Aurora Borealis

Here is a nice video of the Aurora Borealis shot by the Norwegian Terje Sorgjerd in and around Kirkenes and Pas National Park bordering Russia, at 70 degree north and 30 degrees east while temperatures around -25 Celsius.

On Being Wrong

There are some useful thoughts in this talk. Being open to our own limited views and appreciating other viewpoints is the main message I take away.

The Computers are Taking Over!

How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?

Well... it happens when you let the computers run your world, and sadly we are doing more and more of that. For the gory details, read this post by an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who was trying to buy the textbook for his lab and discovered this insane pricing:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

...

The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.

On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.

The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.

Will Food Colouring Help You Live Longer?

Amidst all the ranting about how food additives, especially food colourings, "poison" the food supply, I found this bit from Derek Lowe's blog In the Pipeline interesting:

... treating nematodes (roundworms, C. elegans) with the dye Thioflavin T (also known as ThT or Basic Yellow 1) extends their lives quite significantly - up around a 60% increase in both median and maximal lifespan. Several other related benzazole compounds were also tried, which produced lifespan extension of up to 40%, and at much lower concentrations.

Wouldn't it be hysterically funny given all the hue-and-cry about food dyes being carcinogenic, it ends up that the surprising extension to lives achieved in the 20th century comes down to putting food colouring into the food supply? Or as Lowe puts it:

... as my wife pointed out to me when I told her about this paper, the FDA was just making headlines the other day by recommending that more study be given to any possible links between food dyes and hyperactivity (though stopping short of recommending any warning at this time, due to lack of convincing evidence). On the basis of this latest work, though, I'm starting to wonder if we're not putting enough dyes in our food...

Lowe cites a paper published in the prestigious Nature journal that looks at dyes and their ability to attack and destroy amyloid plaques (the stuff that is believed to cause dementia). This might be a real advance in treating Alzheimer's.

I can't wait for food dyes to become all the rage among health nuts. That will mean we will see people with skin colours of blues, and greens, and yellows, and reds, and oranges, and pinks, etc.

Truth about Taxes

I assumed that since taxes are progressive that the "fair share" of the rich was proportionally more than the fair share of the poor. But I now discover I was wrong.

Here's a post by Paul Krugman that sets me straight:

The claim that only rich people pay taxes is a zombie lie — something that keeps coming back no matter how many times it’s killed by evidence.

So, let’s try another shot to the head.

Yes, high-income people pay the bulk of the federal income tax. But that’s not the only tax! And while the income tax is quite progressive, the payroll tax — the other major federal tax — isn’t; and state and local taxes are strongly regressive.

Citizens for Tax Justice (pdf) has the goods: combining all taxes, federal, state, and local, we get this:

Click to Enlarge
The overall system is barely progressive at all.

And here’s the thing: the people peddling this stuff about those lucky duckies who don’t pay tax because their incomes are low know all this, because it has been pointed out many times. They are deliberately trying to deceive you.

I always assumed that the progressive income tax portion swamped the regressive payroll taxes. But I now stand corrected. It ends up that the tax burden in the US is shouldered by everyone.

But that strikes me as unfair. The person who makes more can afford more. They should be shouldering more of the burden of taxes. And to tax those in the lowest 20% for more than a fairly nominal amount strikes me as imposing too big a burden on families whose resources are already stretched to the limit.

Institutional Corruption on Wall Street

Here is Eliot Spitzer giving a talk at Harvard on institutional corruption on Wall Street. Spitzer begins speaking at 05:18 into the video. At 09:55 he gets down to the topic of discussion:



If you want to get "the bottom line" of the talk, fast forward to 1:11:25 and he summarizes his 10 points. But if you do that, you will be missing an excellent talk on the 2008 Financial Crisis and the corruption that facilitated it. As Spitzer points out many times in this talk: that corruption continues and it is now pointing us toward the next big financial crash.

In the Q&A at 1:16:05 Spitzer gets to my frustration with Obama: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Sadly, Obama wasted this once in a hundred year chance to ratchet up the people's control of the economy and the government. Instead, Obama listened to advisors who assured him that "more of the same" would do just fine to get us through the crisis. But those "advisors" were deeply implicated as participants in the crisis and their "stay the course" advise has mean a very slow recovery from the Great Recession and no lessons learned on the part of the great malefactors of the 2008 financial crisis.

Spring

The temperatures here are still well below normal. While we haven't had a snowfall in a week or so, there is fresh snow on the mountains.

But the days are longer and this video lets me get into the mood for spring...