Interesting is a non-word. You know you’re supposed to avoid it.
- Captain Fantastic
- Captain Fantastic
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
The Psychology of Cows
Domestic cows (Bos taurus) are consumed worldwide as beef and veal, kept as dairy product producers, employed as draft animals in labor, and are used for a long list of other products, including leather and manure. But despite global reliance on cows for thousands of years, most people’s perception of them is as plodding herd animals with little individual personality and very simple social relationships or preferences. Yet, a review of the scientific literature on cow behavior points to more complex cognitive, emotional and social characteristics. Moreover, when cow behavior is addressed, it is almost entirely done within the framework of and applied to their use as food commodities. Therefore, there is relatively little attention to the study of cow intelligence, personality and sociality at a basic comparative level. In this review, we examine the current state of scientific knowledge about cows within an objective comparative framework, describing their cognitive, emotional, and social characteristics. Our aim is to provide a more veridical and objective current summary of cow psychology on its own terms and in ways which will facilitate better-informed comparisons with other animals. Moreover, an understanding of the capabilities and characteristics of domestic cows will, it is hoped, advance our understanding of who they are as individuals.
- Full Paper Here
- Full Paper Here
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
How To Be Successful
Sam Alton has listed simple yet powerful strategies which works:
- Compound yourself
- Have almost too much self-belief
- Learn to think independently
- Get good at "sales"
- Make it easy to take risks
- Focus
- Work hard
- Be bold
- Be willful
- Be hard to compete with
- Build a network
- You get rich by owning things
- Be internally drive
Monday, January 28, 2019
Sunday, January 27, 2019
On Being an Arsehole: A Defense
“The modes of trolling are many,” writes Rachel Barney in her wonderful mock-Aristotelian treatise, “On Trolling.” Characteristic techniques include treating small problems as if they were large ones, disputing what everyone knows to be true, criticizing what everyone knows to be admirable and masking hostility with claims of friendship. If that sounds like the kind of thing Socrates got up to, this is no accident—for like Socrates, the troll claims “that he is a gadfly and beneficial, and without him to ‘stir up’ the thread it would become dull and unintelligent.” The difference, says Barney, is that while Socrates may have annoyed people, that was never his goal; he simply wanted to convince his fellow Athenians that they lacked wisdom and needed to care for their souls. The troll, by contrast, intentionally aims to generate “confusion and strife among a community who really agree,” whether for amusement or for profit or for partisan gain. Socrates was a philosopher, in other words; the troll is just an arsehole.
[---]
Fortunately, the possibilities afforded by the written word made it possible for Socrates’s followers to find new and arguably more effective ways of being Socratic. Plato, for example, invented (or at least mastered) the dialogue form, which allowed both author and reader to examine their own convictions by confronting a multitude of competing views, including those of card-carrying arseholes like Callicles and Thrasymachus. And then Montaigne introduced the personal essay, which depicted that multitude as inhering within the narrator himself, and so, by implication, within the reader as well: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Both forms allow intellectuals to express arseholish thoughts without fully endorsing them, and both therefore permit a degree of honesty that in other contexts might violate social norms. By suggesting that the most important disagreements are those that we have with ourselves, moreover, they offer us a way of being good citizens in both the philosophical and the political senses—to disagree without being disagreeable, as Barack Obama was once fond of saying.
- More Here
[---]
Fortunately, the possibilities afforded by the written word made it possible for Socrates’s followers to find new and arguably more effective ways of being Socratic. Plato, for example, invented (or at least mastered) the dialogue form, which allowed both author and reader to examine their own convictions by confronting a multitude of competing views, including those of card-carrying arseholes like Callicles and Thrasymachus. And then Montaigne introduced the personal essay, which depicted that multitude as inhering within the narrator himself, and so, by implication, within the reader as well: “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Both forms allow intellectuals to express arseholish thoughts without fully endorsing them, and both therefore permit a degree of honesty that in other contexts might violate social norms. By suggesting that the most important disagreements are those that we have with ourselves, moreover, they offer us a way of being good citizens in both the philosophical and the political senses—to disagree without being disagreeable, as Barack Obama was once fond of saying.
- More Here
Quote of the Day
The iron in our blood comes from the death of supernovas, like all iron on our planet. This bright red liquid contains salt and water, like the sea we possibly came from.
- Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
- Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Your Loyalties Are Your Life
Royce argued that meaningful lives are marked, above all, by loyalty. Out on the frontier, he had seen the chaos and anarchy that ensues when it’s every man for himself, when society is just a bunch of individuals searching for gain. He concluded that people make themselves miserable when they pursue nothing more than their “fleeting, capricious and insatiable” desires.
So for him the good human life meant loyalty, “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”
A person doesn’t have to invent a cause, or find it deep within herself. You are born into a world of causes, which existed before you were born and will be there after you die. You just have to become gripped by one, to give yourself away to it realizing that the cause is more important than your individual pleasure or pain.
You’re never going to find a cause if you are working in a bland office; you have to go out to where the problems are. Loyalty is not just emotion. It is action.
[---]
Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth.
That sense of an ultimate unity at the end things, shines back on us, because it means all our diverse loyalties are actually parts of the same loyalty. We all, he wrote, “seek a city out of sight.” This sense of ultimate unity, of human brotherhood and sisterhood, is what is missing in a lot of the current pessimism and divisiveness.
Royce’s philosophy is helpful with the problem we have today. How does the individual fit into the community and how does each community fit into the whole? He offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”
- David Brooks
So for him the good human life meant loyalty, “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”
A person doesn’t have to invent a cause, or find it deep within herself. You are born into a world of causes, which existed before you were born and will be there after you die. You just have to become gripped by one, to give yourself away to it realizing that the cause is more important than your individual pleasure or pain.
You’re never going to find a cause if you are working in a bland office; you have to go out to where the problems are. Loyalty is not just emotion. It is action.
[---]
Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth.
That sense of an ultimate unity at the end things, shines back on us, because it means all our diverse loyalties are actually parts of the same loyalty. We all, he wrote, “seek a city out of sight.” This sense of ultimate unity, of human brotherhood and sisterhood, is what is missing in a lot of the current pessimism and divisiveness.
Royce’s philosophy is helpful with the problem we have today. How does the individual fit into the community and how does each community fit into the whole? He offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”
- David Brooks
Wisdom Of The Week
So, what happened? There are lots of different theories, but in my view it was simply bad management.
In April 2014, Vic Gundotra stepped down as head of Google+ in response to the company’s decision to deemphasize the service as a centralizing social layer for all its offerings. David Besbris stepped in for a while and was then replaced by Bradley Horowitz. Then things get murky. There was Luke Wroblewski, whose title was never really clear, but who was responsible for driving the mobile-first design and strategy linked to the disastrous redesign of the service in November 2015. Wroblewski left without any public mention and the company simply stopped talking publicly about who was overseeing the network.
These changes in management resulted in numerous twists and turns in Google+ strategy that, much like the layers of an archeological dig, are still visible today in the user interface. All this turmoil simply leaked the life out of the network. Employees with a strong vision and passion for the service eventually left and over time, many of its biggest user advocates simply dropped away. Over the last three years, there have been virtually no new features added to the network and it is badly overrun by spam that should be easily controllable by a company with the technology chops of Google. The service, in short, was abandoned: first by management and eventually by the community.
[---]
Most frustrating is the fact that the data on the people you follow is incredibly sparse. It includes a first name and last name and a link to a Google+ user profile web address but there is no guarantee will continue to exist after April. So, basically, our connections with others are lost. I had over 50,000 people following me on Google+. That took a lot of work to build up that following for my writing, and now it is simply gone.
In mid-December, not long after the December 10th announcement, I worked with a handful of volunteers to gather questions from the community about the shutdown process, which we compiled into a document on Google Drive. I then worked some back channels to try to get these concerns into the right hands at Google. Weeks have gone by, the April shutdown looms closer and closer, people are looking for answers about what to do with all their investments in this network, and there is still not a word of clarification from Google.
The way the company has treated its users represents a complete failure of leadership on the part of Google.
The main lesson of Google+ is that it’s time to stop trusting our creations and our relationships to companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the hopes that they will do the right thing with them. They will do the right thing as long as it maps to their primary purpose, which is maximizing returns for their shareholders. When that stops being true, well, then, that assumption of trust disappears. Google+ demonstrates this problem more vividly than any product or service shutdown that I can remember.
That is why I am closely tracking what Tim Berners-Lee is doing with Solid. It’s time to liberate our data and our social ties and social contributions are an important part of that effort.
- The Fall of Google Plus
In April 2014, Vic Gundotra stepped down as head of Google+ in response to the company’s decision to deemphasize the service as a centralizing social layer for all its offerings. David Besbris stepped in for a while and was then replaced by Bradley Horowitz. Then things get murky. There was Luke Wroblewski, whose title was never really clear, but who was responsible for driving the mobile-first design and strategy linked to the disastrous redesign of the service in November 2015. Wroblewski left without any public mention and the company simply stopped talking publicly about who was overseeing the network.
These changes in management resulted in numerous twists and turns in Google+ strategy that, much like the layers of an archeological dig, are still visible today in the user interface. All this turmoil simply leaked the life out of the network. Employees with a strong vision and passion for the service eventually left and over time, many of its biggest user advocates simply dropped away. Over the last three years, there have been virtually no new features added to the network and it is badly overrun by spam that should be easily controllable by a company with the technology chops of Google. The service, in short, was abandoned: first by management and eventually by the community.
[---]
Most frustrating is the fact that the data on the people you follow is incredibly sparse. It includes a first name and last name and a link to a Google+ user profile web address but there is no guarantee will continue to exist after April. So, basically, our connections with others are lost. I had over 50,000 people following me on Google+. That took a lot of work to build up that following for my writing, and now it is simply gone.
In mid-December, not long after the December 10th announcement, I worked with a handful of volunteers to gather questions from the community about the shutdown process, which we compiled into a document on Google Drive. I then worked some back channels to try to get these concerns into the right hands at Google. Weeks have gone by, the April shutdown looms closer and closer, people are looking for answers about what to do with all their investments in this network, and there is still not a word of clarification from Google.
The way the company has treated its users represents a complete failure of leadership on the part of Google.
The main lesson of Google+ is that it’s time to stop trusting our creations and our relationships to companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in the hopes that they will do the right thing with them. They will do the right thing as long as it maps to their primary purpose, which is maximizing returns for their shareholders. When that stops being true, well, then, that assumption of trust disappears. Google+ demonstrates this problem more vividly than any product or service shutdown that I can remember.
That is why I am closely tracking what Tim Berners-Lee is doing with Solid. It’s time to liberate our data and our social ties and social contributions are an important part of that effort.
- The Fall of Google Plus
Quote of the Day
Evolution has taught them that pointless harm will ultimately harm themselves.
- Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
- Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
Friday, January 25, 2019
Quote of the Day
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Mahatma Gandhi
Thursday, January 24, 2019
Quote of the Day
The top two habits that will decide between success and failure, between real change and staying in the same place are patience and perseverance.
- Marc Reklau
- Marc Reklau
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Quote of the Day
And yet, in being the kind of society that does this kind of thing — that is, the kind that sends probes to the edge of the solar system; underwrites the scientific establishment that knows how to design and deploy these probes; believes in the value of knowledge for its own sake; cultivates habits of truthfulness, openness, collaboration and risk-taking; enlists the public in the experience, and shares the findings with the rest of the world — we also discover the highest use for useless knowledge: Not that it may someday have some life-saving application on earth, though it might, but that it has a soul-saving application in the here and now, reminding us that the human race is not a slave to questions of utility alone.
- Useless Knowledge Begets New Horizons
- Useless Knowledge Begets New Horizons
Monday, January 21, 2019
Quote of the Day
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Quote of the Day
However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something.
- Vincent Van Gogh
- Vincent Van Gogh
Saturday, January 19, 2019
Wisdom Of The Week
Raising the republican banner immediately focuses attention on the most urgent issue now before us: the declining health and uncertain future of our constitutional republic. The fundamental challenge faced in Madison's day and then in Lincoln's — preserving a political union of free people in the face of powerful forces of disunion and unfreedom — confronts us once again. Trump's depredations have brought matters to a head, but the root of the problem lies in the destructive nature of contemporary political competition.
Our constitutional system, with its separation of powers and intricate checks and balances, relies on elaborate norms of trust and compromise for effective governance to be possible. Over the past several decades, however, the growing alignment of partisan loyalties with the nation's main racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions has led to increasingly bitter and zero-sum political polarization. The nation is now divided into two hostile camps, and each sees the other as a grave and growing threat to its well-being and way of life. As a result, the norms that lubricate our mechanisms of government have degraded badly, and the mounting frictions threaten the system with worsening dysfunction and even cataclysmic breakdown.
To save and reinvigorate the world's longest-running experiment in republican self-government, we must break decisively with the perverse dynamics that have led us to this pass. We must start by re-orienting our politics so that partisan identity once again cuts across demographic and cultural identities instead of politicizing them. In addition, we need to recover the elemental civic virtue that makes government by persuasion possible — namely, treating our political opponents as rivals, not enemies.
A republican movement on the right can answer these pressing needs. In contrast to our current politics, which runs on the fanning of hatreds across various dividing lines, republicanism begins with love and unity: the patriotic love of country, a love that unites all of us regardless of party. However much we may differ from one another, however many distinctions we draw among ourselves in a modern, sprawling, pluralistic society, there is one thing that binds all Americans together as moral and civic equals: the res publica, or commonwealth, under whose laws we all live and within whose institutions we can all participate to make those laws better. In the republican worldview, all Americans are "real Americans," because we all pledge allegiance to "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." As Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, "We are not enemies, but friends," because we are all members of one, all-embracing body politic. We're all in this together.
This civic conception of patriotism stands in stark contrast to the blood-and-soil conception increasingly evident on the conservative right. Conservatives today all too frequently distinguish between "real Americans" — white, native-born, Christian, and disproportionately rural — and the rest of the country, vowing to "take their country back" from fellow citizens they regard as the equivalent of foreign occupiers.
Such attitudes and rhetoric are utterly poisonous. They are also deeply un-conservative, given that a creedal rather than ethnic understanding of American national identity is among our oldest and most cherished political traditions. This raises some questions: Why the need for a republican turn on the right? Isn't it possible to resist populist ethno-nationalism in the name of genuine conservatism?
[---]
If the laws of political gravity have not been abolished altogether, though, the Republican Party's day of reckoning will come. Indeed, there could be repeated days of reckoning over extended election cycles. In which case, there will be an opportunity for different voices to be heard and new directions to be explored. Will that opportunity translate into real renewal on the right, or just a temporary respite in a downward spiral? The answer turns on whether the appropriate alternative vision is there to seize the moment — one whose ideas are sound and matched to the times, with a larger framing that connects emotionally and intellectually with party regulars and ordinary voters.
The impetus for such changes will not come from today's Republican establishment, or from the right-wing media complex. A new intellectual movement — one that firmly opposes itself to both ethno-nationalism and plutocracy and offers an appealing vision in their place — is the most promising vehicle for generating and articulating new ideas.
For all those whose home could only be on the right and yet are now politically homeless, it's time to move past bemoaning what you have lost. It's time to build a new home.
- Republicanism for Republicans
Our constitutional system, with its separation of powers and intricate checks and balances, relies on elaborate norms of trust and compromise for effective governance to be possible. Over the past several decades, however, the growing alignment of partisan loyalties with the nation's main racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions has led to increasingly bitter and zero-sum political polarization. The nation is now divided into two hostile camps, and each sees the other as a grave and growing threat to its well-being and way of life. As a result, the norms that lubricate our mechanisms of government have degraded badly, and the mounting frictions threaten the system with worsening dysfunction and even cataclysmic breakdown.
To save and reinvigorate the world's longest-running experiment in republican self-government, we must break decisively with the perverse dynamics that have led us to this pass. We must start by re-orienting our politics so that partisan identity once again cuts across demographic and cultural identities instead of politicizing them. In addition, we need to recover the elemental civic virtue that makes government by persuasion possible — namely, treating our political opponents as rivals, not enemies.
A republican movement on the right can answer these pressing needs. In contrast to our current politics, which runs on the fanning of hatreds across various dividing lines, republicanism begins with love and unity: the patriotic love of country, a love that unites all of us regardless of party. However much we may differ from one another, however many distinctions we draw among ourselves in a modern, sprawling, pluralistic society, there is one thing that binds all Americans together as moral and civic equals: the res publica, or commonwealth, under whose laws we all live and within whose institutions we can all participate to make those laws better. In the republican worldview, all Americans are "real Americans," because we all pledge allegiance to "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." As Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, "We are not enemies, but friends," because we are all members of one, all-embracing body politic. We're all in this together.
This civic conception of patriotism stands in stark contrast to the blood-and-soil conception increasingly evident on the conservative right. Conservatives today all too frequently distinguish between "real Americans" — white, native-born, Christian, and disproportionately rural — and the rest of the country, vowing to "take their country back" from fellow citizens they regard as the equivalent of foreign occupiers.
Such attitudes and rhetoric are utterly poisonous. They are also deeply un-conservative, given that a creedal rather than ethnic understanding of American national identity is among our oldest and most cherished political traditions. This raises some questions: Why the need for a republican turn on the right? Isn't it possible to resist populist ethno-nationalism in the name of genuine conservatism?
[---]
If the laws of political gravity have not been abolished altogether, though, the Republican Party's day of reckoning will come. Indeed, there could be repeated days of reckoning over extended election cycles. In which case, there will be an opportunity for different voices to be heard and new directions to be explored. Will that opportunity translate into real renewal on the right, or just a temporary respite in a downward spiral? The answer turns on whether the appropriate alternative vision is there to seize the moment — one whose ideas are sound and matched to the times, with a larger framing that connects emotionally and intellectually with party regulars and ordinary voters.
The impetus for such changes will not come from today's Republican establishment, or from the right-wing media complex. A new intellectual movement — one that firmly opposes itself to both ethno-nationalism and plutocracy and offers an appealing vision in their place — is the most promising vehicle for generating and articulating new ideas.
For all those whose home could only be on the right and yet are now politically homeless, it's time to move past bemoaning what you have lost. It's time to build a new home.
- Republicanism for Republicans
Friday, January 18, 2019
Thursday, January 17, 2019
Quote of the Day
The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.
- Aristotle
- Aristotle
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Quote of the Day
Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world—yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
Quote of the Day
We always believe in 'the truth'; only other people believe in superstitions.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Monday, January 14, 2019
Quote of the Day
The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Sunday, January 13, 2019
Quote of the Day
If you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Wisdom Of The Week
Other politicians have also embraced the phrase, including UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn. I worry about a world in which many people believe lies, but I worry far more about one in which many people instinctively refuse to believe the truth.
Here is the final reason to calm down about fake news: it feeds into the tempting but smug assumption that the world is full of idiots. People are sometimes taken in by lies, and some spectacular falsehoods have gained more traction on social media than one might hope.
But if we persuade ourselves that Mr Trump was elected by people who wanted to be on the same side as the Pope, we’re not giving voters enough credit. It is true that most people are disengaged from serious news, and vote with their guts rather than their heads, or being guided by friends rather than a close reading of policy analysis. That does not make them fools.
There is much to concern me in the current political information environment. I worry (partly selfishly) that it is harder than ever to sustain a business that provides serious journalism. I worry that politicians around the world are doing their best to politicise what should be apolitical, to smear independent analysis and demean expertise.
I worry that there is far too little transparency over political advertising in the digital age: we don’t know who is paying for what message to be shown to whom.
The free press — and healthy democratic discourse — faces some existential problems. Fake news ain’t one.
- Tim Harford, Why there is no need to panic about fake news
Here is the final reason to calm down about fake news: it feeds into the tempting but smug assumption that the world is full of idiots. People are sometimes taken in by lies, and some spectacular falsehoods have gained more traction on social media than one might hope.
But if we persuade ourselves that Mr Trump was elected by people who wanted to be on the same side as the Pope, we’re not giving voters enough credit. It is true that most people are disengaged from serious news, and vote with their guts rather than their heads, or being guided by friends rather than a close reading of policy analysis. That does not make them fools.
There is much to concern me in the current political information environment. I worry (partly selfishly) that it is harder than ever to sustain a business that provides serious journalism. I worry that politicians around the world are doing their best to politicise what should be apolitical, to smear independent analysis and demean expertise.
I worry that there is far too little transparency over political advertising in the digital age: we don’t know who is paying for what message to be shown to whom.
The free press — and healthy democratic discourse — faces some existential problems. Fake news ain’t one.
- Tim Harford, Why there is no need to panic about fake news
Quote of the Day
Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep; whoever sleeps long, does not sin; whoever does not sin, enters Heaven! Thus, let us drink beer!
- Martin Luther
- Martin Luther
Friday, January 11, 2019
Quote of the Day
Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.
- Marcus Aurelius
- Marcus Aurelius
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Quote of the Day
The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Quote of the Day
Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
What Lives in Your Belly Button?
From 60 belly buttons, the team found 2,368 bacterial species, 1,458 of which may be new to science.
Some belly buttons harbored as few as 29 species and some as many as 107, although most had around 67. Ninety-two percent of the bacteria types showed up on fewer than 10 percent of subjects—in fact, most of the time, they appeared in only a single subject.
One science writer, for instance, apparently harbored a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from Japan—where he has never been.
Another, more fragrant individual, who hadn't washed in several years, hosted two species of so-called extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents.
Despite the diversity, themes emerged.
Even though not a single strain showed up in each subject, eight species were present on more than 70 percent of the subjects. And whenever these species appeared, they did so in huge numbers.
"That makes the belly button a lot like rain forests," Dunn said. In any given forest, he explained, the spectrum of flora might vary, but an ecologist can count on a certain few dominant tree types.
"The idea that some aspects of our bodies are like a rain forest—to me it's quite beautiful," he added. "And it makes sense to me as an ecologist. I understand what steps to take next; I can see how that works."
- More Here
Some belly buttons harbored as few as 29 species and some as many as 107, although most had around 67. Ninety-two percent of the bacteria types showed up on fewer than 10 percent of subjects—in fact, most of the time, they appeared in only a single subject.
One science writer, for instance, apparently harbored a bacterium that had previously been found only in soil from Japan—where he has never been.
Another, more fragrant individual, who hadn't washed in several years, hosted two species of so-called extremophile bacteria that typically thrive in ice caps and thermal vents.
Despite the diversity, themes emerged.
Even though not a single strain showed up in each subject, eight species were present on more than 70 percent of the subjects. And whenever these species appeared, they did so in huge numbers.
"That makes the belly button a lot like rain forests," Dunn said. In any given forest, he explained, the spectrum of flora might vary, but an ecologist can count on a certain few dominant tree types.
"The idea that some aspects of our bodies are like a rain forest—to me it's quite beautiful," he added. "And it makes sense to me as an ecologist. I understand what steps to take next; I can see how that works."
- More Here
Quote of the Day
Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.
And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value. That is why the Geneva Conventions have a very basic ban on "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" — even when dealing with illegal combatants like terrorists. That is why the Declaration of Independence did not restrict its endorsement of freedom merely to those lucky enough to find themselves on U.S. soil — but extended it to all human beings, wherever they are in the world, simply because they are human.
- Andrew Sullivan, The Abolition of Torture
And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value. That is why the Geneva Conventions have a very basic ban on "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" — even when dealing with illegal combatants like terrorists. That is why the Declaration of Independence did not restrict its endorsement of freedom merely to those lucky enough to find themselves on U.S. soil — but extended it to all human beings, wherever they are in the world, simply because they are human.
- Andrew Sullivan, The Abolition of Torture
Monday, January 7, 2019
Quote of the Day
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
- Sir Isaac Newton
- Sir Isaac Newton
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Ten Years After The Crisis, What Is Happening To The World’s Bees?
Since the alarm was first raised, many countries have created new monitoring methods to judge the status of their bee stocks. As a result we have much more data on bee populations, although coverage is still patchy and differences in survey methods make it hard to compare between continents.
It is clear that bees in the United States are still struggling. Beekeepers can tolerate up to 15% losses of colonies over winter, but the US is massively above this threshold, having lost 28.1% of colonies over the 2015-16 winter.
Canada, by contrast, reported 16.8% losses. This is better, but still above the level of losses at which beekeepers can easily restock.
Only recently have we had data from central Europe. There, honey bees seem to be doing better: 11.9% losses in 2015-16. Meanwhile, in New Zealand surveys only began in the last year and have reported winter loss of 10.7%. Australia does not yet have a countrywide survey of the state of bee colonies.
- More Here and paper - Death of the bee hive: understanding the failure of an insect society
It is clear that bees in the United States are still struggling. Beekeepers can tolerate up to 15% losses of colonies over winter, but the US is massively above this threshold, having lost 28.1% of colonies over the 2015-16 winter.
Canada, by contrast, reported 16.8% losses. This is better, but still above the level of losses at which beekeepers can easily restock.
Only recently have we had data from central Europe. There, honey bees seem to be doing better: 11.9% losses in 2015-16. Meanwhile, in New Zealand surveys only began in the last year and have reported winter loss of 10.7%. Australia does not yet have a countrywide survey of the state of bee colonies.
- More Here and paper - Death of the bee hive: understanding the failure of an insect society
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
In short, only the duration of transmission matters in steady-state, which is the final L term in Drake’s famous equation. Start time does not matter.
Regarding Andrew’s predicate “given that we haven’t hard any such signals so far” in the OP: despite the high profile of SETI, almost no actual searching has occurred because the field is essentially unfunded (until Yuri Milner’s recent support). Jill Tarter analogizes the idea that we need to update our priors based on the searching to date as being equivalent to saying that there must not be very many fish in the ocean based on inspecting the contents of a single drinking glass dipped in it (that’s a rough OOM, but it’s pretty close). And that’s just searches for narrowband radio searches; other kinds of searches are far, far less complete.
And Andrew is not wrong that the amount of popular discussion of SETI has gone way down since the ’90’s. A good account of the rise and fall of government funding for SETI is Garber (1999).
I have what I think is a complete list of NASA and NSF funding since the (final) cancellation of NASA’s SETI work in 1993, and it sums to just over $2.5M (not per year—total). True, Barnie Oliver and Paul Allen contributed many millions more, but most of this went to develop hardware and pay engineers to build the (still incomplete and barely operating) Allen Telescope Array; it did not train students or fund much in the way of actual searches.
So you haven’t heard much about SETI because there’s not much to say. Instead, most of the literature is people in their space time endlessly rearranging, recalculating, reinventing, modifying, and critiquing the Drake Equation, or offering yet another “solution” to the Fermi Paradox in the absence of data.
The central problem is that for all of the astrobiological terms in the Drake Equation we have a sample size on 1 (Earth), and since that one is us we run into “anthropic principle” issues whenever we try to use it to estimate those terms.
The recent paper by Sandberg calculates reasonable posterior distributions on N in the Drake Equation, and indeed shows that they are so wide that N=0 is not excluded, but the latter point has been well appreciated since the equation was written down, so this “dissolution” to the Fermi Paradox (“maybe spacefaring life is just really rare”) is hardly novel. It was the thesis of the influential book Rare Earth and the argument used by Congress as a justification for blocking essentially all funding to the field for the past 25 years.
Actually, I would say that an equally valid takeaway from the Sandberg paper is that very large values of N are possible, so we should definitely be looking for them!
- More Here
Regarding Andrew’s predicate “given that we haven’t hard any such signals so far” in the OP: despite the high profile of SETI, almost no actual searching has occurred because the field is essentially unfunded (until Yuri Milner’s recent support). Jill Tarter analogizes the idea that we need to update our priors based on the searching to date as being equivalent to saying that there must not be very many fish in the ocean based on inspecting the contents of a single drinking glass dipped in it (that’s a rough OOM, but it’s pretty close). And that’s just searches for narrowband radio searches; other kinds of searches are far, far less complete.
And Andrew is not wrong that the amount of popular discussion of SETI has gone way down since the ’90’s. A good account of the rise and fall of government funding for SETI is Garber (1999).
I have what I think is a complete list of NASA and NSF funding since the (final) cancellation of NASA’s SETI work in 1993, and it sums to just over $2.5M (not per year—total). True, Barnie Oliver and Paul Allen contributed many millions more, but most of this went to develop hardware and pay engineers to build the (still incomplete and barely operating) Allen Telescope Array; it did not train students or fund much in the way of actual searches.
So you haven’t heard much about SETI because there’s not much to say. Instead, most of the literature is people in their space time endlessly rearranging, recalculating, reinventing, modifying, and critiquing the Drake Equation, or offering yet another “solution” to the Fermi Paradox in the absence of data.
The central problem is that for all of the astrobiological terms in the Drake Equation we have a sample size on 1 (Earth), and since that one is us we run into “anthropic principle” issues whenever we try to use it to estimate those terms.
The recent paper by Sandberg calculates reasonable posterior distributions on N in the Drake Equation, and indeed shows that they are so wide that N=0 is not excluded, but the latter point has been well appreciated since the equation was written down, so this “dissolution” to the Fermi Paradox (“maybe spacefaring life is just really rare”) is hardly novel. It was the thesis of the influential book Rare Earth and the argument used by Congress as a justification for blocking essentially all funding to the field for the past 25 years.
Actually, I would say that an equally valid takeaway from the Sandberg paper is that very large values of N are possible, so we should definitely be looking for them!
- More Here
Quote of the Day
We’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding. We’re searching for intelligent conscious, tool-making, communicative beings that live in social groups (so they can reap the benefits of civilization) and that develop the tools of science and mathematics. We’re searching for ourselves . . .
- Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life
- Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life
Saturday, January 5, 2019
Wisdom Of The Week
Asaf tried to explain. “It’s no one thing we do. It’s all of it,” he said. I found this unsatisfying. I pushed everyone I met at the clinic. How could seeing one of them for my—insert problem here—be better than going straight to a specialist? Invariably, the clinicians would circle around to the same conclusion.
“It’s the relationship,” they’d say. I began to understand only after I noticed that the doctors, the nurses, and the front-desk staff knew by name almost every patient who came through the door. Often, they had known the patient for years and would know him for years to come. In a single, isolated moment of care for, say, a man who came in with abdominal pain, Asaf looked like nothing special. But once I took in the fact that patient and doctor really knew each other—that the man had visited three months earlier, for back pain, and six months before that, for a flu—I started to realize the significance of their familiarity.
For one thing, it made the man willing to seek medical attention for potentially serious symptoms far sooner, instead of putting it off until it was too late. There is solid evidence behind this. Studies have established that having a regular source of medical care, from a doctor who knows you, has a powerful effect on your willingness to seek care for severe symptoms. This alone appears to be a significant contributor to lower death rates.
[---]
Like the specialists at the Graham Center, the generalists at Jamaica Plain are incrementalists. They focus on the course of a person’s health over time—even through a life. All understanding is provisional and subject to continual adjustment. For Rose, taking the long view meant thinking not just about her patient’s bouts of facial swelling, or her headaches, or her depression, but about all of it—along with her living situation, her family history, her nutrition, her stress levels, and how they interrelated—and what that picture meant a doctor could do to improve her patient’s long-term health and well-being throughout her life.
Success, therefore, is not about the episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress. That, such clinicians argue, is what making a difference really looks like. In fact, it is what making a difference looks like in a range of endeavors.
[---]
The federal government launched a standard inspection system and an inventory of public bridges—six hundred thousand in all. Almost half were found to be either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, meaning that critical structural elements were either in “poor condition” or inadequate for current traffic loads. They were at a heightened risk of collapse. The good news was that investments in maintenance and improvement could extend the life of aging bridges by decades, and for a fraction of the cost of reconstruction.
Today, however, we still have almost a hundred and fifty thousand problem bridges. Sixty thousand have traffic restrictions because they aren’t safe for carrying full loads. Where have we gone wrong? The pattern is the same everywhere: despite knowing how much cheaper preservation is, we chronically raid funds intended for incremental maintenance and care, and use them to pay for new construction. It’s obvious why. Construction produces immediate and visible success; maintenance doesn’t. Does anyone reward politicians for a bridge that doesn’t crumble?
[---]
Recently, I called Bill Haynes’s internist, Dr. Mita Gupta, the one who recognized that the John Graham Headache Center might be able help him. She had never intended to pursue a career in primary care, she said. She’d planned to go into gastroenterology—one of the highly paid specialties. But, before embarking on specialty training, she took a temporary position at a general medical clinic in order to start a family. “What it turned into really surprised me,” she said. As she got to know and work with people over time, she saw the depth of the impact she could have on their lives. “Now it’s been ten years, and I see the kids of patients of mine, I see people through crises, and I see some of them through to the end of their lives.” Her main frustration: how little recognized her abilities are, whether by the insurers, who expect her to manage a patient with ten different health problems in a fifteen-minute visit, or by hospitals, which rarely call to notify her, let alone consult her, when a patient of hers is admitted. She could do so much more for her patients with a bit more time and better resources for tracking, planning, and communicating. Instead, she is constantly playing catch-up. “I don’t know a primary-care physician who eats lunch,” she said.
The difference between what’s made available to me as a surgeon and what’s made available to our internists or pediatricians or H.I.V. specialists is not just shortsighted—it’s immoral. More than a quarter of Americans and Europeans who die before the age of seventy-five would not have died so soon if they’d received appropriate medical care for their conditions, most of which were chronic. We routinely countenance inadequate care among the most vulnerable people in our communities—including children, the elderly, and the chronically ill.
- Atul Gawande, The Heroism of Incremental Care
“It’s the relationship,” they’d say. I began to understand only after I noticed that the doctors, the nurses, and the front-desk staff knew by name almost every patient who came through the door. Often, they had known the patient for years and would know him for years to come. In a single, isolated moment of care for, say, a man who came in with abdominal pain, Asaf looked like nothing special. But once I took in the fact that patient and doctor really knew each other—that the man had visited three months earlier, for back pain, and six months before that, for a flu—I started to realize the significance of their familiarity.
For one thing, it made the man willing to seek medical attention for potentially serious symptoms far sooner, instead of putting it off until it was too late. There is solid evidence behind this. Studies have established that having a regular source of medical care, from a doctor who knows you, has a powerful effect on your willingness to seek care for severe symptoms. This alone appears to be a significant contributor to lower death rates.
[---]
Like the specialists at the Graham Center, the generalists at Jamaica Plain are incrementalists. They focus on the course of a person’s health over time—even through a life. All understanding is provisional and subject to continual adjustment. For Rose, taking the long view meant thinking not just about her patient’s bouts of facial swelling, or her headaches, or her depression, but about all of it—along with her living situation, her family history, her nutrition, her stress levels, and how they interrelated—and what that picture meant a doctor could do to improve her patient’s long-term health and well-being throughout her life.
Success, therefore, is not about the episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress. That, such clinicians argue, is what making a difference really looks like. In fact, it is what making a difference looks like in a range of endeavors.
[---]
The federal government launched a standard inspection system and an inventory of public bridges—six hundred thousand in all. Almost half were found to be either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, meaning that critical structural elements were either in “poor condition” or inadequate for current traffic loads. They were at a heightened risk of collapse. The good news was that investments in maintenance and improvement could extend the life of aging bridges by decades, and for a fraction of the cost of reconstruction.
Today, however, we still have almost a hundred and fifty thousand problem bridges. Sixty thousand have traffic restrictions because they aren’t safe for carrying full loads. Where have we gone wrong? The pattern is the same everywhere: despite knowing how much cheaper preservation is, we chronically raid funds intended for incremental maintenance and care, and use them to pay for new construction. It’s obvious why. Construction produces immediate and visible success; maintenance doesn’t. Does anyone reward politicians for a bridge that doesn’t crumble?
[---]
Recently, I called Bill Haynes’s internist, Dr. Mita Gupta, the one who recognized that the John Graham Headache Center might be able help him. She had never intended to pursue a career in primary care, she said. She’d planned to go into gastroenterology—one of the highly paid specialties. But, before embarking on specialty training, she took a temporary position at a general medical clinic in order to start a family. “What it turned into really surprised me,” she said. As she got to know and work with people over time, she saw the depth of the impact she could have on their lives. “Now it’s been ten years, and I see the kids of patients of mine, I see people through crises, and I see some of them through to the end of their lives.” Her main frustration: how little recognized her abilities are, whether by the insurers, who expect her to manage a patient with ten different health problems in a fifteen-minute visit, or by hospitals, which rarely call to notify her, let alone consult her, when a patient of hers is admitted. She could do so much more for her patients with a bit more time and better resources for tracking, planning, and communicating. Instead, she is constantly playing catch-up. “I don’t know a primary-care physician who eats lunch,” she said.
The difference between what’s made available to me as a surgeon and what’s made available to our internists or pediatricians or H.I.V. specialists is not just shortsighted—it’s immoral. More than a quarter of Americans and Europeans who die before the age of seventy-five would not have died so soon if they’d received appropriate medical care for their conditions, most of which were chronic. We routinely countenance inadequate care among the most vulnerable people in our communities—including children, the elderly, and the chronically ill.
- Atul Gawande, The Heroism of Incremental Care
Friday, January 4, 2019
Quote of the Day
You are the community now. Be a lamp for yourselves. Be your own refuge. Seek for no other. All things must pass. Strive on diligently. Don’t give up.
- Buddha
- Buddha
Thursday, January 3, 2019
Quote of the Day
UNODC is registering new alarming trends on drug trafficking in West and Central Africa with disruptive and destabilizing effects on governance, security, economic growth, and public health. This is largely due to rising use of tramadol, an opioid painkiller that is widely trafficked for non-medical use in the region.
- UN: Crime and Drugs in West and Central Africa ‘alarming’
- UN: Crime and Drugs in West and Central Africa ‘alarming’
Wednesday, January 2, 2019
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Why We Learn? Should I Fall Forward or Backward - Sherlock
Only thing matters now is to stop blood loss. So Sherlock, fall backwards !Life long of learning, understanding and wisdom cumulates to 3 seconds of decision making.
Happy "Active Learning in 2019"
Quote of the Day
When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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