Does Exercise Boost Immunity?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Does exercise boost immunity? Yes, moderate exercise does, but, unsurprisingly, working to exhaustion does the opposite:

In general, and this is true in both mice and men, says Jeffrey A. Woods, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois and one of the scientists involved, viruses evoke an increase in what are called T1-type helper immune cells. These T1-helper cells induce inflammation and other changes in the body that represent a first line of defense against an invading virus. But if the inflammation, at first so helpful, continues for too long, it becomes counterproductive. The immune system needs, then, at some point to lessen the amount of T1-mediated inflammatory response, so that, in fighting the virus, it doesn’t accidentally harm its own host. The immune system does this by gradually increasing the amount of another kind of immune cell, T2-helper cells, which produce mostly an anti-inflammatory immune response. They’re water to the T1 fire. But the balance between the T1- and T2-helper cells must be exquisitely calibrated.

In the mice at the University of Illinois, moderate exercise subtly hastened the shift from a T1 response to a T2-style immune response — not by much, but by just enough, apparently, to have a positive impact against the flu. “Moderate exercise appears to suppress TH1 a little, increase TH2 a little,” Woods says.

On the other hand, intense or prolonged exercise “may suppress TH1 too much,” he says. Long, hard runs or other workouts may shut down that first line of defense before it has completed its work, which could lead, Woods says “to increased susceptibility to viral infection.”

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Dust and Rocks

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

When men landed on the moon 40 years ago, John Derbyshire thought the world had changed for ever:

How naïve! Nothing changed at all. The Arabs and Israelis had gone at each other hammer and tongs two years before: Four years later they did so again. The mainland Chinese, in the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, were told nothing of the event. (So our newspapers reported. However, several urban Chinese have told me they knew about the Moon landing within a few hours.) Americans themselves were at least as interested in Chappaquiddick as in Tranquility Base.

Forty years on, what does it look like, really, but another TV special? Nothing followed from the Moon landing, other than, of course, five more Moon landings and the wretched, pointless, homicidal Space Shuttle program. It made nothing happen. It did not stir new thoughts in the minds of civilized men, as the great 15th- and 16th-century sea voyages did. It has brought us no potatoes, no tobacco, no Noble Savagery speculations on human nature, no Tempest. It made no dramatic new fortunes (though I suppose some shareholders in the aerospace companies did well). It did not make poor, inconsequential nations into world powers. Nothing unexpected turned up. The voyages, Apollo 13‘s malfunction aside, went rigidly as planned. We found what we expected to find: dust and rocks.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Mencius Moldbug on the Obama prize

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Mencius Moldbug on the Obama prize:

To Americans who wonder how anyone could be so tone-deaf as to pull a stunt like this, it has nothing at all to do with the person, Barack Obama. Probably you can blame the Obama White House for not (a) knowing that this was going to happen, and (b) having the sense to prevent it from happening. And the ultimate diagnosis, of course, is American. But today’s symptom is most definitely European.

The problem is that Americans, even progressives, are the people in the world who adore Obama the least. Normally it is advantageous, for continuity purposes, that Europeans love Obama. But it is not advantageous that they love him so much. It is weird, distracting and confusing. In short: off message.

This strange European affection is easily explained. You see, there was once an agency named the Office of War Information, which was more or less the pro-Roosevelt press organized as a government agency. OWI no longer exists, but not because it fell from favor; some of its people went to CIA, some went to State, some went back to pretending to be ordinary citizens. OWI is essentially the bureaucratic ancestor of the “mainstream media” as we know it today.

After the unfortunate events of 1941–45, the surviving Continental friends of these gentlemen were organized into a new industry, the official media of Europe. Even in Britain, those loyal to the new military configuration of the planet were praised and petted, and reproduced intellectually; those who were not so sure grew old, had no students, declined and died. Europe is a Darwinian paradise of information, all adapted to military events. You can be sure that had things gone otherwise, the grandchildren of Celine, Brasillach and Drieu la Rochelle would constitute “European public opinion.”

So the problem is: Europe is gaga for Obama not because the wise Europeans, with their centuries of history, raw-milk cheeses and infinitely subtle wines, have deliberated long on the subject, gazed into their crystal balls and detected the promise and meaning of Obama. Europe is gaga for Obama because Europe, as we now know it, is a propaganda colony of Washington. The pre-1940 Europe is of historical interest only, like the Aztecs.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Bryan Caplan’s Favorite Confucius Quote

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Bryan Caplan’s favorite Confucius quote:

If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and misery are subjects of shame; if a state is not governed by the principles of reason, riches and honors are subjects of shame.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The Truth is Untellable

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Robert Reich delivered a speech at UC Berkeley in 2007 in which he played the role of a hypothetical candidate who could only tell the truth:

His main point was that the truth was untellable. And although his politics are left of center, his hypothetical unspeakable speech slaughtered every sacred cow the Berkeley audience held dear:
  • A solution in Iraq is going to be tough.
  • Treating more sick people will mean younger people will pay more.
  • It’s too expensive to treat older people at the end of their life “so we’re going to let you die”.
  • If we use government to control costs there will be “less innovation” in medical technology and you should not expect to live much longer than your parents.
  • Global warming can only be tackled by a carbon tax which is going to cost you a lot of money.
  • We’re going to have to pay teachers more for quality education — costing you more — but we have to be willing to fire the turkeys despite the unions.
  • Anyone who does an unskilled, repetitive job will lose it in the near future to outsourcing or automation. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
  • A minimum wage doesn’t help as much as an earned income tax credit.
  • Helping people at the bottom earn more is going to cost higher income people more money.
  • Medicare will bankrupt the nation unless something is done and will impoverish the youth.
  • The best way to ameliorate global poverty is to do away with farm subsidies.

The student audience, which at first clapped enthusiastically as Reich started to tell his unspeakable “truths” stopped clapping by the end. Reich had uttered the fundamental heresy. You really can’t have something for nothing. Pulling in one direction meant giving way in another. He went on to say that America was hopelessly addicted to fantasy; that anyone who got up on stage and reeled off the points he had made was politically dead.

Although I may disagree with many of the public policy positions that Robert Reich takes, his point that the truth makes piss-poor politics seems valid. Things come down to choices: lower costs versus death panels; torture versus intelligence; equity versus growth. And politicians, ever eager to garner votes, never want to say this. They will always try to have it both ways. Even when politicians choose one road over the other, they take pains to suggest they are simultaneously proceeding down two paths. One can disagree with the choices Reich makes but he is right to say that choices are unavoidable.

Choices are unavoidable, but the alternatives are not fixed over the long term. Constraints are real, but the constraints change. The reason politicians survive is that human creativity often rides to their rescue. New knowledge, new resources and new worlds have turned many a hack into statesmen. But they are the beneficiaries, rather than the creators of productivity; what is irrational is to expect genuine creativity in a world dominated by politicians. The missing pairs of choices in Reich’s list are these: creativity versus certainty, risk versus return, bureaucracy versus innovation. We can live only if we take the risk. That is the most unsayable truth of all.

(Hat tip to Aretae.)

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Money and Power and Bad Poetry

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

David Foster cites Irving Kristol on Money and Power:

In New York the ruling passion is the pursuit of money, whereas in Washington it is the pursuit of power. Now, the pursuit of power is a zero-sum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power — at least it has traditionally been thought to be so — but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

Then he follows up by citing a more amusing piece by Kristol from 1972:

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics.
[...]
It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call “the New Politics” is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one’s intense feelings — we must “care,” we must “be concerned,” we must be “committed.” Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.

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Is the Exercise Cool-Down Really Necessary?

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Is the exercise cool-down really necessary? No.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

Barnes & Noble’s E-Reader

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Barnes & Noble is set to reveal its new Kindle competitor next week, Gizmodo says, with a black-and-white e-ink screen and a color multitouch screen, like an iPhone — all in a Reardon-metal frame, if the photos are to be believed. And it should run the Randroid OS.

(The sample page is from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.)

Posted in Business, Media, Technology | No Comments »

Summertime Blues

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Summer vacation is a relic of the time when farmers needed the youngsters to help bring in the harvest, or so we’re told:

Historians, however, pooh-pooh this. Fear of summertime disease transmission, unavailability of air conditioning, and downward influence from the vacation habits of the rich, seem to have had more to do with it.

Whatever its origins, the long school vacation is now a fixture in our culture. Since our teachers’ unions have armed themselves with thermonuclear weapons and captured one of our major political parties, it is likely to remain so, though if there is any rational pedagogical justification for twelve weeks’ juvenile idleness, I should very much like to hear it.

Until recently it could at least be said that summer vacation gave all kids the opportunity for some out-of-school socializing, and older kids a chance to get early work experience. Both rationales are now dead. The first was killed off by a combination of hyper-vigilant modern parenting styles and the home computer, the second by the J-1 visa, with which foreign students can work in the U.S. for up to four months. Why hire a surly, litigious American 16-year-old when, for the same price, you can get a Bulgarian, Ghanaian, or Malaysian 19-year-old keen to improve his English and innocent of trial lawyers?

And so we are stuck with the darn kids for twelve weeks. Few of them seem to have any idea what to do with themselves. Running off to play in the woods Tom Sawyer-style is out of the question: They might encounter poison ivy or Lyme disease. Hanging out in the town is discouraged: pedophiles, drugs, gangs. The district has summer programs, but they are not popular with the mid-teen set, to which my kids (ages 16 and 14) now belong, and in any case they are disappearing as budgets are cut.

What the kids want to do is play computer games. Years of striving to lead them into worthwhile hobbies have yielded only partial, tepid returns. They — boys, especially — yearn for those flickering screens. When deprived of them, they yawn and doze, unable to summon up enthusiasm for anything much else.

It’s the same all over. A friend raised in rural Ireland went back for a visit after some years. A little river runs through his home town; in summer, he tells me, he and his friends would be in it, or by it, all day and every day — swimming if the weather was warm, fishing if not. Yet on this recent visit he was surprised, on a fine summer afternoon, to see no children at all near the river. Where were they? “At home playing Doom,” he was told.

Posted in Education, John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

The “How” of Tribal Engagement

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

Steven Pressfield (Gates of Fire) is promoting the notion of Tribal Engagement Teams in Afghanistan — small teams like Major Jim Grant’s Special Forces ODA (Operational Detachment Alpha) 316:

Each TET tribe will become a target and they will take casualties. There will be fighting. But the fighting will be U.S. soldiers alongside tribesmen against a common enemy. Isn’t that what we want? There will [also] be push-back from assorted Afghan officials, power brokers, warlords, criminals. It will become a very personal fight. Once we commit to the tribe, the Pashtunwali code [honor, revenge, hospitality] comes into effect for the [U.S. teams] as well. In the end it will be the team’s ability to build a true bond with the tribe that is backed up by the warrior ethos: the ability and desire to fight and die alongside them when necessary.

This is not a new idea:

From the 1890s to 1947, British control relied heavily on a small number of highly trained British officers. These frontier officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, and hard working. Many had studied law and the history of the area and spoke some of the local languages. They had a deep sense of duty and a strong national identity. All required a depth of administrative competence and judgment to successfully wield the extensive powers at their disposal. They contributed significantly to the province’s security and stability. These men were particularly valuable in navigating the intricacies of tribal politics.

What does it take to outfit such a team? Not too much:

Three to twelve [U.S.] men, based on the environment
2 interpreters
2 SAT phones
2 SATCOM radios (piggyback frequency)
2 PRC-119s
2 ATVs
2 Pickup trucks
3 Generators
2 Computers with a biometrics kit
Plus initial infill logistics package for the tribe:
100 AK-47s
30,000 to 50,000 rounds of ammunition
Assorted medical supplies
A ‘Gift of Honor’ for the tribal chief

Posted in War | No Comments »

You can believe that if you want to

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

John Derbyshire recently visited the “pleasantly inaccessible” monument to Captain Cook on the western side of Kealakekua Bay, on the big island of Hawaii:

I can’t claim any real familiarity with Cook, never having even read a full biography, but I long ago absorbed the sentiment, universal among his countrymen, that he was what Bertie Wooster would have called a very good egg. My 1911 Britannica concurs: “Along with a commanding personal presence, and with sagacity, decision and perseverance quite extraordinary, went other qualities not less useful to his work. He won the affection of those who served under him by sympathy, kindness and unselfish care of others as noteworthy as his gifts of intellect.”

Cook was clubbed and/or speared to death on this remote, lovely spot on the morning of St. Valentine’s Day, 1779. He was leading a shore party in an attempt to capture the local ruler, to hold him hostage for the return of a stolen longboat. After killing Cook, the Hawaiians dragged his body away. Only fragmentary remains were ever recovered. Modern Hawaiians insist that Cook was not eaten. You can believe that if you want to.

Posted in John Derbyshire, War | No Comments »

An Alien God

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Evolution is not God, Eliezer Yudkowsky says, but it’s strangely close — almost an alien god:

Find a watch in a desert, said William Paley, and you can infer the watchmaker. There were once those who denied this, who thought that life “just happened” without need of an optimization process, mice being spontaneously generated from straw and dirty shirts.

If we ask who was more correct — the theologians who argued for a Creator-God, or the intellectually unfulfilled atheists who argued that mice spontaneously generated — then the theologians must be declared the victors: evolution is not God, but it is closer to God than it is to pure random entropy. Mutation is random, but selection is non-random. This doesn’t mean an intelligent Fairy is reaching in and selecting. It means there’s a non-zero statistical correlation between the gene and how often the organism reproduces. Over a few million years, that non-zero statistical correlation adds up to something very powerful. It’s not a god, but it’s more closely akin to a god than it is to snow on a television screen.

In a lot of ways, evolution is like unto theology. “Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures,” said Damien Broderick, “or they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.” And indeed, the Shaper of Life is not itself a creature. Evolution is bodiless, like the Judeo-Christian deity. Omnipresent in Nature, immanent in the fall of every leaf. Vast as a planet’s surface. Billions of years old. Itself unmade, arising naturally from the structure of physics. Doesn’t that all sound like something that might have been said about God?

And yet the Maker has no mind, as well as no body. In some ways, its handiwork is incredibly poor design by human standards. It is internally divided. Most of all, it isn’t nice.

In a way, Darwin discovered God — a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent — a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise — people would have said “My gosh! That’s God!”

But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God — not comfortably “ineffable”, but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn’t be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft’s Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.

Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.

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Nobel for Institutional Economics

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

The recent not-quite-Nobel prize in economics went to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson for their respective work in institutional economics. Ostrom studied how private individuals cooperate to avoid the tragedy of the commons, and Williamson studied the boundaries of the firm — which Arnold Kling sees through a Hayekian lens:

For example, in health care delivery, I think we need more central planning. Not by government, but by corporations competing to offer better quality and efficiency. The problem is that the corporate model threatens the status of doctors. However, as Michael Cannon and I argued here, when a patient has a complex set of problems, the model of doctor autonomy can work very poorly. In Williamson’s terms, the corporate model can resolve the conflicts that arise between different doctors more effectively than our existing model. For example, when my father was moved to eight different hospital units in fourteen days, a new doctor was in charge of him at each unit. The priorities and treatment plan changed each time. In my opinion, these autonomous hospital units should have been replaced by a hierarchy, in which care is directed by a project manager accountable to the patient.

I prefer a more Hayekian take on industrial organization. That is, I think that industrial organization ought to be aligned with knowledge. Decentralization of power makes sense when information is decentralized. When information can be usefully concentrated, then concentration of power can be efficient. In my forthcoming Unchecked and Unbalanced, I argue that knowledge is becoming more specialized and decentralized, and that this conflicts with the trend for political power to become more concentrated.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Good work, sycophants

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

The creative team from Sesame Street presents Mad Men — and sad men, and happy men:

Posted in Education, Media | No Comments »

What do you do with the people who can’t pay?

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Aretae tries to answer the eternal question, What do you do with the people who can’t pay? A commenter named Melanie points out that pro-business libertarians give the impression that their answer to people who can’t afford food or medicine is tough shit, but I suggest another “libertarian” perspective entirely:

In most cases where charity feels right — educating the children of the poor, providing medical care for those who can’t afford it, etc. — we ignore the market’s well-established alternative to outright gifts or grants: financing.

We don’t have to tax the rich and give the money — minus substantial administrative costs — to the poor in order to help them. If $1,000 of medical care staves off blindness or amputation, it’s obviously worth far more than $1,000 in future earning power, and a loan will do — if a creditor feels he’ll get his money back.

If anything, the role of government should be to enforce such agreements — via garnishing wages, etc. — so that they can and will be made.

And there’s always private charity — until public programs completely crowd it out.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

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