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Oldest Wall Painting

A very early example of painting inside a built structure is being reported from Syria. A Repost Geometric polychromic painting on the interior of a built wall in a structure occupied by Hunter-Gatherers, about 11,000 years ago, in Syria. [source] It looks like modern art, but this painting could hardly be older. Archaeologists discovered the painted pattern of black, white, and red among the ruins of an 11,000-year-old house in northern Syria--making it the oldest wall painting ever discovered. Researchers uncovered the prehistoric artwork while excavating the dwelling near the Euphrates…

Tsunami Warning CANCELLED

OK, you can go back to lower ground now. The warning has been canceled. From the BBC: A tsunami warning has been issued for 11 nations in the south-west Pacific, including Papua New Guinea, after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake off Vanuatu. The epicentre was 295km (180 miles) north-northwest of Vanuatu's largest island, Santo, at a depth of 35km (21.7 miles), the US Geological Survey said. Here is the USGS data for the earthquake: Magnitude 7.8 Date-Time Wednesday, October 07, 2009 at 22:03:15 UTC Thursday, October 08, 2009 at 09:03:15 AM at epicenter Time of Earthquake in other Time…

When it comes to refuting creationist nonsense, I am but slime...

...from one of Michigan State University Professor Richard Lenski's E. coli cultures. Lenski's second response to the clueless "request" of the creationist idiot Andrew Schlafly to provide his raw data to him for "independent review" supporting a recent PNAS paper (more here) by him that is yet another in a line of papers by evolutionary biologists that pretty much destroy the myth of "irreproducible complexity" deeply humbles me. It's a classic in sliding the knife into one's foe, carefully dissecting free an organ, pulling that organ out with a flourish, only to plunge to plunge the knife…

This is a start

But only a start. A new poll finds an encouraging level of doubt among Americans. Nearly half of Americans are not sure God exists, according to a poll that also found divisions among the public on whether God is male or female or whether God has a human form and has control over events. The survey conducted by Harris Poll found that 42 percent of US adults are not "absolutely certain" there is a God compared to 34 percent who felt that way when asked the same question three years ago. Among the various religious groups, 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics and 30 percent of…

Ben Stein and Jack Chick, two more crappy tastes that taste crappy together

Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain. Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…

Interview with anti-HIV drug pioneer

We should all be so luck to do what we love, help make a difference in the world and make a million dollars while doing it. Dennis Liotta Ph.D. has done just that. I had the pleasure of interviewing him and was inspired by his journey to discover some of the most important drugs of our time. I hope others can likewise find inspiration in knowing that science can indeed translate from the lab bench to the real world and make a positive difference in people's lives. Looking at Dr. Dennis Liotta it is hard to imagine that he is worth almost 80 million dollars. Dressed in an unassuming grey…

L'esprit d'escalier

If you're not reading comments here, you're missing out. For reasons I don't entirely understand, some of the best in the business are seeing fit to comment here. They have more to teach than I do! Chris Rusbridge (of, among other things, this thought-provoking meditation on digital preservation) has been spotted here, and whenever he pops up he makes me think about things. This time, I was thinking about disciplinary expertise, and how I need to make a better case that less of it is necessary for data curation than generally admitted. I hope we can at least admit that data curators don't…

Magic diet? Not so much

Alternative medicine practitioners love to coin magic words, but really, how can you blame them? Real medicine has a Clarkeian quality to it*; it's so successful, it seems like magic. But real doctors know that there is nothing magic about it. The "magic" is based on hard work, sound scientific principles, and years of study. Magic words are great. Terms like mindfulness, functional medicine, or endocrine disruptors take a complicated problem and create a simple but false answer with no real data to back it up. More often than not, the magic word is the invention of a single person who…

Chiropractic, quackery, and moral bankruptcy

I've been a bit remiss in my coverage of the Simon Singh case, reviewed in detail by Phil Plait, among others. As many of my readers already know, respected science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel in England by the British Chiroquacktic Association (BCA) because he described some of their treatments as "bogus". Despite the fact that he underplayed his hand, he is still getting his legal ass whooped over in the motherland, thanks to their idiotic libel laws. Be that as it may, the BCA wasn't complaining about Singh being wrong, but about him being mean. You see, "bogus" seemed to…

The think tank strikes back

Tom Giovenetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation has responded to my story on the Microsoft-funded think tanks attack on open source. It's rather an odd response---he's angry that I dared to suggest that they were funded by Microsoft, but he's not going to deny it. Anyway, here it is, with my comments: * Your journalism is as lousy as your software. My software works fine, thank you. First, you accuse IPI of taking money from Microsoft, but you have no facts or proof. True, you'd LIKE us to do your homework for you, but in…

Deja Hockey Stick

In this column, Richard Muller claims that McKitrick and McIntyre have shown that the hockey stick graph is an "artifact of poor mathematics". If you have been following the global warming debate this claim should look familiar, because McKitrick and McIntyre made the same claim last year as well. So what's new? Well, last year they claimed that the hockey stick was the product "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations of extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal…

Journalists of the future make a vaccine documentary

I was out late last night for a function related to my work. As a result, by the time I got home I was too tired to blog. (I know, I know, how can a Tarial-cell powered megacomputer ever get tired?) However, I did have enough time this morning before work to act on a tip I got from some of my readers, not having perused one of the wretchedest of the wretched hives of scum and quackery in a couple of days. It turns out that the chief propagandist at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has unleashed the cranks on a bunch of high school students who made what sounds like an excellent…

British Colonialist Archaeology: More of the same?

[A repost from gregladen.com, unmodified] There is a ceremonial burial in Britain .. ceremonial because it has some red stuff smeared on bone ... that has now bee dated to a few thousand years earlier than previously thought (to ca 25,000 years old). Age of earliest human burial in Britain pinpointed from PhysOrg.com The oldest known buried remains in Britain are 29,000 years old, archaeologists have found - 4,000 years older than previously thought. The findings show that ceremonial burials were taking place in western Europe much earlier than researchers had believed. [...] Some have…

How the ER deals with stress

OK today I'll talk about yet another paper from Jonathan Weissman's group at UCSF ... but I'll write it up in two parts. This post will be generally background about the ER and its ability to degrade proteins. When many scientists think about "cellular functions", diagrams of the central dogma of biology (DNA=>RNA=>protein) pop into their head. But sorting out the good stuff (properly processed mRNA, well folded proteins) from the bad stuff (misprocessed mRNA, misfolded protein) is equally important. Proteins can be divided into two classes, those that have to cross a membrane (membrane…

Neighborhood Science, Episode 1

As I mentioned the other day, some of the kids in the neighborhood and I decided to conduct some experiments into the Mentos + Coke = geyser phenomenon. I thought I'd have pictures and/or video to show you, but due to technical problems (technically, I was the problem) the experiments didn't get captured for posterity. Still, we conducted some good experiments, got a little sticky, had a lot of fun, and learned a bit about doing science on the way. Here's what we did: Hypotheses: There were three different questions that the kids wanted to look at: if the kind of candy used makes a difference…

30 Days, of Hell in Heaven

If you haven't seen it, 30 Days is Supersize Me author Morgan Spurlock's show on FX. The premise is straight-forward: immerse someone for 30 days in a situation opposite to what they're used to. Ostensibly, the idea is to learn "how the other half lives", so to speak. The August 9 episode featured a woman, married with children, who happens to be an atheist. For 30 days she lived with a Christian family in Texas. To my eyes, there was a constant undercurrent of tension in spite of some very friendly and polite surface conversation. There's plenty to jaw about here, but I'd like to offer up…

The latest ark news from Kentucky

There is some faint concern from the Kentucky governor that the Ark theme park will discriminate in hiring — I doubt that it will become a major sticking point. But still, it's true, they will be selective in their hiring based on religious belief. They say that isn't true, but one thing we know about creationists is that they lie. "There will be positions that will require Bible knowledge because...we have certain things in there that are requiring biblical knowledge," he explains. "That doesn't mean, though, if you don't have that you can't work over in the restaurant or some other part of…

Bra-Burners and Feminist Activists: A Wee Primer

Inquiring minds want to know: what's a feminist activist, and how should she dress? My last post has raised a lot of discussion for people about the nature of feminism and feminists. There are questions about litmus tests and whether Zuska applies them. I thought it best to take a moment or too to assuage some of your curiosity and anxiety, in the form of a series of multiple-choice questions or statements. Alas, there is no answer sheet, except the one provided by your own pre-existing (mis)conceptions and biases. Enjoy. Feminists are: A. a relic of the past. But we should be…

Dawkins at KU

The bulk of Richard Dawkins' speech at KU last night was taken almost verbatim from the text of his book. His focus was on what I considered the best parts of the book, an explanation of the flaws of intelligent design creationism and the intellectual poverty that it encourages, as well as an excellent presentation of the error inherent in treating religious beliefs as a property of geographic regions or genetic bloodlines. The parts of the book I objected to most strongly in my review didn't come out until the question and answer period at the end, and I encourage interested readers to…

Snobs

I didn't quite know what to expect when I entered the theater to see The Dark Knight last evening, I just knew it was going to be good.* I was absolutely blown away. This isn't the sort of film where you walk out saying "It was good for a comic book movie." It is a great movie, period, something that changes what a comic-based mythology can be with careful planning (even if the Joker's love of chaos seeps into the mix). Unlike so many other films there's not the sense of obligation to hardcore comic book fans that results in endless streams of in-jokes, cameos, and crossovers; much like it…

Creationism overload

I made a bit of a tactical error in my viewing choices the other night. For some reason I thought that I could handle watching Maxed Out (a great documentary about the soul-sucking practices of credit card companies) and Nancy Pelosi's Friends of God in one night, but I ended up a bit depressed at the end of the evening. I would recommend both, but Pelosi's feature is especially good. Here's a clip from one of her stops to see our old pals from AiG, Ken Ham and Buddy Davis; The documentary Jesus Camp also featuring some disconcerting footage of creationism being peddled to children;…

Book Review: Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway

You know you've got a unique book on your hands when the cover spots a eurypterid snagging a jackalope from under the cab of a Ford pickup carrying a disgruntled ammonite while dinosaurs stomp towards a "last chance" food & gas stop in the background. If you're a fan of artist Ray Troll, however, such a vibrant and motley assemblage probably will pique your interest rather than shock you. His artwork graces the pages of Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway, a collaborative work with paleobotanist Kirk Johnson, a wonderfully nerdy "Epoch Tale" of paleontology. While it may at first seem unusual,…

The year in books

I've read more books than I think I can remember during 2007; the new bookshelves I obtained this past fall are now buckling underneath the weight of the accumulated mass and the volumes that keep are seemingly without a home. Some books I've been meaning to get to for some time and haven't read, others I ripped through with great interest, and others were so utterly terrible that I'm tempted to remove them from my library altogether. In any case, here's a listing of what I can remember reading this year, from the very best to the absolute worst; [Note: These aren't ranked in any way, it's…

How big of a balloon do you need to get to 120,000 feet high?

I am still thinking about the Red Bull Stratos Jump. Sorry, but there is just tons of great physics here. Next question - how big of a balloon would you need to get up to 120,000 feet? I am not going into the buoyancy details of Archimedes Principle - I think that was covered fairly thoroughly with the MythBusters floating lead balloon. However, in short, here is a force diagram for a floating balloon. For a floating balloon, the buoyancy force must equal the weight of the whole thing. It turns out that the buoyant force is equal to the weight of the gas (or fluid) the object displaces…

Basics: The Electrostatic Interaction

Pre Reqs: vectors, forces This is typically the first topic in the second semester of introductory physics - the interaction between objects with electric charge. There are 4 fundamental forces that physics typically looks at: Gravity - an interaction between objects with mass - wow, I don't have a post on the universal law of gravity? Electromagnetic - an interaction between objects with electric charge. Weak Nuclear - an interaction between (let me just say for simplicity) leptons. Strong Nuclear - an interaction between hadrons. I know those last two are complicated - but I am not going…

RP 8: The price of a piece of LEGO

This idea comes from my friend Thomas. His son is like mine in that they both think LEGO are awesome, and they are correct. For some reason, Thomas decided to calculate the price per piece of LEGO in each set. To promote repeatability, I decided to do this also. Looking at the catalog at LEGO.com, I can get both the price of each set and how many pieces it has. Just a note, I looked at almost all of the Star Wars LEGO series and some other select themes. I didn't include any sets that had been marked down in price. I will put the first plot on down below, maybe this would be a good…

Accelerometer Version-2

So, I built a new accelerometer. Why? The jelly-jar one was just not doing it for me. Plus, the cork was starting to make the water all yellowy. It was a good start, but I can do better. What was wrong with the jelly-jar one? First, it didn't let the cork move very far before hitting the wall. Second, it was kind of hard to see exactly where the cork was. Lastly, there was no way to get a reading of the acceleration from the jelly-jar. Now, I am going to fix that. My new design uses a sphericalish glass flask. The floating bob is anchored in (near) the center of this sphere. Here…

The price of a piece of LEGO

This idea comes from my friend Thomas. His son is like mine in that they both think LEGO are awesome, and they are correct. For some reason, Thomas decided to calculate the price per piece of LEGO in each set. To promote repeatability, I decided to do this also. Looking at the catalog at LEGO.com, I can get both the price of each set and how many pieces it has. Just a note, I looked at almost all of the Star Wars LEGO series and some other select themes. I didn't include any sets that had been marked down in price. I will put the first plot on down below, maybe this would be a good…

Could a McCain win impact evolution education?

The Washington Post points out that: as justices finished their work last week, two overarching truths about the court remained unchanged: It is sharply divided ideologically on some of the most fundamental constitutional questions, and the coming presidential election will determine its future path. A victory by the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, would probably mean preserving the uneasy but roughly balanced status quo, since the justices who are considered most likely to retire are liberal. A win for his Republican counterpart, John McCain, could mean a fundamental shift to a…

90,000 KWhr for half a month

I just can't pass this up. One of the chemistry majors had a complaint with the power company. After an unusually high previous power bill, they checked the electric meter half way through the month. The meter said they had used 90,000 kilowatt-hrs of electricity. That is a lot of energy. It is also a lot of money. If I estimate 10 cents per kilowatt hour (the prices varies in space and time), this would be a $9,000 bill. So, what is the deal? Is it a broken electric meter? Could be. If it is not, maybe it is a short. Shorts usually blow a fuse, but if it were an older house, could…

Arts Education

Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits: If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention system, which in turn can…

Andrew Sullivan

I'll be filling in for Andrew Sullivan this week, so most of my blogging will be over there. I'll try to cross-post some of the meatier posts, like this one: The LA Times profiles the normalization of pot: After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet. At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d'oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and…

The Blue Brain

Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain project, recently delivered a talk at TED that's gotten lots of press coverage. (It was the lead story on the BBC for a few hours...) Not surprisingly, all the coverage focused on the same stunningly ambitious claim, which is Markram's assertion that an artificial brain is "ten years away". I haven't heard the talk, so I don't know the context for the remark, but I did spend a few days with Markram a few years ago. The first thing to note about Markram is that he's incredibly brilliant and persuasive. I might be skeptical about the singularity,…

Phony Experts

Nicholas Kristof has a great column today on Philip Tetlock and political experts, who turn out to be astonishingly bad at making accurate predictions: The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts' forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about. The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses -- the…

Bubbles

In case you were wondering how you should invest your retirement savings (assuming you're fortunate enough to still have some), yet another study demonstrates that low cost index funds are the way to go: Basic stock market index funds generally aspire to nothing more than matching the returns of a market benchmark. So in a miserable year for stocks, index funds may not look very appealing. But it turns out that, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund. That, at least, is the finding of a new study by Mark…

The Ritalin Generation

I came of age in the Ritalin generation, which meant that plenty of my classmates in elementary school went to the nurse's office for their little dose of drug. At the time, I remember being jealous of these kids, who not only got to miss 10 minutes of instruction but got to have a real, genuine medical affliction. (I was one of those confused children who, for a brief period, thought it would be awesome to have braces and/or a big cast on my arm.) In retrospect, I can appreciate the complexities of the ADHD debate. On the one hand, ADHD is a real syndrome, with identifiable neural…

Thoughts a week after the election

When I moved out to California two Augusts ago, I had several moments a day when it just hit me: I live here! It was a little rush, a moment of recognition that my life was different in excellent and as-yet-unexplored ways. I still get those moments, especially when I get a glimpse of fog running in torrents through the valleys across the Bay, but also at seemingly innocuous moments. Ever since driving back from Nevada last week, I've been struggling to organize my thoughts about what happened, and having a similar experience. I'll see commentary about President-elect Obama, or a photo of…

Charles Darwin was a genius (I think)

After watching Creation last week I decided to take the plunge and read Origin of Species. As I've mentioned before I did read Origin early in my teen years, but in hindsight with minimal comprehension. Since then I've occasionally started to read Origin, or perused an extract, but I've never made it from front to back as a sentient adult. At this point I'm 3/4 of the way through, and I need to get something off my chest: I now believe that Charles Darwin was a very smart man, a genius. I had heard other people to refer to Darwin in such a fashion, but reading his original works has brought…

But you'd think they'd be proud!

Baltimore has a very sensible ordinance that requires pregnancy counseling centers to plainly state what services they provide. The ordinance requires that a "limited-service pregnancy center" post an easily readable sign, written in English and Spanish, stating that the center does not provide or make referrals for abortion or birth-control services. A center failing to comply within 10 days of being cited could be fined up to $150 a day. That's perfectly reasonable, even if the center is directly opposed to abortion — they could cheerfully put up a sign bragging that they do not abort…

The Echo Maker

Richard Powers just won the National Book Award for his new novel, The Echo Maker. Powers writes science fiction at its most literal and important level: he interweaves scientific sub-plots (the nature of consciousness, the genetic code, the curvature of space-time, the logic of computer programming) with a deep concern for the inner life of his characters. There are no aliens, or distant galaxies; just the human mind pulsing on the page. I'm a big fan of Powers, and The Echo Maker is my new favorite (The Gold Bug Variations are a close second.) The Echo Maker begins with a car crash, which…

Pinker on Lakoff

At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to be pulling the strings for many elections to come. In the new TNR (subscription only), Pinker takes his intellectual axe to Lakoff's theory of "conceptual metaphor," which advises Democrats to package their policies into Orwellian sounding soundbites, so that stupid voters might be tricked into…

The Waves

Lincoln Center recently featured a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Here's what Ben Brantley had to say in the Times: Life unfolds in a series of exquisite contradictions in "Waves," a remarkable, genre-defying work from the National Theater of Great Britain that raises the bar for literary adaptations. The world that is so magically summoned in this improbable page-to-stage translation of "The Waves," Virginia Woolf's most challenging novel, is one of fragmentation and flux, of impenetrable solidity and ghostly transparency, of simultaneous bloom and decay. The six lives this…

The Hidden Cost of Smart Drugs

Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results: I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I'm thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn't noticed anything…

Thursday Throwdown: More volcano news than I can list here

I'm still playing catch-up after my week in the desert, so I've seen a lot of articles I've wanted to mention ... but a certain other volcano has taken up a lot of my time. However, I will attempt to make amends for that now. By the way, would you believe Ubehebe Crater was closed? How do they close a volcano, anyway? However, I did get a great snap of a welded tuff on the road outside of Shoshone, CA. A strongly welded tuff near Shoshone, CA. The dark interior is remelted volcanic ash/tephra surrounded by less welded pink tuff with abundant pumice clasts. Denison student David Sisak is on…

Chilean earthquake fallout: MSNBC implies nature is "out of control"

Screen capture of the MSNBC website on February 27, 2010 at ~5:30 PM eastern time. Most of you have probably already heard about the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck today off the coast of Chile. This becomes one of the most powerful earthquakes on record and so far, the death toll has been relatively low - in the hundreds - especially compared to the horrific disaster of the Haiti earthquake from earlier this year. My thoughts go out to all in Chile recovering from the earthquake. However, I am a little appalled at some of the coverage I've seen for this earthquake. MSNBC has become the…

Point, Coyne-terpoint

Jerry Coyne then: Rules for life: If two friends tell you the same thing about yourself, it's probably true. Jerry Coyne now: thinks the several friends saying the same thing about him must be wrong: more Gnu Atheist-bashing from fellow atheists... inspired by Michael Ruse's rants equating Gnus with Tea Partiers... Jacques Berlinerbrau at the Chronicle of Higher Education... R. Joseph Hoffman at his own website... Both level the same old charges at Gnus: we're strident..., politically impotent, and motivated solely by a desire for publicity, fame, and money. But they also level a new charge…

Does higher education cause atheism?

Barry Kosmin, whose American Religious Identification Survey is one the basic datasets for anyone trying to understand religion in America, isn't convinced higher education causes people to become atheists: Undoubtedly, educational attainment is closely associated with intelligence. So any link between intelligence and atheism seems persuasive. ⦠As regards atheism, one mistake often made, even by many experts, is a failure to differentiate atheism from disbelief and indifference to religion. Certainly, higher education since the days of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment has…

A bit more on abortion

I'll be in and out of internet contact for the next few days, so I may or may not respond to any new wingnuttery from Michael Egnor. But it's worth making a few broad points. First, nothing I've written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don't have moral status as people. My previous posts in this vein have been dedicated to showing that Egnor's criteria for making that judgment from the moment of conception are flawed and lead to pernicious and absurd results. I think I've succeeded there. Second, in discussing abortion, I don't think the really…

Secrecy in science

Scientists generally advocate for openness. Full disclosure of methods is vital to peer review and to reproducibility or even evaluation of experimental results. Scientists are also pushing hard for a new publishing system which doesn't hide research behind copyright walls. The community of science is largely an open book, encouraging collaboration, review, and public discussion of new findings. So it's understandable that Kevin Drum is confused about the secrecy surrounding "Ida", the name given to the newly-described fossil scientifically known as Darwinius masillae. The fossil…

The best & the brightest capturing their value-add

In the interminable debate on Wall Street compensation Ryan Avent makes an important point: Officials in Washington scrutinising the pay packages of TARP recipients are primarily focused on the incentive effects of those pay structures--whether financial pay packages are inducing financial employees to take excessive risks. But the bigger incentive problem may be--almost certainly is--the drain of talent from other fields, into finance. If there were more evidence that this drain was producing significant net benefits for the economy, than there would be less cause to worry. To an increasing…