« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »
October 29, 2006
Who is in heaven?
I wrote a year ago about an annoying strand of militant Atheism that seems to have gotten louder of late. Wired has a multi-page writeup (The Church of the Non-Believers) with Harris, Dawkins and a few other spokesmen for that movement. As usual they all sound like jerks. Certainly not that I'd wish such misery on them, but they could not find a spiritual experience at Machu Picchu, in a sweat lodge, worried about losing their job, with sick kids and dying parents in a service lead by the pope.
But it does mention a cool book, Who's Who in Hell, a "a biographical dictionary (with subject entries interspersed) of tens of thousands of freethinkers, secular humanists, Unitarian Universalists, Ethical Culture activists and famous folks who hewed to no religious creed."
Then I found myself avoiding a bit of studying a reading A Modest Proposal Regarding Stem Cells. That article asked an interesting religious question, at least for Christians. If life begins at conception and a little less than 75% of pregnancies spontaneously abort, what happens to those souls? It is my understanding is the consensus is that they get to go to Heaven by a exculpatory clause. But doesn't that mean that the vast majority of souls in heaven are that of the unborn? People with no relationships, no experiences, no concept of self, and no memories? What do we make of that?
Judaism and other religions with reincarnation have an easier time of this matter. They think the souls get another shot at a full life. So maybe that's what happens in Christian Heaven, where the died-before-they-were -born-crowd is paired with their lost parents they get to experience their missed life.
Just thought I'd share.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2006
Maybe Israel really did win
Check out the intro to "The War in Lebanon" by Mark Helprin and let me know if you still think Hezbollah won. Thanks for the tip dad!
Imagine an Israeli guerrilla organization based in the Galilee, a power unto itself, with seats in the cabinet, a generous welfare apparatus, and the oft-stated goal of Lebanon's destruction and replacement with a Jewish state governed by Jewish religious law. Upon instructions from its foreign patron and supplier of arms, it crosses the border to capture and kill some Lebanese soldiers. Lebanon, however, is in no mood to tolerate such a provocation, especially in light of the guerrillas' arsenal of 10,000 or so short-range missiles targeted at Lebanese civilians.For a month, the Lebanese air force ranges freely over all of Israel, and, without losing a single plane, cuts every major bridge and road link in the country, destroys its power plants, bombs ports, airports, military facilities associated with the guerrillas, and the guerrillas themselves, obliterating all but their buried infrastructure. Significant portions of Tel Aviv and Haifa, and many of the small towns of Israel's north, are reduced to rubble.
With the loss of four sailors and minor damage to a frigate, the Lebanese navy blockades Israel's coasts with 100% effectiveness. More than a thousand Israelis are killed, four times that number wounded, and a quarter of the Jewish guerrillas slain in combat. Because the guerrillas choose to fire their rockets amid the civilian population, the homes of almost a million Jews are razed by the Lebanese air force, the Israeli economy comes to a halt, foreigners are evacuated, and the world looks on in horror.
Meanwhile, its own economy humming, Lebanon deploys in the battle zone on average less than 2% of its army, of which 118 fall in combat. Thirty-nine Lebanese die in the Israeli guerrillas' barrage of 4,000 missiles, a kill rate of less than 1%. Lebanon is able to destroy more than 3,000 of the remaining 6,000 missiles, including almost all those of greater range, putting to rest the guerrillas' threat to attack Beirut.
The guerrillas and their supporters repeatedly beg for a cease-fire. The Israeli prime minister cries that his country has been destroyed, and weeps on camera. Israel is blockaded by sea, its other links to the world cut at will by the Lebanese air force. The Lebanese army remains in key positions in the north of the country, and the world's powers, great and small, sympathetic and not, look on both unwilling and unable to intervene, finally coming to Israel's aid only on the stated condition that Israel accept the presence of alien troops on its soil to disarm the guerrillas and protect Lebanon from further incursions.
Who won?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:54 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
What to do with Iraq
Sad but true perhaps...
[T]he Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. The second article has a great idea, "...ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay." That is a great way to get an excuse to leave or the legitimacy to stay.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2006
I guess not everyone is asleep over there
The people at Sun Microsystems, who have done relatively poorly since the dot com bust about 5 years ago,has just introduced a very cool new concept. Calling it Project Black Box, it fits an entire data center into a standard shipping container. Just connect it to a suitable power supply and bandwidth and you can have one of the world's 200 fastest computers almost anywhere. With a stackable, scalable, relocatable system like this there are far fewer obstacles to creating a distributed data and processing system for Web 2.0 applications, back-office processing for banks, or other activities that are highly sensitive to jurisdiction they operate out of like copyright violation, money laundering, auctions in drugs, body parts and prostitution or simply offering encrypted communication and storage for citizens of oppressed countries. Now the only to setting up their own SeaLand like data center just about anywhere is getting the cash.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:36 PM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
Move all the way in, there is plenty of room in the back
Sometime tonight or tomorrow the 300 millionth American will be born. That puts us on a trajectory to hit 400 million in 2043. That means that not only are we the worlds current super power, we are going to be the next one as well, even if we are a little browner, more southerm, and speak using more Spanglish. They might even hold up the real estate market as boomers downsize their empty nests and finally pass on. To get an idea of how roomy our country is, consider the following countries
Equatorial Guinea
Madagascar
Nicaragua
They are respectivly about as dense today as the US was 50 years ago, is today, and will be in 2043. None of those stike me as terribly crowded places, but allways remember that wealth makes a hure difference in making a place feel roomy. Bermuda is more dense than Bangladesh!
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)
October 12, 2006
Waste not, want not.
In general, promises to solve social problems by capturing additional wealth through reducing wate are a lot of hot air. Normally, the incetives to reduce waste are strong enough that the amount of wate that remains is economically optimal, at least for the producer and the consumer.
But regardless of my skepticism, I read this today and I found it strinking:
"[Singer and Mason] note that 40 percent of the food produced in the United States is thrown away, half of it still edible. If we could eliminate waste, they argue, we could better feed people while creating less havoc for the environment."
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:09 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2006
Eat next to the slowest eater
An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.
People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.
Last week in his lab seven people were finishing lunch while watching a big-screen TV. Cartoons on the TV served as a distraction so participants would not be influenced by what and how much those nearby ate.
Because he does not take money from food companies and is a newcomer at the university, the lab runs on the cheap. The menus, like the one on this day, are often built from Beefaroni, applesauce, M&M’s and Chex Mix: simple, inexpensive food that subjects are familiar with and that can be easily manipulated.
He prefers to experiment on graduate students or office workers, whom he sometimes lures with the promise of a drawing for an iPod. “It’s easy to find undergraduates to participate, but with the guys nothing makes sense because they all eat like animals,” he said.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:09 AM | Comments (0)
October 9, 2006
North Korea joins the club
The NY times reports that North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon. The join, in order, the
USA 16 July 1945
USSR 29 August 1949
Britain 3 October 1952
France 3 December 1960
China 16 October 1964
India 18 May 1974
Israel and South Africa may have tested nuclear weapons in 1979. South Africa no longer has any nuclear weapons.
Pakistan 28 May 1998
How this is handled by the current nuclear powers is going to determine if South Korea and Japan decide to join this list too.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:53 AM | Comments (0)
October 7, 2006
Small world
So as I think I've mentioned before, my sister works for a Jewish cultural organization in NYC. Sitting around the table, they are discussing creating a camp through the organization, but they are struggling to make it simultaneously Jewish but also ecumenical enough that it could appeal to a broad Jewish audience.
So they talk narrows in on activities and eventually sing alongs. One of my sister's favorite religious songs is called Yotzer Or. It goes "God who makes the sun shine and stars glow
you renew the cycle of creation day by day
giving light to our minds and our eyes
time after time with the dawn of each new day"
So she mentions that that to the others at the table. A woman, Jen Shankman, whips her head around. "I wrote that song when I was 16 at camp Kutz. A camp where I went many years later...
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:34 PM | Comments (0)
October 3, 2006
Mortgages and interest rates
One of the great success stories of modern economics is the use of independent central banks to control inflation in counties that use fiat (that is not back by a commodity) currency. Removing the temptation of political figures to use inflationary monetary policy to temporally boost employment and to give the illusion of higher wages seems to be nearly all that is required to tame inflation. But what would happen if an economic calamity occurred that triggered a huge sell-off of the US currency. Then perhaps the central bank raises interest rates dramatically to prevent inflation resulting from surging exports. In that case, if it were large and lasted long enough, what would it take for the government to revoke that independence?
It occurs to me this morning that a major part of American's willingness to tolerate interest rate fluctuations is that they don't matter too much to them. 38.4% of americans participate in a defined benefit plan, (i.e. one that they don't invest the money), and 96% pay social security, which likewise requires no investment decisions. So for many Americans, interest rates are things that bankers worry about. But millions of Americans worry about interest rates each year when they buy a home. Why? Because they get a mortgage. But that's the only time they worry about it because Americans overwhelmingly get fixed rate mortgages, that is mortgages where the interest rate is contestant for the entire term. In the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, variable rate mortgages are the more common type. In these mortgages, after a certain time passes (usually 5 years) the mortgage resets its interest rate each year to reflect prevailing interest rates. In exchange for taking this risk, they pay a lower interest rate then they otherwise would. If every American had this sort of mortgage, it is easy to see how fiscal and monetary policy could come into conflict in the scenario discussed above. Imagine the central bank trying to jack up rates to fight inflation if it meant evicting hundred of thousands, even millions from their homes. So the prevalence of fixed rate mortgages helps contribute to central bank independence in the United States.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
Do not fear the giant ants; it is impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth. There are no giant ants.
A biologist takes a look at giant animals from the movies and discusses why the vast majority are impossible. And remember, if you ever get shrunk to a mass smaller than a mouse, you have nothing to fear from falling. Instead, metabolic concerns (staying warm and fed) are critical.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)