South Korea apologizes, America puzzled

Soo Yun, an American Journalist who was a Fulbright scholar in South Korea last year, describes a national South Korean apology to an inattentive America. I imagine the American ambassador must on the one hand accept graciously, but on the other hand point out that no apology is expected. Most Americans are probably oblivious to South Korea's distress. Today Americans do not have as strong a sense of collective ethnic identity as South Koreans.

So, South Korea, it's ok if you want to apologize, but, on average, most Americans probably don't expect it.

South Korean "blood" mythology is unusually strong, but it is not qualitatively different from other nations. Japan has a similar belief, though probably it is less strong now than it was 30 years ago. China was likewise appalled when Fox news reported the assailant was a Chinese student, and massively relieved when he was found to be 'South Korean raised in America'.

More broadly, consider this tribal identity in the context of these examples:

1. Who, if anyone, should apologize for the annihilation of the Amerindian, or for American slavery? Why should they apologize? Who inherits guilt, and why? How do societies answers change over time?
   
   
2. When can Germany stop apologizing for the Holocaust? How many generations are required? Does Germany have any moral responsibility to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive? (I'd say yes to the last, because of a much stronger version of #3, but it's debatable.)
   
   
3. American soldiers, during the disastrous early days of the Korean war, killed South Korean civilians to speed their escape. (The US Military has recently confirmed this story after an internal investigation - very quietly.) Should anyone living today apologize? (I'd say yes, because there's clear institutional continuity in the US military, but it's a debatable point.)
   
   
4. A euro-American wins a Nobel. Should black Americans be proud? Euro-Americans? The winner's mother? Euros? What if it's a Chinese American?
   
   
5. Canada wins an Olympic medal in Hockey. Should Canadians be proud of their team? What if Montreal wins the Stanley Cup over the Mighty Ducks (ha!) and the teams are both Russian?
   
   
6. Most citizens of the Arab world appear to hate Israel and Jews. A significant number were, at one time, sympathetic to attacks on the WTC. (I suspect that number has shrunk as everyone realizes that a crazed America is not a good thing.) Should an Arab-American apologize for this? (I'd say no, but I bet some apologize anyway ...)
   
   
7. Should Idi Amin's parents have felt guilty for his crimes? What about his teachers?
   

South Korea is a bit extreme, but if we examine the responses to these questions I think we'd find the differences are quantitative, but not qualitative. All humans struggle with the distinction between individual, family, tribe, nation, and culture and the notion of responsibility. Except, of course, for those of us who dispense with the concept of responsibility ...

Pet poisons: FDA suspects deliberate contamination

The theory that Chinese manufacturers spiked food with melanine to increase its apparent nutritional value now has FDA support:

Spiking theorized in pet deaths | Chicago Tribune

... Stephen Sundlof, chief veterinarian for the Food and Drug Administration, said melamine, which has turned up in more than 100 brands of cat and dog food, may have been used to falsely boost the apparent nutritional content of rice protein.

'That's still a theory but it certainly seems to be a plausible one,' he said.

In other news deaths are increasing in South Africa and contaminated feed has been fed to pigs. So melanine has probably entered the human food chain in a few places in the US.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government is declining requests for FDA visits and at least one US pet food manufacturer has sworn off any future Chinese sources.

We're going ahead with plans to make our own pet food.

How would a pet food company get our confidence back? They'd apply for permission to sell food for human consumption. They wouldn't actually sell the food for humans, but that would bring them into full FDA scrutiny. Then they'd provide a human-oriented version of their product for snacks at board meetings. If a company did all of that, I might be inclined to trust them ...

Parental controls - not an Apple thing

I have to limit the kids access to Google Video. Limit, as in, eliminate. Alas, Apple's parental controls are mediocre in 10.4 (better, supposedly, in the now delayed 10.5). If you allow access to a domain in Safari, you allow access to all. Apple's Airport Extreme has NO parental controls, my ultra-cheap DSL router has more.

I wonder how old Jobs kids are ...

1900 Predictions for 2000 - my version

Several bloggers have lately been choosing their favorites from predictions made by John Elfreth Watkins in 1900. He based his predictions on interviews with the best thinkers of the day.

Some predictions were way off (we have UPS trucks instead of pneumatic tubes), others were close or correct. The population prediction (350 million) was based on the US annexing most of the Americas, but that isn't too far off our current number. Trains (in France) easily hit 2 miles/minute. Photos are indeed "telegraphed" from China. Our "shells" can destroy entire cities. Automobiles are more affordable to us than horses were to Americans in 1900. We do "see around the world". Our domestic animals have become atrophied meat producing drones.

Other predictions were understandable but misguided exaggerations of the technology of 1900, such as high speed boats crossing the Atlantic (a consequence of assuming airplanes would not be used for mass transit). Overall, I think Mr. Watkins did extremely well, despite being far bolder than our current crop of timid futurists. I doubt our predictions of 2100 will be as accurate, mostly because of those pesky singularities.

The ones that most interest me are those that reflect the concerns of the day ....

1900 Predictions

Predictions of the Year 2000 from The Ladies Home Journal of December 1900

The Ladies Home Journal from December 1900, which contained a fascinating article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years”.

... Prediction #2: The American will be taller by from one to two inches. His increase of stature will result from better health, due to vast reforms in medicine, sanitation, food and athletics. He will live fifty years instead of thirty-five as at present – for he will reside in the suburbs. The city house will practically be no more. Building in blocks will be illegal. The trip from suburban home to office will require a few minutes only. A penny will pay the fare.

Prediction #3: Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.

Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities.... Cities, therefore, will be free from all noises.

Prediction #11: No Mosquitoes nor Flies. Insect screens will be unnecessary... The extermination of the horse and its stable will reduce the house-fly.

Prediction #12: Peas as Large as Beets. Peas and beans will be as large as beets are to-day. Sugar cane will produce twice as much sugar as the sugar beet now does. Cane will once more be the chief source of our sugar supply. The milkweed will have been developed into a rubber plant. Cheap native rubber will be harvested by machinery all over this country. Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox. The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth.

Prediction #13: Strawberries as Large as Apples will be eaten by our great-great-grandchildren for their Christmas dinners a hundred years hence. Raspberries and blackberries will be as large.... Melons, cherries, grapes, plums, apples, pears, peaches and all berries will be seedless. Figs will be cultivated over the entire United States.

Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.

Prediction #28: There will be no wild animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse...

Life beyond age 35. Food in abundance -- especially fruit. Death to the pesky, fly infested horse. Elimination of insects, mice, rats and every wild animal. Escape from the squalor and noise of the city. These were the desires of a people who lived with disease, miserable diets, and pests.

Mostly, the dreams of 1900 did come true, though we came to like wild animals more than Watkins could have imagined. Watkins would say we lived like gods, albeit, fat, flabby gods. In his day many earned their pay by physical performance -- he'd be appalled by our sloth.

Sachs: a new enlightenment so we may live

I've begun listening to the Reith Lectures, a series of five weekly presentations by Jeffrey Sachs. I gather from his introduction that the audience is formidable, but so are his ambitions. Sachs feels that we're careening towards a big, thick brick wall, and he's using his Reith lectures to call for a course correction.

Seems like something one might want to hear. BBC 4 Reith Lectures 2007: Sachs and the modern world - by mp3, podcast and rss has directions on how to subscribe. I've got two in iTunes so far.

The government owns your medical history

Holy cow.

...Anyway, scrolling down to the section on “Use and Disclosure of Information”, we see that among the people authorized to check out your prescription drug history are:

any local, State, or Federal law enforcement, narcotics control, licensure, disciplinary, or program authority, who certifies, under the procedures determined by the State, that the requested information is related to an individual investigation or proceeding involving the unlawful diversion or misuse of a schedule II, III, or IV substance, and such information will further the purpose of the investigation or assist in the proceeding;

…as well as:

any agent of the Department of Health and Human Services, a State medicaid program, a State health department, or the Drug Enforcement Administration who certifies that the requested information is necessary for research to be conducted by such department, program, or administration, respectively, and the intended purpose of the research is related to a function committed to such department, program, or administration by law that is not investigative in nature;

…and a few other people as well.

So, no federal database, just fifty-one state databases that the feds and state and local governments can go browsing through every time they decide you’ve done something bad.

I feel like I've just passed into another dimension. I'd predicted this would happen in 1996 (I was hardly alone), though I'd naively thought it would take far more than 9/11 to send us down this road. This was all done by the party that claims to fear government. Obviously, what they meant was they fear any government but their own.

Their are no such thing as "privacy nuts", because their record of being right is unassailable.

How long to make the Blacksburg schizophrenia connection?

I've been curious how long it would take the media to make the obvious connection between the Blacksburg disaster and schizophrenia.

As of today, a Google news search has five hits.

If I were running the planet (be afraid), I'd assemble a group to review what policy, educational, and legal changes should be made to improve the recognition and management of psychotic disorders (schizophrenia, major depression, mania, etc) in young adults. The group would be asked to consider management in the context of families, tribes, and cultures that deny the biological reality of psychiatric disorders. The denial group is large, and it includes most American social conservatives.

As ruler of earth, I'd also ask my science czar (I'd have a large science department) to review research on the prevention and management of schizophrenia, and to review the relationships between autism-spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

I can only hope the worldmind will see things my way, and that the hit count will be higher a week from now.

Update 4/21/07: There's been much more discussion about the schizophrenia (and even autism) connection, including a Slate article that linked to an FBI analysis of the Columbine murders. That's a link worth following, btw.

Why are so many products so bad? Assymetrical information theory

Does this explain why we can't buy a good toaster any more? Or why pet food doubles as a euthenasia agend?

Schneier on Security:

...In a market where the seller has more information about the product than the buyer, bad products can drive the good ones out of the market...

This is asymmetric information theory, which won a Nobel in 2001. In a market where brands are not meaningful, doesn't the seller always have more product information than the buyer?

Returning vets: medical care and other support

I'm attending the annual CME program of the Minnesota Academy of Family Practice, and I'm impressed. Regardless of the parlous state of American primary care in general, and family medicine in particular, this inexpensive [1] educational program just keeps getting better. The most memorable presentation thus far is unique enough, I think, to merit a post.

Colonel Basic LeBlanc, MD, of the 1BCT 34th ID "Red Bulls" (Minnesota) spoke on the medical care and global support of the returning soldier. Here are my quick notes. They are not his words, but even so I will try to separate my comments:

• Wounded to death ratio in Vietnam: 2.6/1. In Iraq: 16/1.
  [jf: If one adjusts for this, then the 3,000 American dead today would have been about 15,000 in the 1970s. That's a significant fraction of the 50,000 US soldiers who died over 20 years in Vietnam. Is this war more routinely violent than the Vietnam war?]
  
  
• 25-30% of returning soldiers will experience some form of emotional "disorder", usually transient.
  
  
• Driving behavior is a significant issue for many.
  [jf: My take home -- I'll strive to be sympathetic to aggressive and seemingly irrational drivers. They may be struggling with "transitioning the combat skill". Of course I always give "bad" drivers lots of room, but it will help me be more patient.]
  
  
• Questions to avoid asking vets: "Did you kill anyone?" [jf: apparently it does get asked], "How's it going over there?", and "When do you go back?".
  
  
• Question for caregiver to ask: "How are you and your family doing?"
  [jf: In general the returning vets are said to welcome comments of appreciation, presumably not including any personal opinions on the incompetence of the President.]
  
  
• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): LeBlanc spoke on this, but he didn't give numbers. I got the feeling this was a sensitive topic, but maybe I'm imagining things. If one speculates that there are 48,000 significantly wounded vets, and that half of them have moderate to severe TBI, that's a lot of eternal disability. That would make sensitivity understandable. Many of the care references LeBlanc provided were for Traumatic Brain Injury care.
  
  
• The VA will likely be swamped, much vet care will have to be done in coordination with the VA by non-VA staff. If you're providing medical care, the key to coordination with the VA is to learn the "soldier's VA representative".
  
  
• Military OneSource (1-800-342-9647) is the 24x7 coordinating site for many care related issues.
  

Additional resources:

1. Post deployment health evaluation and management
2. Craig hospital brain injury information
3. Defense and veterans brain injury center
4. Brain injury resource center
5. Book: Courage after Fire
   

[1] OK, so it's heavily subsidized by drug companies, none of whom are doing this from the goodness of their mercantile hearts.

Reality is not looking good: more QM experiments

It was thought, indeed hoped, that if we narrowed special relativity to 'meaning cannot travel faster than light', and allowed for instantaneous communication that did not allow meaning to be communicated, that we could preserve something called "realism". Not so.

Quantum Theory Fails Reality Checks: Scientific American

...Einstein was famously bugged by what are now well-established facts of quantum theory: the randomness of a particle's choices and the possibility of instantaneous linkages between far-flung light or matter. Experimenters now conclude that Einstein cannot even pick his poison, because allowing for instant links kills any simple notion of reality, too.

The team updated a classic 1982 experiment in which researchers measured the polarizations, or spatial orientations, of twin pairs of photons. In quantum theory, photons and other particles do not have definite values for properties such as location or polarization but rather acquire a specific property randomly when measured in an experiment.

... Researchers learned that they could test a related question using photons that are entangled, meaning they are instantaneously connected over any distance in such a way that the measured property of one depends on the other—like a pair of dice that always comes up doubles.

In the 1982 experiment, if the photons "rolled doubles" more than a certain fraction of the time, it meant that particles violated something called local realism: the idea that influences between particles ripple through spacetime like waves (locality) and that particles have hidden nonrandom properties (realism).

But which assumption might be wrong? "It could still be possible," Aspelmeyer says, "that you maintain realism … and that you just relax this locality condition." So he, along with team leader Anton Zeilinger and colleagues, tested a proposed antiquantum model in which influences travel instantaneously but particles have real properties (no locality but realism).

They split red laser photons into entangled pairs and sent the twinned light particles along separate paths. They then measured the polarizations of the photon at different angles to see how often they scored "doubles," called correlations.

Aspelmeyer says the group's hunch was that "if you allow for nonlocal interactions, anything goes, [so] you can recover quantum physics completely" without losing a grip on reality. But, as in the older experiment, they once again saw more correlations than nonlocal realism allowed.

In other words, Aspelmeyer says, nonlocality is not enough to save realism from quantum theory...

So what is "realism"? Despite recently reading 1.5 modern books on QM, I don't know. I don't think the definition in the above article is complete, I suspect the study means that we can't dodge mind-boggling QM interpretations merely by surrendering to instantaneous correlation across the breadth of the universe. I didn't care for the flippant tone of the article, it's not just Einstein who was bugged by what QM means. Feynman, I think, once said something like "if it doesn't drive you batty you're not paying attention".

James Fallows has a blog

James Fallows has a blog. Doesn't anyone ever mention these things? Fallows is one of my favorite writers.

His archives are unusual, they go back to 1970! It looks like someone was playing with the blog and using it to archive old events, articles, books, etc. Sometime in late 2006 Fallows started writing for real.

Phil Carter summarizes five failed military strategies in Iraq

Phil "Intel Dump" Carter, writing in Salon, summarizes five failed military strategies used in Iraq. General Petraeus is executing the sixth strategy - "Plan F".

Phil is a fan of General Petraeus, and I can see why when I followed the link to the General's team. Alas, the incompetence of Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld has left the A+ team an apparently impossible task ...

Time for Plan G in Iraq? - By Phillip Carter - Slate Magazine:

... Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus' plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc's resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power...

Pet food recall again expands, and now there's a motive

Another Chinese source with melanine contamination, this time in rice. Most interestingly, we now have a motive for melanin contamination.

Spiking food with melanine elevates measured protein levels, making the food worth more. This suggests the contamination was deliberate, but the intent was not to kill animals. Indeed, the renal toxicity of melanine appears to be a new discovery. The intent was mere fraud.

Pet food recall expanded; industrial chemical found in second ingredient - International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: An industrial chemical that led to the nationwide recall of more than 100 brands of cat and dog food has turned up in a second pet food ingredient imported from China.

The discovery expands the monthlong cascade of recalls to include more brands and varieties of pet foods and treats tainted by the chemical....

...The chemical, melamine, is believed to have contaminated rice protein concentrate used to make a variety of Natural Balance Pet Foods products for both dogs and cats, the Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday...

...Previously, the chemical was found to contaminate wheat gluten used by at least six other pet food and pet treat manufacturers.

Both ingredients were imported from China, though by different companies and from different manufacturers.

The FDA on Wednesday began reviewing and sampling all rice protein concentrate imported from China, much as the agency has been doing for wheat gluten, Rogers said.

A lawmaker said Wednesday the Chinese have refused to grant visas to FDA inspectors seeking to visit the plants where the ingredients were made. An FDA spokesman later said the visas were not refused, but the agency had not received the necessary invitation letter to get visas.

"It troubles me greatly the Chinese are making it more difficult to understand what led to this pet food crisis," Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin told The Associated Press after meeting with the FDA commissioner, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach.

A message left Wednesday with the Chinese Embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.

Natural Balance said it was recalling all its Venison and Brown Rice canned and bagged dog foods, its Venison and Brown Rice dog treats and its Venison and Green Pea dry cat food.

The recalls now include products made by at least seven companies and sold under more than 100 brands.

The California company said recent laboratory tests showed its recalled products contain melamine. Natural Balance believes the source of the contaminant was rice protein concentrate, which the company recently added to the dry venison formulas.

A San Francisco company, Wilbur-Ellis Co., began importing the ingredient in July from a Chinese company, Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd., according to Wilbur-Ellis president and chief executive John Thacher.

It resold the ingredient to five pet food manufacturers, including Diamond Pet Foods Inc. Diamond manufactured the dry dog and cat foods recalled by Natural Balance, Diamond Pet Foods spokesman Jim Fallon said....

...The source of the melamine remains unclear. It may have contaminated the rice protein through the reuse of dirty bags used to ship the products...

...The Las Vegas importer of the contaminated Chinese wheat gluten, ChemNutra Inc., that led to the original pet food recall has suggested that spiking a product with melamine can make it appear to be richer in protein during tests, thus increasing its value.

ChemNutra also imported rice protein concentrate from China, although from another source. Spokesman Steve Stern said the company is testing those shipments...

... A committee of the House of Representatives is holding a food safety hearing Tuesday and is expected to discuss the pet food recall.

Does anyone believe similar fraud would not be perpetrated on food consumed by humans? China has been remarkable uncooperative, and American consumers have been remarkably complacent.

String theory: a one page summary

CV tells us SEED magazine has pdf/gif (gif?! why not png?) single-page summaries of science and technology topics. The String Theory is the only one I'm interested in. CV says they need one for QM -- I second the notion! Also, General Relativity.

String Theory Cribsheet | Cosmic Variance

SEED has come out with it’s latest Cribsheet, this one on String Theory. The Cribsheets are very handy one-page summaries of some fascinating science issue....

Previous Cribsheets include:

1. Stem Cells
2. Climate Change
3. Avian Flu
4. Hybrid Cars
5. Nuclear Power
6. Hurricanes
7. Extinction
8. The Elements

tigers, lions, cars and the evolution of risk assessment

Emily and I were bemoaning the "new" uncertainties that afflict the middle-class American, but we had to admit that historic uncertainties were rather greater. After all, how can industrial acquisitions compare to the risk of being acquired by a saber-toothed tiger?

Surely our lives don't have risks like that? Or do they? What is a Suburban but a tiger on wheels? We drive about all the time, but at any moment that seemingly sated 18-wheeler might "decide" to take out my Subaru.

A hundred years from now, assuming our great-grandchildren are not again tiger-bait, they'll be appalled that we ever accepted the risk of human-controlled vehicles. Perhaps, Emily suggests, it's the lions and tigers. For eons before we were the apex of the apex predators, we fed the sharp-tooths. We had to develop faculties that allowed us to go about our lives despite the ever present risk of being munchies. It is those faculties, perhaps, that cause us to irrationally accept the risk of driving a car ... And, perhaps, other irrational risks ...