Switching back to Blogger
I’m switching back to my Blogger blog, at least for a while, because I want to use a neat gadget that WordPress doesn’t support. It’s NeoEarth from NeoWorx. It’s an interactive map of everyone looking at the site.
O’Reilly says higher Canadian life expectancy is “to be expected” because “we have 10 times as many people”
Couldn’t resist. See MediaMATTERS for America.
Why they’re called the Van Allen belts —
Bob Park
rather than being named after a Russian scientist. From “What’s new” by Bob Parks.
POLITICAL SCIENCE: WHY THE USSR LOST THE SPACE RACE. Launched on 4 Oct 1957, Sputnik carried no instruments. It just beeped as it passed overhead to taunt Americans. But a month later, Sputnik 2 carried a Geiger tube and a radio transmitter to relay the Geiger output back to Earth. It also carried a tape recorder to store data when the satellite is over the horizon, but it wasn’t working on launch day. Soviet scientists placed a call directly to Premier Nikita Khrushchev requesting permission to delay the launch for a day, but Khrushchev refused; he wanted to announce another successful launch at a meeting of heads-of-state the next day. At the very dawn of the space age, politics was already getting in the way of scientific discovery. Thus it was that the Soviet Union failed to make the first important discovery in space science, as we see below.
VAN ALLEN BELTS: THE FIRST IMPORTANT DISCOVERY IN SPACE. On 31 Jan 1958, only four months after Sputnik, the US launched Explorer 1 carrying an experiment designed by James Van Allen, Physics Chair at the University of Iowa. It was just a Geiger tube, a radio transmitter, and a recorder — but the recorder worked. Data from a full orbit confirmed the existence of charged particle bands around Earth, now known as the Van Allen belts. It was the first major discovery from beyond the ionosphere. Soviet scientists were crushed; only four months after Sputnik the US had taken the lead in space science and has never relinquished it. Manned space flight remains a sideshow. In the end, all that will endure is the science. James Van Allen was the true American space hero. During a long talk with Jim a year before his death in 2006, he summed-up manned space flight: “It’s so old– fashioned.”
They wanted to be next to each other when they died
Here are excerpts from an article from the NYT on a British orchestra conductor who ended his life so that he could die with his ailing wife.
[O]ne of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, Sir Edward Downes, had flown to Switzerland last week with his wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided by an assisted-suicide clinic.
Although friends who spoke to the British news media said Sir Edward was not known to have been terminally ill, they said he wanted to die with his ailing wife, who had been his partner for more than half a century.
The couple’s children said in an interview with The London Evening Standard that on Tuesday of last week they accompanied their father, 85, and their mother, Joan, 74, on the flight to Zurich, where the Swiss group Dignitas helped arrange the suicides. On Friday, the children said, they watched, weeping, as their parents drank “a small quantity of clear liquid” before lying down on adjacent beds, holding hands.
“Within a couple of minutes they were asleep, and died within 10 minutes,” Caractacus Downes, the couple’s 41-year-old son, said in the interview after his return to Britain. “They wanted to be next to each other when they died.” He added, “It is a very civilized way to end your life, and I don’t understand why the legal position in this country doesn’t allow it.”
Sir Edward, who was described in a statement issued earlier on Tuesday by Mr. Downes and his sister, Boudicca, 39, as “almost blind and increasingly deaf,” was principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra from 1980 to 1991. He was also a conductor of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, where he led 950 performances over more than 50 years.
Lady Downes, who British newspapers said was in the final stages of terminal cancer, was a former ballet dancer, choreographer and television producer who devoted her later years to working as her husband’s assistant.
“After 54 happy years together, they decided to end their own lives rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems,” the Downes children said in their statement. …
Attempting suicide has not been a criminal offense in Britain since 1961, but assisting others to kill themselves is. But sincethe Zurich clinic run by Dignitas was established in 1998 under Swiss laws that allow clinics to provide lethal drugs, British authorities have effectively turned a blind eye to Britons who go there to die. …
But British news reports about the Downeses’ suicides noted one factor that appeared to set the case apart from others involving the Dignitas clinic: Sir Edward appeared not to have been terminally ill. There have been at least three other cases similar to the Downeses’, in which a spouse who was not terminally ill chose to die with the other. …
Friends of Sir Edward said that his decision to die with his wife did not surprise them. “Ted was completely rational,” said Richard Wigley, the general manager of the BBC Philharmonic. “So I can well imagine him, being so rational, saying, ‘It’s been great, so let’s end our lives together.’ ”
MOND, an alternative to dark matter
From NewScientist.com.
Mordehai Milgrom
[Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND)] provides an alternative theory to dark matter to explain why stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies are not flung out into space. These stars are travelling at speeds too fast for conventional gravity from the mass at the heart of a spiral galaxy to hold them in their orbits, so something else must be keeping them on track.
One theory is that invisible dark matter provides that extra pull. But an alternative is MOND, devised in the early 1980s by Mordehai Milgrom, now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
One of the suggestions behind MOND is that the gravity experienced by the galaxy’s outer stars is somehow stronger than what would be expected under Newtonian physics. MOND has it that below a critical threshold acceleration, called a0, gravity switches from the conventional Newtonian form that weakens with the inverse-square of distance to a stronger form that declines merely with the inverse of distance.
In other words, Milgrom proposed that gravity was stronger than expected at the low accelerations experienced by the outermost orbiting stars.
By quantifying a0 at 10-10 metres per second per second, this single parameter makes it possible to explain stellar motion in hundreds of spiral galaxies. By contrast, the dark matter idea requires different amounts of the stuff with a different distribution in each galaxy.
This theory has been around for a while. But now it may be possible to test it.
Milgrom reasons that if Newton’s laws are correct, there will be a region between the sun and the centre of the galaxy where the gravity from both cancels out. But this is also where any MOND-based departure from Newtonian gravity will most clearly show up. In other words, if there is gravity in this region, where there should be none, then MOND exists.
If MOND exists, it will appear as if there is an anomalous, “phantom” mass in that region, exerting a gravitational force on the bodies in our solar system. And because this phantom force originates from a broad zone rather than a defined single point, it would exert a pull on the planets from two directions at the same time – a so-called “quadrupole” effect.
Individual benefit vs. collective harm
in a nice column Robert H. Frank of Cornell discusses cases in which individual benefit produce collective harm.
[The] mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods. …
If male elk could vote to scale back their antlers by half, they would have compelling reasons for doing so, because only relative antler size matters. Of course, they have no means to enact such regulations.
But humans can and do. By calling our attention to the conflict between individual and group interest, Darwin has identified the rationale for much of the regulation we observe in modern societies — including steroid bans in sports, safety and hours regulation in the workplace, product safety standards and the myriad restrictions typically imposed on the financial sector.
The message is that there are certain sorts of competitions that if permitted would be harmful to society. For example, we should not permit workers to compete with each other by agreeing to work under increasingly hazardous conditions. Competition of that sort might produce economic benefits for the immediate employer, but the overall cost to society of that sort of competition would out-weigh whatever immediate economic benefit such competition would produce.
Similarly certain forms of financial competition–especially those that involve extraordinary leverage among large organizations–should not be permitted. These competitions will produce economic gains, but they may also result in losses that are catastrophic not only to the competitors but to society as a whole. That, of course, is the argument for regulation of financial transactions.
Making tools a part of our bodies
From The Scientist.com.
 |
| Holding the tool at an elongated arm’s length Image: Lucilla Cardinali |
“To be accurate in doing an action with a tool, you need to make the tool become a part of your body,” the study’s first author Lucilla Cardinali of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in Bron and Claude Bernard University in Lyon told The Scientist. “Your brain needs to take into account that the action is performed with something added to your body part.” …
Michael Polanyi made this point half a century ago in his Personal Knowledge.
Our subsidiary awareness of tools and probes can be regarded now as the act of making them a part of our own body. The way we use a hammer or a blind man uses his stick, shows in fact that in both cases we shift outward the points at which we make contact with the things that we observe as objects outside ourselves. We may test the tool for its effectiveness or the probe for its suitability, e.g., in discovering the hidden details of a cavity, but the tool and the probe can never lie in the field of those operations; they remain necessarily on our side of it, forming part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves out of them and assimilate them as parts of our own experience. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them.
Why we eat the way we do
From an article in the NYTimes about The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, a new book by David, Kessler, former head of the FDA.
Dr. Kessler reports that the Snickers bar, for instance, is “extraordinarily well engineered.” As we chew it, the sugar dissolves, the fat melts and the caramel traps the peanuts so the entire combination of flavors is blissfully experienced in the mouth at the same time.
The solution?
One of his main messages is that overeating is not due to an absence of willpower, but a biological challenge made more difficult by the overstimulating food environment that surrounds us. “Conditioned hypereating” is a chronic problem that is made worse by dieting and needs to be managed rather than cured, he said. And while lapses are inevitable, Dr. Kessler outlines several strategies that address the behavioral, cognitive and nutritional factors that fuel overeating.
Planned and structured eating and understanding your personal food triggers are essential. In addition, educating yourself about food can help alter your perceptions about what types of food are desirable. Just as many of us now find cigarettes repulsive, Dr. Kessler argues that we can also undergo similar “perceptual shifts” about large portion sizes and processed foods. For instance, he notes that when people who once loved to eat steak become vegetarians, they typically begin to view animal protein as disgusting.
The advice is certainly not a quick fix or a guarantee, but Dr. Kessler said that educating himself in the course of writing the book had helped him gain control over his eating.
“For the first time in my life, I can keep my weight relatively stable,” he said. “Now, if you stress me and fatigue me and put me in an airport and the plane is seven hours late — I’m still going to grab those chocolate-covered pretzels. The old circuitry will still show its head.”
A great story about forgetting what’s real
From James Hamilton in Econbrowser.
How to lose on a sure-fire bet
There was a wonderful story in today’s WSJ about how some big banks managed to lose some of their hard-earned TARP money.
Let me begin with a little background. A credit default swap is sometimes described as an insurance contract written against the possibility of default of a particular underlying asset. If I buy a CDS and the specified asset defaults, I get to collect money from whoever sold me the contract. If I also have a long position in the asset in question, I might consider buying a CDS written against that asset as an insurance or hedge against the possibility that the asset loses its value.
But I don’t actually have to own the asset in question in order to buy a CDS from somebody else. I might want to buy a CDS as a partial hedge against some other asset I hold with which the specified security could be correlated. Or maybe I just feel like making a bet with somebody I think is dumber than I am.
The fun and games begin when multiple contracts get written on a single credit event and the notional value of outstanding contracts on that event– the total amount of money that is promised to be paid to the buyers of those CDS in the event of a default on the underlying asset– becomes larger than the par value of the underlying asset itself. Then it would clearly pay the party who sold those contracts to buy the underlying asset itself at par, relieve the original debtors of their burdensome obligations, and be out only $X (the underlying event) rather than some multiple of $X (all the contracts written on the event).
And so the WSJ recounts the tale of a security based on $29 million (par) worth of subprime loans in California, half of which were already delinquent or in default. Betting that the loans weren’t worth $29 million sounds like easy money, and the smart guys were willing to pay 80 to 90 cents for each dollar of CDS insurance.
It appears from the WSJ account as if little Amherst Holdings of Austin, Texas was happy to sell the big guys like J.P. Morgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Bank of America something like $130 million notional CDS on a $27 million credit event, used the proceeds to buy off and make good the underlying subprime loans, and pocketed $70 million or so for their troubles. The big guys, on the other hand, paid perhaps a hundred million and got back zip.
Said big guys, naturally, are screaming bloody murder, trying to bring in the lawyers to show that Amherst wasn’t playing by the rules of the game.
For my money, the first rule we need would be a law, not a rule, that notional not exceed actual.
Barring that, here’s another rule I trust: a fool and his money are soon parted.
There is a moral to this story beyond its amusement value. The moral is that it’s what real that matters. The banks are arguing (apparently) that Amherst didn’t play by the rules. But in fact, the point of a CDS is to insure lenders against loss. Since Amherst paid off the loans, it did exactly what the rules required. No creditor lost any money.
The banks obviously forgot about the underlying reality and started to think of CDSs as simply bets that a borrower would default. In some sense a CDS is a bet, but it isn’t just a bet. The bottom line is that it is an insurance policy against an event happening, not a bet on an event. There is a difference—especially when it’s possible to prevent the event from happening.
A significant aspect of the difference is that a bet presumes that the betters will not effect the outcome. In this case, since the bet depended on an outcome that was easy to control, Amherst was able to turn the event to their advantage. Why was the bet easy to control? Because the bet was about a phenomenon that concerned a finite (and in this case small) number of objects. Most economic bet are presumed to be about very large numbers of objects that cannot be easily manipulated. In this case that was not true. In some ways this was similar to manipulating a market. Markets are not supposed to be manipulated. The idea of a market is that it’s so large that any one participant isn’t going to control it. But in this case Amherst could easily control the market (the event) quite easily. Not only that, the result of its control was aligned with the original intention of CDSs, which makes their action commendable as well as profitable and amusing.
Free My Phone
A petition to sign at FreeMyPhone.
Dear [Decision Maker],
New “smart” phones have set the stage for the future of a mobile Internet. But companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting in the way by shackling open and innovative devices to closed networks. The FCC and Congress must step in to protect consumers and foster innovation. We demand:
1. The freedom to choose any phone on any network.
2. The freedom to choose among many carriers in a competitive, low-cost marketplace.
3. The freedom to access any Web content, applications or services we want through our phones.Sincerely,
