Last Week's Procrastination Post

Slate devoted a whole issue to procrastination. Everybody inveighs against it, and Emily Yoffe hauled out some non procrastinating expert to claim that it's just a bad habit with no basis in biology. I will believe that when I believe the same thing about sleep and eating.

Procrastination is the brain's way of protesting against spending too much time doing stupid and boring things like processing paperwork, writing reports, and mowing the lawn. None of those things was useful to our survival when our brains evolved, and the fact that they might be now has not yet been incorporated into the plan.

Pretty Boy

Verena von Pfetten claims women like, or even prefer, ugly men.

Well that explains why I could never get a date in high school.

And why George Clooney has always had the same problem.

Good as Gold

James Hamilton on why the gold standard is a dumb idea:

A savvy speculator would then reason as follows.

The U.S. has promised that it will continue to convert dollars to gold at $600 per ounce. But that will require them to raise interest rates at a time of potential financial panic, and I don't believe they have the stomach for that. I'm going to ask for my dollars in gold right now, in the guess that they'll abandon this policy shortly. When they give up the standard, my gold will have appreciated, and I'll have a handsome profit.

And how could the U.S. respond to such a speculative attack? We'd have two choices. One would be to say to the speculators, you're right, this idea of driving interest rates up at a time of financial crisis was a dumb one. Dollars are no longer convertible to gold at the old fixed rate.

Or the other option would be to say, no, we really mean it this time, honest, we're serious about this whole gold standard thing. So, we drive interest rates higher and watch the deflation mount. Outstanding debt that is denominated in dollars becomes more and more costly for people to repay, and we'd see a really impressive level of bankruptcies and business failures. The cycle would continue until the politicians who promised to stay on the gold standard are driven out of office and the deflation spiral could finally be ended by the new leaders choosing option 1 after all.
. . .
A 1991 research paper by Ben Bernanke and Harold James noted the very strong correlation between when a country abandoned the gold standard and when it began to recover from the Great Depression.
. . .
As I pointed out in an article published in 1988, gold-standard advocates think in terms of an institution whose continued operation, once adopted, would never again be doubted. But the problem is, if you can go on a gold standard, then you can go off a gold standard. And uncertainty about if and when the latter will occur can make the system itself a very destabilizing force.

One of my favorite blog colloquys went like this:

Wally Paulnuts: Ron Paul is an Austrian economist. . .

Sagredo Slapdown: Ron Paul is a Texan obstetrician. He doesn't understand anything about economics.
(names changed because I forget).

Doesn't Play Well With Others

is one of those notices you hate to have sent home with your kindergartener. It's an implicit threat that your child might be destined to be unpopular, an outcast, a criminal, or perhaps even a Republican. Most kids do learn at least a bit about getting along eventually, though, and few become serial killers.

The religions born of Abraham have a bit of nasty history in that regard, perhaps not so surprisingly given their origin in the worship of a tribal war god. Like many such, he was infernally jealous and intolerant of any competition, frequently commanding the extermination of whole peoples some of whom might have strayed in their devotion or not had the right accent. Check out Exodus for examples.

As his cult fragmented, as popular cults do, the various branches fell to extermination of each other, with occasional bouts of limited toleration. The rise of liberal democracy made necessary a more tolerant practice, and eventually a substantial portion of Christianity signed on, albeit grudgingly, to the notion of religious tolerance. Abe's original homeboys, dispersed and few in numbers, could also summon up at least lip service. The half-bros from the other side of the tracks had a different history, and powerful strains of intolerance still hold sway in much of the Muslim world.

One can find radically intolerant statements in Islamic law and writing, but that's not really different from Christianity and Judaism. In practice, though, at the present epoch of history, Islams intolerance is much more extreme. Neither Christians or Jews today would broadly sanction the murder of apostates, but Islam does.

In the broader panorama of history, though, Islam has frequently been quite tolerant compared to the Christianity of the day, so it's hard to believe that tolerance can't happen.

I think that the current Conservative devotion to a war against so-called "Islamfascism" is as phony and hypocritcal as Larry Craig's war against gays, but there is no doubt that there are fanatics motivated by religion trying to wage war on the West. Religious intolerance is almost certainly a fundamental obstacle to Islamic countries' freedom, modernization and adoption of democratic political institutions. It's a problem that they will probably need to solve if they aren't to be swept away, vast oil wealth notwithstanding.

Or not.

Mitigation: WGIII SPM

I have been surfing through the IPCC WGIII (Mitigation) summary for policy makers, and I'm not impressed. In my opinion, it's a terrible piece of technical writing, unlikely to be of much use to anyone, least of all policy makers.

Why am I so critical, when it has lots of colorful graphs, boxes and tables, and clearly represents a lot of hard work? In the first place, I can't imagine an audience. I certainly can't imagine a senior government official, congressman, or even congressional staffer reading through these 24 pages, or learning much if they did.

The central organizing principle is a set of alternate "scenarios," but you won't find much discussion of them here - for that you need to go "somewhere else." In fact that's true of almost everything in the summary. Curious as to what a US$/tCO2-eq is? Better look "somewhere else."

I have never met a policymaker who was willing to wade through this kind of technical gobbledegook. My guess is than even Congressional staffers would glaze over by Table SPM.2.

The relevant questions a real policy maker might have are not addressed. There are expressions of "agreement" and "confidence," but no discussion of the underlying assumptions. There is blather about top down and bottom up studies, but no discussion of what that might mean.

Predictions about how the climate system will respond to forcings are founded on physics, and so have at least some credibility. Predictions about how economic and political systems will behave are ****much**** more uncertain. Nobody mentions that. Nobody really knows what the economic impact of a cap-and-trade system would be and nobody has a clue as to how it could be enforced internationally.

Cost expressed in US$/tCO2-eq are worthless. What does that mean per gallon of gas?

Nobody, so far as I can tell, is preparing the public for stuff they will ultimately need to sign up for. That may not be the purpose of the WGIII SPM, but don't see any other value to it either.

It's vague where it should be specific (detailed mitigation methods), specific where it should be silent (implausible and widely varying estimates of economic impacts), and maddeningly jargon filled. Are the authors really unaware that a useful summary needs to be mainly self-contained?

Did I mention that I didn't like it?

Too Old to be President?

Yes, I am ageist about the Presidency. John McCain is too old to be President. Let's remember that Reagan, who was a couple of years younger than McCain when he became President, spent his second term drifting into the fog of Alzheimer's disease while George Bush the first and other henchmen immersed the country in the criminal follies of Iran-Contra.

I'm an old guy myself, rapidly approaching Medicare eligibility, and I watched myself and my contemporaries get old. Most of us still have most of our mental faculties about us (somewhere about us - now where did I put those damn things?) but we are all slowed mentally and physically. McCain seems to be a tough guy, from long lived and vigorous stock, but he was never very bright to begin with, he has had cancer, and his body was broken in Vietnam.

McCain deserves our respect and honor for what he went through, but the Presidency is not a reward for good service. Age is not the primary reason I am against him, but it is a reason, and I think a good one.

Damn The New York Times

It's official. Ann Coulter and I agree on the New York Times.

What possessed the New York Times to give neocon godfather Edward Luttwak a platform on its editorial page to tell wacko Muslims to assassinate Barack Obama? Luttwak (who is not Muslim but Jewish) used the platform to propound the notion that Obama counts as a Muslim apostate whose murder is thereby sanctioned by God and religion. Many Muslims have pointed out that Luttwak's inference of apostasy is bizarre and unlikely to be sanctioned even by extremists, though no doubt there are nuts out there extreme enough to be induced to try.

I understand why slimy neocon like Luttwak might try a smear like this - when you have no morals and are about to lose power, anything goes. What in the hell inspired Sulzberger incorporated to print this garbage, though? Has the nutbag wing of the Israel lobby decided that they stand or fall with the neocons?

The NYT has forfeited all journalistic credibility and the respect of every American patriot. Even Fox News has yet to stoop this low.

Road Kill

Brad DeLong leads us to Fake Steve Jobs, who diagnoses Dell.

I love Charles Cooper of CNET and I respect the fact that he's got to print so many column inches per week in order to earn his paycheck but I have to take issue with his latest effort (see here) where he tries to argue that while Dell looks like crap today, in fact Dell could bounce back just the way Apple did. Coop is light on details and specifics and just sticks to the argument that "times change" and that "Dell has bounced back from previous stumbles so who knows?"
. . .
What people overlook is that the advantages that allowed Dell to prosper for about a decade were all fleeting advantages. Dell was for a while an innovative company, but its innovations did not involve product design. They involved manufacturing and distribution efficiencies.
. . .
The other reason Dell won't rebound is that the company is yoked to Microsoft. Vista has hurt them tremendously. Don't doubt it. All of the PC makers know this and they are furious about it. But what can they do? They put their future in the hands of the Beastmaster. They figured they could deal with the Borg's evil nature; they didn't anticipate having to deal with the Borg's incompetence.
. . .
Which brings me to the real difference between Dell and Apple -- simply put, it's me. When you boil down all the facts and data, the real bottom line on Apple's rebound is that Apple rebounded because I came back to the company. I mean it's pretty obvious, isn't it? I get tossed out, the company goes into the crapper. I come back, the company booms. You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, as the Allman Brothers once sang.

Now as for Dell, well, you know what their big problem is? Dell doesn't have me. Or anyone like me. Mostly because, let's face it, there isn't anyone else like me. I'm one of a kind. Sui generis, as the French say.
. . .
To think Michael Dell can do at Dell what I did at Apple is like thinking that if you give Michael Dell a striped shirt and put him in Picasso's old studio and let him buy supplies from Picasso's supplier then you'd have another Picasso. No. Apple is just that -- it's my paint store, the place I get my brushes and canvases and frames and smocks and the metal or clay or whatever Picasso used to make his sculptures. Apple is the loft where I do my work and make love to my nude models. Figuratively speaking. It's the kitchen where I pose for wacky photos with loaves of bread.

The truth on Dell? Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It's DEC and DG and Apollo. It's a flower that bloomed and now must die. It's roadkill. It's mulch. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's a good thing.

Darn! I wish I could write like that.

Fair Farvard

At the end of the Middle Ages, the vast wealth of the Catholic Church proved a severe temptation to monarchs. Somewhat similarly, the Massachusetts legislature has been casting covetous eyes at the enormous wealth of its education industry, and has mused about taxing it.

Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw (we won't mention Greg's less than excellent adventure in the Bush White House) thinks that might be a signal that it's time to move along. Space is short in Cambridge, and the place is big enough to be unwieldy anyway.

1. Instead of expanding the university into Alston, Harvard could create a second campus in another state. Call it Harvard South. (Put it in a better climate than Boston, and I would be one of the first faculty to volunteer for the move.)

2. Transfer much of the endowment to Harvard South. Support Harvard North by slowly selling off land in Massachusetts.

3. Eventually, make Harvard South the main campus, and Harvard North the satellite. If Massachusetts state lawmakers remain hostile, close Harvard North down entirely.

That's dandy with Brad DeLong, who thinks they should move it to Berkeley. That, of course, would be a great waste, since the weather there is only a modest improvement on Boston, the land is also dear, and they already have some fine schools.

Southern New Mexico has an ideal climate though, and land is cheap. Illegal aliens to work in the cafeterias and maintain the grounds are plentiful. And, of course, we would be too thrilled to even think of taxing the joint anytime soon.

That "Harvard South" crap won't cut it though. How about, say, "Farvard?" Or maybe "El Harvardo?"

Sullivan Watches Clinton's "Victory" Speech

I don't think he was impressed:

. . . She cannot concede; she cannot give an inch; she cannot acknowledge reality. Observing sociopaths in close detail as their world collapses around them and they cannot absorb the truth is always fascinating. And yet some sliver of humanity is discernible: her tone is altered. Even she cannot fake enthusiasm or confidence any more. And Bill seems grim. Chelsea seemed close to breaking into tears.

If you want another president whose own grip on reality has little relationship to the outside world, then you know who to vote for.

Harsh? Maybe, but considering the crap she has been spewing lately, hardly unjust.

For a truly repellent performance, though, you really should have caught Lanny Davis on CNN. He was a tired old whore, knowing exactly what he was doing, fully appreciating how disgusting, dishonest and contemptible he was, but obliged to go through the motions one more time anyway.

Too Smart for Your Own Good?

Any body ever accuse you of being too smart for your own good?

Me neither, but it seems that you can be, at least if you are a fruit fly.

In a series of experiments, scientists selected fruit flies for their ability to learn to recognize an undesireable food source by repeatedly breeding the best learners. The fruit flies became good at this kind of learning after a few generations.

It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked jellies. The fast-learning strain of flies needs less than an hour.

It seems that their learning extracted a cost, though:

But the flies pay a price for fast learning. Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

The trouble with this experiment for me is that they initially selected the flies for just the ability to learn one thing. It would hardly be strange if they acquired that ability at some other genetic cost - otherwise why wouldn't the wild type have already acquired that trait. The analogous experiment with humans might select humans for, say, ability to learn trigonometry. After 15 generations or so of this, would anyone be surprised if it turned out that the math geeks couldn't compete with wild type humans in the jungle?

An interesting experiment, but as it stands, it hardly is evidence for the authors point.

Falsifying AGW Theory

James Annan and Roger Pielke [James neglects to provide a link or even identify which RP is in question] are duking it out on the subject of falsifying the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. If we are good Popperians, we should believe that a good scientific theory ought to be falsifiable - subject to disproof through predictions that fail to occur. General relativity, for example, would have been falsified if Einstein's predictions for the precession of Mercury's orbit and the the deflection of starlight during eclipses had proven wrong. Darwin's theory of natural selection would similarly have been damaged if the mechanisms of heredity had turned out to be different for each diffent type of animal.

So what are the critical observations for AGW, asks Roger? At the risk of oversimplifying Annan's answer, he says: AGW is a statistical theory about multidecadal warming - wait a few decades and see. Eli R points out some ancillary effects that are suitable tests.

I don't think Roger is being unreasonable in thinking that these answers are not quite to the point. Maybe we will have definitive answers in a few decades, but what about now? Are there no measurements that can test the theory?

It seems to me that there are some potential tests that examine the gears and wheels of the theory without the need to challenge the Boltzmann radiation law. The AGW theory is statistical because there are large unmodelled factors that affect global temperature.

Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing more or less steadily for many decades now, and with it the associated radiative forcing. The average global temperature has behaved in a much more complex fashion, presumably due to other forcings and to internal dynamics which are assumed to produce heating or cooling. Some of these dynamics likely just store heat in the deeper ocean, and are intrinsically confirmatory of AGW theory. Others change the radiative properties of the planet. These latter, if large enough and of appropriate sign, signal a potential threat to the theory - they represent a possible negative feedback.

Confirmation or disconfirmation of AGW theory must thus concentrate on understanding these dynamics, and capturing them in realistic models.

The above is not exactly an original insight. I'm sure that all the major players understand it well, and that is one reason that considerable effort goes into trying to understand exactly those dynamics. For some reason, though, these rather obvious facts are rarely discussed. Perhaps there is a fear that the discussion of the points would be construed as an admission of doubt.

The Silver Whale

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely (funny how this Moby Dick reference gets more useful as my memory for details fades), my wife gave me a large box, and told me to get my junk out of her drawers.

Maybe I should rephrase that. The box allegedly contained a rolling toolchest, and she asked me to get my tools out of the drawers she wanted to use for her junk.

The box weighed approximately 400 lbs and was constructed to withstand a simultaneous earthquake and H 5 tornado, so just getting it open was a bit of a challenge. When opened, what was revealed was parts, 11,347 of them by rough count or actual estimate, of which only 11,017 were screws, in 33 varieties. What I had, in short, was not a toolchest, but a project.

Now my wife claims that she was unaware that the chest came disassembled. Lending plausibility to that notion is the fact that she clearly remembers a much younger, stronger, keener-eyed, and clearer-sighted me struggling into the wee hours of Christmas morning trying to assemble a couple of big wheel racers consisting of exactly three parts each. On the other hand, she is eager to get me out of the house and into the garage.

Lo these several months later, the project does seem to be taking shape. There is now an actual, rolling, box-shaped silvery metallic object in my garage, and I have even finished assembling the first drawer (less than 200 parts). When I attempted to insert that drawer, though, I met a peculiar obstruction. Further research revealed it to be a part, screwed in place, that didn't seem to belong there. I wonder how much of the box will need to be disassembled to remove it.

I have a friend who is building a jet aircraft in his garage. Aside from the heliarc welding, his task may be the simpler.