Margaret Thatcher

Monday, April 8th, 2013

Margaret Thatcher was certainly an interesting person:

Born Margaret Roberts on Oct. 13, 1925, in the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham to Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, Mrs. Thatcher was schooled from an early age in an ethic of hard work and self-reliance. She grew up in a house with no hot water and an outdoor toilet. Her father, a Methodist lay preacher, was active in local politics and a major early influence.

“He taught her, don’t go with the herd if you think that the herd is wrong,” said Sir Bernard Ingham, who served as Mrs. Thatcher’s press secretary for 11 years.

His interest in politics also provided the books and newspapers which would stimulate her own. The brutalities of World War II and the accounts of a young Austrian Jew for whom her father had arranged shelter in Grantham filled her with a hate of all totalitarianism. She later recalled in her autobiography that as a 13-year-old she took on a group of adults, to their “astonishment”, in a prewar fish-and-chip shop queue after one said that at least Adolf Hitler had given Germany back its self-respect.

Mrs. Thatcher attended local state schools at a time when Conservative politicians were still mainly drafted from Britain’s elite private schools. She studied chemistry at Oxford University and spent her early career in research laboratories.

Mrs. Thatcher took power following Britain’s “winter of discontent” of 1978-1979, in which nationwide strikes over pay by public-sector workers from gravediggers to garbage men brought an economy that had for years been growing at half the rate of its peers close to a standstill. In her first two years as prime minister, the nation’s economy shrank and unemployment rose by a million, hovering at three million until the mid-1980s. There was widespread rioting in inner cities as both these conditions and racial tensions fermented dissent.

I can recall watching a documentary on punk rock’s early days, where the situation in England was clearly dreadful, with garbage piled up between buildings, and I found it odd that everyone seemed to blame some kind of conservative Establishment.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Nuclear-Powered Airplanes

Monday, April 8th, 2013

We need nuclear-powered airplanes, Kevin Bullis argues, not solar-powered ones:

There are some things solar panels are good for, but they’re not good for passenger aircraft. The energy in sunlight is too diffuse. A square-meter solar panel generates less than 200 watts in full sunshine. In comparison, a small, half-meter-wide, gasoline-powered generator can generate 3,500 watts. It can run for 24 hours — at half power — on less than 12 gallons of fuel. The solar panel, of course, stops working at night. If it can generate some extra power during the day, that could be stored in batteries. But batteries store only about 1/100th as much energy as gasoline.

[...]

The lowest carbon route could be making fuels from carbon dioxide and water using energy from land-based solar power or nuclear power plants. Eventually high temperature nuclear power plants now in development might be an even better option — their heat could be used to facilitate the necessary chemical reactions more efficiently than electricity could.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Optimal Music for the Gym

Sunday, April 7th, 2013

The benefits of music seem most pronounced during low-to-moderate-intensity exercise:

A study published last year in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness found that cyclists who synchronized their movements to music reduced oxygen uptake by as much as 7%. The study tested three different musical tempos on 10 men who cycled for 12 minutes at 70% maximal heart rate.

Another experiment, involving 30 people walking on treadmills, found that exercising at the same tempo as the music boosted endurance. One group of participants walked with motivational music, another with neutral music and a third with no music. Endurance increased in both groups listening to music, although the motivational music had the greatest effect. The study was published in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology in 2009.

Experts say most of the benefits of working out to music come from psychological factors. “When people run with music their rate of perceived exertion is lower than if they don’t use music or other devices,” says Gershon Tenenbaum, director of the graduate program in sport and exercise psychology at Florida State University. These benefits tend to evaporate once a person begins exercising at very intense levels, he says.

Dr. Tenenbaum says similar benefits have been observed when athletes are told to imagine they are in a certain location, such as at the beach, or are exposed to particular smells, such as lavender.

David-Lee Priest, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, says music is able to divert attention through a neurological mechanism. The unpleasant feedback from exercising, such as difficulty breathing, sweating or stiff muscles, is transferred to the brain using the afferent, or sensory, nervous system. Listening to music interferes with the transmission of those sensations, he says. “Before you become aware of the fatigue the music will block out the sensations of fatigue and effort so you won’t fully notice them,” he says. That blocking occurs only up to a point — about 70% of one’s maximum capacity, he says.

With resistance training, the benefit of music occurs more before one starts exercising or in between sets, Dr. Priest says. “It’s like taking a mild stimulant.…It will increase your heart rate and blood pressure slightly.”

In a recent study, Dr. Karageorghis and colleagues tested the effects of music on swimmers. After three weeks in which the athletes got used to swimming with ear buds, the researchers conducted three experiments using 26 collegiate swimmers who completed the 200-meter freestyle trials. They listened to motivational music, neutral music and no music. Both music groups saw a three-second improvement in performance compared to their race times without music. Although this represented just a 2% improvement, Dr. Karageorghis says it’s enough to make a difference in the realm of competitive swimming.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 1 Comment »

Against Anton-Wilsonism

Saturday, April 6th, 2013

Scott Alexander speaks out against Anton-Wilsonism and other forms of “insight porn” beyond Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus:

Better I should compare it to my interest in physics as a high schooler. This interest took the following form: I would read Scientific American articles about bosons, then go around saying “Did you know there are several types of bosons, with mass of such-and-such?” Maybe I would vaguely long to go to CERN and see the Large Hadron Collider (a wish I eventually fulfilled). I read some biographies of famous physicists and I could point out the position in the sky of several leading black hole candidates.

A priori there’s nothing wrong with this; it was a more productive use of my high school days than taking drugs or watching reality shows. But the problem is that at the time I thought I was Learning Science. I had this idea that Science was great and admirable, and that people who knew Science could predict eclipses and split the atom, and I was going to be one of those people, and all I had to do was read a few more Stephen Hawking books and then when I became an adult I could receive my Certificate of Scienciness and start splitting atoms. But that wasn’t remotely how it works and although I could charitably be said to be learning about science this has very little in common with learning science.

There are certain fields where it’s really obvious to everyone that learning about the field is different from learning the field. There are probably historians of music who have never picked up an instrument, and they don’t fancy themselves musicians. And political scientists don’t delude themselves into thinking they would make great politicians.

Mysticism is not always one of these fields (rationality isn’t either, but that’s a different blog article). Because so much of mysticism revolves around the idea of the gnosis, a specific kind of knowledge, it is easy to mistake knowledge of mysticism for the knowledge that mysticism tries to produce. This means Robert Anton Wilson and his ilk can cause at least three different types of failure.

First, as I mentioned before, they provide a false sense of reward. If you are actually enlightened, it’s pretty hard to demonstrate this to someone short of shooting them with a chi bolt from your third eye. On the other hand, if you’re knowledgeable about mysticism, it’s really easy to demonstrate this. I would talk to my mysticism-interested friends, and we’d be like “Oh, this reminds me of something the third Zen patriarch said about this subject”, and then we’d feel all cool and mystically advanced. And just as slacktivism sates your desire to do good without requiring any hard work, so this sates the desire to associate with the neat cause of mysticism without requiring any hard work beyond reading lots of books, which for a certain kind of person is the sort of thing they’d do anyway. So this sort of scholarship directly funges against actual results.

Second, they encourage you to think in terms of conspiracy. Quick, what do Buddhism and the Illuminati have in common? Okay, fine, nothing. So how come they’re both part of Anton Wilson’s repertoire? My guess is that mystics say weird things all the time like “Ultimate holy reality is emptiness” or “Spend a while thinking about the sound of one hand clapping”, and people view this as a sort of puzzle. Like mystical traditions are jealous guardians of some kind of secret knowledge, and they’ve let slip a couple of clues, and it’s our Da Vinci Code-esque job to piece together what this secret knowledge is and pierce through the conspiracy. Which I think, despite the fact that many ancient mystery cults did jealously guard secret knowledge, is totally the wrong way of looking at things.

Instead of mystics talking about one hand clapping, let’s go back to my physics example. Physicists also frequently emit bizarre and puzzling statements like “Faster objects have more mass than slower objects”, or “Time and space are really just aspects of a more generalized spacetime.” If you try to understand these statements – really understand them on a gut level – by watching Carl Sagan specials, you will fail. One hypothesis here is that Carl Sagan is part of a conspiracy, where he will tantalizingly tell you a few pieces of the clues but guards the really juicy bits for himself, and you need to piece together the real thing using Sagan, 12th-century alchemical texts, the Windows source code, and a pattern of moles on Neil Tyson DeGrasse’s left cheek. Another hypothesis is that this is the sort of thing which no amount of learning about science will be able to illuminate, but which is relatively straightforward once you learn science and can solve the equations that describe them – and that this knowledge cannot be translated into terms people who haven’t learned science can understand in any way more satisfying than the old “Well, imagine a really taut sheet with some objects upon it…”

Third and most important, they promote dabbling, which is fatal. “Why limit yourself to one tradition when you can take insights from all the different traditions and invent your own tradition that combines the best wisdom of them all as well as your own special touch?”

Well, because until you know at least a little of what you’re doing you don’t know how to do it. This is a form of Chesterton’s Fence, except that instead of a fence in a field it’s like a twelve-dimensional pulsing image in an unexplored region of Dimension Q’qaar and you have no idea what it is or what it does or where you’re going. Oooh, I know, let’s remove the part of Daoism where you don’t drink whiskey and hire hookers every night! That won’t change the underlying state of mental peace at all.

This brings up the related issue of Schelling fences: once you let yourself change things, do you really trust yourself to remove only the chaff and not the parts that are annoying or hard or inconvenient? Yes, 3000 year old forms of practice are inconvenient and laden with superstitious baggage, but Bringing Buddhism To The West was like the state pasttime of California for several very interesting decades back in the mid-20th century. Surely you could latch onto one of the adaptations created then instead of trying to invent your own?

But the most pernicious issue here is that – at least if my college age self is typical – you will end up spending so much time refining and polishing and admiring your new collection of spiritual beliefs that you never actually bother putting them into practice – or if you do, you will change them every few weeks and never get the solid consistent base you need to be good at them.

Posted in Science | 3 Comments »

Women Are Generally Physically Weaker

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Men run much faster than women — to the point that being in the top five percent of young women would put you just outside the bottom five percent of young men — and men are much stronger than women, too.

Saying this is sexist, of course, and a sign that you shouldn’t be allowed to write female characters:

If you’ve ever had an issue with some of the women’s characters on AMC’s The Walking Dead — the root of the problem might be in the source material. Robert Kirkman, the creator of the comics, definitely has some… issues… with women.

Simon Abrams from the Village Voice reports Kirkman told him in an interview for The Comics Journal four years ago:

I don’t mean to sound sexist, but as far as women have come over the last 40 years, you don’t really see a lot of women hunters. They’re still in the minority in the military, and there’s not a lot of female construction workers. I hope that’s not taken the wrong way. I think women are as smart, resourceful, and capable in most things as any man could be … but they are generally physically weaker. That’s science.

First up, Kirkman, you totally do mean to sound sexist, so shut it with the crappy, disingenuous concern.

Since when do you need massive amounts of strength to hunt, even as they do on The Walking Dead? The average fit person would be good to go — especially if they’d all been living under the same circumstances for so long. Plus, if we want to speak “in general”, then women have more stamina than men — even swole bro trainers agree — and that’s probably more crucial than being ripped when it comes to hunting.

By the way, women do not have more stamina than men:

The average VO2max is about 33 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body mass per minute for sedentary young women and around 42 ml/kg/min for sedentary young men (Bouchard et al., Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 30: 252-8, 1998). Elite female distance runners can sometimes reach VO2max readings of 70+ ml/kg/min (Pate et al., International Journal of Sports Medicine 8 (Suppl.): 91-5, 1987), whereas elite men can attain values in the 80s (Pollock, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 301: 310-22, 1977).

Posted in Fitness, Media, Policy | 4 Comments »

Seven Myths About “Women in Combat”

Friday, April 5th, 2013

A retired Marine lieutenant general shares seven myths about “women in combat”:

Myth #1 – “It’s about women in combat.”

No, it’s not. Women are already in combat, and are serving well and professionally. The issue should be more clearly entitled, “Women in the infantry.” And this is a decidedly different proposition.

Myth #2 – “Combat has changed” (often accompanied by “There are no front lines anymore”).

This convenient misconception requires several counters. First, any serious study of military history will reveal numerous historical examples about how successive generations (over millennia) believed that warfare had changed forever, only to find that technology may change platforms, but not its harsh essence. To hope that conflicts over the last 20 years are models of a new, antiseptic form of warfare is delusional.

The second point is that the enemy gets a vote — time, place, and style. For example, war on the Korean Peninsula would be a brutal, costly, no-holds-barred nightmare of mayhem in close combat with casualties in a week that could surpass the annual total of recent conflict.

The final point on this myth reinforces the Korea example and it bears examination — Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, where warfare was reduced to a horrific, costly, and exhausting scrap in a destroyed city between two foes that fought to the death.

The standard for ground combat unit composition should be whether social experimentation would have amplified our opportunity for success in that crucible, or diminished it. We gamble with our future security when we set standards for warfare based on the best case, instead of the harshest one.

Myth #3 – “If they pass the physical standards, why not?”

Physical standards are important, but not nearly all of the story. Napoleon — “The moral (spirit) is to the physical as three is to one.”

Unit cohesion is the essence of combat power, and while it may be convenient to dismiss human nature for political expediency, the facts are that sexual dynamics will exist and can affect morale. That may be manageable in other environments, but not in close combat.

Any study of sexual harassment statistics in this age cohort — in the military, academia, or the civilian workplace — are evidence enough that despite best efforts to by sincere leaders to control the issue, human instincts remain strong. Perceptions of favoritism or harassment will be corrosive, and cohesion will be the victim.

Myth #4 – “Standards won’t be lowered.”

This is the cruelest myth of all. The statements of the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are telling.

They essentially declare “guilty until proven innocent” on anyone attempting to maintain the standards which produced the finest fighting force in the world. There are already accommodations (note that unit cohesion won’t be a metric), there will be many more, and we will pay a bloody price for it someday.

Pity the truthful leader who attempts to hold to standards based on realistic combat factors, and tells truth to power. Most won’t, and the others won’t survive.

Myth #5 – “Opening the infantry will provide a better pathway to senior rank for the talented women.”

Not so. What will happen is that we will take very talented females with unlimited potential and change their peer norm when we inject them into the infantry.

Those who might meet the infantry physical standard will find that their peers are expected, as leaders, to far exceed it (and most of their subordinates will, as well).

So instead of advancing to a level appropriate to their potential, they may well be left out.

Myth #6 – “It’s a civil rights issue, much like the integration of the armed forces and allowing gays to serve openly.”

Those who parrot this either hope to scare honest and frank discussion, or confuse national security with utopian ideas.

In the process, they demean initiatives that were to provide equally skilled individuals the opportunity to contribute equally. In each of the other issues, lowered standards were not the consequence.

Myth #7 – “It’s just fair.”

Allow me two points.

First, this is ground warfare we’re discussing, so realism is important.

“Fair” is not part of the direct ground combat lexicon.

Direct ground combat, such as experienced in the frozen tundra of Korea, the rubble of Stalingrad, or the endless 30-day jungle patrols against a grim foe in Viet Nam, is the harshest meritocracy — with the greatest consequences — there is.

And psychology in warfare is germane — the force that is respected (and, yes, feared) has a distinct advantage.

Will women in our infantry enhance a psychological advantage, or hinder it?

Second, if it’s about fairness, why do women get a choice of whether to serve in the infantry (when men do not), and why aren’t they required to register for the draft (as men are)?

It may be that we live in a society in which honest discussion of this issue, relying on facts instead of volume, is not possible. If so, our national security will fall victim to hope instead of reality. And myths be damned.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Ender’s Game

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

I didn’t realize that Orson Scott Card had posted his original short story version of Ender’s Game, which first appeared in the August 1977 issue of Analog.

It seems suited to that format.

I forgot how Boydian the story is, with an ansible-controlled fleet able to overcome a larger fleet with slower (light-speed) communications.

Posted in Media, War | No Comments »

How Debt Ruins Systems

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

Taleb explains how debt ruins systems — in contrast to other, more flexible forms of financing:

You’re going to Aleppo, Syria, and Florence and you’re going to send me some silk. You trust me, and my correspondent in Aleppo would pay you the minute I get my silk — that kind of transaction. That’s called letter of credit, where you have debt conditional on some commercial transaction being completed. And it also allows people to finance some inventory, provided the buyer is a committed buyer. That kind of facilitation of commerce is how it all started — the letter of credit — and it developed very well.

Before that we had debt in society and it led to blowups in Babylon, and then they had to have debt jubilees. Then of course the Hebrews also had debt jubilees. And of course, they say neither a borrower nor a lender be. The Romans didn’t like debt. The Greeks didn’t like debt, except for a few intellectuals. Intellectuals for some reason, like Mr. Krugman, like debt.

Later on debt came back to Europe with the Reformation and it was mostly to finance wars. The industrial revolution was not financed by debt. California was not financed by debt; it was financed by equity. So debt is not necessary. You can use it for emergencies. Catholic societies — Aquinas was against debt and his statements were stronger than the Islamic fatwa against debt.

We have learned through history that debt in the form of leverage can blow things up. Debt fragilizes. Now what we have had in this economy is a growth of debt mostly financed indirectly by governments. Because if you blow up, we’re going to be behind you.

Posted in Economics, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Policy | No Comments »

Running Like a Girl

Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

It’s no secret that men run faster than women, but these two tables from Paediatric Exercise Science and Medicine demonstrate just how much faster young men are than young women:

Percentile Ranks for 50-m Sprint for Boys

Percentile Ranks for 50-m Sprint for Girls

In a 50-meter sprint, the average time for an 18-year-old guy is 7.3 seconds (±0.5 s), while the average time for an 18-year-old girl is 9.1 seconds (±0.7 s).

One girl in ten can run 50 meters in 8.2 seconds, which is fast enough to put a guy below the 5th percentile.

One girl in a hundred can run 50 meters in 7.6 seconds, which is fast enough to put a boy in the 25th percentile.

So, the number of girls who can run as fast as the average guy is roughly zero.

It didn’t realize it was that extreme.

Posted in Fitness, Science | 6 Comments »

The Mad Billionaire Behind GoPro

Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013

The mad billionaire behind GoPro was once a failed dot-commer obsessed with surfing — and coming up with a wrist camera to capture his exploits:

That concept came a few years after college after an online gaming service he started, Funbug, went belly-up in the dot-com crash of 2000-01, taking with it $3.9 million of investors’ money. “I’d never failed at anything before except computer science engineering classes,” he says. “So it was like, ‘Holy s–t, maybe I’m not capable of doing this.’”

To get his head straight again, Woodman lit out on a surf odyssey through Australia and Indonesia, one last big trip before what he figured would become a life of comfortable middle-class monotony. He brought a contraption he’d made out of a broken surfboard leash and rubber bands that allowed him to dangle a Kodak disposable camera to his wrist for easy operation when the perfect wave hit. Close friend and current GoPro creative director Brad Schmidt met Woodman in Indonesia and became one of the first to toy with the strap. One of his first observations: Woodman needed a camera durable enough to take the wear and tear of the sea. Five months into being a surf bum, a recharged Woodman returned to California with the seed of an idea.

Woodman, then 27, holed up in the house he shared in Moss Beach, Calif., just over the hills from Silicon Valley. He “checked out” from his normal life, including friends and family, locking himself in his beachside bedroom to build his first prototypes. Deciding that he had to sell the strap, the camera and the casing, he armed himself with a drill and his mother’s sewing machine and strapped a Camelback filled half with Gatorade and half with water to his back (negating the 30-second walk to the kitchen) for 18-hour work sessions. “I’d have a sliding door to the outside so I could just go take a pee out on the bushes out on the side,” Woodman recalls. He gave himself four years to make it work before he would drop his idea and enter the workforce. “I was so scared that I would fail again that I was totally committed to succeed.””After he took off, he was like, ‘I think I’m going to start this wrist strap company for surfers,’” says Schmidt, who was skeptical. Says Woodman: “I thought to myself, ‘If I made a few hundred grand a year, I’m, like, in heaven.’”

Between sewing together old wetsuit material and drilling holes in raw plastic, Woodman was constantly trolling online and at trade shows for a camera he could modify and license as his own. He settled on a $3.05 35-millimeter model made in China, sending his plastic cases and $5,000 on a prayer to an unknown entity named Hotax. Woodman received his 3-D models and renderings a few months later and sold his first product in September 2004 at an action-sports trade show in San Diego.

That was the first validation for Woodman, whose friends thought their former surfing buddy had held his breath underwater for a little too long. Neil Dana, his roommate and first hire, recalls a work-obsessed guy constantly fixated on success. “We would be at a party,” Dana recalls, “and he would come up the stairs and be like, ‘Dude, check this out, this is how we’re going to become millionaires!’ ” Woodman was only three zeroes off.

GoPro grossed $350,000 in its first full year of sales. Woodman was the all-in-one product engineer, R&D head, salesman and packaging model. He and Dana rang up surf shops across the country hoping to get some of their product out of Woodman’s father’s home in Sausalito and into the market. In 2005 he appeared on QVC three times, running into Spanx founder and fellow future billionaire Sara Blakely while she was building her company as well. (“If she remembers me, I’ll be amazed,” says Woodman. “But I’d love to get word to her to give her a digital high-five on crushing it.”)

Woodman eschewed venture capital as he grew — a by-product of his Funbug experience and a desire to work without suits interfering. Says Dana, “He wanted to keep it private for as long as possible so he could get a Lotus for ‘product testing’ and do things and not have to answer to a board about it.” At the outset Woodman dropped in $30,000 of his own money, as well as $35,000 from his mother and two $100,000 investments from his father. The company made money from that point and today boasts profit margins, FORBES estimates, around 15%. It wasn’t until May 2011 that GoPro took on $88 million from five venture firms including Riverwood Capital, led by former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks, and Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s venture investment arm, which allowed him, his family and some early executives to take a good chunk of cash out.

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Words from a Bosnian Survivalist

Monday, April 1st, 2013

These chilling words from a Bosnian survivalist remind us how bad things can get — almost overnight:

I am from Bosnia. You know, between 1992 and 1995 it was hell. For one year I lived, and survived, in a city with 6000 people, without water, electricity, gasoline, medical help, civil defense, distribution service, any kind of traditional service or centralized rule.

Our city was blockaded by the army and for 1 year life in the city turned into total crap. We had no army, no police, we only had armed groups — those armed protected their homes and families.

When it all started some of us were better prepared, but most of the neighbors families had enough food only for a few days. Some had pistols, a few had AK47s (  ) or shotguns.

After a month or two gangs started operating, destroying everything. Hospitals, for example, turned into slaughterhouses. There was no more police. About 80% of the hospital staff were gone. I got lucky — my family at the time was fairly large (15 people in a large house, 6 pistols, 3 Aks), and we survived (most of us, at least).

The Americans dropped MREs every 10 days, to help blockaded cities. This was never enough. Some — very few — had gardens. It took 3 months for the first rumors to spread of men dying from hunger and cold. We removed all the doors, the window frames from abandoned houses, ripped up the floors and burned the furniture for heat. Many died from diseases, especially from the water (two from my own family). We drank mostly rainwater, ate pigeons and even rats.

Money soon became worthless. We returned to an exchange. For a tin can of tushonka you could have a woman (it is hard to speak of it, but it is true). Most of the women who sold themselves were desperate mothers.

Arms, ammunition, candles, lighters, antibiotics, gasoline, batteries and food. We fought for these things like animals. In these situations it all changes. Men become monsters. It was disgusting.

Strength was in numbers. A man living a lone getting killed and robbed would be just a matter of time, even if he was armed.

Today me and my family are well-prepared, I am well-armed. I have experience.

Posted in War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

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