Time for the US to pass the baton ...

2020 Vision - A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could end in 15 years. By Fred Kaplan

Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it?

This isn't really news. There's nothing except supernatural intervention that would make the US the dominant world power forever. Bush hasn't caused the relative decline of the US, he's only accelerated it by 20 or 40 years or so (twice the rate of decline). Since Bush was elected by a majority of US voters with a well established track record, it's really the Bush voter that should take historical responsibility.

Stories of my father: umbrella combat

Boing Boing: HOWTO kick someone's ass with an umbrella

As a child in the 1930s my father was a fan of "howto" pamphlets on the use of a concealed walking stick dagger in combat. He probably came across some version of this 1901 article. I'll have to ask him if it looks familiar.

Bush is good for journalism: even Maureen Dowd can write now

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Down: Love for Sale

Maureen wants to prostitute herself to the Bush administration. This is a great column, funny with tears, biting with despair. Maureen used to be a crummy writer, but the longer Bush is in power the better she's doing.

The same powerful tonic has come to The Atlantic, Harpers and the New Yorker. I just read Richard Clarke's article in the January Atlantic -- American as a 2011 military state (but why did he call the Mall of America the Mall of the States? -- was he being polite?). It was a great article, but excellence is now routine in The Atlantic. That wasn't true four years ago. They must be making money -- the mag is getting thicker every month.

Harpers is consistently interesting. The New Yorker, fueled by Seymour Hersh, deserves a few Pullitzers.

True, the New York Times is pretty feeble, but maybe this bracing influence will finally resuscitate them.

Of course I'd rather have Kerry as President. If I have to live with King George however, it's good to have something to read in my hideaway.

A9.com local search -- take that Google!

A9.com Search: thai

Ahh, I love to see Amazon and Google slug it out. Each solid blow means more neat stuff for me.

Google has done a pretty good job with local search. Now A9 does much the same thing -- but they've added images too!

Of course my local MSP favorites don't have pictures yet ... but there's the clever part. Amazon is leveraging their power tool -- an infrastructure for commentary. The link for a nearby Thai restaturant goes to an Amazon page that allows commentary -- and posting of pictures!

If I had a decent camera phone it would be fun to help build the Amazon image library this way.

Does an earthlike planet require a neighboring supernova?

USATODAY.com - A different 'Big Bang' may have saved Earth

I only see the USA Today when traveling. This morning I caught sight of this article. I expected to see some f/u in the New York Times, but USA Today seems to be ahead of the pack. On review I note that this is still a "controversial hypothesis", but a more technical article states some supporting evidence (atypical isotopes) will be published shortly.

This is tremendously interesting, though the journalist missed the key point of interest. The hypothesis is that earthlike planets, the only kind known to support sentience (one example), can only form when a supernova detonates very close (1 light year -- or closer than the current closest star) to a star with an early, very shortlived (few million years), planetary disk (disc). The supernova blows away parts of the disk and seeds the early solar system with heavy metals. Without the supernova effect any earth like planets get expelled or destroyed by careening gas giants early in solar system development -- or whacked by comets a bit later on.

Not to stretch an analogy, but the solar system is like an egg, and the supernova is like exploding ... ummmm ..... errrrr .... you know. If the supernova doesn't blow at precisely the right time and right distance -- the egg is sterile.

So what did Dan Vergano miss? This data should allow astronomers to estimate how common earth like planets are. One of the mysteries of our galaxy is that it's not swarming with little green men. There are several explanations of this; one explanation is that planets that support life, much less sentience, are very rare.

Supernovae are not all that common in our galaxy, though they were probably more common 4 billion years ago. If very proximal supernovae are required to produce "fertile" solar systems, then earth like planets may be quite rare. Since the galaxy is known to be a very violent place, many of those planets would be sterilized or destroyed before life could develop.

I'd be particularly interested to know if any "tweaks" to the fundamental parameters of physics (C, G, Planck's constant, etc) would change the equation to increase the number of "fertile" solar systems. It would be particulary interesting if small tweaks would change the frequency of "fertile" planets to either zero or many. If it turned out that the universe is "tuned" to produce an average of one sentience per spiral galaxy ... well ... that's interesting.

All fun stuff. I guess not everyone shares my hobby however!

Astronomers studying the planet-forming disks of dust that orbit young, distant stars are hoping to solve the mystery of our own solar system's youth. Why is our system so different in form and function from others they can see?

It's a difference that may have saved Earth, because the scientists suspect that Jupiter and Saturn would have collided with the planet — or slung it out of the solar system like a slingshot — if the disk surrounding our young sun hadn't been so damaged.

These "protoplanetary" disks were a hot topic at a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "Something very bad happened to our solar system's disk in its early years," says Steve Desch of Arizona State University in Tempe.

An exploding star, or supernova, likely occurred within a light-year — about 5.9 trillion miles — of our sun in its infancy, he argues. (The closest star to our solar system now, Proxima Centauri, is about 4 light-years away)...

... A presentation at the meeting about a Hubble Space Telescope survey of 25 nearby stars, all youngsters less than 10 million years old, provides evidence that dust disks congeal into more compact bodies over only a few million years.

.... Only the eruption of a star 25 to 40 times bigger than our sun could have littered our solar system with the radioactive elements seen in meteorite surveys reported by Desch's team at the meeting.

Astronomers have seen just such explosions blasting protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula, a star-forming factory 1,500 light-years away. Rather than blowing away the disks, the supernova blasts appear to seed them with metals rocketed out of the heart of the exploding star.

The supernova that blasted our solar system may explain some of its other peculiarities:

•Planets in our solar system follow nearly circular orbits far from the sun. Most planets detected orbiting other, nearby stars follow either highly elongated orbits or circle incredibly close to their stars. Scientists suspect that a stellar explosion could have stopped these developments in our solar system.

•Dust disks seen orbiting nearby stars typically contain much more material, sometimes 100 times more, than our solar system. A Spitzer Space Telescope survey of 26 nearby sun-like stars known to have planets found evidence that six of them have comet belts. But all appear filled with about 100 times more comets than our own. [jf: comets can be very dangerous ...]

"There's good evidence the solar system had a stunted formation when the (supernova) injection happened," Desch says. And that may have been very good for Earth.

Many astronomers believe that Jupiter and Saturn formed deep in space, far beyond Pluto's orbit, and spiraled into the solar system. Why they stopped a safe distance from the sun and left Earth undisturbed — unlike the history of many other solar systems seen nearby — is the final mystery that disk studies may help answer..

Outsourcing to Africa

Rising Data Solutions: Company Profile

Call centers in Ghana. Next will be software projects.

Aztecs: how nasty can humans be?

The New Yorker: The Critics: The Art World

Very, very nasty. Really, really nasty.

So what keeps us from not being Aztecs?

Safire's tips on reading Safire

The New York Times > Opinion > Safire: How to Read a Column

It's been years since Safire wrote anything I was interested in. On his retirement, he managed to pique my interest -- even though it is a bit "cute". Here he decodes the secret language of Safire. Emphases mine. I omitted the ones I think are dull; he claimed 12 but really only had 8.

January 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
How to Read a Column
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

....2. Never look for the story in the lede. Reporters are required to put what's happened up top, but the practiced pundit places a nugget of news, even a startling insight, halfway down the column, directed at the politiscenti. When pressed for time, the savvy reader starts there.

5. Don't fall for the "snapper" device. To give an aimless harangue the illusion of shapeliness, some of us begin (forget "lede") with a historical allusion or revealing anecdote, then wander around for 600 words before concluding by harking back to an event or quotation in the opening graph. This stylistic circularity gives the reader a snappy sense of completion when the pundit has not figured out his argument's conclusion.

6. Be wary of admissions of minor error... In piously making these corrections before departing, the pundit gets credit for accuracy while getting away with misjudgments too whopping to admit.

7. Watch for repayment of favors. Stewart Alsop jocularly advised a novice columnist: "Never compromise your journalistic integrity - except for a revealing anecdote."

8. Cast aside any column about two subjects... (Three subjects, however, can give an essay the stability of an oaken barstool. Two's a crowd, but three's a gestalt.)

9. Cherchez la source. Ingest no column (or opinionated reporting labeled "analysis") without asking: Cui bono? And whenever you see the word "respected" in front of a name, narrow your eyes. You have never read "According to the disrespected (whomever)."

11. Do not be suckered by the unexpected. Pundits sometimes slip a knuckleball into their series of curveballs: for variety's sake, they turn on comrades in ideological arms, inducing apostasy-admirers to gush "Ooh, that's so unpredictable." Such pushmi-pullyu advocacy is permissible for Clintonian liberals or libertarian conservatives [eg. Safire] but is too often the mark of the too-cute contrarian.

12. Scorn personal exchanges between columnists. Observers presuming to be participants in debate remove the reader from the reality of controversy; theirs is merely a photo of a painting of a statue, or a towel-throwing contest between fight managers. Insist on columns taking on only the truly powerful, and then only kicking 'em when they're up.

The unsung heroes in the Dover School district: Defending Science

The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The Crafty Attacks on Evolution

The Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania became the first in the country to place intelligent design before its students, albeit mostly one step removed from the classroom. Last week school administrators read a brief statement to ninth-grade biology classes (the teachers refused to do it) asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact, that it had gaps for which there was no evidence, that intelligent design was a differing explanation of the origin of life, and that a book on intelligent design was available for interested students, who were, of course, encouraged to keep an open mind.

Those teachers deserve a medal for fighting in the defense of rationalism and science.

The Rise and Fall of the Body-Scanning Clinics

The New York Times > Health > Rapid Rise and Fall for Body-Scanning Clinics

There's not that much that surprises me in health technology and marketing, but this did. I did not expect the body-scanning clinics to crash and burn. Is the story really over? These services struck me as a really awful idea, but I'm used to awful ideas being popular.

Overall it seems like the market for these services was more limited than expected; vendors overbuilt then slashed prices. Maybe they'll continue at a lower level of demand, or maybe they'll find a way to provide CT services for far less money. The latter would be interesting if it happened, but it may be the demand simply isn't there. On the other hand the non-medical fetal ultrasound clinics seem to be still in business

This is a great story by Gina Kolata, one of the best medical journalists around. She exposes the greed of some prestigious academic health centers -- who jumped on the bandwagon even though they knew well that this service was likely to cause more harm than help. Shame on Harvard for succumbing, and credit to Yale for resisting.

One of the most important aspects of this story is what it says about the effects of a true marketplace on healthcare costs. There are almost NO true markets in medicine, this was one of them. Prices fell by 50% over a year -- to the very edge of profitability. It may say something about how medical savings accounts might work (I'm a cautious fan):

The New York Times
January 23, 2005
Rapid Rise and Fall for Body-Scanning Clinics
By GINA KOLATA

For a brief moment, Dr. Thomas Giannulli, a Seattle internist, thought he was getting in at the start of an exciting new area of medicine. He was opening a company to offer CT scans to the public - no doctor's referral necessary. The scans, he said, could find diseases like cancer or heart disease early, long before there were symptoms. And, for the scan centers, there was money to be made.

The demand for the scans - of the chest, of the abdomen, of the whole body - was so great that when Dr. Giannulli opened his center in 2001, he could hardly keep up. "We were very successful; we had waiting lists," he said. He was spending $20,000 a month on advertising and still making money.

Three years later, the center was down to one or two patients a day and Dr. Giannulli was forgoing a paycheck. Finally, late last year, he gave up and closed the center.

Dr. Giannulli's experience, repeated across the country, is one of the most remarkable stories yet of a medical technology bubble that burst, health care researchers say.

It began as a sort of medical gold rush, with hundreds of scanning centers, with ceaseless direct-to-consumer advertising, and with thousands of Americans paying out of pocket for the scans, which could cost $1,000 or more.

It ended abruptly with the wholesale shuttering of businesses.

CT Screening International, which scanned 25,000 people at 13 centers across the nation, went out of business. AmeriScan, another national chain, also closed. So, radiologists say, did another company that put scanners in vans and traveled to small towns in the South.

The business's collapse, health care researchers say, holds lessons about the workings of American medicine.

It shows the limits of direct-to-consumer advertising and the power of dissuasion by professional societies, which warned against getting one of these scans. The tests, they said, would mostly find innocuous lumps in places like the thyroid or lungs, requiring rounds of additional tests to rule out real problems, and would miss common cancers, like those of the breast.

It also shows the workings of the medical market - when insurers refused to pay, requiring customers to dig into their own pockets for the tests, scanning centers found themselves cutting prices to compete. Within a year, some centers said, prices fell to less than $500 from $1,000 or more.

... The scans were something new in American medicine - not like traditional screening scans, mammograms or colonoscopies, for example, in which patients are overseen by their doctors. People requested these scans on their own. They paid on their own, with no hints that insurers would start picking up the bill. And the reports came to the customers, not their doctors.

Some proponents said the scans would enable people to take their health care into their own hands. Critics said the scans were medical nightmares, a powerful medical technology gone out of control.

But few anticipated the precipitous reversal of fortune for the scanning centers...

... Dr. Carl Rosenkrantz, a radiologist in Boca Raton, Fla., said the business had another appeal - it promised radiologists a good living without being on call at a hospital and even without necessarily being present at the scanning center.

...Academic medical centers also got into the business, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard, which opened Be Well Body Scan. The center is owned by the Beth Israel Radiology Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the hospital's radiology department...

At Yale, Dr. Howard Forman, an associate professor of diagnostic radiology and management, said he had felt pressure from hospital administrators to explore the possibility of offering whole body scans to healthy people. He could see why. "From a profitability standpoint, you would go in this direction." But he and his colleagues resisted. "There is no evidence that the scans are good medicine," Dr. Forman said.

Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the National Institutes of Health's office of disease prevention, said: "For every 100 healthy people who undergo a scan, somewhere between 30 and 80 of them will be told that there is something that needs a workup - and it will turn out to be nothing."

The same arguments were made by the American College of Radiology and the Food and Drug Administration.

...As for Dr. Giannulli, he has moved on to other things. He founded a company, CareTools Inc., which sells software for medical record keeping to doctors' offices. That, he says, is the new frontier in medicine.

I work in the clinical automation industry, so it's a bad sign that Dr. Giannulli thinks we're the next big thing ...

Twixters: marooned in the twenties

TIME canada.com

My brother Brian was ahead of his time. He followed the path outlined in this Time Canada article during the 1990s. It's the path of the twixters "marooned" in their 20s, done with college but not ready to commit to the long dry road.

More recently, however, it seems to be the rule among my friend's children and pretty common among the recent grads I know of from our neighborhood college (Macalester). I don't think the article describes these people very well though; besides establishing "twixterhood" as an official phenom it doesn't provide much insight into why this is (supposedly) common now. Is it simply a wealth effect? Is it a gestalt reaction to an unpredictable world, a "Lady or the Tiger" paralysis?

I think there's something different happening, and I suspect that there's not one simple explanation. I think of these social transitions as being manifestations of a nonlinear (chaotic) system. (The murder rate is my favorite example of such a manifestation -- it's driven by demographics and employment but transitions are dramatic and affected by many interacting sub-drivers.) There are probably some primary contributors, but also many peripheral interactions that cause a sudden prevalence spike.

It will be interesting to see if the phenomena persists, or if it recedes as quickly as it came.

Hong Kong -- views of another galaxy

MICHAEL WOLF | PHOTOGRAPHY | HONGKONG

It's been over 20 years since I flew into Hong Kong, past the riot of skyscraping housing. This site provides a pictorial update. It looks like another order of magnitude increase in density. I would like to read about what it's like to live in those buildings.

A blog at least partially made up of Iraqi (english) voices

Words From Iraq

It's a bit confusing, but it appears to include posts from various english writing Iraqis. The descriptions of everyday anarchy and violence in Iraq ring true. (via metafilter)

Evolutionary game theory: people are strategies in a "game" played by natural selection

Marginal Revolution: Are you a player or a strategy?

This is new to me, but it has face validity. In some ways humans can be thought of as "strategies" in a kind of meta-game that emerges from the fundamental properties of natural selection.

Our colleague, Dan Houser, has just published an important new paper (co-authored with Robert Kurzban) that supports the assumption of evolutionary game theory. (The paper is also featured in the Economist.)  In a public goods game, Kurzban and Houser are able to identify three systematic strategies; cooperate, free ride and reciprocate (cooperate more when others do so).  The first surprising result of their paper is that these strategies can be tied to specific individuals.  Some individuals cooperate, others free ride and others reciprocate and the strategies that these individuals 'choose' are stable.  (This doesn't mean that individuals play strategies robotically regardless of context a better analogy may be to think of strategies like personalities - even a quiet person can yell sometimes.)

Strategy choice is so stable that Kurzban and Houser can create very cooperative groups simply by weeding out the free riders.  What is even more surprising, however, is that when individuals are randomly assigned to groups each strategy type earns about the same payoff.  Even though the strategies are very different, no strategy dominates the others in a randomly assigned group - this is exactly what one would predict if individuals are strategies in an evolutionary game.

Hmm. Reminds me of this.

Is it childish to call David Brooks "Bobo"?

Crooked Timber: How To Ascribe Super-Powers To Words - David Brooks on the inaugural address

Does Bobo believe this, or what?

Hmm. It seems a big childish to call David Brooks "Bobo". On the other hand, he does inflict his inanities on us. It's a real ethical quandry.

Brooks is emblematic of the fall of the New York Times.