How many nukes does it take to destroy the world? More than you might think. In fact, more than we have:
How many nukes does it take to destroy the world?
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009How can New York City hot dog vendors afford to pay half a million dollars in rent?
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009A hot dog vendor lost his spot outside New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, because he failed to pay his monthly rent — of $53,558:
Pasang Sherpa was under contract to pay the Parks Department $362,201 a year for a stand on the south side of the Met’s entrance and $280,500 for another on the north side. That’s a lot of hot dogs.
[...]
What we do know is that even though Sherpa, a rookie, got in over his head, vendors have long been willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to push $2 dogs outside the Met. (The museum attracts 5 million visitors a year, and the hot dog stands are the only food outlets for blocks.) Last year’s occupant paid $415,000 a year for the Met stands plus at least $25,000 for supplies and labor, and didn’t go under — so we can assume he brought in significantly more than $440,000.Vendors on city streets (as opposed to outside park areas) don’t have to pay rent for specific spots; their only real estate expense is the cart permit the city requires them to buy. Theoretically, that’ll put you back just $200 a year. But since the city caps the number of food vendor permits at 3,100, far below demand, there’s an extensive black market. Some companies buy up the permits for dozens of carts and then lease them to individual vendors at highly inflated prices.
Most food vendors outside the parks system don’t see in a year the kind of money that Sherpa agreed to pay every month. According to street vendor advocacy groups, average vendors make $14,000 to $16,000 a year after they’ve paid for their (likely illegal) permits and received a few tickets. Vendors rack up thousands of dollars in fines every year. They can be fined anywhere from $250 to $1,000 for being parked on the wrong street, being stationed too far from the curb, setting up illegal cart “extensions” that increase their shelf space, or any number of other violations.
Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has a new book coming out for a popular audience, The Predictioneer’s Game, and Clive Thompson of the New York Times visits him to ask, Can game theory predict when Iran will get the Bomb?
A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita, who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso. Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop — so old that the lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off — and showed me a spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.The spreadsheet included almost 90 players. Some were people, like the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; others were groups, like the U.N. Security Council and Iran’s “religious radicals.” Next to each player, a number represented one variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model: the extent to which a player wanted Iran to have the ability to make nuclear weapons. The scale went from 0 to 200, with 0 being “no nuclear capacity at all” and 200 representing a test of a nuclear missile.
At the beginning of the simulation, the positions were what you would expect. The United States and Israel and most of Europe wanted Iran to have virtually no nuclear capacity, so their preferred outcomes were close to zero. In contrast, the Iranian hard-liners were aggressive. “This is not only ‘Build a bomb,’ ” Bueno de Mesquita said, characterizing their position. “It’s probably: ‘We should test a bomb.’ ”
But as the computer model ran forward in time, through 2009 and into 2010, positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power — another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model — sagged significantly.
Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 — bomb-making territory — but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen.
What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent months — the brutal crackdown on protesters, the dubious confessions, Khamenei’s accusations of American subterfuge — are masking a tectonic shift. The moderates are winning, even if we cannot see that yet.
Bueno de Mesquita’s model is loosely based on Duncan Black’s analysis of committee voting:
To predict how leaders will behave in a conflict, Bueno de Mesquita starts with a specific prediction he wants to make, then interviews four or five experts who know the situation well. He identifies the stakeholders who will exert pressure on the outcome (typically 20 or 30 players) and gets the experts to assign values to the stakeholders in four categories: What outcome do the players want? How hard will they work to get it? How much clout can they exert on others? How firm is their resolve? Each value is expressed as a number on its own arbitrary scale, like 0 to 200. (Sometimes Bueno de Mesquita skips the experts, simply reads newspaper and journal articles and generates his own list of players and numbers.) For example, in the case of Iran’s bomb, Bueno de Mesquita set Ahmadinejad’s preferred outcome at 180 and, on a scale of 0 to 100, his desire to get it at 90, his power at 5 and his resolve at 90.Then the math begins, some of which is surprisingly simple. If you merely sort the players according to how badly they want a bomb and how much support they have among others, you will end up with a reasonably good prediction. But the other variables enable the computer model to perform much more complicated assessments. In essence, it looks for possible groupings of players who would be willing to shift their positions toward one another if they thought that doing so would be to their advantage. The model begins by working out the average position of all the players — the “middle ground” that exerts a gravitational force on the whole negotiation. Then it compares each player with every other player, estimating whether one will be able to persuade or coerce the others to move toward its position, based on the power, resolve and positioning of everyone else. (Power isn’t everything. If the most powerful player is on the fringe of an issue, and a cluster of less-powerful players are closer to the middle, they might exert greater influence.) After estimating how much or how little each player might budge, the software recalculates the middle ground, which shifts as the players move. A “round” is over; the software repeats the process, round after round. The game ends when players no longer move very much from round to round — this indicates they have compromised as much as they ever will. At that point, assuming no player with veto power had refused to compromise, the final average middle-ground position of all the players is the result — the official prediction of how the issue will resolve itself.
The computer model, in short, predicts coalitions.
The Root Bridges of Cherrapungee
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009The Atlas Obscura describes the root bridges of Cherrapungee, in Shillong, India:
In the depths of northeastern India, in one of the wettest places on earth, bridges aren’t built — they’re grown.
The southern Khasi and Jaintia hills are humid and warm, crisscrossed by swift-flowing rivers and mountain streams. On the slopes of these hills, a species of Indian rubber tree with an incredibly strong root system thrives and flourishes.
The Ficus elastica produces a series of secondary roots from higher up its trunk and can comfortably perch atop huge boulders along the riverbanks, or even in the middle of the rivers themselves.
The War-Khasis, a tribe in Meghalaya, long ago noticed this tree and saw in its powerful roots an opportunity to easily cross the area’s many rivers. Now, whenever and wherever the need arises, they simply grow their bridges. In order to make a rubber tree’s roots grow in the right direction — say, over a river — the Khasis use betel nut trunks, sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root-guidance systems.
The thin, tender roots of the rubber tree, prevented from fanning out by the betel nut trunks, grow straight out. When they reach the other side of the river, they’re allowed to take root in the soil. Given enough time, a sturdy, living bridge is produced.
The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they’re extraordinarily strong — strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time — and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunjee may be well over five hundred years old.
One special root bridge, believed to the only one of its kind in the world, is actually two bridges stacked one over the other and has come to be known as the “Umshiang Double-Decker Root Bridge.”These bridges were re-discovered by Denis P. Rayen of the Cherrapunjee Holiday Resort. Due to his efforts to promote interest in the bridges, the local population has been alerted to their potential worth and has kept them from being destroyed in favor of steel ones. What’s more, a new root bridge is currently being grown and should be ready for use within a decade.
Innovation is horribly wasteful and inefficient
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009What does it mean to have a private health care system?, Megan McArdle asks:
Now, at this point in the discussion, some interlocutor starts chanting what I’ve come to think of as “the mantra”: othercountriesspendlessandhavelongerlifespans. Then they ask me how I can ignore the overwhelming evidence that national health care is superior to our terrible system. Now, what’s odd about this is that all of those countries do precisely what I am concerned about: slap price controls on the inputs, particularly pharmaceuticals. Their overwhelming evidence indicates that I am 100% correct that a government run system in the US will destroy the last really profitable market for drugs and medical technology, and thereby cause the rate of medical innovation to slow to a crawl.To which [Matt Steinglass] rejoinders that all the Dutch insurance companies are private. Indeed they are, but they’re essentially tightly regulated utilities. There’s no market discovery of drug prices; instead, the prices are set by looking at an average of the rates paid by government systems in nearby countries. The government decides what is reimburseable. It further defines the basic health package that everyone gets, though as I understand it most people also purchase top-off insurance. The supplemental insurance functions more like an actual insurance market. As I understand it, there’s considerable pressure to stop that. And the markets are in peripheral services that mostly aren’t reimbursed by health insurance here, either, like eyeglasses and dental.
The things that make markets innovate — profit potential — have been mostly squeezed out of the system. The things that hasten market discover — prices — have also been increasingly relegated to central authority. Having something like that in the United States would produce exactly the outcome I’m worried about. So if Matt is right, and this is where the slippery slope ends up, my nightmare will have been realized.
[...]
Critics of our system say that it is horribly wasteful and inefficient. I quite agree. But innovation is horribly wasteful and inefficient. It’s quite common for drug researchers at mean-old profit-oriented pharma to go their entire lives without working on a drug that actually makes it past Phase III trials and into patients. Those kinds of crazy bets are exactly the kind of thing that the centralized, rational, efficient systems that progressives like to build (or at least, dream of building) have the hardest time allowing. And when such systems do make start spending big, they don’t tend to get made where the biggest market is — i.e. the most patients with the strongest demand. Instead the decisions are political: which disease has the best organized interest group to lobby the government?Those are just inherent qualities of a government system. They’re the qualities of the systems that progressives lionize in government — the reason that othercountriesspendless. I acknowledge that it can work very well as long as there are some irrational, decentralized, uncontrolled countries in the mix figuring out how to deliver the technology you’ll eventually use, for the same reason that a really surprisingly large number of children can forego vaccination without risking disease. But at this point, the US is the only country left providing a hefty incentive for inventing new treatments. If we stop, the whole world suffers, and we along with it. So for all the many bad points about our system, for now, I’d like to stick with it.
A Lunar Nuclear Reactor
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Researchers at NASA and the Department of Energy recently tested key technologies for a lunar nuclear reactor that might power an outpost on the moon or Mars:
To generate electricity, the researchers used a liquid metal to transfer the heat from the reactor to the Stirling engine, which uses gas pressure to convert heat into the energy needed to generate electricity. For the tests, the researchers used a non-nuclear heat source. The liquid metal was a sodium potassium mixture that has been used in the past to transfer heat from a reactor to a generator, says Palac, but this is the first time this mixture has been used with a Stirling engine.“They are very efficient and robust, and we believe [it] can last for eight years unattended,” says Lee Mason, the principal investigator of the project at Glenn. The system performed better than expected, Palac says, generating 2.3 kilowatts of power at a steady pace.
The researchers also developed a lightweight radiator panel to cool the system and dissipate the heat from the reactor. The prototype panel is approximately six feet by nine feet–one-twentieth the size required for a full-scale system. Heat from a water-cooling system is circulated to the radiator where it dissipates.
The researchers tested the radiator panel in a vacuum chamber at Glenn that replicates the lack of atmosphere and the extreme temperatures on the moon–from over 100 degrees Celsius during the day to below 100 degrees Celsius at night. The panel dissipated six kilowatts of energy, more than expected–a “very successfully test,” says Palac. On the moon, the panel must also survive the dusty environment cause by the regolith.
Lastly, the researchers tested the performance of the Stirling alternator in a radiation environment at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. The objective was to test the performance of the motor, ensuring that the materials would not degrade. The alternator was subjected to 20 times the amount of radiation it would expect to see in its lifetime and survived without any significant problems.
Mason says that the tests are very important in showing the feasibility of the system and that the next step is for the researchers to conduct a full system demonstration, by combining a non-nuclear reactor simulator with the Stirling engine and radiator panel. He says that these tests should be completed in 2014.
(Hat tip to Nyrath.)
Bunny Tales
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Izabella St James has written a book, Bunny Tales, about her time as one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends:
Being a Hefner Girlfriend was a specialised job, not to be confused with being a Playboy Playmate. In fact, Girlfriends were not allowed to become Playmates because Hef had found that they tended to flee the Mansion as soon as they collected their $25,000 Playmate cheque. Girlfriends were given their own bedroom, an allowance of $1,000 a week in cash, a new car, free dental and medical treatment, almost limitless clothes, hairdos, make-up and facials and all the cosmetic surgery they could wish for — Izabella reckons Hef shelled out $70,000 a year on breast implants.It was a very generous deal in many ways, but it did have its drawbacks. First, there was a strict curfew, so unless you were out with Hef, you had to be back in the hutch by 9pm. Second, while you could order any food or drink you wanted, at any time, from one of the many Mansion “butlers”, you were not allowed into the kitchen, even for a glass of water. And third, of course, you had to live in the extraordinarily dingy Playboy mansion, where all the furniture was falling apart, the mattresses were stained and the carpets were covered in dog poo. I remember visiting it in the early Nineties and being struck by its shabbiness then, and evidently it was the same or worse when Izabella moved in. Part of the trouble might be that Hef does not actually own the mansion; he has to rent it, room by room, from Playboy Enterprises and, according to Izabella, pays $25,000 a month for his own bedroom.
But the real drawback was Hef. Stuck in his perpetual Groundhog Day, padding around in his pyjamas, eating all his meals in bed, watching the same classic films with the same old cronies night after night, going to the same bars — Las Palmas on Wednesdays, Barfly on Fridays — the only variation in the routine was restaurant night on Thursdays when the Girlfriends were allowed to choose where they went. But even so, Hef always took his own food, lamb chops. And even when they went out for parties or special occasions such as the Grammys, Hef would only stay long enough to have his photo taken before herding all the Girlfriends back into the car. Surrounded by phalanxes of security men, and roped off in VIP ghettos, they never had the chance to meet anyone.
The girlfriends weren’t all friends, and Izabella got kicked out of the house just before the enemy faction went on to star in The Girls Next Door.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb to David Cameron
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes an open letter to David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative party:
We live in an increasingly complex system and complexity causes Black Swans. How? The more interdependent we become, the harder it is to trace the cause of an event and the tougher to forecast accurately, meaning the traditional tools of economics will fail us. And since the spread of the internet, rumours go round the world in minutes. Consider the run on Icelandic banks. It took place at BlackBerry speed. So the economic variables, such as sales, commodity prices, unemployment or GDP growth, are subject to ever more extreme variations. The over-efficiency of the systems means things run smoothly, but are subject to rare but violent blow-ups.David, you must counter this complexity by lowering indebtedness. We have known since Babylonian times that debt is treacherous and allows no room for mistakes: felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb (“happy is he who owes nothing”). The combination of debt levels swollen from two decades of over-confidence with modern finance’s complex derivatives has been disastrous.
Be careful, too, of the so-called science of economics. Economists have been no better in their predictions than cab drivers. We have an “expert” problem, in which the expert provides you with misplaced confidence, but no information. Because we think, correctly, that the dermatologist, the baker, the chemist are true experts (they know more about their respective subjects than the rest of us), we swallow the canard that the economists at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve are also experts, without checking their record. This reliance on faux experts is, for the most part, what got us here. Now it is continuing with the build-up of government deficit and an increased reliance on flimsy forecasts by the Obama administration.
This problem with experts was particularly acute when it came to the “risk models” on which bankers built those positions that turned sour. So it is that you are coming under pressure to provide more regulation. Alas, the need for more regulation is a myth. I have been fighting risk models both as a Wall Street trader and as a professor and my worst nightmares were the results of regulators. It was they who promoted the reliance on ratings by credit agencies. The “value-at-risk” models regulators promoted made us take more risks.
If we are to have regulators, we need them to operate along conservative lines and conserve the rich knowledge and understanding of risk transmitted through generations of practice, of trial and error. We replaced the heuristics of the elders with arrogant (and incompetent) beliefs, breaking, in the name of science, the chain of knowledge. Old, conservative bankers and traders have been replaced by keen young mathematical analysts, yet anyone who listened to a grandmother who survived the Depression would have been warned against debt and been better prepared than Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, respectively chairman and former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve.
The solution is obvious: build an economy that increases the role of well-tested traditions. Ban financial derivatives that require advanced mathematics rather than trial and error. Look at mother nature. There is a complex system built around sound principles that has insured both evolution and survival. It does not let anything get too big to fail. It breaks things early. I don’t understand why people who stand against tampering with nature accept tampering with the economy that would have organically grown too. Work on building a “robust” society, capable of withstanding errors, in which the role of finance (hence debt) would be minimal. We want a society in which people can make mistakes without risk of total collapse. Silicon Valley offers a good example, where people have the chance to fail fast (and repeatedly).
The best blueprint is the very opposite of the Obama administration’s economic policies (its foreign policy is commendable). It has been administering pain-killers without addressing the cause of disease. Obama is strengthening those who do the wrong thing.
40 Million Years of Uranium, at 10X Current Use
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009Al Fin notes that we have 40 million years’ worth of uranium, at 10 times our current use — and we have three times as much thorium as uranium in Earth’s crust:
According to Brian Wang, there is an estimated 40 trillion tons of Uranium in Earth’s crust, and over 120 trillion tons of Thorium. Only 67,000 tons of Uranium are “consumed” yearly. If rational fuel enrichment and re-cycling is incorporated into the fission cycle, Earth would never run out of fissionable uranium.The Thorium cycle is safer and less prone to weapons proliferation. Fortunately, we have over 100 million years worth of Thorium.
Mathematical Model of a Zombie Outbreak
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J. Smith have produced a Mathematical Model of a Zombie Outbreak — and it’s been published:
“Clearly, this is an unlikely scenario if taken literally,” they wrote. “But possible real-life applications may include allegiance to political parties, or diseases with a dormant infection.”Right.
Anyway, the model focuses on modern zombies, which are “very different from the voodoo and the folklore zombies.” It takes into account the possibility of quarantine (could lead to eradication, but unlikely to happen) and treatment (some humans survive, but they still must coexist with zombies), but shows that there is only one strategy likely to succeed: “impulsive eradication.”
“Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.
And if we don’t act fast enough?
“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”
How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak? Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three days.
What Would Warren Do?
Monday, August 17th, 2009
What Would Warren Do? Lose money, Megan McArdle says, after attending the annual pilgrimage to Omaha:
His acolytes had taken a beating, too — at least the ones I met. Most private-fund managers are cagey about their returns, but everyone at my table at Gorat’s readily admitted to having had a very, very bad year. “I’m down 25 percent,” said one friend I ran into at a “meet and greet.” He runs a tiny hedge fund mostly composed of his own money. But he quickly added, with some cheer, “I’m still outperforming other funds!”In the coming years, we’ll find out if rising above the madness is enough of a success. In many ways, it’s not even clear that Buffett could replicate his own success if he started out today. He built his reputation as an investor in an era when there were more opportunities for easy money, and these days, the news that Buffett has bought a stock is often enough to help support, or even boost, its price.
But I’m not brave enough to second-guess the Sage of Omaha — certainly not while seated at Gorat’s, cramming myself full of investment advice and moderately priced midwestern beef. And even if none of the value investors I ate with are likely to replicate his outlandish success, they will still have an edge over competitors, and the rest of us, because one Warren-like trait they do share is his commitment to thrift and prudence. Just as Warren still famously lives in the same modest house he purchased in the 1950s, almost everyone I met seemed more interested in building wealth and security than in spending riches. During my five days in Omaha, I had at least three conversations about the best way to save money on rental cars. I’m pretty sure that at least one of the people enthusiastically pitching me an off-brand vendor half an hour from the airport was there on an expense account.
Right now, the academic literature suggests that value investing has a modest advantage over a broader market strategy. Better information, more widely available, may continue to erode that edge. But the principles of prudence, patience, and thrift will always, in the end, offer a better chance at outsize returns. The question is whether, once Saint Warren passes, his followers will find the courage to stick to them.
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
Monday, August 17th, 2009Alison Gopnik explains that your baby is smarter than you think:
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Time to Legalize Drugs
Monday, August 17th, 2009Peter Moskos and Stanford “Neill” Franklin, both veterans of the Baltimore City police force, say it’s time to legalize drugs:
Cities and states license beer and tobacco sellers to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold. Ending Prohibition saved lives because it took gangsters out of the game. Regulated alcohol doesn’t work perfectly, but it works well enough. Prescription drugs are regulated, and while there is a huge problem with abuse, at least a system of distribution involving doctors and pharmacists works without violence and high-volume incarceration. Regulating drugs would work similarly: not a cure-all, but a vast improvement on the status quo.
Ending drug prohibition would have all kinds of benefits:
Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.Without the drug war, America’s most decimated neighborhoods would have a chance to recover. Working people could sit on stoops, misguided youths wouldn’t look up to criminals as role models, our overflowing prisons could hold real criminals, and — most important to us — more police officers wouldn’t have to die.
Squirrel is surprise star of holiday photo
Monday, August 17th, 2009The Brandts set their camera timer to take a picture of them at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, Canada, but a curious ground squirrel stole the spotlight.
Malthusianisms
Monday, August 17th, 2009Scott Aaronson shares his list of Malthusianisms that are obvious, once stated, yet impossible for many people to accept — “whole ideologies, personal philosophies, and lifelong habits have been founded on the refusal to understand them”:
- Why are even some affluent parts of the world running out of fresh water? Because if they weren’t, they’d keep watering their lawns until they were.
- Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan.
- Why can’t everyone just agree to a family-friendly, 40-hour workweek? Because then anyone who chose to work a 90-hour week would clean our clocks.
- Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still understand each other.
- Why is science hard? Because so many of the easy problems have been solved already.
- Why do the people you want to date seem so cruel, or aloof, or insensitive? Maybe because, when they aren’t, you conclude you must be out of their league and lose your attraction for them.
- Why does it cost so much to buy something to wear to a wedding? Because if it didn’t, the fashion industry would invent more extravagant ‘requirements’ until it reached the limit of what people could afford.
- Why do you cut yourself while shaving? Because when you don’t, you conclude that you’re not shaving close enough.