Infodder

A "Reasonable" Argument for Believing in God

2011-03-10T22:36:00.001-05:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-adam-jacobs/a-reasonable-argument-for_b_831185.html

hello

2010-12-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

Hey , where are you ? Annarita, do you have an new email?

Sudoku National Championship in Philadelphia

2007-08-27T00:31:00.000-04:00

Anyone want to come try it? (article)

More on Women in Science

2007-08-22T10:57:00.000-04:00

Matt's right, this is in it's final days. Here are my parting shots:

Women in Science
by: Philip Greenspun
February 2006
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.

Is There Anything Good About Men?
by: Roy F. Baumeister
American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually “How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.

Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.

The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.

The Road to Clarity

2007-08-12T15:53:00.000-04:00

Joshua Yaffa writes in the NYT Magazine this week:

The Federal Highway Administration granted Clearview interim approval in 2004, meaning that individual states are free to begin using it in all their road signs. More than 20 states have already adopted the typeface, replacing existing signs one by one as old ones wear out. Some places have been quicker to make the switch — much of Route I-80 in western Pennsylvania is marked by signs in Clearview, as are the roads around Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport — but it will very likely take decades for the rest of the country to finish the roadside makeover. It is a slow, almost imperceptible process. But eventually the entire country could be looking at Clearview.

Some comparisons between Highway Gothic Series E and Clearview are given here:

NYT slideshow accompanying the article
typographic.org
clearviewhwy.com

Earthquake Fun

2007-08-09T05:41:00.000-04:00

For those of you who don't know, I'm in LA this week. I arrived tonight and as I was going to sleep, i felt this! Almost as fun as a thunderstorm :-) I hadn't gotten to sleep yet but Elise was awoken by it so it was pretty substantial.

Woohooo! Good stuff!

Guitarist for Queen to get PhD in Astrophysics

2007-08-09T02:15:00.000-04:00

A buddy of mine passed this along to me: I'm actually not kidding...it took him over 30 yrs!

Barry Bonds' Other Advantage

2007-08-07T18:28:00.000-04:00

Rich sent me this article about the advantage Bonds gets from wearing his colossal arm guard. According this the author, it's much more that just reducing the fear of getting hit, including physically keeping his arm in the correct plane and allowing him greater leverage at impact. I'm not sure I agree with all the arguments, but it's interesting to think about.

If you're in LA in Aug or Sept this year...

2007-08-05T15:43:00.000-04:00

...then try to check out the Florian Maier-Aichen exhibit at the Pacific Design Center. He takes photographs and then digitally alters them to make pretty pictures. "Long Beach" is my favorite. You can read more about him in the Summer 2007 Aperture Magazine (flash required).

Why I hardly ever post to this thing

2007-08-05T11:51:00.000-04:00

From the number of updates there have been recently, it seems like this blog experiment is in it's last clutches of life. Perhaps that's just because it's summer and Alan and Dave have better things to do now that the weather is nice. I've wondered why I don't post to the blog very often, and figured since no else is either, I would list my reasons and everyone else could list theirs and that would increase content, at least briefly. So, here goes:

1) It's painfully slow for me. I am an extremely deliberative writer, for better or worse (probably worse). Practically, this means that it takes me between one and two hours to produce any typical entry. It just doesn't really seem worth the effort to me. Of course, this entry is typed straight in and is not deliberate in any way, so will take a total of about 5 minutes (I'm a decent enough typist).

2) I don't really have much interesting to say. The information that I choose to access is generally either too specialized (for work), too dated (I mostly read big old books on history), or too commonplace (cnn, bbc, espn, etc.) to be worthwhile in a post format. I don't really run across much in the way of truly interesting internet articles, at least what I would consider interesting to a wider audience. In my opinion, this leaves two serious options for things I would post about if I were to post on a regular basis--carefully researched opinion articles on a topic that strikes my interest and general, under-informed rants. I don't really see the point in either of those.

Those are my excuses for not posting much. Does anyone even care? If anyone have their own reasons for not posting here much (other blog/ interesting life/ etc.), it would be interesting (to me, at least) to read.

Four Books, each of which you can read in an afternoon

2007-07-31T21:28:00.000-04:00

I don't have a TV or the internets in my new apartment, so i've been forced to read alot and sleep early:

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark

A single woman takes a vacation from her job as an accountant.

A friend of mine has been talking about Muriel Spark since she (Spark) passed away a year ago. Running out of ways to avoid doing work, I finally borrowed the aforementioned book. It's written in a detached style that manages to hold your interest and then totally messes with you at the end. Spark is imaginative and doesn't give you the hollywood ending that you think she is leading you to. After you read it once, you'll want to read it again to see how you could have missed it. Spark is the kind of writer you think that you can be, if only you had any good ideas. Needless to say, I'm now hooked. The next book by Spark that I'm reading is called Memento Mori. It's about the various responses to a prank phone call a group of different people receive reminding them that they will die one day.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

How a couple (both virgins) spent their awkward wedding night together

I kept hearing about *this* guy and *this* book. Once I realized how short it was, I caved in. Don't read the reviews for this book, they give too much away! I thought it was mostly hilarious and then you get hit with a bad case of "Carpe Diem" at the end. This book is the fancy literary analogue to the movie "American Pie." Be sure to keep track of the number of times that he uses the phrase "a sign of maturity." McEwan is the kind of writer that makes you realize that, even if you had a good idea, you couldn't ever come close to his writing ability.

The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard A. Posner

Similar topics as my earlier post, but more coherent & incisive, using fewer but bigger words

Posner is a judge who is famous for, among other things, his contributions to law and economics. He defines plagiarism as "unauthorized copying that the copier claims is original with him." In addition, this claim *must* cause the copier's audience "to behave otherwise than it would if it knew the truth." One thing that I learned was that judges are, at most, simply editors of their opinions which are actually written by their clerks. I don't know if this is also true for the supremes. One final point: Posner argues that originality and creativity are two related but very different things (perhaps a future post).

The Big Book of Irony by Jon Winokur

What Irony is and isn't, Who does it well, and Why some people don't like it and why

This little book is funny yet thought-provoking. Winokur is a master quote collector and it shows. He frequently refers to Douglas Coupland, who coined the term Generation-X, and a very bright but strange guy named Jedediah Purdy. Purdy wrote a book in his early twenties lamenting the widespread use of ironic detachment in his peers (people our age).

Happy Independence Day

2007-07-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

A great day for barbeque, baseball, and remembering one of the most significant documents in history. I've seen a few references this year to the rough draft of the Declaration which among other things contains a remarkable attack on slavery:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating
it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of
a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian
king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for
suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
this excrable commerce

Pretty amazing. I'd also like to echo a point made by a commenter on Volokh that we were not Americans fighting the British. We were British, and we were fighting our own people and our own government. I cannot imagine what courage and principle it took to sign one's name to such a document, but we owe a lot to them and part of what we owe is to preserve what they fought for.

More than Meets the Eye... Really?

2007-07-02T20:22:00.001-04:00

I was discussing this Saturday night at a party and thought it would make for a good first post. This is a cautionary tale.

There are many things that I have always wanted to do, and as it so happened recently, several things aligned in a way that allowed me to do one of those things. Like any person who has "sold" out to industry, my easy job (by CalTech standards) gives me plenty of disposable cash and quite a bit of free time on the weekends. Add to that a Hollywood marketing juggernaut, and I quickly found myself longing to complete this specific quest once and for all.

I suppose this particular desire originated sometime around 1985 but has been largely dormant since that time. There was a brief stint when I tried to accomplish it during 1998-9. Jaideep joined me for a while, but alas the zeal for our adventure faded away quite rapidly... until this month.

I am, of course, talking about watching the entire Transformers Generation One Cartoon Series.

By my calculations, this would be a relatively easy task for someone who routinely watches seasons of TV shows (all 5 seasons of 24, Veronica Mars, Lost, etc) in 24 hour chunks. There are 98 original episodes and one animated feature film. Clocking in at 22 minutes an episode, that's only ((98*22)+120)/60 = 38 hrs -> easily manageable as a two weekend event.
So, I blocked off my calendar, invited others who may have been excited by the premise, and got down to business. 51 episodes in, here is what it is like:

Episode begins with Decepticons attacking some sort of hydroelectric dam/oil rig/nuclear plant/energy source. Autobots, notified by their all-knowing computer Teletraan I, go to defend humans. Battle ensues. Everyone shoots at everyone but no one hits anyone. Starscream mocks Megatron's leadership abilities. Decepticons are somehow defeated and escape.

Repeat 51 times.

Granted this was a cartoon series designed to push a toy line, but watching the episodes back to back unexpectedly highlights the obvious redundancy in the first two seasons. My expected glee at reliving my childhood is slowly being replaced by the dreaded realization that my 10-year-old self was easily entertained and possibly stupid.

Nevertheless, I march on, hoping that my memories of a deeper mythology will be justified in upcoming episodes. Indeed, the last few story lines have taken place on other planets and have begun to flashback to the Cybertronian past of these robots in disguise. All the while I keep watching, anticipating the moment when the series will reveal its grand story and show me once again that this cartoon truly was more than meets the eye.

A little bet...

2007-06-22T11:32:00.000-04:00

Imagine someone offered you a bet - you pay $1 and pick an integer between 1 and 100. An integer in that range is randomly chosen, and if it matches your choice you win $200. Do you take it?

If you do, it's probably because you do this calculation in your head (whether you realize it or not): $200*(1/100)=$2. Since the expectation of the game is greater than $1, you're better off taking the bet.

Conversely, imagine someone offers you a $1, but if they pick the right number (again out of 100), you owe them $200. Would you take that bet instead (presumably no one thinks it makes sense that you would take both)? Well, towards what I thought was the end of a discussion about economics, a friend of mine did take that bet. Three years later we're still talking about it, so it's time to share it with all of you.

A rational person is expected to undertake any action in which the person believes the marginal benefit outweighs the marginal cost. If someone offers you $2 for something you value at $1, you'd be wise to sell it to them. However, how do you value things that are not definite, but instead have some probability of having a certain value? The conventional explanation is to calculate the expectation. It is the sum over all outcomes of the chance of that outcome happening times the value of that outcome happening.

My friend claims that it is not only the expectation, but also the distribution, that is important in determining what the actual value is. In this case, 99% of the time he wins money. The expectation is closely approached only over a large number of trials, so if he plays only once he is quite likely to come out ahead. Needless to say, since we've argued about this for some time, but I disagree with his reasoning. While I realize that the added information about the distribution may be valuable, I fail to see how. In the end you must make a yes/no decision, and there has to be some point at which your decision changes based on the particular probabilities and payouts. I claim that point is when the total expectation becomes negative. I think it's a significant point that expectation has all sorts of nice properties like additivity.

I think the problem here is a cognitive bias: treating a small probability as if it were zero. I bet the calculation goes: 1/100 is approximately zero, so 0*$200=$0 which is less than $1. So he takes the bet. I wonder if there is some way to test this - at the very least it seems like there are some psych experiments in here somewhere.

If you agree with him, here's the question I'd most like answered: you must go through some decision making process - what's the formula you use to determine whether to play or not?

Genarlow Wilson ordered released

2007-06-20T19:55:00.000-04:00

Before my highly anticipated post on the use of expectation in decision making, I thought I'd pass along what I think is some great news (if a bit old) - last week a Superior court judge ordered the release of Genarlow Wilson. For those of you who are not familiar, Wilson was sentenced to ten years in a Georgia prison for having consensual oral sex with a 15 year old girl when he was 17. After his trial, the Georgia legislature changed the penalty for his crime to a misdemeanor, and at the time consensual intercourse was also a misdemeanor. The law was applied so harshly in part because he was accused of raping another girl and refused to plea to that charge. He was aquitted of rape but convicted of statutory rape and the jury was not allowed to know that a mandatory 10 year sentence was required.

Understandably there was a great deal of outrage over this case, and he got coverage in ESPN, the New York Times and even from Mark Cuban. He is still in jail pending the Attorney General's appeal, but this decision is a big step towards his freedom. This Volkh Conspiracy post discusses the legal reasoning and chances of it being upheld on appeal.

Blatant self-promotion

2007-06-14T03:19:00.000-04:00

As some of you know, I've decided to take the rest of the year off to travel. If you want to keep track of where I am and what I'm up to, take a look at my travel blog.

Hodgepodge

2007-06-14T01:17:00.000-04:00

Some things I've seen in recent weeks that I found interesting but weren't blog-worthy
on their own:

Stopping Menstration with the Pill (Slate): One thing I found interesting was the argument that menstruation was actually somewhat unnatural because for much of human history women spent most of their fertile years either pregnant or breastfeeding.

Reverse Contact Lenses (The Independent): Lenses you wear at night which squish your eyes back to the right shape, restoring perfect vision for up to 48 hrs.

Living Streets (itofd.com): An interesting article (and a cool site by the way) about how to get people to drive carefully on residential streets. One neat idea is to make the street environment more vague, forcing the driver to slow down to figure out what's going on. I can't explain it as well as he can, so just read the article.

AT&T and the NSA (arstechnica.com): Recently published documents show that AT&T has installed sophisticated NSA equipment into its internet backbone which an expert claims has the capacity to filter through up to 10% of all traffic passing through it. I'm sure this isn't a shock to many, but it's pretty disturbing that there is now evidence.

Avandia and the "New-Media Man"

2007-06-13T23:12:00.001-04:00

In all honesty, I don't give a @$#@ (that's French for rat's ass) about the diabetes drug Avandia. While this article in the New York Times is ostensibly about the recent news that Avandia has been associated with an elevated risk of heart disease, the author spends much of his time discussing his research for the article. He refers* to himself as a "new-media man", meaning that rather than trust the headlines, he utilizes the "entire niche of blogs and digital news sources on relevant subjects — drug risks, Big Pharma, diabetes". I was pretty impressed. This guy was going to do a little digging and come up with a nice take-home message, empowering his reader to use the internet to look past the headlines and scrutinize what they are reading. So what was his take-home message?

"And here is what I found: everything, except insight."

What a disappointment! Maybe I should have guessed as much, after all the title of the article is "Call the Doctor". But this was a gimme! The take-home message is so simple, yet the author got caught up trying to weigh opinions of others when he would have been far better off just reading the study and forming his own. To me, the value of so-called "new-media" is unprecedented access to primary sources, allowing the people (as in "we the") to form their own opinions rather than simply selecting between those of politicians and journalists. (The Durham-In-Wonderland blog is a fantastic example, to which I've linked to multiple times before.)

A quick skim of the actual study in the New England Journal of Medicine given a pretty simple take-home message:

There is a 95% that the increase in risk of heart attack due to the use of Avandia for 24 months is between 3% and 98%, the best estimate being 43%. In other words, Avandia does seem to increase the risk of heart disease, but the studies have been small so the precise magnitude is unknown until larger studies are conducted. This result should be taken very seriously because Diabetics are at higher risk for heart disease to begin with, so even a relatively small percent increase in risk is significant, in the same way that doubling your chances of getting in a car accident is more significant than doubling your chances of being hit by lightning.

* in reference to Jaideep's comment, formerly "refferse"

Choose Responsibility

2007-06-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

Five years ago, near Charlottesville, a woman threw a birthday party for her son. To insure that none of the guests drove home drunk, she insisted that (1) the guests not drive to the party and (2) that they spend the night. No one at the party drank above the legal limit for driving and no one left the house as agreed...until the police showed up. For their good faith efforts, Elisa Kelly and her now ex-husband were sentenced to over 2 yrs in jail a piece on 9 counts of providing alcohol to a minor.

In fairness, Kelly definitely screwed up for "[misleading] parents who called to ask about alcohol [and for trying] to get the kids to cover it up after police got there." There are certainly different ways of looking at this case: Radley Balko of Reason (here) and Charlottesville's Daily Progress (here). Along these lines, Balko has also written about a group called Choose Responsibility headed by John McCardell, a former college president. As first reported in this article of the Chronicle of Higher Education, McCardell argues for a plan which would lower the drinking age to 18 with a "catch." People between the ages of 18 and 20 would be given a provisional license to drink alcohol, but it would be revoked if they screwed up. People under the age of 18 would lose access to the provisional license if they screwed up before turning 18. The idea is that this gives kids under 18 an incentive not to drink until they turned 18. It also gives people between 18 and 20 an incentive to drink responsibly. Some Q&A here.

Test Your Ethics (or Lack Thereof)

2007-06-04T00:26:00.000-04:00

Did I just plagiarize that title? Anyway, John Tierney at NYT has posted this about a survey on ethics administered by Carnegie-Mellon. It takes about 10 mins, so try it out if you want, and then read the rest of this post.

The survey presents certain actions in different scenarios and you're asked to specify (a) how ethical it is and (b) how often you do it. You're also given a chance to specify whether it is even an ethical issue at all. I found myself answering that, very generally speaking, most of the things listed were not ethical issues. (Though, there were some definite exceptions.) On the other hand, I also answered that I almost never do most of those things. This is profoundly confusing: "If those things aren't even ethical issues, then why don't I do more of those things?" At first I thought, "Oh, those aren't ethical issues, they're moral issues." But I don't feel comfortable with that distinction either. When taking the survey, my reasoning often went something like this:

Only a dick would do that and I'm usually not a dick, so I wouldn't do that/haven't done that....but it's not like it's a moral or ethical question. If I saw someone doing those things, I would think, "they're probably dicks, but you never know, maybe they're having a bad day."

Since I probably don't know what they mean, I looked up morals and ethics in wikipedia. Even though the entries were different, I really can't tell the two apart. Is there any difference? If so, what it is? (This is straight out of Election.) For whatever reason, I associate morality with big (traditionally) religious questions of good and evil (should i steal/kill/etc.) and ethics with professional/business questions of right and wrong (should i give that person credit for their ideas/steal my work computer/etc.). Are these kinds of questions completely separate or are they different applications of one larger abstract fundamental concept? Is there a word for the "smalller" stuff? In other words, does there exist a concept for actions for which the consequences aren't really that big of a deal, but if you do it, you're a dick/douche/appropriate slang?

For "big" situations, a person has probably thought about it beforehand. Therefore, their response has probably been orchestrated based on a personal "worldview." However, I suspect that, in the heat of the moment and in a split second, for scenarios that haven't been thought about ("small stuff"), one probably tries unconciously to minimize the future potential for feeling guilt. To do this well, one probably has to have some sense of whether a particular action will lead to guilt. If so, presumably one get "better" with time after accumulating more experience. Maybe it's like muscle memory? Does feeling guilt and/or regret have anything to do with things that are considered wrong/evil/not okay/etc.? Is there a relationship or mapping among right/wrong, good/evil, and okay/not okay?

Does the degree of an action even play a role in whether it's okay or not? For example, kicking one ugly, loud, obnoxious, anti-social, disfigured puppy into the middle of an empty road late at night when you're drunk can, from a certain point of view, be rather funny (i.e. it's okay). On the other hand, throwing a box of cute puppies into a busy intersection during rush hour is probably not cool (i.e. it's not okay). Maybe that's not the best example, but hopefully it gets the point across. (note: I don't kick dogs of any kind.) How much weight should be given to the motivation of an action versus the consequences of the action? What, if any, are the moral/ethical absolutes? (Never kick puppies...) In other words, is it always possible to cook up a realistic situation that presents mitigating circumstances for any kind of action? (...unless it's for self-defense) Personally, I can think of only one thing that you should never do under any realistic circumstances (which I'll leave unsaid to encourage discussion); but there could certainly be others. (I know, I know: define "realistic"...)

Hard Sudoku Puzzle (and Solver Website)

2007-06-02T16:11:00.001-04:00

I was trying to do this Sudoku puzzle without writing down anything other than the correct solution. That failed miserably, and even after I gave up on my "no scratchwork" rule, it still wasn't easy. I wondered if there was an website that would solve it for me, and of course there is. How difficult do you think this one is? Got a harder one for me to try?

2				7		1	4	3

	3			4		5	2
	8							2
3	6			2	4
		5				6	1
			6				3
		8
4					1			8

Puzzle 136 from "Sudoku to go" by Will Shortz (the NYT crossword guy)

Wasteful-but-Wonderful Fruit Salad

2007-06-02T04:01:00.001-04:00

It's summertime again, and you know what that means? Alan's wasteful-but-wonderful fruit salad.

Ingredients:

2 large ripe watermelons
1/4 cup chopped mint leaves
1 lime
4 ripe bananas
1 ripe cantaloupe

Refrigerate the watermelon and cantaloupe over night. This is essential! If the melon is room temperature when mixed with the banana, you'll either have warm melon or mushy banana at the end.

Once the melons are cold, cut out the hearts of each of the watermelons and toss out the rest. The heart is the middle part that has no seeds. (In a seedless, use your best judgment) Cut the watermelon hearts and your cantaloupe into about 1 inch cubes. Add mint. Cut the bananas into bite-sized slices and juice the lime over them. This will keep them from turning brown. Mix it all together and let rest in the fridge for 1 hr. Serve COLD!

Notes:
1. Other fruits can be added (blueberries would be my next choice) but avoid oranges and grapefruits; They don't play well with others.
2. If you REALLY like sweets, you can shake 3 tablespoons of splenda over the salad. Spenda is better that sugar here because of its high solubility in cold water.

He's baaaack

2007-05-31T19:27:00.000-04:00

Those of you who are non-Techers never got to meet Mason.
Heck, I should never have gotten to meet Mason.
Mason was a Caltech student who graduated in 1998, well before I arrived. Once or twice a year, though, he would appear on the couch in our house's gathering area known as Lower Crotch. Long after everyone he went to school with had moved on with their lives, I would walk down the stairs and find him sitting there in the same sweat pants, faded Lloyd shirt and sneakers with the same messy, curly hair.
But anyway, eventually I graduated and I didn't really ever think of him again. Except he keeps reappearing! Last month, it was in a friend of a friend's wedding pictures, and this week in a press release about Caltech's latest book of pranks (he's an editor).

"The Legends of Caltech series contains a collection of first-hand accounts
and remembrances of high jinks past, compiled by the Herculean efforts of a
handful of alumni. This latest installment, edited by alums Autumn Looijen
('99) and Mason A. Porter ('98), illuminates Caltech student life and the
schemes that often stemmed from late-night study sessions fueled by donuts
and caffeine. Colorful escapades described in Legends III include pranks
ranging from the elaborate to the simple: reprogramming fellow classmates'
clocks to run backwards; reengineering a building elevator to consistently deliver
passengers two floors below where they wanted to go; or freezing a dormitory
hallway floor to create a rink for "alley broom ball" (ice hockey a la Caltech)."

Anyway, this is a pretty long post for a pretty short purpose, which is basically to say: look guys, Mason edited a book of pranks, isn't that weird? Oh, and also the book is named Legends of Caltech III: Techer in the Dark.
Yeah.

Bicycle Helmets

2007-05-29T00:07:00.001-04:00

As I've often been told to wear my helmet more, I decided to do a little research, and thought I'd write a post on what I found. I browsed some websites and read some original research. Turns out though, I could have just read this amazing wikipedia article on the subject. It is chock full of information, referenced with many of the papers I read, and is completely reasonable in its conclusions.

The gist of it is that it's very difficult to tell if helmets do much or any good. From first principles, they should help if there is a low speed collision involving direct head injury. At high speeds a normal bike helmet will absorb very little of the total energy, and they offer no protection against rotational trauma.

Statistical studies, as is the norm with these things, are difficult and ambiguous. People who wear helmets seem to get head injuries less often, but they're different in many ways. Mandatory helmet laws have not been shown to have a statistically significant effect on the rate of head injuries.

Cycling is safer when more people do it - which is why cycling in the Netherlands, with little helmet use, is much safer than the US, with high use. Helmet laws that discourage cycling are therefore counterproductive.

Of course this doesn't necessarily answer whether I should wear a helmet (any more than the bozo who gets counted in condom failure statistics should impact my decision). My general rule - if I'm wearing sneakers, I'm wearing a hat. I'm traveling slowly, unlikely to fall over, and if I do I can react to prevent myself hitting my head. If I'm wearing bike shoes, I wear my helmet. I'm out for a real ride, up and down hills, and traveling at a higher speed. And given that I'm already going to go click-clack if I try to walk anywhere, it doesn't really matter that I'll have to carry a helmet too.

My final point is that regardless of whether you wear a helmet or not, cycling is not dangerous (by most people's definition). Conservatively, cycling is twice as safe as walking, per mile. Meanwhile, the benefits of cycling are obvious. I mean, obvious.

Arms to Lebanon and its converage in the US media

2007-05-28T20:40:00.000-04:00

This is an email I received from my brother Kurt, posted here with his consent.

************************************************************
I know this is everyones favorite subject: politics and what the US does abroad (or at home for that matter), but this article kind of stuck out to me because I was happy that someone was answering the obvious question that comes up when browsing the headlines about whats going on in Lebanon these days: why does the US need to make emergency military arms shipments to the Lebanese army so it can fight a tiny militant group in a refugee camp?

I don’t know why I am sending it to you all in particular, I guess because its something interesting and a bit different maybe from what we usually think about as a family.

Is anyone following this at all? Is there any discussion in the news about why the US needs to send arms to Lebanon? I’m curious.

Everyone hates sprawl

2007-05-28T19:37:00.000-04:00

Ask most people how the feel about sprawl and you'd get a generally negative response. The word has an almost exclusively negative connotation, at least from what I've seen.

The standard solution offered to eliminate sprawl is to drastically increase urban density. There are certainly many positive advantages to living in densely populated metropolitan areas---diversity, culture, increased public transport, and decreased reliance on automobiles.

Of course, if no one liked sprawl, there wouldn't be any. You can blame developers or local government, but it seems that it rarely occurs to sprawl opponents that some people actually like the suburbs.

It seems to me that the people that advocate against unregulated urban growth are the people that are negatively effected by it--namely people that already have somewhere to live and those that have no desire to exchange cultural vibrancy for extra space. Unfortunately for them, people like living in houses. People like having big yards. Many of them are willing to drive an hour to and from work every day to get it.

The question becomes what are the rights of individuals and communities to determine development? What rights do individuals and corporations have to build on unused land? Should everyone be required to either be farmers or live at urban densities of 100 households (not people, households) per acre (which is denser than Hong Kong) or 500 households (denser than the densest part of Macao, the densest municipality in the world)? Do we let the market take care of these problems? Is there some middle ground?

Sodium Benzoate or Flash - Which is the Silent Killer?

2007-05-27T20:17:00.000-04:00

New research indicates a possibility that sodium benzoate - a common preservative - has adverse effects on yeast mitochondria, with possible implications for humans. I'm normally not remotely alarmist about these sorts of things (I could be described as risk-tolerant, to say the least, as may be indicated in a future post). Of course it's worth looking into, and I'm curious to find out whether this is a real concern. It is a preservative, so it's purpose is to kill things, just hopefully not people.

After reading about this, I figured it was worth going to a few websites to determine which of my favorite sodas had sodium (or presumably potassium) benzoate. What amazed me is how little the Coca-cola and Pepsi websites had to do with drinks. Go to www.pepsi.com, and in addition to an annoying flash display, you see links to music, car culture, sports, entertainment, and fashion. Smaller links below include "brands and products", which is more than I can say for www.coca-cola.com, which as far as I can tell contains no information on the Coca-cola product whatsoever. After 12 mouse clicks, through the corporate page and more annoying flash crap than I would wish on anyone but my worst enemies, I managed to find out that Sprite "has an honest, straightforward attitude that sets it apart from other soft drinks." I wish I were making this up, but I don't think I'm capable of it, unlike the moron that designed this website. Eventually I googled "Sprite ingredient list" and the first hit confirmed that it does indeed include sodium benzoate (as do diet drinks and Dr. Pepper it seems, but not regular Coke and Pepsi).

I think I just self-plagiarized all over myself...

2007-05-26T02:46:00.000-04:00

Plagiarism is something that I think about alot for a couple of reasons. One of them goes back to my first non-Tech honor code experience. During my first year at UVa, the student newspaper catapulted a physics prof to national attention for rosenwinkelling over 100 students in his class for plagiarism. Lou Bloomfield taught a very popular non-mathematical intro phys class called "How Things Work." The "final exam" for the class is essentially a paper that should describe how something works. Motivated by accusations from one of the students in his class, Lou wrote a simple text comparison program to investigate all the papers submitted electronically over the years. In the end, a bunch of students were asked to leave the school or had their diplomas revoked. That particular case was pretty cut and dry because, in most instances, large chunks of the papers had been copied verbatim.

That brings me to the another reason why I think about plagiarism: "Self-Plagiarism." Many of my talks and presentations and technical writeups are copied from each other. In other words, once I've found a way to describe a piece of equipment or a physical process, I simply recycle that piece of text without attribution. I mean, I wrote the damn thing in the first place, right? That should be okay, right? Well, if you google "self plagiarism," one of the first links that comes up is this website by Miguel Roig written for the Office of Research Integrity at US Department of Health and Human Services. Three of the things that Roig lists under self-plagiarism are "redundant or dual publications," "salami slicing," and "text recycling."

An example of dual publication is when the same work or paper is published in two different journals. I personally have never seen this and have trouble believing people try to pull this off. Ok, nevermind: my cubicle buddy just informed me that theorists (snicker) do this all the time. Salami slicing or to quote Roig "the segmenting of a large study into two or more publications" is considered "unacceptable scientific practice." Really? If I understand this correctly, then we do this all the time. Without getting too technical, let me explain: we measured quantities I'll call "A1" and "A2" as a function of another variable "v." One paper we published was essentially "(A1-A2)/v." We then published another paper that was essentially "(A1-A2)v^3."...And then three more papers were published that were literally different linear combinations of A1 and A2. I'm almost almost almost not kidding. The physics of these "derived" quantities are related, but different. Even though all the data came from one experiment taken over a single time interval, is this still self plagiarism and unacceptable?

Here's another situation that Roig talks about (called data augmentation): "when a researcher publishes a study and subsequently collects additional data, which typically end up strengthening the original effect, and publishes the combined results as a new study." Guess what, we've done exactly this as well (see first two links)! Again without going into the details, we count the number of electrons that hit the detectors after they bounce off the target. Being a "counting" experiment, the relative statistical uncertainty scales as the inverse of the square root of the number of electrons counted. We took data in three chunks over two years. Our preliminary results were published after the first year and our final combined results were published after the experiment ended. This appears to be an almost perfect of, in Roig's words, "old data that has been merely augmented with additional data points and that is subsequently presented as a new study." Roig calls this practice a "serious ethical breach."

Finally, he gets to the question that I originally had about text recycling: "a writer’s reuse of portions of text that have appeared previously in other works." Roig gives examples when this is acceptable and when it is "borderline or unacceptable." As you can probably guess by now, we've done it. I'll spare you the details. So...how do i reconcile these things? Well, first of all, the things that I described are fairly common practice in the field I work in: nuclear physics. This is what I call the "cultural differences" defense. Roig makes many good arguments for why self plagiarizing is bad in the "biomedical and social sciences" arena...but can analogous arguments be made to be suited for other fields? I don't know, but maybe I've been "cultured" to believe that what we do is okay. When I think about text recylcing, I feel it's no different from using the same figure depicting an experimental apparatus over and over again. Should you have to make a unique diagram for each new publication if the experimental apparatus is the same? I would say no, but then what's the difference between that diagram and the text used to describe that diagram? And what about our salami slicing? Well, as my cublicle buddy argued, all of those articles were published in a journal that has a limit of ~4ish pages per article. There is no way that we could cover ~20 pages of physics results in ~4 pages. This is what I call the "It's not our fault" defense.

Finally, the trickist one is data augmentation. In the example I used for what we did, the two papers had a different emphasis. Our first year data was a "new" result in the sense that no one had measured it before and it could have been "zero." The fact the the result was not "zero" was a significant finding itself: it was consistent with what we call the Standard Model of Physics. In our second paper, we were interested in seeing if there was any small deviation in the quantity that we were measuring from the theoretical value. This question required more data so that we could achieve the desired statistical precision. (By the way, there wasn't a statistically significant deviation.) Because the scientific questions were different, I claim the two papers really stand on their own. This is what I call the "No, no they're really two different things (hands waving)" defense. My last defense and maybe the most relevant one is the general idea that at no point did we ever try to "decieve" the reader, which is the standard that Roig repeats throughout his document. But this leads to the question of whether an author's "intent" is relevant to the determination of whether plagiarism has occurred. The answer probably depends on what kind of plagiarism is meant by "plagiarism."

Let me attempt to clarify using the ideas of Erik Campbell: "hard" plagiarism is the copying portions of text verbatim. In his very amusing article at the Virginia Quarterly Review Campbell reflects on his run-in with "accidental" hard plagiarism in poetry. He also presents the idea of "soft" plagiarism: "pilfering another’s ideas." This turns out to be a very murky subject because one has to walk a careful line between "creative influence" and "stealing ideas." How does one draw the line when discussing an artistic endeavor?

Take the case of Bryony Lavery's Tony-nominated play "Frozen" as outlined in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article. The play is about a killer, the victim's mother, and a doctor who is studying the killer's mental state to understand his motivation. As Gladwell recalls, the doctor is based on a real life person named Dorothy Lewis whom he had written about in a New Yorker article years ago. The play's author, Lavery, adapted many of the scenes for her play directly from events described in the original article. In some cases the dialogue was (verbatim ) quotes cited in the article. None of these things were attibuted to Gladwell or to the real life doctor Lewis by Laverly. Gladwell goes back and forth about it and ponders how different things that are the result of a creative process, particularly musical ones, are related to each other. Is the relationship one of "cut and paste" or one of transformation and change? Eventually he chides the "plagiarism fundamentalists" for "[pretending that] chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life."

Meghan O'Rourke at Slate goes into more detail about how originality and creativity are related to plagiarism. Her article is relevant to the case of Florence Deeks and H.G. Wells which is recounted in Jonathon Keat's review of A.B. McKillop's book "The Spinster and the Prophet." Whereas, in the Lavery case, Gladwell argues that the two works share a "parent-child" relationship, this one is more of a sibling rivalry: a single path bifucates into two different competing trails. The controversy surrounds H.G. Well's famous book "The Outline of History." McKillop argues that although Wells and Deeks appear to have come up with the idea of writing a "history of everything from the beginning" independently, Wells' books clearly borrows heavily from Deeks' book. However, for Keats, hard plagiarism takes a back seat to soft plagiarism. He argues that Wells' book provides evidence for the important and original idea that "the progress of society" is to be measured against the yardstick of democracy. On the other hand, Deeks had written a feminist tome which presented evidence for a different idea but similarly "deeply original for its time", namely that "civilization (as opposed to barbarity) is feminine" and that "peace and properity were characteristic of female leadership."

In all of aforementioned literary examples, care is taken to distinguish between questions of plagiarism, which in my opinion are resolved in the court of public opinion, and questions of copyright infringement, which is a legal issue. Along these lines Tim Wu at Slate produces a thought provoking article discussing the legal battle between Dan Brown (the Da Vinci code) and Robert Leigh, "a self-appointed grail expert." Essentially the historical and religious claims that Brown presents as fiction are the ones that Leigh and his coauthors present as non-fiction in a book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." Wu addresses the following interesting questions (1) "Can one writer freely borrow someone else's wacky historical speculations?" (2) "When an author offers up a speculation like "space aliens killed JFK," does it really make sense to call that a fact?" (3) "How can dueling authors ever have a meaningful public discussion of who Mary Magdalene was, if, for example, one side claims exclusive ownership of the theory that she was a lowly prostitute?" The precedent for this case exists in American law and Wu summarizes the reasoning succintly: "If the author calls it a fact, you can steal it."

Finally here are some things that I'll save for another post by me or some interested party: (1) the many pieces of software that exist to uncover hard plagiarism, not the least of which is Google itself: Paul Collins at Slate discusses the impact that google book search will have on old and new cases of literary hard plagiarism. (2) Recent high profile cases of the two historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin. (3) How the question of plagiarism is approached in a journalistic context. (4) John Fogerty's long and strange legal battle with Fantasy Records.

First Annual Infodder/Virginia State Standards of Learning Quiz Competition!

2007-05-23T14:42:00.000-04:00

JLab hosts a set of "Standards of Learning" tests for the fine state of Virginia. The questions are from science, math, and technology from the 2nd grade level to the 8th grade level. You can choose to answer 10, 20, or 40 multiple choice questions in random or fixed order from different subjects. At the end, you get a summary of your results. I got a 37/40 on a random selection of questions from all subject areas at all grade levels. The Algebra I portion of the test really killed me....on that note, I challenge you to a friendly competition! For a fair comparison, you'll have to select the same number of questions, same subjects, and same set of questions:

First Competition: 40 questions, Science 8, Technology 8, Earth Science => and then under "more options please": all years, all "strands", FIXED SET NUMBER 1

Second Competition: 40 questions, Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry => and then under "more options please": all years, all "strands", FIXED SET NUMBER 1

Highest number of correct answers per minute will prevail. Post your score and time in the comments. Enjoy!

Stocking a Home Bar

2007-05-21T18:46:00.000-04:00

For quite some time now I've enjoyed entertaining, whether in my dorm room, apartment, or my parents' house. The major thing missing has been alcohol. While I enjoy being around people having a good time, whether that involves alcohol or not, I don't like to drink much myself, which makes it difficult to make drinks for others. However, I would like to throw a cocktail party or two in the future, and so I'm thinking about how to get started.

Some google searching has led me to cocktail.com, and specifically their page on tastings. I figure that's a good start in determining which brands are good values. I've also snooped around cocktails.about.com, which has a section on establishing a home bar. They have a rather extensive list of "essential spirits": bourbon, brandy, canadian whiskey, dark rum, gin, light rum, scotch, tequila, vodka, and rye whiskey. Then there are the liqueurs: amaretto, irish cream, creme de cacao, coffee liqueur, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, and orange liqueur. That's a lot.

I've also seen the Good Eats recipe on cocktails, which unsurprisingly I found fit my style. He presented just three cocktails (martini, daiquiri, and julep) to make very well, with the idea that you should be able to adapt to others from there.

So given that I'm not going to drink a lot myself, what should I be stocking, and what are the most likely drinks that people will want to have available? What should I learn to make well? Any other good resources, with recipes, reviews, etc?

Why are Americans so Fat?

2007-05-21T18:16:00.000-04:00

This article in the nyt last month makes a good argument as to one cause. Agricultural subsidies are primarily directed towards a few crops, including corn and soybeans. This makes the goods derived from these crops, such as high fructose corn syrup, cheaper, while making other produce, such as carrots, oranges, etc more expensive. This means that healthier food ends up being a luxury good.

So why are we subsidizing farmers at all? As technology advances, fewer people can grow more crops, which lowers demand for farmers overall. Of course this has been true forever, and job churning, while painful to the individual, is exceedingly good for society as a whole (or else 90% of us would still be farmers). These subsidies probably have an adverse impact on immigration also, as poorer countries like Mexico depend more on agriculture and can have difficulty competing with subsidized US crops, which pushes Mexican workers across the border.

Ah, the government, encouraging illegal immigration and obesity in one fell swoop. But hey, ban trans fats, because that's a lot easier than acknowledging where the real problems come from.

High-Risk Jobs

2007-05-16T12:28:00.000-04:00

You may or may not know about the movie "A Mighty Heart" that is being released about a month from now. It's about the life and kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and his wife Mariane's efforts to find and recover him. Mariane wrote a book by the same title, so that their then-unborn son would have a chance to learn about his dad; the movie is based on this book.

For the last couple of months I have been doing research on journalists that have been kidnapped and/or killed in the line of duty. You might not realize that this is such a big thing, but we really take our freedom of speech and freedom of the press for granted. Elsewhere in the world, journalists are regularly targeted for exposing crime and corruption, or simply for speaking out against policies they disagree with. Until the Iraq war, one of the worst places to be a journalist was in the Philippines; now, of course, insurgents specifically target journalists in Iraq so the number of deaths there has easily leapfrogged journalist deaths anywhere else.

If you are curious about this, go check out the movie website: http://www.amightyheartmovie.com. The "In Memoriam" section lists all confirmed journalist deaths in the five years since Daniel Pearl's abduction. Of course, there were plenty before that too, but they really didn't get publicity until Pearl's abduction and subsequent videotaped beheading.

If you want some other links to explore on this topic, you can read:

There are other websites too, of course.

Some of the stories on these sites are pretty shocking. For example, check out this story about the murder of Brad Will; one of the photos actually captures his murderer in the act. Or this story about Venezuelan photographer Jorge Aguirre. After he had been shot, he took one last photo of his murderer fleeing on a motorcycle. The vast majority of these journalists were targeted specifically because of their work, not because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This will probably give you a different perspective when you listen to your favorite acerbic, loud-mouthed radio talk show host.

SelectSmart

2007-05-16T11:22:00.000-04:00

Well, we're back, after a great weekend. We didn't have any incredible discussions, unless you're curious why you need to regress statistical projections to the mean. Still, it's political season (even though elections aren't for another 18 months) so you can take this quiz to find out who you should vote for. Answers to the questions are a bit limited, but in the end they nailed me pretty well (not that it's difficult).

Cycling

2007-05-10T02:33:00.000-04:00

Congratulations Matt and Heidi!!!

Since I've moved to the Pacific Northwest, I've been waiting for the weather to get nice so I can enjoy this outdoorsy corner of the country. I've been loving it, but one bit aspect is missing...cycling. I want to invest some money and time into buying a bike and relearning how to ride one (the last time I was on a bike besides Alan taking me out once or twice, was when I was a kid riding around my neighborhood). Many people at work bike-commute, and I just think that is so awesome! So, any suggestion as to what I should get? Used/new? Hybrid? Any other things I should pay attention to?

And just for fun, here's an article about how global warming with affect sex trends, and here's a neat little story about tax returns.

Congrats to Matt (and Heidi)!

2007-05-09T17:58:00.000-04:00

Posting is likely to be very light over the next few days (as if it weren't already), as both Alan and I will be out of town for Matt's wedding this weekend. So we know it goes:

1) Matt's wedding
2) Blogging
3) Work

A hearty congratulations to Matt, and hopefully we'll brainstorm something interesting to post about when we get back. Hey, we're nerds, and we don't drink much.

Also, I'm told Heidi reads the blog on occasion, so if for some reason that occasion is two days before your wedding, congrats to you too!

Funny Commercials: Mac vs PC and more

2007-05-08T02:35:00.000-04:00

The Mac vs PC debate is practically a religious one; People have violently emotional beliefs on the subject with little evidence. For some reason I'm on the PC side and boy do I hate macs, but sure do I like their ads :-) You can watch them all here, even three new ones! This site also has a bunch of hilarious ads from the US and over seas. In light of my earlier post about birth control, I found this add particularly appropriate, but this one was my favorite cuase hey, there's nothing quite like watching a bear get kicked in the nuts.

On another note, this is the cutest thing I have ever seen!

Barry Bonds

2007-05-07T02:37:00.000-04:00

Barry Bonds, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time, is on pace to add the career record for home runs (755) to his trophy chest this summer. Unlike the home run race between Mark Mcguire and Sammy Sosa which saved baseball after the '94 work stoppage, there are mixed emotions this time around. A poll given by ESPN tried to determine why so many people dislike Bonds. In it they ask, "Overall, do you think Bonds has been treated fairly or unfairly?" and then the followup question asked to those answered unfairly: "Do you think he's been treated unfairly mainly because of his (race), mainly because of his (personality), or mainly because of his (alleged use of steroids)?" Certainly each of these factors has an effect, but which is the "main" effect? The results show that of the people who think Bonds is treated unfairly, 27% of Blacks vs 1% of Whites say it's "mainly because of his race". To me, this just doesn't make sense. I don't have any numbers to back it up, but the anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that people treat him how they do primarily because he did steroids and because he's a huge jerk. The fact that he's black seems to me to be a distant 3rd. Am I missing something? I'm certainly not an expert on racial bias so maybe I'm totally wrong.

Here's the evidence as I see it.

1) People were captivated by Bond's chase to hit 73 HRs, before the steroid scandal hit. Only after it become clear he used steroids has he really gained widespread hatred. (although people did think he was a dick before that) This supports steroids at the main cause of his treatment.

2) People loved McGuire, but as soon as he refused to say if he used steroids while testifying before congress people turned against him. Now people hate him. I doubt anyone would claim that people have treated Mcguire unfairly because of his race. Another point to steroids.

3) Bonds is widely regarded as one of the biggest jerks who has every played the game, and was already regarded as such before steroids was even on the radar. According to Jeff Pearlman, the author of the unauthorized biography Love me Hate Me, Bonds was even voted off his college team by this teammates but it was overridden by the coach. Somehow I doubt that was bcause he was Black. Point for "mainly because he's a jerk".

4) If race was the main factor for Bonds' treatment, even though Bonds is a steroid using d$ck, it would imply that even if bonds were a nice, steroid-free player he would still be treated with much of the hatred he is now, just because of his race. That certainly was the case in baseball at one time, and I'm sure race is still is a factor to this day, but clearly black players are no longer hated simply because they are black. (Ken Griffy Jr, Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard)

Some stuff you can watch online for free...

2007-05-06T23:23:00.000-04:00

Reading is hard. Typing is not fun. I have nothing to say, but I *do* like to eat donuts and watch stuff:

The Collapse of Intelligent Design by: Kenneth Miller

meaningoflife.tv: A seemingly emotionless almost robot-like journalist interviews scientists, philosophers, and theologians about stuff I pretend to be interested in.

Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics Blackboard Lunches: About 10 years of talks on a potpourri of topics with varying degrees of formality and technical details.

Beyond Belief 2006: A program put together by The Science Network on science, religion, reason, and survival.

Moving Image Archive at the Internet Archive: Of note are (1) The A/V Geeks Film Archive: bunch of old educational and industrial training videos from a simpler time, (2) Squeak the Squirrel, and (3) The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis.

Wholphin: A DVD magazine of "unseen films" from those McSweeney's people. There is some free "web-only" content. By the way, it's real.

EepyBird: Diet Coke and Mentos...what will they think of next?

Possibly stupid softball question

2007-05-06T15:56:00.000-04:00

For the last few years I've been on softball teams made up partially of novice softball players---usually foreign student who have never played softball before. At least for their first year, they typically only reach base on errors. Along with these newer players there are usually a few really good players who almost never get out as well as a number of ok players who hit safely somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the time.
The question I have is what is the optimum lineup for such a situation? The rules in the league are that everyone at the game gets to bat. The two approaches I see most often are stacking the front of the order and interspersing the good players among the bad. I don't really have a feel for which works better, so I'm throwing the question out to anyone who may know "the answer" or at least have an idea. I'm wondering if the answer changes depending on the relative numbers of each set of player or if the final answer is that batting order doesn't matter at all.

Manny is Manny

2007-05-05T13:27:00.000-04:00

There was an article in the Onion about Manny Ramirez that tipped the scales to me posting about him. Check out this article in the New Yorker which includes such quotes as:

When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’"

And...

After the third such incident, Duquette ventured down into the locker room. “I said, ‘Manny, let me ask you something. I was just wondering why you get back in the batter’s box after ball four.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’"

There's been a lot of talk about Manny's real value. No one contests that he's a great hitter, but his issues playing defense are also well-known. An article in the nyt (registration required) claimed that his defense made him a merely average player. Turns out, the metric was seriously flawed, as it was designed such that Manny was responsible for catching walls that hit twenty feet up the Green Monster (see post 27 - though the importance of that is still in some dispute).

All this being said, Manny signed a huge, long-term contract in 2000, and I think the most exceptional thing is that for every one of those years he's performed exactly as expected the day the contract was signed. Crazy motherfucker and all.

Identity Theft MySpace Style

2007-05-03T22:14:00.000-04:00

To make a long story short, a random guy named Joe Anthony started a myspace page about Barack Obama. Initially he and Obama worked together to update the site but when the campaign decided it wanted total control, Anthony asked them for $39,000 in return. Obama's campaign decided to have MySpace intervene instead, and took control of the name (Joe Anthony got the 160,000 friends though). It's really interesting how politics is changing these days with the advent of myspace, youtube and blogging popularity. It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa starts the Red Dress Press after Mr. Burnes buys all the mass-media outlets :-)

A similar thing happened to my brother, jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. A fan started a MySpace page about Kurt and was responding to people's messages as if he was Kurt. Eventually MySpace intervened there too, and transferred control of the site to Kurt's management team.

When are we really dead?

2007-05-03T00:13:00.000-04:00

This is a really interesting article about what happens when a human's heart stops beating. It seems our cells don't really die when the oxygen is cut off, but rather when oxygen is restored to a previously starved cell. This motivates a much different approach to resuscitation than is typically used involving a slow and controlled restoration of oxygen supply and a lowering of the body temperature.

NBA Refereeing Bias

2007-05-02T18:43:00.000-04:00

An article in the New York Times about a academic paper written by Justin Wolfers (Wharton School of Business, UPenn) claims that there is a statistically significant bias in foul calls based on the race of the referee and the player. The actual paper has yet to be published, so it's impossible to say if they study was done correctly but experts who have read it (see NYT article) claim that it was. We can't really say until we see the actual paper, and nor can anyone else. That's why the response people have had to the article is so amazing. Here are a few:

Charles Barkley, NBA hall-of-fame player: "There are more black players so obviously there will be more fouls on black players" This is a popular sentiment which I've heard three times in the last 2 hrs on ESPN. Do they really think this Penn Professor hasn't though of this, an accounted for it? I guess it's possbile, but according to the three experts the NYT consulted he did, along with a bunch of other effects that these guys haven't thought of.

Kiki Vandeweghe, NBA analyst for ESPN: [Paraphrasing] "The refs get the majority of the calls right. If this were happening, we would have noticed" He also was not the only person to make this argument, and what a horrible argument it is. The entire point of doing statistical analysis is that "noticing" small statistical effects is really hard. Also, a huge fraction of the calls in basketball could go either way so in this case even "getting it right" is subjective.

Mark Cuban, Owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks: "We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others." Exactly! Thank you Mr. Cuban. The study is either done well, or it isn't. If it's done well, it either shows a statistically significant effect, or it doesn't. That's all there is to it.

The NBA: [paraphrasing] "We have better data that we claim does not corroborate your results, but we won't let you see it so you'll just have to trust us that what you are saying isn't true" I'll take less detailed data and peer-reviewed analysis (which this isn't yet but will be, mind you) over the best data and secret analysis any day.

Greylisting

2007-05-02T17:23:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I discovered one of the coolest pieces of technology that I have seen in a long time. It is a powerful technique for dealing with spam e-mail, called greylisting. The basic principle has to do with how an RFC-compliant mailserver is supposed to respond to SMTP error codes. If an e-mail cannot be delivered due to a temporary condition on the receiving mailserver, the receiver can send a "temporary error; try again later" message to the sender, and the sender is supposed to respond when "later" actually arrives.

Greylisting servers employ this simple technique to great effect. When an e-mail arrives at a greylisting mailserver, it records some basic details about the e-mail, then sends an error message back to the sender saying that the destination address isn't available. "But try again in 5 minutes, okay?" Of course, most spam mailservers don't stick around for this kind of nonsense; they just go on to the next addresses they have in their list. But a normal, RFC-compliant mailserver will try again in five minutes, and at that point the graylisting server will let the e-mail through. The result? A nearly total elimination of spam e-mails.

Users of the postfix mailserver can use a project called postgrey. I installed postgrey a few days ago. Since I installed it, I haven't gotten a single spam e-mail. Go postgrey!

Alas, this great technology does have some negative effects, too. I am sad to say that I no longer hear from my harem of Russian girlfriends. However, since the flow of "male enhancement" drugs has also stopped, it's probably all for the best.

Seriously though, there are a few mailservers out there that aren't RFC-compliant when it comes to this behavior, so it is possible that one of your friends will suddenly get bounced e-mails from you with strange 45x errors. It is pretty unlikely though; the vast majority of mailservers in use are good about handling these errors properly.

I'm a female

2007-05-02T00:52:00.000-04:00

So I've been reading this blog since it's inception and have been enjoying it thoroughly. Thank you to all you contributors have have made each day a little less boring and a little more enlightening.

But I've been rather intimidated to actually post anything myself in fear of sounding "dumb".

Now I'm inspired...by none other than gender identity. I read this article a few days ago and found it truly fascinating. If you know me, you know that I'm very interested in the concepts of race and culture. I also sometimes find myself interested in the concept of gender. I'm beginning to think the common trend between these issues (and education, my field of work) is that of self-identity and human development.

Just for fun, I'll add a funny story to that....The Spanish teacher at my school found out last week that one of her students, Courtney, is a girl. Courtney, being a non-Spanish name, did not clue her in, and the student had short hair and always dressed in baggy t-shirts and jeans, so the teacher always referred to Courtney as a boy. School started in September. I wonder if Courtney would be offended if she knew...

Good South Park article

2007-04-29T21:49:00.000-04:00

Here's an article discussing the different roles of Matt Stone and Trey Parker in producing South Park. I really didn't know it worked the way it is described in the article. South Park's a great show, and I think the movie is the greatest comedy of all time, and it's interesting to see how they've kept it together for so long.

(Found through Digg.)

The Moral Basis of an Athiest

2007-04-29T11:00:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd flash us back to an old column at Volokh. It asks how irreligious people justify believing that certain things are morally right or wrong. There are some good comments, and I think you can make quite a convincing argument. One comment summed it up nicely, I believe:

MarmotEsq:

It would be logically inconsistent, essentially crazy, for someone to say they really do want others to force them to do things that in fact they do not want to do.

In effect, I am challenging your premise. I believe that this is logically self-evident, practically a tautology... But it is the foundational fact that leads my fundamental beliefs about how to act and how to expect others to act.
—————
Crazy Craig: I don't want to do it.

Sane Sam: OK. I won't force you to.

Crazy Craig: I want you to force me to do it.

Sane Sam: You mean you really do want to do it but can't bring yourself to do it without someone to providing additional motivation to get you to do it?

Crazy Craig: No. I really don't want to do it. This is not the sort of situation where I really do want to do it but can't bring myself to do it on my own.

Sane Sam: Well, if you really don't want to do it then I won't force you to.

Crazy Craig: No! I don't want to do it AND I want you to force me to do it.

Sane Sam: That's crazy.

Crazy Craig: Exactly.
——————
There is no logical basis for any person to claim that she gets to be the only person out of six billion who gets to force other people do what she wants even while still being free from anybody else forcing her to do what they want.
—————
Meglomanical Meg: I don't want you to force me to do things I don't want to do.

Sane Sarah: The same is true for me. I suggest that we agree that I won't try to force you to do things you don't want to do and you won't try to force me to do things I don't want to do.

Meglomanical Meg: No. I want to be able to force you to do things you don't want do, but I don't want you to be able to do the same to me.

Sane Sarah: So you'd be my master and I'd be your slave?

Meglomanical Meg: Yes. I believe that it is possible to live in a world where others can't force me to do things I don't want to do while I get to force them to do things I want to do.

Sane Sarah: Only a meglomaniac would expect a world where they are the master and everyone else is their slave.

Meglomanical Meg: Exactly.
——————
The only sane conclusion to me seems to be that no one, not even me, should be allowed to initiate force against anyone else. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with defending yourself or others from being forced to do things we don't want to do.)

Call it "libertarianism" or "the golden rule", but to me it is just the way things are.

I happen to like the incidental consequences as well. Without the initiation of force there would be no murder, rape, kidnapping, mugging, etc.

12.1.2005 4:01pm

Well played.

Welcome to Durham-In-Wonderland readers!

2007-04-26T00:22:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the readers of the popular (and excellent) blog Durham In Wonderland, about the Duke/Nifong case. (For our regulars, there is a link on DIW to Infodder so we figured we would officially welcome those who link over.)

The blurb on the top right of the page explains what this site is about: sharing information and ideas. Feel free to browse the archives and comment on the posts. Email infodder@gmail.com if you'd like to be added as an author and write your own posts. Posts can be about anything you find interesting and would like to share, so have at it.

Whether you post, comment or just read, we hope you enjoy Infodder!

Clouds are big

2007-04-25T16:48:00.000-04:00

According to Israeli scientists, clouds are much bigger than we can see with the naked eye. As anyone who has moved from New England to southern California can attest, clouds have a large impact on temperature. During the day clouds reflect some of the sun's light back into space, cooling the ground. At night, heat radiating from the ground is reflected back by clouds, keeping the ground warm. Because of this, clouds are important factors in predicting climate change, and some scientists (though not a "consensus") claim that the impact of cosmic rays on cloud cover is a driving force in climate.

Flat Tax

2007-04-25T10:10:00.001-04:00

Since we were starting a bit of a discussion on the flat tax in my previous post, I'll expound some here.

First, my shorthand in the original post left things confusing, but the phrase "flat tax" usually refers to a single rate with one single deduction. It is possible to eliminate deductions without having a single rate, and to have a single rate with a bunch of deductions, but the ideas generally go hand in hand, and it's this combination that I'm supporting.

It is true that the system of deductions is probably a bigger problem than the graduated scale. It encourages rent-seeking behavior, since it may be cheaper to lobby congress for a tax loophole than to pay the tax you would otherwise owe. Furthermore, it's a playground for the government to attempt to manipulate the market in ways that I think it is ill-suited for. (For instance, you may get a tax deduction for buying a Toyota Prius. Think that's a worthy thing for the government to encourage? Well how about a Ford Expedition? Once the gov't uses tax policy to engineer social change, everything is fair game.)

So if you get rid of the deductions, isn't that good enough? Well I'd be pretty happy, assuming we lowered tax rates across the board so that the effective tax rate didn't go up. Of course we wouldn't, though - because lowering the upper rates benefits "the rich". The graduated tax system provides ample means to engage in counter-productive class warfare. Politically, it's easy to increase taxes on the upper fraction of wage-earners, to the point where the top 10% pay 50% of taxes. If you try to scale those taxes back, you'll be accused of only helping the rich. Politically we're not interested in achieving the most economically efficient state (for whatever our goals are) but simply in what a given law does to change the status quo. This also makes it harder to reduce the size of government, since a program directed at low income people can be presented as paid for by, again, "the rich". The nasty little catch to all of this is that the tax brackets (and deductions) aren't generally indexed to inflation, so what starts out as a tax on the rich ends up punishing more and more of us as time goes on, such as with the alternative minimum tax.

Beyond the rent-seeking and the manipulation, I still don't think a graduated tax makes sense. We can argue about which tax is more "fair", but I think a flat tax results in a better use of resources. As Alan pointed out, the marginal value of a dollar earned decreases. If you increase the tax on that dollar, then you increase the difference between the value to society of the work done to earn that dollar, and the value of the compensation to the worker. People at the upper end won't want to produce as much income, which means they also won't produce that good to society. The contribution of the 200,000th dollar earned is no less than the 50,000th; there's no reason as a society for us to want someone to earn 50,000 but stop before 200,000.

To put it more clearly, a flat tax (at least the ones commonly proposed), even on income, is a "consumption tax". That is, it equally taxes all money spent on goods and services, but not that spent on capital investment. This is a good thing, since capital investment increases productivity, allowing more to be made for less, and making us all richer.

To me, the ideal tax would have a generous standard deduction - perhaps $20k for a head of household, with $5-10k for each other member, indexed to inflation. This deduction makes the tax somewhat progressive - if all your income goes to the necessities of life, you pay no tax - but you pay a flat rate on all your disposable income.

Another intriguing option is to replace the income tax with a national sales tax. In some ways I think this is a spectacular idea. It's clearly a consumption tax; it can be quite fair if, as many states do, you exempt necessities; it would even tax the underground economy, since drug dealers don't pay income tax but would pay sales tax if they wanted to buy anything (except drugs I suppose). I'd be worried that we'd end up with an income tax and a sales tax though. And that would be even worse than the system we have now.

Some Radical Ideas

2007-04-24T11:13:00.000-04:00

Let's add one for law enforcement:
Get rid of the exclusionary rule as well as qualified immunity.

Until some real news picks up, here's a list of some ideas that will probably never pass but I think would go a long way to solving what are perceived to be the most pressing problems. This was just a quick list so if I think of more I'll add them.

Mandatory health insurance to cover catastrophic emergencies
Eliminate employer deductions for health insurance
Flat income tax with a large per-person deduction
- Alternatively, replace the income tax with a sales tax, with exemptions for necessities
Term limits for congressmen
Balanced budget amendment
Phase out social security and the associated taxes
Allow parents to use the tax money spent on their child to send them to a private school
Legalization of drugs, prostitution, gambling
Line-item veto
Replace all government recognized marriage with civil unions
Extremely large increases in allowed legal immigration
High penalties for employers of illegal immigrants
Elimination of all corporate subsidies
Removal of all federal highway funding mandates

If anyone wants more details on what I mean, or why I think a particular idea would be good, let me know and perhaps I'll expand it into a full post. Otherwise you can be thankful that with this list I'd never get elected for anything.

Kakuro

2007-04-24T10:50:00.000-04:00

Well, I haven't been posting much lately, so how else have I managed to waste my time? A game or two of kakuro each day helps. If you got caught up in the sudoku craze you'll probably play this until you see the numbers when you close your eyes, and eventually wish the game never existed. The two sites I've played on are kakuro.com, which has a great interface, and kakuro.cc, which has a horrible interface but more difficult puzzles.

Hopefully something interesting (in a good way) will happen soon and I'll post on it.

Escalators

2007-04-23T03:20:00.000-04:00

XKCD is by far the nerdiest web comic that I've run across. So really, I shouldn't be surprised when I identify with it so strongly, like I did today. Fortunately, the comic is still usually nerdier than me. (Although I might have to try that sometime...)

Something Every Baseball Fan Should Know (About Statistics)

2007-04-19T14:25:00.000-04:00

Update from Dave: An article in Baseball Prospectus (subscription) talked about the wisdom of Erick Aybar trying to steal 2nd in two games so far this season, and being thrown out to end both. Based on win expectancy, Dan Fox calculated the break-even point for trying to steal at 65%. Give Mike Scioscia (the Angels manager) some credit:

"With that combination--the time we had for the pitcher [coming to the plate] and throwing time [for the catcher]--I thought we had a better than 75 percent chance of making it. Erick got a decent jump. It took a perfect throw to get him, and they got it. If it was a 50-50 proposition, obviously we're not going to do it."

(Original Post 4/13/07 at 10:39 PM)

In route to losing their game against the Houston Astros tonight, the Phillies made a characteristically bone-headed base running mistake which drastically reduced their chances of winning. How can I say with confidence that it was "bone-headed"? Because the Run Expectation Matrix told me so!

The situation: It is the bottom of the 8th inning and the Phillies are losing 8-6. The Phillies have runners on 1st and 2nd, with 0 outs. Ryan Howard is up and hits a single into right field. Shane Victorino is rounding third base. A decision needs to be made: send the runner or hold him at 3rd base.

Likely Outcomes:
A: Victorino is held at 3rd base, resulting in bases loaded, with 0 outs.
B: Victorino tries to score and is thrown out, resulting in runners at 1st and 3rd with 1 out, the score still 8-6. (Since Ryan Howard is the runner at 1st and is slow as molasses so we will assume that he does not make it to 2nd as a result of the throw to the plate)
C: Victorino tries to score and is safe, resulting in runners at 1st and 3rd, with 0 outs, Phillies down 8-7. (Again, assume slow-poke Ryan Howard does not make it to 2nd)

Run Expectation Table: The table below, called the Run Expectation Table, shows the average number of runs scored in the league for any combination of runners and outs.

Bases with a Runner	No Outs	One Out	Two Outs

empty	0.54	0.30	0.11
3rd	1.45	0.96	0.37
2nd	1.15	0.74	0.36
2nd, 3rd	1.97	1.45	0.59
1st	0.93	0.57	0.24
1st, 3rd	1.81	1.17	0.49
1st, 2nd	1.58	0.96	0.45
1st, 2nd, 3rd	2.37	1.65	0.82

(Side note #1: This table gives an amazing amount of information and is good for hours of entertainment. Stealing 3rd with 2 outs? Stealing 2nd with no outs? Walking the leadoff man? Sacrifice bunt? Side note #2: These are average numbers and specific circumstances can alter the actual run expectations, so be careful while using them to make generalized condemnations about specific in-game decisions.)

The Statistics: From the table, we would score 2.37 additional runs in the inning given case A, 1.17 runs for case B and 1.81 runs from case C. For case C, a run also scores on the play, so for the avereage total runs scored for each of the cases, we have A = 2.37, B = 1.17, C = 2.81. (MATH CENSORED) The result is that he must have a 73% chance of scoring or higher in order for it to result in more runs, on average. The announcer's intuition wasn't far off when he said "in this situation, you want to make sure that runner can score almost standing up".

That isn't really the whole story though because, although it's pretty counter-intuitive, we don't necessarily want to maximize the number of runs we will score. In the end, we want to maximize the chances of us winning the game. We are down by 2 runs, so we might want favor outcomes which score 2 or 3 runs over those that score 1 or 5+. We can accomplish this with something called the Win Expectation Matrix, which gives the probability of winning the game based on the game situation. Here "game situation" means the number of outs, bases occupied and inning. For our three cases, the probability of winning the game for each of the three cases above is A = 0.54, B = 0.31, and C = 0.63. (MATH CENSORED) We find that the runner needs a 72% chance of scoring safely in order for sending him to cause a rise in the chances or winning the game.

So what was the outcome? The Phillies sent Victorino, who was thrown out at the plate. The next batter grounded into a inning-ending double play, the Phillies lost the game and I'm home at 11pm on Friday writing about it. Such is life in Philadelphia.

You reap what you sow

2007-04-19T13:58:00.000-04:00

I'm not a big fan of lawyers. Of course they serve a legitimate purpose, but they also fit Richard Dawkin's definition of a meme - that is that they create a world in which their propagation is favored. Put simply, lawyers create situations that can only be solved by other lawyers.

A lawyer can take a part of the constitution that has a very plain meaning, and not only twist it around so it says something different, but make it written in a language that only other lawyers can interpret. Thus the 2nd amendment does not protect the right to bear arms, the 5th amendment allows for private property to be taken for something other than public use, and the 10th amendment doesn't limit the federal government to its enumerated powers.

One reason the federal government's power is virtually unlimited is the supreme court's interpretation of the commerce clause. "Congress shall have the power... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." What exactly qualifies as interstate commerce? Running a hotel in Atlanta? Of course. Firing unionized employees at a Pennsylvania steel corporation. Sure! Growing wheat on your farm, to feed your own family? Ummm, this is getting weird, but ok.

A short time ago the 9th circuit tossed a nice one back to the supreme court - does the federal government have a right to criminalize growing marijuana for your own medical use? (Some people speculated this idealogically difficult case was a big fuck you to the supreme court, which often overturned the 9th circuit.) The conservatives had a choice - continue to limit the scope of federal power, and in so doing allow for some drugs to be legalized. The liberals faced one of their own - allow terminally ill patients access to a drug that eases their pain, and in so doing threaten environmental law, labor law, and a host of other laws near and dear to their hearts. Score another one for unlimited federal power.

Now the supreme court has handed down a decision validating the federal law outlawing partial birth abortion. Plaintiffs sought (and failed) to overturn the law based on abortion rights, not on the commerce clause. However, Justice Thomas hinted that from a federalist viewpoint this law was an overbroad application of commerce clause power. If the court had, at some point in the last 65 years, limited the power of the federal government claimed through the commerce clause, states could be free to experiment with medical marijuana, partial birth abortion, and many other things as they saw fit.

This is also further demonstration that, contrary to many people's (uninformed) opinion, Justice Thomas has emerged as the most principled member of the court. He wrote a scathing dissent in Kelo v New London, allowing an eminent domain taking for private use. ("I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution and therefore join her dissenting opinion. Regrettably, however, the Court’s error runs deeper than this. Today’s decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning.") I doubt Thomas is a pot-head, and we know he's not in favor of abortion, but he voted to uphold California's medical marijuana law ("Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.") and he indicated he would overturn the partial birth abortion ban if anyone had bothered to make the commerce clause argument.

I think we could stand to have a scientist or two on the supreme court, but lacking that, we could use more lawyers like Clarence Thomas.

(Thanks to volokh.com for thoughts on the PBA case, including the title of this post.)

Gmail widget

2007-04-17T17:31:00.000-04:00

I've been using gmail exclusively for a couple years ago, and like many of you I love it. I do miss a few features from plain ol' pine, however - mostly the ability to use the keyboard for every function. It appears that the tools to do that with gmail already exist though, and now someone has compiled them into a nice firefox extension. It also does a few other things I'm going to try out over the next couple days, but for the extended keyboard shortcuts alone it's worth it for me. Who wants to deal with a pulldown menu to add a label, anyway?

Free Ben & Jerry's Day

2007-04-16T18:36:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow (Tuesday) you can get a free cone at Ben & Jerry's from noon to 8 pm. I don't care if it's 40 degrees and raining, ice cream is always good. (Found through digg.)

Duke/Nifong Case

2007-04-16T17:55:00.000-04:00

The case of three white Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of gang-raping a black exotic dancer has drawn national attention, but perhaps the most interesting coverage is from Harvard educated historian KC Johnson (not a lawyer or journalist). His blog, Durham-In-Wonderland, is widely accepted as one of the best sources of independent research and information about the case. For almost a year Johnson has been exposing the inept handling of the situation, both by the Durham County District Attorney (Nifong) and Duke University. In fact, his first post, on April 23, 2006, sites evidence which pretty much exonerates one of the three defendants, only 360 days before being officially declared innocent by the North Carolina State Attorney General. It's scary to think how cases like this play out for defendants of lesser means, who cant afford to combat rough district attorneys.

Libertarians and the Environment

2007-04-16T11:10:00.000-04:00

I've considered posting on global warming, but thought better of it. Instead, I'm going to outline how I think environmental problems should be addressed in general. Hopefully this will demonstrate how a libertarian perspective can not only work smoothly, but bring about substantial environmental protection.

Most environmental problems - pollution, global warming, overfishing - fall into a category best represented as a tragedy of the commons. That is, when multiple parties use a public resource, it is to the benefit of each to use as much as possible, since they get reap all the profits but the costs are shared among the whole. Of course in the end, they are all worse off as the public resource is depleted or destroyed. The quote attributed to Aristotle sums it up nicely: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it".

One solution proposed by most traditional environmentalists is for governments to regulate the resource. For instance, they may set a cap on how many fish a given person can catch in a year. There are two fundamental problems with this. First, it is difficult or even impossible for the government to know how to best allocate fish. Perhaps one person is better at keeping fish fresh from the sea to market. Under a free market, it would be beneficial for him to catch more fish, which would earn him more money and provide a better product for the consumer. A central planner allocating fishing licenses has a great deal of difficulty quantifying this, which is the fundamental problem with communism (not the oft-quoted "people need incentives to work").

The second problem is that it will often be more beneficial for one party to spend money trying to influence governmental decisions, rather than actually improving the social welfare by doing a better job than his competitors (referred to as rent-seeking behavior). We see this behavior in eminent domain takings, the Kyoto protocol, and even with interior decorators in Nevada.

The reason a complete free-for-all doesn't work is that an individual entity doesn't pay all of the costs of a particular decision (or necessarily collect all the benefits) - this is referred to as an externality. A particular action may have a positive marginal benefit for a single party, and therefore be pursued, while it has a a negative marginal benefit for society as a whole. In the case of common resources, the costs to the individual may be small while the externalities are large.

So how do we ensure that decisions truly do maximize social welfare? We eliminate the externalities - everyone pays the costs incurred by their actions. The first step to doing this is to strongly enforce private property rights. It's counterintuitive to many, but strong property rights lead to strong environmental protection. If you don't own the water downstream from your power plant, or the air downwind, you are infringing on the rights of the people who do when you pollute it.

It's actually a relaxation of property rights to allow some pollution so as to not completely cripple the ability to do anything. The second step is to ensure that this is not taken advantage of by making people pay for the damage they do to another's property. In the case of global warming, this could be done through any number of mechanisms that charge anyone for releasing greenhouse gases outside of their property. Of course, figuring out the cost associated with global warming is a difficult problem in its own right, but it's something that must be estimated for any mitigating process. The receipts collected from emitters should then be given to the people who are paying the actual costs.

Even though libertarians are generally hostile to government, they can still believe in a strong environmental policy - just not one where the government is in charge of picking winners and losers.

Abstinence Programs

2007-04-15T14:22:00.000-04:00

A new study by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., suggests that abstinence education has no real positive or negative impact on the sexual behavior of young people. Participants were no more likely to abstain from sex than the control group. Conversely, they were also no more likely to have unprotected sex.

While I don't find the results of the study that surprising--telling 12 year olds not to have sex doesn't really seem that useful--I was surprised to learn that Mathematica has a policy research arm. After some research, I was disappointed when I learned that Mathematica, Inc. isn't the company that makes Mathematica (that's Wolfram, Inc.) but an older company that does policy research. I thought they were going to suggest that abstinence education should be replaced with more math and science education, which studies have shown promotes abstinence through high school.

The full study is available here if you're interested.

Wear Your Seat Belt, And Make Your Passengers Wear Theirs

2007-04-15T03:01:00.000-04:00

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was critically injured on Thursday after his SUV was involved in an accident on the Garden Sate Parkway. He broke 12 ribs, his sternum, a vertebra and his femur, which was protruding out of his thigh when paramedics arrived. The revelation that the Governor was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash motivated me to look up some statistics about seat belt use:

Wear Your Seat Belt

Wearing a safety belt reduces your risk of serious injury by 50 percent (source)
Wearing a safety belt reduces your risk of death by 60-70 percent. (source)

Make Your Passengers Wear Their Seat Belts

One out of four serious injuries to passengers is caused by occupants being thrown into each other. (source)
The driver's risk of death in an accident increases by 20% if a passenger in his car is not wearing a seat belt. (source)

T. Rex... tastes like chicken

2007-04-12T17:14:00.000-04:00

A few years ago, I got to write about the fascinating discovery of what appeared to be blood vessels and red blood cells preserved within a T. Rex fossil. Just out today (and appearing Friday in Science) - the analysis of the bone contents. (NYTimes) (LATimes)

Why Readers Don't Leave Comments

2007-04-12T11:09:00.000-04:00

An insightful blog post here about why readers don't leave comments. Clearly our writing is complete, we've taught you something you don't know, and you're all tired. I'm sure we're not argumentative geeks with boring content.

Google Map of My Favorite Restuarants

2007-04-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

Google's new My Maps feature allows you to customize the standard Google map with your own locations, adding comments, photos and even video. I took the opportunity to compile a map of my favorite restaurants around the country. See it here. I'm sure you all have favorite restaurants too, so if you'd like, share in the comments. I'll be in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and New York this summer, and I LOVE a good meal :-) For those of you who are allergic to Google, here are my favorite restaurants in table form.

Philadelphia
Dalessandro's Steaks - 600 Wendover St
Penang Malaysian Cuisine - 117 N 10th St
Jamaican Jerk Hut - 1436 South St
Salumeria - 45 N 12th St
Rangoon Burmese Restaurant -112 N 9th St
La Viola - 253 S 16th St
Cafe Lutecia -2301 Lombard St
La Locanda Del Ghiottone - 130 N 3rd St
New Delhi Indian Restaurant - 4004 Chestnut St
Pattaya Grill - 4006 Chestnut St
El Azteca - 714 Chestnut St
Sabrina's Cafe -910 Christian St
Tuscany Cafe -222 W Rittenhouse Sq # 222
Pho 75 -1122 Washington Ave # F
Pho Cali Vietnamese Restaurant Inc - 1000 Arch St
Vietnam Restaurant - 221 N 11th St

Other Cities
Mattapoisett Chowder House - Mattapoisett, MA
Friedhelm's Bavarian Restaurant & Bar -Fredericksburg, TX
Border Cafe - Cambridge, MA
Claim Jumper Restaurant - Monrovia, CA
Top Restaurant - Pasadena, CA
Harpoon Hannah's - Fenwick Island, DE

How do you get on the terrorist watch list?

2007-04-11T14:13:00.000-04:00

One professor claims you do it by criticizing the Bush administration. This story has been going around for a few days, and I thought I'd collect a few more details. (I originally found this through volokh, which has a number of posts on the topic.)

The story is that a Princeton professor tried to fly somewhere, and was flagged for screening. When he asked why, the person at the counter asked if he had been in any peace marches, and he said no but he had given a speech critical of Bush. The employee said, "That'll do it." On the way back he didn't have any extra screening but his luggage didn't arrive until the middle of the night.

The professor claims that he was put on the watch list to punish him for his speech, and he's received a good deal of support from various blogs (as well as some skepticism). I think when it comes down to it, if someone said "Bush ate my kittens with his bare hands" some people will believe it no-questions-asked, because you know, Bush is the kitten-eating type. But let's think about this in detail, and let's even assume that the administration is willing to pursue this sort of retribution. They decide to punish dissidents, and they pick out a professor that no one outside his field has really heard of, because Cindy Sheehan, Jon Stewart, and Howard Dean would be too obvious. Then they let word pass down to random ticket agents at American Airlines that they put people on the list for peace marches and speeches. They don't harass him on the way back though - because they have something better planned for him. They're going to instruct the baggage handlers to lose his luggage! Muwahahahaha. Well, for a few hours anyway; they'll deliver it to his house overnight.

Seriously? We're supposed to believe this, because of what this guy says a ticket agent told him when he was selected for extra screening? Occam's razor, anyone? The moral of the story: the terrorist watch list is really annoying. It should be handled much better, if it all. However, you lose all your credibility to address the actual problems if you complain about situations like these that are very likely exaggerations. Show a little skepticism, people!

(An article in Slate a while back did a good job explaining the watch list. He came to what I think is a wacky conclusion - "Let's suppose—just suppose—that the No-Fly List has caused only one terrorist not to board an airplane with a sharp tool or explosive shoes. Wouldn't that still be worth these mild inconveniences? Of course it would." To which many people have replied with something to the effect, "What else should we be willing to do to prevent just one terrorist from boarding a plane? Fly naked? Every time we are asked to remove our shoes at the airport, we should be thankful that Richard Reid wasn't known as the underwear bomber.")

Liberal Media Bias?

2007-04-10T23:14:00.000-04:00

According to UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose, there is a systematic leftward bias among major US media outlets. Groseclose came to this conclusion by basically counting how many times a particular paper refers to work by conservative think tanks and policy groups vs liberal ones, ending up with something called an ADA score, where 100 is very liberal and 0 is very conservative. His results show that of all the major US media outlets, only Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume was right-of-center.

Media Outlet	ADA Score

ABC Good Morning America	56
ABC World News Tonight	61
CBS Early Show	67
CBS Evening News	74
CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown	56
Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume	40
LA Times	70
NBC Nightly News	62
NBC Today Show	64
New York Times	74
Newshour with Jim Lehrer	56
Newsweek	66
NPR Morning Edition	66
Time Magazine	65
U.S. News and World Report	66
USA Today	63
Wall Street Journal	85
Washington Post	67
Washington Times	35

There are a lot of interesting details, so if you're interested I suggest reading the full text. Thanks to Matt for a heads up on the article, years ago.

Birth Control: A Condom Isn't Enough

2007-04-10T02:48:00.000-04:00

If you have regular intercourse for 3 years using only a condom for protection, you have a 36% chance of getting pregnant.

( . . . pause for reflection . . . )

Using the pill instead of the condom is a bit better with a 14.3% chance of pregnancy over three years. Using them both brings the chances down to 5% over three years, which is why my mom once told me to "always use two forms of birth control". Even a 5% chance isn't something to take lightly considering the consequences.

There are two main things which can lower the risk of pregnancy:

1) Make sure you use the condom or pill as directed. For those using a condom alone, perfect use lowers the 3-year risk from 36% to 9%. Of course, nobody's perfect.

2) Use a method that doesn't require user intervention: the hormone shot or implant. Those have a 3-year risk of less than 1% on their own and even less when used in addition to a condom.

Here are some details:

Chances of getting pregnant during one year of sexual activity

Method	Rate of Pregnancy (Typical Use)	Rate of Pregnancy (Perfect Use)

Implant (Norplant)	0.09%	0.09%
Hormone Shot (Depo-Provera)	0.3%	0.3%
Combined Pill (Estrogen/Progestin)	5%	0.1%
Male Latex Condom	14%	3%
No Method:	85%	85%

Chances of getting pregnant during three years of sexual activity

Method	Rate of Pregnancy (Typical Use)	Rate of Pregnancy (Perfect Use)

Implant (Norplant)	0.27%	0.27%
Hormone Shot (Depo-Provera)	0.9%	0.9%
Combined Pill (Estrogen/Progestin)	14.3%	3%
Male Latex Condom	36.4%	9%
No Method:	99.7%	99.7%

(click here for the full table of all birth control methods)

Biking and your boy bits

2007-04-09T16:36:00.000-04:00

Biking boys should be wary of their saddles lest their love life suffer. (I know this story has been circulating for a while, but I thought this LA Times article was a good update with lots of exciting details.)

Exercise Builds Brain Cells

2007-04-08T01:02:00.000-04:00

As if the plethora of aliments already known to be prevented or mitigated by exercise weren't good enough (hearth disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, colon cancer, depression, anxiety and osteoporosis to name a few), now there is another: Exercise actually builds brain cells! MRI scans indicate that cell growth occurs in the region of the hippocampus associated with memory and memory loss. So if you are worry about losing your memory, or just have a bad one to begin with like me, try getting on the treadmill :-)

Supercooled, Superheated and Supersaturated Liquids

2007-04-07T23:02:00.000-04:00

Anyone who's heated a glass of water in the microwave only to have it explode when a spoon is put in it knows how scary it can be. That bottle of beer you left in the freezer can instantly freeze when you put it on the counter too. Don't believe me? Check out these videos:

Spontaneous Boiling

Spontaneous Freezing

In the case of the spontaneous boiling, the water has been superheated, which means that the water has been heated above its normal boiling point. How is that possible? Well, normally there are impuities in the water (like minerals or salt) and scratches on the surface of the cup which make it easier for bubbles to form. They do this by providing a phsical edge where bubbles can esailty br created, called nucleation sites. If there are neucleation sites, that as soon as a small portion of the water gets above the boiling poit, the water begins to boil in that region. On the other hand, if the water is very pure and the surface of the cup is very smooth, then there are no easy places for the bubbles to form, thus allowing the water to get to higher temperatures without boiling. When a spoon (or sugar) is put into this superheated water, the spoon provides the needed nucleation sites and the water, already above the boiling point, all boils away very very quickly. The exact same phenomenon occurs with supercooled liquids, except there the nucleation sites make it easier for ice crystals to form rather than bubbles.

The same phenomena is responsible for the popular Mentos and Diet Coke experiment. In this case, the soda is a supersaturated solution of carbon dioxide in water. The porous surface of the Mentos provide a huge number of nucleation sites for the release of carbon dioxide dissolved in the soda, causing it to spew out the top of the bottle.

E-books: the future or a flop?

2007-04-07T22:01:00.000-04:00

Update from Dave: An interesting article about electronic paper in Reuters. Also, there are a number of e-books that are no longer under copyright freely available here.

Original Post 3/27/07 7:40 PM

So Dave's been really excited about the Sony Reader, but do e-books and portable reader systems have a future? I've only seen the Sony Reader briefly, but it wasn't love at first sight. In my quick perusal, the interface wasn't as intuitive and seamless as I'd hoped, and I'm not captivated by the idea of reading a novel from a tiny screen. Plus, according to some anyway, there are plenty of other reasons why they won't take off. Of course, Dave has suggested that portable readers could be the saving grace of the newspaper industry, which would be good for me...

Safety of Artificial Sweeteners

2007-04-06T22:26:00.000-04:00

The safety of artificial sweeteners (wikipedia) is an eteremly politisized topic, and you can find someone arguing everything from "it's 100% safe" to "it's poison" but most scientists seem to agree that they are safe for human consumption, especially in the relatively low doses we ingest them. Hey, even water will kill you if you drink enough of it.

Equal/Nutra Sweet (Aspartame): Aspartame is common in diet sodas and other low-calorie foods as well as a tabletop sweetener. Administration of large amounts of Aspartame has been shown to cause increased rates of cancer in lab rats; however, studies have not found evidence that Aspartame causes cancer in humans. There has also been suspicion that Aspartame can cause headaches and other unwanted effects in humans, but multiple studies have debunked this anecdotal evidence.

Sweet and Low (Saccharin) Saccharin was the first sugar substitute, and caused an uproar when it was found to cause bladder cancer in rats. Further research by Dr. Samuel Cohen showed that the mechanism by which Saccharin causes cancer in rats is not applicable to humans because of a specific difference in urine composition. Saccharin has since been taken off the list of suspected carcinogens by the FDA and is, for the most part, considered safe, particularly in small doses.

note: In Canada, NutraSweet does not contain Aspartame, which is banned in Canada; It contains Cyclamate, which is banned in the US.

Sweet One (Acesulfame Potassium or Ace K) Ace K is relatively new, and thus there is limited information about it's safety. It was approved by the FDA but watchdog groups argue that Ace K has not been properly tested. Ace K is most often used to mitigate the unpleasant aftertaste of Aspartame by using the two together.

Splenda (Sucralose) Introduced in 1999, Splenda recently became the market leader in artificial sweeteners. Now common in some diet sodas and other low-calorie foods as well as a tabletop sweetener. Unlike the other available sweeteners, it can be heated without causing chemical decomposition and can thus be used for baking. Because Splenda is new to the market, research on it is limited; however, animal tests have shown that Splenda can cause an enlarged thymus glad in rats when administered in very large quantities. Although this effect has not been reported in humans, it remains a potential long-term health problem.

Check out The Spoon

2007-04-06T17:15:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to take a quick moment to self promote (I hope that's okay). I am working on a few posts specificly for this site but in the meantime please check out:

http://www.spoonfulloftruth.com

I like to think of it as the love child of politics, personal insight, and humor (yes it was a three-way).

Thanks!

David

...another website...

2007-04-06T02:08:00.000-04:00

...to add to the humour websites, I present you with the following:

http://www.i-am-bored.com

I think the name of the website says it all. It's updated daily, and it sometimes has some interesting things.Publish

Donnie's Favorite Humor Websites

2007-04-06T00:14:00.000-04:00

Life is rough enough as it is. Here are some humor websites that I visit regularly to lighten up the day:

Computer Stupidities
Homestar Runner (updates approx. once a week)
Ask A Ninja (also approx. once a week)
Quote Database

Finally, I often visit Worse Than Failure (previously named The Daily WTF), which usually gives me a laugh, and also gives me some great anecdotes to pass along to my students.

What are your favorite sites?

2007-04-05T19:05:00.000-04:00

Way back in the beginning, sometime last week, I told everyone the sites I visit every day. So, if anyone is reading this, I'd like to hear about the sites everyone else goes to. If it's interesting enough for you someone else will probably think it is too. You don't even have to put a fancy link to it, although if you want to and don't already know, the format is:
<a href="the url you want to link to">the text you want underlined</a>.

If it's not family-friendly, make sure to mark it NSFW.

Women In Science

2007-04-04T16:23:00.000-04:00

Once in my new lab, when discussing Caltech, I said that to admit more women, they'd have to lower their standards. This is unquestionably true, just as if they wanted to admit more men, or baseball players, or saxophonists, they'd also have to lower their standards in every other category. Being unquestionably true is not sufficient to keep people from getting upset about it, I've found.

Correspondingly, if you talk about ideas that may or may not have merit, but still evoke the same kinds of emotion, you get in even bigger trouble. Such is the position that Larry Summers found himself in a couple years ago. He spoke about the reasons that women are underrepresented relative to the population-at-large in tenure-track faculty positions in the sciences. Famously, one reason he gave was the possibility that there are "innate differences" between men and women. He explicitly said what he meant by this: even if the mean aptitude of men and women were the same, if the variance in the male population is greater than the variance in the female population then there will be more men at the extremes (both high and low). Since faculty are drawn exclusively from one extreme, men would be overrepresented.

He mentioned two other explanations - that the different responsibilities in child-bearing could make women less likely to thrive in a career that requires long hours from ages 25-35, and the generally accepted social factors (discrimination - the bad kind). Though he guessed at which factors may be more important, at no point did he say that any of it was unquestionably true. He never said women were dumber than men, or that any individual women could not succeed in science. Still, he was essentially forced to resign.

Several articles were published about the talk; some supportive and some not. I'm going to address one particular criticism - that we should not even discuss the possibility that differences between the sexes account for some of the underrepresentation. To do so, it is claimed, propagates stereotypes which are harmful to women considering or already involved in science.

Which furthers stereotypes more? To discuss the ideas that Summers put forward, or to assume that young women are so fragile that they cannot even hear alternative viewpoints? To assume that they cannot differentiate between someone saying that women as a whole are less likely to be well-suited for scientific careers, and someone saying that they individually are not cut out for it?

The solution to this problem (and I agree that all things being equal, it would preferable to have many more women in science) is not to refuse to have the conversation. If women are less likely to be in science because of family (Summer's guess at the top reason) then institutions could adopt more family friendly policies, as some are already doing. And if social biases are found to be truly a contributing factor, than we can more adeptly and confidently address these biases.

Instead, we are left not with searches for truth, but for what people want to hear. I believe this is only part of a disturbing trend on college campuses towards the stifling of dissent. SFSU students faced disciplinary action for flag-burning. Check out the news at FIRE, a college free speech advocacy group, for many other instances.

A common theme in my posts is that while our intuition is in many cases useful, it is often not the truth, but what we wish were true. If we are not allowed to question it, we will never tell the difference.

I can't find the exact quote, but I remember reading an exchange a short while ago. One person, a politician or civic leader or such, told a scientist (an evolutionary psychologist, perhaps) that his research implied things that were uncomfortable and disheartening to people. His response was something to the effect, "It's what the experiment shows. What would you have me do, fiddle with the results?"

The Effect of Steriods in Baseball

2007-04-04T05:39:00.000-04:00

I ran across this op-ed in the New York Times on Monday. The premise of the article is that the recent increase in home runs in baseball is due to expansion, not to steroids. In the 1990s, MLB added four expansion teams; the theory is that these expansion teams diluted the talent in baseball, allowing the very best players to excel and hit more home runs. Now I don't know much about baseball, so I don't feel that I can judge this theory very well, but my gut feeling is that this seems unlikely.

First of all, the expansion only increased the size of the league by 15%. Are the top players in the minors really that much worse than major-league players that they could cause such a significant increase in home runs? By comparison, 15% is approximately the population growth of the U.S. between the 1977 expansion and the 1993 expansion. I would think that the pool of major-league-quality baseball players would have grown similarly during that time period.

I can understand that there might be a short-term effect, especially if all the "bad" and inexperienced players were initially clustered in the four expansion teams. But I would think that it would have evened out by now with trades and attrition. (The Marlins won the World Series after only 5 years in the majors, so clearly the expansion teams weren't stuck at the bottom with inferior players.)

Now if you look at the home run statistics, there's a significant jump in home runs in the NL in 1993, when the NL gained two teams. Before 1993, the NL seemed to be averaging around 1300 or 1400 home runs per season. Since 1993, it has never had fewer than 1900 (excluding 1994 because of the strike). Of course, some of that increase is due to the fact that there's more teams in the NL now. If you look at home runs per team in the NL since 1977, this is what you get:

(Again, 1994 was special, although given that they were about 70% of the way through the season, they were on course for more home runs than in 1993 or 1995.)

Unfortunately, this graph is inconclusive to me. Sure, the number of home runs per team has gone up about 50% in the past 15 years, and the increase happened around the time of the expansion. There was even a suspicious jump in home runs in 1993. But 50% seems like quite a lot to me, and I still wonder whether the increase is better explained by other factors. It could be drugs. It could also be a rational shift in baseball strategies. (Maybe trying to hit home runs helps you win games? Or maybe home runs attract spectators?)

As I said, I don't follow baseball very closely, so I'm interested to hear what other people think.

Curt Schilling's Blog

2007-04-03T16:04:00.000-04:00

Curt Schilling started a blog near the end of this offseason, and he's sticking with it during the season. In fact, he posted shortly after he pitched yesterday! Love him or hate him, Sox fan or not, it's pretty interesting to read a major league pitcher talk about the game that he pitched hours earlier.

Crime in Philadelphia

2007-04-02T17:21:00.000-04:00

As even those of you not living in Philadelphia probably know, the city's violent crime rates have risen dramatically in the last few years. (There were over 2000 shootings and over 400 murders in Philadelphia in 2006) The factors driving the rise are complex, but many point to the combination of poverty and easy access to guns. Of the 10 largest us cities, Philly has the highest murder rate (27 per 100,000 people) and highest poverty rate (25%). Even more telling is the localization of the crime in the poorest neighborhoods.

There is obviously an extremely high correlation between the average income and crime rate in different regions of the city. Complicating the situation further, areas of high poverty in the city also tend to have a predominately African-America population.

Amung the growing list of porblems is that witnesses are unwilling to testify in court, for fear getting killed themselves. "Snitch or Die" tee-shirts have even become the new fashion trend. The situation is so dire that one Mayoral candidate has suggested declaring a state of emergency, although he doesn't include that in his official 14-point plan.

So what's the solution? Beats me. Jobs and gun control, I guess. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Breakthrough in Blood Transfusions

2007-04-02T13:33:00.000-04:00

Danish researchers have discovered two enzymes that could convert type A, type B, and type AB blood all to type O, the universal donor.

Blood type is determined by the presence of antigens on the surface of red blood cells. People with antigen A are type A, people with antigen B are type B, and people with both are type AB. If a person with type O blood (which contains neither antigen) received type A blood, their immune system would interpret the blood cell as foreign and attack it. However if a person with type A blood received type O blood, there are no antigens to recognize and the blood would be accepted. This is the reason that anyone can receive type O blood (and conversely type AB people can receive any blood - they don't recognize any antigens as being foreign). There is also another important antibody, the presence or absence of which is denoted by a "positive" or "negative" designation.

The two enzymes reported essentially destroy the two antigens, converting the blood to type O. Interestingly, they were discovered by screening bacteria and fungi for enzymes capable of this activity. Many drugs we are accustomed to (for instance Tylenol, Viagra and Lipitor) work by inhibiting a particular protein that when left to function produces some undesirable effect. In this case the drugs are small molecules, and therefore can be rationally designed for that purpose. Enzymes are far more complicated however, and therefore are resistant to rational design. Instead, this screening technique is commonly used.

Small molecule drugs can also be found by this approach; in fact, this is where most antibiotics came from. My current boss, Scott Strobel, just got back from the jungles of Peru where he took undergrads to look for natural products. Maybe the next Tylenol is sitting in the dirty cardboard box in our fridge.

Opening Day

2007-04-02T00:02:00.000-04:00

One of the best days of the year is here, baseball's opening day. I'd slot it below Patriot's Day but ahead of groundhog day. There are high hopes for the Sox after signing many of the best free agents this offseason. But there's hope for everyone; according to Baseball Prospectus's playoff odds report, every team has at least a 3% chance of making the playoffs. My personal goal is to go to games in 8 parks this year, including 4 new to me. I'm starting on Jim Bouton's Ball Four to get me in the baseball mood. I'd highly recommend Moneyball and This Ain't Brain Surgery also.

There's a lot of interesting research going on about the game; earlier I mentioned Baseball Prospectus and Baseballthinkfactory, but also check out Tangotiger's site for looks at how the value of scoring or preventing a run changes in different situations, the ability of a pitcher to prevent hits on balls in play, and accurate measures of fielding ability, among many other things.

Travel Websites

2007-03-29T18:19:00.000-04:00

Here in Connecticut it feels like spring is finally here. And I don't think any of us really travel any more during spring and summer than we do in winter (I for one try to get out of New England at least once during winter), but this is what passes for a segue on this blog. So, here are the travel sites I use most often. Please add in your favorites in the comments, and we'll post the on the sidebar to your right (unless you're looking at your screen from the other direction, then it's on the left, and you have x-ray vision).

www.farecast.com - So good, we mentioned it in the first post. A meta-search engine, with exceptional data presentation. It also forecasts whether the fare will go up or down, but that's actually not the main reason to like it. www.kayak.com is another good meta-search engine. Both send you to the airline at the end and save you the $5.

www.seatguru.com - Once you've picked your flight, pick the right seats. Shows what seats have a little more legroom, a power outlet, or won't recline.

www.enterprise.com - I have to pimp my favorite rental car company. They rented to me when I was under twenty-five, and I've stuck with them. It helps that they're cheap and competent. If you book online, especially from neighboorhood locations and/or on the weekend, you can get ridiculously cheap deals. While I don't have collision insurance my Caltech Visa covers it as long as I use it to pay - check with your credit card info. By declining their insurance, which is a ripoff, I often get a decent car for about $20/day.

www.lonelyplanet.com - I haven't used their website very much, but it seems that much of the information for their top notch guidebooks is available.

www.site59.com - A site for last minute package deals, the same as travelocity's last-minute engine. I really like that you can have two people leaving from different cities and then sharing hotel and car in the destination city.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some, so add on in the comments.

Health Benefits of Cocoa

2007-03-29T17:15:00.000-04:00

According to Dr Norman Hollenberg, of Harvard Medical School, the Kuna people of Panama have extremely low rates of stroke, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Of course that doesn't really help me because, as you might have guessed, I'm not an Indigenous Panamanian . What's interesting about Hellenberg's research is that the death rates rise for Kuna populations who have migrated to mainland Panama, indicating an environmental mechanism rather than a genetic one. (BBC News report)

The suspected cause is something called a flavonoid, an anti-oxidant, high levels of which are found in natural cocoa (also in citrus fruits, green tea, red red wine). While the health benefits of anti-oxidants have been widely publicized, recent research has shed some light on how and what specific types of flavanoids effect health. So far, both the biochemical studies and the observational ones seem to support the hypothesis that the specific flavanoids in cocoa can have dramatic health benefits.

So we should all go get some cocoa powder and start drinking cocoa drink 5 times a day, right? Well, not quite. The cocoa which the Kuna people drink is flavanol-rich, while the cocoa available in the US is generally low in flavanoids, a consequence of processing techniques. Mars Inc. has developed a product called Cocoapro which is made using a proprietary processing method which apparently produces flavanol-rich cocoa. Unfortunately, this is not slave-labor free, so for now you'll have to choose between social justice and health benefits.

Fish Consumption Guidelines

2007-03-28T20:34:00.000-04:00

We know that eating too much fish can be harmful because of high levels or mercury. We also know that eating fish is healthy because it is low in artery-clogging saturated fat and has lots of omega-3 fatty acids, whatever they are. So how do we strike a balance between too little fish and too much. Contrary to popular believe, the answer is not "avoid eating fish", even for pregnant and nursing women. Recent research has shown that for the pregnant and non-pregnant alike, the benefits of eating fish out weight the risks. In fact, according to recent research, women who eat fish during pregnancy may even have smarter children.

According to the American Heart Association (a big fan of those omega-3's) normal people (ie the non-pregnant, non-nursing, non-kids among us) should eat no more than 14 oz (3 to 4 servings, or 2 normal meals) of low-mercury fish and no more than 7 oz (one meal) of high-mercury fish per week. For those of use who are pregnant, nursing or young children, the guideline are to avoid high-mercury fish all together and limit low-mercury fish consumption to 12 oz (2 average meals) per week.

High Mercury Fish (more than 0.6+ ppm)

Shark
Swordfish
Tilefish (golden bass or golden snapper)
King mackerel

Moderate Mercury Fish (0.2 to 0.6 ppm)

Lobster
Grouper
Halibut
Fresh or frozen tuna
Canned tuna (albacore)
Red snapper
Orange roughy

Low Mercury Fish (less than 0.2 ppm)

Pollock
Salmon (fresh,frozen)
Cod
Catfish
Flounder or sole
Crabs
Scallops
Oysters
Clams
Shrimp
Canned tuna (light)
Herring

Social Change Driven by Free Markets

2007-03-28T16:43:00.000-04:00

Being a pretty adamant libertarian (there, it's out), I'm often forced to explain how free markets can bring about a particular desired result. Usually I just dodge the question by asking, "desired by whom?" However, there have been a couple recent articles on the subject that I think are pretty interesting. The NYT talks about Burger King's decision to phase in cage-free eggs and crate-free pork. In this case, public pressure - I don't believe there was a sniff of government action here - was sufficient to get one major company on board. Burger King simply believes that enough people prefer a more socially conscious choice to justify the increased cost.

Do these people really just prefer the good that comes out of these changes? A WSJ editorial (subscription - see an extended blurb at the Volokh Conspiracy here) suggests that people make these choices in part to display to others that they're socially conscious, and therefore gain status. A prime example of this is the Prius - part of its success was probably that it looked different, and therefore you could easily be identified as driving a hybrid. But here's the best part - it doesn't matter! Theory A - Someone values animal welfare, and therefore supports businesses who use cage-free eggs. As more people agree, businesses are forced to respond, and animal welfare increases. Theory B - Someone values what other people think about them, and those people value animal welfare... In fact, Theory B is just a way for the effects of Theory A to be amplified, which in many cases is a good thing. (Humans display a great deal of pack thinking, which presumably was very useful in prehistoric times when information was limited. Perhaps more on this another time.)

Someone in my lab refuses to eat chocolate that is derived from child slave labor. The remainder of us haven't exactly followed suit, but I've certainly changed my behavior somewhat - I buy the non-slave labor chocolate when it's an alternative. It's a small step but I'm optimistic that in the end, Hershey, Nestle, and the others will pay the increased cost (and pass it on to a willing consumer) to be socially conscious.

Virtue is not only possible because we value being good to those around us. It's also because we have all evolved, to some extent, to get along in the group, and that includes making choices that benefit the group at a cost to the individual. Government isn't required, just the ability to remember a face (and even monkeys can do that).

The Science of Weight Loss

2007-03-28T03:55:00.000-04:00

At the most basic level, losing weight simply involves consuming fewer calories than are burned by your body. This is called a calorie deficit. When people diet to achieve this calorie deficit, however, they often become so hungry that the diet is unsustainable and inevitably fails, causing any weight lost to be regained. Fortunately, utilizing some of the science of digestion and nutrition, we can begin to understand how to maintain a calorie-deficient diet while still being satiated (feeling full), and thus maximizing the chances of sustained weight loss.

The number of calories you burn in a day of doing absolutely nothing is called your basal metabolic rate (wikipedia) and can be estimated based on your age, weight, height and gender (here). If you then add in all the calories you burn walking, talking, brushing your teeth, chewing and everything else, you’ll get your calories expended. Here is an online calorie calculator for common activities. Subtract from that the number of calories you intake to get your calorie deficit. For every 3500 Calories (kcal) you are deficient, you’ll lose 1 lbs of fat, which means that if you have a daily calorie deficit of 500 Calories, you’ll lose one pound of fat per week. Interestingly, the act of keeping track of the calories you burn can actually help you be successful at maintaining a reduced calorie all on its own. Here is some information about what types of habits successful dieters have.

Studies on the effect of exercise on weight loss are, surprisingly, somewhat ambiguous. Two major factors are suspected which combine to limit the effectiveness of exercise on weight loss in certain situations. First, people tend to eat back a average of 30% of the calories they burn exercising, so if you aren’t keeping track of the calories you intake, you can unwittingly counteract the benefits of exercise by eating more. Second, some have suggested that people who are forced to exercise compensate by decrease their activity level while not exercising, thus reducing the effect of the exercise on the total calories burned. (I couldn’t find all the articles I read for this, but here’s a good review article on the topic)

So how does one maintain a calorie deficit without feeling hungry? One way is to eat foods that have a large physical volume relative to the number of calories or energy density. This concept is called Volumetrics (book), developed by Dr. Barbara J. Rolls at Penn Sate. The idea can be crudely summarized as: Eat half a burger and a huge salad rather than a small salad and two burgers. You’ll feel just as full, you’ll be content because you got you eat the burger you were craving and you’ll have eaten far few calories than you would have otherwise. Eating smaller portions is also a central tenant of Volumetrics. A good starting point is to learn the energy densities of the different types of food (sugar, carbohydrates, protein, fat) Wikipedia has a list.

Another way to achieve satiety on a reduced calorie diet is to eat a higher than normal proportion of protein. Protein has been shown to cause a greater level of satiety (fullness) than other forms of food, so you can feel more satiated on fewer calories. Also, it takes more energy for the body to digest protein than other forms of food. This is called the Thermic Effect (wikipedia) and some studies have suggested that it can be as high at 25% for protein. In other words, when you eat 100 calories of protein you will burn up to 25 of those calories just to digest the food, leaving only 75 to go toward your total caloric intake. High protein diets can cause some health problems associated with the metabolism of the abnormally large about of protein but is generally considered safe for otherwise healthy people, if done in moderation. This is a good review article on high protein diets, including safety issues. Unfortunately, only those of you with access to university journal subscriptions will be able to access the full article.

So, what does this all mean? In short, to diet effectively, start by keeping track of your caloric intake and expenditure with a goal between 500 and 1000 Calorie deficit per day. Try to eat eat foods that have low energy density (Volumetically) and replace some of your carbs/fat with some additional protein.

Obviously, this is easier said than done :-)

How I waste my day

2007-03-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

I spend an inordinate amount of time online everyday, mostly when I should be running a gel or something. To get things rolling, here are the sites that I go to just about every day:

news.google.com - I've seen other cool news sites, and I'd rather a more directed news feed, but I still find myself going here first every day.

www.volokh.com - A law blog. Some things are interesting, some aren't, and the commenters are actually pretty reasonable (by blog standards).

www.kausfiles.com - The resident blogger on Slate. Mostly politics, where he is firmly in the center, with blogging on cars, the media, and whatever else is handy. Also started a video blog, www.bloggingheads.tv that's often enjoyable to me at least.

www.baseballthinkfactory.com - Home for baseball talk of all sorts. I mostly visit Sox Therapy. I also have a subscription to baseball prospectus, but they haven't had as much solid material lately.

www.digg.com - Less straightforward news than google, but often some good stuff here. Voting by users might be a better way to screen out information than a single authoritative source (like boingboing) or random webcrawling (like google).

www.fark.com - Another way to do "news" - submit & approve.

news.nature.com - Well, I am supposed to be a scientist, so I check this out every once in a while.

I often find myself checking plane fares just about every day, but we'll save those and other useful sites for another day.

Indroducing Infodder

2007-03-27T15:02:00.000-04:00

Infodder is a group blog designed to facilitate sharing of quality information and ideas among friends. Rather than add to the mass of questionable sources, Infodder encourages users to develop and share well-informed ideas by delving more deeply into topics they find compelling. To this end, posts and comments will often contain links to sources related to the post topic.

We envision two primary uses for Infodder. The first is to share non-controversial but useful links like farecast.com without an associated discussion. The second is to share articles and comments on an interesting topic regardless of whether they are viewpoint-neutral or not. These posts are intended to create discussion and additional links on the topic.

In our group of friends we have a huge range of interests and expertise -- musicians, lawyers, doctors, business people, scientists, educators, engineers, journalists, architects, artists, writers. There is much we can learn from each other. We encourage you to read as much as you can about the topics of interest to you and share what you find with all of us!

Anyone can read the blog and leave comments, but only registered authors can create new posts. Authors are registered by the administrators (Dave and Alan) ; Requests to add new authors can be emailed to infodder@gmail.com and although we would like to keep the Infodder community somewhat restricted, if a current author wants to invite a new one, the confirmation process is mostly a formality.

Hopefully this site will help us all become a little more educated and better informed. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please let us know!

Alan and Dave
infodder@gmail.com