Art De Vany: September 2005 Archives

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Marathoners and Injuries

September 30, 2005 05:42 PM

This morning's local paper had stories about five participants in the upcoming St. George Marathon. Their experiences were sad, expected, and funny all at once.

One of the competitors entered in the marathon runs 14 miles three days a week on a treadmill, works out two days a week with weights, and bicycles the two days of the week end. Overtrained? Of course. He was out just a few days ago and picked up the pace on a down hill (real as opposed to treadmill) run. He pulled a hamstring muscle. He still plans to compete.

Another competitor has developed a form of asthma that hits long distance runners. They use their aerobic system so extensively that their upper respiratory system takes a beating which sometimes results in an inflammation of the tract and sometimes lower into the lung. She knows she will have a bout with symptoms after the event, but she plans to compete anyway.

Yet another trains at 5AM so she can get her daughters up and off to school in the morning. She gets 4 hours of sleep a night. She didn't look very good in her picture. Just days ago she sprained a tendon in the front of her foot descending the stairs. She plans to compete nonetheless.

Another has Parkinsons and isn't sure he will make it. No evidence that he has been helped or harmed by doing marathons. But, I would bet on it that the consquences are negative.

Finally, the other is a paraplegic who does the marathon in a wheel chair. Bravo for him. But, on the other hand there are better and safer things to do. But, it is his choice. Well, he blew a tire on a downhill run and flipped the chair over. It didn't kill or hurt him. This time. He hopes to have it back together in time for the race. The St. George Marathon has some steep and long downhills.

Are they having fun? Is what they are doing healthful? Do they seem a bit compulsive? I think so. What I do isn't always safe, but it sure is fun and I have compulsion to set any records. Though, I would like to hit more home runs over the fence this year than last in the Huntsman World Senior Games next week. It shouldn't be hard, but home run hitting is one of those areas of extreme human accomplishment. My paper on home run hitting and steroids will be up on the site sometime next week.

LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

MLB Home Run Hitting

September 29, 2005 12:37 AM

I have finished a draft of an article on home run hitting. This follows on, incorporates, and greatly extends my earlier post on the subject. The article is loaded with interesting statistics, but somewhat technical in places.

Some of the main points:

1. Home run hitting is an extraordinary feat, with the bulk of home runs produced by a few players. In this respect, it is like PGA championships, tennis Grand Slams, World Chess championships, scientific citations, the arts, and the movies. I incorporate the Lotka/Pareto/Murray laws of accomplishment in my estimates of the stable distribution of home run hitting. The distribution has infinite variance, an attribute that tells us how little knowledge we have of the limits of this area of human performance.

2. The number of home runs per hit, per player game, and per MLB game have hardly changed over 44 years of baseball. The annual variation is not large and is mostly driven by the great performances of a few players as in the Maris/Mantle year of 1961 or the McGwire/Sosa year of 1999. Or the Bonds year of 2001.

3. The rise in total MLB home runs per year is primarily caused by the expansion of the number of games played per year and by the almost doubling of the number of teams. Each new team added to MLB adds about 163 home runs per season. Each additional game per season, holding number of teams constant, adds just less than one home run to the season total. Home run production falls by about 400 in strike years even when we account for the reduced number of games played in strike years.

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What about T?

September 28, 2005 10:57 AM

I have had a somewhat flaky internet connection for the past few weeks, so I have not had much to say about the comments. But, the discussion of my post on Jump Squats brings me to say a few things.

1. Free testosterone is not the active form of T. T must be bound to a carrier to be taken to sites where it can be active. There seems to be a correlation between free and bound T, but it may be weak. So, don't place too much emphasis on free T. My free T is not high, but I can build muscle just looking at a barbell. Over the years, my body has learned how to do this. And, all my hormones are in the right sort of balance to signal muscle building rather than fat building.

2. The dietary intake, measured as macro-nutrients (CHO, protein, fat) is so crude I would not place much reliance on it. And, as noted by Fong, the dairies on which they are based are notoriously inaccurate.

3. Not all CHO is equal. The Chinese CHO intake is primarily complex CHO, though there may be a fair amount of rice (I forget the details of the study that became popular on this topic a few years ago) in it. Rice and other grasses contain a lot of mineral-sequestering substances, such as phytic acid, and these inhibit skeletal development, hence short stature of the Chinese Fong mentions. Deficient protein, plants contain about 14 per cent protein, is also a factor.

4. I actually eat a lot of CHO, but it is all in plant form such as vegetables and fruit. CHO that contains water is a good guide to CHO that has both low glycemic index (low obesity promoting potential) and low inhibition of mineral metabolism.

5. In any event, you won't gain muscle based on what you eat.

6. Fasting actually potentiates gene expression for building muscle tissue. Another reason to work out on an empty stomach. A morning work out after an over night fast is quite effective for this.

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Diversity as a Spoils System

As a retired professor who saw many of these under-published, self-protective "scholars" in universities, I, like Victor Hanson in this extraordinary Essay, long ago concluded that "diversity" was something meager scholars applied to people they hired rather than themselves. Once they achieved tenure during the shortages of the 1960s, they pulled up the ladder on those behind them and substituted standards they could never meet. They applied diversity to new hires, but not to themselves.

I know personally two of the university presidents named by Hanson in his article; they were impressive scientists themselves, though always in the accepted way of doing things. They did not change, the constraints they operate under in the office of university president are very different now. But, are these jobs so valuable that they cannot do the simple, honest things that anyone can see are needed? Probably not. Such people could not be hired on today's campus. And they couldn't move the correct decisions through the entangled faculty/bureaucracy that runs most campuses. Protected faculty with tenure and unaccountable bureaucrats are mismanaging and over managing universities in too many cases.

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Jump Squats

September 25, 2005 07:04 PM

You know I do them. They are the last set of my squat routine which is 15 to 30 at a beginning weight, about 8 at a much heavier weight, and 4 or so at a pretty heavy weight. All with no rest in between. Then as many jump squats as I can do. I hold the bar and jump as high as I can in a kind of vaulting move.

Now comes this article on T and cortisol, diet and intense exercise by Kraemer (among others) sent to me by Francois. It shows the jump squat raised testosterone by more than 15%. The bench press was about half of that. Protein and unsaturated fats were also associated with increased T. Tuna and salmon are the body builder's friend. Omega 3 oils induce gene expression that builds muscle, though this established knowledge is not discussed here, it is implied through the T connection.

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Odds and Ends

1. From Chris Highcock comes this story of marathon deaths. The St. George Marathon is held next week. I do hope our outcome is better, but I do expect more than a few deaths over the years to come. Healthful? Only if you have ceased to think about the issues and have swallowed the "aerobics are good" nonsense.

2. Two Associated Press headlines, justy days apart. "Rita Feared to Wipe Out the World" (or something like that), followed by "Damage Not as Great as Feared". What a bunch of nut cakes. They do this all the time. It isn't news, it is hyping expectations based on nothing but a reporter's ill-informed conjectures and the mandatory quote they obtain by calling around until they can misquote an "expert" for what they need for the story.

3. I am responsible for the female shot put event at the upcoming Huntsman World Senior Games, beginning Oct. 3. They are 50 and older, up to the 80 something. But, the event organizers failed to tell me how I am to handle: a. steroid testing as I am told all shot putters use them, and b. push up bras that might give an extra lift to a put.

4. Riding with Corey. We went up to the Kolob Reservoir to ride over the week end. Corey took all the pictures. Not bad for a 10 year old. Here are three, one by me.

Corey riding.

Me sitting by the lake after a long ride.

Ducks rising off the lake in the early morning.

The changing colors of Fall.

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Home Run Hitting

September 22, 2005 08:48 PM

Here is a brief note I wrote on home run hitting from 1959 through 2004. The data come from Baseball1.com, The Baseball Archive. This is a great source.

In the note you will see there is no evidence of increased home run production for nearly all the hitters but a few elite home run hitters. There is no increase in home runs per hit in the 20th, 50th, 70th, and 90th percentiles over these years. Only the maximum home runs in a season shows a brief spike during the huge years Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds had, along with Sammy Sosa. Nobody has achieved the consistent home run hitting of Mark McGwire, from the first year of his career to the end. No one has come close, except for the Mighty Mac himself, to equalling his feat: half of his hits were home runs in 2001. In his record setting year of 70 home runs in 1998 forty five percent of his hits were home runs. Read the whole thing (7 pages) in my note Home Run Hitting.

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Health Savings Accounts and Medical Choice

September 21, 2005 05:47 PM

The time has come for medical savings accounts. The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has a somewhat dispassionate and brief article on Medical Savings Accounts. If this Congress gets only the expansion of health savings accounts for individuals right in a way that 1. removes the tax deduction for employee benefits and 2. opens health savings accounts broadly to all (the self-employed are most likely to use this program), and 3. lets employees opt out of employer-sponsored benefits packages for cash value provided they take a health savings account, they will have made a major change in the US health care market. Consumers, rather than doctors, insurance companies, employers and government agencies, will be put in charge of medical expenditures.

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Our Body is not Communist: Competition and those Aggressive Fat Cells

In my previous post, I tried to show that cell colonies execute their own programs; programs that aid their survival and reproduction within the body. There is real competition in the body for resources; it is not some planned central economy where each type of cell gets exactly what would be best for the overall health of the body. The view that the body is in harmony and homeostasis is one of the last vestiges of the central planning thesis that sees a coordinated order as the result of centalized, rational direction.

The central planning thesis of order used to be invoked in attempts to understand the operation of the brain. It had been crudely modeled as a centralized system in which the "little man" or humonculus sat somewhere inside the brain and directed its actions. That naive view is gone, though it seems to be part of folk psychology even now because people tend to attribute an organized process to an organizer. Naive religions cling to this view when they attribute the order that seems to exist in the world a prime or centralized Mover.

The same thesis underlies a belief that centrally planned economies are somehow better than decentralized ones. If only someone were in charge so they could direct resources to where they are most "needed" the resulting allocation would produce the social optimum. "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need" was the allocation goal communism purported to attain. The problem was it never happened; every communist society we know of allocated resources to a privileged few and all but a few have collapsed.

We are lucky the body is not a planned economy or we wouldn't be alive for long.

In my post, I made the argument that every cell in the body is a self-interested agent, executing its dna program. This is a "tough" program that puts the cell's survival and reproduction first. It could not be otherwise for these cells are derived from primordial organisms programmed to live on their own. Multicellular organisms formed when individual cells accumulated into groups that somehow coordinated their actions. The difference between a collection of individual cells, like slime mold, and a multicellular organism it that, in the latter, the cells specialize their function. Since multicellular organization permits specialization, a multicellular creature has advantages over mere aggregations of like cells. Thus, we can have a liver or eyes whereas slime mold must get by with the restricted facilities available to identical, single, non-specialized cells.

Adam Smith said it all when he told us of the division and specialization of labor and how self interest sustained the coordination among agents, or cells in this case. He could have been the first modern biologist had he turned his great mind to this problem. The discovery of stem cells, those little undifferentiated cells that can turn into just about any kind of cell if they are put in the right neighborhood where they get that important local information from the cells around them, is a compelling proof of the decentalized organization of cellular specialization and coordination.

It appears that a stem cell with the same dna program as every other cell can become a heart cell or an eye cell or a pancreas cell if it is put where its neighbors are heart cells, or eye cells, or pancreas cells. Its all in the neighborhood because the common-to-all dna program is executed under local signals from neighboring cells. A liver cell is no closer to other liver cells than it is to heart cells in gene space, but its dna program is executed from local signals which makes it a liver cell. So, it becomes specialized.

Which brings us back to those fat cells. If the body were a communist, cells would not take more than their "share" somehow determined to be in the best interests of the body. But, they really are self-interested to the point of ruthlessness. They don't care about the harmony of the body or maintaining homeostasis, they care about themselves because that is how evolution programmed them. Its in their dna and the same holds true of all the other cells.

When the body is in chronic positive caloric balance, fat cells grow and proliferate. Its a good thing that they do because it would be dangerous to have excess nutrients constantly circulating in the body. We would have so many free radical reactions that we would die. And our kidneys and livers would quickly fail. If many fat cells simultaineously were to execute their apoptosis program, die and release their contents, it could kill us. So, fat is good up to a point, when we are in chronic positive energy balance.

The problem is when the colony gets to be so large that its mass action and self-interest directs a larger proportion of our total resources to fat. I detailed how that happens in the last post.

There are two strategies for attacking the problem: 1. eliminate the chronic positive energy balance by taking in less energy and expending more energy, and 2. shifting the allocation of resources from fat to the other organs and muscle.

This is easy to do, but the fat cells won't go willingly and you don't want them to release their contents massively because it would be toxic. Change the energy balance by eating less energy dense foods, eating less in total, and by being more active. Walking is part of this, but a small part. It doesn't burn much energy and it doesn't alter the hormone drives that direct energy to fat and the other organs sufficiently. To change the hormone drives you must eat intermittently, eat foods that do not release a strong insulin signal, and you must exercise with enough intensity.

This is easy to do too, but you have to ignore the signals out there in the external world that put choices before us that our brains and bodies never faced before and for which they may have inadequate defenses.

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Dr. Cohen's Book

September 20, 2005 11:42 AM

I have been reviewing my wife's prescription medicines and am a bit appalled at some of the recommendations of her doctor. She has known renal disfunction and yet was put on Plavix as a preventative against stroke. Renal disfunction dramatically lowers the possibly beneficial metabolite produced from the raw material of Plavix. Among the side effects listed are dizziness (which she is experiencing) and some impairment of her already damaged kidneys.

More troubling is the way the benefits are calculated. Reading the overall mortality risks of placebo, aspirin alone, plavix alone, and plavix with aspirin three conclusions come forth: 1. the risks are very low of mortality, 2. the differences among all four procedures are not significantly different, and 3. the relative risk calculations are without statistical foundation since there are no significant differences among the outcomes even with the large sample sizes of the trials.

Remember sample size is everything in the statistics; large enough samples tend to make everything significant just because of the way significance is calculated. Yet, a Bayesian analysis begins with the prior from the large sample and then the posterior likelihood is caculated from that fairly sharply determined prior (because the sample is large). I haven't done the calculation, but it is easy to see that the posterior is not much different from the prior under all the treatments. The literature that comes with the drug does not do a Bayesian analysis and, instead, promotes the relative risk. This far overstates the benefits, which are questionable given the low overall mortality and the lack of precision in the risk ratio.

We are taking her off Plavix and just using aspirin. I don't think her doctor is aware that impaired renal function diminishes the circulating level of the metabolite or is aware of the minimal differences among the outcomes.

Then comes this brief preview from Dr. Mercola's web site of Dr. Cohen's book on drug-related mortality risk, which is known to be a greater risk than most of the health risks you read about in the paper.

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Cell Competition and Cooperation, or Why Fat Cells Don't Go Willingly

September 18, 2005 11:11 AM

This topic is a blending of evolution, metabolism, and competition; it is one of my favorites because economics is such a powerful tool for bringing these issues together. The idea is to understand cell competition and cooperation as a balance among the cell colonies that occupy and constitute a living body. Every large organization balances the interests of its constituents in a way that leaves them in a sustainable equilibrium

I will return to the topic of the title, fat and why it is so hard to get rid of, but first a few examples of the competition that exists in nature and inside our bodies to lay out the principles.

Plants and animals. Plants that are too easy to eat and are nutritious are attractive to herbivores. So, unless they can respond by limiting the ability of herbivores to digest them or by preventing the reproduction of herbivores, they will not survive the evolutionary race. Consequently, plants have many strategies to disarm, kill, or prevent the reproduction of their predators (herbivores). Grasses and the wheat that we eat that are evolved from them contain mineral sequestering substances that lock up the minerals in an herbivore, preventing mineral metabolism and growth. Phytic acid is one of the most prevalent of these and it binds zinc and calcium so that the herbivore does not develop. Phytic acid does the same thing in the human body so that a child raised on a high grain diet is deprived of the minerals he or she requires to develop. Rice, a relative of grass, does the same thing, which is one reason why northern Chinese are taller than southern Chinese; the northerners eat far less rice and more vegetables and meat.

Another trick plants have to keep from being eaten is to chemically castrate male herbivores who consume them. The chemical in this case is a form of plant estrogen that de-masculinizes the male plant eater. This happens to human males too and to females who experience too much estrogen from eating soy beans and wheat.

Yet another trick is outright poison. Plant toxins are among the most dangerous in the biological world. Ricin, the deadly toxin that kills almost instantly, is derived from soy beans. Gluten, the deadly protein that dissolves the gut of celiac disease sufferers, is one of the other protective toxins that wheat and grass related plants use.

It is all a matter of the competition for scarce resources and the defenses that one entity marshals against competitors and predators.

When it comes to cancer, strange things happen because cancer tumors compete with one another for the body's resources. Large cancers secrete substances that limit the growth of smaller cancers. Thus, when a large tumor is removed surgically, the smaller ones are now left unsuppressed and may grow rapidly. This can present a problem for the patient. After a major cancer surgery the patient may face further cancers later because they are no longer suppressed by their larger competitors.

A cancer cell is a cell that does not obey the cellular signal to commit apoptosis (cell death). It has broken away from the cooperation that generally, but not always, prevails among our body's cells. A tumor is a coalition of cooperating cells that breaks from the super coalition of the cells; the core, the sustainable equilibrium among cells in which the imputation to the cells is highest, is violated. Perhaps the equilibrium is disturbed by a virus or collateral damage from the immune system. Something renders the cancer cells less willing to cooperate with the other cells of the body and to seek their own goals. (This somewhat anthropomorphic way of putting it is harmless, but cells do not have goals per se; they just execute their programs.) It is the programs, the genes, that are changed by cancer, giving them less relatedness to the other cells. Thus, cancer cells, being farther from normal body cells in gene space, do not share the interests of the coalition of cells that constitute a living human.

Moving to the more general point, the cells in one's body are close relatives since they share the same genes. This close-relatedness tends to reduce in fighting among the cells, just as the workers in an ant colony tend not to fight because they are all sisters or brothers. The mitochondria are former plant organisms and so the cooperation between them and our own dna derived cells is somewhat lessened. So, there may be more trouble between our cells and these micro-organisms, and there is generally. Sometimes the mitochondria go into steep decline and cease to energize our cells. No one knows why, but this decline creates an energy crisis for the other cells and is a major factor in aging.

Then there is gestational diabetes. This is a situation where the fetus, in competition with the mother for the body's scarce resources, emits hormones that make the mother insulin resistant. When she is insulin resistant she cannot effectively metabolize nutrients and they go to the baby instead.

More generally, insulin resistance is a resource reallocation strategy used by various colonies of cells in the body. Insulin resistance diminishes first the ability of muscle to metabolize glucose. This makes more available to the brain, whose requirements for glucose are higher than all the other organs. muscle versus brain. This was an adaptive strategy for our ancestors who had scant access to glucose and were very active. Insulin resistant muscles were probably essential to the survival of our species. Now, it is killing us in novel ways. This is an ancient adaptation gone wrong in our present world.

Finally, fat.

Fat is an organ competing for resources. In obese people it is the largest organ or cell colony in the body. What strategies do fat cells have to shift resources to them and take them from other cells? Lots, it turns out.

Fat cells secrete many active hormones whose cumulative effect is to make other cells insulin resistant. Fat cells also become insulin resistant but at about half the rate of muscle. Thus, fat cells gain a competitive advantage over muscle cells in the competition for nutrients. In addition, fat cells secrete leptin. If the fat stores are large enough, the mass action of leptin secretion creates leptin resistance. The effect of leptin resistance is to moderate the negative effect of leptin on appetite. A similar effect holds for insulin; when we are insulin resistant, insulin does not shut down the appetite as strongly. And lipolysis is diminished.

The advantages to fat cells of insulin resistance and diminished appetite suppression are directly related to the total mass of fat. Fat cells thrive and get richer, the fatter you are. Consequently, there may be a nutrient or resource economy of scale to fat mass. Such an economy of scale would redirect nutrients to fat at such a pronounced degree that the average return to fat cells increases as fat mass increases.

No one knows if this is true, but if it were it would help to explain how large the fat mass becomes in some individuals. I would also conjecture that fat cells cause fatter individuals to expend less energy. This would be an obvious strategy for the fat colony against the muscle colony. I would go so far as to argue that some hormone or other messenger emitted by fat cells will be found with precisely that effect. It is known that the obese do expend less energy, but the reasoning has always been that they are fat because of it. Given the powerful weapons fat has to defend itself, it is also likely true that fat mass diminishes energy expenditure per unit of active muscle tissue.

Thus, just as the large cancer sites diminish the ability of smaller cancers to grow, fat may diminish the ability of other organs to grow or sustain their mass. The health consequences would be large.

Fat cells do not obey the cellular apoptosis signal and they live a very long time in the body. I would conjecture that the fatter one is the more resistant to the apoptosis signals fat cells become. This would make fat cell turnover per unit of fat less for the obese than for the non obese.

So, what do you do to get rid of those fat cells who won't give up their contents to other cells and who refuse to die?

You have to starve them, but not by starving your other organs. You must change the allocation of resources away from fat and to the other organs and muscle. You must empty the muscle of its glycogen stores so that muscle cells become highly sensitive to insulin, in spite of the attempts of fat cells to deter this. Aerobics won't be enough because 1. if you are obese you are probably made "lazy" by that very fat you are trying to lose, 2. you will not drain enough glycogen, and 3. you will not sufficiently alter the hormone profile to redirect nutrients away from fat. You have got to do glycogen-draining anaerobic exercise. And, you have to eat less, but intermittently as in every other day eating. This begins to attack those fat cells in a way against which they cannot effectively defend themselves.

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Comments and Random Thoughts

September 16, 2005 07:20 PM

1. The evidence cited in the article I posted on forecasting errors shows clearly that financial analysts do not get it right. What they do is to follow the actual earnings sequence over time, adjusting their forecasts to follow the actual earnings sequence. So, they are better at postcasting than forecasting. The lag is about 3 months. Weathermen get it right far more often because they know that nobody can forecast the weather. The research shows that doctors are the absolute worst at forecasting and seem to be incapable of recognizing their own fallibility.

2. The feeling of superior knowledge is a curse. You may think you know a lot, but you don't know anything. Nor do I when it comes to forecasting. I did only it once in my research and I was looking for patterns rather than outcomes. And, I got this right as I was the only economist to forecast the coming of the hub and spoke flight pattern that evolved in airline travel. But, that wasn't hard, all I had to do was to see the constraints on the existing pattern and where it would break as the jumbo jets came into the fleet.

3. God laughs when you make plans. This is a playful kind of wisdom that I like. It is a mischievous concept of God as chance. Far better than any organized religion's view of God. If you have to evoke God to believe in chance, then fine. But, it is more beautiful and inspiring to think of chance for what it is: an irreducible limit to our finite knowledge.

4. Men who can't cook are doomed to obesity and malnourishment. They will be lacking in fundamental nutrients and phyochemicals and will rely on fast foods which are devoid of nourishment and high in calories. Cook by color, texture and variety. Browns are to be avoided. They are a sign of oxydation, the Amadori reaction that browns a cut apple and carmelizes foods through the oxydation of sugar and protein. It does the same thing to the proteins in your body. Colorless foods like rice are devoid of nutrients.

5. New Orleans was a swamp before hurricane Katrina. It was a city version of the modern welfare state. The floods might have been prevented but for the environmentalist law suit that stopped the raising of the levies in 1996. The Sierra Club brought the suit and was successful. Or were they? The environmental disaster from Katrina is of a greater magnitude than even the fanciful stories they told of the consequences of raising the levees.

6. "Journalism" of the kind we have seen is abysmal. But, it is driven by the need for a story. Many are interviewed about their plight and the actions of city, state, and federal governments. Only those interviews that contain a "story" make it through the process to reach the printed page. Reporters want their stuff printed and they have to find a story. So, even though many flood victims are grateful and no verified rapes occurred in the holding facilities (though at least one was attempted), what is selected in the editorial process is completely unrepresentative of the situation. Of course, nothing is representative unless things are normal; that is, unless the individual outcomes are normally distributed. They never are. So, reporters look for what I have called tail events; outcomes far from the typical outcome. I have been through this myself. Reporters call me and several other economists and then pick the economist whose views fit the story. I have stopped doing interviews for the press because I know that it will only be reported truthfully if it fits the reporter's "take" on the story.

7. How do you shape the traps? Remember adaptation is highly specific. You cannot change the overall architecture of the muscle, but you can do moves that require it to adapt to a specific load. So, look in the mirror, something I do not like to do (believe it or not) and watch how the load of the specific move you are doing affects the loading on the muscle. Know whether it is primarily a FT or a ST muscle and work accordingly.

8. A guy in the gym today was doing cable exercises in front of the mirror. He ties up the cables for an hour doing many sets on chest, deltoids and triceps. He looks awful and he is turning himself into a wholly ST kind of guy. I think he likes to see himself in the mirror, a vain and hopeless attitude. I was in and out of the gym and he was still on the cables. He has no symmetry and he has very thick skin. His muscles will never show doing this. He has a bit of bulk, but it is all ST fiber. Worthless in the shoulders and chest. No shape, no calves or quads and all ST.

9. The same process I noted about stories that filter through the editorial process for reporters holds for financial reporters. Is it news when the forecasted earnings are equal to the realized earnings? Any editor would turn the story down. But, if forecasting were accurate (it is not, it is a postcast not a forecast) then this would be the norm. It would not be reported. If forecasting were unbiased and converged on the realization of earnings and if errors were normally distributed (they are not) then about half the earnings realizations would be above the forecast and half below. All they have to do to forecast earnings is to have some idea of the change from prior earnings. You might think they could get this right, but they can't even do that. So, reporters pick a stock where earnings are below the forecast (even when statistically they are within the error region and, therefore, not below the forecast). Then they check to see if the stock fell and then it becomes a story. But, there are equally many where the earnings fell below the forecast, but the stock price went up. If forecasts are unbiased, then this has to be true. Thus, because of the selection process we only hear about stocks whose prices fall when their earnings are below the forecast. Pure selection to find a story.

10. When do you change from being a carb burner to a fat burner? Eventually. So do it. It happens when your insulin levels finally fall into the range that is typical of hunter gatherers and the evolved human physiology. Somewhere below an insulin level of 8 (mine is 3.4). But, you never are a pure fat or carb burner. Every process in the human body is a matter of distributions. Every hormone is always present in some amount. It is concentration of one or some over the others that constitutes a signal. So, a fat burner has relatively low insulin and higher glucagon and other hormones compared to a carb burner. No one knows how long it takes to alter the distribution to a more favorable profile, but it does happen. Would not knowing how long it will take, which is highly individualized, prevent you from going the right way? We should recognize the limits of knowledge and just get on the path that favors better outcomes.

11. There are a lot of people living in circumstances as risky as those who drew a bad outcome from Katrina in New Orleans. Some 3 million or so live in and around Naples below Vesuvius which earlier wiped out an entire city. About 12 million live along the faults in California. There are ocean front homes along every coast. Many people are obese and playing the same risky game as these people. Every disaster relief effort that pours money and resources to these people taxes us all for their choices. The price they pay for their choices does not encourage forethought. Private insurance knows how to price these risks far better than politicians who fall all over themselves in the rush to "help" the victims. We are up around 250 billion now in promised aid, with no end in sight. This is poor public policy.

12. One of the great mysteries is how the US government can create and sustain such a remarkable military fighting machine and do almost everything else so poorly. If only the "war on cancer", the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty" were equally effective as the war we fought in Afghanistan or Iraq. War is such a poor model for any government program but war. Governments cannot seem to run good schools but they are good at creating programs that create and reward victims.

13. Race is such a slippery concept; there are sub-populations within the human populations. And they do differ a bit in their genetics. But, that doesn't tell us much. Yet, these gene frequencies must be recognized because, among other things they tell us something of the susceptibility of sub-populations to diseases and of the efficacy of drugs for genotypes. It is subcultures that more strongly affect behavior. And these have next to nothing to do with race. Yet, it is possible to create a subculture through discrimination or through rewards for particular behaviors. Or lack of punishment. I was particularly struck when I read of the behavior of the sight-disabled or nearly blind. Many with poor vision make their way in life. But, some become "blind" when they accept the aid that is available for vision below the threshold for legally blind. This is just a number, but it had a profound effect in the aid programs. When an otherwise functional person accepts aid and becomes legally blind they change their behavior and begin to act less capably. This is like the story I told in my previous post, What Hump. If Marty Feldman, Mel Brook's Igore in Young Frankenstrein, had accepted the offer of the operation to fix his hump he would have accepted an altered vision of himself and his capabilities. Instead, he said, "What hump"? and retained his personal vision of his own capabilities and "normality."

14. We passed 1.5 million hits today.

15. I have been working on the Mike Austin golf swing this week. What fun to explore a new swing and how effective I think it is. The PGA swing, with all its rotation of torso and forearms, is too hard to keep together without the practice that pros do. And, it is hard on the back with all the twisting it places on the spine. I haven't got it yet, and never will fully, but I like it. I was already "long" in my driver and irons, because I was a baseball player and I retain my FT fibers. But, I have gotten wild from working on shoulder rotation (and playing infrequently and almost never practicing). The Austin swing is not PGA approved; in fact in order to get a PGA card Austin had to demonstrate he could do the PGA swing. Sounds like doctors getting their card and following other association recommendations that are not so good, like the ADA diet.

16. Stretching, as I noted in my recent post, is far over-rated. What else can practitioners of healthful activities do but recommend things that they develop and promote? Never stretch a muscle that has a knot in it. It is already so tight that further stretching can only stress tendons. Unless the trigger point is loosened, there can be no Golgi organ relaxation response; it is already pulled so tight that it cannot respond effectively.

17. There is no religion of peace. All organized religions promote their own existence and further their own survival. They break people off into groups and create an "us and them" attitude. Much research shows that when people are so-grouped they do strange things. I am a human being first and a husband and father and grandfather next. And I am a citizen of this country. I am spiritual, but I will not be a member of a religion. My beliefs and attitudes are my own and completely independent of any religion.

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The Forecasting Follies

September 15, 2005 11:05 AM

Nearly every day an article appears in the financial press "explaining" that such and such a stock fell in price because its earnings did not meet the forecasts of analysts. What nonsense.

What would you say about someone who forecasts the winners of NFL games who got it wrong almost all the time? And why are people so fascinated with forecasts anyway? Election coverage is little more than breathless repetition of polls and long-winded discussions of what they mean for the candidates. Who is going to win the election is a question everyone seems to want to know. But, that knowledge is of little value and no one can predict it unless it is obvious to nearly anyone.

Back to the financial analysts. What the news says when it is announced that earnings are less or more than forecasts is that the analysts got it wrong. It doesn't mean anything about the company whose stock is involved. And the report that the price fell because of the difference between realized earnings and forecasts is just a story. No one knows why the price fell, or even if it did relative to the market portfolio.

There is no reason that one quarter's earnings relative to a forecast should change a company's value significantly. It should make the stock price of the analyst fall, not the company's. Nobody can forecast quarterly earnings reliably. They are random, after all. So they will seldom equal any expectation. The forecasts are also point forecasts of a single value. So any realized earnings will nearly always fail to fall on that single point.

As I said in my Edge Annual Question Center law...

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Sharp Angles

September 14, 2005 08:48 AM

Ever notice how ARod or Pujols look at bat? Or Manny Ramirez? They form sharp angles; their geometry is obvious and tight. The contrast with a lesser hitter is quite obvious; my little grandson looks something like a noodle when he is hitting. He is getting it with the hitting lessons he is being taught at the Sports Academy here in southern Utah. But, he is all soft bends, not sharp angles.

The same point holds for Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods, and to a slightly lesser extent to Ernie Els. Vijay, for all his purity in ball striking does not have the sharp angles of, say, a Hogan.

ARod and A. Pujols have a tight spine, with ample lordosis, and balanced leg and arm angles. Even the great Duke Snider looks kind of soft by comparison.

These great ball strikers have a tightness in the joints and trunk that create leverage on the arms and shoulders. They rotate in a small radius, like a skater who spins faster when she folds her arms to her body. They hold their tight radius, and therefore the geometry of the swing, because they have very stiff trunks. So, the spine stays in a tight radius unlike a bent spine that rotates and wobbles over a much wider area. Look also at the leg angle from the extension of the front leg at impact and the contraction of the back leg, with a sharp angle between the upper and lower leg, all pivoting off a strongly extended foot far up on the toe and driving the pelvis around to finish the swing.

They have tight joints too; they have to in order to hold the sharp angles that they exhibit and that contribute to the geometry of their swings.

As people age, they lose their angularity; they look soft, rounded, and their spine is curved. They don't fully extend their limbs, so they look bent rather than like connected levers. Our movements are almost entirely moving levers under, around and against a rigid core. The spine is just a stack of washers with guy wires holding it up. They have to be rigid too. Or the stack collapses.

So, I think too much is made of being loose and of stretching. Many people loosen their joints rather than their muscles when they stretch. Loose joints and spines are easily injured. And they do not hold or move through good angles. The muscles have to be compliant, but not the joints.

I don't do much stretching. I prefer to exercise the agonist and antagonist muscles in sequence so that I get a relaxation response from the reciprocal inhibition. This occurs when the muscle antagonistic or opposite the one being worked is inhibited by the action of the agonist. This is a feature of our neural systems and I try to exploit it in a natural way when I work opposing muscle groups, one after another.

This morning, for example,

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Panting 18 Year Olds, Birthdays, and Goals

September 12, 2005 08:57 PM

You will have to forgive me for putting this light moment up. It made for such a nice 68th birthday and it was so unexpected.

My wife and I drove our grandaughter, who had been visiting us in Utah, back to Southern California at the end of August. We stayed over at Newport Beach for a night before returning home. When I was at the University at Irvine, I roller bladed almost once a week at the beach in Newport Beach. Because we tried to make the trip a bit of a celebration, I went roller blading on Sunday, the day before my 68th birthday.

As I bladed along the sidewalk on the beach in my shorts, I brushed by three girls walking abreast of one another. I passed them from behind. As I passed, I heard someone panting and running behind me. I looked back to see that one of the girls was holding her heart and running after me panting like she was trying to catch me. The other girls were laughing. A nice compliment, especially to someone at least 50 years older than she.

I do reevaluate my status and set some new objectives on each birthday.

This year I am trying to improve posture and aesthetics. My work outs are more often aimed at symmetry and performance issues than how much I can lift or how big some muscle group is.

I tend to carry my head back a bit, motorcycle riding reinforces this because you can see better out of the helmet. So, first goal is to work on carrying my head better: level head and better alignment. More neck strength and flexibility too.

Working down from there, I am working on the upper tie of my traps as they descend from the neck. I like a sloping and defined upper tail of the trap as it reaches up to the neck. I remember a female colleague of mine who seemed to be fixated on this muscle as we talked about economics. This muscle seems to interest females. It does signal more muscle beneath the shirt and the cuts tell something about the definition of the rest of the body too.

This is part of my neck/upper shoulder goal. I am going to deepen the traps, but not in a bunchy and rounded way. I am working to have a curved trap that starts up on the neck and takes a turn going down and then curves out and then drops to the end of the clavicle. A compound curve, not a bulky mass.

Deltoids need a lot of work that I have had to pass over because of a neck spasm from a couple of years ago that is now healed. It was unrelated to my work outs, but it has been a problem. I learned trigger points and have worked out the problem myself. Deltoids are fast twitch fibers so I plan to do a lot of negatives to mass them up.

Then the transverse abdominus and multifidis groups, with the internal obligues too are in for more work. So important to posture and most sports too. These are ST fibers and their role is to hold posture, so no heavy weights and lots of isometrics.

Lats and upper back work will entail one armed db rows (the asymmetrical load is great for core training) and strong contraction at the top for deepening the cuts. (I think is was my cut back the girl panted over and maybe the calves.) Lat pull downs I do only to hit the upper lats, not the lower. The lower tail thickens your waist and gives the whole body a thick look.

A bit more lower leg mass and more refinement of the calves are next. More vastus and no pant burning, thick upper thighs. The soleus is a ST muscle, while the EDL and gastrocs are FT fibers. The soleus gives the outer sweep to the calf, which is very important. The gastrocs give the inner chunk and you should have a point on it if you do strong contractions at the top. I can tell you, girls like tan, cut calves. But, that is another story.

« Close It

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Never Forget

September 11, 2005 07:35 PM

I know where I was on September 11, 2001. I remember the anger and horror and disbelief as my son and I watched the television images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Towers. We were in an auto dealership processing the paper work for a lease on a small SUV for my son and his family. Four years later, the lease is up and we just turned in the vehicle yesterday.

I am still angry. I will never forget this event. I would go into the dens of Hell, if there were such a place, to get even with these mad men. They were fools and the names of the perpetrators will go down in history as mad men who denied their humanity and were duped.

They are not in Paradise; they no longer exist and they are gone, but for the memories they leave behind. Their biological substrate is destroyed for a fairy tale told by mad men. They are no more.

We must not forget, for these sorts of fools exist in the world of violent Islam and the mad men who urge them on still operate today. They offer nothing in this life. And, there is nothing they or anyone can offer beyond this life.

There is nothing beyond the biological stuff of life except for the memories you leave behind in your offspring, friends, and those you influence. And your genes, but they don't care about you or remember you. You are a vessel for their reproduction. And, they don't believe in virgins since that would lead to their extinction. So, there are no virgins in Paradise.

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Twins

September 9, 2005 02:57 PM

Twins was a funny Arnold Schwarzennegger/Danny De Vito movie about twins who were nothing alike. They were different in height and shape and temperament. The puzzle of the movie was how could twins be so different from one another? They couldn't be as different as Arnold and Danny were if they really were twins. Everyone knows this about identical twins, but it helped make the movie that they differed as much in their appearances as in their evil/good aspects.

Here are two identical twins that look almost as different from one another as Danny and Arnold.

This photo of identical 23 year old twins is from M. Rennie, Exp. Physiol 90.4 pp 427-436. Otto trained in distance running and Ewald trained in the field events. They are the same height and have similar facial structure, but they look very different otherwise.

Their bodies adapted to the demands they made on them; these epigenetic or environmental factors have a large influence on physiology. They have to because the human body is designed to efficiently adapt to what enables survival. Not that their survival was a risk, but the body doesn't know this. It just adapts to demands.

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This Body is Not Made for Sports

September 7, 2005 07:39 PM

Lest you think Mr. Afghanistan is a model, let me say that I think and the research shows that a body builder-type of body is not made for sports. Or life in my opinion. It is OK as an asthetic experiment, but it is not functional or healthful.

I could write a Top Ten Reasons Not to Be a Pro Body Builder entry as I did for marathoners. They share a lot of similar problems, most of which are related to over-training, mineral depletion, excess carbs, altered and unhealthful hormone profiles.

All the problems come down to the same thing; nearly everyone who participates in competitive sports (or glamour contests) is over-trained. I think modern life has enough stress in it and I fail to see why someone would load the stress of over-training on top of it. I know why people do it. It is because they think that more is more and they are goal oriented. They think of the body as a machine too. They want to be recognized. Their genes want to reproduce and are sending them down some path that may be weird. (But, the blonde over there might like it.)

So, what about a body-builder body for life or sport? Do body builders reproduce at a higher rate than accountants? I take that back because a lot of body builders are accountants judging by the way they count sets, calories, protein and all that.

It turns out that body builders have muscle fibers that reflect the high volume work they do. Though they have mass, they have slow reaction and relaxation time in their muscle fibers. Translation: SLOW.

Why this is so is not hard to see. Many sets of any exercise translate into an oxygen signal to the genes. So, the genes express muscle fibers that are suited to oxygen. These are ST fibers and FTa fibers.

They also carry a lot of mass because that is what wins contests. But, in life it doesn't work out that way. Mass slows you down. Add that to the translation of high rep routines into gene expression in primarily slow muscle fibers and you get a slow person, not suited for sports.

Add in all the other poor practices (insulin injections, high glycemic "gainer" supplements, GH injections, maybe some steroids too, demineralization and dehydration to get into contest form) and you have someone who is not all that healthy. Recreational body building to build muscle mass and strength carries some cost. Taking it to the competitive level is a risk to health.

Of the many body builders I have seen in my time I would say most have a puffed look when they are not flexed. It is like an actresse's lips filled with collagen. That is from high rep sets and high volume. They produce poor quality muscle. Not fast, not strong. The best looking bodies are on those who do high intensity training. Low sets, fairly low reps, short work outs, heavy weights. Plenty of rest in between.

There is a reason for the difference in the muscle quality. High rep, long work outs build ST and FTa muscle. High intensity, short work outs, and ample rest build FTb/x muscle. Stronger, leaner, tougher, faster. It shows. Look at Mike Menzter or Dorian Yates to see quality, strong muscle. Strong and fast muscle has a quality that is better than any amount of puff. It is healthier too. Compare Marius Puzinofsky or power lifter Cash to any body builder but Yates and see what I mean.

But, then again, it is a beauty contest and tastes are not stable or explicable in functional terms any longer. They once were in the evolutionary context, but non-linearity has taken them to a strange place in modern body building.

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Mr. Afghanistan

September 6, 2005 12:41 PM

This was too nice a bit of news to pass up. Afghanistan has its first Mr. Afghanistan, Khosraw Basheri, a 23 year old 212 pound bodybuilder and businessman. The Taliban would never have permitted this.

He looks pretty good to me, but his face shows the effects of severe dieting and, perhaps, some dehydration.

The iron game is big in the Middle East. Iran has had many outstanding Olympic lifters over the years, though I think the sport is waning under the Mullahs.

The better news is the progress in civil society, freedom, and education. As usual, the best source for progress in Afghanistan is Chrenkoff.

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Brains, Free Radicals, and E

September 4, 2005 04:55 PM

I don't push vitamins on this site and don't take ads for supplements. I do, as many of you know, take an antioxidant mixture formulated by one of the premiere researchers in the field, Dr. Demopolous. His product can be found at HMPScience.com.

I put this information up again because of a New Scientist article sent to me by Darren, one of our readers, about Vitamin E. The link is New Scientist.

My dosage, relative to the experimental subjects, is near the low end of the human equivalent of the mouse dosage, but well above the RDA for Vitamin E for humans. In my HMP supplement, I get 800 miligrams to 1.2 grams per day of Vitamin E. My diet also contains quite a lot, but I don't know how much because I don't count things like that.

But, I wouldn't take just any E; I take the HMP E. I would avoid the oil-based E sources because they become rancid on the shelf. The E that is included in the HMP product is an acetate-based form, stable, non-rancid and protected in a nitrogen package.

One of the things I enjoyed about my career as a professor was that I became smarter each year I taught. Having a lot of energy and curiosity helped a lot. But, teaching many different classes and often developing courses in new subjects, sometimes far beyond the conventional economics or behavioral science topics, forced me to be a good learner. The diversity of subjects in the Institute of Mathematical Behavioral Sciences was a bonus that kept me fascinated with all the things I could learn that I knew little of.

Near the end of my career I could teach two different classes back to back for a total of three hours of lectures without a single note in front of me. Some poor teachers can do this too in their non-technical subjects, but these were technically demanding subjects (read Hollywood Economics for an example of what I taught). I knew the subjects so well and I could organize the class in real time far better by responding to the students instead of going over canned notes.

But, the main reason was...

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Second Guessing Katrina

September 3, 2005 10:01 AM

Katrina was a hurricane, but the damage in New Orleans was from the flood when the levees were breached. The city is below sea level and there is no place for the flood to drain. The power was shut down to the pumps. So, it will be a long time before the water is pumped back into the sea.

Floods are harder than most natural disasters to deal with because there is little access to the flooded areas.

These factors would have made a pre-positioning of troops counterproductive, in spite of what the "pundits" are now telling us about the lack of response. The pre-positioned troops and their equipment would have been flooded too had they been in the city. Unlike the Tsunami where the waters swept back out to sea, there is no place for the water to go until the pumps come back up and the levees are sealed.

It is an enormous challenge, but the pace of the response is too slow and uncoordinated. It is how government bureacracies and divided responsibilities among city, state and federal agencies operate. We can't depend on them to protect us. The pace and nature of the response is typical of centralized, monolithic agencies. It would be far better to delegate local areas to local agents who can plan their responses to contingencies and have the resources required to implement them. This could be done by bringing quick response private contractors into the process and assigning them to sectors, infrastructure or medical tasks. Local knowledge and resources are responsive to local information. Higher levels pools of resources can be created for these local responses to draw from. And then there can be regional pools for deeper needs. It must be hierarchical, the best known structure for dealing with complexity.

As for the Army Corps of Engineers, we would do best to disband this legacy of early Progressive politics. I wrote a book on this agency and the management of our waterways some time ago; they build canals where they ought not to and canalize rivers and waterways so that they do not bleed off their energy. The result is they gain height as they fill and pick up enormous speed and force. Then, when they do go over the levees they are devastating.

You never have flood protection, all you can do is to mitigate smaller ones and then bear the awful ones that result from the mythical storm of the century. And the damage is increased because more buildings are put in harm's way on the false premise that they are protected.

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Katrina Aid

September 2, 2005 08:24 PM

After much deliberation I have chosen to donate to the families of soldiers who have been damaged by Katrina and its aftermath.

I am giving ten percent of my chapter sales proceeds to Operation AC for as many months as I see necessary.

I have been a Soldier's Angel (I know, I am no Angel and I don't like the name) for some time to a young man while he served in Iraq and who has now returned to New York to join the police force. Operation AC is affiliated with Soldiers' Angels and I feel comfortable sending my money to them. When I sent money to the Red Cross for September 11 aid I was disappointed to find how much went to other uses and to general fund raising. So, no more.

I do prefer to make directed donations to people who do things I like and feel are worthy. I do not like to give to people who are "victims" and who perpetuate this attitude and status from generation to generation. I am appalled at the third world status of the citizens of New Orleans and of the looting and crime. We are seeing the underclass of American society. No one interviewed seems capable of speaking English in a coherent manner and all they do on the televised broadcasts is complain that aid isn't up to what they are used to or demand. It is likely that TV broadcasts seek out these individuals to heighten the sense of tragedy. But, I don't see tragedy here of the kind we saw in, say, Beslan. I see a perpetual and uneducated class expressing the same kind of victimhood that class warfare politicians use. If these people are not the contituency of racial politicians, they are the victims that are required to press their agenda.

What this episode and my reading of No Excuses has caused me to conclude is that the present generation of denizens of New Orleans we are seeing on the news is basically lost. Uneducated, sick, violent, complaining victims. I am putting my hope on the next generation and will use a large portion of my book proceeds to fund scholarships (vouchers) for poor black students who are trapped in dysfunctional schools.

I have some hope that public vouchers will eventually come to pass (preferably over the corpse of the NEA). But, there are so many obstacles in the way and so much time that we cannot waste. So, I will try to find young blacks who aspire to a better education and help fund their escape from their local, dysfunctional schools (from what I see, most of New Orleans' public sector is dysfunctional) to go to a demanding and inspiring private school.

Rather than wait for public vouchers, we can all endow private vouchers to try to narrow the racial education divide that is separating this country and is so graphically exposed in the coverage of Katrina. So, twenty percent of my book sales will go to this venture.

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Mods to my KTM 950

After returning from the KTM Raid in Ouray, Co I made a few changes to my bike. It ran too hot to suit me in the high altitude and somewhat slow speeds that the jeep traffic required on the high trails. And I broke a piece on my old Arai helmet. It was old enough to be replaced anyway.

Having read the outstanding Motorcyclist Magazine review of helmets, I reassessed the Snell standard and decided it wasn't safe enough to suit me. The standard requires the helmet to withstand a double hit, but as a result, the helmet is made too hard to absorb shock and passes too many G's to the head. So, I bought a new helmet too. I bought the Shuberth S1 helmet which came just behind the highest rated helmet (an inexpensive polycarbonate that I have for my grandson). The inexpensive, but safe, helmet didn't fit well and the visor wasn't quite optically perfect. The Shuberth S1, a German high end helmet, fits all these criteria and has a pop down eye shade that works well for me. Its beautiful too.

Here it is sitting on the back rack of my KTM.

I also changed the mufflers...

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Katrina, New Orleans and the Limits of Knowledge

September 1, 2005 09:39 AM

For New Orleans, Katrina is the storm of the century. Or is it?

It turns out there is no storm of the century in the statistical sense. Looking back, one can see what the biggest storm was over the past. But, in forecasting storms one never knows what the biggest event will be or how probable it is.

The 100 year flood plain that many of you will know of because of home purchases, does not exist. That's right, the 100 year flood plain that represents an attempt to forecast what area will flood from the biggest storm likely to occur in the next century is impossible to calculate. But, it is done all the time and has taken hold as the way to quantify flood risk.

It does not exist because the rain fall time series in a location does not have a mean. How can it not have a mean? It has an average, which is just a calculation looking back at past rain falls and taking the average as the sum of the rain falls divided by the number. But, even though the series has an average (called the sample average) it does not have a mean. It turns out the average is dominated by extreme events; forty percent of the total erosion in a decade is done by a single storm. And, of all the storms we have seen we can never know what the future will hold. Larger ones are probable.

The mean is a parameter of the underlying true probability distribution of rain falls. But, it need not exist and does not exist for rain fall. Why should it? Nature doesn't do means as often as people like to think, given their exposure to averages in every thing they read. In order for there to be a mean the probabilities of large events have to fall off quickly enough for the integral of the size of the event, x, with the probability density of the event, f(x), to converge.

It turns out that it doesn't for rain fall and for a lot of other natural phenomena. In other cases, the mean exists but the variance does not. This is true of hurricanes and tornadoes for example. And the movies.

Why this is so is not so hard to understand. It says that there is a lot out there we haven't seen yet. Nature has more in store for us than we have experienced or can know. Our knowledge is limited and our experience is finite in a world where Nature is open and infinite. A hurricane draws in energy and mass from an area far larger than itself and the Earth's atmosphere is so full of stuff that the hurricane is essentially an open system that is driven far from equilibrium drawing mass from far. It is almost unlimited in what it can pull in if the energy driving it is high enough.

As for the global warming explanations; they reveal the ignorance and political agenda of the proponents. And the flood control "protection" built around our rivers and cities, these end up raising the damage because people build in these areas with the false belief that they are protected.

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Flat Tax

The tax system in the US is as unfair, burdensome, and corrupt as it can be. Its complexity reflects the creation of tax benefits to pressure groups by a Congress that is out of touch and too responsive to special interests. And these special interests go far beyond business to charities, foundations, labor, universities, churches and, well the list is endless.

It is a game in which every tax break is seen as a benefit to the recipients, but becomes a burden on everyone else. If many groups form and receive these breaks, then in the end no one gains anything. It is a bit of a Ponzi scheme run by Congress. They get to hand out these prizes, but in the end everyone is disadvantaged by some advantage given to others. In the end, we all lose. Only Congress gains in control of the tax proceeds and in being in control of the granting of tax privileges in exchange for the power and contributions they bring. The tax system is an enormous burden on us all.

It is time to end all this. A long time ago Milton Friedman championed the flat tax. He didn't invent it, every tax known to mankind has been tried by rulers great and small for centuries. But, he did bring it to the attention of economists and others in his popular books.

Some Latin American countries implemented the flat tax years ago. Russia did it last year. And others will follow. Steve Forbes campaigned on it. And he has a book out on the flat tax that is selling well. Now it is time for President Bush to champion the idea and get it done.

John Fund has a brief discussion of the debate around the world on the flat tax.

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