“The Worst Mistake Of The Human Race”
This essay by Jared Diamond is a quarter of a century old, but it’s still worth pondering, particularly as we now know much more about just how bad for our health grains are. I think, though, that he misses a key benefit of agriculture — the fact that it has allowed us to produce billions of people. Minds are a resource, even if we poorly utilize most of them. The more people we have, the likelier we are to come up with new true advances. I’m pretty sure that absent agriculture, technology would not have advanced much, and we’d be nowhere near the position we’re in now — about to finally expand off the planet, and attain the capability of preventing a species-destroying event.
Grasshopper
It’s reportedly on the verge of making its first hop.
Trains To Nowhere Over Rocket Ships
California expresses its preference. My thoughts on XCOR’s Texas move, over at PJMedia.
Hope This Doesn’t Happen In Tonight’s Game
What happens when a ball is pitched at 0.9c?
Verlander’s good, but I don’t think he’s got that kind of arm.
[Update at the bottom of the first inning]
Wow. Between Verlander and (non)Fielder, the Tigers just screwed the American League team. They’re down 5-0 in the first, and the National League hasn’t even batted.
I’m guessing that Verlander’s problem was that he’s not used to pitching just two innings, and was off his early game.
David Axelrod, Soopergenius
Wow, this is really the Wile E. Coyote campaign. Everything the Democrats try with Obama blows up in their faces.
A Point-To-Point Space Transport?
I wonder what the deal is with this company, and who is funding it?
Telstar
Happy fiftieth anniversary to the very first communications satellite. Sadly, I’m old enough to remember the day it happened. That was an exciting year, between Glenn’s flight and it. The space age seemed so young and full of promise to a kid.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the newsreel. That brings back memories.
[Update late morning]
Speaking of Glenn, Amy Shira Teitel has a story on the Atlas reliability prior to his flight. It was about fifty percent.
Promises, Promises
The president has a lot to be held to account for:
The problem for Obama is that his predictions were not only wrong; they were terribly wide of the mark. For example, since the president was sworn in, America has suffered a net decline of roughly half a million jobs. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual premium for family health coverage through an employer reached $15,073 in 2011—an increase of 9 percent, or $1,303, over the previous year. The 9 percent increase in family premiums between 2010 and 2011 followed an increase of 3 percent between 2009 and 2010. Under Obama, the number of foreclosures was the worst in history. In addition, last year was the worst sales year on record for housing, while home values are nearly 35 percent lower than they were five years ago.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate has been above 8 percent for 41 consecutive months. The deficit was around $1.3 trillion the day Obama took office in the midst of the financial crisis; according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the current 2012 budget year, the deficit will be around $1.25 trillion. And a record 46 million Americans are now living in poverty.
In addition, during the Obama years we’ve experienced the weakest economic recovery on record. America’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history. The standard of living for Americans fell more steeply than at any time since the government began recording it five decades ago. Income for American families has actually declined more following the economic recession than it did during the official recession itself.
Change!
[Update a few minutes later]
Being Smart
The dangers of it:
It is troubling that smarter people are often worse off, because they cannot recognise the biases and blunders, due to a deep, complex layer of justification they’ve narrated to themselves. It’s troubling because we expect smart people to be the ones devoid of biases more than others. However, expectation as usual takes a backseat to evidence. Perhaps all we should expect of intelligence, however you conceive it, is a way of thinking, not the content of thought. This means, even if the belief is quite absurd, the methods to get to it can be smart (sophisticated theology is like this to me). But that’s just one way and assuming one kind of definition of intelligence, which is notoriously difficult to study, let alone quantify.
However, this confirms something more practical to me. As Lehrer says, we’re good at picking out the flaws in others. If this is true, this confirms my earlier view that we shouldn’t want a world in which agreement is everywhere. We must welcome criticism and argument, since, no matter how smart we are (indeed, as this indicates, especially considering how smart we might be), we could be wrong. We are, fundamentally, flawed and fallible.
Yes, it’s quite mistaken to think that people who believe in God are stupid, but many devout atheists seem to do so.