Do you think Lexington is bitter?

The Economist's "Lexington" has been an understated shill for the GOP for the past decade. I'm guessing that covers several pseudonymous writers.

Today s/he turns on her masters ...

The decline of the Republican Party | Ship of fools | The Economist

... in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics...

Whoa. That's harsh.

Somebody is feeling a wee bit bitter.

Wasting money: Ginkgo biloba joins the pile

None of this is in any way surprising:

Herbal supplement Ginkgo doesn't stop Alzheimer's: Scientific American

The widely used herbal supplement Ginkgo biloba does not appear to prevent Alzheimer's disease in healthy elderly people or those with mild cognitive impairment, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday...

...Those who took the ginkgo were no more or less likely to develop Alzheimer's or any type of dementia, the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association....

... Dr. Murali Doraiswamy of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, noted that other Alzheimer's prevention failures include statins, estrogen, anti-inflammatory drugs, vitamin E and drugs called cholinesterase inhibitors...

...Michael McGuffin of the American Herbal Products Association said the findings do not undermine earlier evidence that ginkgo is useful in relieving symptoms in people who already have Alzheimer's.

Daniel Fabricant of the Natural Products Association said a study starting when people are in middle age rather than almost 80 would be the best way to analyze Alzheimer's prevention....

Of course the usual suspects are convinced that it still works somewhere, somehow, on someone. They'll never give up.

The interesting question is whether the study was a waste of money.

Well, since lots of people take Gingko to slow cognitive decline, maybe it was worth doing to persuade them to save their money. On the other hand Gingko is probably a relatively cheap placebo and it's not like we have anything that works. Maybe we should have just ignored the question.

What I'm most interested in is whether there was really any good scientific evidence that it was worth trying Gingko biloba to treat early dementia. Were there any persuasive animal studies? Anything observed in the lab that was really remarkable? Or did we just study it because a lot of people liked it?

Money is not endless. We should be researching promising directions, and we should subject truly interesting "herbal" drugs to the same testing regimens we apply to manufactured drugs.

Old notes: Techniques for problem solving by creativity

Before there were blogs, before there was Netscape, back when I used Mosaic on a Mac, I authored web pages. Even then I was struggling towards something like a blog post.

One of those early pages contained a review of what is still one of two or three most interesting business books of the 20th century -- reengineering the corporation.

Since it was tedious in those days to create new pages, I just extended the original page. Eventually it became a collection of odd notes.

Today, the whimsy of a full text search pulled up my old page. I found some interesting bits.

Now, of course, we have blogs.

So I'll periodically extract a few of the better parts -- the better to feed my prosthetic memory.

Starting with one on creativity ...

Management and Related Notes

Sutherland and others

1. Examine the symmetry of the problem, and you may find the symmetry of the solution.

2. Build a taxonomy of the problem and you may discover new combinations to explain

* divide problem into features
* make a each feature a dimension or axis
* organize dimensions into triplets (vary the triplets)
* each triplet forms a box: explore the box

3. Identify categories of the problem -- explore the inverse.

4. Attach the most generic and expansive version first .. A simpler version ... A special case ...

5. Describe the problem aloud to another person

6. Read papers, attend lectures on unrelated subjects.

7. Sleep, exercise.

Dead Lively teaches lessons

Consider this a cheap lesson, Lively users ...

Official Google Blog: Lively no more

...we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year...

...We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

Now you understand data lock.

The lesson will serve you well the rest of your life. You will never look at The Cloud quite the same way.

Yahoo's coming user education will be even more brutal.

Anyone recall when Dave Winer shutdown his UserLand hosted blogs?

Update 11/20/08: In response to a request for more details, see Bradley's post.

Gwynne Dyer: newly posted

Six, all at once. I'm curious to what he says about Obama.

October 24 Perfidious Albion
October 30 Obama: The Limits of Power
November 4 China: Taiwan: Porcupines On A First Date
November 7 The Threat of Green Obama
November 13 Realism in Ukraine
November 14 Never Waste a Crisis

Monty Python. On YouTube.

What will Skynet make of this?

In the same week that Google and LIFE launch a high minded image archive, Google's YouTube launches the Monty Python channel.

YouTube - MontyPython's Channel

... None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years...

Righty oh.

I've subscribed to the feed: http://www.youtube.com/montypython.

New Macs won't let some video play on projectors

Old televisions, projectors, LCD panels -- they're not "HDCP" compliant. So they won't always work as expected with new Macs. Only media that enforce the DRM chain are fully acceptable (emphasis mine)...

AppleInsider | Apple's new MacBooks have built-in copy protection measures

Apple's new MacBook lines include a form of digital copy protection that will prevent protected media, such as DRM-infused iTunes movies, from playing back on devices that aren't compliant with the new priority protection measures.

The Intel-developed technology is called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and aims to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across a variety of display connectors, even if such copying is not in violation of fair use laws.

Among the connectors supported by the technology are the Mini DisplayPort found on Apple's latest MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air, in addition to others such as Digital Visual Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), Gigabit Video Interface (GVIF), and Unified Display Interface (UDI).

ArsTechnica reports that Apple has apparently acquired a license for the technology and is now using it across its DisplayPort-enabled MacBook lines to to prevent transmission of purchased iTunes content to devices that don't include support for HDCP.

"When my friend John, a high school teacher, attempted to play Hellboy 2 on his classroom's projector with a new aluminum MacBook over lunch, he was denied by the error you see [below]," writes Ars' David Chartier. "John's using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA adapter, plugged into a Sanyo projector that is part of his room's Promethean system."

... As a licensed adopter of HDCP, Apple agrees to pay an annual fee and abide by the conditions set forth in Inte's HDCP License Agreement [PDF].

For example, the terms stipulate that high-definition digital video sources must not transmit protected content to non-HDCP-compliant receivers, as described above, and DVD-Audio content must be restricted to CD-audio quality or less when played back over non-HDCP-digital audio outputs.

Hardware vendors are also barred from allowing their devices to make copies of content, and must design their products in ways that "effectively frustrate attempts to defeat the content protection requirements."...

Gee, I wonder why the makers of Audio Hijack couldn't get permission to put their apps on the iPhone.

We know where this ends up.

We will all have little chips implanted into our acoustic and ocular nerves. The chips will decode encrypted media, which will look and sound like nonsense to the unchipped. That way every family member will pay separately for their holograms.

You think I'm joking.

Hah.

Anyone know how I can make anonymous cash donations to the bandits of Sherwood Forest 2.0?

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

See also: Palladium.

Update 11/20/08: Additional details. If Apple had provided another port they'd have been ok, but that would have ruined the vibe.

Update 11/25/08: This is partly a bug. Apple has a QT fix. The Macs were supposed to be able to output regular video to non-compliant monitors, but not HD video.

Google love: The resurrection of LIFE's ten million image archive

Consider this one image.

Prisoners gathering en masse at distribution point to receive their daily rations of food, at Civil War-time Andersonville prison.
Location: Andersonville, GA, US
Date taken: August 1864

It's blurry. Chaotic. Hard to make out. A jumble of mud and anonymity. The men are posing for the camera, while waiting for rations.

Just one of millions of photographs now available in Google's archive of LIFE magazine. There will be 10 million of these in months to come. (I checked, http://images.google.com/hosted doesn't show any other hosted repositories yet.)

Resurrected from dusty negatives and prints...

Official Google Blog: LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s...

... We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos....

... These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.

Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page....

Sometimes I think of Google as a device sent back in time to create archives for the Skynet's reading pleasure. What wondrous things, she thinks, those apes were.

I wonder if this cost Google anything other than scanning fees? The images weren't doing LIFE any good, and now it has Google to manage them. LIFE can even monetize the copies of the images that can be ordered from the "hosted" (implying non-ownership) archive.

Astounding times.

Marked! Where did all our investments go?

Disregarding dividends and taxes, of which the latter is the bigger, we're back to 1998 now:


Figure: S&P over our investing lifespan - 1985-2008 - click to enlarge (Yahoo!)

So what happened?

One theory is that the combination of the 1994 Gingrich Marketarian [3] "revolution" and consequent firewall demolition, combined with at least one major technology transition, produced accelerated returns at the cost of new instabilities. Over a long enough timeline investment returns might be somewhat lower than with a balanced regulatory environment, but "safe" investment timelines are now 20-50 rather than 10-15 years.

I think that's true, but not the entire story.

First, a brief digression. Twenty years ago a friend of mine did quite well by an Amway-like multi-level marketing business. Unlike the pyramid (Ponzi) schemes that devastated Albania in 2000, or the riot-inducing Columbian scheme of 2008, these businesses do sell a physical product. Like classic Ponzi schemes, however, there's a lot of cash flow from new recruits to established executives.

Some would call these new recruits "marks" [2].

People working in these businesses are taught to draw comparisons to the stock market. That's what my friend did twenty years ago, and it's stayed with me ever since. The difference, in theory, is that at best a Ponzi scheme is a zero sum game. All wins come from someone else's losses. In theory everyone can play the market and win -- because it's ultimately powered by global productivity and economic development.

In practice, however, natural selection happens. It always does.

Think of the market as a vast, indigestible feast. Sooner or later, bacteria will figure out how to eat it. It's as predictable as the sunrise.

So how does natural selection play out in this scenario -- remembering that for a biologist fraud is just another name for a survival strategy.

We know humans are predictably irrational. We know people will aggressively search for cheap gas when prices are rising, but won't when prices fall -- even at the same income/price ratio. [5] Similarly we know humans will criticize balance sheets when share prices fall, but not when they rise.

This means that market volatility enables predictable predation strategies during rapid rise. Money can be diverted into senior executive compensation, into insider trading, into payments to political parties and senators, and into sophisticated financial instruments that none of us have the ability to fully understand or model.

This form of market predation (parasitism really, since a dead host is not useful) is bad enough by itself, but it's aggravated by "ratchet effects" [4]. CEO compensation doesn't fall as quickly as share prices. Senatorial contributions can't be stopped without risking undesirable electoral outcomes.

Volatile markets, like those of the past twelve years, can start to look an awful lot like Amway.

We've been Marked.

So what do we do?

About a year ago I drew a crude line from the sane growth curves of the early 90s and I reasoned that share prices weren't too crazy any more. I resumed the share purchases I'd de-emphasized since 2002. Since then the market has fallen a lot more, but we're still doing our index fund dollar-cost-averaging.

It's not that I don't think there's a major parasite effect in the Markets. I think that is a part of what's going on. On the other hand, it's not like we have great alternatives.

I am, however, looking for alternatives. I'd like to find a way to start investing in select privately held companies, companies that are relatively resistant to market-oriented parasitism strategies. Companies that can be driven by the desirable, but arguably irrational, strategies of founders who seek to combine their own wealth with delivering useful goods and services.

Anyone know how we can do that?

See also:

• July 2008: 1999 to 2008. Now what we expected: In which I conclude that the "safe" period for investment holds looks like 50 years, not 10 years.
  
• Jan 2008: The Dow is Down
• May 2007: Eight lousy years

Footnotes -----------

[1] When I visited the Wikipedia link for Amway I came across this fascinating tidbit. Recall that Sarah Palin, darling of the dark core of the GOP, also has dominionist links. Emphases mine.

... its founders contributed $4,000,000 to a conservative 527 group in the 2004 election cycle...

... Former Amway CEO Richard DeVos has been connected with the dominionist political movement in the U.S...

Multiple high-ranking Amway leaders, including Richard DeVos, Dexter Yager, and others are also owners and members of the board of Gospel Films, a producer of movies and books geared towards conservative Christians...

... In 2000, current President George Bush appointed Timothy Muris, a former anti-trust lawyer whose largest client was Amway to head the FTC, which has direct federal regulatory oversight over multi-level marketing plans. ...

Amway co-founder, the late Jay Van Andel (in 1980), and later his son Steve Van Andel (in 2001) were elected by the board of directors of the United States Chamber of Commerce as chairman of that organization.[29]...

Bush appointed Amway's attorney to head the FTC. There are only 12K Google hits on this, so it's not surprising I missed it. It's things like this that make it so hard for me to understand how, 8 years later, Obama won.

[2] The intended victim of a swindler, hustler, or the like.

[3] Marketarian: Someone who subscribes to Marketarianism, the neo-Calvinist / pseudo-libertarian (objectivist) religious belief that the Market is not simply an efficient satisficing mechanism for finding local minima but is a god-like entity that defines moral qualities. See also, Yahwism.

[4] I've been trying to remember the engineering and economics term that describes "stickiness" or "ratchet" effects, where things move more easily in one direction but move more slowly in another. If anyone can name this concept I'll be very grateful. Ratchet effect is the best I can do but I think there's a better name in engineering.

[5] This is why gas stations make money when prices are falling, but lose money when prices are rising rapidly. It's the opposite of what most people think. Convenience stores let them hedge their financial risks.

Future Shock and the Southern white male: Oil, GM, Nascar, Pallor, and Obama

I've been thinking about these numbers ...

Southern Whites for McCain

... Alabama 88%
Mississippi 88%
Louisiana 84%
Georgia 76%
...
Arkansas 68%
North Carolina 64%
...
California 46%
Connecticut 46%
Minnesota 46%
New York 46%
...
Massachusetts 42%
Vermont 31%

In most states there's about an 8% male/female party gap, so the numbers suggest that 92% of the white men at the heart of the slave-holding confederacy voted for McCain.

Those white men have had a rough few years.

Five years ago Nascar culture was ascendant. Now Nascar is fading. Five years ago oil was cheaper than water, now we're in Peak Oil land. Four years ago Bush had finished off John Kerry, now Bush is a fading memory.

Two years ago GM's Hummer was selling well, now both GM and its Hummer are dying.

A year ago these men, largely poor and the victims of America's worst schools, held their ethnic identity tight. Now pallor is passe.

A few months ago they were the coddled core of the GOP. In the new electoral map they're irrelevant ...

Well, at least they still have Rush Limbaugh.

Some look on the fallen mighty with undisguised scorn ...

Frank Schaeffer: Sarah Palin Will Never Be President -- Trust Me

... The small smear of red on the otherwise blue electoral map looks more like a minor bloodstain on a dirty Band-Aid than anything resembling a national political party. Who voted for McCain/Palin in bigger numbers than they even voted for Bush/Cheney? Only one shrinking group: uneducated white folks in the deep south and a few folks in Appalachia. Take away the white no-college-backwoods-and/or-southern McCain/Palin vote and the Republicans would have been approaching single digit electoral college oblivion...

... The Republican Party--and I speak as a former lifelong Republican who, up through the 2000 primary campaign supported John McCain and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations--is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags...

Scorn is never a good idea. It's a particularly bad idea to kick sand on a population with limited education, limited opportunities, deep culture shock, and disproportionate enrollment in the US military. I've been listening to stories of past cultural upheaval; they're enlightening.

Maybe we can't do affirmative action for the southern white male, but we need to keep 'em in mind. They've got a lot to work through, and it would be good to keep 'em out of trouble.

Update 11/20/08: further analysis, via DeLong.

Escape from the Cloud - lessons from my surgeon days

"Surgeon days" you say?

When was John a surgeon?

Well, technically McGill gave me an MD,CM degree, and I think the CM was Latin for master of surgery. More to the point, I assisted with surgeries in the good old days of open abdomens and hands-on anatomy, before scopes made things so dull.

Some surgeries, frankly, are pretty easy. Anyone with a modicum of attention, diligence, and practice could do 'em.

As long as nothing goes wrong.

When the feces fly (inside joke there), that's when those brutal hours in the surgery residency matter.

I thought of that as I contemplated the ruins of my recent iPhone and Cloud experiences. Most of the time I don't miss all those Outlook features.

Except when something goes wrong, and I'm up the creek and paddle-free.

It's the old story. When everyone praises the Cloud, it's time to bail. A lot of Cloud companies are struggling, and when they go ...

So goes your data.

Even if they don't fail, there are too many gotchas. God Help You if you start synchronizing non-trivial data across the Cloud.

I'm ok with Google Calendar, GMail, Picasa and many Google properties. Outside of Google, however, I'm putting a moratorium on storing any data I care about in the Cloud.

It ain't ready for the likes of me.

Ok, so that's only two people. Still, the Canary in the Coal Mine has just keeled over.

Be warned.

Hope on the way - Obama team to undo Bush regulatory attacks

Under the radar regulatory and rule changes were a critical part of the GOP attack on functioning government.

Obama's team intends to repair 8 years of destruction in short order ...

Obama Ready To Quickly Reverse Bush Actions - Follow Me Here…

...A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration...

Republican Siamese Fighting Fish

In an aquarium Siamese Fighting Fish (Bettas) will fight to the death.

The GOP is now stuck in the aquarium of defeat. They're even attacking the propaganda wing of the GOP ...

Palin in spotlight as Republicans turn on each other | World news | The Guardian

... Rush Limbaugh, behemoth of rightwing radio, took to the airwaves to declare war on two enemies: Barack Obama and the Republican party. Bloggers at FreeRepublic.com, an internet hub for conservatives, announced a boycott of Fox News and John McCain's aides fell over one another to leak embarrassing details about the campaign to the press...

... "Ladies and gentlemen, it is worse than I thought," Limbaugh told listeners. "What the Republican party, led by disgruntled and failed McCain staffers, is trying to do to Sarah Palin, is unconscionable ... We're going to be taking on two things here [over] the next four years: Obama, and our own party establishment."..

...The main ammunition in the war was a lengthening list of allegations against Palin: that she thought Africa was a country; that she failed to inform the campaign about a scheduled call with Nicolas Sarkozy which turned out to be a prank; that she refused to undergo coaching prior to her disastrous interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric; that she couldn't name the three countries in the North America Free Trade Agreement; and that the party had spent up to $70,000 (£45,000) on "wardrobe items" for Palin and "luxury goods" for her husband, in addition to the $150,000 already reported. (Some of the claims were revealed by Fox, hence the boycott.)

The New York Times reported that when Palin met McCain in Phoenix on Tuesday night, she held the text of a speech she planned to deliver, in defiance of campaign convention, and had to be overruled....

... RedState.com, announced Operation Leper, designed to blacklist campaign staffers believed to be responsible...

... There was speculation that the culprits may be former aides to Mitt Romney, positioning their hero for a future presidential run...

... Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, speaking to reporters on the candidate's plane, was making little effort to hide his disdain for Palin. Asked if her presence on the ticket had been a disadvantage, he twice refused to answer.

Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy chief, this week denied reports that he had been fired in the final stage of the campaign for siding with Palin and leaking "poison" on McCain to the pro-Palin columnist William Kristol...

... Palin dismissed the criticisms, attributing them to "a small, bitter type of person". Instead, she has emphasised perhaps the only thing that still unites her and her supporters with McCain loyalists: hostility towards the media.

She had "a little bit of disappointment in my heart about the world of journalism today" ...

Palin offered to help reporters confront their problems. "I want to ... help restore some credibility there," she said.

On the one hand it's nice to see such an exquisitely cruel and nasty group of human beings pound on each other's egos. On the other hand we need a respectable, sentient opposition. The GOP is threatening to turn into a party for crazed loons. In which case Minnesota's shark jumping loon will be quite at home.

Incidentally, I don't believe Palin really considered Africa to be a country. She's no intellectual, but she's not cognitively impaired either.

Note the resurgence of the current GOP meme -- it's all the fault of the biased liberal media. It appears the "liberal media" now includes Fox! They really weren't ready to be called on their swill.

Obama’s Economic Advisory Board – includes Robert Reich!

Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong aren’t on the board (and why not?), but another blog author I follow is … Robert Reich!

Thanks Professor Reich!

This is the kind of list that should reassure a lot of people that America made the right choice when we voted for President Obama. Emphases mine, note the names and connections..

Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board - List - NYTimes.com

DAVID E. BONIOR Academic; former Democratic Congressman from Michigan; John Edwards’s campaign manager.

WARREN E. BUFFETT Billionaire investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway; expected to take part by telephone.

ROEL C. CAMPOS Washington lawyer; former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission; former broadcasting executive.

WILLIAM M. DALEY Senior executive at JP Morgan Chase; former Commerce Secretary; chairman of Al Gore’s presidential campaign.

WILLIAM H. DONALDSON Former chairman of the S.E.C.; long career in investment banking, higher education and government.

ROGER W. FERGUSON Jr. Chief executive of TIAA-CREF, the private financial services company; former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve.

JENNIFER M. GRANHOLM Governor of Michigan.

ANNE M. MULCAHY Chairwoman and chief executive of Xerox.

RICHARD D. PARSONS Chairman of Time Warner; former banker.

PENNY S. PRITZKER Senior executive, Hyatt; national finance chairwoman for the Obama campaign.

ROBERT B. REICH Author, academic, former Labor Secretary.

ROBERT E. RUBIN Chairman of Citigroup; former Treasury Secretary.

ERIC E. SCHMIDT Chairman and chief executive, Google.

LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS Economist, academic; former Treasury Secretary.

LAURA D’ANDREA TYSON Academic; former chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and the National Economic Council.

ANTONIO R. VILLARAIGOSA Mayor of Los Angeles.

PAUL A. VOLCKER Former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Pretty damned good.

The true voting divide - Fundamentalists vs. the Secular and non-Christian

Obama seems to be a fairly devout Christian. Even so, the real divide in American voting today not race, wealth or education, it's religion:

Stephen Bates: In the US elections, the religious right remained largely true to their conservative roots | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

... Initial analysis by the respected Pew Forum polling organisation seems to show that about 73% of born-again evangelicals voted for McCain/Palin – down from about 79% four years ago – while non-church goers voted in similar proportions for Obama. Among Catholics – who after all are the largest single denomination in the US and make up 27% of the entire electorate – the margin was much narrower: 52% of white Catholics who are regular Mass-attenders voted for McCain, 47% for Obama, while non-practising Catholics went 61% to 37% for Obama...

The journalist is somewhat confused in the article. When you read the Pew numbers the reality breaks down like this:

• White fundamentalist* -> McCain
  
• Non-fundamentalist Christian (mainstream Protestant, Catholic) -> fairly even
  
• Secular, unobservant, Jewish, non-Christian -> Obama

McCain was a pretty secular candidate by GOP standards, Palin is an extreme fundamentalist (Dominionist). So they really tried to nail the base but stretch McCain out to the secular. Didn't work. It's hard to span both camps in one ticket ...

* They call it "evangelical/born-again" and, oddly, limit it to whites.