Our take...

On Summers...

2005-01-22T16:30:00.000-05:00

For those interested in the recent brouhaha surrounding Lawrence Summers' comments there's a fairly reasonable rant over at PZ Myers and another (with some link to additional empirical research) at Crooked Timber. I have little of value to add here beyond the note that university presidents probably shouldn't be in the business of making broad generalizations - which seem to have some small degree of explicatory power for their university hiring practices - in public settings.

I would further note here, a fact which seems to get little play in most popular accounts of the Summers remarks, that Harvard offers tenure to approximately 25 people a year: even if we assume that the genetic differences between the quantitative ability of men and women are well understood, empirical research suggests that they are IN NO WAY large enough to explain the distribution of women and men among the Harvard faculty.

Catholic Marriage in Spain

2005-01-20T15:33:00.000-05:00

Within my experience (perhaps obviously) it's interesting how many otherwise observant Catholics choose to ignore the Church's council on birth control (i.e. don't use it). Along these lines, it's big news when a portion of the church seems to be almost saying "condoms are OK". Spanish bishops seem to have reached a point where they at least in the neighborhood of talking meaningfully about birth control. Perhaps this, more than the ongoing inauguration, is really today's sign that the apocalypse is upon us.

The season of dishonest Bush/Cheney ads..

2004-10-22T13:17:00.000-04:00

If not now when, I suppose. Commentary on the latest piece of silliness can be found over at Campaign Extra.

On the mechanics of the breaking pitch...

2004-10-08T19:16:00.000-04:00

Because the next month or so is marked not just by the run up to the presidential elections (which happen every four years) but also by the basecall playoffs and the chance for the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series (which hasn't happened since 1918) I thought it appropos to spend some time thinking about the mechanics of the breaking ball.

It turns out that although complicated in the realm of popular culture, there's an old chestnut which makes the rounds something to the effect that physics can't describe a curveball, the mechanics of the breaking pitch has been well understood for at least 200 years. At it's heart is something called the Magnus effect (see here for some neat pictures and more on this topic): a description of what happens to a spinning entity as it travels through a fluid.

The basic idea is this. Because a baseball is relatively large relative to air molecules it is imperfectly aerodynamic: air tends to separate on the upstream side of the ball and recombine on the downstream. This means that, for a nonspinning ball moving forward through the air, a high pressure zone is created on the upstream and a low pressure one on the downstream. This pressure difference acts to slow the ball's forward progress and to make it fall to earth much more rapidly than it otherwise might.

The trick to throwing a breaking pitch is to throw the ball and set it spinning at the same time. When that happens the boundary layer of air around the ball is disturbed. No longer does air separate at the front of the ball and the currents recombine exactly at the back. Instead the location where the air recombines is shifted (if the ball has back spin the location is shifted down, if top spin it's shifted up). A incomplete but still possibly useful explanation of why this might be important has routinely been used to explain how an airplane flies. The idea is, basically, that the in the case of, for example, backspin the recombination point is shifted down. This means that air that travels over the top of the ball will travel relatively faster (think of it as getting the 'kick' from the spinning ball) than air that travels below, in the process becoming slightly less dense (think of it getting stretched) and hence giving the ball a small amount of lift. To make the ball sink or move sideways is a analogous.

If you think about it this way it seems like it might be tough to make a ball curve, but it turns out that big league pitchers and serious pitching machines can make a ball move something like 18 inches off the path it might otherwise take as it travels from the mound homeward.

I just get sick of the lies...

2004-10-06T09:08:00.000-04:00

So last night was the Cheney/Edwards debate. In the course of the affair Cheney (in response to something that escapes me at the moment) asserted that "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." The problem with this sentiment , as anyone who's been conscious in the US over the last several years knows, is that IT JUST ISN'T TRUE. Cheney has asserted on numerous occasions that Hussein was strongly linked to the events of 9/11. I found myself thinking in the debate aftermath that Cheney certainly has to know, I know what he said. So why would he say it? The only explanation I can see is that Cheney has utter disdain for the intelligence of the average voter, has utter disdain for the intellect or seriousness of the people listening. This should make you angry where ever you stand on the poltical spectrum. If you're even just ambivalent on Kerry, vote Cheney out of office as a sign of protest - as your attempt to say "Listen Dick. I'm an adult, treat me like one." For more on this, and other post-debate spin, check Josh Marshall.

UPDATE - There's been a sizable amount written at many other political sites about the line that was undoubtedly expected to be one of the Republican slogans as we come down the home stretch. After asserting that, in his capacity as president of the Senate he was on the hill most Tuesdays, Cheny remarked, "The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight", suggesting, of course, Edwards hadn't been showing up.

This is a lie on two levels.

1. Cheney had met Edwards on more than one prior occasion and the pictures exist to prove it (follow this link to Tim Noah at Slate or this to Kevin Drums entry on the topic).

2. Over the last several years at the Senate Cheney has presided over only 2 of a possible 129 Tuesdays. This, as it happens, is as many days as Edwards has presided.

Dogs just a bit smarter than we thought...

2004-10-05T15:53:00.000-04:00

We here at Our Take have previously written about just how smart we think dogs might be (you'll just have to trust me on this. The post was about a dog recognizing words but it seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the archive). The obvious intelligence of Red (an inhabitant of the Battersea Home for Dogs) was, however, outside of even our estimation. According to the BBC workers at the home had been finding many dogs loose and the place a bit of a wreck when they arrived in the morning. In an attempt to figure out what was going on they installed cameras. When they did so they found that Red had been letting himself out of his cage at night (using teeth and tongue) and then releasing some of his friends. Red now has many offers of adoption (link via OxBlog).

Kerry on Terrorism...

2004-10-05T15:42:00.000-04:00

This has been mentioned elsewhere (by Kevin Drum among others) but I think it's a useful corrective to the conservative blather suggesting Kerry is sort on terrorism and cravenly power hungery to check out David Sirrota and Jonathan Baskin's piece on Kerry's work at breaking up BCCI (that's Bank of Credit and Commerce International).

For those who might not remember, BCCI was a highflyer in international finance for about a decade starting in the early 80's. Founded by a Pakastani businessman, they invested extensively in (among other things) american politicians, creating a strong network of ties on both the right and the left. In the late 80's, though, BCCI started cropping up in all sorts of law enforcement operations: they laundered money from a dictator here, from a drug lord there. In work which was potentially damaging to his own political propects (it was over the objections of many democratic insiders) Kerry led Senate hearings, found a venue for persectution in New York with the sympathetic DA Robert Morgenthau and played a critical role in breaking up the bank both at home and abroad.

In retrospect BCCI was sort of a financial super store for things criminal. At significant potential risk to his own political future, and years before the general public seemed to care really strongly about terrorist financing, John Kerry played the most important role in breaking it up.

U-Locks for Bicycles

2004-09-20T10:57:00.000-04:00

As a public service I want to link to this site. It is apparently possible to pick some U-Locks in ~1 minute using nothing other than the shaft from a plastic ballpoint pen. If you regularly use these sorts of locks and live in an environment where bike theft is common it might be a good idea to add some other sort of protection.

On being a scientist and missile defense...

2004-09-19T14:48:00.000-04:00

I am a scientist. So I can say with some (not a lot but some) authority when I say that being a good scientist or engineer really hinges on an attitude. You want to get 'up under the hood' of what ever problem it is that you study with the goal of being able to predict the future. Put another way, if you study bridges you want to be able to understand the materials out of which you build and the stresses bridges experience to be able to predict that, subject to everything you can think of, the bridge won't fall down. If you study the weather you want to be able to understand atmospheric chemistry/physics well enough to predict what it will do next.

There were in the past, and there are today, plenty of really bright, really insightful engineers who try to build better weapons and better protective measures against weapons. And, as fas as missle defense goes, they all say now we can't do it: that we don't know enough about missle propulsion ang guidance to be able to build rockets which will hit incoming nuclear missiles with any degree of certainty.

So why, you might ask yourself, is Bush insisting on going ahead with the deployment of anti-missile missiles? Certainly one possibility is strategic, some protection is better than no protection. But eqaully certainly missile protection seems little like protecting against sexually transmitted diseases: it may well be that implementing not effective defensive measures just serves to increase tension, making crises more, rather than less, likely. Fred Kaplan in Slate has some more guesses as to why the Bush administration has wandered down this particular path, and none of them make me happy.

Some Statistics Resources...

2004-09-18T19:44:00.000-04:00

For the one (possibly two) people who might find it useful, the following statistics related sights are helpful...

Textbooks and Lecture Notes
The Statitistics Homepage
Hyper Stat Online Text Book
Links to Online Texts and Notes for Economic Statistics

Free Statistical Analysis Software
The R Project for Statistical Computing

On the relationship of candidates to the issues...

2004-09-15T09:09:00.000-04:00

Mark Schmitt (all of whose stuff we should all be reading) has a new post up about the relationships of political candidates, particularly presidential candidates to the issues. The usual criticism, at least from the sort of 'leftist' cricles I inhabit, of this and most presidential elections is that they don't spend enough time on policy, instead dwelling on nebulous character considerations. Shmitt argues that, in a certain very circumscribed sense, this is exactly as it should be. The US, after all, doesn't have a parlimentary system so when voting for a president we're not really voting for particular policies. Instead it is more accurate to say that we're voting for the person who will respond to policy oportunities (or unexpected political circumstance) in a way that we think is most moral/responsible. It's less important, than, that a presidential campaign be about issues for issues' sake, than that it be about issues for what they tell us about how a candidate conceives of his leadership role: how he'll act when in office.

Hurricane Info...

2004-09-13T15:59:00.000-04:00

For those who might live in the South Eastern US or are just generally interested in hurricanes, the National Hurricane Center website is a good place to start. On it you can get tracking charts you can fill in yourself, model results, satellite imagery and official forecasts and warning all in one convenient place.

If you have questions about the operational issues of hurricane forecasting, e.g. What's it like to fly into the eye of a storm?, or about some of the physics, e.g. How do tropical cyclones form?, Chris Landsea's FAQ has answers to these and all sorts of other interesting and relevant questions.

On and on and on in Darfur...

2004-09-11T14:26:00.001-04:00

In all sorts of ways the US has a history rife with forgettable, deeply flawed, just wrong episodes in the grand march for social justice in Central and South American, Africa and Asia. Of course we're not alone here, if the goal was to work for social justice virtually all large and powerful countries have screwed up time and time again through history.

None of which really matters for our foreign policy now. To me it seems like it is this sensibility (the same one which requires the "past performance is no predictor of future sucess" you often hear at the end of financial services commercials) which lead many progressive thinkers to oppose the invasion of Iraq, twice. I remember the protests of the hard line anti-war left as pointing out that while we know Sadam Hussein is a bad guy invading the country and forcibly deposing him won't necessarily make things better. Put another way, it may be right to depose Sadam, but the question isn't what's right, the question is what's the best way to bring freedom where it didn't exist before, of creating a civil society with freely elected representatives where before none existed. If this is true the ethical obligation of our foreign policy isn't so much to do the right thing (as it is typically described in most neocon circles) the obligation is to do the thing which improves bad situations, which helps people the world over be better off than before.

In the 8/30/04 issue of the New Yorker Samantha Power published a long piece on the background and much of the current issues in the struggle in Darfur. Some of the things she's described, the ethnic cleansing, the enforced povery and food confiscation performed toward the Darfurians by the janjaweed have trickled out in other places. Seeing it all together - well seeing it all together forced me to try to think about larger solutions, and the results weren't pretty.

How do you convince stop one ethnic group from killing another? How do you allocate finite unworked land fairly? How to you apportion resources for an expanding population in a way that is so essentially equal that it allows all groups to feel a stake in the system? How do you encourage in people a sense of responsibility to the largest possible group which overwhelms allegiances to local familes or tribes? I don't know the answers to these questions in Darfur (heck I don't even know how to get students to assume responsibility for their own work when I teach). But that doen't mean it's not important. In fact, until those questions can be answered the drone just keeps going on and on in the background. It's not particularly encouraging or hopeful, but it's the drone of the right question to ask and the question that all our consciences should pose until it's fixed. How do we stop it and make it better?

For a nonpartisan take on what's going on in Iraq...

2004-09-09T09:31:00.000-04:00

If you should have an extensive amount of time on your hands, and really want to understand (in a semi-quantitative way) just how poorly the US occupation of Iraq is going, you may be interested in the report just out from the Council of Strategic and International Studies.

Just a Small Reminder about Climate Change...

2004-09-06T09:56:00.000-04:00

It's worth remembering (as most of us drive/walk/bike to work in front of computers or analytical equipment) that the closer your life and livelihood is to the land (hunting/farming), and the higher the latitude at which you live, the more likely climate change is to change almost every aspect of how your life is lived. Keep this handy axiom in mind and this article from the NY Times on the destruction of eskimo communities in the face of changing climate should be little suprise.

Department of Selling Out the Environment...

2004-09-03T11:43:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to write about some of the issue raised in this article by Bill McKibben for some time. The basic thesis of the piece being that while the Bush administration is making a royal mess of foreign policy (while it's corporate supporters benefit) at least it is doing it for ideological reasons. In the environmental realm, on the other hand, the administration is making a royal mess (while it's corporate supporters benefit) for no reason other than what seems naked political self preservation.

Which is all fine (and relatively uncontroversial amongst most who pay attention to this sort of thing), a small off hand comment by McKibben though made me start thinking in a broader way about conservation in general.

...my wife and I have solar panels on the roof of our house to supply some of our power, and they work well—but their biggest effect is to make us far more conscious of turning off lights. Similarly, my hybrid car saves energy in part because of its brilliantly designed engine but also because it comes with a display that tells me constantly how much gas I'm using and this, as a consequence, has cured me of a heavy foot on the pedal.

So what I'm wondering, then, is whether the behaviour described by McKibben might be more generally applicable. While we know regulations requiring conservation would be likely be brutally unpopular (unless, oh maybe, half the West Antarctic falls into the sea) perhaps regulations requiring companies to show the amount of energy cars, heating, air conditioning use in real time would be politically possible.

Perhaps, if we were really empowered with information which enable descisions to be made about the amount of energy we use in our daily lives we would all ( or mostly all) just start adapting practices which conserve.

I believe enough people would for it to matter, and matter alot.

I don't of course know if any of this is true, but I think it's the most optimisitic take on the possibilty of conservation in a long time.

A referendum on dissent...

2004-09-03T11:31:00.000-04:00

I keep going back to him because I'm so amazed to see the flow of his language - to see him actually advocate a position rather than do horse race analysis - but here's Will Saletan on Zell Miller and Dick Cheney's night under the lights...

If the convention speeches are any guide, Republicans have run out of excuses for blowing the economy, blowing the surplus, and blowing our military resources and moral capital in the wrong country. So they're going after the patriotism of their opponents.

...But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.

In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.

Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.

Are you prepared to become one of those countries?

The clincher then is...

So now you have two reasons to show up at the polls in November. One is to stop Bush from screwing up economic and foreign policy more than he already has. The other is to remind him and his propagandists that even after 9/11, you still have that right.

Success in the National Football League

2004-09-02T09:54:00.000-04:00

You'd have to be unconscious, or living somewhere like Key West I suppose, to have missed the central role that the NFL plays in the american cultural obsession with professional sports. Given this obsession, and the attendent rewards for winning, it seems odd that football has not generated anything like baseball's sabermetrics: independent statistical analyses which purport to isolate the ingredients that make good teams good.

In some sense this lack of an external structure makes the game more exciting and changable: the trick being then (if you're a coach or general manager) to modify what you do to best suit the talents of your personnel. However just as clearly it also leads every year to massive copy cat impulses. Other teams see the St. Louis Rams gain success with the 'Greatest Show on Turf' and think, somehow, that this is the next evolution of the game: that they have to change how they play (regardless of whether they have an accurate quaterback and four talented wide receivers) or risk being left behind.

One such remarkably consisent illusion, Aaron Schatz makes the case in Slate, is that a dominating runner is necessary for success. In the piece Schatz offers a number of statistical metrics that stronly suggest that most of the running backs commonly thought of as stars in the league (e.g. Edgerrin James, Deuce McAllister) are just about average (their statistics being wildly inflated by the numbers of carries they receive). While there are actual star running backs (Ladanian Tomlinson, Clinton Portis) Schatz makes the case that it may even in this case pay to do with out the stars in favor of a running back by committee.

On the definition of courage...

2004-08-31T19:16:00.000-04:00

A number of people have said this in all sorts of blogs but lost in the discussion of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth silliness is the big picture issue: if we care about courage in a president (of both the moral, physical and intellectual variety ) does anything Bush has ever accomplished match Kerry's accomplishments?

This decent into the obvious occured for Will Saletan while listening to the muck being shoveled at the Republican National Convention. His article ends with the sort of language you might expect from a rational, really middle of the road type guy (see his archive at Slate if you're curious along these lines) who's just finally had more than he can take.

"The ultimate testament to Bush's manhood, supposedly, is the two wars he launched. As McCain put it, "He ordered American forces to Afghanistan" and "made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq." But the salient word in each of those boasts is the verb. Bush gives orders and makes decisions. He doesn't take personal risks. He never has.

I don't mean to be unfair to Bush. Vietnam was a lousy war. He wanted a way out, and he found it. But isn't it odd to see Republicans belittle the physical risks Kerry took in battle while exalting Bush's armchair wars and post-9/11 photo ops? Isn't it embarrassing to see Bob Dole, the GOP's previous presidential nominee, praise Bush's heroism while suggesting that Kerry's three combat wounds weren't bad enough to justify sending him home from Vietnam?

Watching the attacks on Kerry and the glorification of Bush reminds me of something Dole said in his speech to the Republican convention eight years ago. It was "demeaning to the nation," Dole argued, to be governed by people "who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned."

You tell me which of this year's presidential candidates that statement best describes."

Department of the Obvious...

2004-08-31T15:52:00.000-04:00

Yes we all know all about thin film boiling (when you throw water on a hot pan the drops seem to dance around the surface for several seconds before evaporating) but drinking liquid nitrogen?

Apparently this guy thought it would be a good idea. The predictable, and sad, consequences, resulted.

How does corrosion happen?

2004-08-30T15:31:00.000-04:00

In an article which appeared in the August 20th edition of Science Punkt at al. make the case that corrosion is not an equilibrium process: it's best thought of as a phase change. To put this into everyday experiences...

Water changes phase (from liquid to gas) at 100 degrees C (assuming atmospheric pressure). What's interesting about that phase change (and even more so for phase changes of other substances - water is unique for all sorts of reasons not worth getting into at the moment) is that at these temperatures and pressures small changes in the environment can cause large changes in the macroscopic properties of the system. For example, small changes in the pressure in a vat of nearly boiling water can cause most of the water to boil off (more or less the idea behind a pressure cooker).

So phase changes are interesting in general, then, because they're times when small changes in the environment can lead to big changes in materials properties. If you want to design, e.g. concrete which cracks less readily in cold, plastics which are easier to shape or, as it turns out, steel which better resists rust, you need to understand what's happening at the relevant phase change and how to design your system to either inhibit or encourage change (depending on the specifics).

But back to corrosion. Prior work has demonstrated that viritually all metals form a protective oxide film when exposed to atmospheric conditions (because of reactions with water). Corrosion happens when holes are made through that film which rapidly grow and extend, downwards, into the underlying metal. Prior work has also demonstrated that under 'normal' conditions this protective film has small metastable pits. These pits typically appear and vanish on fairly small time scales, usually showing up at defects in the underlying crystal structure of the metal. Punkt et al. image metal surfaces under small changes in environmental conditions (small changes in temperature/salt content in the overlying water) and find that corrosion occurs when a critical density of the metastable pits occur: when the ms pits are close enough to feel each other. The observed sensitivity of corrosion to environmental conditions, and the pattern which corrosion follows once it starts can all be predicted (at least qualitatively) by a simple model of the process.

Why is this important you might now ask? If you're interested in a car which doesn't rust as easily or any other sort of metal part which works better when exposed to the environment, this knowledge is key. Now you know that one of the ways to beat corrosion is work really, really, hard at making your product defect free (so the ms pits occurs much further apart in the first place).

Unfortunately accessint the article requires a subscription to Science. For those so inclined the full reference is...

Punckt et al., Sudden Onset of Pitting Corrosion on Stainless Steel as a Critical Phenomenon, Science 2004 305: 1133-1136

Two of the groups involved in the research do have easily accessible web pages at which you can find out more about the sort of stuff they study:

-> Hudson Group at UVA
-> Mikhailov Group at the Fritz-Haber Institute

On being asked to give the medal back - again

2004-08-30T13:18:00.000-04:00

Yesterday a deranged (my purely subjective jusdgement), defrocked Irish priest (Cornelius Horan) tackled the leader in the men's marathon, the Brazilian Vanderlei de Lima, with about three miles left in the race. De Lima fell, appeared to be injured, but got up and continued the race, finishing in third.

In light of the Paul Hamm huballo (i.e. those who say he won the medal on a mathematical error so should give it back (ignoring what seems to be the current conventional wisdom that if the whole South Korean routine was reviewed he would do worse)) it seems reasonable to ask whether the Italian who won the race (Stefano Baldini) should give his gold to de Lima.

I've argued below that I think, more or less, that Hamm has every right to hold onto his gold. Evaluating what happened in the marathon seems both harder and easier. Harder in the sense that no one will really ever know whether de Lima wasn't almost all spend (i.e. whether the other runners were about to put on a late burst to bring themselves back into contention). Easier in the sense that Horan's actions clearly tilted the playing field away from de Lima. Would you really want to recieve a medal which, mostly, might come from your principal rival being attacked. I think I can say with some certainty that I would not (for more on the story see this news item. Kieren Healy's also posted on the nutty Irish guy here)

Conversation Highlights from a Weekend in Philadelphia...

2004-08-30T11:29:00.000-04:00

1. "Those Chinese are off the hook!" - beginnings of a discussion between two middle aged women while leaving the movie Hero.

2. "What's the best nation in the world?

What?

"Donation"

....

"Spare a dollar man. Come on, you don't have to be a Rockefella to help a fella."

-The last two in a sequence of ten jokes told by a homeless man looking for some help.

3. "Can I smell your feet?" - question addressed to me by a man who looked like a contractor/painter driving a minivan in the early afternoon in South Philadelphia.

On being asked to give the medal back (Paul Hamm edition)...

2004-08-28T07:22:00.000-04:00

So I read with interest yesterday that the International Gymnastics Federation has publicly requested (but will not force) American gymnast Paul Hamm to give the gold he won in this years all around competition in Athens to the South KoreanYang Tae-young.

The back story here, for the perhaps two people who might care about the forward story (on which I'm about to comment) but don't know the background is that after Hamm won the gold the FIG (yes Federation International Gymnastique) reqviewed tape of Young's parallel bar routine and determined that his start value (the degree of difficulty for his routine) had been miscalculated by judges and that he was owed ~0.1 points (enough to move him from bronze to gold.

Let's ignore all the practical objections to this review: 1. by rule it should have happened at the event (the South Koreans say they were told to file a protext afterward by a functionary on the scene but, if so, this was clearly against the written rule. 2. Hamm points out that if you do review the start value you should review the entire routine, in which case Young loses more than he gains.

Instead I want to just focus on the fact that FIG publicly requested Hamm give up his medal. How truly, truly ridiculous is this? FIG is the governing body of a sport. It has no buiness publicly requesting anything!!!!! Sport's governing bodies make their ruling (there either was or wasn't a violation) and then they move on. Can you imagine the NFL hierarchy saying to Terrel Owens last year "We're not going to fine you for the Sharpie signing end zone celebration (there was no rule violation on your part) but we're really uncomfortable with it and, when we think about it, we think there probably should have been a rule so if you could just please publicly apologize that would make us really happy." Absolutely not. And if they tried anything of the sort they'd be villified 24 hours a day across the US (yes actually 24 hours a day I'm imagining this decision as sports talk radio fodder).

So Paul, if you're reading this (you know unlikely but just possible) keep your medal. You won it fair and square, by the rules of the competition in place at the time. Your performance was bold and inventive - you're a champion in my book.

UPDATE: A number of people have pointed out to me that, while it's seems clear that the FIG is acting badly, the question surrounding whether Hamm should give up his metal is, perhaps, a bit more complicated. I should note, along these lines then, that my understanding of gymnastics judging (something of which I have no first hand experience) is that you can change your routine on the fly. Which is to say that, if Hamm had known he needed a different amount of points to win (i.e. if Young had protested and his score had been changed during the competition) he could have changed his intended routine to one that was higher risk/higher reward.

One of my weblog baseball highlights...

2004-08-27T09:41:00.000-04:00

Ever since ESPN (no you will not get a link from me) moved the baseball columnist Rob Neyer into its premium section I've soured on them. While souring I've also required a new place to look for that sort of analysis coupled with a knack for clear and thoughtful writing.

Such a place is the weblog Red Bird Nation. This is a web log produced by a St. Louis Cardinal's fan so it mostly deals, naturally, with Cardinal related issues (hence the name). I've never been a Cardinal's fan but the guy who writes most of the entries is really more of a fan of baseball than of the Cardinals and his stuff is so consistently interesting and well written that it's a pleasure to read.

Art Theft and the Turn to Violence...

2004-08-27T09:30:00.000-04:00

The recent theft of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" by a gang of masked thieves at gunpoint during business hours from it's museum resting place was, I thought, an aberration (I had - as I imagined most had - always thought of art theft largely as a business most often conducted in the dark of night). In a recent article in Slate Marc Spiegler makes the case that the times are a changing (with respect to art theft): that the Munch theft was emblematic of a new movement in the art theft world towards armed, conducted during working hours, heists. He argues (although I suppose it would actually be difficult to produce any empirical data on this point) that better security measures during nonworking hours (e.g. extensive networks of motion/body heat detectors) have led theives to work during more risky daylight hours where they can actually be reasonably sure they can get the work.

Intelligence Reform Summary...

2004-08-27T09:19:00.000-04:00

If you're interested in reform of the intelligence business (either because that's just the sort of person you are, or because you worry about national security issues, or because you're generally interested in the policy process - whatever the reason really) the Council of Foreign Relations has a nice summary of the various proposals currently floating around.

On how microbes interact with their environment...

2004-08-21T13:50:00.000-04:00

The interaction of microorganisms with their environment is critical to much of how we live: this interaction is the determining factor in much disease, it plays a significant role in the stability (or lack thereof) of the climate system and often determines such things as the cleanliness of our groundwater. For many years much of the interaction of microorganisms with their environment has been assumed to be largely chemical and largely atomic. For example the uptake of nutrients and the evacuation of cellular wastes happens usually because of some type of diffision, i.e. the process is explicable purely by paying attention to the relevant molecules.

Andrew E. Pelling, Sadaf Sehati, Edith B. Gralla, Joan S. Valentine, and James K. Gimzewski, in a just published paper in the journal Science, have found that the cell walls of live yeast cells vibrate with a characteristic frequency which is dependent on temperature. They argue that these oscillations are likely driven the the passage of groups of motor proteins on the inner side of the cell wall - something like the vibration of a house's wall as a nearby frieght train roles past (as Gimzewski explains on his web site). For the technically inclined, I should note that Pelling performed the observations using an AFM (atomic force microscope - essentially a molecularly small record needle) and live cells caught in the pores of a polycarbonate filter).

While the actual observation is interesting, even more interesting are the consequences. Pelling et al. seem to make the case the in the paper (and Gimzewski makes the case in other articles about the research) that it is likely that the observed oscillations are somehow passive: that they are diagnostic of healthy cell function. But it's clear from the paper that the oscillations take a lot of energy. It seems at least possible to me that, if the oscillations truly served no useful purpose (for the cell) the energy used to create them would have long ago been channelled elsewhere more effectively.

If the oscillations actually serve a purpose, it's not at all clear what that might be. More work is needed with tools which say something about the chemistry happening at the same time as these observed mechanical changes and that can resolve the dynamics of these chemical changes.

So there's still a long way to go, but if this oscillatory behaviour turns out to be spread widely among microorganisms, and if it turns out to be useful (to the cell) Pelling et al. have opened the door to an interesting new world.

The reference for the paper (only accessible over the web if you have a subscription to Science) is,

Pelling et al., Local Nanomechanical Motion of the Cell Wall of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Science 2004 305: 1147-1150

However, if you'd like a reprint and don't have a subscription you can drop Gimzewski a line and ask him for one here.

Also playing in Philadelphia...

2004-08-18T08:14:00.000-04:00

From Sunday 8/22 through Thursday 8/26 the American Chemical Society will be holding it's biannual national meeting in Philadelphia. This is a usually a fun meeting (if you're interested in chemistry of any sort). Should you be interested in learning more about what's going on the meeting site is here. Should you be interested in the pure joys of chemistry - you know, molecules for the sake of molecules - also check out ACS's 'Molecule of the Week' feature here. Should you really, really, really, be desperate I'll be giving a talk on Thursday afternoon describing my attempts to create better living through nonlinear optics (better living in this case just means novel tools for probing the surface chemistry of colloidal particles in solution).

Are Philadelphia Lawyers Exploited?

2004-08-18T08:09:00.000-04:00

Because I have several good friends who work in the legal arena in Philadelphia I read with some interest this recent piece in Law.com. The gist of the article is that, yes, Philadelphia corporate lawyers do get paid less than those in other major metropolitan areas. Ignored in this analysis is that the cost of living (principally here I'm thinking of real estate) is also less in Philadelphia than in many other major cities. In other words, don't weap for the counselors from Philadelphia just yet (via Brian Leiter).

Using Tides to Generate Power

2004-08-16T11:13:00.000-04:00

Using wind to generate electrical power is relatively common. Many states boast companies responsible for some small percentage of the total power that generate using wind (check out the American Wind Energy Association for more details). But wind, by itself, can never be the whole answer in power generation. Climatological factors play too critical a role: some states just aren't windy enough.

Where wind is inadequate it may prove possible to generate power by harnessing other natural processes: e.g. tides. In a small pilot project the energy company Verdant Power plans to install a series of turbines on the bottom of the Hudson river (next to New York City) which will rotate to follow the tides. Many practical issues still remain to be considered: e.g. the influence of fields of river bottom turbines on wild life, how to help the turbines spin freely in the presence of lots of debris, but wouldn't it be something, wouldn't it be really something, if someday New York got much of it's power from the tides?

Apologies for Light Posting...

2004-08-15T10:51:00.000-04:00

My apologies for light posting over the last 8 weeks or so. I've been working in Beijing at the Molecular Reaction Dynamics Laboratory in the Institute of Chemistry for that period and web access to blogger (or to web logs in general) was erratic. I've got a number of rough drafts of interesting science related posts and more general notes about living and working in China which should appear within the next several weeks.

Who else should the Catholic Church ban from taking Communion?

2004-06-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

Some Catholic bishops have made news of late by stating that they would refuse communion to Catholic politicians who are pro-choice. But why single out politicians for such treatment? Why not ensure that every communion-goer is on the doctrinal straight and narrow? To this end, churchgoers who want to receive the sacrament could sign a statement avowing that they follow (and agree with) doctrine.

Agreement with the doctrine would seem to be the sticking point here. It's not as if John Kerry, Gov. Jim McGreevey (NJ) or others are actually going around performing abortions (or having them). The most they have done is advocated policies that would allow other individuals the right to make the choice for themselves -- which, perhaps, is moral abrogation enough for the Church. So, agreement with the doctrine must be required for the Church to contend that the person is sufficiently impure to withhold communion.

But, what about Catholic politicians or non-VIP laity who support the death penalty? Have any bishops suggested using fidelity to Catholic doctrine on this issue as a litmus test for receiving communion? Or what about Catholic policy with regard to nuclear weapons? Or the "preferential option for the poor", long stressed within papal encyclicals? Not to mention Catholic policy regarding immigrant rights, refugee protection and asylum, human rights, just war, the living wage, etc.? For goodness sake, what about Catholics who use birth control!? Can we be allowed to receive communion?

Apparently, the official Church teaching on receiving the sacrament is that Catholics knowingly living in serious sin or those who reject Church doctrine should abstain from communion. Yet this guidance for the individual adherent is a far cry from the case of bishops making an example of a public figure. The whole event has raised questions of the extent to which the Church should intervene not just in policy but in politics. But in a sense, the current dispute belies the dubiousness of the question: specifically because American Catholics have little problem diverging from the doctrinal values platform of the Church hierarchy, the Church is a less powerful political entity than its numbers might suggest.

The great irony of course is that 40 some odd years ago, JFK took pains to convince a nation largely ill-disposed to Catholics that his presidency would not be ruled by Rome. It now appears some bishops want the opposite from John Kerry.

In Memory: writer Ralph Wiley, 52

2004-06-15T14:05:00.000-04:00

Ralph Wiley passed away at a young age, though not without an outsized influence on sports journalism. Wiley was a beat reporter in Oakland, a writer at Sports Illustrated and ESPN.com, and the author several books and screenplays including, "Serenity: A Boxing Memoir" and "Why Black People Tend to Shout".

I liked what he wrote, thought he was mischievous and knowledgeable and probably knew more than he said. In particular I read for the way he teased apart the way we watch sports and the nuances in how we often project our subtle biases onto the athletes we ceaselessly follow.

Border Collies may actually be more intelligent than your average three year old...

2004-06-13T12:39:00.000-04:00

Anyone who's seen the movie Babe probably already believed this (or at least wanted to believe) but a recent report in the journal Science by a team of German researchers (see here for a free news account) chronicles a series of experiments which demonstrate that, for at least one border collie, the language learning ability of dogs is about the same as for young children. To me this seems to bring new life to the possibilities for the working dog class: forget herding sheep, I need someone to file references.

Doubling the length of the ice core record of past climate...

2004-06-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

A consortium of european researchers have just published the preliminary steps in an analysis of an ice core recovered from Dome C in the East Antarctica (here's the paper, for which you will need a subscription to the journal Nature, and here are two perspectives on the work for which you may not). The core, over 2900 meters long so far, is notable because it extends the ice core record of past climate back from ~400,000 ybb (the current oldest ice from a core drilled at the Russian Vostok station in the East Antarctic) to ~750,000 ybp

But why is all this important? In general ice core records of the variability of past climate are valuable because they contain high resolution records of past temperature (through the variation in the isotopic composition of the ice), high resolution records of the composition of past rain water (such measurables as the ionic content of the ice), as well as samples of past atmospheres (through bubbles trapped in the ice near the surface). Ice sheets and glaciers are thus the best way we have of looking at past climates sufficiently finely in time to allow testing dynamical models of how climate works and to understand the extent to which climate may vary in the absence of human interaction.

The gist of the new portion of the record is that much of the variability in the older ice looks alot like the variability in the younger (before the influence of humans). In general the major difference appears to be that warm episodes (called interglacials) don't get as warm before 450,000 ybp, but tend to last for longer (so the avg temperature is ~the same).

The authors of the paper make the argument that the ~28,000 year period from 430,000-402,000 ybp (the first really good look at which comes from this core) is the most analogous to the Holocence (the last 14,000 years or so in which all of human history has occured and the climate has been stable enough to allow agricultural development) and therefore infer that, if humans haven't screwed things up, we might expect another 14,000 years or so of climate stability before the next ice age.

It is key to note, however, that the real point of this paper is that humans have screwed things up. We already knew that the greenhouse gas concentrations of the atmosphere are much higher (2x - 5x depending on the species) now than they have been at any time in the last 400,000 years. We now know that this is equally true of the last 750,000 years. What exactly this means for us, and what we do about it, are still open questions.

How 'moral clarity' got North Korea nuclear weapons...

2004-05-17T13:35:00.000-04:00

In a recent piece in the Washington Monthly, Fred Kaplan argues that while Iraq is a US foreign policy problem, the real problem may well be North Korea. The key here is that the North Korean problem (their probably possesion of nuclear weapons and willingness to use them as a diplomatic tool) was largely avoidable.

During the later part of the Clinton administration a package of dimplomatic concession and economic incentives convinced the North Koreans to keep spent fuel rods under lock and key (subject to international inspection) and abstain from any attempt to refine the fuel rods into weapons grade plutonium.

Kaplan argues that this all changed when the Bush administration entered office and that, within 18 months, all evidence suggests that Kim Jong-il now has enough weapons grade Plutonium to build several bombs...

The pattern of decision making that led to this debacle--as described to me in recent interviews with key former administration officials who participated in the events--will sound familiar to anyone who has watched Bush and his cabinet in action. It is a pattern of wishful thinking, blinding moral outrage, willful ignorance of foreign cultures, a naive faith in American triumphalism, a contempt for the messy compromises of diplomacy, and a knee-jerk refusal to do anything the way the Clinton administration did it.

The key point, Kaplan contends, is that the Bush administration refused to negotiation with the North Koreans. In refusing (and indeed in refusing to uphold the parameters of the agreement signed by Clinton) the Bush administration made a tense and difficult situation much, much, much more difficult. It is reasonable to ask, then, why the administration refused to negotiate or, put another way, why, when we finally return to negotiating table do we want the North Koreans to have nuclear weapons?

...Bush had no desire to negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear weapons, much less its energy needs. To Bush and those who agreed with him, this refusal was a matter of principle. Pritchard recalls reading an NSC memo early on in the Bush administration, stating this no-negotiations policy explicitly. The rationale for the policy, according to the memo: to preserve "moral clarity."

One place outsourcing could make a real difference...

2004-05-15T12:36:00.000-04:00

Holly Sklar argues (only partly tongue in cheek) that significant corporate savings could accrue if only companies outsourced their CEOs. After all...

European and Japanese CEOs run many of the world's leading companies for a lot less pay than Americans. U.S. CEOs make five times as much as CEOs in Japan, four times as much as CEOs in Spain, three times as much as CEOs in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands, and twice as much as CEOs in Germany and Switzerland.

(via Brian Leiter)

When you absolutely, positively have to write, where do you go?

2004-05-15T12:29:00.000-04:00

For the screen writer, although I suspect here you can also just substitute graduate student (at least in the humanities, the answer is a coffee shop (perferably one with good pies, big tables and a power outlet close by for the laptop). Which of course raises lots of really interesting work place health questions - aren't screen writers who spend their days typing on a lap top at a coffee shop just crying out for carpal tunnel?

Negroponte homework...

2004-05-09T15:15:00.000-04:00

This has been done all over other blogs, but for anyone who doubts that, particularly in light of the Abu Ghraib abuses, appointing John Negroponte as the ambassador to Iraq is a phenomenally, massively, galactically bad idea should just read this piece by Stephen Kinzer (from 2001 - but still very, very, very relevant).

And a Happy Mother's Day...

2004-05-09T14:59:00.000-04:00

To my mom and all others out there. In honor of the occasion the Washington Post has a photo gallery of all sorts of mothers (via Oxblog).

Bush as the willful fool...

2004-05-08T21:26:00.000-04:00

Jacob Weisberg makes an argument in Slate from a few days ago that to me just feels right. The most troubling thing about Bush, he maintains, is not the particular content of the policies he supports (although these may be troubling as well) but rather his utter disdain for all contemplation. This self-conscious avoidance of thought, the ability to never, ever meet a decision with which he truly had to wrestle, seems (and has proven to be) a pathway to inefficient policy making, poorly formulated policy and an inability to make policy decisions match the facts on the ground.

Neat and Frightening in a Star Trek Sort of Way...

2004-05-02T14:45:00.000-04:00

A recent paper in Nature (here's the article - for which you will probably rtequire a subscription - and here's a news account for which you will not) describes the work of Yaakov Beenenson and others towards a DNA computer which accepts biological input and gives biological output. These bio-in/bio-out computers are important because they fortell a world in which drugs can be treated by small molecules already circulating in the body. The basic idea is that a strand of DNA can be synthesized which reponds uniquely to a particular type of messenger RNA (perhaps those endemic to certain types of cancer). The presence of the target mRNA will trigger the DNA to respond in some tailorable way, perhaps by releasing a particular drug molecule, and thus leading to nearly the minimal dose of drugs necessary to achieve therapeutic effects.

Has Bush lost his brain?

2004-04-16T13:10:00.000-04:00

I couldn't help reacting much like the Daily Mirror to the question and answer session (link via Kevin Drum - who's got a screen shot of the print version).

On DDT, Malaria and the legacy of Silent Spring

2004-04-10T13:39:00.000-04:00

In normal life, when not blogging, I study the environment. The goal is to be a small part of forming a kind of "user's manual" for the planet so informed decisions can be made about our future. Which is all by way of saying that my profession is caring and thinking about environmental issues. For me, and others of my ilk, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring is critically important. The foundation of the american environmental movement, such as it is, Carson's book was the first to lay out the damage that man could inflict on his surroundings. Looming large in this chronicle of damage is the pesticide DDT and its effect on such things as the ability of birds to bring their offspring to term.

In today's NY Times Magazine Tina Rosenberg makes the interesting case that Carson may have been too sucessfull: that because DDT is so reviled in the US its use in small (relatively environmentall benign) quantites in developing countries is strongly discouraged. The practicaly consequence of not using DDT is simple: more people die from malaria, a lot more (the difference varies from country to country but single digit numbers of deaths when DDT is employed vs. hundreds of thousands when it is not are not uncommon). Here, I want to argue, is one case in which american environmentalists have lost their way. Chemistry shouldn't be demonized, it should be critically evaluated and, when we can without causing profound harm for our future, used to help make lives better. To just standby when deaths happen that could be easily prevented - shame on us.

Maybe American Progressives should move to Brussels...

2004-04-08T09:32:00.000-04:00

In the latest issue of the Washington Monthly Nicholas Kulish has advanced the interesting hypothesis that while the Bush administration doesn't actually listen to its own economists and the majority of its consistutents in constructing economic/trade policy it does listen to the EU. The reason behind this is that, put simply, the EU is just too large and too important to ignore. A consequence of this realization is that more and more large american corporate law firms are setting up shop in Brussels to lobby for their clients' interests. What Kulish doesn't consider in the piece, but which seems an interesting possibility is that progressive american political organizations may also set up shop to do much the same thing.

SportsCenter: The Decline and Fall

2004-04-01T04:20:00.000-05:00

If, like me, you spent significant chunks of the 1990s watching Sports Center (if you really understood the need of the Michael J. Fox character on the first season of Spin City to watch all the rebroadcasts of the Big Show in one evening because each time "he was in a different place") and have since drifted away from TV, only catching the occasional Sports Center while traveling, you've undoubtedly been a bit dissapointed. You know what I'm talking about. A sort of growing sense that maybe ESPN had passed you by: perhaps you were no longer as hip/funny/cool as you once were.

For all of us out there Matt Feeney has written just what we needed in Slate: a longish piece arguing that it isn't us who've gotten less cool, it's Sports Center. He argues that what was the epitome of both ironic distance and knowing fandom in the Olberman/Patrick years has become a sort of ghoulash of cliches and hip hop slang in 2004.

So long Jameer -

2004-03-29T04:57:00.000-05:00

So the little team that could finally loses (Nelson has his shot to tie and misses) and now (what with Xavier losing too) the NCAA is left to the big boys and I'm back to worrying that we've seen the last of Iverson in Philadelphia.

Oh well.

On the evidence of experience -

2004-03-27T10:14:00.000-05:00

In reply to a longish piece by Sasha Issenberg in Philadelphia Magazine on the intellectual poverty of New York Times columnist David Brooks Patrick Belton offers his two cents at Oxblog. Patrick knows a lot more than I do about a whole suite of really interesting and important policy issues but in this case it seems obvious that he's fallen off the rails and interestingly its for much the same reasons that Issenberg criticizes Brooks.

Let's start with the Issenberg piece. After dealing with the specifics of many of the details that appear in several Brooks pieces (and showing them to be just incorrect) Issenberg comes to the crux of the matter...

"What I try to do is describe the character of places, and hopefully things will ring true to people," Brooks explained. "In most cases, I think the way I describe it does ring true, and in some places it doesn't ring true. If you were describing a person, you would try to grasp the essential character and in some way capture them in a few words. And if you do it as a joke, there's a pang of recognition." By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it.

Of course giving readers the familiar and then asking them to recognize it could equally well be broadly construed as reconstruing readers' prejudice and asking them to recognize it. I could fill this and several other weblogs discussing in great detail why this is bad, but let's just say for now that it is a.) not informative b.) caters to the worst rather than, possibly, the best of my sensibilities and c.) is demeaning with respect to the level of insight and understanding I might bring to reading Brooks' column (possibly the greatest offense, I am insightful damn it).

In his discussion of the same piece (it almost sounds from Patrick's comments like he was reading something other that I saw) Patrick makes the case that...

Brooks isn't necessarily purveying stereotypes to his buying audience when he seizes onto status details, Tom Wolfe-like, to summon up the distinction between a secular, educated, suburban (and gentrifying-urban) liberal America on the one hand and a godly, more traditional America on the other. This is distinction most readers and commentators would, based on their lived and reflected-upon experience of American social reality, place more evidentiary faith in than in particular demographic points of information about the moment's sales of No Ordinary Time on Amazon.com. As, I think, they should. Nor is this to say that considered lived experience of social reality can't contain prejudices and biases which can and should be battered down by cannonades of evidence - only to say that something like Scottish enlightenment philosopher and epistemologist Thomas Reid's notion of common sense should also guide us in steering a path between the assumptions we live by and points of information which are adduced to challenge and demolish them.

This is deeply, deeply troubling on all sorts of levels. For brevity's sake I'll just pick two.

1. Of course Brooks doesn't necessaryily traffic in stereotypes by the act of latching onto status details (things like whether you buy your household appliances at Home Depot or at Resoration Hardware) to distinguish between social groups. He does, however, traffic in sterotypes, and this is the point Issenberg makes, if the status details are made up/wrong and chosen in such a way as to conform to readers preexisting ideas.

2. In the second paragraph cited above Patrick argues that we, all, should adapt opinions informed by experience as well as by the sort of common sense exemplified by Thomas Reid. I'm at a disadvantage here having read very little of Reid's work but I have spent some time working on how people make decisions (in an attempt to work out good ways to justify environmental protection policies) and working my way through some of the large body of work of folks like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (both psychologists although Kahneman received in the Nobel prize in Economics) on this topic. Criminally simplifying what Kahneman and Tversky showed is that human's ability to generalize from particular episode (and in the process do things like accurately evaluate risk) is just lousy. What this means for Patrick and for how Brooks writes his columns is that the individual experience is a really, really bad way to decide almost anything, whether mediated by common sense or not.

On balance I love Patrick's stuff but here... I can only think he's been addled by one of those famous Oxford fridays of debauchery.

Department of Impressive Scientists - 1. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes

2004-03-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

In the course of trying to teach myself scaling theory to understand the physics of polymer brushes (roughly theory that semi-quantitatively captures how polymer macroscopic properties change with changes in solution and/or microscopic polymer properties) I've started working my way through a small fraction of the large output of the French Noble Prize winner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. Clearly you shouldn't have to give a Noble Prize winner public acclaim (I mean in that sense what can I give that the guy doesn't have already) but I'm going to do so anyways.

Often I read articles like this one from the Boston Globe (which called de Gennes "the Isaac Newton of our time") and I think ehhh. I mean no one would suggest that Nobleists are full of it exactly, but there's a fair amount of distance between doing even really great, pheonomenally important science and Newton. The line I'm trying to draw here is this: Newton's work was remarkable both for its intellectual import but also, and perhaps more remarkably, for its almost self-evidently right quality. Reading Newton you get the sense that not only is this obviously how the world works, I would never have seen it. de Gennes has exactly this kind of talent. A talent for simplifying and universalizing: for seeing how all science really is (to paraphrase Kelvin) either physics or accounting. His is the sort of talent that all scientists think they have when they start out. Wow.

It's not too late to get on board the Jesuit bandwagon.

2004-03-26T05:32:00.000-05:00

It looks as if this, this, this, this may be the year that Geoffrey's 'system' for picking the Final Four (Jesuit schools advance unless playing teams he's seen more than once during the season) may finally pay off as the little school that could, St Joseph's University from suburban Philadelphia is still standing. I hope they continue and allow me to watch/read about college basketball for one more week without thinking I need a bath.

Oh the tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive...

2004-03-25T07:44:00.000-05:00

In the grand tradition of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction "It was a dark and stormy night..." Contest, the BBC yesterday started an exercise in fiction writing by committee (each sentence contributed by a different individual) with the only requirement being that all sentences need be cliches. The results are great, exactly what a veteran of the Bulwer-Lytton contest might have expected (BBC link via Patrick Belton and Oxblog).

Some Insights from the Tatoo Parlor...

2004-03-24T09:03:00.000-05:00

S. K. Williams "Open Letter to the Customers at the Tatoo Parlor Where I Work" sums up a lot of complicated feelings I've had on tatoos for a while. I mean, if you (a woman) are going to get a uterus tatooed on your lower belly wouldn't you at least want to make sure it was, basically, anatomically correct?

On Being an Old Fuddy Duddy (part 1):

2004-03-23T12:50:00.000-05:00

I'm 29 and have spent the lion's share of my adult life in academia (which is to say surrounded, mostly, by men and women in the 18-22 demographic). When I was an undergraduate (cast your mind back to 1992-1996) the dominant women's aesthetic was crunchy: flannel, shorts, minimal make up, everyone had a Nalgene water bottle. I've got fond memories of this sort of vibe but for the last couple of years on campus the trend seems to be almost the opposite: young women bedecked in tight tank tops, midriffs bare even in winter and shorts which a friend of mine once described as vertically challenged (which is to say wider than they are long). The logical extension of all of this is the Girls Gone Wild video series in which, I presume, otherwise really average college age women engage in all kinds of debauchery (make out sessions, masturbation...) in front of video cameras in exchange for hats and t-shirts. One of the interesting things about what I see on campus, and what the GGW videos sell from the internet portal, is that its all symptomatic of a gradual movement to do all the sorts of things feminists used to decry as derogatory toward women in the name of enpowerment. This theme and an interesting description of a night out with the GGW crew in South Beach Miami can be found, courtesy of Ariel Levy, in Slate, here.

Getting Energy from Waste Water -

2004-03-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

Bruce Logan, a professor of Civil Engineering at Penn St, has generated a lot of media hubaloo recently with a pilot version, produced with Hong Liu and Ramanathan Ramnarayanan, of a microbial fuel cell (article is here, it will require a subscription to Environmental Science and Technology). The basic idea is to run waste water through a closed fuel cell containing a consortium of microorganisms. Faced with the abundant source of organic carbon these organisms find themselves in metabolic heaven, oxidizing carbon like crazy. The key point is that the geometry of the fuel cell allows the bugs to dump the electrons from the carbon compounds onto conducting rods and to have this flow of energy removed from the cell where it can either be stored (in some other sort of battery) or immediately used to do useful work.

This is a really nice experiment. It is, however, worth noting its limitations. Basically the idea behind the work is to harvest some of the wasted energy from sewage. However, it still takes energy to produce all the things that go into sewage. Which is to say it takes energy to produce the food we eat, to heat and cool the houses we live in and to create the clothing we wear. Some of this fuel is used (e.g. as heat to keep us warm in the winter) other parts of it (e.g. food that is incompletely digested) is not. This system can, at best, just make up some small portion of this cost. It doesn't even have the potential to remove our fossil fuel dependence.

Introducing Democracy into the Middle East and why its so difficult -

2004-03-06T12:08:00.000-05:00

The sociocultural problems in Saudi Arabia have been well documented (by Robert Baer among others): a dissolute and corrupt royal family that is bleeding the country dry, no willingness to allow for any meaningful social criticism and rights for any of a large number of minorities. Less clear in much of this work, but really nicely highlighted in Elizbeth Rubin's piece in the current issue of the New York Times Magazine, is just why reform is so difficult.

Rubin argues that the modern state of Saudi Arabia was founded on a sort of devil's agreement betweent he House of Saud and the Wahhabi clerics...

The Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi clerics mutually reinforce each other's authority. It's been that way since the 18th century, when Muhammad Ibn Saud, a tribal ruler in the untamed deserts of central Arabia, struck a bargain with Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a puritanical religious reformer. They would purge Islam of the idol worshiping that had slipped into Bedouin religious practices, unify the competing tribes and conquer the Arabian peninsula. The Sauds lost and regained power over the centuries, but that religious-political covenant has endured and is the source of today's Saudi system. The royal family rules over politics, security and the economy. The clerics hold sway over things social and cultural while preaching loyalty to the ruler as one of the highest duties of the good Muslim.

So substantive reform, then, requires a sort of rewiring of the basis of the state: inventing a new state justification, and somehow managing to substitute it for the old, on the fly. Once you start to think about how truly difficult this is, the rest of the article, largely focussed on the reform efforts of the jounrnalist/activit Mansour Al-Nogaidan seem all to predictable.

A worthy cause in NYC -

2004-02-28T17:32:00.000-05:00

McSweeney's (the creation and ongoing project of Dave Eggers of A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius fame) is many things. It's a publisher of books (I picked up Nick Hornby's SongBook from them before it went main stream - still a purchase well worth making but I digress), a quarterly literary magazine, runs an excellent website and a nonprofit tutoring arm in San Fransisco (called 826 Valencia). Hot on the heels of all this they are opening up a similar tutoring arm in New York (called 826 NYC - no web site yet) for which they are holding a benefit at Symphony Space in New York on March 2nd.

Just to give you some idea of how McSweeney's approaches the tutoring arm, 826 Valencia is apparently (in addition to being a great asset for the community) the only independent (not sure exactly what this means in this context) purveyor of pirate garb in San Fransisco. How did that come about? Simple,

In San Francisco, our landlord required us to maintain a retail space. We hadn't thought of maintaining a retail space, and scrambled to come up with an appropriate theme. We knew there were no other independent pirate supply stores in San Francisco, and thus we had no choice.

So what will the retail arm of the 826 NYC do...

In Brooklyn, the storefront will sell superhero supplies.

In any case, this is a worthy cause and these guys are nothing if not clever. Stop by Symphony Space if you're in NYC on March 2nd and surely think about volunteering.

The root of electability -

2004-02-28T13:37:00.000-05:00

Geoffrey offered his (and for much the same reasons our) endorsement for John Edwards in the Democratic primary weeks ago. Imagine my (and I assume his) chagrin as Kerry's electability seems to win him more and more primaries. I'm frustrated by this on all sorts of levels; I think political campaigns would be much better (and political journalism much more interesting) if they could somehow focus on policy positions rather than political process. Another source of frustration is with the very idea of electability. I mean what is it? What does being thought of as electable actually mean? Where does this nebulous sense that a candidate is electable come from?

Since we know electability deals, more than any single other candidate attribute I can think of, with political process we can, perhaps, gain some insight into these questions by moving into the realm of the sociologist. Duncan Watts (sociologist/physicist at Columbia) argues that the pheomenon of electability is much like any other social fad. Therefore, it follows, that elecability might be understood like any other fad, as springing from the difficulty that individuals have in making good decisions (and hence our tendency to defer decision making to our perception of the collective will).

So now we know (or at least have some insight into the process). Unfortunately, I find this does little to make me much happier about candidate Kerry.

The Real Corruption in Sports -

2004-02-27T14:18:00.000-05:00

Those who care about sports out there have heard it, more or less, all before: Jamal Lewis attempting to buy cocaine, Gary Barnett running some sort of brothel/street gang at the University of Colorado, star baseball players jacked out of their minds with muscle enhancing drugs. For sheer strike at the heart of the game, nothing, it is now clear goes as far as the corruption in college flag football.

Flag football has a noble tradition of academic disloyalty. Take the squad that calls itself "Widespread Panic." In 2001, the team played for the University of New Orleans. In 2003, Widespread Panic made the tourney final as students at Nunez Community College.

These days, Nunez reigns as flag's all-powerful overlord. The 2000-student Chalmette, La., school has won three championships in five years under the stewardship of Andrew Sercovich, a 38-year-old former player who now teaches a one-credit athletic conditioning course at the school...

...In last year's flag championship game, the Nunez Pelicans and their 30-year-old quarterback David "Duke" Rousse scored a 26-7 victory over Â… the Nunez Widespread Panic. That's right: When flag football's most prestigious title was on the line, Nunez played Nunez for all the marbles. Even so, Sercovich bristles at the charge that he's running a flag football factory. He's particularly galled by accusations that his 28 players qualify by registering for a single courseÂ—Sercovich's own athletic conditioning class, which includes heavy doses of flag football theory and technique.

Iverson watch? St. Joe's!

2004-02-18T15:43:00.000-05:00

A painful thought for some: but are we watching the last days of Iverson's tenure with the Sixers? I don't have cable -- so I'm not actually one of the "we" who are watching. But I am, I suppose, one of the "we" who is wondering.

Also not watching, though wishing I were, St. Joe's still undefeated and now #2 in the country in college ball. For sentimental reasons, I always pick whichever Jesuit schools make the tournament to go far -- though last year I think I picked St. Joe's in the final four instead of Marquette's entertaining run. Maybe I was a year too soon with the Hawks??

For those that might like to use my own unorthodox picking methodology, the Jesuit schools that seem to make, or have made, the tournament are: St. Joe's, Marquette, Creighton, Georgetown, Boston College, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, St. Louis U., Santa Clara U. Have I missed any? I think Bill Russell may have won several championships while attending University of San Francisco, but that's a while ago.

Why Women Disparage Each Other's Looks -

2004-02-18T09:52:00.000-05:00

It's a setting I'm sure we're all somewhat familiar with (or at least have seen happen on movies or TV). The group of women in the bathroom at a club or restaurant who are disparaging the looks of some other woman who is usually still outside (of course in the movies I watch the one still outside ends up overhearing the comments but overcomes this peer adversity and eventually gets the guy -- I know I'm a bit of a sap). It turns out that this impulse to disparage the looks of other women may be an evolutionarily selected trait.

In a study recently released in the Royal Society's Biology Letters Maryanne Fisher reports an experiement in which one group of women were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of a group of photographs of other women. Fisher found that women tend to find other women least attractive at times during their menstrual cycle that correlate with greatest fertility. She speculates that this disparaging might help increase the odds that a given woman would be most likely to reproduce.

Men showed no such cyclicity in their evaluation of the looks of other women.

Brooks Smack Down -

2004-02-18T09:32:00.000-05:00

In an entirely nonquantitative, purely subjective way I haven't been that impressed with David Brooks' tenure on the Op-Ed page at the New York Times. To me about 1/2 of the stuff he writes seems to make sense, 1/3 of it is wrong and the remainder seems (at best) delusional.

His latest effort is a nice representative of the just wrong class. As David Adesnik points out over at OxBlog the article seems to over estimate the moral content of Reagenite foreign policy (good democracy promotion, lousy human rights) and just misconstrue the Carter legacy (Brooks argues, basically, that Carter employed a lot of mush about root causes without a cogent plan).

To me the Carter error seems much more egregious (Reagen comes out OK in the assessment after all). As David points out, Carter, more than any other president in the last 35 years, injected morality into foreign policy. More than anything else, this moral dimension was at the core of what he did as President and of the life he's lived since. I miss it.

Apologies for Light Posting -

2004-02-18T09:16:00.000-05:00

I've been busy the last week or so taking my comprehensive exam (the last exam ever unless, you know, this whole science thing doesn't work out and I end up being a lawyer). In any case, more normal posting should be back now.

I still believe in miracles...

2004-02-08T18:47:00.000-05:00

It was always unlikely that a kid growing up in New York City was going to be a bobsledder or a ski jumper (which of course didn't stop me from wanting them). But it's still possible to dream big...

If you used to imagine yourself hitting the World Series winning home run, or skiing the fastest downhill or nailing the dismount in gymnastics, or even if you had some entirely different dream, the movie Miracle is great. If you think you used to do these things but just don't remember, see the movie and you'll start to remember a little bit of what it felt like and maybe dream again.

Bolivia in trouble

2004-02-06T12:56:00.000-05:00

The situation in Bolivia, where I spend six months in 2001, deteriorated badly over 2003. This culminated in the resignation of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (Goni), after a well-publicized, violent uprising in La Paz and the adjacent ghetto-city El Alto sparked by a plan to export natural gas to the U.S. through a proposed pipeling running through neighboring Chile. The most dramatic (possibly apocryphal) moment within these events was when a military officer executed on the spot one of his servicemen who refused to fire on the protesting civilians. In total, an estimated 70 people died.

One of the key figures in Bolivian politics is Evo Morales, the indigenous leader of the coca growers trying to form a coalition of the long-disenfranchised indigenous. Among other things, cocaleros constitute the poorest of the poor in Bolivia. Their profession has been targeted by US efforts at staunching narco-terrorism. This has included US military and DEA presence, aid to the ongoing Bolivian militarization of coca-growing regions, and alternative development funds for farmers to plant crops such as bananas, pineapple and the like. By and large, farmers are still impoverished, with many having lost access to the only cash crop -- coca -- that sustained them. As Slate reports, they have found the market for alternative crops saturated, meaning prices have fallen, and no rich countries have stepped up to create the requisite favorable export conditions that could make these crops economically viable. This deterioration in standard of living has added to the country's instability.

Compounding the situation are austerity measures that the current government must enact to remain solvent, service international debt and attract the foreign investment that could eventually spur a recovery. Any additional taxes or cuts in domestic spending that impact the poor are likely to kindle further rounds of violence and protest within this disastrous country.

All of which is a complete and total shame, because Bolivia is one of the most precious places on Earth, and the people are the kindest and most open I've encountered in my travels. It is a country of 8.5 million now, with perhaps another 4 million Bolivians in the diaspora.

Running through Death Valley

2004-02-04T10:51:00.000-05:00

The doc. film Running on the Sun is about an annual 135-mile race beginning 282 feet below sea level at Badwater in Death Valley National Park and ending 8,360 feet up Mt. Whitney. In the book To the Edge, a NY Times report named Kirk Johnson wrote his account of training for and completing the event. If you complete the thing in 48 hours, you get a belt buckle. The men's record is a little over 25 hours, just under 28 hours for the women. In 2002 and 2003, the overall event was won by Pam Reed, the women's record holder.

Among many other observations, watching this film (and to a less visual extent, reading the book) gives one a distinct appreciation for foot care. I've never seen such large blisters.

Apropos plants detecting land mines, that would have come in handy for Badwater finisher Chris Moon, who lost most of his right leg and arm while working for an NGO clearing landmines in Mozambique. He was running to raise money for a charity working with mine survivors.

For the Cod Lovers Out There...

2004-02-04T10:36:00.000-05:00

I'm desperately trying to acquire a taste for salted cod (its a long story). It would appear that my plight is common for Americans.

Retractable endorsement: Edwards

2004-02-02T18:41:00.000-05:00

I've now been on and off a few bandwagons. And I've jumped onto John Edwards' within the last few days.

Within my lifetime, Republicanism has generally proffered a negative domestic message: that the government is not "us" and that less of it is better because it is in our way, takes what is rightfully ours, etc. (Reagan, W) Democrats have surmounted this stigma, however, when they have sold the inspiring qualities of social investment and social equity that good policy can yield. (Clinton, Kennedy).

In that light, Democrats might consider worrying less about finding a candidate with a heroic military record than about finding a candidate able to communicate well with constituents, especially around invoking a positive vision for social development and a robust sense of fairness.

Republicans were aided politically by 9/11, because they controlled the executive, but I would imagine that some of this will be mitigated by the struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the persistance of terror threats, bin Laden at large, and the fact of a diminished American standing in the world (all the worse squandered after 9/11's goodwill-fest). A savvy Democrat could point to all of those and respectfully wonder if we can afford any more of this kind of "success". It's not who could have protected the country that is the fundamental issue (yet-to-be-released 9/11 report notwithstanding, an open society cannot evade these risks); it's what has been done in the interim.

Any election for Democrats will come down to convincing people that we really deserve better from (an ostensibly democratic) government by, for, and of the people. Implicit is the case that we have been hoodwinked into thinking that this was as good as we could hope it to be, that it has therefore become as bad as we allowed (at least, on the view of the Paul Krugman's of the world to which, truthfully, I'm not immune). The question is who delivers that message best and motivates people to tune in and maybe turn out.

A hint: it's not Kerry, Clark, Lieberman, or Dean. Reserving the right to retract, of course, I think it's Edwards.....

Plants Detecting Land Mines (yes really!) -

2004-02-01T11:37:00.000-05:00

One of the relics of conflicts long stopped are land mines. Even long after the fighting has stopped some places are unlivable because cleaning up land mines is slow, dangerous and expensive. Researchers at the Danish company Aresa have have devised a new, and potentially inexpensive way of accomplishing this difficult task. The new method hinges on the observation that landmines give off nitrogen dioxide. Nitrogen dioxde is converted to molecular nitrogen in the roots of some plants. The difficulty is that this conversion usually leaves no visible change in the plant. The Aresa researchers, then, took a naturally existing form of thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) and genetically engineered it so that the biochemical machinery which causes the leaves to turn red (typically happening in the fall) would instead happen when the roots are exposed to nitrogen dioxide. The idea is that fields could be seeded with Arabidopsis thaliana and then left. Returning in several months, land mine disposal technicians could then go right to the areas where red Arabidopsis had grown and remove the land mines.

Outsourcing again...

2004-01-31T12:28:00.000-05:00

I'm not up to speed on the outsourcing literature but I several points jumped (fell) out at me from Geoffrey's post below...

3) Amazing, too, how much more sympathetic people are when a job is lost to a foreigner versus to a machine. The huge increases in productivity made possible by IT, mechanization and other technological upgrades have always cost jobs, but few claim that we should role back that process analogous to protectionist arguments for roling back outsourcing.

I assume the first sentence is a bit of a typo: he intended to write "Amazing, too, how much less sympathetic people are when a job is lost to a foreigner than a machine." Beyond that, though, I think this is a good point. There seems to be no good reason why one type of productivty gain (job loss) should be seen as OK, or even good, while another should create such problems.

5) Not noted in the article, but perhaps as important, is expanding the base of shareholders, or owners of assets, within our economy. Many of the dividends of outsourcing accrue to these parties, so finding ways to distribute those benefits to a wider investing class would seem valuable. Wealth building strategies, such as targeted increased incentives for personal saving and investment, or perhaps the use of employee stock options triggered by outsourcing's productivity gains, might enable greater numbers of individuals here to profit. I wonder if it's possible to "protect" our workers not by cravenly holding onto jobs in a way that makes businesses less competitive and less capable of achieving the very success we want for them, but by making more owners out of our workers in the first place. There asset would be a useful hedge against potential disrupted employment.

In theory I think this idea is fine, in practice bogus. The basic problem is that you (an employee) needs a lot of equity in a company before this equity can be a significant hedge against job loss. Put another way, the amount of money I need to invest before my investment income exceeds my wage income is really significant. Stock options, unless you're a programmer at an early internet company, seem unlikely to match what most middle class folks mage in wages.

Anti-globalization has lost its voice while Outsourcing Roars?

2004-01-30T15:37:00.000-05:00

Tom Friedman writes that the Davos World Economic Forum was devoid of protesters' chaos this year for the first time in several years. This, he posits, is because developing countries (led by India and China) are beginning to grow quickly through economic integration and their own globalization in a way the anti-globalizers could never create through any alternative growth strategy.

Despite always sympathizing with the worries of the protesters, I feel like they are ultimately on the wrong side of this stuff: no matter how much the majority of the protesters decried the homogeneity of global capitalism or the assault on indigenous ways of life that seemed more dignified (in their poverty), it was never forgivable to promote policies that would deny countries the ability to secure a better life for their citizens through more and better jobs. Pieces of the anti-globalization agenda, such as debt forgiveness, concerns over the extension of intellectual property, protectionism in developed countries (see agribusiness) and concerns over the ability of poor countries to selectively protect emergent business sectors rather than throwing them to the wolves of global competition, these ideas were never misplaced. But too often, the movement for these important freedoms
(for which the fight need continue) got shunted into an anti-development rhetoric that was perversely paternalistic, not to mention at cross-purposes with their intention of constraining some of the power of developed economies in developing countries. As Nicolas Kristoff has noted in the Times, even "sweatshops" is a more complicated issue than the do-good multiculturalism of the anti-globalizers would allow. In this case, more "sweatshops" (or, if you prefer, a factory job attached to a definite wage) might be a good thing. Especially when compared with the typical life working to death while salvaging on a garbage heap.

I won't celebrate the silence of anti-globalizers. They have an important position and their presence has made a great deal of difference from the international institutions on down -- even if their theoretical position is at odds with the best chance for the global South. If anything, Friedman's point underscores how much of a difference it makes to global discourse when greater numbers of people share in the economic opportunity that the world's economy is able to generate.

Outsourcing is terrific?!

2004-01-30T13:37:00.000-05:00

Clay Risen's most recent piece in The New Republic describes the current handwringing over increasing number of service industry and high tech skill positions migrating to developing countries. Politicians have begun to debate and demagogue this issue. He argues that things are not likely to turn out as bad as is being made out. Several points:

1) The IT industry was clamoring for more H1 visas for high-skilled foreigners for most of the Tech boom. There were numerous reports about a shortage of Americans qualified to fill such positions, nor did companies presumably mind foreigners' willingness to work as entry-level programmers at somewhat discounted wages. At the same time, as is pointed out, it's not at all clear that the pace of outsourcing during those years was any slower than it is now. In both cases, it's amazing how fear changes everything. When you're worried the pie is shrinking, all perspective goes out the window.

2) At the end of the article a comparison is drawn between the likely effects of a protectionist U.S. and the restrictive employment zones and aging populace of developed European economies. Such policies may lead to higher unemployment and economic stagnation in the medium to long run.

1) and 2) make me think that interesting work could be done around the connection between immigration policies, trade policies and growth/unemployment.

3) Amazing, too, how much more sympathetic people are when a job is lost to a foreigner versus to a machine. The huge increases in productivity made possible by IT, mechanization and other technological upgrades have always cost jobs, but few claim that we should role back that process analogous to protectionist arguments for roling back outsourcing.

4) Obviously replacing lost wages in the short term and worker (re)training afterward is important, and Clay's inclusion of a policy proposal to require, as with unemployment compensation, that outsourcing companies contribute to some of these costs seems sensible.

5) Not noted in the article, but perhaps as important, is expanding the base of shareholders, or owners of assets, within our economy. Many of the dividends of outsourcing accrue to these parties, so finding ways to distribute those benefits to a wider investing class would seem valuable. Wealth building strategies, such as targeted increased incentives for personal saving and investment, or perhaps the use of employee stock options triggered by outsourcing's productivity gains, might enable greater numbers of individuals here to profit. I wonder if it's possible to "protect" our workers not by cravenly holding onto jobs in a way that makes businesses less competitive and less capable of achieving the very success we want for them, but by making more owners out of our workers in the first place. There asset would be a useful hedge against potential disrupted employment.

Last Summer's European Heat Wave and Why Global Warming Might Not Be the Big Problem -

2004-01-28T11:47:00.000-05:00

Last summer was one of the hottest in Europe in recent memory (about six degrees hotter than the average from 1960-1990) and the heat had all sorts of consequences -- not the least among which were the deaths of thousands of French citizens (mostly elderly). One school of thought might suggest that this heatwave is an inevitable consequence of global warming: that with globally averaged warming we should expect to see, you know, warm weather.

Christoph Schar and others claim this just isn't true. They argue that, even if you account for the general warming trend, you can only explain last summer's heat wave if the climate system is getting more variable while it warms m(see Reuter's story here . The paper is available here (it unfortunately requires a subscription to the journal Nature)).

So why is this important? While global warming gets alot of the press its important to remember that it's always globally averaged warming. Clearly humans don't live in a globally averaged world (perhaps unless your a business type who spends all his time travelling - in which case you probably principally experience the climate of office buildings/airplanes) so what we'd really like to know is what happens to local climate while the globe is warming. Schar's paper argues that what's happening to the climate now, and what will likely happen to the climate increasingly often in the future, is an increase in variability: on average warmer but a substantial increase in both really hot and really cool days. If this is true it has critical consequences. If you're a retailer trying to predict what sort of clothes you will stock for the winter clearly you'd like to have some sense of whether the winter will be blamy or bitterly cold. If you sell heating oil you may go bankrupt if you guess wrong and purchase a lot of oil during a particularly warm year. If you're a farmer, clearly a climate that oscillates substantially from year to year makes it much more difficult to decide what would be appropriate to plant. The list goes on, but you get the idea. Even though the U.S. economy isn't agrarian climate influences it in all sorts of ways. And mostly what's bad are the same sorts of events Schar thinks are already happening: strong year to year variability.

Why US foreign policy in Iraq is much more difficult than most in the administration admit...

2004-01-25T17:10:00.000-05:00

Blogger Juan Cole (who spends most of his time as Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the University of Michigan) wrote an excellent piece on the Iraqi Shiites last fall. The gist is that there are fairly good historical/cultural reasons why the Iraqi Shiites (supposedly the linchpin of the administration's policy in the Middle Eaat) may be bad US allies.

I'm getting off my cell phone right now!!!! -

2004-01-22T09:56:00.000-05:00

According to these Swedish researchers talking on a cell phone for as short a time as two hours produced brain damage in rats (link via Chris Genovese).

The Distance Between Priests and Laity in the Catholic Church -

2004-01-21T17:03:00.000-05:00

Based on survey work he conducted over the past 20 years, Andrew Greeley (priest and sociologist) argues in this months Atlantic Monthly that the american priesthood is characterized by two intersecting social phenomen...

1. A younger priesthood, which came of age in a post Vatican II world, who is relatively conservative/reactionary (i.e. believes strongly in the importance of clerical authority and is socially conservative).

2. A priesthood which is generally distant from the concerns of the laity. The money quote along these lines...

Priests as a group are simply not in touch with the laity. In the 2002 Los Angeles Times study only thirty-six of 1,854 priests identified clericalism as one of the major problems facing the Church's laity. Astonishingly, only forty-seven priests thought the sex-abuse scandals worth mentioning. For some reason, priests of all generations are unable or unwilling to see the clergy as responsible for the departure of disaffected laypersons—a problem that today plagues the U.S. Church.

To explain the laity's dissatisfaction with the Church, priests from all generations tend to trot out the usual litany: individualism, materialism, secularism, lack of faith, lack of prayer, lack of commitment, media bias, hedonism, sexual freedom, feminism, family breakdown, lack of education, and apathy. The advantage of such explanations is that they free priests from any personal responsibility and put the blame on factors over which the clergy cannot be expected to exercise much control. The rectory thus becomes an isolated citadel battered by cultural forces, which encourages precisely the sort of closed, band-of-brothers mentality that the Vatican II reforms were designed to break down.

I went to a Jesuit high school (Jesuit's being historically liberal Catholic priests) from 1988-1992 and observed the first point then: younger priests tended to be relatively dogmatic and socially conservative, older ones the opposite. The second point is much more complex, but I think, something I have felt since numerous sexual harassment charges against priest started surfacing as well. I felt then that if only the church could have made an institutional admission of guilt, coupled, perhaps with internal sociological studies to try and understand whether something in the culture of the priesthood was causing the problem, that much of the anguish of the laity could have been avoided. It's tough, even now, at least for me, to see anything but Greeley's "band of brothers" in the Catholic hierarchy and it seems a tragic waste.

Annals of Philanthropy 1. -

2004-01-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

I dislike what McDonald's (and fast food franchises more generally) has done to american cultural life but the money the Krocs made has sure been well spent. Most recently it became clear that Joan Kroc (who died last fall) has left 1.5 billion dollars to the Salvation Army. This is great.

Driving Across the Tundra -

2004-01-16T13:00:00.000-05:00

Artic oil exploration and extraction is conducted (mostly) over seasonal roads of ice. In theory this allows construction of the infrastructure necessary to get oil out of the ground and too market without the ecological consequences of really long roads.

In what is one of the larger ironies of the new year (yes I know it's a young year but I expect this one to stick around) global warming (which is particularly acute at high latitudes), presumably caused by increased oil consumption, seems to lead to a smaller season in which the ice roads are solid and, thus, oil can be extracted. If you're pro oil exploration, but just interested in minimizing its impacts, you're obviously interested in developing criteria to understand the influence of vehicles on tundra. This effort has lead to some interesting (but bloody cold) work in the artic which made it into a recent New York Times here.

Challenges to contemporary ethics in no particular order (almost none of which will be addressed by the academy)

2004-01-14T16:42:00.000-05:00

Perhaps Our Take will develop some kind of preliminary primer on the following:

1) Business ethics. Corporate governance is just one issue. The whole foundation of a shareholder system in which owners’ liability is limited, growth is emphasized over profits, and workers share unequally in the profits needs to be analyzed and challenged.

2) All science-related ethics. Just because we can, should we? And whose responsibility is it to ensure that someone is performing research that tackles the problems of the day? There are risks when technical know-how outpaces normative understanding, or when understanding takes a back seat to current deleterious practices, or when public health is not understood as a public trust.

3) Global vs. local. An eternal conundrum in practical ethics, perhaps, but somehow this seems a more urgent question in a rapidly globalizing, post terror-attacks-within-the-United-States world. In any event, many of today’s policy questions hearken directly back to this nagging issue.
a. Ethical content of proximity? Is the guy on my street corner more worthy of concern than a guy in Cambodia? What about 10 Cambodians?
b. Statecraft and the basis for a just society. Where should the idea of sovereignty be headed? Is the state the appropriate guarantor of human rights and opportunity? Special status/obligations for superpowers?
c. Open society vs. security?
d. Protectionism vs. Free trade (our workers/farmers or theirs? Or, how the world will look once everyone’s exploited, all exotic vacation spots look eerily the same, and none of us have social security? Just kidding. This is a big issue, also linked to (1) I think.)
e. Environmental protection and/or labor standards vs. development and/or profit/rising standard of living?

4) The ethics of planning for the future and making up for lost time. What do we owe future generations? To what extent are we obligated to right past wrongs even if we really didn't have much say in the matter at the time?

Climate Change and Future Extinction -

2004-01-13T17:42:00.000-05:00

Based mostly on empirical observations of species density in existing habitat, Chris Thomas and others have offered (through three different methods) model results which suggest 18-35% of extant species may be extinct (or irreversibly commited toward extinction) in the next fifty years (see also this perspective on the research appearing in the same issue of Nature). These are big numbers and further butress my suggestion, in response to Michael Crichton, that there is a compelling social interest in mitigating climate change.

As might be expected the Thomas paper has been the subject of a lot of controversey. Some of the relevant issues have already been raised in this excellent post by Carl Zimmer. I'll flesh out a few more of the relevant issues in subsequent posts.

Michael Crichton: a well meaning guy gone astray on consensus science and our changing climate...

2004-01-08T09:07:00.000-05:00

Several days ago Glenn Reynolds linked to a talk Michael Crichton had given at Caltech early last year. The same talk was quoted by George Taylor over at TechCentralStation late last month. So what gives? Why the sudden run on Crichton in these libertarian quarters?

Crichton's speech, called Aliens Cause Global Warming (a kind of cute title which made global warming skeptical types much more likely to cite the speech), is a rebellion against the notion of consensus science. He views such science as the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and predictions of nuclear winter as cases in which policy goals managed to intrude into the realm of science before (or in the absence of) any factual knowledge. This fundamental dishonesty, construing issues about which uncertainty exists as definite, profoundly hurts both science and the relationship between science and the larger culture in which it is immersed. Global warming comes into the picture because he views it as the intellectural progeny of SETI and nuclear winter science: special interest groups/desirable policy aims have succeeded in politicizing the scientific playing field to such a degree that individuals who dispute global warming scenarios are professionally demonized.

Where to begin...

I take large issue with the specifics of Crichton's claims regarding the degree to which we know humans are warming the globe. I don't want to address that here, though, mostly because you can hear that argument elsewhere too (David Appell spent a large chunk of this fall posting on some of these related issues). The point I do want to make lies in Crichton's ignorance of probabilities.

First, though, an admission. Intellectually honest (as in my experience are most) climate scientists tell you that we don't know what the climate is going to do. We certainly don't understand the climate as well as mechanical engineers understand, e.g., how to build a house that doesn't fall down. There's fairly good reasons why this is so which can be boiled down to two main points: 1. The climate is much more complicated than a house. 2. We have only one of them so we can't experiement with the climate and gain some empirical sense of how it behaves (or rather we can - we're doing it right now -- but it's slow and we can really only do it once).

The question, then, is given what we know about the physics and chemistry of the earth's surface is there reason to think that it's possible that we're changing the climate? Is there reason to think that the fashion in which we're changing the climate is serious enough to demand policy changes? Serious in this context can mean two things: firstly whether the changes we can induce are large enough in magnitude to matter and secondly whether they're abrupt enough to matter. Clearly our choice of the correct policy response to changing climate has to hinge on some evaluation of these two questions: a strong policy reponse to global warming might be justified if the harm were very likely, but only moderate magnitude, or if the harm were less likely but the consequences much more serious. This logic is the same sort of logic that underlies insurance premiums. We pay the same sort of premium (roughly) for protection against a really serous hazard that is relatively unlikely (e.g. hurricaine induced property damage in Virginia) as for a less serious hazard which is much more likely (e.g. a car accident).

Look. Crichton's right that scientists should never stop asking questions (there are no facts in science after all, just theory which agrees with observation). But this doesn't mean we shouldn't take out insurance on our changing planet. This doesn't mean we shouldn't ackowledge that humans have it pretty good (climate wise) for the last 10,000 years and that it is in our interest to keep it that way.

MORE LINKS: For years climate change skepticists contended that most climate change was too slow to concern humans (thousands of years). Thankfully that view has now mostly been put to rest through examination of chemical records of climate change over the last 450,000 years (changes of large magnitude 5-30 degrees C happen in decades). Much of that work is summarized in a National Academy of Sciences report available here (pay no attention to the purchase options, you can print out the book chapter by chapted after clicking on the link if you'd like).

Dept of Earth Shattering Revelations: 1. Skipping Stones -

2004-01-06T08:45:00.000-05:00

Let's say you wanted to skip a stone. Let's say you wanted to set a new world record for number of skips (let's just further say, while we're saying, that your ambition is limited). You might be curoius as to what is the best angle for your stone to strike the water. If you had access to some resources one thing you might do is to build a machine which would fire metal (stone like) disks at a tank of water at different angles or velocities and monitor the results. Christophe Clanet and friends did so and found that 20 degrees is the magic angle.

It might be fair to ask, in light of this empirical revelation, what's actually going on here. Clanet et al. don't have a theoretical argument that explains the 20 degrees but it is clear that this angle allows a stone to hit the water for the least amount of time (they measured this with a high speed video camera). Hitting for the smallest time period allows less of the stones energy to dissipate with each collision, therefore giving it more energy to continue moving parallel to the water and into skipping glory.

UPDATE: Chris Genovese writes about the same paper here with a couple of interesting extra links.

Just when I thought I wouldn't read NRO -

2004-01-01T15:19:00.000-05:00

I get suckered in by a link from Oxblog who are tooting their own horn (but I enjoy their stuff so I think they should) to Dennis Boyles Europress Review Best of 2004 column. The key part of the column , at least from my point of view, comes at the end under the generic heading The worst's best. The worst's best is, apparently, the BBC car show Top Gear. I don't see this show in central Pennsylvania but after checking out the show's web site and Boyles' description (follows below) I'm now a believer...

...One recent program had British scientists doing tire burns — "the smartest men in Britain doing the dumbest thing known to man" or something similar — and another was devoted to testing the durability of a Toyota pickup — the sort of trucks that, fitted with a set of wooden grates, serve as public transport in much of Africa. The Toyota was bought used for a song, and looked it. It was then driven into a tree, down a set of concrete steps, tied to a boat ramp, washed out to sea, left on the sandy beach when the tide went out, and set afire. After each event, the truck started up and ran. Finally, the thing was parked atop a high-rise building, which was then demolished. When the dust cleared, the Toyota drove off into legend...

Some Advice to Paul Bremer -

2004-01-01T12:35:00.000-05:00

Michael Degnan has some advice for Paul Bremer at McSweeney's. His key insight is that it would be easier to govern Iraq effectively if someone temporarily installed a despot in the US (we can switch back to democracy later). His argument is a bit more empirically based than most on this issue.

The American Disease (or just another reason why I don't read NRO that often) -

2003-12-30T19:31:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson's latest piece in National Review Online argues that, loosely, leftist elitists are out of touch with the situation on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq. That they (and by extension I suppose all of us) should be highly approving of this administrations military effort and quit their ceasless carping. Unpacking the multiple reasons why this piece is just bizarre would take most of the evening (and the world of iron oxide surface chemistry awaits me) but I just want to concentrate on one section I found particularly bizarre...

...We don’t need Osama bin Laden’s preschool jabbering about “the weak horse” to be worried about the causes of this Western disease: thousands of the richest, most leisured people in the history of civilization have become self-absorbed, ungracious, and completely divorced from the natural world — the age-old horrific realities of dearth, plague, hunger, rapine, or conquest....Neither (Paul Krugman nor a French lawyer Hanson saw on TV) knows what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein or how hard it is to go across the world to Tikrit and chain such a monster.

This section (representative of the article as a whole) is just wrong in two ways.

1. The juevenile way. I'm guessing (at least according to the various biographies available online) that Hanson has absolutely no experience with death, plague, hunger, rapine, conquest or what it is like to be in a village gassed by Saddam Hussein. Any issue taken with Paul Krugman for not having experienced these things is an issue Hanson should have with himself. To imply otherwise just isn't true.

2. The adult way. The truth is that even if we haven't actually experienced all of these things we should be able to speak meaningfully about them (e.g. I speak meaningfully about atoms all the time in my professional life (as do millions of scientists) but none of us have ever experienced them). Even if Hanson thinks removing Hussein and the Taliban from power was a good thing this does not absolve Hanson from the reponsibility of addressing process critiques (e.g. we're doing it the wrong way, we're doing it in a way that will ultimately lead to undesirable outcomes). To allow partisan invective as a substitute for argument, to allow hysteria to overcome rationality, is reprehensible. If this is what Hanson teaches his students I'm glad I was educated elsewhere.

Trade and Outsourcing

2003-12-30T13:23:00.000-05:00

Judging by holiday conversation with the family, and various print media articles, there is now a growing unease over the outsourcing not only of nearly all manufacturing jobs, but now an increasing number of service jobs. Some, in what is surely an example of poor coinage, are taking to calling the phenomenon Wal-Martization. The key is a willingness to decrease costs across the entire supply chain, including seeking lower labor costs in developing economies.

Never have we had so much reason to rue the British empire, I suspect, as Indian programers and customer service call centers steal rightful American work.

Although I'm less concerned about this, it is not because I secretly burn for laissez-faire. Rather, I believe that there is a price to international development in the short- to medium-term. We should be open and strategic about this cost, how it ought to be borne, where the benefits will arise, and how they ought to be ultimately distributed.

I have two thoughts.

First, organizing labor in developing countries is an important task. At the Seattle WTO developing countries banded together to reject core labor standards proposed by the US and others, claiming that this was protectionism in disguise. I'm not sure, but this may have been shortsighted on the part of developing countries in the sense that it will be that much harder for these nations to regulate big business on their own in the face of the explicit threat that increasing the cost of production in their own country will lead the business to move the production elsewhere. They would rather have low-paying jobs than nothing, naturally. But at the same time, these countries are not seeing very much more of the profits than the meager wages paid out. Shareholders are the ones who are profiting. Development will only happen if countries (and ideally the workers themselves) are able to retain a greater share of the profits. Organizing labor in the global world is not just a struggle against management, it's a redistributive struggle against shareholders (like me) who have fattened up on the benefits of globalization. It may be true that organizing or labor standards will lead to further shifts in production; but if middle-class mobility can be salvaged from working class industrial jobs, there is the chance to level the field without participating in a race to the bottom.

The second thought is that this outsourcing is maybe not so terrible. There are good reasons to feel happy that the poorer places on earth may be able to do more to feed, clothe, provide employment, and educate their citizens. Further, I would argue, we have no right in this or any country to a lifestyle beyond a certain standard of living (at least, that's what our social safety net including welfare, unemployment compensation, social security, health care, etc. would argue). We have been conditioned, perhaps, to believe that each generation must do better than the previous, but in theory there are plenty of people who could do a fair bit worse and still not be suffering, no? The theory is not entirely persuasive, I realize, because at least some of those people are not the ones who stand to lose anything if more jobs leave the US, because their standard of living may be more secure. But the theory is still instructive in a kind of fundamental way.

The pragmatic argument is that any loss of jobs or transfer of income through outsourcing in the short-term is an investment in development that will eventually lead to the creation of middle-classes and social mobility in other countries. The expectation would be that as emerging markets grow, so does their ability to provide employment. US businesses have long dreamed of China's opening in order to access 1 billion more potential customers, but without money, with what will the Chinese buy all of our great stuff? Increasing standards of living likely will mean that everyone, globally, will benefit from the rise in commerce as more people queu up to buy goods and services, but it will also lead to greater social expectations in developing countries around the type of employment and the kinds of opportunities open to individuals of those societies. Trans-national migration patterns will change as well.

The point is that this income transfer is happening. We can treat it as money lost, but in that case it will likely be lost even if we revert to protectionism which would shrink our economy without protecting the folks who need the protection. Or we can treat it like an investment, and strategically plan to develop value in order to augment the return. We have an interest in avoiding the race to the bottom because it's morally bankrupt, but also because sweatshops and the like are not a terribly efficient way to create value (middle classes in developing countries are a better bet than hoping American demand and cheap labor can keep Gap shares going up 8%, or whatever it does). It's kind of like drilling for oil in the ANWR to alleviate dependence on foreign oil.

Movie Awards

2003-12-29T19:28:00.000-05:00

I like movies. This appreciation has dimmed only somewhat in the last several years by watching a few too many in a theatre from which it is possible to hear thumping dance beats from a next door bar. I have, however, never really understood movie awards. Who gives them out? Should we care about any of them? There's an answer to, at least, the first of these questions in Slate's Explainer here.

Why you should be careful about investing in Italian companies -

2003-12-28T18:13:00.000-05:00

I'm going to go out on a limb here (I have no particular expertise in finance but I want to emphasize that this is a limb on which I feel particularly comfortable standing). Is it possible that when Parmalat can falsely claim the existence of a bank account containing 4 billion dollars in assets that there are regulatory problems?

To the mothership -

2003-12-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

We're returning to the mothership for a few days - back on the 27th.

One way to stop the spread of disease -

2003-12-21T12:17:00.000-05:00

Reuven Cohen and others (see the news story here and the article here - although the article will probably require a subscription to Physical Review Letters) have recently published a novel take on the best way for public health officials to combat the spread of disease.

Human social networks (as anyone who has read Malcom Gladwells The Tipping Point knows) tend to be organized in a sort of hub and spoke network (described technically as 'scale free' since there is no characteristic number of times any one person is connected to others). Clearly if you could vaccinate just the hubs you would be able to stop the spread of disease efficiently. The problem, until now, has always been trying to figure out who were the hubs.

Cohen and friends suggest doing so by asking individuals for a list of their friends and then randomly innoculating the individuals on the list. The idea is that the hubs (those highly connected indivudals we wish to innoculate) will have many more friendships and will thus stand a reasonably large chance of getting innoculated.

On Conflict of Interest in Medical Research -

2003-12-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

Antony Barnett makes the case that some significant portion of the papers that appear in medical journals espousing the benefits of a particular drug treatment are not, in fact, written by the doctors whose name appear as authors on the paper. Instead they are written by medical writers in the employ of pharmaceutical companies whose drugs appear in the paper and the titular authors of the paper are then somehow compensated. Typically no acknowledgement is made of this gargantuan conflict of interest and the readers of the medical journal, and by extension us (their patients), are no wiser.

If indeed Barnett's case is true (as it seems to be in at least a few instances) this is a really disturbing development. Obviously these sorts of biased articles could have very real (and adverse) effects on patient care. Understanding the degree to which this practice is widespread is much more difficult. Barnett suggests that at least hundreds of articles have been so tainted. However he doesn't offer any source for this number, or, to be fair, any reason to think its not far more or less. While the number of such tainted papers has to be of critical concern to any potential medical patient (is the entire profession bought and paid for or just some small parts?), from a professional point of view even one such case makes clear the need to have strong institutional sanctions for such behviour: journals should refuse to publish papers from authors so tainted and professional bodies should revoke their licenses to practice medicine.

Is Power Point Making us Dumber? -

2003-12-17T12:09:00.000-05:00

Clive Thompson poses this question in a recent NY Times article and its a good one (I mean I'm as much of a fan of asserting Microsoft has a huge negative sociocultural influence as anyone). The thesis of the, admittedly brief, article seems to be that Power Point requires that its users ruthlessly cut their material and that, in so doing, requires users to present a massively over simplified view of reality. This may have particular consequences if the presentation at issue is about something important (e.g. whether we should invade Iraq).

Reading the piece though it seems clear that most of the criticisms Thompson levels towards Power Point aren't really about that software per se (for one thing any other presentation software would certainly suffer from the same limitations) but rather about how bad oral presentations are at conveying information in general and nuanced/subtle information in particular. It is a fact, as noted by the Microsoft rep that Thompson quotes but doesn't seem to really believe, that Power Point allows you to create slides of arbitrary complexity. People tend not to for the simple reason that it is difficult to absorb information through hearing a spoken presentation (this is why educational theorists tend to rally against the use of the lecture in higher education). So if you want your listeners to get anything out of your presentation, you have to keep it simple.

As much as it pains me to say it, the sort of cognitive problems that Thompson is alluding to don't seem to have much to do with Power Point. But they do seem to have a lot to do with people choosing to give lectures rather than, e.g., write books.

Strom Thurmond: Hypocrite and Liar -

2003-12-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

Stuart Benjamin has an interesting post over at the Volokh Conspiracy highlighting the fact that a 22 year old Strom Thurmond had a sexual relationship with a then 16 year old African-American woman who worked as a maid in his parents house. The relationship produced a child for whom Strom never cared but who's silence he bought by low grade financial support. The post 22 year old Strom built his political career, at least in part, on his belief in the unalloyed racial superiority of white folk and attempts to avoid the "mongrelization" of the races. The man shocks me even in death.

But would North Still be North (and what about life as we know it)?

2003-12-12T12:20:00.000-05:00

This recent piece in the NYTimes describes the decline the intensity of the Earth's magnetic field (actually what it describes is the content of talks several geophysicists gave to this effect at the ongoing biannual national meeting of the American Geophysical Union). The gist of the piece (and I imagine of the talks) is that we may be seeing the first stages in a flip of the Earth's magnetic field. If this were so we might expect that at some time in the next several thousand years the Earth might undergo a couple of thousand years with a minimal magnetic field before an inverted one (north would, in some sense, be south) started to gain intensity.

In these times of changing geomagnetic fields it is worth noting, I think, that there is absolutely no evidence in the geological record suggesting that this time of low magnetisim would result in an end of all life as we know it type scenario (as I'm sure you remember from this summer's THE CORE). In fact, the paleontological record seems to suggest no significant extinction events ever accompanying a reversal of the Earth magnetic field.

How long has man been influencing the global climate? -

2003-12-11T10:47:00.000-05:00

The vast majority of scientists who study the issue (see the IPCC report for their views) contend that humans have been influencing the global climate since, roughly, the beginning of the industrial revolution.

In a recent paper William Ruddiman has argued that, actually, man has been substantially influencing the global climate since the advent of widespread agriculture in Asia (i.e. something like 10,000 years ago) and that this influence was just increased (a lot) with industrialization. His suggestion isn't dumb (clear cutting for agriculture and subsequent farming tends to move carbon out of soils and into the atmosphere) but assessing this hypothesis quantitatively will require much more work using a variety of approaches.

UPDATE - Andrew Sullivan links (follow this link and scroll down to the entry Fisking the Guardian's Graphics to an NYTimes article on the Ruddiman paper I mention above). He suggests that the paper somehow gives 'a little more perspective' to the modern human influence on the atmosphere. This is a grossly inadaquite description: misleading at best and malicous at worst. Its a bit like saying that context is lent to the observation that DC is the most dangerous city in the US (at least, according to Matt Yglesias) now, by noting that in the past it was much less but still pretty dangerous.

What Sullivan should have said was "...follow this link for evidence that man may have been influencing the climate in relatively minor way for thousands of years before he really started screwing it up in the last 150".

One Perspective on the Ivory Coast -

2003-12-09T11:24:00.000-05:00

Damned if you do and damned if you don't seems to be the message this of Jeremy Kahn piece describing the French intervention in the Ivory Coast. The gist, that somehow the whole situation would have been improved if the French would have let the two sides kill each other a little longer (so that they would both be convinced they were out of miltary options), seems at best sketchy and at worst deeply offensive. To me it seems reasonable that the French would assume that the inhabitants of the Ivory Coast might be able to find a way to live in peace without first killing off a generation.

That said, I think the rest of the report is informative about the situation on the ground and well worth reading.

Also see the diary Jeremy is keeping this week in Slate on his travels in the Cote d'Ivoire.

Peer Review in Setting Regulatory limits for things like Air/Water pollution -

2003-12-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

Chris Mooney highlights some of the (I'd imagine unintended) consequences of the Clinton era Information Quality Act on implementing scientific/regulatory policy. His post is lengthy and worth reading but the gist of the problem is as follows...

The act requires that independent scientists review all data used to make regulatory decisions. So far so good, I mean who wouldn't want independent scientists involved in the process. The trick here is that independent is taken to mean a scientist who has recieved no government funding. A Boston Globe editorial Mooney quotes highlights why this is a bad thing...

To grasp the implications of this radical departure, one must recognize that in the United States there are effectively two pots of money that support science: one from government and one from industry. (A much smaller contribution comes from charitable foundations.) If one excludes scientists supported by the government, including most scientists based at universities, the remaining pool of reviewers will be largely from industry...

Effectively then, the only independent reviewers of regulatory decisions will be scientists employed by industry (with no government funding). A sane reading of independent might suggest that these folks are the least indpendent of all (I mean, after all, an industrial scientists pay check is directly tied to the profitability of his employer. A status that is greatly influenced by regulatory details). Unfortunately the law, as written, seems a sort of Congressional departure from rationality.

The Dean Team (Howard Dean) -

2003-12-07T16:56:00.000-05:00

There's an interesting article in this weeks NYTimes Magazine on the supporters of Howard Dean. What's particularly neat about how the organization (really perhaps more of a movement) is described is that somehow Dean has managed to convince people who mostly feel disenfranchised that they have a voice in the political process. The result is a groups of supporters which somehow differs from the usual campaign structure...

At the headquarters of most political campaigns, there's a familiar organizational structure: a group of junior employees carrying out a plan devised by a bunch of senior advisers. The Dean headquarters feels different: a thin veneer of Official Adults barely hovers above a 24-hour hive of intense, mostly youthful devotion. When the adults leave, usually around 10 p.m., the aisles between cubicles are still cluttered with scooters and dogs; when they return in the morning, balancing just-microwaved cinnamon buns and coffee, they climb over pale legs poking out from beneath their desks and shoo sleeping volunteers off their office couches.

More on Curt Schilling going to the Red Sox -

2003-12-07T16:54:00.000-05:00

For those who aren't baseball fans (and shame on you if you're not) Curt Schilling, one of the top ten pitchers in baseball recently OKed (he had a no-trade clause in his contract) a trade from the Arizona Diamondbacks to the Boston Red Sox. This is not hugely interesting in and of itself. What is interesting is that one of the reasons he OKed the trade was the passion of the Red Sox fans. How did he know about that passion? He logged onto the Red Sox message board Sons of Sam Horn (whose rookie card I have), identified himself and spoke to the fans. It's hard to imagine any other professional athlete doing this. Bill Simmons captures how neat this is... (money paragraph)

Now here's where it gets crazy. The deadline comes ... and Schilling accepts the trade. Better yet, he specifically mentions the passion of the SOSH guys as one of the main reasons he decided to play in Boston. Unbelievable. Can you remember any other instance of fans directly influencing a player like this? Can you remember any other player seeking out the input of fans like this? I mean, unless you're a Yankees fan, how can you not root for Curt Schilling now? Shouldn't every player be like this? And if they were like this, wouldn't you like sports a little more than you already do?

Sick and tired of cell phones ringing in public places while you're trying to ________? -

2003-12-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

The answer for you might just be cell phone jammers. For a mere $230 (US) you can purchase yourself a 30 foot security bubble. Of course there's the small matter of them being illegal in the US...