Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.

Can you buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe, says Paul Graham:

A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask "How could we make something like that happen here?" The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That's how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups?
[...]
People sometimes think they could improve the startup scene in their town by starting something like Y Combinator there, but in fact it will have near zero effect. I know because Y Combinator itself had near zero effect on Boston when we were based there half the year. The people we funded came from all over the country (indeed, the world) and afterward they went wherever they could get more funding — which generally meant Silicon Valley.

The seed funding business is not a regional business, because at that stage startups are mobile. They're just a couple founders with laptops.

If you want to encourage startups in a particular city, you have to fund startups that won't leave. There are two ways to do that: have rules preventing them from leaving, or fund them at the point in their life when they naturally take root. The first approach is a mistake, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups. If your terms force startups to do things they don't want to, only the desperate ones will take your money.

Good startups will move to another city as a condition of funding. What they won't do is agree not to move the next time they need funding. So the only way to get them to stay is to give them enough that they never need to leave.
[...]
Suppose to be on the safe side it would cost a million dollars per startup. If you could get startups to stick to your town for a million apiece, then for a billion dollars you could bring in a 1000 startups. That probably wouldn't push you past Silicon Valley itself, but it might get you second place.

For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in could make itself one of the biggest startup hubs in the world.

What's more, it wouldn't take very long. You could probably do it in five years. During the term of one mayor. And it would get easier over time, because the more startups you had in town, the less it would take to get new ones to move there. By the time you had a thousand startups in town, the VCs wouldn't be trying so hard to get them to move to Silicon Valley; instead they'd be opening local offices. Then you'd really be in good shape. You'd have started a self-sustaining chain reaction like the one that drives the Valley.

The Economics of Religion

I've been enjoying Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcast immensely. Economics is not purely, or even primarily, about money, and his talk with Larry Iannaccone about the economics of religion aptly demonstrates this.

As Roberts points out, Adam Smith laid the foundation for an economics of religion more than two hundred years ago:

In an important, but largely ignored chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that self-interest motivates clergy just as it does secular producers, that market forces constrain churches just as they do secular firms; and that the benefits of competition, the burdens of monopoly, and the hazards of government regulation affect religion like any other sector of the economy. Consider, for example, the following passage:

The teachers of [religion]..., in the same manner as other teachers, may either depend altogether for their subsistence upon the voluntary contributions of their hearers; or they may derive it from some other fund to which the law of their country many entitle them.... Their exertion, their zeal and industry, are likely to be much greater in the former situation than the latter. In this respect the teachers of new religions have always had a considerable advantage in attacking those ancient and established systems of which the clergy, reposing themselves upon their benefices, had neglected to keep up the fervour of the faith and devotion in the great body of the people.... (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations par. V.1.190, Cannan edition. Also, Glasgow edition, Liberty Fund, 1981 vol. 2 p. 789].)

Beating Up Children

Rory Miller tells an amusing tale about beating up children:

We have a brand-new jail completely empty. The voters passed the levy to build it, but the people who run the county decided not to even allow a vote for the money to run it. Great big empty clean jail that doesn't smell like criminals.

Someone got the really cool idea of letting the Boy Scouts hold an over-nighter there. Even cooler, someone decided to have a group of deputies give brief little classes on what Law Enforcement does... but only the cool stuff: K9, night vision, special weapons...

I was asked to do the DT (defensive tactics) portion. Six twenty-minute classes for 40-50 Boy Scouts.
[...]
I arrived at the site and something was wrong. Sounds of shrieking and laughing and running penetrated the concrete block walls of the jail. I met the lieutenant inside. He said, "There was a slight miscommunication. Remember I said Boy Scouts and Eagle Scouts, mostly fourteen to eighteen? It turns out they're Bobcats, Cub Scouts and Webelos. Ages are mostly six to nine. You OK with that?" Hmmmm.
[...]
"At ease!" I yelled, "No shoes on the mats!" They seemed startled, but scrambled to get their shoes off. Half hour to kick off time. If I left them alone, they'd wreck the place.

"All right, gentleman. We're stuck here for a half hour. You wanna screw around or you want to learn something?"

"Learn something!" they shrieked. Shrieking seemed the basic mode of communication. So I got the entire group of them, as well as a couple of dads and others that drifted in playing at a sparring flow drill. By the end of half an hour they were working on blindfolded infighting. Not bad. One learning moment: A kid asked me if I worked there and I said I did. He asked what I did and I said, "Mostly, I beat people up for a living."

The kid started running around to all his friends, "This guy has the coolest job! He beats people up all day!" Some of the parents looked disapproving.

There was a brief ceremony before things kicked off where the Sheriff administered the oath of office and swore in the kids as junior deputies. I remember my oath of office pretty well, but I seemed to have forgotten the parts about doing my homework and listening to my parents.

Then the classes. First a talk about how fighting isn't like on TV and cops have to fight one of two ways, either putting handcuffs on someone without injuring them or fighting for their life. Then, if they were well-behaved (and only one group of the very youngest didn't seem up to it) the sparring flow drill. Then back to talking: "Okay, gentleman, the next part is all about PAIN. Who wants to learn about pain?'

"Yeahhh!!!!!" While the parents, especially the moms, cringed in the background.

Some pressure points, maybe elbow locks. "I don't want to hear about anybody using these on their little brothers or sisters or keeping everybody awake all night practicing. To make extra sure, I'm going to show your parents the pressure points I'm not showing you, including the one that will give you a headache for three days."

"Show us the headache one!"
"No."
"I won't use it, I promise."
"No."
"Can you make people go to sleep like the Vulcan neck pinch?"
"Yes."
"Show us that."
"No. I don't even know you."

The Last Ace

Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down) calls Cesar Rodriguez the last ace, despite the fact that he only had three air-to-air kill when he retired a couple years ago, because it's the closest anyone's come to the required five kills in a long, long time — which says more about American air power than it does about the skills of our pilots:

American pilots haven’t shot down many enemy jets in modern times, because few nations have dared rise to the challenge of trying to fight them. The F‑15, the backbone of America’s air power for more than a quarter century, may just be the most successful weapon in history. It is certainly the most successful fighter jet. In combat, its kill ratio over more than 30 years is 107 to zero. Zero. In three decades of flying, no F‑15 has ever been shot down by an enemy plane — and that includes F‑15s flown by air forces other than America’s.

Rival fighters rarely test those odds. Many of Saddam Hussein’s MiGs fled into Iran when the U.S. attacked during the Gulf War. Of those who did fight the F-15, like the unfortunate pilot framed on Rodriguez’s wall, every last one was shot down. The lesson was remembered. When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, Saddam didn’t just ground his air force, he buried it.

That dominance is eroding, Bowden argues:

Some foreign-built fighters can now match or best the F‑15 in aerial combat, and given the changing nature of the threats our country is facing and the dizzying costs of maintaining our advantage, America is choosing to give up some of the edge we’ve long enjoyed, rather than pay the price to preserve it. The next great fighter, the F‑22 Raptor, is every bit as much a marvel today as the F‑15 was 25 years ago, and if we produced the F-22 in sufficient numbers we could move the goalposts out of reach again. But we are building fewer than a third of the number needed to replace the older fighters in service.

I find it odd that he discusses the future of air superiority at length with no mention of UAVs.

Sometimes You Need a Market Dominant Minority

Riots against French colonial rule on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe have turned lethal, which has led Al-Fin to comment that sometimes you need a market-dominant minority — like the French in Guadeloupe, or the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia — to run the country:

The parts of the world that never developed mathematics, never invented the wheel, never developed advanced written languages, should not be expected to excel in the modern technological world — and they don't. Rioting against rule by market dominant minorities can feel quite righteous — particularly to the socialist revolutionary "intellectuals" who put the "commoners" up to it (like the self-righteousness of the muslim imam who leads children into short but successful carrers as suicide bombers).

From Russia with Blood, Beauty, and Beasts

In Slate's From Russia with Blood, Beauty, and Beasts, Matthew Polly describes how he got a laugh out of MMA champion Fedor Emelianenko — right after he unexpectedly lost at the World Sambo Championships:

Fedor is also everything sportswriters say they want in their champions. While absolutely dominant, he's also humble, modest, and polite. He never trash-talks or gets into trouble with the law. He's a patriot who fights for the honor of his country. And his hobbies are watercolor painting and Dostoyevsky scholarship. America hasn't had a champion who would even know who Dostoyevsky was, let alone read him, since Gene Tunney. Fedor is a credit to his sport, his country — heck, the human race.

But, of course, that's not what sportswriters really want in our athletes. We want quote-spewing narcissists who attend nightclubs packing loaded guns and shoot themselves in the leg. Writing nice things about good people doesn't sell as well as writing mean things about assholes. And from a sales perspective, Fedor is the worst of the nice guys — not only is he bland, he's almost Terminator blank. He enters the ring, destroys his opponents, and leaves as if he were simply picking the newspaper off the lawn. And in interviews, he is almost, if this is possible, more vacant — a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

However, there are rare moments when Fedor flashes a bemused smirk as though he recognizes the absurdity of his occupation. It is a sign of a hidden vein of humor, which, since I didn't expect to get much out of our scheduled interview, I decided to mine. My goal was to make Fedor laugh.

OK, on to how he got a laugh out of him:

"I saw Vladimir Putin's judo video," I said. "What do you think of his skill level?"

"When he was young, he was on the Russian team," Fedor replied. "And I admire his talent."

"How would he do against you?"

"I am an active sportsman, a practicing sportsman. I don't know whether he is practicing now."

This was the moment I was setting him up for: "So, would you let him win?"

For a second, I could almost see his brain light up as he pondered the variety of potential answers to this question and their various implications.

"I don't think it would be like competing, just practicing, just enjoying."
As he finished his sentence, he looked at me with a hand-in-the-cookie-jar expression. I smiled wide and patted him on the shoulder.

"You are very careful, very careful."

Without need of translation, he dropped his head and his shoulders started to heave up and down. Unable to hold back his delight in his artful dodge, he finally let go.

"Heh, heh, heh, heh … heh."

How strong is a chimpanzee, really?

I've been asking, How strong is a chimpanzee, really?, and John Hawks of Slate has done the research to answer that question — rather than repeat the same factoids going around:

After last week's chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, in which an animal named Travis tore off the face of a middle-aged woman, primate experts interviewed by the media repeated an old statistic: Chimpanzees are five to eight times stronger than people. The literature — or at least 19^th-century literature — concurs: Edgar Allan Poe's fictional orangutan was able to hurl bodies and pull off scalps. Edgar Rice Burroughs' fictional anthropoid apes were likewise possessed of remarkable strength. Even Jules Verne's gentle ape, Jupiter, had the muscle to drag a stuck wagon from the mire.

In 1923 biologist John Bauman decided that a scalp-pulling orangutan was grotesquely impossible, so he decided to test the strength of actual apes at the Bronx Zoo with a dynamometer. The apes didn't generally cooperate, but one chimp managed to pull 1,260 pounds. Later, the largest chimpanzee then in captivity, named Boma, pulled 847 pounds one-handed. This was more than the "husky lads" on his South Dakota football team could pull — 200 pounds with one hand, 500 with two.

This is the number that entered the anthropology textbooks and the talking points of primatologists like Jane Goodall and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.

But the "five times" figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman's experiments:

In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. Once he'd corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans — but not by a factor of five or anything close to it.

Repeated tests in the 1960s confirmed this basic picture. A chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier.

Still impressive.

Chimps have proportionally more arm muscle than humans, but their muscles tend to be stronger in general, because chimps have the "strong" form of the ACTN3 gene — like Jamaican sprinters — and thus have more "fast twitch" muscle fibers.

Solving the environment instead of the person

By now I'm quite used to Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan) complaining that real-world phenomena often aren't normally distributed. I was a bit surprised to find Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) making the same point, that the bell curve isn't universal:

According to the research done by Dennis Culhane, it turns out the most common length of time for a person to be homeless is one day. The second most common is two days. These short time, one-time homeless account for eighty percent of the homeless. People are people and they are adaptable. If they find themselves homeless and don't like it they will overcome and get on with their lives.

There were about 10% who come in periodically for a couple of weeks, usually in winter. The last 10% were the chronic homeless. It was this group that make up the people that most of us think of as homeless, whether you think of them as pitiful and severely disabled or alcoholics and grifters.

This means many things. First and foremost, it means the problem is small enough to solve, not just treat.

Philip Mangano, mentioned in the article, has a solution to the problem of chronic homelessness: it would actually save money to give them a nice apartment and provide for all their needs with a dedicated staff of social workers. It would be cheaper than it is to pick up their bills for Emergency Room visits and jail time.

I had a solution, too, but society isn't ready to let people die. I firmly believe that when a safety net begins to enable, it must be removed from that individual. If the person still continues to behave in a self-destructive way society should have no guilt when they suffer the consequences. But that's me — I'm aware that I don't exactly have a standard outlook on problems.

Side thought (and there were many side thoughts from this article) my instinct, when given a problem, is to solve the people (shut down the threat, train the rookie, counsel the errant) to change them in a crisis or help them change themselves... others, including Mangano, solve the environment.

More side thoughts — criminals also follow this distribution. Violent crime is committed by a relatively small percentage of criminals, and they do far more than we ever get them for. Solve the problem or solve the person?

The article applies this to police misconduct — the vast majority of officers do an excellent professional job, a small percentage are asses. The whole idea of the standard response to negative media attention (more sensitivity training) is based on the bell curve assumption. Mass training always is trying to shift the curve a little bit to the 'saint' side. The trouble is that when you have a distribution that runs closer to 30% saint; 25% hero; 20% good guy; 15% civil servant; 7% lazy bastard; and 3% asshole the training insults 75% of your people and the 10% you're trying to reach either don't care or won't act. Again, when the real problem is this small, you can solve it. I prefer firing, but our agency has a tendancy to put the worst officers in positions away from the public, which sometimes involves a promotion. Solving the environment instead of the person.

Real-World Plug-In Hybrids Disappoint On Efficiency

Real-world plug-in hybrids disappoint on efficiency, with a recent test in Seattle demonstrating that 14 customized plug-in hybrid Toyota Priuses did not do much better than standard Priuses:

Try 51 miles per gallon, city and highway combined. Not counting the cost of the electricity.

It's what 14 plug-in Priuses averaged after driving a total of 17,636 miles. The pilot project is one of the few in the nation to subject plug-in hybrid cars to regular motor-pool duty, as opposed to being driven by hypermilers or alt-energy enthusiasts.

Google's own fleet hasn't done much better:

Their Ford Escape hybrids are averaging 28.6 mpg while their pluggable versions of the Escape hybrd get 37.7 mpg for a 32% improvement. Not earth shattering. Their conventional Prius hybrids get 42.8 mpg while their pluggable Priuses get 54.9 mpg for a 28.3% improvement Again, not exactly the end of the oil era. Google breaks out the numbers by car. The best has done 60.5 mpg. But if you look at single day results you can find cars hitting 107 mpg.

Why these disappointing results? A fleet car could get driven a lot in a day and run down its batteries. To maximize the benefit of a pluggable hybrid one really need to drive almost the battery's range each day but no more. Someone who happens to commute a distance that is a little less than the range of a hybrid's battery is the best candidate to get maximal benefit.

Prison Blocks

Some inner-city blocks or neighborhoods deserve to be called prison blocks:

Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. A disproportionate number of them come from a few urban neighborhoods in big cities. Many states spend more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of single blocks or small neighborhoods.

One such “million-dollar neighborhood” is shown above—a half-square-mile portion of Central City, an impoverished district southwest of the French Quarter. In 2007, 55 people from this neighborhood entered prison; the cost of their incarceration will likely reach about $2 million.

So, a few clusters of career criminals are responsible for tremendous damage to society. The author's proposed solution?

The perpetual migration between prison and a few predictable neighborhoods is not only costly — it also destabilizes community life. Some New Orleans officials and community groups are now using prison-admission maps like these to explore new investments — block by block — in the social infrastructure of these damaged neighborhoods. Plenty of money is already being spent on these neighborhoods, in the form of policing and prison costs; the hope is that by spending more money in them, in a highly targeted fashion, the release-and-return-to-prison cycle can eventually be broken.

The author, Laura Kurgan, is the Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University. Not surprising.

Watchmen as Sacred Text

Comic geeks consider Watchmen a sacred text:

John Hodgman
Author, More Information Than You Require
"The movie can be good as long as it appreciates that it has no reason to exist. And yet I think Watchmen deserves an homage, and I'm hopeful because Zack Snyder is making it."

Joss Whedon
Creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse
"It's a comic book about pop culture as viewed through a comic book, so I didn't see the point of making a movie. But I saw the trailer, and it looked phenomenal."

Brian K. Vaughan
Creator, Y: The Last Man; Writer, Lost
"I'll go see it if it doesn't feel like a betrayal of what Alan Moore wants. But it's like making a stage play of Citizen Kane. I guess it could be OK, but why? The medium is the message."

Should We Let California Go Bankrupt?

Should we let California go bankrupt? They are doing it to themselves, Steve Malanga points out:

As Milton Friedman observed in the mid-1990s, you can’t have porous borders and a welfare state. The incentives are all wrong. California has become a case-study in that notion. A report by economists working for the National Academy of Sciences in the mid-1990s concluded that the average native-born California household paid about $1,100 in additional taxes because of government services used by immigrants whose own taxes don’t come close to covering their cost to society. It would be very interesting to see what the numbers are today.

But California doesn’t just have a spending problem. Increasingly it also has economic and revenue problems. Even as I write this other neighboring states are running ads in local newspapers inviting California businesses to move their headquarters out of the state. That’s advertising money well spent. A poll of business executives conducted last year by Development Counsellors International, which advises companies on where to locate their facilities, tabbed California as the worst state to do business in.

There are a host of reasons why California has become toxic to business, ranging from the highest personal income tax rate in the country (small business owners are especially hard hit by PITs), to an environmental regulatory regime that has made electricity so expensive businesses simply can’t compete in California. That is one reason why even California-based businesses are expanding elsewhere, from Google, which built a server farm in Oregon, to Intel, which opened a $3 billion factory for producing microprocessors outside of Phoenix.

In the race for the exits, residents are accompanying businesses. In just one decade California made a remarkable turnabout, going from a state with one of the highest levels of net in-migration to the state with the second highest level of domestic net out-migration. Typically people either head for the exits because they are seeking more economic opportunity or because they are being driven out by high housing costs. You get a little bit of both in California because the state’s zoning regulatory schemes keep housing production artificially low and housing prices high even in a mediocre economy.

As the economist Randall O’Toole points out in his study of housing restrictions, The Planning Penalty, “Thanks to a variety of land-use restrictions, California suffers from the least affordable housing in the nation.” The planning penalty, O’Toole estimates, adds from $70,000 to $230,000 to the cost of a home in the Central Valley, $300,000 to $400,000 in Southern California, and $400,000 to $850,000 in the San Francisco Bay area because in California, 95 percent of the population lives on just 5 percent of the land. “The problem is supply, not demand,” O’Toole observes. “Austin, Atlanta and Raleigh are growing faster than California cities, yet have maintained affordable housing.”

Duke Scientists Find Rare, Potent Antibody to HIV-1

Duke scientists have found a rare, potent antibody to HIV-1 circulating in the blood of a patient — the kind of antibody an HIV vaccine needs to induce:

2F5-like antibodies belong to a class of immune cells called broadly neutralizing antibodies, one of the body's most powerful responses to infection. Only a small fraction of patients with HIV make these antibodies and they typically appear many months after initial transmission of the virus — at a point when scientists feel it is too late to do much good.

Tomaras, working closely with lead author Xiaoying Shen, led a team of researchers who examined the antibodies present in 300 patients infected with HIV-1. They found only one patient who had developed 2F5-like antibodies, supporting the notion that they are, indeed, very rare.

Researchers discovered that the 2F5-like antibody was potent enough to block multiple strains of HIV in the laboratory, but researchers say they are not entirely clear if it played any part in controlling the virus in the patient who carried it.

The scientists were also struck by another discovery: The 2F5-like antibodies arose concurrently with particular autoantibodies that may be a clue as to why these antibodies developed in this person and not in others.

Mermaid dream comes true thanks to Weta

Double-amputee Nadya Vessey's mermaid dream has come true thanks to Weta, the special-effects shop famous for its work on The Lord of the Rings:

The suit was made mostly of wetsuit fabric and plastic moulds, and was covered in a digitally printed sock. Mermaid-like scales were painted by hand.

Mr Taylor said not only did the tail have to be functional, it was important it looked realistic. "What became apparent was that she actually physically wanted to look like a mermaid."

$100 Linux wall-wart launches

Marvell's SheevaPlug $100 Linux wall-wart launches:

Marvell Semiconductor is shipping a hardware/software development kit suitable for always-on home automation devices and service gateways. Resembling a "wall-wart" power adapter, the SheevaPlug draws 5 Watts, comes with Linux, and boasts completely open hardware and software designs, Marvell says.

In typical use, the SheevaPlug draws about as much power as a night-light. Yet, with 512MB each of RAM and Flash, and a 1.2GHz CPU, the unobtrusive device approaches the computing power found in the servers of only a decade ago.

Woman guilty over shopper death

Many Americans have a vague image of England as the land of Jeeves and Wooster, but things have changed drastically over the past few decades.

In June of last year, Antonette Richardson, a 37-year-old grandmother, with convictions for deception and handling stolen goods, called her 38-year-old boyfriend, Tony Virasami, out on bail, tagged and under curfew for shoplifting, so he would come in from the car to the shopping center, where she had pushed her way to the front of the line ("queue") as she went to buy a packet of cigarettes, and one Adam Prendergas had the temerity to yell at her.

Virasami prompty punched out one Kevin Tripp, 57, and killed him — he fell and hit his head, hard.

Richardson told the court she was shocked and disgusted when her boyfriend hit the wrong person. Mr. Tripp's sisters and brother were shocked and disgusted by the criminals' lack of remorse:

"That neither has shown signs of remorse in court, even smiling at us during a previous hearing, makes it even harder to deal with and means we can never forgive them."

At least she was found guilty — if only by an 11-1 majority verdict.

Sunday Dinner

Fixing Sunday dinner is a lot more work when you don't just pick up the ingredients at the grocery store:

Don't know if you are old enough to remember, but the world was supposed to end in the seventies. Maybe the eighties, but there was absolutely no chance that we would make it to 2000 before there was a nuclear attack and/or a complete economic collapse and/or a complete ecological disaster.

My parents believed this and in 1976 they moved us to eighty acres in the desert to raise our own food and live as self-sufficiently as possible.

We raised chickens, lots of chickens, and they were "free range", which means the smart ones found out early that if they slept in the coop racoons would kill them all. The chickens ran wild and lived in trees.

When mom decided it was time to butcher some chickens, dad and I (or just me, if he was working) would get our .22 rifles and cull the herd. Mom would tell us which roosters were off limits and if there were any hens she wanted culled, and we went hunting. Only head shots allowed.

The head on a chicken is a little bigger than a quarter, and the suckers move. We got very, very good at fast accurate shots.

Which brings us to Sunday Dinner. Sunday Dinner was the scrawniest, fastest, luckiest rooster in the world. Mom wanted him dead, because we were getting a suspiciously large number of scrawny fast hatchlings. We tried every butchering day for almost two years. The first time I shot him and saw blood and he ran. I tracked him and didn't find him for hours, when he came home, hiding behind my sister.

After that, if he saw rifles, he ran for the hills and didn't come back for the rest of the day. One time, I left the rifle and tried a handgun, got real close and ... missed. Damnit.

Sunday Dinner's last day, he'd taken off as soon as the butchering started. We were almost done and I saw him running through a path between two cotton woods trees at 75 yards. I snapped off a shot and he started doing the dead chicken dance. Chickens with their heads cut off do run. They also jump and do backflips. Sunday Dinner was spinning end over end, jumping, running and dead.

I carried him to mom for the scalding and gutting part of the day. She said, "Rory, look at this." There were two bullet holes in his comb, healed. One in the wattles at his neck. There was a chip out of his top and lower beak from two different bullets and healed graze at the back of his neck and a healed hole in the side of his neck in front of the spine. He lived a relatively long and healthy life with seven bullet hits to his head and neck. The eighth killed him.

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban

The Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration, Attorney General Eric Holder said today.

This should surprise no one — and judging by recent assault rifle sales, it most certainly did not surprise gun nuts.

Born believers: How your brain creates God

Michael Brooks explains anthropologist Scott Atran's belief that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works — not from a god module but from common-sense dualism and an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect:

He calls this innate assumption that mind and matter are distinct "common-sense dualism". The body is for physical processes, like eating and moving, while the mind carries our consciousness in a separate — and separable — package. "We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views."

There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally. People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners. As Barrett points out, this is an evolutionarily useful skill. Without it we would be unable to maintain large social hierarchies and alliances or anticipate what an unseen enemy might be planning. "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability," he says.

Useful as it is, common-sense dualism also appears to prime the brain for supernatural concepts such as life after death. In 2004, Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast, UK, put on a puppet show for a group of pre-school children. During the show, an alligator ate a mouse. The researchers then asked the children questions about the physical existence of the mouse, such as: "Can the mouse still be sick? Does it need to eat or drink?" The children said no. But when asked more "spiritual" questions, such as "does the mouse think and know things?", the children answered yes.

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says. From there it is only a short step to conceptualising spirits, dead ancestors and, of course, gods, says Pascal Boyer, a psychologist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Boyer points out that people expect their gods' minds to work very much like human minds, suggesting they spring from the same brain system that enables us to think about absent or non-existent people.

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none. "You see bushes rustle, you assume there's somebody or something there," Bloom says.

This over-attribution of cause and effect probably evolved for survival. If there are predators around, it is no good spotting them 9 times out of 10. Running away when you don't have to is a small price to pay for avoiding danger when the threat is real.

Again, experiments on young children reveal this default state of the mind. Children as young as three readily attribute design and purpose to inanimate objects. When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist "to make nice music", while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. "It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were 'for' a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion," says Kelemen.

In similar experiments, Olivera Petrovich of the University of Oxford asked pre-school children about the origins of natural things such as plants and animals. She found they were seven times as likely to answer that they were made by god than made by people.

These cognitive biases are so strong, says Petrovich, that children tend to spontaneously invent the concept of god without adult intervention: "They rely on their everyday experience of the physical world and construct the concept of god on the basis of this experience." Because of this, when children hear the claims of religion they seem to make perfect sense.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Kindling a Revolution

Wade Roush of Xconomy interviews E Ink’s Russ Wilcox on e-paper, Amazon, and the future of publishing — starting with some history:

In 2004 Sony launched in Japan with the Librié. And it didn’t really work very well in Japan. Critics loved the hardware, but there were only 1,000 books available, and that does not make a successful publishing market. And it turns out that e-books are a tough sell in Japan because there is a thriving used bookstore market. People don’t have bookshelf space in their homes to store a lifetime of books, so they have this well-developed practice of returning books to used bookstores, so you can get any used book you want for a dollar. At the same time, people were getting used to standing on trains and reading on their little cell-phone displays. So between those two things, it was very hard to launch the Librié.

But Sony had the vision that if they added a bunch more content and brought it out in the U.S., they would have a product. And at the same time Amazon took note, and said, ‘Aha, the time might finally be right for e-books, if we were to tackle this as a service and sell the content.’ So the Sony PRS-500 launched in 2006 and Amazon came out with the wireless Kindle in 2007, and those guys have each progressively improved their products. From a business point of view, there were some tough times along the way. But since 2004, when we first saw the Librié come out in Japan, our revenues have doubled every year, because we have just been getting more and more devices out there.

He won't disclose the cost of the Kindle’s 6-inch e-paper screen, but if you want to buy a development kit and design your own device, it’s $3,000.

10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to

John Biggs offers 10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2… and 10 reasons not to. I like his seventh reason not to:

Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can’t explain that it’s epaper and uses no current. You just can’t. It’s like explaining heaven to bears.

Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy

Everything is so amazing and nobody is happy, Louis C.K. says:

A level editor in Excel

Darius, who is creating a game for a small game system called the Meggy Jr., has produced a level editor in Excel — which struck me as exactly the kind of thing I've done to generate code in a hurry:

This is the level editor I’m using for a roguelike game I’m building for my Meggy Jr. The level is just a 16×16 bitmap array. Each cell of the array is a different color, and each color is a different object. 6 is blue, and it’s a wall; 5 is purple, and it’s a door.

I built this level editor in Excel. I set the cells to be 20×20 pixels, big enough for me to work with conveniently, and I used conditional formatting to map the background fill colors to correspond to the Meggy Jr’s color mapping. If you look to the right, you’ll see that I’m using CONCATENATE statements to pull together the numbers into the bracketed statements that I literally just copy and paste into my array declaration in code. With this system I can make a level in a minute, and drop it into my code with a couple of mouse clicks. It only took me five minutes to build this level editor.

I’m always pulling crap like this: I love using Excel to abstract things out and then generate code for me. I would never do it for a big project, but for my own hacking it saves me a ton of time.

Brown Belt Syndrome

In describing Boyd's OODA loop — combative decision making — Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) describes brown belt syndrome:

There's a thing called Hick's Law which states that the more options you have, the longer it takes to choose one. Makes sense. I call this the Brown Belt syndrome. It's what happens when you have too many cool ways to win and you get your ass kicked while you are weighing options.

How the Crash Will Reshape America

In looking at how the crash will reshape America, Richard Florida asks, how do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life?

The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy — the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.

If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.

And while homeownership has some social benefits — a higher level of civic engagement is one — it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work — if they can find it — that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.

As homeownership rates have risen, our society has become less nimble: in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were nearly twice as likely to move in a given year as they are today. Last year fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the Census Bureau started tracking address changes, in the late 1940s. This sort of creeping rigidity in the labor market is a bad sign for the economy, particularly in a time when businesses, industries, and regions are rising and falling quickly.

We might also consider not subsidizing corporate debt...

The Unabomber Was Right

Kevin Kelly argues that the Unabomber was right about some things. He starts by summarizing the Manifesto:

• Personal freedoms are constrained by society, as they must be.
  
• The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.
  
• Technology destroys nature, which strengthens technology further.
  
• This ratchet of technological self-amplification is stronger than politics.
  
• Any attempt to use technology or politics to tame the system only strengthens it.
  
• Therefore technological civilization must be destroyed, rather than reformed.
  
• Since it cannot be destroyed by tech or politics, humans must push industrial society towards its inevitable end of self-collapse.
  
• Then pounce on it when it is down and kill it before it rises again.
  

Here's where the Unabomber got it right and wrong:

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from. Civilization has its problems but in almost every way it is better than the Unabomber’s shack.

The Unabomber is right that technology is a holistic, self-perpetuating machine. He is wrong to bomb it for many reasons, not the least is that the machine of civilization offers us more actual freedoms than the alternative. There is a cost to run this machine, a cost we are only beginning to reckon with, but so far the gains from this ever enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all.

The Perfect Enemy

Suppose you were a screenwriter, David Foster suggests, writing a movie for a progressive American and European audience, and you needed the perfect enemy for them to rally against:

Oh, and one other thing. The year in which you are given this assignment is 1999.

You will clearly want your enemy to share many of the characteristics of the Nazis — disrespect for human life, wanton cruelty, a love of apocalyptic violence. But to make the enemy particuarly awful from the standpoint of your target demographic, you will want to emphasize certain aspects of its belief system.

Members of your demographic usually have strong beliefs about women’s rights. So, your enemy must have a particularly disrespectful belief set, and a violent behavior pattern, towards women. Similarly, your demographic is generally favorable toward gay rights… so the enemy must advocate and practice the suppression, torture, and killing of gays. Your demographic is generally nonreligious and often hostile toward religion… so, make sure the enemy includes a large element of religious fanaticism. Members of your demographic talk a lot about “the children” — so make sure your enemy uses children in particularly cruel ways.

Had you created such an enemy for your screenplay in 1999, you would have surely felt justified in assuming that it would achieve its intended reaction with your target demographic.

It didn’t work out that way, though.

The enemy I’ve described is, of course, the one that we currently face in the form of radical Islamic terrorists and their associated rogue states such as Iran. In real life, not in the movies.

But the members of the demographic I specified have been strangely reluctant to engage in wholehearted condemnation of this enemy (observe, for example, the endless excuse-making, for and even glamorization of, Palestinian terrorism), and even more reluctant to join with their fellow Americans for its defeat. Indeed, it seems that many journalists, entertainers, writers, and college professors have such strong feelings of fear and/or contempt for the majority of their fellow Americans that these greatly overshadow any concerns about terrorist fanatics and terrorist states with nuclear weapons.

I was not expecting him to then cite science-fiction grand-master Poul Anderson:

In Poul Anderson’s 1972 SF story "A Chapter of Revelation," God stops the movement of the sun across the sky. (Technically, He does this by slowing earth’s rotation period to a value identical with Earth’s year.) The reason for the miracle is to demonstrate His existence to the world, thereby encouraging people to prevent the nuclear war which is about to occur.

Anderson describes the intital reaction to the miracle:

The pilgramages by torch to the Ganges, by canclelight to the Western Wall and the Mosque of Omar, by furnacelike sunlight to Our Lady of Guadalupe, were not frantic in any true sense of that word. They were awesome: men, women, children by the millions flowing together and becoming a natural force.

A theology student, in conversation with a scientist, offers the view that “…today we’re so far gone into spiritual savagery that nothing except the most primitive, public sort of demonstration could touch us”… to which the scientist replies “As if we’d flunked quantum mechanics and been sent back to roll balls down inclined planes?”

Very soon, people begin to use the miracle to justify whatever belief systems they already hold. A Russian scientist (remember, this was written in 1972) suggests that “The requirement of minimum hypothesis practically forces us to assume that what happened resulted from the application of a technology centuries beyond ours. I find it easy to believe that an advanced civilization, capable of interstellar travel, sent a team to save mankind from the carnage threatened by an imperialism which that society outgrew long ago.”

The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party suggests that it was all about the intersection of Marxism and ESP: “The mind of man may have tremendous abilities, once liberated from the blinkers of the past. More than a third of the contemporary human race is guided by Marxism; more than half this number has for more than a generation been under the tutelage of wholly correct principles. Thus, the massed concentration of the peace-loving peoples may well have triggered cosmic energies to produce those events which have halted the imperialists in their bloody track and trown them wallowing back into the basest superstitions.”

In the U.S., extreme right-wing evangelists use the miracle to prove that their vision is the correct one. Radical Black Power advocates do the same: “‘What He really stopped was this rich man’s war that was getting started when the bombs of white Amerika’…he formed the K with his fingers, a gesture that had become his trademark — ’struck our Chinese brothers. The rich man’s war on the poor, the white man’s war on the black, the brown, the yellow, the red.’”

Moralists assert that the miracle was a warning about moral degeneration: “Satan’s agents continue to gnaw like rats at the heart of faith, morality, and society. These atheists, evolutionists, free-love swine, boozers, tobacco smokers, dope fiends still try to hide from us the plain truth of God’s word as revealed in the Holy Bible.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff propose a preemptive attack on China — ”I keep thinking of Jehovah the Thunderer,” says their spokesman, “ — the Crusades — Don John at Lepanto, saving Christendom with sword and cannon..”

Basically, just about everyone responds to the miracle by reinforcing whatever belief systems they already had, and the world slides into further chaos, with riots, coups d’etat, and cross-border military attacks. The story is a beautiful description of confirmation bias on a very large scale.

The attacks on 9/11 were a “primitive, public” demonstration like the stopping of sun in Anderson’s story, albeit a demonstration which was intentionally brutal rather than benign. But even with an enemy that seems custom-designed to be appalling to “progressives,” and with the most primitive and public demonstration imaginable, confirmation bias has, for many proved far stronger than evidence.

Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Felix Salmon calls David Li's Gaussian copula function the formula that killed Wall Street:

In 2000, while working at JPMorgan Chase, Li published a paper in The Journal of Fixed Income titled "On Default Correlation: A Copula Function Approach." (In statistics, a copula is used to couple the behavior of two or more variables.) Using some relatively simple math — by Wall Street standards, anyway — Li came up with an ingenious way to model default correlation without even looking at historical default data. Instead, he used market data about the prices of instruments known as credit default swaps.

D'oh!

When the price of a credit default swap goes up, that indicates that default risk has risen. Li's breakthrough was that instead of waiting to assemble enough historical data about actual defaults, which are rare in the real world, he used historical prices from the CDS market.

All the ratings agencies needed was one variable, correlation, to rate a tranche:

As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond — corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them — an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function.

The CDS and CDO markets grew together, feeding on each other. At the end of 2001, there was $920 billion in credit default swaps outstanding. By the end of 2007, that number had skyrocketed to more than $62 trillion. The CDO market, which stood at $275 billion in 2000, grew to $4.7 trillion by 2006.

We know it all doesn't end well:

In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don't want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn't have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn't have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.

Li's copula function was used to price hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of CDOs filled with mortgages. And because the copula function used CDS prices to calculate correlation, it was forced to confine itself to looking at the period of time when those credit default swaps had been in existence: less than a decade, a period when house prices soared. Naturally, default correlations were very low in those years. But when the mortgage boom ended abruptly and home values started falling across the country, correlations soared.

Managers didn't understand how the black box worked:

Bankers should have noted that very small changes in their underlying assumptions could result in very large changes in the correlation number. They also should have noticed that the results they were seeing were much less volatile than they should have been — which implied that the risk was being moved elsewhere. Where had the risk gone?

They didn't know, or didn't ask. One reason was that the outputs came from "black box" computer models and were hard to subject to a commonsense smell test. Another was that the quants, who should have been more aware of the copula's weaknesses, weren't the ones making the big asset-allocation decisions. Their managers, who made the actual calls, lacked the math skills to understand what the models were doing or how they worked. They could, however, understand something as simple as a single correlation number. That was the problem.

Taleb of course proclaims, "Anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism."

Amish Hackers

Kevin Kelly says that the Amish have an undeserved reputation for being Luddites who refuse to employ new technology — although the myth is based on some facts:

The Amish, particular the Old Order Amish — the stereotypical Amish depicted on calendars — really are slow to adopt new things. In contemporary society our default is set to say "yes" to new things, and in Old Order Amish societies the default is set to "no." When new things come around, the Amish automatically start by refusing them. Thus many Old Order Amish have never said yes to automobiles, a policy established when automobiles were new. Instead, they travel around in a buggy hauled by a horse. Some orders require the buggy to be an open carriage (so riders — teenagers, say — are not tempted with a private place to fool around); others will permit closed carriages. Some orders allow tractors on the farm, if the tractors have steel wheels; that way a tractor can't be "cheated" to drive on the road like a car. Some groups allow farmers to power their combine or threshers with diesel engines, if the engine only drives the threshers but is not self-propelled, so the whole smoking, noisy contraption is pulled by horses. Some sects allow cars, if they are painted entirely black (no chrome) to ease the temptation to upgrade to the latest model.

The Amish make a distinction between using something and owning it:

The Old Order won't own a pickup truck, but they will ride in one. They won't get a license, purchase an automobile, pay insurance, and become dependent on the automobile and the industrial-car complex, but they will call a taxi. Since there are more Amish men than farms, many men work at small factories and these guys will hire vans driven by outsiders to take them to and from work. So even the horse and buggy folk will use cars — under their own terms. (Very thrifty, too.)

The Amish also make a distinction between technology at work and at home:

Everywhere I turned there were bearded men covered in saw dust pushing wood through screaming machines. This was not a circle of Renaissance craftsman hand tooling masterpieces. This was a small-time factory cranking out wooden furniture with machine power. But where was the power coming from? Not from windmills.

The boss, Amos (not his real name: the Amish prefer not to call attention to themselves), takes me around to the back where a huge dump-truck-sized diesel generator sits. It's massive. In addition to a gas engine there is a very large tank, which I learn, stores compressed air. The diesel engine burns fuel to drive the compressor that fills the reservoir with pressure. From the tank a series of high-pressure pipes snake off toward every corner of the factory. A hard rubber flexible hose connects each tool to a pipe. The entire shop runs on compressed air. Every piece of machine is running on pneumatic power. Amos even shows me a pneumatic switch, which you can flick like a light switch, to turn on some paint-drying fans.

The Amish call this pneumatic system "Amish electricity." At first pneumatics were devised for Amish workshops, but it was seen as so useful that air-power migrated to Amish households. In fact there is an entire cottage industry in retrofitting tools and appliances to Amish electricity. The retrofitters buy a heavy-duty blender, say, and yank out the electrical motor. They then substitute an air-powered motor of appropriate size, add pneumatic connectors, and bingo, your Amish mom now has a blender in her electrical-less kitchen. You can get a pneumatic sewing machine, and a pneumatic washer/dryer (with propane heat). In a display of pure steam-punk nerdiness, Amish hackers try to outdo each other in building pneumatic versions of electrified contraptions. Their mechanical skill is quite impressive, particularly since none went beyond the 8th grade. They love to show off this air-punk geekiness. And every tinkerer I met claimed that pneumatics were superior to electrical devices because air was more powerful and durable, outlasting motors which burned out after a few years hard labor. I don't know if this is true, or just justification, but it was a constant refrain.

I suspect the inferior electrical equipment is inferior because it's cheap and more-or-less disposable. When it breaks, you buy a new one.

The Amish are full of surprises. For instance, they endorse genetically modified corn:

Why plant GMOs? Well, they reply, corn is susceptible to the corn borer which nibbles away at the bottom of the stem, and occasionally topples over the stalk. Modern 500 horsepower harvesters don't notice this fall; they just suck up all the material, and spit out the corn into a bin. The Amish harvest their corn semi-manually. It's cut by a chopper device and then pitched into a thresher. But if there are a lot of stalks that are broken, they have to be pitched by hand. That is a lot of very hard sweaty work. So they plant Bt corn. This genetic mutant carries the genes of the corn borer's enemy, Bacillus thuringiensis, which produces a toxin deadly to the corn borer. Fewer stalks are broken, the harvest can be semi-mechanized, and yields are up as well. One elder Amishman whose sons run his farm told me that he'd only help his sons harvest if they planted Bt corn. He said he told them he was too old to be pitching heavy broken corn stalks. The alternative was to purchase expensive, modern harvesting equipment. Which none of them want. So the technology of genetically modified crops allowed the Amish to continue using old, well-proven, debt-free equipment, which accomplished their main goal of keeping the family farm together.

The Amish allowed in telephones — with limits:

Previously, Amish would build a shanty at the end of their driveway that housed an answering machine and phone, to be shared by neighbors. The shanty sheltered the caller in rain and cold, and kept the grid away from the house, but the long walk outside reduced use to essential calls rather than gossip and chatting. Cell phones were a new twist. You got a phone without wires. You could take business calls without being wired to the world. As one Amish guy told me, "What is the difference if I stand in my phone booth with a wireless phone or stand outside with a cell phone. There's no difference." Further cell phones were embraced by women who could keep in touch with their far-flung family since they didn't drive. But the bishops also noticed that the cell phone was so small it could be kept hidden, which was a concern for a people dedicated to discouraging individualism. Ten years ago when I was editing Wired I sent Howard Rheingold to investigate the Amish take on cell phones. His report published in January 1999 makes it clear that the Amish had not decided on cell phones yet. Ten years later they are still deciding, still trying it out. This is how the Amish determine whether technology works for them. Rather than employ the precautionary principle, which says, unless you can prove there is no harm, don't use new technology, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of Amish early adopters to try stuff out until they prove harm.

Kelly's impression is that the Amish lag about 50 years behind the mainstream, with a manner of slow adoption that is instructive:

• They are selective. They know how to say "no" and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ban more than they adopt.


• They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.


• They have criteria by which to select choices: technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.


• The choices are not individual, but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.

We don't search for the smart ones

Rory Miller was on a search for a missing trail runner:

I tried to encourage the younger members of the team: "It hasn't been that cold and it's only been two days. If the guy had the most basic survival gear or any common sense, we'll find him alive."

These 14-18 year old kids had more search experience than me. They gave me pitying looks and one said, "Sarge, if he had any common sense he wouldn't have tried to go cross-country at twilight. We don't search for the smart ones."

Later, one of the searchers confided that he wanted to quit, "I've been looking at all the people we've saved in the last two years and I don't want any of them breeding. I don't think saving stupid people is good for society." Harsh.

Wireless in the Mountains

I remember reading about Nepal's not-so-local area network years ago, but it's still an amazing story:

With no telephone line, no way of funding a satellite phone link, and with the country in the grip of insurgency, Mahabir realized that to bring 21st-century communications facilities to his village, he would have to leapfrog the conventional technology route. In 2001 he wrote to a BBC radio show asking for help in using the recently developed home-WiFi technology to connect his village to the internet. Intrigued listeners emailed with advice and offers of assistance.

Backpacking volunteers from around the world smuggled in wireless equipment from the US and Britain after the Nepalese government banned its import and use during the insurgency, and suspicious Maoist rebels tried to destroy it. By 2003, with all the parts in place, Mahabir had linked Nangi to its nearest neighbour, Ramche, installed a solar-powered relay station (TV antennae fixed to a tall tree on a mountain peak) and from there sent the signal more than 20 kilometers away to Pokhara, which had a cable-optic connection to Kathmandu, the capital. Nangi was online.

Mahabir says he used a home WiFi kit from America that was recommended for use within a radius of 4 meters. "I emailed the company and told them that I had done 22 kilometers with it," he says. "I was hoping they might donate some equipment — but they didn't believe what I told them."

More than 40 other remote mountain villages (60,000 people) have now been networked and connected to the internet by Mahabir and his stream of enthusiastic volunteers, and many more are in the pipeline. The villagers are now able to communicate with people in other villages and even with their family members abroad by email and using VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phones, he says. Using the local VOIP system, they can talk for free within the village network.

As we embark on another full day's climb up to Relay No. 1 with spare parts to fix a broken component, Mahabir explains that email and phones are simply the means of achieving his goal of providing better education, health facilities, and an income to villagers. It's already working: Mahabir's "teleteaching" network allows the few good teachers in the region to train others and to provide direct instruction to students in any connected village school. Children surfing the net are learning about a whole world of opportunity outside of their isolated village. And Mahabir is developing an e-library of educational resources that will be free to use.

The technology has improved commerce, allowing yak farmers several days' walk away to talk to dealers and their families, and enabling people to sell everything from buffalo to homemade paper, jams, and honey. And the villages, many located on beautiful but little-visited trekking routes by the Annapurna range of mountains, are advertising their facilities for tourists. "We are setting up secure credit-card transaction facilities using the internet so that more tourists will come and provide an income stream to help finance the education and health projects," Mahabir says.

Telemedicine, via webcam, is now linking village clinics with a teaching hospital in Kathmandu. And nurses are getting trained in reproductive medicine and child care.

Scenes from Mixed Martial Arts

Eric Reynolds is an older fellow who's studied a few martial arts and has recently started MMA. While rolling with a younger, more experienced grappler, he found that he was strong enough to deny the arm-bar pretty effortlessly — like the Crusher, playing solitaire, while Bugs Bunny tries desperately to twist his leg.

He'll get his comeuppance at some point, I'm sure, but I have to agree with this observation from his Scenes from Mixed Martial Arts:

He tried it again about thirty seconds later; same result. I was fine with that; any time you can get your opponent to expend energy to no purpose it’s a win. I’ve found that, especially in fighting younger guys filled with testosterone and a need to prove something, it’s good strategy to deadweight on them — let them expend energy, let them pull moves that don’t actually get a submission, and use my torso mass as much as possible to drag on them and make them tired.

You don’t necessarily get physical submission that way, but you can get psychological collapse of the will to fight surprisingly often. The younger they are, the faster that tends to happen. Post-adolescents have good wind and physical stamina but, as a rule, their will is weak. Or perhaps “brittle” would be a better adjective; they lack mental toughness, what chessplayers call sitzfleisch.

From Monarchy to Chaos to Totalitarianism

Societies often go from monarchy to chaos to totalitarianism, Curzon notes:

It should be clear to regular readers, from my posts on Nepal, Georgia, and America, that I am a constitutional monarchist. I believe that a constitutional monarch, often weilding great theoretical power or constitutionally designated as a national symbol, can play a great role in stabilizing a nation during difficult times. Or as conservative journalist Peter Hitchens once said:

I think [a monarch] is an essential part of a balanced constitution in much the same way that the king is an essential part of the game of chess. He doesn’t actually do very much, but by occupying his square, he prevents others from occupying it. I think the history of most countries… which haven’t had monarchies or which have gotten rid of monarchies, suggest that once they’ve gone and politicians start seeking the kind of loyalty and love which monarchs enjoy, you get very serious political problems, and often you get an end to democracy.

That may sound farfetched to an ahistorical citizen of the 21st century. Monarchy today is viewed by many as a backwards entitlement regime, giving benefits to undeserving aristocrats at the expense of hardworking, ordinary people, with no basis other than outdated history. But history shows that Peter is right. The abolition of a nation’s monarchy is regularly followed by a distinct pattern, a steady progression from a politically stable monarchy, followed by a quasi-democratic chaos, consolidated only through brutal totalitarianism. This slow pattern, typically taking 6-12 years, has been startingly reliable in a number of countries regardless of region over the past two centuries.

He cites France, Russia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia as examples.

Running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy

The politics of the Gilded Age were undeniably corrupt — Mark Twain dubbed the whole thing the Great Barbecue — and the progressives of the era — intellectuals like historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the Mugwumps — hoped for a better system:

What Adams and the Mugwumps are asking for is no less than the creation of a new power structure, a "lofty rostrum," which is above democracy — which supersedes mere politics, which makes decisions and policies much as Adams and his friends would have — in the light of reason and science, the "calm lessons of history," not the mad psychological battlefield of the torchlight election parade.

The result is our Modern Structure [of power], of course. The dream made real. The Mugwumps won. Yet somehow, all the diseases Adams diagnoses seem worse then ever. What happened?

What happened is that Adams and his friends, as members of an aristocratic intellectual caste, true Platonic guardians, Harvard-bred heirs to the American dream, had been disempowered. Sidelined, in fact, by grubby street politics of a distinctly Hibernian flavor. This could not have been expected to make them happy. It did, however, render them pure — because even if the Carl Schurzes of the world had been inclined to corruption, which they were not, competing with the James G. Blaines of the world in that department was simply out of the question.

So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.

When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this "marketplace," because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.

Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.

Ideas are not individuals. They do not organize, have meetings in beer halls, wear identically colored shirts, practise the goose step or chant in the streets. However, to ambitious people the combination of good and altruistic intended effects, with evil and self-serving actual effects, is eternally attractive. We can describe policies exhibiting this stereotype as Machiavellian.

The Modern Structure [of power] exhibits a fascinating quality which might be described as distributed Machiavellianism. [The US Government] under the Modern Structure enacts large numbers of policies (such as "affirmative action") which are best explained in Machiavellian terms. However, there is no central cabal dictating Machiavellian strategies, and actors in the Structure do not feel they are pursuing evil or experience any pangs of conscience.

Under this pattern, the intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both. The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc, etc. In other words, the adaptive purpose of the actors is to maximize their own share of sovereignty. The side effects are at least parasitic, and at worst far worse.

Most people's share of sovereignty is zero. However, many aspire to make policy who will never get there, just as many aspire to play in the NBA. Since Machiavellian thinking tends to become the corporate culture of all powerful institutions, and since the ambitious naturally tend to emulate the thinking of the powerful, the natural perspective of the ambitious becomes Machiavellian. In a meritocratic oligarchy, where power is open only to those who succeed in contests of intellectual strength, the natural perspective of the intelligent is Machiavellian.

In other words: Machiavellian ideas are adaptive in a competitive oligarchy, because they allow members of that oligarchy to feel good about themselves while in fact looking out for number one. However, if the same exact people are completely disconnected from power and have no chance of regaining it, these same ideas will dwindle and die out, their intrinsic stupidity soon revealing itself.

Just in time for Watchmen, Mencius re-raises the old question:

Once again, we see the failure to solve the quis custodiet problem. The classic mistake is to pass power to some new institution, already extant but hitherto uncorrupted. It appears worthy of power because it is worthy of power, being uncorrupted. However, it is uncorrupted only because it has not yet held power. Handed power, it becomes corrupt, and the problem repeats.

So it was not the intelligence or education of the Mugwumps that shielded them from the corruption of power, but solely their (temporary) irrelevance. When that irrelevance was reversed, the consequence was a new system of government by deception — the Modern Structure — which is not, unlike the coarse populist mendacity of the Gilded Age, transparent to anyone of any intelligence or education.

The Modern Structure is just as sophisticated as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and no less slippery, mendacious or corrupt than James G. Blaine. It is subject to all the woes of the system it replaced, but its new system of deception is impenetrable enough to convince even most of the most intelligent that up is actually down. It is, in short, a perfect disaster.

Laser-Powered Aircraft Are The Future of Flight. Maybe

Laser-Powered Aircraft Are The Future of Flight. Maybe:

Myrabo first got the idea in 1988 while working on the "Star Wars" anti-missile shield. He calls it LightCraft, a funnel-shaped craft with a parabolic reflector. It channels the heat generated by a laser into its center, heating the air to about 30,000 degrees and causing the it to explode, generating thrust. Small jets of pressurized nitrogen spin the LightCraft at 6,000 RPM to maintain stability.

It was all just theoretical research — which the U.S. Air Force, NASA and the Strategic Defense Initiative provided $600,000 to help finance — until 1997. That's when Myrabo, working with the U.S. Army at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, propelled a small LightCraft prototype (pictured at right with Tregenna Myrabo, business manager of Lightcraft Technologies; it was 6 inches long and weighed 2 ounces) 50 feet into the air. Another test in 2000 using a 10-kilowatt pulsed-carbon-dioxide laser saw the LightCraft climb to 233 feet during a 12.7-second flight. That's not very high or very long, but then Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket climbed just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight.

Myrabo reportedly has made more than 140 test flights using small prototypes. He isn't the only one exploring this field, either. Five years ago, NASA joined Tim Blackwell, a researcher at the Center for Applied Optics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, in using laser propulsion to power a small model airplane. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have used a laser to propel a tiny airplane and detailed their findings in the journal Applied Physics Letters in 2002. Myrabo says he's especially excited about tests being conducted cooperatively between the U.S. and Brazilian air forces; those tests, he says, are being done at greater power than any before.

Lasers remain the sticking point; even the most powerful laser is capable of only a modest test flight. But Myrabo is confident we'll have that problem licked before long.

This seems like a better idea for powering a traffic helicopter or airship than a supersonic — pardon, hypersonic — transport.

What's cooking?

What's cooking? The driver of evolution, says Richard Wrangham, of Harvard:

Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.

In support of his thesis, Dr Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95% according to work done on people fitted for medical reasons with collection bags at the ends of their small intestines. Previous studies had suggested raw food was digested equally well as cooked food because they looked at faeces as being the end product. These, however, have been exposed to the digestive mercies of bacteria in the large intestine, and any residual goodies have been removed from them that way.

Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests — in America, at least — is a myth) but the rise of processed foods. These are softer, because that is what people prefer. Indeed, the nerves from the taste buds meet in a part of the brain called the amygdala with nerves that convey information on the softness of food. It is only after these two qualities have been compared that the brain assesses how pleasant a mouthful actually is.

Who will watch the Watchmen smoke?

With Watchmen coming out soon, and with the recent development of the electronic cigarette, I thought some enterprising entrepreneur would introduce a look-alike product mimicking the harmless cigarette developed by the superhuman Doctor Manhattan.

But it looks like the movie won't be providing free advertising after all. Who will watch the Watchmen smoke?

It's no secret that Zack Snyder paid insane attention to the detail in Watchmen. We've seen full pages of Tijuana bibles, and a to-scale Gunga Diner recreation. But Laurie's smokes are noplace to be seen. So we asked the OCD director himself, while he was doing press for Watchmen, why Ms. Laurie Juspeczyk has kicked her habit.

Where were Laurie's smokes, Zack?

"Yeah, Alan hates smoking. Alan Horn — the head of the studio — that's his biggest, biggest thing. The Comedian can smoke, because he might be a bad guy, he's the bad guy, but that's it. That was the line that he drew."

But aren't those kind of a small plot device for the character to watch her go on and off the wagon?

"I was sad, but it was either that or... the movie wouldn't have been made, literally."

(Hat tip to Jacob Grier via Reason.)

Startups in 13 Sentences

Paul Graham offers 13 sentences of wisdom for startups:

1. Pick good cofounders.
   Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is.
2. Launch fast.
3. Let your idea evolve.
4. Understand your users.
5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
7. You make what you measure.
8. Spend little.
9. Get ramen profitable.
   "Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses.
10. Avoid distractions.
    Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects.
11. Don't get demoralized.
12. Don't give up.
13. Deals fall through.

The Principal of Convenience

Bryan Caplan believes that Eliezer beautifully articulates the moral outrage he felt from the age of 3 to 18:

Another example would be the principal who, faced with two children who were caught fighting on the playground, sternly says:  "It doesn't matter who started the fight, it only matters who ends it."  Of course it matters who started the fight.  The principal may not have access to good information about this critical fact, but if so, he should say so, not dismiss the importance of who threw the first punch.  Let a parent try punching the principal, and we'll see how far "It doesn't matter who started it" gets in front of a judge.  But to adults it is just inconvenient that children fight, and it matters not at all to their convenience which child started it, it is only convenient that the fight end as rapidly as possible.

Apparently times have changed, and "tattling" is now encouraged.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Jonathan Jarvis has produced a beautiful piece, The Crisis of Credit Visualized, as part of his thesis work for the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California:

Broadway By Night

Charles Mackay, who is best known for his Extraordinary Popular Delusions, also wrote about his visit the States — he was from London — in Life and Liberty in America (vol. 1, vol. 2), which Mencius Moldbug considers mandatory reading:

His ideas are typical of a moderate English liberal at the time, which of course makes him wonderfully reactionary for now. I can't imagine a better host.

My first response to Mackay's travelogue is that the America he is writing about is, um, actually, alive. There is no sign of any tetrodotoxin. There are no zombie banks, zombie theaters, or even zombie politicians. If you absolutely have no time for anything beyond a sample, read Mackay's chapter 3 — Broadway By Night.

What would you pay for a ticket to Broadway, 1859? Just to spend a night there? Imagine Mackay traveling to the New York of 2009. How is our Broadway by night? Not bad at all — by the standards of 2009. (And pretty damned good by the standards of 1979.)

I suspect he'd think Manhattan had been subjected to some kind of awful experiment in mass psychiatric medication. Everything has become grim, gray and slovenly. Not to mention that "life and property" are no longer anywhere near what Mackay would consider "very safe." (Being a Londoner of the Victorian era, by "very safe" he means "completely safe" — the presence of a human predator on the streets being slightly more likely than that of an escaped leopard.)

And this is Broadway, then and now. Now, consider his description of St. Louis. What would Charles Mackay make of St. Louis today? What do you make of St. Louis today? (Or Detroit? Consider what this news crew found... in what was once America's fourth largest city.) And then there's Mackay's New Orleans...

But there is another difference between 1859 and 2009: modern technology. We have it. They didn't. So: imagine Mackay's America, plus iPhones and satellites and nuclear power. Now you see the true measure of the gap. It's a little like comparing America, 2009, to Belarus, 2009.

We’re All Fascists Now

Michael Ledeen, author of Tocqueville on American Character, laments that most Americans no longer read Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, which describes Americans so well and thus explains why we’re all fascists now — sort of:

Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville’s vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it.

There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville’s scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht. We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated…

The tyranny he foresees for us does not have much in common with the vicious dictatorships of the last century, or with contemporary North Korea, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. He apologizes for lacking the proper words with which to define it. He hesitates to call it either tyranny or despotism, because it does not rule by terror or oppression. There are no secret police, no concentration camps, and no torture. “The nature of despotic power in democratic ages is not to be fierce or cruel, but minute and meddling.” The vision and even the language anticipate Orwell’s 1984, or Huxley’s Brave New World. Tocqueville describes the new tyranny as “an immense and tutelary power,” and its task is to watch over us all, and regulate every aspect of our lives.

It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.

We will not be bludgeoned into submission; we will be seduced. He foresees the collapse of American democracy as the end result of two parallel developments that ultimately render us meekly subservient to an enlarged bureaucratic power: the corruption of our character, and the emergence of a vast welfare state that manages all the details of our lives. His words are precisely the ones that best describe out current crisis:

That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

The metaphor of a parent maintaining perpetual control over his child is the language of contemporary American politics. All manner of new governmental powers are justified in the name of “the children,” from enhanced regulation of communications to special punishments for “hate speech;” from the empowerment of social service institutions to crack down on parents who try to discipline their children, to the mammoth expansion of sexual quotas from university athletic programs to private businesses. Tocqueville particularly abhors such new governmental powers because they are Federal, emanating from Washington, not from local governments. He reminds us that when the central government asserts its authority over states and communities, a tyrannical shadow lurks just behind. So long as local governments are strong, he says, even tyrannical laws can be mitigated by moderate enforcement at the local level, but once the central government takes control of the entire structure, our liberties are at grave risk.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Watchmen is Awesome?

Wil Wheaton has seen an early screening of Watchmen, and he declares it f—ing awesome — which, I must admit, surprised me. Director Zack Snyder had a couple interesting points to make in the Q&A:

He said that when he was in film school, he wanted to make movies out of everything, whether it was a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. When he read comics back then, he thought that it would be great to make some of them into movies. He singled out Dark Knight Returns and Sin City, but when he got to Watchmen, he said there was no way he would even attempt it.

Then the studio came to him after 300 and asked him to make the movie. He didn't want to do it at first, partially because he was so afraid he'd screw it up, but also because the script was just horrible. It was set in the current day, it was about Doctor Manhattan going to Iraq, something about "The War on Terror" and was a PG-13 monstrosity that would be left open to a sequel. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of thing we're so afraid the studios will do to things we love when they adapt them for film.

He said that the more he thought about it, though, the more he felt a responsibility to make it. He said something like, "If I made it, I had a chance to not screw it up. If I did screw it up, at least it was me who screwed it up. But if I let them take the script they showed me to someone else to screw up, it would have been my fault. So I had to make it."

He also talked about how the studio kept trying to turn it into what he called a "PG-13 Superhero movie" and how he just refused to let that happen. He said that it was going to be rated R, there wouldn't be this ending that they wanted which would make you go for f—'s sake, are you serious with that bullshit? It would be set in 1985, and it would be faithful to the book.

The merchandising machinery is already rolling, by the way, with figures and busts of the characters aimed at the comic-collecting geek crowd, but what caught my eye was the Watchmen lunch box with the Minutemen on the lid. Cute.

I have to wonder how mainstream audiences will receive a left-anarchist 80s period piece.

Very Gradual Change We Can Believe In

Not-So-Dutch Auction

Years ago, when Google tried its unorthodox style of IPO, the business press described it as a Dutch auction:

Google will be using something called a "Dutch auction." It's named after a process used in Holland to bid on flowers. Here's how it works: You and everyone else makes a bid on what you would pay for a share Google stock and how many shares you would like. When all the bids are in, Google will allocate shares on a pro rata basis to anyone who has bid at or above the initial IPO price, which is set by a threshold price that Google will accept.

Only that's not what a Dutch auction is:

A Dutch auction is a type of auction where the auctioneer begins with a high asking price which is lowered until some participant is willing to accept the auctioneer's price, or a predetermined reserve price (the seller's minimum acceptable price) is reached. The winning participant pays the last announced price. This is also known as a "clock auction" or an open-outcry descending-price auction.

This type of auction is convenient when it is important to auction goods quickly, since a sale never requires more than one bid. Theoretically, the bidding strategy and results of this auction are equivalent to those in a sealed first-price auction.

The Dutch auction is named for its best known example, the Dutch flower auctions.

The Google IPO was a kind of Vickrey auction:

A Vickrey auction is a type of sealed-bid auction, where bidders submit written bids without knowing the bid of the other people in the auction. The highest bidder wins, but the price paid is the second-highest bid. The auction was created by William Vickrey. This type of auction is strategically similar to an English auction, and gives bidders an incentive to bid their true value.

Apparently the OpenIPO methodology pioneered by WR Hambrecht + Co for Google was based on the public offering auction used for Treasury bills, which had somehow become known as a Dutch auction.

Ebay also uses the term this way, for an auction of multiple identical items, where all the winners pay the lowest winning bid.

29 business models for computer games

David Perry enumerates 29 business models for computer games:

1. Retail (bricks & mortar)
2. Digital Distribution
3. In-Game Advertising
4. Around-Game Advertising
5. Pay Finder’s Fee from First Dollar
6. Advertgames
7. Try Before you Buy
8. Episodic Entertainment
9. Skill-Based Progressive Jackpots
10. Velvet Rope
11. Subscription Model
12. Micro-Transactions
13. Sponsored Games
14. Pay per play
15. Player to Player trading
16. Foreign distribution deals
17. Sell Access to your Players
18. Freeware 
19. Loss Leader
20. Peripheral Enticement
21. Player to Player Wagering
22. User Generated Content
23. Pay for Storage Space
24. Pay for Private Game Server
25. Rental 
26. Licensing Access
27. Selling Branded Items
28. Pre-Sell the Game to the Players
29. Buy Something, get the game for Free

Hamas lied about Gaza fatalities

Apparently Hamas lied about Gaza fatalities — shocking, I know:

According to the widely cited figures of the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights — which NGO Monitor describes as “pressing [an] anti-Israel agenda in media and international organizations” with its “reports condemning Israel policy often lack[ing] credibility” — some 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the war, or about two-thirds of the total Palestinian death count. But according to the IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), the truth is the reverse: about two-thirds of the dead were fighters from Hamas and other groups.

Out of the 1,338 Palestinian fatalities, the CLA has now identified over 1,200. The Post notes that “its 200-page report lists their names, their official Palestinian Authority identity numbers, the circumstances in which they were killed and, where appropriate, the terrorist group with which they were affiliated.”

Of these, the CLA has conclusively established that 580 were members of Hamas and other terror organizations. Another 300 were noncombatants — women, children younger than 15, men over 65. Another 320 names are yet to be classified; all were men and the IDF estimates that about two-thirds were terrorists.

Col. Moshe Levi, head of the CLA, says Hamas’ “false reporting” was behind the distortions and gives an example: on January 6, about halfway through Operation Cast Lead, Hamas claimed IDF shells had hit a UN school in Jabalya and killed over 40 including many civilians. The claim was widely disseminated and further stoked already mounting diplomatic pressure on Israel, with the UN Security Council calling two nights later for an immediate ceasefire by a 14-0 vote on which the United States — despite Israeli expectations of a veto — abstained.

It turns out, though, that the actual number of Palestinians killed at the school was 12 — nine of them Hamas gunmen, three civilians. The UN itself has since admitted that the IDF was returning fire and that none of its shells hit the school itself.

This is a propaganda war, of course, and the media, as always, are in control.

BART holdup victim grabs knife, kills robber

BART holdup victim grabs knife, kills robber — and gets surprisingly sympathetic news coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle:

A 23-year-old visitor from the East Coast had just gotten money from an ATM when he told his friend on a cell phone that he had a bad feeling about two men approaching him at the Fruitvale BART Station in Oakland.

His worst fears were realized when one suspect, Victor Veliz, 18, held a folding knife with a 5-inch blade to his neck and the other, Christopher Gonzalez, 18, threatened to shoot him Thursday night, authorities said.

In a blind panic, he lashed out at his attackers, grabbing the knife from one of them and punching the other as his friend listened in horror on the phone.

Without realizing it, authorities say, the man stabbed Gonzalez in the chest. Gonzalez stumbled to his family's home around the corner, collapsed into his father's arms and died.

Veliz, who is affiliated with a gang, was arrested at Gonzalez's home after police allegedly found him with the East Coast visitor's cell phone. He will be charged with murder in the death of his accomplice, along with a robbery count, prosecutors said.

The robbery victim suffered only cuts in fighting off his assailants. He ran from the station, flagged down an Oakland police officer on Fruitvale Avenue and turned over the bloody knife. His name was not released.

The man was "scared senseless" when he was attacked about 9:30 p.m. Thursday, said Allison Danzig, an Alameda County deputy district attorney. He acted in self-defense and will not be charged, she said.

When police told him that Gonzalez had died, "he was very saddened and very upset," Danzig said.

Naturally Gonzalez's father proclaimed, "I want somebody to pay for this."

Special Forces' Gigapixel Flying Spy Sees All

Special Forces' Gigapixel Flying Spy Sees All — even if human observers can't watch it all:

You may think your new ten-megapixel camera is pretty hot — but not when you compare it to the 1.8 Gigapixel beast built for the Pentagon. The camera is designed as a payload for the A-160T Hummingbird robot helicopter now being quietly delivered to Special Forces. It will give them an unprecedented ability to track everything on the ground in real time. The camera is scheduled for flight testing at the start of next year.

Developed under the auspices of Darpa, the camera is the sensor part of Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System or ARGUS-IS. The camera is composed of four arrays, each containing 92 five-megapixel imagers. The other parts of ARGUS are the airborne processing system, which has to deal with a phenomenal torrent of data, and the ground-based element. The airborne part fits into a 500-pound pod.

The Hummingbird is unique in its ability to hover at high altitude (over 15,000 feet) and its endurance of over 20 hours. This means it can park high in the sky and scan a wide area. Robo-chopper camera-maker BAE Systems says that its imager will be able to cover an area of over a hundred square miles. The refresh rate is fifteen frames per second and a "ground sample distance" of 15 centimeters — this means that each pixel represents six inches on the ground. (The Darpa diagram, above, suggests a smaller area of coverage, 40 square kilometers or 15 square miles, at that resolution.)

The volume of data is too great to be completely transmitted, but users will be able to define at least sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out at will. The windows can be set to automatically track items of interest such as moving vehicles. In fact, the resolution is good enough for it to offer "dismount tracking" or following individual people on foot.

In addition to the windows, ARGUS will provide "a real-time moving target indicator for vehicles throughout the entire field of view in real-time." Basically, nothing can move in the entire area without being spotted. Unlike radar, ARGUS can zoom in and provide a high-resolution image.

The camera is pretty impressive, but it's the processing and the software behind it that will make this such a capable system. It would take a human a very long time to scan the whole area under surveillance if they were looking for something — but this is exactly the type of task which the swarming software we looked at last week excels at. Luckily enough, that just happens to be a Darpa program too. The technique of looking at small windows of interest also means that it may be possible to speed the frame rate up considerably — we previously looked at a windowing system so fast it could follow speeding bullets.

In case the name Argus doesn't ring any bells, here's the mythological footnote:

Argus or Argos Panoptes was a giant, unsleeping watchman with a hundred eyes all over his body. Unfortunately he was killed by Hermes; according to the myth, his eyes were placed on the tail of the peacock.

Geography professor claims to have found Osama bin Laden

A UCLA Geography professor claims to have found Osama bin Laden — or, rather, to have narrowed down the list of places he might be staying:

Using patterns of how animal species spread, the world's most wanted terrorist can be tracked down to a town in the tribal region of North West Pakistan it is claimed.

By factoring in his need for security, electricity, high ceilings to accommodate his 6ft 4in frame and spare rooms for his bodyguards, the search can be further narrowed to three walled compounds.

According to a team led by Thomas Gillespie, at the University of California in Los Angeles, bin Laden's location is "one of the most important political questions of our time".

Mathematical models used to explain how animal species spread out say he should be close to where he was last spotted.

Their research published in MIT International Review also concluded he should also be in a large town with a similar culture to Afghanistan where he can remain largely anonymous.

The most likely candidate is in Parachinar, 12 miles inside Pakistan, which housed many mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Finally after looking at his need for electricity for dialysis, high walls, spare rooms for his entourage, and trees to hide from prying eyes, satellite pictures show just three suitable houses.

I Dream of Denver

In I Dream of Denver, David Brooks teases urban planners who won't accept that Americans like suburbs:

The time has finally come, some writers are predicting, when Americans will finally repent. They’ll move back to the urban core. They will ride more bicycles, have smaller homes and tinier fridges and rediscover the joys of dense community — and maybe even superior beer.

America will, in short, finally begin to look a little more like Amsterdam.

Well, Amsterdam is a wonderful city, but Americans never seem to want to live there. And even now, in this moment of chastening pain, they don’t seem to want the Dutch option.

He shares some results from a recent Pew survey:

Only 52 percent of urbanites rate their communities “excellent” or “very good,” compared with 68 percent of suburbanites and 71 percent of the people who live in rural America.
[...]
Forty-five percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 would like to live in New York City. But cities are profoundly unattractive to people with families and to the elderly. Only 14 percent of Americans 35 and older are interested in living in New York City. Only 8 percent of people over 65 are drawn to Los Angeles.
[...]
If you jumble together the five most popular American metro areas — Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando and Tampa — you get an image of the American Dream circa 2009. These are places where you can imagine yourself with a stuffed garage — filled with skis, kayaks, soccer equipment, hiking boots and boating equipment. These are places you can imagine yourself leading an active outdoor lifestyle.

These are places (except for Orlando) where spectacular natural scenery is visible from medium-density residential neighborhoods, where the boundary between suburb and city is hard to detect. These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A. These places are car-dependent and spread out, but they also have strong cultural identities and pedestrian meeting places. They offer at least the promise of friendlier neighborhoods, slower lifestyles and service-sector employment. They are neither traditional urban centers nor atomized suburban sprawl. They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red.

They offer the dream, so characteristic on this continent, of having it all: the machine and the garden. The wide-open space and the casual wardrobes.

Comparative Anatomy of Chimpanzee and Human

The recent chimpanzee attack has raised the issue of how strong chimpanzees really are — a question that lacks a solid answer, since chimps rarely compete in either Olympic-style weightlifting or powerlifting.

The Human Evolution Coloring Book provides a useful illustration of the Comparative Anatomy of Chimpanzees and Humans:



Notice that the chimp has roughly twice the relative arm mass of a human. That alone would imply that chimps are stronger but less than twice as strong as similarly sized humans — 2^2/₃ as strong — but their arms aren't simply bigger human arms. How close tendons attach to the joint, for instance, can dramatically affect the mechanical advantage of a muscle — whether it's naturally in low gear or high gear, so to speak.

Our illustration has other limitations, too. First, it shows a gracile chimpanzee, the Bonobo or Pan paniscus, rather than its more robust cousin, the Common Chimpanzee or Pan troglodytes. Second, it shows a human female, which arguably exaggerates the difference in upper-body and lower-body mass between species. Adult human males have dramatically more upper-body mass than females.

A More Efficient Flex-Fuel Engine

Engineers at Ricardo have produced a more efficient flex-fuel engine that doesn't pay the usual 30-percent efficiency penalty for using E85, because it isn't optimized strictly for gasoline:

Ricardo's new Ethanol Boosted Direct Injection (EBDI) engine is designed to take full advantage of the favorable properties of ethanol to improve performance and reduce consumption. "[Ethanol] has a very high octane rating compared to other fuels, and a higher heat of vaporization," says Luke Cruff, chief engineer for the EBDI program at Ricardo.

A higher octane rating means that a fuel is less prone to unwanted detonation, or "knocking." A higher latent heat of vaporization means that ethanol can help control gas conditions in the combustion chamber by lowering temperatures. By modifyingthe pressure and temperature, fuel injected into the engine will burn more efficiently and reduce the formation of nitrous-oxide gases.

Regular flex-fuel engines are unable to exploit these properties because they are optimized for gasoline and run at lower cylinder pressures, says Cruff. The EBDI engine continually monitors the fuel blend using sensors. It then modifies cylinder pressure, fuel injection, valve timing, and other factors to ensure that the conditions get the most out of the fuel mix. One way that the engine modifies cylinder pressure is by using turbocharging.

Vitamin C hampers adaptation to endurance training

Dennis Mangan points to a fascinating study that shows that vitamin C hampers adaptation to endurance training:

Briefly, the authors took a group of young men and had them train on stationary bicycles. One group took one gram of vitamin C daily, the other did not. A parallel study was done on rats using the same general idea - only with rats, one can exercise them to exhaustion. The result: vitamin C put a major dent in the training effect due to exercise.

The figure above shows gene expression of two of the most important internal antioxidant-enhancing enzymes, superoxide dismutase and glutathione peroxidase. The first bar shows levels without training, the second with training, and the third with training plus vitamin C, which shows that the vitamin practically abolished the training effect. The reason seems to be that reactive oxygen species (ROS) formed during exercise are important signals for the synthesis of more mitochondria, the cell's energy factories. Vitamin C quenches the ROS and thus the signals.

Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?

Scientific American asks primate-expert Frans de Waal, Why would a chimpanzee attack a human?

Are captive chimpanzee attacks on humans common?
Yeah, definitely common. Most of the time they attack through cage bars. They bite off fingers. It happens more often with people they don't know very well and people who aren't familiar with chimpanzees. But it has happened to many of the best scientists and researchers, who are now missing digits. The reason we have them behind bars in zoos and research settings is because chimpanzees can be very dangerous — it's to protect ourselves. This was a sort of free-ranging chimp, which is much more dangerous.

But chimps in the wild are not used to people — they're afraid of them. That's why Jane Goodall had to habituate them. So, really wild chimps don't attack people. But in captivity, they have learned in the meantime that they are stronger than humans.

How strong are they?
The chimpanzee has strength for a human that is utterly incomprehensible. People watch pro wrestlers on TV and think they are strong. But a pro wrestler would not be able to hold a chimpanzee still if they wanted to. Chimpanzee males have been measured as having five times the arm strength as a human male. Even a young chimpanzee of four or five years, you could not hold it still if you wanted to. Pound-for-pound, their muscles are much stronger. And the adult males, like Travis — unless his were filed down — have big canine teeth. So you have a very dangerous creature in front of you that is impossible to control.

Do chimps in captivity show more aggressive behavior than those in the wild?
In the wild they're pretty aggressive. They have warfare among groups, where males kill other males, and they have been known to commit infanticide. Aggression is a common part of the chimpanzee behavior, whether it's between or within groups.

They can show tremendous mutilation. They go for the face; they go for the hands and feet; they go for the testicles. To outsiders, they have very nasty behaviors.

Are male chimpanzees more aggressive than females?
Yes, that's for sure.

What might cause a chimp to attack someone it knows?
They're very complex creatures. People must not assume that with someone they already know there's not some underlying tension. It's often impossible to figure out what reason they have for attacking.

Having a chimp in your home is like having a tiger in your home. It's not really very different. They are both very dangerous.

Do you think Lyme disease or the Xanax might have been a factor in the attack?
It's all possible. It's possible it was the Xanax. In general, in chimpanzees — because they are so genetically close to us — they will react very similarly to drugs. It might be that the dosages are different, but it really should be pretty much the same.

A chimp in your home is like a time bomb. It may go off for a reason that we may never understand. I don't know any chimp relationship that has been harmonious. Usually these animals end up in a cage. They cannot be controlled.

When a chimp is young, they're very cute and affectionate and funny and playful. There's a lot of appeal. But that's like a tiger cub — they're also a lot of fun to have.

I'm not sure why five times the arm strength of a (typical) human male is utterly incomprehensible. A pro wrestler should have four or five times the arm strength of a (typical) human male, after all — at a much higher body weight admittedly. Of course, a pro wrestler should have four or five times the leg strength of a typical human male, too, unlike a chimp.

Also, I'm not surprised that Professor de Waal and his colleagues consider it impossible to hold down a young chimp — but I don't think they could hold down a lightweight wrestler either.

The real danger isn't simply chimpanzees' strength but their sharp teeth and their eagerness to maim. They go for the face; they go for the hands and feet; they go for the testicles.

Two Paradoxes of Singaporean Political Economy

Bryan Caplan presents Two Paradoxes of Singaporean Political Economy:

Puzzle #1: Singapore frequently adopts the kind of policies that economists would call "economically efficient, but politically unpopular." For example, Singapore has (nearly) unilateral free trade, admits unusually large numbers of immigrants, supplies most medical care on a fee-for-service basis, means-tests most government assistance, imposes peak load pricing on roads, and fights recessions by cutting employers' taxes. In most democracies, advocating any of these policies could easily cost a politician his job. In Singapore, policies like this have stood the test of time.

Puzzle #2: Even though it follows the forms of British parliamentary democracy, Singapore is effectively a one-party state. The People's Action Party (PAP) has held uninterrupted power since the country gained Home Rule in 1959, and has never received less than 60% of the popular vote. Even more strikingly, the PAP has a near-monopoly in Singapore's Parliament. In many electoral cycles, this party literally won 100% of the seats; it currently holds 82 out of 84.

Staff Jobs vs. Line Jobs

Shannon Love believes the Chinese are going to kick our asses. I don't know to what degree I agree with that, but David Foster's comment caught my attention:

One more thing that’s kind of worrisome is the growing preference for “staff” jobs rather than “line” jobs among the highly educated. (I use “line” here to refer to a job in which an individual has decision-making authority and accountability for the results of those decision, and “staff” to refer to a job which is basically advisory in nature.)

There are a lot of people who are more thrilled by the chance to have proximity to some galactic decision (”should our company spend $10 billion on acquisition X”) than by the chance to have actual ownership of some less-galactic decision (”how many Gerbilator units should we produce this quarter, and what should we price them at?”) To some extent, this represents an attempt to extend the habits of school into the workplace; it also has a component of sheer cowardice.

This phenomenon is at its peak in the “non-profit” world, but also exists in business (as in the example above) and in government... where many “elite” college graduates would be excited about writing a paper on “transportation alternatives for the nation in 2020″ but would be most uninterested in being the Atlanta tower manager for the FAA.

Did World War II end the Great Depression?

Did World War II end the Great Depression?, Megan McArdle asks. Yancey Ward responds:

The success of a private economy is measured by its ability to produce the goods and services desired by the population. WWII, during its interval, does not measure well on this scale. This is the problem with saying the onset of the war ended the depression.

Government can — by borrowing, printing, conscripting, and rationing — produce any level of employment and output it desires, but that is no guarantee of true wealth generation. The meagerness of the citizenry's consumption during the war years is the true measure of the economy's output. The depression ended after the war due to the fact that the private sector had finished clearing its debt problems, the worst aspects of Roosevelt's policies were allowed to lapse along with the additional price controls of the war, and the fact (pointed out by Rob Lyman last night) that uncertainty about future government intervention cleared considerably because the war had a discernible endpoint.

If one believes WWII ended the depression, then we can certainly raise the defense budget to 5 trillion dollars/year for the rest of Obama's 1st term, ration all other goods and services strictly, conscript 40 million men and women, and pay them to sit on army bases all over the country. Prosperity is just around the bend, and we don't even have to fight a world wide war.

Free Market Bank Nationalization

The term nationalization clouds judgment on both sides of the debate, Alex Tabarrok argues:

It's better to think of what we want to do as bankruptcy. Many of the major banks are insolvent. When the liabilities of an ordinary firm exceed its assets the firm enters one of a variety of types of bankruptcy procedure during which management is often removed, the firm is sold or reorganized and liability holders take ownership or are paid off at a discount. Notice that we do not call a bankruptcy procedure, nationalization, even though it typically occurs under the auspices of a government employed judge.

When it comes to the banks the issue is more complicated than with an ordinary firm because the major liability holders are depositors whom the government has guaranteed. As a result, the ultimate liability holder is the government. But now, as a thought experiment, imagine that we had private deposit insurance. What would a private insurance firm do in this situation? Would it pander to the current bank management and carry the zombie banks on its books, hoping and waiting for a miracle? Or would it step in, remove current management, pay off the depositors, reorganize and then sell the banks to recoup its losses? I believe a private insurer would follow the second path, the fact that the government is not yet ready to do this indicates how powerful bankers are in Washington. Thus, given deposit insurance the procedure most consistent with free market principles is bankruptcy, preferably a speed bankruptcy procedure under the auspices of the FDIC which has significant expertise in this field.

A speed bankruptcy; 1) punishes current management reducing moral hazard, 2) will be less politicized if done under the auspices of the FDIC than if done piecemeal with congressional involvement and 3) will get the banks working again as soon as possible.

Notice how the term nationalization confuses the issue. First, it suggests government ownership of the banks which would indeed be a disaster. People in favor of free markets will rightly want to avoid any such outcome but ironically it's the current situation of "wait and see," and "protect the banker," which is likely to lead to an anemic recovery and eventual government ownership. Second, it confuses people on the left who think that nationalization is a way to insure that taxpayers get something on the upside. That idea is a joke - there is no upside. Taxpayers are going to have to pay through the nose but the critical point is that the taxpayers must pay the depositors whom they have guaranteed not the banks.

The debate so far has been framed between a "bailout" and "nationalization." But the public rightly sees the bailout as a way to protect bankers and thus we get pressure for government ownership, which has already happened in part through government control over banker wages. Bankruptcy in contrast is a normal free market procedure, it emphasizes that the firm has failed and current management should be removed. Framing the issue in this way, for example, makes it clear that only the depositors should be protected and under reorganization there should be no control over wages on future management (wages are going to have to be high to get anyone to take on the task). Finally the idea of bankruptcy makes it clear that the goal is to get banks solvent, under new management, and back under private control as quickly as possible.

Recession? No, It's a D-process, and It Will Be Long

Recession? No, it's a D-process, Ray Dalio says, and the depression and deflation will take a long time to work themselves out:

The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course.

When I first started seeing the D-process and describing it, it was before it actually started to play out this way. But now you can ask yourself, OK, when was the last time bank stocks went down so much? When was the last time the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, or any central bank, exploded like it has? When was the last time interest rates went to zero, essentially, making monetary policy as we know it ineffective? When was the last time we had deflation?

The answers to those questions all point to times other than the U.S. post-World War II experience. This was the dynamic that occurred in Japan in the '90s, that occurred in Latin America in the '80s, and that occurred in the Great Depression in the '30s.

Basically what happens is that after a period of time, economies go through a long-term debt cycle — a dynamic that is self-reinforcing, in which people finance their spending by borrowing and debts rise relative to incomes and, more accurately, debt-service payments rise relative to incomes. At cycle peaks, assets are bought on leverage at high-enough prices that the cash flows they produce aren't adequate to service the debt. The incomes aren't adequate to service the debt. Then begins the reversal process, and that becomes self-reinforcing, too. In the simplest sense, the country reaches the point when it needs a debt restructuring. General Motors is a metaphor for the United States.

Idiocracy

Idiocracy is not a good movie, but its premise could make for a good movie:

Russia's Rambo of the Forest

Russia's Rambo of the Forest died in a police shoot-out:

A heavily armed recluse nicknamed Russia's Rambo of the Forest has been gunned down in a shoot-out with police.

Alexander Bichkov, had lived a semi-feral existence in the woods for 20 years, terrorising locals and the police if they ventured near him.

A giant at 6ft 7in with a wild straggly beard, the man lived in an old shack and self-made camps, hunted animals for food and only ventured out of the forest in summer when he wouldn't leave footprints leading back to where he lived.

Russian police said he descended from a family of criminals who were exiled by Stalin to the Kostroma region 450 miles east of Moscow, in the 1940s.

At the end of Soviet times nearly 20 years ago he disappeared from his home in a village in the region after refusing a court order to pay alimony to his ex-wife following an acrimonious divorce.

He was declared dead by his family in 1997 because he had been missing for so long.

But now it is known the former forestry worker had fled into the dense Kologriv woods near his village, which were designated as a nature reserve a few years ago.

Terrified local police refused to go into the woods to hunt him down ever since he captured a local commander while out hunting and held him at gunpoint for hours before freeing him and then disappearing into the trees.

Even after he burned down 30 holiday homes in the area belonging to rich Muscovites, police refused to pursue the man they dubbed "Rambo", after the popular action-film hero played by Sylvester Stallone, who was skilled in weaponry and survival.

They did not know — until killing him on March 14 — his true identity, which was obtained from documents they found and through checks with his family.

He was finally shot after the head of the Department of Natural Reserves in Moscow, angered by the inaction of local police, ordered a surveillance operation on him.

After finding out where he lived, six specialist policemen — including Afghan war veterans — from outside the local police and four armed Park rangers went into the forest on snowmobiles to hunt him down and try to arrest him.

But the hermit, who carried two shotguns and a home-made pistol, ambushed them and wounded two.

He then set alight a swathe of forest as a diversion, tracked behind the men and was apparently preparing to start firing on them again.

But a police sniper managed to shoot him in the head, killing him instantly.

One of the policemen, Andrei Potemkin, said: "He ambushed us and I told him to surrender and that we wouldn't hurt him.

"He yelled 'I've nothing to lose' and opened fire.

"He hit two of the others and fired at me. My bullet-proof vest saved my life. He then set his place on fire, and everything was covered with smoke.

"He's a real professional. While we were helping the wounded, he made a circle around us, hiding in the smoke, and cut us off.

"It was pure chance the sniper suddenly saw his figure in the trees and pulled the trigger. He shot him right in the head and he died in a flash."

Police later found in his semi-destroyed lair more weapons, dozens of furs, hundreds of traps and books about hunting and survival.

Locals told of their relief that the man who had haunted the region for so long was dead.

Maria Muzhalova said: "Parents would not let their children go to school without dogs going with them.

"He would steal boots from outside people's homes and steal potatoes from the fields. If you came across him in the summer, he was way too scary-looking to confront him."

Director of the Kologriv nature reserve, Maxim Sinitzin said; "We were all sick and tired of him. He kept leaving traps for animals everywhere.

"We'd break them and he'd make more. Once he trapped three of our inspectors and told them he'd kill them if he ever saw them in the woods again."

Sprints may be best for diabetes prevention

Fitness orthodoxy shifts slowly. New research demonstrates that sprints may be best for diabetes prevention:

Timmons and his team found that young sedentary men who did just 15 minutes of all-out sprinting on an exercise bike spread out over two weeks substantially improved their ability to metabolize glucose (sugar). Traditional aerobic exercise programs can boost sensitivity to the key blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin. The high-intensity program did this too, but it also directly reduced the men's blood sugar levels — something that standard exercise programs have not been shown to do.

Which political system is the most suitable for Russia?

Gallup asked Russians, Which political system is the most suitable for Russia?

New Procedure Uses Athletes’ Own Blood to Treat Injuries

A new procedure uses athletes’ own blood to treat injuries by injecting the "growth-factor cocktail" right where it's needed — including poorly vascularized tissues, like ligaments and tendons:

Platelet-rich plasma is derived by placing a small amount of the patient’s blood in a filtration system or centrifuge that rotates at high speed, separating red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in the body’s self-healing process, doctors said. A teaspoon or two of the remaining substance is then injected into the damaged area. The high concentration of platelets — from 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — often catalyzes the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells. Because the substance is injected where blood would rarely go otherwise, it can deliver the healing instincts of platelets without triggering the clotting response for which platelets are typically known.

“This could be a method to stimulate wound healing in areas that are not well-vascularized, like ligaments and tendons,” said Dr. Gerjo van Osch, a researcher in the department of orthopedics at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “I call it a growth-factor cocktail — that’s how I explain it.”

Dr. van Osch and several other experts said they had used the procedure as a first option before surgery for reasons beyond its early results. There is little chance for rejection or allergic reaction because the substance is autologous, meaning it comes from the patient’s own body; the injection carries far less chance for infection than an incision and leaves no scar, and it takes only about 20 minutes, with a considerably shorter recovery time than after surgery.

Because of those apparent benefits, the consensus among doctors is that the procedure is worth pursuing. However, several doctors emphasized that platelet-rich plasma therapy as it stands now appeared ineffective in about 20 to 40 percent of cases, depending on the injury. But they added that because the procedure costs about $2,000 — compared with $10,000 to $15,000 for surgery — they expected that with more refinement, insurance companies would eventually not only authorize the use of PRP therapy but even require it as a first course of treatment.

The Chinese Are Going to Kick Our Asses

Shannon Love believes that the Chinese are going to kick our asses:

We’re going to power our economy with scavenged energy [PDF] from intermittent, low-density solar and wind power. The Chinese are going to power their economy with eight-packs of nuclear reactors that they roll off assembly lines in vast numbers.

We have a culture that holds engineers and inventors in contempt and views new technologies first and foremost as threats to be mitigated. The Chinese nearly worship engineers and inventors and adopt new technologies with a reckless disregard of all but the most gross dangers.

Our best and brightest dream of going into politics or “non-profits” that exist largely to suppress commerce and invention. The Chinese best and brightest go into engineering and business and try to figure out how to make and sell things.

Our intellectual class spends its time trying to generate contempt of our institutions, history and traditions and to shatter our belief in our own capabilities. China’s intellectual class spend its time creating and instilling a fierce confidence in their institutions, history and traditions and building a belief that they can accomplish anything.

The Chinese have become the lean and mean, energetic barbarians sweeping down on a fat, decadent and leaderless civilization. They have the same cowboy attitude towards technology and commerce that drove America to the top in late 1800s. They are going to do to us what we did to Europe in the pre-WWII era and for the same reason. The difference this time is that the Chinese share no cultural bond to the rest of the world as America did to Europe.

They will face political challenges in the short term, especially in a global recession, but long-term they will dominate for the simple reason that they will be able to keep the lights on and we won’t.

I suppose we’ll learn to adopt an attitude of superior impotence just as the Europeans have done. China will do great things while we will claim we’re too wise and mature to attempt such things.

We shall live in interesting times.

Funny beliefs

Alex Tabarrok makes fun of some funny beliefs about economics:

Mark Thoma makes fun of Judd Gregg for thinking that tax cuts pay for themselves. Mark is right to make fun. What a ridiculous thing to believe. All the good economists know that it is spending increases that more than pay for themselves.

Pepsi Throwback?

Beverage Industry reports that PepsiCo will be releasing versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew that are once again sweetened with real sugar, rather than High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS):

Typically, the only way to get soda from the "big guys" with real sugar is to import it (i.e., Mexican Coke) or wait till Passover (Kosher Coke, Kosher Pepsi).

Pepsi has been experimenting elsewhere with sugar-sweetened drinks. We reported last February about two such entries… Pepsi Raw in the UK and Mexico's Pepsi Retro.

I'm surprised that the UK and Mexico don't already use sugar in their Pepsi products. The primary reason the US versions switched was price — sugar tariffs and corn subsidies convinced manufacturers to switch to corn syrup in the early 1980s:

A system of tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 significantly increased the cost of importing sugar, and producers sought a cheaper alternative. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the American and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price and the price of #2 corn is artificially low due to both government subsidies and dumping on the market as farmers produce more corn annually. HFCS became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. For instance, soft drink makers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to HFCS in the U.S. in 1984. Large corporations, such as Archer Daniels Midland, lobby for the continuation of these subsidies.

Other countries, including Mexico, typically use sugar in soft drinks. Some Americans seek out Mexican Coca-Cola in ethnic groceries, because they feel it tastes better or is healthier than Coke made with HFCS, or because they believe it will have less effect on obesity.

The Bentonville Mafia

The Bentonville Mafia has taken over Microsoft, and now that these former Wal-Mart execs are in charge, they want to open retail stores — which is not a bad idea, Cringely says:

So it seems inevitable to me that as Microsoft is operated more and more by executives from a giant retailer, that Microsoft will try doing some giant retailing of its own. And sure enough they are doing just that through this new plan to open Microsoft stores — a plan that could equally be laid at the feet of Apple as yet another Microsoft tactic copied from Cupertino.

Only Microsoft stores are different from Apple, stories, we’re told, and that’s true: Apple needed distribution while Microsoft has distribution, in spades. In fact Microsoft has so much distribution that this chain of stores could be viewed very negatively by Microsoft resellers but probably won’t be because I doubt that Microsoft will be actually trying to sell much stuff, and what they do sell will be at full retail unlike everyone else. It’s like buying wine at the winery: you never get a deal, but the samples are free.

So you can try out that cool game computer at Microsoft but actually buy it at Best Buy, just as you would have before.

Why even do it, then? Why have these stores?

Propaganda.

Phil Schiller of Apple made the point back in January when he explained that Apple stores had 400,000 visitors per day or the equivalent of 20 Macworld shows every day. Microsoft wants the same thing. They want to bypass the press machine that they feel has tainted users against Windows Vista, making sure the same thing doesn’t happen to Windows 7.

If Microsoft can achieve that one goal — just that one — then the Microsoft stores will have been worth doing even if they never have a dollar of retail sales.

Every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state

Every democracy must be a psychological-warfare state, Mencius Moldbug argues:

Most people get their opinions from others. If public opinion commands the power of the State, the power to inform is the power to command the State. Just as you will seldom find a stack of twenties on the sidewalk, this power will not just be waving around in the breeze. Someone will capture it, and hold it until it is torn from their hands.

Even if you have not been reading UR long and remain a good democrat, it disturbs you to see the resemblance between political communication and commercial advertising. This is because you know the latter consists largely of psychological-warfare tropes (as per Bernays, Lippmann, and the like). Their goal is not to inform you, but to control your behavior. You know this. And yet...

1709: The year that Europe froze

No one can quite explain why 1709 became the year that Europe froze, but freeze it did:

In England they called the winter of 1709 the Great Frost. In France it entered legend as Le Grand Hiver, three months of deadly cold that ushered in a year of famine and food riots. In Scandinavia the Baltic froze so thoroughly that people could walk across the ice as late as April. In Switzerland hungry wolves crept into villages. Venetians skidded across their frozen lagoon, while off Italy's west coast, sailors aboard English men-of-war died from the cold. "I believe the Frost was greater (if not more universal also) than any other within the Memory of Man," wrote William Derham, one of England's most meticulous meteorological observers. He was right. Three hundred years on, it holds the record as the coldest European winter of the past half-millennium.
[...]
Why it was quite so cold is harder to explain. The Little Ice Age was at its climax and Europe was experiencing climatically turbulent times: the 1690s saw a string of cold summers and failed harvests, while the summer of 1707 was so hot people died from heat exhaustion. Overall, the climate was colder, with the sun's output at its lowest for millennia. There were some spectacular volcanic eruptions in 1707 and 1708, including Mount Fuji in Japan and Santorini and Vesuvius in Europe. These would have sent dust high into the atmosphere, forming a veil over Europe. Such dust veils normally lead to cooler summers and sometimes warmer winters, but climatologists think that during this persistent cold phase, dust may have depressed both summer and winter temperatures.

Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect

A now-ubiquitous piece of clever software called Auto-Tune explains why pop music sounds perfect, if uninspired, these days:

Auto-Tune's inventor is a man named Andy Hildebrand, who worked for years interpreting seismic data for the oil industry. Using a mathematical formula called autocorrelation, Hildebrand would send sound waves into the ground and record their reflections, providing an accurate map of potential drill sites. It's a technique that saves oil companies lots of money and allowed Hildebrand to retire at 40. He was debating the next chapter of his life at a dinner party when a guest challenged him to invent a box that would allow her to sing in tune. After he tinkered with autocorrelation for a few months, Auto-Tune was born in late 1996.

Almost immediately, studio engineers adopted it as a trade secret to fix flubbed notes, saving them the expense and hassle of having to redo sessions. The first time common ears heard Auto-Tune was on the immensely irritating 1998 Cher hit "Believe." In the first verse, when Cher sings "I can't break through" as though she's standing behind an electric fan, that's Auto-Tune--but it's not the way Hildebrand meant it to be used. The program's retune speed, which adjusts the singer's voice, can be set from zero to 400. "If you set it to 10, that means that the output pitch will get halfway to the target pitch in 10 milliseconds," says Hildebrand. "But if you let that parameter go to zero, it finds the nearest note and changes the output pitch instantaneously"--eliminating the natural transition between notes and making the singer sound jumpy and automated. "I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that," he says.

Like other trends spawned by Cher, the creative abuse of Auto-Tune quickly went out of fashion, although it continued to be an indispensable, if inaudible, part of the engineer's toolbox. But in 2003, T-Pain (Faheem Najm), a little-known rapper and singer, accidentally stumbled onto the Cher effect while Auto-Tuning some of his vocals. "It just worked for my voice," says T-Pain in his natural Tallahassee drawl. "And there wasn't anyone else doing it."

The Coming Swarm

John Arquilla (Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military) argues that we should prepare for the coming swarm — that is, we should expect more Mumbai-style attacks:

Right now, most of our cities would be as hard-pressed as Mumbai was to deal with several simultaneous attacks. Our elite federal and military counterterrorist units would most likely find their responses slowed, to varying degrees, by distance and the need to clarify jurisdiction.

While the specifics of the federal counterterrorism strategy are classified, what is in the public record indicates that the plan contemplates having to deal with as many as three sites being simultaneously hit and using “overwhelming force” against the terrorists, which probably means mustering as many as 3,000 ground troops to the site. If that’s an accurate picture, it doesn’t bode well. We would most likely have far too few such elite units for dealing with a large number of small terrorist teams carrying out simultaneous attacks across a region or even a single city.

Nightmare possibilities include synchronized assaults on several shopping malls, high-rise office buildings or other places that have lots of people and relatively few exits. Another option would be to set loose half a dozen two-man sniper teams in some metropolitan area — you only have to recall the havoc caused by the Washington sniper in 2002 to imagine how huge a panic a slightly larger version of that form of terrorism would cause.

So how are swarms to be countered? The simplest way is to create many more units able to respond to simultaneous, small-scale attacks and spread them around the country. This means jettisoning the idea of overwhelming force in favor of small units that are not “elite” but rather “good enough” to tangle with terrorist teams. In dealing with swarms, economizing on force is essential.

We’ve actually had a good test case in Iraq over the past two years. Instead of responding to insurgent attacks by sending out large numbers of troops from distant operating bases, the military strategy is now based on hundreds of smaller outposts in which 40 or 50 American troops are permanently stationed and prepared to act swiftly against attackers. Indeed, their very presence in Iraqi communities is a big deterrent. It’s small surprise that overall violence across Iraq has dropped by about 80 percent in that period.

For the defense of American cities against terrorist swarms, the key would be to use local police officers as the first line of defense instead of relying on the military. The first step would be to create lots of small counterterrorism posts throughout urban areas instead of keeping police officers in large, centralized precinct houses. This is consistent with existing notions of community-based policing, and could even include an element of outreach to residents similar to that undertaken in the Sunni areas of Iraq — even if it were to mean taking the paradoxical turn of negotiating with gangs about security.

Times have changed. When a sniper struck Austin in the 1960s, the police asked ordinary citizens to provide cover fire with their deer rifles. That is now unthinkable.

Social Collapse Best Practices

In Closing the Collapse Gap, Dmitry Orlov argued that the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US — and that he expected the US to collapse soon. This is also the theme of his book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

Now he offers what he calls Social Collapse Best Practices:

One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.
[...]
But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.
[...]
Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic — you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.

They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To

They don't make Homo sapiens like they used to — and they don't all come in one make and model:

Bones don’t lie. John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin at Madison likes evidence he can put his hands on, so he takes me on a tour of the university’s bone laboratory. There, the energetic 36-year-old anthropologist unlocks a glass case and begins arranging human skulls and other skeletal artifacts—some genuine fossils, others high-quality reproductions—on a counter according to their age. Gesturing toward these relics, which span the past 35,000 years, Hawks says, “You don’t have to look hard to see that teeth are getting smaller, skull size is shrinking, stature is getting smaller.”

These overriding trends are similar in many parts of the world, but other changes, especially over the past 10,000 years, are distinct to specific ethnic groups. “These variations are well known to forensic anthropologists,” Hawks says as he points them out: In Europeans, the cheekbones slant backward, the eye sockets are shaped like aviator glasses, and the nose bridge is high. Asians have cheekbones facing more forward, very round orbits, and a very low nose bridge. Australians have thicker skulls and the biggest teeth, on average, of any population today. “It beats me how leading biologists could look at the fossil record and conclude that human evolution came to a standstill 50,000 years ago,” Hawks says.

Huge chimp shot dead after mauling woman in Connecticut

Most people have the impression that chimpanzees are small and friendly, but most people have only seen young chimps on TV and in movies. Adult chimps are fairly large and terrifyingly strong.

A highly trained 200-pound chimpanzee who once starred in TV commercials for Old Navy and Coca-Cola was shot dead by police after a violent rampage that left a friend of its owner badly mauled:

Sandra Herold, who owned the 15-year-old chimp named Travis, wrestled with the animal after it inexplicably attacked her friend Charla Nash, 55.

Nash had gone to Herold's home to help her coax the chimp back into the house after he got out, police said. After the animal lunged at Nash when she got out of her car, Herold ran inside to call 911 and returned armed.

"She retrieved a large butcher knife and stabbed her longtime pet numerous times in an effort to save her friend, who was really being brutally attacked," said Stamford police Capt. Richard Conklin.

Nash was in critical condition Tuesday after suffering what Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy called "life-changing, if not life-threatening," injuries to her face and hands.

"There was no provocation that we know of. One thing that we're looking into is that we understand the chimpanzee has Lyme disease and has been ill from that, so maybe from the medications he was out of sorts. We really don't know," Conklin said.

After the initial attack, Travis ran away and started roaming Herold's property until police arrived, setting up security so medics could reach the critically injured woman, Conklin said.

But the chimpanzee returned and went after several of the officers, who retreated into their cars, Conklin said. Travis knocked the mirror off a cruiser before opening its door and starting to get in, trapping the officer.

That officer shot the chimpanzee several times, Conklin said.

The wounded chimpanzee fled the scene, but Conklin said police were able to follow the trail of his blood: down the driveway, into the open door of the home, through the house and to his living quarters, where he had retreated and died of his wounds.

Herold and two officers also received minor injuries, police said.

Addendum: I've been admonished for leaving out the creepiest bits:

At the time of the 2003 incident, police said the Herolds told them the chimpanzee was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a stemmed glass. He also brushed his teeth using a Water Pik, logged onto the computer to look at pictures, and watched television using the remote control, police said.
[...]
"He's been raised almost like a child by this family," Conklin said Monday. "He rides in a car every day, he opens doors, he's a very unique animal in that aspect. We have no indication of what provoked this behavior at all."

(Admonition by Todd, who pointed out that acting human for years and then flipping out is... quite human.)

A plan to offshore

David Cook and Roger Green have a plan to offshore IT jobs — just 3 miles out — which might have made more sense a few years ago:

Roger Green is a software entrepreneur. David Cook was once a supertanker skipper who spent 15 years hauling crude oil through the world's sea lanes. Now the two men have announced a remarkable venture called SeaCode, a company that plans to hire 600 superb software designers from every corner of the world and house them in a luxury cruise ship just out of reach of US immigration law — but close enough to bid on multimillion-dollar US software contracts.

Babies who gesture have bigger vocabularies

Babies who gesture have bigger vocabularies:

The researchers filmed 50 Chicago-area children and parents from diverse economic backgrounds and counted the number of gestures, such as pointing at a picture.

The team found that 14-month-olds from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during each 90-minute session, compared with 13 meanings conveyed by children from lower-income families.

When the same children entered school at age four and a half, those from higher-income families had better vocabulary scores on standardized tests.

"At 14 months, an age when there aren't even socioeconomic differences in their talk yet, we see there are differences in their gestures," Rowe said.
The videos revealed that parents from wealthier families gestured more with their children than the other parents.

Rowe said the findings suggest that gestures can at least partly explain vocabulary differences between the groups, and may prove useful as the basis for interventions.

"Can we manipulate how much parents and children gesture, and if so, will it increase their vocabulary?" Rowe said.

The obvious answer to Rowe's question is, no; the causality doesn't flow that way.

Democracy has genuine virtues

Democracy has genuine virtues, Mencius Moldbug concedes:

Perhaps Froude wrote the best epitaph for the system:

Democracies are the blossoming of the aloe, the sudden squandering of the vital force which has accumulated in the long years when it was contented to be healthy and did not aspire after a vain display. The aloe is glorious for a single season. It progresses as it never progressed before. It admires its own excellence, looks back with pity on its earlier and humbler condition, which it attributes only to the unjust restraints in which it was held. It conceives that it has discovered the true secret of being 'beautiful for ever,' and in the midst of the discovery it dies.

In the arts of decadence — sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll — democracies excel. If only for these, the second half of the twentieth century will never be forgotten. We need not imagine the level of punitive austerity and reeducation that would need to be inflicted on Western society to make it forget the Rolling Stones and everything after. Possible, surely, but hard to recommend.

Another way to state Froude's thesis is to describe democracies as obtaining their energy by breaking the strong molecular bonds of their authoritarian predecessors. Similarly, fire obtains its energy by breaking the strong molecular bonds of wood. You'll note that the democracies do not seem to have much energy left, and indeed there is not much left of the wood.

How Not To Sort By Rating

Even Miller explains how not to sort by rating:

Wrong Solution 1
Score = (Positive ratings) – (Negative ratings)

Why it is wrong: Suppose one item has 600 positive ratings and 400 negative ratings: 60% positive. Suppose item two has 5,500 positive ratings and 4,500 negative ratings: 55% positive. This algorithm puts item two (score = 1000, but only 55% positive) above item one (score = 200, and 60% positive). WRONG.

Sites that make this mistake: Urban Dictionary

Wrong Solution 2
Score = Average rating = (Positive ratings) / (Total ratings)

Why it is wrong: Average rating works fine if you always have a ton of ratings, but suppose item 1 has 2 positive ratings and 0 negative ratings. Suppose item 2 has 100 positive ratings and 1 negative rating. This algorithm puts item two (tons of positive ratings) below item one (very few positive ratings). WRONG.

Sites that make this mistake: Amazon.com

So, what's the right way?

Correct Solution
Score = Lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter

Say what: We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the "real" fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer. Considering only positive and negative ratings (i.e. not a 5-star scale), the lower bound on the proportion of positive ratings is given by:

(For a lower bound use minus where it says plus/minus.) Here p is the observed fraction of positive ratings, z_α/2 is the (1-α/2) quantile of the standard normal distribution, and n is the total number of ratings.

Google PowerMeter is far more strategic than Google is letting-on

Cringely claims that Google PowerMeter is far more strategic than Google is letting-on:

So this is Google doing its bit for the environment in exchange for which they learn even more about our behavior, right?
Wrong. It’s much more than that.

Google’s PowerMeter is a Trojan horse — a way to become a de facto Internet Service Provider for potentially millions of homes.

Several years ago Google made a $100 million investment in a suburban Washington, DC company called Current Technologies, which is America’s leading provider of both smart electric metering services (that’s what the Google PowerMeter is supposed to be) and power line Internet service based in part on the HomePlug networking standard.

Current’s business model was simple. They’d give participating utilities a way to both measure and control local power consumption pretty much as described above. Oh and, by the way, the meter connection could also be used to provide Internet service, potentially to 100 percent of a neighborhood since pretty much everyone buys electric power. Throw Internet on the power bill, then maybe digital cable service, too. Eventually the power companies would take on the cable and telephone companies to fight for broadband hegemony.

Only it isn’t really happening that way. Current is doing deals with utilities, but most of those utilities aren't going so far as to offer broadband Internet. They are just reading meters, thank you, which isn’t bad unless your profit is supposed to come from the Internet and cable competitor side. So Current Technologies is struggling somewhat and Google’s investment in that company hasn’t grown as much as either company would like.

Enter the Google PowerMeter, which is both an intelligent power meter and an Internet gateway, just like the original vision at Current Technologies.

Electric utilities are enthusiastically installing backbone capability to serve these smart meters. And contrary to popular belief, the network on the power company’s side of that medium-voltage transformer on your telephone pole is usually optical fiber,not Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) which amateur radio operators hate so much. The fact is that BPL has real distance limitations and it is just easier to string fiber alongside the medium and high-voltage lines.

So the utilities partner with Google to install these boxes, ideally in every home. They install enough fiber for gigabit service to the medium voltage transformer with HomePlug or WiFi into the home. And the whole thing interfaces to Google at the power company’s data center where Google will install proxy servers and routers and connect to the Internet backbone.
Eventually Google — not the electric utility — throws the switch on consumer Internet access, IP TV, and VoIP phones, which the electric companies could have done — should have done — on their own but generally couldn’t be bothered to.

Ideally Google lights the whole town with Internet with the utility happily picking-up most of the infrastructure costs yet with Google becoming the ISP.

Now that’s a heck of a deal.

The No-Stats All-Star

Michael Lewis (Moneyball) calls Shane Battier the no-stats all-star:

It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that, it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says. “Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier scoring when he hasn’t ­exactly been open. Some large percentage of them came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says. “But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it becomes a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets the ball back. Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag.” The finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it against his hip and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house! “And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag. “We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger wag!”

Hockey has used a plus-minus stat for years. Now basketball is catching on:

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.

Battier's strengths are subtle:

Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”

People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard.

Acton was exactly wrong

Mencius Moldbug points out that the fish in the sea — he's not really talking about fish, by the way — would be better off owned by a single King of the Fishermen than by no one in particular — but all the fishermen agree that fragmentation of authority is good:

Consider the incentives of the fishermen in an ocean under fractured authority. They are not friends. Each strives to strip the sea before his neighbor arrives. But there is one principle they can agree on: that fragmentation of authority is good.

Why? Because any consolidation of authority must involve stripping at least one player of the power to fish. Any consensus that this is undesirable is a basis for cooperation among all, and is likely to achieve social popularity, regardless of truth. Hominids have been living in tribal societies for the better part of ten million years. They are very good at cooperation games.

For example: if political power is split between Commons, Lords, and Crown, it is easy to construct a settlement in which each of Commons, Lords, and Crown acknowledges the division of authority and promises not to infringe it. While each party will of course struggle to evade this settlement and gain absolute power — note that we don't hear much from the Lords or the Crown these days — the doctrine of benign fragmentation is one all can endorse, even though it is the converse of truth.

Acton was exactly wrong: it is not absolute, but partial power that corrupts. More precisely, it is partial authority not formally matched with partial responsibility.

Why diversifying does not earn you a big bonus

Paul Wilmott explains why diversifying does not earn you a big bonus:

Suppose that you have 100 colleagues, each trading with $10 million. Bearing in mind Einstein’s advice, we are going to keep things simple, so as to make the mathematics as transparent as possible, and assume that they are betting on a coin toss. And, crucially, they are all betting on heads on the same toss of the same unbiased coin — it doesn’t get more undiversified than that.

It’s 50-50 whether they win or lose. If the single toss comes up heads then they all win, and the bank makes 100 times $10 million, of which each trader perhaps gets a tidy $2 million bonus. That’s their down payment on a decent yacht. Everyone’s happy: traders, management, shareholders and depositors. But if it comes up tails, they lose, and the bank goes bust. But while the traders and management only have to find new jobs, the shareholders and the depositors potentially face losing their life savings.

You come along, and, thanks to your college education, you have found a much better trade than your colleagues. Let’s say that you are betting on another, independent coin — but one that is biased. This coin has a 75 percent chance of heads. And you’ve also got $10 million to invest.

Let’s look at two possibilities: first, that you do the responsible thing of betting the good odds on the biased coin, and second, that you bet on the heads on the 50-50 toss just like your colleagues. I say that the first case is “responsible” for two reasons: one because it’s a better bet than that of your colleagues and so will increase the bank’s expected return; and two because it also helps the bank diversify. That’s classic Modern Portfolio Theory, and is also common sense.

O.K., so you bet $10 million on your coin. What is the probability of your getting your $2 million bonus? Easy, it’s just the probability of getting heads, 75 percent, isn’t it? Well, no, it’s not. Yes, there’s a 75 percent chance of your making money for your bank, but if your colleagues have meanwhile tossed a tail, your bank is broke and no one’s getting a bonus, even you. They’ve cost the bank a billion dollars, and you’ve made it a mere $10 million. But what if you toss tails on the biased coin when the others toss heads? The others get their bonus, but you’ve just lost $10 million, what a terrible trader you must be, and are shown the door.

No, the only way to get that bonus is if both you and the others make winning trades — that is, if both coins land heads up. And the probability of that is 50 percent times 75 percent — that’s 37.5 percent. So, even though you have a biased coin working in your favor, the chance of you getting a bonus is still substantially less than half.

By now you can probably see where I’m going with this. Suppose that instead of betting on the biased coin you join in with all your colleagues and bet on the same toss of the first coin. Now you all win or lose together, the odds are even and the probability of getting your bonus is 50 percent. This is significantly higher than if you’d done the “responsible” thing of helping your bank to increase its expected return and decrease its risk.

This example makes it clear that your interests and those of the shareholders and depositors can be complete opposites. They probably didn’t teach you that at business school.

Actually, I'm pretty sure they do teach you that business school.

Owned by a King of Fishermen

Mencius Moldbug describes the fundamental engineering flaw in what he calls the modern structure of government:

This bug is so easy to see that even the New York Times can see it. Of course, our columnist is addressing the governance of fish, not hominids, but note that nothing in his logic depends on scales, gills, or fins:

Since the mid-’50s, economists who study fisheries have basically understood the fate that has befallen these waters. They call it the tragedy of the commons.

If a fish population is controlled by a single, perfectly rational agent — an idealized entity economists refer to as “the sole owner” — he or she will manage it to maximize its total value over time. For almost every population, that means leaving a lot of fish in the water, where they can continue to make young fish. The sole owner, then, will cautiously withdraw the biological equivalent of interest, without reducing the capital — the healthy population that remains in the sea.

But if the fish population is available to many independent parties, competition becomes a driving concern. If I don’t extract as much as I can today, there’s no guarantee you won’t take everything tomorrow. Sure, in a perfect world, you and I would trust each other, exercise restraint, and in the long run, grow wealthier for it, but I’d better just play it safe and get those fish before you do. The race for fish ensues, and soon, the tragedy of the commons has struck.

Ie: if you are a fish, you want all fish to be owned by a King of Fishermen. So long as our fisher king is rational, this "single owner" will govern his fisheries with a strong and kindly hand, maximizing returns over an infinite time horizon, bringing peace, freedom and prosperity to cod, pollock, and sea-bass alike.

But if we fracture this coherent authority into two competing authorities, each can gain by stealing fish from the other. The more authority is fractured, the more predatory it becomes. Thus, the infallible recipe for a sadistic and predatory state: internal competition for power. (Hominids, unlike fish, respond well to fences, so geographical fragmentation is not inconsistent with coherent authority —  the ocean partitioned, as it were, into artificial lakes.)

Why do we track the race of students taking standardized tests?

Why do we track the race of students taking standardized tests?, Philip Greenspun asks:

Yesterday’s New York Times article has an article entitled “Blacks Less Likely to Take A.P. Exam.” The article has two points. Blacks are less likely than other high school graduates to take the Advanced Placement tests. Blacks who take the test are much less likely to pass than non-black students (8 percent of those taking the exams checked the “I am black” box; only 4 percent of those passing the exams had checked the “I am black” box).

Does the utility of this information justify its collection? We’re not willing to do anything drastic to change the way that our schools are run. We will still have unionized teachers, teachers who jobs are guaranteed (tenured) after a few years, and all but the richest kids forced to attend their local public school. If schools are failing black students, we’re apparently more comfortable with that than we are in confronting the teachers and administrators who benefit from the status quo.

Medical doctors say that “Never order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the result.” What are we going to do with this result? Fire teachers if most of their students fail the A.P. exam? That would violate the union contract and we’re not going to do it. Increase the budget for schools with a lot of black students? Many of these schools already spend close to $25,000 per student per year (much of that is spent on administration rather than classroom instruction). Absent an economic miracle there is no way that taxes or debt can be increased to enable an increase beyond 25,000 current dollars per student annually.

Is this what crypto-racism looks like?

Recently Arnold Kling spoke about the bailout, and his comments were twisted beyond recognition by one James Wolcott of Vanity Fair:

A few days ago notice was taken (I'm practicing my passive voice) of economist Arnold Kling's contention that the Obama stimulus plan was actually "reparations" in disguise. Given the complexion of our new president, this was interpreted as injecting a needless bit of race-baiting into the economic debate, raising the specter of a million Jeremiah Wrights marching on the capital mall with outstretched hands, demanding their cut of the action. Oh dear me no, protested Kling. No coded race talk was intended. He was actually thinking of the Treaty of Versailles, as reflected in the sentence "To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I." Idiotically hyperbolic and baseless as Kling's caricaturing is (seriously, name me one frigging Democrat who invoked violations of Belgian neutrality in railing against the Bush tax cuts), it did open the door ajar to possible acquittal on the racebaiting charge. To cool things down, Kling (an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, which has been taking out all those big ads) closed off comments before the mosh pit got any gnarlier.

And there the matter might have rested had not Kling surrendered to heat of candor today at a Heritage Foundation/Club for Growth confab and decried, "Barack Obama is destroying my daughter's future. It is like sitting there watching my house ransacked by a gang of thugs."

Now if Kling can't comprehend the implication of racial menace encoded in daughter-gang-thugs/home invasion, he's either fatuously clueless — too innocent for this wicked world — or weaselly disingenuous, and a drama queen either way. Did he feel the sanctity of his home was being violated when the costs of the Iraq war shot into outer space? Did he picture marauders smashing cherished mementoes when Hank Paulson introduced TARP? Anytime Obama's name and "thug" are thrown in close proximity, it's a pretty sure bet that the speaker or author intends to fan the anxiety and animosity of those who think Obama's presidency represents black grievance gloved with the iron fist of the state — and out to punish whitey. No wonder so many would-be Wolverines in the right blogs are talking about stocking up on assault rifles and ammo — they've got ransackers running wild in their imaginations too. I urge these people to confront their racial fears, think of Scarlet Johansson and strawberry snowflakes and the musical numbers in Rent, and join the rest of us in Matisse's dancing daisy-chain of eternal spring.

I was not familiar with Mr. Wolcott's work — I don't read Vanity Fair — but I now know not to.

Is this what crypto-racism looks like?



Here's what Kling actually said in his intro:

Thank you. I'd like to thank the sponsors of this conference for inviting me to speak. I think about what's going on, what's happening today, as an economist, but I feel it as a father. My wife and I have three daughters, aged between 19 and 25, and when I see what's being done to their future, I am really angry. Back in September, when they were talking about taking $700 billion to "unclog the financial system," I wanted to take Henry Paulson and yank him out of the TV screen and say, "You keep your hands off my daughters' future!" But he got away with it. And I had to — for me it was like sitting there watching my house being ransacked by a gang of thugs. And now we've got a new gang of thugs, and they're going to do the same thing. So, anyway, that's how I feel, we'll go back to how I think.

So, comparing Henry Paulson spending $700 billion of our money to a gang of thugs ransacking his house is racist? Because Obama's continuing the misplaced spending, and he's (half) black? And any reference to thugs is crypto-racist?

Anyway, don't forget to watch the rest of the video for the substance of Kling's argument:

1. This is a big bill, but not a big stimulus.
2. A better alternative would be to cut the employer portion of the payroll tax.
3. These are dangerous times, and we should be trying to craft policies that reduce risks, not policies that increase risks.

Addendum: Here is what Kling had to say in his Stimulus Bill or Reparations Bill?:

I think that President Obama set the bar ridiculously low when he said that 75 percent of the stimulus should kick in within by the end of 2010, but the House bill did not even get over that bar. Why is the stimulus bill so filled with non-stimulus while it omits real stimulus measures, such as cutting payroll taxes?

I think the answer is that it is a reparations bill, not a stimulus bill. People who pay income taxes tend to vote Republican. People who live off taxes tend to vote Democratic. To the Democrats, the Bush tax cuts were a heinous evil, comparable to Germany's violation of Belgian neutrality in World War I. Now, they are demanding reparations, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be paid into teachers unions and other members of the coalition that won the election.

Most of the bill makes no sense from a stimulus perspective. But all of it makes sense from a reparations perspective.

Obviously an attack on Obama's race.

Never Blow Your Nose When You Have a Cold

Never blow your nose when you have a cold, because it sends mucus into the sinuses:

To test the notion, Dr. J. Owen Hendley and other pediatric infectious disease researchers at the University of Virginia conducted CT scans and other measurements as subjects coughed, sneezed and blew their noses. In some cases, the subjects had an opaque dye dripped into their rear nasal cavities.

Coughing and sneezing generated little if any pressure in the nasal cavities. But nose blowing generated enormous pressure — “equivalent to a person’s diastolic blood pressure reading,” Dr. Hendley said — and propelled mucus into the sinuses every time. Dr. Hendley said it was unclear whether this was harmful, but added that during sickness it could shoot viruses or bacteria into the sinuses, and possibly cause further infection.

The proper method is to blow one nostril at a time and to take decongestants, said Dr. Anil Kumar Lalwani, chairman of the department of otolaryngology at the New York University Langone Medical Center. This prevents a buildup of excess pressure.

OK, so do blow your nose, but blow one nostril at a time.

Either Superfluous or Deceptive

Mencius Moldbug declares our written Constitution either superfluous or deceptive:

Britain, of course, is famous for its unwritten constitution — a phrase which strikes the worm-gnawed American brain as oxymoronic. In fact, unwritten constitution is a tautology. It is our written constitution — or large-C Constitution — which is a concept comical, impossible, and fundamentally fraudulent. Please allow me to explain.

England had a constitution well before America had a Constitution, and De Quincey (whose political journalism is remarkably underrated) defines the concept succinctly:

...the equilibrium of forces in a political system, as recognised and fixed by distinct political acts...

In other words, a government's constitution (small c) is its actual structure of power. The constitution is the process by which the government formulates its decisions. When we ask why government G made decision D1 to take action A1, or decision D2 not to take action A2, we inquire as to its constitution.

Thus the trouble with these written constitutions. If the Constitution is identical to the constitution, it is superfluous. If the Constitution is not identical to theconstitution, it is deceptive. There are no other choices.

It's easy to show that the latter is the case for [the United States government]. For example, the two-party system is clearly part of [the United States government]'s constitution. But not only does the Constitutionnot mention political parties, the design notes indicate an intention to preclude them. Obviously this was not successful.

For another example, American law schools teach something called constitutional law, a body of judicial precedent which purports to be a mere elucidation of the text of the Constitution. Yet no one seriously believes that an alien, reading the Constitution, would produce anything like the same results. Moreover, the meta-rules on which constitutional law rests, such as stare decisis, are entirely unwritten, and have been violated in patterns not best explained by theories of textual interpretation. Thus the small 'c' in constitutional law is indeed correct.

In retrospect, the written-constitution design is another case of the pattern of wishful thinking that appears over and over again in the democratic mind.

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels

A Colorado school district does away with grade levels — and, really, what's shocking is that this is considered shocking, even radical:

Ultimately, there will be 10 multiage levels, rather than 12 grades, and students might be in different levels depending on the subject. They'll move up only as they demonstrate mastery of the material.
[...]
And when children fall short of understanding the material, they keep working at it. The only "acceptable" score to move on to the next lesson is the equivalent of a "B" in normal grading – hopefully showing proficiency and giving kids a better foundation as they move on to more advanced concepts. Advocates sometimes describe it as flipping the traditional system around so that time, rather than mastery of material, is the variable.

The Audacity of Doing Nothing

Philip Greenspun has been speaking to money managers, and they want the federal government to demonstrate the audacity to do nothing:

The “real money” investors didn’t want to invest alongside the government. Their concern is that if things go south, the government will take 100% of the value left in the bank or whatever and leave private investors, including recent ones, with nothing. This is precisely what happened to recent investors in Fannie Mae.

The “real money” investors didn’t want to see judges modifying contracts, e.g., bankruptcy judges resetting mortgage payments at a lower level and reducing the principal owed. As far as they were concerned, a central tenet of the U.S. Constitution is that people are free to make contracts. Given how mortgages are split up among investors, a foreclosure is greatly preferable to these folks than a modification. In a foreclosure the most senior investors get what they expected, i.e., their money back. The holders of the most junior tranches, which carried a higher return and were known to be high risk, would get nothing. This is also what they would have expected. If mortgages are modified by government action, however, it is unclear how the obligations among the various private parties should be adjusted.

“What’s wrong with foreclosures?” some of these folks asked. “The historical rate of home ownership is about 60 percent and we’re probably going to revert to that sooner or later so why slow things down? How does it help the U.S. to have high housing prices? Isn’t it better for housing to be affordable? If we give a lot of money to people to prevent foreclosures in March, how is that fair people who were foreclosed on in January?”

Much of the justification for government intervention comes from the assertion that markets have failed. One money manager scoffed at this idea. “The markets are working fine, but they’re giving people answers that they don’t like, so people cry market failure.” Stocks and bonds low? That’s because investors are afraid of a prolonged depression and continued government interference. House in a jobless region of Michigan worth almost nothing? A place with 50% of its former jobs only needs 50% of its houses. There are plenty of former steel towns where the price of a comfortable house stabilized at $20,000 decades ago and has barely moved since.

What did these guys want the government to do? Nothing, basically. “Back in the 19th Century, there were a lot of steep crashes, guys got wiped out, and the economy came back quickly.” What’s different now? The government is a lot bigger and more powerful. Rich companies and people can put some of their wealth into lobbying and demand that the government prevent them from getting wiped out (or at least slow the process).

Body Language Reveals Wealth

Body language reveals wealth — or, rather, status:

Psychologists Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, videotaped pairs of undergraduate students who were strangers to one another, during one-on-one interviews. In total, 100 undergraduate students participated.

The researchers then looked for certain gestures that indicate level of interest in the other person during one-minute slices of each conversation.

They found that students whose parents were from higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds engaged in more of what he called "impolite" behaviors, such as grooming, doodling and fidgeting. Lower SES students showed more "I'm interested" gestures, including laughter and raising of the eyebrows

The higher SES students fidgeted with nearby objects for an average of two seconds, while those from lower SES backgrounds almost never fidgeted during the 60-second clips. Upper SES students also groomed themselves for short stints while lower SES students didn't. Rather, the lower SES students nodded their heads, laughed and raised their eyebrows an average of one to two seconds more than their upper SES counterparts.

"We're talking seconds here, but that is a pretty big difference when you consider that we coded one minute of interaction time," Kraus told LiveScience. "So how many times a day are you nodding if you're lower socioeconomic status?"

It comes down to our animalistic tendencies, Kraus explained. Like a peacock's tail, the seemingly snooty gestures of higher SES students indicates modern society's version of "I'm fit," and "I don't need you."

"In the animal world, conflict arises when you're battling for status. So it's adaptive for us to avoid those conflicts and tell us we know 'I'm higher status than you, so don't bother having a conflict with me,'" Kraus figures.

Lower SES individuals can't afford to brush off others. "Lower SES people have fewer resources, and by definition should be more dependent on others," Kraus said.

Why didn’t we see a similar bubble in commercial real-estate markets

Shannon loves says those clamoring for further regulation of the housing market need to answer a question:

If greedy, irresponsible, unregulated etc. capitalism caused the housing bubble, why didn’t we see a similar bubble in commercial real-estate markets which operate under even less regulation than the residential markets? Why does the politically neglected and unregulated commercial real-estate market exhibit much milder swings?

Wall Street Can’t Count

Cringely notes that Wall Street Can’t Count and shares this graphic as evidence:



My first thought, before studying it, was that market cap might not be the right metric for comparing enterprises that have just rejiggered their capital structures. Market cap takes into account equity, but an enterprise is also financed through debt — which can become substantial after, say, receiving a bailout.

But I was thinking far too deeply.

The real problem is that the graphic, produced by J. P. Morgan and distributed by Bloomberg, represents market caps as circles with diameters proportional to the dollar value, when your eye naturally assumes that the two-dimensional circle's area should be proportional to the dollar value.

So they've squared all the values, vastly magnifying the already levered-up changes in market cap. Smooth.

Let's Get It On — for Free

In an effort to promote its MP3 store this Valentine's Day, Amazon is giving away free copies of Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On. Cute.

Oarfish

Oarfish are "large, greatly elongated, pelagic Lampriform fish comprising the small family Regalecidae."

In fact, one such "large, greatly elongated" species of oarfish, the Regalecus glesne or King of Herrings, is the longest bony fish on record, growing up to 11 meters long.

(The whale shark, Rhincodon typus, is longer but cartilaginous.)

The family name Regalecidae is derived from the Latin regalis, meaning royal:

The tapering, ribbony silver bodies of oarfish — together with an impressive, pinkish to cardinal red dorsal fin — help explain the perception of majesty taken from rare encounters.

Oarfish are rarely encountered and even more rarely encountered alive. They tend to linger at the surface or to beach themselves only when sick or dying, but these rare encounters may have led to stories of sea serpents.

Recently though an oarfish beached itself on the California coast:

A Great, Horn-Crowned Hog

Mencius Moldbug has some fun with the works of a bitter, old artist and the government's response to our current economic crisis:

Goya left no captions for his Black Paintings, so we have no way of knowing whether or not he meant to call this one Democracy. Events of the last week, however, have shown that Goya got one thing wrong. The black-robed figure is no goat at all — but a great, horn-crowned hog.

No, Not Calpis

Most Americans know very little about Hinduism, seeing it as a live-and-let-live religion, like Buddhism, but with a peculiar interest in cows. Most Americans are unaware of what hardcore Hindu nationalists are up to, like launching their new cow urine soft drink:

The bovine brew is in the final stages of development by the Cow Protection Department of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India's biggest and oldest Hindu nationalist group, according to the man who makes it.

Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink – called "gau jal", or "cow water" – in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched "very soon, maybe by the end of this year".

"Don't worry, it won't smell like urine and will be tasty too," he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. "Its USP will be that it's going to be very healthy. It won't be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins."

The drink is the latest attempt by the RSS – which was founded in 1925 and now claims eight million members – to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness.

Hindus revere cows and slaughtering them is illegal in most of India. Cow dung is traditionally used as a fuel and disinfectant in villages, while cow urine and dung are often consumed in rituals to "purify" those on the bottom rungs of the Hindu caste system.

In 2001, the RSS and its offshoots – which include the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party – began promoting cow urine as a cure for ailments ranging from liver disease to obesity and even cancer.

The movement has often been accused of using more violent methods, such as killing 67 Christians in the eastern state of Orissa last year, and assaulting women in a pub in Mangalore last month. It also has a history of targeting foreign business in India, as in 1994, when it organised a nationwide boycott of multinational consumer goods, including Pepsi and Coca Cola.

The cola brands are popular in India, now one of their biggest markets, but have struggled in recent years to shake off allegations, which they deny, that they contain dangerous levels of pesticide.

Mr Prakash said his drink, by contrast, was made mainly of cow urine, mixed with a few medicinal and ayurvedic herbs. He said it would be "cheap", but declined to give further details about its price or ingredients until it was officially launched.

When I first heard this story, I immediately thought of Calpis, the Japanese soft drink:

Calpis (カルピス Karupisu) is a Japanese uncarbonated soft drink, manufactured by Calpis Co., Ltd. (カルピス株式会社 Karupisu Kabushiki-gaisha), headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo. The beverage has a light, somewhat milky, and slightly acidic flavor, similar to plain or vanilla-flavored yogurt, or Yakult. Its ingredients include water, nonfat dry milk, and lactic acid, and it is produced by lactic acid fermentation.
[...]
The name Calpis was actually constructed as a portmanteau, by combining cal from calcium and pis from Sanskrit sarpis (supreme taste). Sarpis is used to described the essense of Buddhist teaching.

I prefer Pocari Sweat.

(Hat tip to Yana.)

In House Software

Joel Spolsky briefly wrote in house software at Viacom in New York:

New York was the first place I got to see what most computer programmers do for a living. It’s this scary thing called “in house software.” It’s terrifying. You never want to do in house software. You’re a programmer for a big corporation that makes, oh, I don’t know, aluminum cans, and there’s nothing quite available off the shelf which does the exact kind of aluminum can processing that they need, so they have these in-house programmers, or they hire companies like Accenture and IBM to send them overpriced programmers, to write this software. And there are two reasons this is so frightening: one, because it’s not a very fulfilling career if you’re a programmer, for a list of reasons which I’ll enumerate in a moment, but two, it’s frightening because this is what probably 80% of programming jobs are like, and if you’re not very, very careful when you graduate, you might find yourself working on in-house software, by accident, and let me tell you, it can drain the life out of you.

OK, so, why does it suck to be an in house programmer.

Number one. You never get to do things the right way. You always have to do things the expedient way. It costs so much money to hire these programmers — typically a company like Accenture or IBM would charge $300 an hour for the services of some recent Yale PoliSci grad who took a 6 week course in dot net programming, and who is earning $47,000 a year and hoping that it’ll provide enough experience to get into business school — anyway, it costs so much to hire these programmers that you’re not going to allowed to build things with Ruby on Rails no matter how cool Ruby is and no matter how spiffy the Ajax is going to be. You’re going into Visual Studio, you’re going to click on the wizard, you’re going to drag the little Grid control onto the page, you’re going to hook it up to the database, and presto, you’re done. It’s good enough. Get out of there and onto the next thing.

That’s the second reason these jobs suck: as soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship you learned in CS323. You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk which is starting to break down because it wasn’t done right in the first place, twenty-seven years of that and you get a gold watch. Oh, and they don’t give gold watches any more. 27 years and you get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Now, at a product company, for example, if you’re a software developer working on a software product or even an online product like Google or Facebook, the better you make the product, the better it sells. The key point about in-house development is that once it’s “good enough,” you stop. When you’re working on products, you can keep refining and polishing and refactoring and improving, and if you work for Facebook, you can spend a whole month optimizing the Ajax name-choosing gizmo so that it’s really fast and really cool, and all that effort is worthwhile because it makes your product better than the competition. So, the number two reason product work is better than in-house work is that you get to make beautiful things.

Number three: when you’re a programmer at a software company, the work you’re doing is directly related to the way the company makes money. That means, for one thing, that management cares about you. It means you get the best benefits and the nicest offices and the best chances for promotion. A programmer is never going to rise to become CEO of Viacom, but you might well rise to become CEO of a tech company.

Anyway. After Microsoft I took a job at Viacom, because I wanted to learn something about the internet and Microsoft was willfully ignoring it in those days. But at Viacom, I was just an in-house programmer, several layers removed from anybody who did anything that made Viacom money in any way.

And I could tell that no matter how critical it was for Viacom to get this internet thing right, when it came time to assign people to desks, the in-house programmers were stuck with 3 people per cubicle in a dark part of the office with no line-of-sight to a window, and the “producers,” I don’t know what they did exactly but they were sort of the equivalent of Turtle on Entourage, the producers had their own big windowed offices overlooking the Hudson River. Once at a Viacom Christmas party I was introduced to the executive in charge of interactive strategy or something. A very lofty position. He said something vague and inept about how interactivity was very important. It was the future. It convinced me that he had no flipping idea whatsoever what it was that was happening and what the internet meant or what I did as a programmer, and he was a little bit scared of it all, but who cares, because he’s making 2 million dollars a year and I’m just a typist or “HTML operator” or whatever it is that I did, how hard can it be, his teenage daughter can do that.

Mothers who are pregnant in the summer have taller and stronger-boned babies

Mothers who are pregnant in the summer have taller and stronger-boned babies:

Those born in the late summer and early autumn are around half a centimetre taller and have wider bones than their peers born in winter and spring, an 18 year project found.

Expectant mothers lucky enough to be blooming in the hot months should get enough sun to boost their vitamin D levels just by walking around outside or even sunbathing.

63% of Americans Reject Darwin's Theory of Evolution

63% of Americans reject Darwin's theory of evolution — after careful consideration, I'm sure:

In the 150 years since he published his groundbreaking On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the 200 years since the date of his birth celebrated this week, Charles Darwin has failed to convince the majority of Americans of the validity of his theories; an August 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found that 63% of Americans say they believe that humans and other animals have either always existed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being while only 26% say that life evolved solely through processes such as natural selection. A similar Pew Research Center poll, released in August 2005, found that 64% of Americans support teaching creationism alongside evolution in the classroom.

The New Physiognomy

When phrenology fell into disrepute in the late 19th century, physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience, too. Now New Scientist looks at the new physiognomy, or how your looks betray your personality

Milton Friedman on Greed

I enjoyed this excerpt of Milton Friedman discussing greed with Phil Donahue:



(Hat tip to Dan from Madison of ChicagoBoyz, who felt it aptly summarized his feelings on the stimulus.)

America’s Diet: Too Sweet by the Spoonful

America’s diet is too sweet by the spoonful, Jane Brody says, but we shouldn't be especially worried about high-fructose corn syrup, because it isn't too terribly different from table sugar:

High-fructose corn syrup is made by converting the starch in corn to a substance that is about 90 percent fructose, a sugar that is sweeter than the sugar that fuels the body cells, called glucose, and processed differently by the body. The fructose from corn is then mixed with corn syrup, essentially pure glucose, to produce one of two mixtures called high-fructose corn syrup: 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose, which is used to sweeten soft drinks, and 42 percent fructose and 58 percent glucose, which is used in products like breads, jams and yogurt.

Neither substance is radically different from ordinary sugar, which is 50 percent fructose and 50 percent glucose. The main difference is that in high-fructose corn syrup, the two sugar molecules are chemically separated, and in sucrose they are linked. Whether this difference is meaningful to health is still debated.

Personal Rapid Transit

Two Personal Rapid Transit systems are being installed this year, one at Heathrow International Airport and one in the UAE's experimental "green" development, Masdar City:

PRT systems are supposed to combine the convenience and privacy of automobiles with the environmental benefits of mass transit. Automated electric vehicles, or pods, each designed to carry from four to six people, wait at stations throughout a city or development, like taxis waiting at taxi stands. A person or group gets in a pod and selects a destination and the vehicle drives there directly.
[...]
Although PRT systems vary, the basic design involves a network of stations connected by a track that loops past all of the stations in a system. Large networks can include many interconnected loops. When a vehicle leaves a station, it travels along an on-ramp until it merges with the main loop. When it reaches the destination station, it exits this central loop via an off-ramp. The ramps allow individual pods to stop at a station while others pods continue to travel at top speed along the main track. As a result, it can be faster than buses, which have to stop frequently. Simulations suggest that the systems could run with as little as half a second between each vehicle, but the initial systems, such as the one in Masdar City, will keep the vehicles three to four seconds apart — enough to stop a pod should the one in front of it suddenly break down. A central computer controls the traffic.

At both Heathrow and Masdar City, the vehicles will be battery-powered, driverless cars. The system at Heathrow — built by Advanced Transport Systems, based in Bristol, UK — uses cars powered by lead-acid batteries along a concrete track and guided by laser range finders, says Steve Raney, a consultant for the company. For Masdar City, a Dutch company called 2getthere has developed cars powered by more-advanced batteries made of lithium iron phosphate. The pods travel on pavement equipped with embedded magnets placed every five meters, which the vehicle uses, along with information about wheel angles and speed, to determine its location, says Robert Lohmann, the marketing manager at 2getthere. When a person selects a destination, a central computer designates a path for the vehicle, and an on-board computer makes sure the car sticks to the path. (The system is being used now to control vehicles that transport cargo in warehouses.)

Power from bumps in the road

MIT students hope to harness power from bumps in the road:

The project came about because "we wanted to figure out where energy is being wasted in a vehicle," senior Zack Anderson explains. Some hybrid cars already do a good job of recovering the energy from braking, so the team looked elsewhere, and quickly homed in on the suspension.

They began by renting a variety of different car models, outfitting the suspension with sensors to determine the energy potential, and driving around with a laptop computer recording the sensor data. Their tests showed "a significant amount of energy" was being wasted in conventional suspension systems, Anderson says, "especially for heavy vehicles."

Once they realized the possibilities, the students set about building a prototype system to harness the wasted power. Their prototype shock absorbers use a hydraulic system that forces fluid through a turbine attached to a generator. The system is controlled by an active electronic system that optimizes the damping, providing a smoother ride than conventional shocks while generating electricity to recharge the batteries or operate electrical equipment.

In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kW on a standard road -- enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.

They filed for a patent last year and formed a company, called Levant Power Corp., to develop and commercialize the product. They are currently doing a series of tests with their converted Humvee to optimize the system's efficiency. They hope their technology will help give an edge to the military vehicle company in securing the expected $40 billion contract for the new army vehicle called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV.

Michelin has already integrated similar technology into their electric wheel.

The Iceberg Secret, Revealed

The Iceberg Secret, Revealed:

You know how an iceberg is 90% underwater? Well, most software is like that too — there's a pretty user interface that takes about 10% of the work, and then 90% of the programming work is under the covers. And if you take into account the fact that about half of your time is spent fixing bugs, the UI only takes 5% of the work. And if you limit yourself to the visual part of the UI, the pixels, what you would see in PowerPoint, now we're talking less than 1%.

That's not the secret. The secret is that People Who Aren't Programmers Do Not Understand This.

This leads to some Important Corollaries, like Important Corollary Two:

If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.

Joel's advice?

Once you understand the Iceberg Secret, it's easy to work with it. Understand that any demos you do in a darkened room with a projector are going to be all about pixels. If you can, build your UI in such a way that unfinished parts look unfinished. For example, use scrawls for the icons on the toolbar until the functionality is there. As you're building your web service, you may want to consider actually leaving out features from the home page until those features are built. That way people can watch the home page go from 3 commands to 20 commands as more things get built.

Bill Gates on whether improving health in poor countries will lead to a population explosion

Bill Gates on whether improving health in poor countries will lead to a population explosion:

When the Gates Foundation started out, it emphasized "reproductive health," a.k.a. population control. (Someone once noted that you can always convince poor people that rich people have too much money and rich people that poor people have too many children.) But they soon discovered that there's a direct relationship between improving health and slowing population growth. The most effective way to get people to have fewer children is to rapidly improve the health prospects of those kids. Speed is important, because it gives parents a chance to react and have smaller families.

This implies that aid should be concentrated, to get a small group out of the Malthusian Trap, rather than to grow a larger group a bit faster than usual without improving their long-term situation.

Does a Big Economy Need Big Power Plants?

Does a Big Economy Need Big Power Plants? Amory B. Lovins says, no:

Thermal power stations burn fuel or fission atoms to boil water to turn turbines that spin generators, making 92 percent of U.S. electricity. Over a century, local combined-heat-and-power plants serving neighborhoods evolved into huge, remote, electricity-only generators serving whole regions. Electrons were dispatched hundreds of miles from central stations to dispersed users through a grid that the National Academy of Engineering ranked as its profession’s greatest achievement of the 20th century.

This evolution made sense at first, because power stations were costlier and less reliable than the grid, so by backing each other up through the grid and melding customers’ diverse loads, they could save capacity and achieve reliability. But these assumptions have reversed: central thermal power plants now cost less than the grid, and are so reliable that about 98 percent to 99 percent of all power failures originate in the grid. Thus the original architecture is raising, not lowering, costs and failure rates: cheap and reliable power must now be made at or near customers.

If central thermal power plants are so efficient and so reliable because they're big and centralized, then numerous small plants might not help the situation. Rod Adams, publisher of Atomic Insights, makes this point — and others:

He talks about how most power failures occur in the grid, not the power plant, and then advises that a microgrid of small, distributed units can be more reliable than our current model. The problem with that statement is that central station power plant reliability is partially a result of careful engineering, redundancy and professionally trained operators that would not exist if units are too small. Microgrids also have many of the same vulnerabilities of the existing grid, but they will be less carefully engineered and less carefully maintained.

Lovins likes to use the evolution of computers as an analogy, but anyone who is commenting here who has paid close attention to the computer revolution knows that reliability has not been its strongest measure of effectiveness.
[...]
As William Tucker pointed out, Lovins is not totally wrong — there are some significant advantages to right sized power plants that can be manufactured in a factory rather than stick built and that can be delivered in far less time than is typically assumed for a large central station power plant of any kind. There are at least three companies who have publicly announced plans to build nuclear power plants in unit sizes of less than 50 MWe (150 MW thermal). They are Toshiba, which has designed a 10 MWe unit that can run for 30 years without new fuel; Hyperion, which has designed a 70 MW thermal heat source useful for assisting in enhanced oil recovery, district heating and which can be connected to a 27 MWe steam turbine for power production; and NuScale, which has designed a 45 MWe power plant that can be delivered as a single 300 ton unit to a site that has water or rail access.

For my money, those smaller nuclear plants have a huge advantage over the types of systems that Lovins advocates — they produce reliable power without producing any polluting emissions at all. They also need very little in the way of fuel delivery infrastructure. In a world powered by Lovins microgrids, there will be a large demand for diesel fuel and natural gas to fuel the generators that must back-up intermittent wind and solar power. That vision also includes a whole lot of excess capacity that must sit idle for much of its existence.

Huge study boosts disappointment on multivitamins

Huge study boosts disappointment on multivitamins:

The largest study ever of multivitamin use in older women found the pills did nothing to prevent common cancers or heart disease. The eight-year study in 161,808 postmenopausal women echoes recent disappointing vitamin studies in men.

Recency Bias and Economic Crisis

Nick Silver examines the perceived risk of an economic crash based on recent memory:

I decided to set up a rudimentary statistical experiment. Suppose it's January 2008 and you're an investor — or an economist — trying to forecast the probability of a major downturn in the United States economy. We'll define such a downturn as occurring any time real GDP falls at an annualized rate of 4 percent in any one quarter, which is about equal to the decline experienced in the fourth quarter of 2008. Between 1947 and 2007, quarterly GDP fell by this amount on eleven separate occasions.

About the simplest economic model one can build is to assume that fluctuations in GDP occur randomly and follow a normal bell-curve distribution. From there, it is reasonably straightforward to calculate the percentage chance of a "crash" — a 4 percent decline in GDP — in any given quarter.

If you had done this calculation in January 2008, using data from the past sixty years — roughly since the end of World War II — you would have estimated the chance of a crash in the upcoming quarter to be 3.17 percent, implying about one crash for every eight years of economic activity. Not exactly an everyday occurrence, but certainly something you would need to be prepared for.

But suppose instead that your time horizon is shorter. You decide to look only at data from the past twenty years — or essentially since Alan Greenspan took over as chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. With that time horizon, the risk of a crash appears to be very low indeed. In fact, you would assess the probability to be just 0.04 percent — meaning one crash for every 624 years. This deceptively simple choice of assumptions, then, turns out to make a huge amount of difference. If you'd looked at data from the mid-eighties onward, instead of from World War II onward, you'd have underestimated the risk of a crash by a factor of about 80.

Moreover, if you were to conduct this "crash-risk" calculation retroactively and graph it over time, you'd identify a couple of inflection points at which the potential impact of recency bias increases. Using a twenty-year time horizon, your perceived risk of a crash would fall dramatically as of about 1995, once you started to "forget" about the oil crisis of the mid-1970s — this happens to coincide with the beginnings of the dot-com bubble. Then a few years later, as of 2001 or 2002, the risk of a crash would fall almost to zero, as the economic turmoil of the early 1980s begins to be written off by investors. This happens to coincide with the start of the housing bubble.

It doesn't necessarily take an unforeseeable combination of events, then, to precipitate a market crash like the one we're now experiencing; a short memory span would suffice.

Probabilistic CMOS

I'm going to need a deeper explanation before I truly understand "probabilistic" CMOS, but it looks to provide more computational power while using less electricity than traditional Boolean chips:

Silicon transistors become increasingly 'noisy' as they get smaller, but engineers have historically dealt with this by boosting the operating voltage to overpower the noise and ensure accurate calculations. Chips with more and smaller transistors are consequently more power-hungry.

"PCMOS is fundamentally different," Palem said. "We lower the voltage dramatically and deal with the resulting computational errors by embracing the errors and uncertainties through probabilistic logic."

They designed their proof-of-concept chip specifically for encryption:

Palem said PCMOS is ideally suited for encryption, a process that relies on generating random numbers. It's equally well-suited for graphics, but for different reasons. In a streaming video application on a cell phone, for example, it is unnecessary to conduct precise calculations. The small screen, combined with the human brain's ability to process less-than-perfect pictures, results in a case where the picture looks just as good with a calculation that's only approximately correct.

The Persistence of Ideology

Sociologist Daniel Bell declared The End of Ideology in 1960, and Francis Fukuyama famously declared The End of History in 1989, after the fall of Communism, and yet, Theodore Dalrymple notes, ideology persists:

Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.

If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be.

Rage can be a powerful reward in itself:

Feminists continued to see every human problem as a manifestation of patriarchy, civil rights activists as a manifestation of racism, homosexual-rights activists as a manifestation of homophobia, anti-globalists as a manifestation of globalization, and radical libertarians as a manifestation of state regulation.

How delightful to have a key to all the miseries, both personal and societal, and to know personal happiness through the single-minded pursuit of an end for the whole of humanity! At all costs, one must keep at bay the realization that came early in life to John Stuart Mill, as he described it in his Autobiography. He asked himself:

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

This is the question that all ideologists fear, and it explains why reform, far from delighting them, only increases their anxiety and rage. It also explains why traditional religious belief is not an ideology in the sense in which I am using the term, for unlike ideology, it explicitly recognizes the limitations of earthly existence, what we can expect of it, and what we can do by our own unaided efforts. Some ideologies have the flavor of religion; but the absolute certainty of, say, the Anabaptists of Münster, or of today’s Islamists, is ultimately irreligious, since they claimed or claim to know in the very last detail what God requires of us.

As with most Dalrymple pieces, you should read the whole thing.

Los Angeles has the highest population density

Los Angeles has the highest population density in the nation:

Yes, that was the word “highest,” not a smudge on your monitor. At 7,068 people per square mile, Los Angeles is considerably denser than New York-Newark, which ranks fourth at 5,309 people per square mile (behind San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose as well as Los Angeles). How could this be?

It is true that Los Angeles’s downtown disappoints, especially when compared with such thriving urban cores as Midtown Manhattan, Downtown San Francisco, or Chicago’s Loop. [...] However, despite the fact that Los Angeles’s center is comparatively low-density, its peripheral areas are considerably denser than the suburbs of other cities.

Los Angeles’s homes sit on very small lots, in part due to the difficulty of providing water infrastructure to new developments. (Other southwestern cities share this trait.) Moreover, Los Angeles has a large immigrant population that lives at very high densities. The area also has very few vacant lots.

So if the fundamental characteristic of sprawl is low density, Los Angeles is the least-sprawling city in the nation. (The least dense among the 40 largest metro areas is Atlanta.)

I have to agree with this comment that density figures depend greatly on scale:

Comparing LA density to the entirety of the New York metro area is disingenious. The New York metro has a proper center — NYC — with a density of of 27000/sq mi — and hence proper proper public transport. LA doesn’t. Of course if you include the Hamptons and bucolic Litchfield, Connecticut, into your statistics for New York, you can prove anything.

Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

In exploring the art of Making Wrong Code Look Wrong, Joel Spolsky looks at what Hungarian notation originally meant:

It looked like Hungarian, and Simonyi was from Hungary, thus the name. In Simonyi’s version of Hungarian notation, every variable was prefixed with a lower case tag that indicated the kind of thing that the variable contained [ e.g. rwMax].

I’m using the word kind on purpose, there, because Simonyi mistakenly used the word type in his paper, and generations of programmers misunderstood what he meant.

If you read Simonyi’s paper closely, what he was getting at was the same kind of naming convention as I used in my example above where we decided that us meant “unsafe string” and s meant “safe string.” They’re both of type string. The compiler won’t help you if you assign one to the other and Intellisense won’t tell you bupkis. But they are semantically different; they need to be interpreted differently and treated differently and some kind of conversion function will need to be called if you assign one to the other or you will have a runtime bug. If you’re lucky.

Simonyi’s original concept for Hungarian notation was called, inside Microsoft, Apps Hungarian, because it was used in the Applications Division, to wit, Word and Excel. In Excel’s source code you see a lot of rw and col and when you see those you know that they refer to rows and columns. Yep, they’re both integers, but it never makes sense to assign between them. In Word, I'm told, you see a lot of xl and xw, where xl means “horizontal coordinates relative to the layout” and xw means “horizontal coordinates relative to the window.” Both ints. Not interchangeable. In both apps you see a lot of cb meaning “count of bytes.” Yep, it’s an int again, but you know so much more about it just by looking at the variable name. It’s a count of bytes: a buffer size. And if you see xl = cb, well, blow the Bad Code Whistle, that is obviously wrong code, because even though xl and cb are both integers, it’s completely crazy to set a horizontal offset in pixels to a count of bytes.
[...]
But then something kind of wrong happened.

The dark side took over Hungarian Notation.

Nobody seems to know why or how, but it appears that the documentation writers on the Windows team inadvertently invented what came to be known as Systems Hungarian.

Somebody, somewhere, read Simonyi’s paper, where he used the word “type,” and thought he meant type, like class, like in a type system, like the type checking that the compiler does. He did not. He explained very carefully exactly what he meant by the word “type,” but it didn’t help. The damage was done.

Apps Hungarian had very useful, meaningful prefixes like “ix” to mean an index into an array, “c” to mean a count, “d” to mean the difference between two numbers (for example “dx” meant “width”), and so forth.

Systems Hungarian had far less useful prefixes like “l” for long and “ul” for “unsigned long” and “dw” for double word, which is, actually, uh, an unsigned long. In Systems Hungarian, the only thing that the prefix told you was the actual data type of the variable.

This was a subtle but complete misunderstanding of Simonyi’s intention and practice, and it just goes to show you that if you write convoluted, dense academic prose nobody will understand it and your ideas will be misinterpreted and then the misinterpreted ideas will be ridiculed even when they weren’t your ideas.

Grandma's moistening kettle may have held off flu

Grandma's moistening kettle may have held off flu:

The correlation with flu and low humidity is important because in cold winter weather, when flu is most common, even a high relative humidity reading may indicate little actual moisture in the air, and the less moisture there is, the happier the flu virus seems to be.

Shaman and co-author Melvin Kohn, an epidemiologist with the Oregon Department of Health Services, reanalyzed data from a study published in 2007 in the journal PLoS Pathogens by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. That report found there were more flu cases when it was colder and drier.

The Oregon researchers said relative humidity could only explain about 12 percent of the variability of influenza virus transmission and 36 percent of virus survival in the 2007 study.

In their new analysis, Shaman and Kohn said using absolute humidity explains 50 percent of influenza transmission and 90 percent of virus survival.

Warm air "holds" more water at the same relative humidity.

Marijuana Cuts Lung Cancer Tumor Growth In Half

Marijuana cuts lung cancer tumor growth in half, according to Harvard researchers:

In the present study, the researchers first demonstrated that two different lung cancer cell lines as well as patient lung tumor samples express [cannabinoid receptors] CB1 and CB2, and that non-toxic doses of THC[the active ingredient in marijuana] inhibited growth and spread in the cell lines. "When the cells are pretreated with THC, they have less EGFR stimulated invasion as measured by various in-vitro assays," Preet said.

Then, for three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression, Preet says.

Although the researchers do not know why THC inhibits tumor growth, they say the substance could be activating molecules that arrest the cell cycle. They speculate that THC may also interfere with angiogenesis and vascularization, which promotes cancer growth.

Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live

Darwinism must die so that evolution may live, proclaims Carl Safina:

Equating evolution with Charles Darwin ignores 150 years of discoveries, including most of what scientists understand about evolution. Such as: Gregor Mendel’s patterns of heredity (which gave Darwin’s idea of natural selection a mechanism — genetics — by which it could work); the discovery of DNA (which gave genetics a mechanism and lets us see evolutionary lineages); developmental biology (which gives DNA a mechanism); studies documenting evolution in nature (which converted the hypothetical to observable fact); evolution’s role in medicine and disease (bringing immediate relevance to the topic); and more.
[...]
Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory.” It’s as if, since 1860, scientists have just ditto-headed Darwin rather than challenging and testing his ideas, or adding vast new knowledge.
[...]
Charles Darwin didn’t invent a belief system. He had an idea, not an ideology. The idea spawned a discipline, not disciples. He spent 20-plus years amassing and assessing the evidence and implications of similar, yet differing, creatures separated in time (fossils) or in space (islands). That’s science.

That’s why Darwin must go.

Keep Your Identity Small

Keep your identity small, Paul Graham advises, to avoid "religious wars":

Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.

But this isn't true. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.

I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.

His conclusion:

The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Is the Tipping Point Toast? Duncan Watts' research suggests it should be:

He programmed a group of 10,000 people, all governed by a few simple interpersonal rules. Each was able to communicate with anyone nearby. With every contact, each had a small probability of "infecting" another. And each person also paid attention to what was happening around him: If lots of other people were adopting a trend, he would be more likely to join, and vice versa. The "people" in the virtual society had varying amounts of sociability — some were more connected than others. Watts designated the top 10% most-connected as Influentials; they could affect four times as many people as the average Joe. In essence, it was a virtual society run — in a very crude fashion — according to the rules laid out by thinkers like Gladwell and Keller.

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend — not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one — and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

He also replicated Milgram's famous six degrees of separation experiment, but he did not get the same results: hubs weren't crucial.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Kindle 2

Amazon has, as predicted, announced the Kindle 2; it will be released February 24.

It looks quite a bit sleeker, and they're emphasizing that it's just one-third of an inch thick. It also turns pages faster and displays images in 16 shades of gray, and the battery lasts longer.

I'm not sure how I feel about the text-to-speech capability. If you watch the demonstration video, it's still quite Speak & Spell.

Iran with nukes is not the end of the world

Mark Safranski discusses ten questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett about America and the world after Bush, and Barnett notes that Iran with nukes is not the end of the world:

We know how to deal with revolutionary powers who talk big; we did it before with the USSR and the PRC. The Shia bomb isn’t a new animal, so please, let’s avoid having our entire foreign policy held hostage to its threat. Instead, simply extend our nuclear umbrella to Israel and let Tehran know in no uncertain terms that if they make the slightest move in that direction — either directly or through proxies — that we will liquidate them completely and there’ll be no Iran on the far side of that stupid move, meaning we will strike pre-emptively on the side of caution. We should be very clear here: America can and will do this. We’ve done in the past and we got away with it and we can do it all over again and get away with it in the same manner. Iran wants to be in the “big boy” club? Well . . . that’s the rule-set they’ll encounter.

Finally, as for nuclear disarmament, that’s just nonsense. Nukes are good. They killed great-power war. Going to zero is plain stupid. It’d make the first idiot dictator with a bomb the equivalent of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. I see no reason whatsoever to go down that naïve and utopian path. That stuff is just peddled by old men who feel guilty about the past. Let them pass on in peace, but please, don’t endanger this world and its future by placating such foolishness.

47 speed bicycles, AK brand

Gun nuts say, do not mention firearms in the title line of any Craigslist post, because the "hoplophobes" will delete your post immediately:

Even though Craigslist does not allows firearms and ammunition advertisements, it is still beneficial to check the Sporting Goods section. In my my local Craigslist there are "47 speed bicycles, AK brand", and similar items regularly for sale.

Ward Three Morality

David Brooks laments that the rich are beginning to run afoul of Ward Three Morality:

The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.

But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

For those who don’t know, Ward Three is a section of Northwest Washington, D.C., where many Democratic staffers, regulators, journalists, lawyers, Obama aides and senior civil servants live. Thanks to recent and coming bailouts and interventions, the people in Ward Three run the banks and many major industries. Through this power, they get to insert themselves into the intricacies of upscale life, influencing when private jets can be flown, when friends can lend each other their limousines and at what golf resorts corporate learning retreats can be held.

The good news for rich people is that people in this neighborhood are very nice and cerebral. On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in. They live in modest homes with recently renovated kitchens and Nordic Track machines crammed into the kids’ play areas downstairs (for some reason, people in Ward Three are only interested in toning the muscles in the lower halves of their bodies).

Nonetheless, many people in Ward Three do have certain resentments toward those with means, which those of you in the decamillionaire-to-billionaire wealth brackets should be aware of.

In the first place, many people in Ward Three suffer from Sublimated Liquidity Rage. As lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants, they make decent salaries, but 60 percent of their disposable income goes to private school tuition and study abroad trips. They have little left over to spend on themselves, which generates deep and unacknowledged self-pity.

Second, they suffer from what has been called Status-Income Disequilibrium. At work they are flattered and feared. But they still have to go home and clean out the gutters because they can’t afford full-time household help.

Third, they suffer the status rivalries endemic to the upper-middle class. As law school grads, they resent B-school grads. As Washingtonians, they resent New Yorkers. As policy wonks, they resent people with good bone structure.

In short, people in Ward Three disdain three things: cleavage, hunting and dumb people who are richer than they are. Rich people have to learn to adapt to the new power structure if they hope to survive.

Wal-Mart Tests New Hybrid Trucks, Alternative Fuels

Wal-Mart is testing two new hybrid trucks and two new alternative-fuel trucks:

• A full-propulsion Arvin Meritor hybrid that will initially operate in the Detroit area. This dual-mode diesel-electric hybrid is believed to be the first vehicle of its type;


• Fifteen trucks operating in Buckeye, Ariz. distribution center near Phoenix, will be converted to run on Reclaimed Grease FuelTM, made with the waste brown cooking grease from Walmart stores. In addition, the remaining trucks located in the Buckeye distribution center will operate on an 80/20 blend of biodiesel made of reclaimed yellow waste grease;


• Five Peterbilt Model 386 heavy duty hybrid trucks with diesel-electric hybrid power systems developed by Eaton Corporation and PACCAR, that will be based in Dallas, Houston, Apple Valley, Calif., Atlanta and the Washington/Baltimore regions and;


• Four Peterbilt Model 386 trucks and one yard truck, which operates only on the distribution center property, will operate on liquid natural gas. These trucks are part of a partnership with the Mojave Air Quality Management District and will operate out of the distribution center in Southern California.

I'm not sure how they're measuring it, but they plan on doubling fleet efficiency by 2015; they've already improved it 25 percent from their 2005 baseline.

Here comes the e-book revolution

Here comes the e-book revolution, Mike Elgan says:

At what temperature do electronic books catch fire? We're going to find out sometime this year. E-book sales are about to ignite.

On Monday, Amazon.com is expected to unveil a new version of its Kindle reader. It will probably be a lot better and a little cheaper than the first version. But the real news already broke this week: A company spokesman announced that Amazon plans to offer Kindle books on cell phones.

This news countered Google's announcement that the 1.5 million public domain books available on its Google Book Search offering will soon be available (free, of course) via a new cell phone application.

He lists six trends driving this growth, but I have to wonder about his very first trend:

1. The economy. The economy is in the tank, and people are looking to cut costs any way they can. An Amazon Kindle pays for itself after the purchase of 20 or 30 books, then starts paying dividends.

In a bad economy, people are going to make a big up-front expenditure that will pay back after they buy 20 to 30 books?

I found this analysis amusing:

The blog did the math and determined that the New York Times could buy every single subscriber an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it would still cost them half as much as it will cost them to send paper newspapers for just one year.

The Great College Hoax

Kathy Kristof describes The Great College Hoax "that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle":

The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.

College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers.

Like many good cons, this one contains a kernel of truth. Census figures show that college grads earn an average of $57,500 a year, which is 82% more than the $31,600 high school alumni make. Multiply the $25,900 difference by the 40 years the average person works and, sure enough, it comes to a tad over $1 million.

But anybody who has gotten a passing grade in statistics knows what's wrong with this line of argument. A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn't have increased his income.

All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.

Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one--even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don't pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn't include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.

"I call it the million-dollar misunderstanding," says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, of the prevailing propaganda.

Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt.

"There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud," Sander says. "There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path."

J. B. S. Haldane

J. B. S. Haldane was quite a character:

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, FRS [1892-1964] was one of the three main founders of modern population genetics, along with Sir Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright.

In his life he played many parts: biochemist, physiologist, geneticist, soldier, popularizer of science, and spy. On occasion, he was even a fictional character.

Son of Britain’s most prominent physiologist, (John Scott Haldane, another eccentric polymath) he worked in his father’s lab by age 8 and was already acting as a human guinea pig. He attended the Dragon School, Eton (which he hated) and Oxford, which he loved. He mastered Latin, Greek, French and German and received a double first in mathematics and classics, although his interest was already turning to science. He was fascinated by the newly rediscovered Mendelian theory of genetics and made a significant discovery before graduation – genetic linkage, which occurs when different alleles are inherited jointly because of their proximity on the same chromosome. He discovered this by analyzing his younger sister Naomi’s guinea-pig colony. That early work was interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an officer of the Black Watch – a Scottish regiment known by the Germans as the “Ladies from Hell”, because of their kilted ferocity. JBS Haldane in no way detracted from the regiment’s reputation: he was often in combat and actually enjoyed it. In fact he reveled in killing the enemy, personally delivering bombs behind enemy lines. His commander called him the “bravest and dirtiest officer in my Army.”

After service in France and Iraq, with occasional time outs for recovery from wounds and experiments in which his father exposed him to chlorine gas in order to test new gas masks, he resumed his research work, first as a fellow at Oxford and then accepting a Readership in Biochemistry at Cambridge where he taught until 1932. During that time at Cambridge he did most of his systematic work on evolutionary genetics. He was the first to estimate the mutation rate of a human gene and introduced the concept of genetic load, the net effect of the substandard genes in a population.

In 1927, he showed that the chance of fixation – reaching 100% frequency – of a single copy of an advantageous allele with advantage s is 2s. This key insight explains why a very limited amount of hybridization with another species is bound to result in the acquisition of most of their favorable alleles, and also plays a role in our analysis of the recent acceleration of human evolution. The work of this period is summed up in his classic The Causes of Evolution.

Of course helping to found the central theory of biology could not fully occupy his time. He made major contributions to enzyme chemistry. He acquired a wife, not without some trouble and strife, since she (Charlotte Burghes) was inconveniently married to someone else at the time. He was the first to suggest the possibility of ‘test-tube babies’ and the currently fashionable ‘hydrogen economy’. His famous essay “On Being the Right Size” elegantly shows how size itself (through the square-cube law) determines fundamental biological features.

His speculative writings such as Daedalus inspired works of science fiction, in particular Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. He even shows up as the villain: Weston, in C. S. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, is thought to be modeled (in part) on Haldane.

Keep reading to learn about his time in the Communist Party.

Flu may not have killed most in 1918 pandemic

Flu may not have killed most in 1918 pandemic:

Keith Klugman of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues looked at what information is available about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed anywhere between 50 million and 100 million people globally in the space of about 18 months.

Some research has shown that on average it took a week to 11 days for people to die -- which fits in more with the known pattern of a bacterial infection than a viral infection, Klugman's group wrote in a letter to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

"We observed a similar 10-day median time to death among soldiers dying of influenza in 1918," they wrote.

People with influenza often get what is known as a "superinfection" with a bacterial agent. In 1918 it appears to have been Streptococcus pneumoniae.
"Neither antimicrobial drugs nor serum therapy was available for treatment in 1918," Klugman's team wrote.

Now there are also vaccines that protect against many different strains of S. pneumoniae, which cause infections from pneumonia to meningitis.

The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer

I suppose I first learned about Oppenheimer — beyond that he was the "father of the bomb" — a few years back, when I read E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation.

Born into a wealthy family, he was a frail but precocious boy, pampered and socially awkward, who grew up to be an arrogant and even cruel young man — but somehow he ended up running the Manhattan Project and running it well.

The latest episode of PBS's American Experience, The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer, gives an extremely sympathetic portrayal of his life and the infamous loss of his security clearance years after the war.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for Oppenheimer, but I'm amazed how shocked — shocked! — we're supposed to be that the military would not trust a man who almost married one (crazy) Communist, did marry another (crazy) Communist, had a brother who was a Communist, had good friends who were Communists, including one who asked him to pass along secrets, etc., especially after the Communists had already developed an atomic bomb using technical secrets stolen from Americans.

How dare they take away his security clearance!?

Can't we admit that both sides were reasonable? Oppenheimer knew he wasn't handing over atomic secrets, but the military had good reason to believe he might?

Anyway, watch the whole thing yourself online.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

Population Models

On the site for their new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending share some "deleted scenes" that didn't make it into the book, including this piece, which examines some simple population models and demonstrates an interesting result when you add a lethal disease — malaria, in this example — into the mix:

There is more than half again as many resources per person now than there was before malaria appeared. What this means on the ground is that people do not have to work very hard to get enough to eat, that there is fruit on the trees for plucking, and that there are not great labor demands on anyone.

Gregory Clark (Clark 2007) points out that the medieval Englishman had a higher standard than a medieval Japanese because there was much more sewage and filth in England and so a heavier burden of disease. This extra disease translated, as in our malaria example, to a lower population density and higher standard of living.

What are the social consequences of this new disease for our population? The most important immediate consequence is that there are plentiful resources for everyone and so, following the nature of the creature, males withdraw from subsistence work as they find that they can simply parasitize women for food. In much of central Africa the result is societies in which men don’t do anything very useful and women provision themselves, their children, and the men. The euphemism in economics for this kind of society is “female farming system.” Left free of the demands of subsistence we expect the men will start hanging out together, perhaps even all moving into a village men’s house (not so common in Africa). This may soon lead to local and regional raiding and warfare and an entrenched culture of local violence.

The warfare itself may cause enough excess death that a female farming system is sustainable even in the absence of a killer disease. Highland New Guinea, for example, seems to have had a classical cad system for millennia or more. (Ethnographic shorthand for societies where males put a lot of effort into competition with other males is that they are cad societies as opposed to dad societies where male effort is directed to provisioning a male’s own family.) Of course there are other contributing factors here like the extremely broken terrain that makes the establishment of a larger polity with an effective constabulary difficult or impossible.

Japan’s Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson

Japan’s big-works stimulus is a lesson — in how to spend money with very little return:

The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.

And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a two-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children’s art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing Beluga whales.

Nor is this remote port in western Japan unusual. Japan’s rural areas have been paved over and filled in with roads, dams and other big infrastructure projects, the legacy of trillions of dollars spent to lift the economy from a severe downturn caused by the bursting of a real estate bubble in the late 1980s. During those nearly two decades, Japan accumulated the largest public debt in the developed world — totaling 180 percent of its $5.5 trillion economy — while failing to generate a convincing recovery.

Now, as the Obama administration embarks on a similar path, proposing to spend more than $820 billion to stimulate the sagging American economy, many economists are taking a fresh look at Japan’s troubled experience.

I shudder to think that this is not obvious to everyone:

“It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again,” said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. “One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future.”

People don't like to accept the short-term pain of letting some businesses fail:

In the end, say economists, it was not public works but an expensive cleanup of the debt-ridden banking system, combined with growing exports to China and the United States, that brought a close to Japan’s Lost Decade. This has led many to conclude that spending did little more than sink Japan deeply into debt, leaving an enormous tax burden for future generations.

Some economists — those popular with politicians, I suppose — claim that Japan's stimulus would have worked if they'd just spent more. Others recognize the whole thing as a waste:

Dr. Ihori of the University of Tokyo did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.

Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park

Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park:

For many expatriate workers in Dubai it was the ultimate symbol of their tax-free wealth: a luxurious car that few could have afforded on the money they earned at home.

Now, faced with crippling debts as a result of their high living and Dubai’s fading fortunes, many expatriates are abandoning their cars at the airport and fleeing home rather than risk jail for defaulting on loans.

Police have found more than 3,000 cars outside Dubai’s international airport in recent months. Most of the cars — four-wheel drives, saloons and “a few” Mercedes — had keys left in the ignition.

Some had used-to-the-limit credit cards in the glove box. Others had notes of apology attached to the windscreen.

“Every day we find more and more cars,” said one senior airport security official, who did not want to be named. “Christmas was the worst – we found more than two dozen on a single day.”

When the market collapsed and the emirate’s once-booming economy started to slow down, many expatriates were left owning several homes and unable to pay the mortgages without credit.

“There were a lot of people living the high life, investing in real estate and a lifestyle they couldn’t afford,” one senior banker said.

Under Sharia, which prevails in Dubai, the punishment for defaulting on a debt is severe. Bouncing a check, for example, is punishable with jail. Those who flee the emirate are known as skips.

Electric Motorcycle Promises 150 MPH

Electric Motorcycle Promises 150 MPH:

Mission Motors unveiled the bike, dubbed Mission One, at the TED conference and said it will begin selling them next year for $69,000 apiece. Although several electric motorcycles have been announced in recent weeks, Mission Motors sticks out because its 12 employees have worked for Tesla, Ducati North America and Intel, and the bike they're building could set a new benchmark for EVs of all kinds.

"As a motorcycle enthusiast and engineer, I knew I could combine my passion for motorcycles with my passion for innovation and create a motorcycle that truly sets a new standard in the perception of electric vehicles," company founder and CEO Forrest North said at the Mission One's launch.

The prototype, wearing bodywork designed by Yves Behar, was designed entirely in-house by Mission Motors. Power comes from a 3-phase AC induction motor and a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery the company claims delivers 150 miles and recharges in just two hours at 240 volts. That climbs to eight hours at 120 volts.

Top-shelf hardware includes Ohlins suspension at both ends, four-piston Brembo brakes and Marchesini forged wheels. The components — and the claimed 150 horsepower — put the bike on par with hardcore sportbikes like the Ducati 1198. That's exactly what North had in mind.

"With Mission One, we're writing the next chapter in motorcycle design, delivering a new riding experience without sacrificing performance or design in a zero emissions vehicle," he said in a statement.

I don't see why the makers of an electric vehicle would want to emphasize top speed, when their real strength is off-the-line acceleration.

Terrorists Love Action Movies

From reading Christopher Dickey's Securing the City, Dwight Garners learned the comical and scary degree to which terrorists (and would-be terrorists) have been in thrall to American action movies:

The scenes of Godzilla stomping across New York City, crushing everything in its path, were mesmerizing and inspiring. One captured terrorist later warned of an attack against “the bridge in the Godzilla movie.” Interrogators had to go rent Mr. Emmerich’s film to find out what he meant: the Brooklyn Bridge.
[...]
Richard Reid, the failed shoe bomber, used the pseudonym Van Damme, after the B-grade martial arts star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Another terrorist was obsessed with “Air Force One,” the Harrison Ford president-in-peril film.

Weirdest of all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the pudgy 9/11 plotter who will be forever remembered for his disheveled mug shot — was supposedly an amusing guy when he attended an agricultural state university in North Carolina. His nickname? “B’lushi.”

"Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?"

"Austrian" economist Robert Murphy answers the question, "Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?"

Now, in truth, someone doesn't have to have a better suggestion in order to point out that a recommended strategy will exacerbate the situation. If an allergic man has been stung by a bee, I don't know what to do except rush him to the hospital and maybe scour the cupboards looking for Benadryl. But I'm pretty sure drawing blood from his leg, in order to inject it into his arm and thus "stimulate his immune system," is a bad idea on numerous accounts — not least of which, is that I'm pretty sure an allergic reaction means your immune system needs to calm down. But the point is, if a bunch of guys hold the man down — he has to be forced to endure the procedure for his own good, don't you know — I feel perfectly qualified in yelling, "Stop!"

He goes on to give concrete policy recommendation that are, of course, politically impossible.

Blowback Revisited

In Blowback Revisited, William Lind notes that our soldiers overseas are being introduced to statelessness and how a place works when the state disappears:

To the large majority of American and European soldiers, this is a lesson in horror. They return home thankful they live in a place where the state endures. The last thing they want is to see their native country turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan.

But a minority will learn a different lesson. They will see statelessness as a field of opportunity where people who are clever and ruthless can rise fast and far. They look upon themselves as that kind of people. They will also have learned it is possible to fight the state, and how to do so. The effectiveness of IEDs is part of that lesson; so are the power and rewards that come to members of militias and gangs. In their own minds, and perhaps in reality, they will have found a new world in which they can hope to thrive.

There is a parallel here with what the men who fought in the trenches on the Western Front in World War I learned. For most, it was the worst time in their lives. Their experience is captured by All Quiet on the Western Front. But a minority found it the best time of their lives. Their book is Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. It was these men, looking to re-create that tremendous experience, who made up the Brownshirts of the S. A. Their very name, Storm Troopers, originated in what they had done during the war. They came home determined to create a different Germany, and they did.

That's more than a little unfair to Jünger, by the way. He was conservative and militarist and opposed to the Nazis.

Why do we normalize brain size by body weight?

On the site for their new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending share some "deleted scenes" that didn't make it into the book, including this piece, which asks, Why do we normalize brain size by body weight?

Like other early humans, Neanderthals were relatively uncreative; their tools changed very slowly and they show no signs of art, symbolism, or trade. Their brains were large and had grown larger over time, in parallel with humans in Africa, but we really have no idea what they did with them. Since brains are metabolically expensive, natural selection wouldn't have favored an increase in brain size unless it increased fitness, but we don't know what function that those big brains served. Usually people explain that those big brains are not as impressive as they seem, since the brain-to-body weight ratio is what’s really important, and Neanderthals were heavier than modern humans of the same height.

You may wonder why we normalize brain size by body weight. We wonder as well.

Among less intelligent creatures, such as amphibians and reptiles, most of the brain is busy dealing with a flood of sensory data. You’d expect that brain size would have to increase with body size in some way in order to keep up. If you assume that the key is how much surface the animal has, in order to monitor what’s causing that nagging itch and control all the muscles needed for movement, brain size should scale as the 2/3rds power of weight. If an animal has a brain that’s bigger than predicted by that 2/3rds power scaling law, then maybe it’s smarter than average. That argument works reasonable well for a wide range of species, but it can’t make sense for animals with big brains. In particular it can’t make sense for primates, since in that case we know that most of the brain is used for purposes other than muscle control and immediate reaction to sensation. Look at this way - if dividing brain volume by weight is a valid approach, Nero Wolfe must be really, really stupid.

Fictional detective Nero Wolfe is frequently described by Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the stories, as weighing "a seventh of a ton" (about 286 pounds or 130 kg).

Anyway, they go on to address the larger problem of Neanderthal intelligence:

We think that Neanderthal brains really were large, definitely larger than those of people today. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they were smarter, at least not as a culture. The archaeological record certainly indicates that they were not, since their material culture was definitely simpler than that of their successors. In fact, they may have been relatively unintelligent, even with their big brains. Although brain size certainly is correlated with intelligence in modern humans, it is not the only factor that affects intelligence. By the way, you may have read somewhere (The Mismeasure of Man) that brain volume has no relationship to intelligence, but that’s just a lie.

One paradoxical possibility is that Neanderthals lacked complex language and so had to be smart as individuals in order to learn their culture and technology, while that same lack severely limited their societal achievements. Complex language of the type we see in modern humans makes learning a lot easier: without it, learning to create even Mousterian tools may have been difficult. In that case, individuals would have to repeatedly re-invent the wheel (so to speak) while there would have been little societal progress.

It could also be that Neanderthal brains were less powerful than you’d expect because there just weren’t enough Neanderthals. That may sound obscure, but bear with us. The problem is that evolution is less efficient in small populations, in the same way that any statistical survey – polls, for example -becomes less accurate with fewer samples. Natural selection is pretty good at eliminating a defective gene when its disadvantage is significantly great than the inverse of the population size. When the disadvantage is smaller than that, the defective gene has a reasonable probability of reaching high frequency by drift. It can even become universal in that population. This tendency is insignificant in large populations, but it can lead to problems in small ones, as more and more slightly deleterious mutations accumulate. There is a countervailing tendency — the generation of favorable mutations, which are likely to spread — but that tendency becomes weaker and weaker as the population becomes smaller. Thus, over the long term, a population that is too small is likely to go extinct for purely genetic reasons, if some other disaster doesn’t strike first. This is an issue that concerns conservationists who are trying to maintain endangered species such as the whooping crane or Florida panther.

IBM to build world’s first national smart utility grid

IBM to build world’s first national smart utility grid — in Malta:

As with other island states, power and water are intricately linked on Malta. All of the archipelago’s electricity is generated from imported fuel oil while the country depends on energy-intensive desalinization plants for half its water supply. Meanwhile, rising sea levels threaten its underground freshwater supplies.

“About 55% of the cost of water on Malta is related to electricity — it’s a pretty staggering amount,” Guido Bartels, general manager of IBM’s Global Energy & Utilities Industry division, told Green Wombat from Malta on Tuesday.

So how can digitizing the grid help? IBM and its partners will replace Malta’s 250,000 utility meters with interactive versions that will allow Malta’s electric utility, Enemalta, to monitor electricity use in real-time and set variable rates that reward customers that cut their power consumption. As part of the $91 million (€70 million) project, a sensor network will be deployed on the grid — along transmission lines, substations and other infrastructure — to provide information that will let the utility more efficiently manage electricity distribution and detect potential problems. IBM will provide the software that will aggregate and analyze all that data so Enemalta can identify opportunities to reduce costs — and emissions from Malta’s carbon-intensive power plants. (For an excellent primer on smart grids, see Earth2Tech editor Katie Fehrenbacher’s recent story.)

A sensor network will also be installed on the water system for Malta’s Water Services Corporation. “They’ll indicate where there is water leakage and provide better information about the water network,” says Robert Aguilera, IBM’s lead executive for the Malta project, which is set to be completed in 2012. “The information that will be collected by the system will allow the government to make decisions o