Secession Day

The Fourth of July is commonly known as Independence Day, but a better term for it, Patri Friedman says, is Secession Day:

Secession almost always involves multiple groups of people, some small and local, others large and distant, who want to rule the same territory. And history tells us that large, distant rulers are often reluctant to grant independence. The word “independence” takes all the historical messiness involved in winning freedom from a hostile enemy and sweeps it under the rug, while the term “secession” puts this inherent tension right out into the open.

So Saturday, July 4th is Secession Day.

End All Taxes — Except One

Reihan Salam reiterates Henry George's 130-year-old call to end all taxes — except one:

A staunch believer in laissez-faire economics, George found it perverse that we tax productive activities like work and innovative investment while letting landowners grow rich simply because they scooped up property at the right time. In that spirit, George called for a “Single Tax” on the unimproved value of land. There’s a certain compelling logic to the Single Tax that stands the test of time. When you tax income, aren’t you punishing people for working hard? But when you tax an asset like land, you’re simply encouraging the most valuable use of that land. In the years since George faded from the scene, a number of economists, from Milton Friedman to Paul Romer, have found virtue in the Single Tax, not least because it creates the right incentives for government. Simply put, the better you govern, the more valuable the property. The more valuable the property, the more revenue you raise.

This would make even more sense if governments were for-profit corporations.

The board game Monopoly was created by Georgists, by the way.

A Closer Look at Adverse Selection and Mandatory Insurance

If insurance companies can't tell the difference between high-risk consumers and low-risk consumers, then the low-risk consumers will drop out of the market and go uninsured. Low-risk consumers won't pay what the insurance companies ask, because they don't expect to lose anywhere near as much as the insurance companies expect them to lose:

Suppose there are two equally common types of people who buy insurance:

High-Risk Consumers: They have a 20% chance of losing $2000. Since they're risk-averse, they value full insurance at $1000 ($600 more than the actuarially fair premium of $400).

Low-Risk Consumers: They have a 1% chance of losing $2000. Since they're risk-averse, they value full insurance at $50 ($30 more than the actuarially fair premium of $20).

If insurance companies can't distinguish high- from low-risk consumers, an actuarially fair premium for an average consumer would cost (0.5*$400) + (0.5*$20) = $210.

If consumers purchase insurance voluntarily, though, the low-risk will drop out of the market — they won't pay $210 to get a policy worth $50 to them. With only high-risk consumers in the market, the competitive price of a policy is $400. The market fails to realize $30 worth of consumer surplus per low-risk consumer.

If, on the other hand, we make insurance mandatory, then we can actually improve the efficiency of the insurance market — by making the low-risk consumers pay more than they would pay, but less than the high-risk consumers gain through the rigmarole:

The regulation is efficiency-enhancing, because it takes $160 from every low-risk person in order to give $190 to every high-risk person.

Some people will see the mandatory-insurance scenario as more fair; others will see it as much, much less fair.

Bryan Caplan takes a closer look at adverse selection and mandatory insurance though, and he finds something very different from the theoretical model:

When you actually look at these regs, you'll notice some peculiarities:

1. Mandatory insurance is most prominent in the auto insurance industry. But these regulations don't target low-risk drivers. Their main purpose, contrary to the adverse selection model, is to make sure high-risk drivers get insurance.


2. Even more shocking: The regulations usually go on to somehow subsidize the rates that high-risk drivers pay. This is necessary because, contrary to the adverse selection model, insurance companies are able to detect high-risk drivers, and do not want to cover them at a loss.


3. Economists usually mention adverse selection in the context of health insurance. But in the market for individual health insurance — precisely where you'd expect adverse selection problems to be most severe — governments very rarely mandate insurance coverage. Instead, they focus on mandatory employer-provided health insurance, where the adverse selection problem is likely to be milder.


4. When governments do mandate health insurance, they almost always subsidize the rates that high-risk buyers pay. This is once again necessary because, contrary to the adverse selection model, insurance companies are able to detect high-risk customers, and do not want to cover them at a loss.

Bottom line: Real-world insurance regulation has little or nothing to do with economists' "moral hazard and adverse selection" mantra. The "intellectual" bases of real-world regulation of insurance are rather populism and paternalism: Big bad insurers won't cover people unless it's profitable, and simple-minded consumers don't care enough about their own health to pay for it themselves.

Contrary to e.g. Krugman, insurance isn't a "special" market where laissez-faire doesn't work. Instead, it's a normal market where democratic politics doesn't work, because both the public and economists remain wedded to populism and paternalism.

Tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods

To an entrepreneur, Steve Blank says, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods:

It means you get to sit at a venture capital firm (some even pay you for the privilege) and stay until you have come up with an idea for your next company or have joined a company you’ve met as they passed through the VC’s offices. Depending on the size of the venture firm they may have one to three EIR’s who stay an average of a year or so. It really means that the VC’s would like to own a piece of you.

To a VC it’s a cheap investment, and if they somehow don’t bind you to their firm, someone else will. In reality an EIR is a set of wonderful golden handcuffs. Of course no VC firm will come right out and say, “If you’re an EIR for us you can’t do your next deal with any other firm.” Hmm… You’ve taken their money, eaten their food, sat in their meetings and you are going to take money from someone else? They have your soul. It sounded like a great deal. I had no idea what I wanted to do next, and would get paid to think about it? How could it go wrong? Little did I know.

Read the whole story, but I'll skip to his lessons learned:

• Your level of due diligence should be commensurate with your position in the company and proportional to the reality distortion field of the presenter
• Never join (or start) a company whose business model you can’t draw
• Subjects in which you are not a domain expert always sound exciting
• Sleep on any major decision

Does language affect thought?

In discussing the language of clear thinking recently, I brought up the notion that language may affect thought. I found this example amusing:

“We gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

Dial4Light

For the past few years, the cash-strapped village of Dörentrup in central Germany has been switching off all the streetlights from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. the following morning — but now they have Dial4Light:

In the first project of its kind in Europe, the residents of Dörentrup can now switch on the lights on a specific street whenever they like. All they have to do is register for the scheme online and provide a phone number. Then each time anyone needs to see in the dark, they call the Dial4Light number, enter the six-digit code that corresponds to the stretch of road they want lit, and within seconds the lights are on. They'll stay on for around 15 minutes, enough time for someone to walk from one end of the average Dörentrup road to the other.
[...]
"We found out that on each stretch of road, people only switch on the lights up to three times each night," explains Frank Bräuer, project leader at Lemgo. "That's why this system works in villages or the outskirts of a town where residents don't need the lights burning all night." But Dial4Light won't work for everyone, he admits: "It wouldn't be suitable for a big city like New York or London, where there's a lot going on at night."

Ego Makes Entrepreneurs

Wharton doctoral student Brian Wu has found that risk-taking entrepreneurs are not unusually risk tolerant; they're just overconfident.

Don’t trust historians

Don’t trust historians, Scott Sumner says, because they're inclined to rank Wilson as the 6th greatest president in US history:

1. I had known for quite some time that Wilson’s economic policies were perhaps the worst in American history. He presided over the creation of the Fed and the income tax, which went from 0% to something like 70% while he was president. In the long run the Fed may have been a good thing, but there can be no doubt that 1913 was premature, we didn’t know anywhere near enough about monetary policy to warrant a central bank meddling in the gold standard. He presided over a period of very high inflation after WWI, when we actually needed somewhat lower prices. Then we had a severe depression in his last year of office. Industrial production had fallen by 32.5% by March 1921 when Harding took office (and you think things are bad now!)

But guess what; by November 1922 we had recovered, as industrial production had already passed the previous cyclical peak. (If you factor in a 3% trend rate of growth, a new peak was reached around March 1923.) How did he do it? Recall that Hoover and FDR relied on policies of propping up wages and raising tax rates — that’s why FDR’s recovery took nearly nine years, and even 8 and 1/2 years from a July 1933 industrial production figure that was roughly as depressed as March 1921.) Instead, Harding let wages fall and cut income tax rates sharply. BTW, do you think industrial production will fully recover by January 2011, after Obama has been in office for 2 years?

2. Wilson had arguably the most destructive foreign policy in American history. When there is a delicate balance of power in Europe you don’t want to meddle unless you plan to stay there permanently. Yes, I know Wilson did intend the US to hang around, but he should have known we were an isolationist country before he brought us into WWI. All he did was assure that the strongest country in Europe lost. When we pulled out (as was inevitable), a rematch was almost preordained. WWII was the fruit of Wilson’s foreign policy. (As were more than 116,000 dead American soldiers.)

3. Wilson was one of the most repressive presidents in American history, imprisoning thousands of people whose only crime was to disagree with his political views. It was left to Harding to release people like Socialist leader Eugene Debs from prison, as well as many others.

4. And I also recently learned that Wilson was a vicious racist. Yes, I know racism was widespread at the time. But he was much worse than the Republicans who came before and after him. Check out this article from Reason magazine.

So other than being a horrible president in terms of economic policy, foreign policy, civil liberties and civil rights, he was a great president.

(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

I, Toaster

In Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless, the protagonist tries to impress the inhabitants of another planet with his amazing Earth technology, only — as Adams writes — "Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."

This inspired — if that's the right word — artist — if that's the right word — Thomas Thwaites to build his own toaster from scratch:

Beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.

As Radley Balko points out, Thwaites' Toaster Project could be called I, Toaster, because the basic idea behind it was explored in Leonard Read's I, Pencil back in 1958:

Read's influential essay meticulously runs through the processes required to create something as simple as an Eberhard Faber pencil, including the harvesting and processing of cedar, the mining of graphite, and the mining, processing, and application of the many minerals and chemicals that make up the pencil's eraser, ferrule (the bit of metal that holds the eraser in place), lacquer, ink, and the black nickel rings that fasten the ferrule to the pencil's wooden rod. Read also included those things that power the processing and refining plants, as well as the automobiles that transport the pencil ingredients to those factories (which are themselves made up of thousands of parts made up of millions of ingredients, also mined, processed, and assembled all over the world).

Read's conclusion, written in the first-person voice of the pencil:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

In other words, the division of labor is what makes pencils — and, for that matter, all of the conveniences of modern life — possible. Millions of people are involved in the manufacture of a single pencil, or in Thwaites' case, a single toaster. No single human being could possibly possess the know-how to make one on his own.

As you might imagine, Thwaites is not celebrating trade, technology, and mutually beneficial exchange; he's condemning it. Sigh.

The end of retirement

Changing demographics may lead to the end of retirement:

When Otto von Bismarck introduced the first pension for workers over 70 in 1889, the life expectancy of a Prussian was 45. In 1908, when Lloyd George bullied through a payment of five shillings a week for poor men who had reached 70, Britons, especially poor ones, were lucky to survive much past 50. By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65 — three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.

Now retirement is for everyone, and often as long as whole lives once were. In some European countries the average retirement lasts more than a quarter of a century. In America the official pension age is 66, but the average American retires at 64 and can then expect to live for another 16 years. Average spending on public pensions across the OECD is now the equivalent of more than 7% of GDP (they cost America just 0.2% back in 1935). In some countries the current figure could double by 2050, to say nothing of the cost of private pensions and extra spending on health and long-term care.

Why Not Try A Scientific Approach To Science Education?

Physicist Carl Wieman noted a consistent pattern in the grad students who came to work for him:

New graduate students would come to work in my laboratory after 17 years of extraordinary success in classes, but when they were given research projects to work on, they were clueless about how to proceed. Or worse — often it seemed that they didn’t even really understand what physics was.

But then an amazing thing happened: After just a few years of working in my research lab, interacting with me and the other students, they were transformed. I’d suddenly realize they were now expert physicists, genuine colleagues. If this had happened only once or twice it would have just seemed an oddity, but I realized it was a consistent pattern. So I decided to figure it out.

Does it really take 17-years as a caterpillar before one can become a beautiful (physics) butterfly? No, of course, not; it's just that those 17 years of classes are largely wasted — as demonstrated by a number of studies:

The first is by Joe Redish, a highly regarded physics professor at the University of Maryland. Even though the students thought his lectures were wonderful, Joe wondered how much they were actually learning. So he hired a graduate student to grab students at random as they filed out of class at the end of the lecture and ask, “What was the lecture you just heard about?” It turned out that the students could respond with only with the vaguest of generalities.

Zdeslav Hrepic, N. Sanjay Rebello, and Dean Zollman at Kansas State University carried out a much more structured study. They asked 18 students from an introductory physics class to attempt to answer six questions on the physics of sound and then, primed by that experience, to get the answers to those questions by listening to a 14-minute, highly polished commercial videotaped lecture given by someone who is supposed to be the world’s most accomplished physics lecturer.

On most of the six questions, no more than one student was able to answer correctly.

In a final example, a number of times Kathy Perkins and I have presented some non-obvious fact in a lecture along with an illustration, and then quizzed the students 15 minutes later on the fact. About 10 percent usually remember it by then. To see whether we simply had mentally deficient students, I once repeated this experiment when I was giving a departmental colloquium at one of the leading physics departments in the United States. The audience was made up of physics faculty members and graduate students, but the result was about the same — around 10 percent.

It gets worse:

Adapting the characterization developed by David Hammer, novices see the content of physics instruction as isolated pieces of information— handed down by an authority and disconnected from the world around them — that they can only learn by memorization. To the novice, scientific problem-solving is just matching the pattern of the problem to certain memorized recipes.

Experts—i.e., physicists—see physics as a coherent structure of concepts that describe nature and that have been established by experiment. Expert problem-solving involves employing systematic, concept-based, and widely applicable strategies. Since this includes being applicable in completely new situations, this strategy is much more useful than the novice problem-solving approach.

Once you develop the tools to measure where people’s beliefs lie on this expert-to-novice scale, you can see how students’ beliefs change as a result of their courses. What you would expect, or at least hope, is that students would begin their college physics course somewhere on the novice side of the scale and that after completing the course they would have become more expert-like in their beliefs.

What the data say is just the opposite.

On average, students have more novicelike beliefs after they have completed an introductory physics course than they had when they started; this was found for nearly every introductory course measured. More recently, my group started looking at beliefs about chemistry. If anything, the effect of taking an introductory college chemistry course is even worse than for taking physics.

If we look at the differences between a novice and expert, we quickly realize that we're not actually training students to become experts:

The first is that experts have lots of factual knowledge about their subject, which is hardly a surprise. But in addition, experts have a mental organizational structure that facilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge. Third, experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking (“metacognition”), at least in their discipline of expertise. They are able to ask themselves, “Do I understand this? How can I check my understanding?”

A traditional science instructor concentrates on teaching factual knowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like ways of thinking about the subject come along for free or are already present. But that is not what cognitive science tells us. It tells us instead that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort.
[...]
People learn by creating their own understanding. But that does not mean they must or even can do it without assistance. Effective teaching facilitates that creation by getting students engaged in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level and then monitoring that thinking and guiding it to be more expert-like.

When you put it in those terms, you realize that this is exactly what all my graduate students are doing 18 or 20 hours a day, seven days a week. (Or at least that is what they claim—the reality is a bit less.) They are focused intently on solving real physics problems, and I regularly probe how they’re thinking and give them guidance to make it more expert-like. After a few years in that environment they turn into experts, not because there is something magic in the air in the research lab but because they are engaged in exactly the cognitive processes that are required for developing expert competence.

Why not try a scientific approach to science education?

Wieman's first strategy for improving teaching is reducing cognitive load — which is a remarkably verbose and unclear way of saying go slow and be clear. It also contradicts much of my own experience. If a lecturer slows things down and simplifies them to reduce cognitive load, the lecture becomes less engaging, not more. The real problem is that most lectures are like early interstates: the path is so straight, you fall asleep at the wheel. You need some curves, some anticipation, some expectations that may or may not be met.

His second strategy is addressing beliefs students have about science. That means explaining why a topic is worth learning, how it operates in the real world, why it makes sense, and how it connects to things the student already knows. Sure, but nothing's worse than those bulleted lists at the start of the chapter in a modern textbook: "After studying the material in this chapter, the student will be able to..."

The third strategy, the one that appeals to me, involves engaging students, monitoring their thinking, and providing feedback — which is hard to do in a 200-student lecture hall. That's why Wieman recommends three demonstrably effective technologies:

1. Just-in-time teaching: The technique uses the Web to ask students questions concerning the material to be covered, questions that they must answer just before class. The students thus start the class already engaged, and the instructor, who has looked at the students’ answers, already knows a reasonable amount about their difficulties with the topic to be covered.


2. Clickers: Each student has a clicker with which to answer questions posed during class. A computer records each student’s answer and can display a histogram of those responses. The clicker efficiently and quickly gets an answer from each student for which that student is accountable but which is anonymous to their peers.


3. Simulations: The “circuit construction kit” is a typical example of a simulation. It allows one to build arbitrary circuits involving realistic-looking resistors, light bulbs (which light up), wires, batteries, and switches and get a correct rendition of voltages and currents. There are realistic volt and ammeters to measure circuit parameters. The simulation also shows cartoonlike electrons moving around the circuit in appropriate paths, with velocities proportional to current. We’ve found this simulation to be a dramatic help to students in understanding the basic concepts of electric current and voltage, when substituted for an equivalent lab with real components.

Now that he has offered up his hard-won teaching wisdom, is anyone listening?

Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon

Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon — or so it seemed to Rick Robinson in high school:

Arnold Toynbee has pretty much fallen down the memory hole, but in the mid-20th century his reputation was considerable. I'm sure I learned his name from Clarke, who mentions him fairly often, in one story even naming a spaceship Arnold Toynbee. Oddly, Clarke never much worked the future-history street corner. I don't know if Asimov ever mentions Toynbee, but A Study of History is the perfect companion piece for the Foundation Trilogy.

Like Spengler, Toynbee was big on the grand cycles of history, the rise and fall of civilizations. Unlike Spingler, however, Toynbee does not fall back on semi-mystical mumbo jumbo about civilizations being organic entities with a fixed lifespan. (Later he fell back on a different semi-mystical mumbo jumbo.) Although most past civilizations have declined and fallen, this is not inevitable; a flexible enough society might keep winning the game of Civilization indefinitely.

You win, says Toynbee, by growing through a cycle of challenge and response. Challenge usually means something like "Vikings show up," to which the response may be organizing the fyrd, or simply giving them Normandy provided that they ask for it in French. Each response, if successful, usually ends up planting the germ of the next challenge. The Vikings learn French and become Normans, for which the response is to ship them off to conquer England and Sicily.

Or, suppose an academic enclave on the fringes of a declining empire faces the challenge of petty kingdoms that have broken away from imperial control. It responds by repackaging its learning as religious magic to awe the natives. This works, but the religious establishment gets out of hand, only to be muscled aside by trading interests ... each Seldon Crisis leading logically to the next.

If a civilization fails to handle a Seldon Crisis it "breaks down," and spends the rest of its history — some 800–1100 years, depending on how you measure — trying and failing to patch things up. The civilization first enters into a Time of Troubles, persisting and destructive internal warfare, that last about 400 years. The Time of Troubles ends with the last guy standing, who founds a Universal State that will in turn last about 400 years.

Toynbee's prototype for this grand cycle is classical civilization. The Greeks were going along fine, he says, till the Pelopponesian War (431-404 BC) screwed it all up for them. The Time of Troubles, with Greek and then semi-Greek states bashing endlessly and pointlessly away at each other, lasts a nice exact 400 years till the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, after which Cleopatra 's asp leaves Augustus the last guy standing. Another 409 years — close enough! — takes you to the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378, when the Goths wiped out a full Roman army, for Toynbee the effective end of the Empire. (Apparently Theodosius the Great doesn't count, let alone Justinian.)

After the fall comes a 300-year fallow period, an interregnum, at the end of which one or more new civilizations will rise out of the ashes of the old one to embark on their own Seldonian adventures. Just 309 years from Adrianople takes you to the battle of Tertry in 687 — not exactly household-name stuff, but the winner was a guy named Pepin of Heristal, majordomo to a Merovingian king whose name no one then or since has bothered with (Theuderic III). Majordomo sounds cooler when you translate it as Mayor of the Palace. Pepin's son was Charles Martel, the Hammer, his grandson was Charlemagne, and we are off to the races with the Rise of the West.

It turns out that nearly all other fallen civilizations have followed this same trajectory on the way down — admittedly Toynbee was not above a little hammering to help things fit. Within the 400-year primary wavelength he identifies a 200-year harmonic — federal ideas were in vogue for a while in post-Alexandrine Greece, to Toynbee a "rally" amid the Time of Troubles, while the Roman rough patch between Marcus Antonius and Diocletian is a "rout" foreshadowing the eventual fall. Even Justinian can be seen as a final "rally," even though Rome had already fallen. Toynbee notes some multi-generation social rhythms that are fairly well-established, such as the cultural naturalization of immigrant populations, to suggest that these long cycles have some natural basis.

All of this is enormously persuasive when you are a geeky teenager, and Toynbee seemed like the Newton or Darwin of history. I was actually motivated to do some critical research — and learned to my dismay that professional historians regarded it all as sophisticated BS. The rap on him, in a nutshell, is that he did a lot of hammering to make other civilizations fit the schedule, in fact beating world history pretty much out of recognition.

20,000 Nations Above the Sea

Is floating the last, best hope for liberty? I'm not convinced, but Brian Doherty takes a long look at seasteading and what makes it different from past attempts at creating a free country:

First, seasteading does not require anyone to take over existing terrain. That was hopeless; the land’s all claimed by some government or another, even the parts barely above water. And an open rebellion against an existing regime is unlikely to succeed. Seasteaders therefore will make their own “land.”

Second, seasteading is modular. Unlike various floating nations that never got off the drawing board — the “Freedom Ship,” the “Aquarius Project,” and other pipe dreams — the institute’s plan doesn’t require an upfront multimillion-dollar buy-in. Seasteading can start small, and in fact Friedman is sure it will start small, with tiny family-sized platforms called “coaststeads” near the mainland serving both as proof of concept and a laboratory for working out the kinks before community-sized seasteads are ready to sprout in international waters. Friedman figures the cost of such starter sea homes won’t be too out of line with housing costs on land, especially if people are buying in a communal or time-share fashion. In fact, most recent cost estimates for a particular hotel/resort seasteading design came out to roughly $258 per square foot (without factoring in some assembly and deployment costs), which is quite a bit cheaper than the current price of many single family homes in the San Francisco Bay area.

Third, seasteading isn’t just based in libertarian theorizing and hopes. Friedman knows that seasteads will need to have some business hook, and he’s busy working those angles. There’s SurgiCruise, a nascent floating medical tourism company that is seeking venture funding. If Americans will fly to Mexico, India, or Thailand for cheaper medical care free of U.S. regulatory costs, the idea goes, why wouldn’t they sail 12 miles for it? Among the other first-tier business ideas being bruited about with varying levels of intensity are vacation resorts, sin industries, aquaculture, deep-sea marina services, and universal data libraries free of national copyright laws.

Fourth, because the open ocean plus “dynamic geography” allows for experimentation with governance in any form, seasteading shouldn’t appeal only to libertarians. Sure, any seastead that Friedman would want to live in would get as close to anarchism as can be managed. But he thinks a variety of ideologues should be willing to leap on board, from sustainability-oriented environmentalists to members of various intentional communities, religious or philosophical or whatever, that want to shape their own lives in peace without government interference. Such communities might not be individualist in their internal policies, but they fit within the libertarian framework of seasteading itself, which allows for a wide variety of freely chosen social structures.

You're hired. You're fired.

For his first job in Silicon Valley, Steve Blank was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department:

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. (Driving across the U.S. is an adventure everyone ought to do. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) With my offer letter in-hand I reported to ESL’s Human Resources (HR) department. I was met by a very apologetic manager who said, “We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last week. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. I am sorry there really isn’t a job for you.”

I was stunned. I had quit my job, given up my apartment, packed everything I owned in the back of my car, knew no one else in Silicon Valley and had about $200 in cash. This could be a bad day. I caught my breath and thought about it for a minute and said, “How about I go talk to the new training manager. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?” Taking sympathy on me, the HR person made a few calls, and said, “Sure, but he doesn’t have the budget for a lab tech. He’s looking for a training instructor.”
[...]
As I talked to the head of training and his boss, I pointed out that the clock was ticking down for them, I knew the type of training military maintenance people need, and I had done some informal teaching in the Air Force. I made them a pretty good offer – hire me as a training instructor at the salary they were going to pay me as a lab technician. Out of desperation and a warm body right in front of them, they realized I was probably better than nothing. So I got hired for the second time at ESL, this time as a training instructor.

The good news is that I had just gotten my first promotion in Silicon Valley, and I hadn’t even started work.

The bad news is that I had 6 weeks to write a 10 week course on three 30-foot vans full of direction finding electronics plus a small airplane stuffed full of receivers. “And, oh by the way, can you write the manuals for the operators while you’re at it.”

Two weeks before the class was over the head of the deployment team asked him to come along to Korea: “We’ll get you temporarily assigned to us and then you can come back as a Test Engineer/Training Instructor and work on a much more interesting system.” This led to his roommate philosophizing about how he kept getting more and more interesting jobs:

His theory, he told me, was this: “You’re not so smart, you just show up a lot in a lot of places.” I wore it as a badge of honor.

Uranium Found on the Moon

The Japanese Kaguya spacecraft, which was launched in 2007, has detected uranium on the moon using a gamma-ray spectrometer:

Scientists are using the instrument to create maps of the moon's surface composition, showing the presence of thorium, potassium, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium, titanium and iron.

"We've already gotten uranium results, which have never been reported before," said Robert Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, and a member of the Kaguya science team. "We're getting more new elements and refining and confirming results found on the old maps."

The findings could help decide where to build future lunar colonies, since manned outposts will need energy, and could potentially derive it from nuclear power plants.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" Re-created

Nazi Wunderwaffen — miracle weapons — continue to sing their siren song. Now Nat Geo has brought together a team of Northrop Grumman contractors to rebuild a replica Ho 2-29 — a jet-powered plane built primarily of wood and shaped like a modern stealth fighter — from the original blueprints:

Lead designer Reimar Horten was a glider designer "obsessed with the all-wing [design] because of the possibilities it created for low drag and exceptional performance," said Florida-based aviation historian David Myhra, who interviewed the Horten pair numerous times from the early 1980s until their deaths in the late 1990s.

Walter Horten was a military man who had lost hundreds of Luftwaffe colleagues during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

"That loss never left him to the day he died," said Myhra, author of The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft.

"He was burning with revenge and felt the need for a plane that would be pretty much invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system. That's what he wanted his brother to design."

The result of their collaboration was unique among Luftwaffe designs.

"It has no vertical surfaces for stability or control. Every exterior surface of that aircraft contributes lift," said Russell Lee, curator for the only remaining Horten 2-29 aircraft, at the National Air and Space Museum's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility outside Washington, D.C.

"That had been tried before and failed time and time again," Lee said. "Reimar Horten took the idea further and made it more practical than any other designer really up until the B-2."

In the end, Hitler's stealth fighter wasn't especially stealthy:

"This design gave them just about a 20 percent reduction in radar range detection over a conventional fighter of the day," Dobrenz said.

According to tests on the replica, World War II British radar would have picked up the Horten over the English Channel at about 80 miles (129 kilometers) out, versus 100 miles (160 kilometers) for a conventional World War II fighter.

But because of the Ho 2-29's tremendous speed, the time from detection to target—the British mainland—would have been lowered from the usual 19 minutes to just 8 minutes, making it difficult for Allied defenders to respond.

"Probably, for at least a short amount of time, it could have been a game changer, until a counter was developed for it," Dobrenz said.

The evolutionary origin of depression

Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan believes that mild depression is a warning mechanism, like physical pain:

Dr Nesse’s hypothesis is that, as pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones — in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore, he argues, there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit — and he believes that low mood is at least part of that mechanism.

It is a neat hypothesis, but is it true? A study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests it might be. Carsten Wrosch from Concordia University in Montreal and Gregory Miller of the University of British Columbia studied depression in teenage girls. They measured the “goal adjustment capacities” of 97 girls aged 15-19 over the course of 19 months. They asked the participants questions about their ability to disengage from unattainable goals and to re-engage with new goals. They also asked about a range of symptoms associated with depression, and tracked how these changed over the course of the study.

Their conclusion was that those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could, indeed, disengage more easily from unreachable goals. That supports Dr Nesse’s hypothesis. But the new study also found a remarkable corollary: those women who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.

The importance of giving up inappropriate goals has already been demonstrated by Dr Wrosch. Two years ago he and his colleagues published a study in which they showed that those teenagers who were better at doing so had a lower concentration of C-reactive protein, a substance made in response to inflammation and associated with an elevated risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Dr Wrosch thus concludes that it is healthy to give up overly ambitious goals. Persistence, though necessary for success and considered a virtue by many, can also have a negative impact on health.

Dr Nesse believes that persistence is a reason for the exceptional level of clinical depression in America — the country that has the highest depression rate in the world. “Persistence is part of the American way of life,” he says. “People here are often driven to pursue overly ambitious goals, which then can lead to depression.” He admits that this is still an unproven hypothesis, but it is one worth considering. Depression may turn out to be an inevitable price of living in a dynamic society.

NASA Wants Your Ideas for Digitizing Rocket Scientist’s Notes

NASA is asking the public for suggestions on the best way to analyze and electronically catalog Werner von Braun's notes, which were literally discovered in boxes six months ago.

Teens Don’t Twitter

Teens don’t twitter, Cringely notes — not even the ones who send and receive 14,000 SMS text messages per month, like a girl named Echo:

Yes, Echo has unlimited texting, but among her friends this behavior isn’t unusual and it says a lot about how media habits — good and bad — are changing in our culture.

If a typical month has 30 days that’s 720 hours, a third of which we’ll guess Echo spends asleep, giving her 480 hours of texting time per month. Fourteen thousand texts (the number was actually higher, but we’ll round it down for simplicity) divided into 480 hours is about 29 texts per hour or about one every two minutes. Since texting is usually a binary activity (the texter sends a text for every text they receive) we can guess that Echo writes about 7,000 text messages per month, with writing probably taking twice as much time as reading. Half an hour at the mall with a stopwatch told me the average teenage SMS message takes about 20 seconds to type (if you can call it typing) suggesting that Echo is spending about a quarter of her waking time on texting.

According to both Neilsen and the Pew Internet Life Project, Echo is an outlier, a user of texting at prodigious levels beyond her peers. A Neilsen study from the second quarter of 2008, for example, says that mobile phone users age 13-17 send or receive an average of 1742 texts per month, which would only require 7.25 hours by my reckoning. So Echo is an outlier, but on the other hand her data is fresher and texting IS rising at a rapid pace.

So who cares? Advertisers care. Kids who are texting aren’t attending to TV ads while they are doing it, nor are they reading magazines or newspapers (what are those?). So advertising is coming quickly to SMS.

TV executives care. Remember those words “standard text messaging rates apply” at the end of every American Idol episode? Well for reality television, texting means revenue. Idol averages 30 million voters per week of which a quarter are using SMS that reportedly yields a nickel per vote to the TV producers. Seven and a half million messages per week and 12 weeks of voting yields another $4.5 million per season for Simon and the gang.

Educators care because texting competes with other activities like paying attention at school and doing homework. Keeping kids from texting in school is almost impossible.

To really understand the Echo phenomenon, though, you have to appreciate that she’s a very pretty girl living in a semi-rural area where kids like to complain that there isn’t anything to do. So they gossip. If teens twittered, which studies show they don’t, Echo would be a twitterer because her peers are interested in her life. And that’s what really makes her an outlier, because Echo is an opinion leader and a trend-setter and SMS — generally a one-to-one technology — isn’t well-suited for that. So the poor girl has to work really hard to keep all her friends informed, using an antiquated interpersonal communication technology as an ad hoc social network.

What’s most interesting to me about this phenomenon is the part about teens not twittering. All the studies show that’s true but don’t seem to look for causality. They miss the simple point that twittering is public behavior (one-way at that!) and texting is private and bi-directional. An adult or a teen celebrity might twitter but most regular kids see what they are communicating as too private to share with anyone other than the person for whom it is intended, much less any old creep who chooses to subscribe. And divas like Echo, who might happily embrace a more public channel, are trapped by the tools of their audience.

Girls age 13-17 are interested in relationships (who likes who) and boys age 13-17, who would normally be interested more in things, also happen to be generally obsessed with girls age 13-17, effectively dragging boys into the sway of SMS, too, sustaining an industry.

There’s clearly a new product opportunity in here, somewhere.

Fixing the Health Care System

Arnold Kling does not believe that fixing the health care system is a trivial task:

I love it when people who have never managed anything more than a government grant are convinced they can manage one sixth of the economy.

He's pointing out the hubris of Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin and David Cutler in writing The Two Trillion Dollar Solution for the Center for American Progress.

Interactive Wine Bar

Jared Schiffman and Phillip Tiongson, co-founders of Potion, have developed an interactive wine bar that transforms floors, walls, and furniture into communal screens that are controlled by gestures.

The Real Genius Of The Kindle

Tom Weber argues that the real genius of the Kindle is what it doesn't do:

When my Kindle arrived from Amazon earlier this year, it felt at first like a severely crippled computer. After all, it has a display screen, a keyboard — even a wireless connection and a web browser of sorts. But every time I tried to indulge my digital-media-trained attention span, pausing in the middle of a book or article to check baseball scores or skim a few blogs, the experience was too cumbersome to enjoy.

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like — gasp! — old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine — enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

Signaling and Solidarity

Will Wilkinson notes that "folks on Twitter have been turning their avatars (little profile photos) green to show solidarity with the protesters in Iran" — but why do this?

How does it help? I want the Iranian people to live in freedom, just as I want all people to live in freedom. But the point of the gesture eludes me, unless the point of the gesture is to be seen making the gesture by others who will credit you for it. Like so many political gestures, it is vanity dressed up as elevated moral consciousness. It doesn’t help.

Wilkinson understands the impulse to express solidarity with Iranians who seek freedom, but he doesn't trust it:

Why not?

Because I realize that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I don’t understand Iranian politics very deeply. I will now proceed to make some mistakes that prove this. For example, I did not know until this episode that Mousavi was Prime Minister of Iran for many years under Khomeni, which pretty much guarantees he’s no angel. I did not understand anything about the internal divisions within the Council of Guardians and the Assembly of Experts. Indeed, I still don’t completely grasp how these various bodies are related to each other. What I gather is that that Khameni and Ahmadinejad are aligned against former Prime Minister Mousavi and former President Rafsanjani (who is now the head of the Assemby of Experts, the body that chooses the Supreme Leader. Thank you Wikipedia). I don’t really grasp whether Mousavi and Rafsanjani are in it together, or are in a “the enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine” sort of thing, or what. As far as I can tell, the ruling axis got worried A’jad might lose the election, botched the vote-rigging, but validated the result anyway. I don’t know who would have won had the vote been counted (I think this remains quite unclear), but in any case, it seems clear enough that Ahmadinejad is staying in power despite a pretty transparent flouting of the rules of an already deeply anti-democratic constitution. This provided a great opportunity for the anti-Khameni/Ahmadinejad faction to encourage a popular uprising, which I am sure is fueled by real discontent with the current regime. And much of this discontent I am sure is surely rooted in an authentic desire for a more liberal and democratic Iran.

Is that what we get if the Mousavi-Rafsanjani axis comes to power? A more liberal and democratic Iran? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think many people do. I do know that these guys are deeply embedded in the larger status quo power structure, have had power before, and their records don’t look so good. They may well represent improvement, but I don’t honestly know that. As far as I know, the outpouring of desire for change that we see so clearly on YouTube is being exploited by one faction of the Iranian ruling class to depose another. I’d like to see the whole theocratic structure of Iran fall. I’d like to see the whole country radically liberalize, but I think that’s unlikely, largely because I doubt very much that that’s what most Iranians want. I want Iran to be free, and I want Iranians to want to be free. And I’m quite willing to cheer for freedom. Go freedom! But given my ignorance of exactly what and who I’d really be cheering on should I alter my Twitter avatar to reflect the campaign color of the former PM of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I think the intellectually and morally responsible course of action is to watch with colorless hope.

For a left-libertarian, he sounds an awful lot like a Burkean conservative.

Patri Friedman adds that there are short-term and long-term problems with naive activism:

In the short-term, their act may lead them to feel they have "done their duty", and to not do things that are more effective. But more importantly, this sort of response just reinforces the behavior of naively channeling one's desire to make the world better into superficial and ineffective strategies. And that is a powerful enemy of achieving real change through strategies that focus on results, not just easy ways to feel good.

Acer’s Everywhere in the PC World

Acer’s everywhere in the PC world, with 11.6 percent of the market to Dell’s 13.6 percent:

For close to 15 years, Acer suffered from a split personality. One part of the company built computers for other PC sellers that would then put their labels on the machines. Another part of Acer sold very similar computers under the company’s own brand.

The arrangement created obvious conflicts, Acer executives say, with the group responsible for the Acer-branded products competing against the customers of the manufacturing arm.

In 2000, Acer began cleaving off its manufacturing division. A year later it formed an independent company called Wistron to handle these operations. A smaller, nimbler Acer emerged, outfitted with a new logo and lofty, global aspirations.

With a clean slate, Acer made what looked like counterintuitive decisions. It decided to focus on laptops for consumers, and to sell them through partners and retailers, avoiding any kind of direct sales.

This approach placed Acer on a distinctly opposite path from Dell, which was the PC industry’s major success story in 2000. Dell had surged past rivals like Compaq, I.B.M. and H.P. through an ultra-lean direct sales model that hinged to a large degree on shipping desktop computers to big businesses.

In the subsequent years, however, computer retailing shifted in favor of Acer. Consumers now buy more computers than businesses do, and these buyers tend to prefer laptops to desktops. The advantages that Dell once gained by mixing and matching components for customers at its factories have faded as consumers have flocked to stores to buy preconfigured computers.

“When we split, we thought that if the PC is going to become more of a commodity, consumers will end up as the largest part of the business,” says Mr. Lanci, who became chief executive last year. “Going direct didn’t look like the right model for addressing that. After eight or nine years, it looks like we made a very good decision.”
[...]
Last year, Acer relied on about 6,000 employees to hit $16.6 billion in revenue and a profit of $358 million. While the company probably produces more revenue per employee than its rivals, it does so on the back of less profitable products. Its operating margin of 2 percent is about half that of H.P. and Dell, placing it in a profit category below even some retailers, said A. M. Sacconaghi, a securities analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
[...]
Over the last two years, it has acquired brands like eMachines, Gateway and Packard Bell. It pitches eMachines as its most affordable brand, while Acer-branded products cater to the mainstream. The Gateway moniker covers more expensive, flashier computers in the United States, while the Packard Bell brand serves the same purpose in Europe.

Angel Shrugged

Amy Wallace interviewed "the world's favorite angel" before her death — about Ayn Rand:

How did you first learn of Ayn Rand’s interest in you? I gather she got in touch in the late '70s, when Charlie’s Angels was one of the biggest hit shows ever to appear on TV?

Ayn contacted me with a personal letter (and a copy of Atlas Shrugged) through my agents. Even though we had never met (and never did), she seemed to think we must have a lot in common since we were both born on the same day: February 2nd.

Why did Rand say she was so determined to see you in the role of Dagny Taggart, the female heroine in Atlas Shrugged?

I don’t remember if Ayn’s letter specifically mentioned Charlie’s Angels, but I do remember it saying that she was a fan of my work. A few months later, when we finally spoke on the phone (actually she did most of the speaking and I did most of the listening), she said she never missed an episode of the show. I remember being surprised and flattered by that. I mean, here was this literary genius praising Angels. After all, the show was never popular with critics who dismissed it as “Jiggle TV.” But Ayn saw something that the critics didn’t, something that I didn’t see either (at least not until many years later): She described the show as a “triumph of concept and casting.” Ayn said that while Angels was uniquely American, it was also the exception to American television in that it was the only show to capture true “romanticism” — it intentionally depicted the world not as it was, but as it should be. Aaron Spelling was probably the only other person to see Angels that way, although he referred to it as “comfort television.”

Did Ayn have any favorite episodes of the show?

I have to admit that I don’t think Ayn was a big fan of the stories themselves because she kept saying that someday somebody would offer me a script (and a role) that would give me the chance to “triumph as an actress.” Ayn wanted that script to be Atlas Shrugged and that role to be her heroine, Dagny Taggart. But because of the challenges in adapting and producing the novel for television, several years went by and the script and role that Ayn hoped I would someday be offered turned out to be The Burning Bed and the role of Francine Hughes instead. And so, in an unexpected way, Ayn’s hope or expectation for me did come true. Looking back, she seemed to see something in me that I had not yet seen in myself.

Had you read Atlas Shrugged or any of her other famous books? What was your familiarity with the Rand world view?

At the time that Ayn contacted me about Atlas Shrugged, my only real familiarity with her work was the movie version of her previous novel, The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper. I remember liking the movie because it was unique in that the characters seemed to be the embodiments of ideas as opposed to real flesh and blood people with interests and lives. Now that I think about it, I think that’s why Ayn was drawn to Charlie’s Angels. Because the characters that Kate, Jaclyn and I played weren’t really characters (the audience never saw us outside of work) as much as personifications of the idea that three sexy women could do all the things that Kojak and Columbo did. Our characters existed only to serve the idea of the show (even “Charlie” was just a faceless voice on a speaker phone).

But I also responded to The Fountainhead because, as an artist (a painter and sculptress) myself, I related to the architect’s resistance to make his work like everyone else’s — which was, of course, what Ayn’s own art was all about. And that resistance to conformity is probably one of the reasons that she was so determined to see me play Dagny: At the time I would have been the completely unexpected choice.

It sounds as if you and Rand got along pretty well.

Later, when I read Atlas Shrugged, I was reminded of my first and only conversation with Ayn and how some of the characters in her novel(s) take an immediate liking to each other, almost as if they had always known each other — at least in spirit. And this was the feeling I got from Ayn herself, from the way she spoke to me. I’ll always think of “Dagny Taggart” as the best role I was supposed to play but never did…

The Language of Clear Thinking

Alfred Korzybski famously said that the map is not the territory. This is the key point of his general semantics: we should be conscious of the abstractions we use.

If we try to reason from the "essence" of something, in true Aristotelian style, we might abstract away meaningful complexity. If we apply binary logic, we may label things true or false when they are largely true or largely false, or likely true or likely false. Korzybski thus recommended what he called null-A, or non-Aristotelian logic.

The language we use also introduces many questionable abstractions, and Korzybski believed that ambiguous language lent itself to unclear thinking. Most infamously, he railed against unclear use of the verb to be, which led a former student of his to suggest a modified form of English, E-Prime, which eliminated to be entirely:

To exist or not to exist,
I ask this question.
— modified from Shakespeare's Hamlet

Proponents of E-Prime believed that it would do more than clarify communication; they believed it would clarify thought. This is an example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which suggests that language influences thought, and that some languages might lead to clearer thinking. That was the rationale behind Loglan, the logical language, with its grammar based on predicate logic.

These ideas soon found their way into Golden Age science fiction. A.E. von Vogt had his protagonists overcome their totalitarian foes through clever use of intuitive, inductive logic in The World of Null-A. (Peter Chung's animated Æon Flux shares many motifs with The World of Null-A.)

Robert Heinlein also embraced many elements of general semantics, especially the notion of languages designed to improve thinking. In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the self-aware computer receives its precise instructions in Loglan — which makes Loglan sound like a variant of Prolog. Heinlein took the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis much further in his short story, Gulf, which posits a new language used by a race of supermen. The language, Speedtalk, uses every phoneme (sound) used in any human language, not the small subset that belongs to any one language, and maps every word in Basic English to its own phoneme.

Basic English also shows up in H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come as the lingua franca of the future. Similarly, it inspired the Newspeak of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (It doesn't take much to turn Wells' utopian ideas upside-down.)

Nyrath has much more to say about future languages, but I thought I'd end with this amusing bit of geekery:

Raphaël Poss (AKA "Kena") took the obvious step and adapted the Tengwar alphabet to the Lojban set of phonemes. As Mr. Poss puts it: "...it is far more natural to write Lojban with a logical writing system. ... the tengwar system inherently contains some main Lojban morphology rules, making Lojban easier to learn when it is written with tengwar."

A Master of the Consultative Sale

Twenty-eight years ago, Steve Blank was a bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of products to potential customers. He was not a master of the consultative sale:

Convergent’s business was selling desktop computers (with our own operating system and office applications) to other computer manufacturers — most of them long gone: Burroughs, Prime, Monroe Data Systems, ADP, Mohawk, Gould, NCR, 4-Phase, AT&T. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” — word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. This was just before the IBM PC hit the desktop so there were no “standard” operating systems or applications for desktop platforms. Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. Convergent Technologies was one of those OEM suppliers.

Their engineers hated us.

I was traveling with the regional sales manager who had called on these companies, gotten them interested and now needed someone from the factory to provide technical details and answer questions about how the product could be configured and customized.

As the eager young marketer on my first sales call, as soon as we shook hands I was in front of the room pitching our product and technical features. I knew everything about our operating system, hardware and applications – and I was going to prove it. I talked all about how great the new products were and went into excruciating detail on our hardware and operating system and explained why no one other than our company could build something so brilliantly designed. (This being presented to another company’s proud engineering team who was being forced to buy product from us because they couldn’t build their own in time.) After I sat down I was convinced the only logical conclusion was for the customer to tell us how many they wanted to buy.

The result wasn’t what I expected. The customers didn’t act particularly excited about the product and how brilliantly I presented it. I do believe some actually rolled their eyes. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

After the meeting our sale rep took me aside and asked if “perhaps I wouldn’t mind watching him on the next call.“

The next day, as I drove to our next meeting the sales guy was intently reading the sports section of the newspaper and as I glanced over he seemed to be writing down the scores. I wondered if he had a bookie. When we got to the meeting he reminded me to be quiet and follow his lead.

We shook hands with the customers, but instead of launching into a product pitch (or better, letting me launch into the pitch) he started asking how their families were. He even remembered the names of their wives and kids and some details about schools or events. (I couldn’t believe it, here we were wasting precious time and the dumb sales guy is talking about other stuff.)

Just as I thought we were going to talk about the product, he then mentioned the previous nights football game. (Damn, another five minutes down the tube as the whole room chimed in with an opinion as we talked about something else unimportant.)


Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. He complemented their elegantly designed minicomputers and made some astute comment about their architecture (now I’m rolling my eyes, their computers were dinosaurs) and asked who were the brilliant designers. I was surprised to see that they were in the room. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors. And our sales guy was agreeing and commiserating. (And I’m thinking why is he doing all this, just tell these idiots that the world has passed them by and they need to buy our stuff and lets get an order.)

The engineers spoke about all the pressure they were getting from management to build desktop personal computers rather than their traditional minicomputers. And that their management wanted these new systems on a schedule that was impossible to meet. Then our sales guy says something that makes me stop breathing for a while. “I bet if your management team would give you guys the resources you guys could build desktop computers better than anyone, even better than us.” There’s a unanimous agreement around the table about how great they were and how bad management was.

The Consultative Sale

Our sales guy then quietly asked if there was any way we could help them. (Help them?!! We’re here to sell them our stuff, why can’t we just present what we got and they’ll buy it.) The VP of Engineering says, “well we don’t have the resources or time, and as long as you know we could build better computers then you guys, why don’t you tell us the details about your computers.”

I had just watched a master of the consultative sale.

The molecular connection between dietary restriction and increased lifespan

A diet on the brink of starvation extends lifespan in mice and many other species, but now researchers have discovered that two enzymes play a key role in longevity:

But first author Andrea C. Carrano, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in American Cancer Society Professor Tony Hunter's laboratory, hadn't set out to unravel the molecular connection between dietary restriction and increased lifespan when she started to investigate the role of the mammalian enzyme WWP-1. "I only knew that WWP-1 was a ubiquitin ligase and that mammalian cells contain three copies, which would make it difficult to study its function."

Ubiquitin ligases work in tandem with so called ubiquitin-conjugating enzymes to attach a chain of ubiquitin molecules to other proteins. This process, called ubiquitination, flags protein substrates for destruction but can also serve as a regulatory signal.

Since the laboratory roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans only contains one copy, Carrano teamed up with Salk researcher Dillin, who studies aging and longevity in C. elegans. Initial experiments revealed that worms without the WWP-1 gene seemed normal but were more susceptible to various forms of stress. "This finding was the first hint that WWP-1 might play a role in the aging process since mutations that affect stress very often correlate with longevity," she says.

Prompted by the findings, Carrano's next set of experiments focused on WWP-1's potential role in the regulation of lifespan. When she genetically engineered worms to overexpress WWP-1, well-fed worms lived on average 20 percent longer. Deleting PHA-4, which was discovered in Dillin's lab and so far is the only gene known to be essential for lifespan extension in response to diet restriction, abolished the life-extending effects of additional WWP-1 placing the ubiquitin ligase as a central rung on the same genetic ladder as PHA-4. Without WWP-1, cutting down on calories no longer staved off death.

When a study by others found that UBC-18 interacts with WWP-1, Carrano wondered whether it could play a role in diet-restriction-induced longevity as well. She first confirmed that the UBC-18 functions as an ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme and gives WWP-1 a hand. She then tested whether it played a role in lifespan regulation. "Overexpression of UBC-18 was not enough to extend the lifespan of worms but depleting it negated the effects of caloric restriction," says Carrano, who is busy looking for potential substrates of the UBC-18-WWP-1 ubiquitination complex.

"The WWP-1 pathway is highly conserved between worms and mammals and could play a role in the human aging process," says senior author Tony Hunter, Ph.D., a professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory. "We didn't expect that this protein would be involved in the regulation of lifespan but it is very exciting when experiments lead you in a surprising direction."

GDP tell us less and less

GDP tell us less and less about broader efforts to improve human well-being, Tyler Cowen notes, as we spend more and more time on the Web:

Buying $2 worth of bananas boosts GDP; having $20 worth of fun on the Web does not.