Reverie

"We are the friends of liberty everywhere but custodians only of our own."--John Adams

After terrorists killed 193 people in Madrid, the FBI matched a fingerprint on a terrorist's bag to a man in Oregon named Brandon Mayfield. They arrested him. But Mayfield was innocent. Weeks later, Spanish investigators compared the prints more carefully and found the real terrorist. An article recently used this as an example of the vagaries of science. But science--in this case technology--is not vague and DNA is very specific; this DNA mistake was a human error, the erroneous application of a very settled and understood science. 

The need to explain the creation of wealth is obscured yet again by political debates within modern societies about how wealth ought to be distributed, which presupposes that wealth worth distributing exists in the first place. Economists speak of a “lump fallacy” or “physical fallacy” in which a finite amount of wealth has existed since the beginning of time, like a lode of gold, and people have been fighting over how to divide it up ever since. Among the brainchildren of the Enlightenment is the realization that wealth is created. --Pinker

From a letter to the editor of the NY Post:

When a government diverts more resources to its armies, navies, and air forces, that government does indeed strengthen its military, both absolutely and relative to the strength of other governments’ militaries. In contrast, when a government diverts more resources to export industries and other select firms, that government weakens its economy, both absolutely and relative to the strength of other economies. It does so by starving efficient firms under its jurisdiction of resources while feeding these resources to inefficient firms. Inefficient firms grow at the expense of efficient firms.

Antemeridian: adj: occurring before noon



​What is....naloxone?



Countries with policies that are consistent with more economic freedom show higher levels of prosperity and entrepreneurial activity (see Sobel, 2008a, 2008b; Kreft and Sobel, 2005; Sobel, Clark, and Lee, 2007; Hall and Sobel, 2008; and Hall, Sobel, and Crowley, 2010). Most importantly, these policies include institutions that provide secure property rights, a non-corrupt and independent judicial system, contract enforcement, and effective limits on government’s ability to transfer wealth through taxation and regulation. Another factor is demographics: the entrepreneurial age group is 25 to 49. That is shrinking in the West.


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The concept of abstractions have always focused on their nature itself, as if, in some Platonic way, they had an essence, an ideal form.  We now talk about these ideas differently, giving parsing adjectives to concepts. So now an idea like "justice" can be subdivided and might be something different depending upon circumstances.

When this year's tax bill was passed (at 2 in the morning) Amazon had 77 lobbyists on the floor of the Senate.

PNAS has corrected a highly cited paper after an investigation found evidence of misconduct.

The investigation—conducted jointly by the University of California, San Francisco, and the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center—uncovered image manipulation in Figure 2D, which “could only have occurred intentionally.” The institutions, however, could not definitively attribute the research misconduct to any individual.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. wrote recently: "In America, no family should be forced to put off having children due to economic insecurity." Think about what that means.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has asked questions about the work of a private consulting firm that has undertaken projects for the United Arab Emirates, according to people familiar with the investigation, suggesting his probe is looking more deeply at foreign influence in Washington.

Stanford University's John Ioannidis, in his 2017 publication "The Power of Bias in Economics Research,"  found that the vast majority of estimates of economic parameters were from studies that were "underpowered," and this, in turn, meant that the published estimates of the magnitude of the effects were often biased upward.

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Children’s has performed more than 1,800 pediatric liver transplants – the most in the United States

A judge in Los Angeles ruled Wednesday that Starbuck’s, Peet’s, and many other retailers face potentially massive liability under California law for not warning consumers that naturally occurring substances in roasted coffee beans can cause cancer, at least in lab animals. Acrylamide is a naturally occurring substance formed when many foods are browned or otherwise subjected to high heat, including in many cases grilled burgers, fried chicken, bread, almonds, and potato chips. Like many other constituents of everyday life, it appears to cause cancer in some animals at high dosages. And that brings it under the terms of Prop 65, which has already led to a proliferation of warnings on and around thousands of common goods and services in California, from office furniture to hotel corridors to garages (car exhaust).

The woman identified by police as the attacker who wounded three people at YouTube's headquarters in California was a vegan blogger who accused the video-sharing service of discriminating against her, according to her online profile. I'm not sure I'm ready for militant vegans. Evangelical atheists are bad enough.

The Kremlin is crying foul on Facebook, accusing the social media giant of censorship after it took down more than 200 pages and accounts that were run by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency — the "troll factory" that is under indictment for interfering in the 2016 U.S. election.

The Russians are upset over censorship.

President’s attacks on e-commerce company stem from its CEO’s ownership of the Washington Post, which the American leader says writes unfair stories about him, say people close to the White House.(wsj)

I do not know if the story is attributed to people who are named.

Women are traditionally barred from entering or touching the sumo ring, known as the dohy. Japan’s first female governor, Fusae Ota, has repeatedly clashed with the sumo organization over whether she would be permitted to crown the champion of an annual tournament, a traditional responsibility of the governor of Osaka.

Entrepreneurialism has a lot of qualities; one is age. And the West is having a decline there.

Our responsibilities to our fellow citizens are increasing. USA Today (4/5, Ungar) reports US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams “issued an advisory Thursday urging more Americans to carry naloxone, which can reverse the opioid overdoses that kill a person every 12½ minutes in this country.” USA Today says this is the first advisory from the Surgeon General in 13 years – the last, in 2005, concerned alcohol use during pregnancy.



Phosphorus is one of the most crucial ingredients of life, at least our kind of life. It is critical for storing and transferring energy, which means living organisms can’t really survive without it. So, if it is unevenly distributed in the universe, it may be that life's possibilities are also. And so far, studies seem to indicate it is unevenly distributed.

A Japanese worker has been reprimanded by her boss for “selfishly breaking the rules” after she became pregnant before it was her “turn”, according to media reports. The plight of the woman, who has not been identified, highlights the unsettling practice of some Japanese companies dictating when female staff are allowed to marry and have children, depending on their level of seniority.

A woman in Ft. Myers has married a tree to protect it from some excavation/removal plan. When I heard about this I was worried there was another unhospitalized wacko around but I found a short interview with her and she was really funny.

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AAAAaaaannnnnndddddd....a picture/graph: