Why We Are Still Arguing About Darwin

Friday, January 11th, 2008

Lee Harris explains Why We Are Still Arguing About Darwin:

The stumbling block to an acceptance of Darwin, I would like to submit, has little to do with Christian fundamentalism, but a whole lot to do with our intense visceral revulsion at monkeys and apes. This revulsion, while certainly not universal, is widely shared, and it is a psychological phenomenon that is completely independent of our ideas about the literal truth of the Bible.

His larger point:

At the same time, those who accept Darwin (as I do) need to understand the true origin of the revulsion so many people feel against his theory. For the basis of this revulsion is none other than “the civilizing process” that has been instilled into us from infancy. The civilizing process has taught us never to throw our feces at other people, not even in jest. It has taught us not to snatch food from other people, not even when they are much weaker than we. It has taught us not to play with our genitals in front of other people, not even when we are very bored. It has taught us not to mount the posterior of other people, not even when they have cute butts.

Those who are horrified by our resemblance to the lower primates are not wrong, because it is by means of this very horror of the primate-within that men have been able to transcend our original primate state of nature. It is by refusing to accept our embarrassing kinship with primates that men have been able to create societies that prohibit precisely the kind of monkey business that civilized men and women invariably find so revolting and disgusting. Thou shalt not act like a monkey — this is the essence of all the higher religions, and the summation of all ethical systems.

Those who continue to resist Darwin are not standing up for science, but they may well be standing up for something even more important — a Dawkinsian meme, if you will, that has been instrumental in permitting mankind to transcend the brutal level of our primate origins. Our lofty humanitarian ethical standards have been derived not by observing our primate kin, but by imagining that we were made in the image of God. It was only by assuming that we were expected to come up to heavenly standards that we did not lower our standards to those of our biological next of kin. The meme that asserts that we are the children of God, and not merely a bunch of wild monkeys may be an illusion; but it is the illusion upon which all humane civilizations have been constructed. Those who wish to eliminate this illusionary meme from our general meme pool may be acting in the name of science; but it is by no means obvious that they are acting in the name of civilization and humanity.

Posted in Lee Harris, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Healthy habits can mean 14 extra years

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Healthy habits can mean 14 extra years:

To get an extra 14 years of life, don’t smoke, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise regularly and drink alcohol in moderation. That’s the finding of a study that tracked about 20,000 people in the United Kingdom.

That’s welcome news to some of us — but it’s not exactly what the actual study found:

We examined the prospective relationship between lifestyle and mortality in a prospective population study of 20,244 men and women aged 45–79 y with no known cardiovascular disease or cancer at baseline survey in 1993–1997, living in the general community in the United Kingdom, and followed up to 2006. Participants scored one point for each health behaviour: current non-smoking, not physically inactive, moderate alcohol intake (1–14 units a week) and plasma vitamin C >50 mmol/l indicating fruit and vegetable intake of at least five servings a day, for a total score ranging from zero to four. After an average 11 y follow-up, the age-, sex-, body mass–, and social class–adjusted relative risks (95% confidence intervals) for all-cause mortality (1,987 deaths) for men and women who had three, two, one, and zero compared to four health behaviours were respectively, 1.39 (1.21–1.60), 1.95 (1.70–2.25), 2.52 (2.13–3.00), and 4.04 (2.95–5.54) p < 0.001 trend. The relationships were consistent in subgroups stratified by sex, age, body mass index, and social class, and after excluding deaths within 2 y. The trends were strongest for cardiovascular causes. The mortality risk for those with four compared to zero health behaviours was equivalent to being 14 y younger in chronological age.

So the two subtle differences are (1) they weren’t looking at fruit and vegetable consumption, but at vitamin C levels, which tend to imply fruit and vegetable consumption, and (2) they did not demonstrate 14 more years of longevity but one-fourth the mortality, which implies 14 more years of longevity, because subjects who were 14 years older died four times as often.

The real issue though is why would you convert all those variables to 0-or-1 values, then sum them, then convert the sums to four categorical variables, before running the numbers?

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Super-Green City of the Future

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

San Francisco’s so-called Treasure Island may become the Super-Green City of the Future:

Built for the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, Treasure Island was claimed as a Naval base during World War II. When the base was finally decommissioned 11 years ago, San Francisco began studying how to redevelop it. From nearly 300 meetings among city officials, engineers, architects and the public emerged a plan for the most ambitious new community in the United States—a 13,500-person “urban oasis” that will rise from the soil of reclaimed Superfund sites, combining cutting-edge technology with restored natural systems to leave a light footprint on the Earth. After ground is broken in 2009, Treas­ure Island will become a testbed for the newest ideas in energy efficiency, water conservation, waste management and low-impact living. Says Rogers, with idealism undaunted by the task ahead: “We want it to be the most ecological city in the world.”
[...]
Turning Treasure Island into the archetype of an ideal city—one in which residents want to live, work and play—requires completely re-envisioning how it will be laid out. The single-family homes on cookie-cutter lots will disappear, Rogers explains, and current renters will be able to apply for new multifamily units and residential towers concentrated on the island’s south and west edges. Housing density will increase from eight to 75 units per acre, allowing developers to double the amount of land left as open space while accommodating five times as many people.

The sprawling blocks, which now stretch up to 2000 ft. long, will shrink to a pedestrian-friendly 400 ft., and 90 percent of residents will be within a 10-minute walk of downtown. There, they will be able to access stores and services such as a post office and a new ferry terminal that will provide frequent shuttles to San Francisco. Bicycle lanes will connect residents to Yerba Buena Island and the east span of the Bay Bridge.

Similar “new urbanist” principles have been applied to communities across the country, such as Stapleton on the site of Denver’s old airport. But Treasure Island’s planners take the ideas one step further. After analyzing weather patterns, for example, they decided to reorient street grids 35 degrees west of due south to optimize solar exposure and protection from the wind. Not only will the diagonal alignment make outdoor spaces more comfortable throughout the year, it will save energy on heating, cooling and lighting structures.

All the buildings on Treasure Island will meet the gold standard of the U.S. Green Building Council, further reducing energy consumption. In the island’s 220 acres of open space, a new, biologically diverse ecosystem—including plants found in coastal prairie and oak woodlands—will help offset the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by locking up carbon dioxide. This natural sequestration, together with increased energy efficiency and a decreased reliance on automobiles, will drop per capita carbon emissions 60 percent, from 7740 to 3030 pounds per year.

Posted in Urbanism | No Comments »

Newborns visit relatives as cuddly rice bags

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Newborns visit relatives as cuddly rice bags — in Japan, of course:

New-born babies in Japan who can’t make it around to visit all their relatives can now send them proxies instead — cuddly bags of rice.

A small rice shop in Fukuoka, southern Japan, has been swamped with orders for “Dakigokochi” rice-filled bags shaped like a bundled baby and printed with the new-born’s face and name.

Each rice bag is tailor-made to weigh as much as the new-born and shaped so the rice fills the bag up. Holding the round-edged bag would feel like holding a real baby.

“Other rice shops sell bags printed with baby photos, but they use regular bags. People say they aren’t good for holding,” said Naruo Ono, owner of the rice shop, Yoshimiya.

“Rice for small babies would be stuck at the bottom of the bag, and the baby’s photo would be scrunched at the top.”

It is customary in Japan to give people gifts or money on occasions such as births, and the recipient then responds with other gifts, often worth half the amount they received.

The rice bags have made perfect “half-return” gifts, Ono said, although relatives face a dilemma once they are done with the cuddling.

“People say they have a hard time opening them up and eating the rice,” Ono said.

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Super Soaker Inventor Cuts Solar Power Costs

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

Super Soaker Inventor Cuts Solar Power Costs with his new heat engine — which has no moving parts — the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System:

Solar energy technology is enjoying its day in the sun with the advent of innovations from flexible photovoltaic (PV) materials to thermal power plants that concentrate the sun’s heat to drive turbines. But even the best system converts only about 30 percent of received solar energy into electricity—making solar more expensive than burning coal or oil. That will change if Lonnie Johnson’s invention works. The Atlanta-based independent inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun (a true technological milestone) says he can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.

Johnson, a nuclear engineer who holds more than 100 patents, calls his invention the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System, or JTEC for short. This is not PV technology, in which semiconducting silicon converts light into electricity. And unlike a Stirling engine, in which pistons are powered by the expansion and compression of a contained gas, there are no moving parts in the JTEC. It’s sort of like a fuel cell: JTEC circulates hydrogen between two membrane-electrode assemblies (MEA). Unlike a fuel cell, however, JTEC is a closed system. No external hydrogen source. No oxygen input. No wastewater output. Other than a jolt of electricity that acts like the ignition spark in an internal-combustion engine, the only input is heat.

Here’s how it works: One MEA stack is coupled to a high- temperature heat source (such as solar heat concentrated by mirrors), and the other to a low-temperature heat sink (ambient air). The low-temperature stack acts as the compressor stage while the high-temperature stack functions as the power stage. Once the cycle is started by the electrical jolt, the resulting pressure differential produces voltage across each of the MEA stacks. The higher voltage at the high-temperature stack forces the low-temperature stack to pump hydrogen from low pressure to high pressure, maintaining the pressure differential. Meanwhile hydrogen passing through the high-temperature stack generates power.

“It’s like a conventional heat engine,” explains Paul Werbos, program director at the National Science Foundation, which has provided funding for JTEC. “It still uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.”

The bigger the temperature differential, the higher the efficiency. With the help of Heshmat Aglan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Alabama’s Tuskegee University, Johnson hopes to have a low-temperature prototype (200-degree centigrade) completed within a year’s time. The pair is experimenting with high-temperature membranes made of a novel ceramic material of micron-scale thickness. Johnson envisions a first-generation system capable of handling temperatures up to 600 degrees. (Currently, solar concentration using parabolic mirrors tops 800 degrees centigrade.) Based on the theoretical Carnot thermodynamic cycle, at 600 degrees efficiency rates approach 60 percent, twice those of today’s solar Stirling engines.

This engine, Johnson says, can operate on tiny scales, or generate megawatts of power. If it proves feasible, drastically reducing the cost of solar power would only be a start. JTEC could potentially harvest waste heat from internal combustion engines and combustion turbines, perhaps even the human body. And no moving parts means no friction and fewer mechanical failures.

As an engineer, Johnson says he has always been interested in energy conversion. In fact, it was while working on an idea for an environmentally friendly heat pump (one that would not require Freon) that he came up with the Super Soaker, which earned him millions of dollars in royalties. That money allowed Johnson to quit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (where he worked on the Galileo Mission, among other projects) and go independent. His toy profits have funded his research in advanced battery technology, specifically thin-film lithium-ion conductive membranes. And that work sparked the idea for JTEC. Besides, he jokes, “All inventors have to have an engine. It’s like a right of passage.”

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Look, But Don’t Touch

Monday, January 7th, 2008

I’ve been discussing Michael Schrage’s Serious Play, which examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation:

Can Detroit’s lagging competitiveness in the 1980s be blamed in part on its prototyping media? Absolutely. Intricate and expensive clay models didn’t lend themselves to easy modification or rapid iteration. The sheer effort required to craft them actually made them more like untouchable works of art than malleable platforms for creative interaction. The medium’s message is, Look but don’t touch. “American automobile companies didn’t have an iterative culture,” says IDEO’s David Kelley. “Clay…was like God’s tablets.” GVO’s Michael Barry agrees: “When a model starts to harden up,” he says, “so does a lot of the thinking.” Clay was more than a medium; it was a metaphor for management.

Daniel Whitney of MIT’s Draper Labs, who has studied the use of computer-aided design tools in Japan, observes that until the 1990s, U.S. car companies attempted to use clay models as inputs for their computer-aided design systems. This approach combined the worst of both media worlds: it was labor-intensive and imprecise, analogous to typing a handwritten novel into a word processor, editing the printout by hand, and retyping the final version into a computerized typesetting system. The cost in time, labor, and errors in painfully high.

Posted in Business, Serious Play, Technology | No Comments »

Why Northern Europe?

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Why Northern Europe? Victor Davis Hanson answers:

I received a lot of questions the last few weeks about why Mediterranean peoples in Italy and Greece who crafted Western civilization eventually faded before Northern Europeans (tribal barbarians during a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization), and especially Anglo-American culture.

A couple of observations. First, and most obviously, northern Europeans derived their own Western culture only through the classical inheritance. Second, by the 7th century Islam was on the move, and the Mediterranean and Eastern European states were a sort of buffer belt for the next 1,000 years—as the once classical bastions like northern Egypt, Ionia, Greece, Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete were serially overran. Third, geography was turned upside down, as Mare Nostrum became a sort of dead-end pond, while Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland had access to the Atlantic, and with it a direct route to India and China, and the Americas. Fourth, England was spared much of the internecine squabbling on the continent, developed a sort of cosmopolitanism and globalized presence as an island and imperial sea-people, and was able to develop a stronger sense of Protestantism, setting the stage for an Anglo-American global ascendancy.

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Monkeys ‘pay’ for sex by grooming

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Monkeys ‘pay’ for sex by grooming:

Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.

And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Experts change advice on kids’ allergies

Monday, January 7th, 2008

Experts change advice on kids’ allergies:

  • There is no convincing evidence that women who avoid peanuts or other foods during pregnancy or breast-feeding lower their child’s risk of allergies.

  • For infants with a family history of allergies, exclusive breast-feeding for at least four months can lessen the risk of rashes and allergy to cow’s milk.

  • Exclusive breast-feeding for at least three months protects against wheezing in babies, but whether it prevents asthma in older children is unclear.

  • There is modest evidence for feeding hypoallergenic formulas to susceptible babies if they are not solely breast-fed.

  • There is no good evidence that soy-based formulas prevent allergies.

  • There is no convincing evidence that delaying the introduction of foods such as eggs, fish or peanut butter to children prevents allergies. Babies should not get solid food before 4 to 6 months of age, however.

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Pakistan International Airlines Ad from 1979

Monday, January 7th, 2008

This Pakistan International Airlines Ad from 1979 is eerie in retrospect, I suppose.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Death Ray Replaced By The Voice of God

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Death Ray Replaced By The Voice of God:

While U.S. efforts to deploy it’s microwave Active Denial System (which transmits a searchlight sized bean of energy when makes people downrange feel like their skin is on fire) continue to be delayed, another non-lethal system, LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) has been quietly deployed to Iraq. And there the story gets a little strange.

LRAD is basically a focused beam of sound. Originally, it was designed to emit a very loud sound. Anyone whose head was touched by this beam, heard a painfully loud sound. Anyone standing next to them heard nothing. But those hit by the beam promptly fled, or fell to the ground in pain. Permanent hearing loss is possible if the beam is kept on a person for several seconds, but given the effect the sound usually has on people (they move, quickly), it is unlikely to happen. LRAD works. It was recently used off Somalia, by a cruise ship, to repel pirates. Some U.S. Navy ships also carry it, but not just to repel attacking suicide bombers, or whatever. No, the system was sold to the navy for a much gentler application. LRAD can also broadcast speech for up to 300 meters. The navy planned to use LRAD to warn ships to get out of the way. This was needed in places like the crowded coastal waters of the northern Persian Gulf, where the navy patrols. Many small fishing and cargo boats ply these waters, and it’s often hard to get the attention of the crews. With LRAD, you just aim it at a member of the crew, and have an interpreter “speak” to the sailor. It was noted that the guy on the receiving end was sometimes terrified, even after he realized it was that large American destroyer that was talking to him. This apparently gave the army guys some ideas, for there are now rumors in Iraq of a devilish American weapon that makes people believe they are hearing voices in their heads.

This made more sense when an American advertising firm recently used an LRAD unit to support a media campaign for a new TV show. LRAD was pointed at a sidewalk in Manhattan, below the billboard featuring the new show. LRAD broadcast a female voice providing teaser lines from the show. The effect was startling, and a bit scary for many who passed through the LRAD beam. It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using “spoken” (as opposed to “screeching”) LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the “word of God” into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Charles Munger on Niederhoffering the Curriculum

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits — like this bit on Niederhoffering the curriculum:

There was a wonderful example of gaming a human system in the career of Victor Niederhoffer in the Economics Department of Harvard. Victor Niederhoffer was the son of a police lieutenant, and he needed to get A’s at Harvard. But he didn’t want to do any serious work at Harvard, because what he really liked doing was, one, playing world-class checkers; two, gambling in high-stakes card games, at which he was very good, all hours of the day and night; three, being the squash champion of the United States, which he was for years; and, four, being about as good a tennis player as a part-time tennis player could be.

This did not leave much time for getting A’s at Harvard so he went into the Economics Department. You’d think he would have chosen French poetry. But remember, this was a guy who could play championship checkers. He thought he was up to outsmarting the Harvard Economics Department. And he was. He noticed that the graduate students did most of the boring work that would otherwise go to the professors, and he noticed that because it was so hard to get to be a graduate student at Harvard, they were all very brilliant and organized and hard working, as well as much needed by grateful professors.

And therefore, by custom, and as would be predicted from the psychological force called reciprocity tendency, in a really advanced graduate course, the professors always gave an A. So Victor Niederhoffer signed up for nothing but the most advanced graduate courses in the Harvard Economics Department, and of course, he got A, after A, after A, after A, and was hardly ever near a class. And for a while, some people at Harvard may have thought it had a new prodigy on its hands. That’s a ridiculous story, but the scheme will work still. And Niederhoffer is famous: they call his style “Niederhoffering the curriculum.”

(Hat tip to the Photon Courier.)

Posted in Charles Munger, Economics, Education | No Comments »

Revisiting the Stupid Party

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

In Revisiting the Stupid Party, Lee Harris (The Suicide of Reason) looks at the strengths of being “stupid”:

The nineteenth century English philosopher John Stuart Mill bequeathed to modern conservatism a lasting inferiority complex when he dismissed the conservatives of his day as “the stupid party.” No one likes to be called stupid, as we can all agree, though Mill himself may not have understood this, since it is highly unlikely that anyone had ever called him by this disparaging epithet. In his famous Autobiography, Mill tells us that he was reading Plato in the original Greek when he was five, and by the time he was twelve, he was capable of discussing the fine points of economic theory with the leading authorities of his day — facts that may well have seriously skewed Mill’s judgment about the intelligence of other people. Stupid, for Mill, may have meant those who only learned how to read Plato in Greek at the ripe old age of eleven, in which case the charge of belonging to the “stupid party” loses much of its sting.

Yet the sting of Mill’s insult remains today, and it explains, in part, the conspicuous braininess of contemporary conservatism. Conservative think-tanks abound in PhD’s and experts in every field imaginable, whose intelligence, as measured by IQ tests and academic credentials, is certainly a match for those of their ideological opponents. But has the emergence of a conservative intelligentsia proven to be an unmixed blessing? Or is the very phrase conservative intelligentsia an oxymoron?

Let’s begin by noting that the eagerness to appear intelligent to others is a fairly recent development among conservatives. By and large, the English Tories whom Mill dubbed as the original stupid party did not share this desire in the least. If you read the delightful novels of Anthony Trollope, you will find them teaming with hilariously dim-witted Lords who feel no need to apologize for their mediocre minds, as long as they have their aristocratic pedigrees. Their stupidity, as many of them no doubt hazily realized, was their best defense against the inroads of clever madmen intent on turning their world upside down — men like John Stuart Mill, for example, to whom tradition meant nothing, and who was willing to throw out the solid heritage of the past in the pursuit of the latest fad, dubbed by him “experiments in living.” Against the blueprints for a better world concocted by the brilliant they opposed the redneck wisdom encapsulated in the adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Today, no self-respecting conservative wants to be thought stupid, not even by the lunatics on the far left. Yet there are far worse things than looking stupid to others — and one of them is being conned by those who are far cleverer than we are. Indeed, in certain cases, the desire to appear intelligent at all costs can be downright suicidal. Throughout history people have come along who were able to outtalk and outthink their neighbors, like the paradox-bearing sophists of ancient Greece or the mocking philosophes of the eighteenth century French salon. The bell curve virtually guarantees that there will always be those who can pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of us, and if we once begin to listen to their spiel, then we find that before we know it we have been taken advantage of. It is not easy to outfox the fox, and those who try often end up on the unpleasant end of the food chain. Thus, it is safer simply never to begin listening to them — or when you must listen to them, to force them to go so slowly that they despair of ever drawing you into their clutches, acting on the maxim: “Never let a good argument get the better of your common sense.”

Posted in Lee Harris, Policy | No Comments »

Charles Munger on Workman’s Comp and Bad Incentives

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits — like this bit on workman’s comp madness:

Anyway, as the Medicare example showed, all human systems are gamed, for reasons rooted deeply in psychology, and great skill is displayed in the gaming because game theory has so much potential. That’s what’s wrong with the workman’s comp system in California. Gaming has been raised to an art form. In the course of gaming the system, people learn to be crooked. Is this good for civilization? Is it good for economic performance? Hell no. The people who design easily–gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell.

I’ve got a friend whose family controls about 8% of the truck trailer market. He just closed his last factory in California and he had one in Texas that was even worse. The workman’s comp cost in his Texas plant got to be about 30% of payroll. Well, there’s no such profit in making truck trailers. He closed his plant and moved it to Ogden, Utah, where a bunch of believing Mormons are raising big families and don’t game the workman’s comp system. The workman’s comp expense is 2% of payroll.

Are the Latinos who were peopling his plant in Texas intrinsically dishonest or bad compared to the Mormons? No. It’s just the incentive structure that so rewards all this fraud is put in place by these ignorant legislatures, many members of which have been to law school, and they just don’t think about what terrible things they’re doing to the civilization because they don’t take into account the second order effects and the third order effects in lying and cheating. So, this happens everywhere, and when economics is full of it, it is just like the rest of life.

The people who design easily–gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell.

Posted in Business, Charles Munger, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Serious Politics

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

It’s been a while since I last mentioned Michael Schrage’s Serious Play, which examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation.

One of his key points is that prototypes are always political, because knowledge is power, and this warps how prototypes get made and shared:

As we have seen, some prototypes raise political questions that the organization is unwilling or unable to answer. A primary reason for the failure of the IBM PCjr home computer in the mid-1980s was that IBM management had decided it might cannibalize sales from IBM’s popular line of personal computers. The product of a spec-driven culture, the PCjr was deliberately hobbled in the prototyping process to thwart that possibility. Less than two years after its introduction, the PCjr was withdrawn. IBM’s internal politics of prototyping killed it.

Posted in Business, Serious Play, Technology | No Comments »

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