Go forth and multiply a lot less

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Go forth and multiply a lot less, The Economist recommends:

Sometime in the next few years (if it hasn’t happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country’s population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000–05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

The move to replacement-level fertility is one of the most dramatic social changes in history. It manifested itself in the violent demonstrations by students against their clerical rulers in Iran this year. It almost certainly contributed to the rising numbers of middle-class voters who backed the incumbent governments of Indonesia and India. It shows up in rural Malaysia in richer, emptier villages surrounded by mechanised farms. And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated. At a time when Malthusian alarms are ringing because of environmental pressures, falling fertility may even provide a measure of reassurance about global population trends.

So, why is 2.1 such a special number?

If there were no early deaths, the replacement rate would be 2.0 (actually, fractionally higher because fewer girls are born than boys). Two parents are replaced by two children. But a daughter may die before her childbearing years, so the figure has to allow for early mortality. Since child mortality is higher in poor countries, the replacement fertility rate is higher there, too. In rich countries it is about 2.1. In poor ones it can go over 3.0. The global average is 2.33. By about 2020, the global fertility rate will dip below the global replacement rate for the first time.

Population growth has quite a bit of momentum though:

Populations can rise while fertility declines because of inertia, which matters a lot in demography. If, because of high fertility in earlier generations, there is a bulge of women of childbearing years, more children will be born, though each mother is having fewer children. There will be more, smaller families. Assuming fertility falls at current rates, says the UN, the world’s population will rise from 6.8 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050, at which point it will stabilise (see chart 1).


Behind this is a staggering fertility decline. In the 1970s only 24 countries had fertility rates of 2.1 or less, all of them rich. Now there are over 70 such countries, and in every continent, including Africa. Between 1950 and 2000 the average fertility rate in developing countries fell by half from six to three — three fewer children in each family in just 50 years. Over the same period, Europe went from the peak of the baby boom to the depth of the baby bust and its fertility also fell by almost half, from 2.65 to 1.42 — but that was a decline of only 1.23 children. The fall in developing countries now is closer to what happened in Europe during 19th- and early 20th-century industrialisation. But what took place in Britain over 130 years (1800–1930) took place in South Korea over just 20 (1965–85).

Things are moving even faster today. Fertility has dropped further in every South-East Asian country (except the Philippines) than it did in Japan. The rate in Bangladesh fell by half from six to three in only 20 years (1980 to 2000). The same decline took place in Mauritius in just ten (1963–73). Most sensational of all is the story from Iran.

When the clerical regime took over in 1979, the mullahs, apparently believing their flock should go forth and multiply, abolished the country’s family-planning system. Fertility rose, reaching seven in 1984. Yet by the 2006 census the average fertility rate had fallen to a mere 1.9, and just 1.5 in Tehran. From fertility that is almost as high as one can get to below replacement level in 22 years: social change can hardly happen faster. No wonder the explosion on the streets of Iran this year seemed like a clash between two worlds: 15–29 year-olds, one-third of the population, better educated and with different expectations, against the established regime and the traditionalists.

Why has fertility dropped? Imagine you were born a poor peasant, but now you find yourself living in the city:

You may have moved to a town, or your village may have grown. Schools, markets and factories are within reach. And suddenly, the incentives change. A tractor can gather the harvest better than children. Your wife may get a factory job — and now her lost wages must be set against the benefits of another baby. Education, thrift and a stake in the future become more important, and these middle-class virtues go hand in hand with smaller families. Education costs money, so you may not be able to afford a large family. Perhaps the state provides a pension and you no longer need children to look after you. And perhaps your wife is no longer willing to bear endless offspring. Higher living standards, better communications and more education enable you to rely on markets and public services, not just yourself and your family.


Macroeconomic research bears out this picture. Fertility starts to drop at an annual income per person of $1,000–2,000 and falls until it hits the replacement level at an income per head of $4,000–10,000 a year (see chart 2). This roughly tracks the passage from poverty to middle-income status and from an agrarian society to a modern one. Thereafter fertility continues at or below replacement until, for some, it turns up again (see article).

The link between living standards and fertility exists within countries, too. India’s poorest state, Bihar, has a fertility rate of 4; richer Tamil Nadu and Kerala have rates below 2. Shanghai has had a fertility rate of less than 1.7 since 1975; in Guizhou, China’s poorest province, the rate is 2.2. So strong is the link between wealth and fertility that the few countries where fertility is not falling are those torn apart by war, such as Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where living standards have not risen.

Family research adds detail to this sketch. Indonesia’s Family Life Survey showed that, on average, each birth reduced by a fifth the likelihood that a woman would have a job — lowering household income and pushing some families into poverty. So smaller families made middle-class status more likely. Between 1974 and 1996, Bangladesh turned a district called Matlab into a giant demographic experiment: some villages and households got family planning, others did not. According to one study of the results, fertility in the areas that received help declined by around 15% more than in those that did not. And over the two decades of the experiment, indicators of the well-being of women and their children — health, earnings, household assets and so on — were all higher in the villages that got the planning. Does this suggest that lower fertility causes wealth, or that wealth lowers fertility? It would be better to say that the two things go together.

Higher standards of living reduce fertility, and lower fertility improves living standards — in a modern economy.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

Cheaper desalination

Friday, November 6th, 2009

Saltworks Technologies has set up a test plant in Vancouver to demonstrate cheaper desalination:

Existing desalination plants work in one of two ways. Some distil seawater by heating it up to evaporate part of it. They then condense the vapour — a process that requires electricity. The other plants use reverse osmosis. This employs high-pressure pumps to force the water from brine through a membrane that is impermeable to salt. That, too, needs electricity. Even the best reverse-osmosis plants require 3.7 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to produce 1,000 litres of drinking water.

Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi, by contrast, reckon they can produce that much fresh water with less than 1 kWh of electricity, and no other paid-for source of power is needed. Their process is fuelled by concentration gradients of salinity between different vessels of brine. These different salinities are brought about by evaporation.

The process begins by spraying seawater into a shallow, black-bottomed pond, where it absorbs heat from the atmosphere. The resulting evaporation increases the concentration of salt in the water from its natural level of 3.5% to as much as 20%. Low-pressure pumps are then used to pipe this concentrated seawater, along with three other streams of untreated seawater, into the desalting unit. As the diagram explains, what Mr Sparrow and Mr Zoshi create by doing this is a type of electrical circuit. Instead of electrons carrying the current, though, it is carried by electrically charged atoms called ions.

Salt is made of two ions: positively charged sodium and negatively charged chloride. These flow in opposite directions around the circuit. Each of the four streams of water is connected to two neighbours by what are known as ion bridges. These are pathways made of polystyrene that has been treated so it will allow the passage of only one sort of ion — either sodium or chloride. Sodium and chloride ions pass out of the concentrated solution to the neighbouring weak ones by diffusion though these bridges (any chemical will diffuse from a high to a low concentration in this way). The trick is that as they do so, they make the low-concentration streams of water electrically charged. The one that is positive, because it has too much sodium, thus draws chloride ions from the stream that is to be purified. Meanwhile, the negative, chloride-rich stream draws in sodium ions. The result is that the fourth stream is stripped of its ions and emerges pure and fresh.

It is a simple idea that could be built equally well on a grand scale or as rooftop units the size of refrigerators. Of course, a lot of clever engineering is involved to make it work, but the low pressure of the pumps needed (in contradistinction to those employed in reverse osmosis) means the brine can be transported through plastic pipes rather than steel ones. Since brine is corrosive to steel, that is another advantage of Mr Sparrow’s and Mr Zoshi’s technology. Moreover, the only electricity needed is the small amount required to pump the streams of water through the apparatus. All the rest of the energy has come free, via the air, from the sun.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Civilisation: A Personal View

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

In 1970, the newly hatched Public Broadcasting Service aired a 13-part TV series called Civilisation: A Personal View, which had already been a high-brow hit for the BBC the year before:

“The very simple thought I started from,” said David Attenborough, the BBC executive who dreamed up “Civilisation,” “was to get on the screen the loveliest things created by European man in the past thousand years.” When Clark was invited to serve as its host and writer, he added an urgent imperative of his own: “It’s worth trying . . . to make people realize how fragile civilisation is and how easily it might slip from our grasp.”

By “civilisation” Clark meant Western civilization, and the first episode, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” made it clear that he was no less firm a believer in the primacy of high culture and the genius of great men. In the opening sequence, an unseen organist thunders out a toccata as the camera pans across the face of Michelangelo’s David, the façade of Chartres Cathedral and other icons of Western art. Then Clark reads the stately words of John Ruskin: “Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last.” From there he embarks on a discursive tour d’horizon devoted solely to the doings of dead white giants: Charlemagne, Raphael, Bach, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Byron, Rodin. If you think Michael Jackson was a musical master, you’ve come to the wrong shop.

Much of the effect of “Civilisation” arose from the witty flair with which Clark conducted this highbrow travelogue. “Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well,” he proclaimed in one episode. In another he described opera as “one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.” But for all his charm, you were never in a moment’s doubt of his passionate belief in the power and significance of Western culture.

Four decades ago, Time magazine declared “Civilisation” to be TV’s “most distinguished (not to mention only new) cultural series” of the year. Those words have a hollow ring today. For years PBS has been trimming back its high-culture programming, partly because it doesn’t do well in the ratings and partly, I suspect, because such lofty fare has lost favor with the intellectual elite. The notion of devoting a 13-hour TV series to the glories of Western art would now be thought comical—or contemptible—by those well-placed eggheads who regard the West as the source of all evil in the postmodern world. Among such enlightened folk, “Civilisation” is regarded as an embarrassing relic, painfully slow-moving and politically retrogressive.

I doubt that Clark, who died in 1983, would have been surprised to hear that. In “Civilisation” he warned that Western culture rested on a thin crust of ice: “Advanced thinkers, who even in Roman times thought it fine to gang up with the barbarians, have begun to question whether civilization is indeed worth preserving. . . . It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.” The day that PBS replays “Civilisation” in prime time is the day I’ll breathe a little easier about the prospects for the preservation of the art that Kenneth Clark championed so eloquently—and unapologetically.

Behold the first six minutes of the first episode:

The whole series is available on DVD.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

Did James Cameron Rip Off Poul Anderson’s Novella?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

James Cameron’s new spectacle, Avatar, is coming to theaters this winter:

After watching that trailer, I immediately thought of Poul Anderson’s classic novella, Call Me Joe, about a wheel-chair-bound man psionically controlling a genetically engineered creature on the inhospitable surface of Jupiter. Apparently I was not alone in seeing the similarities, as others have harshly asked, Did James Cameron rip off Poul Anderson’s Novella?

Well, he certainly started from Anderson’s premise — but Anderson didn’t produce a trite story of noble savages fending off capitalist-imperialist-colonialist corporations out to destroy their planet.

Posted in Media | No Comments »

A Warm Bath of Political Correctness

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Orwell described the traditional boarding-school education given to upper-class English boys as “five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery.” John Derbyshire describes a modern university education as a warm bath of Political Correctness:

I upgraded the metaphor from lukewarm to warm because of the crude force and intimidation that is used when ramming PC down college freshman throats — so much coarser than the gentle, subliminal indoctrination carried out at Orwell’s Eton.

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

Yemen is a Desert

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Yemen is a desert, and it’s running out of water:

“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”

Drilling deeper and deeper isn’t a sustainable strategy though. It doesn’t increase the flow of water into Yemen; it just reaches deeper and deeper into the underground stock of water, the aquifer.

Yemen’s population has quadrupled in the last 50 years, to 24 million, but that’s not its only problem:

Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.
[...]
Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.

For centuries, the people of Yemen preserved traditions of water conservation:

Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it collapsed in the sixth century A.D.

But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate, allowing farmers and villagers to pump water from underground aquifers much faster than it could be replaced through natural processes. The number of drills has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002.

The popular drug, qat, comes from a particularly “thirsty” plant:

Despite the destructive effects of qat, the Yemeni government supports it, through diesel subsidies, loans and customs exemptions, Mr. Eryani said. It is illegal to import qat, and powerful growers known here as the “qat mafia” have threatened to shoot down any planes bringing in cheaper qat from abroad.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

3-D Photovoltaics

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Using zinc oxide nanostructures grown on optical fibers and coated with dye-sensitized solar cell materials, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new type of three-dimensional photovoltaic system, which could replace the familiar large panels atop roofs:

Dye-sensitized solar cells use a photochemical system to generate electricity. They are inexpensive to manufacture, flexible and mechanically robust, but their tradeoff for lower cost is conversion efficiency lower than that of silicon-based cells. But using nanostructure arrays to increase the surface area available to convert light could help reduce the efficiency disadvantage, while giving architects and designers new options for incorporating PV into buildings, vehicles and even military equipment.

Fabrication of the new Georgia Tech PV system begins with optical fiber of the type used by the telecommunications industry to transport data. First, the researchers remove the cladding layer, then apply a conductive coating to the surface of the fiber before seeding the surface with zinc oxide. Next, they use established solution-based techniques to grow aligned zinc oxide nanowires around the fiber much like the bristles of a bottle brush. The nanowires are then coated with the dye-sensitized materials that convert light to electricity.

Sunlight entering the optical fiber passes into the nanowires, where it interacts with the dye molecules to produce electrical current. A liquid electrolyte between the nanowires collects the electrical charges. The result is a hybrid nanowire/optical fiber system that can be up to six times as efficient as planar zinc oxide cells with the same surface area.

“In each reflection within the fiber, the light has the opportunity to interact with the nanostructures that are coated with the dye molecules,” Wang explained. “You have multiple light reflections within the fiber, and multiple reflections within the nanostructures. These interactions increase the likelihood that the light will interact with the dye molecules, and that increases the efficiency.”

Wang and his research team have reached an efficiency of 3.3 percent and hope to reach 7 to 8 percent after surface modification. While lower than silicon solar cells, this efficiency would be useful for practical energy harvesting. If they can do that, the potentially lower cost of their approach could make it attractive for many applications.

(Hat tip to Mark Frazier.)

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Good Dog, Smart Dog

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Researchers are once again taking seriously the notion of smart dogs:

Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.

In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.

Hungarian researchers reported in a study last year that a guide dog for a blind and epileptic person became anxious before its master suffered a seizure and was taught to bark and lick the owner’s face and upper arm when it detected an onset, three to five minutes before the seizure. It is still somewhat mysterious how exactly dogs detect seizures, whether it’s by picking up on behavioral changes or smelling something awry, but several small studies have shown that a powerful sense of smell can detect lung and other types of cancer, as the dogs sniff out odors emitted by the disease.

Dogs can understand language and perform other “human” cognitive tasks much better than scientists used to accept:

By giving dogs language learning and other tests devised for infants and toddlers, Dr. Coren has come up with an intelligence ranking of 100 breeds, with border collies at No. 1. He says the most intelligent breeds (poodles, retrievers, Labradors and shepherds) can learn as many as 250 words, signs and signals, while the others can learn 165. The average dog is about as intellectually advanced as a 2- to 2-and-a-half-year-old child, he has concluded, with an ability to understand some abstract concepts. For example, the animal can get “the idea of being a dog” by differentiating photographs with dogs in them from photographs without dogs.

Steve Sailer adds an interesting meta-point about such articles:

Something I’ve noticed over the years in this kind of article or television documentary about all the new tasks to which dogs are being applied is that they seldom mention what would have immediately occurred to a pre-20th Century reader. Contemporary readers are interested in the selection process for finding dogs with the best propensities for the job and the subsequent training process. But a 19th Century reader would have immediately thought of taking the dogs who are best at a particular skill and breeding them together.

Consider the Newfoundland, a giant water dog with webbed feet who doesn’t dog paddle like the average dog, but uses a more powerful technique rather like the breast stroke. Moreover, Newfoundlands desperately want to rescue people from drowning. On shorelines all over the world, there are statues of heroic Newfoundlands who rescued humans from watery graves. Unfortunately, you can’t really take a Newfoundland for a walk along a public beach because he might immediately splash into the water and start hauling protesting swimmers out.

Presumably, it took a lot of generations of selective breeding to come up with a great beast with these characteristics. Presumably, you could breed together dogs that are best at each new job and eventually come up with new breeds where a much higher percentage of the dogs would pass the selection process and would require less training. But modern readers don’t want to hear about that because that would be eugenics. For example, here’s Jonah Goldberg’s 2002 National Review Online column:

Westminster Eugenics Show
Repugnant thinking that’s died out for humans is thriving at the Westminster Kennel Club.

This is not to say that foresighted individuals aren’t developing new breeds, just that the entire concept is usually left out of mainstream discussions.

For example, I’ve seen it claimed that a few dogs can sniff out cancer in people, at least melanomas on the skin. I don’t know how accurate that is, but say you could develop over a few decades a breed of dog that could detect a variety of cancers by sniffing people. Think of what a boon that would be to the world’s poor — instead of expensive scans, doctors in poor places could do cancer screenings for the price of dog food!

But this kind of thinking is unpopular today because the conventional wisdom is that eugenics is a “pseudoscience” — i.e., it’s not just morally wrong, it’s impossible.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

The F Word

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

The most recent episode of South Park mocks inconsiderate f–––––s:

I wasn’t expecting them to run with the whole question of what The F Word — not the F word, the other one — even means, but they handled it well — dialing the vulgarity to 11, yes, but also including some nuanced subtext.

Posted in Media, Policy | No Comments »

Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups, Steve Blank explains:

A Lean Startup is not about the total amount of money you may spend over the life of your startup. It is about when in the life of your company you do the spending.

If venture capital is flowing, you can make mistakes and just get more funding — but when times are tight, you have to avoid an out-of-control burn rate, because you won’t get any do-overs:

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship.

Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.) are all expensive and potentially fatal distractions if done before you have found product-market fit and a repeatable sales model. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

Blank recommends the Customer Development process:

In Customer Development your goal is not to avoid spending money but to preserve your cash as you search for a repeatable and scalable sales model and then spend like there is no tomorrow when you find one.

Posted in Business, Steve Blank | No Comments »

Bear kills militants in Kashmir

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

A bear killed two militants and wounded another — he escaped with yet another militant — when the Muslim separatists set up camp inside the bear’s cave, in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar:

The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise — police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

I can only imagine what a bear would do when shot with an AK-47. It’s not a powerful rifle — but it does have a high rate of fire.

Apparently the conflict in Kashmir has increased the population of bears and leopards:

Following the outbreak of the insurgency people had to hand in their weapons to police — which put a halt to poaching.

As a result, there has been a greater incidence of man-animal conflict, say experts.

I’m surprised by two things: (1) that the Indian government would want to disarm Indians in Kashmir, and (2) that poachers would be the least bit affected by a ban on weapons.

(Hat tip to Todd.)

Posted in Animals, War, Weapons | No Comments »

The Ph.D. Problem

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Louis Menand describes The Ph.D. Problem:

It is easy to see how the modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. The discipline relies on the principle of disinterestedness, according to which the production of new knowledge is regulated by measuring it against existing scholarship through a process of peer review, rather than by the extent to which it meets the needs of interests external to the field. The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage — in fact, they more or less require — a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product — ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it — the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.

Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.

Posted in Education | No Comments »

Empty Attributes

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

As preposterous as political correctness seems to John Derbyshire, who grew up in the monocultural England of the 1950s, his children have completely internalized it:

My daughter, age 14 and brighter than average, reacts with horror — instinctive horror, from internalized revulsion — if I comment in any way at all on anyone’s group identity. I’m not talking about the n-word here, which I don’t use, but just saying things like, “So-and-so is Jewish, isn’t she?”

Nellie will grimace and say, “Really, Dad!” It is wicked, morally wrong, to notice anyone’s Jewishness, blackness, Hispanitude, Orientality, gayness, sex, disability, and all the rest.

You must go through life holding fast to the belief that these are empty attributes, carrying no information value, and that any reference to them must be — can only be — motivated by malice. Plainly people can actually go through life doing that. It’s amazing to me, but they can — sort of floating effortlessly above the reality of human nature, defying gravity.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

Wing Commander Pink, the Pashtoon Whisperer

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Jane Mayer writes in The New Yorker about The risks of the CIA’s Predator drones and “targeted international killings by the state” — which are, it would appear, totally different from hunting down pirates, killing captured spies, etc.

Mencius Moldbug takes this as an opportunity to mention “a relevant little bit of inconvenient history” — Pink’s War:

Jane Mayer, meet Wing Commander Richard Charles Montagu Pink. Which of these people knows more about how to subdue the troublous Pathans? If you wanted to solve the problem, whose advice would you take? And what do ya think Wing Commander Pink would have done with a Predator or two?

He reiterates a point Porphyrogenitus made recently — and goes a few steps further, I suppose:

Reprisal, including reprisal by bombardment, is a perfectly legitimate tactic under classical international law. Moreover, reciprocity holds; the laws of war do not protect those who choose not to observe them. Eg: savage Pathan hill-tribes.

The result is that civilization wins, savagery loses, and wars end. Insurgency is ineffective and basically unknown under these rules, which I suspect would put Margaret [a commenter who called using a Predator drone predatory] out of a job. Instead, people die, and keep dying. And she eats. She is not alone in this.
[...]
You don’t even need a pith helmet and a lisp to understand how a civilized nation can subdue and govern savages and barbarians. You can stay on our side of the Atlantic and our century, and look at the US experience in the Philippines or Haiti. You can read any pre-1945 field manual from the US military. PC-COIN basically consists of taking every known axiom about how to solve the problem properly, and reversing it. Instead of constantly demonstrating strength, for instance, it constantly demonstrates weakness. This masquerades as counterintuitive, which masquerades as smart. Indeed, one cannot defend it without being pretty damned smart.

And it’s not even the willingness to bomb villages from the air, or whatever, that generates victory. Since we have way better gear than Wing Commander Pink, we can be way more subtle. All that is needed is that USG demonstrate to the Afghan people that it has chosen to rule them by force and without their consent, as a result of their actions in harboring Osama, KSM and their nasty friends. Seal the border, register and tax the population, impose indirect rule. Find some modern equivalent of Lord Cromer to run the whole thing.

Instead, we create the ultimate in passive-aggressive goverment. We whine and wheedle and curtsy before the savage tribe, pay it welfare for its misdeeds, apologize at every possible opportunity. At the same time, we hunt it with Predators. It’s like a bad episode of “The Dog Whisperer,” with the Pashtoons instead of the dog. Couldn’t we get Cesar Millan to run Afghanistan for a while? His skin is about the right color, and he could hardly do worse.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, War | No Comments »

A Surprising Recipe for Speed

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Apparently short heels and long toes are a surprising recipe for speed — if you don’t understand mechanical advantage:

Using ultrasound imaging, researchers compared the feet of 12 top college sprinters with those of 12 mere mortals. Surprisingly, the athletes had particularly short heels and longer-than-average toes — features that actually put them at a mechanical disadvantage when running.

“What we found is that sprinters actually had less mechanical advantage than the non-sprinter subjects that we tested,” said biomechanics researcher Stephen Piazza of Penn State University, co-author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “This was surprising to us because we expected that sprinters needed all the help they could get.”

Piazza and his co-author, kinesiology graduate student Sabrina Lee, launched their study after they happened to measure the Achilles’ tendon of a former NFL wide receiver, and were shocked by how little leverage his tendon provided.
[...]
On average, top sprinters had heels that were 25 percent shorter than their non-athlete counterparts, as well as significantly longer toes.

To understand the paradox, the researchers set up a computer model of a sprinter’s push-off. The simulation revealed that despite providing a mechanical disadvantage, the short lever arm of a sprinter’s heel actually produced more force than the longer lever arm of a non-sprinter.

“It turns out that there’s a trade-off that we think is going on,” Piazza said. “The larger the lever arm of the Achilles tendon, the more the tendon has to travel up when you point your toes. What that means is that the calf muscles have to shorten more rapidly, and muscle that is shortening more rapidly can’t generate much force.”

In other words, sprinters sacrifice the mechanical advantage of a long lever for the benefit of a stronger push-off. Since quick acceleration over a short distance is the key to winning a short race, Piazza says the trade-off makes sense for sprinters. “He has to be able to generate a lot of force, but he also needs that leverage,” he said. “It turns out that by giving up some leverage, you actually gain more in terms of force generation and get a net benefit.”

Have these researchers ever driven a stick-shift? High-gear isn’t faster off the line.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »