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Can Economic Utility Be Measured?

A friend of mine (who happens to be Ph.D student in economics) sent me a skeptical email regarding a recent article that sought to measure marginal utility: I'm really not convinced that marginal utility can be so easily correlated with activity in the midbrain. I think one of the virtues of the economic definition of marginal utility is that it's ultimately vague in definition. Depending on the context it can be happiness or money or satisfaction or whatever that person wants. I'm not sure it benefits from a strict neuroscientific definition. I understand the skepticism. But I think there is…

Fake vs. Real Forces

In this post, I am going to talk about real and not real forces as well as the fake centrifugal force (if you don't like the word "fake" you could replace that with "fictitious") First, an example: suppose you are in a car at rest and press the gas pedal all the way down causing the car to accelerate. What does this feel like? If I weren't skilled in the art of physics, I might draw a diagram something like this:  Yes, maybe someone would add gravity and the chair pushing up, but this shows the…

Basics: Kinematics

**pre reqs:** *none* Often I will do some type of analysis that I think is quite cool. But there is a problem. I keep having to make a choice. Either go into all the little details, or skip over them. My goal for this blog is to make each post such that someone could learn some physics, but I also don't want it to go too long. So, instead of continually describing different aspects of basic physics - I will just do it once. Then, when there is a future post using those ideas, I can just refer to this post. Get it? Fine. On with the first idea - kinematics. Kinematics typically means…

Men Vs. Women

Here's another common question I get at my book talks: "Is there a difference between the male and female brain when it comes to decision-making? Are women really more intuitive? Which sex is the better decider?" While there are certainly relevant differences between the male and female brain - that wash of sex hormones in the womb can have significant effects - I think it's important to begin by emphasizing the profound irrelevance of gender in most experimental studies of decision-making. Let's begin with that perdurable cliche about female intuition. My own hunch is that women got…

Thoughts on MLK Day

For once I tried to think ahead about a major anniversary, and I'm still casting about for original thoughts on what would have been Martin Luther King Jr.'s 80th birthday. Obviously, there's the significance of MLK Day being followed by President Obama's inauguration. That's a connection so obvious that it needs to commentary. King had a dream, and while little white boys and little black girls aren't playing hand in hand as often as we'd like, we've made progress. We elected a black president, and in no small part, that's a result of the voting reforms Dr. King demanded. It's significant…

Shifting the Overton Window: What will Judaism become?

Someone turned me on to a new journal – Secular Culture & Ideas – covering cultural (secular) Judaism. There's an interview with science journalist Natalie Angier, an essay on secular thought in American politics, and several articles on Jewish feminism. Douglas Rushkoff's essay on how secular voices can redefine Judaism is especially interesting in light of our previous discussions of the Overton Window. Rushkoff begins: Can we talk? Why aren’t I surprised that none other than Joan Rivers is responsible for one of the most accurate condensations of the core values of a three thousand…

Fraud and Justice

Over at the Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney describes what it feels like to lose all of your money to a Wall Street Ponzi scheme: Last Thursday at around 5 p.m., I had just checked on a rising cheese soufflé in my oven when my best friend called. "Heard Madoff's been arrested," she said. "I hope it's a rumor. Doesn't he handle most of your money?" Indeed, he did. More than a decade ago, when I was in my late 40s, I handed over my life savings to Madoff's firm. It was money I'd been tucking away since I was 16 years old, when I began working summers in Lord & Taylor, earning about $65 a…

Lotteries

This makes me sad: When gasoline prices shot up this year, Peggy Seemann thought about saving the $10 she spends weekly on lottery tickets. But the prospect that the $10 could become $100 million or more was too appealing. So rather than stop buying Mega Millions tickets, Ms. Seemann, 50, who lives in suburban Chicago and works in advertising sales for a financial Web site, saved money instead by packing her lunch a few days a week, keeping alive her dreams of hitting a jackpot and retiring as a multimillionaire. "With companies tightening and not giving cost-of-living increases, you have to…

Polls and the line between truth and conspiracy theory

In the poll on conspiracy theories I mentioned a few days ago, I mostly focused on the item about vaccines, mentioning in passing the fact that Democrats (and liberals) bought into far fewer conspiracy theories than Republicans (or conservatives). I didn't point out that, of the "conspiracy theories" Democrats were more likely to accept, several require a rather fine parsing to register as conspiracy theories (rather than simply an over-broad but accurate account of history). For instance, the PPP poll asked whether "the CIA was instrumental in distributing crack cocaine into America’s inner…

Can an omnipotent deity be omnibenevolent

Folks are talking about the problem of evil. John Wilkins takes on the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin, arguing that, for theologies where the problem of evil is a problem, evolution probably does less to exacerbate the issue than basic physics, or physiology, or first principles of ecology. And he's right. But one sentence setting up this argument doesn't work for me: Evil exists, so if you believe in a âtri-omniâ deity (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent), you had better find a reconciliation. This idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god is pretty common, but…

Why the indigenous still dominate the Andean region

400-500 years ago in the midst of the Great Dying somewhere the indigenous inhabitants of the New World suffered mortality rates on the order of 90-95%. This was almost certainly due to the facts of evolutionary history; the indigenous peoples had little defense against Eurasian pathogens. A result has been the reality that most of the New World is inhabited by European, African or mixed populations. But there are exceptions. In Mesoamerica there is still an indigenous dominated region from southern Mexico into the highlands of Guatemala. More substantially the highlands of the Andes, and…

Crossword Guy just doesn't get math

One of my pet peeves about people and math is that most people don't really have a clue of what math is. I've been writing this blog for something over three years, and by the standards of a lot of people, I've almost never written about math. Yesterday, my son's kindergarten class had a picnic. On my way home, I was listening to the local NPR station, which was interviewing some crossword puzzle writer whose name I cannot remember; I will therefore refer to him as "crossword-boy". (It was not Will Shortz; Shortz is much smarter than the guy they were interviewing.) At one point, they…

Love of Country Versus Friday Night Cheerleading

In an excellent post about torture, Amanda Marcotte concludes: On another blog, I had some right winger squeeing and questioning my patriotism because I supposedly want our country to "lose" the war in Iraq that I thought the President told us wasn't happening, what with the mission being accomplished and all. It's sort of an interesting conundrum, because I can't deny that I want us to pull out of every country where we don't have the consent of the people, I want us to shut down our gulags and torture chambers, and I want the current interlopers out of the White House and the Republican…

Professional Wingnuts: IDiots and Gay-Haters

In a great post over at Pandagon about a lesbian mother who confronted the rightwing ninnies at the Family Impact Summit, I came across this link to a good column by a former employee of the American Family Association (italics mine): It is not coincidental that the road to Hell is paved with the best of intentions, thus while one hopes that conservative leaders, such as Don Wildmon, began their crusade motivated by morality, it appears that a number of them have been hypnotized by the siren song of the almighty dollar. Christian activism has become a lucrative business. According to its 990…

We're very traditional around here

THIS. IS. MINNESOTA. We like our Christmases white around here, and it's not enough just to have a few decorative snowflakes tumble down — we need a blizzard, and that's what we're going to get. I was out there in the frigid whiteness earlier today, clearing the driveway and sidewalks, and now I'm all worn out, ready for a good night's rest. I expect I'll get up tomorrow to find even more snow piled up everywhere. Another traditional way to spend the day before the blizzard is to scurry about stocking the larder, and I did a bit of that too…which led to the nicest, sweetest, most heart-…

Fast Track Article Reviews?

By way of Brad DeLong, I came across a post by Tyler Cowen that discusses 'fast track' article review: -sounds like grants to me http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/academic-journa.html http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/07/economic-i… More insidious, in my view, is the gradual morphing of the referees from evaluators to anonymous co-authors. Referees request increasingly extensive revisions. Usually these represent improvements, but the process takes a lot of time and effort, and the end result is often worse owing to its committee-design. Authors, knowing referees…

Sunday Sermon: John Nichols on Impeachment

John Nichols, in an interview with Bill Moyers, clarifies a very important--and misunderstood--point about impeachment (italics mine): JOHN NICHOLS: Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake. You are making a mistake that too many people make. BILL MOYERS: Yes. JOHN NICHOLS: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and…

My Tepid Democratic Presidential Endorsement

I've been relatively undecided about whom to vote for in Feb. 5 primary--and for the first time EVAH! I actually get to decide who the Democratic nominee will be. I was leaning towards Edwards. Since 2004, he was the most liberal candidate on most issues, even though his political record before then was spotty (I think that of all 'big three' Dems; why everyone was saying how strong the Democratic field was still mystifies me). Now, that Edwards is out, I plan on voting for Obama. Here's why: Obama is far less hawkish than Clinton. In retrospect, I don't think Clinton voted against her…

Bush Administration Cuts Funding for Schoolkids' Health and Immunization

Because nothing says compassionate conservatism like cutting funding for poor disabled children. From the Washington Post: The Bush administration issued a new rule Friday that eliminates Medicaid reimbursement for certain transportation and administrative tasks undertaken by schools on behalf of students with disabilities. A wide range of medical services are furnished to students in schools. Speech and physical therapy are typical examples. Medicaid, the government's health insurance program for the poor, helps pay for those activities for low-income children. It will continue to pay.…

Pigs, MRSA, and 'Superbugs'

By way of Amanda, I came across this NY Times op-ed by Michael Pollan that discusses the role of agribusiness' misuse of antibiotics in the rise community-acquired methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). I've talked about the MRSA 'pig epidemic' before, and, Intelligent Designer knows I've talked about the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture, such as the attempt to get cefquinome approved for use in agriculture (Sack, met Mr. Stupid and Ms. Hammers). But I'm not sure that Pollan is correct about this. The strain of CA-MRSA found in pigs is nothing like those found in healthy…

What Makes U.S. Graduate Education Very Good?

Over at AmericaBlog, Chris compares U.S. and French Ph.D. programs: The French Grandes Ãcoles are the best schools in the world, but for higher degrees (Masters, PhD) nothing comes close to the US, possibly the UK. One reason is that the US and UK generally provide much more competition from around the world whereas (in general) the French system limits you to the best in France. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the US and UK will take "the best" of everywhere into classrooms which is much more difficult. Academic competition is healthy. (disclaimer: I'm going to discuss the sciences…

Antibiotic Resistance and the 'E-Word'

Having been trained as an evolutionary biologist, I've always thought that the medical literature avoids using the word evolution: instead, words like emergence, development, spread, and acquisition are used. In PLos Biology, there's an article that quantifies what I've always suspected: The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high…

What's the Matter With South Carolina?

I go for a walk, and watch some soccer, only to find out that Thursday, the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee passed 'standards' that force students to "summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." I have to hand it to the creationists: pushing this during the summer, when university faculties are off doing science, is probably the right time to do something like this. Too bad it will make the kids of South Carolina ignorant and stupid. Teaching the basics of evolutionary biology is hard…

George Will, funny guy

It's true, he always makes me laugh. It's the bow tie, the strangled delivery (he always looks like he's careful not to open his mouth too much, lest something fly in…or out), and his oh-so-prim-and-proper prudery. But early in the American epidemic, political values impeded public health requirements. Unhelpful messages were sent by slogans designed to democratize the disease — "AIDS does not discriminate" and "AIDS is an equal opportunity disease." George, you are a Republican. Vague political slogans that dance around the actual issues without mentioning any vulgar behaviors or body…

Appeasing Bush

With all the Neville Chamberlain talk flying around, the neocons are right about one thing: there has been too much appeasement. Appeasement of Bush, that is. tristero writes about the rattling of sabers--and nukes--at Iran (boldface mine): As for Iran, let me explain: YOU may think it's highly unlikely - the famous 1% probability, as a commenter mentioned - that Bush won't use nukes and is setting us up for conventional warfare. That is because you are sane and sensible. But the Bush administration thinks it's very likely. Hersh is alarmingly clear that there was close to a mutiny at…

The Boot, the Jack, the Fist, and Joe Lieberman

It appears that some Lieberman supporters are so frustrated by the internet support for Ned Lamont, they are not only attempting to provoke violence at Lamont events, but are actually behaving violently. From Matt Stoller (italics mine): A large man, around 50 years old or so, then started screaming at Ned, "Are you an Al Sharpton Democrat, or a Bill Clinton Democrat?" Ned was trying to answer, and the gentleman kept yelling. The Lamont press secretary tried to intervene, and meanwhile, the people behind the counter who owned the restaurant were horrified and embarrassed. Then Ned Lamont…

The Real Impetus Behind the "Sanctity of Marriage" Canard

The Mel Gibson anti-Semitic tirade is turning into quite the teachable moment. I've never understood the 'sanctity of marriage arguments.' To me, they always sounded analogous to the arguments against interracial marriage: underneath it all was only squalid and ugly hate. Here's what Gibson said about homosexuality in 1992 (it's below the fold because it's pretty vile): Heartthrob actor Mel Gibson, asked by one of Spain's leading magazines what he thinks of homosexuals, launched into a tirade against gay men. "They take it up the ass," Gibson told El Pais as he got out of his chair, bent…

Hepatitis C: Treating Heroin Addiction as a Public Health Problem, Not a Moral One

Tragically, Massachusetts is having a hepatitis C outbreak, and it's entirely due to surging heroin use: The spike in hepatitis C, an illness most often spread by drug needles tainted with the virus, emerges during a period of epidemic heroin use in Massachusetts. That is almost certainly no coincidence, said John Auerbach , the state's public health commissioner. "I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," Auerbach said. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very…

Saturday Sermon: Lewis Lapham on the Culture Wars

I'm working my through Lewis Lapham's Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration. Here's what he has to say about the culture wars: So many saviors of the republic were raising the alarm of culture war in the middle eighties that I now can't remember whether it was Bob Bartley writing in the Wall Street Journal or William Bennett speaking from his podium at the National Endowment for the Humanities who said that at Yale University the students were wallowing in the joys of sex, drugs, and Karl Marx, disporting themselves on the New Haven green in the…

How Do You Oppose Meals-on-Wheels?

Remember Conservative Ideologues: You drink his blood after you molest him. It's more fun that way* I would like to think certain things transcend political, religious, and ideological divides. One might think that Meals-on-Wheels, a program that relies heavily on donations, discounts, and volunteers to bring meals to elderly shut-ins would be liked by all. I would like to think that aiding frail, elderly people is about as universal as it gets. But never underestimate the moral depravity of the conservative ideologue. In a recent post, I wrote: Maybe it's that I grew up in Virginia,…

Some Sunday Links

Here are some Sunday links for you (with extra linkyness since there won't be one next week). First, I blind you with science: E. coli, chimps, and antibiotic resistance. Oh my! A crocodilian with a fish tail! Watch the creationists deny that this is an important fossil... Speaking of fossils, the Hairy Museum of Natural History has an interesting post about a Long Lizard with very Short Arms. ScienceBlogling Nick reports on the sanity the British government is showing towards drugs and alcohol. Darksyde has a good post about adult stem cells. Over at Effect Measure, is an ongoing series…

Balancing selection and climate adaptation?

Dan MacArthur has a post up, Climate genes: positive or balancing selection?, where he questions the interpretation of data from a recent paper, Adaptations to Climate in Candidate Genes for Common Metabolic Disorders: The critical point I want to make is that while positive selection will usually tend to increase the frequency of an allele until it reaches 100% frequency, balancing selection can result in a situation where an allele reaches a stable frequency that is less than 100%. For a case of heterozygote advantage, the stable frequency will be the point at which the selective advantage…

"Dangerous Ideas"

A few weeks ago Edge.com asked prominent thinkers what their Dangerous Idea was. The poser of the question was Steven Pinker, and he's on Radio Open Source today (you can listen on the web, wait 'till 7 PM EDT). I offered my 2 cents in the comments, the basic gist of which was that the explosion of information and the ability to access it in the modern world makes secure understanding and knowledge more difficult than in the past. Professionally obfuscatory paradigms like Post Modernism and neo-Creationism can arise precisely because trust and good faith are more crucial in a world where…

The IT Version of the Mad Biologist's Pentultimate Political Philosophy

Which for those of you who don't know what the Mad Biologist's Pentultimate Political Philosophy is, it's very simple: people have to like this crap. Recently, I upgraded to Firefox 4 and I've been having 'stability issues', although they seem to have decreased in frequency somewhat. Which brings me to this excellent post about the increasing unreliability of personal computers: Here's one we all know well: you visit a page you visit everyday, probably a page you visited just minutes ago. Nothing has changed on your end, but suddenly the page locks up. The little egg timer tells you the…

Clearly, Dennis Prager Doesn't Know Very Many Elderly Jews

Conservative commentator Dennis Prager has a nice little bigot eruption, brought to us by Thers at Whiskey Fire: It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black. This is easily demonstrated. Imagine if some Democratic politician had announced that demanding a photo ID at the voting booth was an attempt to keep Jewish Americans from voting. No one would understand what the person was talking about. But why not? Jews vote almost as lopsidedly Democrat as do blacks. So why weren't Jews included in liberal…

Artificial vs. natural selection

Mike the Mad Biologist has a post up, A Biologist Confuses Artificial and Natural Selection: There's a really interesting article in last week's NY Times magazine about global warming and the spread of weeds.... ...Artificial selection occurs when the fitness criterion--that is, what trait or phenotype will have higher survivability or reproductive output--is directly chosen by the experimenter. In the case of the weeds, if we were delibrately trying to grow better weeds--that is, mowing down rice biovars that aren't sufficiently 'weedy'--that is artificial selection. Simply changing the…

Is Mormonism relatively weird or absolutely weird???

There's a hilarious, and often thoughtful, comment thread over at The American Scene. Ross Douthat is a Roman Catholic, and many of his readers are serious intellectual Christians. So, I am always interested when they object to the bizarre and obviously anthropogenic hocus-pocus of Mormonism. Some snips of interest: dude, mormans are weird. let's just face it. the whole thing makes me giggle when I talk about it. golden tablets . . . the whole thing is goofy-times. [later] Because the theology is "weird," and the history is even weirder. Captain Moroni? Golden tablets? Steve Young gets his…

Fitness is a bugger!!!

In my post below where I try to synthesize The Superficial and The Causes of Evolution I used the term "fitness." Well...as Matt McIntosh pointed out the term itself is problematic, and so using it as a reference of any sort is really sketchy. Evolgen has slammed the use of "genetic load", and I I think the skepticism is warranted to some extent. The originator of the formula for genetic load, JBS Haldane, famously quipped "fitness is a bugger!" Part of the problem is that the term "fitness" has unique connotations in evolutionary biology. Physical fitness, health and longevity, often…

Moral dimensions of political tribes

Watching Beyond Belief 2 I was interested in Jonathan Haidt's contention that liberals and conservatives exhibit alternative valences on five different "Moral Foundations." In short, liberals tend to emphasize "Harm" and "Fairness," and manifest little interest in the values of "Loyalty," "Authority" and "Purity." In contrast, conservatives tended to have a more balanced weighting of values across all five dimensions, as well as deemphasizing the first two components in relation to liberals. My own immediate thought was, "Where do I fit in?" I assumed I would be closer to liberals here…

Mutating question meme

Sheril tagged me with a meme of the form: There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations: * You can leave them exactly as is. * You can delete any one question. * You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in…

The interracial gamble

My post a few days ago about multiracial humans elicated many comments, and not all of them were flip or for amusement. There are some serious issues, like synergistic and antagonistic epistasis, which I would like to explore in the future. But, I think there are two primary "take home" points: 1)  Aside from cases of problematic populations with recessive diseases (frankly, I think Ashkenazi Jews fall under this) the fitness benefit of outbreeding does not stand out so much as to be of great comment in the grand scheme of how you fix upon your one and only. I don't even think it really is…

Creationist Turkey shold not be let into the EU!

The headline says, Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds, but here is the money shot: "The only country included in the study where adults were more likely than Americans to reject evolution was Turkey." My liberal friends often make fun of the "inbred" Creationist yokels who inhabit the hinterlands of this great nation, and contrast them with the sophisticated secularity over the waters. On the other hand, many Americans, especially culturally sensitive progressives declare that the EU should let Turkey in to show that it is "open minded" and not a "…

I welcome a bio-friendly Left!

Strong words from a "progressive" site: Because it further negates their discrimination-based "biblical worldview," the science of human genetics - which has again suggested homosexuality is genetic (determined before birth) and not simply "a lifestyle choice" - is the Christian Right's special target. Genetic mutations and evolution are not theories. They're facts the validity of which cannot be disputed scientifically. (Ask any bacterium or virus, or read the medical literature on pathogens evolving to become resistant to traditional drugs used against them.) The more people…

Math and Creation

I don't speak that much about the Evolution-Creation debate in comparison to other Science Bloggers. Fundamentally, it is because I find the elucidation of the fact of evolution far more fascinating at this point in my life than an analysis of the meta-scientific and cultural issues revolving around the Creationist response to evolutionary science. But today I checked the genetics & evolution query on google news as is my habit, and I stumbled upon this blog entry, Mathematicians and Evolution by Casey Luskin. Most of you probably know him, and I'll leave it to others to appraise this…

Why can't we get along like habiline and erectine?

The New York Times has an article up reiterating the fabled "bushiness" of hominid phylogenetic trees: Scientists who dated and analyzed the specimens -- a 1.44 million-year-old Homo habilis and a 1.55 million-year-old Homo erectus -- said their findings challenged the conventional view that these species evolved one after the other. Instead, they apparently lived side by side in eastern Africa for almost half a million years. My knowledge of bones is not strong, so I leave it to John Hawks or Kambiz to decompose the details. That being said, the big picture is that this is another strike…

The Triumph of the Coalition of the Sane

Tonight is a triumph for the Coalition of the Sane. While legitimized insanity has been happening since the Reagan era (Got James Watt?), the last eight years have been dreadful for those not suffering from massive psychological delusions. Our political discourse (such as it is) has moved well beyond arguing over marginal income tax rates. We are, instead, arguing about basic physical, material phenomena: is global warming real; did evolution actually happen; how does human reproduction work? This is insane. No biologist or climatologist should ever have to waster her time arguing with…

On "Cancer Ridden"

Orac is right to call out Stoller for referring to McCain as cancer-ridden--it's not true. Worse, it's cruel, and I should have made it clear that I've never supported the 'cancer critique.' (I have called McCain many things, but never that). At the time, I thought it would be dishonest to cut out that one sentence, but I was absolutely wrong to not to call out Bowers on this. The part that I highlighted--which was why I thought the post was worth quoting: Our nominee should crush this guy. And if he doesn't, then next year, the Generals are going to come out and undermine Obama unless…

Was the Anthrax Attack Really a Mixture of Two Strains?

In reading this NY Times story about the anthrax investigation, this statement about how the presence of an inversion (a region of flipped DNA) puzzled me (italics mine): The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million chemical letters of their DNA. But researchers found enough differences in the attack strain to provide a reasonable chance of identifying its source. The chief difference was that a stretch of DNA was flipped head to tail in some bacteria in the attack strain, but not in any other samples. Further, the…

We're Missing the Point About the O'Keefe-NPR Non-Scandal

If you haven't heard, rightwing slime mongerer James O'Keefe struck again and managed to give National Public Radio (NPR) a black eye, although to a considerable extent, this was a self-inflicted wound. Over at Whiskey Fire, Thers makes a very astute observation (italics mine): The most bizarre aspect of this wingnut "sting" is its intended "gotcha." What the wingnuts thought they would be able to "prove" is that NPR is a biased socialist left-wing organization that would be thrilled to spread Islamist propaganda for a hefty paycheck. What got the NPR executives fired was their alleged…

No, We Don't Need to Slow Down Moore's Law

Matthew Yglesias writes regarding Moore's Law, which states that CPU transistor counts double every two years: My pet notion is that improvements in computer power have been, in some sense, come along at an un-optimally rapid pace. To actually think up smart new ways to deploy new technology, then persuade some other people to listen to you, then implement the change, then have the competitive advantage this gives you play out in the form of increased market share takes time. The underlying technology is changing so rapidly that it may not be fully worthwhile to spend a lot of time thinking…