Reflections on prayer (long)

Dear J.,

Can I share with you a couple of experiences from the Army that made me think? In English not Latin this time. :) Both concern communication between heaven and earth.

The first one is about one of my buddies.

Right after we got to Ft. Benning, we spent about 10 days in a reception battalion, basically doing paperwork and getting issued equipment (and eating chow, and standing in lots of lines all day in order to do all these things). This guy, Private Ontiveros, joined the Army in large part to support his girlfriend and their daughter, in particular so his daughter would have access to medical care through the Army system. However, it turns out that because they're not married, he needed to have a paternity test in order for his daughter to be acknowledged as his by the Army. Fortunately for him, he'd had one done previously for some reason (something about a custody struggle at a point when he and his girlfriend's relationship had been on the rocks) and he just needed his girlfriend to fax the info for him. However, he's been waiting for it for a while and it was almost time for us to ship out downrange and start actual training, and he still didn't have the fax reply. He was quite concerned about it, and the night before we had to leave he approached me privately and asked me to pray on his behalf that the fax would come through. (I did so, silently. "Dear Heavenly Father, I know you're aware of this already and you may already be on it, but would you please help Ontiveros get his daughter's paternity results in time? I would really appreciate it. Thank you. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.") I presume he probably asked the same thing to a few of the other guys who were also Christians. I talked to him the next day, right before we left, and he was really happy. He had been going through the old faxes from the previous week, and a name on one of the faxes happened to catch his eye as being his girlfriend's grandmother's name. It turned out to be the paternity test result fax, and it had actually arrived several days prior, it had just gotten overlooked. Everything turned out okay.

Reflection:

The experience made me think about how what was actually needed to answer Ontiveros' prayer was not to make something *happen* (fax arrive), but to make something *known* (the fax had already arrived), and how that is not that unusual. Many prayers can be answered by inspiration through the Holy Ghost, as I think happened in this case, without doing *anything* with anything made from molecules which a normal person would call a "miracle".

The second experience I want to share is my own.

About a week before HBL (Holiday Block Leave), and the day before we were scheduled to take a PT (Physical Training) test, I got a bad muscle cramp or something in my left calf. I tried stretching it out and drinking water, but the muscle was still knotted up or something several hours later, and in fact it was feeling worse--my tendons felt hyperextended as if I'd been stretching too far for too long and it was getting pretty distracting. I was going to say a quick prayer asking for it to get better quickly, but someone I felt that would be inappropriate. Instead I felt that this was a trial which was supposed to last for a while, and that it would be better to ask for there to be no permanent injury, and for me to endure it well in the meantime. Later that night it was feeling yet worse and I was resting when Private Messmer noticed that my calf was swollen to about twice normal size--so it wasn't just a muscle cramp, there was something going on--which alarmed everyone sufficiently that I had to go to the hospital emergency room to get checked out. (The Army is really concerned with preventing injuries.) Several hours later they had ruled out anything immediately serious, but still didn't know exactly what the problem was. I was issued crutches and told to keep weight off that leg for a few days and to come back for a followup ultrasound on Monday. It is, by the way, extremely annoying to try to function in boot camp while wearing crutches--either you try to carry your own stuff and it's awkward physically, or someone helpfully carries your stuff for you and it's awkward socially. By Tuesday night things hadn't improved noticeably--still couldn't put much weight on the leg without cramping up, still going crazy from residual feelings of hypertension in the tendon--and I was ready to be done with crutches, but the doctors still had no idea what was wrong. After thinking it over, I decided that it no longer felt inappropriate to pray for the injury to get better, and I did[1]. By morning I felt functionally improved to the point where the crutches were more trouble than they were worth--I no longer felt hypertension when standing, could walk unassisted, and could even run for short distances again. The calf was still swollen (even as I write this it's still about 1 cm bigger around than my right calf, although partly maybe that's because of fencing :)) and the doctors still spend a few more days worrying about it, but the real problem was gone.

Reflection:

For me, the interesting part of this experience was what was described in Doctrine and Covenants 46:28-30, being inspired what to pray for and what not to, and also knowing how that prayer would be answered. It's the first time I can remember experiencing anything like that.

"And it shall come to pass that he that asketh in Spirit shall receive in Spirit... He that asketh in the Spirit asketh according to the will of God; wherefore it is done even as he asketh."

-M.

[1] I also felt it was appropriate to ask for a blessing of healing from two guys in my platoon, Private Kelly and Private Allred in my platoon, who I had recently learned were both ordained elders in the priesthood--rather unusual for a military platoon to have three of us there but so it was. We found a handy supply closet and discreetly did the blessing in there just before bedtime.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
-Jordan Rixon

"They said it couldn't be done, and he did it"

Via LambdaTheUltimate.org, Herb Sutter has some interesting things to say about C's contribution to the modern world of programming:

http://herbsutter.com/2011/10/12/dennis-ritchie/

Bjarne Stroustrup made an eloquent point about the importance of Ritchie's contributions to our field:"They said it couldn't be done, and he did it."

Here's what Bjarne meant:

Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths (8 bits per byte doesn't suit you? how about 9? or 7? or how about sometimes 6 and sometimes 12?) and memory addressing (don't like 16-bit pointers? how about 18-bit pointers, and oh by the way those aren't pointers to bytes, they're pointers to words?).

There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware. Fortran did okay for array-oriented number-crunching code, but nobody could do it for general-purpose code such as what you'd use to build just about anything down to, oh, say, an operating system.

So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they're competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language.

How silly. Everyone knew it couldn't be done.

C is a poster child for why it's essential to keep those people who know a thing can't be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world's first portable and efficient programming language to build the world's first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.)

Thanks, Dennis.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Shipping containers & cost of trade

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/09/19/keith_tatlinger_shipping_container_inventor_dies/

Time was, plain old "how many miles away?" geography shaped trade networks. That didn't really last all that long, only until ships were invented and economic or trade geography became a thing of shipping routes. A millennia BC and Phoenicians were getting tin from Cornwall while people in Somerset weren't all that sure that Cornwall existed (a little extreme, yes, but not much). We're all aware of how the Portuguese navigators changed the spice trade, cutting out the various grasping hands in the Middle East looking for a slice, but the continuing superiority in cost of sea freight over land, even with railways, can astonish. It certainly astonished me to find that in the 1860s, getting wheat from Chicago to New York cost 17 per cent of the Chicago wheat value, while getting it from New York to London only cost 12 per cent of that Chicago value of wheat*.

What the shipping container has done is just about entirely take away geographical distance as a determinant of freight costs. It really doesn't cost much more to ship something from China to Europe than it does to ship something inside Europe. Beijing, Brisbane, Brindisi and Birmingham, they're really all just nodes on the container shipping routes and getting from one node to another costs about the same amount, wherever in the world they are.

OK, this is not entirely and strictly true, there are slight differences in shipping costs, but near enough as to make no difference. It's near impossible to pay more than $5,000 to get 40 tonnes in a container from any one node to any one other. [I]t costs $125 a tonne to get stuff from Shenzhen to Sheffield or from Santiago to Savannah.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

UW CS and Bioscience in the news

I bet J. would find this interestesting. FoldIt was created at UW.

http://scienceblog.com/47894/gamers-succeed-where-scientists-fail/

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

McGurk effect

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/09/seeing-is-hearing-the-mcgurk-effect.html

I can't describe it. Just watch 0:45 to 1:05. This is so bizarre.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

"The science is settled"

Except it never really is. Because if it were settled, it would be engineering and not science.

Anyway, I thought this was interesting.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6544701.ece

Scientists have discovered that dinosaurs may have been much lighter and sleeker than previously thought because of potential flaws in the equations used to calculate their weight.

The findings could force researchers to rethink many of their beliefs, particularly about giant plant eaters such as apatosaurus which had been thought to weigh up to 37 tons. The creature's real weight was closer to 18 tons, according to new calculations.

Tyrannosaurus rex, the best-known predatory species, may have been far more lithe than imagined and able to move and turn at high speed.

"Palaeontologists have for 25 years used a statistical model to estimate the body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large extinct animals," said Gary Packard, from Colorado State University, whose research will appear in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology this week. 

"We have found that the statistical model is seriously flawed and the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed."

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Burt Rutan : engineer

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/16/burt-rutan-engineer-aviationspace-pioneer-and-climate-skeptic/

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

A scientific/political controversy

Via Jerry Pournelle. The acid in the intro would have been better saved for the conclusion, but it's an interesting read.

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=4311

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Article: Bill Gates on improving education

J.,

You may find this article interesting from a scientific perspective.

"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."

Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students' education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.

"We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year," he says. "Well, I'm enough of a scientist to want to say, 'What is it about a great teacher? Is it their ability to calm down the classroom or to make the subject interesting? Do they give good problems and understand confusion? Are they good with kids who are behind? Are they good with kids who are ahead?

There is also some discussion of approaches that aren't cost-effective (smaller schools), and how teacher's unions are torn between sticking up for their weakest members (people who shouldn't be teachers) vs. sticking up for good education.

Have a good day!

-M.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Grand Strategy of Al Gore

Insightful article on the grand strategy of the green movement. This quote made me think:

Gore's self-presentation  as a condescending, de haut en bas Great Explainer patiently enlightening the rubes so infuriates many of his opponents that they cannot help themselves.  They start arguing with him about hockey sticks and CO2. This is exactly what Mr. Gore wants; it moves the argument onto his strongest terrain.  Whatever one thinks of the scientific evidence for climate change, Gore is on much stronger ground when he argues that the earth is warming than when he argues that a great green global treaty on the lines he proposes can ever be either adopted or enforced.

It's certainly true that my own irritation with the AGW folks is essentially methodological: not that their beliefs are wrong but that they are unproven and unscientific. It offends me that someone would claim that something (positive temperature feedback) is 100% accurate when it's actually somewhere between perhaps 30% and 80%, and yet the observation is correct that Gore is undoubtedly much happier talking about science which is 60% certain than policy which is about 1% likely to be workable or cost-effective. So from a policy perspective, debating the science of climate change is playing into his hands.

Ironically, though, I'm a lot more sympathetic to the policy aims than the science. In a general sense, I DO support environmentalism. I support research into clean energy (esp. solar and nuclear) and I pay extra money for free-range chicken eggs and meat (although I don't care if it's "organic"). But I get really exercised about untruths and unprofessional science.

-Max

[1] Nothing in science is ever 100% accurate. Newtonian physics is terrifically well-supported by everyday experience, is used by civil and mechanical engineers every day, is simple and intuitive... and it's wrong, as Einstein pointed out with Special Relativity. But Special Relativity is wrong too, according to General Relativity. And General Relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics, so we know one of them must be wrong. All of these theories are immeasurably better-supported and better-tested than positive temperature feedback via CO2 emissions (i.e. "global warming").

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Bayesian Inference in F#

Recommended: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lucabol/archive/2008/11/26/bayesian-inference-in-f-part-iia-a-simple-example-modeling-maia.aspx

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Do-it-yourself medicine?

I'm not sure whether this resource is targeting doctors or sick individuals but it is interesting. $59 per month ($395 per year) so it's not for casual readers, but if you're seriously interested in your health it might be worth it. Like homeschooling.

http://info.firstconsult.com/

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Iran and Nukes: What's the cost of preventing acquisition?

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=982

It may be too simple to reduce the argument to just two sides—those who fear the regime's acquisition of nuclear weapons more than the consequences of a war to prevent it, and those who fear the consequences of a war above all else—but in this case simplicity has the virtue of capturing the essence as observers ponder which set of unpalatable risks they would rather run. What is remarkable, though hardly surprising, is that the two sides usually put forth very different assessments of what using force would entail. Those who fear Iranian nukes above all else tend to minimize the risks of using force, while those who fear war tend to exaggerate them. Neither side, however, has persuasively spelled out the reasons for their assessment, leading one to suspect that much of the argument rests on less than rigorous analysis.

What would an honest assessment of the risks of military conflict with Iran look like? How should we think about it? These are difficult questions even for those who are not partisans of one side or the other. Wars are notorious for yielding unintended and unexpected consequences; for reasons explained below, a war against Iran is even harder than usual to bound analytically.

At least three concepts are key to any coherent discussion of a U.S.-Iranian military engagement: complexity, uncertainty and war itself. By complexity we mean the number of moving parts in a given situation: actors, processes and the connections among them. By uncertainty we mean structural uncertainty—that is, not just ignorance of the magnitudes of agreed casual factors, but the ignorance of the causal factors themselves, and their mutual relations. For example, not only may the U.S. government not know, say, the technical status of the Iranian nuclear program, or the actual state of readiness of Iranian forces. It may not know (or worse, have wrong) the decision-making and implementation protocols of the Iranian government, how the Iranian people and military would react to an attack, what Tehran would ask its allies and proxies to do, and what in fact they will do.

As to the meaning of war, it may hardly seem worthwhile to probe something so self-evident, except that it is not self-evident anymore, if it ever was. A simple definition of war is the waging of armed conflict against an enemy, but this is too limited a concept in the 21st century. War in our time involves simultaneous conflict in the military, diplomatic, economic and social domains on four levels: political, strategic, operational and tactical.³ While a war with Iran might begin in the military domain, it would likely expand to others, and while it might begin at the operational or tactical level it would soon encompass strategic and political levels as well.

How these twin expansions would take place has everything to do with context. All wars have one. Would a U.S.-Iran war break out during a protracted diplomatic process, or in the absence or abeyance of one? Would it happen during a period of increasing tension and military readiness, or out of the blue, after one party thinks that the dangers of war have subsided? Would the U.S. government assemble a broad "coalition of the willing", just a few close allies-in-arms at the ready, or go it alone, even actively dissuading Israel from joining an attack? What would the domestic political situation be in the United States? Would there be an internal political consensus to act, or would there be an active, acrimonious debate? Would the American people be prepared for the aftermath of an initial attack, including rising oil prices and falling stock values? What would the economic situation be like in the United States and beyond? The answers to these questions would have a substantial impact on the war's course, conduct and outcome.

Excellent article, highly recommended.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Biological warfare

Interesting from a couple of perspectives: interpreting intelligence, and what an actual government cover-up looks like. For one thing, initial reports were both basically true (there had been a biological disaster) and inaccurate (60-100 deaths, not 1000). For one thing, an effective cover-up will have lots of sincere spokesmen who sincerely deny that anything sinister occurred, because they've been lied to as well. So how do you tell a phony conspiracy from a genuine one? I have no idea.

Emphasis added.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/

 The first reports emerged in October 1979 by way of a Russian-language newspaper in Frankfurt, West Germany that was close to the Soviet emigre community, which ran a brief report lacking any details about a major germ accident leading to deaths estimated in the thousands taking place in Russia.(1)  New details emerged in this same paper in early 1980, with reports of an explosion in April 1979 at a secret military installation near Sverdlovsk that released a large amount of anthrax spores into the air, again with a thousand people estimated dead from the disease. 

...The Soviets replied angrily to these accusations, claiming that the deaths in Sverdlovsk were the result of eating tainted meat. A Tass article entitled "A Germ of Lying," which was published on March 24,1980, was typical, in combining the Soviet argument that a natural outbreak of anthrax, which was endemic to the area, with condemnation of the U.S. accusations as part of a plan for "spurring up the arms race and] intensifying tensions in the relations between states," calling into question the validity of the 1972 biological arms convention, and waging psychological warfare against the USSR.(2)  U.S. intelligence analysts quickly dismissed the Soviet explanation as not in accordance with the evidence.

...Soviet scientists again presented this explanation along with examples of the autopsy data at scientific meetings in Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Cambridge in April 1988 arranged by Meselson, who gave his view that the tainted-meat explanation was "completely plausible and consistent" with current knowledge about anthrax. Also lending plausibility to the Soviet version was the fact that veterinarians had reported animal deaths from anthrax before doctors reported human fatalities at Sverdlovsk. Though Meselson agreed there was need for a thorough investigation of the U.S. accusations, Meselson testified before a Senate hearing in 1989 that the evidence supported the Soviet explanation, not an explosion at a Soviet biological weapons facility.

...Yeltsin had a personal connection to the Sverdlovsk issue, as he had been Communist Party chief in the region at the time of the anthrax outbreak, and he believed the KGB and military had lied to him about the true explanation. At a summit meeting with President George Bush in February 1992, Yeltsin told Bush that he agreed with U.S. accusations regarding Soviet violation of the 1972 biological weapons convention, that the Sverdlovsk incident was the result of an accident at a Soviet biological warfare installation, and promised to clean up this problem. In a  May 27th interview, Yeltsin publicly revealed what he had told Bush in private:

    "We are still deceiving you, Mr. Bush. We promised to eliminate bacteriological weapons. But some of our experts did everything possible to prevent me from learning the truth. It was not easy, but I outfoxed them. I caught them red-handed. I found two test sites. They are inoculating tracts of land with anthrax, allowing wild animals to go there and observing them..."(5)

...Here, they were allowed to see autopsy slides of a key area between the lungs of the Sverdlovsk victims, which clearly showed the characteristic signs of damage found in cases of inhalation anthrax. This joined with other new evidence: the rediscovery of information from 1950s anthrax studies that indicated inhalation anthrax could take weeks to become symptomatic, not just days, and data on wind patterns and the clustering of anthrax victims around Sverdlovsk, which supported the airborne vector explanation.The 1993 visit allowed Meselson to fill in the final gaps, placing the identified victims clearly within the plume of deadly anthrax spores that the data on wind patterns at the time indicated.

Regarding the actual cause of the release, information later obtained from people involved with the Soviet biological warfare effort revealed that the cause of the anthrax release in Sverdlovsk was the failure by maintenance personnel to replace a critical filter in a vent serving the anthrax production facility.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Perspective

Optimist: the glass is half full.
Pessimist: the glass is half empty.
Realist: the glass exists.
Idealist: well, the glass SHOULD be full.
Fatalist: it's just going to evaporate anyway.
Anarchist: break the glass!
Capitalist: let's sell this glass!
Feminist: HIS glass looks fuller than MY glass.
Chemist: the glass is 50% H2O, 40% N2, and 10% O2.
Engineer: the glass is twice the required size.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

Interesting polling technique

Link: http://www.public-consultation.org/studies/budget_feb11.html

Linked from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/04/25/politicians_not_public_to_blame_for_debt_crisis_ryan_obama_deficit_study_americans_concessions_109648.html

 

The most interesting thing about this is the technique of enabling Americans to play with the budget interactively instead of just asking for visceral policy preferences like "balance the budget".

 

On average respondents made net spending cuts of $145.7 billion. The largest cuts included those to defense ($109.4 billion), intelligence ($13.1 billion), military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq ($12.8 billion) and the federal highway system ($4.6 billion)--all of which were cut by majorities.

 

On average respondents increased revenues by $291.6 billion. The largest portion was from income taxes which were raised by an average of $154.8 billion above the levels currently in place. Majorities increased taxes on incomes over $100,000 by 5% or more and increased them by 10% or more for incomes over $500,000.

 

Majorities also made increases in corporate taxes and alcohol taxes as well as new sources of revenue, including a tax on sugary drinks, treating 'carried interest' income as ordinary income (also known as the hedge fund managers' tax), and charging a crisis fee to large banks. A plurality (49%) favored a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. But a sales tax was rejected by 58 percent of respondents.

 

-Max

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

Pascal quote

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

        -Blaise Pascal. [On a paper discovered after his death, stitched into the lining of his coat. Dated 23 Nov 1654.]

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Private enterprise vs. NASA

From http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/2011/Q1/mail662.html:

 

"One last point of comparison, on the fundamental need to shut down NASA in-house space transport development in favor of procuring transportation on a commercial basis outside of the utterly dysfunctional NASA rocket bureaucracy: Ares 1/Orion were up to $49 billion projected cost to 2019 first flight when they were cancelled. SpaceX recently stated that their total cost for Falcon 9/Dragon development (actual first flight, 2010) has been $600 million so far. That's more than an 80 to 1 cost ratio, for considerably less than a 2 to 1 vehicle capability ratio."

 

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Science Is

J.,

 

Scientific praxis from a game theory perspective. Excerpt attached, bolding the key insight.

 

http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/1886-terence-kealey-what-does-climategate-say-about-science.html

 

Secrecy was originally normal: when around 1600 a young London obstetrician called Peter Chamberlen invented the obstetric forceps, for over a century he, his younger brother, his younger brother's son and that son's son (all obstetricians) kept the invention a secret. Rich women, knowing that the Chamberlens were the best obstetricians in Europe, engaged them to deliver their babies, but the price those women paid (apart from handsome fees) was to be blindfolded and trapped alone with the Chamberlens in a locked room during labour so that no one could discover the secret of the forceps. That emerged only during the 1720s when the last Chamberlen, having retired rich but childless, finally divulged it.

 

It was Robert Boyle who, by his leadership of the Royal Society of London, which was created exactly 350 years ago this year, negotiated (i) the convention whereby priority - and therefore esteem - goes to the scientist who publishes first, not to the scientist who might have made the discovery earlier but who has kept the findings secret, and (ii) the convention that papers are accepted for publication only if they contain a methods section as well as a results section, to allow reproducibility.

 

We see here, therefore, that science is not innately a public good: it is innately a discreet one where, in a state of nature, scientists would publish not their methods but only their findings . and where they would sometimes delay or obscure the publication even of those. But it was Boyle who realised, in classic game theory mode, that if the Fellows (aka members) of the infant Royal Society collaborated with each other in publishing their findings (i) openly, and (ii) including their methods sections, then the scientists within the Society would do better, by virtue of their access to the whole of the Societyfs membershipfs collective discoveries, than would those isolated researchers who worked outside the circle of mutual disclosure. And it was because the Royal Society's original experiments were conducted collectively but in the presence only of its Fellows, and because its publications were preferentially circulated to its Fellows, that the Fellows enjoyed an advantage over non-Fellows.

 

Science, therefore, only appears to be public because, over the centuries, most scientists globally have gradually modelled themselves on the Royal Society's 'new' conventions, the better to take advantage of the mutuality of knowledge. But not all scientists have done so completely, and as Birkhead showed in his THE article many disciplines have elaborated the convention of publishing their findings a year or two before they publish their data, thus keeping a lead on the further study of their data

 

My favorite definition for science is still Jerry Pournelle's, "Science is what you can put in a letter to another colleague and he'll get the same results you did." Therefore what she calls "science" I would call "research," with one (mine) being an individual activity and another (hers) being a social phenomenon. At any rate, when we talk about funding "scientific research" for example it is the social phenomenon (her definition) we are talking about. I would argue that the key problem for a society is trying to set the rules so that researchers engage in science instead of something else.

 

-M.

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

Schizophrenia pathogen

J.,

This article ("the insanity virus") reminds me of taxoplasma gondi and
Greg Cochran's pathogen theory of homosexuality. In this case these
researchers think they've identified the (a?) pathogen responsible for
schizophrenia: HERV-W, also implicated in multiple schlerosis cases.

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus/

The background on endogenous retroviruses is interesting too.

-M.

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Morality of lying

D.,
 
Interesting to see this discussed. I think you know already what my position is: God cannot lie, therefore followers of Christ cannot permit themselves to lie--lying, even in a good cause, is ultimately a dead end and should be swiftly repented of if you find you have engaged in it.
 
http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/02/the-on-line-journal-public-discourse-under-the-brilliant-editorship-of-ryan-anderson-has-become-a-key-site-for-people-inter.html

Here's an excerpt to give the flavor of the discussion. Emphasis added for a definition that I like.

 
Even apart from the invocation of religious authority, it seems to me that Tollefsen (with whom I am co-author of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life) is correct that lying is intrinsically wrong.  So the only way I can think of to defend Live Action's tactics is to argue that the utterances and actions of those who represented themselves as sex traffickers and prostitutes were not lies.  My sense is that Rick is inclined to defend Live Action's tactics in precisely this way.  I don't think it can possibly work when it comes to the utterances of the Live Action team.  They stated things they knew to be false precisely with a view to persuading the Planned Parenthood workers that they were true.  That's just what a lie is.  And their utterances were not made in a context of social conventions that could render a statement one knows to be false something other than a lie:  such as when someone invites a friend out for a "quiet meal" on his birthday, only to deliver him to a big surprise party in his honor.  Could Live Action have pulled off the sting without making false utterances?
 
I think the answer to that is probably yes.  And that takes us to the next question.  What about deceptions that do not involve false utterances?  Some are plainly wrong.  Others, however, seem pretty clearly not to be.  Tollefsen points out that Aquinas, while condemning lying even in justified wars, held that military feints are not necessarily lies and can be morally permissible. Getting to just what it is that distinguishes the two is, I predict, where this debate is heading---and that, I believe, is just where it should head.
 
-M.
--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Federal Wages (data on)

Some snippets:
 
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/yes-they-re-overpaid_541409.html
 
The specific econometric procedure is called "fixed effects," because it focuses on wage changes for individual workers, who have many characteristics that are fixed from year to year. One of the first economists to apply fixed effects analysis to the federal pay issue was Princeton's Alan Krueger in 1988. Using a dataset called the Displaced Workers Survey, Krueger found that workers who lost jobs in the private sector and then joined the federal government earned about 12 percent more than displaced workers who found another private sector job. (Somewhat ironically, Krueger would go on to become President Obama's chief economist at the Treasury Department.)  
 
A similar approach confined to postal workers reached a similar conclusion. In the late 1990s, the Postal Service surveyed all new hires, asking them how much they were paid in their previous job. Overall, new postal hires received salaries over 28 percent higher than what they had been paid in the private sector, which University of Pennsylvania law professor Michael Wachter and his co-authors called "enormous wage increases over their previous wages in full-time private sector jobs." 
 
A number of studies of fiscal consolidations in OECD countries over the past several decades have shown that reductions in the government wage bill—that is, the size and pay of the public sector work force—are an important part of larger efforts to balance the budget. A recent study published by the American Enterprise Institute showed that countries that succeeded in reducing their fiscal gaps placed a lot of weight on reducing public sector pay. 

Just as few federal employees quit their jobs, many private sector workers seek federal employment, seeing it as both well compensated and secure in a time when many private sector jobs are not. While data on the number of applicants per federal or private sector job are scant, research in the late 1980s indicated that federal jobs on average received 25 percent to 38 percent more applicants than private sector positions. A 1985 study by economist Steven Venti concluded that from 18 percent to 29 percent of workers would accept federal employment if offered. Roughly three times as many men would be willing to accept federal employment as are actually offered federal jobs; for women, the ratio is six times, implying that federal jobs provide a significantly more attractive overall package than private sector options. 

These results, Venti concluded, suggest "the government could continue to attract a workforce of current size with substantially lower wages." Moreover, even significantly lower wages would only slightly reduce the quality of federal job applicants. We will have the opportunity to test this view as the administration's pay freeze takes effect. Will federal quit rates rise as pay is frozen? We doubt it.

The devil is in the details. Cutting or freezing federal pay across the board would be an improvement over the status quo, but more fundamental reform is needed. Without a change in the basic system of setting pay, salaries could easily creep upward again with little fanfare. In addition, we do not want to cut the wages and benefits of certain federal workers—research scientists, engineers, and senior lawyers, for example—who are not currently overpaid.

-Max
 
--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.
 
If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Why Gold?

Why gold as a reserve currency? Here's a cogent explanation from intellectual-detox.com, emphasis added:

The Gold Standard

Some people ask the question: "Should the dollar be backed by a gold standard." But that is the wrong question. The right question is what will happen.

Any government that is strong enough will want to enact a fiat currency. If the government is greedy it will enact a fiat currency to reap the benefits of seinorage. If the government is benevolent (or thinks its benevolent) it will enact a fiat currency to smooth over economic fluctuations.

The world switched to a fiat currency when the U.S. had enough domestic and international hegemony to enforce the dollar as the global standard. The fallacy that many believe is that gold was made obsolete because of technology and "progress". They believe that somehow basing a currency off a inert, mostly useless metal is somehow archaic.

But gold is not a natural currency because its shiny. It's a natural currency because it is the best Schelling point/Nash equilibrium for a group of independent actors to settle on as a store of value. If you have five independent, mutually wary agents (either individuals or governments) trying to negotiate a common store of value, then gold is the default because a) no one can simply print infinite amounts of it b) it has the highest stocks to production ratio, so its has the least amount of dilution from mining.

As the American manufacturing base rots, its military fails at yet another war, and its political system continues to spin in circles, people and nations may start to lose faith in the dollar as a store of value. At that point, the most natural alternative as a reserve currency will be gold.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Food

From a friend: http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/health/2010/fall/sweet-satisfaction.shtml

Thinking about food makes you eat less.

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Interesting blog

Interesting blog. Will get added to my regular feed.

http://www.halfsigma.com/

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

MLK Day Terrorist Bomb

About four hours away from me: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-0119-spokane-bomb-20110119,0,3022661.story

Is al Qaeda diversifying outside of airports, or is this another lone crazy like Loughner?

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Marriage rate

This data is U.S.-only:

Age	1970	1999	2000	2002	2004	2008
Male:
20 to 24 years	35.8%	83.2%	83.7%	85.4%	86.7%	86.9%
25 to 29 years	10.5	52.1	51.7	53.7	56.6	57.6
30 to 34 years	6.2	30.7	30.0	34.0	33.4	32.4
35 to 39 years	5.4	21.1	20.3	21.1	23.4	23.0
40 to 44 years	4.9	15.8	15.7	16.7	18.5	16.9
Female:
20 to 24 years	54.7%	72.3%	72.8%	74.0%	75.4%	76.4%
25 to 29 years	19.1	38.9	38.9	40.4	40.8	43.4
30 to 34 years	9.4	22.1	21.9	23.0	23.7	24.0
35 to 39 years	7.2	15.2	14.3	14.7	14.6	15.2
40 to 44 years	6.3	10.9	11.8	11.5	12.2	12.9

(From http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0763219.html)

It used it be that 95% of 45-year-olds had been married at least once. According to this chart, it's now down to 87% for women, 83% for men. On one level this is worrisome: the U.S. is already underpopulated by global standards, by about x3, if you go by people per acre of arable land. On another, Darwinian level it's merely amusing. I predict that the marriage rate in 2070 will be at least as high in the United States as it is today, and families will probably be slightly larger, because the people who never marry (like me) will have bred themselves out of the gene pool...

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!