The plutocracy of buttons

Buttons at the The British Button SocietyWhy do women’s clothes button from the left, while men’s clothes button from the right?

When buttons appeared in the seventeenth century, they were seen only on garments of the wealthy. It was the custom for men to dress themselves and for women to be dressed by servants. To button from the left is easier for a generally right-handed servant.

[via marginalrevolution]

Questions in the color of blood

Recently I read “Before the 60s, life was in black & white.”

There’s been much progress in the colorful years hence. But thinking of the confusion and conflict these days, I thought that life today seems black & blue. There’s war, pittance populism, the parade of fibbing peddlers, impotent policies, rude prospects. Where’s the aspiring demand for grand justice, hopeful living and fair civility?

The story in the Washington Post and many other sources of the writhing woman and the janitor is a signature of this era.

After slipping out of her wheelchair, while moaning on the floor, hospital staff walked past Edith Isabel Rodriguez or cleaned the floor around her. She lay untreated on the ER lobby floor for 45 minutes before dying. A video camera captured the episode. Emergency calls were unheeded. LATimes has posted a picture memorial.

She needlessly died of cruel indifference.

We live in the color of tired blood.

And we trumpet tired issues.
But what if FoxNews had done the reporting?
What’s real?
What wpyou; Calvin and his Dad think?

C: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they
have color film back then?
D: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It’s just the
WORLD was black and white then.

C: Really?
D: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was
pretty grainy color for a while, too.

C: That’s really weird.
D: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.

C: But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world was black and
white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
D: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.

C: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their
paints have been shades of gray back then?
D: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else in the ’30s.

C: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
D: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

Washing wisdom

Is it true that people behave the way we expect them to behave?

In the “Pygmalion Effect”, teachers who expect students to do better actually cause their students to do better.

Wiki says it’s more commonly known as the “expectancy effect” where students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so.

It’s conventional wisdom in the profession and has been for more than thirty years.

And it’s bunk.

The self-fulfilling prophesy might be junk science.

From Science That Matters,
found via Anders Sandberg.
He says we really need blogs that poke holes in false factoids and help filter significant research.

Taleb quote

“Another human failing stems from the nature of happiness. In the short run, people’s happiness is often shaped more by how many “positive events” occur in their day than by the arrival of one important piece of good news. Winning $100,000 in the lottery feels almost as good as winning $1 million. We therefore look, consciously or not, for small but repeated successes when we should be shooting for “one large win.” It’s easy to see why: Big payoffs come only rarely, and perhaps late in life; in the meantime, who wants to keep on feeling like a loser?”

Nonetheless, getting out of our comfort zones is good for innovation and thus good for the economy.”

Got optimism?

The Edge question for 2007 is “What are you optimistic about?
It’s an important question in an era where many are fearful.

Are we worrying too much?
For example, these thoughts from WorldChanging sum a common feeling of worry.

As a general principle, it seems that the older we are, the more difficulty we have wrapping our brains around the truly alarming timetable accelerations we’re now being given by experts in everything from climate change to species loss to poverty alleviation.

To put it simply, things are getting worse more quickly than we thought, and much more quickly than we’re making things better.

Prospects of planetary collapse we once thought native to the next century, or the century after that, are looming as possibilities for the next decade or two.

Things are spiraling seriously downwards, so we need to change our thinking and move with a speed unseen since World War Two.

Can our projections be wrong?
Nassim Taleb sees a more optimistic future, and it depends on randomness. As one of Taleb’s dedicated fans, Arlene Goldfarb might say, our future is chaos coagulating into life. I’ve posted about Nassim Taleb’s popular work in probability and randomness, author of Fooled By Randomness and the Black Swan.

Taleb’s essay at the Edge warns us, once again, to be very cautious about our trust in projections about our future. Taleb says,

“Alas, we are victims of the narrative fallacy. The pattern-seeking, causality producing machine in us blinds us with illusions of order in spite of our horrifying past forecast errors.”

Experts are seldom accurate
As if we are growing suspicious simultaneously, Marc Andreessen asserts similar caution. Experts too often are wrong. He recommends Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? as one of the most important books you’ll ever read.

Madame Charlatania at Bolinas FaireCiting the following review of Tetlock’s book, Andreessen warns us that we are witnessing the downfall of “the whole edifice of expert forecasting and the idea that the future is predictable in any meaningful way at all.

From the New Yorker review:
It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book that people who make prediction their business — people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables — are no better than the rest of us.

When experts and pundits are wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it.

We should learn to expect the unexpected
Against the grain, as usual, Taleb’s essay argues for optimism.

I am convinced that the future of America is rosier than people claim — I’ve been hearing about its imminent decline ever since I started reading. Take the following puzzle. Whenever you hear or read a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured”, “unintellectual” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, they are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows people call “high culture”. Yet the person making these statements will be likely to be addicted to his Ipod, wearing t-shirts and blue jeans, and using Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his (Intel) PC, with some Google searches on the Internet here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happened that the U.S. is currently far, far more tinkering an environment than that of these nations of museum goers and equation solvers — in spite of the perceived weakness of the educational system, which allows the bottom-up uncertainty-driven trial-and-error system to govern it, whether in technology or in business.

It fosters entrepreneurs and creators, not exam takers, bureaucrats or, worse, deluded economists. So the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional and theoretical studies is where it very strength lies — it produces “doers”, Black Swan hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, or others with a tolerance for risk-taking which attracts aggressive tinkering foreigners. And globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable and fat-tailed part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable and more linear components and assign them to someone in more mathematical and “cultural” states happy to be paid by the hour and work on other people’s ideas. (I hold, against the current Adam Smith-style discourse in economics, that the American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows to capture the randomness of the environment — “cheap options”— not much because of competition and certainly less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith, nor to some extent, those of Karl Marx, seem to be conscious about the role of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style causation and cannot separate skills and payoffs.)

The world is giving us more options,
and options benefit from uncertainty.

Counting duh

Duh! The Stupid History of the Human RaceFinally a little data to help determine if we’re losing our mind.

How many ‘Doh!’ moments does the average person have?
“We’ve all run upstairs to get something, only to arrive and realise we’ve forgotten what we went up there for? But just how common are these moments of absent-mindedness? According to a new study by Icelandic psychologists, healthy people commit an average of 6.4 such lapses or “action slips” a week.”

Wiki says Duh is an American English slang exclamation that is used to express disdain for someone missing the obviousness of something.

The Diamond

Never take someone for granted
Hold every person close to your heart
because you might wake up one day and realize that you’ve lost a diamond
while you were too busy collecting stones.

Tribute video: ‘Love’s Been Good to Me’, Johnny Cash & June Carter

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?William Butler Yeats

WHY should not old men be mad?Some have known a likely ladThat had a sound fly-fisher's wristTurn to a drunken journalist;A girl that knew all Dante onceLive to bear children to a dunce;A Helen of social welfare dream,Climb on a wagonette to scream.Some think it a matter of course that chanceShould starve good men and bad advance,That if their neighbours figured plain,As though upon a lighted screen,No single story would they findOf an unbroken happy mind,A finish worthy of the start.Young men know nothing of this sort,Observant old men know it well;And when they know what old books tellAnd that no better can be had,Know why an old man should be mad.  -  from On The Boiler

Abusing kids with food

Calling for new rules at the British Medical Association’s annual meeting, a group of doctors in central England believe extreme cases of overfeeding a young child should be seen as a form of abuse or neglect and designated for regulatory action against those parents. [story]

One doctor spoke of a ten-year-old girl who could walk only a few yards with a stick. He said that he believed her parents were “killing her slowly” with a diet of chips and high fat food.

Praise him. Hug her.

mindHacks noticed that hugs are more effective for comforting women, words better for men, according to a new study reported in The Independent.

The research shows that after being affectionately touched by the partners, women were far better able to deal with stress and had lower heart rates when they were stressed.

Men, on the other hand, are healthier when their partner says nice things to them.

The aim of this study, by researchers from the University of Zurich, and Emory University, Atlanta, was to see whether the behavior of couples to each other affected how their bodies handled stress.

They add: “Whereas men in contrast to women show immediate benefits from verbal social support by that partner, our findings in women suggest that not social support, but rather affectionate physical partner interaction markedly contributes to lower reactivity to stressful life events.”

Every color from every flag

All the colors of all the world's flagsColors from every nation’s flag are merged in this picture, in proportion.

At Flags by Colors, Shahee Ilyas used a list of countries from The World Factbook database and flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia to calculate the proportions of colors for all flags combined.

Male symptoms of pregnancy

A Slightly Pregnant ManExpectant fathers suffer pregnancy symptoms.

Fathers-to-be endure cramps, back pain, mood swings, food cravings, morning sickness, extreme tiredness, depression, irritability, fainting and toothache, researchers found.

Some even develop swollen stomachs that look like a “baby bump”. Stomach cramps were the most common complaint. One man told researchers: “My stomach pains were very much like a build-up of a woman’s contraction as she’s giving birth. They started mild and then got stronger and stronger and stronger.”

Authors of the largest study of its kind in Britain say the phenomenon where men suffer sympathy symptoms is called Couvade Syndrome. [story]

Link to Slate article on what fatherhood does to the body and the brain.
Link to Time on the psychology of fatherhood.

Not taught in college

The Man Who Sells the Moon

Dennis Hope, self-proclaimed Head Cheese of the Lunar Embassy, will promise you the moon. Or at least a piece of it.

Since 1980, Hope has raked in over $9 million selling acres of moon real estate for $19.99 a pop.

So far, 4.25 million people have purchased a piece of the moon, including celebrities like Barbara Walters, George Lucas, Ronald Reagan, and even the first President Bush.

$9 million!?!

Insomnia

Insomnia, the most common sleep complaint, affects almost half of adults 60 and older.

Give ethanol a chance?

As a rule of thumb, if it began in the Bush Administration, it isn’t working. Stunted and moralistic thinking has left many failures and a horrid national decline. We’ve merely learned what’s plutocratic, ineffective and cruel.

Hoisting war: the wrong enemy.
Huge spending: crippled execution.
Hustling corn: Do we truly believe fields of corn contain the energy we use?!

To be fair, a lonely author has gathered the arguments in favor of ethanol here.


What’s being said offshore?
The ripple effect of America’s new infatuation with alternative fuels is being felt around the world.

Last year ethanol consumed about one fifth of the US corn crop. By next year it could consume up to half, sparking a debate about food versus fuel.

Driven by prices that have doubled in the past two years, farmers have planted a record 37 million hectares of corn in the past few months. If the US is addicted to oil, then it is starting its rehab in Iowa…

Despite its green image, several studies have shown that ethanol produced from corn has little if any benefit in reducing greenhouse gases. Sugar-based ethanol, produced by countries such as Australia and Brazil, is more environmentally friendly, but is stopped from being imported to the US by a tariff of 51 cents a gallon.

Can the good times continue to roll?

The ethanol boom:
It’s not driven by fundamentals.

“The fundamentals are pointing towards a lower price, because we have plenty of corn. It’s the perceived demand … We’ve got a heck of a big crop coming. Sometime we are going to realise that and the price is going to drop.”

“The industry could also be stopped dead should the price of oil drop. Twice in the past 100 years ethanol has looked like establishing itself as a competitor to petrol, only for low prices to wipe it out.

“Despite its lack of greenhouse benefits, ethanol is being swept along by a green image.

“Long term, there are probably better solutions than ethanol out there, but they may be 25 or 30 years down the road.” [Sydney Herald]

Policies based on image and crony politics,
market chaos and ineffective solutions.

To Google your life

Charles Stross has posted a richly commented transcript of a very well-received speech ‘which discusses certain under-considered side effects of some technologies…’ such as an upcoming capability to build a ‘lifelog’.

He says, “I’m a science fiction writer by trade, and people often think that means I spend a lot of time trying to predict possible futures. Actually, that’s not the job of the SF writer at all — we’re not professional futurologists, and we probably get things wrong as often as anybody else.

“But because we’re not tied to a specific technical field we are at least supposed to keep our eyes open for surprises.

“So I’m going to ignore the temptation to talk about a whole lot of subjects — global warming, bioengineering, the green revolution, the intellectual property wars — and explain why, sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to end up in Wikipedia. And I’m going to get us there the long way round …

“Today, I can pick up about 1Gb of FLASH memory in a postage stamp sized card for that much money. fast-forward a decade and that’ll be 100Gb. Two decades and we’ll be up to 10Tb.

“10Tb is an interesting number.

That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year.

That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream — compressed a lot relative to a DVD, but the same overall resolution — of everything I look at for a year….”

Why would anyone want to do this?

Is the brain the next target?

Catalog of ArmsIs the brain the next target of terrorism?

The possibilities are frightening and progress rapid.

Two leading researchers of biological weapons present their concerns, and argue scientists need to take action now on the status of brain science and its potential for military application to enhance soldier performance, to develop new weapons and to facilitate interrogation.

Several generic approaches to containing the malign applications of biology are shown, and it is concluded that success or failure in doing so will be significantly dependent on the active involvement of the scientific and medical communities.

If such applications are pursued, they will also expand the options available to torturers, dictators and terrorists.

Bioterrorism and the brain
An inventory prepared by the United Nations.

One little boy

“Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat each other?”

Without missing a beat, one little boy answered, “Thou shall not kill.”

Before war

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. – Thomas Paine

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott

Schwarzendogger

Bully whippet mutationBreeders are increasingly using DNA screening.

“When mutant, muscle-bound puppies started showing up in litters of champion racing whippets, the breeders of the normally sleek dogs invited scientists to take DNA samples at race meets here and across the United States.

They hoped to find a genetic cause for the condition and a way to purge it from the breed. It worked.

[story]

A dazzle of weathered sequins

Rolling Stones, Isle of Wight festivalThe Rolling Stones hadn’t appeared in England for more than thirty years. Many people at the concert had no idea.

“Old guys – I know they were sort of important in terms of the history of rock and roll,” said the boy in the White Stripes T-shirt.

“I mean, Keith Richards is the guy Johnny Depp used as a model for Captain Jack [in the Pirates of the Caribbean films]. You can’t get cooler than that, can you?”

[post at Telegraph]

Decline of the old heavyweights

Putin has called for a dismantling of the WTO and the International Monetary Fund.

Putin wants a new world economic framework, a new system that more favorably accounts for ‘the rising power of emerging market economies like Russia, China, India and Brazil, and the decline of the old heavyweights of the United States, Japan and many European countries.’

Putin said 60 percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product was now produced outside of the Group of 7 countries – the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada.

Putin called for central banks to hold reserves in a wider selection of currencies. Now, banks largely hold their reserves in dollars and euros.

Putin said Russia would integrate with the world economy on its own terms – and possibly not by embracing the current rules of the global economic order.

Putin also said the world needed more cities that would serve as financial centers.

Putin wants new economic “architecture”.