Cab thoughts 9/7/13

We all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.” ~ Bat Masterson, found in his typewriter after he died.

John Peterson, a blogger on SeekingAlpha who is knowledgeable in the energy field, has a new article which is simple and straightforward. He has no position on global warming but agrees CO2 is rising. His argument is with the efforts to deal with the changes which he thinks are both focused on the wrong populations and mired in the belief that there are adequate rare earth minerals to substitute for cheap petroleum. But his basic point is this:
"The .....[two CO2 producing]..... culprits are:
1. 1 billion humans in industrialized economies where per capita CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for decades; and, 2. 6 billion humans in developing economies that (a) want to be richer, (b) know a better life is possible because we gave them Internet access, and (c) are working hard to build a brighter future for themselves and their children and grandchildren.

CO2 emissions aren't climbing because of activities in the industrialized west. They're climbing because billions of humans in developing economies are increasing their carbon footprints as they try to catch up."

One can view the world as sets, as mathematicians do. The editor of the Guardian says a UK official told the newspaper to destroy the files regarding Snowden. Are the government and its people in the same set?

Billy Carter, the President's brother, was paid a half a million dollars by the government of Libya while his brother was president and was registered as an agent of the Romanian government.

Named for a physician in Napoleon's army, the "Lisfranc" injury was first described when a rider fell from a horse with his foot still in the stirrup. It can be the result of a direct blow or a fixed rotational injury. They are appearing in football athletes. It occurs at the midfoot, where a cluster of small bones forms an arch on top of the foot between the ankle and the toes. From this cluster, five long bones (metatarsals) extend to the toes. The second metatarsal also extends down into the row of small bones and acts as a stabilizing force. The bones are held in place by connective tissues (ligaments) that stretch both across and down the foot. However, there is no connective tissue holding the first metatarsal to the second metatarsal. A twisting fall can break or shift (dislocate) these bones out of place. These injuries are usually mistaken for sprains.

Who was .... Phoebe Mozee?

According to a recent article on The Wefunder Blog (a crowdsourcing group), the U.S. has at least 256,000 active Angels who collectively invest some $21 billion a year (more then all venture capital sources combined) in new businesses.

Keynes’ described President Woodrow Wilson as “slowminded and bewildered”; a “blind and deaf Don Quixote”

Titanic director James Cameron optioned Steven Pressfield's Last of the Amazons in 2002 when it was still in galleys. Apparently he has lost interest.

Scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It's a phenomenon called dual-task interference. In one experiment, Pashler had volunteers press one of two keys on a pad in response to whether a light flashed on the left or right side of a window. One group only did this task over and over. Another group had to define the color of an object at the same time, choosing from among three colors. These are simple variables: left or right, and only three colors. Yet doing two tasks took twice as long, leading to no time saving. This finding held up whether the experiment involved sight or sound, and no matter how much participants practiced. If it didn't matter whether they got the answers right, they could go faster. The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don't divide your attention. (from Your Brain at Work by David Rock)

Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, Texas, harbors one of the world's largest breeding colonies of bats - about 10 million Mexican free-tailed bats. They consume an estimated 100 tons of insects each night, mainly agricultural pests.

vicissitude \vih-SIS-ih-tood; -tyood\, noun: Regular change or succession from one thing to another; alternation; mutual succession; interchange; Irregular change; revolution; mutation. Vicissitude comes from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim, in turn, probably from vices, changes.

Donte' Stallworth, an NFL wideout, was released by the Washington Redskins. Stallworth was hindered through most of training camp by a hamstring injury. The story centered on a hot air balloon accident he suffered earlier this year. And he has had a number of injuries in the past--but nothing compared to the injury he inflicted. Buried in the story was this quote: "He was suspended for the 2009 season by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for violating the league's personal conduct policy for a DUI vehicular manslaughter charge." DUI vehicular manslaughter is apparently against NFL policy and will be dealt with seriously. Not only was he suspended, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for the crime.

Alpha particles are 2 protons, 2 neutrons, like helium. Alpha particles cannot even go through a few centimeters of air. Alpha irradiation cannot hurt humans when the alpha source is outside the human body, because human skin does not let the alpha particles go through. But alpha radiation can be very harmful if the source is inside the body, for example when people breathe dust or gas containing materials which decay by emitting alpha particles.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/07/dont-play-lacrosse-at-duke.html

Buffett on value investing: "I can only tell you that the secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis, yet I have seen no trend toward value investing in the 35 years I've practiced it. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. The academic world, if anything, has actually backed away from the teaching of value investing over the last 30 years. It's likely to continue that way. Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper."Warren Buffett(Speech he gave at Columbia Business School May 17, 1984 marking the 50th anniversary of Security Analysis)

A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep or about three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.

AAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd.......a picture:

Phoebe Mozee (aka: Annie Oakley). Famous for her marksmanship by the age of 12, she once shot the ashes off of Kaiser Wihelm II's cigarette at his invitation. When she outshot famed exhibition marksman Frank Butler, he fell in love with her and they married. They remained married the rest of their lives.

Dark Fields

Occam's razor is a principle attributed to the 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Occam. It states: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." This has been rephrased by many but might be most usefully stated as: "When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better." Simplicity, of course, is very subjective but often applies to metaphysics, non-empirical understanding.

For example: Einstein's theory of special relativity compared with Lorentz's theory that ruler's contract and clocks slow down when in motion through the ether. The equations are the same but, because the ether could not be detected, by Occam's razor it had to be eliminated.

Life, of course, does not always lend itself to simplicity. Evolution proceeds in a Rube Goldberg manner: Whatever survives, stays. Hence the octopus and the camel. Nor are we humans easily simplified, to the dismay of our leaders.

A number of years ago a physician, V. S. IAnovskii, immigrated to the United States and ended up working in a venereal disease clinic. His experiences distressed him so that he wrote a book about them called, cleverly, "The Dark Fields of Venus." It was not a profound book, just a collection of vignettes about the mostly young people he treated and how the disease damaged their lives. It was "2666"-like in its repetitive, relentless focus. But, he concluded, it was not just the spirochete. There was something bigger, something more at work here as these people searched their physical health for more than physical solutions. Somehow their affliction was a small part--perhaps even a consequence--of a larger, empty yet yearning personal landscape, a dark field.

Whatever the solution, he concluded, "penicillin was not enough."

Which makes one think of Einstein's take on Occam: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Cost, Price and Crony Capitalism

 

Section 340B of the Public Health Service Act (created under Section 602 of the Veterans Health Care Act of 1992) was enacted in November 1992. Under 340B, eligible hospitals are allowed to buy drugs from drug companies at forced discounts of 25% to 50%. The hospitals can then bill government and private insurers for the full cost of the drugs, pocketing the spread. 340B-qualified hospitals have a big incentive to search for patients and prescribe lots of drugs. The costlier the drugs, the bigger the spread. Expensive cancer drugs are especially appealing. The original legislation creating 340B envisioned that only about 90 hospitals that care for a "disproportionate share" of indigent patients would qualify. But free money was being made available in a very difficult and uncertain field. By 2011, 1,675 hospitals, or a third of all hospitals in the country, were 340B-qualified.

Take the Duke University Health System. In 2011, Duke bought $54.8 million in drugs from the discount program and sold them to patients for $131.8 million, for a profit of $76.9 million. That profit was a substantial portion of the health system's 2011 operating profit of $190 million. (Only one in 20 patients served by Duke's 340B pharmacy is uninsured.)

In the process, treatment of the doctor's patients is moved from an office setting to a hospital outpatient department. Hospital care is considerably more expensive. As a result, between 2005 and 2011 the amount of chemotherapy infused in doctors' offices fell to 67%, from 87%, according to a new analysis of Medicare billing data done for community oncology groups. The share of Medicare payments for chemotherapy administered in hospitals (as opposed to outpatient oncology practices) increased to 41% in 2011, from 16.2% in 2005. Because the overhead for a hospital is higher than for a doctor's office, a patient treated in a hospital clinic incurs $6,500 more in costs than the same person treated in a private medical office, according to data from the Community Oncology Alliance. Patients who get chemotherapy at a hospital also face an additional $650 in co-pays and other out-of-pocket expenses. The price for infusing the drugs alone rises by 55%, according to an analysis of Medicare data. These inflated prices for cancer treatment inevitably drive up the cost of health insurance.

The new health-care law, The Affordable Care Act, expands 340B to cover cancer centers, new categories of hospitals and rural health centers. Since one of the ways that hospitals qualify for 340B turns on how many Medicaid patients they serve, ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion will also increase the number of 340B-eligible entities. More than 400 oncology practices have been acquired by hospitals since ObamaCare passed. Acquiring a single oncologist and moving the doctor's drug prescriptions under a hospital's 340B program can generate an additional profit of more than $1 million for a hospital.

The administration has used informal "subregulatory guidance" to expand the 340B program still further. One big change came in March 2010 "guidance" that allows hospitals to contract with an unlimited number of neighborhood pharmacies to dispense drugs through them. There is no requirement that these "satellite" pharmacies have any geographic tie to the hospital. This has created an industry of middlemen who build vast networks of pharmacies, all to expand the number of 340B prescriptions that a hospital can capture. There are now more than 25,000 arrangements between such satellite pharmacies and 340B-qualified treatment sites, according to the Health Resources and Services Administration. More, the definition of a "covered patient" for 340B purposes is so murky that hospitals are able to buy and bill discounted drugs for patients when the hospital merely serves as a conduit and doesn't give direct patient care.

Costs rising, private practices contracting, hospitals making egocentric business --not community health--decisions--these are not healthy signs. Influence peddling and graft are certainly factors here and unintended consequences of a gigantic program like this are to be explained. The problem is they do not seem to be anticipated.

(Much of this is from Dr. Scott Gottlieb's article in the WSJ.)

Education Versus Training

Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, when presented with a letter she supposedly wrote to the Martin family replied that she did not read cursive. She is not alone. Here are a few achievement scores from her predominately black school: Thirty-nine percent of the students score basic for reading, and 38 percent score below basic. In math, 37 percent score basic, and 50 percent score below basic. Below basic is the score when a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
66.1 percent of Black students entering high school in 2006 graduated in 2010. Nationally, only 26 percent of black students graduate six years after entering college.

In a recent article, Walter Williams, the conservative economist from George Mason University, disparages the current educational system and its tendency to avoid serious testing. He is particularly interested in the failure of the educational system to test black men. He implies there is a subtle racist factor here, a lack of confidence in the black student generally. How then, he asks, do blacks do so well in two of America's most competitive and selective areas, athletics and entertainment?

In a recent discussion about this question an interesting explanation for these selective successes was presented: Coaching. Both athletics and entertainment channel talent through rigorous coaching. True, it is very selective and only the highest level proceed--which in itself might be highly selective--but there is no question during the discussion that coaching is remarkably influential on young people. And both entertainment and athletics recognize the value of training.

This is a provocative idea. Imagine an educational system with a developmental arm, a training and coaching arm, in addition to its educational one, a program of mentoring, institutionalized and permanent, perhaps rotational, perhaps permanent, perhaps chosen by the student himself, where academic and civic problems could be developed and explored starting in the first grade. It would be expensive and would become ideologically plagued and union ridden but, if the long term advantages could be kept in vision, it would be an interesting notion to explore. A few studies varying mentor numbers, time spent, mentor education requirements and the like would be simple and inexpensive to start. It would take a long time to evaluate, of course, but the current experiment certainly doesn't work and who knows what the country will suffer because of it.

 

The problem needs more than money; it needs a plan.

 

 

Piltdown Man

Piltdown Man was a great fraud in anthropology. Fragments of an early hominid skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England, suggested the possibility of an early "ape-man," the longed for "missing link." Charles Dawson claimed he did not personally find it but that that a workman at the Piltdown gravel pit had given him a fragment of the skull found before his visit. Re-exploring the site on several occasions, Dawson found further fragments of the skull and took them to Arthur Smith Woodward, of the geological department at the British Museum. In August 1913, Woodward, Dawson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and trained paleontologist and geologist, began a systematic search of the spoil heaps specifically to find missing canines. Teilhard de Chardin found a tooth that, according to Woodward, fitted the jaw perfectly. (His association with the effort ended then.)

Woodward proposed that Piltdown man represented an evolutionary missing link between apes and humans and supported the notion then prevailing in England that human evolution began with the brain. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ("Dawson's dawn-man", after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. In 1915, Dawson claimed to have found three fragments of a second skull (Piltdown II) at a new site about two miles away from the original finds. So far as is known, the site was never identified and the finds appear undocumented.

Eventually the "find' was revealed to be the lower jawbone of an orangutan deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human. But suspicions had appeared early. In 1913, David Waterston of King's College London published in Nature his conclusion that the sample consisted of an ape mandible and human skull. French paleontologist Marcellin Boule concluded the same thing in 1915. A third opinion from American zoologist Gerrit Smith Miller concluded Piltdown's jaw came from a fossil ape. In 1923, Franz Weidenreich examined the remains and correctly reported that they consisted of a modern human cranium and an orangutan jaw with filed-down teeth. It is said the perpetrator "aged" the specimen by soaking it in tea.

There were a number of likely suspects because, surprisingly, it was assumed the site was "seeded" with the fakes and were innocently come upon. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, lived near the site and was said to have planted the material to discredit the science of evolution that he opposed as a spiritualist. Stephan Jay Gould long suspected Pierre Teilhard de Chardin himself. Subsequent research clearly points to Dawson. Archaeologist Miles Russell of Bournemouth University analyzed Dawson's antiquarian collection and determined at least 38 were fakes. Among these were the teeth of a reptile/mammal hybrid, Plagiaulax dawsoni, "found" in 1891 (and whose teeth had been filed down in the same way that the teeth of Piltdown man would be some 20 years later.) Axes, Chinese vases, cave drawings--Dawson's was a history of shameless and fearless fraud. Apparently he had hoped Piltdown would allow him to become a member of the Royal Society. One wonders how such an erudite community could be fooled so but much was at stake. The finds "confirmed" the unproven belief that the large modern brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet. And the large brain--and important ancestor--was welcome in England and Europe.

A common misunderstanding about science is that there is, strangely, something magical about it. It is seen as somehow more pure a discipline, less subject to human error and frailty. Thesis, inquiry and conclusion in science are, however, very human. And the possibility of honest mistakes is only the beginning. Ambition, as here, greed, ideology, madness--all of these factors can complicate the scientific world.

Hoyle supported a steady state universe for years. Paulson defended the triple helix. (When Watson and Crick solved the problem with the double helix, Paulson's wife scolded him, "Why didn't you work harder on it?") Lysenko locked a nation in a crazy ideological science heresy for decades.

But science is hard, a lot harder than prejudice, fanaticism, righteousness, 

"Z"

In movie long gone by and based on fact, a government, beset by a rebellion symbolized by a murdered leader remembered by the partisans as"Z"--phonetically meaning "He lives"--banned the use of the letter Z.

Voldemort in Potter, the Wendol in "The 13th Warrior"-- all frightened cultures have "The name that must not be spoken." Indeed, many cultures believe in the power of names. The American Indian have personal names that are symbols of their integrity which they will not reveal, even under torture. Names mean things to us.

Naming is important, too. According to Genesis, God gave Man the right to name all the animals and, at the same time, the right of dominion over them. Naming carries with it a sense of power, of hegemony. The Egyptian god Ptah allegedly had the power to create anything he could name.

The great Russian-French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck put a heavy emphasis on naming as a way to gain cognitive power over objects even before they have been understood.

Mathematicians often observe that, on the basis of intuition, they sometimes develop concepts that at first resist definition. These concepts must be named before they can be brought under control and properly enter the mathematical world. So naming can be the path toward that control. Egorov and Luzin believed that if they named God, they assured his existence, and similarly they thought that by naming new mathematical sets, they could make them real. God could not be defined, but he could be named. The new sets also resisted definition, but they too could be named. The Russians returned to Moscow and created one of the most powerful mathematical schools of the twentieth century. ( Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity by Jean-Michel Kantor and Loren Graham)--for those of you too suspicious of all this, Mr. Graham is from MIT and Harvard.

Politics is a wonderful source for a different type of control through words.
During the French Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety outlawed all words associated with royalty; they took the kings and queens out of the playing card deck and replaced them with Committee members. During the First World War the German shepherd dog was renamed the "Alsatian" by the British.
The hasty evacuation of our embassy in Yemen was not an evacuation but "a reduction in staff," despite what the Yemeni government said.

Terror attacks are now "man-caused disasters," the "global war on terror" is now an "overseas contingency operation."

Nidal Hasan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but he is charged with "workplace violence."

An al-Qaida-affiliated terror attack in Benghazi becomes a spontaneous demonstration out of control.

Torture is "enhanced interrogation."

Government spending is "investment."
Lord knows what "shared prosperity" and "single payer" mean.

"But," as George Orwell warned, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

Sunday Sermon 9/1/13

In the Williamstown church, big and modern with the altar in the center and huge organ pipes. An older congregation with an ancient, infirm priest. An unusual statue of the Virgin best described as winsome.

The readings sound like social advice, The Sirac readings are  particularly good (do not test beyond your strength) but, as always are more. Christ on humility is especially riveting as he urges people not to take high places in dinner then, laughing perhaps, says on should always entertain those who are too poor to return the favor.

Humility is Christ's concern today. Humility is not weakness as it is usually portrayed in culture, it is seeing life in the context of a larger whole.

That is too much for the vision for a Tamerlane.