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August 29, 2007
Auction off the early dates?
Q and O has an interesting article about the politics of presidential primaries. Essentially, it revolves around national political parties reducing or eliminating the delegates of states that push up their primaries. This has become a big problem this year as many states have pushed their primaries earlier and earlier to amplify their impact on the national election outcomes.
This inspired me. Why not have a higher price for an earlier primary? You start off with the current delegate system. The Democrats allocate delegates by "based on its share of the total Democratic popular vote and its share of the electoral vote in the three most recent presidential elections". That's your default power. There would be a fixed set of dates for primaries, say 8 Tuesdays in a row. The price is a percentage. You shrink your number of delegates by the percentage you bid, with a smaller percentage as a higher bid. So, say s price of 25% for a state with 400 delegates would give them an impact of 25%. The first date would cost a lot, say 25%, while a the last date would always be 100%. States could be rewarded for high levels of political participation by different prices or just simply by giving them additional delegates to work with. The overall idea is that there is a value to going early so states that go later should be rewarded by having enough delegates to continue to make their primaries influential. Yet, too many states on any day should be avoided because it spoils the opportunity for candidates to visit and campaign in those states, so it shouldn't be too much influence.
I tried to figure out how to make this into an auction, but I got confused about how an auction of a status good would work. The value of being early depends heavily on the number of other delegates decided on that same day, but there is no practical limit to the number of delegates that could be decided on a given day. It is further complicated by having earlier states with similar interests appearing in the order. Iowa may well speak for Kansas and NJ for NY, so if the former are early the latter may well prefer going later if going early is costly.
Here is the closest I got. Each state bids the percentage with the same interpretation as above. Delegates bidding the same percentage have their primaries on the same day. Polling dates will be determined by and spaced out as is practical to maximize the efficacy of the process, but with a certain minimum between dates.
Any thoughts?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2007
Science is hard when you can't run experiments
Michael J. Disney over at the American Scientist has a criticism of modern cosmology entitled Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale? He argues that all modern theories of cosmology share the problem of having more parameters than the data can estimate. Bellow, I've reproduced the time line that accompanies his article.
I thought this is interesting because mythologically the cosmological problem is similar to what economists do. Experiments are limited because the past is imperfectly recorded and our tools and methods of observation are limited. Economists catch a lot of flack for the fact our models can only grossly approximate economic reality. Yet, we can just like the cosmologists archive a mathematical description that matches reality. All we have to do is pack the model with so many parameters that the dynamics in the ones of interest are matched closely. But that's not science, and we've discussed that in class. Two different of professors (an econometrician and a macroeconomist) each spent half a class making sure we knew that models should have no more parameters than there are distinct empirical facts to match. Typically, you plug in parameter values established by other experiments and models, next you calibrate any new parameters using plausible value or data fitting, and then you see if the observed steady state or dynamics matches the empirics. What you don't do is plug everything into the sun into your model and then calibrate it to the observed state to have a model that mindlessly matches the past perfectly but predicts and means nothing.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:09 AM | Comments (0)
August 19, 2007
Nickelback If Everyone Cared
I heard the song "If Everyone Cared" by Nickleback on the radio the other day. It is a bit of a modern version of Lennon's Imagine, and a very pretty song. It contains the lyric "Then we'd see the day, when nobody died " Which made me wonder, when was the last day that nobody died?
Low genetic diversity is a major reason why the human population is believed to have been through several bottlenecks where the population of humans was just a few thousand (average of 10) for a million years.
Maximum life expectancy was about 40 for all of prehistory, with an average of 20 years. So what if we treated life expectancy as binomial, so that your probability of dying on any one day was 1/average life expectancy or in this case, measured in days, 1/7305. The probability of a population of 10,000 having no deaths would be (7304/7305)^10000 = 0.25. That means that for most of human history on average 1/4 days no one died.
But by 9000 B.C.E there were 5 million people and the exercise becomes almost surely impossible. Let's say that then they had today's Global life expectancy of 66 years, which is way to high, and we use that same approximation as before.
It is hard to standardize what one means by possible, but I think of is as equvilent to was it likely that it I'd like to happened at least once in a thousand years which is 0.000274% of days. If we can agree on that, then even by 9000 BCE if there were more than 300,000 people then this was not possible even at today's health. Prehistoric health obviously makes that less likely.
If we choose a conservative value of 30 for life expectancy in late prehistory, then the criticical point occurred when the population moved from 100k to 150k. At that point it went from happening once every 25 years to happening once every 2000 years. Exponentials will do that to you. I figure (using groth rate math on census data) that human population crossed this threshold about 12 or 13 thousand BCE. So some day in 12500 BCE, most likely a temperate spring day in the northern hemisphere, nobody died.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)
August 15, 2007
The Copernicans rear their ugly heads again
The other day I discussed Gott's use of Copernican probability estimates to try to determine the length that human civilization will last. Andrew Gelman also didn't think much of this in his piece Copernican probability estimates. Then today I saw Boing Boing's piece Hans Moravec on living inside a simulation. Essentially Hans' argument works like this, ""In fact, the robots will re-create us any number of times, whereas the original version of our world exists, at most, only once. Therefore, statistically speaking, it's much more likely we're living in a vast simulation than in the original version." And that seems exactly the same line of argument that the Copernicans use. If you throw up your hands (or lack any other data) at estimating how likely something is, you use its existence as the sole datum. And that estimate is worth about as much as you pay for it.
But I'm not sure I even grant the premise. By definition the reality necessary to perfectly simulate a universe must be "higher resolution" than the simulated one. It doesn't have to be a richer universe in every aspect, but to simulate a universe with a certain plank time, plank distance, of a certain size, and of a certain age is going to take bare minimum amount of computational hardware and memory. To build a computer to do that simulation you'll need a lot of matter and energy. Obviously limits of thermodynamics, gravity and other physical laws are going to limit the efficiency of that computer,
How much do you need? Consider these quotes from the article Information Storage and the Omniscience of God:
In 1981, Jacob Bekenstein [Bekenstein] derived equations that allow the calculation of the maximum possible data that can be contained in any given space or body, including all quantum mechanical energy levels. This number, called the Bekenstein bound, is huge for most objects. For a human being, the bound is roughly 10^44 bytes, an outrageously large number (although many scientists and mathematicians regularly deal with such numbers).
For a sense of scale, all deliberate human information generation is a few (perhaps 10s) of exabytes which are 10^18. For a free discussion of the limits of computation see THE COMPUTATIONAL UNIVERSE with his real paper here. He determines that a perfectly thermally efficient computer with a one kilogram computer of mass able to convert into energy can perform a maximum of 5.4258 × 10^50 operations per second. Parallelization doesn't help here because we are already operating at the maximum speed that information can move and change things. Similarly, a kilo devoted to information storage holds about 10^31 bits in the ultimate computer. Now sure, any simulation can make abstractions, but because we can observe the details and are ignorant of the abstractions, any computer simulating our universe would have to be able to handle those things.
So to recap, any universe that can simulate our existence must devote more mass and energy to doing so than it would take to do so in true reality. Therefore, the given the computational requirements of simulating our universe, as measured by our telescopes, supercolliders and telescopes, that's a tremendous amount devoted to simulation. An implausibly huge amount, even at the limits of computation. So I have strong reason to believe that our reality is the (or a) real one.
A topics for another post is can we save enough with clever programing to actually require far less computation and memory.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:08 PM | Comments (0)
Using statistics to learn from Tim Donaghy's game fixing
Tim Donaghy is a former N.B.A. referee who plead guilty today to conspiring to defraud the NBA by not providing them with his "honest services". As part of his deal for reduced sentence he should have to enumerate every game where he didn't give his honest judgment and in what direction. That would provide data to a generation of sports economist to see statistically what biased refereeing looks like statistically. If he cannot remember, he should authorize the companies he gambled with to reveal which games he bet on so we can presume he fixed games that he both refereed and be upon.
For example, we could check if Justin Wolfers NY Times Op-Ed was right (free here), that this allowed him to beat the spread but did not change the outcomes of the games.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:44 AM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2007
The internet is a crazy place where you can buy just about anything
What to get for the man who has everything? How about bespoke hand sculpted bobble head dolls. That is, bobbleheads that look like you (or your dad, mom, wife, kids, or whoever) -- only smaller.
It's you small
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
We haven't found all the good, cheap ideas yet IV
Watercone is a plastic clear solar cone that uses solar energy to evaporate water. This allows inexpensive desalination of water anywhere the sun shines. Planned price is about 20 Euros or about $27 at today's exchange rate. Check out their product specification page here. Scaled up in areas with cheap labor and access to the sea, it could be a significant improvement over the proposed nuclear desalinization method which is used currently by the Navy and essentially involves boiling sea water. I was surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia produces 24% of the total world capacity of freshwater using desalination., but I guess if not them, then whom? Le-fabuleux claims that stage one of desalination technology vaporization (of which the domes are an example) of seawater and condensation of the vapor, and the second generation being reverse osmosis, which which works rather like massive dialysis of sea water. It seems the third generation is to almost use electrolysis. They use two electrodes which are opposite in polarity to attract the Na+ and Cl- ions in seawater. Like using a magnet to seperate out the iron from crush cereal. The difficulty is that the voltage supplied to each electrode must be very low (less than or equal to 1 volt) or you get electrolysis, which takes much more energy and doesn't get you water. I was also surprised to learn that not all desalination comes from sea water, aquifers can also become salty and desalination is used there as well.
Does anyone know what to do with all that salt? Seawater contains 3 percent salt by weight. A gallon of fresh water is 8 pounds and that means a gallon of sea water must weigh about 8.24 pounds. That means about a quarter of a pound of salt is generated for every gallon you desalinate. I guess you can just dump it back in the ocean. On a big enough scale would that increase local salinity and damage life in the oceans nearby? I guess you could do what Bolivia did with its extra salt and make buildings out of it. If you don't get much rain that could be a good building material. Otherwise do as they do in China and make roads of salt.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:18 PM | Comments (0)
Why state level term limits are a bad idea
In general, I'm in favor of term limits because I feel that elected office should be the culmination of a successful life in other endeavors like business, science, humanitarian work, the clergy, educating, union organizing, and that sort of thing. Plus, you only seem to be able to squeeze a few terms of reform out of someone before the are captured by the forces of populism and special interests.
But as long as congress depends on a seniority system (and despite reforms, it does) to assign committee leadership, it is a bad idea. Reforming your state, even if constitutional which according to U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton they are not. Because term limits mean that even if the same party stays in power, that the clock is reset on seniority. And that means less power, influence, and appropriations (pork ttoo) to any state that attempts it. The states with the three longest serving senators (they happen to be small states and that helps) are also those with the highest appropriations per capita. Beware of the law of unintended consequences.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:58 AM | Comments (0)
Wow, I'd have seen every one of them
The 10 Most Awesome Movies Hollywood Ever Killed
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
August 13, 2007
Colony Die-off Disorder
Are the Bees Dying off Because They're Too Busy? is an interesting article with nothing but anecdote as evidence. It certainly serves as a plausible alternative hypothesis.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)
CDO market in trouble
I've written several times about CDO and other credit derivatives. I still maintain there are natural buyers and sellers for these products, but you probably aren't it. The natural buyer or seller is someone who by nature of their particular holdings can use one of these instruments as a hedge or insurance. A simple example is a company that is a supplier to IBM of parts. Based on the way the inventory is financed, at any one time IBM owes them for about a month worth of parts which is worth say $10,000,000. So they buy $10,000,000 of protection in IBM. Although those following carefully will wonder about duration, but let's ignore that for the sake of simplicity. Now when ever IBM gets into trouble the yield on their bonds goes up (and the price falls). But their protection works in the opposite manner, when IBM gets in trouble it gets more valuable and the effects cancel. In effect, the vendor pays a fee to neutralize the effects of movement in IBM's creditworthiness on their firm's value.
We've seen significant volatility and sell off in these markets. By the volume of the cries of pain of movements in the credit derivatives market, I can't help but feel that many who bought these instruments didn't really understand them or it just wasn't the right product for them. But most people never heard about these products or if they did and were interested were far below the legal thresholds to own them. That's why I wasn't the least be surprised to see the NY Times report that Small Investors Seen as Safer in Stock Slide. If you held a run off the mill portfolio of leveraged stocks and bonds, you lost maybe 10% max since the highs of early July. As Mahalanobis points out, High Yield bonds have jumped about 150 basis points and 150 basis points on 10 year bond will cost you about 10% in principal. Since balance-sheet leverage ratios of more than 25-to-1 are not unheard of, that means wipeout for the poorly managed, highly leveraged, and the unlucky.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:57 AM | Comments (1)
Improving your life gradually
In The Road to Clarity, the NY Times discusses how a new font ClearView was developed to make roadsigns more readable. I especially enjoyed the typographic blog typographica's posting on the font, Clearview: A New Typeface for US Highways which visually highlights the differences between the old and new sign fonts. You can download a close copy of the new font over at Mike The Actuary’s Musings.
Key quotes:
"Signs that you’d be hard pressed to read at 700 feet were legible at 900 or 1,000 feet"
"Clearview showed a 16 percent improvement in recognition over Highway Gothic, meaning drivers traveling at 60 miles per hour would have an extra one to two seconds to make a decision"
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:53 AM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2007
Huh?
"Representative Jerrold Nadler, whose district includes part of the Brooklyn Bridge, points out that the White House has so shortchanged repair work on roads and bridges, by some $90 billion, that it might make a list of structures it considers worth saving, and another list for what would have to be closed and abandoned for lack of money."
As Is: One Bridge, Needs Work
I'm curious what he means. The House of Representatives has the power control the purses of government, so how is this Bush's fault? If it was the fault of the Republicans, the Democrats have been in power for 6 months, so why haven't they fixed it? Sure maybe it wouldn't have been fixed in time, but where is the big ramp up after the change in power to suggest that the Democrats knew any better than the Republicans that infrastructure spending was being under- and miss-spent?
Article 1 Section 7
All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:45 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2007
A great example
What good are imaginary numbers to a 7th grader?
DRDR gives a great answer:
In answering this question in the simplest way, I don't think it's enough to say "complex numbers are important because they're sometimes solutions to equations with real coefficients." We need to find an example where the complex solutions yield real results.The simplest college-level example is probably the solution to the second-order differential equation that governs spring oscillation, but 7th-graders don't know differential eqs. Difference equations, however, might be more understandable to a seventh-grader.
For instance, consider the recursive system a(t+2) = a(t+1) + a(t), with a(0)=a(1)=1. This is just the Fibonacci sequence, which I think most grade-school kids can understand or might have been exposed to (I first saw it in third grade at a public school).
Now supposed you want evaluate a(1000) without having to calculate a(999),...,a(1). You can derive a closed-form non-recursive solution to this system of the form a(t) = A*r1^t+B*r2^t where r1 and r2 are the irrational roots of the equation r^2=r+1, and A and B are determined by the initial conditions. What's beautiful about this example is that though the equation involves irrational numbers, the solution yields integer results for integer initial conditions.From there, it's not hard to leap to the example of the difference equation a(t+2) = a(t+1)-a(t) which exhibits oscillitory behavior, and it's not too hard to think of a practical application for this equation. Here the solution is the same form as above, except the roots are now complex. Here even though the closed form solution involves all sorts of irrational and complex numbers, you still get integer results when you evaluate the equation given integer initial conditions. I think this is about the simplest application of complex roots leading to real results that you can get.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:04 PM | Comments (0)
You think this summer is hot?
What were the 10 hottest years in American history?
From highest to lowest, "1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939"
It isn't only economic figures that are revised, recent records of US temperatures have been revised down considerably.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:42 PM | Comments (0)
Many Eyes
If you like the economic data visualizer Gap Minder then you'll love Many Eyes, which has examples in transportation, entertainment and a variety of other fields.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:39 PM | Comments (0)
August 9, 2007
Light posting
I project has taken me out of town for two days and so posting will be light to nonexistant until Friday.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:49 AM | Comments (0)
August 7, 2007
Snapfish comes in second
With an eye toward the high shipping and handling costs, I was wondering if Snapfish, the photograph printing/developing service that I've used for the last 7 or 8 years was still deserving of my business. A recent (2007) review by Top 10 Reviews found that Snapfish was the second best. Given that the best was no cheaper in bulk, the photo quality was the same, and Snapfish has given me years of flawless customer service, I'm sticking with them. Take a look at how your preferred printer compares. Most of my friends use Snapfish or Kodak Easy Share, so I was surprised that Kodak came in dead last.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
Corn derived ethanol is more a part of the problem than a part of the solution
An amazing article on corn ethanol from the July 24 issue of Rolling Stone, Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles, is fantastic and a must read for anyone interested in understanding American energy policy or who thinks that Ethanol should be a big part of America's fight against anthropogenic climate change.
A few quotes:
"The most seductive myth about ethanol is that it will free us from our dependence on foreign oil. But even if ethanol producers manage to hit the mandate of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022, that will replace a paltry 1.5 million barrels of oil per day -- only seven percent of current oil needs. Even if the entire U.S. corn crop were used to make ethanol, the fuel would replace only twelve percent of current gasoline use."
"Nor is all ethanol created equal. In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane has an energy balance of 8-to-1 -- that is, when you add up the fossil fuels used to irrigate, fertilize, grow, transport and refine sugar cane into ethanol, the energy output is eight times higher than the energy inputs. That's a better deal than gasoline, which has an energy balance of 5-to-1. In contrast, the energy balance of corn ethanol is only 1.3-to-1 - making it practically worthless as an energy source. "Corn ethanol is essentially a way of recycling natural gas," says Robert Rapier, an oil-industry engineer who runs the R-Squared Energy Blog."
"...The gas tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of the difference between ethanol from corn and ethanol from cellulose is "like the difference between traveling to the moon and traveling to Mars."corn -- roughly enough calories to feed one person for a year...In Mexico, tortilla prices have jumped sixty percent, leading to food riots. In Europe, butter prices have spiked forty percent, and pork prices in China are up twenty percent. By 2025, according to Runge and Senauer, rising food prices caused by the demand for ethanol and other biofuels could cause as many as 600 million more people to go hungry worldwide."
"...the difference between ethanol from corn and ethanol from cellulose is "like the difference between traveling to the moon and traveling to Mars.""
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
A loss for freedom
I am saddened to report that that Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs that I mentioned in my posting Dying so that others may live lost their most recent appeals court ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Now more people have to die so that they can be protected from the side effects of drugs. I know I feel safer already.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:06 AM | Comments (0)
Law of unintended consequences #10561
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:10 AM | Comments (0)
August 6, 2007
Highly paid ursines and bovinae
Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen are asking why Wall Street workers are so highly paid.
I see three aspects, the first of which applies broadly to wall street and the last to only the very highest paid folks. First, Wall street workers are highly productive workers. It doesn't take much more work to do huge deals than tiny ones because the technology is leveraged effectively, and examining the changes in volumes o . Second, Wall Street pays huge salaries because they want to attract people who would otherwise start their own businesses, and based on their credentials, connections, and work ethic, that alternative would be successful for many. People seem to be paid based on their next best use of their labor, with their marginal product as a cap.
Check out this graph of Dow Jones Industrial Average volume, it has had nearly exponential growth over the last few decades, and trading volumes look like that in just about every financial product:
The last one is the winner take all / first mover advantage aspect, where wall street seems to have outsize rewards to moving a bit faster, with a bit higher volume, or by knowing a few extra people.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:35 PM | Comments (0)
August 3, 2007
What price for perscription drugs?
The economist has a new post, Price power comments on a proposal (Drug Reimportation = Back Door Price Controls) to cut off drugs to countries that bargain too hard on the price of prescription drugs. Now as I discussed in an earlier article (Who is subsidizing whom?), it isn't obvious that even if we sell countries drugs at very low prices, that we (those who pay a higher price) still don't benefit. To which they complain about feasibility, "Foriegn (sic) governments have a secret weapon in their arsenal: they can break the patent on your drug, or use compulsory licensing to grant you a small royalty. Yes, there are all sorts of good reasons not to do this, but I suspect that if you cut off the supply of a life-saving drug, courts would readily agree that this was a legitimate humanitarian exception to the patent laws."
Two points. First, one way to do this is to do your drug safety testing in a place like the US where reimbursement rates are much higher, and then not do those tests in other countries until you have a commitment on the reimbursement rates. That would make it much harder for the courts to force you because hey, the drug isn't officially safe yet. The second is that even after they have ensured their drug is approved, they could say we'll make our drug available for sale, and this is the rate. If you don't like it, don't buy it. You haven't cut off supply, so that puts governments and courts in a tougher position.
As a public policy matter, it would be easier (but not a good idea) to just lobby the US for reform, saying that it is illegal for them to sell drugs in the US for for than X% (X>100) of what they are sold in any other OECD nation and that they had to have full disclosure of the price they sell it for. Sure, allow a narrow clause for charity and humanitarian sales. Then companies would solve their collective action problem. Currently since all other drug companies tow the line, any company that fights too hard on price risks what the economist discusses, giving up profits that they could get under the negotiated rate. But now you aren't risking the profits of that country, you are risking the big profits from America, and so you have to fight back. And now you are in a public relation war. Why should you get to nationalize a drug just to force your people to pay far less than the Americans. Maybe you violate IP laws or trade agreements, and the US has a lot of power and influence.
So more likely what would happen is that since they now that lowering the price in any country means they lower their prices in their money maker countries, the drug companies have more incentive to push back. When the negotiators from other countries see all companies pushing back harder in negotiations, they'd have to settle for lower prices, to the extent that the process is at all a negotiation. Since these countries do seem to negotiate and not make up a price, that seems plausible.
In any case, I don't buy this whole line of reasoning. Selling drugs to other countries, at pretty much any price is a good deal for the American drug consumer. Drug companies don't produce drugs for less than their marginal cost. That means that they make some profits and are also able to spread out the costs of drug production over more pills. Because that's where the lion's share of the profits come from, we get drugs aimed at our (to some extent) unique problems.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 1, 2007
You aren't throwing your money away by renting
Getting rich slowly that neatly explains why renting isn't throwing your money way. Essentially, because owning a comparable home is so much more expensive then it is to rent, you must consider the difference in your financial planning.
Suggesting several key points:
For most consumers, real estate should be purchased as a consumption good. Buy it to customize the way you live. Buy it to set down roots in a particular community. Depending on your state, buy it as a hedge against bankruptcy. Just don't buy it to force you to save. If you have enough cognizance to know that's the reason you are doing it, just rent, and max out your 401k and IRA for you and your spouse. unless you get lucky in your real estate picks, you'll pay lower fees, get a higher return, and you'll find it much easier to move as family and job demands. But between the interest, the taxes, the aggravation, and the hassle of moving, home ownership is lousy investment.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:47 PM | Comments (0)
Watery claptrap
While I do agree with their claim that tap water is under rated ( I only buy bottled water when I need the bottle or their is no alternative), I'm disappointed to see the NY Times repeat the claim (in In Praise of Tap Water) that people get their recommended eight glasses of water a day. Where is the fact checking? A simple Google search would have dug up that 8-glasses-of-water rule is half empty as reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Dr. Heinz Valtin, a Dartmouth University kidney specialist and authority on water balance, did what may be the most exhaustive study on the 8-by-8 rule in 2003. It found no scientific basis for recommending eight glasses of water a day.The rule did not emerge from any scientific research or any established knowledge about human water needs. There's no scientific proof that humans need eight glasses of water each day. Nobody even knows for sure who cooked up the 8-by-8 rule.
If you don't like the way your tap water tastes, buy a filter. The per gallon water cost is astoundingly low and it is better for the environment too.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:49 AM | Comments (0)
Swords into plowshares
Aresa Biodetection, is a Danish biotech company that has developed a genetically modified flower that can detect the nitrogen dioxide evaporating from explosives buried in soil. That means that, changes color when planted above land mines. Hopefully the gene(s) that makes this possible can be spliced into a variety of plants so that they can adopt it to local plants in areas with serious land mine problems. That way it won't take much to keep the plants alive, and maybe with the right plant they could just toss seeds out of helicopters in areas they think have mines.
Thanks to Wired for the tip: Flower Power Takes on Land Mines
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:52 AM | Comments (0)
Maybe a rental, but it looked interesting
After attending the Cato Summer Institute a few years ago, I saw the incredible Alan Kors give a series of lectures, one of which was the horrible state of academic freedom among the students of American universities. WHen it came out. That excited me to read his book, The Shadow University and that got my blood boiling.
Now there is a movie coming out about those issues of academic freedom, indoctrinate-u that looks exciting. Here is the trailer and a deleted scene to get you interested.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:32 AM | Comments (0)