Love explained

Talk to the Animals - New York Times:

Sure sounds like love to me ...

Functionally, I suspect love is an often temporary chemical imbalance of the brain induced by sensory stimuli that causes us to maintain focus on something that carries an adaptive agenda. Love is an adaptive feeling or emotion - like hate, jealousy, hunger, thirst - necessary where rationality alone would not suffice to carry the day. Could rationality alone induce a penguin to trek 70 miles over the ice in order to mate and then balance an egg on his toes while fasting for four months in total darkness and enduring temperatures of minus-80 degrees Fahrenheit and gusts of up to 100 miles an hour? And bear in mind that this 5-year-old penguin has just returned to the place of its birth from the sea, and thus has never seen an egg in its life and could not possibly have any idea what it is or why it must be kept warm. Any rational penguin would eventually say, 'To hell with this thing, I'm going back for a swim and to eat my fill of fish.'

And to those with particularly challenging children, a not-so-temporary imbalance. If one loves long enough in the face of selfish logic, it would not be surprising were the brain to change fairly permanently.

This is a fascinating essay. Does the necessity of love indeed bound rationality? I don't quite agree. I think the author is confusing 'rationality' with 'self-interest'. Rationality is the capacity to reason, self-interest is one end to which reason is put. One may be exceedingly capable of logic, extrapolation, creativity and problem solving, and yet dedicate those ends to comrades, children, friends, society, or mate.

From the perspective of pure reason, I suspect a worm or even a rock is loved neither more nor less than one's self. Reason alone has no goals nor ends, any more than today's computers have goals or ends.

Excellent discussion of extended warranties or service contracts

To Buy or Not to Buy: The Quandary of Warranties - New York Times

1. The length of a manufacturer's warranty (assuming, unlike Samsung air conditioners, one can find a service center) is a marker of quality. Extended warranties or service contracts are pure insurance plans.

2. The margin on electronics is 25%, the margin on a service contract is 45%. That's why sales people push service contracts.

3. Consumer reports has some specific recommendations:

Consumer Reports generally advises against buying extended service contracts because 'the cost of repair is probably equal to the cost of warranty, so you should probably just keep that money in your pocket,' a spokeswoman, Lauren Hackett, said. One Consumer Reports survey found that three years after purchase just 5 percent to 7 percent of televisions needed repair, and 13 percent of vacuums (not counting belt replacements). But 33 percent of laptops had been sent to the shop or the recycle bin.

The consumer group does recommend extended service policies on three items, Ms. Hackett said: laptops, treadmills (they are too cumbersome to take to the shop, she said, and service calls are expensive) and plasma TV's, because the technology is new and 'if you are spending $5,000 for a TV set, you might want to get a warranty.

A very nice summary, except they forgot that many high end credit cards offer one year extensions to the manufacturer's contract. Once you factor in that option any service contract becomes much less interesting -- even on a laptop.

Another twist: sometimes the manufacturer's service is not the best. Apple's service contract (AppleCare) requires devices be serviced by Apple, and they apparently use psychopathic inmates as their labor force. There are advantages to finding non-Apple service if it's available.

Strategic errors: creating CD DRM schemes that shut out the iPod

Apple, Digital Music's Angel, Earns Record Industry's Scorn - New York Times

This is a great business article. Apple and the record labels are fighting about Apple's online music store pricing and Apple's iPod only DRM scheme (FairPlay).

Why does Apple have any leverage at all in this fight? Because the alternative to Apple is illegal file sharing -- and there's no revenue there at all.

That's why BMG's DRM protected CD scheme is suicidal:

... BMG in particular has taken steps that may apply pressure to Mr. Jobs to make Apple's software compatible with that of other companies. The company has issued dozens of new titles - including high-profile CD's from the Dave Matthews Band and the Foo Fighters - with software to limit the number of copies that can be made from the disc. The software is compatible with Microsoft's music software, but not Apple's, and as a result music from those Sony BMG albums cannot be transferred to iPods that are hooked up to Windows-based PC's. EMI has been test-marketing similar software with a handful of titles.

So what will a BMG customer do now? Will they give up iTunes, their iPod, and the music they've purchased online? Or will they get the MP3s from friends or strangers? Just guess.

Phone company posted rates are completely meaningless

A Monthly Mystery - New York Times

Well, not completely meaningless. You know the monthly fee will be higher than whatever is published. I've blogged on this before and sent letters of complaint to our state attorney general. At last the New York Times has noticed:

Although surcharges have been around for a while, they have been growing and more consumers are complaining that such fees have become a backdoor way for phone companies to raise prices while keeping advertised rates low.

The carriers might promote flat-rate phone plans for, say, $49.99 a month, but once the many indecipherable fees are larded into a bill, a customer may actually pay $10, $20 or more a month.

"The proliferation of these charges is happening because the carriers are playing a shell game, plain and simple," said Thomas Allibone, an independent auditor and a former member of the consumer advisory committee at the Federal Communications Commission. "They'd rather weather a customer's complaint because they are making $20 or more in surcharges."

...The phone companies say that the surcharges are legal and that they have the right to keep them out of the advertised price of calling plans as long as they are explained on Web sites and in service contracts.

I wrote my letter to our attorney general about Sprint when I tried to get a copy of contract that explained their pricing. Oddly enough, they couldn't find one. I tried quite a bit.

In our increasingly libertarian world, caveat emptor is a slogan to live by.

Alas, the fundamental problem is that, in a sufficiently complex environment, we are all stupid. There is some point at which we can't keep up and we simply surrender all hope. Cheap computing power is enabling scams of great complexity, such as intricate ways to disguise true prices. We could negotiate one such scam, but not a hundred. How many people have thought through the full implications of various Digital Rights Management schemes, and how those schemes decrease the value of DRM protected media?

Bottom line, barring regulatory action, this will only get worse.

First United Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Open Letter to Kansas School Board: Teachng the Controversy

If one is going to teach intelligent design as science, then one ought to be able to litigate to include other approaches, such as 'incompetent design' or 'accidental creation' or 'silly design' ...

...I’m sure you now realize how important it is that your students are taught this alternate theory. It is absolutely imperative that they realize that observable evidence is at the discretion of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to teach our beliefs without wearing His chosen outfit, which of course is full pirate regalia. I cannot stress the importance of this enough, and unfortunately cannot describe in detail why this must be done as I fear this letter is already becoming too long. The concise explanation is that He becomes angry if we don’t.

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature...

...In conclusion, thank you for taking the time to hear our views and beliefs. I hope I was able to convey the importance of teaching this theory to your students. We will of course be able to train the teachers in this alternate theory. I am eagerly awaiting your response, and hope dearly that no legal action will need to be taken. I think we can all look forward to the time when these three theories are given equal time in our science classrooms across the country, and eventually the world; One third time for Intelligent Design, one third time for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and one third time for logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Has the social security crisis been averted? Klotho protein for aging

Life-Lengthening Hormone Found in Mouse Research

We can extend the lifespan of mice 20% by injecting a peptide produced by the Klotho gene:

The discovery was triggered by a study Kuro-o and his colleagues published in 1997. That study identified a gene in mice that, when damaged, caused the animals to experience all the hallmarks of aging in humans -- hardening of the arteries, thinning bones, withered skin, weak lungs -- and to die prematurely. They dubbed the gene Klotho, for the Greek goddess who spins the thread of life.

Suspecting the gene may play a role in regulating life span, Kuro-o and his colleagues genetically engineered mice with overactive Klotho genes. In the latest experiments, they found that these animals lived an average of 20 to 30 percent longer than normal -- 2.4 to 2.6 years vs. a normal life span of about two years -- without any signs of ill effects, according to the new report.

'The extension of life span is widely accepted as a reliable marker for the suppression of aging,' Kuro-o said. 'This shows the Klotho gene regulates aging.'

The researchers then identified a small protein component, called a peptide, that the gene produces and found it circulating in the animals' blood at double the normal level.

After isolating and purifying the substance and reproducing it through genetic engineering techniques, the researchers injected the substance into normal mice. Tests on those animals, combined with experiments involving cells in the laboratory, indicate that the substance modulates a crucial biological pathway involved in an array of basic metabolic functions that has become the focus of aging research in recent years.

'It's a pathway that has been conserved by evolution that has been found to play a key role in regulating life span for flies, worms, mice and probably humans,' Kuro-o said.

Studies, for example, suggest that damping down this pathway -- known as the insulin/insulin-like growth factor-1 signaling pathway -- may be the mechanism that extends longevity in animals that are fed an ultra-low-calorie diet.

This may be very important for persons with the very rare disease of Progeria. (Yes, this has occurred to others.)

Would a purified protein of this sort slow aging in humans and thus avert the social security crisis? Ahh, there's the catch. Given the advantages to human communities of long-lived women, and the the extent to which males have mostly female genomes, I'd guess we find three things:

- It doesn't work on females -- we'll find their Klotho peptide levels are already pretty high.
- It does add 5 years of life to newborn males if given for the entire lifespan, but has no significant benefit for middle-aged males.
- It has a big impact on a subset of the the population that turns out to have a faster basal aging rate (maybe as high as 30% of our population).

The third of these might indeed avert the "social security crisis". (We already know how to avert it really -- more selective immigration policies (wealthier immigrants -- follow Canada's model) and making payouts more progressive.)

Now that's how to do marketing on the net: NWA promotions via RSS feed

Northwest Airlines Promotions

Leave aside that NWA just cancelled my flight out of Denver tomorrow (so much for being unaffected by labor issues -- but they did rebook me on United an hour later). The RSS feed on this page tells me they have some smart people (or, more likely, smart business partners -- expedia used to do their web pages).

I'd never sign up for NWA promotions via email. That would have the same effect on my email as spam. On the other hand, a bookmark in my bloglines web-based RSS reader is another story. I can click on it when I like, clear it when I like, it's in my new 'marketing' folder, it's just useful.

Amazing it's taken this long to happen.

The Paleolithic Renaissance: 35,000 years BCE

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Bones reveal first shoe-wearers

The first renaissance happened about 35,000 years BCE. Wouldn't you love to know why?

The advent of footwear occurred during a period Professor Trinkaus describes as 'a well-documented archaeological explosion' which also produced a number of other notable human advances.

Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge, UK, agrees there were 'dramatic changes' in human behaviour at this time. 'From 35,000 years ago onward, you see the first art, the first stone tools, and the first personal decorations and jewellery.'

More advanced shoe-making skills could have been a product of this overall increase in technological ingenuity.

'There is a strong hint that people were doing more complicated things with ...skins, with special stone tools for cleaning and awls for piercing.

Brilliant detective work. Smaller little toe bones in fossils is a marker for shoe wear.

Darwin - the great suffer too

The Discovery Institute (Creationist/fundamentalist front) blames Darwin for Stalin, Hitler, Mao, acne, and Willie Horton. If that entire enterprise had two neurons to rub together they'd be flagelllating themselves after reading this essay: A Dog and the Mind of Newton: Corante > The Loom >A Dog and the Mind of Newton

a few weeks before his death, he looked over the letter she had written to him just after they married. At the time she was beginning to become worried about his faith and urged him to remember what Jesus had done for him. On the bottom he wrote, 'When I am dead, know that many times, I have kissed & cryed over this.'

Darwin was not spared the suffering which comes to many who live and love deeply. I cannot do justice to the story with excerpts, so one must follow the link.

Things to tell someone who wants to invest money

The Big Picture: 10 rules to Win the "Loser's Game"

Follow the link for the book reference:

1. Never, never speculate.
2. Your home is not a stock.
3. Save lots more.
4. Brokers aren't your friends.
5. Never trade commodities.
6. Avoid new and exciting deals.
7. Bonds also ride up and down.
8. Never invest for tax benefits.
9. Write goals and stick to them.
10. Never trust your emotions.

The neurospychology of irritable bowel syndrome

The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes - New York Times

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a real enthusiasm for "psychosomatic" causes of irritable bowel syndrome. I recall by the early 1980s, however, neuroendocrine studies of the bowel suggested that natural was highly conservative -- the same neurotransmitters and receptors were used in the gut and the brain. I think it was pretty common even then to figure one day we'd find out that some gut motility disorders reflected a neurotransmitter defect that was probably also present in the brain; later an association between bowel dysfunction and autism underscored that hypothesis (though that's been usually misinterpreted as having something to do with gluten).

Now, 20 yeas later, we have some data.

...''You can run any test you want on people with I.B.S., and their GI tracts look essentially normal,' Dr. Mawe said. The default assumption has been that the syndrome is a psychosomatic disease. [jf: that was the assumption in 1980, the journalist is being dramatic here]

But it turns out that irritable bowel syndrome, like depression, is at least in part a function of changes in the serotonin system. In this case, it is too much serotonin rather than too little.

In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall.

People with irritable bowel syndrome do not have enough SERT, so they wind up with too much serotonin floating around, causing diarrhea.

The excess serotonin then overwhelms the receptors in the gut, shutting them down and causing constipation.

When Dr. Gershon, whose work has been supported by Novartis, studied mice without SERT, he found that they developed a condition very much like I.B.S. in humans.

Several new serotonin-based drugs - intestinal antidepressants, in a way - have brought hope for those with chronic gut disorders.

But do they, as expected, have the same problem with SERT function in the brain?

Muddled thinking among the Darwinists

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution - New York Times

It's fair to label me a secular humanist, ergo a "Darwinist". As fair as any label anyway. Among my tribe pointing out muddled thinking is a duty, even when the muddler is one of us:

... Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science...

...The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

The writer claims one can both accept the fact of evolution and maintain a 'personal faith in god', but then his next sentences rather severely circumscribe the nature of that deity. In particular it can't be a deity that has a particular 'plan for man' or who 'creates man in his own image'. So the author is suggesting that science and faith can be reconciled, but then he says the reconciliation only works with a particular sort of faith, incompatible with Christ the Divine. That seems like either muddled thinking or (worse) intellectual dishonesty.

This is too absolute for my tastes. Humans are flawed masses of compromise (favors evolution if you ask me -- surely a deity would produce a better product?). There have been great scientists who were staunch catholics, though it is true most seem to tend towards a more abstract and Spinozan view of a deity. Even so, I think I could come up with ways to reconcile a divine Christ with natural selection. Heck, it's not that hard (it helps that I'm agnostic, though the teachings of Christ are so radical as to suggest the miraculous).

On the other hand, it's dishonest to say that science doesn't suggest something about the Designer -- namely that if there is one (or many), She/they/it doesn't much resemble the Yahweh of fundamentalist judeo-islamic-christian teachings.

CT for lung cancer - remember neonatal retinoblastoma?

Warned, but Worse Off - New York Times

A very intelligent NYT OpEd about CT screening for lung CA (by Steven Woloshin, Lisa Schwartz and H. Gilbert Welch -- physician researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and faculty members at Dartmouth Medical School.):

The less familiar, but more worrisome, harm comes from overdiagnosis and overtreatment. In the largest study to date, Japanese researchers using CT scans found almost 10 times the amount of lung cancer they had detected in a similar group of patients using X-rays. Amazingly, with CT screening, almost as many nonsmokers were found to have lung cancer as smokers.

Given that smokers are 15 times as likely to die from lung cancer, the CT scans had to be finding abnormalities that were technically cancer (based on their microscopic appearance), but that did not behave in the way most people think of cancer behaving - as a progressive disease that ultimately kills. So here's the problem. Because we can't distinguish a progressive cancer from a nonprogressive cancer on the CT scan, we tend to treat everybody who tests positive. Obviously, the patients with indolent cancers cannot benefit from treatment; they can only experience its side effects. Treatment - usually surgery, but sometimes chemotherapy or radiation therapy - is painful and risky. Some 5 percent of patients older than 65 die following partial lung removal, and nearly 14 percent die with complete removal.

Ahh, those young whippersnappers don't seem to remember one of the most disastrous errors in imaging screening -- neonatal retinoblastoma.

I'm not sure, however, that I remember the story correctly -- a quick PubMed search did not immediately validate my recollection. Either I'm mis-remembering or we're sweeping another of our mistakes under the carpet.

What I remember is that sometime when CT was new we started diagnosing a LOT of retinoblastoma. Many infant eyes were removed, with congratulations all around at disaster averted. The only question was -- why the sudden upsurge in this terrible malignancy? Ahh. That was the catch. It turned out the newfangled scans were detecting a lesion that looked like retinoblastoma, but actually spontaneously regressed (maybe we call this retinocytoma now?). In retrospect almost all of those eyes could have been retained. (I don't recall if any infants lost both eyes.)

Maybe my memory is completely faulty. I'd love to see comments if anyone else remembers this. If so, it's a story that bears repeating.

Total Information Awareness is not really dead ...

Remember Microsoft Passport and Intel/Microsoft's Palladium? When the public complained the names went away, but the work went forward.

Remember 'Total Information Awareness'? TIA was Poindexter's project to use massive databases to spot terrorists. It was a wee bit controversial (The 'Left Behind' people freak out about this 'number of the beast' stuff. The NRA doesn't like it either. Bush doesn't like them angry, so their opinions matter). It went away.

Sure.

As Schneier points out, it didn't go away at all. It's come back in other names and forms:

Crypto-Gram: August 15, 2005: Secure Flight

Last month the GAO issued a new report on Secure Flight. It's couched in friendly language, but it's not good...

... The TSA violated federal law when it secretly expanded Secure Flight's use of commercial data about passengers. It also lied to Congress and the public about it.

Much of this isn't new. Last month we learned that the TSA bought and is storing commercial data about passengers [jf: here he means traffic violations, credit ratings, etc. We know the quality of data in these commercial programs is utterly atrocious, and there's no regulation or feedback mechanism.], even though officials said they wouldn't do it and Congress told them not to...

... Commercial data had another use under CAPPS-II In that now-dead program, every passenger would be subjected to a computerized background check to determine their "risk" to airline safety. The system would assign a risk score based on commercial data: their credit rating, how recently they moved, what kind of job they had, etc. This capability was removed from Secure Flight, but now it's back. An AP story quotes Justin Oberman, the TSA official in charge of Secure Flight, as saying: "We are trying to use commercial data to verify the identities of people who fly because we are not going to rely on the watch list.... If we just rise and fall on the watch list, it's not adequate."

... My fear is that TSA has already decided that they're going to use commercial data, regardless of any test results. And once you have commercial data, why not build a dossier on every passenger and give him or her a risk score? So we're back to CAPPS-II, the very system Congress killed last summer. Actually, we're very close to TIA (Total/Terrorism Information Awareness), that vast spy-on-everyone data-mining program that Congress killed in 2003 because it was just too invasive.

Secure Flight is a mess in lots of other ways, too. A March GAO report said that Secure Flight had not met nine out of the ten conditions mandated by Congress before TSA could spend money on implementing the program. (If you haven't read this report, it's pretty scathing.) The redress problem -- helping people who cannot fly because they share a name with a terrorist -- is not getting any better. And Secure Flight is behind schedule and over budget.

It's also a rogue program that is operating in flagrant disregard for the law. It can't be killed completely; the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandates that TSA implement a program of passenger prescreening. And until we have Secure Flight, airlines will still be matching passenger names with terrorist watch lists under the CAPPS-I program. But it needs some serious public scrutiny.

Dumbest lead of the week: critique of hospital performance

It's the Simple Things, but Some Hospitals Don't Do Them - New York Times

This could have as readily been titled - astonishing quality of most healthy care systems in america. The data looked pretty good in most financially sound institutions; much better than 10 years ago. The complaints about difficulty delivering data seem very legitimate to me, the regulators are playing games here.

What the data does show is that financially troubled care systems fail to delivery quality care. That should come as no surprise, but I'm glad we're documenting it.