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September 30, 2005
The same problems happen over and over
Have you been following the controversy between the schools that don't want the military to recruit on campus and the federal government who wants to deny them funding for doing so?
This isn't this first time this subject has come up:
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." - Thucydides
You may recall that Thucydides died almost 2500 years ago.
Thanks for an in the Dartmouth Free Press for tipping me off to this quote.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
They'll bet on anything these days
The other day the National Inquirer claimed that that the President is drinking again. They put the odds at less than 20%. I love the idea that all these people are busy speculating (in a financial sense) on these matters. It gives us a chance to get efficient information aggregation on otherwise unobservable probabilities. That's why I liked the idea of a terrorism market, and I loved following the betting market for the presidential election
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:07 AM | Comments (1)
September 28, 2005
Today's mine resistant animals
The Penguins of the Falkland Islands are flourishing in the minefields that remain from the Falkin War. It seems they are too light to set off the mines and the mines keep humans from bothering them.
But military areas have become flourishing areas for wildlife before. In Korea, the demilitarized zone (DMZ) has become a verdant wildlife preserve, one guarded by mines, unexploded ordinance, and fierce soldiers on both sides. Similar forces conspire to make Vieques, Puerto Rico a unusually lush piece of land.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2005
A great book
I just finished Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. This was a fabulous book. Written in that arcane, annotated style of romantic era fiction and biography, it tells the story of two magicians in their attempt to bring magic back to England. It has lots of little details about life in the early 19th century in England, but gently lampoons the bigotry that typified the era.
I laughed, I fretted about characters, I wondered if it would all work out. I scarfed this book down.
I read it on the subway, in the bathroom, and while waiting for the elevator. I stayed up late in the night reading. I carried the ridiculous 800 page hardcover nearly everywhere.
Highly recommended.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Social Responsibility
I'm a long term hater of the Social Responsibility movement, except in the trivial sense of putting a friendly face to the public to protect your brand. Reason has a debate on social responsibility between a few capitalists and Milton Friedman, the great free market economist.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2005
They use the same pieces but are they playing the same game?
We've reached an age where we can sit a man across the table from a computer and if they both move pieces constrained by the rules of chess, there exists computers that will consistently beat or tie the greatest human chess players.
But are they really playing the same game? I'd argue not.
Take for example kangaroo boxing.
Human beings make sure that the animal obeys the rules. They are both subject to physical laws. But no one would claim that excelling at kangaroo boxing is the same as excelling at real boxing.
Chess games between humans and computers are like this. These games examine if computer scientists can collapse what is know about playing chess algorithmically, into code good enough to emulate the result that a human achieves. In other words, it is an attempt to
overcome the human players strategically superiority with computer massive tactically superiority. But they aren't really doing what a human being does, which is use massive use of heuristics and pattern recognition, and only a very limited ability to examine possible moves. But to those who only wish to see the finest ballet on the chess board, consider that humans are far weaker than horses, and yet feats of human athletics interest us far more.
But another indication that it isn't quite the same game when playing a computer is that the same people who win against the computers lose against other humans. Tricks that work on computers would result in quick defeat against the greatest human players. A German named Eduard Nemeth has a about a 700 point chess score than Kasparov, but has beaten machines to which Kasparov has lost. Nemeth isn't even a grand master. He just knows where stick the monkey wrench.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:05 PM | Comments (2)
September 22, 2005
Defending English?
The title of a recent cover of Time Magazine is "System Failure: An investigation into what went so wrong in New Orleans"
I was always taught that it was a sign of uneducated or too casual speech to use "so" to mean "very". But when I mentioned it to my father (who probably taught me that rule) he said that in this case, the "so" implied a "that" which was omitted. Even so, that's not an effective and proper way to communicate in a cover, as the "that" implied by the "so" isn't obvious. Do they mean "that even the federal government couldn't help", or perhaps that "that people would behave that way"? It seems it could go in several directions.
Dictionary.com takes a softer stance:
Critics have sometimes objected to the use of so as an intensive meaning “to a great degree or extent,” as in We were so relieved to learn that the deadline had been extended. This usage is most common in informal contexts, perhaps because, unlike the neutral very, it presumes that the listener or reader will be sympathetic to the speaker's evaluation of the situation. Thus one would be more apt to say It was so unfair of them not to invite you than to say It was so fortunate that I didn't have to put up with your company. For just this reason, the construction may occasionally be used to good effect in more formal contexts to invite the reader to take the point of view of the speaker or subject:The request seemed to her to be quite reasonable; it was so unfair of the manager to refuse.
I'm a stickler, but the benefits or too much stickling far outweigh that of too little in a global language like English.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
Is it just me or is everyone talking about religion these days?
A friend of mine lent me a book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
I've give up on it. Between conversations about intelligent design vs. natural selection, the role of Islam as a peaceful religion, the purpose of religious observance, and the role of religion in population growth, I've had dozens of conversations about the conflict between religion and atheist secular humanism. It seems I'm not the only one hearing a lot about this of late, Book Forum has a new piece on the End of Faith book, and other similar books published lately.
More positive takes on The End of Faith
Here,
here ,
and here
Some of my thoughts inside.
A Texan doctor once told me that the death certificates required that he check a box to indicate if the person died of smoking related affects. He asked me, what does in a man if he is sedentary, smokes two packs a day, poor, overweight, diabetic, has high cholesterol, and dies of heart disease? A lot of the critique is a version of this problem. You have poor, ignorant, people living without the benefit of the rule of law or property and they behave like beasts. One way they manifest this is by killing each other, and he says it was religious in nature. I am not buying it. The Muslims in India and Pakistan emerged from the lowest classes, then the British left and the whole system fell into war. Is that a war over scarce land, class, wealth or religion?
Rational (communist) or at least secular (racial) ideologues have committed the very greatest acts of murder in human history in the name of their ideas. I am not convinced that people who claim to use a rational system of beliefs are less capable of evil. He takes as "self evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn...scholars alive for blaspheming..." To that, I simply draw your attention to the chaos is New Orleans to see how thin is the vial of decency.
The killing fields of Cambodia can serve as a reminder that ordinary people can find good reasons to murder the blasphemer. There is no such thing as an ordinary person; He is simply using that as code for people like this -- those who have lived a safe, warm, educated and well-fed life. He tries to make much hay of the Muslim suicide terrorists who do things in the name of Allah. He seems to say that only religion can inspire such things, but the vast majority of suicide terrorists are secular, be they the Bathists of Iraq, the Tamils of Sri Lanka, or the Kamikazes of Japan.
One reason of his distain for religion is simply that that it is silly and non-falsifiable. Surly Popper was on to something, and good science is always falsifiable, but also surely, the non-falsifiable enriches the human experience. If religious ones do not suit you, then let me share a few that are. What you think of as orange also looks like orange to me. Ideas spread like living ideas beyond their thinkers. Your happiness is valuable as an end. Here the book really breaks down. Is he critiquing any ideology where you believe things without a full understanding of the evidence? Because his attitude makes him sound like a foolish Objectivist, berating everyone for not being at once an economist, a philosopher and a scientist. The universe is not fully knowable by one man, if by us all in total. It is essential that we take much on faith because of our limited capacities. Virtually all adherents of patriotism, cosmopolitan liberalism, evolution, and astronomy all essentially do so at a non-rational level. His book becomes a critique of accepting anything that you cannot establish with your senses as true.
The book purports to be an argument again religion. He makes no effort to address the believers’ issues. He shows contempt for the religious at every corner and simply assumes you will nod your head along for the ride. It feels like fuel for fiery anger that liberal, secular urban elites feel at a world they do not control
The book speaks at length about the danger poised be belief in an age of inexpensive mass destruction. If that risk is real, and he really does not expect to convince people, then the book is just resignation at the inevitable destruction at our world. The tone of the book does not read that way; it seems that he wants to convince people, even if he inexorably offends nearly everyone he needs to convince. As for the Brights, I lump them in with the Communists, the Objectivists, utilitarians, and the other elite consumers of secular ideologies. Nearly to the man, I have found them as dogmatic and unpleasant as the religious ideologues they seek to supplant, but lacking the carefully developed tools to make happier the people they aim to serve.
I do believe that without religion people would find reasons to murder on a mass scale. I submit into evidence the abattoirs of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, the first under which secular ideologies conducted their wars. Would man tire of such things without religion? Would you accept the French revolution and the American Civil War as secular wars? The Napoleonic Wars? The wars of colonization of the Americas? The wars of the feudal period before the reformation? The Opium wars? The competition for scarce resources has driven most of the slaughter of life on earth. The amount of ideological murder engendered by man barely is a drop in the bucket. That certainly does not excuse it, but murder and mayhem lurk shallowly beneath the surface of man. Because religion is integrating deep within us, it simply provides another outlet for these ideas to manifest. Al Qaeda would not exist without Islam, but as I said, the Tamil Tigers and Kamikaze would still exist without religion. Anti-Semitism, which is not a religion, has served as a murderous ideology throughout the centuries. Anti-gypsy ideology has likewise served. I am just not convinced that the record of secular society if peaceful enough to conclude that the gradual elimination of religion will cause a parade of peace into the end of history.
The book is improving slightly as I work though it. I have found the explorations of the neurological foundations of rationality and irrationality interesting.
Heaping murderous ideologies claiming a secular mantle in with religions strikes me as unfair. Religious ideologies seem to indulge in less wanton slaughter then many of their rational counterparts. Certainly, with genetic, historical, and philosophical information available at the time of their founding, Sovietism and Nazism could be described as rational secular ideologies. I do not agree that secularist rationalists get to decide who is amongst their ranks. The temptation to exclude the unsavory should leave that in more unbiased hands. That goes for any group.
I am more comfortable with the idea that ideology is a tool that, while essential to the human condition, is also very dangerous. Given that progressive, liberal democracy is only one of several secular ideologies and has only been dominant for about a hundred years, the jury is still out on whether it will prove successful on the time scale of the species.
You would be hard pressed to prove the point that there are fewer wars or people dying in them today then there were 25 years ago. Huge, awful wars are rare. You might find the Richardson's work on "The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels" interesting. I know it only by reputation, but he gathered data on all (well all large and most small) armed conflicts between 1820 and 1949. He found 108 wars, and ranked them based on the log of number of people killed. Two were a seven on his scale, WWI and WWII, and a convincing case can be made that both were fought for secular reasons. He found seven in category 6,
Taiping Rebellion - 1851-54, 2 million dead
US Civil War - 1861-65, 800 thousand dead
Great War in La Plata - 1865-70, a million dead
Sequel to the Bolshevik Revolution - 1918-20, 600 thousand dead
First Chinese-Communist War - 1927-36, a million dead
Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, two million dead
Communal riots in the Indian peninsula, 1946-48, 800 thousand dead
None of those are obviously religious either, but I do not know them so well. I am a believer (but a weak one) in The Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention. Relatively rich, free people tend not to murder each other on a massive scale. However, I am not sure that is a stable equilibrium. Often, the police state is erected in free societies to protect them from hostile, illiberal enemies. If they over swing, they may come to be as their enemies.
One of the ways I have backed into my faith is a realization that without faith, most lives are devoted to hedonism or selfishness. Raising children is expensive and for many, undesirable given other options. Perhaps you want to focus your energy on a few. However, in aggregate, people rejecting the sacrifice to have bigger families has massive consequences. In the rich world, people who are not religious have too few children to replace their number.
I wonder if that is sustainable.
If secular liberalism delivers great wealth, but current demographic evidence suggests that their number gradually is replaced by religious immigrants or not all, what then? If, two hundred years from now, there are a quarter as many people living in the rich world, will it be judged a success, no matter how rich they are? Can an ideology that jeopardizes the genetic connection to posterity of its subscribers be unequivocally successful?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:40 AM | Comments (1)
Simon Wiesenthal, tireless Nazi hunter is dead at 96
"You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.'"http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/international/europe/21wiesenthal.html?pagewanted=all
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:55 AM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
Roberts is getting that job
In an article discussing why Roberts is qualified and virtually a shoe-in for the nomination, I came across this quote:
" But he quickly added that "the ideal in the American justice system is epitomized by the fact that judges -- justices -- do wear black robes, and that is meant to symbolize the fact that they're not individuals promoting their own particular views, but . . . doing their best to interpret the law, to interpret the Constitution, according to the rule of law."
I didn't know that. Fascinating.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
Someone beat me to it
Imagine my surprise that just a few days after my article "Mass reward and punishment", I saw an article on gizmodo for dontbuyjunk.com.
Listen to this discription:
The idea for this site started when we noticed our friends and family often asking us for product advice before making a purchase. They know us as electronic enthusiasts who enjoy regularly researching about the latest and greatest products, from magazines to Internet message boards. Even if we didn't know the best recommendation off the top of our heads, we knew where to find the product information and how to then analyze it to come up with the best recommendation. However, we became increasingly frustrated that there was not a site that we could feel comfortable recommending to our friends and family that would offer accurate recommendations in a simple and personalized manner
and this:
The Web ratings are scraped from a continually-growing list of over 200 sources. To extract meaning from these reviews without forcing you to read each one, we find descriptive phrases that best portray the author's opinion of a product attribute (for instance, Sound Quality of an MP3 Player). In addition to quoting these phrases, a score is assigned to each attribute based on the general impression our editors get from the author, using the following scale: Very Negative, Negative, Neutral, Positive, and Very Positive. This scale is then converted into a numerical scale, and all ratings are combined into a single numerical rating, using a proprietary weighting algorithm. This algorithm accounts for many variables that can affect the validity of a review, including the credibility of the source, and the age of the reviews.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
We haven't found all the good, cheap ideas yet II
Back in August we talked about a cheap, water filtering. drinking straw. More than 3.4 million people die each year as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world.
Another cheap and brilliant solution makes headlines this week at treehugger. Boiling water is a low tech and widely available method of sterilizing water. However, the water needs to hang out at 150 degrees for a few minutes before it is safe. But how to know exactly when it is safe? For the world's ultra poor, fuel is scarce and (dirty wood or dung mostly), any filtration technique has to use as little as possible to be practical.
Professor Bosscher of the University of Madison, WI figured out a great solution. He impeded a small wax bead in a sealed glass tube. The tube goes in a string in the water vessel, and the wax melts when the water is safe. Flip the tube to reuse it.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2005
That's a good idea
Treehugger points out that a new oil, used in sprays and as a lubricant in chainsaws, that disperses mushroom spore that will grow on the stumps and scrap wood left behind. The mushrooms help the forest regrow faster, and the mushrooms are food varieties and can be sold. That means greater revenue from relatively pristine land and less of a reason to convert it to track housing.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:19 PM | Comments (0)
Communists again show the way in heartless capitalism
The village voice has an article on how China has become a major player in the international business of supplying transplant organs. Guess where they get their supply, from the prisoners they execute. If the criminals deserve it and the victims get the money (although in this case both are unlikely) I don't have a problem with this. There is something poetic in using the flesh of the worst sorts of people to save the lives of the sick.
Thanks to econopundit for the tip.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:32 PM | Comments (0)
Mass reward and punishment
Today I had an idea for a business I call "Reward and Punishment"
I think it would be easy to start and could be advertising financed. Websites like NexTag, Epinions, and Amazon all allow you to rate your experiences with the companies and products that you love and hate. Unfortunately, everyone has a few favorite opinion sites they visit because no one site is the obvious place to go for these reviews. As a result, maybe we submit photography related postings to digital photography review and book reviews on amazon, and hope others know to do the same. But what if you could go to one website, and see reviews and price searches across most of the relevant sites? What if that same site let you store your user name and passwords for multiple review websites, and then let you submit one review into many websites?
With a website like that it wouldn't matter what sites you used, no matter what you could get your word out and hear what others had to say. Crappy quality and service would be punished and durability and kindness rewarded.
What do you think?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:45 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
With stuff like this happening, the Roberts' conformation is a sure thing.
Today another court in the 9th circuit struck down an optional recitation of The Pledge of Allegiance in schools as unconstitutional.
Volokh has a 10 point list (the first 8 or so are the strongest) of reasons that this is not soundly reasoned.
However, even better was this bit was from the comments...
I think the country is strengthened by having "under God" in the pledge, because it allows religious citizens, whose faith commitments demand the recognition that God is supreme and makes supreme claims over every nation, that they are pledging allegiance to an entity that it not making claims to be absolutely supreme over the claims of deity. ~P Duggan
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:15 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Death before dishonor? Work or spoon in the eye?
For those terrible days at work when you can't decide between going to work and jabbing a spoon in your eye.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2005
The family with one balance sheet
My friend likes to think of his family working as a team. To the extent that his family has assets that they aren't consuming, he likes to treat them with the love and respect of joint assets. Instilling this into your own family has downsides. There is some risk in making them feel entitled or simply too dependent. But an article at Money Sense points out a strength of this model. You shouldn't earn 1% in a savings account while you pay 10% on your credit cards. If they plan to give them the money anyway, it likewise doesn't make sense for the parents earn 3% in a money market account while their children pay 6% in a mortgage.
The article features other excellent money management tips.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Bush is one of the most average presidents we've ever had
Today's WSJ asked a selection of historians to ranks American Presidents. They found Bush was solidly within the "Average" camp, with a score of 3.01. If you harbor a suspicion about the liberal makeup of academia, you would wonder how Bush could escape the dreaded "Failure" category. In "...this survey -- conducted by James Lindgren of Northwestern University Law School for the Federalist Society and The Wall Street Journal -- aimed at ideological balance. The scholars were chosen with an eye toward balancing liberals and conservatives, and Mr. Lindgren asked each participant about his political orientation, then adjusted the average to give Democratic- and Republican-leaning scholars equal weight."
A friend of mine with an avocational interest in history historian thought this was a strange methodology. After all, "...the world may not really be evenly divided between liberals and conservatives. This poll seems to over represent conservative thought, in my opinion, by looking for a "balance.""
I agree that this over represents conservative thought, although only in the sense that historians are overwhelmingly liberal. I couldn't find numbers for the population at large, but By 2 to 1, voters self-identify as conservative over liberal (with a plurality of moderates). So in that sense, this acts to normalize historian's opinions to reflect those of the population. An interesting question would be if the study of history makes one more liberal (in much the way that economics is said to make people more libertarian). If for some reason it does (rather than reflect a selection bias), then it wouldn't be right to do this kind of correction. According to a new paper, "Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty", there are about 7 and a half times as many liberal as conservative historians.
See the complete results of ideological leanings by field of study and the ranks of the presidents inside this entry.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:04 PM | Comments (2)
But is it Kosher?
Spiegel, the German newspaper, reports on new experiments in cell growth that could allow growing meat in petri dishs. Why bother? Because such meat would be cruelty and killing free. But right now it costs about a quarter of a million dollars a pound and requires cattle womb juice to grow, so it is neither cheap nor kind. But I wonder if this will ever be an efficient method of producing meat. A Wired article I read a few years ago pointed out that a seed is a nano-machine for manufacturing wood, and as such, any man made competitor was going to have a hard time catching up. A cow is a nano-machine for making meat, so we are always going to have a massive uphill battle to make it cost competitive with that.
But this might be going someplace else entirely. We could use this to grow forbidden and ultra impractical meat. How so? Imagine growing a petri dish full of hummingbird tongues. In nature, gathering them would be a criminal waste, in the dish, perhaps it would merely be a stupendous luxury. Then of course, there are the taboo meats, man, monkey, dolphin, or black rhino. A similar idea was explored in the movie The Freshman.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:19 PM | Comments (2)
September 9, 2005
For Christ and His Kingdom?!
My brother just started his second year at Wheaton College. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Wheaton is a Christian school with an active requirement of a "commitment of faith from all its employees."
I mean, my brother isn't much of a practicing Jew, but he certainly isn't a Christian. He chose Wheaton for its amazing undergraduate astronomy program. Nevertheless, this isn't a deadletter religious affiliation as it is in many of the nation's older schools, Volokh points out that it is affecting hiring in the economics department.
Oh wait, nevermind, this is the Wheaton in IL, not MA where my brother attends.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:46 PM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2005
That's interesting
Did you know that in England, time immemorial is any time before 1189?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:09 PM | Comments (0)
Why did crime explode?
Reason discusses how tolerated petty criminality, lack of food and water, and gross mishandling by government explains why New Orleans had such a criminal response to disaster.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:00 PM | Comments (0)
I thought it was the only place with the room to take them in
The 19th Hole, in an article on evacuation of New Orleans, suspects that Houston was chosen as the refugee location to reduce black and Democratic political power.
That doesn't sound plausible. The article mentions Memphis as a closer alternative, but Huston has more than three times the population of Memphis. Huston was likely the only place that could hold all the refugees without overwhelming public services.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2005
Are you sure no one wants them in their backyard?
You may have heard some claim a lack of refining capacity is driving up fuel costs. They usually mention in the same breath that . Recently there has been a temporarily spike in gas prices due to limited refining capacity as Katrina knocked a about 10% of our refining capacity off line. However, that has little to do with why oil has been above 40 since last July. Ask yourself the following, given the power of the oil and driving lobbies, if tons of money were available in making oil into gas, wouldn't the oil companies have found a way to build more refining capacity?
At the time of this writing, oil at about $65 a barrel. Since the wholesale price of 42 gallons of gas is about $84 (@ $2 a gallon). So in this simple way of thinking about it, you get paid $19 dollars to make the oil in to gas. The financial markets talk about this in a more formal way, called the crack spread. The process of making refined fuels is called cracking. The crack spread on a barrel of oil in Texas is about $25. See the picture below for more details on a current quote. This is a huge spread. The average since 1992 (as far back as I could get data) is $4.13. Thought of another way, historically you get paid 10 cents a gallon to make gas from oil. As of today you get paid 60 cents. Since oil has jumped about 60 cents sine Katrina, that crack spread movement has been passed along to the consumer.
Historically, the cost of refining oil has consumed all the revenue from doing so. That is the real reason for lack of spare refining capacity. But, what about all those people unwilling to live near refineries? Surely that is a reason.
To that, I merely mention casinos and drugs. Only those that profit from or enjoy the products of these mixed blessings wants them nearby. Both are subject to legal sanctions limiting or eliminating their availability. Yet virtually everyone in America has access to an unlimited amount of both. Oil is legal and people use it to drive their cars and heat their homes. So they have constituency. We also have the space. The United States is ranked 145 out of 198 in least dense countries on earth. Our neighbor, Canada, is 185. Problem getting local approval? The Indian Nations, sovereign on their own land, dot the US and could build their own refineries, just as they've built casinos. We find space to build power plants, garbage dumps, highways, and other loud and unpleasant things. We have to face the fact that we aren't willing to pay for additional refining capacity and that's why we don't have any.
The Times has some interesting coverage on the issue.
Here is a great map to demonstrate how a surfeit of fuel blends is exacerbating refinery capacity problems.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 2:38 PM | Comments (0)
Female Orgasm
Is the female orgasm useful in its own right or vestige from males?
Several decades ago, while a graduate student, I noted that when a subordinate male grizzly bear mounts a female, his head swivels constantly over his shoulder as he anticipates the arrival of any dominant boar[sic], who would rapidly supplant him. Not surprisingly, subordinate grizzlies ejaculate quickly whereas dominants are substantially less rushed. I have no idea whether grizzly sows experience orgasm, but it seems likely that if they do, it would be more likely when copulating with the latter than with the former. And this, in turn, led me to wonder whether female orgasm is a signal whereby a female's body tells her brain that she is sexually engaged with a dominant individual. If this is the adaptive significance of female orgasm, then we certainly would not expect orgasm to occur with regularity, and would be altogether misled if we took its seemingly erratic occurrence as evidence that it does not serve an evolutionary function.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
September 6, 2005
Aptitude differences between populations
Commentary has a great article, The Inequality Taboo, on the persistent differences in aptitude between the races and sexes. I highly recommend it.
Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders’ assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.
A sad prediction in the footnotes,
I will venture a prediction that a variety of academic achievement measures in elementary and secondary school will soon show renewed convergence because of the No Child Left Behind Act, which puts schools under intense pressure to teach to the test in basic skills. If students are drilled on limited ranges of subject matter, scores will tend to rise. The more basic the tests are (that is, the easier they are), the more that improvements among the least skilled will affect the mean. Also, the higher the stakes facing a school—and the No Child Left Behind Act makes those stakes very high indeed—the greater will be the incentives for administrators to use some of the many resources at their disposal to make the results come out right, through the judicious manipulation of suspensions and absences, and through outright cheating (yes, it has been known to happen). Some convergence in black and white test scores will probably occur, but partitioning that effect among the competing explanations is a task that will take a few years. Insofar as the convergence has been the result of teaching to the test and of artifacts, it will be temporary.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:37 PM | Comments (1)
September 2, 2005
Not every problem needs a technological solution, but...
A South African company has developed a device that inserts barbs into a rapist's penis during penetration. It has a similar cost and application as a female condom, and the device requires surgical removal.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2005
Are we doing enough in solidarity?
The scripting news asks, in light of the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans and environs, "Why haven't we canceled the US Open?"
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:23 PM | Comments (0)
Interesting
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)
Like something from the end of days
Over at the interdictor, a libertarian, stuck guarding and running a data center in New Orleans though Katrina, comments on the experience, as well as the general anarchy that is ruling the city.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:30 AM | Comments (0)