French universities and the revenge of the weak

French universities sound like some American public grade schools:

Higher Learning in France Clings to Its Old Ways - New York Times

... There are 32,000 students at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris, but no student center, no bookstore, no student-run newspaper, no freshman orientation, no corporate recruiting system.

The 480,000-volume central library is open only 10 hours a day, closed on Sundays and holidays. Only 30 of the library's 100 computers have Internet access.

The campus cafeterias close after lunch. Professors often do not have office hours; many have no office. Some classrooms are so overcrowded that at exam time many students have to find seats elsewhere. By late afternoon every day the campus is largely empty.

...Nanterre is where the French student revolt of 1968 broke out...

When I was in Thailand in 1981, I visited the campus of a lesser known Bangkok university. It was inexpensive or free, the students came from diverse backgrounds. Some worked in the tourist industry; a diverse trade back then. The main building was an enormous concrete block structure, ventilated by ceiling fans. Aging TV monitors hung from the ceiling. Somewhere a lecturer spoke ... It sounds better than Nanterre.

I wonder if France has public pre-university schools that are as miserable as some of our "local property tax funded" disasters.

I think of this as an instance of a much greater problem, "the problem of the weak". In the modern post-industrial world the ranks of the "weak" are growing daily. Once an IQ of 90 was consistent with a productive life working shifts in St. Paul's Ford assembly plant -- that plant closes next year. Once twitchy and restless men were able to fit into a less competitive corporate world. Once outsiders could find reasonably well paying jobs so their children could become insiders. Once poor children could get a good education, and find opportunities as adults.

Now the "weak" are warehoused in places like Nanterre. This is not a good thing. Eventually, they will become restless. The "strong" will neeed to study the residential architecture of South America.

From each according to their ability; to each according to their need may yet rise again ... [1]

[1] Follow the link to learn the provenance of the quote, and appreciate the serendipity of Google. I found this article because I could only recall a fraction of the quote, Google brought this reference up when I tried to complete it. This is what US political struggle is all about now.

The viral invention of DNA

Carl (Loom) Zimmer reviews an hypothesis about the evolution of DNA. The first cells were thought to be RNA based. How did DNA develop? The hypothesis is that viruses "invented" double stranded DNA as a technique to evade the defence mechanisms of RNA based cells. (The opposite of what RNA viruses do to us.) In time fragments of this double stranded DNA took up residence permanently in cells. (This happens routinely with viruses now).

DNA has a lot of advantages over RNA as mechanism for heredity. In time the DNA encoding replaced the RNA encoding in cells. Modern life was on its way.

Neat idea.

Qwest: An unexpected hero

I'm a Qwest customer - voice and DSL. I've never thought of them as particularly heroic. Time to rethink. Note that the NSA explicitly refused to involve the FISA court or the US attorney general's office. They were authorized by a higher power.

USATODAY.com - NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

... One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as 'product' in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. 'They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,' one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events...

A lot of people must be very worried about the health of this country to take the risk of talking about this. They are true American heroes.

NSA phone monitoring: Call your bookie recently?

Having trouble flying? Maybe you called your brother-in-law, the bookie, one time too often. One of his regular callers calls a known bad guy. Now you're on a watchlist too.

Or maybe you just dialed a really bad wrong number ...

Last January paranoid traitors like me figured the NSA wasn't exactly blindly wiretapping US phone calls, they were instead studying the call patterns to decide who to target. Five months later, this is now common knowledge:

The NSA has assembled a gigantic database of telephone calls in the United States, with the help of all of the major telecommunications providers (except Qwest). The database is not of voice recordings, but of calls made. It constitutes data on a huge network of ties between people who call each other...

It's not really that hard to figure out what this administration is up to. If they were at all competent they'd be even scarier.

BTW, good luck getting off that watchlist ...

Molly Ivins can't resist Hookergate

Most of the press remains remarkably moribund (a bit disturbing really), but Molly Ivins is moved ...

Hookergate: Poker, hookers and the Watergate building

... On other hand, if you expect me to pass up a scandal involving poker, hookers and the Watergate building with crooked defense contractors and the No. 3 guy at the CIA, named Dusty Foggo (Dusty Foggo?! Be still my heart), you expect too much. Any journalist who claims Hookergate is not a legitimate scandal is dead -- has been for some time and needs to be unplugged. In addition to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, Hookergate is rife with public interest questions, misfeasance, malfeasance and non-feasance, and many splendid moral points for the children. Recommended for Sunday school use, grades seven and above...

The Terror: My education has been incomplete

Pol Pot. Mao. Lenin. Stalin. Rasputin. The modern era's A team of evil*. Tough to break into, but Robespierre qualifies. Indeed, he may be the founding member.

In Our Time is usually reasonably calm, but a year ago things were intense. Mike Broers (Oxford), Rebecca Spang (University College, and pretty scary herself), Tim Blanning (Cambridge) and Melvynn Bragg (BBC) were going at it. Good. The Terror merits intensity.

Forget Marie Antoinette (thankfully she doesn't even merit a mention on this episode) or the King. What about 250,000 peasants slaughtered by the revolutionary army? The ten day week? The attempt to abolish Christianity? The new calendar? This is the "revolution" (madness really) that eats its own, ending with Robespierre guillotined after botching his own suicide.

My one criticism is the reluctance of these academics to call a spade. Robespierre was insane; probably severe bipolar disorder with psychotic episodes. That's not so unusual, but France seems to have caught the same disease for a few years. France gave democracy a bad name for a century and inspired the rest of the 'A Team of Evil'.

There's no way the French have come to terms with this bit of their history. They wouldn't be romanticizing their "revolution" if they had. It has taken America about 200 years to begin to come to terms with the slaugher of the Amerindians, but France doesn't seem even that far along.

I wonder if we could tie George Bush down** and have him sit through 100 episodes of IOT. (Lord, one can dream - alas, it would be cruel and unusual punishment to strain his brain that way). If he would listen he might reconsider the risks associated with democracy. It's not a trivial thing to put in place.

* I put Hitler in some other dimension of evil.
** Note to NSA: this is a rhetorical flourish. I'd be happy to put some episodes on his iPod however.

See also: Ta Mok.

The galaxy gets healthier -- so where are the LGMs?

Our galaxy is a safer place today:

Gamma Ray Bursts--One Less Thing to Worry About. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future
Posted by Carl Zimmer

In case you were worrying that life on Earth would be wiped out by a catastrophic burst of gamma rays, rest easy. It turns out that our galaxy may not be a very good source of gamma ray bursts. I found this particularly interesting given recent speculation that gamma rays bursts might have triggered mass extinctions. The bursts are clearly catastrophic, but probably not close enough to Earth to cause much trouble.

But if the galaxy is less hostile to life than once thought, and if we accept recent studies suggesting earth-like planets may less rare than once though, then where all the little green men? Assuming conventional technology and a reasonable expansion rate, any reasonably prolific species should carpet the galaxy in a million years or so. That should have happened hundreds or thousands of times by now -- the evidence should be inescapable. So where is it? ...

COMMENTS

... This makes the 'great silence', aka the Fermi Paradox, ever more intriguing.

One explanation for the fact that the galaxy isn't swarming with LGMs is that our galaxy is very inhospitable to life. Periodic bursters are a nice way to sterilize chunks of the galaxy, and thus they help explain the paradox. Another historic explanation was that earth-like planets are rare.

We now think earth-like planets may be not terribly rare. Today we learn that bursters may not be all that common. These modify terms in the old Drake equation, meaning there's more pressure on something else to explain our solitude.

Personally, I favor the explanation that the period of time that any technologic culture is interested in exploration and expansion is very short. (That is, biological imperatives never persist).

The other common explanation is that all technological civilizations turn into gray goo ... :-).

Gray goo is shorthand for a nanotech disaster, which is shorthand for "any wild technology that inevitably wipes out any society that discovers it".

Natural cancer resistance - in mice and men

Scientists have bred cancer-proof mice. They basically can't get cancer. The trait is inherited and their white cells can destroy cancers in other mice.

Fascinating in its own right, but this has led to something that, in retrospect, seems obvious. It's not unlikely that there are humans that naturally very cancer resistant. I suggest looking at families with generations of heavy smokers and no cancers. Studying those people might give us some very interesting clues.

Sick Americans: cost and cause

Years ago a Canadian study found the treatment of common surgical and medical diseases was significantly better in Canada than in the US. So Canadians didn't only live longer, they also received better healthcare (on average).

Now middle-aged white English seem quite a bit healthier than similar Americans:

Health in America and Britain | Transatlantic rivals | Economist.com

... the comparison was between Americans and the English. Scots, with their notoriously high rates of heart disease, were conveniently excluded by the choice of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing as the source of the British data, as were the Welsh and the Northern Irish. With this caveat, Dr Marmot's research revealed that people who are between 55 and 64 years of age are a lot sicker in America than they are in England (see chart). Diabetes is twice as common: 12.5% of Americans suffer from it, compared with 6.1% in England. Cancer is nearly twice as prevalent in America, while heart disease is half as high again.

The main environmental suspect is lack of activity and something dietary. Certainly genetics is a suspect too, maybe white Americans are too much like the Scots. A heck of a lot of English men died on the bloody fields of France 100 years ago -- were there recent severe selection pressures? A comparison with Canada might help.

The Economist makes the interesting point that US healthcare spending may, in part, be higher than the rest of the wealthy world because white Americans are a sickly bunch.

Update 5/9: Thinking about this further, I'm betting it's genetic and the key factor is resistance to diabetes. We already suspect that northern europeans are diabetes resistant compared to most human populations. My bet is the English are particularly resistant.

Update 5/10: My mother, who is English, ascribes any health improvements to drinking large volumes of black tea. She also claims that, irregardless of any helpful resistance to diabetes, the English are cursed with awful tooth and jaw development.

So is tea good for the islet cells? Who knows ...

Update 5/12: Or maybe walking is much more beneficial than we'd thought ... or lack of sleep is much more harmful than we'd realized ...

Mother's Day - who's the worst?

In the holiday spirit, the NYT reviews loving maternal behavior in birds and mammals. A cool antidote for Disney sappiness or penguin wish fulfillment.

My award for worst parent goes to the mother of the eaglet who starved it while its sibling pecked it 1,569 times, but really the competition is ... ummm ... fierce.

The weak die so that the strong may live. Be grateful for your abundance ...

An odd digression into mathematics: Physics and the Reimann-Zeta functions

I'm listening to my favorite pocast, In Our Times -- this one's on Prime Numbers. They start with Euclid, and work their way up to the Reimann-Zeta functions and beyond. Things get weird. The primes seem randomly distributed, with a probability of discovery that falls as the log of the number considered. Random and unpredictable, and yet the related Reimann-Zeta function has a very predictable component ... Where does the randomness come from? (It sounds like the imaginary component of the imaginary numbers in the RZ function hold the random component, but our lecturers didn't delve into that topic.)

This is the great dream for mathematicians then, that there is some method to transform the seemingly perfect randomness of the primes into something that's utterly predictable. True, this could devastate the world economy (encryption relies on the unpredictability of primes), but it would mean mathematical glory.

Randomness and utter predictability. It reminds me of Einstein's wistful declaration 'God does not play dice with the universe'. Surely he must have looked to the Reimann-Zeta function as a way to bring order from apparent chaos -- alas, to no avail.

In the age of Google, one can quickly ask if anything has come up recently. I did find this page. Physicists continue to play with these tempting toys ...

I do recommend listening to In Our Times ...

Humane execution

The electric chair sometimes required a few flips of a balky switch. Injection has its own imperfections:

Merciful (but messy) alternatives to lethal injection. By Hanny Hindi

... State executions today are strictly medical procedures, complete with lab coats and white sheets. Strapped to the gurney and carefully injected with an IV, the inmate looks as though he'll recover nicely. Though recent challenges have again revealed that the lab coats are worn by amateurs and the IVs are frequently botched, executioners can rest assured that their goal will ultimately be met. Prisoners may very well suffer needlessly excruciating deaths, but the witnesses won't feel a thing.

Painless witnessing and simple clean-up. That's what led to the current lethal cocktail. Too bad about that "cruel and inhumane" problem. This Slate article mentions vets are the true masters of the gentle putdown, so maybe we should turn this over to the vets. Alas, I've a hunch vets will be even less agreeable to assisting than physicians have been.

The Chinese are the true masters of the process. A soft nosed bullet to the back of the head. Personally, I'd be okay with strapping a significant explosive charge to my occiput. If administered in an armored incineration chamber it would even allow for convenient cleanup.

Or maybe we should think again about the idea of state murder of convicts who are both stupid (or mentally ill) and poor. (Smart sane killers are rarely caught, rich killers are rarely convicted.)

PS. If it's not obvious, I'm no fan of the death penalty. Were we to keep it, I would say we ought to require random assignment of attorneys for all death penalty cases. Even the playing field a bit ... And, at, the very least, learn from China.

Anonymity achieved - of a sort

This blog was once known by my true name. Problem was, periodically business contacts or interview subjects would google my name, and the first thing they came across were my blog postings. This occasionally led to some odd interactions. I figured I needed a bit more distance from the blog, so I renamed it. My true name is embedded in the url -- but of course from google's perspective that doesn't matter.

I also removed links pointing to my eponymous domain.

It worked. Now when I google on my name the blogs are all but invisible.

An interesting lesson in the effervescence of digital identity! A certain kind of anonymity is not hard to achieve.

Schizophrenia is "hot". Why now?

Schizophrenia is in the news. In the past week USA Today devoted much of their front section to this family of neurologic disorders, the Wall Street Journal featured an article on schizophrenia in the prison systems on their front page, and this morning NPR did a book interview with the parents of a schizophrenic adult.

Why now? This is not a new disorder. As measured by any reasonable combination of cumulative suffering, anguish, economic burden and prevalence schizophrenia is the worst affliction of the post-industrial world. And yet, it's been relatively ignored. Why should that change now?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. It's the boomers.

Schizophrenia is usually recognized around age 20. It's a disease that, unlike MS or breast cancer, silences its victims. Only parents can write about it and campaign against it.

The median boomer was born in 1955. She had her first child in 1983. That child was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2003. By 2005 he was running into legal problems. Now she's writing about her son.

We can all wish that schizophrenia had been "public enemy number one" 10 years ago. No matter, now is the time. This is one issue on which a beleagured and widely despised president could win a few friends. Bush should declare war on schizophrenia. It's one of the few good things he can still do.

What are spleens good for?

In horses the spleen is an oxygenation turbocharger. In humans it's usually thought to be an almost disposeable part of our immune system (after splenectomy some usually manageable bacterial infections become much more serious however). Reading this, though, one must wonder if we've ever monitored spleen behavior during wind sprints.