Gulf War II: The critic's view summarized

The New York Review of Books: Iraq: The War of the Imagination summarizes the Woodward, Suskind and Risen on the Bush administration's path to perdition with additional commentary and footnotes. Mark Danner promises a future article on the "third act", namely what comes now.

Bush/Cheney et al combined bad data with bad judgment and terrible execution to produce a strategic blunder an order of magnitude worse than the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. America dutifully reelected them, so their voters share the blame.

Despite all that has gone before, I am cautiously optimistic. There is so much at stake in Iraq that many powerful forces, and immense numbers of less powerful people, will conspire to try to salvage the situation; albeit at an immense cost in lives and economic productivity. Perhaps, if there are enough of these forces, the colossal and catastrophic incompetence of George Bush and Dick Cheney can be managed and redirected, and these two men can retire to give speeches we can all ignore.

The strange economics of PC Games: why are so many junk?

Amazon.com: Cars Radiator Springs Adventures (Win/Mac)
sells for $18. My son wants it, but the reviews on both Amazon and the Apple website are unusually dismal. It appears to be genuine junk.

Now, I admit it's not that unusual in the 21st century to buy stuff that's pure junk. The cost of ownership of this worthless junk is mind-boggling -- but it's everywhere. PC/Mac children's games, however, seem even junkier. Console games don't seem to have the same problem.

Why does this strategy, which is basically fraud, work for PC/Mac games vendors but not for console vendors? My guess is it has something to do with the absence of copy protection, naive buyers, and the collapse of the PC/Mac games market. In this environment, maybe fraud is the only successful strategy ...

Free Will RIP - The Economist on preemptive punishment

It has begun.

"Free Will" was a convenient fiction; the transmutation of the Soul into something that could live, for a time, with science. It was always doomed to folow the Soul into the exile of theology, the only question was when. I said my farewell in the early 1990s -- neurosciences and genomics had shrunk Free Will into a tiny remnant of its old self. In retrospect it didn't really matter, whether by the happenstance of circumstance or the tyranny of genetics we are the products of chance. The Calvinists covered this long ago.

It takes a while for something like this to sink in though. This editorial in The Economist tells us that the news has traveled from the heralds of science fiction to the realm of politics...

Liberalism and neurology | Free to choose? | Economist.com

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were “freely” entered into, then social relations would be very different...

...At that point, the old French proverb “to understand all is to forgive all” will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be happening. At the moment, the criminal law—in the West, at least—is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any crime is committed.

Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA Database being built up by the British government (which includes material from many innocent people), would already allow the identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and violence. How soon before those people are subject to special surveillance? And if the state chose to carry out such surveillance, recognising that the people in question may pose particular risks merely because of their biology, it could hardly then argue that they were wholly responsible for any crime that they did go on to commit.

Nor is it only the criminal law where free will matters. Markets also depend on the idea that personal choice is free choice. Mostly, that is not a problem. Even if choice is guided by unconscious instinct, that instinct will usually have been honed by natural selection to do the right thing. But not always. Fatty, sugary foods subvert evolved instincts, as do addictive drugs such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. Pornography does as well. Liberals say that individuals should be free to consume these, or not. Erode free will, and you erode that argument.

In fact, you begin to erode all freedom. Without a belief in free will, an ideology of freedom is bizarre. Though it will not happen quickly, shrinking the space in which free will can operate could have some uncomfortable repercussions.

Yes. The Economist, slow as it is, is a bit quicker than the mainstream media. The others will follow over the next two to three years, with conversations in movies and the talk shows.

How will the realization dawn? Will there be a ferocious counter-attack, or will we discover that the edifice of resistance has been crumbling in the West? Hard to say, but I don't think this is much of an issue for most faiths. All functions of Free Will can readily revert to the Soul, and many Christian faiths have dropped Hell -- removing the most troublesome issue with a supposedly benevolent deity. Calvinists, of course, have never had a problem with those born to be damned. The going is even easier for Hindus and Buddhists, but I'd wonder about Islam...

The death of a Free Will is, however, a problem for "true (19th) liberalism" (i.e. The Economist) and, if they exist, compassionate Libertarians. The long feared embrace of 20th century Liberalism looms for both.

It will also be a significant challenge to modern American evangelical Protestantism, which has promoted the separation of Free Will from Soul and combines a "just" (but not merciful) God with eternal damnation. Something will have to give there.

Kudos to The Economist for launching the conversation, and for connecting it to the oncoming train of preemptive punishment.

Update 1/19/07: See also (all connected to The Economist, interestingly)

• you are a robot
• the chemistry of love
  

Levitating globes, calculators and $18 digital cameras

DeLong notes how cheap computing changes the economics of toy construction:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Levitating Desktop Globes

...It's now cheaper to have a computer sense the position of the globe and increase or decrease the strength of the top magnet in order to pull the globe up or down than to have a cradle of magnets underneath...

Silicon is sand, and sand is cheap. In the same vein, my local gas station is selling a Philips digital camera/camcorder for $18.00. Sand and plastic; once the developments cost has been recouped there's no basement for the price.

Calculators took the same route 30 years ago. Like embedded chips and the low end digital camera they were just sand and plastic; eventually low end calculators became so cheap they could only be sold as add-ons and gimmicks.

Curiously, the personal computer has remained conspicuously expensive. Only recently has mainstream computing begun to approach to price point of the Commodore 64 ... Too many moving parts ....

Die smarter? Longevity genes, Alzheimer's and gambling with Faust

The 'related links' section of this SciAm summary are also of interest:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Single Gene Could Lead to Long Life, Better Mental Function -- A variation of a gene that controls the size of cholesterol molecules in the bloodstream is common among elderly Ashkenazim who remain mentally sharp

... Those centenarians who passed were two to three times more likely to have a common variant of a particular gene, called the CETP gene, than those who did not. When the researchers studied another 124 Ashkenazi Jews between 75 and 85 years of age, those subjects who passed the test of mental function were five times more likely to have this gene variant than their counterparts.

The CETP gene variant makes cholesterol particles in the blood larger than normal. The researchers suggest smaller particles can more readily lodge in the lining of blood vessels, leading to fatty buildups, which are a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

Whether or not this gene variant protects the brain by preventing this buildup, or through some other mechanism, remains uncertain, says Barzilai. Future research should also investigate whether this gene has an effect on dementia associated with Alzheimer's disease, says pathologist and human geneticist George Martin at the University of Washington.

Pharmaceutical companies are currently developing drugs that mimic the effect of this gene variant, says Barzilai. Unfortunately, one known as torcetrapib, manufactured by Pfizer, was pulled in December due to increased death and heart problems among study subjects, "but others in development aren't seeing that, so it might just have been a problem with that drug," says Barzilai. "If not, it's a question people might face--whether or not people want to prevent Alzheimer's even if there's a small risk of getting a heart attack.

Fascinating basic science, but like all good basic science it mostly raises questions. For all we know now this gene doesn't so much provide longer life, as kill off those who lack some other compensatory gene that provides benefits. It might, for example, be primarily an Alzheimer's reduction gene that also increases the risk of heart attacks, so if you sample elderly people with the gene you're finding those who have some other factor that offsets the heart attack effect.

Alas, many "beneficial" genes turn out to have a Faustian component -- such as trading slower aging and faster healing for more cancer. (Turns out mice do this big time -- if they're not killed they almost always die of cancer -- but they heal fast.)

Which brings us to Barzilai's comment. The promise of modern pharmacogenetics is really about optimizing the Faustian bargain. So you make a "deal with the devil", but the deck is stacked in your favor. If your MI risk is low but your dementia risk is high, then you might opt for an anti-dementia drug that increases the risk of MI. If your dementia risk is high, and your MI risk is average, you schedule bypass surgery in 8 years. Who needs recreational bingo when you can gamble on this scale?

Keeping up with the metagenome

Biology has changed a bit since the day -- and yet not so much. In my 1970s biology classes ecosystems and emergent interactions were very fashionable ...

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog : 2006 12 0 The metagenome and obesity

...the introduction to the paper by Turnbaugh et al. (2006:1027) puts it well:

The human 'metagenome' is a composite of Homo sapiens genes and genes present in the genomes of the trillions of microbes that colonize our adult bodies. The latter genes are thought to outnumber the former by several orders of magnitude. 'Our' microbial genomes (the microbiome) encode metabolic capacities that we have not had to evolve wholly on our own but remain largely unexplored. These include degradation of otherwise indigestible components of our diet, and therefore may have an impact on our energy balance.

Hawks is highly recommended for anyone who wants to track the development of modern biology and, of course, anthropology.

Fertility and wealth: a paradox resolved?

The wealthier and more powerful women become, the fewer children they have.

I've heard dozens of explanations for this seemingly biologically insane behavior, but none of them made sense to me. It's been in the back of my mind for over twenty years.

Now the paradox may be heading towards resolution:

BBC NEWS | Health | Large families 'bad for parents' : "

...They add the findings also suggest why women now tend to have fewer children.

'If women have generally incurred greater fitness costs of reproduction, this could explain why they generally prefer fewer offspring than their husbands and reduce their fertility when they obtain more reproductive autonomy.'

The researchers assert a strong correlation between number of children and maternal mortality. If true this would help understand the apparent wealth paradox. A caveat however, I have little faith left in case control studies. The only reason this one has any persuasive power is that it fits with what we see in other animals.

It's probably not only the direct effect of bearing children -- the paternal mortality also rises ...

Racism is alive and public in Virginia's Republican representative

Of course racism never went away in American culture or politics, but for years it was at least disguised. Virgil Goode Jr, the GOP representative for Virginia, has done the nation a great service by ripping off the disguise. His racism, and perhaps that of his constituents, is now on international display. Emphases mine ...

Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim - New York Times

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

... Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”...

... “I’m looking forward to making friends with Representative Goode, or at least getting to know him,” Mr. Ellison said, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. “I want to let him know that there’s nothing to fear. The fact that there are many different faiths, many different colors and many different cultures in America is a great strength.”

... Dennis Prager, a conservative columnist and radio host, condemned the decision as one that would undermine American civilization.

“Ellison’s doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal — the Islamicization of America,” said Mr. Prager, who said the Bible was the only relevant religious text in the United States.

“If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress,” Mr. Prager said.

In his letter, Mr. Goode echoed that view, saying that he did not “subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” He also called for ending illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration.

Linwood Duncan, a spokesman for Mr. Goode, said the Virginia lawmaker had no intention of backing down, despite the furor.

“He stands by the letter,” Mr. Duncan said. “He has no intention of apologizing.”

Bravo Mr. Goode. Please don't retreat into some feigned mealy-mouthed faux apology. Your pretty blond face will give us a living symbol of the evil that lives at the heart of the GOP. I didn't get to vote for Mr. Ellison (neighboring district), but now I wish I could have. Mr. Ellison's reply, "making friends" is diabolical; guaranteed to drive Mr. Goode into a frothing rage that somebody will capture for YouTube.

I'm sure Mr. Goode and Mr. Prager would feel much the same way about, shudder, a Jew, Hindu, or ... horror of horrors ... no, I dare not mention it ... an atheist taking office.

John McCain -- this is your party ...

UK robotics report: why you should really read science fiction

As a proper geek-child, I was very fond of comic books and science fiction. I also took a typing class, which in my day was considered the province of secretaries. I never imagined both choices would prove to be so practical. A good lesson for our latest educational obsessions.

The value of my 1970s typing classes is, of course, now obvious. The value of my science fiction vice is having been long prepared for the latest news:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Robots could demand legal rights

.... Robots could one day demand the same citizen's rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.

If granted, countries would be obligated to provide social benefits including housing and even 'robo-healthcare', the report says.

The predictions are contained in nearly 250 papers that look ahead at developments over the next 50 years.

.... The research was commissioned by the UK Office of Science and Innovation's Horizon Scanning Centre.

The 246 summary papers, called the Sigma and Delta scans, were complied by futures researchers, Outsights-Ipsos Mori partnership and the US-based Institute for the Future (IFTF)....

Duh. Well, yes. If robots, or non-robots for that matter, become sentient they will acquire rights. The tricky part, which I wrote about in my Williams College ethics class in 1981, is how "rights" are afforded when one steps away from DNA. Does a severely retarded human child earn more "rights" than a genetically enhanced chimp? Does a super-sentient AI get more "rights" than the most brilliant, wise, handsome, rich, etc human? (My 1986 medical school ethics essay was about how those questions expose the degree to which morals and mores are a pragmatic compromise between ethical theory and the limits of human wisdom.)

Overall, I suspect the "Horizon Scanning Center" would have done as well to buy a copy of each the yearly "hard" SF anthologies printed since 1975, but it must have been great fun to work on the reports and I'd enjoy reading them. I hope they go online sometime.

I was struck, when I first heard this news on NPR, that the journalists were relatively sober. That's noteworthy. Ten years ago the chatter would have been flip, today there was only a hint of humor. These memes are infiltrating the human gestalt...

MS and sunlight

Twenty years ago I remember a medical school lecturer mentioning that MS had a peculiar latitudinal distribution based on where a person grew up. The further north one went, the more common it was. I'm sure I wasn't the first person hearing that to think that there was some connection to sunlight exposure in early life.

Maybe there is ...

Vitamin D may lower risk of multiple sclerosis, study finds - USATODAY.com:

Among whites, those with the highest blood levels of vitamin D had a 62% reduced risk of developing the disease. The protection was the strongest for people who were younger than 20 — a finding that suggests that to be effective, a protective agent might need to kick in very early in life, Ascherio says...

Laws that are universally disobeyed

How many people who bought two way radios for their children this Christmas have gotten their FCC licenses?

Motorola Talkabout FV200 AAA Radios - 2 Pack from REI.com

... FV200 radios operate on radio frequencies that are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); license and fees required...."

I think someone should try to register just to see what the FCC does.

Note to Congress: a law that's never obeyed and never enforced is simply silly.

AOL and Yahoo: email down the tubes

AOL has been on a long slow death spiral for about 10 years, but I didn't realize Yahoo was in dire straits until I read this announcement from my ISP:

VISI | Announcements | Difficulty sending mail to yahoo.com or aol.com?

Over the past weeks, it appears that Yahoo has begun grey-listing all (or most) incoming mail. This means that they are rejecting the first mail delivery attempts and telling sending servers to try again later. Yahoo also appears to be grey-listing with content filters. In this case, customers may see the error message: message text rejected by mx1.mail.yahoo.com: 451 This message indicates that suspicious content was detected, but that the sending server may try again.

For mail grey-listed automatically or by IP, users may see: : connect to x.mx.mail.yahoo.com[209.191.aaa.xxx]: server refused mail service You may also see error code 421 in the error response.

Generally, this email is also being retried, however, if retried too soon, it will be rejected again. It may even be rejected permanently by Yahoo with no change in error message that we have found. Yahoo's documentation claims that they are not grey-listing, but instead are filtering mail based upon the sending server's compliance with standard mail practices. Our servers, however, are compliant, but we are still seeing significant deferrals. Yahoo is also testing DomainKeys verification, which we are reviewing to potentially mitigate the problem. There appears to be no way to contact Yahoo about this except via web forms that do not generate any response except confirmation of receipt. We recommend that any users forwarding email to yahoo.com addresses cease forwarding or redirect to another location.

Of course, this affects not only customers forwarding mail to Yahoo, but ANYONE attempting to send mail to Yahoo addresses.

AOL AOL uses an automated system to block mail from potential spam sources. When mail is reported as spam by users, the IP addresses for servers used to transmit the mail are recorded, and, once their limit has been reached, IP addresses are blocked from sending mail to AOL for 24 to 48 hours. This can be exacerbated by VISI customers forwarding email to their own AOL accounts and then reporting any forwarded spam, which can result in temporary blocks of VISI mail server IP addresses. The automated system is COMPLETELY automatic, and no intervention is possible in expediting removal of IP addresses. Unfortunately, this will affect ANY customer attempting to send to AOL addresses, not just forwards to AOL accounts. As with Yahoo, above, we recommend that any users forwarding email to aol.com addresses cease forwarding or redirect to another location.

I ran into a variant of this problem with Gmail. I was redirecting an unfiltered email stream to Gmail, and when I read the mail in Gmail I "marked" the spam. Alas, Gmail looks at the redirect as the source of the email, so the more I marked as spam the lower the reputation of the redirector fell. Over time Gmail marked more and more valid emails as spam, and missed more and more spam. I fixed it by filtering the mail stream, and never marking anything that was redirected as spam (I just delete it).

The Yahoo and AOL bizarre responses to the spam deluge tells us how dire their financial situations are, but I must also say that Visi should have figured out DomainKeys a year ago. Maybe Yahoo is doing this in part to force adoption of DomainKeys; too bad their execution is incompetent.

In the meantime, encourage anyone you know who's still using Yahoo or AOL to get out fast and switch to Gmail.

Update 12/21/06: There's a good defensive strategy for those of us still using SMTP services (non-webmail) btw. Get a Gmail account and configure your dedicated email client to use Gmail's smtp service. If Google is your sending service, I suspect Yahoo and AOL won't be blacklisting the sending domain.

Google is NOT slowing down

Google folk were rumored to be catching their breath. No. Rather than doing new products, they're extending existing products in innovative ways and discovering innovative, micro-NLP based, ways to do ad-hoc interoperability across Google and with non-Google products.

I have an embedded link one one of my blogs to a Custom Search Engine. Today when I used it, a dialog box appeared asking if I'd like to add this custom search to the button list that appears next to the search box in my Google Firefox 3.0 beta toolbar.

I said yes, and now it's there. When I get home and login to Google/Firefox, I would not be astonished to see the button migrate.

Today I noticed the addition of the 'call' link to Google local search, as well as a few other clever tweaks (though they need to do better about exposing links so one can send a link to recreate a local search context).

Google is not slowing down. If anything, they're ramping up. Scary and exciting.

Mankiw plays tricks, but is saved by a Dave Barry column

Greg Mankiw, a respectable Republican, claims that the study of economics makes students more "conservative". Of course he's playing semantic games; he knows his more naive readership will equate "conservative" with Republican. It's only at the end of his post that his conscience forces him to confess that he really means "classically liberal"; in other words the very antithesis of modern Rovian Republicanism. Classic liberalism (championed by The Economist in the 1980s and early 1990s, and parodied by The Economist ever since) is a respectable doctrine, albeit one that struggles with "the problem of the weak".

Despite this bit of weaselly trickery, the column is redeemed by a link to a classic Dave Barry column. I do miss Dave Barry's writing, but he seems to have decided to semi-retire. Dave Barry in his heyday was a rare public and populist intellectual, of a sort we most desperately need.

Car rental: enter gold number, price jumps $200

The 'arms race' of modern pricing continues apace. I priced a personal 5 day van rental twice on Travelocity - once with no loyalty number added and again with the loyalty number.

The price of loyalty, was a $200 increase. Yes, I would pay Avis for the joy of being a loyal customer.

To their credit Travelocity listed Avis twice after I entered my registration number, once at the disloyal price and again at the inflated loyal price.

These days it is increasingly foolish to do any price negotiation directly with a travel related vendor.