New Cerulean

With tax season approaching, I sat wondering just exactly what it was that all these “dues” I’ve paid have been spent on.  Sure, it’s informative to look at the big picture, but I think it’d be cool for the federal government to allocate income to expenses and provide each of us a receipt.  Okay, it’d be impractical to match each dollar as it is received by the government to each expense as it is incurred, so they could simply track all government expense chronologically, then align tax returns against this expense list as each return is processed.

Some years you’d get a receipt that says “Thank you for your purchase of 137 cubic yards of concrete that were poured into the new park visitor’s center at Snolobuger National Overlook”, or maybe “Thank you for paying 15.6 days of the salary of Spelvin ‘Spud’ Stankiewiscz, adjutant sub-district protocol officer for the diplomatic attache to Moldova”, and other times you might get “Thank you for funding 1/1000000th of a project that we can’t tell you about, but which we assure you would let you rest easier at night knowing about it if we could”.  A cottage industry could spring up to provide Soviet-style medallions that proud taxpayers could wear, showing exactly what role they’ve played in keeping our great nation running.

Now, some folks might not like getting a receipt that thanks them for their purchase of 3.26 cluster-bomblet munitions.  So the government can hold an eBay-style auction on who gets “credit” for what expense.  People would go in hock to be credited as the person who provided President Obama with new carpeting in the Oval Office or some other glamorous assignment.  A sort of vanity tax.  I’d be all in favor of paying lower taxes in exchange for ending up with a receipt that says I paid for “1/2000th of a study to reduce odor from pig faeces” or somesuch.  (Oh, I’m sure I’d buy the medallion for that).

Disabling AdPLA enzyme allows continued breakdown of stored fat

I like this approach so much better than all those targeting appetite.  I have a feeling that even if a successful appetite suppressant were found, many obese people wouldn’t choose to use it simply because food, or more precisely, the sensation of caloric rush after eating, is an addiction.  By keeping the body in fat-breakdown mode, we still get the rush, and the only guilt we may feel might be over consuming more than we need, (which hasn’t exactly been an overpowering guilt in our culture thus far).

I do wonder what it feels like to have stored fat continually being broken down, though.  It seems like you might constantly have a higher level of glucose in your blood.  This might leave you feeling continually energetic, but would also promote all the horrible things that come from high blood sugar - protein cross-linking, cancer, atherosclerosis, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, etc.  Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Brain tweak lets sleep-deprived flies stay sharp

By altering fruit fly’s brains to express more of a particular dopamine receptor, flies are able to sustain freshly-slept performance on learning tasks even when sleep-deprived.  This suggests that sleep may (someday) become optional for humans, too.  The study’s author, PJ Shaw, says:

“I want to emphasize, though, that this type of treatment would just be for people who absolutely have to stay awake,” he adds. “It’s not about trying to cram too many hours in your day—everyone else should just suck it up and get a good night’s sleep.”

I find that equivalent to saying “You must die with one-third of your life unlived.  Just suck it up.”

Militant jihadists are inspired by night dreams, suggests research

I suppose people have always been encouraged to ‘follow their dreams’.  Often, this results in people launching new careers or moving to some other country.  But this study suggests there is a dark side to encouraging otherwise directionless people to follow the impulses of their unconscious brains.  How many turns of history have hinged on people reading significance into the semi-random sputterings of brains kept idle to prevent them from being eaten by nocturnal predators?  Ah, humans…

Congress acts to stop adding oil to the national strategic petroleum reserve. This will increase the petroleum available on the world market by 70,000 barrels a day, or one tenth of one percent. An already symbolically small gesture, congress chooses to shut this spigot off as the strategic reserve is at 97% of capacity, and would have shut itself off within a year. This allows congress to take credit for something that would have happened soon, anyway, while not actually making even a small dent in the price of gasoline. But they’re seen to be DOING SOMETHING, and that’s what really matters.

In almost the same breath, the Senate voted 56-42 to reject the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and some offshore waters that are now closed to oil development. According to Walter Williams:

Oil and gas exploration in a tiny portion of the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would, according to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey’s estimate, increase our proven domestic oil reserves by approximately 50 percent.

So, when faced with an opportunity to actually do something that could tangibly affect domestic oil supply in a big way, Congress chooses the symbolic action of preserving our wildlife refuge, despite the fact that oil development would only take place on a small portion of this preserve, and despite the fact that this preserve will never even be seen by 99.99% of the population and can only affect their lives in a symbolic way.

Our government appears to have devolved into a series of theatrical actions - gestures that convey their feelings about an issue without having substantive impact.  While it is easy to lay blame for this interpretive dance version of government at the feet of these legislators, I fear their behavior is only a mirror of our national soul.  We elect these people, by and large, on how we “feel” about them.  It’s a rare voter who does the homework to see beneath the posturing and derive the vote-worthiness of candidates based on actual impact of their actions.  Doing that takes work.  This is why we need to come up with some form of incentive for voters who invest the time and energy to understand the issues they’re voting on.  As I’ve previously advocated, I believe a national lottery that is tied to how one scores on a multiple-choice quiz covering the candidates and issues on each ballot would go a long way toward shoring up our anemic government.  It’d be more than a symbolic action.

Clay Shirky has posted an article that suggests we are now seeing a sort of phase-change in developed society from passive couch potatoes to active participants. He says that after WWII, people had to deal with something new - free time, a cognitive surplus. For the most part, he says, people spent their free time watching TV. Now, he says, the internet is catalyzing a transformation by allowing people to create and share with everyone. And this is a fundamental change in his view.

While I agree for the most part that having a participatory medium is surely attracting many brain-cycles away from TV, I don’t see it as quite the fundamental shift he does nor for the reasons he cites. There are other factors involved in this turning away from TV. In the days of broadcast network TV, it used to be a source of social cohesion. Having limited channels and limited shows meant that you had many experiences in common with people all over. It also meant that all that advertising power was more focused - more money per channel (might have) created more involved and engaging entertainment. Nowadays, the average sofa spud has hundreds of channels to watch, of which they have probably chosen their favorite half-dozen that they flick back and forth among. But it isn’t necessarily the same half-dozen channels as their neighbor. So, aside from special events and a few well-publicized series, people just don’t derive that much shared culture from TV anymore. The fracturing of entertainment bandwidth into so many channels also means there is less cash per channel to invest in creating interesting new content. So we have a lot of re-runs and inexpensive new content like talk shows, ‘reality’ shows, etc. On top of all that, video on demand makes it so that each person’s video reality is even less likely to overlap with anybody else’s. We’ve lost our video cultural identity, and we’ve diluted the effort that can be spent on each new piece of content. Given these facts, it’s no surprise that people are seeking other ways to entertain themselves and to bond socially, by creating and sharing common experiences with their friends. One of the huge advantages of the internet in fostering social cohesion is the ability of distant birds of every peculiar feather to flock together electronically, rather than chatting about last night’s TV around the water cooler.

Another factor that Mr. Shirky neglects to weigh is that many Americans, for example, are not and never have spent the majority of their free time watching TV. Americans have historically had one of the highest rates of membership in clubs, associations and societies of any culture. They also belong to churches and participate in many social undertakings there. Even in the age of broadcast networks, hobbies were an expected part of a normal, healthy life. People who didn’t have them were advised to take one up. The ‘wordless workshop’ fans of yesteryear would be the same sorts who read Make magazine nowadays. Tinkerers were everywhere and manly men, at least, were expected to have a fundamental grasp of how to make a stalled car go. The point being that it would be an inaccurate simplification to say that people simply spent their newfound free time watching TV.

So although I think Mr. Shirky has it right that the internet has added a fundamentally new and attractive way for people to gain social meaning and entertainment, it’s not clear to me that this trend is quite the tectonic shift he paints it as. Nor do I agree that people’s need to participate is the fundamental driver - I think it’s more driven by people’s need to share socially. It is, if anything, more a continuation of the fracturing of cognitive bandwidth ushered in by cable TV. Each website, each YouTube sensation, amounts to a cultural touchstone. Instead of promoting a cultural homogeneity that arose from broadcast TV, it is splintering culture into hundreds of millions of amorphous sub-tribes sharing subsets of identity and common experiences. The cultural isolation wrought by the advent of cable TV is being bridged by the selection capability of the internet.

The President Pelosi Scenario originally speculated on how the impeachment of Bush and Cheney would then devolve the presidency to Nancy Pelosi. But now, with Sen. McCain scratching and squinting about his possible running mates, a new avenue of a Pelosi presidency is taking shape. McCain would be 72 by the time he reaches office. According to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services (table 5, page 17), a white male in the US has a 15.2% chance of dying between the ages of 72 and 76, which would cover McCain’s first term. Now, supposing the wet dreams of the rabid internet Ron Paul advocates comes true, and McCain chooses Paul as his running mate. He’d be 74 by the time he takes office, making his probability of dying in the first term 18.3%. The combined odds of both candidates kicking the bucket before the end of term would be about 2.8%. Small odds, but not impossible. Around 1 in 35. Nothing to seriously consider, but enough to give staunch conservatives something else to mull over as they try to sleep. Sweet dreams…

Turns out human noses can be trained by shocking. I wonder what effect this observation will have on training olfactory-reliant professions like cooks, perfumers and sommeliers? Of course, one can easily imagine commercial interests influencing which product is the one that is discriminated by shock, giving a sort of Ludovico Treatment against the competition’s products.  Perhaps doctors can be trained to smell cancers, the way some dogs are able to. If it works for smell, it ought to work for other perceptions as well. Imagine art students learning to discriminate colors by shock treatment. Or music students learning perfect pitch and different instrument temperaments. It seems those knuckle-whacking nuns were probably onto something.

Paul Krugman misses the point of the ‘economic stimulus package’ agreed on by congress and the president. Krugman argues that giving $300 to folks who are already financially comfortable will probably just result in them plunking the dough in their savings, rather than increase spending. He goes on to say that sending checks to folks who are not as well off would guarantee that the money would be spent, thus stimulating the economy.

What he fails to grasp is that this is just a psychological sop. Adding $15 billion in spending to the US economy is a drop in the bucket - according to some, $15 billion amounts to less than two months of current spending on the Iraq war, most of which is spent within the US economy, buying men and material from US sources. This war stimulus has been going on for years, and has racked up about 33 times the ’stimulus’ to the economy that the new stimulus package will.

No, what this stimulus package is about is persuading the folks who are financially comfortable that they do not need to cut back on their spending. The economy stays afloat on the expectations and desires of its participants. If everyone gets a case of economic gloom, we’re going to postpone buying that new mega-HDTV, so as to have a little more cushion in the bank in case of a layoff. But if tossing us a bone in the form of a $300 check is enough to convince us that everything is going to be okay, then we’ll keep spending. The intent isn’t to have people rush out to Wal-Mart and buy $300 of Chinese goods. The intent is to get financially comfortable people, who form the backbone of the economy, to refrain from cutting back and to go on living and spending as if everything is okay. Whether it’ll work is an entirely different matter. Is an unexpected $300 windfall enough to make us feel prosperous? Will it convince us that everything is going to be okay? We’ll find out soon.

And the cynical side of me observes that this is, after all, an election year. Does it strike anyone as surprising that incumbents would approve a bill to send each of their constituents a check for $300? I suspect they’d all love to do it themselves, if only it were legal. This way, it is.

Lasting impression: Does the face of a CEO determine a successful company?

Turns out college students asked to rank faces on competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity and trustworthiness were able to sort the profitable from the not-so-profitable among Fortune 1000 CEOs. From this result, I can predict the rise of two boutique businesses:

1. Plastic surgery specializing in maximizing ’successful’ features.
2. Facial-identification software that predicts which candidate CEO will make the most money. This will be useful to both investors and to boards of directors who need to select a new CEO.