The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.

Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

…

“It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said today in a telephone interview. “As the ice skater puts when she’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.”

Read the whole story in this Bloomberg filing reprinted on BusinessWeek.com.

As we re-synchronize our watches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that the rings around Uranus were discovered.  In fact, in 1789 William Herschel had discussed possible rings around the seventh planet.  But it was only 23 years ago that, using the Kuiper Airbourne Observatory, the rings– 13 bands of extremely dark particles, varying in size from micrometers to a fraction of a meter– were definitively observed.

Hubble Space Telescope photo of Uranus, its rings, and its moons

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reminds us that it’s smart to stay in school:

But as Calculated Risk reports, while unemployment among the best educated is still lowest, it’s increased as much in percentage terms for them during this current recession as for any other group.

click to enlarge

One notes that all four groups** were slow to rebound after the 2001 recession– not an encouraging reminder if one is hoping for a brisk employment-led, consumption-fueled recovery this time around.

But in some ways more striking is a difference we might expect, but that hasn’t yet emerged.  Calculated Risk:

I’d expect the unemployment rate to fall faster for workers with higher levels of education, since their skills are more transferable, than for workers with less education. I’d also expect the unemployment rate for workers with lower levels of education to stay elevated longer in this “recovery” because there is no building boom this time. Just a guess and it isn’t happening so far … currently the unemployment rate for the highest educated group is still increasing.

Clearly, from an individual’s point-of-view, it’s still smarter to get more education than less.  But the perturbations of past periods remind us that the gearing between between academic degrees and financial success isn’t always perfectly tight…  Indeed, those with sharply-defined professional credentials in fields– e.g, finance– that are unlikely even in the intermediate term (if ever) to recover their bubble-fueled growth rates, may find their advanced degrees at best unhelpful; at worst, downright prejudicial.

Economic recovery and growth will be driven to some large extent by innovation; that innovation will create new– and new kinds of– jobs.  Looking even just five years out, much less ten, one has to admit that it’s just not possible to predict what these emergent jobs, nor their requirements, will be.  (Consider, e.g., the hottest topic– and job category– in marketing/advertising these days: “social media marketing”…  which wasn’t even a glimmer a decade ago, and was just being born five year ago.)  This is a challenge for those new to the work force, who have to wrangle the product of their schooling and their personal experience into a shape that can fit the entry-level positions they seek.  It is a much bigger challenge for those  mid-career who find themselves needy of making a move:  these more mature folks have not only to learn new fields, they also have to re-direct the considerable momentum of perception and habit that characterized their old– and they have to do those things, usually, in ways that justify salaries way north of entry-level.

All of which underlines for your correspondent the extraordinary value of a liberal arts education.  When one is faced with a “working adulthood” that is one transitional challenge after another, no skill is more valuable than the capacity to adapt.  And no capability is more central to that adaptation than the ability effectively and efficiently to learn.

This is precisely what, at its core, a liberal arts education is about:  learning to learn.

There are many, many other reasons, rooted in personal and societal benefits, to pursue a liberal arts education, and top support a strong foundation of liberal arts in higher education.  But the lessons of the last couple of years– indeed, of the last several decades– suggest that the economic rationale is plenty strong as well…

And besides, it’s fun.

* “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
- Albert Einstein

** To put these cohorts into perspective, the Census Bureau suggests that, of these folks “25 yrs. and over” (in 2008):
- 13.4% had less than a high school diploma.
- 31.2% were high school graduates, no college.
- 26.0% had some college or associate degree.
- 29.4% had a college degree or higher.

UPDATE:  Reader JK directs our attention to another treatment of the data, in the NY Times. As he suggests, even more dramatic.

As we revisit our course catalogues, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, the first major legislative step in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal  program.  The sense of urgency was sufficiently high– four days earlier Roosevelt had declared a “Banking Holiday,” closing all of the nation’s banks– that most legislators passed the Act without even reading the single copy that was available for review.  The EBA gave the government authority to shutter insolvent banks; that, coupled with the Federal Reserve’s informal-but-explicit pledge to guarantee the deposits of banks allowed to reopen (de facto deposit insurance), eased the crisis of public confidence:  within two weeks of banks’ re-opening on March 13, Americans had re-deposited over half the cash they’d withdrawn and hoarded through the period of bank failures that marked the first chapter of the Great Depression.  Later that year, the (more considered and embracing) Banking Act of 1933 replaced the EBA, and established such lasting practices and institutions as the FDIC.

Roosevelt signing the Emergency Banking Act

From Paul Toutonghi, a list of businessmen’s names from Dickens– the absolute master of the onomatopoeic insult:

Nickleby

Hawk

Squeers

Gride

Quilp

Gradgrind

Tigg

Pecksniff

Heep

Smallweed

Krook

Merdle

Flintwich

Casby

Fledgeby

Wegg

Hexam

Next?  Perhaps lawyers?   (Jaggers, Vholes, Tulkinghorn, Grewgious, Grimwig… )

As we thank our forebears for our family names, we might recall that it was on this date in 1817 that the New York Stock Exchange came in out of the cold.  The origin of the Exchange dated back to May 17, 1792, when the Buttonwood Agreement was signed by 24 stock brokers outside of 68 Wall Street (under a buttonwood tree). Then, on March 8, 1817, the organization drafted a constitution, renamed itself the “New York Stock & Exchange Board,” and moved into a rented room down the road at 40 Wall Street.  (Today, the trading floor– one the NYSE’s several exchanges– is at 11 Wall Street.)

Traders at work under the buttonwood tree

From The Selvedge Yard, a blog that your correspondent regularly enjoys, “Vicious White Kids– the Sex Pistols Take on Rock ‘N Roll & the South.”

Read the entire instructive tale, see other photos, and check out the live Dallas performance footage here.

As tap our toes to “Anarchy in the U.K.,” we might recall that it was on this date in 321 that Roman Emperor Constantine I decreed:

On the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for grain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost.

… and dies Solis– day of the sun, “Sunday”– became the day of rest throughout the Roman Empire… and ultimately, the West.

Constantine (Capitoline Museums)

]]> http://roughlydaily.com/2010/03/07/no-hat-no-cattle/feed/ 0 LW Swing your partner... Come on in! ... and get down! http://roughlydaily.com/2010/03/06/perpetual-notion-machine/ http://roughlydaily.com/2010/03/06/perpetual-notion-machine/#comments Sat, 06 Mar 2010 10:02:34 +0000 LW http://roughlydaily.com/?p=2377 ]]> xkcd

The principle of explosion (ex falso sequitur quodlibet*), a law of classical logic, asserts that “anything follows from a contradiction”– that’s to say, once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition (or of course, its opposite) can be inferred from it. Symbolically, that’s:

Readers may be relieved to know that two different models of paraconsistent logic allow for contradiction without explosion.

* “from falsehood/contradiction follows what pleases”

As we revisit our debate strategies, we might recall that it was on this date in 1869 that Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table of elements to the Russian Chemical Society.  Mendeleev’s chart captured the known elements of the day, and allowed him to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

Mendeleev and his chart, memorialized in St. Petersburg