Another Reason Not to Fear Monomolecular Wire
In a common science-fictional cliche (for example, in “Thin Edge” by Johnathan Blake MacKenzie), monomolecular wire is supposed to be an invisible, infinitely-sharp knife that will slice through flesh and bone with hardly any resistance. Any terrorist (or even an irresponsible twit) can loop it across a doorway and slice any passerby to ribbons. I criticized this a few years ago, but it still looked like it might still be dangerous at the thickness of dental floss. There's another reason it won't be the ultimate terrorist weapon. It can be detected by Silly String:
I'm a former Marine I in Afghanistan. Silly string has served me well in Combat especially in looking for I.A.Ds., simply put, booby traps. When you spray the silly sting in dark areas, especially when you doing house to house fighting. On many occasions the silly string has saved me and my men's lives...
When you spray the string it just spreads everywhere and when it sets it lays right on the wire. Even in a dark room the string stands out revealing the trip wire.
For example:
Webcams have been dotting the American landscape for over a decade now. They can be purchased for next to nothing and are supported by a host of software and hardware developments. At its heart a webcam is really only a few dollars worth of parts and a plastic shell.
With a little effort it would take a small company only a short time to integrate a host of intellectual properties to provide a robust and effective monitoring system to all of Iraq. Look at the typical cellphone today, possessing as it does camera, gps and dozens of other functions. Strip away the keypad, lcd screen and lighting; replace them with a mesh network transponder system and perhaps a MEMS motion/vibration detection chip. This energy efficient device could be packaged in a rugged inexpensive plastic shell injection molded to look like a rock, brick, tile or what-have-you.
Upon mass production it would cost only tens of dollars. For the price of a couple of humvees and a tank these things could be scattered out the backs of trucks, dropped from airplanes or emplaced by hand to literally blanket roadways, city regions or any place that needed it with video monitoring. The mesh network would feed video back to a central station or up to satellites via spread-spectrum broadcasting. With motion activation software built in, inactive sites could powerdown and use their resources to help pass signal.
But wait, there's more.
There's yet another possibility. Would it be possible to scatter “starved octahedra” reflectors in the war zone? The octahedra described here:
One every navigational bouey and nearly every boat that floats around in Puget sound there is a metal octahedron. Now these are no ordinary octahedra because they do not contain the usual triangular faces. Instead they contain the 3 diametrical squares. In an xyz-coordinate system with the origin at the center of the octahedron the squares are on the 3 coordinate planes (xy- xz- and yz-planes). I once asked what these were for, and was told that they were for radar. Apparently they show up very sharply on radar.
If those reflectors are small enough they might be overlooked. (In that case, it might be necessary to use lasers instead of radar.) Small reflectors can be expected to move slightly in response to sound waves. That motion might be detectable by the Doppler effect.
There's probably some kind of catch …
Does Academia Discriminate against Conservatives?
Some academics think so. In the comments here (about the blog of Luboš Motl, a “reactionary physicist”):
I think for him it would be the best, simply to SHUT DOWN HIS BLOG IMMEDIATELY and concentrate himself working on some papers. He has ruined his life with his blog.
In Munich, I’ve heared Suesskind complaining personally about Lubos Blog! If Lubos would not have this blog, almost everyone would employ a former Harvard professor. (But of course, Lubos won’t shut down his blog, because he thinks that he was always right, seeing no insults he has made. He writes that he “does not enjoy elementary human rights now”, and this shows no insight, that he has done something wrong)
Hmmmm…
On the other hand, this might be an isolated incident.
Equal Time for Banker Potter
In the world of the movie It's a Wonderful Life, did the supposedly-evil banker Mr. Potter (Mr. was apparently his first name) also have a wonderful life? If he had never existed, would this banker with a heart have frittered away the capital of the townspeople? Did Mr. Potter make it possible for a town with a healthy economy to rescue Bailey's bank?
Did the absence of equal time mean the FBI's characterization of the movie (seen via BoingBoing) was actually accurate?
Statistics and Insanity
I suspect the number of lunatics who think they are the President of the United States or Pope or Secretary-General or even Bill Gates probably exceeds the number of actual people in those positions. Does that mean that President Bush or Pope Benedict should come to the conclusion that he is a lunatic and resign? It seems like statistical reasoning has its limitations …
In related news:
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
Food Irradiation and Nutrition
There's evidence that food irradiation can increase the levels of Vitamin A and carotene.
Literary Critics, Science Fiction, Atheists, and Religion
The claims that religion is inherently irrational (in the comments here, there, and yonder) remind me of Robert Conquest's description of the literary world's reaction to science fiction:
'SF's no good,' they bellow till we're deaf.
'But this looks good.' -- 'Well then, it's not SF.'
Do Personality Tests Only Tell Us What We Already Know?
This one did. I'm a Crackpot.
Thank you, Mr. Obvious.
Is Transhumanism Incompatible with Belief in an Afterlife?
Why would transhumanism be incompatible with a belief in an afterlife? Even an immortal lifespan is a mere aleph-null years and there are much larger cardinalities.
I was inspired by this discussion.
Did Nukes Win the 1980 Election for the Republicans?
While considering the comments on this post, I realized that they might have done so.
A substantial number of leftist arguments depend on the claim that liberals know more than conservatives. Did the no-nukes movement in the 1970s undercut that? I suspect that in the late 1970s, most voters in “blue” states knew somebody who could explain in great detail how liberal heroes were selling horsebleep. As a result, pro-nuclear candidates were able to win solid majorities in many of the bluest states. (I recall that John Anderson first became well known as a supporter of nuclear power.)
Of course, the 1980s and 1990s, oil prices dropped off the public radar and nuclear power was mostly ignored.
You Can't Melt Your Own Coins?
Is there any Constitutional basis giving the Federal government this power?
WASHINGTON — People who melt pennies or nickels to profit from the jump in metals prices could face jail time and pay thousands of dollars in fines, according to new rules out Thursday.
Soaring metals prices mean that the value of the metal in pennies and nickels exceeds the face value of the coins. Based on current metals prices, the value of the metal in a nickel is now 6.99 cents, while the penny's metal is worth 1.12 cents, according to the U.S. Mint.
The only Consitutional clause that comes close is that giving the government the power to regulate the value of the currency … and if they had that power, they could outlaw coin collecting.
But wait. there's more:
Under the new rules, it is illegal to melt pennies and nickels. It is also illegal to export the coins for melting. Travelers may legally carry up to $5 in 1- and 5-cent coins out of the USA or ship $100 of the coins abroad "for legitimate coinage and numismatic purposes."
Violators could spend up to five years in prison and pay as much as $10,000 in fines. Plus, the government will confiscate any coins or metal used in melting schemes.
Doesn't that violate the Consitutional prohibition on export taxes?
Are the Fifties returning?
Why did the chicken cross the road at the Holocaust Denier Convention?
The road was paved in the first place by Talmudic Zionists intent on overthrowing Aryan Civilization! The chicken had every right to cross the road. The chicken had every reason to cross the road. Nevertheless, the chicken did NOT cross the road and any evidence to the contrary was planted by Mossad agents. The fact that the chicken was first seen on one side of the road and then on the other side is irrelevant since the road was repaved in accordance with the dictates of the New World Order. The fact that the chicken was seen walking across the road is irrelevant since the witnesses were Jews and under instructions from Rabbi Baba Mezia, President Second Amendment, and Professor Volume C of the Encyclopedia Britannica to mislead the furshlugginer goyim.
How many Holocaust Deniers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to break the bulb and another to deny that the bulb was ever broken.
Vilifying Pinochet—Cui bono?
There are two groups who can benefit from the vilification of Pinochet.
First, there are wannabe dictators-for-life. Vilifying Pinochet will deter anybody who might want to suppress a revolution and then step down. The opposition will be limited to other would-be dictators-for-life—a much smaller group. Any dictator who steps down voluntarily should be given the benefit of the doubt.
Second, there are the neo-Nazis. They have claimed that Hitler is vilified because he was anti-Communist. The obvious retort—until now—was that other anti-Communist dictators have not been similarly vilified. Vilifying Pinochet will give neo-Nazis some superficial plausibility.
Do Fictional Characters Have Rights?
They may have rights soon in parts of Germany:
Politicians in Bavaria and Lower Saxony have proposed a new offence that will punish "cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters" inside games. Early drafts suggest that infringers should face fines or up to 12 months' jail for promoting or enacting in-game violence.
If this spreads, Steven King is in deep organic fertilizer.
I suppose the term “fictional” will be classified as an ethnic slur and replaced in decent society by “ontologically challenged.”
This has, of course, been anticipated.
Equality Matching and Immigration
As long as I'm discussing Alan Fiske's theories, I should apply them to more controversies. For example, the libertarian view of immigration law is that it should be based on market pricing, the liberal view is that it should be based on communal sharing, and most conservatives think of immigration as something based on equality matching. To make matters more confused, much of the open-border side thinks the immigration-control side is based on authority ranking and the immigration-control side thinks the open-border side is based on communal sharing. Sometimes the immigration-control side even tries attributing authority ranking to the open-border side (while comparing importing voluntary immigrants to importing slaves).
I also think equality matching is unsuitable for organizing anything more complicated than a parking lot.
George Lakoff and Alan Fiske
Alan Fiske classified human interactions into four types:
Communal sharing is how you treat your immediate family: All for one and one for all. Or as Marx put it: From each according to ability, to each according to need.
Equality matching, by contrast, means we all take turns. From kindergarten to the town meeting, it's all about fair shares, reciprocity, doing your part.
Authority ranking is how tribes function, not to mention armies, corporations and governments. Know your place, obey orders, and hail to the chief.
Market pricing, of course, is the basis of economics. It's what we do whenever we weigh costs and benefits, trade up (or down), save or invest.
I just realized that George Lakoff's analysis of politics is based on the assumption that communal sharing (called the “Nurturant Mother” frame) and authority ranking (called the “Strict Father” frame) are the only two types of interaction worth considering.
There are, of course, situations in which communal sharing is preferred and market pricing is wildly inappropriate.
Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
It depends. Would yeast pretend to write an article on energy sources while blowing off the most promising technologies with superficial nonsense? For example:
The well-known alternative ways of producing liquid fuels, such as coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids, are neither ready to scale to the huge volumes we need nor likely to attract the immense capital needed for such an undertaking within the required time frame, due to the uncertainties and risks of the global commodities trade. ("The ability and willingness of major oil and gas producers to step up investment in order to meet rising global demand are particularly uncertain," according to the IEA report.)
Translation: People who know more about this topic than this cliche-monger think the price of oil is likely to either remain stable or decline over the next few decades.
The tar sands of Alberta are currently producing about 1 of the world's 85 million barrels per day of oil production, but "as North America runs short on natural gas to cook the tar out of the sands and water to move the mess to processing plants, very large increases in production from the tar sands seems less and less likely no matter what the price of oil."
Why would we have to depend on gas in a fossil-fuel field? (Of course, we could cook the tar sands with a nuclear bomb …) Isn't the surface of the Earth 3/4 water? Isn't water recyclable?
In my wildest dreams-and I say this as one who has made my living in retail solar for several years now-I don't see solar and wind together achieving more than perhaps 15% of our total global energy mix in the next 30 years.
Why not? It's interesting that no details were supplied in the one field where he might know something. Is he trying to suppress competition? (Maybe that explains the rest of the piece.)
Nuclear energy, likewise, is also not the right solution to the problem, because it neither creates liquid fuels nor is it feasible. Nuclear power has earned the support of environmentalists who recognize the benefits of its lack of greenhouse gas emissions, but it has been estimated that if we were to meet our anticipated electrical needs over the next 30 years with nuclear power, we would have to build some ten new plants each year in the U.S. alone-a highly unrealistic outcome. And in the same way that we are about to pass peak oil, we are past peak uranium.
Question: Why is it unrealistic to build ten new plants per year? That would be a small part of the GNP. As for the peak uranium, uranium is as abundant in the Earth's crust as gold is in gold ores. The extraction costs for gold are $10 per gram. A gram of uranium can produce far more than $10 worth of energy. Finally, the following statement “Nuclear power has earned the support of environmentalists who recognize the benefits of its lack of greenhouse gas emissions …” sounds like the environmentalist wacko version of “I didn't do it! Nobody saw me do it! You can't prove anything!”
I won't say anything about biofuels other than point to this criticism of the claim that they use more energy than they produce.
The entire analysis is rendered plausible by the theory of overshoot, a phenomenon frequently observed in animals and other heterotrophs. It is rarely seen in plants and other autotrophs. As far as ecology is concerned, humans are, of course, autotrophs.
A Theory on Why the Democrats Are Opposed to Free Trade
If we had free trade with Vietnam, they might have to admit we won the Vietnam War. It just took a little longer than expected.
Comparing Physics and Economics
There's a debate going on at Political Animal on why economists are allegedly respected less than physicists. I disagree on the existence of this relative lack of respect. Lots of people are disrespectful of physicists. We can start with anti-nuclear-power activists and continue through young-Earth creationists, astrologers, people who think that quantum mechanics means that refusing to perceive something means it doesn't exist, etc.…
By the way, in the course of the comments at Political Animal, I saw an odd claim:
Physicists don't get cushy jobs at think-tanks as a reward for pushing theories that support policies that make their bosses richer.
Have you ever tried telling a liberal activist that depleted uranium is relatively harmless? (Given the ubiquity of trace amounts of uranium, the “completely uncontroversial facts about radioactivity” clearly imply that everybody has been killed by radiation and this is the afterlife.) You can think of that as an illustration that physicists are also disrepected when they're saying the “wrong” things.
By the way, how do we know minimum-wage laws raise wages?
I noticed an assumption by the liberal commenters in the debate at Political Animal: If there is any possibility of error by opponents of minimum-wage laws, then we can assume the downside can be disregarded. Can this be applied in the other direction? Can the same people who assume it is impossible for the Federal Government to enforce laws against abortion, or some drugs, or immigration automatically assume that it is suddenly able to enforce wage-setting laws? Maybe we just get bootleg wages or back-alley wages … Have there been enough studies showing an increase in wages? Maybe we can find cases of rising wages without minimum-wage laws. Maybe we can even find a study showing higher wage growth rates.
On the other hand, demand for evidence can be taken too far.
Is It Racist to Remove Airline Passengers for Disruptive Praying?
There's a precedent.
We can even apply Gary Farber's rule:
I've long, as a Jew, found a highly useful test for distinguishing legitimate commentary from hate; I take the noun of the statement in question, switch it to "Jew," or the adjective to "Jewish," and see how I think it stands up.
It works in both directions.
If Hezbollah's Best Troublemakers Are in Beirut …
… maybe now is the best time for Israel to invade.
At a minimum, that would stop the “demonstration.”
They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha!
According to this story:
Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.
Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.
Of course, Libertarians are envious.
I suspect it was the Perot voters. They went Republican in 2000, 2002, and 2004 but not in 2006.
On the other hand, Republican support among the brain damaged is not unanimous.
Set seriousness bit to ON
It looks like this supposed result was due to data mining:
Rakfeldt says the study was legitimate, though not intended to show what it did.
“Yes it was a legitimate study but these data were mined after the fact,” Rakfeldt says. “You can ask new questions of the data. I haven’t looked at” Lohse’s conclusions regarding Bush, Rakfeldt says.
If a scientist looks at, say, a hundred different possible correlations, sheer chance would indicate that some of the results will seem improbable enough to be published.
I'd like to know how hard they tried to torture the data into confessing.
Does History Always Move Left?
The following is one of the more preposterous leftist cliches:
Since the F.D.R. administration, conservatives have unsuccessfully opposed legislative and judicial reforms that today are considered so mainstream as to be "conservative." In effect, yesterday’s liberalism is today’s conservatism, and this has been the direction of social and political change since the age of the Flappers and the Model T.
Examining the writings of such conservative icons as Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr, Phyllis Schlafly, and nine others, Joshi uncovers statements that most people today would consider not just radical but outrageous: · In the 1950s, Russell Kirk opposed Social Security because he said it was "un-Christian."
Time has run back in some fields. There are former leftist ideas that used to be dominant but are now almost unheard of: wage and price controls, eugenics (which used to be a liberal plank until it became unfashionable), nationalizing the “commanding heights” of the economy, the Fairness Doctrine. There are others that are noticeably declining: gun control (a former mainstay of the Democrats that they dropped almost completely in the last election), Social Security (the former “third rail”), large parts of environmentalism (there are environmentalists nowadays defending DDT and nuclear power). In some ways, yesterday's conservatism is today's liberalism (i.e., Clinton putting putting through Reagan's platform).
It's not surprising that we get such rhetoric from leftists. After all, if you pride yourself on being the wave of the future, you have to believe there is an identifiable wave of the future. It helps if you believe that yesterday's wave of the future is the same as today's.
There's another reason for such rhetoric. It's part of the “let's scare conservatives” tactic.
Pick a phenomenon which looks likely to increase in the future. (Examples include: immigration from places other than Europe, acceptance of evolution, use of higher biotechnology, etc.) Pretend it somehow makes traditional values obsolete somehow. Wait for a conservative to believe that propaganda. Accuse them of being anti-progress.
The only real puzzle is why conservatives fall for it so often.
By the way, do I have to read that book now? I've read enough wacko leftist books …
This Might Sound Reasonable …
… but anti-Malthusians are next.
They will be followed by either race realists or by anti-racists, depending on who can get hold of the levers of power first.
Is Gulf War II Surpassing World War II?
According to Agence France-Presse, it is:
THEY were America's days of infamy, 60 years apart - Pearl
Harbour and September 11. The first led the US into World War II, a
conflict it endured for 1348 days; the second was followed by a war
that from tomorrow will have lasted even longer.
On the other hand, if we count the occupation after regime change, World War II has lasted to the present.
Even if we only count occupations when there is a terrorist campaign going on in the background, we kept troops in occupied Dixie for over a decade … and went back in during the 1950s to finish the job.
Neuroeconomics Continued
Neuroeconomics (earlier discussed here) is one of the most promising sources of excuses for self-appointed experts to claim they know more about people's lives than the people living them. The most plausible of those excuses (that people use the more rational part of the brain when agreeing with experts) has just disappeared.
It looks like the demographic group most closely associated with really dumb decisions uses more of the brain while making them:
Surprisingly, behavioral scientists have actually done these interviews with hundreds of American adolescents. In order to explore really stupid behavior, they have asked what seem to be really stupid questions: Is it a good thing to set your hair on fire? Drink Drano? Go swimming where sharks swim?
The results are fascinating, and unsettling. While teenagers are just as likely as adults to get the answer right (the correct answer is “No”), teens actually have to mull the question over momentarily before they answer. As summarized by psychologists Valerie Reyna of Cornell and Frank Farley of Temple in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, teenagers take a split second longer than adults to reject such patently inane behaviors. And more of the teenage brain lights up, suggesting that they are actually going through some kind of deliberative calculation before concluding what the rest of us assume is obvious.
By the standards of neuroeconomics, clearly adolescents are superior at making decisions. The more radical neuroeconomists might even want to make self-destructive behavior compulsory.
Maybe that explains the two year dumb-off …
Illegal Combatants and SWAT Teams
If the police in this raid were out of uniform, does that make them illegal combatants? After all, the same reasoning applies to them as to the Hezbollah or Al Qaeda fighters disguised as civilians.
Somehow, I don't think they're going to Gitmo …
Is It Gone?
I haven't seen the Fox News spammer in the past two weeks.
Mission accomplished: He got the Democrats in control of Congress.
Addendum: It's ba-ack!
In the Background at Phdcomics
It looks like the paper in the background in the author biographies episode of Phdcomics was this paper (published by IEEE here). You can see part of three references which, in the original paper, were:
KOLTCHINSKII, V. (2004). Local Rademacher complexities and oracle inequalities in risk minimization. Manuscript. LESKI, J. (2002). Robust weighted averaging. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 49, 796-804. OMBAO, H., RAZ, J., STRAWDERMAN, R., and VON SACHS, R. (2001). A simple GCV method of span selection for periodogram smoothing. Biometrika, 88, 1186-1192.
I was reminded by the latest comic, but there wasn't enough detail to track down that one.
In related news, I remembered this event when it was about to start and it was too late to attend.
While Looking for Israel Robot Hornet on Technorati …
… I found the following entry:
'JERUSALEM: Israel is using nanotechnology to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet", would be able to navigate its way down narrow ... , it comes from CNET, and maybe Israel has really crossed the line from mere fascist regime based
It looks like this is an accusation that Israel is a fascist state or worse. (I'm not sure. I got the error message: “You don't have permission to access /227512.html on this server.” when I tried following it up.)
The really interesting part is that the publicly-accessible part of the blog includes a post apparently intended to satirize imaginary conservatives saying:
Bush is the 2nd greatest President of all time and if you don't agree you're a ZOG slave
………
Eventually agents of the liberal Jewish shadow government told us that "expressive behavior" is against the establishment's code of conduct. We promised to no longer approach people and they relented, but fifteen minutes later they came back to forcibly escort us from the premises. We broke out into "I'm proud to be an American" as we were forced off the grounds.
So … Israel is a fascist regime … but it's conservatives who are anti-semitic. How's that again?
I won't do more than mention the fact that the people they're trying to satirize can't stand that liberal Bush.
Iran's Game Plan?
The people in the Iraq Study Group appear to believe that “constructive engagement” with Iran is possible. (That means assuming that the current attempts on the part of Iran's leaders to look like maniacs is just a bargaining point. This is dubious but not preposterous.) Let's consider what constructive engagement is likely to consist of.
It should be obvious what constructive engagement means. It means we let Iran turn Iraq and Lebanon into puppet states and, in return, they hand over Ahmadinejad and a few token terrorists and stop the reactors. This will produce great rejoicing because Disaster Has Been Averted.
Of course, it also means they start up the reactors again and put a new loonie in a high-profile position when Saudi Arabia finally collapses and they want a slice.
This will be followed a few years later by agreeing to stop their biowarfare research in return for a halt in oil-shale research …
Meanwhile, other nations have been taking notes and are considering how to use pretended insanity as a bargaining chip.
A Theory about Today's Politics
Is the current dumb-off the result of the Stoned Generation finally taking over?
It's almost as though the people running both major parties have suffered some brain damage.
A Biblical Prophcy Coming True?
According to Deuteronomy 7:17–21:
7:17 If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations [are] more than I; how can I dispossess them?
7:18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: [but] shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt;
7:19 The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out arm, whereby the LORD thy God brought thee out: so shall the LORD thy God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.
7:20 Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.
7:21 Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the LORD thy God [is] among you, a mighty God and terrible.
According to Reuters:
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.
The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet", would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.
Okay, Reuters isn't that reliable. (They probably mean “microtechnology” instead of “nanotechnology” and “terrorist” instead of “militant.”) On the other hand, it's not in the “just made it up” category.
It could probably turn a battle even if the hornet was limited to detecting enemies. For one thing, Reuters etc. would have to be more accurate in the future.
In possibly-related Israeli news …
We're also cutting off the Other Side's oil weapon (seen via Meryl Yourish):
HAIFA, Israel, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- The Israeli process for producing energy from oil shale will cut its oil imports by one-third, and will serve as a guide for other countries with oil shale deposits, according to one company.
………
It would cost about $17 to produce a barrel of synthetic oil at the Hom Tov facility, meaning giant profit margins in a world of $45 to $60 per barrel crude. Yearly earnings are forecasted to be between $159 million and $350 million, Shahal said.
………
The United States also has a giant reserve, mostly in Colorado, and Hom Tov sees potential for its patented process there.
In other word, we can say to OPEC: nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, phphphphtttt!!!!
Addendum: It's been done. According to Joshua 24:12:
24:12 And I sent the hornet before you, which drave them out from before you, [even] the two kings of the Amorites; [but] not with thy sword, nor with thy bow.
Sigh
According to Deborah Orin-Eilbeck in The New York Post:
The strongest opposition to illegal immigration is coming from heartland America and even the Northeast. Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), one of the toughest foes of legalization, won his re-election handily.
Speaking as somebody who voted for Rep. King, I did so out of embarrassment about the possibility of being represented by a Democrat.
Camp of the Saints and Eurabia
A thought experiment: What if the scenario in The Camp of the Saints had taken place a few decades ago? If a few million anti-Muslim Hindus had come to Europe, the Muslims would have no hope of taking over and would have to stay on their best behavior. We wouldn't have a problem with Eurabia.
A Reason to Be Suspicious of Anti-Immigration Activists
I noticed the following on an anti-immigration blog:
The international corporate class and the social work Establishment that drools at the thought of a huge new clientele do not like Anglo-Saxon-Celts. I know that's not the sort of thing you're supposed to say out loud, but it's true.
“Anglo-Saxon-Celts”? Those of us with names like Hertzlinger (or Giuliani or even Rumsfeld) would find that alarming … if we didn't outnumber the Anglo-Saxon-Celts (how did Celts get into this?) by now.
An odd note: The same blog also covers psychic phenomena. It's almost like reading an extended John Campbell editorial.
Diagnosing the Decline of New York State Republicans
The New York Times reports on the decline on Republicans in New York state:
Republicans have slipped to less than 27 percent of the state’s 11 million registered voters and Democrats outnumber them by nearly 2.4 million. The suburbs shifted hugely — the county executives of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk are Democrats — and even reliably Republican counties upstate, some of them crippled by declining population, can no longer be taken for granted.
Suburban Republicans in New York state brought this on themselves. Several decades ago, they passed zoning laws designed to keep out the riffraff. Those laws had the effect of raising housing costs to preposterous levels. (High taxes in the state as a whole may have been agreed to for similar reasons.) Time passes … and the political line-up changed from rich vs. poor to large families vs. small families. The large families most likely to vote Republican would rather look for cheaper housing and move somewhere else.
Question about Today's Day by Day
In today's Day by Day, why is the Iraqi waiter brown? Middle-easterners aren't South Asian.
Uh Oh
There's a real problem with the Democrats running imitation Republicans right now. They tried that in 1992, when they figured that they were in the Outer Darkness because they had been defeated by tight-fisted budget cutters. In accordance with that belief, they nominated a tight-fisted budget cutter for President. In the recent election, they figured they were opposing nearly-fascist nationalists. Guess who they ran:
Many of the Democrats who recaptured seats held by Republicans have been described as moderates or social conservatives, who will be out of synch with Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi. The better term, with props to Fareed Zakaria, is probably illiberal Democrats. Most of those who reclaimed Republican seats ran hard against free trade, globalization, and any sort of moderate immigration policy. That these Democrats won makes it likely that others will take up their reactionary call. Some of the newcomers may even be foolish enough to try to govern on the basis of their misguided theory.
………
For some reason, economic nationalists never seem to complain about job-killing Dutch or Irish competition. The targets of their anger are consistently China and Mexico, with occasionally whacks at Dubai, Oman, Peru, and Vietnam.
An even harder-edged nationalism defined many of the critical House races, where Democrats called for a moratorium on trade agreements, for canceling existing ones, or, in some cases, for slapping protective trade tariffs on China. These candidates also lumped illegal immigrants together with terrorists and demanded fencing and militarization of the Mexican border. In Pennsylvania, Democratic challengers Chris Carney and Patrick Murphy defeated Republican incumbents by accusing them of destroying good jobs by voting for the Central American Free Trade Agreement and being soft on illegal immigration.
The good news is that economic nationalism is easy to ridicule even on a sound-bite basis. Repeat after me: Every dollar we send overseas comes back. If somebody claims that the foreigners just hang onto the the money, it might be necessary to ask they're using the dollars as wallpaper or burning them in bonfires.
A Difference between Vietnam and Iraq
South Vietnam was unable to resist the invasion from North Vietnam largely because it was bankrupt. The official government of Iraq, in case you hadn't noticed, has some oil revenue.
Another Vietnam lesson to unlearn
I suspect many of the people anticipating “another Vietnam” figure that once the Americans leave, they're never coming back. They might have to unlearn that soon. We recently turned protecting Afghanistan over to NATO. If there's a Taliban resurgence and NATO wimps out, we're going back in. It looks like there's bipartisan support for that.
In view of the Islamist takeover of Somalia, we might be back in Somalia soon as well.
I'm sure the Iraqi insurgents will be taking notes.
The Lesson of the Election
It's easy for Democrats to win. All they have to do is nominate Republicans.
In Case Anybody Was Wondering
I voted Libertarian for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, and Comptroller. I didn't hold some of the loony opinions of our gubernatorial candidate against him. That's expected from Libertarians. (Sometimes, I think this should be the Libertarian campaign song.)
I voted Republican for Senator and Congressman. At least I'm represented by the last remaining Republican Congressman here in The People's Republic of Long Island.
I voted no on an “open-space” resolution (the genteel version of immigration restrictions). It has the effect of keeping the riffraff out, but it's dressed up in high-sounding language.
I voted Conservative for the remaining offices. I wanted some way to let The Powers That Be know I didn't want RINOs. On the other hand, I didn't vote Conservative for Senate and Congress because that might be mistaken for support for the border fence.
The one difficult decision was the State Senate race. On one hand, my State Senator supports those “open-space” resolutions and laws against driving while phoning. On the other hand, his opponent was endorsed by Planned Parenthood so I had to vote for him.
Speaking of elections
Why, in all the coverage of the Virginia Senatorial election, is there no mention of the Yourish candidacy?
Helpful Capitalists?
Last year, I blogged about the theory that fewer choices are better. If that theory is correct, then a South Korean ISP is improving the lives of their customers (seen via Boing Boing). Isn't it amazing how helpful capitalists can be?
Set sarcasm bit to off.
Actually, I think that the most probable result is that the ISP in question will lose customers rapidly. (Maybe they thought they could get away with it as a result of reading too many net-neutrality polemics.) It seems a bit strange though, that parts of the left side of the political spectrum think that capitalism provides too much choice and other parts think that capitalism restricts choice.
The War on Terrorism and the War on Some Drugs
It's becoming increasingly clear that the War on Some Drugs is undermining the War on Terrorism by producing an alliance
between the Taliban and Afghan opium farmers.
Most politicians are reluctant to touch the War on Some Drugs because any attempt to stop it would be attributed to drug “experimentation.” (I put “experimentation” in quotes because it's not a real experiment unless there's an identifiable control group.) The only people who can legalize hard drugs are people who would never be thought of as former drug users, e.g., evangelicals, Mormons or other “religious fanatics.”
I'm not planning to run. I was part of what little control group there was during the drug-experimentation era, but I'm not a member of any stereotypical anti-drug group.
The Democrats won't do it. At most, they'll legalize pot and continue the War on Some Drugs in which the Some Drugs will be cocaine and heroin. That will simply continue the anti-American takeovers of Bolivia and Afghanistan.
Would Romney be the best choice in 2008? After all, only Nixon could go to China and only Clinton could reform welfare.
Maybe There's Been a Fake Tet Offensive after All
If the past month has been the deadliest for U.S. troops since October of last year, maybe there's an attempt at an annual October surprise.
On the other hand, the Other Side is so ineffective that their best efforts can hardly be told from a random fluctuation. I'm reminded of Plankton's sinister plots on Spongebob Squarepants.
Fetus, Incorporated?
While looking for other people's comments on J. D. Hayworth and Jonathan Tratt (earlier comments here and here), I found the following non-sequitur in a troll's comments at Jews for Life:
Wow. And I thought the crazy left were supposed to be the conspiracy theorists. I guess there's plenty of conspiracy to go around. Thank you for keeping me apprised of how things are spinning on the right fringe.
Best, An Immoral Liberal Reader (immoral by default, right? because the Lord protects those who fight for the rights of major corporations.
I never realized fetuses were major corporations. How are fetal stocks doing nowadays? What's the return on investment? Will it soon be the Dow-Jones-Embryo Average?
Search-Engine Query Oddity
I've gotten around a dozen referrals from search engines asking “:Who discovered the world is round?” in the past couple of weeks. I didn't know I was an authority on the topic.
While I'm on the topic, the answer to the question “Who discovered America?” may surprise you.
He Shouldn't Have Gone to an Extremely-Reform Synagogue, Part II
In the first part, I discussed a candidate's forum at an Extremely-Reform synagogue in which anti-abortion remarks from Jonathan Tratt produced a mass walkout. This, in turn, provoked his Israeli-born wife, Irit, to say, “No wonder there are antisemites.” I have some idea of what she might have meant by that.
It's common in the Holocaust-denier and Holocaust-excuser community to claim that Jews should not complain about the Holocaust because we supposedly back the far bloodier phenomenon of abortion. (At other times, they claim we're in cahoots with Catholics to raise the birth rate of the mud people.) In response, I sometimes point out that support for abortion is not unanimous among Jews and there are reasons within Jewish tradition to hold to a strict anti-abortion standard. If Irit Tratt had participated in similar flame wars, the sentence “No wonder there are antisemites.” might mean that fervently pro-abortion Jews are making it harder to come up with anti-antisemitic arguments.
He Shouldn't Have Gone to an Extremely-Reform Synagogue
In Arizona, Representative J.D. Hayworth has been accused of antisemitism for saying something favorable about Henry Ford. (My personal opinion is that it's a bad sign when a supposed conservative is as ignorant of history as most liberals … but that's another rant.) In order to combat that, he sent Jonathan Tratt, one of his a Jewish supporters, to defend his record at a candidates’ forum at Temple Beth Israel in Scottsdale:
Jonathan Tratt, a real estate investor and political fund-raiser, made the remark while defending Hayworth’s opposition of abortion rights. Tratt, who is Jewish, was referring to the fact that although ancient rabbinic law does not ban abortion, it restricts it to instances when the health of the mother is in danger.
The term “health” is too fuzzy. They mean the life of the mother. The remark produced an odd reaction:
The comment by Jonathan Tratt, a spokesman for the Hayworth campaign, drew loud and angry boos and caused nearly three-quarters of the crowd of more than 200 to walk out in disgust. After the walkout, another Hayworth surrogate, Irit Tratt, stood on the Temple's bimah as she told members of the audience who gathered to ask questions, "No wonder there are anti-Semites."
It's about time one of us anti-abortion Jews spoke out.
On the other hand, I don't think “No wonder there are anti-Semites.” was an ideal response. They should have said “Your attempt to convert us to Christianity did not work.”
It should not be astounding that a Baptist was closer to Jewish tradition than Extremely-Reform Jews. After all, Orthodox Jews are more Catholic than the Catholics. They don't approve of the rhythm method and they're more thorough about insisting that scripture can only be interpreted in the light of tradition.
I will, of course, remember that this has been described as obvious evidence that conservatives are antisemitic the next time somebody makes that claim. I consider such claims to emanate from the Jewish equivalent of CAIR.
Speaking of the Jewish equivalent of CAIR …
I recently accused Debbie Findling, one of the people in the “We Had Abortions” petition, of having an inappropriate career as a philanthropic foundation executive. Her job is not so inappropriate. It turns out that she's the Deputy Director of the Goldman Fund, an organization devoted to keeping Jews liberal and abortion unrestricted.
An Imitation Tet Offensive as an October Surprise
If the loons running Iran wanted to swing the Congressional election over to the Party of Surrender and if they had widespread support in the Shiite areas of Iraq, they could probably start an imitation Tet Offensive designed to disrupt the U.S. Army's supply lines between the Persian Gulf and Baghdad. If they don't, that might be evidence they don't have any local support.
Even if they started one tomorrow, that would mean they don't think they can sustain such an offensive for more than two weeks. If they thought it could last longer they would have started it already.
Part II of Do You Believe in Γ0?
The first part of the discussion of applying standard atheist claims to mathematics can be found here.
There is a common atheist theory that religious ideas simply reflect the way we evolved instead of the nature of reality. I see no reason why something that evolved would not reflect reality and it stands to reason that something evolved, something that helps us survive, would be more likely to reflect reality. The opposite assumption was ridiculed by Ayn Rand:
His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.
Recently, George Lakoff (his nonsense is not limited to politics) has apparently been applying the above theory to mathematics. (I say apparently because Wikipedia is not always reliable):
Lakoff has also claimed that we should remain agnostic about whether math is somehow wrapped up with the very nature of the universe. Early in 2001 Lakoff told the AAAS, "Mathematics may or may not be out there in the world, but there's no way that we scientifically could possibly tell." This is because the structures of scientific knowledge are not "out there" but rather in our brains, based on the details of our anatomy. Therefore, we cannot "tell" that mathematics is "out there" without relying on conceptual metaphors rooted in our biology.
Will he next claim that we cannot tell if light is “out there”?
300 Million Americans
“More! More! I'm still not satisfied!”—Professor Tom Lehrer
On the other hand …
What if the environmentalists happen to be right, for once?
If there is a limit to the number of people on Earth, we can expect rents to rise. Higher rents usually go along with declining birth rates. (There is a problem with this analysis. If enough people underestimate the limit, they might not be surprised when rents start increasing even if that increase was due to political corruption.)
Even if we look beyond Earth to the rest of the universe, population growth might have a subexponential limit. Rents might be enough to slow growth without stopping. If enough people are travelling close to the speed of light looking for cheaper neighborhoods, time dilation can slow population growth.
Environmentalists have tried getting around similar arguments by inventing the theory of “overshoot.” (This is partly due to the potato chip from Brazil phenomenon.) They have some empirical evidence that animal populations likely to overshoot, but we're plants.
On the gripping hand …
The environmentalists need not be right. It might be possible to create “basement universes.” There might even be technical fixes so innovative that we haven't even thought of their possibility.
Omega 3 Fats vs. Omega 6 Fats
Who's doing the half-time show?
According to a recent study, a high ratio of omega-6 fats (found in corn and soybean oil) to omega-3 fats (found in fish and walnut oil) in the diet can increase a propensity to violence. I'm sure there are people in Hamas or Hezbollah reading that research and resolving to use more corn oil in school lunchrooms.
I'm reminded of an episode of My Favorite Martian in which the Martian started having hallucinations in response to eating food made with polyunsaturated fats.
On the other hand, not every study can be taken seriously.
It's an IQ Test
It should be obvious that this story is an IQ test designed to see if people will believe any load of organic fertilizer that looks like a scientific study.
On the other hand, the human race just might possibly split into two species: those who believe this nonsense and those who don't.
An Oddly-Named Food
I recently saw cans of Spotted Dick on sale in the ethnic foods aisle at my local supermarket. I had thought it was a practical joke invented by British expatriates.
Donald Knuth on Stratified Random Sampling
In Chapter 2 of Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, Knuth said about his use of stratified random sampling in Bible study:
We could have rolled dice. True randomization clearly leads to a better sample than the results of a fixed deterministic like chapter 3, verse 16. On the other hand, there is no reason to think there is anything unusual about chapter 3, verse 16 except in the Book of John. And I didn't like the idea of rolling dice, for several reasons. One reason was that we would have to roll the dice in advance if people were going to prepare for the class. But then if a person missed a class they wouldn't know what to do for next time. The other reason is that when you roll dice there's a temptation to cheat. You get a bad roll and you say, “Well I didn't really mean that … the dice slipped, or bumped into the edge. Let's try again.” Thus my 3:16 rule actually couldn't be rigged.
Another Body Count
One of the more plausible defenses of the Lancet study is that it used a far more accurate technique than the official statistics and it was the only study to have used such a technique in this case. On the contrary, there was similar study from the UN (seen via Confederate Yankee) that showed far fewer deaths than the earlier Lancet results. The UN results sound high but they're not extraordinary.
More Comments on That Lancet Study
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
An isolated study (the last similar report was from the same people) is never extraordinary evidence.
All the other complaints about this study are commentary on the first two. (In possibly-related news, a team of researchers have claimed that Israel is the least neurotic nation on Earth. Talk about extraordinary claims …)
Much of the rhetoric defending the study resembles John Campbell editorials on J. B. Rhine. (The statistical techniques used are standard … The critics are merely expressing their prejudices … etc.). Maybe there could be a CSICOP-type organization to investigate similar possible bullbleep.
Show Trials?
Parts of the environmental movement are proposing an odd way of dealing with disagreement:
It's about the climate-change "denial industry," which most of you are probably familiar with. What you may not know about is the peculiar role of the tobacco industry in the whole mess. I've read about this stuff for years and even I was surprised by some of the details.
When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards -- some sort of climate Nuremberg.
It resembles part of item 36 of the Crackpot Index:
40 points for claiming that when your theory is finally appreciated,
present-day science will be seen for the sham it truly is. (30 more points for fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.)
A Note about That Lancet Study
I'm sure that my fellow wingnuts have heard of another study by the same team that came up with improbable numbers of civilian casualties a few years ago. We can't consider this to be a scientific result.
The scientific method is not a matter of “Has this been published in a really prestigious journal?” (contrary to what some people appear to think); it's a matter of “Has this been replicated?” As far as I know, this hasn't been. If it were true, others would have seen the same phenomena by now.
I don't know what the cause of the discrepancy is but I'd like to know how they hired the people who were supposedly taking the survey.
Eat Your View?
Would the slogan “Eat your view” (you should only eat food that was grown in places you can see from your residence) apply to inhabitants of orbital colonies?
A Question about 30 Rock
Was the character Jack based on Kelvin Throop?
What's New York's Excuse?
According to Robert Putnam, ethnic diversity makes people less gullible (seen via TJIC):
A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists.
His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor.
In that case, shouldn't New Yorkers be more skeptical of liberalism?
Where Opposition to “Conscience Clauses” Leads
There is a lawsuit to force a Jewish-owned medical clinic to open on Saturday.
North Korea Apparently Exploded an Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Nuclear Bomb
It's a cute, adorable nuke.
The apparent size of the explosion (possibly as small as half a kiloton) is of the same order of magnitude as the energy content in the tanks of a fully-fueled 767. In other words, we've already been attacked with a couple of those things.
Another note: If this was a real bomb (and not a dud or a fake), it's of an appropriate size to be used in an Orion-style spaceship.
A Suggestion for a Statistics Course in Fallacies
You could probably organize an entire course around the fallacies on this website (in particular, on AIDS and IQ).
More Evidence We Shouldn't Trust Petitions Signed by Scientists
They're now defending Intelligent Design by petition. (My earlier criticisms of scientific petitions can be found here and here.)
FIW Works Both Ways
A Muslim police officer in Britain, inspired by the principle of “Freedom—I Won't,” is refusing to guard the Israeli embassy (seen via James Lileks):
PC Alexander Omar Basha - a member of the Metropolitan Police's Diplomatic Protection Group - refused to be posted there because he objected to Israeli bombings in Lebanon and the resulting civilian casualties of fellow Muslims.
I think he has every to right to be excused. Scotland Yard, in turn, has every right to be excused from paying his salary. For example, consider the following incident:
Here in Minneapolis there’s a controversy about Muslim cab drivers who refuse fares who are carrying alcohol. The airport, as I understand the story, is studying whether to implement special lights on the cabs that alert passengers to hooch-friendly or hooch-hostile cabs.
Somehow, I doubt if the cabbies refusing to carry drunks are still insisting on their fares.
WordPerfect on Foley
WordPerfect flagged “Foley” as a spelling error. It suggested, among other words, “fool” as a substitute.
Not in the Right Line of Work
One of the people in the “We Had Abortions” petition has a possibly-inappropriate job:
Another signatory, Debbie Findling of San Francisco, described her difficult decision last year to have an abortion after tests showed that she would bear a son with Down syndrome.
"I felt it was my right to make the decision, but having that right doesn't make the decision any easier," she said. "It was the hardest decision I've ever made."
Findling, 42, is married, with a 5-year-old daughter, and has been trying to get pregnant again while pursuing her career as a philanthropic foundation executive.
I hope she's not involved in disability rights.
Addendum: Her employer is even more wildly inappropriate.
This Is Embarrassing
First, the Libertarians nomimated an anti-vaccination activist, Dawn Winkler, for governor of Colorado (seen via Orac). Now, I find that John Clifton, the Libertarian nominee for governor of New York, wants a state investigation of depleted uranium. (I discussed depleted uranium long ago.) The major fact mentioned in the more detailed link on the 12 Point Agenda page is that
A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that in terms of the atomicity, (the amount of radiation produced), a ton of DU used on the battlefield releases the equivalent of 100 Hiroshima bombs worth of radiation released into the atmosphere.
I found the term “atomicity” completely unfamiliar and was unsurprised when it turned out to be utter bullbleep. (It's supposed to be the number of radioactive atoms.)
Interesting fact: The potassium-40 in the foods consumed by Americans has approximately the same “atomicity” as half a ton of depleted uranium. On a second thought, that might be the start of the next set of investigations…
Neuroeconomic and Neurophysics
In the course of criticizing neuroeconomics, Arnold Kling briefly summarizes it as follows:
Some interpreters of neuroeconomics appear to argue that:
1. Individuals make decisions that are not "rational" by economic standards.
2. With new means to study the brain, we can show that these irrational decisions are correlated with greater usage of the emotional part of the brain.
3. Therefore, government paternalism is justified in steering people away from the decisions that are correlated with emotion and toward those decisions that are correlated with reason.
Since today's social sciences are about as firmly established as physics was in the day of Aristotle, maybe we can consider how Artistotle might have reacted to neuroscience studying people handling physical objects. If neurology existed back then and if it had been applied to people throwing objects, it would have found:
Individuals throw objects in ways that are not “rational” by the standards of Aristotelian physics. With new means to study the brain, we can show that these irrational decisions are correlated with greater usage of the more primitive parts of the brain. Therefore, government paternalism is justified in steering people away from the decisions that are correlated with instinct and toward those decisions that are correlated with reason.
We can imagine a government program to train people to throw objects the “rational” way, in straight lines instead swinging arms in circles. (Slings, of course, would be banned.) They might prohibit people from cooling soup by blowing on it. (Air is the hot, wet element and, of course, could not cool off anything.)
In retrospect, the above suggestions can be seen to be nonsensical. It takes reason a long time to find the truth. Why should we believe that current neuroeconomics has done so?
Come to think of it, the example of physics might show that once reason has hit upon the right approach, regulations become unnecessary. In the past few centuries, human beings have been handling physical objects using machines designed by human reason. There was no regulation passed commanding that.
Instead of Indoctrination
On Protein Wisdom, Scott Eric Kaufman is defending academia against the charges of indoctrinating students and flunking qualified conservatives. There's more than one way for a professor to lean left. I suspect the most important way is simply to neglect to correct leftist misinformation.
Misinformation is frequently passed down from one generation of students to another. As a result, students learn that Christopher Columbus discovered the world is round, that astronauts are weightless because they're beyond the Earth's gravity, that marijuana smoke does not contain carbon monoxide, that religion is somehow opposed to rational thought, and that plutonium is the most toxic substance on Earth. All that is needed is for the professor to not bother correcting the currently-trendy parts of the misinformation.
In some cases, all that is needed is a delay in correcting the misinformation. Once an opinion has become sufficiently entrenched, any professor who tries correcting it will be regarded as having sold out to “The Establishment.”
Outbreaks of Sanity
There have been signs of increasing environmental sanity in the liberal establishment. Parts of it now back nuclear power and DDT.
One implication is that environmentalism can no longer be dismissed out of hand. Some of the people involved are worth taking seriously. (That does not make them right.)
I'll keep an eye out for a defense of strip mining from the same people.
No Comment
From a conspiracy-theory blog on the recent controversy on the Pope's speech:
Quoting someone and not expressing one's rejection of it is agreeing with it. The Pope is an intellectual and knows the proper way of attribution and quoting. For example, if I quote bin Laden or Jerry Falwell or GW Bush in my speech, and then not show my opinion of that quote, I announce my agreement
I Want That Job!
According to Boing Boing, some people are getting paid to write the stuff that I blog for free. How can I get on that payroll?
It's not merely the money. If I were paid to blog, I'm sure I'd be better known … even if only by leftists trying to pretend I've been bought.
MathML, Firefox, and Blogspot
The following sentence:
One half is .
can be viewed properly using Firefox at the Atom Feed, but not in the the usual blog.
According to a commenter on my other blog, there is a plug-in for IE that can be used to view MathML, but I would prefer to avoid software from an ally of Warren Buffett.
Disclaimer: By “ally of Warren Buffett,” I was referring to Microsoft.
Do You Believe in Γ0?
Some of the classic atheist criticisms of religion for allegedly using circular reasoning could be used against impredicative mathematics. Since impredicative mathematics is needed to prove that Γ0 is well ordered …
Speaking of religion
I have trouble reconciling 5 and 9 in the list of God's Top 10 Movie Messages to the World:
9. On His unwillingness to condemn: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
………
5. On what we are doing to the planet: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."
Could a refusal to condemn real sins lead to the abandonment of tradition? Could that, in turn, lead to a “God-shaped hole” that will be filled with some newfangled cult (e.g., deep ecology) instead of a religion old enough to be debugged?
On the other hand, people who are willing to change their minds for no good reason on the side of lacking belief might be expect to also change their minds for no good reason in the direction of too much belief.
Has This Been Replicated?
No, it's not embryonic stem cells this time.
Irina Ermakova, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences tried testing a common GMO, Roundup Ready soybeans, on pregnant rats and found they apparently damaged the rats offspring:
Ermakova’s first surprise came when her pregnant rats started giving birth. Some pups from GM-fed mothers were quite a bit smaller. After 2 weeks, 36% of them weighed less than 20 grams, compared to about 6% from the other groups (see photo).
But the real shock came when the rats started dying. Within three weeks, 25 of the 45 (55.6%) rats from the GM soy group died, compared to only 3 of 33 (9%) from the non-GM soy group and 3 of 44 (6.8%) from the non-soy controls.
I have a few questions:
Has this been replicated? Some of the embryonic stem-cell results were just made up. Have there been any similar experiments? Was this a matter of random variation? If scientists try testing something a few hundred times, some of the results will be apparently improbable. Was this a matter of systematic error? Was the cage with the rats fed Roundup Ready soybeans cleaned properly? What did the rats who weren't fed soybeans eat? In the unlikely event there is something to this, could it be that Roundup Ready soybeans lack a vital nutrient? That would explain why they're deadly in an artificial environment but have not been associated with any birth-defect epidemic in the United States. The hypothetical nutrient might be common in other foods. If there's nothing to this, will Project Censored acknowledge that?
While I was reading about the above, I noticed an alleged fact that is fascinating, if true:
… Even the DNA in the mother’s food may be a factor. German scientists found fragments of DNA fed to pregnant mice in the brains of their newborn[1].
………
[1] Doerfler W; Schubbert R, “Uptake of foreign DNA from the environment: the gastrointestinal tract and the placenta as portals of entry,” Journal of molecular genetics and genetics Vol 242: 495-504, 1994
This might be the start of a new version of the Nobel Prize sperm bank.
Communist Tactics vs. Pluto
The anti-Pluto forces at the recent International Astronomical Union meeting triumphed through Sitzfleisch, not debate:
The IAU gathering in Prague last week reversed its own experts' recommendation that would have allowed Pluto to keep its status, albeit in a different class of planet. Outraged protesters say the vote, at the end of the conference, was hijacked because most delegates had gone home and were not allowed to vote. Only about 428 of the IAU's 10,000 members cast a vote.
The same tactics were used by Communist front organizations in the 1940s. Today's Wall Street Journal carried an article about Olivia de Havilland and her description of such a front organization, the Independent Citizen's Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions:
… In executive meetings of the Citizen's Committee, Ms. de Havilland also took note that the group rarely embraced the kind of independent spirit it publicly proclaimed. It always ended up siding with the Soviet Union even though the rank-and-file members were noncommunist. “I thought, ‘If we reserve the right to criticize the American policies, why don't we reserve the right to criticize Russia?’” After scrutiny, Ms. de Havilland saw that this had become quite impossible.
As Ms. de Havilland returns to that time, her every word is deliberate, punctuated for maximum dramatic effect. “A motion that ordinarily would have no chance of being adopted by the entire membership would be introduced early in the meeting, and someone would filibuster so that the chairman would finally put the motion on the table,” she remembers. “Somebody else would then filibuster about another issue. And I thought, “Why is this?” The most intelligent men would get up and talk absolute drivel for 15 minutes. Most people got fatigued and would leave. And by 11 o'clock, there would be only about six people left—a nucleus—and me. And suddenly, the controversial motion was taken off the table, voted on, and passed.”
“I realized a nucleus of people was controlling the organization without a majority of members of the board being aware of it. And I knew they had to be communists.”
The same strategy was used in the same era in less glamorous contexts. According to my father, there was an attempted Communist takeover of the Chemistry Club at Queens College in the 1940s. Their tactic was to extend meeetings until everybody else got bored and went home and they could vote for their agenda. (This was stopped by putting a time limit on meetings.)
Calvin Trillin mentioned the same tactics in the essay “The New New Right” in his collection Uncivil Liberties:
It was known by then why Communists in the thirties had found it easy to outlast everyone until they became a majority in any meeting they wanted to take over: no one else could bear to sit through their speeches.
Of course, everybody knows the Communists are opposed to Plutocrats.
One Reason Today's Muslims Are Acting Nuts
On an earlier occasion, I theorized that today's Muslims are trying to imitate Jews … but they're imitating Jews as described by loonies. In addition, they might be imitating the way real Jews have acted 1900 years ago back when real Jews were loonies. (This was also covered in the movie Life of Brian. It might not look serious, but it was remarkably accurate.) I don't know if this is deliberate, but if it is, the Muslims should note that the Jews lost the resulting wars.
Statistics from an Alternate Universe
A recent study of religion and excess weight sounded plausible until I got to the following paragraphs:
Ferraro's study also found that about 20 percent of "Fundamentalist Protestants," (Church of Christ, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God and Church of God); about 18 percent of "Pietistic Protestants," (Methodist, Christian Church and African Methodist Episcopal), and about 17 percent of Catholics were obese.
By contrast, about 1 percent of the Jewish population and less than 1 percent of other non-Christians, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others), were tipping the scales with commensurate gusto.
What's the color of the sky on their planet?
Do We Have to Rename Element 94 Now?
Plutonium was named after the next planet beyond Neptune …
Lamont for Senate!
No, I haven't gone insane.
The recent unpleasantness in Lebanon indicated the degree of cluelessness in the Israeli political class. Israel clearly needs a politician who has a clue and is liberal enough for Israeli voters. If an American Jewish politician who fits that description is looking for a job in a few months …
Addendum: There's another candidate in the race.
Crackpot Alert!
The latest paranoid theory about the collapse of the World Trade Center is that it's very suspicious that Tower 7 collapsed even despite less apparent damage than Towers 5 and 6:
From this image, which building seems the more likely to collapse? The 47 story behemoth with limited fire in a few floors - or a nine story shell completely engulfed by fire and flames from top to bottom? Yet it was Building 7 and not 5 that collapsed on the afternoon of September 11.
On the contrary, a small building is more likely to remain standing even with a weakened skeleton. A skyscraper is a fight between gravity and steel. In a small building there's no contest.
By the way, wouldn't a fake controlled demolition also include demolishing Buildings 5 and 6?
Apocalypse Some Other Time
Iran couldn't even manage to produce an imitation Tet Offensive.
Plagiarizing Hollywood
The following passage from The Belmont Club sounds familiar:
Die Welt relates the experience of an Israeli officer who fought Hezbollah during the early 1980s. Israel had artillery, tanks, airplanes to Hezbollahs guns and knives. But Israel was a liberal democracy and Hezbollah a ruthless criminal organization. The overmatch in will made knives were more powerful than tanks because Hezbollah was willing to use them unhesitatingly. "Hezbollah’s barbarism is legendary. Gen. Effe Eytam, an Israeli veteran of that first Lebanon war, tells of how--after Israel had helped bring "Doctors without Borders" into a village in the 1980s to treat children--local villagers lined up 50 kids the next day to show Eytam the price they pay for cooperating with the West. Each of the children had had their pinky finger cut off."
The above tactic was obviously plagiarized from the movie Apocalypse Now:
Kurtz:
I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms.
On the other hand, Communism was discredited so badly that the United States might soon have a military base in Vietnam. (Real message to Islamofascists: You're a pale imitation of an imitation of a bunch of losers! Nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, nyaaaahhhh, phphphphtttt!!!!)
This Must Be from a Mole
According to an article in the American Family Association Journal, a large percentage of college freshmen who were “born-again” Christians were no longer such upon graduation. This is sufficiently close to the opinions of self-congratulatory atheists that I suspect the article in question was written by an atheist mole.
I won't do more than mention that the article in question did not mention sample sizes (the large swings between the two sets of surveys might be due to random fluctuations in small samples), or the lack of either type of control (they did not mention what happened to “born-again” Christians who didn't attend college or what happened to the previously-unsaved in college). There was a study that had neither flaw that found that students left college with opinions similar the ones they started with.
To the extent there is liberal brainwashing, I suspect it occurs in dormrooms, not classrooms. Judging by Yale University's reaction to Orthodox Jewish students who wanted to live off campus, the “campus lifestyle” is regarded as more important than any verifiable learning. Many college students graduate with a tremendous load of misinformation (for example, that plutonium is the most poisonous substance on Earth) and I doubt if that was taught in the classroom.
Has there been any study comparing the opinion changes during college of students attending commuter schools vs. residential schools?
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