Eliminate unnecessary words:

The use prepositions is hardly important. One thing, they're difficult children learn and non-native speakers have lots trouble them. As me, I'm all it. Dumping prepositions trash basket would shorten my emails and this would save paper that we use produce books.

Barbara Ehrenreich on princesses:

In Princessland, the only career ladder leads from baby-faced adolescence to a position as an evil enchantress, stepmother or witch. Snow White's wicked stepmother is consumed with envy for her stepdaughter's beauty; the sea witch Ursula covets Ariel's lovely voice; Cinderella's stepmother exploits the girl's cheap, uncomplaining, labor. No need for complicated witch-hunting techniques--pin-prickings and dunkings--in Princessland. All you have to look for is wrinkles.

Of course I knew that our culture values appearance above just about everything else, especially for women. But I hadn't thought about how Disney associates physical beauty with moral goodness.

The Colorado Nonprofit Association just released their report on individual charitable giving. Because of previous research, I was ready to make fun of hypocritical Boulder, but it's really not that bad. Boulder's rate (3.8% of income) is better than the national average (3.6%) and a lot better than Denver. The winners are Colorado Springs (4.2%) and the zip codes inside the Air Force Academy (5.7%).

Too often I'm embarrassed by the public actions of Christians. But the recent stand of John Sentamu against the thug in charge of Zimbabwe is an important act of courage. Sentamu is the Archbishop of York, second in command in the Church of England, which is my church.

Before you click on the link, form a picture in your head of what the Archbishop of York should look like. There's more background here.

Local, independent businesses failing? Don't blame Wal-Mart. Blame your city council:

Local officials who simultaneously decry big box stores and national chains while doling out burdensome regulatory structures and complicated permit processes should understand that regulatory burdens hit the smaller, independent places hardest, because they're the places that have the smallest amount of discretionary cash to hire legal aid (or, if you're really cynical, to make the appropriate campaign contributions).

The article uses Alexandria, Virginia as an example, but he could be describing the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder.

Press release of the day:

Fox Entertainment Group (FEG) today announced its acquisition of Beliefnet, a Web site that enables consumers to better understand their faith and build diverse spiritual communities by providing content and tools for a broad range of religions and spiritual approaches.

"Consumers." That one word says it all.

Not every blog I read is pompous and intellectual. Today I want to point you to Kyle, who took a picture of a book mis-filed in the Windows subsection of the Poetry section of his Barnes and Noble. Kyle is a math teacher in LA, living the Stand and Deliver life.

Also take a look at the blog of frequent commenter Theo, who knows how to make the best of working in a cubicle. Or at least, to make the best of spending time in a cubicle.

It's not about talent, it's about hard work:

Attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.

This has certainly been true for whatever academic success I've had. I've never felt innately good at math, just willing to put in the time to learn about it. It's fascinating, and hopeful, that this attitude might help with relationships as well:

Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people’s willingness—or unwillingness—to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them, according to a 2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.

More reflections on coffee:

From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink. Could that passage have been written on decaf?

The whole essay is like that, a little over the top. She spends several hundred words describing the process of brewing coffee with a French press in great detail as if it's some obscure medieval ritual no one has heard of. But if you have a few extra minutes, it's an entertaining read, especially the part where the advantages of caffeine over alcohol are discussed.

Good news about Rwanda and coffee.

Selling sleep:

Sleep may finally be claiming its place beside diet and exercise as both a critical health issue and a niche for profitable consumer products.

They persuade us that we're sleeping poorly and then sell us stuff to fix it. It's interesting that the new sleep drugs might work partly by causing amnesia - if you don't remember tossing and turning, then you must have slept peacefully.

This piece tells the same story about depression and anxiety drugs. All the profit incentives press toward describing new disorders; there's no incentive to say that some condition is normal.

Ronald Bailey gives an overview of ways to quench our thirst for fuel.

You would think that people who are more educated, wealthier, and more politically engaged - you know, cosmopolitan - have more contact with opposing points of view. But no, it turns out the elite life is an echo chamber.

You're scared of genetically modified food, so you eat organic. There's only one problem:

One of the most effective standard methods of breeding to obtain improved crops is to bombard seeds and plants with gamma rays to alter their DNA by causing mutations, some of which can then be selected for a desired trait. (Incidentally, organic farmers, in their desire to avoid artificial chemicals, are even more dependent than conventional farmers on crop varieties generated by irradiation.) Irradiation alters both chromosome structure and genome sequence in a way that is quite random. Moreover, there is no legal requirement to test such irradiated products either for effects on health or for what they might do to the environment. By contrast, genetic modification in the laboratory introduces a well-characterised gene or genes into an established genetic background without big disruption.

Students are not internally motivated, so we should bribe them to do well.

According to Blogger, this is my 500th post. To mark the occasion, I'm asking my huge audience for feedback. What have been your favorite and least favorite posts? Should I quit blogging completely? Should my posts be longer or stay the same length?

Sure, diversity is good. But if you have to choose between social cohesion and diversity, dump diversity:

People who celebrate diversity (and its parallel, multiculturalism) are endorsing only one part of what it means to be a complete human being, neglecting morality (and its parallel, group and national pride). Just as we cannot be whole persons if we deny the fundamental rights of others, so we cannot be whole persons if we live in ways that discourage decency, cooperation, and charity.

I mentioned this study before, but the article I'm linking here is better and more interesting.

Theodore Dalrymple on the "new atheists":

Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns.

Megan McArdle on school vouchers:

You're already sending your kid to private school. You're just confused because your tuition fees came bundled with granite countertops and hardwood floors.

PLOS Medicine asks "Which Single Intervention Would Do the Most to Improve the Health of Those Living on Less Than $1 Per Day?"

The responses range from recognizing our interconnectedness to direct cash gifts. I still like the Copenhagen Consensus as an answer to that question, because it has a bit more method to it than simply asking "experts."

The best book review of 2007:

Owing to laziness, busyness, and a bogus holiday that shut down all the city’s mailrooms at the worst possible moment, I have been forced, very much against my will, into the most blindingly obvious irony I’ve ever been obliged to arch my inner eyebrows at: I have to start writing my review of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read without actually having read the book.

Aid money to Africa just disappears down a black hole:

Already today there are increasing numbers of Africans who call for an end to this sort of support. They believe that it simply benefits a paternalistic economy, supports corruption, weakens trade and places Africans into the degrading position of having to accept charity. "Just stop this terrible aid," says the Kenyan economic expert James Shikwati.

And some related thoughts from Mexico [my rough translation]:

So the question isn't how to eliminate poverty. The policymakers should ask themselves how those who have the least can generate wealth. For example, what are the goods and services that they can produce themselves?

Yes, I know that linking a post in a foreign language immediately makes me a Grade A arrogant pretentious pseudo-intellectual jerk. But being arrogant, pretentious and pseudo-intellectual is maybe the whole point of this blog.

A defense of open borders.

Drug legalization is already here:

How people get their dopamine or other brain chemicals is ever more explicitly, like the rest of medicine, tied to questions of class.

On page 7 of today's Colorado Daily, an ad for Whole Foods. The text reads "Love our store but hate the parking lot? We now have more parking spaces to better serve you!"

Distributing malaria preventing bed nets is tricky:

In practice, nothing much had been working. In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by 2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets. By 2005, only 3 percent were.

By all means, we should distribute bed nets, and the more the better. But DDT may be a cheaper and more effective tool to fight malaria. Of course, what we really need is a vaccine.

The end of incandescence.

Most wealth is intangible:

Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries.

It's education day on Evil Line. The other day I told my conscientious, hard-working roommates that spending a lot of time grading was worthless, so I've paid my penance by reading several education articles.

Robert Frank is talking about economics education, but what he says echoes the thoughts of Carl Wieman on teaching physics. It's also similar to what my department is starting to do with the calculus sequence: less material, more slowly, with an emphasis on explaining verbally what you're doing rather than procedural fluency in doing it. Also see Keith Devlin on what we mean by "conceptual understanding."

That's all about college education. For high school and below, we have arguments that school choice doesn't work and that school integration doesn't help. So what does work?

False confessions may not be that rare, since researchers can recreate them in the laboratory:

Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.

The difference between rich countries and poor countries is trust.

Slate takes a look at hybrid technology, with a local connection:

Hybrids Plus Inc., founded last year in Boulder, Colo., lashes together up to 1,200 lithium-ion cells the size of D batteries into pumped-up battery systems that can be charged in wall outlets. "In daily usage, we're seeing numbers as high as 137 miles per gallon," says CEO Carl Lawrence. Even with their Rocky Mountain-high cost—refitting a Prius can cost $24,000—the conversions are drawing interest from wealthy techies who gain psychological satisfaction from using less gas. (This is Boulder, after all.) The 15-person company has completed six conversions and should finish an additional 20 this year.

Prenatal genetic testing and relatively easy access to abortion leads to all kinds of questions about sex selection and eugenics:

What is a “designer baby” but a new consumer choice? When a vague, distorted feminism is conflated with enthusiastic consumerism, when “choice” is the catchword of both, designer babies can easily emerge as the natural, if not inevitable, next step in the evolution of our liberated, capitalist society.

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow takes a thorough and honest look at disentangling the ideology of eugenics from the pro-choice movement, and is eventually led to this fascinating paragraph:

The first and least controversial task for pro-choice activists, then, is to make it very clear that the rights for which they have fought are fundamentally different from the right to determine the genetic makeup of offspring. Whether the latter right is legitimate or not, it is not the same as or an extension of the former. Pro-choice activists have struggled for women’s freedom to control their own lives and bodies, not to control the lives and bodies of their children.

Homeowner associations are taking away your right to dry:

The clothesline was once a ubiquitous part of the residential landscape. But as postwar Americans embraced labor-saving appliances, clotheslines came to be associated with people who couldn't afford a dryer. Now they are a rarity, purged from the suburban landscape by legally enforceable development restrictions.

Checkers is a draw.

Another town is switching to "shared space" traffic control - letting pedestrians and cars wander together without traffic lights. I think Boulder should be next.

I've mentioned this approach before.

These days, no one has any blue-collar skills. I can definitely relate to that; if I have to interact with a physical object other than a book or a computer, I'm pretty much lost.

Medicine and health are not the same thing:

If you would not pay for medicine out of your own pocket, then don't bother to go when others offer to pay; the RAND experiment strongly suggests that on average such medicine is as likely to hurt as to help.

Using graph theory to transplant kidneys.

"Somalia needs water. But it needs peace, too."

Diversity transforms us all into turtles.

An intentionally inflammatory post at Overcoming Bias:

In many situations it would be better to impose a punishment of torture than imprisonment. The fact that the U.S. justice system rejects torture as a punishment is the result of an anti-torture bias.

Overcoming Bias, though interesting, is firmly in the "we're super-rational and you're all superstitious morons", "most people are mindless lost sheep except the chosen rational atheist libertarian few" camp of blogs.

As a critique of this kind of thinking, this post gets it half right. But the problem is not really consequentialism, it's materialism.

An advice column from a theoretical physicist:

It will be impossible for you to determine precisely both the position and velocity of your dog, rendering him maddeningly difficult to catch.

Creepy sentence of the day:

The UN recommends a gender ratio of no more than 107.

It's from a BBC report on how China's one child policy is leading to more boys being born than girls.

Many thanks to Crawdad for designing a new header for this blog. It may be tweaked a bit in the future, but it's already such an improvement that I decided to go ahead and use it.

While I'm updating the header, I have a small problem that I was hoping my readers could help me with. The Solzhenitzyn quote above is attested several places on the always trustworthy and factually accurate internet, but this variant also appears:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

When sources are cited, both quotes are attributed to The Gulag Archipelago, which I unfortunately don't own. Did he write them both, or is one of them made up? Note that all the quote sites I've been to list one or the other, but not both. If they're both accurate, which should I use?

In China, you are forbidden to reincarnate without government permission.

Arthur Miller had something in common with Albus Dumbledore:

It would be easy to judge Arthur Miller harshly, and some do. For them, he was a hypocrite, a weak and narcissistic man who used the press and the power of his celebrity to perpetuate a cruel lie. But Miller's behavior also raises more complicated questions about the relationship between his life and his art. A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear—or, more likely, all three—Miller's failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of his story.

This is the kind of article that suffers most from reading it on a glowing screen from a pithy link on a third-rate blog that compares the tragic but somehow redemptive subject to a wizard in a children's book. The article is touching, not funny, and long, and deserves to be read in dead tree form while sitting in an armchair. But it deserves to be read, so I'm linking.

We're all living in a video game.

Today is a sad day for journalism. The Weekly World News is folding:

He founded Weekly World News as a sort of poor man's [National] Enquirer, running celebrity gossip and UFO sightings that didn't quite meet the Enquirer's high standards.

As a wannabe scientist, one of the sites I visit is PlosOne, a peer-reviewed, open access journal with the lofty and probably hopeless goal of becoming a Science or Nature without the subscription costs. Mostly they publish stuff about renal fibroblasts, but two of their recent articles caught my eye.

This one claims to show that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, at least for rats.

And this one explores how much word recognition relies on context, gestalt recognition of the whole word, or piecing together the letters.

Rolling Stone says ethanol is just a subsidy program for agribusiness, that it won't help global warming, and that it will make people starve.

I have, of course, talked about ethanol and other biofuels before.

Daughters or development, choose one:

Through their various mandates and mindsets, international institutions have put families and poor countries on the horns of a deadly dilemma: They can have social and political progress or they can have more than one or two children. Rights and development are pitted against faith and human life—increasingly, female life.

More on the five-second rule.

For all my many readers in the San Francisco area, I'm giving a talk at the 9th US National Conference on Computational Mechanics on Monday, titled "An implicitly coupled parallel fluid-structure interaction algorithm for blood flow in arteries." (Isn't advertising their public appearances something that bloggers do?)

I'll be at the conference most of next week and probably not posting. While I'm gone, you can read this very long but very good article about malaria, which Bill Gates calls "the worst thing on the planet."

Gregory Mankiw asks if the rich pay enough taxes:

If your image of the typical rich person is someone who collects interest and dividend checks and spends long afternoons relaxing on his yacht, you are decades out of date. The leisure class has been replaced by the working rich.

"Stop trying to 'save' Africa."

How to beat drug-resistant bacteria, including a look at recruiting other bacteria and viruses to do the work for us.

No comment:

We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

It's environment day on Evil Line. Bjorn Lomborg says what he always says, and since I still agree with him, I'm still linking:

My point is that cutting carbon emissions costs a lot and it provides only a small benefit 100 years from now; handing out condoms and information, however, is very cheap and it works for people suffering from HIV-AIDS right now.

And William Saletan says biofuel is a good idea that won't make poor people starve:

If you want to help poor people, biofuel beats the heck out of oil. In a biofuel economy, the chief asset is open land. Who has open land? Poor countries. Latin America has sugar cane. Africa and Asia have cassava. Switchgrass, which grows in dry regions, will level the playing field further.

I really like Saletan's piece, in its quirky tone, in its Bush as good guy, Castro as bad guy attitude, and in its content.

One of the problems with Sarkozy is that he jogs. It's undignified:

Mr Sarkozy has rekindled a French suspicion that the habit is for self-centred individualists such as the Americans who popularised it. “Jogging is of course about performance and individualism, values that are traditionally ascribed to the Right.”

But if Sarko wants to stay in shape, dieting isn't an option. Because the best evidence suggests that dieting doesn't work at all.

Two blog posts about how what we celebrate today has global, not just national, significance. First, from Thomas Jefferson's last letter:

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

But perhaps more interesting, from a blogger in Spain:

Sostenemos como evidentes estas verdades: que todos los hombres son creados iguales; que son dotados por su Creador de ciertos derechos inalienables; que entre éstos están la vida, la libertad y la búsqueda de la felicidad.

Only economists should be allowed to vote.

So you're an HIV virion, cruising through some unlucky victim's blood. You dodge some antibodies and breathe a sigh of relief when you cross the cell membrane into a host cell. The next dangerous step is reverse transcribing your RNA into DNA. What with doctors pumping pesky reverse-transcriptase inhibitors into your victim, that can get tricky. But you do it and breathe another sigh of relief. Next you cross into the nucleus and integrate into the host DNA. Once that's done, you're home free, right? Inside your host's DNA, where could you possibly be safer?

Not so fast:

In tests on cultured human tissue, the mutated enzyme, Tre recombinase, snipped HIV DNA out of chromosomes.

This is a really cool approach, and, of course, I hope it pans out.

An appreciative article about Arts and Letters Daily and the people who run it. A and L is probably my biggest source for all the wonderful and interesting links I collect here; if you read it, you probably don't need to read me.

My college English professor speculates on the end of Harry Potter.

Another look at Jeffrey Sachs's millennium village project. This one focuses more on Sachs himself, his vision and, well, naivete.

A survey of school voucher programs in DC finds not much difference:

Students who participated in the first year of the District of Columbia’s federally financed school voucher program did not show significantly higher math or reading achievement, but their parents were satisfied anyway.

But wait, there is a difference:

The $7,500 scholarship that families spent was about half the average public expenditure per student in the District of Columbia public schools.

This last line is misleading; replace "families" with "taxpayers". The bottom line is that school choice provides more bang for the buck.

Astronauts use their free time to do more science.

Playing vaccine whack-a-mole:

The good news is that in the Prevnar-using world, those strains of bacteria have nearly vanished. The bad news from the Alaska study is that strains not covered by the vaccine seem to be moving into the vacuum the vaccine created—making an end run around Prevnar.

This one-sentence description from an article in Popular Science is so startlingly accurate that if you read it you almost don't need to take the tour:

If you tossed a Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop and a Munich beer hall in a blender, you’d get a pretty close approximation of the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins.

Even apart from the local reference, the article is quite good. It's about making biofuel from algae, something they're apparently starting to do in New Belgium's back yard.

Raise gas taxes, save lives.

A college education makes you more religious.

Junk DNA isn't junk:

The majority of DNA in the human genome is transcribed into functional molecules, called RNA, and that these transcripts extensively overlap one another. This broad pattern of transcription challenges the long-standing view that the human genome consists of a relatively small set of discrete genes, along with a vast amount of so-called junk DNA that is not biologically active.

A Mexican is worth exactly one third as much as a slave.

"Give us DDT."

I came into the office on Saturday to work, and instead, of course, I surfed the web. Here's what I found:

Yet another piece about how children don't play outside anymore.

Yet another piece about the potential clash between environmentalism and development. This one is strongly worded but maybe over simplified.

Terrence Tao's thoughts on "hard analysis" and "soft analysis". I take a look at Tao's blog whenever I want to feel like a fraudulent excuse for an incompetent mathematician; I got at least a few paragraphs into this one before getting lost, which is better than usual.

And my nomination for best blog post title of 2007, We'll Always Have Paris.

A thought-provoking interview about aid to Africa:

If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape.

Also of interest is this article about Jeffrey Sachs's millennium village project.

Guess who just doubled the size of what was already the largest anti-disease program in human history. Bill Gates? Jimmy Carter? Guess again.

Free life:

If we are willing to pay people to hear or watch ads, why stop there? How about "free life"? Corporations subsidize or create extra babies, under the proviso that the guardians agree to have their little ones doused with particular ads. What if you could addict your kid to Coca-Cola, or some other product, before birth, what sort of market would arise?

Andrew Sullivan has a long-running series of pictures from people's home and office windows. My office doesn't have a window, but if it did, the view would look something like this. I think it was taken from the Campus Police building across the street, and you're looking pretty much straight at me as I type this.

Most published research findings are false:

Among the 45 most highly cited clinical research findings of the past 15 years, 99 percent of molecular research had subsequently been refuted. Epidemiology findings had been contradicted in four-fifths of the cases he looked at, and the usually robust outcomes of clinical trials had a refutation rate of one in four.

This is about biomedical research; I expect things are somewhat better, but not enormously better, in the mathematical fields.

The Traveler's Dilemma, where common sense and the Nash equilibrium collide.

The New York Times has an article about getting kids away from video games and outside to play "traditional childhood games", a topic I touched on earlier.

How to play rock-paper-scissors:

Haven’t a clue what to throw next? Then go with Paper. Why? Statistically, in competition play, it has been observed that scissors is thrown the least often. Specifically, it gets delivered 29.6% of the time, so it slightly under-indexes against the expected average of 33.33% by 3.73%.

The article also offers some tips on how to cheat. My conscience prevents me from quoting them.

A lot of interesting stuff in this article from the New Scientist. One sample:

The results revealed that people experience the emotion associated with their expressions. Those with a forced smile felt happier, and found the cartoons funnier than those who were forced to frown.

Feeling north and seeing with your tongue:

Figure out how to change the sensory data you want — the electromagnetic fields, the ultrasound, the infrared — into something that the human brain is already wired to accept, like touch or sight. The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it's time to build them.

I think the hat problem is interesting.

To decrease carbon emissions, don't raise fuel economy standards. Raise gas prices.

The five-second rule works.

The dark side of capitalism:

The genius of capitalism turns the simple and easy--meals, relationships, joy--into things complicated and hard; it commodifies all of life. With a click of the mouse and a credit card number it also offers instant pleasures. What once could be done outside the market--for instance, games and sports--now requires money and purchases.

Two articles today that show some journalistic courage: Emily Bazelon says you don't have to be a religious nut to be concerned about Giuliani's family history, and Pamela Constable says something that needs to be said about the relationship between Islam and domestic violence.

The UN agrees with me about biofuels; they're promising but potentially problematic.

How weddings got ridiculous:

Today's marriage ceremony is indeed a statement of love: the love of buying things, and, more particularly, buying things that have been personalized to express one's taste and, so the industry tells us, the essence of who one is.

The secularization hypothesis - the idea that as societies modernize, religion will fade away - is false. John J. DiIulio Jr. explains that this has consequences for foreign policy:

It is bad to doubt the overwhelming empirical evidence that religion matters to domestic politics as well as the delivery of social services. But it is far worse to treat religion as a back-burner reality in global affairs when it is boiling over in so many places. The State Department needs to wake up and smell the incense.

Atul Gawande on aging:

It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore.

He argues that doctors don't deal with aging very well, and he makes a pretty good case.

Your unconscious is smarter than you are.

Just add iron: using plankton to fight global warming.

How young liberals become old conservatives.

Obesity in the United States is associated with poverty. Michael Pollan asks why:

Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

"Foodlike substance." Accurate, I think.

This week's wrong definition of faith comes from David P. Barash who writes:

It has long been, let us say, an article of faith that at least in polite company, religious faith — belief without evidence — should go unchallenged.

If Barash could drop the attitude, this article would be an interesting survey of explanations for the origin of religion in human society.

Calorie restricted diets and anorexia:

A CR person says he wants to live longer; an anorexic typically says she wants to be thin. But the deeper wish for a sense of purpose—and the discovery of that purpose in the rewards of not eating—are the same.

Steve Chapman writes about the partial-birth abortion decision.

You don't actually have to exercise. Someone just has to convince you that you're exercising:

Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

Rethinking Rachel Carson:

Her concerns about the effects of insect death on bird populations were well-founded. But threats to human health were central to her argument, and Carson was wrong about those. Despite massive exposure in many populations over several decades, there is no decisive evidence that DDT causes cancer in people, and it is unforgivable that she overlooked the enormous boon of DDT for malaria control in her own time.

Another promising treatment for HIV.

Ron Rosenbaum explores the world of gold-plated Scrabble sets, hand-cranked gadgets, and, of course, the SnacDaddy.

Srinivasa Varadhan has won the Abel Prize. I'm embarassed to admit I'd never heard of him before.

The fossil fuel economy is making us less social:

We’ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world’s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we’ve built a culture much the same — the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don’t need a helping hand from a soul.

Of course it's better for the environment to bring your own mug to the coffee shop. Or maybe not.

There are a bunch of problems with this study; it looks like they're calculating "energy of manufacture" in a very simple and probably inaccurate way, and I'd like them to include "energy of delivery" and "energy of disposal" (ie, gasoline for the garbage truck), both of which are costs that occur many times for the disposable cups and only once for the reusable. But it is striking anyway - I wouldn't have guessed that the environmental cost of washing a mug is comparable to the cost of manufacturing a styrofoam cup.

A loyal reader points me to this piece about the race to find the most stable three-dimensional shape. Those who know their fables will be able to predict the winner.

On a slightly more technical note, Terrence Tao explains why my favorite millenium problem - global regularity for Navier-Stokes - is hard.

Let your kid play outside:

A child is almost as likely to be struck by lightning as kidnapped by a stranger, but it's not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors watching television instead of out on the sidewalk skipping rope.

Worrying shortens your life; the good news is you can stop worrying.

It works for NASCAR, why not NASA? I look forward to seeing the shuttle Discovery with a huge DuPont decal and the number 24 on its side...

I was introduced to the greatest rap lyrics of 2007 in a 15-passenger van on the way to New Orleans:

I'm hot 'cause I'm fly
You ain't 'cause you not.

The Village Voice goes into painstaking detail to explain why these lines are so compelling. I especially like Figure 4.

What happens when one of the world's greatest violinists takes his three-million-dollar violin and acts as a street performer in a DC subway station? It turns out that context matters.

I'm gonna take a break from blogging for the next 40 days or so. See you around April 8.

The foiling of the Air Mauritania hijacker is a great story. The lesson is, if you're going to hijack a plane, make sure you can understand French. Or something like that.

Until now I haven't been two impressed with the dialogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan that I linked earlier. That is, I wasn't impressed until I read Sullivan's latest piece, which is phenomenal. I had trouble picking an excerpt that did it justice; we'll start here:

No civilization has ever been atheist at its core. No polity has ever been constructed in the absence of faith, or in the absence of a tradition of faith that makes belief in the present possible at all. Earth to Sam: Does this not tell you something? Or is it plausible that human beings tomorrow will become something that in all of human history and pre-history they have never, ever been?

Read the whole thing. It's long, but I'm serious. Go read it.

In defense of toll roads:

Historically, we've spent billions on roads and provided them for free. This approach has given us endless traffic jams, because as any former Soviet commissar can tell you, if prices are too low, endless queues follow. Our free roads end up being anything but free, as massive congestion causes us to pay with time instead of cash.

Don't tell your kid she's smart. Tell her to work hard:

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

I've always thought wind chill measurements were bogus. Now I have support.

The first Carnival of Mathematics is up. I am just a tiny bit disappointed, but I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting that would have been better.

Severely restricting calorie intake may make you live longer. But maybe it's better to just stop worrying about food.

Alan Jacobs points out how some of those who attack Christianity - including Sam Harris and Stephen Pinker - are very ill-informed about their subject.

Keith Devlin makes the obvious point that math has an ethical dimension:

If ever there was a time when physicists could stand aloof from the messy everyday world, that era came to an end when the first atomic bomb was detonated. It may have been an illusion that we mathematicians were able to remain pure for a few decades longer, but illusion or not, we can no longer maintain such an attitude.

This is one of the reasons I'm on the applied rather than theoretical side; applied mathematicians are explicit in considering the consequences of their work. Which doesn't mean we won't mess things up, but at least we have our eyes open.

Lab-grown meat. It's coming.

Socially responsible gasoline:

These days, any purchase is fair game for an ideological battle. Since I'm headed to buy cruelty-free chicken weighted down with an entire food philosophy, why not put some thought into the implications of my gas purchase?

Conservatives use Windows, liberals use Mac OS.

NASA's head talks about different reasons for exploring space:

Real Reasons are intuitive and compelling to all of us, but they're not immediately logical. They're exactly the opposite of Acceptable Reasons, which are eminently logical but neither intuitive nor emotionally compelling. The Real Reasons we do things like exploring space involve competitiveness, curiosity and monument building.

So I see an attractive girl at a party. I'm really supposed to go up to her and say "If you could be any cartoon character, which one would it be and why?" Do I say hello first, or just launch right into that question?

Steven Pinker on the problems of understanding conciousness:

The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris are having a debate about well, religion, and in particular the relationship of religious moderation to extremism. It's worth reading.

The 2007 Edge question is up: What are you optimistic about? Why?

I paid a fair bit of attention to the Edge question last year, so it's been interesting to compare answers from the two years. For instance, regardless of the question, the answer seems to be "Religion is bad and science will replace it" for Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Andrew Brown. Fair enough, but doesn't saying the same thing over and over get boring? I feel like they could have written their responses before hearing the question. To his credit, Sam Harris says something at least a little different this time around.

Some of the pieces really do address the question, and offer real optimism: Steven Pinker, Esther Dyson, and Geoffrey Carr, all of whose responses I really liked. On the other hand, Susan Blackmore doesn't seem to understand what optimism is.

I have to point out the mathematicians, Keith Devlin who says 3D graphics will revolutionize math education (I think he's wrong, unfortunately), and Steven Strogatz, who talks about sleep. His response is the kind I like, focused on a small but interesting area, not feeling the need to speak grandly about all of civilization and society.

The good news on the medical front is the discovery of a cheap, simple drug that's effective against may cancers; the bad news is that TB may be making a comeback.

Neil Gross says anti-Americanism in the world isn't as bad as you think. Andrei S. Markovits says it's worse. From Markovits:

Anti-Americanism constitutes a particular prejudice that renders it not only acceptable but indeed commendable in the context of an otherwise welcome discourse that favors the weak.

In Guatemala I met a Canadian who said something bad about Americans, added to me, "Of course, I don't consider you an American," and thought it was a compliment.

Seed asked several scientists where their field was heading in 2007. Note particularly the responses of Nathan Wolfe and Paul Bloom.

I'm back. After the first 36 hours or so, Guatemala was terrific; I'm a little disappointed to be back, not least because the high in Guatemala City is 75 and in Boulder it's 15. You can read a little bit about the trip from a fellow traveller's perspective on this blog.