Pigou: where the rational left meets the rational less-left

Greg Mankiw is the the closest thing to a "rational right" person I know of. He's "close" because he once worked for Vlad Bush and because he's a Libertarian, which I think sort of qualifies as sort of on the right. (Would he work for Vlad again? He doesn't say these days.)

The Pigou Club is where he meets people like Al Gore and Paul Krugman. Follow the wikipedia link to get the background.

Neil Armstrong vindicated

Long ago we walked the moon. Yes, I know it seems unbelievable.

Anyway, Neil Armstrong, now 76 yo, has long been thought to have "flubbed" his historic catchphrase "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind"...

High-tech analysis may rewrite space history:

... In the 2005 book First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, Armstrong told Hansen that others have pointed out that he can often be heard dropping the vowels from his speech in his radio transmissions.

'It doesn't sound like there was time for the word to be there,' Armstrong said in the book. 'On the other hand, I didn't intentionally make an inane statement, and . . . certainly the 'a' was intended, because that's the only way the statement makes any sense.

'So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn't said -- although it might actually have been.'"

Emphases mine. New analysis suggests Armstrong did indeed include the vowel, but a communications glitch dropped it. Apparently whatever NASA was doing to conserve bandwidth tended to chop Armstrong's vowels ...

The complexity of causes: Pompey and the Fall of Rome

In 49BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and tyranny ruled Rome. Twenty years before, the laws of the Republic were swept away so that a terrifying threat could be ended...

What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us - Pirates of the Mediterranean - New York Times

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped...

With the acquiescence of an anxious populace, Pompey passed laws that gave him unlimited power, and he crushed the pirates with an efficiency Rumsfeld would envy. (Pompey was not incompetent.) Caesar used those laws to seize power.

Would the Republic have survived if Pompey's power grab had been thwarted? Perhaps not, the Republic had many problems. Pompey's power, however, was a leading indicator that the end of the Republic was near.

Khmer America: The fellowship of the waterboard

Recently the GOP legalized waterboarding. Today Crooked Timber provides us some historic context. The United States of America has joined the illustrious Khmer Rouge in the Fellowship of the Waterboard ...

Crooked Timber: What Waterboarding Looks Like:

The current administration is out there on torture together with the ******* Khmer Rouge.

and in comments ..

... Am I the only one here disgusted by this repulsive attempt to imply moral equivalence between our democratic torture, torture for the sake of liberty, democracy, Judeochristianity and free markets – with Khmer Rouge’s godless, evil, anti-market torture?...

May the ghosts of Cambodia visit the dreams of Vlad Bush.

Note that McCain voted for the torture bill. I would like to repeat that. McCain voted for this bill. On a day of infamy, that was a particularly sad note. With that act, he destroyed the reputation of a lifetime.

In the last election American Catholics swung towards Bush. The GOP has failed yet another test, how will the Catholic church respond this time? Will the religious right begin to wonder if they've chosen the wrong champion?

BTW, the October surprise? A direct attack on Roe V. Wade -- something to make the religious right forget the torture bill. (Incidentally, I think it is time for RVW to pass into history, but the October action will be done in the worse possible way ...)

PS. Regular readers note this is the first obscenity ever to appear in the posts of CT. There's cause.

How hot will it get? Hotter than ever.

Another analysis of historical temperatures has come out. The Look has summarized the article and presented the graph. The graph is a bit hard to interpret because it spikes so severely between 1900 and 2002. We're not talking hockey stick, we're talking rocket.

The easiest thing to do is follow the blue line for the 2001-2005 mean. The earth was super hot 400,000 years ago, and we're still about 1 degree C short of that. That was the hottest earth in 1.35 million years - as far back as we can go. If we don't do some radical CO2 reduction however, we'll blow by that record (pass it by a whopping 2 degrees C) and move out of the range of human evolutionary history.

Cut and run? Ok, maybe limp.

This is blackly funny. A GOP House candidate parrots Rove's tired 'cut and run' line, forgetting who his Democrat opponent is ...

WorkingForChange-Beyond the pale:

... In Illinois' 6th Congressional District, long represented by Henry Hyde, Republican candidate Peter Roskam accused his Democratic opponent Tammy Duckworth of planning to 'cut and run' on Iraq.

Duckworth is a former Army major and chopper pilot, who lost both legs in Iraq after her helicopter got hit by an RPG. 'I just could not believe he would say that to me,' said Duckworth, who walks on artificial legs and uses a cane.

I hope Duckworth is savvy enough to have gotten a chuckle out her opponent's stupidity...

Paul Graham: a big thinker in the world of software development

A brilliant colleague of mine recently recommended I review some of the writings of Paul Graham, in particular a famous essay Hackers and Painters and also the rest of his essay collection. The essays are primarily about creating a software business, also an interest of mine. You know he has to be good, because he recently returned to OS X.

Beyond the direct interest of Mr. Graham’s work, a few observations about the new world:

• The famous essay, which has been widely read, has never been published except on the web.
• My Graham doesn’t bother with RSS feeds, but two fans have created unofficial but “blessed” feeds that point to new essays. In our new world, there are creators and communicators and creator/communicators. All roles are valued. I added Joseph Grossberg’s feed to my Bloglines collection, then from there found an interesting comment by another blogger, and added him as well. Thus does the network grow.

My colleague, btw, is a creator but not a communicator…

Avandia (rosiglitazone) for Rat Alzheimer's Prophylaxis?!

I'm sure it's too late to buy stock in GlaxoSmithKline today, but it might be worth shorting it when disappointment sets in.

This FuturePundit article describes a rat study demonstrating that a "PPAR delta agonist" prevents progression of rat Alzheimer-disease like dementia. Sounds like they're talking about Rosiglitazone (Avandia), a Thiazolidindione class drug [1] that's alleged to work in diabetes by stimulating PPAR Delta receptors and thus enhancing intracellular glucose uptake.

The theory is that defects in insulin uptake into neurons play a role in the development of Alzheimer's disease, and the plaque and tangles we see are secondary processes arising in glucose starved brain cells. Improve uptake is alleged to slow disease progression.

I follow this domain casually, and this "type 3 neuro-diabetes" theory of Alzheimer's seems new to me, but of course being middle-aged I've probably forgotten about earlier readings.

Interesting for sure. In the unlikely event it actually worked GlaxoSmithKline would have hit the jackpot and the US debt bomb would be defused. Anyway, if it's really promising we'll know within the year.

[1] All of this stuff is pleasantly new to me, I'm getting far enough removed from medical practice I actually get to read about new physiology periodically. That's fun.

PS. I've always been suspicious that exercise really helped prevent Alzheimer's disease. It would fit with this though, if exercise had some global effect on insulin response and glucose uptake ...

PPS. All members of this class of medication cause weight gain ... Isn't that a deliciously nasty choice? You can be thin and demented, or hefty and not demented ...

Update 4/21/2010: Didn't do so well in human trials!

The Hall of Shame: 6 Democrats join

Histories Hall of Shame will include the Bush administration and all but two every GOP Senators in office today. It will also include six democrats. Five are anonymous drones, but it is astonishing how far Lieberman has fallen. This was a man who once had a reputation.

10/2/06: Correction: Lincoln Chafee opposed and Olympia Snowe did not vote. My apologies to these two.

What DeLong reads

DeLong responds to yet another decrepit journalist decrying the blogosphere. Those articles are both ridiculous and boring, I'm surprised DeLong has the energy to respond.

Along the way, he tells us what the reads. He rates the FT and the WSJ (news only, not the rabid and demented editorial pages) above the Economist, then runs through his blogs. Happily, I read at least half of them. DeLong is more avidly political than I, so my list leans more to science, technology and OS X than his. Still, I'm pleased to read at least half his favored set!

Now I need to start reading the Finacial Times ...

Guardians of the Enlightenment: Join SEFORA, promote the rationalist bill of rights

SEFORA is special interest group -- for scientists, engineers, and rationalists. Non-partisan, but it's obvious what's inspired them. My spouse and I have joined, even though we didn't make the illustrious first thousand. SEFORA (Scientists and Engineers for America) asks candidates to endorse a rationalist bill of rights -- and promotes candidates that sign up:

SEFORA

# Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.

# The federal government shall never intentionally publish false or misleading scientific information nor post such material on federal websites.

# Scientists conducting research or analysis with federal funding shall be free to discuss and publish the results of unclassified research after a reasonable period of review without fear of intimidation or adverse personnel action.

# Federal employees reporting what they believe to be manipulation of federal research and analysis for political or ideological reasons should be free to bring this information to the attention of the public and shall be protected from intimidation, retribution or adverse personnel action by effective enforcement of Whistle Blower laws.

# No scientists should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of their research.

# Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.

# The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.

# While scientists may elect to withhold methods or studies that might be misused there shall be no federal prohibition on publication of basic research results. Decisions made about blocking the release of information about specific applied research and technologies for reasons of national security shall be the result of a transparent process. Classification decisions shall be made by trained professionals using a clear set of published criteria and there shall be a clear process for challenging decisions and a process for remedying mistakes and abuses of the classification system.

I can't imagine any Republican who could sign up for this, so SEFORA will inevitably be supporting Democrats.

We knew what was happening. The Fall of America, part VII.

If you’re a Chinese high school student of 2018 reading this as part of your essay on “how did 21st century America betray its ideals”, you should not believe that bunk about “regular Americans didn’t know what was happening”. If Americans didn’t “know” what was happening, it was because they chose not to look.

So don’t buy it. Guilty we are. We did not deserve the legacy we inherited. I hope your China will find a better path …

Antiterrorism Bill on Detainees, Geneva Conventions - Rushing Off a Cliff - New York Times,

….These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws:

Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted.

The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published.

Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence.

Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial.

Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses.

Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence.

Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture.

There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it.

We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration.

They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Update 9/28: I bolded the part about the "spineless democrats", but on reflection this is a perfect Rovian trap. The man has no limits. If only we were better than Rove knows we are, but I fear his low opinion is justified. He's right that Americans will fall for his trap. Perhaps Democrats can do nothing but remain silent and vote against the bill.

Update 9/29/06: There's some "law" of the Internet that forbids comparisons to the Nazi era. Is there an appeal process by which one can obtain exemption from the law? I think we should invoke it. Really, though, I'm not sure the Nazis went in for this kind of Orwellian process. It's not even clearly Soviet. Maybe more tinpot dictatorship ...

FolioViews and ICD-9: a billion dollar tale never told

The more decrepit one becomes, the more "odd stories never told" one accumulates. This is one of those stories, a tale of a seemingly minor technical decision made 20 years ago -- with vast economic, social and scientific consequences that almost nobody recognizes today. It's a story about what happens when data moves into software and how proprietary data formats can shape a world -- unrecognized by anyone. It's a story of the mutability and immortality of software, and about data lock. It's boring, obscure, and I really don't know it all -- but I'm one of the few people that can guess some pieces of it. So, I'll tell it now, and hope corrections in the comments section.

In the 1980s a company named Folio Corporation produced a DOS information management software packaged called "FolioViews". They called it an InfoBase, and it was one of several semi-structured information managers that, in today's terms, were a cross between a database, a textbase, a content management system and and ontology editor. I was quite fond of that class of software, the most famous of which was probably Lotus Agenda. There were several similar, immensely powerful, and long forgotten applications on Mac Classic.

I remember that product because I used to write software reviews for the Journal of Family Practice in the 80s, and I wrote on FolioViews/DOS. (Back then JFP was still a scientific journal, not a throwaway.) FolioViews made a rocky transition to Windows 3.x, I wasn't as impressed with the Windows version, but, oddly enough, I have all the manuals. The software is gone.

That's where I thought the story ended, around 1993. It didn't though.

FolioViews was picked up by a number of governments, government contractors, publishers, CD-ROM vendors and legal firms around the world. It became a vertical market product. Somewhere along the way it was purchased by NextPage and buried (a search on their web site yields nothing about FolioViews). It probably lives a zombie existence there as a potential source of software patent litigation; many of these 1980s software packages implemented designs and ideas that were later patented independently, the old software can invalidate later patents.

Ahh, but what about the economic implications? That's a twisted tale. Somewhere along the line FolioViews became the standard means of editing and publishing ICD-9 and ICD-10, which started life as data sets used by epidemiologists and healthcare researchers. (For all I know it's used for CPT also, but that's murkier.) Here's the catch. ICD-9, in the US at least, became, by default, the only "standard" way to talk about diseases, disorders, and patient conditions. It became the flawed foundation of health care payment rules (along with CPT, DRG, etc etc), clinical decision support systems and EHRs (including one I helped create).

ICD-9 is the primary source of everything we know about what health issues Americans have, a fundamental constraint on the accuracy and capabilities of decision support systems, and a major obstacle to smarter/better healthcare systems. ICD-9 is also built and maintained in FolioViews -- but it's not distributed that way. It's distributed as a paper book (or a PDF, same difference). Fragments of ICD-9 are also published as database-like tables -- but that's only a fraction of it. The complete ICD-9, which exists only in FolioViews, is a rich and baroque mixture of classification, ontology and document -- mostly we don't have it.

Fundamentally, ICD-9 is locked away in the FolioViews Infobase somewhere in the offices of a federal contractor. My 1990s FolioViews manual tells me FolioViews can export wordprocessing documents or the proprietary "Folio Flat File" -- but that's it. Data Lock. Big time. FolioViews had its own peculiar and powerful way of managing data, and even if FolioViews had some sort of useable export facility it would be a non-trivial job to recreate it. It's not clear that there's an equivalent modern software environment that could recreate FolioViews. It might be easier to hire people to translate the WordPerfect output into a purpose-built environment -- except that really we need to dump ICD-9 and ICD-10 and do a SNOMED-derivedICD-11 (but that's another story).

So here we are, twenty years later, living with the consequences of a modest decision made when DOS was king. In a sense, a large portion of American healthcare is a captive of FolioViews, software who's fundamentals, including file formats and data structures, are lost in the mists of ancient computing. Something to think about the next time you wonder why software vendors struggle mightily to produce reliable and interoperable systems to support both clinical practice and financial obligations. The reasons may be more mysterious than you can imagine ...

References:

• A 2003 PDF marketing document about FolioViews
• The Fien Group
• Canadian Legal FolioViews InfoBase review
• QuickerWit database entry on FolioViews
  

Update 12/13/06: Interesting twist. A renamed descendant of Folio Views is used by the Mormon church (LDS) to distribute census/genealogy data. FolioViews was indeed a groundbreaking piece of software in its DOS incarnation, so unique it cannot be quite killed. Incidentally, I found this usenet discussion as a side-effect of how I track my usenet postings and follow-up. I add the semi-unique string 'jfaughnan' as metadata to my postings, and I have standard google query embedded in a my news page that retrieves postings. Since 'jfaughnan' appears in the URL for this blog, my standing query turned up the usenet posting referencing the blog. A very new age sequence of circumstances.

Answering the stupid question: what would YOU do in Iraq

Apparently in right wingnut circles and spineless journalists there's a call for "democrats" (meaning rationalists in this context) to come forward with their "solutions" to the Bush/GOP catastrophe in Iraq.
Shrillblog amplifies a Kevin Drum response. In brief, this is the GOP's Vietnam. There isn't a fix any longer, there are only less bad alternatives. The less bad alternatives are basically versions of retreat under fire, possibly with a continued presence in the north. It appears that Iran has won, the US lost an immense amount of money and thousands of lives, and the Iraqi people lost much more. If there are better options they will need to come from the Iraqi people and with an internationalized support rather than direct US support.

Politically, the sad truth is that the American people are not ready to hear this. A recent MN opinion poll show that less than 50% believe that the Iraq war was bungled. The numbers are a large increase from a year ago, but that's still not enough.

Given the impossibility of being frank, and the hopelessness of the GOP and the Bush administration, a non-suicidal rationalist politician will say relatively little. (Betty McCollum, our local representative, is rather honest -- but her seat is so safe I think the GOP opposition might be on the lam somewhere).

The irritating thing here is not the GOP ploy -- it's a perfectly reasonable ploy. It's the spineless journalists who play along with it ...

The Fall of Microsoft?

I've proclaimed the Fall of Microsoft before. The last time was OS/2 3.x, which was so clearly superior to both Win 98 and Win NT that it seemed sure to succeed. That's when I learned a lasting lesson about business strategy (including the Black Arts) vs. technical excellence. (I think of OS/2 every time my XP box slows to a grinding halt, tied up by its utterly lousy multitasking engine.)

Now I'll do it again. No, it's not Vista. Sure Vista will be a massive turkey, but we know about that. It's Word and Outlook/Exchange.

Word I've written about. It's fundamentally awful when used as anything but a sophisticated typewriter. Yeah, the help files and the grammar/spelling checking are good -- but that's about the end of it.

In some ways though, the Outlook/Exchange combination is even worse. Word I can work around the bugs, but Outlook/Exchange is just nasty. I got my latest jolt today when performance and reliability issues (sync errors with Exchange) forced me to switch to cached mode -- which is far faster. Except that my Sent folder had vanished, and I had several cryptic/worthless Outlook sync error messages that pointed to dead addresses.

No harm done of course. I keep my data in non-synched offline PST files and past experience had taught me to backup my Sent folderm, and anything else that's synched with the Exchange server, prior to switching modes. So I didn't really lose any data.

The point is though, that Outlook/Exchange and Word are two of Microsoft's core money spinners. Over the years they keep getting worse, not better. Microsoft can't seem to fix it. They've moved into a parasitic mode, siphoning the juices of the corporate customers who can't escape data lock. That mode will work for a long time, but it's a Faustian bargain. Once a corporation, or an organism, becomes a parasite, reversion to free range existence is very rare.

This time, the Fall may be for real ...