Peter Thiel's Graph of the Year 2013

- More Here

The Sidney Awards 2013, Part 2 - David Brooks

Well on this second installment, I have read only half of them. Here is the complete list:

• Structure by John McPhee
• Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs by Kevin Kelly
• The Twidiocracy -The decline of Western civilization, 140 characters at a timehe Twidiocracy by Matt Labash
• Kludgeocracy in America by Steven M.Teles 
• Surviving Anxiety -I've tried therapy, drugs, and booze. Here’s how I came to terms with the nation's most common mental illness by Scott Stossel 
• Notes on 21st-century relationships by Douglas Coupland

Average person falls in love 2.5 times in a lifetime and that some psychologists believe that human beings are capable of five or six loves in a lifetime. One lesson is, don't use them up quickly.

Carol A. Westbrook's 2013 New Year Resolution

Learning about the known genes is useful but, in most cases, it is not going to make a major impact on a person's health.  And, considering the expense, it is certainly not going to justify implementing whole genome sequencing as a standard part of our medical care -- at least not for now.  But most of the current discussion on the benefits of genome sequencing has been one-dimensional, focusing on the significance of identifying these known genes and risk factors.   Yet what excites me about this project is not the known genes, but the incredible potential of a person's DNA sequence having a major impact on his health and longevity in the future, in ways that we cannot even predict.

Consider, for example, common conditions that clearly have a genetic component but can't be pinned to a single gene. These include asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, kidney failure, anemia, cancer, depression, schizophrenia, obesity, heart attacks, osteoarthritis and many others.  In fact, conditions like these probably cover the majority of all doctors' visits (excluding infection and accidents). These are the "unknown unknowns," where combinations of genes and environmental factors come to play.  Perhaps we will be able to use our genome sequence to prevent these diseases by targeting the mutation, or lessen the severity of the condition, or modify outside factors that impact them.

• What if you knew that would get diabetes if you were overweight, but you also knew that you could prevent this obesity by modifying a gene in your liver?
• What if you knew that your daughter had the potential to be a math genius? Would you help her develop her potential?
• What if your doctor could treat your hypertension with an individualized combination of drugs that had no side effects for you?
• What if you learned you have a risk of schizophrenia, but could prevent it by a treatment designed target the DNA sequence and stop its progression?
• What if you knew what biochemical subtype of depression you had, so you could treat it with the correct drug?

Impossible dreams? Sure, but so was obtaining the complete human genome sequence 1988.  There is no question that genome research is moving so rapidly that we don't even have a vision of where it will be in 10 years.  But I'm confident that the medical implications will strengthen as research continues and more complete genomes are compiled.  I am pleased to be an early contributor.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

People laugh out loud and broadcast their laughter when they're worried about the statement that they purportedly find funny. They would smile - perhaps surreptitiously -otherwise.

- Nassim Taleb

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.

- More Here

 

The Untold Indian Heritage of Bob Marley

While some African traditions may have been passed down over the four centuries since their arrival in the Caribbean, chances are their spiritual practices were destroyed by Christian missionaries spreading gospels and building churches. The easiest way to indoctrinate an individual, and by extension their culture, is to capture their metaphysical understanding of the universe. This can be done through physical intimidation and forced education, though the most effective means is through language. Africans went from having a rich philosophy that taught regeneration of existence, as well as a deep respect for all aspects of nature, into a specific form of religion that explicitly states that no matter what you do in this life, it is only preparatory for what lies after.

What the Indians brought with them, and what changed the psychology of lower class islanders, was the concept of karma. The word comes from the Sanskrit karmen, and implies that your actions affect what happens to you—they leave imprints on the present moment that essentially create who you are. When these imprints become a pattern, the individual is habituated into believing their way of reality is a reflection of how reality is 'supposed to be.' Through right action and effort, you can liberate your mind from dangerous cycles such as this.

This philosophy that Indian workers brought with them, which empowered Afro-Jamaicans to form their own communities, was the notion that liberation was available right here, in this lifetime. To a culture bred into 400 years of mental and physical slavery, this opened their eyes to a fresh way of existing within their newfound social freedom. This did not downplay the obvious African connection that future generations of Rastas felt towards Ethiopia, their imagined homeland—many traveled to that land thinking utopia awaited, only to return to Jamaica discouraged. Yet the influence of Indians has been forgotten over time, which is a shame given the beautiful merging of cultures that took place on this island and the profound influence that one reggae musician has had on the world.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group... then to hell with them.

- Poor Charlie's Almanack

2014 and 1914 ( I Love & Hate Adam Gopnik)

Lodged somewhere in our collective memory of that catastrophe is an image, a metaphor of hubris, from just a year or so before: a great four-funnelled ocean liner, the biggest and most luxurious ever built, whose passengers, rich and poor, crowd on board, the whole watched over by a bearded man named Edward John Smith, with the chief designer, Thomas Andrews, along for the maiden voyage, too. Then the ship sets off from Southampton, sure of itself, unsinkable, until it comes to the ice fields of the North Atlantic, off the coast of Newfoundland—and speeds right on through them to its anchorage, here in New York. Because this ship isn’t the Titanic but its nearly identical twin sister, the Olympic, made at the same time, by the same people, to do the same job in the same way. (A single memorable image exists of the two ships in dock together.) The Olympic not only successfully completed its maiden voyage but became known as Old Reliable, serving as a troop carrier in the First World War, and sailing on for twenty years more. (A third, late-released liner in the same class, the Britannic, hit a mine in the Aegean, in 1916, while serving as a hospital ship, and sank, a true casualty of war.)

The story of the two ships is one to keep in mind as we peer ahead into the new year. It reminds us that our imagination of disaster is dangerously more fertile than our imagination of the ordinary. You have certainly heard of the Titanic; you have probably never heard of the Olympic. We have a fatal attraction to fatality. We don’t have one movie called “Titanic,” starring Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, about a tragic love and a doomed adventure, and another called “Olympic,” a musical comedy starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway, about a happy voyage over. We have only one movie, and remember only one sad tale. If our history leads us to the First World War, then we imagine that we were always bound on that collision course, and we cannot imagine that, with a bit of luck and another set of contingencies, we might have been on the Olympic, not the Titanic. We search for parallels of disaster, and miss parallels of hope. False positives are the great curse of diagnostics, in historical parallels and prostate screenings alike.

Sanity lurks in sailing around the ice. But, then, sanity doesn’t necessarily guarantee safe passage. Two boats set sail in those prewar years a century ago: the boat that sailed on and the boat that sank. Olympic or Titanic? Which is ours? It is, perhaps, essential to life to think that we know where we’re going when we set out—our politics and plans alike depend on the illusion that someone knows where we’re going. The cold-water truth that the past provides, though, may be that we can’t. To be a passenger in history is to be unsure until we get to port—or the lifeboats—and, looking back at the prow of our ship, discover the name, invisible to our deck-bound eyes, that it possessed all along.

- More Here

Best Books of 2013

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman (Hirschman's life taught me the importance of observation, details matter and how to live a good life irrespective of circumstances. Yes, the book made me cry.)

Albert Hirschman’s odyssey of the twentieth century can be read— to borrow one of his own metaphors— as the epic of a mariner sailing ever into the wind. What he stood for, fought for, and wrote for was a proposition that humans are improvable creatures. Armed with an admixture of daring humility, they could act while being uncertain and embrace alternatives without losing sight of reality

What he wanted was not so much a theory with predictive powers, but a way to think about societies and economies, beginning with the premise that living in the world means we cannot step out of time to divine universal laws of human motion severed from the day-to-day banalities and mysteries of existence. The intellectual is as much a creature of the world as his or her subject— and so too are his or her concepts, which are limited and liberated by the context from which they emerge. It is for this reason that experience of real life, appreciating one’s place in history, was such a wellspring for Hirschman, as it was for his inspiration, Montaigne, whose last essay was “On Experience.” Life, as Montaigne reminds us, is “a purpose unto itself.” The excursions into real life— as struggler against European fascisms, soldier in the US Army, deep insider of the Marshall Plan, advisor to investors in Colombia, and consultant to global foundations and bankers— were never digressions for Hirschman; they were built into the purpose of observing the world to derive greater insight, and from insights invent concepts that could in turn be tested, molded, refashioned, and even discarded by the course of time. These were the pendular swings from a contemplative life to a life of action and back again— pendular because they were codependent.

If biography is the art of the singular to illuminate a pattern, Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities. 

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and Our Gamble Over Earth's Future by Paul Sabin (Intellect and brilliance takes back seat if you let you passions get better of you. Check your blind spots, avoid confirmation bias or else you will only get a pyrrhic victory and will undo lifetime good work.)

The history of Ehrlich and Simon’s conflict instead reveals the limitations of their incompatible viewpoints. Their bitter clash also shows how intelligent people are drawn to vilify their opponents and to reduce the issues that they care about to stark and divisive terms. The conflict that their bet represents has ensnared the national political debate and helped to make environmental problems, especially climate change, among the most polarizing and divisive political questions.

Sometimes rhetorical sparring partners hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better. The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Despite their respective strengths, both Ehrlich and Simon got carried away in their battle. The ready audience for their ideas encouraged them to make dramatic claims. Their unwillingness to concede anything in their often-vitriolic debate exacerbated critical weaknesses in each of their arguments.
The clashing insights of Ehrlich and Simon are necessary to help frame our thinking about the future. Our task is not to choose between these competing perspectives but rather to find ways to wrestle with their tensions and uncertainties, and to take what each offers that is of value. Ultimately, humanity’s course will be determined less by iron laws of nature or by unbounded market powers, Ehrlich and Simon’s dueling lodestars, and more by the social and political choices that we make. Neither biology nor economics can substitute for the deeper ethical question: What kind of world do we desire?


The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths by John Gray (A beautiful book  which expressed what I was incapable of expressing properly in any language.)

If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation Hardcover by Tyler Cowen  (You kidding me? It would be miracle if I don't learn anything from Tyler's writings and I don't believe in miracles.)

Humans with strong math and analytic skills, humans who are comfortable working with computers because they understand their operation, and humans who intuitively grasp how computers can be used for marketing and for other non-techie tasks. It’s not just about programming skills; it is also often about developing the hardware connected with software, understanding what kind of internet ads connect with their human viewers, or understanding what shape and color makes an iPhone attractive in a given market. Computer nerds will indeed do well, but not everyone will have to become a computer nerd. The ability to mix technical knowledge with solving real-world problems is the key, not sheer number-crunching or programming for its own sake. Number-crunching skills will be turned over to the machines sooner or later.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell (Gladwell conveys a very important message in this book, you simply have to "get" what he is talking about. Otherwise you will just read it as a sequence of brilliant stories or just call him a simplifier.)

We need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers— and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor.

Quote of the Day

Things that aren’t supposed to happen do happen. Short-run outcomes can diverge from the long-run probabilities, and occurrences can cluster. For example, double sixes should come up once in every 36 rolls of the dice. But they can come up five times in a row— and never again in the next 175 rolls— and in the long run have occurred as often as they’re supposed to. Relying to excess on the fact that something “should happen” can kill you when it doesn’t. Even if you properly understand the underlying probability distribution, you can’t count on things happening as they’re supposed to. And the success of your investment actions shouldn’t be highly dependent on normal outcomes prevailing; instead, you must allow for outliers.

- Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor

Wisdom Of The Year 2013

Tyler Cowen's brilliant blog post on the culture of guns, the culture of alcohol is the most insightful piece I read this year:

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.

I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.:

Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.:

In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.:

It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.

In the book Surely You're Joking, Richard Feyman says he stopped drinking because he was afraid of becoming an alcoholic, since he once wanted to drink while there was no social reason to do so and he didn't want to do anything that would harm his brain.

In George E. Vaillant's brilliant book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, chapter 9 is titled alcoholism and some of his findings:

• Where alcohol is concerned, it is what people do, not what they say, that is important.
• 57 percent of the Grant Study divorces were associated with alcoholism.

Susan Sontag always fascinated me; this year her old Rolling Stone interview simply blew my mind way - Susan Sontag really did read everything there was to read:

I feel I’m changing all the time, and that’s something that’s hard to explain to people, because a writer is generally thought to be someone who’s either engaging in self-expression or else doing work to convince or change people along the lines of his or her views. And I don’t feel that either of those models makes much sense for me. I mean, I write partly in order to change myself so that once I write about something I don’t have to think about it anymore. And when I write, it actually is to get rid of those ideas. That may sound contemptuous of the public, because obviously when I’ve gotten rid of those ideas, I’ve passed them on as things that I believe— and I do believe them when I write them— but I don’t believe them after I’ve written them because I’ve moved on to some other view of things, and it’s become still more complicated ... or perhaps more simple.

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.
I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.
Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.
In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.
It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.
- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I receive many emails asking me what is my attitude toward guns and gun control.  I would say I wish it worked better than it does (a key point), I don’t think it works very well, I am happy to make those changes which seem to work somewhat, but overall I see an America with lots of guns and a falling crime and murder rate, so let’s focus on what is working, whatever that may be. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I receive many emails asking me what is my attitude toward guns and gun control.  I would say I wish it worked better than it does (a key point), I don’t think it works very well, I am happy to make those changes which seem to work somewhat, but overall I see an America with lots of guns and a falling crime and murder rate, so let’s focus on what is working, whatever that may be. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

I receive many emails asking me what is my attitude toward guns and gun control.  I would say I wish it worked better than it does (a key point), I don’t think it works very well, I am happy to make those changes which seem to work somewhat, but overall I see an America with lots of guns and a falling crime and murder rate, so let’s focus on what is working, whatever that may be. - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/the-culture-of-guns-the-culture-of-alcohol.html#sthash.lU69SSu4.dpuf

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

Quote of the Day

It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.

- Amos Tversky

43 Brilliant Musings From Nassim Taleb's Facebook Page

• Quite a predicament to be both evil and risk averse
• It is a sad situation to be boring without being virtuous. 
• It takes a lot of skills to be virtuous without being boring. 
• Intelligence without imagination: a deadly combination.
• There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don't make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.
• A good man is warm and respectful towards the waiter or people of lower rank.
• Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.
• We often benefit from harm done to us by others; almost never from self-inflicted injuries. 
• A great book eludes summaries. A great aphorism resists expansion. The rest is just communication.
• What counts is not *what* people say, it is *how much* energy they spend saying it. 
• Many want to learn how to memorize things; few seek that rare ability to forget.
• High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, & mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
• If you have something very important to say, whisper it. 
• The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain "why" you did something.

- More Here and even more in his book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

The Sidney Awards 2013, Part 1 - David Brooks

It's that time of the year; glad that I read all except the most important one!! Here is the complete list:

• Science is not your enemy by Steven Pinker
• Crimes against humanities: Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don't let it happen by Leon Wieseltier 
• Requiem for a Dream:Aaron Swartz was brilliant and beloved. But the people who knew him best saw a darker side by Larissa Macfarquhar
• They're Watching You at Work by  Don Peck

And the one great essay, I missed was Do Elephants Have Souls?

The Intelligent Plants - Michael Pollan

“If you are a plant, having a brain is not an advantage,” Stefano Mancuso points out. Mancuso is perhaps the field’s most impassioned spokesman for the plant point of view. A slight, bearded Calabrian in his late forties, he comes across more like a humanities professor than like a scientist. When I visited him earlier this year at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, at the University of Florence, he told me that his conviction that humans grossly underestimate plants has its origins in a science-fiction story he remembers reading as a teen-ager. A race of aliens living in a radically sped-up dimension of time arrive on Earth and, unable to detect any movement in humans, come to the logical conclusion that we are “inert material” with which they may do as they please. The aliens proceed ruthlessly to exploit us. (Mancuso subsequently wrote to say that the story he recounted was actually a mangled recollection of an early “Star Trek” episode called “Wink of an Eye.”)

In Mancuso’s view, our “fetishization” of neurons, as well as our tendency to equate behavior with mobility, keeps us from appreciating what plants can do. For instance, since plants can’t run away and frequently get eaten, it serves them well not to have any irreplaceable organs. “A plant has a modular design, so it can lose up to ninety per cent of its body without being killed,” he said. “There’s nothing like that in the animal world. It creates a resilience.”

Indeed, many of the most impressive capabilities of plants can be traced to their unique existential predicament as beings rooted to the ground and therefore unable to pick up and move when they need something or when conditions turn unfavorable. The “sessile life style,” as plant biologists term it, calls for an extensive and nuanced understanding of one’s immediate environment, since the plant has to find everything it needs, and has to defend itself, while remaining fixed in place. A highly developed sensory apparatus is required to locate food and identify threats. Plants have evolved between fifteen and twenty distinct senses, including analogues of our five: smell and taste (they sense and respond to chemicals in the air or on their bodies); sight (they react differently to various wavelengths of light as well as to shadow); touch (a vine or a root “knows” when it encounters a solid object); and, it has been discovered, sound. In a recent experiment, Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, found that, when she played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for a plant that hadn’t been touched, the sound primed the plant’s genetic machinery to produce defense chemicals. Another experiment, done in Mancuso’s lab and not yet published, found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, which suggested that plants somehow “hear” the sound of flowing water.

The sensory capabilities of plant roots fascinated Charles Darwin, who in his later years became increasingly passionate about plants; he and his son Francis performed scores of ingenious experiments on plants. Many involved the root, or radicle, of young plants, which the Darwins demonstrated could sense light, moisture, gravity, pressure, and several other environmental qualities, and then determine the optimal trajectory for the root’s growth. The last sentence of Darwin’s 1880 book, “The Power of Movement in Plants,” has assumed scriptural authority for some plant neurobiologists: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle . . . having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense organs and directing the several movements.” Darwin was asking us to think of the plant as a kind of upside-down animal, with its main sensory organs and “brain” on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top.

- Michael Pollan on The Intelligent Plants: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora (hope he writes a book on this soon)

Quote of the Day

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

- Mark Twain

There is Grandeur in This View of Life...

While talking to a 20 year old kid over the weekend about Darwin, I saw the correlation between these lines from Taleb's Antifragile:

"The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.

I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components— and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books— my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.

Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres— make room for others."

And the last lines from Darwin's Origin of Species:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Quote of the Day

We all know people who’ve flunked, and they try and memorize and they try and spout back. It just doesn’t work. The brain doesn’t work that way. You’ve got to array facts on the theory structures answering the question ‘Why?’ If you don’t do that, you just cannot handle the world.

- Charlier Munger

Max Holiday Card 2013 !!

Wish you all a wonderful holiday season !!

This year's theme is based on my favorite book of the year - Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman. 

If biography is the art of the singular to illuminate a pattern, Hirschman’s odyssey can be read as a journey with no particular end, the life of an idealist with no utopia because he believed that the voyage of life itself yielded enough lessons to change who we are and what we aspire to be; to require and stay on course toward an abstract destination threatened to deprive the journey of its richest possibilities.

Montaigne's affection for the aphorism, for accumulating quotes, rubbed off on Hirschmann instantly, and he began to stockpile his own, starting with a mantra from Montaigne; 

Observe, Observe Perpetually.

Quote of the Day

An acquaintance of ours was hailing a tax at the corner of Park and Sixtieth one recent afternoon when a large English bulldog, promenading in the custody of a chauffeur, and a French poodle, held in check by a uniformed maid, suddenly went for each other, tugging at their leashes and raising an unearthly racket of barks and snarls. According to our man, an apartment-house doorman hurried up to them and called out, “Gentlemen, please!,” whereupon the two dogs fell silent and went off in opposite directions without so much as a backward glance.

- The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Hardcover by The New Yorker Magazine and forward by Malcolm Gladwell

Help Cecil Williams Keep His Seeing Eye Dog Orlando

Cecil is a 61-year-old blind man and Orlando is his guide dog.  On December 17th Cecil and Orlando were waiting for the subway to arrive when Cecil felt faint and fell onto the tracks.  Orlando tried to act quickly and keep Cecil on the subway platform.  Cecil fell onto the tracks. Orlando jumped down onto the tracks, like any faithful dog would, to go to his owner's aid.  Cecil clutched a scared Orlando as the train rolled over them. They were immediately taken to the hospital for treatment.  Come January Cecil's insurance will no longer cover the cost to care for Orlando. Since Cecil is unable to afford caring for Orlando Cecil will have to find a new home for him.  Please help these two stay together by donating to this cause!  You can also see their story on December 17th episode of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams close to the very end of the show.

- You can help by contributing here on indiegog campaign

Best Articles Of 2013

I started using Instapaper exclusively to mark the best articles/essays/blog posts I read in a year but at times I do forget. Here's a short list of readings I enjoyed this year:

• Genetic evidence suggests that, four millennia ago, a group of adventurous Indians landed in Australia
• Self in Self-Help by Kathryn Schulz
• Wallace & Depression by Thomas Meaney
• Amusing ourselves to death and Why is the power of tyrants short lived? by Farnam Street 
• Bayesianism for Humans by Less Wrong
• The trouble with democracy by David Runciman
• Lion forms unusually close bond with conservationists by David Strege
• Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course by Max Chafkin
• David Foster Wallace on Planet Trillaphon by Thomas Meaney
• News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier by Rolf Dobelli
• The Eternal Mainframe by Rudolf Winestock 
• The Secret History of Guns by Adam Winkler
• The Tragedies of Other Places by Rafia Zakaria
• How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math by Matt Waite
• And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’ by Fred Vogelstein
• How I Write by Robert Sapolsky
• The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously. by Samuel Scheffler
• Artificial Intelligence and What Computers Still Don't Understand by Gary Marcus
• Inside Google’s Driverless Car by Burkhard Bilger
• There are no significant facts about human beings by Charles Foster
• Retail Therapy: Inside the Apple Store: Let’s Get Ready to Rumble. by Timothy McSweeney
• Of Our Chances (science fiction is built to showcase the future but philosophy teaches us so much more about the way the world goes - and how it might end.) by Ken Baumann
• Raise the Crime Rate by Christopher Glazek
• Surprised By Grief by Andrew 
• On Eating Animals by Mary Johnson
• The Essayification of Everything by Christy Wampole
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (Beyond the Greeting Cards) by Danny Heitman
• Revealed preferences for longevity by Frances Wooley
• GM Crops - Promise and Reality @ Nature Specials 
• Is College Moving Online? by Nathan Heller
• Pro-Life, Pro-Animal: The conscience of a pro-life, vegan conservative by Matthew Scully

My top three favorites:

1. The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol by Tyler Cowen 
2. Susan Sontag Really Did Read Everything There Was to Read by Mark O'Connell 
3. On the Phenomena of Bull Shit Jobs by David Graeber (check this bullshit job title generator)

Quote of the Day

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti library.

-  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Hayek's Unanswered Question

Hayek spent his life arguing for man's freedom. The Fatal Conceit was his last contribution to that effort. The question, though, is how man should then use that freedom. And that is the question Hayek was unable to answer because he could not cross the faithful threshold. Nevertheless, he recognised, in his final published words, that "on that question may rest the survival of our civilization".

- Read the whole thing, its very good.

I think, Hayek won. No one human is capable of giving all answers and he believed in that and he vindicated himself by not having answers. Now, the burden is on us and the future generations to answer that question.

Beauty of Mathematics

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.

- Bertrand Russell

Rights Aren't Just for Humans, Anymore

The panic over the possibility of safeguarding not merely animal welfare, but legal animal rights, fails to recognize that we already do just that. Humans, after all, are animals too. When we respect human rights, we therefore respect the rights of (some) animals. And if we respect the rights of some animals, then there is no reason in principle not to respect the rights of certain others.

But just as not all humans have the same rights, recognizing certain rights for chimps would not require attributing those same rights to pigs, bluejays, and earthworms. Children enjoy no right to enter into contracts, for example, because they are deemed to lack the capacity for it. Adults generally may enter into contracts—but not all of them. We make exceptions for the mentally incompetent.

To conclude that chimpanzees’ cognitive abilities justify the right not to be imprisoned or experimented upon, therefore, does not mean those same rights must be conferred upon animals without those cognitive abilities.

Why do people have rights in the first place? Suppose future space exploration discovers a planet populated by highly intelligent beings, with an exquisitely rich culture dating back several millennia, who look not at all human. Wouldn’t it make sense to recognize them as rights-bearing creatures anyway? And wouldn’t that make more sense than attributing human rights to mannequins—which look very much like humans, but have no human capacities?

A question like that might seem too fanciful. But the advance of computing science is leading to another one. Well before long-distance space travel becomes feasible, the day will arrive when computers become both self-aware and vastly smarter than the smart people who made them. At that point, we will have to consider whether thinking machines have rights.

Moreover—and more apposite to the chimpanzee question: The thinking machines will have to consider whether we do.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.

- Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

Earthrise - How Astronauts Took the Most Important Photo in Space History

"Hey, don't take that. It's not on schedule !!" 

- Few men who knew when to bend rules to share a glimpse of the grand oasis in the vastness of space.

Quote of the Day

He has existed only, not lived, who lacks wisdom in old age.

- The Moral Saying of Publius Syrus (A Roman Slave)

Wisdom Of The Week

Never in my wildest dreams, I thought someone in early 20tth century would have warned us about the overuse of antibiotics is leading to increasing bacterial resistance. But of all people, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, feared microbial resistance and discussed it in his Nobel Prize speech of 1945  (via Mark Bittman who thinks FDA is bull sitting again and we’re looking at an industry-friendly response to the public health emergency of diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, resistance that is bred in industrially raised animals.). Full text of Alexander Fleming's Nobel lecture - here:

Their results were first published in 1940 in the midst of a great war when ordinary economics are in abeyance and when production can go on regard- less of cost. I had the opportunity this summer of seeing in America some of the large penicillin factories which have been erected at enormous cost and in which the mould was growing in large tanks aerated and violently agitated. To me it was of especial interest to see how a simple observation made in a hospital bacteriological laboratory in London had eventually developed into a large industry and how what everyone at one time thought was merely one of my toys had by purification become the nearest approach to the ideal substance for curing many of our common infections.

And we are not at the end of the penicillin story. Perhaps we are only just at the beginning. We are in a chemical age and penicillin may be changed by the chemists so that all its disadvantages may be removed and a newer and a better derivative may be produced.
Then the phenomenal success of penicillin has led to an intensive research into antibacterial products produced by moulds and other lowly members of the vegetable kingdom. Many substances have been found but unfortunately most of them have been toxic. There is one, however, streptomycin, which was found by Waksman in America which will certainly appear in practical therapeutics and there are many others yet to be investigated.

But I would like to sound one note of warning. Penicillin is to all intents and purposes non-poisonous so there is no need to worry about giving an overdose and poisoning the patient. There may be a danger, though, in underdosage. It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.

The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant. Here is a hypothetical illustration. Mr. X. has a sore throat. He buys some penicillin and gives himself, not enough to kill the streptococci but enough to educate them to resist penicillin. He then infects his wife. Mrs. X gets pneumonia and is treated with penicillin. As the streptococci are now resistant to penicillin the treatment fails. Mrs. X dies. Who is primarily responsible for Mrs. X’s death? Why Mr. X whose negligent use of penicillin changed the nature of the microbe. Moral: If you use penicillin, use enough.

And 68 years later, today we here in this country are feasting on meat laden with antibiotics three times day, everyday. Of-course most don't even think of the sufferings of these poor animals (yes, life they live is much worse than their death). To borrow John Gray's phrase - "Is this what we call progress?"

Quote of the Day

President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has a message for the federal government and regional accreditors: Go easy on the MOOCs.

In a report released on Wednesday, the council of engineers and scientists recommends the federal government not interfere with vendors and providers experimenting with massive open online courses and other forms of distance education. That message extends further to accreditors, which are encouraged to waive some of the standards required of institutions seeking approval for traditional programs.

- Go Easy on MOOCs

15 WWF Success Stories of 2013

President Obama took several steps to support countries reeling under the onslaught of wildlife crime and help end poaching and trafficking. The US pledged $10 million to improve protection for threatened wildlife populations and the rangers who protect these species in multiple African countries. The White House also appointed WWF President and CEO Carter Roberts and several others to the Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking.

WWF organized a global petition to urge the Mexican government to ban gillnets from the vaquita’s marine habitat, and more than 38,000 people from 127 countries and territories participated in the effort. The Mexican government will begin phasing out drift gillnets used for shrimp fishing in the upper Gulf of California in favor of more selective and vaquita-friendly fishing gear. This gear—developed and tested by WWF—reduces bycatch of the critically endangered vaquita porpoise while still allowing fishers to continue earning their livelihoods.

From 2010 to 2013, 441 new species were scientifically identified in the Amazon, including a titi monkey that purrs like a cat and a new passion flower that sprouts spaghetti-like filaments from the center of the bloom. Various scientists described the new species and WWF compiled the list of 258 plants, 84 fish, 58 amphibians, 22 reptiles, 18 birds and one mammal.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Greenspan’s new book is obviously intended to show that his errors were only partial and that he has found useful ways to correct them, and thus to refurbish his reputation as oracle-in-chief. It fails. His argument is thematically vague and analytically weak. In the end it sounds like the same old right-wing conviction that the unregulated or very lightly regulated market knows best.

Begin with the book’s title and subtitle. The analogy between a map and a theory is a useful device. Fathers-in-law are always pointing out that any economic theory ignores this or that obvious fact about the real-world economy. But a map on the scale of one to one is precisely useless. A map on the scale of one to 500,000 is useful for most purposes, but you cannot expect it to show every bend in the road or every dirt track leading north. Greenspan does not seriously discuss the goals and the limitations of reasoning about the economy. He talks some about his early life as a forecaster, and he is clear that economic policy has to be based on forecasts: policies undertaken now will have effects in the future, and sensible economic policy usually has long-run goals anyway. But the reader of this book will learn little or nothing about the process of forecasting other than that it is difficult and that the results are always uncertain. Duh.

The new Greenspan concedes that the decisions made by participants in the economy are not always governed by rational adaptation to given facts, and that this failure leads to unpredictability and instability. Instead the economist-forecaster-policymaker has to take account of “animal spirits.” (The phrase was introduced into economics by Keynes and was recently revived by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.) This is a step in the right direction, but even here Greenspan does a poor job. He rattles off a long list of what he regards as “inbred” propensities of people and groups to behave irrationally, or at least non-rationally, in economic matters. They include fear, euphoria, aversion to risk, preference for early rewards over larger later ones, herd behavior, dependency on peers, a bias toward dealing with people close to home, competitiveness, reliance on a code of values, a bias toward one’s relatives, self-interest, and self-esteem. That comes to twelve propensities, some broad, some narrow, some vague, some precise, some important, some less so, and Greenspan says that there are more of them.

- Review of Alan Greenspan's new book The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting

Best Movies of 2013

Honestly, I haven't seen many movies year but out of the few I have seen:

1. World War Z
2. Captain Philip
3. Gravity

"Movement is life" quote from WW Z is a favorite. I think, it applies to all aspects of our lives:

I used to work in dangerous places. People who moved survived and those who didn't. Movement is life.

It nicely fits with one of my all time favorite quotes from the book 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene:

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be….

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.

Another great lines from WW Z - Mother Nature is a Bitch:

Mother Nature is a serial killer. No one's better, more creative. Like all serial killers, she can't help the urge to want to get caught. And what good are all those brilliant crimes if no one takes the credit? So she leaves crumbs. Now the hard part, why you spend a decade in school, is seeing the crumbs, for the clues there. Sometimes, the thing you thought was the most brutal aspect of the virus, turns out to be the chink in its element. And she loves disguising her weaknesses as strengths. She is a bitch

And of-course this one:

Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.