Wine, Physics, and Song

Krugman on Chinese currency policy and purchasing power parity

howard — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:51:59 +0000

Since I linked earlier to a post arguing that the Chinese currency seemed not that undervalued based on Balassa-Samuelson considerations involving the relative prices of traded and nontraded goods, thought I should link to Paul Krugman’s fairly persuasive counterargument—which is basically, look at their current account surplus: they’re exporting savings. Here’s his op-ed on the subject.

Perrin Cotes du Rhone “Nature” and “Tradition”; Vacqueyras

howard — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:18:22 +0000

Perrin & fils are establishing a brand, in the best way, and following a grand French tradition. Proprietors of the great (well, it’s expensive enough that I haven’t tried it) Chateauneuf-du-Pape property, Château de Beaucastel, they also make several excellent Côtes-du-Rhône that are a clear cut above most plain Côtes. I found their Tradition to be excellent, with a bit more tannin and substance than standard Cotes, but still with easy-to-drink berry flavors and a bit of autumn-leafy complexity. Their organic “Nature” 2007 ($17/750ml, $10/375ml, Canadian at LCBO) was even better—or at any rate different. Mostly Grenache, with some Syrah, like most Côtes. My notes say “Great nose–hints of chocolatiness, sweetness–something like chocolate milk or cocoa powder in the nose and on the palate. Some complexity—hard to describe—a bit chalky or mineral. Really a remarkable wine. Herbs? Tastes alive. Pretty long finish. Closest thing might be “The Stump Jump” (an Aussie Grenache-Shiraz). Definite chalkiness now. Really great!”

Nice label, too: all of Perrin’s labels feature various shades of off-white to cream paper, with classic French typographic design reminsicent of the 19th century. The “Nature” features laid paper with visible chain-lines, groovy retro typography of the sort modeled on elegant fountain-pen script, with some of the lettering in green, and green butterflies on the cream background. On the other wines, some lettering is black, some red. Their wine is classic French tradition-based quality product; they know it and the labels send the message too: the design isn’t uniform, but it’s clearly a family of designs, discreetly but unmistakeably radiating the glory that is France at its best.

Cuvee Catharine Brut Rose—Henry of Pelham; Bodegas Weinert, Luigi Bosca and Argento Reserva Malbecs

howard — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:14:05 +0000

At wine and cheese two weeks ago at PI, I bought a glass of the Henry of Pelham, VQA Niagara, Ontario, Cuvee Catharine Brut Rosé (non vintage). At first, I was disappointed that it seemed a bit closed, though fruity and acidic. Then it opened up, getting toastier (or was that just me) with scents of strawberry and other yummy stuff, but keeping that crisp acidity and clarity. This apparently costs $30 CDN at the winery, so it’s getting up into the range with Champagne, but it’s made by the traditional Champenoise method, from the traditional Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes, and I think it competes well with French bubbles, which moreover are going to set you back at least $38 at this quality level. Bottom line, I’d buy more even at this price; I don’t give numerical ratings, but take that as a rave review.

My free glass was the Bodegas Weinert Malbec from Argentina—the most Bordeaux-like of the Argentine Malbecs I’ve recently tried. Darker, more restrained and tannic than these, it was nevertheless a bit elegant, and a nice wine that I order on occasion with dinner. At $20 or so at LCBO, I’m perhaps not as wild about it as a few other Argentine Malbecs I’ve found there: the Luigi Bosca single vineyard Lujan de Cuyo 2006 Malbec Reserva is fantastic, melding silkiness and Bordeaux-like caramelly oak notes with beautiful, not-too-jammy fruit ($18CDN); the Argento reserve Malbec 2005 ($12) similar but perhaps a bit less complex, and with definite emphasis on blueberry fruitiness slightly reminscent of some Aussie Shirazes. Again, the relevant “rating” is that I bought more of both of these after tasting them. Fittingly for wines from Argentina, they are both great with steak.

Krugman calls out Chile/Chicago-boys spin, and tells us he told us so on Malaysia

howard — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 17:15:26 +0000

For anyone who completely buys the story that the Chicago-boys free market policies did wonders for Chile, Paul Krugman has an interesting twist. Look at his graph; it really jumps out that citing historical growth rates to make points about the effects of economic policies can be hugely affected by where you choose your endpoints. As reference points, Socialist Salvador Allende became president of Chile on November 3, 1970, and was killed in a right-wing coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, on September 11th, 1973. You can see in Krugman’s graph that Chilean GDP, which had declined roughly 10% under Allende, continued to drop another 14 percentage points below its 1970 baseline, in the first year after the coup. After poking above that baseline in 1980 and 1981, it dropped as part of the general Latin American debt and economic crisis (which I view as associated with global effects of the US inflation-fighting tight-money recession induced by the Federal Reserve board and its chair Paul Volcker at the end of the Jimmy Carter years) and didn’t reach 1970 levels again until 1988. In 1988, voters rejected the prospect of eight more years of Pinochet in a plebiscite, leading to negotiations and elections in 1989 resulting in Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin taking over the presidency.

Perhaps part of the continued (and even greater!) decline of GDP per capita under the first year of the Pinochet dictatorship can be laid to the continuing effects of the chaos of the Allende years (which in turn, some attribute partly to right-wing “economic sabotage” though I’d guess it had more to do with Allende’s policies). But the rapid recovery from the trough reached in 1975 can hardly be viewed primarily as testimony to Chicago-boys-style ultra-free-market policies: it was probably in large part recovery from an economic crisis, to a point where resources were again fully employed, though presumably having a functioning market economy—whether Friedmanite or just run-of-the-mill-liberal-democratic–played a crucial role. The whole business of just what the caused of the economic chaos in the second half of the Allende administration is interesting and important, and I’m not an expert here. I think hugely stimulative monetary policy, leading to inflation, was an important factor. Capital flight may have been another.

I think the fact that “Chile was hit much worse than the other major players” in the early-1980s Latin American economic crisis is linked to another historical point Krugman recently reminded us of. Many of us remember the 1996 Asian financial crisis, which I view as having been, let us say, not helped by the Clinton-era crew of economists and Goldman-Sachs-linked financial types promoting financial market liberalization in Asia. Malaysian dictator Mahathir imposed controls on the flow of capital out of the country, after the crisis hit, and was excoriated for it by many of these same liberalization-promoting types, but they worked and the Malaysian currency and economy weren’t hit as badly as predicted, and as many other countries were. Chile had some of the most liberal capital-flow regulations in Latin America at the time of the early-1980s economic crisis, and I believe this is generally viewed as part of the explanation why it was among the worst hit. Indeed, I think the episode is one of the things that led the IMF to reconsider its position on capital flow regulation.

A different Hallelujah

howard — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:29:27 +0000

Not the Leonard Cohen song. The Happy Mondays, from Madchester Rave On:

Lunch at Perimeter: Rice-wrapped Seabass with Puy Lentils.

howard — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:48:57 +0000

Perimeter’s bistro is amazing. The rice-wrapped seabass with Puy lentils I had yesterday at lunch was perfection. Nice, thick piece of fish, cooked perfectly. Flaky. Firm. Moist. Flavorful. Swathed in a rice wrapper and lightly browned, ending up covered in a crisp, savory golden sheath. Thin slivers of red and yellow peppers and suchlike veggies encased with the fish. The whole atop a generous bed of tiny, dark, earthy, intense Puy lentils, larded with and accompanied by more bits and slivers of veggies—carrot, more peppers, and so on. A drizzle of excellent olive oil. Karla, Steve, Frank, and the rest of the chefs and kitchen staff at PI get a big salute, or in Japanese style, a deep bow of acknowledgment, for this and many other unfussy but elegant, intense, and satisfying creations. Food like this relaxes and rejuvenates mind and body. I think we all work better—prove better theorems, achieve better philosophical insights, find more efficient ways to make the institute run or keep the building in good shape, and so forth, after a meal like this. Not that that’s the point—like a piece of music, a painting, or a good theorem, such a dish is its own best reason for being.

Vijay Vazirani thinks we should look for combinatorial algorithms for convex programs

howard — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:36:40 +0000

Just a link to Vazirani’s guest post on Noam Nisan’s blog Algorithmic Game Theory, which seems to relate to my interest in convex sets with beautiful structure. (Homogeneous self-dual cones, like the positive semidefinite matrices (semidefinite programming) or the positive orthant (linear programming); just plain homogeneous cones; hyperbolicity cones…; just plain self-dual cones; weakly self-dual cones (ones isomorphic to their dual, but for which no inner product on the space can make the dual (defined according to said inner product) equal to the cone itself), etc…). And a thought, perhaps misguided: isn’t a crucial ingredient of an efficient algorithm for a convex program usually something like an efficient algorithm for something like: determining membership in the convex set, or calculating a nice barrier function for the set? And doesn’t the ability to do that usually depend on the set (and/or the cone it generates) having a “nice” structure? Perhaps the detailed properties of this structure bears some relation to the “combinatorial” structure of algorithms like the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm for max-flow? Or perhaps particular problems have additional structure that isn’t being captured in a typical convex formulation. I’m no expert here (and have indeed forgotten what the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm is, though I think I once read about it in a book by Vazirani). This post is primarily to remind myself to look at this more closely—and to link to Vazirani’s, which seems worth of attention.

To my mind, a 15th gold medal olympic performance for Canada—k.d. lang, Hallelujah

howard — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:13:53 +0000

One amazing thing about this olympics was that most of the athletes’ gold medal performances were as enthralling and moving, in their distinct ways, as k. d. lang singing fellow-Canadian Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah at the opening ceremonies.

Liveblogging Canadian gold-medal 3-2 hockey win celebration from uptown Waterloo Ontario

howard — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:58:53 +0000

The horns and cheers are sounding in my house a block off the main street (King street) of uptown Waterloo. I watched the end of the US-Canada hockey game in a pub, the Fox and Fiddle, on King street and it was a hard-fought thriller. I’m happy for Canada, and they’re sure as heck happy! The US team fought hard and has nothing to be ashamed of—but you could see the disappointment in their faces afterward, though they were absolutely sportsmanlike about it.

King street near the major pubs is lined with people hugging each other, high-fiving, waving canadian flags, and stopping passing motorists to high-five them as well. After a Candian lead of 2-1 held for a long time, the US, which had been playing strongly and getting plenty of time with the puck, made a tieing goal with about 20 seconds left. In a really hard-fought overtime, Canada sunk a sudden-death goal for the gold. With that medal, they now have the most gold medals any country has won in a single winter olympics, said the commentators on CBC TV.

There was a lot of spirit in the pub, and I realized I was dressed in black, grey and blue from head to toe—not a spot of red except on my red, grey, and blue hat. (Or should that be tuque?) No issues, though—I am not a hugely vocal sports fan and don’t normally watch hockey—though somehow the guy who was going ’round hugging everyone in the pub took a look and gave me a miss. I walked up and down King street to check out the scene, and ended up having to high-five a few people and clap one person on the back, all with a “Congratulations!” which presumably marked me as not Canadian. (A Canadian would yell “Canada, yeeeaaaaaaaah!!!”., as about five hundred are doing a block or two away right now.)

I did see one ambulance turn the corner onto King, lights flashing. Keep it safe out there, guys and gals. Don’t drink and drive, don’t get into fast traffic, etc… (Fifteen minutes after the victory, after the medal ceremony, a group in the pub raised a chant of “Let’s get wasted!”.)

I had a pint of Molson’s Canadian Lager during the overtime. The drink of the Canadian women’s hockey team, it was clear, smooth, and tasty, and really hit the spot. No cigars today, though—although I suppose up here you can get real Cubans. (Now there would be a provocative way to celebrate a US win!)

I’m glad it was a really hard-fought game, with everyone playing their best, and I don’t think anybody should feel bad about their performance. Great job all around, and a smashing finish for the Canadians to a great olympics!

It’s getting louder out there. Hopefully I can find my camera and post some pics of the celebration.

Edit: didn’t find my camera, but Youtubers provide more than enough flavor of the scene:

Interesting links for Sunday 2/28/2010: political economy of protectionism, complexity of the theory of the reals, subgroups of SU(N), and how to write mathematics.

howard — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:35:07 +0000

Interesting-looking bit of political economy research. They propose that sectors employing lower-earning workers more intensively are receive relatively more trade protection, based on research in the US and China, and apparently attempt to differentiate between the contributions of envy and altruism to this effect. Also, presumably, compare it to theories where amount of protection depends primarily on the resources available to an industry to help secure it. NBER charges five bucks (OK, that beats Springer journals hands-down, but still) to download, so unless PI gets a subscription, looks like I’m not reading it. What is with charging money for working papers!? Can’t we get these economists on the arXiv???

Proving that Proving is Hard. Computer scientist Dick Lipton gives a beautiful introduction to work by Fischer and Rabin on the computational complexity of the formal first-order theory of the real numbers. As Lipton explains, Alfred Tarski showed that this theory is complete—that every well-formed statement in the language of the theory can either be proved, or be disproved, from the axioms of the theory. Fischer and Rabin investigated how hard it can be to prove statements in the theory. According to Lipton, they showed that it’s (worst-case) exponentially hard: there is a positive constant such that there are true sentences of the theory, of length shorter than , whose shortest proof has length at least . (I’d guess what’s meant is that they show this holds for all large enough , or at least for an infinite set of .)

Quantifier elimination—the method of deciding statements in the theory of the reals, used by Tarski in his decidability proof—has, at least theoretically, applications in optimization, which I hope to delve into in a future post.

A nice, probably not-too-easy (for me) and not-too-hard problem in group theory from my colleague Alberto Montina: is a subgroup of of maximal dimension (as a manifold) and are there any others.

Paul Halmos, How to Write Mathematics.