Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Inside the Divided Brain

Here is an interesting lecture on brain asymmetry:

Funny

Here's the future. Beauty has been democratized!

Understanding the Evil and Nefarious Schemes of Marketers

Here is truth laid bare...



I was well into my twenties before I had this level of sophisticated understanding of the evil marketing schemes of merchandisers.

Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

Jeffrey Kluger's "The Sibling Effect"

This book is an interesting mix of science reporting and autobiography. His topic is birth order and the effects that siblings have on each other. He uses is own quite interesting family to spice up the story with personal details. I found that fascinating.

The book will acquaint you with the major results on the biological and sociological effects of siblings on each other. It looks at genetics, sex, gender, birth order, and a bit of cultural history. It nicely mixes this up with a survey that runs through Kluger's life but nicely separates out issues chapter by chapter.

Here is a bit where Kluger is being grandly philosophical:

I may have been lucky in the siblings I got, and all six of us may have been lucky in the way we were able to parlay the challenges we faced into greater closeness and loyalty, as opposed to greater distance. But if there's anything my research and my own history have taught me, it's that in the overwhelming share of cases, our relationships with our siblings -- whether easy and loving or fraught and factious -- deserve all the care, tending, and watering we can give them. Nature, after all, plays for keeps. Any human life will have more than its share of pains and grief -- and it will end in death no matter what. And yet the life of anyone with a sibling begins with a sidekick and traveling companion who can be with you the entire way. Wasting that relationship is folly of the first order. It's true when we're kids, it's true when we're adults, and it's surely true when we're aging and alone. To the extent that this book has a mission, it's to argue for the sibling ideal -- and for better understanding and preserving those bonds.

I would recommend this as a fun and educational read for everyone.

I've previously reviewed his book Simplexity which was a much more serious review of science. This book doesn't put the demands on you for any real interest in science. You can read this book as a light "biography" with some interesting scientific bits thrown in. It is very entertaining, not in a purely "ha ha" way, but as an insightful look into relationships and family dynamics that I find engrossing. The book will lead you to some "aha!" moments.

Defining the "Self"

I love to puzzle about questions like "what is the purpose of life?", "is a virus alive?", "how do you know when you 'know' something?", etc.

Here is the cartoonist Scott Adams (aka creator of the Dilbert cartoon) taking the puzzle of defining what makes you 'you' and giving an interesting reply:

Have you ever wondered who you are? You're not your body, because living cells come and go and are generally outside of your control. You're not your location, because that can change. You aren't your DNA because that simply defines the boundaries of your playing field. You aren't your upbringing because siblings routinely go in different directions no matter how similar their start. My best answer to my own question is this:

You are what you learn.

If all you know is how to be a gang member, that's what you'll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you'll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you'll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you'll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.

I'm fascinated by the way a person changes at a fundamental level as he or she merges with a particular field of knowledge. People who study economics come out the other side thinking a different way from people who study nursing. And learning becomes a fairly permanent part of a person even as the cells in the body come and go and the circumstances of life change.

You can easily nitpick my definition of self by arguing that you are actually many things, including your DNA, your body, your mind, you environment and more. By that view, you're more of a soup than a single ingredient. I'll grant you the validity of that view. But I'll argue that the most powerful point of view is that you are what you learn.

It's easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there's almost nothing you can't learn your way out of. If you don't like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You're free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.

Suppose you don't like your social life. You can learn how to be the sort of person that attracts better friends. Don't like your body? You can learn how to eat right and exercise until you have a new one. You can even learn how to dress better and speak in more interesting ways.

I credit my late mother for my view of learning. She raised me to believe I could become whatever I bothered to learn. No single idea has served me better.

I would put down Scott Adams' "definition" as an 'aspirational' definition of self. Its purpose is to motivate you to learn and grow. In reality, you are something quite different from what you "learn". I had that driven home to me when my mother developed a brain tumour and the operation to remove it was botched by an incompetent (but licensed) surgeon. It left her with left neglect and other cognitive impairments (she couldn't visually distinguish me from my brother but she could tell by listening and by using deduction, e.g. the clothes we wore who was who). She was still "my mother" but a big chunk of her was gone.

What that hammered home is that we are a meat machine. You mess up the brain tissue and you change "you" into something else. The religious nuts can talk about soul and an afterlife and other fantasies, but the reality is that we have one life in this world in this body and if the body is broken we change and if the body dies we are gone. It is a real mystery that matter can be alive. It is an even bigger mystery that matter can be self conscious. Life is a wondrous thing. I find it really disgusting that religious "know it alls" pound on a book and claim they have all the answers. Why they have is a blighted mind and a refusal to experience the mystery of life, this wonderful, brief gift we have, and the chance to interact with others using the mystery of our minds. Our being alive is truly mind-boggling. To demean this by pretending that some religious doctrine "comprehends" the meaning of life and "surpasses" mere mortal knowledge is disgusting. Life is too precious and wonderful to be captured by the scribblings of some religious fanatics.

The Essence of Being Human

Researcher Robert Sapolsky has nailed it. We are dopamine junkies...



Those of us who are flops in life can't handle time delay of more than a day or week. But as Sapolsky points out, the typical successful middle class dopamine junkie can hold out for the reward of "getting into the best nursing home". The truly long distance and heroic dopamine junkies are the ones who can delay gratification into the hereafter, waiting for the reward that Saint Peter offers them.

Who says that reductive science can't take the measure of man? This talk is an excellent example of reducing a human to a single neurochemical.

If you are dopamine-driven and still haven't had enough Sapolsky, click here, here, here. And repeat that for 100,000 times!

Peak Oil

For the doomsday crowd that follows regular predictions of gloom-and-doom, the "peak oil" story has been a good one.

The typical "picture of doom" is something like this from Wikipedia:

Click to Enlarge
That picture is pretty convincing. We are on the slide to perdition. Only a bleak and hopeless future awaits us...

But wait a second. Here is a more recent graph from an article in the Houston Chronicle:

Click to Enlarge
The article goes on to report a "new peak" in production:

North America appears headed for an oil renaissance, with crude production expected to hit an all-time high by 2016, given the current pace of drilling in the U.S. and Canada, according to a study released by an energy research firm this week.

U.S. oil production in areas including West Texas' Permian Basin, South Texas' Eagle Ford shale, and North Dakota's Bakken shale will record a rise of a little over 2 million barrels per day from 2010 to 2016, according to data compiled by Bentek Energy, a Colorado firm that tracks energy infrastructure and production projects.

Canadian crude production is expected to grow by 971,000 barrels per day during the same period, with much of the oil headed for the U.S.

Combined, the U.S. and Canadian oil output will top 11.5 million barrels per day, which is even more than their combined peak in 1972.

Goldman Sachs has estimated the U.S. could move from being the No. 3 oil producer behind Saudi Arabia and Russia to the No. 1 spot by 2017.

It's a reversal of the steady downward production trend that started after 1971, when U.S. oil production peaked around 9.5 million barrels per day.

I know this is a shock and disappointment to the end-of-days crowd. But this is an old story. If you followed the Club of Rome with its best seller in the early 1970s, the book "Limits to Growth" you've seen this tale before. It is so convincing. The end is nigh! Repent!

But human ingenuity keeps foiling that tale of gloom and despair. It is so seductive to believe that there is no hope and we must give up our sinful "modern ways" and go back to our pastoral past when we were disease ravaged and lived an average of 34 years. But those pesky scientists and technologists keep ruining out return to a "golden age" by creating new techniques or helping us conserve or producing a new substitute. This story is older than civilization. But the siren call of "repent! the end is nigh!" keeps winning because it appeals to our dark side that expects us to be punished for "having it too good".

The Club of Rome pessimists are still in business and no doubt still selling their siren song of "the end is nigh!". But you are better off reading "The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. Unlike the Club of Rome, Simon has been right more than wrong. But unlike the Club of Rome, Simon is ignored by the press. It is so much easier to sell papers with the story of doom-and-gloom. Nobody wants to hear that we will "muddle through" or that we can count on "human ingenuity". We want morality plays. We want punishment for sinful ways, the excesses of the past. Nobody wants dull fact, reasoned judgement, and a scientific attitude. It doesn't sell.

The Mixing of Human and Neanderthal Genes

Here is a nice, short, but informative video on the brief interchange of genes between modern humans and Neanderthals:



There is more by Lynn Fellman at her web site. Her blog, the Sci Art blog, looks interesting.

Your Friend, Mr. Policeman

Funny. When I was a kid I was taught that Mr. Policeman was my friend. I've since learned to give them wide berth because you can't predict how they will behave and you essentially have no rights unless you have lots of money and powerful friends to help you buy/bribe the appropriate "justice".

Here is a case of an adolescent who was beaten and arrested "because he had a suspicious bulge in his pants". That was a colostomy bag. And the guy suffered Down's symdrome so when the police got pushy and aggressive, the poor kid did what any normal person (or animal) would do. He tried to flee. That simply enraged the cop who was too stupid to recognize mental impairment or be acquainted with the need for colostomy bags.

And here is the case of a physically disabled woman sitting in front of her house who didn't jump when a cop ordered her to "jump". She mistakenly believed that she had a right to sit on her property and wait for the ice cream truck to drive by so she could get some ice cream. The cop "subdued" her so violently during her arrest she had to be taken to the hospital for treatment of injuries during the "arrest".

It is good to see that the "land of the free" has police to make sure that freedom is properly respected. It is so heart-warming to read that "the best country in the world" is protected by diligent police who aren't confused or impeded by mental retardation or physical disability. They believe in dishing out "justice" to any and all with an "even hand".

When you read the above, you can understand why the US is busy killing thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are simply doing "police work" on an international scale bringing the fruits of American "freedom" and "love of liberty" to everyone.

I wish I lived in a world where the police were in fact "working for the people" and respected citizen's rights. But sadly, I live in an alternate universe where the police feel they are employed by the top 1% to enforce a system where the job of the bottom 99% is to help enrich to top 1%. In this alternate universe, the laws are written to give tax cuts to the rich while providing the "benefits" of fees and hidden taxes to the bottom 99%. The judicial system is a pompous, expensive, ridiculous system that delivers "justice" that is tangential to real justice. The rich get their wrists slapped no matter how many victims and how seriously harmed those victims are. The poor get manhandled and long prison terms for their "crimes" no matter how little real harm (if any) was done because "everybody knows" the poor are dangerous and must be watched closely and severely punished for the least intimation that they might step out of line.

Fear in the Financial Markets

Here is a bit from a post by by Barry Ritholtz in his The Big Picture blog that spells out how much fear and uncertainty is running among investors:

The credit crisis blew up a mere 3 years ago; the recency effect has investors fearing a replay of that crisis, only centered on European instead of US banks. Bloomberg observes more than $75B in fund withdrawals have been pulled from U.S. equity funds since the end of April (Fund Withdrawals Top Lehman as $75B Pulled). That is more than the five month withdrawal after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. US stocks have lost $2.1 trillion in market cap May 2011.

...

Hence, our Stew of Negativity is fairly well understood: Start with fears of another 2008 bank crisis; add a new cyclical recession as your two base ingredients of investor’s worries. Season that with the ongoing de-leveraging and the long slow recovery process that typically follows credit crises; add the accompanying housing overhang, merely half way through its rush towards 10 million foreclosures. Salt & Pepper to taste.

Go read the original to get the embedded links.

Human nature is funny. Fear runs highest after the fact. For example, after a terrorist attack you suddenly get police in the streets and people terrified of living their lives. Before the attack, everybody is secure and happy. This is called "closing the barn door after the horses have fled". The danger was before the attack. The safest moments are usually after the attack because that's when security is on high alert. The same is true of the financial markets. Credit is tight right now because banks got burned by their fradulent lending practices before 2008. Before 2008 the joke was that if you could fog a mirror you got a loan. Now, companies that have the business and want to expand, can't get a loan. It is all so hysterically funny. Human nature is so perverse!

Psychopath as a Neurobiologist

This is fascinating. Here is James Fallon, a neurobiologist, how has all the markings of a psychopath. But he isn't. He is a reputable scientist. And he "discovered" through his research into brain scans that he is psychopath. Not a hardened killer psychopath, but a "pro-social psychopath".

Here is a TED talk he has given:



And here is another interesting, more recent talk by James Fallon.

And here is an NPR profile of James Fallon.

Fallon has many ancestors who were mad killers, including the notorious Lizzie Bordon:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

From Reason TV:



And here is a talk by James Fallon at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2011:



In this video James Fallon talks of Robert Hare's famous PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist)

Thinking Like an Engineer

Most people don't know how to quantify their decisions. They think the world is black or white. You are either for or against something.

But there is a different way. You evaluate what an option cost. It is called a cost-benefit analysis. You can use it to evaluate alternatives and come up with a more rational decision, one based on understanding the hidden costs to the decision as well as the hidden benefits.

Here's an example:

Paul Krugman Notices an Oddity of 9/11

Here is a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul Krugman takes a lot of flak for telling things as he sees them. He is courageous and modest, and he has stayed in the fight despite being ignored and hated. To me, he is like an Old Testament prophet: reviled in his own land, but one day he will be recognized for his honest, heroic, and prescient stand. He's been dead right on almost every issue.

Meanwhile, for comic relief, there is Michael Moore who has done much to publicize problems and wrongs, but who can't resist putting his own ego front and centre. If you want to read something that is 180^o out from Krugman's quiet stance, read this article by Michael Moore where he turns the focus off the big issue and instead focuses on "me, me, me". I like Michael Moore but I don't like his narcissistic egotism. Krugman stays at his post focused on the issues, while Michael Moore makes sure he is in the shot when he does a documentary or writes up the injustice or tragedy with his own ego front and centre. I prefer the quiet hero.

As for 9/11... here is a post by Barry Ritholtz at his The Big Picture blog that best captures my opinion about the way the media is milking the situation:

Relentless Media Hype

I’ve already had my say about what happened 10 years ago. I do not feel a compelling need to revisit it again and again and again.

MSNBC is replaying their September 11, 2001 broadcast; the WSJ made their entire 9/12 paper available online. Other outlets are doing similar “tributes” if thats the right word.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but the relentless 9/11 coverage and tributes feels both ghoulish and exploitative. Sorry, but this is simply too much, I’ve had more than I can take of this. I do not care to spend the entire day crying, but if I watch any more of this coverage that is what will happen.

To those people who can find some consolation in this, I wish you well. Its a macabre spectacle to me. I need to find something more joyous and upbeat.

Between narcissistic egoism and bathetic maudlinism and commercial exploitation, I'm finding early September to be the doldrums of the year.

Update 2011sep12: Here is an added post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that gives his thoughts about the exploitation of 9/11:

More About the 9/11 Anniversary

It looks as if I should say a bit more about yesterday’s anniversary. So:

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, when people who made speeches, then feathered their own political or financial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – those who put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after.

So it was a shameful episode in our nation’s history – and it’s one that I can’t help thinking about whenever we talk about 9/11 itself.

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

Lawrence Krauss' "Quantum Man: Richard Feynnman's Life in Science"

This is a good review of "the complete" Richard Feynman. It has better coverage of the science than more popular biographies. It doesn't break any new ground on the personality of Feynman, but that would be hard to do after a half dozen other biographies, especially Feynman's own autobiographical books.

What most impressed me about this book was Krauss' ability to demonstrate the widespread influence of Feynman's work. Sure he got a Nobel prize, but that didn't get the publicity and "public intellectual" stature that a lot of physics "greats" get. Instead, he is known more for his quirky personality. But Krauss takes the effort to show truly how wide and deep the influence of Feynman's work is on modern physics.

This book reinforces, yet again for me, what I like most about Feynman: a great, deep thinker, who remained humble and focused more on the science than on the glory. Too many scientists ascend to positions of "august sage" and produce nothing in their later years. Feynman was working until the day he died still creating interesting new science.

It is hard to pick anything that gives the flavour of Feynman, but I liked this bit from the book talking about Feynman's 1959 lecture to the American Physical Society "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom":

Feynman began his lecture by saying that some people were impressed by a machine that could write the Lord's prayer on the head of a pin. That was nothing. He envisaged first writing the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin. But, he argued, that was nothing, because one could easily do that with regular printing by simply shrinking the area of each dot used in half-tone printing by a factor of 25,000. As he argued, even then each dot would contain about 1,000 atoms. No problem, he imagined.

But even that was timid, he argued. What about writing all of the information in all of the books in the world? He performed an estimate for doing so that is amusingly similar to one that I did when I tried to consider how much information would be required to store a digital copy of someone for transporting, in The Physics of Star Trek. He argued that it would be easy to store one bit of information (that is, a 1 or 0) using, say, a cube of 5 atoms on a side, or a few more than 100 atoms. He also estimated there were about 10¹⁵ bits of information in all of the books in the world, which at the time he estimated to be about 24 million volumes. In that case, to store all of the information in all of the books in the world would take merely a cube of material less than one-hundredth of an inch on a side -- as small as the smallest speck of dist to the human eye! Okay, so you get the picture.

Feynman loved to calculate. He was a theorist, but one with an eye for detail and an insistence that theory connect with fact, that until you could calculate specific numbers that matched experiment, you didn't have real science.

The book is well worth taking your time to read. Everybody should get to know one of the great minds of the 20th century.

The New Gold Standard?

This is fascinating stuff. A programmer has developed a new non-governmental currency. The reaction has been interesting and informative.

Here is a bit from an article by James Surowiecki in MIT's Technology Review:

The Bitcoin network, designed by an unknown programmer with the handle "Satoshi ­Nakamoto," used a decentralized peer-to-peer system to verify transactions, which meant that people could exchange goods and services electronically, and anonymously, without having to rely on third parties like banks. Its medium of exchange, the bitcoin, was an invented currency that people could earn—or, in Bitcoin's jargon, "mine"—by lending their computers' resources to service the needs of the Bitcoin network. Once in existence, bitcoins could also be bought and sold for dollars or other currencies on online exchanges. The network seemed like a potentially useful supplement to existing monetary systems: it let people avoid the fees banks charge and take part in noncash transactions anonymously while still guaranteeing that transactions would be secure.

Yet over the past year and a half Bitcoin has become, for some, much more. Instead of a supplement to the dollar economy, it's been trumpeted as a competitor, and promoters have conjured visions of markets where bitcoins are a dominant medium of exchange. The hyperbole is out of proportion with the more mundane reality. Tens of thousands of bitcoins are traded each day (some for goods and services, others in exchange for other currencies), and several hundred businesses, mostly in the digital world, now take bitcoins as payment. That's good for a new monetary system, but it's not disruptive growth. Still, the excitement is perhaps predictable. Setting aside Bitcoin's cool factor—it might just as well have leapt off the pages of Neal ­Stephenson's cult science-fiction novel Snow Crash—a peer-to-peer electronic currency uncontrolled by central bankers or politicians is a perfect object for the anxieties and enthusiasms of those frightened by the threats of inflation and currency debasement, concerned about state power and the surveillance state, and fascinated with the possibilities created by distributed, decentralized systems.

Bitcoin is not going to make government-backed currencies obsolete. But while the system's virtues, such as anonymity and the lack of bank fees, may not matter much to most consumers, one can envision it being useful in a variety of niche markets (some legal, others not, like recreational drugs). Where anonymity is valuable, where trusted third parties are hard to find or charge high rates, and where persistently high inflation is a problem, it's possible that bitcoins could in fact flourish as an alternative currency.

Before they become such an alternative, though, the system will have to overcome a major, and surprising, problem: people have come to see it primarily as a way to make money. In other words, instead of being used as a currency, bitcoins are today mostly seen as (and traded as) an investment. There's a good reason for that: as people learned about Bitcoin, the value of bitcoins, in dollar terms, skyrocketed. In July 2010, after the website Slashdot ran an item that introduced the currency to the public (or at least the public enthusiastic about new technologies), the value of bitcoins jumped tenfold in five days. Over the next eight months, the value rose tenfold again. This attracted an enormous amount of publicity. More important, it also made people think that buying and holding bitcoins was an easy way to make a buck. As a result, many—probably most—Bitcoin users are acquiring bitcoins not in order to buy goods and services but to speculate. That's a bad investment decision, and it also hurts Bitcoin's prospects.

True believers in Bitcoin's usefulness prefer to deny that speculation is driving the action in bitcoins. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The value of the currency has been tremendously volatile over the past year. A bitcoin has been worth as little as a few pennies and as much as $33, and after seeming to stabilize at around $14 over the summer, the bitcoin's value tumbled by almost 50 percent in a matter of days in August. Media coverage has had an outsized impact on the value of bitcoins, even when it has not had a major impact on the number of transactions conducted. Blog posts in which people talk about buying bitcoins because of how much they've increased in value are common. In May, Rick Falkvinge, founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, which focuses on patent and copyright reform, posted that he had decided to put all his savings into Bitcoin. Although he had previously published a series of posts arguing for the bitcoin's viability as a currency, his first listed reason for investing in bitcoins was that their value had risen a thousandfold against the U.S. dollar in the previous 14 months. That's classic speculative thinking.

The problem with having the Bitcoin economy dominated by speculators is that it gives people an incentive to hoard their bitcoins rather than spend them, which is the opposite of what you need people to do in order to make a currency successful. Successful currencies are used to transact day-to-day business and lubricate commerce. But if you buy bitcoins hoping that their value will skyrocket (as anyone investing in bitcoins would), you're not going to be interested in exchanging those bitcoins for goods, since then you'll lose out when the value of bitcoins rises. Instead, you're going to hold onto them and wait until you can cash out.

This kind of hoarding is made more likely by the way Bitcoin is set up. Whereas the supply of modern, "fiat" currencies is controlled by central banks, the supply of bitcoins is permanently limited; there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins in existence.

Obviously this "currency" is the gold bug's delight since it is a strictly limited quantity. But if you look at the wild gyrations in value and the hoarding, this obviously isn't suitable as a real world currency. It is a perfect illustration of the problems of a gold standard.

Here is a bit by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that hammers home the point:

Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those green pieces of paper, fixes the total quantity of cybercurrency instead, and lets its dollar value float. In effect, Bitcoin has created its own private gold standard world, in which the money supply is fixed rather than subject to increase via the printing press.

So how’s it going? The dollar value of that cybercurrency has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment.

But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.

Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.

And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.

So to the extent that the experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes, it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.

I never cease to be amazed at people who yearn desperately for simple solutions. There is no perfect currency. The economy and currency are a social construct. They work only while people believe. Fixing the supply or basing the supply on some shiny yellow stuff is too simplistic. The real world will always be complex, murky, and unstable. But it ends up being more stable than a "perfect currency" like gold or Bitcoin.

The key question is the one Surowiecki asks:

After all, would you accept bitcoins in exchange for your work or products if you knew their value had fallen 50 percent in a matter of days?

Good News & Bad News

The good news is that you don't have the brain of a chimp. You've got a human brain with all the wonders of language and symbolic manipulation that implies.

The bad news is that you've got a problem that chimps don't have. From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Human brains shrink as people grow old, unlike even our closest animal relative, says a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that highlights what researchers call the unique character of human aging.

The human brain normally can shrink up to 15% as it ages, a change linked to dementia, poor memory and depression. Until now, researchers had assumed this gradual brain loss in later years was universal among primates.

But in the first direct comparison of humans to chimpanzees, a brain-scanning team led by George Washington University anthropologist Chet Sherwood found that chimpanzees don't experience such brain loss. From that, researchers concluded that only people are afflicted by this oddity of longevity.

...

Unlike chimpanzees and other primates, elderly humans are prey to a host of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease. Researchers hope that by understanding the basic biology of the brain, they can devise ways to treat or postpone the harmful mental effects of age.

Go read the whole article to get all the dismal details.

Great! So I get the joy of comprehending my place in the universe, but the price I have to pay is a slow descent into dementia as I get older. I love the sense of humour of Mother Nature.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous

For me the 1980s were a nightmare. America fell in love with the TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I found it wretched to think that people "adored" the rich because of their wealth. But the era from 1980 to now has been marked by this deference to the rich and powerful

People need to wake up from their illusions. This story from CNN should help. Here is yet another story of "lifestyles of the rich and famous" where the curtain is peeled back and you can see the corruption and meanness and the evil that lurks behind the glitter:

As we were about to leave, one of the staff told us there was a nanny who worked for Hannibal Gadhafi who might speak to us. He said she'd been burnt by Hannibal's wife, Aline.

I thought he meant perhaps a cigarette stubbed out on her arm. Nothing prepared me for the moment I walked into the room to see Shweyga Mullah.

At first I thought she was wearing a hat and something over her face. Then the awful realization dawned that her entire scalp and face were covered in red wounds and scabs, a mosaic of injuries that rendered her face into a grotesque patchwork.

Even though the burns were inflicted three months ago, she was clearly still in considerable pain. But she told us her story calmly.

She'd been the nanny to Hannibal's little son and daughter.

The 30-year-old came to Libya from her native Ethiopia a year ago. At first things seemed OK, but then six months into her employment she said she was burned by Aline.

Three months later the same thing happened again, this time much more seriously.

In soft tones, she explained how Aline lost her temper when her daughter wouldn't stop crying and Mullah refused to beat the child.

"She took me to a bathroom. She tied my hands behind my back, and tied my feet. She taped my mouth, and she started pouring the boiling water on my head like this," she said, imitating the vessel of scalding hot water being poured over her head.

She peeled back the garment draped carefully over her body. Her chest, torso and legs are all mottled with scars -- some old, some still red, raw and weeping. As she spoke, clear liquid oozed from one nasty open wound on her head.

After one attack, "There were maggots coming out of my head, because she had hidden me, and no one had seen me," Mullah said.

Eventually, a guard found her and took her to a hospital, where she received some treatment.

But when Aline Gadhafi found out about the kind actions of her co-worker, he was threatened with imprisonment, if he dared to help her again.

"When she did all this to me, for three days, she wouldn't let me sleep," Mullah said. "I stood outside in the cold, with no food. She would say to staff, 'If anyone gives her food, I'll do the same to you.' I had no water -- nothing."

Her colleague, a man from Bangladesh who didn't want to give his name, says he was also regularly beaten and slashed with knives. He corroborated Mullah's account and says the family's dogs were treated considerably better than the staff.

Mullah was forced to watch as the dogs ate and she was left to go hungry, he said.

It seems to sum up how the workers at the beachside complex were viewed by the Gadhafi family.

This is definitely beyond the Queen of Mean, Leona Helmsley, who was a darling of Robin Leach and his unctuous program Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

The problem with a society where a few are fabulously weathy and many are dirt poor is that the rich become unhinged. They develop delusions of grandeur and think they deserve what they have and turn ugly and mean toward those who are not so "blessed" with the goodies of life. This is a sickness.

Sadly, America has fallen to this illness and is still running a fever. I hoped that with the election of Barack Obama the fever would break, but it hasn't. I know it must and will some day. I wish it were sooner rather than later. But for now, the disease is still running wild in the soul of America.

Sex and Ancient Humans

It was only a few years ago that the idea that Homo sapiens sapiens interbred with Neanderthals became thinkable. Now genetics no only demonstrates it but claims it delivered benefits.

Here is a bit from a Yahoo! News report:

Sexual encounters with archaic humans like the Neanderthals produced children who inherited key genes that have helped modern humans fight illness and disease, said a US study published Thursday.

"The cross-breeding wasn't just a random event that happened, it gave something useful to the gene pool of the modern human," said Stanford University's Peter Parham, senior author of the study in the journal Science.

Equipped with knowledge of the genome of the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, of whom a tooth and a finger bone were discovered in a Russian cave last year, researchers scoured the data for hints of what genes crossed over.

Scientists already knew that about four percent of Neanderthal DNA and up to six percent of Denisovan DNA are present in some modern humans.

This study took a close look at a group called HLA class I genes which help the immune system adapt to fight off new pathogens that could cause various infections, viruses and diseases.

Researchers traced the origin of one type, HLA-B*73, to the Denisovans, who likely mated with humans arriving in West Asia on their way out of Africa. The variant is rare in modern African populations but is common in people in west Asia.

"We think this had a lot to do with the pathogenic environment in different parts of the world," said Laurent Abi-Rached, a French researcher and lead author of the study.

"When modern humans came out of Africa, they were going into a new environment. This gave them an advantage. It was a rapid way of acquiring defense," he told AFP.

These ancient HLA genes have multiplied among modern populations and are seen in more than half of Eurasians today, said the study.

I love the way science slowly advances human knowledge. The world is a very interesting place and facts, for me, are far more fascinating than fiction.

I don't get excited about hyped "science" like the Ivanov experiments. But I enjoy sound science which breaks new ground such as the new genetics which allows hybridization with Neanderthals to come out of the murky world of speculation into the world of hard facts.