Isegoria

Should we be surprised that the descendents of Vikings have a high pain tolerance? From Stoic Redheads:

Redheads have long been portrayed in literature and art as strong-willed and fiery. Now there may be a scientific explanation for these traits. The key, according to researchers at McGill University in Montreal, is a gene that is linked both to red hair coloring and to higher levels of pain tolerance. It has been known since the mid-1990′s that mutations of the MC1R gene are responsible for hair color — and fair skin and freckles — in about 70 percent of redheads.

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When animals and humans experience pain, their brains release natural opiates similar to morphine. In most cases, however, the MC1R gene produces a protein that interferes with the efficacy of those substances as well as of artificial painkillers. What Mogil found is that the variant of MC1R that causes red hair also appears to allow these opiates to work unimpeded. As a result, redheads can withstand up to 25 percent more pain than their blond and brunet peers do before saying ‘stop.’

According to Alan Murray, Hedge Funds Are New Sheriffs of Boardroom:

Hedge funds are the counterweight. While Sarbanes-Oxley forced companies to play defense, hedge funds force them to play offense. Any risk-averse company that wants to sit on a big pile of cash waiting for a rainy day is likely to find itself under quick attack from these fast-moving pools of money that will come in, buy up stock, and agitate for change. The hedge funds have become the new sheriffs of the boardroom. But they are less concerned with legal processes and accounting procedures and more with returns to shareholders.

Jane Galt cites James Hamilton in Good as gold:

Under a pure gold standard, the government would stand ready to trade dollars for gold at a fixed rate. Under such a monetary rule, it seems the dollar is ‘as good as gold.’

Except that it really isn’t — the dollar is only as good as the government’s credibility to stick with the standard. If a government can go on a gold standard, it can go off, and historically countries have done exactly that all the time. The fact that speculators know this means that any currency adhering to a gold standard (or, in more modern times, a fixed exchange rate) may be subject to a speculative attack.

Jane Galt explains her fiscal philosophy in Why should you deprive yourself today for the benefit of tomorrow?:

Don’t buy a car, or a house, because you like what people will think of you for owning it. Do you really care about the opinions of people who judge you based on your material possessions?

Why, yes, you do. We all do; it is in the nature of primates to seek status. But status-hunting via material goods is a zero-sum game, and unless you’re Bill Gates, the odds are you’re going to lose. With a little mental discipline (okay, a lot) you can stop playing that game, and force yourself to concentrate on the things that really give you joy, rather than simply creating a transitory gleam of envy in someone else’s eye.

What are the things that give me joy? Family. Friends. Travel. Writing. Reading. My dog. Eating good food. Being healthy. So I’ve rearranged my budget to emphasize those priorities — a gym membership, expensive dog food to cater to my dog’s allergies, trips hither and yon, giving parties, buying good food to cook. But I’ve also recognized that many of these things don’t cost me money, and that by cutting out the tempting inessentials, I have more time and energy to devote to the things I care about, as well as the peace of mind that comes from putting money in the bank.

Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month admits that his seminal software engineering book is a bit like the Bible — Quoted Often, Followed Rarely:

Some people have called the book the ‘bible of software engineering.’ I would agree with that in one respect: that is, everybody quotes it, some people read it, and a few people go by it.

The energy industry has found a new way to both Cut Emissions and Pump More Oil:

The energy industry has found a new way to dispose of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: pump it back into the underground oil reservoirs from whence much of it came.

Five million tons of CO2 has been successfully pumped underground into the Weyburn oil field in a pilot project in Saskatchewan, Canada.

The CO2 is piped from the Great Plains Synfuels Plant, a giant ‘gasification’ plant near Beulah, North Dakota.

Not only does the project dispose of the nasty CO2, the pressure from the gas helps to extract more oil. The field’s oil-recovery rate has been doubled, and its life extended for another 20 years, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Price of Motherhood asks, Ready to have a baby? You’ll earn 10 percent more if you wait a year:

On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she’ll earn higher wages — about 3 percent higher — for the rest of her life; the rest is because she’ll work longer hours. For college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet — for these women, the wage hike is not 3 percent, but 4.7 percent.

So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you’re giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There’s an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth — right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s. Once you’re in your 30s, there’s far less reward for continued delay. Surprisingly, it appears that none of these effects are mitigated by the passage of family-leave laws.

It’s Miller’s clever methodology that makes this all so interesting:

So, professor Miller did something very clever. Instead of comparing random 24-year-old mothers with random 25-year-old mothers, she compared 24-year-old mothers with 25-year-old mothers who had miscarried at 24. So, she had two groups of women, all of whom made the same choices regarding pregnancy, but some of whom had their first children delayed by an act of chance. That’s a fairer comparison — and it confirmed the 10 percent earnings hit.

But the comparison was still imperfect. Maybe miscarriages and high wages have a common cause — a propensity for risk-taking, for example. Miller noted that it appears that most miscarriages are not caused by risky behavior. Then she also performed the statistical equivalent of a second experiment. She compared 25-year-old mothers with those 24-year-old mothers who conceived while using birth control. Now you’ve got two groups of women, none of whom wanted to be pregnant at 24. Some became pregnant by chance, which gives us something like a controlled experiment.

Again, the experiment is imperfect. Getting pregnant while on birth control might be a symptom of carelessness, and carelessness can be a liability in the workplace. So, she tried yet again. She started with a bunch of women who all reported that they’d been trying to get pregnant since they were 23. Some succeeded at 24; others at 25. Insofar as those successes are random (or at least not caused by anything that also affects wages) we have yet a third controlled experiment.

In Tolerance or Death!, Bruce Bawer argues that “European culture leaders should smack down fanatical Islamists,” rather than “bend over for them”:

Defenders of this many-fronted assault on free speech routinely tag critics of Islam as racists. Of course, Islam is not a race but a religion whose ideology should, in a democratic society, be entirely open to criticism — and, for that matter, to parody and mockery. Outraged by the House of Commons measure, comedian Rowan Atkinson (who plays the character Mr. Bean on television) commented: ‘For telling a good and incisive religious joke, you should be praised. For telling a bad one, you should be ridiculed and reviled. The idea that you could be prosecuted for the telling of either is quite fantastic.’ Atkinson was nearly alone among British authors, artists, and entertainers in his vocal criticism of the bill.