Things Never Change

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Eric Falkenstein is reading a military and political history of Rome that he finds interesting and depressing, because it demonstrates that things never change:

All the dysfunctional diagnoses and remedies, leading to decline. You get the feeling society’s optimal sphere of military control was greater than its optimal governance size, making most of its last 5 centuries a disequilibria of waxing and waning coalitions and dynasties. I don’t think our politics is much better. Certainly, the best of the Romans are better than most modern politicians, but bit by bit they misunderstood what was sustainable, how to balance authority with sustainable power. Eventually it was no longer Holy, Roman, or an Empire.

What was most interesting was the part on how Romans needed to raise money, but had to resort to debasing the currency by decreasing the amount of silver in their money, which really took off in the third century AD. As prices rose they were totally flummoxed as to the cause, and blamed this on ‘greed’, a common enough political response in the twentieth century to excessive money growth. But fundamentally, there was no solution because the size of the Empire was larger than could be sustained, and monetizing the debt was a symptom of this problem. No politician gets power saying we should do less, the assumption is always that a state can achieve whatever it wants if it tries really really hard. Blaming symptoms we don’t like, such as greed and hubris, is a constant refrain. Some things never change.

Posted in Economics, Eric Falkenstein, Policy, War | No Comments »

The World is Americentric

Saturday, September 5th, 2009

Europe could challenge the US, George Friedman says, but it won’t:

Europe, if it ever coalesced into a unified economic and military power, could certainly challenge the US. However, as we have seen during the recent financial crisis, nationalism continues to divide the continent, even if exhaustion has made that nationalism less virulent. The idea of Europe becoming a multinational state with a truly integrated economic decision-making system — and with a global military force under joint command — is as distant a dream as that of China becoming a global power.

This is not an Americentric view of the world, he says:

The world is Americentric. The US marshals the economic resources of North America, controls the world’s oceans and space, projects force where it wishes — wisely or not. The US is to the world what Britain once was to Europe. Both nations depended on control of the sea to secure their interests. Both nations understood that the best way to retain control of the sea was to prevent other nations from building navies. Both understood that the best way to do that was to maintain a balance of power in which potential challengers spent their resources fighting each other on land, rather than building fleets that could challenge their control of the sea.

That last point bears emphasizing:

The US is doing this globally. Its primary goal is always to prevent the emergence of a single power that can dominate Eurasia and the European peninsula. With the Soviet Union’s collapse, China’s limits and the EU’s divisions, there is currently no threat of this. So the US has moved to a secondary goal, which is to block the emergence of any regional hegemon that could, in the long term, grow into something more dangerous. The US does what it can to disrupt the re-emergence of Russian national power while building relations with bordering countries such as Poland and Turkey. It encourages unrest in China’s border regions, using the ideology of human rights as justification. It conducts direct or surrogate wars on a seemingly random basis, from Somalia to Serbia, from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Here’s where it gets interesting:

Many of these wars appear to go badly. However, success is measured not by the pacification of a country, but by its disruption. To the extent that the Eurasian land mass is disrupted, to the extent that there is perpetual unrest and disunion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the US has carried out its mission. Iraq is paradigmatic. The US intervention resulted in a civil war. What appeared to be a failure was, in fact, a satisfactory outcome. Subjectively, we would think George W Bush and his critics were unaware of this. But that is the point of geopolitics. The imperatives generate ideologies (a democratic Iraq) and misconceptions (weapons of mass destruction). These, however, are shadows on the wall. It is the geopolitical imperatives, not the rhetoric, that must be understood in order to make sense of what is going on.

Thus, the question is how these geopolitical and strategic realities shape the rest of the century. Eurasia, broadly understood, is being hollowed out. China is far weaker than it appears and is threatened with internal instability. The Europeans are divided by old national patterns that prevent them from moving in a uniform direction. Russia is using the window of opportunity presented by the US absorption in disrupting the Islamic world to reclaim its sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, but its underlying weakness will reassert itself over the next generation.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

Survivorship Bias and Austrian Business Cycle Theory

Friday, September 4th, 2009

Eric Falkentein shares his take on survivorship bias and Austrian business cycle theory:

When I was in charge of capital allocations at KeyCorp, I spoke with many of the business line managers, and was impressed by the fact that all of them had rather sterling track records, especially in the last recession. But I later figured this was all survivorship bias: the losers in the last recession lost their jobs. Thus, each thought they had some special alpha, special asset class, impervious to the mistakes of those who caused the big losses in the past. For a 45 year old who has never really screwed up it’s hard not to think this is the case, as opposed to merely the blind selection process of capitalism. This error is the fundamental genesis of business cycles, in my opinion.

In grad school, while learning macro, I would spend nights reading Austrian Business cycle theory, including von Mises’s Human Action (900+ pages!), and lots from Hayek. I was intrigued by the idea that business cycles were caused by a misallocation of resources, as opposed to merely ‘too much’ investment. That is, say you have 10% of the country’s resources in internet development, but discover the demand only wants 5%. All is fine as long as you don’t care about profits, look at sales/price ratios, but then eventually people get tired of not making money, someone says ‘the emperor has no clothes! There will never be profits’, and everyone stops investing in these areas. The transition from the old to new regime is only possible via firm failures and involuntary unemployment, because people don’t switch to new jobs until their old ones are gone, forcibly.

My only beef with the Austrians is that they emphasized the genesis of this missallocation via money creation, especially the fiat money creation of central banks and how this causes the interest rate to be ‘too low’, causing overinvestment in capital. This again gets into a straight aggregate overinvestment story, and that isn’t very empirically robust. I think to the extent there is overinvestment, it isn’t total investment nearly as much as in the wrong sectors. Today, that sector is housing, and finance.

Posted in Economics, Eric Falkenstein | No Comments »

150th Anniversary Of Solar Carrington Event

Friday, September 4th, 2009

A couple days ago it was the 150th anniversary of the solar Carrington event, named after English astronomer Richard Carrington, which caused such an intense geomagnetic event that telegraph lines operated from currents induced by geomagnetism:

On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air.

In the wee hours of that night, the most brilliant auroras ever recorded had broken out across the skies of the Earth. People in Havana and Florida reported seeing them. The New York Times ran a 3,000 word feature recording the colorful event in purple prose.

Today, such a solar eruption, or coronal mass ejection, would melt power stations and throw us into an unelectrified society for months or years, because our power grids are more vulnerable than ever:

The problem is interconnectedness. In recent years, utilities have joined grids together to allow long-distance transmission of low-cost power to areas of sudden demand. On a hot summer day in California, for instance, people in Los Angeles might be running their air conditioners on power routed from Oregon. It makes economic sense — but not necessarily geomagnetic sense. Interconnectedness makes the system susceptible to wide-ranging “cascade failures.”

To estimate the scale of such a failure, report co-author John Kappenmann of the Metatech Corporation looked at the great geomagnetic storm of May 1921, which produced ground currents as much as ten times stronger than the 1989 Quebec storm, and modeled its effect on the modern power grid. He found more than 350 transformers at risk of permanent damage and 130 million people without power. The loss of electricity would ripple across the social infrastructure with “water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, phone service, fuel re-supply and so on.”

“The concept of interdependency,” the report notes, “is evident in the unavailability of water due to long-term outage of electric power — and the inability to restart an electric generator without water on site.”

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Why Iraqis Still Fight Like Arabs

Friday, September 4th, 2009

James Dunnigan examines why Iraqis still fight like Arabs — and what that means:

Iraqi troops are somewhat mystified that they are not as successful at dealing with roadside bombs, as they Americans. The Iraqis now have the same equipment, and training, yet the Americans were much more successful at finding bombs and keeping roads clear of them. The Iraqis asked their American mentors for help, and were given some bad news (along with the requested help.)

The bad news was that the Iraqis were the victims of their own bad habits. The first thing the Americans noted was that the Iraqis were not sharing information on what the terrorists were up to. Bomb removal teams from the army or police operated as if the other did not exist, even if they patrolled the same roads. Different intel organizations in the police and military would not share information, or work together.

This is one of many bad habits that American advisors have been pointing out for decades:

  • Most Arab countries are a patchwork of different tribes and groups, and Arab leaders survive by playing one group off against another. Loyalty is to one’s group, not the nation. Most countries are dominated by a single group that is usually a minority (Bedouins in Jordan, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, Nejdis in Saudi Arabia). All of which means that officers are assigned not by merit but by loyalty and tribal affiliation. This continues in democratic Iraq, where political parties or powerful politicians strive to control individual police or army units.

  • Islamic schools favor rote memorization, especially of scripture. Most Islamic scholars are hostile to the concept of interpreting the Koran (considered the word of God as given to His prophet Mohammed). This has resulted in looking down on Western troops that will look something up that they don’t know. Arabs prefer to fake it, and pretend it’s all in their head. Improvisation and innovation is generally discouraged. Arab armies go by the book, Western armies rewrite the book and thus usually win. Despite years of American advice on this matter, many Iraqi police and military personnel stick with the old, less effective, traditions.

  • There is no real NCO corps. Officers and enlisted troops are treated like two different social castes and there is no effort to bridge the gap using career NCOs. Enlisted personnel are treated harshly. Training accidents that would end the careers of US officers are commonplace in Arab armies, and nobody cares. This is slowly changing, with the steady growth of a proper NCO corps and better officer attitudes towards their troops. But the old ways often return, with disastrous effects on troop morale and effectiveness.

  • Officers are despised by their troops, and this does not bother the officers much at all. Many Arab officers simply cannot understand how treating the troops decently will make them better soldiers. This is another old tradition that dies hard.

  • Paranoia prevents adequate training. Arab tyrants insist that their military units have little contact with each other, thus insuring that no general can became powerful enough to overthrow them. Units are purposely kept from working together or training on a large scale. Arab generals don’t have as broad a knowledge of their armed forces as do their Western counterparts. Promotions are based more on political reliability than combat proficiency. Arab leaders prefer to be feared, rather than respected, by their soldiers. This approach leads to poorly trained armies and low morale. A few rousing speeches about “Moslem brotherhood” before a war starts does little to repair the damage. This still exists in Iraq, particularly when it comes to Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia police or army units. More Iraqi officers now know that the paranoia and parochialism are bad, but ancient traditions are hard to abandon.

  • Arab officers often do not trust each other. While an American infantry officer can be reasonably confident that the artillery officers will conduct their bombardment on time and on target, Arab infantry officers seriously doubt that their artillery will do its job on time or on target. This is a fatal attitude in combat. It’s been difficult getting Iraqi officers to change when it comes to trust.

  • Arab military leaders consider it acceptable to lie to subordinates and allies in order to further their personal agenda. This had catastrophic consequences during all of the Arab-Israeli wars and continues to make peace difficult between Israelis and Palestinians. When called out on this behavior, Arabs will assert that they were “misunderstood.” This is still going on.

  • While American officers and NCOs are only too happy to impart their wisdom and skill to others (teaching is the ultimate expression of prestige), Arab officers try to keep any technical information and manuals secret. To Arabs, the value and prestige of an individual is based not on what he can teach, but on what he knows that no one else knows. Still around, despite years of American advisors patiently explaining why this is counterproductive.

  • While American officers thrive on competition among themselves, Arab officers avoid [competition] as the loser would be humiliated. Better for everyone to fail together than for competition to be allowed, even if it eventually benefits everyone. Still a factor.

  • Americans are taught leadership and technology; Arab officers are taught only technology. Leadership is given little attention as officers are assumed to know this by virtue of their social status as officers. The new generation of Iraqi officers and NCOs have been taught leadership, but for too many of them, this is an alien concept that they do not understand or really know what to do with.

  • Initiative is considered a dangerous trait. So subordinates prefer to fail rather than make an independent decision. Battles are micromanaged by senior generals, who prefer to suffer defeat rather than lose control of their subordinates. Even worse, an Arab officer will not tell a US ally why he cannot make the decision (or even that he cannot make it), leaving US officers angry and frustrated because the Arabs won’t make a decision. The Arab officers simply will not admit that they do not have that authority. The new generation of army commanders and staff officers have been sent to Western staff and command schools, but there’s still not a lot of enthusiasm for initiative (which is seen as a decadent and dangerous Western import.)

  • Lack of initiative makes it difficult for Arab armies to maintain modern weapons. Complex modern weapons require on-the-spot maintenance, and that means delegating authority, information, and tools. Arab armies avoid doing this and prefer to use easier to control central repair shops. This makes the timely maintenance of weapons difficult. Still a problem in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East.

  • Security is maniacal. Everything even vaguely military is top secret. While US Army promotion lists are routinely published, this rarely happens in Arab armies. Officers are suddenly transferred without warning to keep them from forging alliances or networks. Any team spirit among officers is discouraged. Remains a problem.

I’ve discussed why Arabs lose wars before.

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Why China is not a contender

Friday, September 4th, 2009

George Friedman explains why China is not a contender:

Han China is surrounded by four buffer states, Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. Without these buffers, the borders of China move inward and China becomes vulnerable. With these four buffers in place, China is secure — but as a landlocked island, bounded by mountainous jungle, the Himalayas, the steppes of central Asia and the Siberian wasteland. China is blocked in all directions but the sea.

The vast majority of China’s population lives within a thousand miles of the Pacific coast. Beyond this line, water supply will not support large populations. Most industrial development has taken place within a hundred miles of the coast. Consider the following numbers, culled from official Chinese statistics. About 65 million Chinese people live in households with more than $20,000 a year in income. Around 165 million make between $2,000 and $20,000 a year. Most of these live within 100 miles of the coast. About 400 million Chinese have household incomes between $1,000 and $2,000 a year, while about 670 million have household incomes of less than $1,000 a year. China is a land of extra ordinary poverty. Mao made the Long March to raise an army of desperate peasants to rectify this sort of extreme imbalance. The imbalance is there again, a volcano beneath the current regime.

China would have to triple the size of its economy — and the US would have to stand still — if China were to pull even with the US in GDP. Militarily, China is impotent. Its army is a domestic security force, its ability to project power blocked by natural barriers. Its navy exists mostly on paper and could not possibly pose a serious threat to the US. Casual assertions of China surpassing the US geopolitically ignore fundamental, overwhelming realities. China could conceivably overcome its problems, but it would require most of the century to overcome problems of this magnitude.

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An Elites Liberation Movement

Friday, September 4th, 2009

To Steve Sailer, the 1960s cultural revolution looks like an Elites Liberation movement:

In traditional Western cultures, below the rank of aristocrats, romantic and sexual impulsiveness was a major threat to social standing. The punishment in terms of class standing for out-of-wedlock births was so harsh that the illegitimacy rate among women in England in 1200–1800 was stable at around 3–4%, even though women didn’t marry on average until age 24 to 26.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s, which hit home in the 1970s, disrupted this traditional system of social sanctions. You can see its power in the spread of the term “single mother,” which is now used as a self-description not only by mothers who have never been married, but also by divorced mothers, and even by widows with orphans! My wife knew a Korean lady with two young daughters whose husband had been killed in a car crash. Being old-fashioned, I assumed she would describe herself with that honorable term “widow.” But, being a newcomer to America, she had realized what I hadn’t noticed yet: “widow” was out of fashion, “single mother” was in.

And yet … the old logic that children need two parents to have the best chance to succeed in life still plays out even though we aren’t supposed to mention it. What I’ve noticed in socializing with financially successful families whose children are on the academic fast-track is that they follow the old rules implicitly. Divorce is relatively rare, illegitimacy even rarer, mothers who aren’t highly-paid executives are typically housewives, and so forth.

So, by removing social indoctrination of the masses, the post-Sexual Revolution system selects even more than the earlier system for social success by individuals who are intelligent and cold-blooded. In contrast, people of impulsive temperaments and less ability to foresee the consequences of giving into their impulses are now much more on their own with far less guidance from the culture.

Thus, the people in the upper reaches of society are increasingly of what you might call a Swedish or Swiss personality (or are Asian immigrants whose families never took seriously the 1960s).

But nobody is supposed to notice that publicly. So, the top level of our society continues to argue for the breaking down of old restrictions, whether on the idea that marriage is between a man and a woman or that their should be limits on debt and interest rates. After all, individualistic self-determination works fine for the upper middle class.

From this perspective, the 1960s cultural revolution looks like an Elites Liberation movement, in which Unitarians, Congregationalists, Jews, Episcopalians, Christian Scientists, and similar products of centuries of bourgeois culture decided that they, personally, could get by without the old rules, which, indeed, many of them could. Moreover, they were tired of being expected to be role models of starchy behavior for the proles.

But the tenor of the times demanded that this Elites Lib movement be cloaked in egalitarian and civil rights rhetoric and policies (such as refocusing AFDC from Roosevelt’s aim of supporting widows to supporting single mothers, because we wouldn’t want to discriminate against blacks), with disastrous effects on people toward the bottom of society, especially blacks.

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A Five-Minute Intelligence Test for Kids

Friday, September 4th, 2009

This five-minute intelligence test for kids is surprisingly effective:

Imagine seven cards laid out on a table in front of you, each card two inches square, with vertical lines of different lengths in the middle of each card.

Your task is to move the cards around and put them in order so that the longest line is on the left, and the shortest is on the right. If you do this fairly well, getting a majority in the right order, I’ll ask you to repeat the task with another set of seven cards, this time with lines even more similar in length.

Now I hand you three discs, each the exact same size but somewhat different in weight — more or less the weight of a tennis ball. You need to arrange them in order, heaviest to lightest. Again, if you sort them correctly, I’ll hand you three weights with less discernible differences.

In less than five minutes, we’re done.

So, how effective is this Swiss test?

On 5 and 6 year-old kids, this simple test is virtually synonymous with a 90-minute intelligence test of their full cognitive capacities; the two tests have a 99% correlation. It turns out that kindergartners who are really good at sorting line length and relative weight are the exact same kids who score high on tests of conceptual reasoning, memory, and attention. Whatever the neurobiological advantage is, it’s driving performance on both tests — at least at that age.

Why does it work so well?

They don’t yet completely understand why the simple test works so incredibly well. But to do the tasks correctly, your brain is fundamentally making a series of comparisons, incorporating visual and haptic sensory information. The key here is that the white space of the cards prevents you from putting the two lines exactly next to each other. Your eyes flip back and forth between lines, and the lines are just far enough apart that your brain has to make a figural representation of one line, store that in short term working memory, bring that mental image over to a real line, and then compare the line in memory against the line on the card, discriminating the difference.

What does that have to do with reasoning? Well, reasoning too is fundamentally a matter of noticing pattern differences, holding things temporarily in your mind, and making comparisons — just that the complexity becomes multi-dimensional.

Posted in Education, Science | No Comments »

Diversity is The Most Important Thing public schools teach

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Diversity is The Most Important Thing public schools teach, Eric Falkenstain laments:

In theory, diversity is about accepting people different than you; in practice diversity means those who ignore diversity have more moral clout. Thus, my kid’s schools do not have little birthday celebrations (eg, cupcakes) anymore because the new Somalis don’t celebrate birthdays, and we wouldn’t want to implicitly single them by having birthdays as was done for years. No one can mention this sucks in public, however, without being called in intolerant bigot, and as we all know, diversity is The Most Important Thing public schools teach.

Or a bunch of Hasidim move to a small town in Iowa to run a kosher meat packing plant (and hire illegal immigrants at $5/hour), avoiding the locals in their social activities and in schools, referring to them as shiksas and goyim, and the locals, not the new asocial group, needed to learn to ‘understand and respect each other’s differences’.

An institution that employs a bunch of autistic types is ‘diverse’, even though no individual who works there is accepting of diversity except management.

Thus, diversity is about acceptance when you are passive or ‘leading’, but for those who are not considerate about existing mores or who are doing, it’s a pretext for being insular.

Posted in Education, Eric Falkenstein, Policy | No Comments »

How Marvel Went from Bankruptcy to $4B Buyout

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Chris Zook examines how Marvel went from bankruptcy to a $4B buyout — and naturally he sees the same four-part pattern he discovered at Bain:

  1. The renewal of Marvel was based not on leaping to new hot markets, or dramatic new technologies, but the reapplication of the strongest assets in the company’s historic core — its loyal customer base, its stable of 5,000 characters, its library of 30,000 market-tested stories, and its brand.

  2. Profitability in the entertainment world has shifted dramatically from channels (e.g., stations, magazines) to proprietary content and from analog to digital. Marvel’s strategy follows the profit pool.

  3. The most successful strategic transformations are not those that find a large singular opportunity, but those that find a repeatable formula to take the strongest elements in its core and reapply them to new situations over and over. This is quintessentially true in the case of Marvel’s stream of movies, games, self-production initiatives, and even treatment of individual characters (e.g., Spiderman I, II, III….).

  4. We found that 90% of strategic comebacks were fueled, in part, by assets in the original core business when it was at its best that were adapted to a new environment and took on new value that had not been previously recognized. This was true of IBM’s service business that led its turnaround, or Harman Kardon’s automotive business that fueled its renewal, and even of Apple’s software interface differentiation and young and loyal customer base.

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Pimp My Rifle

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

James Dunnigan describes some popular add-ons for infantry weapons, starting with the red dot sight:

This sight, similar to the point-and-shoot viewfinder found in cameras for many years, was first used by the military (U.S. Army Special Forces) in 1970, and also became popular with hunters and paint ball gun users. The red dot sight was more accurate than iron sights, could be used with both eyes open and was generally more effective at typical combat ranges (under a hundred meters). The sight was particularly effective at night, and in the 1970s, that was its big advantage.

Current devices, like the U.S. Marine Corps ACOG (Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight), does not use batteries and provides a red chevron-shaped reticle and bullet drop compensator. For daytime use, a fiber optic system collects available light for brightness and controlled contrast in the scope. At night, the system relies on tritium for illumination. The 4×32 sight allows you to get first round hits at 300 meter, or longer ranges. The sight still allows for better accuracy at closer ranges, with both eyes open. The manufacturer, Trijicon, made the original sights of this type back in the 1970s. SOCOM has long used them, and many marines and soldiers have bought the civilian version of the ACOG with their own money. At a thousand bucks each, ACOG costs more than the rifle it’s mounted on, and the users consider it well worth the price.

For a while, troops were happy with a Surefire White Light 6P flashlight taped to the end of their rifle, but now they have MFALs — Multi-Functional Aiming Lights:

This looks like a small flashlight, and attaches to the rifle. But this device can put out visible, or invisible (infrared, or IR) light. When using IR, you go into a cave providing light only you can see, with your night vision equipment. If you are real quiet (or sort of quiet), you have a big advantage over the bad guys trying to hide in the dark. This rig also allows you to see any booby traps the enemy may have laid for you. MFAL also emits a laser pointer (like the older “red dot”), but one that cannot be seen by the enemy (unless they also have night vision gear, which they usually don’t.) The MFAL was developed with the help of feedback from combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Beaming Solar Energy from Space to Japan

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Space-based solar power isn’t a crazy idea — as long as you ignore the economics, which a Japanese consortium apparently has:

Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and IHI Corp. will join a 2 trillion yen ($21 billion) Japanese project intending to build a giant solar-power generator in space within three decades and beam electricity to earth.
[...]
Japan is developing the technology for the 1-gigawatt solar station, fitted with four square kilometers of solar panels, and hopes to have it running in three decades, according to a 15- page background document prepared by the trade ministry in August. Being in space it will generate power from the sun regardless of weather conditions, unlike earth-based solar generators, according to the document. One gigawatt is enough to supply about 294,000 average Tokyo homes.
[...]
Transporting panels to the solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth’s surface will be prohibitively costly, so Japan has to figure out a way to slash expenses to make the solar station commercially viable, said Hiroshi Yoshida, Chief Executive Officer of Excalibur KK, a Tokyo-based space and defense-policy consulting company.

“These expenses need to be lowered to a hundredth of current estimates,” Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo.

The project to generate electricity in space and transmit it to earth may cost at least 2 trillion yen, said Koji Umehara, deputy director of space development and utilization at the science ministry. Launching a single rocket costs about 10 billion yen, he said.

“Humankind will some day need this technology, but it will take a long time before we use it,” Yoshida said.

The trade ministry and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which are leading the project, plan to launch a small satellite fitted with solar panels in 2015, and test beaming the electricity from space through the ionosphere, the outermost layer of the earth’s atmosphere, according to the trade ministry document. The government hopes to have the solar station fully operational in the 2030s, it said.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

National Power

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Opinion and reputation have little to do with national power, George Friedman notes:

Whether the US president is loathed or admired is of some minor immediate import, but the fundamentals of power are overarching. Nor do passing events have much to do with national power, no matter how significant they appear at that moment. The recent financial crisis mattered, but it did not change the basic geometry of international power. The concept of American decline is casually tossed about, but for America to decline, some other power must surpass it. There are no candidates.

From a military perspective, I suppose that zero-sum analysis makes sense, but I’d hardly dismiss economic decline as a non-issue, simply because no other nation has yet surpassed our standard of living.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | No Comments »

Neither Steam Nor Punk

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

I don’t know how a post-apocalyptic animated movie, based on an Academy Award-winning short — with an intro by Ray Kurzweil — slipped under my radar, but 9 did. (It opens one week from today, on 9/9/09.)

A fan of the original short described its rag-doll heroes as stitchpunk, and the name stuck. In fact, the notion that the film’s setting and aesthetic are steampunk has stuck too, even though there’s very little Victorian about the whole thing. It’s a whole lot more Eastern Bloc, as Shane Acker, its creator, explains:

The design of the short film was inspired by the work of several stop-motion animated masters; Jan Švankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and the Lauenstein brothers. [...] For that scenic design, I was inspired by photographs of European cities destroyed in World War II, as well as the fantasy artwork of Zdzislaw Beksinski.

For the film, Jeff van der Meer gives an overview of steampunk, including its history, which seems to reinforce my point:

But it wasn’t until 1987 that K.W. Jeter coined the term “Steampunk” to describe his new novel Infernal Devices. In the pages of Locus Magazine (#315, April 1987), Jeter rather blithely wrote, “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term…like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.” Jeter, along with fellow writers Tim Powers (Anubis Gates) and James Blaylock (the novella “Lord Kelvin’s Machine”), spearheaded the Steampunk literary movement, despite being largely forgotten by the Steampunk community today.

Blaylock and Jeter in particular are to Steampunk what John Fitch was to the Steamboat. Fitch created a working steamboat, but Robert Fulton made the steamboat commercially successful. In the case of Steampunk, the iconic cyberpunks Bruce Sterling and William Gibson together play the role of Fulton. Their The Difference Engine (1990) is most often cited as the seminal Steampunk novel.

The Difference Engine could be seen as “historical cyberpunk,” another term for Steampunk. Set primarily in 1855, The Difference Engine posits an alternate reality in which Charles Babbage successfully built a mechanical computer, thus ushering in the Information Age at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. Juxtaposing Lord Byron, airships, and commentary on the unsavory aspects of the Victorian era, the novel’s many Steampunk pleasures include a vast and somewhat clunky mechanical AI housed in a fake Egyptian pyramid. Sterling and Gibson, like Moorcock, also comment on the negative role of new technology in propping up regimes, with a powerful British Empire facilitating the fragmentation of the United States into several less powerful countries, such as the Republic of California and the Republic of Texas. However, The Difference Engine, by positing a premature information revolution, also focuses on repression through invasion of privacy caused by an all-seeing mechanical “Eye.”

In the mid-80s, the hip new movement in science fiction was cyberpunk, which stood utopian science fiction on its head, emphasizing “high tech and low life” — cybernetics and punk — and how “the street finds its own uses for things.”

Authors who weren’t part of the hip new movement naturally resented that fact. I assume that’s what Jeter was getting at when he quipped, “I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term…like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.”

The Difference Engine, on the other hand, actually transferred the cyberpunk ethos to the Age of Steam — where it didn’t belong, I might add — to create a true steampunk story — if not a reasonable projection of how Babbage’s analytical engine might have influenced history had it worked. Since then, the term has evolved to cover just about anything involving “retro” technology — or Victorian fashion.

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Depression’s Evolutionary Roots

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Depression's evolutionary roots suggest that it might serve a useful purpose:

One reason to suspect that depression is an adaptation, not a malfunction, comes from research into a molecule in the brain known as the 5HT1A receptor. The 5HT1A receptor binds to serotonin, another brain molecule that is highly implicated in depression and is the target of most current antidepressant medications. Rodents lacking this receptor show fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress, which suggests that it is somehow involved in promoting depression. (Pharmaceutical companies, in fact, are designing the next generation of antidepressant medications to target this receptor.) When scientists have compared the composition of the functional part rat 5HT1A receptor to that of humans, it is 99 percent similar, which suggests that it is so important that natural selection has preserved it. The ability to “turn on” depression would seem to be important, then, not an accident.

So, how is depression useful?

Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.

Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted. In a region of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), neurons must fire continuously for people to avoid being distracted. But this is very energetically demanding for VLPFC neurons, just as a car’s engine eats up fuel when going up a mountain road. Moreover, continuous firing can cause neurons to break down, just as the car’s engine is more likely to break down when stressed. Studies of depression in rats show that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying neurons with the fuel they need to fire, as well as preventing them from breaking down. These important processes allow depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage, which may explain why the 5HT1A receptor is so evolutionarily important.

Many other symptoms of depression make sense in light of the idea that analysis must be uninterrupted. The desire for social isolation, for instance, helps the depressed person avoid situations that would require thinking about other things. Similarly, the inability to derive pleasure from sex or other activities prevents the depressed person from engaging in activities that could distract him or her from the problem. Even the loss of appetite often seen in depression could be viewed as promoting analysis because chewing and other oral activity interferes with the brain’s ability to process information.

But is there any evidence that depression is useful in analyzing complex problems? For one thing, if depressive rumination were harmful, as most clinicians and researchers assume, then bouts of depression should be slower to resolve when people are given interventions that encourage rumination, such as having them write about their strongest thoughts and feelings. However, the opposite appears to be true. Several studies have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and they suggest that this is because depressed people gain insight into their problems.

There is another suggestive line of evidence. Various studies have found that people in depressed mood states are better at solving social dilemmas. Yet these would seem to have been precisely the kind of problems difficult enough to require analysis and important enough to drive the evolution of such a costly emotion. Consider a woman with young children who discovers her husband is having an affair. Is the wife’s best strategy to ignore it, or force him to choose between her and the other woman, and risk abandonment? Laboratory experiments indicate that depressed people are better at solving social dilemmas by better analysis of the costs and benefits of the different options that they might take.

So, depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving.

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