A Few Things

December 20, 2007 11:19 AM

I note this insight in a comment by Tuesday. I knew this and yet had not tied it together this clearly. It is regarding the Ancestors as Runners post of a few days ago where we discussed the mixture of continuous running, walking or trekking, and sprinting. I had argued that the distribution of these activities would have been more concentrated on walking, possibly at a high pace, and sprinting. Continuous running would also have been done for some periods. In fact, in my Essay, I argued that monitoring of wild animals and fish has been used to show that the distribution of these mixtures of activities follows a power law, to a good approximation. Now Tuesday puts this together nicely to make this argument:

"I know I've seen a study on the subject, though I can't seem to find it at the moment. Because walking and running/sprinting are more efficient gaits than jogging, they can be sustained for longer periods before complete rest is required, so over long periods of time (days/weeks) a walk-run pace does indeed cover more distance than a continuous pace."

I have seen the studies too, and have posted on some of them in the past, though I can't take the time now to find them. But, the point is that this mixture, with some time in the continuous mode, is likely to be more energy efficient. Why didn't I put it this way?

Further evidence comes from studies of intermittent versus continuous exercise and there the verdict is that a human can do a lot more work if done intermittently than if done continuously. Or, put another way, you can do a lot more work in a given period of time if the work is done in an intermittent fashion. This gain in time versus energy expenditure efficiency, as you know by now, is one reason Evolutionary Fitness makes use of intermittency in eating and energy expenditure. I think it is the ancestral pattern too, as this evolving discussion seems to indicate.

Does that mean that continuous running is out of the picture? I don't think so, but it ought not to be done to the exclusion of the others, as seems to be the practice of many joggers and marathoners seeking to keep their heart rate in a zone. The power law spreads activities over all zones and intensity, but it is concentrated on something close to walking/trekking with bursts into the other zones. The energy spent in the zones is greater in the walking/trekking and in the sprinting zone, using the mobility example, but there is a portfolio which ought to include some continuous running, as another commenter noted.

My model is to use the gym for my "fight or flight" zone and to take long walks for my "easy" zone. My sprinting now is pretty much confined to tennis which is a nice mix of high and easy work; play in other words. An hour hitting tennis balls on the ball machine set up to launch from side to side and hitting baseline returns with occasional rushes to the net for volleys is a nice work out.

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Terrorism, Education and Poverty

December 17, 2007 12:56 PM

Here is the abstract and the link to a paper in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy
Vol. 13 (2007) / Issue 1 / Research Papers

The subject is the link between education, poverty and terrorism among Palestinians, a topic much discussed these days. Most commenters in the media claim poverty is the root of terrorism. Perhaps it is the other way around; societies where terrorism breeds are made poor by the corruption of public trust and misplacing blame on others. In the one presidential debate I have seen the moderator made this now standard assertion as the preface to her question to the Republican candidates.

As we know from the Saudis on those flights on 9/11, they were from middle class to slightly affluent families. And, they were educated as well. This study finds a similar pattern among Palestinian terrorists.

Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians. (If you go to the link below the abstract, you can obtain the full paper.)

Claude Berrebi, RAND Corporation

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both higher education and standard of living are positively associated with participation in Hamas or PIJ and with becoming a suicide bomber, while being married significantly reduces the probability of participation in terrorist activities.

Berrebi, Claude (2007) "Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians," Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 13 : Iss. 1, Article 2.
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol13/iss1/2

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Why do children not qualify for health savings accounts?

December 16, 2007 09:05 AM

I discovered to my regret that children who do not work do not qualify for a medical savings account. I tried to enroll my grandchildren in medical savings accounts. I found that I was able to buy catastrophic insurance for them but could not set up a medical savings account for them. Nor would my funding of the savings accounts be tax deductible.

This is a serious omission in the law. Parents (or grandparents) or others should be permitted to fund a child's medical savings account in conjunction with a catastrophic policy. Imagine the fund a healthy child would have by the time they grow up and become adults. It could be enough to fund all their future medical costs. Even if it were not enough, the adult child would begin the journey of adulthood with assets that could be used to offset medical insurance costs or retirement. The law might be written to let a dedicated health savings account be used as an offset to health insurance, Medicare, or Social Security contributions.

There are many possibilities. Parents could fund their children's medical savings accounts with tax deductible contributions. And these contributions could offset the health premiums they might otherwise pay at their place of employment. The children would be protected even if the employer alters or discontinues medical programs. All this applies to the parents and their medical savings accounts as well. Portable medical savings accounts remove the risk associated with job change or with unemployment.

If contributions to child medical savings accounts were tax deductible, individuals could fund accounts for poor children or children of irresponsible parents. The contributions to the children's fund would be tax deductible and encourage foundations, wealthy individuals, and even persons of modest means but big hearts to fund medical savings accounts. These children, in turn, would grow up to be healthier, wealthier, and they would have a stake in staying healthy since it would directly affect their wealth when they mature.

Imagine having the next generation of children grow up with proper and complete medical coverage and sizable health savings account balances. Since it is "their money" they would be smart shoppers for health services. This would put enormous pressure on suppliers and elicit sharp competition among health services. The competition would benefit everyone.

The children would have a start on their future health and retirement funding. They would have high quality service at competitive prices through their childhood and for much of their adult life. The doctors would see little or no red tape in billing and payment. The medical savings account credit card would pay the bill at the time of the office visit and for many hospital stays. Insurance only kicks in when a more serious accident or condition occurs.

If such a program were started in other countries and they were not corrupt (not run by the government or the UN) it would be possible to provide medical coverage and future wealth throughout the less developed world. American insurance companies could compete with foreign providers to offer competitive accounts and policies in Burma, Africa, Latin America, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Thailand and so on. It would be a boon to the health of children all over the world. And, the children would grow up with a modest to large amount of wealth. They would have a stake in their own health and in the society around them. The medical care business would be transformed.

By the way, there is no such thing as social security. There are only people who are more or less secure against contingencies. They might pool their risks against these contingencies, but there is no effective way for a society to avoid risk. As a program for risk pooling, Social Security is very ineffective. It is not insurance, it is redistribution among generations. It is a Ponzi scheme because the risk pool is allocated from one generation to another. And, it is fraught with demographic risk and political risk. It will eventually go under or have to be modified substantially by disavowing the contract between generations because it is not sustainable.

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Halfway through the Mitchell report on steroids in basball

December 13, 2007 05:07 PM

So far the report is a bore. No science save the usual references to the harm associated with steroids and protecting "our kids" the mantra of the new social engineer/prudes/and semi-fascists who want to make us do things their way.

It is a sleazy document so far, and thus gets much press coverage for the naming of names and locker room gossip. One section actually is devoted to sports writer comments on baseball and steroids, just about the least credible group on anything. All they want to do is to be noticed and to sell their story, an admission made by the sports writer who castigated Ted Williams, one of the greatest and most ethical of baseball players.

If I find some statistics that purport to document the surge in hitting, I will take a good look at them. So far there is nothing but an allegation that hitting surged in 1996 with no specifics.

Mitchell was not my favorite senator when he was senate majority leader and he is not winning any more admiration with this, so-far, sleazy report. Some of the usual antagonists to steroids also appear in the report, as they do in the Senate hearings. The same crew of witnesses keeps recycling, making the same statements.

Steroids are not that dangerous. They don't kill people. The people who overuse them already have significant problems. Most of the effects are reverseable, though not always for women. Steroids, as the research I have discussed, are only moderately effective.

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CPU and Comments

My apologies for my site hitting its cpu limit. It seems that I now have enough bandwidth, but not enough cpu to handle the traffic. Of course, when we fix the comment problem that will lower the cpu load, but I have increased the cpu capacity anyway, though it will take a week or so to become active. Ah, success does have its own issues.

And my apologies to those of you who have tried to post comments to no avail. I have gone through all the past unsuccessful attempts to comment and given all of you trusted status, including a couple I had banned for poor language and manners. I hope this is a fresh start and look forward to the always interesting comments.

I have gotten some requests for SuperMike to provide more details of his EF-style workouts and eating. SuperMike, if you are there, send me an email and I will post your response.

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Stunned

December 9, 2007 11:00 AM

I happened to check the site meter for RogerSimon.com today. I think it is an interesting blog and have looked at it from time to time, largely for his sharp reviews of movies and also for his slightly ascerbic take on political events. As he is one of the founders of Pajamas Media, I had thought his site would get far more traffic than mine. He has also been in operation longer.

I was stunned to see that my site has a lot more traffic than his. I am getting 4004 visits per day, he is getting just under 3000. My daily page views are 8811, his are 4007.

I am getting about 120,000 visits a month from between 115 and 120 countries. I will have about 13 million hits this year at the present pace.

Now, what do I do with this monster? A new set up is coming with a public and a subscription area with deeper content and a forum in which I will participate. The major lesson is that I ought to get back to the book now that I have seen how my message has been received. WW is working on her recipes and I am pulling out my files and drafts.

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Perfectionists

December 5, 2007 12:43 PM

Have a look at this NYT article Perfectionism before you buy that next self-help book.

I have learned to get along with my slight perfectionism. I find my best work is always done with a sense of effortlessness and enjoyment. Blogging, maybe not my best work, is completely effortless. I sometimes look back on a post and wonder how I did it.

Perhaps the deepest link to eating disorders and an exessive concern with body image is with perfectionism. Most steroid users are ordinary guys looking for a perfect body image, not athletes. Eating disorders seem to come from the same sort of excessive concern with the opinions of others or a critical parent from the past that you still carry around in your brain and in your self-talk.

My perfectionism appears in sports more often than elsewhere. I often expect to perform at a high level which is really kind of silly when you think about it. So I turn it into a learning experience to enjoy the study of technique and science behind a sport.

I think an element of Zen teaching is to get the student's ego and perfectionism out of the way. We could all do that in everything we do.

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Cascades of Ideas and Beliefs

Having worked out some of the dynamic belief and information processes in the movies, I have seen how powerful learning from others can be. I can't resist: 1. trying to feed ideas and opinions into the cascade on global warming to try to move it onto a better dynamics and to reduce the relative frequency of bad ideas to good, 2. pointing out this insightful analysis of the global warming-we have to do something belief dynamic from The OpinionJournal of the WSJ.

The role of journalism, as I have seen it from my perspective as someone who is now and then asked to comment, seems to be promoting consensus through Kahneman's availability heuristic. The more an idea is "out there" and available, the more plausible it becomes. Not true, but that is how our minds work.

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My Comments on Some Recent Comments

November 30, 2007 07:29 PM

As I migrated to my new site and upgraded to a new version of Movable Type I lost some comments. They were treated as junk or spam by the new version. Fair enough because I once got a ton of it. But, the few of you who were treated badly have been welcomed. I monitored the junk-labeled comments and added the posters to our trusted posters. I hope this resolved the issue, but we will probably have to revisit it later.

A few responses to various comments.

Machines. I use the machines when I want to make my workouts efficient and safe. If I can stay at one station for three workouts, that is time gained and progress. Not that I am ever in a hurry, but I want the pace and intensity to be up there. So, one station, three exercises works.

Post work out drinks. A real killer to your metabolism, as I discussed in the earlier post, and many others. To add to the issues, a high carb drink or post-work out ingestion of a "gainer" or "recovery" drink shuts down gene expression that builds muscle.

Super Mike shows this clearly. Low muscle glycogen turns on gene expression that signals muscle development. How could it be otherwise in the evolutionary context? There were no gainer drinks, shakes, or supplements loaded with carbs. So, the genes had to express adaptation when it was called for. And that context is after an intense exertion. What would have been the reward from that exertion? Meat. A kill. What would that have contained? No high-carb "gainer" drink to replenish muscle glycogen. Rather, it would have contained low saturated fat, organs with abundant saturated fats and vitamin A. Consequently, the genes evolved to express muscle repair and development in that nutritional contexts. Hence, no sugar in the muscle when gene expression occured.

The other aspect of the hunt would have been a kind of awe at the majesty of an animal whose body supported the life of the hunter and his kin. Such an animal is worthy of worship and admiration because they had survived and thrived in that bountiful and dangerous environment. There is a thankfulness for that sacrifice and a relief that the dangerous hunt ended favorably. Religious rites, such as they may have been in the Paleolithic would have been in tribute to the majesty of the powerful animal whose body yielded the ingredients of life.

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Non-punitive environmentalism

November 27, 2007 08:39 PM

We are all environmentalists. It is just that those who call themselves environmentalists have made the role unrealistic. Too many of them have turned into a bunch of anti-growth, statists whose aim seems to be to control others. It is a worthy cause to keep the planet clean and healthy. It is equally worthy to promote growth, freedom and property rights that foster a care for the environment. Too many, self-styled, Environmentalists (with a big E) are anti-growth (the main contributor to rising health and well-being). They are against freedom and property rights and appear primarily to seek a positive self-image, no matter what the cost. They want to be enlisted in a noble cause, but care little if your rights or the welfare of the third world suffers in the promotion of that cause.

William Nordhaus and his co-author have a new book on this subject. The review published in Opinion Journal is right on the mark. I met Nordhaus at a conference long ago and he is a serious and highly competent scholar. His argument is one that real environmentalists will embrace. It will disgrace the disservice to the environment and to humanity that is practiced under the flag of environmentalism. On the other hand, they may really be misanthropes who are effectively pursuing their agenda under whatever banner they can co-opt.

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Transfer Finished

It took a day or so, but the transfer to a new host with far more capacity is finally complete.

We now have 4 times the bandwidth that was limiting the blog and readership. We are headed for more than 2 million hits this month and have the capacity to go to about 4 million.

I want to add a forum where we can talk more about some of the issues that interest us. There are so many of them and new research is finally getting closer to what matters.

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Bandwidth

November 20, 2007 07:17 PM

The site hit a bandwidth limit last night. I raised the limit, but we are nearing that too. My hosting service has indicated they will raise my monthly limit to 100GB, but have not done so yet. Presently, the bandwidth limit is 60GB. I do think the messy comment interface is partly to blame and am going to fix it for sure real soon now. So, until the bandwidth is raised I think it might be useful to hold comments for later. Sorry about this. It is nice to see so much traffic. I will make the necessary changes to accommodate current traffic and new growth.

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Islam and Tribalism

November 15, 2007 10:02 AM

Read Stanley Kurtz' deep historical analysis of the Waziristan region of Pakistan and the origins of Islamic Fundamentalism Tribes of Terror in this Claremont Institute Review of Books article.

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Norman, A nice boy who hit early and lost his way, if he ever knew it

November 14, 2007 09:46 PM

Norman Mailer was one of the wonder boys of campy, leftist, self-centered, America hating writers who made it. An adolescent radical and would-be sexual conquestor (Che are you listening?) What a fraud. Just like Dylan Thomas (whose poetry I tried to read because women loved it. I was young, what can I say?), he was a confused fraud, caught up in the media love (is there anything more superficial?). I doubt he believed anything he said. I only put this link up Roger Kimbell Exposes Mailer because WW was watching Hannity and Colmes last night and they replayed a Mailer interview. What a self-absorbed foolish man who thought himself profound. Though now and then a reader tells me I am not, I know it. No one is as profound as Mailer thought he was or as the press made him out to be. And then there is the $23 million someone just paid for a Warhol painting. Is he/she hoping for a bigger fool later to pay more. Remember, at some point a tulip bulb cost as much as a city block in downtown Amersterdam.

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Farm Subsidies

November 9, 2007 11:21 AM

A note from the Patriot Post:

The Senate began debate this week on a $280-billion agricultural bill that has something for everyone, except those searching for common sense. The House passed a $286-billion version last summer, and the Senate version is being debated not just by the farm states, but also unions, immigration advocates and energy lobbyists. Amendments were proposed to protect immigrant workers, thought to be vital to agricultural production, and ethanol producers, who refuse to accept that corn-based ethanol will continue to drive up food prices without providing the supposed benefits of energy independence. Republicans have no reason to support this legislation because its needless subsidies run counter to the GOP’s free-market, small-government ideology. Democrats should be against it because it funnels well over two-thirds of the subsidies to large corporate farms while leaving small family operations devoid of financial support. Yet both parties are falling over themselves to add more pork to the bill. Why? It’s all about the votes, of course, which often requires bringing home the bacon.

According to the top economists gathered in Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus, eliminating farm subsidies in the first world and liberalizing trade would produce annual benefits of $2.4 trilion, with half of that accruing to the third world. Even if you paid off existing recipients of subsidies the benefit for each dollar spent to do that would bring $15 of benefits. Not only is the crass vote buying in the farm bill bad for US taxpayers and the world economy, it is particularly harmful to the under developed part of the world.

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Death Penalty for victims

November 2, 2007 10:14 AM

I don't like the death penalty, but I am in favor of it because it saves innocent lives. John Lott discusses the evidence and the stay placed by Supreme Court as it considers lethal injections.

The innocent lives that are saved by executions are, unfortunately, not visible and there is no one to demonstrate in their favor. Until it is too late and they are murdered by some savage.

I conjecture that the preventive effect of executions is understated even in the most sophisticated research. And the deterrence effect may also be larger than is found in most studies. There are several reasons for this.

1. Killers claim multiple victims. If they are executed the chain is ended. If they are put in prison, they may be paroled and strike again. This requires a longitudinal study that is difficult to do and most studies seem to take a more or less cross-sectional approach because that is how the data are assembled. While in prison, killers do kill other prisoners, they injure or kill guards, and they may direct or encourage murder by their fellow criminals who remain outside prison in retribution for being put away. This case by case, time series evidence is far more powerful than the aggregative statistics can show, but often fails to get the proper weight because it cannot usually be put to the common statistical tests.

2. The incentive to kill is dramatically altered by the possibility of execution. This is shown by the attempts of killers to enlist others to do the killing. Gangs will recruit underage children who can kill without the fear of execution. Mobsters hire professional killers. So do aggrieved wives and husbands and business partners. Convicted killers go to great lengths to avoid execution.

3. The deterrence effect of armed potential victims is the dual of the death penalty. Killers are far more likely to kill unarmed victims than armed ones, showing that the fear of death or injury looms large in their decision. The same fear of being killed by a potential victim is present if the killer is instead facing the possibility of execution. They are two sides of the same coin.

4. Murder is a rare and horrendous event. The usual regression analyses and risk analyses are smoothed and averaged and made all too normal. Murder requires a statistical model that is either distribution-free or uses a more exotic extreme value or fractal distribution to more accurately reflect the probabilities.

The lives of the victims saved have to somehow be weighed against the life of the killer. I don't see that in the arguments of the advocates of ending the death penalty. We know there is a decision bias we all tend to have that underweights the prospect of multiple deaths of unknown victims against the execution of a known individual. Kahneman and Tversky showed this long ago, though their examples are somewhat different from this frightening calculation. We must make it however and overcome our bias if we are to clearly understand the issue and save innocent lives.

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Justice Clarence Thomas

October 2, 2007 09:59 AM

I ordered Justice Thomas' book yesterday. It was number one on Amazon. If you can believe it OJ's book was number 12. That is the good and bad of it.

A reader alerted me to Rush Limbaugh's interview with Justice Thomas; I read the part about his younger brother dying while jogging. We know about the dangers of jogging.

I have read a few of the Justice's opinions and found them to be true to his statement about his writing and approach from the interview:

JUSTICE THOMAS: My role is to interpret the Constitution, when it's a constitutional case and a case or controversy. It's to interpret a statute. It is not to impose my policy views or my personal views on your Constitution, our Constitution, or on your laws. It's not my private preserve to work out these theories, and I guard very, very diligently against doing that. I think a part of being able to stay within the confines of that limited role, one has to be humble about one's -- a judge has to be humble about his -- own approach and what his capacities are. Before I start the term, and certainly in many, many cases, I had a little prayer that I used to say years ago when I was at EEOC: "Lord, grant me the wisdom to know what is right and the courage to do it." So I also think that, in addition to wisdom or humility, you need the courage to do what is right. If the answer is something that is difficult or that will lead to criticism, you still have to do it, if it's right. It's your oath. So that's, in a nutshell, my approach to the job.

He is inspiring.

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Numb3rs: My Take on the Show

September 30, 2007 07:37 PM

Well the show was not so good. I have come to despise modern direction with over-paced cuts and loud noise. The dialog seemed artificial because it was not recorded well and was of a different pace relative to the fast cutting. Life does not move that quickly.

The mathematical points, of course, were correctly presented, being worked out by the Mathematica staff, but seemed a bit stretched. Logic and evidence were the most powerful tools, for example in hypothesizing that the bad guys were bound for China and a freighter. And the trust metric was more subject to the voting procedure (my friend Don Saari is probably the world expert on this) than the weighting of the vector of attributes of the person being "trusted". Posing the question this way did elicit the components of the attribute vector on which the agents decided. Sometimes posing the question the right way gets you close to the answer.

I never could get the sound right on my set up and so found the dialogue murky and hard to understand. As for the "guru" professor sitting in the meditation center, come on. I have known many great mathematicians and found the portrayals of the two in the show off. Most are immersed in life and find mathematical challenges rather than the applications in the show intriguing.

Nonetheless, it is really wonderful to see a show present the power of mathematics to a broad audience. If the direction were less hot and the story developed a bit more, what a great show it would be. You cannot begin developing the math until you know a lot about the problem and the problems are too briefly presented to get much of it right. A lot of the analysis is pushed by the evidence and how you incorporate it into the problem statement. But, what do I know?

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Numb3rs

September 28, 2007 11:16 AM

I was exploring the Mathematica documentation center this morning and found this fascinating show Numb3rs beginning its fourth season tonight on CBS. I am a pretty heavy user of Mathematica and feel that it is one of the most powerful tools of this century. Finally, a TV show one can learn from and with real depth. How did I miss it for so long? I will have to buy the DVDs of previous shows. Exploring the math behind this season's premiere show was fascinating. Be sure to click on THE MATH behind NUMB3RS to the right on the show's page.

WW and I prefer to see shows on DVD; we have all the Seinfeld and House episodes now and plan to add a few more shows.

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Libertarian with a little "l"

September 15, 2007 11:51 AM

I really enjoyed this contradictions of libertarianism article, reprinted from the City Journal (one of my favorites), enjoyable and revealing. My research is often cited in Libertarian literature, particularly my article on spectrum and property rights, but also my work on deregulation, land reform in Mexico, and volunteer armed forces. But, I never was a libertarian in the big "L" sense of taking personal freedom above all else.

Where I think Kay Hymowitz may have overstated her case is in failing to recognize the vast research on decentralized complex social systems where it is repeatedly shown that free agents establish rules of the game and find essential mechanisms to bring cooperation where unrestrained freedom fails. The family is part of this and genetic programming supports both family affiliation and a disposition to cooperate locally and even globally.

I think John Lott's Freedomnomics may one day be added to the classic literature of libertarianism (with a little "l").

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Mexico and other things

September 9, 2007 02:32 PM

I came back a bit earlier than I had planned from Puerto Vallarta. My unit was late being finished and it is the only one in the building that can be lived in right now. The common grounds are not finished either. Given the humidity in this nearly tropical part of Mexico right now, there was not point in toughing it out. We will go back when the weather is more agreeable.

I had a bit of Montezuma's revenge just before driving home, which made the 1600 mile trip a bit hard. Even then, I made it home in just 2 days, not speeding either. I was able to drive long days alone and had little difficulty driving 20 hours the last day. So, I would say my endurance is OK at this age. (The only time I talk much about my age is near my birthday, it is only a number as far as I am concerned).

Speaking of Montezuma's revenge, a mild ameobic dysintery, the real Montezuma's revenge on the Spanish was syphillis. A disease that did not previously exist in Europe, syphillis exacted a terrible toll on health and history. It is thought that Ivan the Terrible and Henry VIII had syphillis that made them mad later in life. Probably, Nietzche had it too, or so I have read. In many cases, syphillis lies dormant or non-obvious as it attacks the nervous system and progresses into madness.

I see Mexico going through a real change; in Puerto Vallarta there is much prosperity and stupendous growth, fueled by Americans and Canadians buying property. Many quality developments are underway and selling briskly.

Even inland in the agricultural area around Culiacan there is substantial growth and wealth formation. The fields there look as well developed as though of Italy and many parts of the US. In the town there are new car dealerships, including Cadillac/Saab and Mercedes Benz as well as new Dodge and other maker dealerships. And they all look as clean and stylish as the best US dealerships.

The housing and poor buildings that you see are often on properties with unclear or disputed title; squatters or Ejido dwellings (they do not own the land in the Ejidos thanks to the strange land reforms in Mexico after the Revolution) are run down or unfinished or abandoned. This is true everywhere, even in New York at Jamaica Bay where the summer cottages are squatting on city-owned land. Or on Indian reservations or even religious fundamentalist communities where the church has title to all the land.

In 100 years, Mexico and even Bangledesh will be wealthy countries. The growth in wealth in the last century has been enormous and is moving at a far faster rate in this century.

The Mexicans I met on the trip were all friendly and helpful; I think they are more polite than I usually see here. There is a civility among the people that one hears little of as our media tends to cover the Marxist politicians and the drug runners and coyotes most. Of course, we should have a worker program that lets these people come here to work under conditions that are legal and controlled. The unions and immigration activist groups seem not to want it as the former do not want the additional labor supply and the latter require a clientele for their agenda (which seems to be mostly Anti-American).

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Bandwidth

August 30, 2007 11:01 AM

I fixed the bandwidth problem. There is a monthly limit of 40MB, which we exceeded. I upped it to 50MB. Even that may not fix it. Movable Type tops out at 100MB. It may be time to move to some other blogging system that does not have the comment problems we have experienced. When I return from Mexico, I will look into all this.

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Peacock for Lunch

August 28, 2007 07:46 PM

As I was eating lunch at La Petite, a restaurant here in Puerto Vallarta operated by a French chef, I was joined by this peacock who came up to my table.

I am eating only from 1 to 2 meals a day while here. There are many fine restaurants, but it still isn't the sort of food that WW and I make. I am not as active here and I do find that my eating matches my activity extremely well. When it may fail is when you are inactive, so I take the precaution of less frequent eating. I don't try to limit calories, just how often I eat.

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Carmina Burana and the first biological weapon

August 15, 2007 09:45 AM

I have been looking through parts of Michael Kennedy's A Brief History of Disease, Science, & Medicine. It is quite a tour and I am enjoying the ride.

A couple of anecdotes from his amazing book:

1. Carmina Burana by Carl Orff (a favorite of mine) is a composition setting to music the poems of the Lollards, a group that challenged the authority of the Church after the Black Death of 1346. They objected to the sale of offices and pardons by the Church. They were supressed, but the Lollards reemerged with Martin Luther.

2. Around the same time, Muslim Tartars fighting Italian merchants in Crimea invented biological warfare by catapulting corpses of plague victims into the citadel where the Italians had taken refuge. Some things are not so new as they seem.

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Comments by readers on the last few posts

August 13, 2007 08:46 PM

I do enjoy the comments I get and am grateful for them as I do learn a great deal from them.

My guess on tennis players and their tummies seems to be confirmed by several commenters, a tennis coach and a Spaniard who knows what Nadal eats. Their diets will shorten their careers and leave a competitive edge to someone who takes the next step toward fitness by abandoning outmoded and incorrect advice from fitness experts.

As to Barry Bonds, I do not know if he ever took steroids or if he unknowingly took them, thinking they may have been flax seed oil. He has never tested positive. Even though his "trainer" had a protocol that included steroids, he has said Barry was not on that. My main point is that you cannot see what his critics seem to see in his statistics.

Too many people are seeing patterns where there is only randomness. Humans do that. It may have been adaptive in the evolutionary environment, which though complex did not approach the complexity we confront now. This is really a failing; a failure to see randomness rather than pattern. Nassim Taleb has written a nice book on this called Fooled by Randomness. This whole home run thing is a problem of being fooled by randomness.

Barry may or may not have taken steroids. His increased mass is easily attainable by someone who trains for mass and speed without steroids. I weighed just a bit less than he at the age of 65, though I have recently gone for more power to weight in my body composition. The decline of other athletes that is cited as evidence of steroid use is illusory. Aaron did not decline by much either. And nobody among older players trained like Barry. Moreover, there is not a shred of evidence that steroids alter aging patterns.

Journalists have to sell papers. Ted Williams was excoriated in the Boston press, largely by a single sports writer who later told Ted that he had to sell papers. This is one of the greatest and most disciplined and moral players ever to play the game. So, ignore the journalists. What do they know or care about but to sell papers.

Thus, where do we go for the "truth"? What do you want for truth? You seldom will get it when things are as variable as home run hitting is. The truth is that we can't see patterns in the data that confirm any belief and yet, if we are eager enough, we can see things that confirm any belief you want to have.

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John Lott Discusses Freedomnomics on C-SPAN

August 12, 2007 11:30 AM

I almost forgot to mention that John will discuss his terrific book, Freedomnomics, on C-SPAN at 11:00 am EDT. The interview repeats at midnight and the booktv site has the full schedule for subsequent replays.

Go see it, the book is wonderfully ingenious, clearly written, and the balance of evidence and analysis makes John one of the formidable economists in the public policy arena.

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118

August 4, 2007 08:30 AM

Last month people from 118 countries visited the blog, a new record.

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Beethoven

August 1, 2007 09:01 PM

From a book review of a recent biography of Beethoven by Doctor Mai: Diagnosing Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven.

"The cause of Beethoven's death was liver failure due to alcohol abuse. The autopsy was performed by Dr. Johann Wagner, who was assisted by Dr. Karl von Rokitansky. Rokitansky was a resident in pathology, and Beethoven's autopsy was the first one he performed. He subsequently performed 59,786 autopsies in his outstanding career as a pathologist and became famous for his observations on the gross features of pathologic abnormalities of organs.

At Beethoven's autopsy, Wagner and Rokitansky found — besides cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol abuse — ascites, splenomegaly, pancreatitis, and thickened bones of the skull. The eighth cranial nerves were wrinkled and shriveled because they had been compressed by the thick skull bones, a finding consistent with Paget's disease of bone, which can cause deafness. Other conditions that have been put forth as the cause of Beethoven's deafness — including head trauma inflicted by his alcoholic father, syphilis, and otosclerosis — lack credibility. There is also some question of whether lead poisoning caused Beethoven's illnesses. In 1996, a lock of his hair was found to contain high levels of lead. Lead poisoning was common in Europe during Beethoven's time because wine contained lead that had leached from its containers."

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Endowing Idiots and Roccoco Marxism

July 24, 2007 10:43 AM

Nice to see Ward Churchill finally got fired. What took so long? His contemp for American, his students, and decent people is so evident.

When I see the contempt and indignation with which academics regard Americans and America, I am reminded of McLuhan's response, "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Moral indignation, as a show of superiority, has become a way of life and of argumentation for academics, "intellectuals", and Al Gore and his like. Distain is the weapon of intellectual weaklings. It is the weapon of choice for the NYT (I turned down an interview yesterday with them) and many on the political left.

Tom Wolfe, in his old essay on Roccoco Marxism, exposes the pretense and utter lack of morals or intellect behind the person who feigns moral indignation at your argument or opinion. He captures the thought climate at a modern university these days with this:

"Today the humanities faculties are hives of abstruse doctrines such as structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, commodification theory ... The names vary, but the subtext is always the same: Marxism may be dead, and the proletariat has proved to be hopeless. They're all at sea with their third wives. But we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be-women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees - which we can use to express our indignation toward the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges, to keep the flame of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt burning. This will not be Vulgar Marxism; it will be ... Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, sly as a Watteau."

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Deep Cores, Climate Variation, and Weight Loss

July 10, 2007 09:49 AM

I have made the point several times that natural climate variation is so large that the climate models, forecasts, and conclusions about climate change have little foundation. Variation is too large to draw any conclusions and they are left completely out of forecasts. You never hear about the topic of variation from the press on climate, stock market movement, home runs, or any topic. Of course, any complex system, of which all these are examples, have a lot of variation. So, have a look at this article on Deep Cores and contemplate and relish the variation that is in all natural things.

As in climate variation and in the variation in our lives, the same point is true. We are here at this point and there are many paths before us. And, we have no control over the climate or any other natural process. We have some influence on the likelihood of moving along an ensemble of paths, but no control. The choices we make influence the probabilities of the paths on which our evolving lives will move. But, that is all.

To close on the problem of weight control, I find that many people who embark on a weight loss program expect to have far more control of the process than is possible. If you weigh yourself every day or even every week and want some kind of uniform or dramatic change, you are setting yourself up for failure. You have to just live the new way and let it happen. It will happen. But, excessively monitoring your progress or perceived lack of progress is a prescription for failure. It is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: if you obsessively measure your weight, you will perturb the natural process. You will be fooled by the random variation and draw pessimistic conclusions that are not valid. Focus instead on what you do or eat and let it happen. It took many years to wreck your metabolism. Evolutionary Fitness will transform your metabolic health. If you want to measure your progress then focus on how you feel and your insulin level. If you feel better and your insulin declines, you are moving along a good path.

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Justice Thomas Brief in Bong HIts 4 Jesus

June 28, 2007 11:36 AM

I read quickly through the Supreme Court's June 25 decision on this case. It is a fascinating tour through the changing state of schools in our country.

Justice Thomas concurring decision, in particular, reviews the traditional forms of discipline and student conduct in the schools. It begins around page 19 of Morse ET AL. v. Frederick. He argues that the Constitution does not protect student speech in public schools. Historically, judiciary was reluctant to interfere in school administration until Tinker opened the door.

The Tinker decision expanded students' speech rights by ruling that, unless a student's speech would disrupt the educational process, students had a fundamental right to speak their mind. Justice Black in dissenting to Tinker mad the telling point: "subjecting all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students."

Justice Black argued that Tinker "surrendered control of the American public shool system to the public school students." I have to agree and if I had children in school now I would home school them or send them to private schools.

Whether you agree with Justice Thomas' decision or not, and I do, it is a fascinating history of the dumbing down of schools. The least bright and the noisiest students now are as likely to shape discussion in the schools as the brightest. And the teachers.

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Death as Deterrent

June 20, 2007 03:47 PM

As I come back to my reading of John Lott's exellent new book, Freedomnomics, I was caught by his recent discussion of capital punishment. It does reduce murder, when the right measures are employed in the studies. Here is John's brief OP ED on the subject of Death as Deterrent.

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Thanks

June 9, 2007 11:16 AM

WW and I thank you all for those nice wishes and congratulations. She is a wonder. Recall that she went from a size 10 to a size 4 on EF. When she hit a Victoria Secret size 4 she looked so good I had to marry her. (The young guys who hit on her at work and the gym have no clue that she is 69 years old, like me.)

She has created many EF meals too. So we do cook together or take turns.

Here is an interesting meal she did the other day.

Red and white cabbage with some carmelized red onions and chicken, all done in the pan on olive oil in just a few minutes. No martyr cooking for her.

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Married

June 8, 2007 11:56 AM

Wonder Woman and I were married May 25 on the lawn of the court house in Ely, Nevada. We honeymooned at Lake Tahoe and then at the softball tournament in Reno.

I am a lucky guy.

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1.3 Million

June 1, 2007 11:16 AM

I have been gone for about 10 days at a softball tournament in Reno and a few days at Lake Tahoe. I hit a few to the base of the fence, but couldn't get one to go out. My ribs are still sore from a fall I took at Elba. We lost most of our games, which is what I expected since this team is Almost the Worst Team in the History of the Universe, ranking just above the last team I played on. But, it was fun and they are fun guys to play with.

I was surprised to see that the blog went to 1.34 million hits last month. A new record and with no postings for over a week.

The meal entries seem to be popular. They are nothing special to me, just the way WW and I eat every day.

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Veto and Consensus

May 14, 2007 12:15 PM

Given the evenly divided Congress, nothing much is going to get done and a lot of it will entail back room deals and a lot of pork.

I think if I were President I would be vetoing just about every piece of legislation that reached my desk until the Congress got it right. This would force consensus in the Congress as they would have to find enough votes on each bill to over ride the veto.

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Lethal Incompetence

April 25, 2007 08:00 AM

I don't really like to get into this subject, but something caught my eye and more is on the way as Iraqi intelligence documents become available and are translated.

I recall from reading Yossef Bodansky's book, The Secret History of the Iraq War (2003), that Iraqi WMD were hidden in deep bunkers under the Euphrates River and moved into Syria with Russian help. Maybe this is true, maybe not. But, Bodansky spelled out the argument and evidence in a pretty convincing way. Israeli intelligence reports noted the heavy truck convoys that moved from Iraq into Syria.

Now, there is this news story in The Spectator about a US special agent, Dave Gaubatz, who found evidence of weapons storage in deep underground bunkers, three of them under the Euphrates as related by Bodansky. An excerpt from The Spectator (the full link is here.

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

In 2005, the CIA visited the sites and confirmed that they had been looted. Mr. Gaubatz's reports have vanished and an attempt by an intelligence attorney, John Loftus, to have Congress investigate Glaubatz's claims have hit a brick wall. Gaubatz argues that intelligence and political world is preventing the airing of the matter to prevent the revelation of their lethal incompetence.

John Loftus puts it more directly:

The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.

Mr Loftus goes further. Saddam’s nuclear research, scientists and equipment, he says, have all been relocated to Syria, where US satellite intelligence confirms that uranium centrifuges are now operating — in a country which is not supposed to have any nuclear programme. There is now a nuclear axis, he says, between Iran, Syria and North Korea — with Russia and China helping to build an Islamic bomb against the West. And of course, with assistance from American negligence.

There is other evidence of Iraqi involvement in terror: Iraq spies have now been convicted for spying in the US and an new Iraqi document shows that the Saddam's Fedayeen were directed to undertake operations against the US and other Western countries.

Iraq was a threat to the US. This is supported by ample evidence. Is Syria the new Iraq?

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Nassim Taleb's Black Swan

April 24, 2007 11:13 AM

A review of Nassim's new book, The Black Swan in Opinion Journal.

I particularly enjoyed his version of Skepticism, which he calls Academic Libertarianism. An academic libertarian (from his glossary) considers that knowledge is subjected to strict rules but not institutional authority. He is a frequent reader of the blog and says he has been drawn to my views. I am a libertarian in all things, though I do not accept the view of libertarianism posited by Libertarians. There is no institutional authority on libertarianism.

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Sayulita

April 15, 2007 09:19 PM

There is a beautiful village just north of my place on the north end of the bay at Puerto Vallarta. It is called Sayulita, a surfing village and retirement spot that you ought to go to if you can. I will be spending a lot of time there when I want to surf as the bay at Punta Esmeralda is sheltered and quiet, better for kayaking and strolling to restaurants and the marina.

The day I took these pictures I was at a surfing contest, just watching.

Here are just two shots.

Looking back from the ocean to a restaurant with Palapa covered tables.

The entry to a colorful house in the center of the village. This is the kind of color you see through out the village, and much of Mexico.

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Spectrum Freedom

April 9, 2007 09:15 AM

One of the paradoxes that I noted in my ``Implementing a Market-Based Spectrum Policy'' (The Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. XLI (2) (Pt. 2) (October 1998)) celebrating Coase's proposal for market allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum is that spectrum is not a public good because it is wasted and allocated into broad regions for inefficient uses. Because the system for managing spectrum use is so wasteful, the abundance that technology could permit is prevented because the technology itself must be frozen in order to make the centralized and inefficient system work. Thus, even though Congress declared that the spectrum is a public good, the system they put in place made the spectrum anything but a public good. It made the spectrum scarce and available only to a privileged few (many of whom were members of Congress).

Consequently, new technologies that could so vastly expand the availability or effective supply of spectrum as to make it a public good cannot come forth in an administered system that relies of rationing, inflexible allocation, and frozen technology to manage interference. Thus, the paradox: if spectrum were made a private good, it would become so abundant that it would become a public good. More flexibility and better technology can only come forth if the spectrum becomes a private resource. And, when that happens, the capacity of spectrum to carry information will expand so vastly, that spectrum would become an essentially public good, available to all at virtually no cost.

Slowly, this is happening as this scheme described in the NYT article to exploit computer controlled, real time allocation of spectrum will "sniff out" available spectrum on the fly and match communicators in real time. So much spectrum sits idle at any point in time that the new technologies will effortlessly expand spectrum use with no intrusion on existing users or messages.

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Reforming Islam

April 3, 2007 10:03 AM

Following the penetrating video talk by Evan Sayet I posted a few days ago on weak thinking (see Indiscriminateness) comes this brave and revealing article in the WSJ Opinion Journal by a former Islamicist now committed to reforming Islamic violence.

I read the Bernard Lewis book several years ago, as well as many of his more recent articles and talks that the author refers to. Professor Lewis does judge in his What Went Wrong? and it is a sophisticated assessment of the turning point in Islamic teaching. Dr. Hamid reveals how the unwillingness to judge the barbaric practices that Islamicists promote is part of the rejection of judgment that has become part of the modern gestalt that Evan Sayet described so brilliantly. To accept and defend Sharia on cultural relativistic grounds is a rejection of liberal principles and human dignity.

Neither of these brave thinkers notes that Islamic teaching follows the money: the radicalization of Islam is funded and promoted by certain groups. Immams used to be poor scholars on bicycles. Now they command huge madrassas and mosques, are surrounded by staffs and drive Peugeots. They are bought and paid for by states ruled by extremists.

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Odds and Ends

March 21, 2007 09:15 PM

Been kind of busy and having fun. I have a few things to mention, not important.

1. I am going to make Chapter 1 of my book free. It turns out there is another site selling the chapter as their own product and they even have a PayPal account to send funds to. I won't mention the site as I do not want to send traffic there. The best way to kill their incentive is to give my chapter away. I will do that soon. So, don't buy it if you were thinking about it. Wait until it is free.

2. I did a Long Drive competition recently. I had little time to prepare, but managed to make it to the semi-finals. Just four of us left and I hit my best drives, but I did not get the soft draw I had planned for and the balls were just out to the right. I broke my long drive driver face the day before and used my older, stock R7. The winner qualified for the national event. Gregg told me that, had I qualified, I would have been the oldest person ever to have done so. I hit from 298 to 317 and there was no roll in the late evening. I usually hit that far with little or no effort. I think that is it as I have nothing to prove and really don't like golf that much.

3. My grandson and I went dirt biking in Stoddard Valley of the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California for three days. My new KTM 525 EXC was fantastic. It seemed a bit "too busy" in the previous rides, but in the deep whoops of the desert and higher speeds it was just right. I rode like I was 15; fearless, relaxed, and in that graceful ballet of high speed and movement that I love so much. Next month I do it again on the Isle of Elba off the Tuscany coast of Italy with European enduro riders and the famous Scott Harden of KTM Adventure Tours.

4. A documentary film producer making a film about innovative thinkers has been calling to set up an interview for his film. No date yet, but we will connect and I will be part of the film. Somebody at Harvard mentioned me to him and he has been on the blog. If it works, fine. But, I have been interviewed so many times and have seen how little impact it has had that it is only interesting, not important, to me. The topic is Evolutionary Fitness, though it could as easily have been complexity, movies, or financial securities.

5. I promised a post on beginning Evolutionary Fitness and will do it rather soon.

6. Congress is whoring its way through this session with the house leadership packing the defense bill with pork that will give their constituents trichinosis. These people are dishonest and incompetent and violating any trust we might have conferred on them. It is all about getting reelected. No more incumbents.

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At the center of UN Networks of Corruption

February 8, 2007 08:10 AM

Claudia Rossett is one impressive reporter. Here is her work reporting on Michael Strong's role in many UN shady enterprises.

I came across this looking for the UN's environmental programs. It turns out the Strong is the lead person here too. He chaired the UN Rio Conference.

UN Wheeler Dealer.

I suggest we all read the IPCC Assessment written by the scientists which comes out next month rather than the summary written by UN personnel.

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Friedman's Free to Choose

January 31, 2007 10:04 AM

Milton Friedman's powerful series on the role of freedom and institutions in promoting prosperity is available in a web stream broadcast. The original PBS show and an updated version are available here Milton Friedman.

One irony is Arnold Schwartzenegger's tribute to Friedman's ideas in the introduction to the series. Political office changes not the man or his ideas but what he does in order to stay in office, or so it seems. Arnold's present course in California would not be approved by Milton. But, that is a small matter compared to the power of Friedman's thought and the depth of the science on which it builds. Politicians go where the wlnd and their own sense of preservation take them. The present Congress shows that dramatically. What a place. There are no good reasons to reelect an incumbent any longer.

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Health Care in Japan: When does the state own your body?

January 26, 2007 07:06 AM

As more state and federal policies move nearer to universal, third party health care it is instructive to see how this system is working in Japan, a rich and generally healthy country.

In short, it is failing. Here is a brief report by two doctors Health Care in Japan.

There is merit in the new proposal to level the tax field between privately purchased and employer sponsored health insurance by extending a medical insurance deduction to individuals. This would also fix one of the primary causes of being without health insurance which is changing jobs or temporary unemployment.

When the state preempts other forms of insurance and rations health care, you no longer have the ability to make choices that affect your medical treatment. Were I a young man or did not have Medicare, I would take a catastrophic policy with a medical savings account. A healthy young person would become a millionaire by the time they retire.

Isn't it time to vote for freedom over protection?

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Another Reason Not to be a Doctor

January 24, 2007 11:10 AM

I think it is hard enough to be a doctor these days with impending federalization of health care.

Here is another one, It's your love life.

Let's see, do I have to stop seeing Bat Girl because she scheduled nurses who treated my wife? Or, because we were introduced by medical staff of the hospital where my mother was treated? The problem here, as Volokh indicates, is the undervaluing of freedom relative to protection.

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Mr. Diety

I loved these sketches of how hard it is to be Mr. Diety from the Skeptics web page. I am still laughing at the Celine Dion line at the end of the first one. I thought I was the only person who didn't like her singing.

Allmightiness one day at a time.

Gentle, humorous skepticism. It is needed. What about scenes of Mohammed in the cave speaking with Mr. Diety? It would never work.

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Hitchens on Steyn on Islam on The State of The World and America's Role in it

January 23, 2007 05:33 PM

This is the essential struggle of our times.

Hitchens on Steyn

I read Steyn's book, America Alone, just before I went off to my softball tournament. Hitchens and Steyn are two of our best commentators on the world today.

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Why I Retired from University Teaching

January 17, 2007 01:54 PM

It wasn't so much the pay or the ever-growing class size. It was the students. The research and learning I can do anywhere.

Charles Murray nails it in this article on students who are not up to it or interested Too many Americans are going to college

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Adding Up

December 28, 2006 06:51 PM

I said it would be a hard year and a great year.

It has been.

I lost my dear Bonnie and my mother.

I found someone I care for.

The blog has gone over 10 million hits.

My Extremal Security invention is patent-pending and trademarked with major players interested in licensing it.

Aleck and I have formed Extremal Security Partners LLC.

This coming year will be interesting though I hope less eventful.

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Quack Watch

December 5, 2006 09:26 AM

I check the Quack Watch website now and then when I have a question about health claims that are made by various "experts". It is a good source of information that will allow you to draw your own conclusions after you have gone through the evidence.

Try it now and then Quack Watch.

A skeptic ought to doubt until there is evidence sufficient to warrant provisional acceptance. Of course, that is true of how you interpret what you read at Quack Watch (and here) too.

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The State of the World

November 30, 2006 09:48 AM

The Spectator has a fine summary by Allister Heath of Goklany’s, The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute (they published my [co-authored] book on electromagnetic spectrum years ago).

You must be subscribed to the Spectator to read the whole article, but subscription is free. Go to The Spectator to sign up.

Here is a brief part of Allister Heath's summary of the book. It reminds me of the Skeptical Environmentalist by Lumborg, which was the first to actually look at measures of health and well-being and draw the same conclusions.

For billions of people around the world, these are the best of times to be alive. From Beijing to Bratislava, more of us are living longer, healthier and more comfortable lives than at any time in history; fewer of us are suffering from poverty, hunger or illiteracy. Pestilence, famine, death and even war, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are in retreat, thanks to the liberating forces of capitalism and technology.

If you believe that such apparently outlandish claims cannot possibly be true, think again. In a book which will trigger intense controversy when it is published later this month, the acclaimed American economist Indur Goklany, former US delegate to the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel on climate change, demonstrates that on every objective measure of the human condition — be it life expectancy, food availability, access to clean water, infant mortality, literacy rates or child labour — well-being and quality of life are improving around the world.

A remarkable compendium of inform-ation at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute, reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious.

Needless to say, Goklany has already been accused of naive Panglossianism by the doom and gloom merchants, to whom all must always be for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. This is deeply unfair to Goklany: like the rest of us, he is concerned at the shameful deprivation, disease and misery that continue to affect hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, North Korea and all the rest of the world’s horror spots. But he argues convincingly that to recognise their horrific plight should not prevent us from also acknowledging our progress in liberating even larger numbers of people from extreme poverty.

We should be especially proud of the fact that humanity has never been better fed: the daily food intake in poor countries has increased by 38 per cent since the 1960s to 2,666 calories per person per day on average. The population of those countries has soared by 83 per cent during that time, so this is a stupendous achievement which puts the final nail in the coffin of Malthusianism.

Together with a 75 per cent decline in global food prices in real terms in the second half of the 20th century, caused by improved agricultural productivity and freer trade, fewer people than ever before are going hungry. The rate of chronic undernourishment in poor countries has halved to 17 per cent, compared with a little over a third 45 years ago. In wealthy countries, the cost of essential foods has collapsed, with the price of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to incomes dropping by between 82 and 92 per cent over the past century; similar trends are now visible in developing countries too.

There is still a long way to go; but never before in human history have so many people been liberated from extreme poverty so quickly. The number of people subsisting on $1 a day has declined from 16 per cent of the world population in the late 1970s to 6 per cent today, while those living on $2 a day dropped from 39 per cent to 18 per cent. In 1820, 84 per cent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty; today this is down to about a fifth.

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A Heavy Tale

November 23, 2006 09:04 AM

One of the things to be thankful for today is to be freer of the risk of AIDS than in most other countries. But, even here, politics has interfered with science and prevented the knowledge we all require to protect ourselves and others from the risk of AIDS. I saw one of my best friends die of AIDS because of transfusions of untested blood. Ironically, he wrote a book on the subject and criticized then current policies of failing to test donors and failing further to test inventories of blood stocks for HIV/AIDS. I know my HIV/AIDS status (negative) because I donated blood often for his transfusions. But, I was not always around and he had several surgeries because his joints were damaged from his haemophillia. The failure to test killed him and many others. And it continues to be the weak link in the containment of the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

Here is an update and personal view by someone deeply involved in the battle against ignorance and political correctness, as true in Africa as here and among the charities, governments, and other NGOs, that even now hampers the battle against this fierce disease. From the Kenya Times.

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Fixed?

November 16, 2006 08:29 AM

Maybe I have fixed my site. I found over 13,000 track backs cluttering my disk space and denying me access because I was over my limit. They were all junk, ads posted as though they were trackbacks. How crass of someone to do that.

To delete them I had to delete the entries where they occured. Otherwise it would have been tedious deleting the trackbacks individually. I would have been here all week doing that. So, I have deleted and then reposted these earlier entries. Track backs are now disabled.

Now, I can get to the body building thoughts next. I can assure an earlier commenter that he is wrong: it is the muscle micro tears that stimulate growth. And pain relievers reduce the building response. But, he is right, there is an easier way to stimulate growth. I have done it for years and the research now shows the wisdom of my strange practices (according to other people who learn from magazines and other people).

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Back

November 15, 2006 09:16 PM

As you may know, I have been gone for the past week. When I got back yesterday there were problems with the web site. I couldn't get access to it and many files were missing. I am growing a bit weary of fighting these issues, but I will plug away because I think the issues I discuss, particularly on health, are so crucial.

So, coming real soon now some new thoughts on muscle.

Also, when I hear from Charles Staley about the link I will link to his site for an interview I did with him just before I left.

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Another Glich to the Site

November 6, 2006 08:32 AM

My site became inaccessible to me for the past week. It is fixed now, but this has happened several times in the past few months. That is part of the explanation for the lack of activity. Another is that I am busy right now on a large project. And I am headed to the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival this week to give a talk and award the Mallen Prize for Motion Picture Research to my former graduate student and co-author David Walls. (I won the Prize 5 years ago.) I will have my portable with me in case there is something I wish to post.

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Edge Newsletter

October 12, 2006 10:22 AM

This is a superb edition of the Edge newsletter.

I am not a member of this group, though I am asked each year to submit something to the Edge World Question Center. Its organizer, the legendary book agent John Brockman, was my agent at one time for the book I ought to write on the movies. Something more popular and less equation-bound than Hollywood Economics. Maybe someday after Evolutionary Fitness. Right now, I am playing softball and getting ready for a week-long motorcycle ride starting this Sunday.

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Countries and Hits

October 6, 2006 06:09 PM

I often find it interesting to see which countries land in high or low ranks on my site. We are only a few days into this month and the number of countries is only 82, but the top 30 are often the same. The most countries I have seen on the site is 117.

The United States only ranks 22, but Network and US Commercial should be added or nearly so into the mix. So, we are a primarily US group. The education group ranks very high and I am proud to say there are many scientists at universities who read the blog. There are many people from other countries in the hit parade. I am quite suprised by Finland's high rank and very proud to see the US Military (thanks guys and gals I would be with you if they would take me) ranks way up there.

But, Brazil above Japan, France, Italy, New Zealand, Denmark, Argentina, Mexico and Singapore? Who would have thought it? Then again, it is random so population or computer literacy are not all that matters. If it is true that Brazilians love fun, then why not? Evolutionary Fitness is one of the few ways you can be lean, muscular, and beautiful while having fun.

Top 30 of 82 Total Countries
# Hits Files KBytes Country
1 87130 38.99% 63406 39.55% 2846069 37.33% Network
2 58222 26.05% 42155 26.30% 2180133 28.59% US Commercial
3 36080 16.14% 25414 15.85% 1183906 15.53% Unresolved/Unknown
4 5646 2.53% 4504 2.81% 199509 2.62% US Educational
5 4246 1.90% 2930 1.83% 136506 1.79% United Kingdom
6 3841 1.72% 2745 1.71% 98509 1.29% Australia
7 3689 1.65% 2842 1.77% 111352 1.46% Canada
8 2822 1.26% 2421 1.51% 88259 1.16% Finland
9 1987 0.89% 1469 0.92% 71783 0.94% US Government
10 1661 0.74% 1086 0.68% 59845 0.78% US Military
11 1608 0.72% 1175 0.73% 52366 0.69% Sweden
12 1511 0.68% 1243 0.78% 65170 0.85% Netherlands
13 1479 0.66% 1335 0.83% 61545 0.81% Germany
14 1398 0.63% 726 0.45% 43458 0.57& Norway
15 1375 0.62% 1030 0.64% 53451 0.70% Non-Profit Organization
16 1098 0.49% 1011 0.63% 35424 0.46% United States
17 801 0.36% 642 0.40% 30001 0.39% Austria
18 786 0.35% 152 0.09% 3869 0.05% Russian Federation
19 686 0.31% 375 0.23% 15684 0.21% Brazil
20 611 0.27% 376 0.23% 36392 0.48% Japan
21 507 0.23% 490 0.31% 17145 0.22% France
22 488 0.22% 345 0.22% 17600 0.23% Italy
23 456 0.20% 394 0.25% 13184 0.17% New Zealand (Aotearoa)
24 329 0.15% 205 0.13% 9911 0.13% Denmark
25 308 0.14% 209 0.13% 15534 0.20% Argentina
26 304 0.14% 271 0.17% 15754 0.21% Mexico
27 297 0.13% 222 0.14% 11992 0.16% Singapore
28 291 0.13% 202 0.13% 11503 0.15% Old style Arpanet (arpa)
29 291 0.13% 264 0.16% 18737 0.25% Poland
30 273 0.12% 218 0.14% 10715 0.14% Israel

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Pure Steyn

Mark Steyn is so funny and so smart, he makes the authors of these pretentious books look like, well, pretentious fools.

Mark Skewers the Future-Casters.

I am ordering his book right now.

And another thing, his bottom-up approach is the basis for complex analysis, institutional economics, and Hayekian spontaneous order. The top-down guys, our "leaders", don't like it because it makes them more or less passengers, rather than planners and leaders, on a random flight into the future.

As I said on the Edge site: The future is over-forecasted and under-predicted.

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Comment Problems

October 2, 2006 11:40 AM

Sorry about the bad behavior of the comments section. I thought it might just be my browser (Safari) and OS (Mac OS X), but it seems to be universal. On the one hand, it increases hit counts when people do comment by loading unnecessary pages. On the other, it discourages comments and decreases hits. Hard to tell what the net effect is, but it ought to be fixed and will be "real soon now" after, well, you don't want to see the list.

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Bandwidth and Vitamins

September 29, 2006 07:22 PM

Hiking with two distinguished scientists in Zion. I had a great day hiking with Robert and Barry, both of whom are accomplished psychologists/psychiatrists who focus on neurological and physiological aspects of mental and metabolic disease. We had an nice hike, a fine lunch, and great conversation.

It seems my little site hit another bandwidth limit today. I was not even able to post. If you can't get on I can't get on. So, what to do? Do I need the site to go to 2 or 3 million or more hits per month? I don't think so. I have other things I want to do. I will at sometime slightly change the way I do things here. I will offer a subscription, I think, for slightly more detailed and innovative posts. But, I will continue to post when I feel there is something I need to share. So, you will be able to ride free or get more with a subscription (which will be a very nominal fee).

After reviewing the advertising options, I have decided not to accept ads from anyone but Mark Sisson. Many of you know who Mark is and I have been using his product for the last 2 months, along with the glutathione in the HMP product line. I like it. It has a few advantages over the HMP product, at least for me.

First, I can throw away or not use the other supplements that I sometimes use. Mark's formula is very complete. Second, I get no gastric distress from Mark's product. Some mornings, when I have had a bit too much coffee, I get an upset stomach if I take the HMP product. I hate that. This doesn't happen with Mark's product and I think the digestive enzymes he puts into the mix is helpful to me. I continue to take the glutathione from HMP. Third, well I can't tell you.

Mark's ad will be a minor distraction on the side bar when I have time to put it there. Ignore it or have a look. I use it.

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Super Car

September 26, 2006 10:38 AM

This is the Xeno III designed by Nick Pugh. Its construction was always in doubt, but the result is spectacular. Mark Christensen partnered with Nick in transforming Nick's concepts into the automotive flesh you see here.

Mark sent me his book Super Car telling the story of the Xeno and I couldn't put it down. Well, at times I had to because their failings and foibles were so many and so great I had to have some relief. That they persevered and that the car looks so pure is a tribute to their commitment to an ideal and to the dextrous use of multiple credit cards.

A few lines from the witty book:

"I've borrowed $2,500 from everybody I know and currently my wife and I, using credit cards, are able to pay money back only to those most likely to starve or sue."

"Sure, there are problems. This minute, the unfinished Xeno is about as safe as a time bomb, and there are questions too. Like, where will we find the money to make the Xeno more than just dangerous, and whose soul will have to be sold to do so? Also, there are lawyers after me and suggestions that I make Don Quixote look like Alan Greenspan..."

Every chapter has gems like these. I really enjoyed the book and it was a ride through the Southern California car scene for me, one I lived through during the 1950s.

Mark attended my talk at the Calorie Restriction Society meetings and has been following Evolutionary Fitness for a couple of months. He is writing a book on the quest for immortality, a quest worthy of someone who could build the Xeno. I am in the book somewhere he tells me.

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Quick Thoughts

September 22, 2006 02:58 PM

Running and other dumb things. Do have a look at the excellent comments on deaths among endurance runners and bicyclists. Yuneek, who can produce references faster than a politician can change positions, supplies yet more spot-on references to studies on runners and cyclists and the list is getting pretty long if you go back over some of my earlier posts such as Top Ten Reasons Not To Run Marathons and associated comments. Sisson and Fugate weigh in with sharp comments too.

Kids. I bought a soft, large-diameter rope so that my grandson and I could pull one another and play tug of war. I took the rope and an 8 pound medicine ball (how did it get this name?) with Corey to the field. We tugged and pulled until he dropped laughing and worn out. Then we took turns throwing the ball as high and as far as we could. After a rest and conversation about what we were doing, we did it all over again. Then we went home and tossed a football. A great work out for a little kid. He wants to do it again.

Hitting. I had been wondering how my softball hitting would be since I have not played for almost a year. But, I have been visualizing my swing, sort of a Pujols/ARod swing, and working certain muscles that enable it. My rotator cuffs and my core have been prime targets of my workouts along with heavy db rows. The tight core works with my swing which is rather upright and with a short stride. I throw the bat head into the ball with my arms and just a bit of shoulder rotation. I don't open the lead hip until the ball is struck. This keeps everything moving down line through the ball. The release is the key and I support a full release by letting the top hand go off from the bat as the bat goes through the hitting area and then rolling the left wrist over and letting the left arm extend more down line than around. A little like Mark McGwire. I make sure to tell myself to go quick to the ball. This keeps me back a long time, which is hard to do in slow pitch, and then lets me explode into the ball. Boy, does it work. I went 6 for 6 and was a bit tired from being on base so much. All but one hit was for extra bases and two were triples. One hit high on the fence, two more were on the warning track, and a line drive down the third base line got to the fence in no time. Too much base running though. Got to start hitting more out, but the beat up practice balls have no life in them.

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Server

September 18, 2006 11:16 AM

My site was moved to a new server and things were shut down briefly. I couldn't even log in to post entries. It is fixed now and the server will be faster and more reliable. I have been traveling a bit too. The nice thing about not taking ads or promoting my site is that I don't have to post all the time. Just when I want to or have something I think is worth noting.

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You Act, Therefore You Think You Are

September 7, 2006 09:56 PM

I really enjoyed the discussion of the little paradox I raised about renting our genes. If the Genes R Not Us, then who are we?

It is one of those self referential paradoxes. They are always incomprehensible and several readers made that clear by confusing us about who we are. I trust they know who they are since they did sign in with their names.

I wrote a post on this some time back (What the heck was it, there are over 400 now and I am lost in my own blog. Am I a participant or an author? I think sometimes that I am only witnessing this whole thing.) where I showed or at least argued that knowledge of self (your you) must be incomplete or inconsistent (Geodel's theorem). The self can never have enough axioms or logical power to know itself. The mind does not have enough stuff to know itself.

So who is the you renting these ancient genes? It is a working organism for sure: My motto is "You act, therefore you think you are." Decartes had it backwards and sideways. It is action, not thought that makes you aware of self.

Self knowledge and self-determination orginate in action. That is why I try to find my fixed point by acting and responding to the environment. It is the primal attitude, for there could have been no other alternative. Navel gazing was not something an HG could do often. The navel gazers were eaten and did not reproduce, not much at least. And no one would pay for such confused thoughts.

I bet there were no Gurus then. The honored people would be those with practical knowledge and sound minds. They would be honored in the little band of 25 or so humans that our ancestors lived in as they were struggling to survive.

Jihadist humor...

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Body Parts

September 6, 2006 10:59 PM

What if a suicide bomber showed up in Paradise and was told his 72 virgins are ready but they can't find all his body parts?

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Short Thoughts

September 5, 2006 08:13 PM

September 11th is coming up. The Jihadists are losing, but we have to change the way people are educated (indoctrinated) in some countries. This is true in the UK, the USA and other countries. Immams, preachers and others seek their own glory and gratification. They don't know the way to heaven. There is no way. Sentience dies when brain cells die.

Why should virgins wait for you to bomb yourself to reach them? There are lots of men they would prefer. Do they get a choice?

The bench press has to be the worst lift of all. It is far over rated. Why? Tell me. But, with a big lift one seems to gain bragging rights in the gym. The lift is not a power lift. It is too slow to be a power lift. It is all about ST muscle fiber. This I do not want.

A field experiment. My buddy Gregg, a premiere golf long driver, was talking to a 600 pound bench presser. The lift, not the person. They tried a little experiment, not published in peer reviewed literature, but convincing. They both tried to throw a medicine ball from a crunch position off a bench. Gregg threw it across the room, about 35 feet. The bench presser threw it about 15 feet. Why? No FT fiber. Mostly ST fiber in the kind of mass required for this slow lift.

Many-set body building routines primarily produce ST fiber. Just look at it, they do so many reps and sets. The only fibers that can stand up to that volume is ST. That is why the research shows (finally the research got it right) that they have slow contraction and relaxation response.

The Tabata, De Vany, Bernstein and anyone else who did their own experiments protocol. We have talked about this before. It is a good protocol, which the research is only now showing to be productive with the contribution of Dr. Tabata beginning with his training of the Japanese speed skating team. It works very well, partly because it gets the body above the threshold required for adaptation to occur. I started doing my own version in about 1971. My buddy Bob Coulson saw me jogging (yes I did it at one time, but didn't take long to correct it) and told me that I looked like I was struggling. I was. I hated it and it was humid and hot in that part of Texas where i was doing it. He was right. I thought about it and started doing what felt right. Hard sprints mixed with easy running. I ran down all the guys who I started long runs with out of boredom and a need for some real intensity. They could not run fast enough to keep up, being all ST sorts of guys. Dr. Bernstein, the guy who wrote the best book ever on diabetes, had the same protocol. If you notice, most of the routines I recommend include some kind of hard sprint in a way that is like the Tabbata protocol.

Reg Park, Steve Reeves and all those other body builders. They are building ST fibers. I think this answers the mystery as to why volume works for body builders and why they are so slow. The volume produces oxygen, rather like a jogger, but in this case the MAPK signal produces hypertrophy of the ST. The joggers are sending inflammation and apoptosis signals to their muscle cells. Both are changing FTxb to FTa fibers to ST.

If I were after power and super quick speed, I would work out once a week. A few really hard moves. I really would randomize it on the grounds that you never know in the evolutionary environment when your next test will come. But, you better not fail it.

Finally, there is some new research that science magazines call nutrigenomics. Guess what it is? They are finally talking about how food influences gene expression. You know that already if you have been paying attention.

Next, there will be a field called dynamicogenomics that will finally discuss how activity influences gene expression. But, you already know about that too.

Together, these are called Evolutionary Fitness.

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August Traffic Report

August 31, 2006 05:07 PM

It is time to report why my little site went up against so many bandwidth limits this month and last. The August traffic report makes this clear; there is huge traffic on the site. 107 countries and a lot of pages per visit.

The Tom Cruise firing sent about 15,000 extra readers here. Some of them will reconnect I gather from comments. I love to think that my comments in the LA Times about movie executives acting like wimps and pointing out that things don't have to be this way contributed to another flakey actor hitting the streets and collecting unemployment. Cruise is a good actor, but so are a lot of lying husbands.

Back to traffic.

Daily Averages

Hits per Day 40395 Files per Day 27901 Pages per Day 8352 Visits per Day 3546

August Totals

Visits 109942 Pages 258923 Files 864954 Hits 1252246

The most hits in a day were 68 thousand and something.

So, we are going far over a million hits this August (last month a mere 3 thousand below a million).

ArthurDeVany.com has reached 8.19 million total hits and 830,358 total visits in its relatively brief life.

Looks commercial. My revenue so far: 0. OK with me up 'til now. But, it has to change.

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Technorati

Technorati Profile

I am just "claiming" my site here for Technorati. They say that my blog is ranked 27,922, which seems to be a link-based measure. If someone wants to explain it, I would be grateful.

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Comments

August 30, 2006 05:32 PM

First of all, thanks very much for the compliments and happy birthday wishes. It was a happy birthday and I wasn't sure it was going to be after the way the year began.

Stacy's sweet note is perceptive in an important way. I began a transformation, which she notes, of my body and my mind when we moved to California in 1984. My diet and exercise changed and I became more refined and leaner. My research took a new direction as well; I began to do more empirical work and to study complexity, which entailed learning a new kind of mathematics. I moved my home to the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, though I stayed in the Economics Department as well. I began to read widely in biology and physiology and evolution, always with the theorist's perspective and an interest in the models, but with a deep respect for empirical evidence and testability. It was all deliberate.

I had RK surgery on my eyes, changed my hair cut to the one I wear to this day, and changed the way I dressed. My colleagues began to call me Don Johnson, the Miami Vice guy. I am not sure why, but the hair cut and Palms Springs desert style clothes were influences. [That is not a T-shirt in the picture. I never wear T-shirts. It is a silk shirt, my favorite fabric along with micro fiber.]

As I studied the statistics and dynamics of complexity and discussed brain research with my colleagues I adopted the view that "you are not in charge." As I have said before, you can make choices now that may influence the stochastic course of events, but you cannot determine the outcome. That means you cannot fail, because to fail you must have the ability to make something happen over which you have little or no control. It really takes the pressure off when you accept that you cannot determine a unique outcome through your actions; there is no possibilty of failing if you maintain this point of view. Ihelped me become a more tolerant and kinder person. I began to approach my relations with people as a sort of a contract. This means to treat the other person as an equal who has equal standing with you before the law and ethically and to negotiate a relationship that is mutually beneficial. It is like ethical contracting as a personal way of relating to people. I can't tell you how well it works and how much easier it is to relate to people this way.

My research took off, my appearance and demeanor became more refined, my body grew stronger and leaner. My brain developed greatly over this time frame. So much stimulation and such a good diet, high in fatty acids that nourish the brain and keep those membranes flexible so that new circuits can readily form. I really am WAY smarter than I was 25 years ago. I have lived like a hunter gatherer in a world of science and mathematics foraging for new knowledge and learning the landscape. I really do think that Evolutionary Fitness is as good for your brain as it is for your body.

Should women do the Nick and Nick workout?

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Birthday

August 29, 2006 02:52 PM