Marriage in New York

The New York State Senate has decisively killed a bill that would have allowed for same-sex marriage.

 

From Big Lizards:

I believe this will mark the turning point. The American voters have always -- every single time -- opposed radically rewriting the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, along with polygamy, polyandry, group marriage, and overly consanguineous marriage. Whenever the people were allowed to vote directly, they invariably supported the traditional definition of marriage.

....

...today's stunner indicates to me that the fad has passed. It's not just that New York, one of the most liberal states in the nation, turned down SSM; more important, it wasn't even a close vote. Not only all Republicans vote against it (contrary to expectations before the vote), so did eight of the 32 Democrats, a full quarter of that caucus.

Proponents of SSM can dream all they want; that strong a vote is not going to be reversed in the forseeable future. If anything, in the upcoming elections, the New York State Legislature will shift to the right, just like every other state and the federal Congress.

There currently are only four states that allow SSM: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, and Vermont; New Hampshire will join them on New Year's Day (I wonder how Mark Steyn feels about this). I can confidently predict that that is it; no more states will enroll in that perilous roster. In fact, I suspect that Iowa and New Hampshire may not stick with it for long... and if the voters in Massachusetts are ever allowed their vote, neither will they.

One swallow does not a summer make, nor one cold snap a winter.  I'll wait for more data.

A Reason To Be Skeptical

A Reason To Be Skeptical - Reason Magazine

Thomas Friedman on The Narrative

From the New York Times:

Here's my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his support for Muslim suicide bombers, about how he showed up at a public-health seminar with a PowerPoint presentation titled "Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam," and about his contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric famous for using the Web to support jihadist violence against America — the more it seems that Major Hasan was just another angry jihadist spurred to action by "The Narrative."

What is scary is that even though he was born, raised and educated in America, The Narrative still got to him.

The Narrative is the cocktail of half-truths, propaganda and outright lies about America that have taken hold in the Arab-Muslim world since 9/11. Propagated by jihadist Web sites, mosque preachers, Arab intellectuals, satellite news stations and books — and tacitly endorsed by some Arab regimes — this narrative posits that America has declared war on Islam, as part of a grand "American-Crusader-Zionist conspiracy" to keep Muslims down.

....

...In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

"Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, 'This is not Islam.' I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn't. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves."

The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach

 

 

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The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach

via NCSE - National Center for Science Education - Defending the Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools. by Glenn Branch on 12/2/09

The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach — the new journal aspiring to promote accurate understanding and comprehensive teaching of evolutionary theory for a wide audience — is now available on-line.

read more

 

 

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Another county heard from

Andrew Suttaford at The Corner:

Here's an interesting response to the Warmergate (Climategate, take your pick) scandal from Eduardo Zorita, an individual who contributed to the fourth IPCC report (and he's not somebody who believes that AGW is a hoax). The whole thing is well worth reading, but note, in particular, this:

I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research.

ClimateGate update

From NRO, courtesy of Iain Murray

 

All of the spin and hand-waving distracts from the three main elements of the Climategate scandal:

 

1. The data were manipulated to hide a decline in recent temperatures, meaning that we cannot be sure that the paleoclimatological record shows that the recent warming was in any way unusual. This is separate from the issue of whether or not it has been warming or cooling, which is a distraction from what Climategate tells us.

 

2. There was a concerted effort to subvert the peer-review process of journals that might publish "skeptical" articles (and thereby undermine the "consensus" argument).

 

3. There was an organized attempt to circumvent or obstruct the legal requirements of the UK's Freedom of Information Act 2000, which appears on its face to rise to the level of criminality.

 

In addition, there have been attempts to muddy the waters with assertions that data were publicly available all along (ha!) and the insinuation that anyone using "stolen" emails is somehow more immoral than the perpetrators of the three frauds outlined above. I call this latter defense the Spycatcher Gambit, as those who use it seem to believe that if they can just suppress the emails as stolen, the problem will go away.

Murray on ClimateGate

If you're doing important work that you know will be controversial, you don't lose the data.

 

Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg

Read the rest of it.

Not out of the Woods yet

Tiger Tiger turning right
In the driveway late at night
Your immortal hand and eye
Couldn't make the car comply?
 
Of whose waiting shapely thighs
Did you dream with bolted eyes
Instigating you to crash
Into the stately water ash?

Was it worth a rendezvous
With some star-struck ingenue
Just to verify you could
Withstand a sliced Norwegian wood?
 
Tiger Tiger turning right
In the driveway late at night
What covert obsession made
You climb into the Escalade?

NRO Corner

Stigma

Jonah Goldberg at NRO's corner blog looks at the value and function of stigma in a free society:

 

Charles Murray had a really excellent post on the value of such stigma the other day. He writes (emphasis mine):

Stigma is the only way that a free society can be generous, whether through private help or government programs. The dilemma is as old as charity: how to give help without creating a cycle in which more people need help. Stigma is the way out. Stigma does three things.

 

First, stigma leads people to socialize their children in ways that minimize the chance that they'll need help as they grow up. When children are taught that accepting charity is a disgrace, they also tend to be taught the kinds of things they should and shouldn't do to avoid that disgrace.

 

Second, stigma encourages the right kind of self-selection. People in need are not usually in a binary yes-no situation. Instead, they are usually somewhere on a continuum from "I'm desperate" to "Gee, a little help would be kind of nice." Stigma makes people ask whether the help is really that essential. That's good—for the affordability of giving help, and for the resourcefulness of the potential recipients.

 

Third, stigma discourages dependence—it induces people to do everything they can to get out of the situation that put them in need of help.

 

All of these benefits of stigma reflect tendencies. Of course there are lots of exceptions. But large-scale assistance is shaped by tendencies. The European model says that people should look upon assistance as a right. Once you say that, the tendencies you create commit you to a cradle-to-grave system of government-decided support systems and corresponding limits on the ability of people to make choices for themselves.

The role of stigma in a free society is one of the least appreciated topics in modern discourse, I think.

Stigma is what keeps a society free without descending into the bad sort of anarchy (and such anarchy breeds a natural desire for a unhealthily powerful state to impose order).

 

Harry Plotter

From Clayton Cramer's blog...

 

 

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Harry Plotter

via Clayton Cramer's BLOG by Clayton on 12/1/09

Harry Plotter

I mentioned the efforts of the unknown programmer Harry to get the HadCRUT datasets to reproduce, so that the data could be plotted to match the previous output. The following parody of Harry Potter and Hogwarts was too good to pass by.

 

 

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Trees and networks before and after Darwin

It seems the Victorian notion of the Great Chain of Being was breaking down before Darwin published. Trees and networks before and after Darwin (From the Abiogenesis Chemical Evolution list.

By the mid-Eighteenth century the Great Chain of Being was increasingly seen to be an inadequate description of order in nature, and by about 1780 it had been largely abandoned without a satisfactory alternative having been agreed upon. In 1750 Donati described aquatic and terrestrial organisms as forming a network, and a few years later Buffon depicted a network of genealogical relationships among breeds of dogs. In 1764 Bonnet asked whether the Chain might actually branch at certain points, and in 1766 Pallas proposed that the gradations among organisms resemble a tree with a compound trunk, perhaps not unlike the tree of animal life later depicted by Eichwald. Other trees were presented by Augier in 1801 and by Lamarck in 1809 and 1815, the latter two assuming a transmutation of species over time. Elaborate networks of affinities among plants and among animals were depicted in the late Eighteenth and very early Nineteenth centuries. In the two decades immediately prior to 1837, so-called affinities and/or analogies among organisms were represented by diverse geometric figures. Series of plant and animal fossils in successive geological strata were represented as trees in a popular textbook from 1840, while in 1858 Bronn presented a system of animals, as evidenced by the fossil record, in a form of a tree. Darwin's 1859 tree and its subsequent elaborations by Haeckel came to be accepted in many but not all areas of biological sciences, while network diagrams were used in others. Beginning in the early 1960s trees were inferred from protein and nucleic acid sequences, but networks were re-introduced in the mid-1990s to represent lateral genetic transfer, increasingly regarded as a fundamental mode of evolution at least for bacteria and archaea. In historical context, then, the Network of Life preceded the Tree of Life and might again supersede it.

This Global Warming Scandal

Clayton Cramer has combed through the comments at Eugene Volokh's blog and pulled out some interesting bits. (And bytes.)

 

 

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This Global Warming Scandal

via Clayton Cramer's BLOG by Clayton on 12/1/09

This Global Warming Scandal

It just keeps getting worse. Along with statements by the scientists that strongly suggest intentional efforts to suppress alternative points of view and manipulation of the data to get the "right" results, the programs actually used to convert the raw data have a lot of very serious problems. Some of these problems are sloppy programming that raises serious questions as to whether the outputs can be trusted. The comments at Volokh Conspiracy are quite enlightening:

There are four major classes of such bugs known definitively to be in the code.

1) Use of static data or static places: This means the code sometimes stores things in a particular place, but always the same place. If two instances of the code are ever running at the same time, they will step on each other, producing incorrect output. This is the least serious, as someone could simply assure us that they never ran two instances at once. We'd have to trust them on this, but under normal circumstances, that wouldn't be a disaster.

2) Failure to test for error conditions. In many places, the code fails to test for obviously insane error conditions but just goes on processing. That means that if the input is somehow fundamentally broken, the output may be subtly broken. Again, we don't have the input to retest.

3) Reliance on the user to select the correct input sets. The code relies on the user to tell it what data to process and doesn't make sure the data is correct, it must trust the user. CRU had data sets with identical names but fundamentally different data. There's no way now to be sure uncorrected data wasn't used where corrected data was appropriate or that data wasn't corrected twice.

4) Reliance on the user to select the correct run-time options. During the run, many of the programs relied on the user to select the correct options as the run progressed. The options were not embedded in the results. A single mis-key could cause the output to be invalid.

Unfortunately, these types of defects combine in a multiplicative way. A mis-key during a run could result in subtly bad input that could cause an error condition that's not detected resulting in radically bad output that's not detected because of lack of input validation ...

The defenses of this bad programming are enough to make me wonder if I was some sort of weirdo is how I do my job (or did my job, back when I had one):

Minor quibble here: If the program gives garbage output for "obviously insane" or "fundamentally broken" inputs, this may not be the fault of the program. If I'd spent my time doing input validity tests on all the possible inputs to subroutines I wrote, I wouldn't get at real work done. At some time, you have to assume some good nature in others, and get on with the tasks at hand. After all, they're using your code, you aren't using their data..... Sounds cruel, but if you've worked in the field... If they pay me for taking care of their excessive stupidity, then again....

Not to mention, what do you care if the output is wrong for "fundamentally broken" input?

Perhaps if I had not written defensive code that checked inputs for validity, I would still be employed writing bad code? Or are the defenses of this absurdity just ad hoc, to make the Climate "Research" Unit look good?

Along with bad programming without dishonest intent, there seems to be dishonest intent as well. John Lott over at Fox News discusses this problem:

But the CRU's temperature data and all of the research done with it are now in question. The leaked e-mails show that the scientists at the CRU don't know how their data was put together. CRU took individual temperature readings at individual stations and averaged the information out to produce temperature readings over larger areas. The problem comes in how they did the averaging. One of the leaked documents states that "our flagship gridded data product is produced by [a method that] renders the station counts totally meaningless" and "so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!" There were also significant coding errors in the data. Weather stations that are claimed to exist in Canada aren't there -- leading one memo to speculate that the stations "were even invented somewhere other than Canada!"

The computer code used to create the data the CRU has used contains programmer notes that indicate that the aggregated data were constructed to show an increase in temperatures. The programmer notes include: "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend -- so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!" The programmers apparently had to try at least a couple of adjustments before they could get their aggregated data to show an increase in temperatures.

All this could in theory be correctable by going back and starting from scratch with the original "raw" data, but the CRU apparently threw out much of the data used to create their temperature measures. We now only have the temperature measures that they created.

Yet as Lott points out, the vast majority of American news media are barely covering this story, if they are covering it at all.

 

 

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Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine - R. W. Grant - Mises Institute

But it's for the good of the people!

Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine - R. W. Grant (Mises Institute)

[1978]

This is a legend of success and plunder And a man, Tom Smith, who squelched world hunger. Now, Smith, an inventor, had specialized In toys. So, people were surprised When they found that he instead Of making toys, was BAKING BREAD!

The way to make bread he'd conceived Cost less than people could believe. And not just make it! This device Could, in addition, wrap and slice! The price per loaf, one loaf or many: The miniscule sum of under a penny.

Can you imagine what this meant? Can you comprehend the consequent? The first time yet the world well fed! And all because of Tom Smith's bread.

A citation from the President For Smith's amazing bread. This and other honors too Were heaped upon his head.

But isn't it a wondrous thing How quickly fame is flown? Smith, the hero of today Tomorrow, scarcely known.

Yes, the fickle years passed by; Smith was a millionaire, But Smith himself was now forgot Though bread was everywhere.

People, asked from where it came, Would very seldom know. They would simply eat and ask, "Was not it always so?"

However, Smith cared not a bit, For millions ate his bread, And "Everything is fine," thought he, "I am rich and they are fed!"

Everything was fine, he thought? He reckoned not with fate. Note the sequence of events Starting on the date On which the business tax went up. Then, to a slight extent, The price on every loaf rose too: Up to one full cent!

"What's going on?" the public cried, "He's guilty of pure plunder. He has no right to get so rich On other people's hunger!"

(A prize cartoon depicted Smith With fat and drooping jowls Snatching bread from hungry babes Indifferent to their howls!)

Well, since the Public does conle first, It could not be denied That in matters such as this, The Public must decide.

So, antitrust now took a hand. Of course, it was appalled At what it found was going on. The "bread trust," it was called.

Now this was getting serious. So Smith felt that he must Have a friendly interview With the men in antitrust. So, hat in hand, he went to them. They'd surely been misled; No rule of law had he defied. But then their lawyer said:

The rule of law, in complex times, Has proved itself deficient. We much prefer the rule of men! It's vastly more efficient. Now, let me state the present rules.

The lawyer then went on, These very simpIe guidelines You can rely upon: You're gouging on your prices if You charge more than the rest. But it's unfair competition If you think you can charge less.

A second point that we would make To help avoid confusion: Don't try to charge the same amount: That would be collusion! You must compete. But not too much, For if you do, you see, Then the market would be yours And that's monopoly!"

Price too high? Or price too low? Now, which charge did they make? Well, they weren't loath to charging both With Public Good at stake!

In fact, they went one better They charged "monopoly!" No muss, no fuss, oh woe is us, Egad, they charged all three!

"Five years in jail," the judge then said. "You're lucky it's not worse. Robber Barons must be taught Society Comes First!"

Now, bread is baked by government. And as might be expected, Everything is well controlled; The public well protected.

True, loaves cost a dollar each. But our leaders do their best. The selling price is half a cent. (Taxes pay the rest!)

Recursivity: The Fruitlessness of ID "Research"

At Recursivity, Jeffrey Shallit writes about: The Fruitlessness of ID "Research".

One of the hallmarks of science is that it is fruitful. A good scientific paper will usually lead to much work along the same lines, work that confirms and extends the results, and work that produces more new ideas inspired by the paper. Although citation counts are not completely reliable metrics for evaluating scientific papers, they do give some general information about what papers are considered important.

ID advocates like to point to lists of "peer-reviewed publications" advocating their position. Upon closer examination, their lists are misleading, packed with publications that are either not in scientific journals, or that appeared in venues of questionable quality, or papers whose relationship to ID is tangential at best. The paper I have in mind is Stephen Meyer's paper “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories”, which was published, amid some controversy, in the relatively obscure journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in 2004.
....
what I want to do here is look at every scientific publication that has cited Meyer's paper to determine whether his work can fairly said to be "fruitful". I used the ISI Web of Science Database to do a "cited reference" search on his article. This database, which used to be called Science Citation Index, is generally acknowledged to be one of the most comprehensive available. The search I did included Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index. Even such a search will miss some papers, of course, but it will still give a general idea of how much the scientific community has been inspired by Meyer's work.

I found exactly 9 citations to Meyer's paper in this database. Of these, counting generously, exactly 1 is a scientific research paper that cites Meyer approvingly.

By contrast, let's compare Meyer's work with another paper, in the same field, of roughly the same length, and published in the same year:

W. G. Joyce, J. F. Parham, and J. A. Gauthier, "Developing a protocol for the conversion of rank-based taxon names to phylogenetically defined clade names, as exemplified by turtles", Journal of Paleontology 78 (5) (2004), 989-1013.

This paper has been cited 60 times since 2004, according to ISI Web of Science...
....
The grand total: exactly 1 paper (Weber's) can be said to be a scientific paper that cites Meyer approvingly, and even that is subject to debate.* This meager record does not support the claim that ID is a scientific revolution with far-reaching consequences.

ID advocates are constantly telling us that intelligent design is a new scientific paradigm that will prove fruitful. Five years after ID's flagship "peer-reviewed" paper, that does not seem to be the truth.

Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation - Telegraph

The London Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker comments on Climate Change, calling it the worst scientific scandal of our generation.

A Misleading Brainteaser - Robert Blumen - Mises Economics Blog

Robert Blumen at the Mises Economics Blog looks at: A Misleading Brainteaser.

It is the month of August; a resort town sits next to the shores of a lake. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit. Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 dollar bill on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the butcher. The Butcher takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the pig raiser. The pig raiser takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel. The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 dollar bill and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that, in these hard times, gave her “services” on credit. The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 dollar bill to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 dollar bill back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything. At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 dollar bill, after saying he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

Jason Rosenhouse at Evolution Blog compares it with this scenario from Beavis and Butthead:

Actually, this scenario reminds me of something I once saw in -- of all things -- a Beavis and Butt-head cartoon.

Beavis and Butt-head were supposed to be selling candy bars as part of a school fundraiser. They each had twenty candy bars, each one costing one dollar. Butt-head pulls out a dollar and buys a candy bar from Beavis. Beavis now hands the dollar back to Butt-head, thereby buying a candy bar for himself. They keep passing the dollar bill back and forth and before long they have both “sold” all of their candy bars.

There is a significant difference, though, which the alert reader can glean from the comments.

Tipler on ClimateGate

Frank J. Tipler, author of The Physics of Immortality, among other books, offers: The Skeptical Scientist’s View (Pajamas Media)

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.
....
Two factors have enabled this particular conspiracy to survive for so long.

First, the actual data for surface temperatures have been available only through a small number of organizations. Every experienced scientist has had occasion to doubt a colleague’s reported experimental result. No problem: The skeptical scientist merely has to try to replicate his colleague’s result, and a failure means that the claim is false. But how does one replicate the claim that the average temperature of the Earth — an average computed from taking the data at thousands of temperature stations all across the globe — was one degree Fahrenheit lower in 1900 that it was in 2000? It is impossible to visit all the stations today, to say nothing of the stations of 1900. Replication is impossible.

I am automatically skeptical of any claim that by its very nature cannot be replicated by other scientists. What keeps scientists honest is not that scientists are more honest than other people — we aren’t — but that we know our colleagues are looking over our shoulders. Everyone is honest when he knows he is being watched.

We must seriously question whether climate “science” is, or even can be, a true science if skeptics cannot check its experimental claims. The only way climate “science” can approach being a real science is for all of its raw data to be made available. Only then is it possible for outsiders to check, at least partially, the claims of the insiders.

The second reason this conspiracy has been able to survive so long is simply that climatologists are now trained to believe in global warming theory. Remember the overwhelming urge of scientists to believe in their own pet theory, to believe that the data simply must confirm the theory, to believe that the only valid data points are those which confirm the theory? Data that are inconsistent with the theory are not recorded by believers, or not published. To true believers, such data are obviously due to an error in making the measurements, and so need not be recorded.

This human failing is why we need outside non-believers to check the theory against all the data — not just the data selected by the believers.

Scientific conspiracies like the global warming conspiracy are actually quite common. They occur whenever it is difficult for outsiders to check the claims and whenever a pet theory is involved....

"Climategate" -- Forget the Emails: What Will the Hacked Documents Tell Us? - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

Ronald Bailey, at Reason's Hit and Run blog, offers his take on what's being uncovered in the British Climate Research Unit document dump: Forget the Emails: What Will the Hacked Documents Tell Us?

He cites British statistician William Briggs, pointing out that we really don't know the historical temperature of the earth. We can guess, based on proxies and models, but it's still guessing:

One example from something called a “SOAP-D-15-berlin-d15-jj” document. A non-native English speaker shows a plot of various proxy reconstructions from which he wanted to “reconstruct millennial [Northern Hemisphere] temperatures.” He said, “These attempts did not show, however, converge towards a unique millennial history, as shown in Fig. 1. Note that the proxy series have already undergone a linear transformation towards a best estimate to the CRU data (which makes them look more similar, cf. Briffa and Osborn, 2002).”

In other words, direct effort was made to finagle the various reconstructions so that they agreed with preconceptions. Those efforts failed. It’s like being hit in the head with a hockey stick.

Briggs lists nine sources of error, of which the CRU accounts for one.

He continues:

I hope that a lot of independent researchers will be taking close looks at the CRU documents to check on the accuracy of their interpretations of climate data. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue if climate researchers had made their data publicly available in the first place.

Whole Briggs analysis here.

Quick Addendum: It turns out my hopes for independent analysis are being fulfilled. Over at CBS News, correspondent Declan McCullagh reports that independent programmers are now looking into CRU code and finding some pretty disturbing things...

Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds

Interesting description of an unintended consequence. I suspect a game redesign is in order RSN.

 

 

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Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds

via Schneier on Security by schneier on 11/25/09

If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other, you open the door to extortion:

One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared you trustworthy outlined in green, attached in a hub-and-spoke pattern to your face in the center.

[...]

That feature was fine as far as it went, but unlike other social networks, The Sims Online allowed users to declare other users untrustworthy too. The face of an untrustworthy user appeared circled in bright red among all the trustworthy faces in a user's hub.

It didn't take long for a group calling itself the Sims Mafia to figure out how to use this mechanic to shake down new users when they arrived in the game. The dialog would go something like this:

"Hi! I see from your hub that you're new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I'm kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don't worry, we'll turn it green when you pay…"

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn't worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn't usually involve gangsters.

 

 

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The Newmarks on ClimateGate

Betsy Newmark has some comments on What is so disturbing about Climate-gate.

What should be disturbing to anyone involved in science or who just took a high school science class is the cavalier attitude to data and research. What raises scientific research above research in other fields such as the social sciences is the rigor demanded of observing phenomena and reporting on the results. And the sine qua non is the willingness to share data so other scientists can duplicate your tests and examine your methods. And yet, this is what those researchers at East Anglia and other researchers at American universities have been trying to do. They've been refusing data requests, trying to avoid Britain's Freedom of Information laws, while intimidating scientific journals to keep critical studies out of publication. Then they deride their critics by saying they're not being published in the same journals that they just threatened if they published such critical studies.

This is a total rejection of the scientific method. And for what? To protect their theories about man-made global warming. Here they're asking nations across the globe to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and rejigger their entire economies because of their warnings about global warming. And yet they totally reject any attempts for an honest, yet skeptical examination of their theories.

She also links to her husband's post, listing a baker's dozen links on global warming.

A place to buy weird stuff

http://www.mcphee.com/shop/

"ClimateGate"

How are non-experts supposed to evaluate the merits of climate change? According to Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy, it's a matter of social validation. “Climategate” and the Social Validation of Knowledge.

Most of us, however, lack expertise on climate issues. And our knowledge of complex issues we don’t have personal expertise on is largely based on social validation. For example, I think that Einsteinian physics is generally more correct than Newtonian physics, even though I know very little about either. Why? Because that’s the overwhelming consensus of professional physicists, and I have no reason to believe that their conclusions should be discounted as biased or otherwise driven by considerations other than truth-seeking. My views of climate science were (and are) based on similar considerations. I thought that global warming was probably a genuine and serious problem because that is what the overwhelming majority of relevant scientists seem to believe, and I generally didn’t doubt their objectivity.

At the very least, the Climategate revelations should weaken our confidence in the above conclusion. At least some of the prominent scholars in the field seem driven at least in part by ideology, and willing to use intimidation to keep contrarian views from being published, even if the articles in question meet normal peer review standards. Absent such tactics, it’s possible that more contrarian research would be published in professional journals and the consensus in the field would be less firm. To be completely clear, I don’t think that either ideological motivation or even intimidation tactics prove that these scientists’ views are wrong. Their research should be assessed on its own merits, irrespective of their motivations for conducting it. However, these things should affect the degree to which we defer to their conclusions merely based on their authority as disinterested experts.

ACORN Document Dump Scandal

ACORN said it would cooperate with any investigations. It seems to have chosen to do so by lightening the load of any investigators who might have to go through their documents. From Big Government.com: San Diego ACORN Document Dump Scandal

On October 1st, 2009 California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced that an investigation had been opened into ACORN’s activities in California, resulting from undercover videos showing employees seemingly offering to assist the undercover film makers with human smuggling, child prostitution and even tax advice to boot.

Although ACORN has denied any wrongdoing, some of the employees involved were terminated, and ACORN has publicly stated that they would fully cooperate with any investigations that followed.
....
Shockingly, we now learn that the ACORN office in National City (San Diego County) engaged in a massive document dump on the evening of October 9th, containing thousands upon thousands of sensitive documents, just days prior to the Attorney General’s visit.

Stop the (Health Reform) Juggernaut (from Forbes.com) Health Issues ACSH

Jeff Stier at the American Council for Science and Health calls on Congress to...Stop the (Health Reform) Juggernaut. It's not so much that it will kill people. It will slow the development of new medicines, and lots of people will die who would otherwise live.

Pelosi's health care bill may cost the pharmaceutical industry $150 billion over a decade -- nearly double the amount the companies conceded when they cut a White House-approved deal with Sen. Max Baucus this summer. By making fewer resources available for R&D, the bill will stifle innovation. It is a sure-fire prescription for fewer new life-saving drugs.
Democrats in Washington are out to cut health care costs at the expense of the research-intensive (as opposed to generic) pharmaceutical industry. Yet drugs often improve the span and quality of life in a remarkably cost-effective way. Innovative new drugs have helped many patients avoid costly hospitalization. From 1980 to 2000, the number of days spend in the hospital for every 100 people fell from 129.7 to 56.6, a drop of 56% -- meaning that Americans avoided 206 million days of hospital care in 2000 alone, according to Medtap International, which provides health economics and outcomes-research services.
A study in 2000 sponsored by the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research concluded that increased use of a blood-thinning drug would prevent 40,000 strokes a year, saving $600 million annually. A 1997 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found the costs of treatment per episode of major depression fell by 25% from 1991 to 1995, largely as a result of new medicines.
New drugs are also generally better than older ones at reducing mortality. In a study of patients who took drugs between January and June 2000, those who took newer medications were less likely to die by the end of 2002.

Climategate

Samizdata looks at the release of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) What a difference an internet makes

It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.

....
Amazing. If true.

As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Those were my first sentiments exactly (although I don't think that being glad when an opponent has dropped dead is all that surprising - I'm sure we all know that feeling), and the sentiments of practically everyone else in the anti-AGW blogosphere when they first heard about this. Now, it is looking ever more likely that it is true, all of it.

Not least because the first big response from the hackees has been to cry, not: load of made-up bollocks, but rather: stop thief! Yes, we have been hacked, and that's outrageous. The story is that we have been hacked. (Lots of people are suddenly discovering the case for intellectual property rights.) The BBC's first version of this story goes with this angle, and with pretty much nothing else. AGW scientists (good) robbed by anti-AGW fanatics (bad). But this response has not killed the story. It has only given it legs. If there's nothing to it, why be so fussed about the hacking?

Even if the mainstream media try to bury this, they can't stop us anti-AGWers from talking about it amongst ourselves, and my bet is that they will quickly abandon the attempt to ignore the content of this material, and instead make copious use - perhaps even acknowledged use, with links - of the work even now being done by all those damned bloggers. If they don't do this, they will merely look foolish. It's a different world, from the one where all the journalism was done by "journalists", and only those journalists could decide what journalism would be done.

Sure enough, the New York Times already has a report about this, and James Delingpole already has a piece up at the Telegraph blog. (Thank you Instapundit.) This won't now be buried, even if the story ends up being that a lot of trivia was hacked, and then a lot of incriminating stuff was forged and added, which is looking less and less like the story with each hour that passes.

Two particularly good bloggers on this story so far have been Bishop Hill (already quoted above) and Devil's Kitchen, the Bishop for the trawling through that he is already starting to do, and DK for the way he (among many others) is already teasing out what it all might mean...

LameStream Media: Why Did You Bypass These Juicy ACORN Nuggets?

There are those who just refuse to look at what has been turned up on ACORN. LameStream Media: Why Did You Bypass These Juicy ACORN Nuggets?

How Single Parents Affect the Brain - WSJ.com

Do children need both mothers and father? There's some suggestive research cited in the Wall Street Journal: How Single Parents Affect the Brain

Conventional wisdom holds that two parents are better than one. Scientists are now finding that growing up without a father actually changes the way your brain develops.

German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and others are conducting research on animals that are typically raised by two parents, in the hopes of better understanding the impact on humans of being raised by a single parent. Dr. Braun's work focuses on degus, small rodents related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, because mother and father degus naturally raise their babies together.

When deprived of their father, the degu pups exhibit both short- and long-term changes in nerve-cell growth in different regions of the brain. Dr. Braun, director of the Institute of Biology at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, and her colleagues are also looking at how these physical changes affect offspring behavior.

Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.
....
Still, the prevalence of single-parent households has researchers looking at possible consequences for children. An OECD report found that just 57% of children in the U.S. live with both parents, among the lowest percentages of the world's richest nations.

The report, which sparked some controversy when it was released in September, found that children in single-parent households have an increased risk of delinquency and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, as well as poorer scholastic performance.

The OECD also analyzed data from 122 separate studies and found that there was variability in the negative effects on children of living in a single-parent home; on average, the OECD found, the magnitude of the impact was relatively small. On a standardized intelligence test with a median score of 100 points, for example, a child in a single-parent family would be about 3.5 points worse off than a similar child in a two-parent family, according to Dr. Chapple, who co-wrote the report.

Fear the Geek - News - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper

Zero tolerance bounces around Randy Cassingham's blog on a regular basis. One of Randy's readers cited the Columbine massacre as a defense for zero tolerance policies. Well, they were in place for two years before the shooting, and didn't prevent it.

Dan Savage has his own thoughts about what led up to the shooting. Fear the Geek

I had no problem fathoming Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's motives. While I didn't suffer the extreme abuse some of my friends did, I was fucked with enough to spend four years fantasizing about blowing up my high school and everyone in it. I can only imagine the scenarios that must have rolled through Marty's head on a daily basis. Watching SWAT teams inch their way toward Columbine High, I wasn't shocked that something like this could happen in a high school. I was shocked that something like this hadn't happened at any of mine.

Klebold and Harris aren't heroes; they were hateful, twisted racists who, in addition to going after jocks, hunted down and murdered one of Columbine's six black students. But they didn't go guns blazing into a vacuum. Harris left a suicide note, discovered by police and reprinted in one of Denver's daily papers, The Rocky Mountain News. I haven't seen the note printed anywhere else, which strikes me as odd.

The note reads: "By now, it's over. If you are reading this, my mission is complete.... Your children who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time are dead. THEY ARE FUCKING DEAD....

"Surely you will try to blame it on the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, or the way I choose to present myself, but no. Do not hide behind my choices. You need to face the fact that this comes as a result of YOUR CHOICES.

"Parents and teachers, you fucked up. You have taught these kids to not accept what is different. YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I have taken their lives and my own--but it was your doing. Teachers, parents, LET THIS MASSACRE BE ON YOUR SHOULDERS UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE."

The power cliques that rule American high schools are every bit as murderous as Harris and Klebold, only their damage is done in slow motion, over a period of many years, and fails to draw the attention of parents or teachers--let alone news anchors, SWAT teams, and presidents. How many kids ostracized, humiliated, and assaulted in American high schools, like the survivors of Columbine High, are left scarred for life? How many commit suicide every year?

Patterico's Pontifications » L.A. Times Columnist Uncritically Quoted Star of Latest ACORN Video

Patterico's Pontifications » L.A. Times Columnist Uncritically Quoted Star of Latest ACORN Video

In September, L.A. Times columnist James Rainey wrote a column in which he uncritically quoted ACORN worker Lavelle Stewart suggesting that she had turned Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe out of her office...
....
...(Breitbart tells me that Rainey is now claiming he did try to contact Breitbart. Breitbart told me he can find no evidence of the attempted contact. Breitbart told me that tonight. It was very easy to contact Breitbart, as it always is.)

The best part: Rainey recently criticized Fox News for uncritically accepting only one side of the story. I mean, there are so many levels to the irony, you need an elevator to visit them all.

I now publicly ask the question Rainey would not answer privately: having written a misleading column that falsely suggested that ACORN in L.A. was clean — and that Giles and O’Keefe were dishonest — is James Rainey now going to write a new column and correct the record?

The will of Landrieu

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

The Senate Health Care covers a lot of ground.  One of the items in the bill is a $100 million barrel of pork, for which only one state qualifies -- Louisiana.  ABC puts it:

I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

Gotta watch out for the Lawgivers.

Temple Mount Archaeology

From Commentary Magazine: Helping the Palestinians Falsify History

For sheer gall, Barack Obama’s labeling half of Israel’s capital a “settlement,” as Jonathan has pointed out, may be hard to beat. But a New York Times report of a new book about the Temple Mount is definitely in the running. Seeking to give readers some background, the report offered the following gem: “The lack of archaeological evidence of the ancient temples has led many Palestinians to deny any real Jewish attachment or claim to the plateau.”

We’ll ignore the fact that the Second Temple is actually well-documented in extant writings from the period, and that several sections of the Temple compound’s outer walls, as described in these writings, have been uncovered (the Western Wall being one of them).

Instead, let’s discuss why there is a dearth of findings from the Temples themselves. (1) There happens to be a mosque on the exact site where, according to tradition, the Temples once stood. (2) Israel, contrary to Palestinian propaganda, is not out to “destroy al-Aqsa”; indeed, it scrupulously avoids any action that might endanger the mosque. (3) Israel is so deferential to Muslim sensibilities that, after capturing the Mount in 1967, it handed control of the site back to the Muslim waqf. Which brings us to (4): for all these reasons, Israel has never excavated the only place in the world where remnants of the Temple could possibly be found. Nor were any digs conducted there before 1967: al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock have stood undisturbed for hundreds of years. And yes, it is hard to produce archaeological evidence if you never even conduct a dig.

What is outrageous about this report is not just the way it abets Palestinian falsifications of history, though it certainly does that: since the reader isn’t told that this “lack of evidence” stems from the fact that nobody ever looked, he naturally assumes that archaeologists did, in fact, look and found nothing.

Even more outrageous, however, is the way Israel’s generosity is being used against it: its very restraint in eschewing excavations on the Mount — its concern, again, for Muslim sensibilities, its desire to avoid even the appearance of harm to the mosques — has been twisted into “evidence” that no Jewish connection to the Mount ever existed.

Economics is upside-down

From Marginal Revolution:

Only in economics are floors above ceilings!  It might be better to say "a minimum allowed price above the market price" and "a maximum allowed price below the market price," although that is a bit of a mouthful.  I find that the floors and ceilings language does work, however, if the instructor explicitly points out the oddity of floors above ceilings!  In that case, students find the distinction memorable.

When you've lost the Dean of Harvard Medical School...

From the Wall Street Journal: Health "Debate" Deserves a Failing Grade

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.
....
Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that's not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform.

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

Click to Give @ The Animal Rescue Site

Click to feed a rescue animal. Click to Give @ The Animal Rescue Site

for APA-L

Obamacare: Buy now, pay later

By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, November 16, 2009

There is an air of absurdity to what is mistakenly called "health-care reform." Everyone knows that the United States faces massive governmental budget deficits as far as calculators can project, driven heavily by an aging population and uncontrolled health costs. As we recover slowly from a devastating recession, it's widely agreed that, though deficits should not be cut abruptly (lest the economy resume its slump), a prudent society would embark on long-term policies to control health costs, reduce government spending and curb massive future deficits. The administration estimates these at $9 trillion from 2010 to 2019. The president and all his top economic advisers proclaim the same cautionary message.

So what do they do? Just the opposite. Their far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

The campaign to pass Obama's health-care plan has assumed a false, though understandable, cloak of moral superiority. It's understandable because almost everyone thinks that people in need of essential medical care should get it; ideally, everyone would have health insurance. The pursuit of these worthy goals can easily be projected as a high-minded exercise for the public good.

It's false for two reasons. First, the country has other goals -- including preventing financial crises and minimizing the crushing effects of high deficits or taxes on the economy and younger Americans -- that "health-care reform" would jeopardize. And second, the benefits of "reform" are exaggerated. Sure, many Americans would feel less fearful about losing insurance; but there are cheaper ways to limit insecurity. Meanwhile, improvements in health for today's uninsured would be modest. They already receive substantial medical care. Insurance would help some individuals enormously, but studies find that, on average, gains are moderate. Despite using more health services, people don't automatically become healthier.

The pretense of moral superiority further erodes before all the expedient deceptions used to sell Obama's health-care agenda. The president says that he won't sign legislation that adds to the deficit. One way to accomplish this is to put costs outside the legislation. So: Doctors have long complained that their Medicare reimbursements are too low; the fix for replacing the present formula would cost $210 billion over a decade, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. That cost was originally in the "health reform" legislation. Now, it's been moved to another bill but, because there's no means to pay for it (higher taxes or spending cuts), deficits would increase.

Another way to disguise the costs is to count savings that, though they exist on paper, will probably never be realized in practice. So: The House bill is credited with reductions in Medicare reimbursements for hospitals and other providers of $228 billion over a decade. But Congress has often prescribed reimbursement cuts that, under pressure from squeezed providers, it has later rescinded. Claims of "fiscal responsibility" for the health-care proposals reflect "assumptions that are totally unrealistic based on past history," says David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general and now head of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Equally misleading, Obama's top economic advisers assert that the present proposals would slow the growth of overall national health spending. Outside studies disagree. Three studies (two by the consulting firm the Lewin Group for the Peterson Foundation and one by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency) conclude that various congressional plans would increase national health spending compared with the effect of no legislation. The studies variously estimate that the extra spending, over the next decade, would be $750 billion, $525 billion and $114 billion. The reasoning: Greater use of the health-care system by the newly insured would overwhelm cost-saving measures (bundled payments, comparative effectiveness research, tort reform), which are either weak or experimental.

Though these estimates could prove wrong, they are more plausible than the administration's self-serving claims. Its health-care plan is not "comprehensive," as Obama and the New York Times (in its news columns) assert, because it slights cost control. Obama chose to emphasize the politically appealing path of expanding benefits rather than first attending to the harder and more urgent task of controlling spending. If new spending commitments worsen some future budget or financial crisis, Obama's proposal certainly won't qualify as "reform," as the president and The Post (also in its news columns) call it. It's more like malpractice: a self-inflicted wound.




=============

Simply compare and contrast Gibson's interview questions for Barack Obama and those for Sarah Palin. Gibson's Interview Questions for Obama:

• How does it feel to break a glass ceiling?
• How does it feel to "win"?
• How does your family feel about your "winning", breaking a glass ceiling?
• Who will be your VP?
• Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
• Will you accept public finance?
• What issues is your campaign about?
• Will you visit Iraq?
• Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
• What did you think of your competitor's [Clinton's] speech?

Gibson's Interview Questions for Palin:

• Do you have enough qualifications for the job you're seeking?
• Specifically have you visited foreign countries and met foreign leaders?
• Aren't you conceited to be seeking this high level job?
• Questions on foreign policy...
• ...territorial integrity of Georgia
• ...allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO
• ...NATO treaty
• ...Iranian nuclear threat
• ...what to do if Israel attacks Iran
• ...Al Qaeda motivations
• ...the Bush Doctrine
• ...attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan
• ...Is America fighting a holy war? [misquoted Palin]

Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric both intentionally attacked Palin with questions designed to embarrass. Had Obama been queried with the same devious intentions, he'd have been reduced to the blubbering teleprompter-less soul we saw yesterday in Japan.

<http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/11/gun-ho-twilf-bad-news-medias-long.html>

Walter E. Williams Explains “Price Gouging” Myth | American Conservative Daily

Today on Facebook, I saw a complaint that pharmaceutical companies were raising their prices in advance of "reform". Maybe it's time to revisit the concept of "price gouging". Walter E. Williams Explains “Price Gouging” Myth | American Conservative Daily

Let’s start off with an example. Say you owned a small 10-pound inventory of coffee that you purchased for $3 a pound. Each week you’d sell me a pound for $3.25. Suppose a freeze in Brazil destroyed half of its coffee crop, causing the world price of coffee to immediately rise to $5 a pound. You still have coffee that you purchased before the jump in prices. When I stop by to buy another pound of coffee from you, how much will you charge me? I’m betting that you’re going to charge me at least $5 a pound. Why? Because that’s today’s cost to replace your inventory.

Historical costs do not determine prices; what economists call opportunity costs do. Of course, you’d have every right not to be a “price-gouger” and continue to charge me $3.25 a pound. I’d buy your entire inventory and sell it at today’s price of $5 a pound and make a killing.

The absurdity of the health care bill

According to Robert J. Samuelson

[The] far-reaching overhaul of the health-care system -- which Congress is halfway toward enacting -- would almost certainly make matters worse. It would create new, open-ended medical entitlements that threaten higher deficits and would do little to suppress surging health costs. The disconnect between what President Obama says and what he's doing is so glaring that most people could not abide it. The president, his advisers and allies have no trouble. But reconciling blatantly contradictory objectives requires them to engage in willful self-deception, public dishonesty, or both.

The campaign to pass Obama's health-care plan has assumed a false, though understandable, cloak of moral superiority. It's understandable because almost everyone thinks that people in need of essential medical care should get it; ideally, everyone would have health insurance. The pursuit of these worthy goals can easily be projected as a high-minded exercise for the public good.

It's false for two reasons. First, the country has other goals -- including preventing financial crises and minimizing the crushing effects of high deficits or taxes on the economy and younger Americans -- that "health-care reform" would jeopardize. And second, the benefits of "reform" are exaggerated. Sure, many Americans would feel less fearful about losing insurance; but there are cheaper ways to limit insecurity. Meanwhile, improvements in health for today's uninsured would be modest. They already receive substantial medical care. Insurance would help some individuals enormously, but studies find that, on average, gains are moderate. Despite using more health services, people don't automatically become healthier.

The pretense of moral superiority further erodes before all the expedient deceptions used to sell Obama's health-care agenda. The president says that he won't sign legislation that adds to the deficit. One way to accomplish this is to put costs outside the legislation. So: Doctors have long complained that their Medicare reimbursements are too low; the fix for replacing the present formula would cost $210 billion over a decade, estimates the Congressional Budget Office. That cost was originally in the "health reform" legislation. Now, it's been moved to another bill but, because there's no means to pay for it (higher taxes or spending cuts), deficits would increase.
....
Though these estimates could prove wrong, they are more plausible than the administration's self-serving claims. Its health-care plan is not "comprehensive," as Obama and the New York Times (in its news columns) assert, because it slights cost control. Obama chose to emphasize the politically appealing path of expanding benefits rather than first attending to the harder and more urgent task of controlling spending. If new spending commitments worsen some future budget or financial crisis, Obama's proposal certainly won't qualify as "reform," as the president and The Post (also in its news columns) call it. It's more like malpractice: a self-inflicted wound.

Nidal Hassan's Powerpoint Presentation

Washington Post has a copy of Nidal Hassan's grand rounds presentation up.

More climate graphs and stuff

This is from The Register, a UK paper that seems skeptical enough about the notion of a climate apolalypse that it has a category called "Thermageddon".

The cosmic ray effect - a factor of the background CBR bombardment itself, and the relative strength of the earth and the Sun's magnetic shields - shows a strong correlation between temperature, CBR and is extraordinary.

....

In addition, "deep freezes" in the Earth's temperatures have coincided with short-lived but intense bursts of cosmic ray activity. Modulation is thought to reflect the Sun's passage through spiral arms of the Milky Way, and also the Sun's oscillation in relation to the plane of the galaxy. The Sun bobs up and down 2.7 times per orbit.

 

And here's the correlation into deep time, with CO2 as a comparison.

Fuel from Bacteria

The Royal Society for Chemistry reports on the development of a strain of bacteria that produce a nifty chemical -- Isobutyraldehide:

(CH3)2-C-CHO.

Why Isobutyraldehyde? Well, it's...

...a precursor to several useful chemicals, including isobutanol, which has great potential as a fuel alternative to petrol.

And what's more:

'Here, we were successful in engineering CO₂-eating bacteria to produce isobutyraldehyde very efficiently,' says James Liao, who led the work at the University of California, Los Angeles, US. 'Our process is around 10 times faster than hydrogen production and about 100 times faster than genetically engineered ethanol production.' 

....

Importantly, extracting the final product from the mix is a simple process. 'The fuel vaporises to the gas phase easily, making separation extremely simple. Afterwards, we can liquefy it again by simple condensation,' Liao told Chemistry World.  

This process helps keep the bacteria alive longer, as they are not exposed to large amounts of chemicals. 'The bacteria are very stable, and in our flasks without much environmental control, the bacteria continued to produce for about 10 days,' Liao says.  

That last bit is important.  The chemicals we want for burning and chemical feedstock are almost always waste products.  If they build up in a high enough concentration, they poison the organisms producing them.  Just try to get yeast to ferment past about 12% by volume.  If you can pull the waste products away from the bacteria on an ongoing basis, you can keep them from poisoning themselves and run the process on a continuing basis.