Fed Funding of Science and Tech

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. --Anne Frank

Mom gets back today.
Howe closed today because a big tree was knocked down on a car and blocked the street during last night's storm.

Conflict magnet Pelosi said  the Trump administration’s decision to delay putting former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill was “an insult to the hopes of millions.”

Kine can be the pleural of "cow." Stigmata of stigma. Charismata of charisma.

After Iran shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone, Washington was preparing to launch a retaliatory strike, but the mission was called off at the last minute, U.S. officials said. (wsj)
The commentators on the Right are unhappy.

If you do a Google search for the phrase “Man drowns saving….” you’ll find about 11,000 results for a general Google search and 3,550 results for a Google news search. Then do a search for “Woman drowns saving…..” and you’ll get only 277 general results and 9 results for a Google news search. Girls are probably better swimmers.

John Kay, a well-known economist and Financial Times columnist,  cannot allow himself to be discouraged about political institutions. Here he says,  “The guiding purpose of the legal and regulatory framework should be to impose and enforce the obligations of loyalty and prudence, personal and institutional, that go with the management of other people’s money.” The government enforce virtue? I'm not sure which crisis is the more important here, the decline of virtue or the faith in government.

Hermeneutic: adjective: Interpretive or explanatory. From Greek hermeneutikos (of interpreting), from hermeneuein (to interpret), from hermeneus (interpreter). After Hermes in Greek mythology, who served as a messenger and herald for other gods, and who himself was the god of eloquence, commerce, invention, cunning, theft, and more. Earliest documented use: 1678..
Other words that Hermes has given us are hermaphrodite, hermetic, and herm.

Combined oil production in America’s Big Three oil fields (Bakken, Eagle Ford and the Permian Basin) will top 7 million barrels per day next month — an amazing seven-fold (and 600%) increase in just a decade thanks the twin revolutionary advances in drilling and extraction technologies (hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling) that have accessed oceans of oil resources trapped in shale formations miles below the ground were previously inaccessible using conventional extraction technologies.

On this day in 1787, New Hampshire became the ninth and last necessary state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, thereby making the document the law of the land. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted by two votes to ratify the document, and the last of the original 13 colonies joined the United States. Today the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

                            Fed Funding of Science and Tech

Is America falling behind the technological and scientific frontier? Does public funding effectively drive scientific innovation?
Jonathan Gruber is the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT. He has long been involved in crafting public health policy, and is considered a key architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare. He has a new book,  “Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream,” and is promoting it. This is from an interview:

"When Hitler blitzed across Europe, meanwhile in 1939 the US produced six tanks. We had torpedoes that didn’t explode when they hit the ships. Soldiers practiced with broomsticks instead of guns. And Vannevar Bush knocked on FDR’s door. He was a prominent scientist, former Dean at MIT, and he said, “I think we can win the war if you give me unlimited money to hire as many scientists as I want to invent the technology we need to win the war.” And FDR amazingly said, yes, and at one point Vannevar Bush’s organization employed two-thirds of all the physicists in the US, and did in fact invent the technology that was crucial to us winning the war. For example, radar, which was originally invented in the UK, but was perfected here in the US and turned the tide of the Battle of the Atlantic. But more importantly, it set up not only wartime applications but peacetime applications. Remember, what was the first microwave called? The Radar Range.

So much of our private sector innovation came out of these public sector investments. And then after World War II, Vannevar bush really had his greatest insight, which was, “look, we won the war with science, let’s win the peace with science.” And he wrote a famous report called “Science the Endless Frontier,” which proposed that the federal government continue massive science funding. Now interestingly, coming to the politics point from a few minutes ago, that report kind of languished for a while, until Sputnik and then the man on the moon, which got people excited. That led to the ramp-up. And the ramp-up, as I said, was that by the mid-1960s we spent about 2% of GDP on public R&D."

This is an important topic and raises the question of invention vs. innovation.
https://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2018/10/invention-vs-innovation.html