Brer Clinton: the rage returns

Incredibly, for it's surely suicidal, right wingnuts are allegedly trying to resurrect the shade of William Clinton. This is a bit like having your enemy sick a dog on you -- except its your dog. Maybe we should call him Brer Bill 'Briar Patch' Clinton.

Or perhaps it's not incredible. Maybe it's 'suicide by cop'. The wingnuts know they're destroying the nation, so they're asking us to stop them before they kill again.

Not that I'm a Clinton fan. Through some terrible strain of self-destructive arrogance he gave his enemies the perfect weapon, and they used it to put Vlad Bush in office. That was a historic failure. Still, to remember a competent president with a competent administration ...

David Brin, expanding on Russ Daggatt, provides a minor demonstration of what a potent weapon the wingnuts have handed the forces of reason.

Grief

A mother's son dies at war. She tells the story of her grief. It is in grief that we are most akin.

System failure: No Contact orders in Minnesota

Another story of a women killed by boyfriend/husband. The sad story didn't suggest much that could be done differently, until near the very end ...

Two slayings renew calls for vigilance

... The Minnesota Legislature this year increased the penalties for violating no-contact orders, making repeated violations a gross misdemeanor. Kluz said that Lee is the 15th woman to be killed in Minnesota this year in a domestic violence situation.

Huh? A gross misdemeanor? Repeat required? That was an increase?!

Why is it that the noteworthy part of any article is always about 3/4 of the way to the end?

Most of the time there doesn't seem to be any obvious response to tragedies like this one, but the "gross misdemeanor" suggests an obvious fix. Maybe a GM at the judge's discretion on the first violation, but otherwise a felony and arrest.

Not your father's immunology - and odd implications thereof

Nor your father's definition of the human.

In the past few weeks we've read of toxic viral payloads in sometimes commensal bacteria, we're read of viral infections that are a critical part of placental formation in at least one mammal, and we've read about T-Reg cells, such as:

• mice without T-Regs developed a fatal inflammatory bowel disease -- not due to autoimmune attacks on bowel cells, but rather due to immune attacks on normally tolerated bowel bacteria
• the best response (mice again) to some parasite infections is to keep a few of the buggers around so the immune system stays tuned. T-Regs help with that.
• T-reg activity may increase in pregnancy in some women to manage tolerance of the foreign fetus
  

This must be starting to at least make its way into medical school infectious disease lectures, and of course there are lots of implications for a range of auto-immune diseases (Is ulcerative colitis an auto-immune attack on GI bacteria, why do parasite infections seem to suppress UC, what's the relationship between cutaneous T-Reg cells, vitamin D, sunlight exposure and multiple sclerosis, etc).

Eventually we'll change the way we treat infections, and probably abandon the idea (still persisting) that patients need to take all their antibiotics to kill all the pathogens. We may eventually move to the long mooted concept that managing infections is about managing the "human" (meaning nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA, bacterial DNA, Viral DNA, a few prionic forms and lord knows what else) superorganism and its ecology rather than the traditional view of an attacking "pathogen".

Hmmm. What could this approach imply about managing terrorism?

Why do humans lose their childhood memories?

One of the curiousities of human memory is that childhood, for most people, is largely lost. I think I'm not atypical in having a few memories I suspect are genuine, another set based on what I've been told, and mostly no memory at all.

The assymetry between parent and child is one of the more poignant aspects of parenting; one party remembers much of a rather important relationship, the other remembers little.

Why do adults not retain childhood memories? Is there an adaptive advantage to forgetting, or is it simply a side-effect of the way the human brain develops?

Protecte expensive checked gear, fly with a gun

Well, ok, a starter pistol. The pistol means your checked gear qualifies for weapons handling. It's safe from theft and abuse, and it'll arrive with you.

If we end up having to check our laptops and cellphones starter pistols will be commonplace on planes (well, in the locked secured gun case actually).

Safari must die.

I love Safari. I love the elegance, the performance, the efficiency, the security, stability and features of Safari. I love the Cocoa services and the beautiful UI and the excellent printing. It's a great product from a great team.

Safari must die.

I've known that for months, years maybe. Still, I held out hope. Hope died when I created a Gmail account for my wife last night. There's a button to click to test username availability; in Firefox it updates the page, in Safari it does nothing. I became so frustrated by the process I quit and did it using Firefox.

Safari was the right choice in its time. Back in the day was no way Apple could rely on IE, and Phoenix (later Firefox) was either unborn or unproven. Apple was right to start work on their own browser. Then came Google, and Ajax and, painfully, slowly, widespread support of Firefox as well as IE.

Now Safari is wrong. Being smaller, faster, better, more standards compliant is not enough. The best man doesn't always win the race. Safari cannot contend against Google, Yahoo, and every up and coming Web 2.0 solution. Most of all, Safari cannot defeat Google.

Gates, in his robber-baron heyday, had one great gift even I admired. He would shoot the horse he'd ridden when it faltered. He shot OS/2 (in the back), he shot pre-web MSN, he shot a lot of things. When he stopped shooting Microsoft went into decline.

Jobs shot the Newton (in the forehead). He can shoot Safari.

Maybe keep Webkit for Apple products, but use Firefox's Gecko engine and identify to websites as Mozilla/Firefox. We've got Camino and soon Firefox/Cocoa; Apple should work to make Apple's branded browser the best Firefox there is. Make it beautiful, make the printing work, make it Rendezvous and Keychain and spotlight and Cocoa and Webkit and Photocasting and Address Book friendly. Above all, make it Firefox/Mac -- even if you still call it "Safari".

Death to Safari. Long live Safari/F.

Bombing to the stone age - why now?

Google news is picking up a lot of stories about the alleged US threat to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age"...

KRT Wire | 09/22/2006 | White House denies threat to bomb Pakistan `back to the Stone Age'

With the United States and Pakistan united in a war against terrorism, the suggestion Friday that the United States once threatened to bomb the Pakistanis 'back to the Stone Age' landed like a diplomatic bombshell...

Hmm. Puzzling. I thought everyone assumed Pakistan signed up with the US because of do-or-die ultimatum -- they sure didn't do it for love. Musharaf's version seems a bit direct, but maybe Armitage is like that.

So no surprise there. The surprising part is Musharraf is talking about it now, and that the topic is getting so many Google hits. I wish someone who knows Pakistan would explain why now, and what Musharraf might be up to ...

Brad DeLong read my blog!

Wow.

My wife will be very impressed. Seriously, she's a big DeLong fan too. We're just two geeks in a pod.

She'll be back from her urgent care shift soon. I have to figure out how best to spring this on her. Maybe I'll casually leave the laptop open to DeLong's page so she scans it while winding down ...

In my previous universe, Bush/Rove used more than nukes to sell their invasion

Salon has a laudatory review of a book by the inestimable Frank Rich on the tragic history of the Bush II (aka Vlad) regime. This sort of book is presumably written for future history students writing essays on the Fall of America, it’s unlikely to have much impact on anyone living now. The picture is indeed dire, with the usual mention of how imminent nuclear attack was used to build support for the way and Bush’s reelection:

Why we are really in Iraq | Salon Books

…What reason could team Bush come up with for attacking Iraq? 'Abstract and highly debatable theories on how to assert superpower machismo and alter the political balance in the Middle East would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against the enemy of 9/11 ... For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable fictional ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons…

Dire as this story is, things were worse in my old universe. In my universe smallpox and biowarfare threats were used as well, and they were even more persuasive than the fear of nuclear weapons. Much was made of mobile labs that turned out to be nothing much at all. In that alternate timeline this led to a massive smallpox immunization program that was widely debated and partly implemented. In that reality some of the vaccination volunteers were seriously harmed by side-effects.

In this universe, however, that clearly never happened — or someone besides my wife and I would remember it. Bad as things are here, in the reality I used to inhabit they were actually worse …

Google Spreadsheets: the next Gmail?

Google hit a home run with Gmail, despite my personal problems with its spam management.

Looks like they may be equally serious about Google Spreadsheets, judging by what they're adding. For many home users this is plenty of functionality, this will probably be my wife's spreadsheet and a shared workspace for quite a few things we do (lists, schedules, etc).

It's time for me to create an internal family page with links to key web apps and services that we'll use on our home network and remotely -- a kind of shared application space.

Videochat family reunions: Cringely on Apple's strategy

Cringely is no Jobs-sycophant, but he can't help wetting himself over what he thinks Apple's going to do next. (I say that fondly because I love Cringely's column.)

Sometimes he's way over the top (retinal laser headmounted displays), sometimes he's spot on. He's always interesting. Today he's skirting the edge of plausibility with a column on Apple's possible media, VOIP, iChat, video-conferencing, HDTV play. Whoa. Makes me want to wait on Mum's Mac Mini purchase until after the January iTV announcement -- just in case.

If Apple could really do this they'd sell of a lot of HDTV units for someone. I fear, however, that the bandwidth requirements would kill most home WAN connections. of course Cringely had another column recently on why homeowners should pay for fiber to the home ...

Immigration and African American incarceration

Mankiw, a libertarian economist intellectual who once worked for George (torture) Bush, points with interest to an article alleging a strong and possibly causal correlation beween "immigration, black wages, black employment rates and black incarcerations". This is something many have suspected, but evidence is hard to come by. The same, I believe, will be found to be true for other groups including white collar workers (maybe without the inarceration effect, they have more room to fall).

Mankiw is right that this will likely have a big influence on the immigration debate. It's not proof, but that's hard to come by in economics.

Sleep and brain development - in flies

Fruit Fly sleep is proportional to neuronal development. Dull flies sleep less, smart flies more. It's especially important that young flies get social stimulation -- and sleep.

I wonder what this says about homework in young children, or sleep deprivation in middle-aged parents?

Stop reading this blog and go to sleep.

DeLong explains why China is paying for our toys and homes

Why does China keep sending us spending money? What's in it for them. DeLong tries to explain it ...

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Brad Setser on Similarities Between Amaranth and the People's Bank of China...:

... The Politburo and State Council may understand it. They may be thinking as follows: 'We grow at 8% per year as long as we can keep export-led industriallization going. When export-led industrialization stops and we have to substitute domestic-demand-led industrialization, our growth rate is likely to fall to 5%. Thus each year we keep this juggling act going raises China's GDP--permanently--by about RMB 500 billion a year, an increment to the present value of China's total national wealth of RMB 10 trillion. To keep the juggling act going requires that we spend RMB 3 trillion a year buying dollar-denominated securities that will be worth only RMB 2 trillion when we sell them. That looks like a benefit-cost ratio of 10:1. So let's keep juggling as long as we can.

That maybe what they are thinking in the Politburo and the State Council.

I think this falls into the category of "bizarre ways market systems route around structural anomalies". If we think of the market as a massive optimization algorithm, and we think of structural anomalies in infrastructure, law, resource allocation, etc as obstacles, then we can imagine China's subsidy of US consumption as the result of solving an allocation problem despite structural anomalies.

Deviant, but gets the job done.

The Economist did a recent review of the rise of the 'developing world' (now greater than 50% of world output); I've not finished the series but it will be interesting to see how it intersects. The part I've read predicts greater upheavals than the 1st industrial revolution. This fits.