Quotulatiousness

June 27, 2011

Bodyhacking is closer than you may think

Filed under: Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:15

An occasional meme in science fiction stories is someone being able to control the actions of another using remote control. We may be closer to that, um, “vision” than we expect:

Now that pacemakers are to be loaded with firewalls and bionic-man body parts are appearing on production lines, the concept of body hacking has become a spooky possibility. Researchers in Japan have begun to try to teach people how to play instruments by remotely controlling their hands.

Developed by the University of Tokyo and Sony Computer Science Labs, the aptly named PossessedHand stimulates muscles that move our digits, New Scientist reports.

A belt with 28 electrode pads is strapped to the arm, sending signals to the joints between the three bones of each finger, with two for the thumb.

Stephen Gordon: The “broken window” fallacy of “green” jobs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

It’s always nice to see a reference to Frédéric Bastiat in a modern day setting:

But it is possible to oversell the green jobs theme. Job creation should not be a goal of environmental policy, no more than it should be a policy goal in the fields of health or national security. If, instead of hiring people, we could use magic to stop disease, crime and environmental degradation, we would. Pointing to jobs ‘created’ to fix these problems is an error that Frédéric Bastiat identified in his ‘parable of the broken window’. Broken windows generate work for glaziers, but that doesn’t mean that breaking windows will increase national income.

An often-quoted statistic goes something like this: “wind energy produces 27 per cent more jobs per kilowatt hour than coal plants and 66 per cent more jobs than natural gas plants”. This could well be true, but it is hardly a strong argument in favour of the employment opportunities that would be generated by investing in wind energy: hiring more people to produce less energy is not a strategy for prosperity. Similar gains in employment could be obtained by outlawing mechanical excavators so that all digging must be done by hand. It may make sense to encourage the development of wind power, but increased employment is most emphatically not one of the reasons for doing so.

June 22, 2011

“Medicalizing” bad behaviour to avoid guilt

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Frank Furedi looks at a disturbing ongoing phenomenon in western society: the “medicalization” of bad behaviour:

The rebranding of promiscuity as sex addiction is not confined to Britain. Throughout Europe and the US the numbers of sex addicts is said to be on the rise. Anthony Weiner has recently been diagnosed — by the media and self-styled experts at least — as a ‘sex addict’. Following the revelation that he sent rude pictures of himself to various women online, Weiner has been widely depicted as a sick man. ‘He needs treatment’, one expert told the Associated Press, because apparently, without help, ‘sex addicts’ can go ‘completely out of control and destroy their lives’.

[. . .]

Lust, infidelity, betrayal and the drive for sexual domination have always presented a challenge to a society’s grammar of morality. However, the contemporary conflation of a bad habit with a medical problem is symptomatic of the difficulty that Western societies now have in making moral judgments about human behaviour. Sometimes, even people who claim to possess religious convictions find it difficult to ascribe guilt to immoral behaviour. That is why behaviour that was once denounced as sinful is now increasingly discussed through the language of therapy rather than the language of morality.

[. . .]

The problem with this recycling of bad habits and degrading behaviour as medical problems is not simply that it fails to hold people to account for the choices they make and the consequences that their actions have. Yes, a lot of people — including celebrities such as Keith Urban, Tiger Woods, Michael Douglas and Lindsay Lohan — can present themselves as victims of an addiction rather than as lecherous and self-regarding individuals.

But the real problem is the message that this diseasing of human behaviour sends to all of us. The fashionable label of ‘addictive personality’ encourages people to acquiesce to their worst instincts in a quite fatalistic way. Addicts are portrayed as victims of circumstances beyond their control: they are literally counselled to accept powerlessness as the defining feature of their existences. Sexaholics Anonymous mimics the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step that a sex addict takes on the road to sexual sobriety is to admit that ‘we were powerless over lust’.

June 20, 2011

SpaceX and the rogue consultant

Filed under: Law, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:48

SpaceX is going to court over a would-be consultant’s claims that their rockets are unsafe:

According to SpaceX’s filing with the Fairfax County circuit court in Virginia, Joseph Fragola, veep at tech consulting firm Valador, tried to obtain a hefty deal from SpaceX at the beginning of June:

     Fragola attempted to obtain a consulting contract from SpaceX worth as much as $1 million. He claimed that SpaceX needed an “independent” analysis of its rocket to bolster its reputation with NASA based on what he called an unfair “perception” about SpaceX. SpaceX did not respond favorably to Fragola’s offer.

The rocket company — which as everyone knows is helmed, CTO’d and in part bankrolled by famous nerdwealth kingpin Elon Musk — says it then found out that Fragola had subsequently done his level best to create such a perception:

     SpaceX subsequently leamed that Fragola has been contacting officials in the United States Government to make disparaging remarks about SpaceX, which have created the very “perception” that he claimed SpaceX needed his help to rectify.

     For instance, in an email he wrote on June 8, 2011, to Bryan O’Connor, a NASA official at NASA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, Fragola falsely stated: “I have just heard a rumor, and I am trying now to check its veracity, that the Falcon 9 experienced a double engine failure in the first stage and that the entire stage blew up just after the first stage separated. I also heard that this information was being held from NASA until SpaceX can ‘verify’ it.”

SpaceX for its part says that this rumour is “blatantly false… as a purported ‘expert’ in the industry, he should have known that the statements were false.”

June 17, 2011

Sunspots and the Maunder Minimum

Filed under: Environment, History, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Don J. Easterbrook provides more background information on the historical situation at the time of the last low-to-no-sunspot period:

Galileo’s perfection of the telescope in 1609 allowed scientists to see sunspots for the first time. From 1610 A.D. to 1645 A.D., very few sunspots were seen, despite the fact that many scientists with telescopes were looking for them, and from 1645 to 1700 AD sunspots virtually disappeared from the sun (Fig. 1). During this interval of greatly reduced sunspot activity, known as the Maunder Minimum, global climates turned bitterly cold (the Little Ice Age), demonstrating a clear correspondence between sunspots and cool climate. After 1700 A.D., the number of observed sunspots increased sharply from nearly zero to more than 50 (Fig. 1) and the global climate warmed.


FIGURE 1. Sunspots during the Maunder Minimum (modified from Eddy, 1976).

The Maunder Minimum was not the beginning of The Little Ice Age — it actually began about 1300 AD — but it marked perhaps the bitterest part of the cooling. Temperatures dropped ~4º C (~7 º F) in ~20 years in mid-to high latitudes. The colder climate that ensued for several centuries was devastating. The population of Europe had become dependent on cereal grains as their main food supply during the Medieval Warm Period and when the colder climate, early snows, violent storms, and recurrent flooding swept Europe, massive crop failures occurred. Winters in Europe were bitterly cold, and summers were rainy and too cool for growing cereal crops, resulting in widespread famine and disease. About a third of the population of Europe perished.

Glaciers all over the world advanced and pack ice extended southward in the North Atlantic. Glaciers in the Alps advanced and overran farms and buried entire villages. The Thames River and canals and rivers of the Netherlands frequently froze over during the winter. New York Harbor froze in the winter of 1780 and people could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island. Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing many harbors. The population of Iceland decreased by half and the Viking colonies in Greenland died out in the 1400s because they could no longer grow enough food there. In parts of China, warm weather crops that had been grown for centuries were abandoned. In North America, early European settlers experienced exceptionally severe winters.

BoingBoing on the new sunscreen regulations

Filed under: Health, Randomness, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:28

Maggie Koerth-Baker goes into some detail on four things you (probably) don’t know about sunscreen:

Starting next year, sunscreen — and the way its marketed — will change. This is good news. The changes correct some rather glaring examples of consumer misinformation. And it’s also important news … at least, from the perspective of this redhead.

New Food and Drug Administration regulations mean that, by the summer of 2012, there will be no such thing as “waterproof” sunscreen. That’s because, frankly, there already wasn’t such a thing. A sunscreen might be more water resistant than a competitor. But you can’t assume that one application of the “waterproof” stuff will stay with you through hours of pool time. Next year, sunscreen bottles will be honest about that fact, and they’ll tell you how long you can expect water resistance to last.

The other big change: What the sunscreen protects you from. Under the new regulations, only broad-spectrum sunscreens — the kind that protect you from both the UVA and UVB wavelengths of solar radiation — with SPF values of 15 and higher, can claim to prevent skin cancer. Anything else must tell you that it’s just for preventing sunburn.

Update: And, for a bit of balance, openmarket.org points out that this is probably a solution in search of a problem:

Unfortunately, this good/bad assessment comes from the bureaucrats of the FDA and not actual consumers, who are the ones that make this subjective assessment every time they make a purchase. This new labeling rule is akin to a customer review, which then begs the question as to why the FDA has the right to express its opinion on every bottle of sunscreen while the average consumer does not? Is it because those at the FDA are ostensibly smarter and more in-tune about what is in our best interest than we lowly plebeians are? I’m sure they certainly think so.

Finally, the FDA ignores that many consumers are already adequately informed and realize (when they buy an SPF 4 sunscreen, for example) that their desired sunblock may not strongly protect them from UVA or UVB rays — who actually believes an SPF 4 provides real protection? Much like who honestly believes that smoking isn’t hazardous to health and relies on the FDA-mandated labels to make him/her aware of this misconception? Consumers already weed out the good products from the bad through company reputation, trial and error, word of mouth, etc. This new regulation only serves to discourage and worry those who already buy sunscreen that they value and increase its cost of production. The notion that we’d all be ignorant consumers incapable of acting in our own best interest without the benevolent patriarchy of the FDA is absurd.

June 15, 2011

Fight that natural urge to (over-) protect your children

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

An interesting article by Lori Gottlieb on the perils of over-protective parenting styles:

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

Oh, and for those of you who regularly utter phrases like “Good job, buddy!” every time your kid manages to do something trivial, you can just knock that right off:

A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.

Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”

June 14, 2011

Pack up your worries about global warming: unpack your parka and mittens

Filed under: Environment, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:18

I’ve been skeptical about the whole global warming issue, and I’d like to be equally skeptical about a new ice age threat:

What may be the science story of the century is breaking this evening, as heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity, which could mean that the Earth — far from facing a global warming problem — is actually headed into a mini Ice Age.

Lower sunspot activity translates into likely lower temperatures here on earth, just like in the “Maunder Minimum” period, also known as the “Little Ice Age”.

Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715. Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years, the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented. This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the “Little Ice Age” when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes. There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.

As I wrote back in 2004, “I’ve never been all that convinced of the accuracy of the scientific evidence presented in favour of the Global Warming theory, especially as it seemed to play rather too clearly into the hands of the anti-growth, anti-capitalist, pro-world government folks. A world-wide ecological disaster, clearly caused by human action, would allow a lot of authoritarian changes which would radically reduce individual freedom and increase the degree of social control exercised by governments over the actions and movement of their citizenry. “

On the other hand, as Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, humanity is better adapted to dealing with higher temperatures than lower ones — as are most living creatures. Given a choice between the risks of increasing temperatures globally and the risks of a new ice age, it should be pretty easy to figure out which scenario allows the better chances for all of humanity to survive and thrive.

Update: Anthony Watts has more. “If we are right, this could be the last solar maximum we’ll see for a few decades,” Hill said. “That would affect everything from space exploration to Earth’s climate.”

Update, 15 June: My skepticism is overwhelmed by the skeptic-in-this-instance New Scientist‘s Michael Marshall, who does the quick math that a Maunder Minimum for the next 90 years would only lower global temperatures by 0.3C. And New Scientist is still bullish on the global warming potential of between 2 and 4.5 degrees Celsius over that same time period. They’re science writers and I’m not, but I have to say I’m still much more worried about the potential cooling than the potential warming.

June 12, 2011

QotD: A scene from an Australian National Park

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:53

A few years ago, two National Park rangers were doing a similar service while assorted tourists looked on and took their happy-snaps. The birds, whatever they were, had moved along the road a few yards when a dingo walked out of the long grass, killed one and started to stalk the remainder.

The two Rangers became embroiled in an ideological argument as to which protected specie was to be left alone. The tourists, appalled at the slaughter, then chased the dingo away. The Rangers were instantly reconciled and started issuing citations to the offending tourists for trespassing in a National Park, threatening protected species, obstructing traffic, affray, foul language etc. The tourists were told their cars could be impounded and all, eventually, got court summonses. Fines were levied and they were warned that the offences potentially carried jail time.

One disgruntled victim opined that he should have run over the Rangers and the birds. This was overheard by ‘authority’ and he was hauled into court again.

Visitor numbers at the National Park declined dramatically.

Roger Henry, posting to Railroad_Modeling_Still_Makes_Me_Grumpy@yahoogroups.com, 2011-06-11

Bureaucratic details of the wild camel slaughter proposal

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Remember the deliberate destruction of the massive bison herds that used to roam the central plains of North America? Australia’s environmentalists are looking to do an Outback version of their own. Viv Forbes looks at the details included in that Australian government “climate change” proposal:

Think this is all a hoax? Then check this out:


http://www.climatechange.gov.au/government/initiatives/carbon-farming-initative/methodology-development/methodologies-under-consideration/management-of-feral-herbivores.aspx

Yep, our bureaucrats have put together a 62 page proposal to issue carbon credits for killing feral camels. They note that there is not much use in killing an old camel so the cullers will be required to declare the age of each camel killed, so that that the Government auditors can determine how much pollution will be saved. To help this complex calculation the government is researching the average life expectancy for feral camels.

The document is full of endless dribble, including how the cullers discount the credits they will get by the amount of pollution that is created by the culling.

Here is a sample:

“There are two options for measuring fuel consumption for EVc,j,y as detailed below. Option 1 is preferred.

Option 1) Recording of all fuel purchased or pumped for use in these vehicles during the management activities.

Option 2) Recording of all ground vehicle and fuel types and odometer readings before and after management activities.

For Option 2 the amount of fuel consumed is calculated by taking the fuel consumption rating of the vehicle as a litres per kilometre figure and multiplying this by the kilometres of travel undertaken as part of the management activity, then divided by 1000 to convert to kiloLitres, as per the equation below:

Where:

GDgv,c,j,y = Ground distance travelled by vehicle gv using fuel type j in undertaking the management activities c in year y
LPKgv,j = Litres of fuel type j combusted per kilometre for vehicle gv

Update: The Retronaut has some photos from the near-annihilation of the buffalo in the late 1800s.

June 11, 2011

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

June 6, 2011

Tyler Cowen discusses “The Great Stagnation”

Filed under: Economics, History, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:13

“How are we supposed to have a mature debate when any criticism is seen as treason?”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Mark Piggott on the need to be honest about the state of the British NHS in order to improve healthcare:

The UK National Health Service is like a relative: we are allowed to slag off this national treasure, but woe betide anyone else who tries it. I have no idea if the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, really wants to improve the institution or dismantle it and sell it off to the highest bidder, but whatever his motives, anyone who uses the system knows it needs surgery; no amount of knee-jerk op-eds will change that salutary fact.

In this unhealthy climate I feel obliged to state that I believe in the NHS; many medics do a fine job and healthcare should be free at the point of need. Yet having witnessed the care provided to my grandmother, 89, following a diagnosis of lung cancer, I believe that unless the NHS is willing to admit and tackle its flaws, it will have to shoulder some of the blame if the private sector convinces politicians it can run things better.

[. . .]

After collecting my father from the lobby, we went back to the ICU. A bossy woman at the nurse’s dock insisted she wasn’t on that ward; I had to point nan out, in one of the few occupied beds behind her. The woman compounded her mistake by acting as if we were in the wrong. Many users of the NHS will be familiar with this attitude: that ill people and their relatives are simply a nuisance preventing the otherwise smooth running of the system.

[. . .]

The doctors organisation, the British Medical Association (BMA), reacting with customary promptness, has called Lansley’s reforms ‘mad’. They may be right, but the BMA, like the politicians, has a vested interest in how the NHS is run. As can be witnessed by its endless lectures on the evils of alcohol, the BMA appears to be in the fortunate position of being able to get any message, no matter how authoritarian, to the media, who then obligingly splash it across every front page and news bulletin. Perhaps we haven’t really changed that much from the days of my grandparents, who always believed that doctor knew best.

June 5, 2011

Brendan O’Neill goes whale watching

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:43

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge:

 It’s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to ‘meet the whales’. I’m sure one of them had even used the word ‘commune’, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.

Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they’d be clinging to any bit of the boat’s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.

Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. ‘We might not go out today,’ she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. ‘It’s looking a bit patchy,’ she explained.

Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word ‘Ice’ in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say ‘Lost in Iceland’ on the front and ‘Is anybody out there?’ on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman’s warning of ‘patchiness’ at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: ‘Let’s go! We don’t mind if it’s a little rough.’ They would make for brilliant famous last words.

The Marmite affair hits Port Hope

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Apparently the bureaucratic reach of Danish food nannies now extends as far as Port Hope, Ontario. I dropped in to the British Pantry to stock up on my usual assortment of pickled onions, crisps, toffees, and floral gums, to discover that not only did they not have any Marmite, they couldn’t get any more. This is serious . . . food DefCon Three level serious.

A quick interrogation of the sales person revealed that this is due to some strong disinformation activity on the part of the anti-Marmite faction: “Oh, we can’t bring that in anymore because it’s got beef extract in it. We’re not allowed to import that without a beef importing permit.”

My (sadly) empty jar of Marmite proclaims on the front that it’s 100% Vegetarian:

20110605-105004.jpg
100% Vegetarian
20110605-105347.jpg
Ingredients: Yeast Extract
Salt
Vegetable Extract
Niacin
Thiamin
Spice Extracts (contains Celery)
Riboflavin
Folic Acid
Vitamin B12

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