Alcohol improves men’s s3xual performance. When I’ve been drinking, my problem is not the so-called ED, unless by that one means the inability to…errrmmmm…attain…completion, yes, that’s the word…and get rid of the “E.” I can’t say that I’ve ever had a partner complain about it…
Category Archives: Science And Society
How Identical Are Identical Twins?
Not as much as you might think.
This has implications for cloning. People who expect an exact replica, whether person or pet, may be disappointed.
Missing The Point At The Economist
I just want to pull my hair, of which I have little to spare, when I read editorials like this:
Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.
Here we go again. Humans versus robots, it’s all about science and exploration. It is not all about science and/or exploration. The space program is about much more than that, but the popular mythology continues.
Humanity, some will argue, is driven by a yearning to boldly go to places far beyond its crowded corner of the universe. If so, private efforts will surely carry people into space (though whether they should be allowed to, given the risk of contaminating distant ecosystems, is worth considering). In the meantime, Mr Obama’s promise in his inauguration speech to “restore science to its rightful place” sounds like good news for the sort of curiosity-driven research that will allow us to find out whether those plumes of gas are signs of life.
Hey, anyone who reads this site know that I’m all for private efforts carrying people into space. They also know that I don’t think that anyone has a right to not “allow them to do so,” and that I place a higher value on humanity and expanding earthly life into the universe than on unknown “distant ecosystems.” What have “distant ecosystems” ever done for the solar system?
I also question the notion that Obama’s gratuitous digs at the Bush science policy had anything whatsoever to do with space policy. And of course, to imagine that they did, is part of the confused policy trap of thinking that space is synonymous with science.
Not Just A Theory
Here’s a useful web site for those people who claim that evolution is “only a theory,” an argument that’s so ignorant that it’s not even wrong.
The Economy Is Not A Machine (Part Two)
I had a post on this subject the other day, but Brian Micklethwait (boy, is that an English name or what?) is more pithy:
In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian.
Just so.
Bad News At The FDA
Via Virginia Postrel — Sidney Wolfe has been put on the committee overseeing drug safety. This is a calamity. Many unseen murders, and needless suffering, will ensue. As she notes:
He’s got the “consumer” slot. Well, I’m a big-time pharmaceutical consumer, and this man does not speak for me.
Fortunately, I’m not (yet) much of a pharmaceutical consumer, but he doesn’t speak for me, either.
Questions For John Holdren
From Jeff Jacoby:
4. You argued that “a massive campaign must be launched . . . to de-develop the United States” in order to conserve energy; you also recommended the “de-development” of modern industrialized nations in order to facilitate growth in underdeveloped countries. Yet elsewhere you observed: “Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” Which is it?
5. In Scientific American, you recently wrote: “The ongoing disruption of the Earth’s climate by man-made greenhouse gases is already well beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable.” Given your record with forecasting calamity, shouldn’t policymakers view your alarm with a degree of skepticism?
6. In 2006, according to the London Times, you suggested that global sea levels could rise 13 feet by the end of this century. But the latest assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea levels are likely to have risen only 13 inches by 2100. Can you explain the discrepancy?
This seems like a terrible pick to me, and now we’re going to see a “war on science” from the Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s one more, suggested in comments: Have you read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto? If so, with which parts did you agree, and with which did you disagree? (A lot of people had fun after its publication, putting parts of it up alongside excerpts of Al Gore’s book, and defying people to guess which were which.)
The Economy Is Not A Machine
I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. An ecosystem is a much more accurate (and more useful) analogy. And I’ve always found this amusing/frustrating:
Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”
It’s particularly ironic (and there must have been some cognitive dissonance) that Gould wrote this, because my understanding was that he was a life-long Marxist. And of course, the opposite applies as well — many free marketeers refuse to believe in biological evolution. They understand that there is a natural emergent order in the marketplace, but can’t believe that life could evolve unguided from above.
I’m one of those weirdos who believes in both free markets, and free nature.
[Update late morning]
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on the myth of the “economic multiplier”:
It is amazing what happens when you assume that you live in a linear world. You say that the multiplier for government spending is 1.57.
Really? Over what range? Think of it this way: at which level of additional government spending would the path of U.S. real GDP be the highest?
(a) $100 billion in spending above the baseline
(b) $1 trillion in spending above the baseline
(c) $100 trillion in spending above the baselineIf you use a constant multiplier of 1.57, the right answer is (c). Yet we know that this is not the right answer. At $100 trillion in additional government spending, the United States would be operating like Zimbabwe, with similar results.
This is similar to the (dumb) argument often made by space advocates that space spending has a high (or higher) “multiplier” effect than other kinds of spending (the study most cited on this is the one done by Chase Econometrics back in the 70s).
Yes, obviously, if you pay engineers to do things, they’ll go out and spend the money on goods and services, and create more jobs for other people. And yes, if you develop technology, some of it is bound to have an economic benefit and improve productivity, or create new products, and grow the economy.
But when one makes these kinds of arguments, it’s all too easy to ignore what you’re spending the primary money on. It really does matter what product the engineers are building with government money. When it comes to space, does anyone think that it makes no difference whether we had continued to employ people building and flying Saturns, or had developed the Shuttle? Or that if we’d developed a better version of the Shuttle (perhaps by starting with smaller prototypes, and continually improving the concept over the past thirty-five years) that it would have made no difference in our prospects for being spacefaring? That it makes no difference whether we spend thirty-billion dollars developing Ares, or instead something that actually reduces the cost of access to space?
To listen to the “multiplier” argument, it doesn’t matter at all. Having the engineers design a machine to bore a hole to the earth’s center has the same economic value as to build a space elevator.
When we are talking about government spending, it isn’t sufficient to talk about how much we’re spending, and whether or not it will “stimulate the economy.” We have to talk about what we’re spending it on, and unfortunately, much of what the Democrats want to spend it on will (relative to letting people decide what to do with their own money) not create wealth, or grow the economy, but rather destroy it. It’s what governments do.
Bad Design
Sorry, but I see no other sensible explanation for the screwed-up bodies that we have than that we evolved from other forms. It’s hard to believe that God is built like this, and he supposedly made us in his own image.
Quackery
Derek Lowe takes on (loon) Deepak Chopra et al.
As a commenter notes, one of the (many) frightening things about nationalizing health care is that these people will probably have a lot of influence over it. All part of the Democrat war on science.