Dave Barry defines a sense of humor

Dave Barry - Elegy for the humorist. By Bryan Curtis

Dave Barry once defined "a sense of humor":

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

How dangerous are cell phones?

Times Online - Britain

Professor Sir William Stewart, chairman of the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB), said that evidence of potentially harmful effects had become more persuasive over the past five years.

The news prompted calls for phones to carry health warnings and panic in parts of the industry. One British manufacturer immediately suspended a model aimed at four to eight-year-olds.

The number of mobiles in Britain has doubled to 50 million since the first government-sponsored report in 2000. The number of children aged between five and nine using mobiles has increased fivefold in the same period.

In his report, Mobile Phones and Health, Sir William said that four studies have caused concern. One ten-year study in Sweden suggests that heavy mobile users are more prone to non-malignant tumours in the ear and brain while a Dutch study had suggested changes in cognitive function. A German study has hinted at an increase in cancer around base stations, while a project supported by the EU had shown evidence of cell damage from fields typical of those of mobile phones.

“All of these studies have yet to be replicated and are of varying quality but we can’t dismiss them out of hand,” Sir William said. If there was a health risk — which remained unproven — it would have a greater effect on the young than on older people, he added.

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I'm betting there won't turn out to be much if any effect, but I'm definitely interested. I expect there'll be a genuine review article in JAMA or NEJM soon.

Predictions from 1961: looking to 2000

Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?

A quite funny list of predictions. The ads on the left, however, suggest it was probably not the most serious of exercises. More like the National Enquirer predicting life in 2040. Intriguingly, many of the IT predictions weren't that far off. Extrapolation around cars and robots however went very wrong.

...Doors will open automatically, and clothing will be put away by remote control. The heating and cooling systems will be built into the furniture and rugs.

You'll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you're away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

You'll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

Cooking will be in solar ovens with microwave controls. Garbage will be refrigerated, and pressed into fertiliser pellets.

Food won't be very different from 1961, but there will be a few new dishes - instant bread, sugar made from sawdust, foodless foods (minus nutritional properties), juice powders and synthetic tea and cocoa. Energy will come in tablet form.

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will "talk" to each other.

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man's stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

The family car will be soundless, vibrationless and self-propelled thermostatically. The engine will be smaller than a typewriter. Cars will travel overland on an 18 inch air cushion.

Railways will have one central dispatcher, who will control a whole nation's traffic. Jet trains will be guided by electronic brains...

What the heck is Bush saying here?

President outlines role of his faith - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics - January 12, 2005

I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person,' Mr. Bush said. 'I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is.

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What the heck is he saying? God, how anyone could vote for that guy ...

spare the death squad, spoil the liberation. Giblet speaks

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

We must destroy them to save them.

The incurable disorder: Obesity

Faughnan's Notes: the JAMA Atkins vs. Ornish vs Zone vs. Weight Watcher Diet Study Post

I posted on this JAMA study a few when the media covered it earlier this month. I updated my post after reading the article. Follow the link to see the original and the updated comments.

The anti-science (anti-Darwin) forces will win

Salon.com News | The new Monkey Trial (Michelle Goldberg)

...It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans -- 65 percent, according to the poll cited above -- favor teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

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This is a long article, but overall not a bad overview. The author unfortunately omits mention of the most important anti-science figure in America. George Bush has made it clear, even back when he was first running against Gore, that he supports the anti-evolutionary forces.

I don't think Goldberg was clear enough on the misuse of the concept of "intelligent design". Intelligent design, in the broad sense, does not conflict with the idea of evolution. After all, God could have designed the universe and much else besides, and yet all of our biology might be a result of natural selection. Of course the "intelligent design" persons are not interested in this idea. They believe that God created them explicitly, in this case the "design" refers not to the design of creation, but to the "design" of humanity. I suspect, some of the ID folk would be willing to ascribe everything but humanity to be operations of natural selection. It's all about the primacy of humanity's role in the universe, and the belief that we were built in God's image.

Goldberg also fails to mention the most interesting and persistent fallacy in the thinking of the ID cult -- the fallacy of purpose. Their mathematical arguments against evolution are generally designed to show that if we were to rerun earth's history, the probability of developing anything like us is very low.

Think about it. That's only a quandry if one assumes, as they do, that we're the purpose or point of universal history. It's like someone who flips a coin a trillion times, then declares there must be a God because there's no way someone could flip another coin a trillion times and get exactly the same sequence of heads and tails.

Goldberg does mention that this is fundamentally not merely a crusade against Darwin, the positions taken by the creationist forces are fundamentally assaults on the foundations of science, attacks against reason, deduction and empiricism.

Alas, all of these arguments matter not at all.

The key paragraph, which I've excerpted above, is towards the end. 65% is a strong majority. Emphasis on strong -- among those group there are many for whom this is a "hell or heaven" issue. Weighting for this influence, it seems an overwhelming majority.

At various times in our nation's history we've shifted between a "rationalist" and a "romantic" perspective. Now the latter group is ascendant. The romantics feel that science is, like politics or the arts, a matter of opinion. This romantic group, oddly enough, includes both social conservatives and left wing intellectual deconstructionist heathens. Irrationality makes strange bedfellows.

There's not that much to be done. China may have to carry the torch of Rationalism for the 21st century. I can only hope they take good care of it. The rest of us will have to hunt around for scattered refuges of Reason in the US and resign ourselves to private schools (vouchers anyone?).

There is one final irony. The more layperson's cosmology I read, the more inclined I am to consider that some entity may have designed our universe [1]. So I think there's an interesting discussion about Intelligent Design in the cosmology/physics department. The Creationists are just barking up the wrong tree. They should be hounding physicists, not biologists.

[1] There are interesting distinctions between a created physical universe and the "our reality is a simulation" (created virtual universe), but the two have more in common than not.

Boycott God

Send a Message to God - He has gone too far this time. By Heather Mac Donald

A satirical take on the problem of evil. The blackest of humor.

Tale of a multilevel marketing scam: "Work at Home" with herbalife

Work from Home, unwelcome Herbalife Signs

Ever wonder how those "work at home" business actually work?

The big event of 2005: nanotech solar energy conversion?

CTV.ca | New plastic can better convert solar energy

TORONTO — Researchers at the University of Toronto have invented an infrared-sensitive material that's five times more efficient at turning the sun's power into electrical energy than current methods...

Sargent and other researchers combined specially-designed minute particles called quantum dots, three to four nanometres across, with a polymer to make a plastic that can detect energy in the infrared....

"In fact, there's enough power from the sun hitting the Earth every day to supply all the world's needs for energy 10,000 times over,'' Sargent said in a phone interview Sunday from Boston. He is currently a visiting professor of nanotechnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sargent said the new plastic composite is, in layman's terms, a layer of film that "catches'' solar energy. He said the film can be applied to any device, much like paint is coated on a wall.

"We've done the same thing, but not with something that just sit there on the wall the way paint does,'' said the Ottawa native.

"We've done it to make a device which actually harnesses the power in the room in the infrared.''

The film can convert up to 30 per cent of the sun's power into usable, electrical energy. Today's best plastic solar cells capture only about six per cent.

...Sargent's work was published in the online edition of Nature Materials on Sunday and will appear in its February issue.

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We'll know this is real if we see a change in oil futures. A 500% efficiency increase in solar energy production is potentially world changing.

If this is real, then the big news event of 2005, the one remembered by history students, will not be about a tsunami. I'll be watching for more detail ...

The dismal state of consumer electronics: the curse of being market driven

NYTimes.com (Pogue): Circuits Newsletter

The newest camcorders, designed to meet the needs of discriminat ... err braindead consumers have been market driven over a cliff:

... problem of manufacturers concentrating on the zoom multiple, which is what people understand, instead of the widest angle, which is just as important. The result is camcorders with horribly "zoomed in" widest angles. Once again, they put their R&D into the features that market well, not the ones that actually make a better camcorder!

You can find out a camcorder's widest angle by looking at a less often published specification: the 35mm equivalent of your camcorder's zoom. The smaller the small number is, the wider the camcorder can get when fully zoomed out, and the bigger the big number the more zoomed in it can get.

Your DCR-TRV70 has a 35mm equivalent of 52 to 520mm. The 52mm minimum is HUGE. That's why you feel like your video is zoomed in. ... (Compare that to the 28mm of the Rebel, and the 18mm measurement of some good wide-angle lenses.)

You said you were looking for a Sony camcorder, so I looked up the 35 mm equivalents of their camcorders in the TRV70's price range (of course, all of these will be replaced this week at the Consumer Electronics Show):

DCR-HC65: 46 to 460 mm
DCR-HC85: 52 to 520 mm
DCR-PC350: 45 to 450 mm (probably the best camcorder in the Sony 2004 line)
DCR-HC1000: 49 to 588 mm (stay away — far, far away!)

It may be just old age, but I feel as though in the past 6 years this trend has run amok. Vendors are "customer driven" indeed -- but the problem is, the customer is an ass!

Ok, not an ass -- just a human being overwhelmed by endless complexity and unable to make informed buying decisions. Market research shows customers care about "Zoom" -- even though it's the last thing they need for most home video work. (Do you really want to see Aunt Jennie's zit?). The engineers know the customer is being stupid, but if they give the customer what they really need, rather than what the customer thinks they need -- the engineer's company will be out of business.

This happens all over the place. The result is that people who want quality products that are intelligently designed are being forced into the professional market -- and that costs a fortune!

Unfortunately it's only going to get worse. Successful companies must be market driven. They have no choice but to deliver what the masses want -- even if it's bad for them. Hmm. Maybe I'll become a Straussian.

ConsumerReports.org: $26 per year, or $18 if you cancel first ...

Consumer Reports Customer Service Center

Differential charges are a common tactic, but you're supposed to be more subtle about than this.

ConsumerReports.org charges $4.95/mo for their online ratings service. You can upgrade at any time to the yearly fee. That's $26.00. Or you can cancel, and be offered a yearly fee of $18.

So, if you want to subscribe, sign up for month then cancel ...

On human language

Economist.com | Endangered languages

The Economist reviews the decline of human languages. Some interesting excerpts:

• 10,000 years ago, when the world had just 5m-10m people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them
• today the world has about 5 billion people and only about 6,800 distinct languages
• Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Forgotten History: Haiti and the Mau-Mau rebellion

The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > 'Though the Heavens May Fall' and 'Bury the Chains': Freed

This is the week for forgotten (in the states) history. The Economist reviewed two books on the Mau-Mau rebellion. The stupidity, cruelty and brutality of the English war on the insurgents is little known; the occupiers a better job than most in erasing their history. The Economist reviewer compares the methods of the English in Kenya to those of the US in Iraq. It's not a compliment.

The NYT reviews books on the fall of slavery that also touch on Haiti's successful slave rebellion, a rebellion that makes the American revolutionary war seem tame in comparison:

...Haitian rebellion. The sections of the book that deal with them bring to light an astounding, and forgotten, episode in Western history. Since Haiti alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13 colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. It belonged to France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the slaves were intentionally worked to death -- it was cheaper to replace them than to sustain them -- so the market for Africans was very brisk. Uprisings had long been frequent in the West Indies, but at long last rage in Haiti converged with the tactical brilliance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and others and the slaves seized the island. This part of the story is familiar. But there is more.

First the British and then the French under Napoleon sent huge forces against the Haitians. The British sent a larger army against Haiti than it had dispatched to fight in the American Revolution. And it buried 60 percent of those soldiers in Haiti. The two greatest powers on earth went up against a population of half-starved, desperate people and were utterly defeated. It is no surprise that these two abysmal wars of empire have fallen out of history. One cannot read about them without concluding that the Haitian Africans contributed mightily to making the Caribbean slave system untenable.

I'm sure Toussaint L'Ouverture was a brilliant tactician, but, without knowing anything about the war, I suspect malaria and Yellow Fever were Toussaint's all-powerful allies.

Brzezinski on what it would take to "win" in Iraq

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: Defining Victory Down

Mr. Scowcroft appeared at the New America Foundation with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, who declared the Iraq war a moral, political and military failure. If we can't send 500,000 troops, spend $500 billion and agree to resume the draft, then the conflict should be 'terminated,' he said, adding that far from the Jeffersonian democracy Mr. Bush extols, the most we can hope for is a Shiite-controlled theocracy.

The Iraqi election that was meant to be the solution to the problem - like the installation of a new Iraqi government and the transfer of sovereignty and all the other steps that were supposed to make things better - may actually be making things worse. The election is going to expand the control of the Shiite theocrats, even beyond what their numbers would entitle them to have, because of the way the Bush team has set it up and the danger that if you're a Sunni, the vote you cast may be your last.

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In the entire history of the United States, has any president made a greater mistake? No, not the invasion of Iraq. Bushe's mistakes are the people he trusts, his rejection of contrary council, and a fundamental belief that his will is somehow favored by God. It is those things that led to the failure to secure the occupation, and now has made "winning" extraordinarily unlikely.

My only consolation is that Kerry would have had the same choice. Either admit defeat, or renew the draft.