manner. This increases the total amount of high-performing visual-spacial and mechanical genes in each generation, and therefore increases the potential numbers of craftsmen and inventors with every new generation. You can't get a homegrown industrial revolution without this process happening. You won't have enough talented people to create it otherwise.
Africa has never been a high craft culture, therefore it does not produce inventors. This is not a surprise.Replies: @Anonymous
Also look at how obsessively white men pursue craft hobbies – for little or no financial reward.
Or obsessively watch birds or angle for fishes etc.
Yep. Hence the claim that his single greatest contribution to science was the role that he played in developing the industrial laboratory.
bored identity is shocked, shocked to hear that East LA Law Enfarcement has failed to disclose full identity of Dreaming Edisonito,16, whose major contribution to juvenile sado-mesticoism consists of bold reinvention of catapult…..obviously, este niño is just another, genuine ‘hidden figures’ material:
What Would Abuela Coca Do?
After my son had spent a semester in the sixth grade, I was told that he was a "C" student in math. This seemed unlikely to me, so I arranged to meet the teacher. Oh, it's true, she assured me; she said that she divided the grade into tests, homework and work done in class, and my poor son was a "C" student in every area.
So, I asked her to describe a typical test. "Well," she said, "the students have to solve 30-35 problems." And how many problems does my son solve correctly? I asked. "Oh, he gets all the answers correct," she replied.
Full stop.
So how does he get a "C"? "Well, you see, he needs to show his work." (It's a penmanship exercise.)
And what about homework? "Well, he gives correct answers, but he needs to keep his homework in a neat notebook, with a table of contents." (Clerical task.)
And what about in class work? "Well, your son seems to spend a lot of time looking out the window; he doesn't listen after the first time I explain something." (Failure to worship female teacher with full attention, and properly socialize with other students.)
Anyway, long story short, my son is now working on his math PhD, having been admitted to both the #1 and #2 grad schools in the world.
How many other boys have been told by female teachers that they just don't have what it takes to succeed in math, like good penmanship and good clerical skills and good social skills? How many lost Einsteins and Edisons are there?Replies: @Buffalo Joe, @JackOH
Anon7, thanks.
“The real lost Einsteins and lost Edisons are the boys who are being systematically forced out of math and science by female teachers who are determined to make sure that at least half of the students to get good grades are girls.”
My unconfirmed suspicion for years has been that male students are steered away from STEM majors, and women are being steered toward STEM majors at my local Podunk Tech. I would not have guessed dubious grading practices as early as grade school to accomplish the same thing.
Other candidates for “lost Einsteins and lost Edisons” may be the remnant of talented White kids in majority Black schools who succumb to the dysfunctionality of much of Black culture.
"utu" is a fucking liar. At least accuse a great mind of being a plagiarist in public, and not behind a screen name.
Here are actual physicists discussing the relativity priority issue:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativityReplies: @kihowi, @utu
Getting a bit too angry. Mica is a jewish name, isn’t it?
as far as I know, Con Ed is ==still== delivering high-pressure steam through pipes, in lower Manhattan.Replies: @JMcG, @Buffalo Joe
Veolia does this in Philadelphia as well. There are steam heating facilities still in use in Center City.
Tesla did briefly work for Edison:
“In 1884, Edison manager Charles Batchelor, who had been overseeing the Paris installation, was brought back to the US to manage the Edison Machine Works, a manufacturing division situated in New York City, and asked that Tesla be brought to the US as well.[42] In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States.[43] He began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, an overcrowded shop with a workforce of several hundred machinists, laborers, managing staff, and 20 “field engineers” struggling with the task of building the large electric utility in that city.[44] As in Paris, Tesla was working on troubleshooting installations and improving generators.[45] Historian W. Bernard Carlson notes Tesla may have met company founder, Thomas Alva Edison, only a couple of times.[44] One of those times was noted in Tesla’s autobiography where, after staying up all night repairing the damaged dynamos on the ocean liner SS Oregon, he ran into Batchelor and Edison who made a quip about their “Parisian” being out all night. After Tesla told them he had been up all night fixing the Oregon Edison commented to Batchelor that “this is a damned good man.”[41] One of the projects given to Tesla was to develop an arc lamp–based street lighting system.[46][47] Arc lighting was the most popular type of street lighting but it required high voltages and was incompatible with the Edison low voltage incandescent system, causing the company to lose contracts in cities that wanted street lighting as well. Tesla’s designs were never put into production, possibly because of technical improvements in incandescent street lighting or because of an installation deal that Edison cut with an arc lighting company.[48]
Tesla had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Working_at_Edison
But that doesn’t help the Tesla Cult much, seeing as how Edison invented stuff like the phonograph long before he ever heard of Tesla…
But converting between DC voltages is nowadays a long-solved problem, and modern switching circuits are even more efficient (and can be miniaturized and mass-produced many orders of magnitude better) than AC transformers.
That this wasn’t the case a century ago doesn’t do us any benefit. The AC power grid is like asbestos insulation, the Spanish-American War, narrow streets with little parking in major cities, Aral Sea irrigation projects, lead-glazed tableware, the 1986 amnesty, the de facto standardization on IBM-compatible PCs, taping over the master recording of Super Bowl I, etc.
All rational decisions made because at the times they were made the benefits seemed to clearly outweigh the (monetary and opportunity) costs, but ended up creating massive unforeseen costs that far outweighed the real or alleged benefits.
Sure, it seemed like the right decision at the time, and arguably even was the right decision at the time by Keynes’ reasoning (in the long run we’re all dead, but on the other hand DC switching hardware would’ve advanced faster in DC-verse), but from our perspective in the present day it ended up being a trillion-dollar mistake.
What was definitely the wrong decision in Edison and Tesla’s era was going with AC over DC at point of use as well as for transmission. If we had DC point of use it would greatly simplify many electronics and appliances, and more importantly would’ve allowed transparently and gradually replacing the legacy AC grid with a modern DC grid (and, before that, newer improved-capacity/efficiency AC standards) once modern switching circuits became available. As things are, 30 years from now the grid will probably be all-DC except at the point of use, which is truly absurd.
As far as laptop DC converters, the Apple chargers (for example) actually first ups the voltage (to 380V DC), accounting for most of the unit’s bulk, before reducing the voltage to a variable level depending on the rate the laptop is drawing power. Inside the laptop are numerous additional switches which power different components at different voltages.
If we had a DC grid (or DC point of use) system, it would’ve been possible (in the last half-century) to do this sort of on-demand voltage switching within or at some point before the electrical outlet. So no, you wouldn’t still have bricks on your cords. You’d also be able to charge your phone in 5 minutes, or Melon Usk could charge his Edison at the maximum possible rate from a regular wall outlet.
Tesla’s role in the AC-vs-DC debate was historically-significant, but hardly, in retrospect, worthwhile or worthy of adulation.Replies: @The Alarmist, @Jack D, @Anonymous
You kind of trivialise the engineering challenges of running more than a very local dc grid.
FWIW, Tesla lived out his days in a building that still ran an internal dc grid. Poetic justice, or cruel fate?
Dunno. Edison has quite a list of inventions to his credit: the phonograph, the quadruplex telegraph, the carbon microphone, ……
Sorry, but I don’t recall stating any place of employment for Tesla. Why are you “correcting” me?
OT: Haven Monahan sighting.
Now they came for that guy from “that 70s Show” Danny Masterson. Publicly fired from his job despite police investigating and finding no merit to a rape claim made against him from a jealous ex.
One of his “rape” victims was a past girlfriend who said he raped her in the middle of their 6 year long relationship – once complicated by the fact that she had allegedly accused three other Hollywood stars of previously raping her. She also apparently pursued him after the breakup and threatened his then girlfriend.
I’ve been a producer of a number of productions … doesn’t mean I actually produced all of them.
Edison’s best invention was the incubator that allowed him to put his name on a lot of other peoples’ good ideas.
In other words living in the US for Bell would be akin to say, a spy from another nation or someone from the Russian Mafia coming to the US in middle age to look after his overseas holdings, so to speak.Replies: @syonredux
Scots first and foremost
Dunno. According to the BBC, Bell became a US citizen in 1882:
Dunno. My understanding was that he split his time between the US and Canada, with Canada being more of a vacation spot.
Except for the fact that Bell did a lot of his scientific./inventive work in the USA….and his chief collaborator on the telephone was an American, Thomas A Watson (famous in popular memory as the recipient of the first telephone call):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Watson
So, of the competing claims…..Scotland gets the lion’s share….and then the USA and Canada….
http://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.htmlReplies: @Pericles
At IQ 145, the US Whites still outnumber the US Jews by roughly 3 to 2.
Here is a longer discussion (comment 158):
https://www.unz.com/isteve/new-york-terrorism-open-thread/#comment-2060795
"utu" is a fucking liar. At least accuse a great mind of being a plagiarist in public, and not behind a screen name.
Here are actual physicists discussing the relativity priority issue:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/35090/why-did-einstein-get-credit-for-formulating-the-theory-of-special-relativityReplies: @kihowi, @utu
“utu” is a fucking liar. At least accuse a great mind of being a plagiarist in public, and not behind a screen name.
Where did you acquire your skills of eristic?
Tesla’s whole career wasn’t nearly as impactful as, say, the phonograph, to name just one Edison invention.
Also, Tesla was wrong and Edison was right. Direct current is superior to alternating current in virtually every way (including and especially over long distance).
AC makes the grid much harder/impossible to significantly upgrade, made the task of rural electrification much more difficult, is the reason it’s difficult or impossible to transmit across national borders, and, ironically, is a major source of cost and complexity in renewable energy and electric cars.
Every time you plug in an applicance with a bulky/heavy brick on the power cord, make sure to thank Mr. Tesla.Replies: @James Speaks, @Jack D, @Thirdeye
Edison was more of an administrator of what was, for the time, a very good engineering laboratory. Edison built upon previous experiments with acoustic sound reproduction and incandescent light to make practical and marketable devices based on those ideas. Not conceptual breakthroughs, but then the concept is only the first step in product development, which was where the Edison lab excelled.
AC power still has advantages for electro-motive applications. State-of-the-art locomotive traction motors have been AC since the early 1990s.
What Really Happened At The School Where Every Graduate Got Into College
Reality, NPR no less.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/28/564054556/what-really-happened-at-the-school-where-every-senior-got-into-college
You implied that Edison had somehow capitalized on Tesla’s inventions, while Tesla’s inventions in fact drove Edison to the margins.
There is no publicly available data on the actual performance of Asian American citizens on the SAT compared to non-citizens, of which there are tens of thousands who take the test and are included in aggregate statistics.
Please immediately link a document that explicitly provides the data you’re citing or don’t make such ignorant comments again.
(That said the estimate you stated could be close to true)
I doubt you’re an employee of the CollegeBoard.
Anyway, technology is advancing at a frantic pace to drive consumption rather than to meet need. Haven't you noticed that most people use innovation in a maladaptive way? Haven't you noticed the obese and bleary-eyed tech zombies out there? Wouldn't it be more innovative to coordinate the harmonious, efficacious use of innovation?
Quality of life is in decline as is intellectual development in any field that doesn't drive innovative profit making. And you, Sailer, are merely a drone, mindlessly driving us ever closer to techtastrophy!
Case in point: Haven't those robotic Japanese patent-holders stopped breeding?Replies: @RUSH Limbaugh, @Charles Erwin Wilson
Who sicced the Puritan on Sailer?
Probably? It is a miserable convenience sample. None of Chetty’s results apply to anything except maybe, and that is a qualified maybe, the NYC public schools.
It is another instance of taking data and twisting the results to serve an anti-American agenda.
None of Chetty’s data is properly anonymized; he just effectively lied, but we already know this from the studies he released on college admissions, because he would have had to have the actual names/SS numbers of each tax return to match with the college admissions data.
The real interesting story behind all the nonsense Chetty work is this massive breach of ethics, why the private data of Americans was unethically given away by the government, but maybe a hacker-of-Chetty in turn can find the Trump family tax records or something. Go out and do it, Russians! :p
Einstein wasn’t a terrible inventor btw. He invented a refrigeration system that has had some commercial applications IIRC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator
Edison’s perhaps biggest contribution to invention was to industrialize the undertaking of invention, as you point out.
Btw raw number of patents is probably a sub par indicator although a good first order approximation. If the bottom 50% are patenting yet another device to prevent being squirted in the eye with a grapefruit, what are they really worth?
The real interesting story behind all the nonsense Chetty work is this massive breach of ethics, why the private data of Americans was unethically given away by the government, but maybe a hacker-of-Chetty in turn can find the Trump family tax records or something. Go out and do it, Russians! :pReplies: @Steve Sailer, @The Z Blog
Any evidence for that allegation?
David Edward Hughes invented the carbon microphone. The Edison lab was first to develop it into a marketable device and was awarded a controversial patent for it.
Dunno.Edison’s work on the quadruplex telegraph and phonograph, for example, were largely solo…..
Dunno….the sources that I have read credit Hughes, Edison, and Berliner with independently developing the carbon microphone….A not uncommon occurrence in the history of invention. Cf how the steamboat was independently invented by three men at about the same time: Jouffroy d’Abbans in France, John Fitch in Pennsylvania, and William Symington in Scotland…
AC power still has advantages for electro-motive applications. State-of-the-art locomotive traction motors have been AC since the early 1990s.Replies: @syonredux
What counts as a conceptual breakthrough vs an improvement? Was the phonograph a conceptual breakthrough by Edison that was improved by Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell?
Before Edison there had been some experiments with recording a record of sound waves as an inked line on paper but they were just squiggles with no practical application - no one could play them back again until modern times.
agreed. a lot of research papers in atomic/optical physics are what my friend called “chinese copying papers” that were literal copies of parts of papers from better journals.
as far as I know, Con Ed is ==still== delivering high-pressure steam through pipes, in lower Manhattan.Replies: @JMcG, @Buffalo Joe
Karl. Edison had a lot to do with steam generation and steam powered electrical generating plants. There was a company that built/managed construction of steam plants, EBASCO. I believe that stood for Edison Bonding And Security Company, financed steam plants.
“We”? Tell me what you accomplished and how you struggled?
Svigor, that would only work if Bill Clinton’s pelt was hanging somewhere, senator doesn’t equal president. It’s like in chess, Knight doesn’t equal King.
i'm so old, I can remember that the USPTO has, in recent years, CONSIDERABLY tightened up its stance on "patentable subject matter" and on "patent denied because the invention 'would have been obvious' to a POSITA" {"person of ordinary skill in the art"}
We had many decades of a US Supreme Court which was fundamentally uncomfortable about allowing grants of patents - an openly said so in its written decisions. They hated that US COnstitution provision almost as much as they hated the Second Amendment.
First the Americans allowed trial lawyers to grab control of the medical system.
Then they graduated to allowing trial lawyers to decide when an engineer's work-output should be declared to be public property.
57 Jack D > a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit
A thousand dollars extra, is quite a small price to pay for a refrigerator that will last forever because it has zero moving parts, and also allows you to live far away from people who read the New York TimesReplies: @Jack D, @oldfarmerbrown
I had one, neighbors had them,they were a pain. One had to hook them up to a natural gas or propane source. One couldn’t just buy one and plug it in anywhere. You had to contract a plumber to put in/move gas piping just to clean under them. Accidental gas leaks were common. They did work when the power went out.
Stan, “…I have yet to meet her.” Try searching dimly lit bars at 2AM.
Fortunately, I can simulate normality.
Is this the same Raj Chetty that proposed the magic zip code theory; if only we could move poor minorities into wealthy zip codes they would achieve greatness? President Obama used this theory to push Section 8 housing, and its related crime, into suburban neighborhoods.
As was the case with the magic zip codes (which zeroed in on Sioux County, Iowa, as the USA's most upwardly-mobile), it's Chetty's map that worries. That is, the inventors' map is a pretty good match for the upward mobility map.
In both cases, a key plank in Chetty's solution to the problems he thinks he's identified is for the under-performing to be exposed to the more successful areas' cultural capital and its aura of magical achievement-enabling.
So both the magic upward mobility zip codes and the investor-friendly zones are ripe targets for exploitation by social engineers. This topic was discussed here at iSteve earlier this year when Mark Zuckerberg toured Iowa and pushed his plan to Save The World by imposing a 'cultural capital gains tax' on these over-privileged communities.
The real interesting story behind all the nonsense Chetty work is this massive breach of ethics, why the private data of Americans was unethically given away by the government, but maybe a hacker-of-Chetty in turn can find the Trump family tax records or something. Go out and do it, Russians! :pReplies: @Steve Sailer, @The Z Blog
Alternatively, how do we know he really has the data set he claims to have? He would not be the first guy to fake his data.
Reality, NPR no less.
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/28/564054556/what-really-happened-at-the-school-where-every-senior-got-into-collegeReplies: @Buffalo Joe
George, Thank you for the link. What is happening at that school is criminal and who ever heard of HS teachers getting $15,000 to $30,000 bonuses? In Buffalo more than 37% of HS students miss 35 days of classes or more, which is 7 weeks of school. They still graduate. Teachers in Buffalo public school average 18 or more days absent per school year which is 3 weeks of classes. Public education in the USA is in need of a RICO investigation!
Nowadays we say, “Correlation is not causation,” which is one word fewer and still pretty Latinate.
Farmer, Amish around here still use spring houses and ice houses.
If you are a smart black or hispanic then there is non real incentive to be an innovator. You simply get average grades, apply to an investment bank or law firm and get given a massive salary for being window dressing. I don't think people realise how easy it is for these people.Replies: @Anonymous, @Art Deco, @Forbes
It used to be called tokenism, now it’s Celebrate Diversity! Same results.
The metric is “per 1000 children,” and as those a very rural areas any anomaly will stick out. In statistics, small samples give you outliers.
Apparently she kept a scrapbook of the movie tickets from her dates with guys from 1981. And she listed Roy Moore as one of them. In 1981 she would have been 18 and Moore in his 30's.
Last night on twitter several people pointed out that one of the tickets in her 1981 collection has the word "child" printed on it,and thus appears to have been issued to a child.
So why would an 18 year old girl get a "child's" ticket?
Look for yourselves. This is clearly an organized hit job. It's not a very good one, but if the media won't tell the public they might get away with it. If some MSM outlet ran this today, Moore would soar in the polls. But they won't.Replies: @Forbes
In my day, a child’s ticket was something like 12 years old and under. After that, it’s an adult ticket. Essentially, teenagers are adults for movie tickets.
This must go back a while. Any modern gas stove has a flex connector that allows you to pull it out to clean and there’s no reason why you couldn’t use the same flex on a gas fridge.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/new-york-terrorism-open-thread/#comment-2060795Replies: @Jack D
Those #s are right assuming a 115 Jewish mean IQ but I think that’s a touch high (as is 40% of the geniuses from 2% of the population). I would guestimate it at more like 25%/110 or so.
But converting between DC voltages is nowadays a long-solved problem, and modern switching circuits are even more efficient (and can be miniaturized and mass-produced many orders of magnitude better) than AC transformers.
That this wasn’t the case a century ago doesn’t do us any benefit. The AC power grid is like asbestos insulation, the Spanish-American War, narrow streets with little parking in major cities, Aral Sea irrigation projects, lead-glazed tableware, the 1986 amnesty, the de facto standardization on IBM-compatible PCs, taping over the master recording of Super Bowl I, etc.
All rational decisions made because at the times they were made the benefits seemed to clearly outweigh the (monetary and opportunity) costs, but ended up creating massive unforeseen costs that far outweighed the real or alleged benefits.
Sure, it seemed like the right decision at the time, and arguably even was the right decision at the time by Keynes’ reasoning (in the long run we’re all dead, but on the other hand DC switching hardware would’ve advanced faster in DC-verse), but from our perspective in the present day it ended up being a trillion-dollar mistake.
What was definitely the wrong decision in Edison and Tesla’s era was going with AC over DC at point of use as well as for transmission. If we had DC point of use it would greatly simplify many electronics and appliances, and more importantly would’ve allowed transparently and gradually replacing the legacy AC grid with a modern DC grid (and, before that, newer improved-capacity/efficiency AC standards) once modern switching circuits became available. As things are, 30 years from now the grid will probably be all-DC except at the point of use, which is truly absurd.
As far as laptop DC converters, the Apple chargers (for example) actually first ups the voltage (to 380V DC), accounting for most of the unit’s bulk, before reducing the voltage to a variable level depending on the rate the laptop is drawing power. Inside the laptop are numerous additional switches which power different components at different voltages.
If we had a DC grid (or DC point of use) system, it would’ve been possible (in the last half-century) to do this sort of on-demand voltage switching within or at some point before the electrical outlet. So no, you wouldn’t still have bricks on your cords. You’d also be able to charge your phone in 5 minutes, or Melon Usk could charge his Edison at the maximum possible rate from a regular wall outlet.
Tesla’s role in the AC-vs-DC debate was historically-significant, but hardly, in retrospect, worthwhile or worthy of adulation.Replies: @The Alarmist, @Jack D, @Anonymous
It sounds to me like you are positing some kind of magical DC system that would automatically give you any desired voltage or amperage at any outlet without any extra hardware. Maybe this is possible but certainly no one is doing it now.
There is trillions of $ tied up in the current AC electrical grid and everything plugged into it. It would be nice if we could do some kind of clean slate reboot with 21st century technology but it’s not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Certain high voltage transmission lines are run as DC but that will be as far as it goes.
My elementary school was 30% Black; my high school 70% Black. A bright, able White kid only has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional tenth" among Whites to think about where his talents lie and what his adult future might be. A bright, able Black kid has to avoid the ne'er-do-well "dysfunctional duo-quintile" among Blacks.
Chetty's "never got a chance to deploy their skills" is risible, dangerous bullpuckey. Has this slob not noticed the zillions spent by a feckless White America on proving the equalitarian fantasy?Replies: @stillCARealist, @Lurker, @Eagle Eye
Stanford economist Raj Chetty …
Raj, of course, means “rule” as in “British Raj.”
What about Chetti?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chettiar
The phonograph was as close to a breakthru as any major invention ever. NO ONE, ever, had recorded and played back sound before. When Edison played back himself saying “Mary had a little lamb” he was the first man in all of history to hear a recording of his own voice.
Before Edison there had been some experiments with recording a record of sound waves as an inked line on paper but they were just squiggles with no practical application – no one could play them back again until modern times.
Yes.
As was the case with the magic zip codes (which zeroed in on Sioux County, Iowa, as the USA’s most upwardly-mobile), it’s Chetty’s map that worries. That is, the inventors’ map is a pretty good match for the upward mobility map.
In both cases, a key plank in Chetty’s solution to the problems he thinks he’s identified is for the under-performing to be exposed to the more successful areas’ cultural capital and its aura of magical achievement-enabling.
So both the magic upward mobility zip codes and the investor-friendly zones are ripe targets for exploitation by social engineers. This topic was discussed here at iSteve earlier this year when Mark Zuckerberg toured Iowa and pushed his plan to Save The World by imposing a ‘cultural capital gains tax’ on these over-privileged communities.
The slides are posted on the cloyingly named equality-of-opportunity.org
One slide shows a U.S. patent application by way of example. The named inventors are:
Musabji; Adil M.; (Glendale Heights, IL) ;
Borak; Jason; (Lombard, IL) ;
Lynch; James D.; (Chicago, IL) ;
Alwar; Narayanan; (South Barrington, IL) ;
Shutter; Jon D.; (Chicago, IL)
From the published paper:
Wasn’t Bell the guy who invented the iPhone?
The study’s mostly unremarked – God save ye, Miss Marple – worthlessness, the report of it, and Steve’s report of the report, as well as the first fifty or so comments – all I could stomach – proclaim loudly I am the only soul around with a thorough understanding of patents and the relevant, related matters.
Sad.
Oh, and can someone chip in with me to buy Yan Shen a skanky white hooker for a couple hours so he can exorcise his demons and resentment already?
Number of patents is an extremely poor metric for innovation. Large companies just mindlessly churn out as many as they can to try to beat their competitors over the head in the courts system. Trying to glean technological insights by reading patents is a fools errand, although that was originally the whole point of the patent system.
50 years ago this might have been a reasonable metric, but it is not today. A more reasonable approach is to say, “hey, what are the most important inventions of the last X years?” and see where they originated.
Agree.
I didn’t say I couldn’t find women. My point was that the ladies are not especially impressed by spergy hobbies.
Fortunately, I can simulate normality.
The white population of South Africa is similar to that of Francophone Belgium. They're affluent but not exceptional with real incomes on the order of those in Spain. The homicide rate in South Africa is horrid, but it still accounts for just 4% of all deaths (and is a phenomenon which tends to be concentrated in places like the Johannesburg slums).Replies: @Anonymous, @27 year old
You take deliberately missing the point to a whole new level
Agree. Bigly.
Reason number 317 why I love Jack D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Watson
So, of the competing claims.....Scotland gets the lion's share....and then the USA and Canada....Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
I do. Bell is buried in Beinn Bhreagh, which is in Canada. He cared so much for the US that he decided to be buried in Canada. Tells a lot about a person where he decided to spend his eternity under ground. Especially one of the Victorian Era. If Bell cared that much for the US, then he would have definitely decided to be buried here. And of course he chose to be buried in Canada. Meaning that he identified with Canada more than with the US.
206 Yojimbo/Zatoichi > And of course he chose to be buried in Canada.
anyone can express any preference he/she/xir wants to
But dead men don’t decide where they will end up interred.
Home scale heat driven refrigerators still exist for places that are off the grid (the Amish buy them too) but they are not economical either in terms of purchase cost or running cost vs. mechanically driven units so they are as rare as steam cars or gas lamps. Probably the high purchase cost is in part due to low volume production - a very basic fridge that would cost $500 as an electric unit goes for $1,500 as a gas unit:
https://www.lehmans.com/product/dometic-gas-refrigerators/Replies: @Anonymous
At one time Servel gas refrigerators were common in homes in the United States, many were bought as alternatives to the regular electric ones even in homes that had regular AC available and conveniently wired.
They had no moving parts and tended to last longer than regular ones, but they heated up the kitchen more than regular ones, and if the burner became clogged with dirt could put out carbon monoxide and kill people in the home. Because houses were not very well sealed up that was almost unheard of, but it happened once or twice, and now the Servels have a bounty on their lives by a corporate entity afraid of being sued.
They were a triple bitch to fix if they did go bad, as well. The gas/water mixture that made them work was kept secret and only a few self taught engineer/repairmen were able to service the actual system itself. While there were no moving parts, corrosion and chemical action would eventually give the system a “heart attack” and repairs were almost as involved as cardiac bypass surgery: the system had to be depressurized, evacuated, the clogged pipe located, cut out and a new one welded in, then the system recharged with distilled water, ammonia and hydrogen in secret proportions. There are still a few people that do this, using homemade “heart lung machines” with anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen cylinders and regulators. They charge a lot of money, by the way.
The Amish, missionaries, and rural cabin vacationers still use this type of fridge, and while new ones are made, a few old timers still swear by the vintage Servel. (Whirlpool, or maybe it was Frigidare, made a very few of these as well: in Europe, Electrolux was the vendor.) It has a few quirks, such as needing to be perfectly leveled, and it needs to be operated in an area with ventilation and its burner kept clean and adjusted properly.
http://www.mainegasrefrigerator.com/our-accreditations.html
I understand the need for these things if you are "off the grid" in a cabin, Amish, etc. but given their many downsides (I'd say the potential of the thing killing you is a pretty big one) and the very high reliability of electrical fridges (if anything the old ones are even more reliable than the newer ones) I can't imagine why anyone with access to line current would have wanted one.
But converting between DC voltages is nowadays a long-solved problem, and modern switching circuits are even more efficient (and can be miniaturized and mass-produced many orders of magnitude better) than AC transformers.
That this wasn’t the case a century ago doesn’t do us any benefit. The AC power grid is like asbestos insulation, the Spanish-American War, narrow streets with little parking in major cities, Aral Sea irrigation projects, lead-glazed tableware, the 1986 amnesty, the de facto standardization on IBM-compatible PCs, taping over the master recording of Super Bowl I, etc.
All rational decisions made because at the times they were made the benefits seemed to clearly outweigh the (monetary and opportunity) costs, but ended up creating massive unforeseen costs that far outweighed the real or alleged benefits.
Sure, it seemed like the right decision at the time, and arguably even was the right decision at the time by Keynes’ reasoning (in the long run we’re all dead, but on the other hand DC switching hardware would’ve advanced faster in DC-verse), but from our perspective in the present day it ended up being a trillion-dollar mistake.
What was definitely the wrong decision in Edison and Tesla’s era was going with AC over DC at point of use as well as for transmission. If we had DC point of use it would greatly simplify many electronics and appliances, and more importantly would’ve allowed transparently and gradually replacing the legacy AC grid with a modern DC grid (and, before that, newer improved-capacity/efficiency AC standards) once modern switching circuits became available. As things are, 30 years from now the grid will probably be all-DC except at the point of use, which is truly absurd.
As far as laptop DC converters, the Apple chargers (for example) actually first ups the voltage (to 380V DC), accounting for most of the unit’s bulk, before reducing the voltage to a variable level depending on the rate the laptop is drawing power. Inside the laptop are numerous additional switches which power different components at different voltages.
If we had a DC grid (or DC point of use) system, it would’ve been possible (in the last half-century) to do this sort of on-demand voltage switching within or at some point before the electrical outlet. So no, you wouldn’t still have bricks on your cords. You’d also be able to charge your phone in 5 minutes, or Melon Usk could charge his Edison at the maximum possible rate from a regular wall outlet.
Tesla’s role in the AC-vs-DC debate was historically-significant, but hardly, in retrospect, worthwhile or worthy of adulation.Replies: @The Alarmist, @Jack D, @Anonymous
AC was the superior system then, and still is now.
Switchmode voltage changing supplies are more efficient than AC transformers (actually, they use transformers internally themselves) in small sizes, but when one gets to large utility sized transformers they are still more efficient than a switchmode converter, and less expensive. Large switch mode high power conversion is complicated and uses lots of expensive semiconductors: standard line (50 or 60, occasionally 25 or 400 Hz in industry or marine, rail or airborne use) frequency transformers are just copper and an electrical steel core.
Even third world countries can build electrical distribution transformers, albeit not quite as efficient as the best ones used in the US and Western Europe today. By contrast, the large DC-DC step up and down converters that would be needed are dependent on big semiconductor fabs and require a much higher level of expertise to design.
I have many electrical books written in the 1920s to the 1950s showing DIY constructors such as farmers and radio hams (then as now a notoriously cheap bunch) how to build electrical transformers of all kinds, including ones designed to be connected to 4150vac distribution lines.
Before about the mid-1960s, high power DC-AC conversion at any efficiency was just not possible. There were schemes that used mercury thyratrons and such like, but motor generator sets with less than 75% efficiency at best were common until the 1970s. Indeed I worked in an electronics plant that had two old synchronous motors belted to each other at a 5/6ths ratio to supply plant 50 Hz power for production test of export products as late as 1997.
AC power has another huge advantage over DC: large motors are generally of the synchronous type and both much more efficient than DC motors, with commutators, and are inherently speed controlled by the AC line frequency. Otherwise, regulators and governors requiring calibration would be required to expect a motor to turn at any particular speed.
Consider what was then the common phonograph. You want the record to turn at a constant 33 1/3 rpm? With AC motors this was easy, it was simply a matter of calculating the mechanical ratio of motor speed to platter speed with gears, drive wheel sizes, or belt pulley sizes. DC turntables would have needed a Rube Goldberg regulator arrangement.
An interesting aside: Uniquely, Japan uses either 50 or 60 Hz power, depending on where in Japan you are. So, Japanese turntables had to be able to run on either 50 or 60 Hz AC, so they did use DC, via solid state silicon diode rectification, to turn the motor. But in lieu of a complicated phase lock loop and frequency standard, they used the line frequency to control speed in an ingenious way. The platter was cast with tone rings with four bands, with teeth so that at 33 or 45 rpm, the teeth would appear to stand still with a neon strobe light that ran off the AC line. This was at 50 or 60 Hz, but exactly one or the other, anywhere in Japan (or anywhere else). There was a DC voltage control the user set with a knob so that one of the four lines would appear to stop when s/he had it set to exactly the right speed. Since the range was somewhat limited, in practice, you didn’t really have to know which of the four was supposed to stop: when one did you were good to go. (A toggle changed the DC range from the 45 rpm voltage range to the 33 rpm voltage range. They did not really overlap.)
This is a fantasy.
About 9% of those in management occupations are black. Financial managers are less likely to be black (7%) than managers generally. About 4.4% of all lawyers are black. The black share among physicians is 7.5%, among engineers is 5%, among non-academic psychologists is 5.8%, among computer programmers is 7.6%, and among pharmacists is 10%. Yolanda Washington, Rph, is not paid a 'massive salary' to fill your bloody prescription at Walgreen's.
Michelle Obama was politically connected and working as an apparatchik in industries with large compliance costs. When she left the University of Chicago Hospitals, her position was eliminated.
For a biographical squib which teaches differently see that of Lawrence Mungin (who had a BA and LLB from Harvard). He was paid a handsome, not massive, salary as an associate at the BigLaw firm of Katten Munchin (about $96.000 a year) He ended up practicing solo in South Carolina. Lots of people flame out of Biglaw, so that's not all that surprising. Mungin was unusual in that he was sold on the idea of slapping them with an anti-discrimination suit which had little merit. (There was no question he was a competent lawyer; he was just a bad fit for the firm he was in, and likely for BigLaw generally).
The thing about patronage and privilege is that it's restricted to the few.Replies: @LondonBob
In my experience the less demanding jobs in IBs are stacked with blacks. If you are moderately intelligent and black then HR will find you a job. Sure not front office, but middle office or back office operations, there the managers will be over promoted blacks.
Yeah; you are doing it wrong. Moving my gas dryer involves closing the valve with my hand then disconnecting the flexible plastic hose from.the pipe and the dryer. If I just need to move it a bit to clean the hose provides plenty of leeway to do so.
“Raj” is more properly “king” in a name, but actually it’s short for “Nadarajan” (from wiki), which is a title of Shiva (usually rendered “Lord of the Dance”).
Switchmode voltage changing supplies are more efficient than AC transformers (actually, they use transformers internally themselves) in small sizes, but when one gets to large utility sized transformers they are still more efficient than a switchmode converter, and less expensive. Large switch mode high power conversion is complicated and uses lots of expensive semiconductors: standard line (50 or 60, occasionally 25 or 400 Hz in industry or marine, rail or airborne use) frequency transformers are just copper and an electrical steel core.
Even third world countries can build electrical distribution transformers, albeit not quite as efficient as the best ones used in the US and Western Europe today. By contrast, the large DC-DC step up and down converters that would be needed are dependent on big semiconductor fabs and require a much higher level of expertise to design.
I have many electrical books written in the 1920s to the 1950s showing DIY constructors such as farmers and radio hams (then as now a notoriously cheap bunch) how to build electrical transformers of all kinds, including ones designed to be connected to 4150vac distribution lines.
Before about the mid-1960s, high power DC-AC conversion at any efficiency was just not possible. There were schemes that used mercury thyratrons and such like, but motor generator sets with less than 75% efficiency at best were common until the 1970s. Indeed I worked in an electronics plant that had two old synchronous motors belted to each other at a 5/6ths ratio to supply plant 50 Hz power for production test of export products as late as 1997.
AC power has another huge advantage over DC: large motors are generally of the synchronous type and both much more efficient than DC motors, with commutators, and are inherently speed controlled by the AC line frequency. Otherwise, regulators and governors requiring calibration would be required to expect a motor to turn at any particular speed.
Consider what was then the common phonograph. You want the record to turn at a constant 33 1/3 rpm? With AC motors this was easy, it was simply a matter of calculating the mechanical ratio of motor speed to platter speed with gears, drive wheel sizes, or belt pulley sizes. DC turntables would have needed a Rube Goldberg regulator arrangement.
An interesting aside: Uniquely, Japan uses either 50 or 60 Hz power, depending on where in Japan you are. So, Japanese turntables had to be able to run on either 50 or 60 Hz AC, so they did use DC, via solid state silicon diode rectification, to turn the motor. But in lieu of a complicated phase lock loop and frequency standard, they used the line frequency to control speed in an ingenious way. The platter was cast with tone rings with four bands, with teeth so that at 33 or 45 rpm, the teeth would appear to stand still with a neon strobe light that ran off the AC line. This was at 50 or 60 Hz, but exactly one or the other, anywhere in Japan (or anywhere else). There was a DC voltage control the user set with a knob so that one of the four lines would appear to stop when s/he had it set to exactly the right speed. Since the range was somewhat limited, in practice, you didn't really have to know which of the four was supposed to stop: when one did you were good to go. (A toggle changed the DC range from the 45 rpm voltage range to the 33 rpm voltage range. They did not really overlap.)Replies: @Jack D
The one area where 120V AC is really a pain is lighting. Lighting was originally the main driver behind electrification and is still an important application, even more than motors in the home. Incandescents ran well directly on 120VAC. But lighting is fast going over to LEDs. LEDs are very durable but most LED bulbs have cheap flyback converters inside the base that are failure points. And of course electronics (phones, computers, etc.) also prefer low voltage DC. It’s hard to transport low voltage very far but producing DC from AC at every socket is also a big waste. Maybe in the future house wiring will include a secondary low voltage DC system for lighting and electronics.
Your point is inane.
They had no moving parts and tended to last longer than regular ones, but they heated up the kitchen more than regular ones, and if the burner became clogged with dirt could put out carbon monoxide and kill people in the home. Because houses were not very well sealed up that was almost unheard of, but it happened once or twice, and now the Servels have a bounty on their lives by a corporate entity afraid of being sued.
They were a triple bitch to fix if they did go bad, as well. The gas/water mixture that made them work was kept secret and only a few self taught engineer/repairmen were able to service the actual system itself. While there were no moving parts, corrosion and chemical action would eventually give the system a "heart attack" and repairs were almost as involved as cardiac bypass surgery: the system had to be depressurized, evacuated, the clogged pipe located, cut out and a new one welded in, then the system recharged with distilled water, ammonia and hydrogen in secret proportions. There are still a few people that do this, using homemade "heart lung machines" with anhydrous ammonia and hydrogen cylinders and regulators. They charge a lot of money, by the way.
The Amish, missionaries, and rural cabin vacationers still use this type of fridge, and while new ones are made, a few old timers still swear by the vintage Servel. (Whirlpool, or maybe it was Frigidare, made a very few of these as well: in Europe, Electrolux was the vendor.) It has a few quirks, such as needing to be perfectly leveled, and it needs to be operated in an area with ventilation and its burner kept clean and adjusted properly.Replies: @Jack D
A couple of years ago the WSJ did an article about this guy, an old white guy who is maybe the last living Servel repairman:
http://www.mainegasrefrigerator.com/our-accreditations.html
I understand the need for these things if you are “off the grid” in a cabin, Amish, etc. but given their many downsides (I’d say the potential of the thing killing you is a pretty big one) and the very high reliability of electrical fridges (if anything the old ones are even more reliable than the newer ones) I can’t imagine why anyone with access to line current would have wanted one.
Dunno. My understanding is that Bell liked Nova Scotia because it reminded him of his native Scotland….So, being buried there seems more like further evidence that he was, first and foremost, a Scot….