| Tuesday, November
13, 2007
Today's Surprise:
Subject: Ecology and humanity -
Dr. Pournelle -
I believe you may find this interesting:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4065/
- a striking discussion of how terrorism and
mass-murder (shocked Europeans see this hitherto "US" activity coming to
their own back yard) can be seemingly logical conclusions of a certain "deep
ecological thinking". Not too surprising, of course, but a chilling
realisation nevertheless...
Best regards,
Roar Larsen Norway
And Denmark cannot form a government without
taking in Muslim parties to the coalition. Ideas Have Consequences,
Richard Weaver told us a long time ago; but no one listened.
========
Subject: Crack Jail Time
Jerry,
re: jail time for
Aikens.
His being in jail for a time means that he can't sell
drugs to my grandson during that time.
That's good enough for me.
His IQ wouldn't qualify him for Harvard anyway.
Ephraim F. Moya
Query: do you think jailing Aikens has
made it more difficult for your grandchildren to acquire either powder or
crack cocaine if they want some? Is it easier or harder to get the stuff in
Washington DC than Kansas City?
I would like to see a cost/benefit
analysis of the War on Drugs. I am all for your grandchildren not buying
crack, but I suspect their parents have more to do with that than Willie
Mays Aikens or your friendly neighborhood narco agent. I may be wrong here,
but the money spent jailing Aikens for 20 years: is there no better
investment?
==========
Economics as
Voodoo Science : Take from an
Economist...
You're missing one category of economist that doesn't
deserve the epithet "Voodoo Economist", although I will agree that more than
a few of my colleagues make it difficult not to think that of the economics
profession.
It's the lowly business economist, the one who never
publishes anything of note to academics or pundits, because he or she is
busy writing for clients and the company they work for. Some of us go on to
greater and better things: Alan Greenspan was one of us before he made the
big time. We more often than not don't have a PhD, because we looked at what
was facing us and decided that it'd be better to work for a living, instead
of devoting one's life to increasingly meaningless additions to academic
"wisdom" that newly minted PhDs usually need to unlearn before they can
actually be productive (as someone who has trained PhDs to be productive
forecasters, there's a lot to be unlearned...).
Think of the business economist as the unsung hero of
the profession, much like engineers and technical experts who, in the
tradition of engineering, simply get the job done. We rely heavily on
computer models, of course, but with one huge difference: we actually
understand what they say and do. We work on models that are designed by
people - us -who understand interdependencies and elasticities of demand and
supply, and we work with the supply side of the economy, where the value is
actually created. My test of whether someone is a good economist is to see
what they understand of the supply side, of the industrial sectors and where
the value is created: those that understand that - like Alan Greenspan -
deserve the term economist: those who only care about how it is distributed
- the demand side - may have studied economics, but apparently failed to
receive an education. That is, of course, the fault of the academic
discipline called economics, which today is nothing much more than thinly
veiled theoretical mathematics, instead of the operations analysis and
empirical econometrics that it should be. The moment when an economist
starts to work with empirical evidence to show that the real-world actually
behaves the way he or she thinks it should is the moment that they deserve
the title.
Me, I'm a professional forecaster: I've been
forecasting industrial activity since 1988, when I left a trade association
to work free-lance as a forecaster. I don't do the big, abstract thing we
call GDP: I do the nitty-gritty of helping my clients find their markets.
It's the kind of work that they can do, but I do it faster and better than
they can, because I'm not involved in the actual manufacturing of the
widgets, don't have an agenda, and my clients are welcome to ignore my
advice at their detriment. Sure, we're more often than not hired to be an
alibi - if sales don't develop the way people want them to, then it's the
forecaster's fault for having done a lousy job - but I've never had a client
that wasn't willing to admit that my work gave them insight into their own
markets that they wouldn't have had otherwise. I've forecast individual
markets for individual industrial products (now *that* is real work), as
well as investment goods industries world-wide, and consumer goods
industries world-wide.
You'll never have heard of me because we operate in
the background, which is what our customers want. I now run a 150+ sector
model of a small European country for one of the major banks there. We've
been running that model for 10 years (and getting paid for it!), and when
that customer did back-testing, to see if we were worth the money, our work
turned out to be the only significant explanation of why companies would
turn insolvent and stop paying their loans back (this is of rather large
interest to banks), and if they had listened to what we were saying, they'd
have saved a vast sum over that period of time by having charged more for
marginal loans or not have had made the loans in the first place. Now, I'm
not at liberty to say what that sum would be: our customers don't usually
tell us, because they know we'd jack up our prices to just slightly less
than what they'd save. But suffice to say that such a service runs to six
figures a year, and that from banks that are notoriously tight-fisted about
spending money on something that their professional staff, if they still
existed, should be doing as a matter of course. Given that many banks no
longer even have professional economists indicates how large our potential
customer base actually is. Right now we have a terrible time finding good
people, because so few want to get their hands dirty and actually get
products out there that non-economists can understand and actually use.
I made the decision many years ago not to pursue an
academic career: haven't regretted it one bit. I will be the first to admit
that I'm not a math genius: numbers have to make sense to me, have meaning,
before I can really get my teeth into them. I'd never have survived what
friends and former colleagues have gone through in order to get their PhDs,
but at the end of the day it makes no difference, because more often than
not they haven't learned anything that has real significance. Their time
would have been better spent understanding the fundamental behavior of
companies operating within a given environment and how companies make their
decisions, in learning how to express that in equations that operate within
an empirical framework, and to have learned how the economy actually
operates, rather than be indoctrinated in making judgments of how it should
be spent.
I guess I kind of take it a little personally when
those outside of the profession dismiss it because of what many have done to
the profession. If I sound defensive, it's because I work, as an economist,
providing real value to business clients who are trying to make sense out of
a complex and interdependent world that more often than not defies
explanation...and for which the usual academic economists can't be bothered
to work on, since it is empirical, and that means getting your hands
dirty...
Best regards,
A long-time fan and someone who really should get a
subscription off to you sometime Real Soon Now...
What you do sounds a lot more like
operations research than economics: and if you were an academic economist,
would you be able to operate as you do? I ask seriously, since I note
that Nobel Prizes in economics have gone to people with conflicting
theories.
My objection to academic economics is
precisely that it never goes back to the data. Allasamee with climate
science. When I was in the operations research business, confirmed
predictions and testable hypotheses were all we had to sell. Of course if
our predictions contradicted established theories we were usually ignored.
To the detriment of those who ignored them. The UW Grade Prediction Project
is a good example.
Thanks.
==========
Forbes article by Arthur C Clarke
Hi Jerry,
take a look at
http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/11/09/
arthur-clarke-emp-tech-future07-cx_ac_1112bomb.html
The View From 2500 A.D. Arthur C. Clarke
Daniel Brodsky
I love Arthur dearly, but his view of the
future is not mine.
Regarding directed energy weapons, read
Doug Beason's book
The E-Bomb. I don't know a great deal about chemically pumped EMP
weapons; perhaps a reader can tell us more?
===========
Wormholes!
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/31770
<snip>
‘Wormholes’ could be made from exotic materials
Imagine peering into a hole, only to see a distant
object as though it were right next to you. No cameras, no elaborate
periscopes are involved — instead you are gazing through an
electromagnetic “wormhole” created in a specially designed material.
A proposal for such a wormhole comes from Yaroslav
Kurylev at University College London in the UK and colleagues in the US
and Finland, who came up with the idea by building on the mathematical
theory that gave us the invisibility cloak — a device that was realized
for microwaves last year. Whereas in an invisibility cloak rays of light
are guided around a cylindrical or spherical volume like water flowing
around a stone, a wormhole would have light guided around a more
elaborate, tubular shape. The device would appear solid at most
wavelengths of light, but at cloaking wavelengths it would disappear,
and light entering the tube at one end would emerge at the other with no
visible tunnel in-between
</snip>
Maybe Stargate wasn't so far off the mark after all.
If light can pass, so can radio waves which means controlling surface
explorers on the moons of Jupiter to mine for metals and to explore is
certainly possible. If light can pass, how long before they figure out how
to pass matter?
Braxton S. Cook
==========
Doing Well by Doing Good...
Apparently Mr. Gore has decided to do well by doing
"good".
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/technology/13gore.html?
"Deepening his ties to Silicon Valley,
former Vice President Al Gore said on Monday that he had become a
partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers."
"...Mr. Gore keeps an apartment in San
Francisco and spends five to six days a month in the area; a portion of
that time will now be spent at Kleiner Perkins, which is based in Menlo
Park, Mr. Gore said."
"Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and
author of the blog Infectious Greed, said that Mr. Gore's new role could
benefit start-up companies by providing guidance through the political
process.
"For instance, Mr. Kedrosky said, Mr. Gore
would now have a financial incentive to push for subsidies, like the tax
incentives or rebates that have buoyed the solar industry, or to provide
start-ups with important connections in government and big business.
"Anyone who thinks this is happening
because Al has fantastic clean-tech entrepreneurial chops is fooling
themselves," Mr. Kedrosky said. Alternative energy "is a policy issue, a
political issue, and that requires connections to get things done."
"Mr. Gore "is a political rainmaker," Mr.
Kedrosky said. The association between Kleiner and Mr. Gore "just means
that clean tech is an inherently political exercise."
"...Kleiner Perkins said it would
collaborate with Generation Investment Management to find and finance
clean-tech start-ups globally. Generation, which is based in Britain and
was co-founded by Mr. Gore, focuses on investing in larger operations
and later-stage companies focused on clean tech."
I suspect his "carbon footprint" is many multiples of
mine...but of course it is for the greater good.
Charles Brumbelow
=========
Re: Bell's Palsy.
I contracted Bell's Palsy late in 2001. My doctor said
it could have been caused by stress, infection or extreme cold. Considering
that I was going through a divorce, a bout of 'downsizing' at work, and a
national crisis at the time, stress could have indeed been it. To confuse
matters, I had heavily iced my neck as an aid in relaxation that week. Also,
I had flu-like symptoms quite possibly contracted from any of my many
students at the local college. Basically, my cause ended up being all of the
above.
The doctor prescribed a series of some steroid or
another right off the bat, but that had no effect. I had to tape my eye shut
at night and when I showered (either that or switch to baby shampoo and
soap). My lips could not close tightly enough on the right side to use a
straw. And worst of all my horrible manners came home to roost in an
unexpected way - I found my accustomed HUGE bites at meal time were now
falling right out of my mouth.
On an amusing note, I wear my hair in a crew cut, and
the hair on the right side did not stick up straight any more, it tended to
lay to the side.
After about a month, my doctor was visibly glum. He
told me recovery usually happened within a month if it was going to happen,
and that recovery was rare at all after about six months.
I had no recovery for over six months. The right side
of my forehead had become as smooth as a baby's.
When I did recover it was very sudden. All the nerves
were working again within a period of days. Unfortunately, my muscles had
atrophied after over half a year of disuse. Six years later I have them
trained back to about 95% of full function. My smile is symmetrical again,
my frown not so much (but who really wants to practice frowning)? My eye
tends to droop when I am tired, and the entire side of my head will begin to
ache and complain when I am fatigued as well. The muscles are just not as
strong on that side anymore.
Given that, I encourage you to massage the affected
area, and to 'work out' the muscles to avoid any atrophy while you are
afflicted. Sit in front of a mirror and use your hands to move the paralyzed
side in coordination with your healthy side. I think of it as lifting
weights with my face, and do two to five sets of each motion each day:
moving from big frown to big smile, squinting eyes closed to wide open eyes,
puckering lips to gaping mouth, and massage of the scalp.
Now for the odd part. I am a religious man, and all
through my episode, I prayed in a casual almost off-hand manner regarding my
desire to be done with Bell's Palsy. After a Sunday sermon on the importance
of ASKING before we can receive, I realized that I hadn't prayed to that
extent regarding the issue.
My recovery coincided exactly with the Sunday where I
specifically, sincerely and humbly asked the Lord to heal me. By the next
Sunday I had all nerves working again and only the atrophy of muscle tissue
to overcome.
I am generally skeptical of faith healing and am
inclined to believe that we need to do everything within our means before
leaning upon the Lord. I am not sure exactly what your religious leanings
are, but I encourage you to follow your doctor's advice carefully, keep up
the physical therapy, and then spend whatever time you feel appropriate
communing with the higher power of your choice, or just meditating deeply.
Whether it be placebo effect or the power of faith, you have my best wishes
in this.
If you want to post this, feel free, but leave my name
off, I'm oddly shy about the whole thing.
My problem isn't that severe. I am getting
weekly professional massages, and I do some on my own, and I've long been of
the "use it or lose it" school anyway. Thanks for the description.
For me some days are better than others. I
can't tell if things are getting better or not. It's even hard to figure how
long I have had this, since the phony sinus headaches from the arthritis in
my neck have been around more than a year, and they seem all mixed up with
the more recent problems of throat, swallowing, and eyeball leaks and focus.
Me, I was so afraid it was cancer than I
continue to be grateful that it's mostly just an annoyance. Rather
aggravating annoyance, but annoyance.
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