Air travel is for the strong alone

Last week my return flight from Denver was delayed by 6 hours. If it had been cancelled I'd have had to fly to Chicago, get a hotel, and look for a flight to MSP the next day. There were no seats from Denver to MSP for over a day.

This is now the rule. Underpaid junior analysts attempt to quantify the chaotic and airlines have increased overbook rates. I suspect academic mathematicians will ultimately show that the system is non-linear, and that the consequences of overbooking cannot be predicted within reasonable bounds.

Eventually a few people will die from the stress of travel, there will be litigation, and the airlines will reform.

Air travel is now for the strong alone. I do not encourage my elderly parents to fly.

Gasoline prices: refining or secular trend - the 11 year chart

I was wondering the other day, how much gasoline costs in Europe. It's about $3.40 a gallon in the Twin Cities, and over $5.00 a gallon in Canada, but what about in France or Germany? Have gas prices reached the "magic" $7.00 a gallon mark? I'd long imagined that was a price point that would change consumer choices about where to work and live, and what to drive.

Is the effect entirely due to refining capacity, as some suppose? If so, wouldn't the effect differ between the US and Europe?

Once upon a time this would have been a hard question to answer. Tonight Google gave me the answer within a minute of asking the question: Weekly Retail PrPemium Motor Gasoline Prices (Including Taxes) - DOE)

I've graphed [1] the results, click the image below to see a more readable graph (Europeans, of course, have far more taxation on gasoline, that's the big gap in the chart):



In 12/2001 the US price was $1.25 and the French price was $3.24.
In 5/2007 the US price was $3.28 and the French price was $6.72.

The French price has doubled (2.07x) in a bit more than 6 years and the US prices have more than doubled (2.6x). (I assume the numbers are not corrected for inflation.)

Lately the US prices have risen somewhat faster than the European, that fits with part of the price increase being a refining capacity issue. Overall though there's a reasonably clear trend, albeit with more than a few reversals. If we accept the trend then French gasoline will be $13.50 @ 2013 and $27 @ 2019. I wonder how close this is to the "tipping point" where the ROI on petroleum storage starts to become persuasive.

Without adjusting for income in any way, it's noteworthy that US gasoline is now as expensive as French gasoline @ 2001 and French gasoline today is nearing the "magic" $7/gallon mark. I've long assumed that consumers will only change their behavior substantively when gas passes $7/gallon. It will be interesting to watch what European consumers do now.

[1] I tried to do this without resorting to Excel, but, really, non-Microsoft spreadsheets on the Mac are mediocre and Google's Spreadsheet app is really only a handy list manager. Excel still rules with an iron fist.

Reason: climate change knowledge by taxonomy of denial

Bless the net that brings us this sophisticated knowledge resource (via DeLong):

Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist

Below is a complete listing of the articles in 'How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,' a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.

In the ancient world we had nothing like this. Magazines and newspapers were never organized as a resource, and books were long, expensive, slow to emerge, static and inefficient.

This is the sort of thing that provides hope for humanity's feeble powers of reasoning.

The comet that depopulated the Americas

Archeologists are seriously considering the theory that a cometary impact about 11,000 BCE depopulated much of the Americas (Economist.com). If true, one wonders what the Clovis people might have achieved but for that impact. Would they have "discovered" Europe?

Some animals survived, and perhaps a few humans. We should learn much more in the next year or two.

I wonder if the Chinese will start scanning space for incoming comets. Maybe this sort of thing is not so infrequent as once thought ...

American meat industry wants you to chew your melamine happily

Wouldn't you like to know where your food is coming from? The American Meat Institute (AMI) wants you to trust them ...

Country-of-origin labeling is anti-import, claims industry

... Calls to implement mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) are irresponsible, because the legislation is an anti-import law and not a food safety program, according to an influential US meat industry body.

The origin and safety of imports, especially from China, is under increasing scrutiny following the discovery of the banned chemical melamine in pet food and feed destined for US livestock.

The American Meat Institute (AMI), in a letter sent last week to Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Herb Kohl, who both chair Agriculture subcommittees at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said that US meat and poultry is safe.

J Patrick Boyle, president and chief executive officer of the AMI, and letter author, said that it was well known that all imported meat and poultry products are subject to re-inspection and every box of product is recorded and accounted for by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).

"Unfortunately, some groups have public policy positions supporting mandatory county-of-origin labeling for red meat that are solely for the purpose of erecting trade barriers, especially directed at Canada and Mexico - our two largest export markets for red meat

Ahh, don't you love these industry groups? Boyle, of course, is lying. Canada is not what we're worried about, and the public's concerns are not about import barriers.

I'll send a note to my representative and senator, maybe you should to. I want labeling on the food and the ingredients, though that might require putting a URL on the label.

Krugman on the resurrection of bin Laden

Credit to Paul for catching Bush's resurrection of the man who's name he'd forgotten:

Trust and Betrayal - New York Times

...To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure,” he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

I'm with the congressional leadership on this. The American public has performed very badly over the past few years; I share Krugman's suspicion that denial is still commonplace. There's far too much at stake hear to fail for principal alone. Remember the Nader.

I suspect bin Laden is dead. French intelligence thought so over a year ago, and he's too much of a megalomaniac to remain this silent. Zawahiri, alas, is probably still alive.

Bias in science: not the gender, the children?

We recently had the opportunity to chat with some young academic scientists. They love their work and their world, but it's very different from the professional trades and corporate worlds I've known. The differences may be most obvious to an ancient outsider like myself.

I was left with the dawning recognition that the debates about gender bias in science may, like most passionate debates, be talking around the elephant in the room. The baby elephant, that is.

That's not to exclude a direct bias against the XX chromosome, but even there I wonder if the bias isn't opportunistic. The modern life sciences have been brutally competitive for decades, and globalization is increasing that competition. Any opportunity to eliminate a rival may be used, and XX might come in handy.

Even so, what I read and hear suggests the direct bias is against distractions, and parenting is a major distraction -- especially for women. The productive lifespan of a scientist is as short as the major league baseball career, and it coincides with peak fertility periods. Competition is severe and resources are tight -- it's logical that parenting should be recognized as a fatal weakness.

If parenting could be outsourced completely I think science might accept that, but scientists are trained to be realists. They know mothers are prone to fall in love with their dependents, and thus to become distracted.

In this matter science seems to have rationally abandoned the pro-parenting bias that is common in other worlds, such as primary care medicine and even corporations. I work for a very typical large publicly traded company, and our divisional leader is a mother (though her children are grown of course). The distinction, I think, is that executive skills don't deteriorate as quickly as scientific skills. There's a potentially longer productive career, and there are a larger number of intermediate slots. A corporation will be "happy" to pay a "CEO-capable" mother a relative pittance to take a mid-level management position that's compatible with childcare. The most senior people of both genders, however, are not distracted by children. Their children are grown, or managed by a (female) spouse, or they are childless (often by choice).

If I'm right, and this may be a testable hypothesis, then the prospects for change are very limited. We would need to change the global competitive imperative, shift fertility into the 40s and 50s, or extend the lifespan of the brain to escape this emergent trap.

The Economist is doing day passes now ...

The Economist is now doing Salon-style day passes. I gave up on them last year after 20+ years of dedicated reading, but even in their dotage they still have a few excellent articles in each issue. The ads are quick to click through, so I'll be catching up a bit now.

I can't image their readership is suffering; they've been successfully targeting fans of the WSJ editorial page. I wonder why they're bothering...

Iraq, the GOP, Memorial day and I don't have anything to say

Behind the NYT paywall Frank Rich adds the denial of Iraqi refugees to the usual list of GOP/Cheney/Bush crimes and the occasionally relevant Dowd points out yet again that Bush has no credibility and no plan.

A few weeks back Kristoff railed against inaction on Darfur. Bush/GOP/Cheney again.

All true. All relevant every day and especially Memorial day.

What's left to say? America is a troubled nation that reelected a man who'd have been a mediocre leader in normal times, but has been a historic catastrophe in our times. Maybe we'll teeter away from disaster in two years, but we'll still be on the brink.

How do we reach Americans?

Doonesbury.com: denial of service attack?

I read Doonesbury on the web daily. For the past two days Doonesbury.com has returned:

www.doonesbury.com could not be found. Please check the name and try again.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and it's likely that Trudeau Inc will be commenting on the GOP's war.

Coincidence or a denial of service attack?

One way to defeat a DOS attack is to redistribute the "offending" material to multiple distributed servers. This turns the attack into a promotion. Media syndicates, of course, don't want to do this. It dilutes their IP ownership.

Maybe it's time they thought this over ...

Pursuing the evolution of the philosophy of quantum physics

This post is partly a pursuit of my ongoing interest in the philosophical interpretations of quantum reality, but it's mostly a story of how radically the world is changing. I still remember paging through volumes of the Index Medicus in our library -- a task as far removed from today's world as using a book to look up a logarithm (yes, I learned that too ...).

Recently, when searching for post of mine on a related topic, I came across one from 2004 about a research paper on the "emergence" of consensus reality as a result of multiple observations selecting for a "pointer" (stable) macro state. (Quantum Darwinism.)

It's interesting stuff, but how do I pursue it further? Turns out, it's not so hard.

My blog post pointed to the Nature article. That pointed to a PubMed (med?!) citation, and related articles, including one on quantum coherence in biological systems. (Is the human brain a quantum computer? It's fun to ask such questions, though I suspect it is not.) Note that these PubMed queries have an RSS feed, so I can track activity via Bloglines.

Next I took the title from the PubMed citation and plugged it into Google Scholar; this produces an interesting result set with links to yet more related articles.

Today most of the endpoints are dead-ends (pay-per-view journals), but more and more science is being published in open journals. We're not far from a world in which the queries I did (they took far less time to do than to describe) will end in readable journal articles, such as D Poulin's 2004 Physics thesis. (PDF btw, Google tries to render an HTML version, but it chokes on the equations).

Incidentally, it does appear that realism (observer-independent reality) has joined locality ("things" are bounded by space) in the dustbin of history. Our university is deeply quantum, and the seeming persistence of everyday reality is an emergent result ...

PS. There's a wee bit of whackiness in some of the results I found.

The Clinton's sleazy donor - InfoUSA

Ouch. Ouch.

Hilary and Bill Clinton trn out to have an old "friend" and multi-million dollar "donor" who runs a sleazy business. Vinod Gupta is the CEO of InfoUSA, a company known for the information they provide to the highest bidder:

... InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”..

Gupta's been gifting millions to the Clintons for years:

...Gupta has steadfastly believed that to get what you want done in America, you have to put your money where your mouth is.

He held a $1000-a-person fundraiser last March at his home in Omaha, Nebraska, for Hillary Clinton that raised $100,000 for her senate campaign.

He also raised $500,000 for a large party last May for Clinton and Al Gore. His political contributions put him in the company of entertainment moguls like Steven Spielberg and Haim Saban...

He's a big donor. I wonder what Hilary's real record is on consumer privacy detection, and the management of abuses by companies like InfoUSA.

Recently, the same newspaper that exposed InfoUSA's profitable relationship with international criminals preying the elderly had some more on InfoUSA's relationship with the Clintons (emphases mine)...

Suit Sheds Light on Clintons’ Ties to a Benefactor - New York Times
May 26, 2007 By MIKE McINTIRE

When former President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Vinod Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.

The company, infoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Mr. Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, court records show. During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events.

Those expenses are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders of infoUSA, who assert that Mr. Gupta wasted the company’s money trying “to ingratiate himself” with his high-profile guests.

The disclosure of the trips and the consulting fees is just a small part of a broader complaint about the way Mr. Gupta has managed his company. But for the former president, and for the senator who would become president, it offers significant new details about their relationship with an unusually generous benefactor whose business practices have lately come under scrutiny.

In addition to the shareholder accusations, The New York Times reported last Sunday that an investigation by the authorities in Iowa found that infoUSA sold consumer data several years ago to telemarketing criminals who used it to steal money from elderly Americans. It advertised call lists with titles like “Elderly Opportunity Seekers” or “Suffering Seniors,” a compilation of people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. The company called the episodes an aberration and pledged that it would not happen again.

Asked to describe Mr. Clinton’s consulting services, an infoUSA official said they were limited to making appearances at one or two company events each year. Jay Carson, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, would not elaborate on what the former president does for infoUSA, but said that he shared the public’s concern about misuse of personal information.

“It goes without saying that any suggestion that seniors are being preyed upon should be fully investigated and addressed by the appropriate agencies,” Mr. Carson said.

Aides to Mrs. Clinton were at pains to distance her from infoUSA, pointing out that she had sponsored legislation that would strengthen privacy rights of consumers. As for the flights on infoUSA’s plane, Phil Singer, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, said the senator “complied with all the relevant ethics rules” on accepting private air travel.

Ethics rules for senators and candidates require only that the recipient of a flight make reimbursement at a rate equal to that of a first-class ticket, a long-derided loophole that allows special interests to provide de facto gifts of expensive private air travel, which generally costs far more than commercial fares. Mr. Singer would not say what Mrs. Clinton paid for her flights...

...“When the C.E.O. of a publicly traded company can say with a straight face that the shareholders benefit from having a yacht with an all-female crew stationed in the Virgin Islands, then you’ve got a problem,” Mr. Denton said...

...InfoUSA made $2.1 million in quarterly payments to Mr. Clinton from July 2003 to April 2005, and in October 2005 entered into a new three-year agreement to pay him $1.2 million. It also gave him an option to buy 100,000 shares of infoUSA stock, with no expiration date....

...Mr. Clinton normally commands $125,000 to $300,000 for the many speeches he gives each year, and has earned almost $40 million on the lecture circuit since leaving office...

Mr. Dean also said that the numerous flights infoUSA provided for Mr. Clinton’s nonprofit foundation activities constituted charitable donations, for which the company was entitled to a tax deduction. The flights included trips to European capitals, Alaska, Florida, Hawaii and Mr. Clinton’s home state of Arkansas...

The thought of Bill Clinton on all female yacht in the Virgin Islands is irresistible.

Edwards looks better all the time.

Prozac retrospective

The history of Prozac is recommended reading for any physician. I particularly liked the story of how the drug found an indication.

The promise of pharmacogenomics is that we'll be better able to tell who will benefit from Prozac and who won't.

Emergence, unanticipated consequences, and hidden inflation

I've been interested lately in emergence and natural selection in non-biologic systems. There are surprisingly common applications in every day life. In the corporate world technical accounting rules and cash flow incentives can cause an emergent attack on an entire product line -- without anyone realizing why they're making bad choices.

In academia certain kinds of results are highly grantable, so the research program is pursued even though many believe it's misdirected. In time papers spawn papers and a new, regrettably false, dogma is born.

In all these cases the behavior is a result of incentives changing the "ecosystem", and organisms (people) evolving (adapting) to the new environment.

Which brings me to our X-ACTO electric pencil sharpener. It never worked properly, and after months of chewed up pencils we came to our senses and tossed it out. Another defective product, broken by design. Just like our DVD/VCRs, toasters, etc.

If we were to replace the X-ACTO with a similar model, our yearly cost of pencil sharpening would double or triple. Gee, that sounds like inflation -- except, of course, the price of the sharpener is stable or falling. Hmm. Rising cost of pencil sharpening, falling costs of sharpeners ... So is inflation really 3.5%, or is it perhaps 7%?

Imagine a system in which all the economic pressures that once created inflation still exist, but we've figured out how to block the traditional expression of inflation. Pressure. No outlet. Where will it go? It will find a way out, an emergent solution. A solution like products that are cheap but have very short lifespans.

The Federal reserve, of course, is oblivious. Their instruments can't spot the problem, they're looking in the wrong direction. In the meantime the cost of sharpening keeps rising ...

MySpace and sex offenders -- can this get any more ridiculous?

I created a MySpace page once, just to see what the fuss was about. Hint, it's about a fundamental biological activity that's not eating, sleeping, or breathing. Most of the profiles are of people from ages 15 to 25.

Astonishingly some of the clientele tend to be ... on the prowl. I thought that was kind of the point, but some are nastier prowlers than others. Recently MySpace decided it was going to try to screen out members who've been convicted of "sex crimes". Now, how are they going to do that?

This is known in my day job as a problem in "patient matching". In the absence of a unique identifier, how can you tell two people are the same? Well, it's not easy -- even if your population is cooperating. Matching is statistical. If the gender, us-legal-names, address history, birth dates, etc more or less match, then you assume the two people are the same. A social security number is often (mis)used in healthcare matching, but a phone number can do almost as well. Sooner or later you do get a false match, but, if people aren't trying to hide their identity and you can ask for a SSN or phone number, you can do pretty well. All of these obvious matching algorithms, by the way, are patented.

Homeland security tries to do the same thing with less data. They probably severely inconvenience over a thousand innocent people for every bad actor they may deter. It's completely pointless.

So, what did MySpace do? They hired a company that tries to track felons based on a (probably patent violating) matching algorithm. MySpace doesn't have a SSN though, so the matches are highly problematic. Not to mention that any "predator" who ever entered correct data has now changed it. Oh, and do you think the birth dates on MySpace are accurate?

The company had to find some matches, so they relaxed their algorithm a tad ...

ABC News: MySpace Error: Woman No Sex Offender:

... 'The Jessica Davis in question is absolutely not a sex offender,' Cardillo told ABCNEWS.com, explaining that beyond sharing a similar and common name, Jessica Davis the non-sex offender and Jessica Dawn Davis the sex offender also had birthdays two days off as well as two years off and had lived in Florida at roughly the same time.

Cardillo, who called the initial match an'unfortunate circumstance,' said that the database worked exactly as intended.

'It was so close,' Cardillo told ABCNEWS.com. 'It was one of those rare instances where there was nothing else we could have done but flag her. If we get an offender and I'm looking at a date of birth that's two days off, we're going to assume were dealing with the offender.'"

In other words, they deliberately err on the side of false positives. There's no appeal process, MySpace simply deletes the user's profile page and all their content. I'll bet, even considering that the MySpace user base almost certainly has a higher than average concentration of bad actors, that the majority of their matches are false positives. Wait until MySpace then turns over the names and addresses of their "matches" to the police.

Sigh.