http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the-mighty-power-of-the-nocebo-effect/

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/yh18j-PRkNM/010812.html

Slashing carbon dioxide emissions has the added benefit of significantly reducing air pollution and could prevent millions of premature deaths each year, according to a series of studies in the British medical journal, The Lancet. The six studies demonstrate that cutting greenhouse gas emissions will significantly reduce air pollutants such as fine particulate matter — known as black carbon — and ground-level ozone. One study in India looked at the benefits of a proposed program that would replace 150 million heavily polluting wood or dung stoves with cleaner stoves that use renewable energy or natural gas. Replacing the dirty stoves by 2020 would not only prevent an estimated 2 million premature deaths but would also reduce greenhouse gas pollution by hundreds of millions of tons and cut down on black carbon deposits, which settle on glaciers in the Himalayas and hasten their melting, the study said. “These papers demonstrate there are clear improvements for health if we choose the right strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Linda Birnbaum, director of the U.S. National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, which helped fund the studies.

This piece originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Health at 12:32 PM)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/O3DSJtcIb-A/010811.html

Last Thursday i went to see

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/some-new-rules-for-frequent-and.html

Below is a graph built from data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which compiles very robust information on airfares. It reflects something called the Air Travel Price Index (ATPI), which measures airfares while controlling for service class and itinerary (so airfares won't artificially appear to get cheaper, for instance, if an airline takes out some business class seats to stuff more people in coach, or more expensive if it begins to fly some longer-distance routes). I've further adjusted this data for "CPILEGSL", which is the consumer price index (inflation) less energy items -- and then divided the airports between the 25 busiest and the rest (BTS tracks data down to the 85th largest air travel market, which is Charleston, SC).



What we see, indeed, is that airfares have gotten cheaper -- by about 15 percent overall over the past fourteen years (adjusted for inflation), although with some periodic spikes due to fuel prices. I know, I know: you're paying less for worse service, given the add-on fees for everything from bottled water to checked baggage, the bizarre ritual that is airport security, and the seemingly inevitable delays. As a relatively frequent flier, you have my sympathies. But given their razor-thin profit margins, the airlines at least seem to be doing their best to pass the cost-cutting onto consumers in the form of cheaper tickets. Given the increasing presence of "discount" carriers like Southwest, JetBlue, Frontier and Virgin America in many markets, indeed they may not have a whole lot of choice in the matter. ("Discount" belongs in quotation marks, since some of these carriers -- particularly Virgin and JetBlue -- offer a superior coach-class experience as compared with the majors.)

We also see, however, that the larger airports, which have seen their fares decrease by 18 percent, have had it better than smaller ones, which have experienced a 12 percent decline. This appears to hold true both for secondary airports within a large market -- once a bargain, they now often charge travelers at a premium -- as well as primary airports in smaller cities. And if you're traveling from one small airport to another, the price pressure may be doubly noticeable.

Suppose, for example, that I wanted retrace the Miles' family's route from Syracuse to Omaha, leaving on Tuesday, January 12th and returning on Friday, January 15th. The best I can do on Kayak.com is $428 on United. That's almost 50 percent more expensive than a round trip from New York to San Francisco over the same period, which I can get for $293 with a layover in Denver (or $309 for a direct flight) -- even though the distance covered is about twice as long.

The cheapest I could get from Des Moines to Gulfport, MS during this time period is $396 -- and that's with three stops on the inbound flight. But Chicago to Seattle -- covering about three times the distance -- is $337, and for a direct flight.

Phoenix to Houston is just $198. But Tuscon, Arizona to Houston is $341 on Southwest, or $392 on a major carrier.

These are not cherrypicked examples -- they're just the first three random ones that I happened to try. I won't speculate too much about the economics behind all of this -- although good old economies of scale, plus the degree of competition in a particular market, surely have a lot to do with it. If you're traveling to or from an airport that doesn't serve as a hub or focus city for one of the major carriers, you're probably not benefiting much from the cheaper airfares that other travelers are seeing, and you may even be paying something of a premium.

The strategy for travelers is obvious enough: if you need to end up in a smaller city, you might consider flying to a larger city instead and driving, training or busing the rest of the way. For a lot of travelers, for instance, the cheapest way to fly to Tucson may be to go to Phoenix, to Portland, ME may be to Boston, or to Omaha to Kansas City.

It also seems like some of the cardinal rules of smart travel no longer seem to apply. For instance, based on my extensive experience as a procrastinator, it seems to be quite a bit cheaper than it once was to book flights at the last minute. In contrast, the penalties for changing your itinerary are still quite steep. So if your travel plans are still coming together -- you're not sure whether you're meeting is going to finish on Wednesday or extend until Thursday, for instance -- it really may be better to wait to book your travel, rather than having to pay a change fee later. In certain cases, booking a one-way ticket and worrying about the return trip later may even be a perfectly sane strategy. (Caution: avoid either of the above if you're coming into town for a major event that a lot of other people are traveling to -- say, the Super Bowl or a political convention -- since the airlines know they have you by the balls. I've gotten burned, for instance, trying to play it cute with the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. This may also apply to the holiday period, where skipping or re-scheduling a trip may just not be an option.)

And because of airlines like Southwest that charge by the segment rather than by the round trip, you should no longer fear so-called open-jaw itineraries. You may pay hardly any premium to travel into Las Angeles and out of Las Vegas, for instance, or into London and out of Paris, if you can get more out of your trip this way.

All of this, assuredly, may sound a little self-serving. I tend to travel to and from large cities, I tend to book my travel late, and I've always been a fan of creative itineraries that combine multiple business or pleasure "objectives" (in different cities) out of the same journey. So all of these changes are working in my favor. And take the above with a grain of salt; I'm just a political blogger with a tryptohan hangover, and not any sort of travel writer. But if you're still following the 20th Century playbook to book air travel in 2009, you're probably costing yourself more than you think.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/worldchanging_fulltext/~3/yrlE6Zpg6hU/010810.html

The evidence from US air pollution markets.

Contrary to claims that cap and trade is untested or uproven, there are a half dozen or so operational cap-and-trade programs already functioning in the United States. Of these, the most significant are the Acid Rain Program and the NOx Budget Trading Program. Both have large vibrant trading markets, both have been extremely successful in achieving environmental aims, and neither has evidenced manipulation or gaming.

The Acid Rain Program has been administered by the US Environmental Protection Agency since 1995. It includes a cap-and-trade program for sulfur dioxide (SO2) -- and all evidence suggests that the program has functioned exceedingly well. In fact, the program achieved steep emissions reductions at lower-than-expected costs.

The lion's share of the success in SO2 reduction can be attributed to the market-based cap-and-trade program. According to a 2007 article in Electricity Journal:

As part of its compliance strategy a regulated source may engage in allowance trading—buying or selling surplus allowances. Because of the cap, there is no need for EPA to review each transaction thereby reducing the time, transaction costs, and administrative costs to trade allowances. Parties to a trade can enter the transactions online using EPA’s information system, allowing trades to be processed in less than one day; competition and market liquidity have driven down the costs of private transactions to less than 0.1 percent of the cost of an allowance, and administering transactions of millions of allowances each year requires less than one full-time employee at EPA.

In other words, cap and trade was able to deliver environmental improvement at a low cost. And it did so quickly.

The EPA also runs the NOx Budget Trading Program, a cap-and-trade system designed to reduce the nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions that contribute to ground-level ozone, which is the primary component of smog. (This NOx program is sometimes lumped together with the Acid Rain Program, which treats both SO2 and NOx, but they are different programs; the Acid Rain Program's treatment of NOx is more similar to a traditional regulatory approach.) The NOx trading program has been working since 1999, operating first as a multi-state agreement known as the Ozone Transport Commission and folded into a larger federal system in 2003.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) has an exceptionally smart 2005 white paper, "Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading in the U.S. States," that takes a close look at the allowance markets under the NOx Budget Trading Program. It hasn't been entirely seamless, but neither has it been seamy. In fact, at the highest level, the program has been a smashing success:

The OTC NOx Budget Program proved to be effective on economic, environmental, and administrative grounds. From 1999 to 2002, annual emissions were significantly reduced and consistently fell below the emissions cap. Compliance with the program was nearly perfect, and it appears that there was little if any leakage, or the displacement of emissions and/or economic activity, from the OTC region to other regions. The cost of reducing emissions was considerably lower than the initial forecasts...

All of which is encouraging.

That said, the NOx allowance market did experience a few hiccups, including some price volatility near the beginning of the program and then again in 2003 when the program shifted into federal hands. But WRI's analysis of the market reveals that the volatility was largely the result of uncertainty and lack of information on the part of market participants. Indeed, as the program continued and the market matured, it demonstrated its ability to adapt to relatively complex regulatory changes.

A recent in-depth analysis by the US EPA -- in the form of an April 2009 white paper examining the biggest price changes in the SO2 and NOx markets -- comes to substantially similar conclusions. The SO2 market experienced a couple instances of temporary price spiking, but a closer look reveals that these short-lived spikes can be largely attributed to changes in the governing regulatory framework that, basically, tightened the cap and set off a scramble for allowances. (Interestingly, the EPA found that some firms made money on trading allowances with no untoward consequences for market stability. Indeed, in my judgment, money-making opportunities for traders may have actually increased liquidity and thereby helped stabilize the market.)

The EPA's findings for the NOx market were roughly parallel to WRI's. The short-term price volatility can mostly be attributed to information gaps and uncertainty about various factors, including when specific kinds of pollution-reduction technology would come online. Price volatility isn't, generally speaking, a good thing but neither is it terrible. Indeed, as the EPA paper concludes:

Market observers should not confuse temporary high prices in the transition to new market dynamics as volatility. We have demonstrated in both programs that a relatively large portion of the increase is a natural adjustment to a new control level, while some portion is related to early market jitters and tends to self-correct relatively quickly... We have also explained how the concerns of undue volatility in the SO2 allowance market are misplaced outside of a transition to aggressive new regulations: EPA found that generally speaking, allowance market volatility is no more or less than volatilities of other related energy prices and stock prices of energy-related companies.

But maybe what's most important for those of us who like draw analogies to carbon markets is what's missing: evidence of fraud, gaming, or market manipulation. That's because no one belives that either the SO2 or NOx market have been distorted by bad actors. To the contrary, despite a few bumps in the road, they accomplished what markets are best at: they quickly delivered the least expensive benefits from around the economy.

This piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily.

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(Posted by Eric De Place in Bright Green Economy at 11:50 AM)

http://coilhouse.net/2009/11/friday-afternoon-movie-they-live/

http://coilhouse.net/?p=11348

It’s been quite a hiatus for the FAM. Why that was, no one knows. Perhaps the FAM was in hiding, on the lam after a particularly large methamphetamine deal went decidedly South; or maybe the FAM has been kept in a dank, dingy basement for the past two or three weeks, the unwilling plaything of a cruel and demented mistress. Like I said, we’ll never know. But the FAM is back, albeit with a gaunt visage and a faraway look in its eyes. Poor, poor FAM.

To ring in its return we present to you, our adoring, viewing audience Rowdy Roddy Piper’s breakout film, They Live; directed by the one and only John Carpenter. Now, I realize that there has been a particularly heavy dose of Carpenter on the FAM as of late and, rest assured, this will be the end. For a while. Hopefully. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They Live is the story of a young man named George Nada who comes into the possession of a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see the truth lying under the surface of our perceived reality. That truth being that the world is controlled by skull-faced aliens who jerk us about like puppets through the use of hidden, subliminal messages. This lifting of the veil terrifies Mr. Nada and he is encouraged to save the human race by masticating chewing gum and “kicking ass”. He is partnered with Kieth David — who previously appeared in Mr. Carpenter’s The Thing — who plays the part of Frank Armitage. Frank Armitage is also the pseudonym that Carpenter used when he wrote the script and is also the name of a character in The Dunwich Horror by one Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The story of They Live a has equally pulpy roots, the plot being taken from both “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a story called “Nada” from a comic entitled Alien Encounters by both FantCo and Eclipse.

It is no surprise then that They Live turned out the way it did. This is a classic sort of quick and dirty sci-fi, with brash, one-liner-spewing heroes and a central premise masquerading as social commentary. But you know what? As cheesy as They Live can be — um, Rowdy Roddy Piper stars in this — it is still fantastic, a delectable morsel of Carpenter’s truly over-the-top films that are both unabashedly silly and truly enjoyable. It is mindless, yet guilt-free entertainment and sometimes, that’s all one need.

Post tags: Conspiracy theories, Crackpot Visionary, Film, Horror, Sci-fi

Arun Kumar was born to disabled parents, beaten by his grandparents, ran away from home, got a job in a garment factory and had all his savings stolen by the police.

He was only 11.

Today, at 13, he shares a cramped, dingy shelter with 63 other runaways and former street kids in New Delhi.

He is one of the lucky ones.

A creepy string of calf mutilations in southern Colorado has a rancher and sheriff's officials mystified.

Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks. The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed.

But rancher Manuel Sanchez has found no signs of human attackers, such as footprints or ATV tracks. And there are no signs of an animal attack by a coyote or mountain lion. Usually predators leave pools of blood or drag marks from carrying away the livestock.

Two officers from the Costilla County Sheriff's Office have investigated the mutilations but say they don't know what's killing the calves.

"There's nothing really to go by," said Sanchez, who's ranched for nearly 50 years. "I can't figure it out."

A spokesman for the sheriff's office told The Pueblo Chieftain that investigators doubt a person butchered the calves because there is no blood at the scene.

"I've butchered a cow before and I know what kind of a mess it leaves," Sgt. James Chavez said.

Some in the area believe the mutilations are the work of aliens. An area UFO chaser, Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs, has been to the Costilla County pasture to investigate.

He told the paper there have been other unexplained calf mutilations in the area, including three in March. One of the other calves, found dead on a ranch near Trinidad, had its ears removed, Zukowski said.

"We're trying as much as we can to find a pattern," said Zukowski, who runs a UFO Web site called ufonut.com.

Sanchez said he has sold off his 32 remaining calves out of fear more would be mutilated. He hasn't decided how he'll manage the remaining 40 animals in his herd.

"It's a big loss for a small rancher," he said.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2009/11/27/federal_escapees_await_a_magis.html?cxntfid=blogs_the_blotter

The men who escaped from a federal prison in Bastrop County on Nov. 20 will be returned to Austin to face charges probably late next week, officials said today.

Leandro Luna, 52, (pictured at left) and Adan Chavez, 53 were arrested Thursday in Mexico. They are currently in the Val Verde County jail in Del Rio, awaiting a hearing before a magistrate Monday, said Hector Gomez, a supervisory deputy for the U.S. Marshals Service in Austin.

The pair is expected to be charged with felony escape, Gomez said. After questioning in Austin, one of the two may be charged with theft of a government car, also a felony, he said.

An interrogation of the suspects in Austin should also give federal investigators a better idea of the criminal involvement of others who may have helped in the escape, Gomez said.

The men walked out of a minimum-security facility, stole a Crown Victoria government car, made their way to Austin, hopped in a blue truck in the parking lot of the H-E-B at Interstate 35 and East William Cannon Drive and made their way to Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Gomez said.

Gomez said U.S. Marshals in West Texas had been alerted after the escape because Luna has relatives in Ciudad Acuña, which is across the border from Del Rio

Although Austin authorities have yet to be fully briefed by Mexican authorities on the arrests, Gomez said they were made without complication.

“It was pretty much what we expected,” Gomez said. “You know the saying leopards don’t change their spots? These guys always want to come home. It was just a matter of waiting for them.”

Previous story: Escaped Bastrop County inmates found in Mexico

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2009/11/27/four_people_from_central_texas.html?cxntfid=blogs_the_blotter

Four people traveling from Austin to East Texas were killed Thursday night when the van they were traveling in collided with an 18-wheeler, according to the Lufkin Daily News.

The Department of Public Safety said a Dodge van making a U-turn from the eastbound shoulder of Texas 103 was hit by an eastbound semi. The collision occurred about 11 miles west of Lufkin shortly after 10:15 p.m., the newspaper said.

Todd Szymankiewicz, 35, of Austin, and his 4-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter were pronounced dead at the scene. Dakota Klein, 14, of Pflugerville, the son of the woman driving the van, was also killed.

Szymankiewicz’s wife Deva, 28, and Holly Klein, the driver, were taken to a hospital in East Texas with internal injuries after the collision. Klein has since been moved to University Medical Center Brackenridge, where she is listed in stable condition.

East Texas hospital officials said Deva Szymankiewicz was also taken to Brackenridge, but officials there had no record of her today.

The 18-wheeler’s driver, Jay Edgar Garth, of Huntington, was not injured, according to the Lufkin newspaper.

All of the passengers in the van were wearing their seatbelts, the newspaper said.

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/11/the_consequences_of_.html

I've just caught a short video by the brilliant behavioural economist Dan Ariely who explains the surprising effect of wearing fake goods on the likelihood of us cheating and for on much we suspect that others are being dishonest.

Ariely is riffing on one of his recent studies that was led by psychologist Francesca Gino. It'll shortly appear in Psychological Science but can read the full text online as a pdf.

The study involved asking people to wear real or fake designer sunglasses, when in reality they were all the genuine article. Interestingly, those wearing the supposedly fake shades behaved less honestly in subsequent tests and were more likely to suspect others of behaving unethically.

Ariely gives a brilliant account of the study but there's an interesting aspect in the full paper which he doesn't touch on so much. In the final experiment of the study, the researchers found that it was a change in attitude that seemed to drive the change in honesty.

Wearing the 'fake' sunglasses seemed to increase personal feelings of being inauthentic and these feeling of the 'counterfeit self' were most associated with changes in behaviour.

Participants who believed they were wearing imitation goods were more likely to agree with the sentiments "Right now, I don't know how I really feel inside" and "Right now, I feel alienated from myself" and were more like to say that they felt "out of touch with the ‘real me’" and felt as if "I don’t know myself very well".

The study suggests that fake goods change how we perceive ourselves and this relaxes our boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

The video is short and brilliantly explained and the study is fascinating.

Link to Dan Ariely video on the effect of faking it.
pdf of full text of scientific paper.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/F7flx4ulDEM/hello_southern_california.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/hello_southern_california.php

I'm going to be on radio station KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA, at 10:15am California time (12:15 Central time). You can also listen in via the web.

This is a left-wing Pacifica station, so I'm sure they'll be piping it into all the California shopping malls in place of Muzak, so if you're out shopping, maybe you'll hear me too.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/VY0YOIosHXc/an_australian_double_standard.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/an_australian_double_standard.php

In March, there's going to be a massive atheist conference in Melbourne, Australia. It's going to be excellent, with speakers being brought in from around the world, and with mobs of delighted godless Aussies gathering to celebrate and discuss secularism (I know some of my readers here will be there!) Reasonably enough, the Atheist Organization of Australia has asked the government to chip in and help them do it right with a request for about a quarter million dollars. The government has been dragging its feet, though, punting the request about and making no promises.

Now you might say that times are tough, the economy is down, the government might just be strapped and is cutting corners. In that case, I'd say, OK, we atheists have to do some penny-pinching too, it's only fair.

But then how to explain the fact that the Australian government just blithely handed over $2.5 million for a religious conference? And has flatly rejected the bid for funding from the atheists?

Government spokesman Luke Enright said: "The decision not to fund this event has nothing to do with religious ideology - the convention just doesn't meet the criteria required to receive government funding".

What's the Australian word for "bullshit", people?

Pile it higher, Australians!

Reverend Tim Costello, a patron of the world's religions event, said it was important to support the forum, as "90 per cent of the world is deeply religious".

"In a global context, most of the world is profoundly religious, and there literally can't be peace without religious peace," Mr Costello said.

Have you ever noticed that Christians like to count Communists as atheists when recounting the evils done in the name of that ideology, but whenever they make the argument from popularity, as Costello is doing here, they suddenly forget the Chinese? It's very strange.

I also think he's lying. A majority of the world is casually religious, not deeply or profoundly. I'd go further: most of the people in this world are stupidly religious, with ingrained beliefs that they did not acquire through thought or study, but through regular indoctrination from childhood on.

We also will not have peace through religion. Religion is arbitrary, false, and unverifiable; it is a body of ideas with no empirical restraint, that can be freely invented, and in the worst cases, inspire dangerous fanaticism. We will not have peace while religion is uncaged.

It does not matter, though. The fact that atheists are a minority does not argue that they deserve no consideration at all. I thought this was a well understood principle; the danger in a democracy is the tyranny of the majority, and safeguards have to be put in place to protect the rights of minorities. Since Costello is a "reverend", unfortunately, that probably means he's an ignorant ass who has never learned anything that matters.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/rl5W02dHq14/a_wicked_twist.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/a_wicked_twist.php

Michael Young was a nasty old Christian bigot who lived a long life and left his fortune to his relatives. Apparently,though, fundamentalist hate isn't necessarily heritable, and one of those relatives, who I think is named Anthony Perry, established the Michael Young Fund, and is handing out the money to…well, follow the link. Let's just say it's a good thing there is no afterlife, or he'd be seething in even greater torment.

Just to forestall the usual whines, what if this happened to me, and I left money to my kids and one of them used the capital to hand out cash to organizations I disliked? I'd be dead, first of all, so I wouldn't care; and I would leave what little money have to my kids to do with as they'd like, not as I'd like, so I wouldn't have grounds to complain anyway.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/OkujZuh5tNw/darn_it_i_didnt_even_know_thes.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/darn_it_i_didnt_even_know_thes.php

Or I would have roasted one yesterday.

I wonder if you can get free-range turctopus?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/_2z1OZosSiE/friday_cephalopod_black_friday.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/friday_cephalopod_black_friday.php

Vampyroteuthis infernalis

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/celebrating-id-al-adha/

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=9765

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/deficits-the-causes-matter/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=5691

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/rashomon-in-the-desert/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=5685

http://coilhouse.net/2009/11/exquisite-tymoshenko-doll-helps-orphans/

http://coilhouse.net/?p=11308

[Image courtesy of Reuters]

Can one of you guys please get me this Yulia Tymoshenko doll for my birthday? A $53K porcelain representation of Lady Yu as Robin Hood, complete with a bow and arrow and leather boots fitted with spurs, isn’t too much to ask for this year, is it? Anyone? …guys? Okay, fine. I’ll settle for the homemade Barbie version. (Unless Marina Bychkova decides to take a stab at it.)

The dolly above, along with other figures of prominent Ukrainian politicians, was crafted by artist Yelena Kuznetsova for yesterday’s Ukrainian Doll Parade, an auction aimed towards raising money for the construction of an orphans’ rehabilitation center. Tymoshenko’s doll was by far the most popular; it was auctioned off for ten times the estimated price, according to news source RT.

Top row: L: Yulia shows the babybats how it’s done. R: Yulia and the Prince of Darkness. Bottom row: L: Yulia and her pet tigress, Tigrulya. R: Yulia knows how to accessorize.

The Coilhouse obsession with Tymoshenko (and, more recently, her tribe of Amazonian defenders) dates back to 2007. Since then, she’s been busy – negotiating oil disputes with Russia, campaigning for health reform, and galvanizing global support for leg-o-mutton sleeves and black lace. After falling out with President Yushchenko earlier this year, Tymoshenko announced her bid to run in the January 2010 Presidential Elections. While I’m neutral on Tymoshenko as a politician, I’m a staunch supporter of her hair and its commitment to solving the gas crisis.

Today is Tymoshenko’s birthday, so here’s wishing our Ukranian Dune Priestess the very best on her special day. Your update on Yulia’s gothic agenda, after the jump.

Read the rest of Exquisite Tymoshenko Doll Helps Orphans

Post tags: Faboo, Goth, Hair, Personal Style, Politics

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/charity/pinkglove.asp

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091126.html

M78 Wide Field

http://www.superpoop.com/archives/2009/Nov

http://www.superpoop.com/archives/2009/Nov/?#256

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/bad-emulation-advance.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20605

You may recall my guess is that within a century or so, human whole brain emulations (ems) will induce a change so huge as to be in the top four changes in the last hundred million years. So major advances toward such ems are big news:

IBM’s Almaden Research Center … announced … they have created the largest brain simulation to date on a supercomputer. The number of neurons and synapses in the simulation exceed those in a cat’s brain; previous simulations have reached only the level of mouse and rat brains. … C2 … re-create[s] 1 billion neurons connected by 10 trillion individual synapses. C2 runs on “Dawn,” a BlueGene/P supercomputer. …  DARPA … is spending at least US $40 million to develop an electronic processor that mimics the mammalian brain’s function, size, and power consumption. The DARPA project … was launched late last year and will continue until 2015 with a goal of a prototype chip simulating 10 billion neurons connected via 1 trillion synapses. The device must use 1 kilowatt or less (about what a space heater uses) and take up less than 2 liters in volume. …

“Each neuron in the network is a faithful reproduction of what we now know about neurons,” he says. This in itself is an enormous step forward for neuroscience, .. Dawn … takes 500 seconds for it to simulate 5 seconds of brain activity, and it consumes 1.4 MW.

“Enormous step” seems a bit too much, but even so Randal Koene agrees this is big news:

This recent demonstration of computing power in simulations of biologically inspired neuronal networks is a good measure to indicate how far we have come and when it will be possible to emulate the necessary operations of a complete human brain. Given the storage capacity that was used in the simulation, at least some relevant information could be stored for each updatable synapse in the experiment. That makes this markedly different than the storageless simulations carried out by Izhikevich.

Even if big news, this is not good news.  You see, ems require three techs, and we have clear preferences over which tech is ready last:

1. Computing power – As a steadily and gradually advancing tech, this makes the em transition more gradual and predictable.  Here first only expensive ems are available, and then they slowly take over jobs as their costs fall.  Since it is a large industry with many competing producers, we need worry less about disruptions from unequal tech access.
2. Brain scanning – As this is also a relatively gradually advancing tech, it should also make for a more gradual predictable transition.  But since it is now a rather small industry, surprise investments could make for more development surprise.  The use of the tech is also very lumpy, so we may get billions, even trillions, of copies of the first scanned human.  And the first team to make that successful scan might gain much power, if it hasn’t made cooperative deals with other teams. By the time a second, or hundredth, human is scanned most of the economic niches may be filled with copies of the first few ems.
3. Cell modeling – This sort of progress may be more random and harder to predict – a sudden burst of insight is more likely to create an unexpected and sudden em transition.  This could induce large disruptive inequality in economic and military power, both among teams trying to succeed and among ordinary folks displaced by em labor.

This new DARPA project seems focused more on advancing special computing hardware than cell-modeling.  If so, it makes scenario #1 less likely, which is bad.  Can someone please tell these DARPA knuckle-heads that they are doing exactly the wrong thing?

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/gobble.html

(Previously.)

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/harhTx49oi0/congratulations_to_the_ladens.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/congratulations_to_the_ladens.php

They have successfully spawned. Say hello to Huxley Laden!

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/11/project_hm.html

Patient HM became famous for having a dense surgically-induced amnesia and taking part in numerous neuropsychology studies that told us a great deal about the structure of memory. He died last year but left his brain to science and Project HM has been set up to co-ordinate the scientific analysis of his brain.

According to a post on the Project blog, the process of dissecting and digitally recording the structure of HM's brain will begin on Wednesday 2nd December and apparently you'll be able to watch it live via video streamed from the site.

The best write up of the Project is over at Nature News who have unfortunately jailed their article behind a pay wall. However, here's the punch line:

On 2 December, exactly one year after Molaison's death, [Neuroanatomist Jacopo] Annese, of the University of California, San Diego, will begin dividing the brain into roughly 2,400 slices, each thinner than a human hair, and digitizing them. Annese hopes that Molaison's brain will become the first of many in a digital human-brain library at the university.

Annese is one of the few people with the sophisticated equipment needed to slice whole human brains, which is how he came by Molaison's brain. Most labs cut human brains into blocks before slicing them — the fate that befell Albert Einstein's brain.

Annese will mount and stain about every 30th slice for cell nuclei and projections, which will allow him to map the cellular architecture in three dimensions. The remaining slices will be available to the neuroscience community, with researchers able to view the particular slice they want to study before requesting it.

Link to Project HM website.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/oQm0f1reVX4/the_pie_made_from_the_cursed_u.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/the_pie_made_from_the_cursed_u.php

The thread continues. Since we were last debating the merits of pie, I give you…evil pie. Probably rhubarb.

I have no idea what those subtitles say, but it's probably something horrific.

I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/parenting-is-not-about-kids.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/?p=20593

Bryan Caplan wondered why parents forget a kids view:

The mom and dad in these stories  … pointlessly alienate their kids by pushing them into activities that aggravate parent and child alike.  … [they] largely ignore all sorts of kid-on-kid abuse, leaving their older sons in a brutal Hobbesian jungle.  When they do respond, it’s awfully arbitrary. …  Many parents really do forget what’s it’s like to be a kid. … I honestly don’t know why.  I bet Robin Hanson would have a clever functionalist story.

I commented:

Parents seem so eager to appear adultish that they alienate their kids. How could parents possibly care so much about what other adults think of them than they sacrifice their own kids happiness?  It is almost as if parents cared more about being respected than having fun.

Bryan responded:

[This] assumes that other parents care about your parenting far more than they actually do.  In reality, most parents are too tired and preoccupied to worry if somebody else’s parents aren’t “adultish” enough.

But Bryan presumes we care less about the judgments others make when they make snappier judgments.  Yet we all care about how our surface features appear to others, especially when those others make snap judgments – after all if they judged more carefully, our inner beauty might shine through.  And the busier are other parents, the snappier are their judgments.

Katja Grace was once similarly puzzled:

A cheap method of disinfecting water … its effects were not significant … [in] rural Bolivia. … [Researchers] suspect a big reason for this is that lining up water bottles on your roof shows your neighbors that you aren’t rich enough to have more expensive methods of disinfecting water. … Fascinating as signaling explanations are, this seems incredible. … Parents are known for obsessive interest in their children’s safety. What’s going on?

I responded:

The bottles … should reduce kids’s death rate by 1.5%.  … When are parents ever willing to make themselves appear poor or low status to reduce their kid’s chance of dying by 1.5%?

Now consider other “tired” parents activities:

• Playing music to baby in womb, dragging them to concerts
• Lots more “pushing [kids] into activities that aggravate”
• Work hard for income to pay for track houses on cul de sacs
• Insist anywhere kids visit eliminate all pointy objects
• Carefully monitor men at playgrounds, even men with kids
• Never let go of hand of kid at mall, to prevent kidnapping
• Making kids sit at table until they eat “healthy” food
• Drag kids to doc every time they get a cold
• Making sure kids do all their homework
• Obsessively overly clean kid environments

These are usually justified as helping kids, but most have questionable marginal value.  But they are what “good parents” are thought to do.   Ask yourself: how big would the marginal benefit to kids of an activity have to be for parents to do it if that activity made them look like a bad parent?

We all have illusions about love and romance, and are reluctant to accept signaling explanations of behavior where we feel so genuine and virtuous.   But romantic illusions pale compared to parenting illusions, making it all the harder to call a parenting spade a spade.

Bryan is writing a book trying to convince parents to have more kids, via convincing them to lighten up on parenting effort.  This is a noble cause, but I’m afraid it hangs on Bryan getting parents to see parenting-lite as higher status, such as via celebrating rich folks who send their kids off to boarding school, or our great grandparents who had ten kids each.

Added: Bryan responds here.

DNA Lounge update, wherein the War on Fun gets some more press.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/wrYVu_T0jd0/looks_nothing_like_me.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/looks_nothing_like_me.php

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/clzeqgSWj4E/try_not_to_think_catholic_thou.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/try_not_to_think_catholic_thou.php

I know, it's Thanksgiving in America, and I've already been curmudgeonly enough for you—but I have to do you the favor now of ruining your appetite with this tale of institutionalized child abuse in Ireland. It involves the Catholic Church, of course (and isn't that unsurprising ennui just another indication of Catholicism unsavory reputation?).

Authorities enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law as four archbishops, obsessed with secrecy and avoiding scandal, protected abusers and reputations at all costs, the report said..

Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.  

In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of ''don't ask, don't tell'' throughout the Church.

''The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,'' it said.

''The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.

There is one bright spot of common sense.

The inquiry, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, said the hierarchy cannot claim they did not know that child sex abuse was a crime.

That's good to hear. The spectacle of a gang of gruesome old sanctimonious virgins looking befuddled and trying to claim, "We had no idea that buggering children was a bad idea, your honor" would be a bit much to take.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/a-thanksgiving-day-biking-tradition-comes-to-baghdad/

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=9815

   "The Pilgrims" arrived in North America in December of 1620. What they found in the area they landed was abandoned Indian villages, some with unburied skeletons of the dead lying among the weeds --due to diseases introduced by earlier settlers,-- and a very hostile reception from those Indians still alive. It would seem the last European to come by (one of John Smith's lieutenants, Thomas Hunt) had decided it would be a jolly undertaking to capture some Indians to sell into slavery in Europe, and had gratuitously killed a number of others.
   Thomas Hunt had intended to sell the Indians for £20 a piece in Spain, but apparently some friars in Europe managed to interdict this plan, and one of the indians, known as Squanto, was able to make his way back to North America, and ended up at the Pilgrim's Plymouth Colony as a translater.

   In 1621 the Pilgrims celebrated what is regarded as "the first thanksgiving" in North America (there had already been a long tradition both in the New World and Europe for thanks giving feasts though). They somehow convinced some local Indians to attend.

   In 1622 Indians were again invited to a feast*. Their share of the liquor was poisoned and 200 Indians died. A further fifty were finished off by hand.
   Then pumpkin pie was probably eaten, though I doubt they had whipped cream.**

* Admittedly this occurred in Jamestown, some 600 miles South.

** Yeah I looked up the history of whipped cream, sounds like it would need to be colder than they could probably make it in order to whip properly

I don't usually attend Thanksgiving wearing arms and armour, but then again, I didn't just barely decide not to kill the guests THIS year

   Thankyou for tuning in to another Emo-Snal Classic Historical Downer! ;D
   Notwithstanding, I am looking forward to devouring some turkey/stuffing/pumpkin pie until I go into a food coma.


   And in other news, tomorrow I fly up to Portland for the weekend, check into the tallship Lady Washington on Sunday, and Monday set sail! Will be sailing for at least two weeks. Internet access may be spotty.