Original Cin

Something’s rotten in Oklahoma City:

Long-secret security tapes showing the chaos immediately after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building are blank in the minutes before the blast and appear to have been edited, an attorney who obtained the recordings said Sunday.

…

“Four cameras in four different locations going blank at basically the same time on the morning of April 19, 1995. There ain’t no such thing as a coincidence,” Trentadue said.

He said government officials claim the security cameras did not record the minutes before the bombing because “they had run out of tape” or “the tape was being replaced.”

-Tim Talley, “Attorney: OKC bombing tapes appear edited“

Of course, schools are no political prize at all whatsoever:

The notion that schoolchildren are being subjected to partisan politics rather than taught civics emerged earlier this month before an Obama speech to students was played in thousands of schools.

By then, unlike February, there was broader mistrust of Obama, particularly over his health insurance overhaul plans. Concerns that he would use his speech to students as a political tool grew partly because the White House initially released a lesson plan encouraging students to “help the president.”

….

“There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” he said. “The teacher’s intention was to engage the children in an activity to recognize famous and accomplished African Americans.”

He said he would not identify the teacher who led the song. State education officials said she retired at the end of the last school year.

[Probably true, but I'd still like to see that retirement verified by a third party... trust but verify... - Nic]
- Geoff Mulvihill, “Scrutiny rises over NJ kids singing Obama song“

On a completely unrelated note, I’m sure, Barrack Hussein Obama wants the school year extended:

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).
- Libby Quaid, “More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation“

.

My idea: Fix the schools, by actually getting lots of teachers and administrators that aren’t, on the whole, transparent sycophants. Does Obama have any ideas in his head other than “More Cowbell Government?”

Social Security is in trouble (on NPR).

Last time, I talked about the idea that increasing carbohydrate consumption is a huge force behind increasing obesity. The jury, in all honesty, is still out, and Taubes says as much.  General philosophies that you can’t prove a negative be damned, I think we can be pretty sure at this point that low-fat diets don’t work for a lot of people.

So, let’s suppose it’s true that high carbohydrate diets cause obesity and diabetes, which cause heart attacks, strokes, Alzheimer’s and other serious health problems. What are we to make of the role of the U.S. government in all this? And of other national governments around the world? Farm subsidies no longer appear as mere foolish economic protectionism, but as a policy that, quite frankly, kills people. Add to this the fact that nutritional labels are organized around the low-fat viewpoint: fats are listed first, saturated fat at the top, right after calories, and grouped with other things to supposedly minimize, such as cholesterol and sodium; carbs and protein are relegated to the bottom — thank goodness they’re listed at all! Also, government funding paid to disseminate the low-fat message, and for the questionable research behind it. Food pyramid, anyone? The fact that the message may have been right for some doesn’t excuse that it seems to have been deadly for others.

Now, it’s important to note — I’m not saying any of this was intentional. Rather, people with good intentions and a lot of power bent a few rules of good conduct. That is what makes Good Calories, Bad Calories especially frightening. It seems to be a made-for-a-textbook example of how concentrated power can go awry.

Meanwhile, the federal government made it cheaper for us to eat sugar and starch through massive grain subsidies. As the old farmer told the stars of King Corn, “You couldn’t make any money growing corn if not for the government payments.” Those government payments are the reason we feed cattle corn instead of letting them eat grass as nature intended. Subsidies are the reason high-fructose corn syrup is in half the products you’ll find in the grocery store, including bread. Dirt-cheap subsidized corn is the reason for Big Gulps and endless refills at the soda dispenser.

via Tom Naughton, Fat Head » Cheaper Health Care.

Eleven-time World Series of Poker champion Phil Hellmuth wears a hat and sunglasses when he plays poker. He does it to disguise his reactions from the other players, which might seem surprising. One would think that a man who can win 11 championships and more than $6 million over 18 years would be able to control his expression when he’s on the job.

In fact, says Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Ph.D., Toshiba professor of media, arts, and sciences at MIT and the author of Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World, he can’t. Nor can you. According to Dr. Pentland, our tiny, unconscious reactions can say more than we mean — and they don’t lie.

via The Impact of Unconscious Communication.

“If Today Was Your Last Day” offers better advice to an immortal than to someone who will die tomorrow. Here are some of the things in the song that would make more sense to do if you had thousands of years or longer rather than just one days left:

“Leave no stone unturned….try to take the path less traveled by…“

If you’re going to be around for a while, the cost of exploring new ideas, going new places, and trying new techniques is low — you can always go back to what you know works. On the other hand, let’s say you spend two hours of your last day on something that doesn’t work — you’ve just wasted over 8% of your remaining time.

“…Leave your fears behind…”

Possibly makes sense for fear of things that might result in death, possibly not, but let’s put that aside for now; if you’re immortal and you screw up in a non-fatal way, you have a lot of time to set things right socially, emotionally, physically, whatever. Suppose everyone thinks you’re worse than Hitler because of a faux pas. If you’re immortal, you can change their minds, or at the very least work on a new identity. For the last day scenario, you’re reputation is pretty much sealed; whatever you do that so terrible will be on the evening news, and you’re not going to have enough time to organize a press conference for a rebuttal. Non-lethal physical injuries are even worse — a broken leg will dramatically change the types of activities someone with lots of lifespan can do, but they have time to heal and can still have a full life in the meantime. Break a leg on your last day, and you’ll be in terrible pain for the rest of your life and not doing much of anything.

“…say goodbye to yesterday?“

I suspect immortals would definitely have to get a bit less starry-eyed about the past, simply because they’d have centuries of it after, well, a few centuries.

“Donate every dime you had…”

This one is tricky, but I think massive donations make much more sense if you’re going to live a long time rather than if you’re going to die in the very near future. If you’re going to die soon, it makes sense to try to get as much fun (utility?) out of the remaining time as possible, and it’d be easier to do that with a lot of money. No need to worry about what happens about anything you can’t spend as long as you have a halfway decent last will, which might even be something you could throw together with some online software and a couple friends in a pinch (NOT the right way to do things at all, this is something that shouldn’t be rushed, but I’m assuming someone with only 24 hours left is not going to spend hours talking to a lawyer, and people have gotten away with far more unusual things for wills) — you can still give gobs of money to charity. On the other hand, if you’re immortal and give all of your money to charity or someone random, it’s no big deal — wait a few years, and you’ll have plenty again, as long as you maintain some sort of reasonable income stream; if you don’t include illiquid assets that generate an income stream as “money,” this gets very, very trivial.

“And would you call those friends you never see? / Reminisce old memories?”

If I were going to go out in a day, no. The last thing I’d want to do in an “every second counts” situation like this is leisurely go over old stuff with kinda-friends. I’d much rather do new, fun stuff, as quickly as possible, with the friends I see most often. But if I had all the time in the world, sure. Friends are valuable, and improving a friendship has benefits into the future. The immortal has a future (the long now?) to consider — not so if it’s your last day.

“Would you forgive your enemies? …. Would you make your mark by mending a broken heart?”

Same thing as the friends. There’s a harm to having enemies and an unhappy ex or two or more into the future, but unless you think someone will try to sabotage your last day if you don’t reconcile with them, it doesn’t make much sense to waste time on them. That, and you might very well be depriving them of an after-funeral celebration if you call them and let them know all is forgiven.

“And would you find that one you’re dreaming of? ….fall in love if today was your last day?”

Relationships take time to build. You can bonk in 24 hours and maybe get dinner, go on a date, or role-play a deeper relationship; an actual lifetime romance takes… well, a lifetime.

“You know it’s never too late to shoot for the stars”

If you’re going to die in 24 hours, then, yes, it is too late to shoot for the stars. Writing a novel, building a skyscraper, founding a colony at sea, developing a new form of intelligence, or literally shooting for the stars in a rocket are all things that take time. Not a big problem for the extended lifespan, which is why we should support research toward life extension.

Admittedly half-baked political reform idea that could still be useful with a bit of work: Anonymous Representatives.

…mathematics is only a tool, though an immensely powerful one. No equations, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect. It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 7, 1962

I finished reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes a few days ago. I think I’ve made a lot of progress on my goal to lose weight just by doing so (it’s the light blue square in my goal grid), although only time will tell. It’s a marvelous book with political, scientific, and health freedom issues that go far beyond those that Taubes immediately brings up, and I am stunned.

Calories convincingly makes the case that a misunderstanding of statistics regarding heart disease at the turn of century, as well as a flawed understanding of what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, essentially caused an ill-founded crusade against dietary fat. Combined with the fact that fat is roughly twice as calorie-dense as protein and carbohydrates, this led to many health officials recommending low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. This puts a recent NutritionData blog entry into perspective (the entire post is worth reading, slowly, and carefully,  although it makes a lot more sense with details from Taubes):

The prevailing wisdom that meat and saturated fat are unhealthy is based on the same sort of inconclusive, circumstantial evidence as the studies I’ve noted here.  But if we really want to get to the truth, we’re going to need to consider ALL the (flawed) evidence, not just that which supports our point of view. – Monica Reinagel, More evidence that saturated fat has been falsely accused?

The bulk of the evidence on diet is inconclusive and circumstantial because, Taubes points out, the research is just not conducted in a competent manner:

…institutionalized vigilance… is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease, and obesity, and it hasn’t been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult to use the term “scientist” to describe those individuals who work in these disciplines, and, indeed, I have actively avoided doing so in this book. It’s simply debatable, at best, whether what these individuals have practiced for the past fifty years, and whether the culture they have created, as a result, can reasonably be described as science, as most working scientists or philosophers of science would typically characterize it. Individuals in these disciplines think of themselves as scientists; they use the terminology of science in their work, and they certainly borrow the authority of science to communicate their beliefs to the general public, but “the results of their enterprise,” as Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, might have put it, “do not add up to science as we know it.” – Calories, 451

Indeed; calories is full of examples of questionable assumptions, poor choices of animal models (rabbits!?), and a general lack of clear thought. This book is just as much a book about the history of science (?) as it is about nutrition, and it puts contemporary events such as the rise of evidence-based medicine in perspective. (When I ran across it in the text, I found the Cochrane Collaboration website already in my bookmarks).

Fast forwarding past the history lesson that justifiably takes hundreds of pages in Good Calories, Bad Calories, the best information we have on metabolism at this point suggests that insulin promotes the storage of energy as fat, and that the intake of carbohydrates causes a big increase in blood insulin levels. Neither point should be terribly surprising to anyone that’s ever been around diabetic family members on insulin. Taubes describes this as fat cells pulling in calories, making fewer available for everything else, and increasing appetite — this model “assumes that energy intake and expenditure are dependent variables” (358).

Calories is simply too much to talk about all at once, and I’ll continue writing about this for a few days at least.

Found this online:

…Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. “If you’re more physically active, you’re going to get hungry and eat more.” Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. “Why would they build those?” he asks. “I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000.” – John Cloud, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin”, Time

Why assume a conspiracy theory? It’s easier to suppose that fast-food restaurants (basically McDonald’s) that had play areas were more successful, and are therefore common today. Actually, if this is the case, as soon as any fast-food chain has play areas for kids, or even locates by a public park, the outcome seems pretty well inevitable, intentionally and conscious conspiracy or no.

I saw this video on Thinking on the Margin. It reminds me of my “the world is strange” idea.

Robin Hanson, “Hated Because It Might Work,” on the always wonderful Overcoming Bias:

Saying you want to do something weird for value or symbolic belief reasons is far less threatening than saying you want to do something weird for instrumental reasons. Common social norms encourage acceptance of weird values and symbolic beliefs, as long as those don’t much effect ordinary behavior. But by saying your weird act is a much better way to achieve important ordinary goals, you are saying the rest of us are making a big mistake.

I don’t have a clue about what to do with a significant other that doesn’t want you to do weird things, but then again, I’m not married, either.

If it sounds too good to be true… not that I would necessarily call something that creates unemployment “good”.

Obama sounds populist themes in Virginia bus tour – Yahoo News

By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 14 minutes ago

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Democrat Barack Obama is sounding tough populist themes on the campaign trail, pledging to create union jobs to build energy-efficient cars and to end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas.

The Skeptical Optimist takes a humorous look at energy policy:

Q: But to encourage entrepreneurs, scientists, and companies to get moving a lot faster towards that superbattery breakthrough, the government will need to set up some kind of new incentive, won’t it?
A: Of course; I’ve been trying to tell you all along that government energy policy needs to change in a big way.

Q: How about something like an “X-prize” for a new superbattery? Maybe a few hundred million dollar prize for the first entrepreneur, or company, or group of scientists to come through with the new technology?
A: Uhhh… No, no, we couldn’t do that. Uhhh… that’s McCain’s idea… obviously just a “gimmick” (…according to these talking points they sent me…).

Arnold Kling writes on Econlog:

…like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won’t find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.

Robin Hanson points to an interesting case of underconfidence on my favorite blog, Overcoming Bias.

I was talking with my friend Jeff today, and we were discussing the economy. I mentioned that GMU Professor Bryan Caplan has pointed to the falling dollar at EconLog as a cause of rising gas prices. The article at US News pointed to by Caplan has a more detailed explanation, but, alas, no charts….

Someone out there believes that gas prices are going to fall, or at least not rise very much in the future, and Chrysler seems to believe them. The company is currently offering to pay the difference between $2.99 and whatever the current cost of gasoline is, if you get one of their vehicles.

This is interesting, and there’s been a fair amount of discussion about it online. But I haven’t seen anyone point out that this means that Pricelock/Chrysler are basically shorting gasoline over the next three years. Pricelock’s website focuses mainly on the volatility of gas prices, but this really doesn’t make sense for a three year timeframe. Pricelock could change the guaranteed price every year, or every six months, and still provide a huge buffer against changing gas prices at far less obvious risk to themselves. So, what’s going on here, given that I’ve even heard some people swearing that $10/gal gas is right around the corner?

First of all, an overview of shorting. Let’s say that I’m really sure that Nintendo and Sony are going to drive the XBox line into the ground, mini Linux-run PCs like the Asus EEE are the wave of the future, and Google’s support of the ODF format and its Google Docs platform means that Office will optional software for businesses in the future. Basically, suppose I think Microsoft is doomed. I can short MSFT today at about $29.99 – basically making a promise to buy shares at some point in the future and getting the market price per share today. Let’s say I do this for 1000 shares. Disregarding brokerage fees, if the stock becomes completely worthless, I’ve just made $29,990. If the price falls to $10 (maybe only two of my three predications came true) then I’ve made $19,990 after I spend $10,000 to keep my promise to buy shares.

But, suppose instead that Linux is proven to cause cancer, Nintendo and Sony both bow out of the console market, and Google pulls the plug on Docs, and the price of MSFT increases dramatically, to $200 a share. When I make good on my promise to buy 1000 shares, I’ll be out an uncool $170,010! People often say that shorting has “unlimited risk.” This is not literally true (it’s just plain silly to think that the market capitalization of any stock could exceed the U.S. GDP, and lots of barriers will be encountered well before that point), but shorting anything is risky.

Now, look at the $2.99 “Let’s Refuel America” deal from Pricelock. It’s short-selling, but the target is gasoline instead of the common stock of a company. Even (especially) if you consider the profit from selling the car itself, it’s still shorting, just at a higher effective price than $2.99 per gallon.

Someone is making a huge gamble here. Pricelock, the company, could hardly be more opaque. Their website seems to have been run by a domain-squatter until late last year. Here’s my guess: this company was specifically created just to make this gamble. But regardless of who’s inside Pricelock, Chrysler would not play along if it thought that they weren’t able to make good on their promise. This means either insanely deep pockets to the extent that Chrysler is sure everything will turn out O.K. no matter how high gas prices get, or Chrysler has determined that gas prices are not really going to rise that much, that fast.

Who has the best information on the demand for gas in America for the next three years? Who has “inside information”? You can make good guesses based on trends and demographics and do fairly well, but only automakers can take this and also consider inside information on the availability of super-fuel efficient cars and cars that run on alternative fuels.

So, here’s Chrysler, signaling something about what it thinks fuel prices will be. I wouldn’t necessarily bet with them — the auto industry has made plenty of boneheaded decisions in its time. But, you’d be a fool to bet against them.

The famous David D. Friedman writes on his blog about the decision against homeschooling in California:

The term “fascist” has been overused, and in any case I know nothing about Croskey’s views on economics. But I find it extraordinary that he would be willing to explicitly argue that public schools exist largely to indoctrinate children in views the government approves of, with or without the consent of their parents.

Indeed…

Pirate ships had checks and balances on power.

It’s often been said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. Here’s a fascinating thought:

If there are recurring outcomes of this kind in your life or relationships, perhaps you are being chosen, whether you know it or not.
- Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution, What if you always get the same outcome?