The horrible price of the War on Science - lessons from AIDS denialists

Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has caused millions of deaths through his carnal stupidity. He was a dupe of Peter Duesberg, a genuinely evil man who also influenced Christine Maggiore. The Guardian has just published Maggiore's obituary (emphases mine)...

Bad science: Thanks to HIV/Aids denialists like Christine Maggiore more will die | Comment is free | The Guardian

... What if everything you thought you knew about Aids was wrong? That was the title of a book by Christine Maggiore, an HIV/Aids-denialist lauded in the American media. She is now dead.

Maggiore decided that HIV does not cause Aids, and that antiretroviral drugs do not treat it. She was HIV positive, which the media loved. She declined to take ARV drugs and specifically decided not to take HIV drugs during her pregnancy, despite the strong evidence that they massively lower the risk of maternal transmission. She insisted on breastfeeding her children, even though it has been shown that this increases the risk of maternal transmission. She also refused to have her children tested for HIV. Her daughter, Eliza Jane Scovill, died three years ago. The coroner attributed the death to Aids and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. She was three years old.

Last Saturday, two days after Christmas, Maggiore died of pneumonia, aged 52. She was an extremely effective advocate. She set up successful campaigning organisations and counselled HIV-positive pregnant women on how to avoid pressure from medics to use azidothymidine (AZT) during pregnancy to prevent maternal transmission of the virus. She appeared on the cover of Mothering magazine, with a "No AZT" sign painted on her pregnant tummy.

However, as always, this is about far more than one person. Maggiore's views on HIV were driven by the work of Peter Duesberg, a well-known Aids denier. He was unable to persuade other scientists that his views on HIV were correct, but he did very well with journalists, most notably Neville Hodgkinson, former science correspondent of the Sunday Times.

Over two years in the early 1990s the paper published a series of lengthy articles rejecting the role of HIV in causing Aids, calling the African Aids epidemic a myth. It was all a scam to make money and defend reputations, they said....

... Duesberg went on to great things, including South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki's disastrous presidential advisory panel on Aids. It was here that the country's Aids-denialist policies were set into play, with tragic consequences. One demographic modelling study estimates that if the South African government had used antiretroviral drugs for prevention and treatment at the same rate as the Western Cape, around 171,000 new HIV infections and 343,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1999 and 2007...

Given the stakes, if Duesberg was sure that HIV did not cause AIDS, why did he not inoculate himself with HIV like Robert Wilner claimed to have done? (Wilner died 6 months later of an unrelated MI.) Duesberg once said he would do so, but he never has.

Wilner and Maggiore were tragedies, but Duesberg and Hodkinson are evil.

The era of AIDS denialism is passing, but we still struggle against global climate change denialism. The shattered remnant of the GOP is still at war against science and reason, indeed what's left is ever more the party of Limbaugh.

Remember the lessons of the Maggiore family. Denying reality has consequences.

The inanities of conservative pundits: volume XXXXXXXXIV

Sometimes it's worth quoting these loons just to remind us that they are completely hopeless -- and yet were once very powerful...

FDR and the New Deal: Did it prolong the Great Depression? | Salon

... During a Christmas Eve appearance on Fox News, I pointed out that most mainstream economists believe the government must boost the economy with deficit spending. That's when conservative pundit Monica Crowley said we should instead limit such spending because President Franklin Roosevelt's 'massive government intervention actually prolonged the Great Depression.' Fox News anchor Gregg Jarrett eagerly concurred, saying 'historians pretty much agree on that.'...

Of course historians don't "agree on that". Surely there must be one or two semi-serious historians who would argue the point, but they're the lonely exception.

Never forget -- these people caused grievous harm to America and the world. They are still around. They will try to return.

Disruption: Laptop, batteries not included

Yesterday I wrote about how laptops were finally going to track the price collapse of calculators. I figured we’d see $200 netbooks later this year.

Wrong.

Belco Alpha 400 Netbook | Gear Live

Belco is the latest company to unveil their netbook, the full-flash Alpha 400. It certainly is basic with its 7-inch display, 128MB RAM, 1GB internal memory, a 400MHz MIPS processor, a 10/100 MB Ethernet interface, and WiFi connectivity. It also has a SDHC memory card slot for another 32GB of storage and runs on Linux. Let’s not forget it works as an e-book, MP3 and game player and has installed business software. You can get the netbook for way-cheap. Try $169.95.

My prediction of Netbooks being sold by 2011 for under $75 (albeit with an exclusive install of “Chromestellation”) is starting to look a wee bit conservative.

So why is the price so low? The Belco Alpha 400 requires a power outlet.

Now, I realize this is hard to believe, but the reason I found the Belco was that it occurred to me that the most expensive component of a Netbook is not the crummy screen, it’s the hopefully non-exploding rechargeable LiOn battery. So I was searching on “Netbook” and “batteries not included”.

Some days the Singularity feels closer than other days.

A Netbook with a plug is silly, but watch for the Netbooks that are sold without a battery and without a charger. They’ll use either disposable batteries or standard rechargeables.

That will be the final sign of the big disruption.

Incidentally, there are rumors afoot of huge layoffs at Microsoft. If true those cannot possibly be justified by their current business situation – which is excellent. They could only be justified if Balmer et al believe the price of personal computing is going to collapse.

Update: So if Microsoft sells MSN and Live, can they get away with buying Comcast? Just an idle thought.

An essay on adoption and stories

A good one for our family, and for all families with mysterious origins ...

Ellen Ullman - My Secret Life - NYTimes.com

I AM not adopted; I have mysterious origins...

Apple's Netbook past - the Newton eMate

After I wrote of the long deferred but now impending crash of laptop prices, and then updated it with a post on Netbooks running AndroidOS/Linux, I experienced an itchy feeling of Deja Vu.

Sure enough, I'd written about this a year ago, referring to a 2006 Dan's Data article that mentioned the PalmOS Dana laptop. I think, though I don't trust my memory on this, Palm even showed their own laptop before they died in the late 90s. (The current company is a zombie remnant.)

Of course there were also WinCE devices back then that blurred the boundary between PDA and laptop.

Dan's 2006 article mentioned the Newton eMate -- which was sort of a proto-Netbook (I was in an EMR startup building a web-based medical record back then ... so there was a proto-Cloud...). Emphases mine.

eMate 300 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

... The eMate 300 was a personal digital assistant designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer to the education market as a low-cost laptop running the Newton operating system. The eMate was introduced March 7, 1997, for US$800 and was discontinued along with the Apple Newton product line and its operating system on February 27, 1998.

The eMate 300 featured a 480x320 resolution 16-shade grayscale display with a backlight, a stylus pen, a full-sized keyboard, an infrared port, and standard Macintosh serial/LocalTalk ports. Power came from built-in rechargeable batteries, which lasted up to 28 hours on full charge... The eMate used a 25 MHz ARM 710a RISC processor...

In those days wireless LANs were crude, slow, unreliable, proprietary, power sucking, and expensive. So the eMate wasn't really a Netbook (maybe we should call them Cloudbooks?), but it was certainly a proto-Netbook.

Cheap wireless LANs were a big missing link in the evolution of the Netbook/Cloudbook.

Apple will do a true Netbook equivalent this year. They really don't have a bleedin' choice.

Squeezed 2009: Netbooks, Android and Microsoft

One of the few advantages of increasing entropy is I remember my first electronic calculator.

It weighed about 10 pounds, needed 120V, and could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I think it could store one intermediate result. It cost the equivalent of about $150 in today's money. That was a breakthrough, because a year or so before the same machine cost about $500.

That was the end of my slide rule.

Within a year or two vastly smaller and simpler calculators cost about $50, and a few years after that they were essentially free. [1]

Now that was disruptive technology.

We've never seen anything like that in the world of the personal computer. Today's personal computers have been, in most meaningful ways, no more affordable than the Commodore 64 ($135 to produce in 1982).

Yes, after twenty-seven years we have at least a million times the storage and maybe five times the display capabilities at perhaps half the inflation adjusted retail price, but in terms of tasks like writing this post the cost/value equation of the personal computer is closer to the car than the calculator.

Why is that? I think it's partly because calculators, for most people, delivered 90% of their value very quickly. They were commoditized at birth. They were also born before intellectual property protection was fully developed -- in a sense they were "open source" from the start.

By contrast the early development of the personal computer clobbered products like the Data General Eagle, but then a relatively slow change in the value equation built the mother of all profit generating corporations -- Microsoft.

That's about to change. The Market can't solve problems like global climate change or the problem of the weak, but, eventually, when the driving pressures are big enough and with a bit of antitrust help, it will find an out.

The squeeze is coming now. It's coming from China and India, from Google's Chromestellation and Google's Android, from open source and the Target Trutech netbook. Oh, yeah, and from the Great Recession as well.

After all, what's a Netbook running Chrome and Linux but a calculator in drag? It's fundamentally complete. It's built entirely of plastic, silicon (sand) and a tiny amount of rare metals. All the technology development costs have been fully realized, and there's no vendor with true monopoly control. IP attacks won't work if China and India decide not to cooperate.

It's not just the Netbook. Android is open source as well. Stick an Android phone in a cradle with a 1024 display and a keyboard and you have a computing platform at hundred thousand times more powerful than the Commodore 64.

The squeeze has been coming, but in 2009 it's going to be obvious. The price of the personal computer has been doing a Wile E. Coyote -- running on air for 27 years.

This year, gravity is going to kick in. Within another two years we'll see very crappy netbook equivalents being sold for under $75. Maybe they'll be today's netbook, maybe they'll be an iTouch with external display and bluetooth keyboard, maybe they'll be subsidized Chromestellation machines -- but it's going to happen.

This isn't all bad for Intel. The computing must be done. They can sell cheap chips to the netbooks and the phones, and lots of chips to the Cloud.

It's tough for Apple, but they can sell a bundled set of fully integrated and relatively trouble free goods and services alongside new consumer goods. Still, it will hurt. They're going to have to introduce a sub-$500 general computing device in 2009. Remember that when Jobs disses a market he's usually lashing his engineers to come up with a solution.

Ahh, but then there's Microsoft and Dell.

For them, this is very bad.

It will be very interesting to see what they try to do about it.

[1] Today, because they're so exotic, engineering and finance calculators cost more than they cost in the pre-PC 1980s. Or, if you have an iPhone/iTouch, you can run a superb emulator for a pittance.

Update: I left something out of the equation.

Update 1/1/09: This post on Netbooks running Android must have been written at about the same time as my post.

Update 1/2/09: I previously praised a 2007 Dan's Data review of low cost Linux laptops and connected it to the Newton eMate. In a f/u comment on the eMate I note the missing element of the proto-Netbook world of the 1990s (1980s if you count Tandy's famous proto-laptop) -- cheap wireless LANs. I'm still thinking about the Comcast role -- Netbooks aren't necessarily cheaper than laptops if you account for network access costs. That's why the Obama administration's position on public wireless service is such a big deal. It's probably the most important technology policty they will make-- one way or the other.

Update 1/8/09: This Chinese pseudo-x86 "Godson" chip development project is more than slightly relevant.

Update 1/22/09: Microsoft agrees. They're not stupid.

Exercise is brain food - slowly, a theory of why

Years ago I was skeptical of research claiming that exercise was not only associated with better memory and perhaps better cognition, but that it also improved memory and cognition.

The results keep coming though, including some interesting animal models. So, I'm starting to believe. The case for building one's life around exercise is stronger than ever.

It would be helpful, though, to have some plausible mechanism for why exercise should help memory. Hand waving about sloshing blood is not persuasive. This is more interesting ...

Exercise and your brain: Why working out may help memory: Scientific American Blog

A new study shows that sugar may not be so sweet for the brain – and may lead to memory problems.

Researchers from four universities report in the Annals of Neurology that people who absorb glucose more slowly than those who metabolize it quickly are more forgetful and are more likely to have a faulty dentate gyrus, a pocket in the hippocampus section of the brain. The hippocampus is involved with learning and memory formation....

... Glucose metabolism naturally slows with age, and memory begins to decline in our 30s, says co-author Scott Small, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. The new study suggests a possible association between the two, because elevated blood sugar appears to damage the dentate gyrus, Small says.

The dentate gyrus's exact function is unknown. But it's one of several circuits in the hippocampus that, if disrupted, impairs memory, such as a person's ability to learn the names of new people or to remember where they parked their car.

The possible connection between its dysfunction and poor glucose regulation may explain earlier observations that exercise benefits the dentate gyrus, Small says. Until now, scientists believed that physical activity reduced the risk of age-related memory loss by allowing glucose to be absorbed more quickly into muscle cells, but were not sure why. This indicates, Small says, that the dentate gyrus could be the missing link...

Obviously these are incremental results that, in isolation, don't merit a news article. The key is that they're part of a trend focusing on the effects of exercise on glucose update, and how that may alter performance of flaky brain components that are long past their warranty period.

So how do we build our lives around exercise? It's not like there are open slots to fill in -- our family gave up on watching TV in the last century and we really can't do less household work. So other good things have to go - sleep (bad idea), social time, family time, home maintenance, reading, study, work ...

Sir Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett, the brilliant satirist and writer, is now Sir Terry ...

Terry Pratchett knighted in Queen's new year honours list | The Australian

... Pratchett, 60, best known for his satirical Discworld fantasy series, becomes a knight, one of the queen's most important honours, and will now be addressed as a 'Sir'.

'There are times when phrases such as 'totally astonished' just don't do the job,' he said. 'I am of course delighted and honoured and needless to say, flabbergasted.'

In December 2007 Pratchett announced he had a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease, and earlier this year he donated $725,000 to research into the disorder...

Discworld news has the best coverage.

Tonight, if we ever get the children to bed, Emily and I will watch the second half of Hogfather (buy DVD signed by Pratchett) in honor of the season. Re-reading the book and watching the movie is our new holiday tradition. Death makes a very satisfying Santa. (The movie, incidentally, tracks the book too closely to work as cinema, but it's a joy for fans.)

I've read about between 35 to 37 of Terry Pratchett's books (including all 33 of the Discworld Series) - including those allegedly written for children. There's not a one that I didn't enjoy, or that I wouldn't read again and again. He is a genius and a gentleman.

Welcome to the Year of the Pensive Hare Sir Terry!

A thorough review of DRM 2008 - Gizmodo Australia

I came across this Gizmodo Australia review of DRM because it happened to link to a Gordon's Tech post I'd done on DRM issues with downloaded apps for the Wii, and a query turned up the connection.

It's an good reference review; we've come a long way since the days of products that allowed one to duplicated "copy-protected" floppy (yes, in those days they were floppy - 5.25") disks. I think oen product was called something like "Copy II PC"?

DRM is the reason that video games went form desktop machines to consoles. So DRM isn't fundamentally bad, but it becomes malign when too much power accrues to copyright owners. The key to a reasonably use of DRM technology is a healthy political process of negotiation and compromise ...

Price fixing investigations of SMS texting: also ask about instant messaging

In reign of the Dark Lord antitrust enforcement languished. The Marketarian religion did not admit to imperfections requiring government attention.

In the recovery new light is being cast where dark things have grown ...

Digital Domain - What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting

... Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four...

A lot of things changed when the Democrats took the senate. (Thank you, thank you, Senator Tim Johnson). This was one of them.

I hope Senator Kohl will look beyond the price fixing of SMS messages into the more interesting questions of conspiracy to block instant messaging alternatives.

In particular, I think it will be interesting to ask Apple's management to discuss what happened to the Push notification that was supposed to come to the iPhone in August of 2008. That service would have enabled effective iPhone instant messaging, which would have devastated the iPhone SMS revenue that goes to both AT&T and Apple. Once slated for the OS 2.2 Push notification vanished without explanation.

Anyone have an in to Senator Kohl? I would really love to hear the answers to those questions ...

Amazon MP3 - how did they make such a mess of it?

I earned a $5 Amazon MP3 credit, so I figured I'd give their DRM free music a try.

The first artist I tried, a Jazz vocalist, had only a few albums available on Amazon.

So I figured I'd try the Dixie chicks.

Sure enough, Amazon had some tunes, but the layout is a mess and browsing is a slow and awkward experience. A piece of the left side of the screen is given over to advertising.

Huh? An ad next to the music listings? I thought they were trying to sell music.

It smells like they've given up. Well, at least prior purchases are DRM-free. Nothing will disappear when Amazon exits this business.

Update 1/6/09: iTunes music is almost all DRM free now. Amazon's experiment is done.

WaMu and the problem with index funds

Like everyone else, we've been wondering what we did wrong. What can we learn from the WaMu story?

We were, after all, WaMu investors, albeit indirectly. We own index funds that, at one time or another, probably owned shares of WaMu. The track record of the low expense index funds has been very good since John Bogle, an honorable man, pioneered them at Vanguard. The thesis has been that money managers, when their salaries and other overheads are included, can't beat index funds. Of course, there have been exceptions.

Hmm. Maybe any money manager who beats index funds should be immediately investigated by the SEC.

But I digress.

The problem with index funds is that they're only as smart as the market, and only as good as publicly traded companies. If the market's regulatory frameworks are broken, if corruption is on a historically seasonal upswing, if the world is too complex to detect theft, then index funds are just a way to get taken.

The problem is, obviously, that index funds are only as good as the publicly traded company.

So are there any alternatives to index funds for the retail investor?

See also:

1. Complexity collapse
2. Disintermediating Wall Street
3. The future of the publicly traded company
4. The role of the deadbeats
5. Firewalls and separation of powers
   
6. Marked!
   

Life imitates art - the WaMu story

Well, not exactly. Cliches are much more common in life than in art ...

The Reckoning - WaMu Built an Empire on Bad Loans - Series - NYTimes.com

...While Mr. Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said.

“In our world, it was tolerated,” said Sherri Zaback, who worked for Mr. Parsons and recalls seeing drug paraphernalia on his desk. “Everybody said, ‘He gets the job done.’ ”

At WaMu, getting the job done meant lending money to nearly anyone who asked for it — the force behind the bank’s meteoric rise and its precipitous collapse this year in the biggest bank failure in American history...

We really need to try a different sentient species. Personally I like dogs.

This was novel though ...

...WaMu turned real estate agents into a pipeline for loan applications by enabling them to collect “referral fees” for clients who became WaMu borrowers...

Dark humor aside, there's one interesting question about all this.

Why are we reading about this now?

It's not as though WaMu was subtle.

I would really like to know the story about why there was no story.

Update: Thinking more about why there was no story. A hypothesis -- that business journalists interact with the wrong level of a corporation. They interact with senior management, who are more fun and who can provide favors, tips, and ad revenue. The real story is further down the value chain, hence invisible.

Provigil enthusiam: I bet on accelerated aging

Judith Warner makes the case for putting Provigil in the water.

Synchronously, the NYT writes about the odd relationship between sleeplessness and heart disease, one of series of studies over the past few years showing relationships between limited sleep and disorders associated with aging.

Free lunches are exquisitely rare.

There's no way any studies done to date would be sensitive enough to detect a 10-20% acceleration of aging associated with long-term Provigil (modafinil) use. Animal models might show the relationship, but they'd have to use animals with a relatively long lifespan.

I bet we'll learn that regular Provigil use that reducing an individual's sleep needs from 8 to 6 hours a night also significantly accelerates aging.

Just a hunch.

Living well with less energy - lessons from tobacco

If we had the right price signals, we could live well with far less energy that we use now.

Consider the passively heated home. It's a marvel of efficient engineering and, in some climates, can operate without a dedicated furnace.

Of course we can't rebuild all our homes this way, but it's easy to imagine that, over the next twenty-five years, per capita US energy consumption could fall by 3-5% a year even as GDP rises.

Of course that won't happen with oil company ads urging energy conservation. Those remind me of tobacco ads urging health lifestyles. You know, the ads the tobacco companies ran when they were trying to fend off cigarette taxes.

The tobacco taxes came, and, shock, twenty years later public smoking is rare in Minnesota.

It's very hard to stop smoking, but people did it. It's easier never to start smoking, and people did that too. The campaign against smoking is a blueprint for transforming America's energy habit.

The campaign needs to start with price signals. Without them we're just pretending. Regulations are a feeble substitute for a serious carbon tax.

Today the NYT Editorial page called for a gasoline tax offset by other tax reductions. This is only the beginning of what will be a long and terrible political process that will need support from every friend of reason.

If we're lucky carbon and gas taxes will be a core campaign issue in 2008. It will be a tough campaign of course, we know the GOP will continue their war against civilization and reason, we know the GOP will do everything possible to leave the human world a smoldering ruin*.

I hope you've enjoyed your pre-inaugural rest, but that's over now.

* Which makes the GOP, ironically, a sort of Green party -- but that's another story.

12/28/08: Uh-Oh. Friedman agrees. Which reminds me that gasoline and carbon taxes are quite different. A gasoline tax that leads to electric cards powered by coal-fueled plants would be an absolute disaster. The primary argument for a gasoline tax is to reduce dependency on Saudi Arabia, but I suspect that's a misguided mission. The carbon tax is what we need; a gasoline tax is secondary.