National Do Not Call Registry

National Do Not Call Registry

The state registries are no longer used to update the federal list. So you have to do the federal separately. It works well, but it's only good for five years.

Something to add to one's "moving list", and to one's 5 yr calendar.

The Argentinian solution

Christopher Brauchli: The Etymology of Torture

Rendition. Torture. Corruption. Shrinking middle class. Fiscal chaos.

Which nation?

1. Argentina
2. United States of America
3. Both

In Argentina "transferal" referred to the process of taking a person from the Naval Mechanics' School in Buenos Aires known locally as ESMA. In an earlier incarnation it was an officers' casino. In its later incarnation it was one of the detention centers to which political dissidents, leaders of the opposition and those considered a threat to the military dictatorship were taken from March 1976 until the end of 1983. Its name notwithstanding, it would only have been considered a "school" by those who consider the use of torture as a teaching device to educate people as to what they should say to the torturer.

According to a description by Larry Rohter of the New York Times, the building had a long hall the name of which had something in common with "transferal" and "rendition." Its name was a euphemism. It was called "Happiness Avenue." There were no stores on Happiness Avenue as there are on some of the elegant avenues in Buenos Aires. There were just rooms in which acts of torture took place. "Happiness Avenue" was not a one-way street. Once the authorities completed the torture, which could go on for extended periods, the victim was drugged and participated in what the Argentine navy called "transferal." The victim was taken to the airport, placed in an airplane, flown over and then thrown into the ocean. Drowning was much pleasanter than the activities on Happiness Avenue. It had an end.

The United States uses "rendition" which loosely translated means "we provide the body, you perform the torture." "We" is the United States government in the guise of the CIA and "you" is the country to which those the soon-to-be-tortured are sent. Those who participate in rendition are sent to countries where torture is an accepted way of extracting information. That is not, however, why they are sent there. According to a report in the New York Times prisoners are moved to other countries in order to help the United States with budgetary problems. Administration officials have said that sending prisoners to Egypt, for example, is an alternative to the "costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries." The fact that those countries engage in torture is nothing more than a coincidence.

Even though rendition is primarily a money saving device, a number of individuals were tortured following their rendition. Maher Ara is a Canadian citizen who was arrested at Kennedy airport, transferred to and tortured in Syria before being released without being charged with a crime. Khaled el-Masri was arrested on the Serbia-Macedonia border, held and tortured for five months and then released without being charged. His captors told him it was a case of mistaken identity. They meant to torture someone else with his name. He was an incidental beneficiary of the torture rather than its intended target.

Intuit (Quicken): We don't just hate our customers. We make them scream.

Amazon.com: Electronics: Quicken 2005 Deluxe [Plan, Save, Take Control] [CD]

Wow. I've never seen a product sold on Amazon that got an average rating of 1.5 stars. This is a new record.

I first used Quicken in the 1980s. I think I started with version 2.0 on DOS 3.1. That was a great application, though it did tend to corrupt its database. Nobody's perfect. I started using a Quicken credit card around then -- got my transactions on a diskette. Completely reliable. Sigh. The credit card transactions were never reliable after Quicken moved to electronic downloads instead of the USPS.

Intuit has been a pretty steady death spiral for about 10 years. With Quicken 2005 they're scraping the bottom. I'm on QKN 2002, but Intuit has kindly informed me that as of 4/19 I won't be able to do funds transfer any more (never mind the revenue they make on my Quicken credit card). Quicken 2005 won't work with the relatively open OFX transaction standard, Quicken has stopped supporting that standard since they want to move transactions through their proprietary systems and capture the significant licensing revenue. Businesses, banks, and credit cards are balking -- they want to stay with OFX.

I hope the banks stand their ground.

It's time for me to move to Microsoft Money -- or, better yet, give up and go to a paper ledger. I'm lazy though, so first I'll see if I can find a copy of QKN 2003 or 2004. That ought to give me another year to switch to Microsoft Money.

How to buy a flash memory "MP3" player (but not the Shuffle!)

Microsoft Windows Media - Buying a Flash Memory MP3 Player

Crazy Apple Rumors linked to this site. It's absolutely hilarious! I believe it's a genuine attempt at Microsoft marketing. If you know the Apple Shuffle, you need to read this site.

Crazy Apple Rumors is very funny, but this is better. It reeks of bitter envy.

How to decrease your junk mail burden

The New York Times > New York Region > No Need to Stew: A Few Tips to Cope With Life's Annoyances

The NYT highlights tactics people use to get revenge on marketers (almost always) who annoy them. This is one of my favorites:

Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: 'Not at this address. Return to sender.' But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had 'or current resident' on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said.

Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the 'business reply' envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. 'That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me,' said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

'You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh,' said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

The USPO says its legal. Go for it guys! If only 10% of you do this, my junk mail burden will fall. It's not just revenge, it's an act of charity for all mankind.

Digital Rights Management: letting the snake in the door

via MacInTouch: Andrew Orlowski (The Register) writes about Apple tightening the iTunes DRM noose:

While Apple has been in the news again this week for its war against the people who promote its products, another of its wars has received much less attention. It may as well be a covert war.

Bit by bit, Apple is tightening the DRM noose, reducing the amount of freedom its own customers enjoy. Last year, the company cut the number of times users could burn a playlist from ten to seven. This time, Apple has chosen to cripple one of its coolest and most socially beneficial technologies - Rendezvous.

Apple actually applied the restriction two months ago, but the passage of time hasn't made it any sweeter. In iTunes, Rendezvous allows users on the same subnet to share their music - although this is limited to streaming only. But the most recent version of iTunes, 4.7.1, restricts that streaming capability even further, and users aren't happy, as this support discussion shows. It used to support five simultaneous listeners, but now iTunes only permits five listeners a day.

I don't think these are new lessons, but they are not easy to remember or apply. Apple's Fair Play DRM technology was introduced with a relatively large amount of freedom. As Apple's distribution scheme has gained market share, Apple has consistently revised its software to reduce the freedom of Apple's customers to use their software. Since Apple controls the software (iTunes), hardware (iPod), DRM standard (FairPlay), and distribution channel (iTunes store) they have unlimited power to control what their customers can do with their music. (Don't want to upgrade your copy of iTunes? Hah. It will be trivially easy to move you along.)

This is why I don't buy anything from the Apple music store - despite my affection for my iPod and for iTunes. I buy standard, non-DRM protected CDs. I use AAC encoding -- an open standard (MPEG-4) that is supported by non-Apple devices.

We'll see how this all plays out. The more we see how the market is deploying DRM the more we may come to love the pirates of the PRC.

If anyone still thinks Apple has some peculiar virtues I hope they are fully disillusioned. I'd absolutely choose Bill Gates to rule the computing world over Steve Jobs; if Apple can stay at a 5% market share I'm likely to remain an Apple customer. My great fear is that somehow Apple will hit a 10% market share -- at that point they'll be quite intolerable.

Is Bill Gates a creationist?

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Questions That Plague Physics: A Conversation with Lawrence M. Krauss -- [ COSMOLOGY ] -- Lawrence M. Krauss speaks about unfinished business

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is a champion of the Enlightenment. In an interview with Scientific American he mentions something both disturbing and interesting.

...I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-million grant, which is the second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio, institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which it isn't. [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that the foundation 'has decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments.']

One grant could be a mistake. Two grants is design. I'd gotten rumblings that among some middle-aged west coast geeks there's been a resurgent interest in 'intelligent design'. George Gilder might be the tip of the iceberg.

These are very smart and wealthy people, but they are not often scientists. If they have a technical background, it's not in biology. They are middle-aged now and feeling definitively mortal. Perhaps this is not surprising.

This will be interesting.

Yoo-hoo? Mainstream journalists? All you folks fretting about your role and relevance? How about looking into the Gates donations to the Discovery Institute?

Tsunami and the Nicobar islanders

The Tsunamis is "ancient" history now, but in researching the alleged near- Homo sapiens sapiens extinction event of the Tabo eruption I came across a web site describing the peoples of the Nicobar islands -- a group that colonized that area shortly after the Tabo eruption. The Negrito in particular represent a very ancient "race". The web site has news of how these people survived the Tsunami, but in at least one case rescue efforts have caused more pain than the Tsunami itself:

05-mar: ...While the Tsunami was in itself a traumatic experience for most, what has followed is even more traumatic. This is true especially for the inhabitants of Chowra, Bompoka and Trinket, the three islands in the Central Nicobars that were badly damaged and are now seen as unfit for habitation.

Chowra, a small flat island with a high population density and limited natural resources, had a pre-Tsunami population of 1,464, now reduced to 1,408. The relatively low number of casualties was completely unexpected. In view of the Tsunami's behaviour in Car Nicobar, the complete destruction of Chowra was initially feared. However, when rescue operations ended on Chowra on 4th January, it was found that 'only' 56 had died. No, the waves had not spared the rest of the population: most of them had been washed out to sea. But the Chowrites, sea people that they are, managed to fight the gigantic waves and swim back to land. The Chowrites are no ordinary people. Up to now, they are the only group in the Nicobars that have maintained a strong cultural identity despite outside interventions. It is known throughout the archipelago that the Chowrites have remained opposed to we1fare and development programs promoted by the Administration until recently. To the Chowrites, their identity and culture, inextricably linked to their land, are endowed with magic and has been foremost in all contact with the outside world.

For the first time, the people of Chowra have now been separated from their land. Following the rescue operations, all inhabitants of Chowra and Bompoka were moved to relief camps on Teressa island. Having spent two unhappy months there, they now wish to return to their islands and start a new life. But, unfortunately, they are not allowed to do so. In a meeting that was organized by the Administration on Teressa in early February, discussions were held with the Chief Captain of Chowra, Jonathan. The Administration urged Jonathan to stay in their new home on Teressa and tend to their plantations on Chowra, at least during the temporary rehabilitation phase. The main argument put forth by the Administration was the lack of water on Chowra. Jonathan failed to understand why this should be an issue after the Tsunami. Chowra had always faced water scarcity, no solution to which had ever been found or sought by the Administration, so why should this suddenly be an issue now? Jonathan expects nothing from the Administration. Why should he? He said that the desalinization plant that had been set up at one point worked only for a short while. It never got repaired or serviced when it broke down. His people had managed well in the past and they could do so now. Two weeks after that meeting, Jonathan, in a letter, still begged for boats 'to return to Chowra for at least 10 days to collect our left belongings ... before the [southwest] winds, because then there will be many problems once this wind starts. We have to reach Chowra before that'. When an official assessment team visited Chowra for the first time on 28th February, it was surprised to find that conditions on Chowra were much better than in most other villages/islands. Unfortunately, it had taken 2 months to realize this...

On human extinctions

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Experts weigh supervolcano risks

The BBC is doing a show on super volcanoes. These are supposed to happen every 100,000 years or so. They're as devastating as a really major meteor impact but five times more common. On the other hand, we think we might be able to avert a meteor strike. Volanoes ... well, probably not much to do there.

This quote, however, really suprised me:

One past super-eruption struck at Toba in Sumatra 74,000 years ago and is thought by some to have driven the human race to the edge of extinction. Signs from DNA suggest human numbers could have dropped to about 10,000, probably as a result of the effects of climate change."

Huh? I recall the 10K number from estimates of the origins of Homo sapiens sapiens, but that's 250K years ago. This is the first I've heard that we just about went down the tubes a mere 74K years ago. I think Home Floriensis and Homo sapiens neanderthalis both survived that period. Neaderthal man might have been better adopted to cold than other humans; I wonder if they would have flourished after the eruption.

Anyway, I want to learn more.

The ten commandments case brings Scalia out of the closet

Brad DeLong's Website: Nino Scalia, by Grace of God Justice and Lord

DeLong on Scalia:

Nino Scalia is allowed to break with those like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln who think that legitimate power ascends from the consent of the people. It's a free country. He can take his stand with those like James I Stuart, Innocent III, and Khomeini who think that legitimate power descends from God.

But does such a guy have any business being a Justice of the Supreme Court of a free country? No.

The Ten Commandments case is forcing a lot of things out into the light. However it turns out, we'll learn a lot about America. The principle of separation of Church and State may be about to take a hard fall.

Good.

We need to concentrate some minds.

Undoing the Enlightenment: Divide First, Conquer Second

In an earlier post I digressed from some Senator Rick Santorum language associated with the No Child Left Behind legislation to a broader discussion of the Orwellian language used by creationists (now repacked as 'intelligent designists").

Upon discussion with my Muse (Emily), the diabolical strategy of the counter-Enlightenment agenda was revealed to me (how's that for theological language?). It is a strategy that Machiavelli, a scion of the Englightenment, would have most appreciated. For that matter, Sun Tzu would also approve. Consider this paragraph in a National Center for Science Education essay:

Santorum language appeared in the 2003 Kansas legislative session in the form of Senate Bill 168. SB 168 encouraged curricula that helped students understand "the full range of scientific views that exist," and exempted educational staff from any penalties for deviating from state curriculum requirements. SB 168 further betrayed its creationist leanings when it explicitly singled out "origins science" for special treatment, requiring that "origins science" -- but not other science -- be taught "inclusively, objectively, and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption." The artificial distinction between "origins science" (sciences dealing with the past) and "operations science" (sciences dealing with the present) has been a running theme in creationist publications for decades.

If one wished to undo the Enlightenment, how would one begin? One would not strike at strength, but at weakness. First divide, then conquer. "Operations Science" includes physiology, biochemistry, bacteriology, molecular biology, meteorology, chemistry, applied physics and far more. This is strong science. (Note, however, that medicine, a profession related to some of the strong sciences, has been shown to be vulnerable to attack.

On the other hand "origins science" is less immediate to the everyday life of the average person. Origins science is concerned with history, with fossils, with cosmology, and with evolution. The average citizen would feel that their life is not affected one bit by the study of dinosaurs, of quasars, of Neandertals, of the Aztecs, or of natural selection. This is vulnerable science. This is where one would start undoing the Englightenment.

Children of the Enlightenment -- arouse yourselves!

On spam, marketing, noise, search, reputation management and the evolution of the blog

Need an Outlook reference?

I was looking for a book on Outlook 2003. I don't need a novice reference, I need a power-user reference. I looked first at O'Reilly (the home of the power user), but they don't have anything current. Google and Amazon weren't helping, though Amazon was somewhat useful.

So I turned to an authority, a blog called Marc's Outlook on Productivity. Marc is not a super-power user, but he concentrates on this domain.

This is new. I could ask a friend, but I already know more about Outlook than anyone else I know. Five to ten years ago I'd have tried Usenet, but it's been done in by spam and blogs. Five years ago Google would have given me a good answer, now Google is overwhelmed by spam and marketing. Amazon usually works, but there aren't enough people interested in this topic to provide me with useful information. This isn't surprising, Amazon is often weak in dealing with multiple editions of computer books with a small readership -- there's too much dilution of a limited number of reviews. Once upon a time I'd have gone to a 'community site', but they have too much noise and are too hard to track.

So I took a new tack - the next best thing to asking an expert colleague for a recommendation. I went to the blog of an expert I trusted. I trusted this expert because I've followed his writing for a year or so. (Note: blog, expert, domain specific, reputation->trust)

The Post Categories in this blog (Note: ontology, terminology, classification, search, metadata) helped me find a relevant post very quickly. I ordered the book from Amazon. Unfortunately the publisher doesn't allow one to view the contents in Amazon (most annoying).

The pace of evolution of the web and of search in general is breathtaking. In ten years we've marched through an astonishing array of solutions, most of which have been destroyed by the twin demons of marketing and spam (arguably spam is a form of marketing!).

I wonder if the idea of personal authority and reputation will be the persistent solution. In all these years it's been a common thread. Attempt to automate (most nobly by Google) have fallen to the corrupting forces of marketing. Sure, people can be corrupted, but I've found that there's a goodly number of people that are surprisingly resistant to such influences. If they demonstrate this resistance over time, they become influential. (Then the corrupting forces can become irresistible, but there are always replacements .. and so it goes ...). Blogs, especially when they are authored by a single person, are the only way I know of in today's net to create an identify, a reputation, and finally, trust in domain recommendations.
am (noise). Interesting to consider what the biological equivalence is.

It's interesting to consider what the biological equivalence is.

PS. Note to marketing folk -- much of my professional life falls in the broad domain of marketing. Marketing is a powerful domain that rules much of modern life -- like all powers it has two faces.

Update 4/25/05: So, what was the book like? Not bad, but of the 1000 or so pages probably 30 are useful for me. People like me are not common enough to base a book on, so I guess I have to make do with a chapter her or there.

No Child Left Behind advocates teaching creationism?

Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens (washingtonpost.com)

The No Child Left Behind Law contains a language that espouses the teaching of creationism in science classes [see update below for a partial correction]:

Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to 'the full range of scientific views that exist.'

'Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy,' Santorum said in an interview. 'My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had.'

In today's Orwellian world "full range of scientific views" is a codephrase for "intelligent design" which is a code phrase for "creationism".

If Bush and his ilk mandated a mandatory Yahweh- only religion class in public schools they'd at least win points for honesty. Alas, they're too cowardly for that.

I think I'll start advocating the teach of chiropractic theories as an alternative to traditional human physiology. There's at least as much "legitimate scientific debate" around chiropracty as there is around the fundamental value of natural selection. (ie. zero in both cases).

Update 3/15: Some more on the Santorum Amendment from an authoritative source discussing the assault on reason taking place in Kansas -- ground zero for the counter-enlightenment. The Santorum amendment was stripped from the NCLB final legislation but remains in the conference report. It is this tactic that's being repeated at every level of government. (Emphases mine, note the full range of Orwellian strategies and neologisms -- George is spinning now ...)

According to the Lawrence Journal-World, an antievolution resolution was introduced in the Kansas House of Representatives on February 15, 2005. The sponsor is Representative Mary Pilcher-Cook (R-Shawnee), who said that the proposed resolution, which is nonbinding, was meant to promote "objectivity in science education."

Although the full text of the bill is not yet available, the story reports that the resolution includes language recommending the teaching of "the full range of scientific views that exist." This language is derived directly from the "Santorum Amendment," which U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) attempted to insert into the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Phillip Johnson, a leading promoter of "intelligent design," wrote the amendment for Santorum. The Santorum Amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate but stripped from the bill by the House-Senate conference committee, and now only appears in modified form in the NCLB conference report. See NCSE's compilation on the Santorum Amendment for details.

Santorum language appeared in the 2003 Kansas legislative session in the form of Senate Bill 168. SB 168 encouraged curricula that helped students understand "the full range of scientific views that exist," and exempted educational staff from any penalties for deviating from state curriculum requirements. SB 168 further betrayed its creationist leanings when it explicitly singled out "origins science" for special treatment, requiring that "origins science" -- but not other science -- be taught "inclusively, objectively, and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption." The artificial distinction between "origins science" (sciences dealing with the past) and "operations science" (sciences dealing with the present) has been a running theme in creationist publications for decades.

On February 6, 2005, nine days before Pilcher-Cook introduced her antievolution resolution, an op-ed promoting the Santorum language appeared in the Kansas City Star. The opinion piece, written by Kansas City resident Vicki Palatas, was entitled "'Full range of scientific views' includes theory of a creator." Palatas wrote, "The report interpreting this legislation explains that on controversial issues like evolution, 'the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist.'" Palatas cited several talking points popular among intelligent design proponents, and concluded, "Intelligent design teaches the theory of a creator based on scientific observation and analysis, not the worship of one." In another opinion piece on January 2, 2005, Palatas explicitly grouped intelligent design with a laundry list of other conservative religious causes, decrying the failure of public schools to "allow teaching intelligent design as a theory of the creation of the universe." She concluded that governmental restraint in this and other matters amounted to "intolerance and maligning of our faith."

Passed by the Senate, but stripped in a committee?? Wow, American politics is interesting - especially considering that the House is famously conservative.

The National Center for Science Education essay is horrifying and fascinating. Note the contradictory themes of the creationists who can speak both "intolerance of faith" and a "theory of a creator". Or perhaps they are not so inconsistent -- for it is their faith that assures them that the "analysis of the creator" will give them the answer they expect. Historians of science might tell them that such analyses often give quite surprising answers. If we do develop methods to test for analyze "deities", Palatas and her ilk may yet regret their enthusiasms.

More practically, the lessons of the past few decades is that extremists are very, very persistent. They love the struggle itself. Rationalists fatigue, they move on, they have a life (yes, even I have a life -- actually, rather a lot of one). In our era the dominant extremists in America are right wing conservatives -- I think they'll win in Kansas. Science is going to take a serious beating for years to come.

Hmm. The enlightenment is beginnning to feel pretty anomalous. I need to consult a historian.

Race as a collection of genes that travel together

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: A Family Tree in Every Gene

The hypothesis is that genes tend to travel together, and that it's possible to assign a human being living today to a geographically isolated population in which a characteristic collection of genes was very common. That assignment is a "race".

This is a statistical model of race. Imagine a 'gene-space' consisting of (say) 100 or so marker gene values. If we treat this as a 100-dimension space then an individual human should appear as a point in this space. If we then add a dimension for frequency, we may "see" hills and valleys on this "surface". Those are "races". Most of us are somewhere on the flank of a mountain, but there ought to be (how can one resist the word?) "pure" folk at the peaks. Conversely we ought to be able to find folks living in "valleys" who are truly "unique". (Some say I'm "different", but I think they have something else in mind.)

Here's how Leroi puts it:

The New York Times March 14, 2005
A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

... If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans...

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong...

.... The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies... To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so...

... Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.

... Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes.

... When the Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.

The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans...

The full article tries to justify race identification as a way to improve healthcare. I'm skeptical. Maybe as an interim approach, but we'll do better with pharmacogenomics than race as a proxy for individual gene values. I'd call this an interesting hypothesis rather than something that's immediately useful.

China will pay - the bennies of empire

Recently I predicted (hey, I'm not alone!) that our party-days are numbered, that foreigners won't continue to fund our profligate ways. Nonsense, says Niall Ferguson. China will keep the taps open much longer for the US than for, say, Argentina. It's all the wages of empire, the ROI for our massive military and young warriors ...

The New York Times > Magazine > Niall Ferguson> The Way We Live Now: Our Currency, Your Problem

Every congressman knows that the United States currently runs large ''twin deficits'' on its budget and current accounts. Deficit 1, as we well know, is just the difference between federal tax revenues and expenditures. Deficit 2 is generally less well understood: it's the difference between all that Americans earn from foreigners (mainly from exports, services and investments abroad) and all that they pay out to foreigners (for imports, services and loans). When [only] a government runs a deficit, it can tap public savings by selling bonds. But when the economy as a whole is running a deficit -- when American households are saving next to nothing of their disposable income -- there is no option but to borrow abroad.

There was a time when foreign investors were ready and willing to finance the U.S. current account deficit by buying large pieces of corporate America. But that's not the case today. Perhaps the most amazing economic fact of our time is that between 70 and 80 percent of the American economy's vast and continuing borrowing requirement is being met by foreign (mainly Asian) central banks.

Let's translate that into political terms. In effect, the Bush administration's combination of tax cuts for the Republican ''base'' and a Global War on Terror is being financed with a multibillion dollar overdraft facility at the People's Bank of China. Without East Asia, your mortgage might well be costing you more. The toys you buy for your kids certainly would.


Why are the Chinese monetary authorities so willing to underwrite American profligacy? Not out of altruism. The principal reason is that if they don't keep on buying dollars and dollar-based securities as fast as the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury can print them, the dollar could slide substantially against the Chinese renminbi, much as it has declined against the euro over the past three years. Knowing the importance of the U.S. market to their export industries, the Chinese authorities dread such a dollar slide...

... there are three good reasons that the administration is tacitly delighted by the Asian central banks' support. Not only is it keeping the lid on the price of American imports from Asia (a potential source of inflationary pressure). It is also propping up the price of U.S. Treasury bonds; this in turns depresses the yield on those bonds, allowing the federal government to borrow at historically very low rates of interest. Reason No. 3 is that low long-term interest rates keep the Bush recovery jogging along.

Sadly, according to a growing number of eminent economists, this arrangement simply cannot last. The dollar pessimists argue that the Asian central banks are already dangerously overexposed both to the dollar and the U.S. bond market..

... Though neither side wants to admit it, today's Sino-American economic relationship has an imperial character. Empires, remember, traditionally collect ''tributes'' from subject peoples. That is how their costs -- in terms of blood and treasure -- can best be justified to the populace back in the imperial capital. Today's ''tribute'' is effectively paid to the American empire by China and other East Asian economies in the form of underpriced exports and low-interest, high-risk loans.

How long can the Chinese go on financing America's twin deficits? The answer may be a lot longer than the dollar pessimists expect. After all, this form of tribute is much less humiliating than those exacted by the last Anglophone empire, which occupied China's best ports and took over the country's customs system (partly in order to flood the country with Indian opium). There was no obvious upside to that arrangement for the Chinese; the growth rate of per capita G.D.P. was probably negative in that era, compared with 8 or 9 percent a year since 1990.

Meanwhile, the United States may be discovering what the British found in their imperial heyday. If you are a truly powerful empire, you can borrow a lot of money at surprisingly reasonable rates. Today's deficits are in fact dwarfed in relative terms by the amounts the British borrowed to finance their Global War on (French) Terror between 1793 and 1815. Yet British long-term rates in that era averaged just 4.77 percent, and the pound's exchange rate was restored to its prewar level within a few years of peace.