An interesting article at the Gray Lady. If they go under, this is the sort of thing I’ll miss.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Cavemen
…and women. Some thoughts on an interesting genre of fiction. Also, the zombie Jane Austen.
Swarm Savvy
This article about how bees and ants make collective decisions reminds me of my emergent stupidity theory:
So clearly it’s not enough to just put a bunch of dumb things together — how they are put together matters as well. But it at least offers the possibility that if you had a large enough bagful of Michael Moores (admittedly, it would require all of the burlap that the world will produce for the next century or so), you might have a chance of getting something intelligent as a result.
But to get back to my NASA example, I have a theory that the converse is true as well. You can aggregate a bunch of really smart things (like rocket engineers) and come up with something really, really dumb — an entity that would make decisions that no single individual among them would ever make, sans psychotropic drugs. Call it, if you like, the “committee effect.”
I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I suspect that it’s kind of like the rule for determining the resistance of a parallel network of resistors.
[Danger Will Robinson! MATH ahead!!]
If resistors are in series, that is, connected end to end in a long row of them, it’s easy to determine the total resistance — just add them up. So two resistors of ten ohms each become one resistor of twenty ohms when one end of one is connected to one end of the other, and the resistance is measured across the two free ends.
Parallel resistors, in which both ends of the resistors are connected to each other, so that the current flows through them all simultaneously, instead of first one and then the next and so on, has a different rule to compute the net resistance.
It’s: Total Resistance = 1/((1/R1)+(1/R2)+…+(1/Rn))
where the “R”s represent the individual resistances, and there are n resistors. In words, it’s the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the individual resistances.
For the example given above, it would be one over the sum of one-tenth plus one-tenth, or one over two-tenths, or one over one-fifth, or five ohms. So instead of doubling the resistance, as in the series case, we’ve halved it.
It can be shown (exercise left for the algebra student) that if all of the resistors are of equal value, the formula simplifies to the original resistance divided by the total number of resistors.
[End MATH]
Which is a frightening thought, if the same rule applies to my “emergent stupidity” theory. Assuming for simplicity that everyone in a government bureaucracy has the same I.Q. (it doesn’t change the answer that much if you allow variation, but assuming that they’re equal makes the calculation much simpler, as one can see from the formulas above), that means that the net I.Q. will be that I.Q. divided by the number of agency employees.
If you add the number of lobbyists and interest groups to the mix, you can drive it down another order of magnitude in value, to the point that it has the intelligence of a lobotomized fern (only slightly smarter than Joe Biden).
And my theory would seem to be borne out by the quality of decisions coming from, for example, the U.S. Agriculture Department, or the INS, or the State Department.
All of this, of course, is a long way of saying that I’m not encouraged by the prospects of merging several federal agencies and departments into a much larger (and probably dumber) one called the Department of Homeland Security, and then actually entrusting it with homeland security…
Just for those morons in comments who imagine that I was ever in favor of the DHS. I think the theory goes a long way toward explaining the hundred days, hundred f-ups that we’ve been seeing since the end of January as well.
There’s Something Missing
So the president made (or is making) a speech before the NAS today in which he proposes to increase spending for “science,” and R&D (I wonder if he understands that these are different things?).
Well, no surprise there. Increasing spending is his first resort to every conceivable problem (except when it comes to defending the nation). But do you not see what I don’t see?
Obama said he plans to double the budget of key science agencies over a decade, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.
He also announced the launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. It is a new Department of Energy organization modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that led in development of the Internet, stealth aircraft and other technological breakthroughs.
Look, Ma, no space agency! No mention of NASA at all. This, combined with the continuing absence of an administrator or White House direction, makes me wonder just where space falls in the priorities of this administration.
But actually, what I find much more disturbing is this:
“I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow — but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. I am here today to set this goal: we will devote more than 3 percent of our gross domestic product to research and development,” Obama said in a speech at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.
Let’s leave aside the arbitrariness of setting a percentage goal at all (why 3%? Why not 2.5% or 5%?). Let us also ignore the fact that at the rate things are going, there’s not going to be much of a GDP to have a percentage of, and that the $420B number makes some optimistic estimates.
Why set the goal as a percentage of GDP? Why not as a percentage of the federal budget, something over which a president and a government has at least theoretical control? The implication is that he doesn’t just preside over the government and its spending priorities, but that he commands the entire national economy, and can, should and does dictate how others are to spend their own money, which apparently is no longer their own money. It implies a conceit of omniscience on the part of him and his advisors about how much we should be spending on R&D as a function of domestic product, and how we should be spending it, when he has no useful control over what non-governmental entities are spending.
Or does he? Just what does he have in mind?
Oh, and note the latest gratuitous slap at the previous administration, without which, apparently, no Obama speech is complete:
In recent years, he said, “scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas.”
He then drew chuckles, commenting: “I want to be sure that facts are driving scientific decisions, not the other way around,” Obama said.
Yes, there will be no predetermined ideological agendas in an Obama administration.
Right.
Oh, one other thing. I don’t have the time to run the numbers right now, and it obviously depends on how you categorize things, but I’d wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t already spend more than 3% of the GDP on R&D. It’s just not being spent the way The One wants it to be spent.
[Update a few minutes later]
This brings to mind some thoughts that I had last summer on the ability to command and control R&D, with bad Apollo analogies.
[Late afternoon update]
One of Clark Lindsey’s readers makes a good point about the non-mention of NASA:
Perhaps, as the reader suggests, if NASA had not dropped most of its R&D in favor of funding a handful of giant development projects like Ares I, it would get more backing for such activity.
Of course, Ares 1 is R&D, technically speaking. But almost all other, more diverse and certainly more useful R&D has been sacrificed to fund it. But somehow, I actually doubt that this is the reason for the apparent oversight. It think it’s just an oversight.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, NASA didn’t go entirely unmentioned. He did repeat the flawed Apollo analogy again (it’s one of his favorites), and then said this:
My budget includes $150 billion over ten years to invest in sources of renewable energy as well as energy efficiency; it supports efforts at NASA, recommended as a priority by the National Research Council, to develop new space-based capabilities to help us better understand our changing climate.
That little whirring windy sound you hear is my upright forefinger twirling around and around.
Whoopee.
Not Guilty?
There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:
New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”
Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.
And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.
Solar System Day
Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.
Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.
So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.
Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.
But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.
I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.
I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).
Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.
But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.
Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.
[Thursday morning update]
Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…
…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.
This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?
Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.
[Bumped]
The Achilles Heel Of Aging
Most people aren’t aware of the recent scientific breakthroughs in life extension technology, but here’s a good update:
In 2004 my lab teamed up with Dr. Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes of Health to see if resveratrol could improve the health and extend the lifespan of mice. When middle-aged mice were fed a low-fat diet, resveratrol delayed diseases of aging but did not extend lifespan. When fed a high-fat diet, mice on resveratrol got chubby but stayed healthy — they were less susceptible to diseases we associate with obesity, like type II diabetes. And with a sufficient- win a Nobel Prize. ly high resveratrol dose, they burned enough fat to stay lean. What’s more, the resveratrol mice on the high-fat diet ran twice as far on a treadmill as their unmedicated counterparts, and their remaining lifespan after treatment began increasing by an average of 25 percent compared with the high-fat controls. Notably, in both the obese and the lean mice on resveratrol, there was the clear physiological signature of calorie restriction.
The trouble is, while resveratrol is found in many foods, it is present only in very low concentrations. Someone wanting to get a resveratrol dose equivalent to what we used in our mice studies would need to consume hundreds of bottles of red wine each day. Resveratrol has served its purpose, proving the possibility of inducing the physiology of dieting and exercise with a small molecule. Now pharmaceutical companies are working on synthetic molecules that are thousands of times as potent as resveratrol: The race to develop a drug that targets sirtuins is on, though the longterm effect of activating sirtuins in humans requires further research. If the mice studies are anything to go by, the side effects of these drugs could include protection from multiple illnesses, including heart disease, osteoporosis, cataracts, and Alzheimer’s.
Bring it on. I’m all in favor of this, which is one of the reasons that I’m not a conservative.
An Upcoming Regulatory Disaster
Since EPA plans to find endangerment on both health and welfare grounds, the Agency could be compelled to establish “primary” (health-based) NAAQS for GHGs. Logically, the standard would be set below current atmospheric levels. Even very stringent emission limitations applied worldwide over a century would likely be insufficient to lower GHG concentrations. Yet the CAA requires EPA to ensure attainment of primary NAAQS within five or at most 10 years—and it forbids EPA to take costs into account. Regulate CO2 under the NAAQS program and there is, in principle, no economic hardship that could not be imposed on the American people.
It’s the new hair shirt in the new environmental religion. And all from unelected bureaucrats.
[Tuesday morning update]
Here’s a place to go to express your concerns.
[Bumped]
Nurturism’s Last Stand?
John Derbyshire has some thoughts about the latest attempt to defy human nature and biological determinism:
…remember that the human sciences differ from the physical sciences in an important way. We have been acquainted with galaxies, quarks, genes, superconductors, neurons, and tectonic plates for only a few decades. We have been observing each other — our fellow human beings — with very keen interest for several dozen millennia, since homo sap first showed up and formed social groups. We should therefore expect far fewer surprises in the human sciences than in the physical sciences. The reasonable expectation is, that the human sciences mostly just validate and quantify what we always kinda knew. Striking, dazzlingly counter-inutitive results show up a lot in the physical sciences. In the human sciences they ought to be rare. When such results are announced, they should be approached with even more than the scientifically-normal amount of skepticism.
Both social conservatives and the left have a huge ideological investment in the tabula rasa theory of humans. Social conservatives because it is necessary for them to believe that homosexuals are made, not born, and leftists because they always seek to remold man in the image of their utopia, to fit him in their procrustean bed of equality and “fairness.”
I Hate When That Happens
Is there a gamma-ray burst with our number on it?
That’s a problem that even colonizing the solar system isn’t going to solve, absent huge well-shielded shelters. We need to get moving on interstellar drives.