Athwart History

Gingrich: Then Again...

2012-01-24T15:16:00.000-08:00

Having accused Newt of desperation just a few days ago, I have to eat my words today:

Gingrich now has 31% support from registered Republican voters in the Gallup daily tracking poll, compared with 27% for the former Massachusetts governor.

The former House speaker now has completely erased a 23-point advantage Romney enjoyed earlier this month.

For myself, I'm still undecided. Mitt is just so, so dull. I'd love to see Newt mixing it up with Obama in the debates. But Obama is nothing if not a disciplined campaigner, and Newt is anything but that. I'd hate for Newt to win the nomination and then make some October unforced error that sank his campaign.

This is about where I was in 2008. As the NJ primary approached, Mitt and McCain were both still in the running. Holding my nose, I pulled the lever for McCain, primarily because of Mitt's blandness. I didn't expect McCain to pull his punches in the general election and thought he'd have a better chance of winning. Of course, I was wrong.

This time around, once again it's all about winning. Policy-wise, there's not much to choose between the three front-runners (Paul not included: he's the outlier and frankly unacceptable, not to mention unelectable). I suspect Mitt is more electable than Newt or Rick Santorum; he'll be more likely to appeal to moderates. But Newt, despite what some people say, actually does have a record of reaching across the aisle, and he might prove capable of winning them over. And there's no question Newt will fire up the base more than Mitt. Then again, this year, do we need our candidate to fire up the base? The other candidate should be doing this for us.

Next Tuesday will be a watershed, that much is certain.

This is Brilliant

2012-01-24T14:36:00.000-08:00

What I can I say but: Wow.

Desperation is...

2012-01-12T10:20:00.000-08:00

...Newt Gingrich's pride in Todd Palin's endorsement. My favorite part is where he "hopes" that Sarah's endorsement is coming soon.

Being Unhelpful About Education

2011-12-14T10:39:00.000-08:00

Very interesting Washington Post article about a school board member who took the Florida state standardized tests for reading and math.

You can guess what happened: he flunked them both. On the reading test he did poorly, but managed to eke out a 62%. Of the math test questions he states, "I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly." But here's where it gets interesting. You might think that this person would be embarrassed by his complete failure, in particular at (let's face it) basic math. But no. Here's what he actually said:

It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities...."

Yes, something is seriously wrong. Something is very seriously wrong when a person can obtain three university degrees and still not know a single question on a 10th grade math test, and the problem isn't with the test. I'd like to see some evidence that this gentleman actually can "make sense of complex data", because something does not compute here.

What does it mean when he says he "helps oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion... budget"? Well, it turns out that it means he was elected to the school board of a large district. So he's good at getting elected: fine. But that's not the same as being hired, and on the basis of what I read about his tests, I personally wouldn't hire him to oversee a $3 billion organization in a heartbeat. Would you?

It's possible that the standardized tests are too hard. Or it's possible that our schools are being run by over-educated idiots. To help you decide, consider the following: in the international PISA study, the United States finished 15th out of 30 in reading, 24th out of 29 in mathematics, and 21st out of 30 in science, while spending among the highest amount per student in the world.

American Airlines, Then and Now

2011-11-29T23:21:00.000-08:00

So American Airlines is bankrupt. That's bad news, I suppose, for the economy as a whole. And it's unfortunate for any AA employees who lose their jobs as a result. But in some larger sense, this seems like just desert.

Back in the mid-1990s, when computerized airline booking was pretty new, I once made a somewhat complicated reservation via CompuServe (there's a blast from the past, and gives you an idea of how many computer eons ago this took place). But I screwed up somehow. I meant to book a ticket from Newark; instead I booked one to Newark. Furthermore, I didn't even realize my error until I arrived at Newark Airport the day of travel, bags in hand, wondering why there was no line at the ticket counter.

Can you guess what happened? If you've traveled in the past ten years you might not believe this, but I swear it is true: They fixed it for me at no charge. The error was purely mine, and they just fixed it.

I can report another episode that happened a few years later. Again, flying out of Newark. This time, however, I was late for my flight because - and again this is difficult to fathom in today's world - my taxi broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike and the driver had no way to communicate with his dispatcher. So we ended up stuck on the Turnpike waiting for a police car, and then a tow truck, and then for the tow truck to take us to some service center, and then for another cab to arrive. By that point, of course, my flight was somewhere over Kentucky. When I got back home I called American to see what they could do: I needed to make the next possible flight out. They wanted to charge me a full last-minute fare at first - after all, I had missed the flight without warning them - but I managed to talk them into converting my ticket to a stand-by the next morning, at no charge.

Compare that to my recent return flight from a Thanksgiving trip. I booked the flight six weeks in advance. I selected seats: row 17, three together. The day before the flight I went online to check in and print my boarding passes. But my seats were now listed as "unassigned"! Imagining my wife, pre-schooler and I having to sit separately, I quickly tried to select new seat assignments, but naturally the only ones available were for an upcharge. I called AA customer service, and they patiently explained that, while there was nothing they could do, they would be able to seat us together when we checked in the next morning at the airport.

Well, that seemed a little crazy to me. I had had a seat assignment, which had been somehow erased without telling me. The customer service representative couldn't tell me why. Shouldn't I be able to get a new seat assignment, at least over the phone? No way, she said. Has to be in person, because they keep some seats in reserve for families with small children traveling together. (Are airlines beset with scammers pretending to have small children in their party in order to check in over the phone? Did they need visual proof that we had a small child with us? Maybe the truly savvy scammer could bring one to the ticket counter as camouflage.)

With no alternatives at hand, we showed up bright and early a bit before six in the morning to get our seat assignments. Sure enough, they did have three together! In the last row: row 33. Which, on an MD-80, turns out to be the loudest place on the plane, and the only row for which the window is entirely blocked by the engines.

I suppose I should be happy that we got to sit together at all. But consider the inversion in customer experience. In my first anecdote, I made an error and they took me at my word that it wasn't my fault and corrected it for me. In my second, the fault was not mine but also certainly wasn't theirs, and they still did their best to fix it. But in the third, I did everything by the book and properly, they screwed up, and then they wouldn't fix it.

I understand that at some point American Airlines eliminated one olive in each salad offered in the in-flight meal. This supposedly saved them several million dollars a year. The thought of having a salad during a flight - or a meal of any sort - is laughable today, but far more worrisome is that they have taken cost-cutting to its natural limit, and the customer experience is now seriously impacted. The economy has been bad for airlines for years, but surely this attitude to their customers contributed to the failure of American to remain profitable. Here's hoping they learn a valuable lesson.

UPDATE (12/9): An alternate view. Some good points...

People Who Can't Plan Shouldn't Run Businesses

2011-11-23T10:30:00.000-08:00

Just ran across a story about a "businesswoman" who was nearly ruined by a deep-discount coupon deal.

Rachel Brown, who runs the Need a Cake bakery in Reading, Berkshire, launched an offer via the money-saving website in the spring in which she offered a 75 per cent discount on 12 cupcakes, which normally cost £26.
However Mrs. Brown vastly under-estimated the popularity of the deal and was besieged by 8,500 people who signed up for the £6.50 bargain.

Naturally, Mrs. Brown is accusing Groupon of nearly ruining her business. But isn't she really to blame here? You can limit the number of deals you will accept via Groupon. Sure, Groupon's salespeople are supposedly pretty cut-throat and want businesses to make pretty steep discounts to maximize Groupon's profits.

But you know what? Sure they are. Groupon's in business for Groupon, not for the Need a Cake bakery. I feel bad for Mrs. Brown, who was evidently taken to the cleaners here while Groupon made a tidy profit. But she should've thought this through. Hmmmm, she might have thought, what's my worst-case scenario? What actually happened probably wasn't far removed from that.

The Groupon business model offers a quick buck, since they pay upfront based on coupon sales. But somehow businesses seem to forget that each coupon sale is a promise to provide some service which they have already been paid for. This could be a problem for Groupon going forward. I wonder how many repeat customers they get? My guess is: not many. Then again, the depths of human gullibility and greed seem endless.

The Iron Lady

2011-11-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

I was briefly super-psyched to see that there will be a major motion picture about Margaret Thatcher in January 2012:

Hmmmm, Meryl Streep as Maggie Thatcher? That's ominous. Then I looked more deeply. From the first reference:

What was it like to work for Margaret Thatcher? What sort of woman was she at the height of her powers? You might think that if you were setting out to make a so-called "biopic" about such a dominant figure on the political stage of the late 20th century, your researchers would have sought out those who were closest to her in those years and asked them.
I do not know whom the makers of the Meryl Streep film talked to. Perhaps Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, but certainly not me. To judge the film from its trailer, they confined their inquiries to the Daily Mirror and perhaps Tim Bell's public relations firm.

From the second:

"Sir Mark and Carol are appalled at what they have learnt about the film," says a friend of the family. "They think it sounds like some Left-wing fantasy. They feel strongly about it, but will not speak publicly for fear of giving it more publicity."

Oh, boy. At least the hard Left is also a bit upset:

That's all fine, but that narrative trajectory risks skewing the story. This was not just a time of one woman's assault on a male bastion, but an era of rage about what Thatcher, economy destroyer and warmonger, was doing to Britain.

Here's what Maggie had to say about being an "economy destroyer", by the way:

I guess I'm still psyched. But prepared for a hatchet job.

Perry Bites the Dust

2011-11-10T15:02:00.001-08:00

I have to admit I was one of the hopers when Rick Perry threw his hat in the ring. Supposedly he's an excellent campaigner, and there's no doubt that he's presided over a very good Texas economy while the coasts slide into the ocean. It's hard to get excited about Romney. Cain's sexual allegations have caused him to implode. And none of the others seems serious. With Ryan and Christie sitting it out, that left a huge gaping whole for someone to fill. Perry seemed like he might be that person.

But really. He tries to make a point about eliminating agencies and can't even remember his own talking point. That's not a guy we can have debating Obama if we expect to win. I'm afraid this seals the deal: it's going to be Romney, and we might as well accept it and make the best of it.

Income Mobility

2011-11-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk lately about income mobility in America. The Pew Economic Mobility Project (EMP) has done yeoman's work in this area. Scott Winship has a good summary of its findings in the latest issue of National Review. The quick takeaway can be summarized by these two points: first, absolute income mobility is still widespread — about 80% of people are better off than their parents were; second, however, relative income mobility is lower in America than in other industrialized countries — for example, people born into the bottom income quintile have only about a 60% chance of escaping it, while the average for most industrialized countries is closer to 70%. That's not a vast difference, but it's measurable.

But, as is his wont, Thomas Sowell steps up with some thoughtful counter-observations. His main point has to do with following actual people over their lifetimes, instead of simply looking at the history of an income bracket.

The Internal Revenue Service can follow individual people over the years because they can identify individuals from their Social Security numbers. During recent years, when "the top 1 percent" as an income category has been getting a growing share of the nation’s income, IRS data show that actual flesh-and-blood people who were in the top 1 percent in 1996 had their incomes go down — repeat, down — by a whopping 26 percent by 2005.
How can both sets of statistics be true at the same time? Because most people who are in the top 1 percent in a given year do not stay in that bracket over the years.

Something Sowell doesn't mention, and that I'd like to see, is relative income mobility by age group. Statistics show very clearly that young adults are much less wealthy than older adults (which makes the current structure of Social Security all the more absurd, but I digress). So it isn't really fair when looking at relative wealth to compare a 25-year-old college graduate to a 60-year-old executive. The bottom quintile will necessarily have a disproportionate number of 25-year-olds, many of whom will climb to higher quintiles through the natural process of wealth accumulation. But suppose we followed a 25-year-old from the bottom income quintile among 25-year-olds? It would be interesting to see what income mobility would look like then. Worse, no doubt. But by how much?

A Solar Moore's Law

2011-11-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article about a "Moore's Law of solar cell efficiency" this morning. The main takeaway is this:

Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells.

This is all to the good, of course. Even a solar skeptic like myself wants to see more power options: I'd love for my skepticism to be mistaken. But that's not what interested me.

When you read that article you'll see a graph, showing the cost per watt of solar cells from 1980 to the present. It's a steady downward march. Is there any correlation between that trend and government subsidies or research grants into solar power? I was unable to find any good historical data on that kind of spending: solar is often lumped in with "renewables" that would include wind, hydroelectric and geothermal power.

There's big bucks to be made in solar if the efficiency improves enough, and the recent Solyndra scandal shows that the government isn't so good at allocating research and development dollars. Maybe it's time to see if this solar Moore's Law can sustain itself without throwing tax dollars at it? Just a thought.

What Separates Us From the Animals: Trade?

2011-11-04T16:59:00.001-07:00

This is an enjoyable and enlightening talk on the history of trade and why it is the key to human success.

9-9-9 vs 20%

2011-11-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm enjoying the GOP's jousting flat tax proposals. Isn't it nice to be debating the best ways to limit government, instead of the best ways to expand it?

We have two real proposals on the table here. Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan would tax personal income at 9%, corporate income at 9%, and levy and national sales tax at 9%. Rick Perry's 20% plan would create an optional 20% flat tax, with exemptions, that taxpayers could choose as an alternative to paying existing taxes.

Of the two systems I prefer Perry's, for a few reasons.

First, it's less radical. Cain's plan radically cuts income taxes and replaces the revenue with a sales tax. This would require the United States to create a system for administering a national sales tax, and would create uncertainty both for government revenue and businesses affected by the sales tax. State sales tax policies are extremely varied: some have few exemptions, while others have various carve-outs in an effort to make such taxes less regressive. In New Jersey, there are "enterprise zones" in which sales taxes are halved. The negotiations necessary to bring about a 9% national sales tax - higher than most states' - would be complicated to say the least.

Second, it's more politically feasible. Such a major change is going to engender lobbying efforts from industries that may be negatively affected. Take an inexpensive clothing retailer - Old Navy, say, just to pick one. In many states there is no sales tax on their products because clothing is exempt below some limit. Would a national sales tax also exempt them? You can be sure they would prefer it does, and would lobby to bring about that outcome. Remember the rent-seeking behavior that went on during the negotiations for Obamacare.

True, the Cain plan is simpler. Perry's plan has been attacked as "more complicated than the existing tax code", because it adds yet another layer onto an already complicated tax system. That is true. But the end result will likely be simpler for large numbers of people. My judgment is that total hours spent calculating income tax will be lower under the Perry plan than under the current plan, and that's what really matters. If large numbers of people choose the 20% flat rate, that provides a path to simplifying the rest of the tax code, as parts of it will be rendered irrelevant.

I wish I had more confidence that either plan would ever be debated by Congress.

Arguments from Probability

2011-10-31T09:30:00.000-07:00

As with any logical proposition, one contradiction disproves the proposed rule. If each of 38 counterexamples has merely a 10% chance of being valid — an underestimate — then the probability that the Earth is billions of years old is less than 3.8%. In other words, the Earth must be young with a likelihood of greater than 96%.

(From the Conservapedia.)

It is a statistical certainty (p < 10^-11) that there are innocent people being held at Guantanamo Bay.

(Sig on Slashdot.)These are a couple of cases I've seen recently of probability theory misused. The first one is easier to deal with, so let's start with that.The claim is that each counterexample has "merely a 10% chance of being valid — an underestimate". This claim is already problematic. Take this counterexample:

The Bible makes references to the dinosaurs. There is no explanation for this if dinosaurs supposedly lived hundreds of millions of years ago.

How would we calculate the odds that this claim is correct at greater or less than 10%? For the record: Biblical evidence for dinosaurs is razor-thin. It mostly rests upon Job 40, which reads (in the King James Version):

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.

I simply ask the reader: do you think there is a greater or less than 10% chance this describes a dinosaur? Follow-up question: if dinosaurs — huge beasts larger than anything else that ever walked this earth — lived in Biblical times, do you think it's likely there would be one single reference?

It strikes me that the probability that this is true is less than 10% — much less, in my judgment. But ultimately the point is that this is a judgment call.

But there is a deeper problem with the Conservapedia's argument. It makes the implicit assumption that each counterexample is independent. Here's a thought experiment: suppose we roll a fair 6-sided die and try to determine which face is on the table (that is, the one we cannot observe). We observe each of the five other faces, and find they are 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. For each one we say: we did not observe a 6, which means the odds of the bottom face being a 6 is 5/6. In total, then, the odds of the bottom face being a 6 is (5/6)^6 or about 33.5%. But this is obviously absurd, since we know that the bottom face must be a 6: we've seen all the other faces. The reason the argument fails is that our observations are not independent.

The same holds with Conservapedia's argument. Consider these two claims:

1. The Moon's orbit is a very strong counterexample: the moon is receding from the Earth at a rate[3] that would have placed it too close to the Earth merely four billion years ago, causing instability in its orbit, tidal catastrophes on Earth, and other problems that would have prevented the Earth and the Moon being as they are today. Additionally, the moon's orbit is becoming increasingly and unexpectedly eccentric, suggesting a lack of long-term stability,[4] which further disproves the theory of an Old Earth.
4. The planetary orbits in the Solar System — including Earth's — are unstable and unsustainable over the long periods claimed by Old Earth believers.

Let's ignore the question science behind these claims and take them at face value. The problem is that even if both are true, both may simply be indicative that orbits are unstable. If that claim has a 10% chance of being true, then both claims 1 and 4 would be true, but would not make the basic fact any more or less true. If we observed planets in other star systems that had unstable orbits, for example, we could toss in additional claims about them, but they would not be independent of the claims already made and thus would add no value to the overall question of whether the universe is old or young.

Very well. Let's consider the Guantanamo prisoner claim now. We can back into the assumptions made pretty easily. If the likelihood of an individual prisoner being guilty is g, then the likelihood that every prisoner is guilty is g^N where N is the number of prisoners. Currently N=171 if Wikipedia is reliable. The claim is that g^171 < 10^-11, so this means g < 0.86.

That strikes me as low. But perhaps the calculation was made when we had more detainees. The maximum number was 775, in which case g < 0.968. Eh, maybe. But as with the Old Earth argument, one problem is that we are asked to believe a specific probability about the individual case, and then extrapolate it to the overall case. The argument is extremely sensitive to these probabilities: suppose that actually g = 0.995. Then the odds of a single innocent detainee would be only 58%. We have no idea what the probability g really is, though, so we are left making guesses. And these guesses strongly influence the outcome.

Independence is less of an issue here, but it's important to mention another factor. Not each detainee may have the same probability of being innocent. This can make a big difference. Suppose that there are 10 detainees, 9 of which are definitely guilty and 1 of which has a 50% chance of being guilty. Alternately, suppose there are 10 detainees who each have a 95% chance of being guilty. In both cases, a randomly chosen detainee has a 95% chance of being guilty. But the probability of having at least one innocent detainee is 50% in the first case and 40% in the second. It is easy to craft other examples that can push these probabilities as far apart as you like.

One thing I've ignored covering here is the question of whether these numbers are actually relevant. That's a big topic that could cover large swathes of the philosophy of science, but suffice for now to point out that probability has a somewhat different meaning in the Old Earth question than in, say, gambling. Either the Earth was created about 4.5 billion years ago or it was not: this is a question fundamentally unlike asking whether the next dice roll will be boxcars. The similarity between the two is that both deal with unknowns. We will never know, with 100% certainty, whether the age of Earth is about 4.5 billion years, so the best we can do is assemble all the evidence and weigh it. That's how science works.

On the Guantanamo question, I have similarly questions of relevance. Suppose the claim was true that at least one detainee was innocent with statistical certainty. How would that affect our policy? Would it help us determine which one? Would we be willing to let terrorists go in order to decrease the probability of detaining innocents? Such questions cut to the heart of any judicial policy, and they can't be answered by facile calculation.

The Epstein Treatment

2011-10-27T14:50:00.001-07:00

Watch Does U.S. Economic Inequality Have a Good Side? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Richard Epstein defends capitalism. Delicious.

Messaging on Regulation

2011-10-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

Got an email from BarackObama.com today that reads, in part:

Yesterday, a Bloomberg News analysis found that the Obama administration has passed fewer regulations than George W. Bush had at this point in his presidency...

(Funnily, the link on "Bloomberg News analysis" points not to Bloomberg News, but to a Huffpo article about it. Here's the original, for those who want the straight dope.)The first paragraph in the Huffpo:

President Barack Obama has signed fewer regulations than President George W. Bush had at this point in his presidency, but it's putting a bigger dent into the wallets of the effected (sic). [emphasis mine]

Do I really care about the number of rules that have been passed? If Obama had a passed a single rule, but it cost the economy a trillion dollars, should I feel better because he's passed "fewer" rules? I think all I care about is the cost, or actually, what I care about is the net benefit, since surely we aren't making regulations just for the sake of making them.I'm not sure who this email is aimed at. Democrats will be upset that Obama isn't regulating more. Republicans might be a little surprised, but sharp ones will notice that he's costing us more anyway, and conservative Republicans don't think either Bush is a model worth emulating. Independents? I don't hear many of them calling for more regulation, except maybe of the banking industry.Very, very odd. The Obama campaign is floundering for a message, it would seem.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-12T15:50:00.000-07:00

There may be a nugget of truth to what the Occupy Wall Street people are saying. After all, conservatives should easily be able to get on board with the notion that we don't like government and big business getting in bed with each other. So I've read some commentary that we should co-opt them instead of ridiculing them. The problem with that strategy is this sort of person:

The Boatlift of 9/11

2011-09-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

Incredibly moving story about the Boatlift of 9/11, in which nearly half a million New Yorkers were evacuated by boat from lower Manhattan in less than 9 hours following the 9/11 attack.

AttackWatch

2011-09-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

So the Obama campaign has a new site to report "smears" or "attacks" against the President. Interesting. Setting aside for the moment how this looks (an enemies list? informing on your friends and family?), I get why someone thought this was a good idea. The President is currently pretty unpopular, down in the high 30s or maybe just touching 40, and trending down. There's an avalanche of bad memes out there, so this looks like an attempt to collect some of them, so that staffers can sift them and maybe put out some counter-memes.

That's probably all this is. But my gosh, how can we ignore how it looks? I'm trying to imagine the response on DailyKos if President Bush had done this. (Fairly similar to what I'm seeing on Ricochet, I imagine, but with more expletives and a lot more hate and Hitler allusions.)

Just for the heck of it, I'll report this post and see what happens. If you hear nothing further from me, tell my wife I love her.

Some Notes on Obama's Jobs Speech

2011-09-08T21:36:00.000-07:00

You can watch the speech here. I just have some random early thoughts...

* The President mentioned early and often that the proposal would be paid for. Obviously this is a response to political heat he's feeling over the deficit. But when he finally got around to explaining how it actually would be paid for, it was completely disingenuous. There was no plan: that was left for a future speech. And what details we got were that he would get Congress to make additional cuts. So, in short, he wants to pass a jobs bill that would increase the deficit, but "pay for it" by future spending cuts. Anyone buying this?

* The proposal calls for more jobs for teachers, but essentially zero details on how to do this. Grants to states? He recognizes that state budgets are to blame for layoffs, but gives no details on how his bill would help.

* Kids can't learn in anything but a super-modern building, eh? I've seen the school my wife went to, in a small village in Bulgaria. Probably wouldn't pass inspection in rural West Virginia, but she got a fine education. It ain't the buildings, it's the teachers.

* The proposal calls for more spending on infrastructure. Sounds eerily familiar. Sort of like the stimulus plan from 2009, which funded all those shovel-ready construction projects. But it's going to work this time?

* Employer tax cuts to stimulate hiring: here the problem is numerical. The numbers given were that a small business employing 50 could potentially see $80,000 in tax cuts. But that's only $1,600 per employee. Say you're an entrepreneur whose business is stagnant. A new employee would cost you at least $30,000 per year. Would saving $1,600 cause you to hire one when you otherwise wouldn't? I'm sure there are cases where it would, but I can't imagine this is common. It's very hard to believe this measure would create enough jobs to even notice - it takes something like 150,000 jobs to register 0.1% in unemployment figures.

* One other numeric gripe: the case of Warren Buffett's taxes was brought up. He, Obama claimed, earns $46,000,000 a year and pays 17.7% in taxes. Buffett's secretary makes $60,000 a year and pays 30%. First, I simply do not believe that his secretary pays 30%. I make a lot more than she and I don't pay 30%, at least not in federal income taxes. Possibly if you add up all her marginal tax rates she's at 30%, but then let's do the same with Buffett. Her average federal tax rate is almost certainly under 10%.

Second, it's worth at least thinking about total taxes paid. Even taking the numbers uncritically, Buffett's secretary paid $18,000; Buffett paid $8,000,000.

Last, there's simply a difference between capital gains taxes and income taxes. Obama might not like it, but there are good reasons for the rates to differ. Is Obama in favor of a flat tax? I doubt it. Or does he want to raise the capital gains rate? That would be a job killer. So this part of the speech really had nothing to do with anything; pure political theater.

* The later part of the speech was a hodgepodge of talking points with no proposals: lower corporate taxes, free trade agreements, cut regulations (but not too much! as if we're in danger of under-regulation), cut wasteful spending. All pure theater. Nothing will be done about any of these, with the possible exception of free trade agreements.

* A late, oblique shot was taken across the Supreme Court's bow. Mention was made of various New Deal and Great Society programs, and Obama said how awful it would be if we'd let our dedication to a single document (the Constitution, unstated but obvious) had prevented the government from doing whatever it needed to do to help people. I took this as a defense of Obamacare from possible overturn on Constitutional grounds. Interesting to see that he's worried about this.

The Shame of Kelo

2011-09-02T18:05:00.000-07:00

The 2005 Supreme Court decision Kelo vs. New London broadened municipalities' power to condemn property. Previously the takings clause had been used primarily to convert underused private property for some public use. Kelo allowed the city to give the property to another private developer, on the theory that this would generate tax revenue for the city.

It's now six years later. How much tax revenue has been generated? You might guess the answer: zero. But it gets worse:

Now, we learn from the local newspaper, The Day, that following the hurricane Irene, the city has designated the Fort Trumbull redevelopment site as a place to dump vegetation debris.

Hopefully this is just a temporary situation. Nonetheless, the fact that the site was originally condemned in 2000, the path cleared for development in 2005, and is now being used as a temporary dump is pretty clear evidence that the purported benefits from this taking will not be soon in coming.

Feds Poised to Take Huge Real Estate Bath

2011-08-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

Or so this article would have you believe. It sounds bad, no doubt. I checked with a friend of mine in real estate, and his comment was:

In short, probably true but a bit misleading. It's frustrating but not nefarious. They just have a lot of crap to move and no great system for it. Similar stories abound in bulk for FDIC sales. I know one smart, wealthy guy who tried repeatedly to bid and [was] repeatedly shut out.

Still, I can't help wonder if that smart, wealthy friend of a friend just wasn't politically connected enough.

More Global Warming News

2011-08-26T18:21:00.000-07:00

The headline "Cloud formation may be linked to cosmic rays" may not sound like much, but it is actually yet another blow to the standard model of anthropocentric global warming.

One of the problems with computer climates models is modeling clouds, which provide negative feedback. As the air heats up, the theory goes, more clouds form, which raises the Earth's albedo (a measure of how much light is reflected) and reduces heat absorption. The CLOUD experiment, which has been confirmed to have positive results, verifies that cosmic rays also cause clouds. Cosmic ray flux is inverse to solar flux, so when solar flux drops, cloud formation rises, and vice versa. This has implications for climate models, and hence for AGW theories.

For "settled science", there sure is a lot of new science coming out. Before we spend billions of dollars on climate change mitigation, it's pretty important that we understand our climate.

James Wilson, the Forgotten Founder

2011-08-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

I've long been a big fan of the musical (and, later, movie) 1776. It's a terrific (but of course, somewhat fictionalized) account of the political horse-trading that went on in the Continental Congress in the days leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence on (well, approximately on) July 4, 1776.

The climax of the story centers around the Pennsylvania delegation, which supposedly is split 2-1 against independence. The one in favor is Ben Franklin; those opposed are John Dickinson and the feckless James Wilson. Dickinson and Franklin carry on the debate, while Wilson sits helplessly in the background, voting "nay" when required by Dickinson but otherwise keeping his mouth shut. Only when the rest of Congress has voted for independence (a measure which must be approved by all the states, not just a majority), and Franklin asks that the Pennsylvania delegation be polled individually, does Wilson get singled out.

After Dickinson and Franklin vote "nay" and "yea" respectively, Wilson is asked for his vote, and pressure is applied by each side. Wilson changes his vote, explaining to Dickinson that while others were opposed, his nay vote would be just one of many. But now, if he voted nay, he would be remembered as the man who opposed independence. "I just didn't bargain for that," he complains, and votes yea. Wilson becomes the deciding vote in favor, but hardly heroically. He is manipulated at every turn, and his greatest desire is anonymity.

The truth, it turns out, is miles apart from the story. James Wilson was actually a Scot who arrived in America in 1766 at the age of twenty-four, and during the ten years between then and the events portrayed in 1776, he earned sufficient accolades through lecturing to be awarded an honorary degree by the University of Pennsylvania, studied law and attained the bar, opened a successful legal practice, joined the Pennsylvania State Militia and rose to the rank of Brigadier General, and wrote the influential pamphlet "Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament". Hardly the career of one meek and anonymity-seeking.

His later career proceeded from highlight to highlight. After the Revolution, Wilson was such an eminence during the Constitutional Convention that he is considered second only to Madison among its framers. He was one of the first appointees to the Supreme Court. Through his real-estate dealings he became one of the wealthiest men in post-Revolutionary America.

Sadly, his final years were unhappy. After the Panic of 1796, his debts overtook him and he lost everything. He was imprisoned for debt in 1797, and died of a stroke in 1798. A bright flame, too quickly extinguished. Nothing like the character from the musical. Wilson's memory deserves rehabilitation.

Cooling on Warming

2011-07-29T16:12:00.001-07:00

This is sure to annoy the radical greenies. A key passage:

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

Book Review: The Wonder of Boys

2011-07-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Wonder of Boys is an interesting book about raising boys by Michael Gurian. The author, a self-styled feminist, attempts to correct some misconceptions about boys that were created by radical feminists. Along the way he takes a few swipes at radical conservatives as well, trying for a moderate line. The book is good evidence for the end of the Culture Wars.

Some of the myths Gurian corrects are (1) that the difference between boys and girls is a social construct that can be "corrected" by proper upbringing; (2) that male culture is the root of all evil and should be thwarted at every turn; and (3) that the particular family structure isn't important as long as the boy is loved. The emphasis the author puts on these corrections will inevitably waste the time of those readers who already agree with him.

Luckily, there is still much to glean from the book about the nuts and bolts of boy-raising. From sports to discipline to learning styles to the teaching of morality, Gurian covers all aspects of this important task. Both the father's and mother's point of view are considered. The author is clearly an expert in his field. Still, while the book's advice is good and, I think, worth applying, his reasoning is often muddled.

For example, Gurian refers often to primitive tribes as archetypes for how we should be raising boys. He uses the Hillary Clinton line "it takes a village to raise a child" unironically, even giving it the authority of unnamed "anthropologists". (As in, "[A]nthropologists have generally agreed that it takes a whole village to raise a child." They have?) This line of reasoning is odd considering that in other places Gurian discusses what modern America has lost in terms of community as we have become more mobile. Wouldn't a better archetype, then, be pre-modern America rather than primitive tribes who have very different methods of child-rearing than Americans ever did?

I'll end the review with this thought-provoking extended quote from near the end of the book:

By focusing so obsessively on the safe ascension of women in the workplace and neglecting the work role of men, we are teaching most boys that they don't really have a clear path to self-respect anymore; their job is to make sure women and girls have a clear path to those things. Herein lies a bitter irony. Boys and men have always, in whatever culture, known that their primary job is to sacrifice themselves so that women and girls can be safe. The last thirty years of feminism, for all its good, has not noticed that feminism is preaching the same old message to male culture when it asks male culture to see how victimized women are, and make sure women are taken care of. Male culture has been biologically and socially based on this principle for millennia.

Tau+3

2011-07-01T10:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a few days late on this, but Tau Day (6/28) was earlier in the week. Tau is a new idea to replace pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) with the more natural constant tau (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its radius). Seems crazy, but there's a pretty good case to be made for this.

The problem is that pi is so entrenched, I can't see it ever being changed. But it's interesting nonetheless. If I were still in the habit of writing mathematical papers I'd try to insert tau here and there (appropriately footnoted) and see if it caught on.

The Boys of Pointe du Hoc

2011-06-06T13:27:00.000-07:00

On this 67th anniversary of D-Day, I was reminded of Reagan's speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary. Here it is:

A few observations. First, the Soviets never really stood a chance once Reagan was elected. His rhetoric was so powerful and persuasive, it's hard to imagine it emanated from the same office that produced Carter's accommodationist "inordinate fear of Communism" speech a mere seven years earlier. Speak softly and carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt said. And boy, did Reagan take that lesson to heart. Speak peacefully but prepare for war: in the hands of a master rhetorician the combination was unstoppable.

Of course, it's easy to see that in hindsight. Reagan's genius was that he intuited the right strategy against almost all of the experts.

Second, this speech really illustrates how second-rate was George W. Bush. Bush tried but never could really convince that Islam was not the enemy, and that conciliation was possible. Reagan did make that clear, even while condemning the "evil empire". Reagan managed to convey that the Soviet regime was the problem, not the Soviet people. With Bush a similar message vis-a-vis Muslims and Islamic regimes was never clear.

Canada As Racist, Imperialist Entity

2011-05-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

Posted without comment:

Hillary Deleted

2011-05-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Hasidic newspaper Der Tzitung edited Hillary Clinton - and Audrey Tomason, the only other woman in the room - out of the iconic photo of the Obama situation room during the bin Laden operation.

In other photo news, Clinton explained her expression, hand over mouth, as probably covering up a cough. Frankly, I don't believe for a second that Hillary was coughing. I also couldn't care less either way. The whole coughing spin strikes me as an overreaction to what she feared would be seen as a womanly "eeeek!" moment. But I don't think many people who know Hillary think she was heading for the fainting couch.

About the editing job, two points: first, the reaction strikes me as slightly misguided. It isn't offensive because women were edited out; it's offensive because it was edited. This way lies madness, and Jews of all people really ought to know better, what with their experiences under Communism, as well as Islamic historical revisionism regarding Jews. Second, imagine if the room had been full of women. Would Der Tzitung have edited them all out, showing just an empty room?

I would think that a Talmudic scholar could easily figure out that the right solution to this dilemma is simply not to print the photo at all. If that leads to fewer photos in the paper, then that's the price you pay for having 12th-century beliefs about the sexes.

The White House's Incoherence on Health Care

2011-05-10T22:03:00.000-07:00

From the White House blog today:

Those who claim that the “individual responsibility” provision exceeds Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce because it penalizes “inactivity” are simply wrong. Individuals who choose to go without health insurance are actively making an economic decision that affects all of us.

I hope it's clear to them what a dangerous precedent this would create. If doing nothing can be construed as an economic act that affects all of us, then what can't be? For example, once I've been forced to buy my health care, then literally doing nothing can be hazardous to my health. This potentially raises my future health care costs, and when those costs are shared by all, it affects everyone. Therefore, according to the White House's logic, it would be perfectly Constitutional to fine me for not exercising.

Of course, many liberals may well believe this. Nancy Pelosi expressed shocked disbelief at the notion that the PPACA's health insurance mandate might be unconstitutional. When Elena Kagan was asked during confirmation hearings whether a law requiring people to eat vegetables would be unconstitutional, she evaded the question.

Simply put, the left does not believe the Constitution is a "living document". They believe it is an irrelevant one. Only when the Constitution happens to coincide with one of their sacred cows do they recognize it; whenever it poses the slightest barrier, it is met with utter disdain.

The Loony Left On Osama

2011-05-09T18:32:00.000-07:00

When I say "loony left" I am referring, of course, to Noam Chomsky and his ilk. Brilliant linguist and political whack-job Chomsky has published his take on the Osama operation in the magazine Guernica.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

Surely Chomsky meant Saudi commandos, since I'm sure he's acutely aware that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Oh, but he believes that bin Laden didn't either!

There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon.

Osama Dead

2011-05-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

A few hours ago President Obama announced that American forces killed Osama bin Laden and, importantly, captured the body. So there should be proof.

Couple of points. Obviously, I'm happy this finally happened. We haven't heard much from Osama, but he's the kind of guy who's better off dead. So good for Obama for keeping the pressure up and taking the shot when the chance came. There's no doubt the President was in the loop on the final decision.

Second, if I can be permitted a little glibness, Osama's death penalty - executed less than ten years after the crime of which he was guilty, actually came faster than the average time on death row in the United States (which stands at 169 months in the latest statistics I could find - here - and hasn't been less than 120 months since 1993).

Third, while I'm pleased Obama ordered this mission, it's just one more indication of the difference between running for President and being President. I have no doubt that, had this operation been announced during the 2008 campaign, Obama's reaction would have been something like: Great, but we should have captured him and tried him with due process. He now realizes that Presidents often do not have that luxury.

Careful What You Wish For

2011-04-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

This is brilliant.

The Third Wave

2011-04-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Just read a fascinating article about a student experiment in totalitarianism. From the article:

On Monday, I introduced my sophomore history students to one of the experiences that characterized Nazi Germany. Discipline.... To experience the power of discipline, I invited, no I commanded the class to exercise and use a new seating posture.... It was strange how quickly the students took to this uniform code of behavior I began to wonder just how far they could be pushed.

As the class period was ending and without forethought I created a class salute. It was for class members only. To make the salute you brought your right hand up toward the right shoulder in a curled position.... You would be walking down the hall when all of a sudden three classmates would turn your way each flashing a quick salute. In the library or in gym students would be seen giving this strange hand jive.

I decided to issue membership cards to every student that wanted to continue what I now called the experiment. Not a single student elected to leave the room. In this the third day of activity there were forty-three students in the class. Thirteen students had cut class to be a part of the experiment. While the class sat at attention I gave each person a card. I marked three of the cards with a red X and informed the recipients that they had a special assignment to report any students not complying to class rules.

I won't give away how the experiment ends - read the article to find out - but suffice it to say that it well illustrates the appeal of the fascist mentality. As Solzhenitsyn put it: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."

Environmental "Truth" in a Nutshell

2011-04-17T23:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my family visited the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland. Pretty cool; definitely recommended. It's on a hilltop overlooking the bay, in a beautiful state park, and has many nice exhibits for ages 4-12 or so.

On the downside, a big chunk of the museum is given over to Bill Nye the Climate Guy. One attraction was a bicycle kids could ride while watching a video of Bill biking in front, and confronting a boy and his father for driving to the gym. "Why don't you bike or walk to the gym, or better yet, give up those gym memberships altogether?" says Bill. "Why don't you mind your own *&^# business?" I wanted them to respond.

But the worst one, and this really sums up something essential about the environmentalists, was a wind turbine demonstration. You were supposed to pull a handle, which started a flow of air going, that turned the wind turbines and made a light go on. Simple. Only, when I tried it, because of the angle of the turbine blades, the wind didn't make them turn. They just juddered and rocked back and forth, never actually making more than a few degrees of rotation in either direction.

But the light came on anyway. Obviously, the demo had been rigged: when you pulled the handle, it made the light go on. The turbine had nothing to do with it. I get why a museum would do this, of course: you want the demos to work and not frustrate the kids. But the irony is thick: environmentalists constantly try to rig the numbers to make it look like converting to a more expensive, less efficient form of energy production will create jobs, or to make it look like wind plants produce more energy than they do, or what have you. Are here they are rigging a museum demo about one of their pet technologies. Priceless.

Fascinating Fact

2011-04-12T17:44:00.001-07:00

Today is the sesquicentennial of the opening shots of the Civil War: the siege of Fort Sumter. And here is a fascinating fact that I just learned: the first shot fired by the Union defenders of Sumter came from the hand of Abner Doubleday, the (alleged) inventor of baseball.

Saving Entitlements

2011-04-08T17:23:00.001-07:00

Republicans are making a tactical mistake by calling their efforts to bring spending under control anything other than "saving entitlements". For decades they have been successfully depicted as wanting to throw Granny out on the street, so saying they want to "cut" anything, even though we have to, is not going to win the critical independent vote. The only way this works is if the Republicans can successfully counterattack with the message that the Democrats are actually out to destroy entitlement programs and Republicans are working to save them.

The argument is actually pretty simple. Under the Democrat "plan" - i.e., pretend our budget is fine as long as possible - entitlements will eventually become such a burden that they really will become unsustainable. They will crowd out other government spending; we will see rising interest rates, a devalued dollar, and the crowding out of private investment. The resulting backlash will likely be draconian: people who were "promised" entitlements and paid in for most of their lives will see their benefits cut to the bone, because there really will be no money. This is the future if the Democrats get their way.

As a conservative, I'm fine with saying that entitlements should be cut. But frankly, I don't count in this calculus. Independents will decide the 2012 election, as they have every election for the past 20+ years. And they are suspectible to the Granny-on-the-street argument. The Republicans must argue - and they have the benefit of the facts on their side, so all they have to do is stick to their guns on this - that Granny will be much safer with them than with the Democrats. Up to this point I don't think they've done this.

Republicans in the Mist

2011-04-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

Some great quotes from thisSalon article from a woman who discovers that Republicans are people, too. Here's one in particular:

She has the same education as I have, and yet she has made different decisions, decisions that are so counter to what I believe. Decisions I find abhorrent.

"Abhorrent," indeed. It's a commonplace that conservatives view liberals as stupid, while liberals view conservatives as evil. But it certainly is a funny word coming from a representative of the "Party of Tolerance."

This is a democracy, after all. Isn't it worth understanding a bit more about why approximately half the country votes differently than we do? Isn't it important that we understand why people -- good and legitimate Americans, whose votes count as much as ours -- like Sarah Palin? Isn't it crucial we figure out why any woman would want to defund Planned Parenthood, if only so we could then address the argument?

Just so. As a conservative in a family that is largely composed of two wings, the apolitical and the liberal, I'm sometimes on the receiving end of the sort of attitudes the author writes about. What's surprising to me is that the author is so confused. Very few people on either end of the political spectrum are out to ruin the country.

Most people have pretty localized interests: themselves, their families - particularly their offspring - and to a lesser extent, their neighbors, fellow Americans, all of humanity, and most tenuously of all, all living things. That's generally true for both conservatives and liberals. So if we agree on that much, obviously the difference comes down to how we perceive the best interests of those ever-larger groups.

The difference there can be pretty severe, of course. But that doesn't mean your opponents are either evil or stupid. I'm glad to see this one Salon writer finally figured this out.

Doing Your Taxes

2011-03-31T13:49:00.001-07:00

Jay Nordlinger writes today about taxes in America:

You know how people say, “There’s something wrong with our tax system if people can’t do their taxes on their own”? I think I agree with that. A special caste, almost a priestly caste, has grown up: tax accountants, tax preparers. They exist to help us do our taxes, or to do them for us.

Reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with a friend from Denmark. He was extolling the virtues of the Danish system: you give the government all your information, and they compute your taxes for you and send you a bill. Simple. I understand the allure of this idea, especially around this time of year. This year I get to file a federal return and two state returns, with major penalties on at least two of them because of some unexpected income in the year. It's a pain, and thank goodness we have software to help us.

I'd still prefer not to give the government my information if I don't have to. It's a losing battle, of course, or maybe a lost one: most of my finances are reported to them anyway in the normal course of doing business. But at least there's a chance to reverse this. Once the government is doing your taxes for you, the odds of reversal drop to infinitesimal levels.

But an even more important point is that with the authorities doing my taxes for me, I'm not as involved in the tax system. Right now I can see the loopholes: railroad workers get special treatment, as do the blind, the aged, those affected by natural disasters, and so on. It's right there on your 1040. Some loopholes are harder to find, of course, which is why we still have tax accountants. But if we turned over all preparation to the government, I lose whatever insight I currently have.

My Danish friend thought I was being a typically paranoid American. I hope my response was typical.

Watch Veena Malik

2011-03-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

Veena Malik is my new hero. The Pakistani actress takes an imam to task on television for criticizing her appearance on an Indian reality TV show. She is unstoppable!

I almost felt sorry for the imam. He probably thought he'd just do his usual thing, invoke the community, shame, etc., and that his opponent would be cowed. But Malik will not be shamed, will not be cowed. She fights right back, gives better than she got, and just whips the guy. Of course, this is how it looks to a Westerner like me: a brave woman speaking truth to power. But the more important question is, how does it look to the average Pakistani?

The Heart Warms

2011-03-28T15:43:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone points out that Texas should be the growth model for the nation.

Clean Energy: Pro and Con

2011-03-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

If you have a couple of hours, watch this. It's the video of a debate on the proposition: "Clean energy can drive America’s economic recovery." Or if you can't watch the video, you can read the transcript or listen to the debate.

Impeach!

2011-03-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

Says... Dennis Kucinich. No, not because the aliens said to. Apparently he thinks we should impeach Obama because of the attack on Libya. Priceless, priceless.

The best part are the comments below the story. My favorite is this one:

This was authorized by the U.N.

Please explain how the President has committed a crime.

Oh, well, in that case....

Clarity in Libya

2011-03-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to President Obama for clarifying our position vis-a-vis Libya. We are only intervening to protect Libyan civilians, not to oust Colonel Ghaddafi. However, Ghaddafi should go. But not because of the military intervention, of course. No, he should go because otherwise we might work with the U.N. to isolate him diplomatically, a threat which must chill the Colonel to his bones.

It is no wonder that the President is held in such high regard by foreign leaders, including the Arab League, whose own clarity of purpose was demonstrated by their welcoming a no-fly zone as long as no bullets or missiles were actually used. Perhaps butterfly nets would have sufficed.

No doubt this will all come to a happy conclusion soon.

Break Out the Potassium Iodide!

2011-03-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

Or rather, don't. XKCD explains relative radiation doses. It's interesting to read, and to compare the differences among Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl.

Clearly, TMI was nearly a non-event by comparison. The maximum external dosage was only 1 mSv, one-third the dosage from a single mammogram. The lowest radiation dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk is 100 mSv, so if you got that maximum external dosage near TMI for 100 years, you'd just reach this threshold. It's pretty clear that containment worked at TMI.

Next take Fukushima. All the facts are not yet in, but it's clearly worse than TMI: a one-day dose 50km away was already measured at 3.6 mSv. But — probably — no actual reactor fuel has been exposed to the atmosphere, which implies that the radioactive materials causing this dose have a short half-life and will quickly decay. There is reason for caution here, but this is almost guaranteed to be no Chernobyl.

It has been over 20 years since Chernobyl. And according to XKCD's chart, you can still get a 6 mSv dose in one hour on the grounds of the stricken reactor. That means spending a single day there, unprotected, would increase your risk of cancer. Spending two weeks there could very well kill you with a 2.1 Sv dose.

You could safely go on a camping trip to TMI today. Not so Chernobyl. The jury is still out of Fukushima, but my bet is that in 20 years it'll be much closer to the safer end of this spectrum.

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie

2011-03-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like Hollywood finally noticed that Atlas Shrugged is one of the bestselling novels of all time. The question, "Who is John Galt?" will finally be answered in cinematic form. I'm happy about this - and tickled that the movie opens on Tax Day, April 15, 2011. Even though I continue to have grave reservations about Ayn Rand herself, the novel is something different - something novel, if you will - and a sound rejection of the liberal platitudes that suffuse so many movies.

You can expect a thousand-page novel to be shortened for the film version. But maybe not too much: the one coming out in a month is just Part 1. Will Part 2 be just John Galt's speech? Let's hope not.

What Democrats Mean by "Democracy"

2011-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

Now that the Wisconsin state senate has passed Governor Walker's collective bargaining bill, it now falls to the State Assembly. But the Assembly was not able to hold a vote today. Why? Because of the danger posed by union protesters in Madison. I hope Democrats are extremely embarrassed by this. What the protesters are engaging in is raw violence for the purpose of preventing a vote they know will go against them, and entirely indefensible. Wisconsin's Democratic state legislators escaping to avoid the vote was bad enough, but could at least be viewed as a legitimate, if sharp-elbowed and cowardly, tactic. But protesters preventing the orderly functioning of government is ugly banana republic politics.

The Decline of Planetariums

2011-03-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

Or is that "planetaria"?

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to attend a school that had its own observatory and planetarium. As early as first grade, I was exposed to the wonders of the planetarium show, where the sky was projected on a hemispherical ceiling from this funny ant-like device. An astronomer (or maybe just a science teacher) would explain about the constellations, or the planets, or the Milky Way, or whatever, and could demonstrate on the ceiling what he was talking about. And it wasn't just in school that I enjoyed them - I visited several other planetariums over these years (the 70s and 80s) and got the same basic thing.

So when did they turn into overpriced movie theaters? My family and I visited the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. One thing we were really looking forward to was the planetarium show. It's billed as a planetarium; that's what I expected. But when we entered the room, it was just an Omnimax theater. We didn't get a planetarium show at all; instead it was just a 30-minute movie.

I guess it's easier for them to run a movie every half hour than a live show. And trying to recreate childhood experiences almost always disappoints. But the content itself is so watered down now. There's no basic descriptive astronomy: what's a constellation? what's a star? where are the planets? The subject matter is too broad (this particular one was about the origin of life in the universe) and necessarily, therefore, too shallow.

So take this as a call for planetarium shows like they had in the old days. And if anyone knows where I can still find one today, leave it in the comments!

Bogus Recovery

2011-03-08T23:12:00.000-08:00

I feel sort of bad posting this, because I've been so awfully slow at posting the past three months. Sorry, everyone! In my defense, I've started a new job, and I'm very busy. Anyhow, having said that, all I have here is a repost from another blog. Not good news.

Why Bother Trying to Prove There Is No God?

2011-02-06T23:40:00.000-08:00

Science and religion are like oil and water. Science is about devising theories about how the universe works; religion is about devising theories about how it *ought* to work. Granted, there are religious people who want to encroach on science, and I suppose they've made some small amount of headway with slightly clever ideas about Intelligent Design and so on. But these ideas are really no threat, in my opinion.

Which makes it all the stranger when real scientists take them seriously. In this case, cosmologist Don Page "says that a slightly negative value of the [cosmological] constant would maximise this process. And since life is some small fraction of the amount of matter in galaxies, then this is the value that an omnipotent being would choose." Whereas in the universe as we know it, the cosmological constant actually has a small positive value. Therefore, concludes Page, God must not have fine-tuned the constant.

What nonsense, and what a waste of time. There are any number of explanations why Page could be wrong: maybe greater density of stars and galaxies leads to more radiation, making it less likely for stable molecules to form. Maybe a higher constant leads to a universe whose duration is too short for life to evolve. Maybe anything. And moreover: who cares? This sort of theological debate really doesn't belong in science. Page may have a real discovery on his hands: that he has found a link between the cosmological constant and galaxy formation. That's useful knowledge. But to try to leverage it into a theological argument demeans it.

Misconceptions in Math Education

2010-12-22T22:40:00.000-08:00

This is worth a read.

The great misconception about mathematics -- and it stifles and thwarts more students than any other single thing -- is the notion that mathematics is about formulas and cranking out computations. It is the unconsciously held delusion that mathematics is a set of rules and formulas that have been worked out by God knows who for God knows why, and the student's duty is to memorize all this stuff. Such students seem to feel that sometime in the future their boss will walk into the office and demand "Quick, what's the quadratic formula?" Or, "Hurry, I need to know the derivative of 3x^2 - 6x +1." There are no such employers.

Mathematics is not about answers, it's about processes.

Apologies for My Absence

2010-12-22T22:38:00.000-08:00

My apologies for over a month of silence from Athwart History: Mr. History has moved across the country and started a new job. So things are in some turmoil right now. But with any luck we will be back to regular posting soon!

A Modest Proposal

2010-11-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

They say that if you tax something, you get less of it. So maybe that's the real benefit of a death tax: less death!

Why Have Kids?

2010-11-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

The radio today reminded me about happiness studies that consistently show that having kids reduces your happiness. This raises an important question: why bother having kids? It's expensive, for starters. It's inconvenient. If it also, to top it off, makes you less happy, then why do it at all?

I think the answer most parents - myself included - would give is that having kids fulfills a need that can't be met by any other means. There's probably some neurological trigger at work here; there's no need to mysticize it. But that makes it no less real. And it raises another important question: is life really about maximizing happiness?

Most religious people would easily answer no to this question. So let's address it to the non-religious, again like myself. I do not believe that maximizing happiness is the goal of life (as evidence of my belief I offer the fact that I consciously chose to have children). The goal seems to be to have a posterity, to leave something behind after we die. For all of us do at some point come to a realization that we are going to die. That fact is difficult to grasp, but the tragedy is eased by the knowledge that something will succeed us, that we are a part of some larger tapestry. Otherwise, we are simply here for a brief few moments of time and then are gone forever.

There are, of course, other ways to join the tapestry of the world than having children: one can become famous, one can make great friends who will carry our memories, etc. But children are the most reliable route, and the one most accessible to the average person. After all, if everyone were famous, no one would be; by definition this route is accessible only to a very few (particularly when we restrict our view to those who are famous enough to be truly remembered a generation after their deaths; this is a very exclusive club indeed).

Consider two people: One, the pure individual, not necessarily nihilistic, but one focused purely on happiness. He is not necessarily a bad person, or selfish, but by definition is self-centered. Two, the family member, one who has a tightly-knit family, with all its trials and tribulations. Picture in your mind's eye both of their lives at the age of, say, 40 years old. The individual is traveling in Europe with his girlfriend, sampling the best that life has to offer. The family man is rushing home after work because his wife has an outing planned that evening and it is his night to prepare dinner for the kids and put them to bed. Which is happier? We can't see into their heads, of course, but it's easy to imagine that the individual is.

Let us cast our view forward twenty years. Now both men are near retirement. The individual has mastered his golf game and has toured all the major courses. He regales his friends with stories of his travels and adventures. He is the life of every party. The family man's children have grown up and left the house; he has paid a heavy price to put them through college, foregoing many of life's pleasures for this. His kids have developed in different ways: perhaps one is a real success, with many friends and a career. Perhaps another is not on such a positive track. But they remain family nonetheless. Again, the individual appears to have had the happier life.

But now let us move another twenty years into the future. Both men are on their deathbeds. The individual has a few friends who visit him, but most of them are preoccupied with their own families, and many are uncomfortable at the sight of the old man so broken down. The family man, though, has his family: his kids have had kids of their own, so there are grandkids. They come to visit out of love and affection. The old man dies knowing that his life had a purpose, however small in the grand scheme of things. Does the individual?

That is not so clear. He might. It's not my intention to disparage or denigrate this lifestyle choice. But odds are good that this man will realize at some point that his life will end entirely unnoticed. The family man's position is not so much better: his life will end mostly unnoticed: his family is but a tiny drop in an ocean both of time and of space. But the difference between nothing and something can be a vast chasm.

So is the goal of life, then, merely its extension, even if only in memories and deeds? Not quite. The truly fulfilled man does not just seek to be remembered, but to have had an impact. We don't just wants our kids to remember us, but for us to have set them on a certain path, to have prepared them for life and, ultimately, for their own struggle with its meaning. That, perhaps, is the greatest blessing of grandchildren: evidence that the torch has been passed one more generation, that the lessons we taught and the pleasures we forewent were not in vain

U.S.: Manufacturing Powerhouse

2010-11-11T09:04:00.000-08:00

Kevin Williamson has a great article on why we shouldn't scapegoat a low renminbi for our economics troubles. Embedded in his article is a great point, often overlooked, about American manufacturing. You hear people from time to time saying things like: We don't build things in this country any more. Poppycock. Here's Williamson:

Despite all the new competition, the United States remains a manufacturing powerhouse — in fact, the total value of manufacturing output in the United States today is far, far higher than it was in the 1950s. Measured by revenue, profit, or return on investment, U.S. manufacturing is unparalleled, and our factories' output is more than twice China’s. But it is true that many manufacturing jobs have been "lost." They were lost not because U.S. manufacturing can't compete with that of feckless Third World rivals, but because U.S. manufacturing is, to use the technical economics term, awesome. The real productivity of U.S. businesses overall grew at an average rate of 1.5 percent a year from 1973 to 1995, which is a really robust number. But the productivity of U.S. manufacturing businesses grew by 2.5 percent in those same years, which is enormous. As Martin Wolf puts it in Why Globalization Works, that growth in productivity alone would have reduced significantly the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States. Add in the fact that people in affluent societies spend relatively less of their disposable income on manufactured goods and relatively more on services, and that reduction becomes even more dramatic. And so it was. There is an obvious parallel: In very poor societies, large numbers of people are employed in agriculture, and people spend most of their money on food. As they get richer, relatively few work in agriculture, and they spend proportionally little on food. Manufacturing, as Wolf sees it, is the new agriculture. In historical terms, it was not that long ago that 75 percent of the U.S. work force was engaged in farming. Now it's less than 1 percent. But who laments the loss of good farming jobs? (Mostly people who have never worked on a farm, that's who.)

I often ask people to name the country with the largest manufacturing output. China? Japan? Nope. It's the U.S.A. It's worthwhile remembering this.

In Defense of Keith Olbermann

2010-11-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

It's hard to avoid a whiff of schadenfreude when hearing about Keith Olbermann's suspension by MSNBC in the wake of the revelation that he donated to three Democratic candidates in contravention of MSNBC policies. But that would be too easy.

What's so wrong about political donations from opinion journalists, really? Is anyone surprised to find that Olbermann favors Democrats? Does anyone think: Hey, maybe this means Olbermann might be less than fair when talking about politics. It's one thing when supposedly objective journalists are caught donating. (Although is any journalist really objective? Question for another day.) But Olbermann, Hannity, Maddow, Huckabee: they are not objective. They are not hired to be objective, they are hired to give opinions.

Opinion journalists, pretty much by definition, operate in the open. They have to talk in order to do their work. They give their opinions as part of the job. So their opinions are already a matter of public record. There would seem to be nothing whatsoever lost by allowing them to donate or otherwise exercise their freedom of political speech.

Unless, of course, their employers want to maintain the fig leaf that they are actually objective journalists. But surely MSNBC doesn't think anyone believes that about Keith Olbermann. Right? Free Olbermann!

Welcome to Gridlock

2010-11-03T05:13:00.000-07:00

My predictions were fairly accurate. I said +7 in the Senate and +61 in the House. So far it's +5 in the Senate, with Colorado, Washington and Alaska left. Alaska will be a Republican or Independent who caucuses with Republicans. If the other two split evenly, there's your +7. In the House, RealClearPolitics has it +61 with 423 races called. However, here's the bad news for the Democrats: in the remaining 12 races, every one is currently held by a Democrat. So if they split evenly, expect a final pickup of 67 seats in the House. Wow.

But the exact numbers don't really matter at this point. We know that the House will be GOP-controlled, the Senate Democrat-controlled, and of course the White House run by a Democrat. So unless the President tacks sharply to the middle, we can expect gridlock city. The GOP should try to pass useful bills, but will probably serve more of a pressure-generating role: they will need to put some ideas on the table that have not had an airing over the past two years. Ideally, some of these ideas might get passed. But if not, the second-best thing is to win the battle of ideas so that after 2012 conservatism can make some legislative progress.

Reid Wins

2010-11-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to oust Reid, but this could have a silver lining. Reid is still very unpopular nationwide. Angle would've been problematic at best. And it really doesn't matter much whether the GOP has 47 Senators or 48 or even 49. Frankly, I think if the Democrats were smart, they'd replace Reid after this debacle. Remember after the 2008 elections when people were expecting the GOP to lose seats in 2010 because of all the seats they'd have to defend? We're a long way from there, and Reid is being blamed.

Toomey!

2010-11-02T21:23:00.001-07:00

And it's Toomey in Pennsylvania. Fantastic news.

Also looks like Kirk wins in Illinois!

Fiorina couldn't pull it off in California. Too bad, but not unexpected.

6 Left in the Senate

2010-11-02T20:36:00.000-07:00

It's 49-45 in the Senate, with 6 left uncalled: Colorado, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Washington, Illinois and California. Republicans would have to win them all to have a clear 51-seat majority: don't count on that. Currently the GOP leads in PA (Toomey's up 52-48 now!), WA and IL (go Kirk!), but losing everywhere else. If that holds, it'll just match my prediction: a 7-seat pickup.

Early Returns Are In...

2010-11-02T20:03:00.002-07:00

Toomey and Sestak separated by 2,000 votes. That one could go late into the night.

CNN just called it for Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold. Yea!!! Earlier today I was cleaning up some old email and realized that I was on a Feingold email list back into 2009. Reading over some of the emails I didn't even see Johnson's name mentioned six or eight months ago. Came out of nowhere and knocked off a Democratic stalwart. That one's got to sting.

Manchin winning in WV - too bad, but we saw that coming. He's been leading consistently in polls the last couple of weeks.

Buck losing in Colorado by 5%. Not good.

Exit polls just coming in from California and Washington - Fiorina down 53-43 and Rossi down 52-46.

And just saw Kirk up 48-47 in Illinois!

Early Election-Day Observations

2010-11-02T11:57:00.002-07:00

Concerning the election today, a few early observations:

1. My polling location was nearly empty. I walked in, gave my name, got my card, and voted. No lines whatsoever. Here in blue-state New Jersey, where the biggest race is Little-Pallone, that's no big surprise. But perhaps is reason to hope for Little, a major underdog whose only hope is that her voters are much more enthusiastic than Pallone's.

2. Pallone has been running attack ads over the past week. This must indicate that he's at least a bit worried. If he was running a 30-point lead, he could safely run soft-focus ads talking about how great he is, and not worry about the tiny gnat buzzing around. But he's been forced to go after Little by name. It's probably not fair to say that he's running scared, but he's hearing footsteps.

3. WNYC (my local NPR affiliate) is talking about Christine O'Donnell and her gaffes this election season. A less relevant discussion it would be hard to imagine. Look, Democrats: she's going to lose, and deservedly so. How about talking about some close races?

The Election, Finally

2010-11-02T03:30:00.002-07:00

I am going off today to vote for Anna Little in her insurgent campaign against Congressman Frank Pallone. She's an unabashed Tea Partier - here in New Jersey! - and seems like a decent enough sort. I'm no knee-jerk Tea Party supporter. I generally support their ideas, but they've put forth a few really poor candidates. Still, that's partially just because they're inexperienced in the world of politics, and that's not a bad thing. In fact, I'd say it's a good thing, net-net.

Little can't be any worse than Pallone, who - unlike many of his Democrat colleagues - has been campaigning fully in support of Obamacare, the Stimulus, and all the other boondoggles of the 111th Congress. The polling is unclear, but Little might just have a shot. In many ways, while this individual race isn't all that important, it can be a bellwether for the hoped-for Republican surge. For if Little wins, or even is within a point or two, then it's going to be a huge night.

More blogging tonight as polls come in. For now, this is my emblem:

Prediction Time

2010-11-01T08:24:00.001-07:00

In the Senate, I'm predicting a 7-seat gain for the GOP. Ignoring the seats with 10-point leads one way or the other, there are 8 seats in play, with 2 locked up for the GOP. Those 8 seats are: California (DEM+3), Colorado (GOP+4), Illinois (GOP+2), Nevada (GOP+4), Pennsylvania (GOP+5), Washington (GOP+1), West Virginia (DEM+3), and Wisconsin (GOP+7), where I'm giving the latest poll results in each case. Many of these polls are within the margin of error, but we can still calculate probabilities for each. Based on these numbers, we can find a joint probability distribution for various levels of GOP pickup.

GOP Gain	Probability
+2	negligible
+3	0.04%
+4	0.6%
+5	4.6%
+6	17.6%
+7	34.1%
+8	30.9%
+9	10.9%
+10	1.3%

The median of the distribution is at the high end of a 7-seat GOP pickup. It's certainly pretty likely that we'll have an 8-seat pickup, but playing the odds I'll predict +7.

In the House, it's more complicated since there are a lot more races. Also, polls are sketchier. But let's use the latest Real Clear Politics map to make some estimates. If we plug in some reasonable probabilities corresponding to "likely GOP", "leaning GOP" and "tossup", we get this distribution for GOP seats (here I'm ignoring insignificant tails):

GOP Seats	GOP Lead	Probability
Under 223		0.07%
223	10	0.06%
224	12	0.10%
225	14	0.17%
226	16	0.28%
227	18	0.45%
228	20	0.69%
229	22	1.01%
230	24	1.45%
231	26	1.99%
232	28	2.65%
233	30	3.40%
234	32	4.22%
235	34	5.06%
236	36	5.86%
237	38	6.55%
238	40	7.07%
239	42	7.38%
240	44	7.44%
241	46	7.24%
242	48	6.80%
243	50	6.18%
244	52	5.41%
245	54	4.58%
246	56	3.74%
247	58	2.95%
248	60	2.25%
249	62	1.65%
250	64	1.17%
251	66	0.80%
252	68	0.53%
253	70	0.34%
254	72	0.21%
255	74	0.12%
256	76	0.07%
Over 256		0.08%

The median of the distribution is for the GOP to have 240 seats, representing a 61-seat GOP pickup. There is a 96% chance the GOP will pick up between 50 and 76 seats, and a 90% chance they pick up between 52 and 69 seats. So I think we can count on the GOP having at least a 26-seat majority and it's not impossible for them to attain a 60-seat majority.

Of course, this will do them little good without the Senate or the White House. Those will have to wait until 2012.

Menendez Wants to Allocate Your Collective Wealth

2010-11-01T07:02:00.002-07:00

Bob Menendez (D-Cuba) makes the following assertion about tax cuts on ABC's This Week:

You can't talk about spending and being responsible about spending and then spend $4 trillion that you don't have of our collective wealth to the individuals who have the greatest wealth in the country.

I see. According to Sen. Menendez, your money, my money, and your neighbor's money is all collective wealth to be allocated to the poor, the middle-class, or the wealthy as Sen. Menendez and Barack Obama decide. This is the face of the Democratic Party, folks. We've got to eject these clowns posthaste.

Here's the video. The interesting part starts around 9:15:

Intrade Predicts 61-Seat GOP Gain

2010-10-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

Very interesting analysis of Intrade data from Eddy Elfenbein.

An Open Letter to NPR

2010-10-25T15:27:00.002-07:00

I just received an e-mail from my local NPR affiliate, WNYC, to "double my pledge". This is the e-mail I sent in response:

To Whom It May Concern:

I will not be "doubling my pledge", or indeed renewing my pledge next year when the anniversary rolls around. The reason for my change of heart is the firing of Juan Williams. This was an inexplicable, execrable move that I simply cannot support. Please make it clear to your own management and on up the chain that there is at least a portion of your listenership that does not believe that what Williams had to say was even close to a firing offense, and that firing him as a result illustrates NPR's disrespect and intolerance for opposing viewpoints.

Sincerely,
--

- James

UPDATE: To their credit, WNYC responded. Some boilerplate aside, here's the important part:

As the local New York broadcaster of NPR programming, we are always interested to hear our listeners' comments about their programming content and their organization. However, it is important to understand that our organization does not have influence in the content of NPR programming, with their staff, or in their personnel decisions. We pay NPR for the programming and news that we broadcast and, as such, are separate independent organizations.

It's not directly WNYC's fault that NPR fired Juan Williams. But they're not exactly independent, either. WNYC is part of the NPR family. I don't give money to NPR; I give to WNYC. And it seems perfectly reasonable to cut off funding to WNYC in this case. I want them upset with NPR.

The logic seems to me stronger than when people boycott a company for advertising on a show they find objectionable. The company isn't directly responsible for the show's content, but they know the basic message and can sever the relationship if it grows too burdensome. I'm putting pressure (a tiny amount in my case, but hopefully my case is but one among thousands) on WNYC so that they will pressure NPR.

Solving Linear Equations Just Got Much Faster

2010-10-22T15:38:00.001-07:00

In computer science, we measure the efficiency of an algorithm in a couple of ways, but one of the most important is called "asymptotic complexity", usually written in something called big-O notation. This notation captures an algorithm's scalability as the problem size gets larger. For example, an algorithm with O(n) performance takes about twice as long to run if the problem size doubles. An algorithm with O(n^2) performance would take four times as long.

You can get a feel for this without computers. Most of us have sorted books alphabetically before, by title or by author. If you have just a few books, say ten or fewer, you can usually eyeball it and get them sorted without using any special algorithm. What you are really doing here (I think) is a sort of mental version of what we CS types call a "selection sort" - you are finding the alphabetically first book, placing it first, then finding the next one and placing it, and so on. With a small set of books, that works fine. But suppose you have 1,000 books to sort. Now the problem is much harder: you can't store the 1,000 books in your memory, so the only practical way to carry out that algorithm is to pick up the first book at hand and then start checking all other books. As you find one alphabetically earlier, put down the book you're holding and pick up the new one, then continue until you've looked at all the books. The book you're holding is the alphabetically first one, so place it on the shelf. Great! Now repeat another 999 times.

This takes a while. In big-O terms, it's an O(n^2) algorithm, which means that running it for 1,000 books takes about 100^2 = 10,000 times longer than running it for 10 books. Not very practical!

You probably intuitively understand this, because if you were really given the job of sorting 1,000 books, you wouldn't do it this way. An alternate (and much faster) way is to start by sorting the books by first letter: you put all the books with authors starting with A in a pile, all the books with authors starting with B in another pile, and so on. Eventually you have 26 piles, some bigger and some smaller. The average pile size will be 1,000/26, or about 40 books. If you just ran selection sort on the piles, each would take about 4^2 = 16 times longer than sorting 10 books, and you'd have to do it 26 times, so you end up doing 416 times more work than sorting 10 books. But that's a 24x improvement over just running selection sort. (To the detail-oriented: yes, it's true that since the piles are different sizes, you won't actually do quite this well in practice. But you can easily make the large piles small by running our "binning" algorithm on the second letter for those large piles: take the S pile and make new piles for authors starting Sa, Sb, Sc, and so on.) (Also: but what about the time needed to split the the 1,000 books into bins in the first place? The good news here is that deciding which pile to put the books into is easy: just look at the book. So you just look at each book once. That takes some time, but it's not significant compared to the rest of the algorithm, which involves comparing pairs of books. In big-O terms, this is an O(n) contribution to the overall algorithm, so it doesn't change the overall complexity.)

So, now you understand how complexity works. We care a lot about the complexity of algorithms that we use all the time. For example, above I talked about sorting, because we sort all the time. You can hardly take two steps in your average code base without tripping over a sort. It turns out that sorting (assuming nothing about the data being sorted) takes O(nlogn) time, meaning that it scales almost linearly: that logn term rises slowly, but it's there. O(nlogn) is slower than O(n), but it's much, much faster than O(n^2). Suppose an algorithm takes 1 second with 1,000 data points. Then an O(n) algorithm would take 1,000 seconds with 1 million data points. An O(nlogn) algorithm would take 3,000 seconds (we'll use base-10 logs here). But an O(n^2) algorithm would take 1 million seconds.

Another problem that comes up a lot in CS (not as much as sorting, but a lot) is solving systems of linear equations. Here the measure of problem size is "number of variables", and we'd like to solve systems with lots of variables: millions, even billions of them. The naive, basic algorithm for solving them is something called Gaussian elimination, and it's an O(n^3) algorithm - that's cubed. As you can imagine, this performs pretty badly with large numbers of variables. With a million variables, an O(n^3) algorithm will run a billion times slower than it would with 1,000 variables. So if you could solve a system of a thousand variables in a microsecond, it would take 1,000 seconds - almost 17 minutes - to solve one with a million variables. There are some algorithms that solve linear systems slightly faster than this, but improvements have been slow.

So along comes these Carnegie Mellon researchers. They've figured out a clever algorithm that reduces the complexity of solving (certain kinds of) systems of linear equations to O(n(logn)^2) time. It's hard to express how huge an advance this is. Take our example above: where solving a system of 1,000 variables takes a microsecond and solving a system of a million variables takes 17 minutes. With the new algorithm, you could solve the larger problem in 9,000 microseconds, which is still just 9 milliseconds. Or you could solve an even larger problem - a billion variables - in just 36 seconds. This is an extraordinary achievement.

Read the whole story here.

UPDATE: I meant to mention this in the original post, but forgot. It's worth worrying a bit about the constant. The problem with "asymptotic complexity" is that it only gives an ordering of runtimes with very large problem sizes. For small problem sizes, the constant, or even constant-time or other lower-order terms, can dominate the actual run-time.

The constant shows up as follows: suppose that algorithm A has runtime of approximately n seconds for problem size n, and that algorithm B has runtime of 10^-10 n^2 for problem size n. Then algorithm A has O(n) complexity and B has O(n^2) complexity. But for problem size n=1,000, A takes 1000 seconds while B takes only 10^-4 seconds. For problem size n=1,000,000, A takes 1,000,000 seconds while B takes 100 seconds. As you can see, B is much faster over a very wide range of problem sizes. So even though B is "slower" in the asymptotic sense, it's probably faster in most real cases.

Lower-order terms can matter, too: suppose algorithm A has runtime of 10^-6 n + 2 seconds, while algorithm B has runtime of 10^-6 n^2 seconds. Both A and B have the same constant. But for problem size n = 1,000, A takes about 2 seconds while B takes 1 second: the added 2 seconds for A (presumably for setup and precomputation, or something) dominates the runtime. For much larger problems, of course, A may still be faster: its asymptotic complexity is O(n) compared to B's O(n^2).

So this new algorithm has great asymptotic complexity, but it's worth waiting until we see the constants, lower-order complexities, and other things (like how well the algorithm fits into cache, how well it can be parallelized, etc.) before considering it a big win.

Another Entry in the Black Book of Communism

2010-10-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

This is truly awful.

A pregnant woman in south China was detained, beaten and forced to have an abortion just a month before her due date because the baby would have violated the country's one-child limit, her husband said Thursday.

Forced abortions are bad enough. But a forced abortion of an eight-month fetus is indistinguishable from murder (even if you don't think the abortion of, say, a one-month fetus is murder). A fetus at that stage is perfectly viable outside the womb. The Chinese cold-bloodedly killed a baby in their mad pursuit of social policy.

NPR Fires Juan Williams

2010-10-21T16:02:00.003-07:00

NPR has fired Juan Williams for his remarks about Muslims on The O'Reilly Factor.

Obviously, NPR is within its rights to do so, being a private organization. (Well, sort of. Doesn't NPR receive government funding? The government certainly twists the arms of other organizations that act in ways it doesn't like if they receive funding.) But there is a difference between having a right to do something and something being the right thing to do. You might imagine, from the fact of his termination, that Williams must have said some truly awful things about Muslims. Here's what he said:

But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Many Americans share these views. Any why wouldn't they? Muslims are responsible for most plane hijackings around the world, and four particular ones nine years ago that you might remember. Williams isn't making a policy proposal, for crying out loud. He's airing his personal fears. Surely NPR wouldn't fire someone for giving a personal, mainstream opinion. Maybe it was this (which O'Reilly said, but Williams agreed with):

The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.

That's controversial, surely. You could easily disagree with it. But is it a firing offense?

It's a shame that NPR felt the need to take such an extraordinary step about such ordinary statements.

UPDATE:

Here's video of Juan Williams' side of things:

If Williams said something bigoted here, we should remember this the next time a person of color admits to experiencing a frisson of fear upon seeing a white policeman. Apparently, such an admission can get you fired from NPR.

The Closing of the American Mind (Jazz Version)

2010-10-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Whenever I listen to my Ella Fitzgerald CD, I want to comment on this. Here are the opening lyrics of the Cole Porter song Just One of Those Things:

As Dorothy Parker once said to her boy friend,
"Fare thee well,"
As Columbus announced when he knew he was bounced,
"It was swell, Isabelle, swell,"
As Abélard said to Héloïse,
"Don't forget to drop a line to me, please,"
As Juliet cried in her Romeo's ear,
"Romeo, why not face the fact, my dear?"

This was written in 1935, the depths of the Depression. At that time, these references were considered intelligible enough to use in popular culture. Can you imagine such a thing today?

On Nuclear Accidents

2010-10-19T15:03:00.000-07:00

Just read an interesting article by Ed Grabianowski on io9 about nuclear accidents and near-disasters. Couple of quotes:

We spent the Cold War in perpetual fear that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would start an intentional nuclear conflict. The truth is, we came far closer to blowing ourselves up with nuclear weapons than we ever came to WWIII.... The Russians either lost a nuclear sub, lost a sub with nuclear weapons on board, had a nuclear sub's reactor melt down, or all three roughly every other week.... The sad lesson is that we have less to fear from naked aggression than we do from incompetence and bad engineering.

I don't mean to diminish the danger of nuclear accidents, and certainly there was a learning curve involved here - a very dangerous learning curve (it's notable that all the incidents listed occurred between 1950 and 1979, and all the ones in which radiation was released occurred before 1966). But Grabianowski betrays his own politics with some of these claims. How can he know we came "closer to blowing ourselves up than to WWIII"? There were several incidents that came close to sparking WWIII, too - which was "closer"?

It's tempting to think that, as close as some of these engineering mishaps were, they actually weren't as close as the author thinks. Grabianowski himself points out that the Russians had accidents all the time that never had the dire consequences he imagines (other than Chernobyl). That strikes me as evidence that nuclear engineering is not as prone to actual disaster scenarios as the author thinks.

Grabianowski's closing quote, that we have less to fear from aggression than from incompetence, is utter nonsense. Even restricting our historical view just to nuclear weaponry, it's hard to ignore the fact that far more people have been killed by atomic weapons than by atomic accidents. In fact, it's possible that more people were killed on 9/11 than by Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. (Wikipedia says: "It is estimated that there will ultimately be a total of 4,000 deaths attributable to the accident, due to increased cancer risk." But these estimates are notoriously unreliable, and impossible to prove. In any case, the numbers are comparable.) The twentieth century witnessed hundreds of millions die as a result of naked aggression, and two or three orders of magnitude less due to engineering mishaps.

The numerical comparison demonstrates the absurdity of the claim. But the philosophy behind it is also wrongheaded. Does Grabianowski believe that our military is more dangerous in peacetime than it is valuable in wartime? Having a nuclear-armed military runs the risk of accident. Building and operating nuclear power plants runs similar risks. But in both cases, there is significant return on this investment. In the field of nuclear technology, it is much easier to imagine disaster scenarios than to actually find them.

We should be cautious, but not allow our caution to stop us moving at all. Doing nothing, or worse, doing the wrong things, also runs risks. Suppose the Global Warming people are right. Then we should be building nuclear plants at breakneck speed. The risk of accident should be overwhelmed by the risk (according to the most dire claims of the Warmingists) of warming. But in many cases those very environmentalists block nuclear power, preferring pie-in-the-sky plans involving solar or wind power. The result is what no one wants: ever greater dependency on fossil fuels.

Grabianowski probably was not thinking all of these things when he wrote the article. I have no reason to believe that he is a nuclear-power-protesting environmentalist. Nonetheless, his article feeds a nucleophobia that we as a society must learn to get over.

That Living Constitution

2010-10-15T15:19:00.001-07:00

I had a discussion earlier in the week with a liberal (he would prefer me to say "progressive") friend of mine who was astonished at my declaration that the left was responsible for judicial activism in the Supreme Court. Surely, he said, the left would merely say the same thing about the right. This was a phenomenon that was universal, and that both sides practiced in an effort to subvert the other, nothing but further evidence that the Court has become politicized.

He's right: the left would say the same thing. But they'd be wrong. Judicial activism - by which I mean judges writing decisions using their own preferences rather than their interpretation of the Constitution - stems from Progressive impatience with Constitutional restraint. We can go over the whole history of this another time, but a Corner post by John Derbyshire really gets to the root of it.

A reader writes to Derb:

let me relate the story to you of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s visit to my alma mater. (For the record, I was not in attendance at her lecture, but I heard the same story from multiple trusted colleagues). A student asked Justice Ginsburg about the use of the "intermediate scrutiny" test for equal protection review. Intermediate scrutiny is the standard by which courts review challenges to government classifications based on gender. (The court uses "rational basis" review for what it calls "non-suspect" classifications, such as wealth, which is a relatively easy test for the government to pass, and a "strict scrutiny" test for "suspect classifications," such as race, which is a much harder standard for the government to clear). The basis of the question was Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion in US v. Virginia (the case that forced Virginia Military Institute to become a co-ed institution), in which she applied a version of intermediate scrutiny that had never been applied before and which seemed to many observers much more like a strict scrutiny review (in other words, she held the government to a higher standard than precedent seemed to dictate). The student wanted to know how Justice Ginsburg arrived at the use of this "revised" standard.

Her answer astonishes me to this day. She told those assembled that the justices do not use the analytical framework to reach the results in a given case, but that they decide the result first and then fit the opinion into the existing framework.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is a stunning admission. I do not believe you would hear anything like it from any originalist on the Court.

Practical Passwords

2010-10-13T15:43:00.000-07:00

According to this article on Web password standards, I am one of the "stupid people" who maintain unsafe password practices. Here are some of the findings and my responses:

"4 in 10 respondents shared passwords with at least one person in the past year.": I haven't done this one, but I've encouraged my wife to give me a couple of her passwords to help debug some problems she's having. I don't think she's making a huge mistake here. How many of those 4 in 10 shared passwords with a trusted loved one?
"Nearly as many people use the same password to log into multiple Web sites, which could expose their information on each of the sites if one of them becomes compromised.": I use the same password all the time (I have about five that I generally use, across dozens of sites requiring a password). Sure, it's true that this means if one site is compromised then so might others. But the person getting that password would have to know which sites, and my usernames on those sites. That's not necessarily all that easy.
"Almost half of all users never use special characters (e.g. ! ? & #) in their passwords, a simple technique that makes it more difficult for criminals to guess passwords.": Not necessarily. Most use of special characters is in "133t" spelling: instead of your password being "password", it'll be "p455w0rd" or something like that. I've written dictionary attack software. Adding 133t spelling adds some words to check, but it's not that big a deal. It's true that a password like "5*(AJS*&1" is hard to crack, but then so is "jka82pma8". Furthermore, most sites lock you out after a small number of wrong guesses, so dictionary attacks aren't really very effective.
"30 percent [of young people] logged into a site requiring a password over public WiFi (vs. 21 percent overall).": Again, this is no big deal... if you do it over SSL encryption. True, sending a password on an unencrypted public WiFi channel is risky. Don't do that. But your bank's Web site is SSL-encrypted, so don't worry about that.
"And 30 percent remember their passwords by writing them down and hiding them somewhere like a desk drawer.": No less a security guru than Bruce Schneier has endorsed this practice, and I completely agree. Hackers can't hack your desk, or your wallet. You're far better off having hard passwords written down in a fairly secure location than really bad passwords (e.g. "123456") that you can remember.

There are, of course, good password practices and bad. But I'm not convinced that surveys like this really reveal that people are as stupid as they think (they may be, but not for the reasons put forth in the survey).

Having a different password for every site, as they recommend, is a wonderful idea. It's also totally impractical. They're also correct that having a single password you use for every site is also a bad idea. The happy medium is to have a few passwords. Use one you can easily remember for all the stuff you don't care much about: Facebook, Slashdot, etc. Use a somewhat harder one for online stores (and don't trust any online store that makes it easy to retrieve your credit card number). And use your best one - maybe here it makes sense to go the "one per site" route - for online banking and brokerage accounts.

Who is Tom Donilon?

2010-10-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

He's the new National Security Advisor, replacing Marine General James Jones. And his appointment demonstrates President Obama's unseriousness about national security. Donilon is a professional lobbyist, not a national security expert (although he has been an Obama advisor on national security since the transition in 2008-09, and worked in Pres. Clinton's state department). Should we take this as a small but clear signal that Obama will not be practicing Clintonian triangulation after he loses control of Congress in November? The appointment of a party hack to a critical post would seem to indicate this.

Congrats to Liu Xiaobo

2010-10-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is a poke in the eye of China's Communist regime. Finally!

China is trying to block news of the announcement from its own citizens, using the Great Firewall of China and even radio jamming. They claim to be upset because Liu is a "criminal". But he's no murderer - all he's guilty of is "inciting subversion of state power", which is the sort of crime that in the United States is likely to get you elected. In China they throw you in jail.

I don't know much about Liu's story, but if China is throwing this big a hissy fit about his winning the Nobel Prize, he must be a good choice.

Joining the Blog Bomb for Geert Wilders

2010-10-07T03:24:00.004-07:00

Geert Wilders is currently on trial in the Netherlands for his short film Fitna. The film can be viewed in its entirety here. Please be advised that it contains graphic scenes of violence.

The film depicts Islam in a very bad light. By interspersing verses from the Koran with scenes of Islamic violence and hatred, it creates the impression that they are related. (I suspect there is something to this, by the way. But that is a question I have dealt with in other blog posts.) One of the most damning indictments in the film is its videos of Muslim clerics speaking in Arabic, subtitled in English. As the invaluable Middle Eastern Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has illustrated time and again, it's a common terrorist tactic to say one thing to Western audiences and quite another to Arabic ones. Fitna provides a similar service.

The Netherlands is prosecuting Wilders under its hate speech code. Does the film fall under the purview of the code? Perhaps: I am not an expert on Dutch law, needless to say. But if you believe in freedom of speech (as the Dutch government clearly does not), this film is exactly the sort of thing that must be protected. It is political speech, protest speech. Note that the film has not been attacked as libelous. Inaccuracy is not part of the complaint.

Furthermore, its message is merely that Islam is dangerous and to "stop Islamization". There is no call to answer violence with violence. This is not hatred. It may be wrong; you may disagree with the message. But silencing the messenger is an offense against one of the basic freedoms of Western civilization.

Enviro-Fascists Show Their Colors

2010-10-04T15:14:00.000-07:00

This is a real ad promoting an environmentalist carbon-control program. It's "voluntary", but as you can see from the ad, they'd prefer that it wasn't.

The most telling point, I think, comes at the end, when the voice-over actress gets the button treatment. Just goes to show that no matter how much you do, it isn't enough. You have to be 100% committed to environmentalism, all the time, or they want you dead (or, at least, out of the way - let's give them the benefit of the doubt).

It all reflects a very Tom Friedman-esque viewpoint: if only we had more fascism and not so much democracy, we could really get some things done!

Economist v. Tea Party

2010-09-30T16:02:00.002-07:00

The Economist (in the person of its America-desk essayist, Lexington) casts a baleful glance at the Tea Party's reverence for the Constitution.

WOULDN’T it be splendid if the solutions to America’s problems could be written down in a slim book no bigger than a passport that you could slip into your breast pocket? That, more or less, is the big idea of the tea-party movement, the grassroots mutiny against big government that has mounted an internal takeover of the Republican Party and changed the face of American politics.

There is something to this, of course. But Lexington gets a few things wrong, too:

...[T]here is something infantile in the belief of the constitution-worshippers that the complex political arguments of today can be settled by simple fidelity to a document written in the 18th century.

This is simply a straw man, nothing more. Of course the Constitution doesn't contain the answers to all our problems. The point the Tea Partiers are making is twofold: first, that the Constitution is the ultimate law of the land, a meta-law, so to speak, that forms the skeleton from which all our other laws and governmental institutions draw their authority, and that that framework has been increasingly ignored over the past century; second, that returning to Constitutional principles would help restrain or even roll back encroaching government, in particular federal, control over our lives.

Lexington points out that the solution to the question of whether gays should marry is not contained in the Constitution, as if this is some indictment of it, or reason we should ignore the document. The Constitution is not meant to answer such questions, of course. It is meant to give us a framework within which we answer them. So when the judicial branch arrogates legislative power to itself, as it has in this and many other modern controversies, Constitutionalists are likely to object. It isn't that the answer is necessarily objectionable (although that is often also the case), but that the way in which it was determined was illegal and weakens the framework in the future.

But it isn't only Lexington's legal/philosophical analysis that is awry. The historical analysis also comes up short.

[The Tea Partiers] say that the framers’ aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republic’s Articles of Confederation of 1777.

The Constitution of 1787 certainly had the effect of bolstering the executive, but it is also designed to balance the powers: state against federal, legislative against judicial against executive. It's certainly true that Madison and his compatriots had states' rights firmly in mind when crafting the document, and the Tea Partiers are absolutely accurate to argue that a primary reason states have lost so much power is because of unConstitutional abuses.

Finally, Lexington argues that, since we can't know what the founders would have thought of the modern welfare state, or recognized its institutions, we have no choice but to ignore their document. This is disingenuous at best. One reason we have the country we have, one reason it became so unrecognizable to the founders in the first place, is because of Progressive steamrollering of the founding documents. It's perfectly fair to see a restoration of respect for the Constitution as one way to roll back some of those changes.

The modern progeny of the Progressive movement have zero respect for the Constitution. They see it as no impediment at all to the furtherance of government control of our lives, and there are any number of videos showing Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and other Democratic bigwigs baldly asserting as much. Conservatives are not revolutionaries at heart; turning back the clock on a century of Progressive changes (some of which, especially in the field of civil rights, we should keep) is too massive a movement to undertake overnight, and is politically impossible anyway. But to roll back a few things (Obamacare being target number one), to restore a sense that there is resistance to the growth of government: these are practical goals that the Tea Party can achieve. Raising the stature of the Constitution in the minds of the public can only help them do it.

Obamacare Wipes Out Health Care For Children

2010-09-29T16:17:00.001-07:00

Matthew Shaffer lays out the case for why Obamacare was responsible for wiping out the market in child-only health insurance policies.

Insurers say the blame for their withdrawal lies not with them, nor even with the Obama administration’s general desire to extend health coverage, but rather with a single, hastily written provision of Obamacare. As the bill was being negotiated, insurers accepted that it would prevent them from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, but they assumed that other means of managing risk — such as pricing, co-payments, and restrictions on coverage — would still be available. So insurers were surprised to discover that the law essentially required full “guaranteed issue” and banned price discrimination across the child-only market, regardless of clients’ risk profiles.

[...]

[Health Care for America Now (HCAN) communications director Avram] Goldstein thinks that argument is misleading. “When the industry expressed reservations about the rules, the Obama administration accommodated them,” he explains. “HHS Secretary Sebelius and her staff added in the ability for insurers to create open enrollment periods, so that a child who suddenly developed a health problem could not just rush over and buy a policy that would be guaranteed issue. Instead you have to say during the year, when you don’t know if you’re sick, whether you’ll enroll. They tried to accommodate insurers.”

This is true, but insurers still have good reason to be skittish. [America’s Health Insurance Plans] explains insurers’ uncertainty with a thought experiment: Suppose twelve different insurers each had an enrollment period in a different month of the year; then parents could still wait until kids got sick to purchase insurance, because they could simply pick the insurer that was enrolling that particular month.

Shaffer doesn't quite connect the final dots, though. The basic problem is that the goal behind setting up an open enrollment period is at odds with that of providing health care for all. Suppose a parent wants to sign up a kid for a child-only policy. If there are many open-enrollment periods scattered throughout the year (from different insurers), then adverse selection allows the parent to wait until the kid is sick before signing up. If there are few open-enrollment periods, though, then the kid may have to wait an arbitrarily long time before getting covered.

It's a teeter-totter: when one side goes up the other goes down. You can attempt to balance the tension between the two, but you cannot resolve it.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the article in the original posted. That oversight has been corrected.

Painting Yourself Into a Corner

2010-09-29T15:28:00.002-07:00

There are riots in Brussels today as Europeans protest austerity measures by the EU and its national governments. Their "argument", such as it is, might seem reasonable: that the recession was caused by banks pushing the envelope, not by those citizens being affected by austerity, so somehow the austerity measures aren't "fair".

But how do they think governments got so flush in the first place? It was certainly due, at least in part, to a booming economy caused by banks pushing the envelope. During boom times, tax revenues is up. But you have to expect a bust eventually (unless you believed that late '90s bunk about the "end of the business cycle"). Governments didn't save up for the rainy days to come: not just European ones; the U.S. and certain states (I'm looking at you, New Jersey, and don't think I haven't noticed you, California) are just as guilty.

So here's the conundrum. Governments get rich because of an unsustainable bubble they tacitly encouraged. Social spending grew to match revenues. When the bubble burst, tax revenue fell and the increased spending suddenly blew massive holes in budgets worldwide. So austerity measures were necessary to close the holes. Now the people who benefitted from increased spending are pissed: their lollipops are being taken away. But what's the alternative? Current budgets are unsustainable, so where's the revenue to come from? You could raise taxes, but that risks killing the geese that lay the golden eggs.

You could target banks, extract as much tax revenue from them as possible, and enforce regulations and laws to prevent future bubbles. But that runs the same risk: if those banks run out of innovative options, tax revenue from them will wither.

What's happened is that we've painted ourselves into a corner. The only way to get out is to take that first unpleasant step onto the wet paint.

Funny to the Left of Me, Angry to the Right

2010-09-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

Heard on NPR a few minutes ago: A guest on the Leonard Lopate Show said that the left just can't manage to be angry, while the right can't seem to generate humor. Maybe I'm missing something. The right has Chris Buckley, P. J. O'Rourke, Jonah Goldberg, David Kahane, Glenn Beck, and so on. Who does the left have? A bunch of guys and gals who fall over laughing whenever someone mentions Bu$hitler.

And the left doesn't do angry? The only thing the left does better than angry is pompous, condescending self-righteousness. (The anger comes when you put it like that.)

Vote Nixon!

2010-09-27T16:48:00.002-07:00

Here's some footage of the first 1960 Presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. Nixon sounds like a guy I would vote for in a heartbeat.

Too often in appraising whether we are moving ahead or not, we think only of what the federal government is doing. Now, that isn't the test of whether America moves. The test of whether America moves is whether the federal government, plus the state government, plus the local government, plus the biggest segment of all - individual enterprise - moves.

We have, for example, a Gross National Product of approximately $500 billion. Roughly $100 billion to $125 billion of that is the result of government activity. $400 billion is the result of what individuals do. The reason the Eisenhower administration has moved, the reason we've had the funds locally to build the schools and the hospitals and the highways, to make the progress that we have, is because this administration has encouraged individual enterprise, and it has resulted in the greatest expansion of the private sector of the economy that has ever been witness in an eight-year period.

And that is growth. That is the growth that we are looking for, it is the growth that this administration has supported and that its policies have stimulated.

The Post I've Been Wanting to Write

2010-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out the right angle on a post for a few weeks, one that talks about the idea that the real problem with the American economy is that we aren't consuming enough. Until we kick-start consumptions, the idea goes, the economy will remain sluggish. (The idea is poppycock, by the way.)

Anyway, I've been pre-empted by Kevin Williamson, who has explicated it better than I could have.

You Didn't Ask Me But I'm Going To Tell You Anyway

2010-09-25T06:47:00.001-07:00

I have what I guess is a pretty un-nuanced, old-fashioned view of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Basically, the purpose of the military is to bring violence upon our enemies. It's not a tool of social policy. If having gays serve openly in the military enhances its ability to do violence, then I'm all for it. If not having them serve openly works better, then I'm all for that. If DADT is the best policy, then... well, you get the picture.

It's possible to take that "best for the military" thing too far, of course. I wouldn't support a policy of executing every tenth man in a platoon that screws up, even if that could be proved, via scientific study, to enhance military effectiveness. But our policy with regard to gays in the military has never been anything like that draconian. If discovered, they are discharged; that's all.

Being gay might be a personal choice, or it might be inherent. There's a big debate about this, and in some cases it might matter which is right. (Personally I suspect it's a bit of both, in different proportions for different people.) In the case of military policy, I don't see how it matters one bit. If it's a choice, then that's one choice that's denied to you, like wearing shorts and sandals on parade, or wearing a nosering and a mohawk. If it's inherent (which is a broader term than "genetic" - it might be inherent due to upbringing), then so are lots of other things that keep people from serving in the military. If you have flat feet, you cannot serve. Why? Because it detracts from military effectiveness.

Which of these policies actually is best for the military is not a question I am at all qualified to answer. But it should be the only question being asked. Whether it enhances social justice or something is irrelevant.

A Death Tax Tale

2010-09-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a company. This company was founded during the Great Depression, and survived that turmoil and the World War that followed it. In the 1960s it was bought by a pair of entrepreneurs who thought they could make it even better. And they did. Under their ownership it prospered. Eventually one of these owners died and his family's share was bought back by the company. That was costly, but the company survived it. The company survived other hardships as well: legal troubles, financial market struggles, moves, new products.

The company has been run by this family of entrepreneurs for nearly fifty years now. And after all of this history, it has been forced to sell itself. Why? Has the company been poorly run? Is it drowning in debt and has to find a partner to help pay its creditors?

No. The company generates millions of dollars in profits a year. It has no debt.

What is happening is simple: the second of the pair who acquired the company is aging, and so is his wife. At some point - maybe tomorrow, maybe ten years from now - they will be dead, and the estate tax will kick in. And if that happened, the company would basically be out of business, because while it is a cash cow, it doesn't have the funds to buy back enough stock to allow the family to pay those taxes. Furthermore, such buybacks would radically change the capital structure of the company, with the family possibly losing control. And all for no good reason.

Naturally, the company wants to avoid this outcome. So it is being acquired. The family and the minority shareholders get their payoffs now, and the company will be absorbed by its new partner. While the company has been lucky - the partner has pledged to run the company as a stand-alone operation, and not mess with its corporate operations or culture - they will install a new CEO, and inevitably some changes will be coming. Employees are nervous, and rightly so.

This is the sort of unintended, and injurious, consequence that Republicans talk about when they attack the "death tax." To make matters worse, in this case at least, the government won't even collect the tax. The acquisition will trigger some capital-gains taxable events (I assume - it may even manage to avoid those depending on the specifics of the deal), but those will be timed to coincide with current lower capital-gains tax rates. The 55% estate tax that will go into effect in 2011 (barring new legislation to prevent the sunsetting of the 2001 Bush tax cuts) will collect zero revenues from the company. It's hard to find a purer example of the Laffer curve at work.

Stupid Koran Tricks

2010-09-10T05:35:00.000-07:00

So there's this dimwit (whose name I won't honor by putting in print) in Florida who wants to burn a Koran tomorrow. Stupid.

But what's nearly as stupid is the press coverage of it. Years ago, networks figured out that when some drunken sports fan jumps onto the field to make an ass of himself, the thing to do is not to broadcast his antics to millions of viewers across the nation. You studiously don't film it, talk about something else for a few minutes while security takes care of it, then get back to the game.

I suppose it's harder to do that here. This Florida pastor isn't doing anything illegal, so the police won't be hogtying him and marching him off to the drunk tank. And he can make as much noise as he wants to on the Internet and wherever else he can. But why help him by giving him free publicity? I'll do my part by not providing a name or link, although that's spitting in the wind considering that his name, church, and probably blood type are already in all media outlets.

It's kind of sad when the sports media is wiser than the rest of the media.

On Same-Sex Marriage

2010-09-09T15:11:00.002-07:00

I've written before that I find arguments both for and against same-sex marriage to be about equally inane. That leaves me, net-net, against codifying the practice into law, because as a conservative I favor a millennia-old tradition over a newfangled idea unless significant evidence can persuade me otherwise.

National Review's recent editorial "The Case For Marriage" is the best argument I've read to date bolstering my default position. Is there a similarly persuasive case in favor of same-sex marriage? If so, I haven't read it - and as I've said, it would have to be even more persuasive to swing me against tradition.

Why is Labor Day a "patriotic" holiday?

2010-09-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

On Independence Day we celebrate our founding as a nation - if we're going to have a flag-waving holiday, that's the logical choice. On Memorial Day we celebrate our fallen warriors - so that one makes sense, too. We have two days on which we celebrate specific American heroes - Presidents' Day and Martin Luther King Day - but those evince at most mild patriotic displays. Thanksgiving is traditionally American, but centers more around family than country. New Year's Day is a strictly secular, global holiday; finally, Easter and Christmas are religious, global holidays.

Other than minor holidays like Veteran's Day and Columbus Day, which most of us don't get anyway, that leaves only Labor Day. In my experience, Labor Day is third behind only Independence Day and Memorial Day in patriotic displays. In my town, for example, we have a fireworks display. I see kids wearing American flag clothing in the park.

But Labor Day is not especially American, and the part of it that is has not much to do with founding American values. Labor Day commemorates the bloody breaking of a strike in 1894. Its associations are with the International Labor movement and it is essentially the American version of May Day, which is the international (not American) socialist holiday (and also commemorates a massacre during a 19th-century strike). Labor Day was created as a conciliatory gesture toward the growing labor movement.

So I don't quite understand the fireworks and the flags. USA! USA! We're unionized!

Math Corner

2010-09-07T15:01:00.000-07:00

John Derbyshire has another good one up in his August Diary. It's another probability question, this time about cards:

I have an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards. I shuffle it thoroughly. What is the probability that not one card is in its original position?

As often happens, the way to approach this is to look at the conjugate question: what is the probability that at least one card is in its original position? Suppose, for example, that one card is in its original position - we'll call this a stationary card, because it didn't move after shuffling. There are C(52,1) ways to pick this one card, and the other 51 cards can be arranged arbitrarily, so there are 51! ways to arrange them. However, we've done some double-counting here, because some of those 51! include arrangements that have a second stationary card.

It's worth going over this point in some detail, because this is an argument we're going to come back to again. To see what's happening here, it's useful to reduce the number of cards. So let's say there are only 4 cards, numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4. There are, of course, 4! = 24 possible arrangements of these cards. Let's look at all the arrangements with the "1" card in its original position:

1,2,3,4
1,2,4,3
1,3,2,4
1,3,4,2
1,4,2,3
1,4,3,2

Also, let's look at all the arrangements with the "2" card in its original position:

1,2,3,4
1,2,4,3
3,2,1,4
3,2,4,1
4,2,1,3
4,2,3,1

Notice something? The lists aren't distinct. Those first two entries are common to both lists. What we've done is double-count arrangements that contain at least two stationary cards.

We can subtract those back out pretty easily: there are C(52,2) ways to pick two cards, and then 50! arrangements of the other 50 cards. So we'll subtract C(52,2)50! arrangements.

But wait! We've removed too much, because both of the previous sets included arrangements that had at least three stationary cards. Going back to the 4-card example, take a look at the arrangement "1,2,3,4". We originally double-counted it, but then we double-removed it. So to count those arrangements we have to add back in arrangements with at least three stationary cards, and that's C(52,3)49!.

It should be no surprise at this point that this pattern continues. Now we've double counted arrangements with four stationary cards, so we subtract C(52,4)48! of those, at which point we need to add back the ones with five - there are C(52,5)47! of them - and so on. We end up with this many arrangements:

C(52,1)51! - C(52,2)50! + C(52,3)49! - C(52,4)48! + ... + C(52,51)1! - C(52,52)0!

There are 52! total arrangements of 52 cards, so to get the probability, we divide the above expression by 52!. This simplifies down to:

1/1! - 1/2! + 1/3! - 1/4! + ... + 1/51! - 1/52!

But this is the probability of having at least one stationary card, and we wanted the probability of having zero stationary cards, which is:

1 - 1/1! + 1/2! - 1/3! + 1/4! + ... - 1/51! + 1/52!

Reasoning the same way you can see that if you had n cards, the probability would be the first n+1 terms of this series. (It's an interesting fact that the above expression is the first n+1 terms of something called the Taylor series for 1/e, where e is the base of natural logarithms that you may dimly remember from high school or college. For more than 8 or so cards, the difference between the actual probability and 1/e is very small: less than 0.01%.)

Let's look at Derbyshire's second (related) problem:

I have a deck of n cards, numbered from 1 to n. I shuffle the deck thoroughly. Then I turn the cards over one by one. If the k-th card I turn over bears the number k, call that a "match." What is the probability that after going through the whole deck I shall have tallied m matches, where m is some number in the range from zero to n?

Based on the work we did before, this isn't hard at all.

Let's write the number of arrangements of n cards that have m matches (what I earlier called "stationary cards") as A(n,m). Then the probability p(n,m) that Derbyshire seeks is just A(n,m)/n!. Furthermore, we can reason about A(n,m) as follows: Suppose we select m cards and call them the matches. There are C(n,m) ways to make this selection. For each selection, there are A(n-m,0) arrangements of the remaining cards that have no matches. Any combination of a selection of m matches along with an arrangement of n-m cards that have no matches is equivalent to an arrangement of n cards with m matches. So A(n,m) = A(n-m,0)C(n,m).

Furthermore, since p(n,m) = A(n,m)/n!, we can write p(n,m) = A(n-m,0)C(n,m)/n! = p(n-m,0)C(n,m)(n-m)!/n! = p(n-m,0)/m!. Since our solution to the first problem gave us p(n,0) for every n, we now know how to calculate p(n,m) for every n and m.

Senate Math Update

2010-08-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

Way back on December 16, 2009, I posted a very simplistic analysis showing that the GOP had roughly 3 chances in 5 of picking up Senate seats, about 1 in 6 of losing seats, and just a 1% chance at picking up 6 or more seats. I called this "things looking moderately up for the GOP".

Nate Silver's Predictatron, whose sophistication compared to my analysis is roughly that of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner to the Wright Flyer, shows the situation considerably stronger for the GOP: a 20% chance that the GOP picks up ten seats, and only a 3% chance of the GOP losing any net seats. Eight months ago I had the chance of the GOP picking up 10 seats at too low to be meaningful. Silver shows that a good bet would be for the Senate to be a 52-48 or 53-47 split, leaving Democrat, after the upcoming November elections. Considering how uneven the open seats are tilted toward the GOP, this is excellent news.

Ayn Rand and the New Man

2010-08-24T15:35:00.001-07:00

The desire to have Heaven on Earth is dangerous, but hardly novel. You can trace its philosophical origins back at least to Plato (who promoted, in The Republic, the ideal of philosopher-kings who would rule with perfect wisdom and magnanimity). Its social origins surely stretch as far back as human history records: the earliest governments were organized under "god-kings" who reigned with the legimitacy of literal deities.

In modern times - post-Renaissance - this strain of thought can be traced through the French Revolution, through Marx, to Communism, and still looms like a shadow over the world. In Tom Sowell's terminology, this is the "unconstrained vision": the idea that anything is possible if only human nature can be suitably molded. It is a utopian vision. It promises the moon. And with such incredible promises, equally incredible insults to dignity and humanity have been justified. After all, if one is bringing about utopia, what does it matter (say the utopians) if a few million looters are thrown in the gulag? What does it matter if thousands of opponents are guillotined? One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.

By contrast, the "constrained vision" holds that human nature sets certain boundaries which we cannot, as a society, hope to exceed. This view of humanity is that which defined the American experiment. James Madison wrote in Federalist 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Madison does not imagine, as Plato, that human nature might be molded to produce a class of philosopher-kings. Nor does he imagine, as Marx, that history's inevitable progression through capitalism, then Communism, will result in a New Man capable of exquisite anarchy. Rather, he realizes that men are not and will not be angels, and thus we must deal with them as they are, not as we wish they would be.

And this is where Ayn Rand comes in. A champion of some free-market types, Rand is, unfortunately, no less a utopian than Marx. Her chosen utopia is a bit different in style from most, filled with self-interested, omnicompetent heroes and heroines. In a sense, it is more like Homer than Plato. Galt's Gulch is a modern-day Mount Olympus. But therein lies exactly the flaw: populated by Randian demigods, it is almost literally Heaven on Earth. Rand cannot see how to attain her vision for humanity without creating New Men to her liking. And we've seen where that leads. As Whittaker Chambers writes: "To a gas chamber — go!"

Further reading on this subject: Jason Lee Steorts, Whittaker Chambers.

UPDATE: Also read Richard Reinsch's post on the subject.

Separated at birth?

2010-08-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

Roger Sterling

Charlie Crist

Chinese Traffic Jam

2010-08-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

This traffic jam has now lasted nine days and stretches 62 miles along the Beijing-Tibet expressway.

So much for Tom Friedman's "optimal policies", eh?

Is Modern America Like 16th-Century Spain?

2010-08-23T15:18:00.002-07:00

Imagine for a minute that everyone on Earth just had an interesting windfall: every dollar, every euro, every peso and yen and renminbi, just cloned itself. So the total amount of money just doubled instantaneously. Here's the question: is anyone richer?

A moment's thought should convince you that the answer is no. The amount of money has doubled, but the goods that can be bought with that money are no more plentiful. So more money is chasing the same number of goods and services. What we would expect to see is the value of money falling by exactly half, just enough to offset the windfall in cash. At the end of the day, no one is actually any better off.

The situation is a little more complicated when you imagine a windfall in a single nation. There are now two effects we care about: domestic production and imports. More money means that domestic prices will likely rise, for the same reason that they would rise worldwide in the global windfall scenario. But imports would remain cheap, so we would expect an increase in imports. And because domestic prices rose, exported goods become more expensive, and hence exports should fall. As a result, the balance of trade becomes negative: our windfall begins to drain out of the country into other countries.

When you look at 16th-century Spain, that's basically what happened. Spain's New World possessions generated immense amounts of gold and silver - free money! - but did nothing to increase Spain's actual productivity. The results were just as I described: prices of Spanish goods rose, imports went up and exports fell. Spanish gold flowed to other nations. The experts of other nations traveled to Spain to work. The short-term consequences for Spain were largely positive: people were able to consume more and their lives were somewhat easier than they otherwise might have been. (Of course, 16th-century Spain had plenty of problems, too, what with the Inquisition and so on.) The long-term consequences were mostly bad, though, as Spain was left behind by its more cash-starved northern European competitors, and their American colonies, who ultimately leveraged productivity increases into wealth and power on a scale Spain never realized.

So is modern America following the same path as Spain? Obviously we have not discovered a New World filled with riches, poorly protected by feather-clad tribesmen wielding stone weaponry against our armored knights and cannons. But we have greatly increased the store of money in our nation. That volume of money has been sloshing around for over a decade, creating a stock market bubble here, a housing bubble there. Just as in Spain, our balance of trade is highly negative: that money is flowing outward. And just as in Spain, foreigners are flocking to our shores to work.

Here's another crucial link: just as Spain controlled a huge portion of the world supply of the primary currency at the time, so does the United States control the world's reserve currency, the U.S. dollar. In the 16th century, the mercantilist system prevailed, under which your national economy was considered strong if it had a lot of gold and silver in it. These days, gold is a marginal store of value (the total quantity of gold ever mined in the world is about a third of U.S. GDP), but the U.S. dollar can be created in as great a quantity as the U.S. Treasury decides.

It's a common worry that China will stop buying Treasury bonds at some point, and that this will starve us of easy credit. That's a legitimate concern. But the comparison with Spain illustrates an additional long-term danger: that our productivity will be hindered by easy access to cash. The United States is still a far more innovative, flexible economy than Inquisition-era Spain. But why risk it? We need to drain the sloshing overage of cash out of our economy, take the painful lumps that will ensue, and get back to what we do best: producing goods and services for the world.

Thinking of Iran

2010-08-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

Reading this account of the first post-Communist Rolling Stones concert in Prague, I couldn't help but think of Iran. Will they ever be able to look back at the first post-Islamist concert, maybe by Blurred Vision? My vision gets a blurry thinking about it.

DNA Sequencing: Useless?

2010-08-09T15:42:00.001-07:00

Adam Keiper, editor of the excellent journal of science and society The New Atlantis, posts to the Corner about an interview by Craig Venter in which he states that the Human Genome Project has yielded "zero" fruit.

Specific DNA sequencing efforts certainly have yielded fruit. Venter points out that finding a gene that adds only 1-3% to the likelihood of getting some disease is of no clinical value: also true. Keiper takes this further:

For better or for worse, our limited genomic knowledge is already influencing people's decisions about important matters. Some women who learn from DNA tests that they have a genetic susceptibility to breast cancer are electing to undergo mastectomies even though they don’t yet have, and might never develop, the disease.

It's not clear Keiper is applying Venter's numbers to his own conclusions, but if so he's trying to take his argument a bridge too far. The BRCA mutations that have been shown to correlate highly with breast cancer change a woman's likelihood from a baseline of about 6-8% by age 70, to a hefty 85%. That is, if you have the BRCA mutation, you have an 85% chance (better than 5 in 6) of getting breast cancer by age 70. That's a huge result, and it's not surprising that some women found to have the mutation would choose to circumvent the disease by having double mastectomies.

Before women reading this rush off to get genetic testing, I should point out that the BRCA mutation is quite rare - well under 1% of the population - and only a small percentage of breast cancer cases involve it. So in that sense, its clinical value may be small since the test is relatively expensive. But wouldn't a cheap BRCA test be of enormous value to, say, a woman of 30 who was considering starting a family?

The larger point Venter and Keiper make is quite right: the HGP was overhyped. But they go a bit too far to deflate the hype. It did have some value.

The Tea Parties and Racism

2010-08-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

This is excellent. Watch the whole thing.

Race relations in the U.S. have significantly diverged from the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's people like this who can restore us to sanity - if that's even possible. Perhaps the single most disappointing thing about Obama's Presidency has been his inability to improve race relations. Videos like this help restore my optimism.

Remember the Oil Spill?

2010-08-04T15:42:00.000-07:00

That unprecedented environmental disaster seems to have faded a bit.

Just goes to show what Calvin Coolidge once said: if you see ten problems coming down the road, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.

Banning the Burqa

2010-08-02T15:38:00.001-07:00

Claire Berlinski writes a thoughtful and convincing essay on why we should ban the burqa, and now.

Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

A clothing ban is highly distasteful. It's possible that one has to live through the consequences of widespread veiling, as Berlinski has (and I haven't), to gain an emotional, not merely intellectual, understanding of the necessity of banning it. I don't think I'm quite there yet, but Berlinski supplies the best argument I've read to date.