The country is Burma, not Myanmar

Why does the American news media use the name Myanmar instead of Burma? The UK BBC reports:

The ruling military junta changed its name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. Rangoon also became Yangon. ...

The change was recognised by the United Nations, and by countries such as France and Japan, but not by the United States and the UK.

A statement by the Foreign Office says: "Burma's democracy movement prefers the form 'Burma' because they do not accept the legitimacy of the unelected military regime to change the official name of the country. Internationally, both names are recognised."

It's general practice at the BBC to refer to the country as Burma, and the BBC News website says this is because most of its audience is familiar with that name rather than Myanmar. The same goes for Rangoon, people in general are more familiar with this name than Yangon.

So the country is popularly known as Burma, and the USA says that Burma is the official name. Isn't that enough? Why would anyone call it Myanmar?

Nevertheless, the NY Times, WSJ, TV networks, etc call it Myanmar. They appear to be making some sort of political statement by doing so, but what? That the UN is more important than the USA? That the military junta ought to crush the pro-freedom rebels? I don't get it. I just see it as anti-Americanism on the part of the major news media.

I should note that not all call it Myanmar. USA Today still calls it Burma.

Research on best teaching methods

From a 1998 Wash Times article:

What if the federal government spent $1 billion over nearly three decades to study thoroughly the question of which teaching method best instills knowledge, cognitive skills and positive self-concept in students?

What if that study were able to conclude exactly which method best does all three?

Wouldn't the American people like to know about it?

Both the study and its conclusion do exist.

The method is called Direct Instruction, and I learned about it here.

Don't expect your local schoolteachers to have even heard of it.

The Scientist and the Stairmaster

Gary Taubes writes:

Why most of us believe that exercise makes us thinner—and why we're wrong.

Just last month, the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine published joint guidelines for physical activity and health. They suggested that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.” What they didn’t say, though, was that more physical activity will lead us to lose weight. Indeed, the best they could say about the relationship between fat and exercise was this: “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.” In other words, despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can’t say that exercise will help keep off the pounds.

This article shows how hard it is to prove anything about free will and human behavior. It seems obvious that you could exercise to lose weight, but the medical studies don't prove it.

Islam v Islamist

I just watched Islam vs. Islamist, a documentary produced for PBS. It was controversial, and PBS tried to kill it.

It describes how some Moslems want to reform Islam so that it could be coexist with Western democracy, and how they are ostracized and attacked for their efforts. You can buy it here. My local broadcast had a panel discussion afterwards with Muslims, including a couple who didn't like the documentary.

I just found this, from a gaming site:

Admit it - back in the 20th Century, none of you imagined that World War III would be Robots vs. Muslims. Seems obvious now.

Abolish the SAT test

Charles Murray, coauthor of the controversial book The Bell Curve, now suggests abolishing the SAT test. It is no longer useful in helping to predict college grades, if grades, other test scores, and other measures are available. He also says:

Hence the final reason for getting rid of the SAT: knowing those scores is too dispiriting for those who do poorly and too inspiriting for those who do well.

The high IQ society, MENSA, has already stopped using the SAT test. It accepts scores from pre-1994 SAT tests, but says that the SAT, PSAT, and ACT "no longer correlate with an IQ test."

Lesbians sue because they have unwanted twins

What's wrong with this picture? News from down under:

AUSTRALIA, September 20, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A lesbian couple in Australia have taken the first 'wrongful birth' lawsuit in Australian legislative history to court. The two women, who have three year old twin daughters, are suing Canberra obstetrician, Robert Armellin, for 'wrongful birth' after he supervised the implantation of two embryos instead of one into the birth mother during the in-vitro fertilization procedure.

The women, who cannot be named because of a court order, are suing the doctor for almost $400,000 (USD) which they contest will be the cost of raising the mistakenly implanted second child. The sum includes funds for private school, medical expenses and lost wages for the women.

According to the Australian newspaper, the PerthNow, the mother claimed that certain aspects of pregnancy were extremely stressful to her - for instance, buying a stroller - due to the fact that she was carrying twins. "It was like the last frontier of acceptance to spend hundreds of dollars on a pram." The mother also lamented that she suffered nausea during the pregnancy.

The mother's partner claimed in court that the couple became so overwhelmed with every day childcare issues that they lost their ability to function as a couple.

Of course they can't function as a couple; they're lesbians!

I don't know how this nonsense gets to Australia. Maybe the twins will someday also sue because they were raised by wacky lesbians.

Thelma and Louise

Judith Warner writes:

I watched "Thelma and Louise" again this week.

Boy, how times have changed.

Remember, in 1991, how topical the movie seemed? How revolutionary, how thrilling, how cathartic?

It didn’t seem any of those things to me the other night, when I attended a screening of the film guest-hosted by Senator Susan Collins and Representative Jane Harman.

It simply seemed depressing, oppressive and hopeless. It seemed like a relic from the past, a buried memory. It was dark. It was disturbing. It was -- it dawned on me, driving home and still sniveling over the sight of that blue Thunderbird plummeting into the void — a movie that could not be made today.

Thank goodness. ...

That year [1991], the William Kennedy Smith rape case went to trial, belittling and publicly humiliating the victim; Anita Hill confronted Clarence Thomas and emerged besmirched while he reigned victorious; and Roe v. Wade seemed destined for extinction.

Date rape is no longer a contentious concept; it's a known reality. Rape victims are no longer so thoughtlessly named and shamed by the media as was William Kennedy Smith’s accuser. Rape itself is down – its incidence having dropped 75 percent since the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice.

Thelma and Louise is about two women who go on a road trip, murder a man after a bar dispute, flee the police, and commit suicide.

I am appalled that Warner refers to Smith's accuser as a "rape victim", and the NY Times editors allow this. Smith was acquitted of all charges in a jury trial; he is not a rapist and she is not a rape victim. I didn't think that the accuser's story was very plausible. The column looks libelous to me.

Black on white crime

If a population were 90% white and 10% black, and if crime were race-blind, then would you expect more white-on-black crime or black-on-white crime?

The simple answer is that it should be exactly the same. You would expect more white criminals, and more white victims. But the interracial crime should be symmetrical.

Take a simple numerical example. Suppose you have 100 people, including 90 whites and 10 blacks. Suppose that 10% are criminals, and each criminal mugs 10% of the population. Then you would have 9 white criminals, and each would mug 1 black and 9 whites, for a total of 9 white-on-black crimes. You would have 1 black criminal mugging 1 black and 9 whites, for a total of 9 black-on-white crimes. That is 9 cross-racial crimes, either way.

The actual crime data for the USA is not symmetrical. There is far more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime, no matter how you measure it.

Those who complain about the prosecution of the Jena 6 act as if whites are committing crimes on blacks. But every account of the Jena 6 incidents shows that the serious crimes were committed by blacks on whites.

It appears to me that the only reason that anyone has any sympathy for the Jena 6 is some confusion over the name "Justin". One white boy named Justin was involved in putting a couple of nooses on a tree in a school yard as a prank. Another white boy named Justin got beaten up and left unconscious several months later. There is no connection between the nooses and the beating, and some out-of-town racial agitators assumed that it was the same Justin. It was not. The beating was an ordinary and brutal crime by some thugs who belong in jail. Let Jena deal with it.

If it turns out that the Jena 6 were motivated in part by racial tensions in the town, then they are guilty of a hate crime, and should receive extra stiff sentences under hate crime laws.

Duke president persecutes the innocent

I didn't know that Duke University President Richard Brodhead has a previous history of accusing an innocent man of an awful crime, for essentially political reasons. Brodhead is famous for punishing the lacrosse team when he knew that they were innocent, and apparently he help persecute an innocent teacher in a previous job at Yale. Amazing. The man is a disgrace.

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach

From the WashPost, 2 weeks ago:

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

I can understand why someone might think that the CDC says that only older people need flu vaccine. The official CDC website recommends:

People who should get vaccinated each year are:

1. People at high risk for complications from the flu, including:
* Children aged 6 months until their 5th birthday,
* Pregnant women,
* People 50 years of age and older, and
* People of any age with certain chronic medical conditions;
* People who live in nursing homes and other long term care facilities.

2. People who live with or care for those at high risk for complications from flu ...

While this includes kids under 5, and flu is on the separate CDC schedule for childhood vaccinations, it is not required for school and the CDC has not pushed for that. Saying that only older people need flu vaccine is a reasonable first approximation to the CDC recommendations.

The Iraq example is even more strained. Those who frequently deny any connection between 9/11 and Iraq are usually promoting their own myths. They want us to believe that the 9/11 attack was just an isolated criminal act, and the only appropriate response is to arrest and prosecute those who were directly responsible. If the guilty parties are all dead, then they'll want us to just forget about it and hope that it doesn't happen again.

The WashPost seems to just want to promote the myth that Pres. Bush lied about Iraq and 9/11. If it really wanted to do some honest debunking, then it would have addresses what Bush really said.

There are lots of myths that seem to persist in the face of others trying to debunk the myths. I am not sure yet whether this is a psychological defect of the human mind. In some cases, the myths have a germ of truth, and the debunkers refuse to address the true aspect of the myth for some ideological reason.

You can find Schwarz's paper here.

Differences between Christianity and Islam

I keep hearing people who want to lump together Chistian and Islamic fundamentalists, or who argue that Koran quotes endorsing violence are no different from Bible quotes.

In the Bible, the violent stuff is in the Old Testament, and was repudiated in the New Testament. Where there are differences, Christians subscribe to the New Testament.

In the Koran, it is the other way around. The peaceful stuff is in the older (Mecca) parts, and the endorsements of violence and warfare are in the later (Medina) parts. Islam teaches that the later parts are more valid.

Islam teaches coercion, the subjugation of non-Moslems, and warfare against unbelievers. These teachings are in the Koran, they have been widely practiced for over 1300 years, and they continue to be taught by all major branches of Islam today. They are not just out-of-context Koran quotes; they are central to the core beliefs of Islam.

No one today commits terrorist acts in the name of Christianity. Terrorist acts in the name of Islam are praised throughout the Islamic world.

Mohammedans are allowed to worship peacefully in all Christian countries. Christian, Jews, and other non-Mohammedans have been driven out of Islamic countries.

The Christians are nothing like the Mohammedans.

Hillary Clinton's war vote

People still claim that Pres. Bush lied to get us into the Iraq War, or that we entered the war under false pretenses. And yet no one can identify the lie.

Another way to look at the matter is to look at what Congressional leaders said when they voted to authorize the war. Sen. Hillary Clinton said:

If left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. ...

This is a difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make. Any vote that may lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction. ...

And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein: This is your last chance; disarm or be disarmed.

So she was not relying on claims that Iraq had WMD stockpiles or was an imminent threat; she was concerned about its potential for WMD warfare in the future. She realized that her vote would lead to war if Iraq did not comply with UN resolutions.

That was Oct. 2002. H. Clinton is now the leading Democrat candidate for President. The Democrats supported the Iraq War based on accurate info. Only the lying Bush-haters say otherwise.

Tales of the crash of 2007

Ben Stein writes:

"I'm leaving him," she said. "He's grouchy all the time. I want a guy who's rich and cheerful all day and all night. Why should I have to suffer because his business is bad?"

"He's your husband," I said. "You have to stick by him."

"Why? I want to laugh and have fun, and he's in a bad mood for months on end. I didn't make this mortgage mess, and I don't see why I should have to suffer for it."

There's more.

Killing donors for their organs

It is sometimes claimed that organ donors are never killed for their organs, but now there is this example:

With time slipping away, one of the transplant surgeons ordered repeated doses of the narcotic morphine and the sedative Ativan, jokingly calling the drugs "candy," according to police reports. Navarro eventually died, but too late for his organs to be useful.

Horrified nurses complained, prompting multiple investigations. In July, prosecutors charged Hootan Roozrokh with trying to hasten Navarro's death, marking the first time a surgeon has faced criminal charges in a transplant case.

Consider that when you sign that organ donor card.

Science suffers from an excess of significance

The WSJ reports (also here):

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance.

You can find links to the Ioannidis papers here. His arguments are much more applicable to the soft sciences than to the hard sciences.

The Waning of IQ

It looks like IQ bashing is popular again. There is a new book on IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea, and David Brooks writes in the NY Times (mirrored here, here, and here):

A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence of I.Q.

For a time, I.Q. was the most reliable method we had to capture mental aptitude. People had the impression that we are born with these information-processing engines in our heads and that smart people have more horsepower than dumb people. ...

Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the strengths and consequences of specific processes. ... While psychometrics offered the false allure of objective fact, the new science brings us back into contact with literature, history and the humanities, and, ultimately, to the uniqueness of the individual.

New science? We have political correctness requiring that IQ not be mentioned.

This article claims that research shows that it is better not to tell a kid that he is smart.

IQ research has its problems, but it is a whole lot better than most other psychology research. If you reject it, then you should probably reject all psychological diagnoses.

Here is a good rebuttal to Brooks, and here is another.

One of the silliest anti-IQ arguments is that there are multiple intelligences. The argument is like those who say that you cannot compare apples and oranges, even tho they've surely bought apples and oranges at the supermarket where they sat next to each other with different price labels. Stephen Jay Gould is someone who made a lot of money by arguing that IQ is disproved by the possibility of multiple intelligences.

Yes, of course there are multiple measures of intelligence. That is obvious to everyone who does IQ testing. They merely argue that some measures are more useful than others.

Ex-Guantanamo prisoners sue

Court news:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four former Guantanamo prisoners should be allowed to proceed with their lawsuit claiming torture and violations of their religious rights, their lawyer argued on Friday. ...

The lawsuit claimed the four were subjected to various forms of torture, were harassed as they practiced their religion and were forced to shave their religious beards. In one instance, a guard threw a Koran in a toilet bucket, according to the lawsuit.

"You don't need the Supreme Court to tell you that putting Korans in the toilet bucket is something the United States shouldn't be doing," Lewis said during the arguments. "Everything is saying you can't do this."

I think that we would need the Supreme Court for that. There is no law against a prison guard putting a Koran in toilet bucket. If enemy combatants were citing the Koran to justify their jihad against the West, then the guard ought to throw it into the toilet bucket.

Jeffs is not a rapist

CourtTV news:

ST. GEORGE, Utah (Cou rt TV) - A woman who was married at 14 to her older cousin told a jury Thursday that she married at the instruction of Warren Jeffs, the leader of a polygamous sect, and out of fear of eternal damnation.
ADVERTISEMENT

As the first witness to take the stand in the case against Jeffs, the woman, now 21, said that Jeffs, her schoolteacher and spiritual adviser, taught that her purpose in life was to be obedient and submissive to her husband.

Jeffs may be a kook and a menace, but he is on trial for being an accomplice to rape, and I don't see how he could be guilty of that. Who is the rapist, her husband? If so, why isn't her husband on trial for rape?

The alleged victim testified that her decision to marry was influenced by a fear of eternal damnation, and that Jeffs urged her to stop refusing sexual relations with her husband. If Jeffs committed a crime by giving advice, then a lot of marriage counselors are also criminals.

I also think that it is a little strange that the press is not publishing the accuser's name. She is a 21-year-old adult. Her marriage is a public record. I can see where a rape victim might not want it know that she had sex with a stranger, but the accuser her only had sexual relations with the man who is her husband and the father of her children.

Opposing the war from the beginning

I tried to listen to the Democrat rebuttal to Bush, but I was lost at he start:

The following is the Democratic response to Bush's Address:

I'm Senator Jack Reed from Rhode Island, and I was privileged to serve in the United States Army for 12 years.

I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. It was a flawed strategy that diverted attention and resources away from hunting down Usama bin Laden’s terrorist network.

From the beginning? I guess he was okay with Iraq invading Kuwait, threatening to take over Persian Gulf oil supplies, using oil money to acquire and develop WMD, refusing to comply with UN resolutions, and supporting terrorist Mohammedans who hate America.

Every war strategy has flaws, and diverts resources. It is our military power that keeps shipping lanes opens, protects our prosperity, and keeps our enemies away. The Democrats never make any constructive suggestions on how Iraq or Afghanistan could be handled any better. They just gripe about how they are against whatever Pres. Bush does, and tout their Bush-hating credentials.

These politicians like Reed are despicable. He should just spell out his views more clearly, and say:

I belong to the opposition party. We get elected by badmouthing Pres. Bush at every opportunity. We are spineless cowards who are afraid to stand up to America's enemies, and we have no substantive ideas for doing anything. We are real good at whining about whatever Bush does, and saying that his plan has flaws. The MidEast will probably still be a mess in 1000 years, and if we can blame it all on Bush, we can get re-elected.

Polls on the Iraq al Qaeda connection

33% of American adults, including 27% of Democrats, answered Yes to this CBS News/New York Times Poll question:

Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

I am wondering if pollsters went around to people during World War II asking the question, "Do you think Adolf Hiter was personally involved in the December 7th, 1941, attacks on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii?

I don't think that Hussein was personally involved, but there is an obvious connection. After 9/11/2001, we declared war on al-Qaeda, and Hussein had the choice of being with us or against us. He chose to be against us, and refused to obey UN resolutions and cooperate with UN weapons inspections.

The case against Craig is weak

I wonder if any US Senator has been booted from office on such flimsy evidence as Larry Craig. All we know is that:

Craig peered into the stalls at an airport men's room, and waited for a vacant one.
A policeman in a sting operation said that Craig tapped his foot, and claimed that it was a signal.
The cop said that he saw Craig's hand near the floor, but was unsure whether it was his right hand or his left.
Craig disputed the cop's account, but agreed not to contest a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge when the cop promised to keep the story out of the press and to not charge him with a sex crime.
Craig reacted with a mixture of defiance and embarrassment.
An Idaho paper did a year-long investigation into whether Craig was gay, interviewing 500 witnesses, and ended up with some tenuous evidence that it was reluctant to publish.

Craig has also opposed same-sex marriage, as have all of the major Democrat presidential candidates.

Meanwhile, former NJ governor Jim McGreevey is now teaching is teaching ethics, law, and leadership at Kean University, and studying to become an Episcopal priest. McGreevey was someone whose scandalous personal life really did lead to him abusing his official responsibility.

A reader asks, "Why would it matter if he used his right or left had to solicit sex from an undercover officer?"

Craig was not charged with a sex crime. He apparently reached towards the floor with one hand. Craig and the cop had differing accounts, and whether it was his right or his left hand has a direct bearing on the plausibility of those accounts. The fact that the cop cannot say which hand it was undermines his credibility. The cop only had to observe about four things, and be able to testify about them. The hand was one of those things. Either the cop was confused, or he embellished his story, or he wasn't paying careful to Craig.

I don't know whether or not Craig is a degenerate. The Idaho paper interviewed 500 people for a story, and the result was inconclusive. I don't believe that he committed a crime at the Minneapolis airport incident.

Feds try to undermine Second Amendment

The feds filed a court brief defending the DC handgun ban:

The Council also found that the handgun is a criminal's weapon of choice. It cited national statistics showing that "handguns are used in roughly 54% of all murders, ..." ... These dangers were even more pronounced in the District. Within its "totally urban" environment, ..., handguns were responsible for 155 of the record 285 murders in the District. ... Faced with the evidence that handguns pose a particularly
serious threat to public safety, the Council chose to ban handguns because it concluded that less restrictive regulation would be ineffective. Since handguns present a singular danger, the solution was to stop the introduction of more handguns into the District.

I guess it is trying to argue that DC crime is much worse than the national average, but 155/285 is 54.4%.

School arts classes matter

Ellen Winner and Lois Hetland tell the benefits of teaching art:

One justification for keeping the arts has now become almost a mantra for parents, arts teachers, and even politicians: arts make you smarter. The notion that arts classes improve children's scores on the SAT, the MCAS, and other tests is practically gospel among arts-advocacy groups. A Gallup poll last year found that 80 percent of Americans believed that learning a musical instrument would improve math and science skills.

But that claim turns out to be unfounded. It's true that students involved in the arts do better in school and on their SATs than those who are not involved. However, correlation isn't causation, and an analysis we did several years ago showed no evidence that arts training actually causes scores to rise. ...

While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they're also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school.

Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.

I think that it is unlikely that art and music classes will increase anyone's math test scores.

Poincare was correct about the aether

Steve Sailor and John Hawks comment on the top scientists in history. It is good to see credit to 20th century geniuses like R. A. Fisher (invented much of modern statistics),  Leo Szilárd (invented the A-bomb by first conceiving the idea of a nuclear chain reaction), John von Neumann (helped create quantum mechanics and electronic computers), and Claude Shannon (invented information theory).

Poincare surely belongs on the list also, for creating the theory of special relativity, but a commenter repeats this canard:

Poincare formulated what is called the principle of relativity, but I don't think he devised special relativity before Einstein. (But maybe you know something I haven't heard about.) Lorentz came damn close and predicted many of the effects of special relativity. Unfortunately his theory did not discard the idea of ether and didn't quite pan out experimentally.

This is a common error. A special relativity textbook (pdf) says:

It has become popular to credit Henri Poincaré with the discovery of the theory of Special Relativity, but sadly Poincaré got many of the right answers for all the wrong reasons. He even came up with a version of E = mc²! In 1904 Poincaré had gone as far as to enunciate the "principle of relativity" in which "The laws of physical phenomena must be the same, whether for a fixed observer, as also for one dragged in a motion of uniform translation, so that we do not and cannot have any means to discern whether or not we are dragged in a such motion." In 1905 Poincaré coined the term "Lorentz Transformation" for the equation that explained the null result of the Michelson Morley experiment. Although Poincaré derived equations to explain the null result of the Michelson Morley experiment, his assumptions were still based upon an aether. It remained for Einstein to show that an aether was unnecessary, a conceptual leap that thwarts many students even today.

These last two sentences are completely wrong. Let's look at what Poincare actually said about the aether. In 1900, he said:

Our ether, does it really exist? I do not believe that more precise observations could ever reveal anything more than relative displacements. [quote from Whittaker]]

In 1902 Poincare wrote:

Whether the ether exists or not matters little -- let us leave that to the metaphysicians; what is essential for us is, that everything happens as if it existed, and that this hypothesis is found to be suitable for the explanation of phenomena. After all, have we any other reason for believing in the existence of material objects? That, too, is only a convenient hypothesis; only, it will never cease to be so, while some day, no doubt, the ether will be thrown aside as useless.

In other words, the aether is just a philosophical construct with no observable consequences. In 1904, he wrote:

The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for a stationary observer as for one carried along in a uniform motion of translation, so that we have no means, and can have none, of determining whether or not we are being carried along in such a motion.

... from all these results there must arise an entirely new kind of dynamics, which will be characterized above all by the rule that no velocity can exceed the velocity of light.

It follows from this principle that it must be impossible to observe the aether, if it exists. Einstein's famous 1905 paper on relativity only says this about the aether:

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the ``light medium,'' suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the ``Principle of Relativity'') to the status of a postulate, ... The introduction of a ``luminiferous ether'' will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an ``absolutely stationary space'' provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

Einstein always claimed that he never read Poincare and his paper did not cite any references. We know that this is a lie because Einstein copied Poincare's ideas and terminology, and because:

The great French mathematician Henri Poincaré enunciated the principle of relativity at least as early as 1902 in his popular book Science and Hypothesis. We know from Einstein's friend Maurice Solovine that the two pounced on Poincaré's book, indeed that it kept them "breathless for weeks on end." It should have. In Science and Hypothesis, Poincaré declares: "1) There is no absolute space, and we can only conceive of relative motion; 2) There is no absolute time. When we say that two periods are equal, the statement has no meaning; 3) Not only have we no direct intuition of the equality of two periods, but we have not even direct intuition of the simultaneity of two events occurring in two different places." These ideas lie at the heart of relativity, and it is hard to imagine that they did not have a profound effect on Einstein's thinking.

Einstein's description of the aether as "superfluous" is almost identical to Poincare's view. Moreover it was Einstein, not Poincare, who reversed himself and later accepted the aether in a 1920 paper:

Therefore I thought in 1905 that in physics one should not speak of the ether at all. This judgment was too radical though as we shall see with the next considerations about the general theory of relativity. It moreover remains, as before, allowed to assume a space-filling medium if one can refer to electromagnetic fields (and thus also for sure matter) as the condition thereof.

Other commenters on Sailor's blog list various other character flaws that are known about Einstein. I am just addressing the origin of special relativity. Credit belongs to Poincare (and Lorentz), not Einstein. Pretty much everything Einstein said on the subject was published earlier by Poincare. You can find more details on Poincare's theory here.

iPhone monkeys

Here is an amusing cartoon. The reference is to the movie 2001, where apes are inspired to fight with weapons by discovering a monolith.

As far as I can tell, the Apple iPhone only offers one novel feature -- the ability to listen to voicemail message out of order. Everything else has been available from other vendors for years. Some phones offer fancier features like GPS, much better cameras, keyboards, Java, Flash, 3rd-party apps, extra memory, etc. And of course the iPhone is crippled, like other Apple products.

There is someone claiming to have figured out how to unlock the iPhone so that it can be used with T-Mobile's network, and he wants to sell unlocked iPhones. But even if you could get such a phone, you would not be able to listen to your voicemail messages out of order, so I doubt that it would interest the typical Apple customer.

Mathematician makes a billion dollars

Here is the world's highest paid mathematician:

What could anyone conceivably do to earn $1.5 billion in a year?

That's how much James Simons, founder of New York hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, took home last year, according to a study released today on the growing compensation gap between business leaders and everyone else.

Simons ranks No. 214 on the Forbes list of billionaires. He first got famous for some brilliant work in differential geometry.

The article says that the highest paid real CEO was Terry Semel of Yahoo, who made $90M in 2006. He was then fired after stockholders complained about poor performance.

New Blink book

Gerd Gigerenzer, a German social psychologist, has written a new book justifying making decisions by gut feeling. Here is a sample of his research:

In the 1990s, I was living in Chicago, where there are high dropout rates from the high schools. People often asked, "Is there a way to know which school has the lowest dropout rate?" There existed data measuring different cues of school performance: the pay of teachers, the number of English-speaking students in a class, things like that.

I wondered: could one feed these into a computer, analyze them and obtain a prediction on which high school produced the fewest dropouts? We did that. And we were astonished to find that computer-based versions of Franklin’s bookkeeping method -- a program that weighed 18 different cues -- proved less accurate than going with the rule of thumb of "get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information."

Q: What was the "one good reason" that got you the right answer?

A: Knowing which school had high daily attendance rates. If two schools had the same attendance levels, you needed one more cue -- good writing scores -- and then you could ignore the rest.

No, this is an example of the superiority of computer analysis. Simple regressions often show that one or two factors are dominant, but it takes a statistical analysis to prove it. Those who rely on gut feelings often get fooled into thinking things like teacher pay are more significant.

Monkeys accused of sexual harassment

BBC reports:

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis. ...

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

Nachu's women have tried wearing their husbands' clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

"When we come to chase the monkeys away, we are dressed in trousers and hats, so that we look like men," resident Lucy Njeri told the BBC News website

"But the monkeys can tell the difference and they don't run away from us and point at our breasts. They just ignore us and continue to steal the crops."

In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim.

"The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us," said Mrs Njeri.

Even the monkeys recognize behavioral differences between men and women.

Psychotherapy can be harmful

Two recent NY Times articles admit that psychotherapy may be harmful. This says that treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ineffective at best, and this psychiatrist admits:

It’s not just patients who have a hard time knowing if their treatments are helping them; sometimes the therapists themselves can’t tell.

In a study published last month in the journal Psychotherapy Research, Michael J. Lambert and Cory Harmon, psychologists at Brigham Young University, gave psychotherapy patients a questionnaire about how they were feeling and functioning. ...

The clear implication is that therapists are not always the best judge of how their patients are doing, perhaps because they are blinded by their own optimism and determination to succeed.

Some therapists might even view worsening during treatment as a sign of progress — a misguided "no pain, no gain" view of psychotherapy.

I would think that it should be obvious that some psychotherapy can be harmful. Maybe even most of it is. There are many studies reporting harm to psychotherapy, and the professional psychotherapy organizations acknowledge that it can be harmful.

Nevertheless, I have found many people who persist in believing that psychotherapy is always beneficial. If you point to failures, they will often assert that the problem was with the therapist, and claim that a good one will always help. But there is no psychotherapist anywhere who can report uniformly positive results.

Kolata further confuses means and medians

I attack Gina Kolata's column below, and now she has published a defense in the NY Times to all the criticism. She still defends Prof. Gale, and writes:

For the unconvinced, Dr. Gale’s response:

What I did was to get a copy of the C.D.C. report and use the data in its tables. The C.D.C. groups people into four groups and gives percentage of men and women in each group



From these figures you can estimate the total partners claimed by each sex. I got between 40 percent and 75 percent more male than female partners depending on how you guess the average on each interval. Thus, the raw data is inconsistent (so it doesn’t matter whether you take averages or medians or any other statistic).

Yes, it does matter. If you assume that the men in these groups have 1, 3, 8, and 15 partners, while the women have 1, 5, 13, and 21 partners, then the women have slightly more partners than the men. The CDC data, as reported in the above table, is consistent. The men and women can have the same number of total partners, and yet the men have a median of 7 partners and the women have a median of 4 partners.

Prof. Gale is a very smart guy, and Kolata is one of the better science writers around, but this explanation is nonsense. It will only generate more email.

You can find additional comments on Slate and on this blog.

Here is more on why Kolata and the NY Times don't like to explain math properly.

Feminists gripe about double standards

The feministing blog has a long list of gripes about sexist double-standards. Here are a few:

My personal favorite is when people say the phrase, "you guys." It's just infuriating that many describe it as a gender-neutral phrase, when "you all" or "y'all" work just as well.

I'm an amateur weightlifter. The general philosophy at the gym is "no pain, no gain." As most of us know, pain is not pretty. I've had a few people comment on how I never smile, that I look too aggressive/angry when I lift.

The avowed feminist career woman and single mother who turns into a stay-at-home mom upon marriage, and, when divorced, demands alimony to maintain her lifestyle while only working part time. This has happened to three friends. For some reason, these women, all in their mid to late forties, can demand equal rights without assuming equal economic responsibility.

One of the double standards that I hate the most is the distressing difference in the clothing that is marketed towards girl infants when compared with boy infants.

How about engagement rings? Two people decide to get married, but only one of them is marked as "taken"?

However, the young, female clergywoman is NOT considered generally a catch, especially if she's trying to do something not involving child-care or youth groups. If she's trying to actually be the preacher, to represent the church, etc. dating is extremely hard.

1) double standards that I internalize and make me unhappy every day. ..., the absolute worst is the gender and appearance double standard. I totally have a type of people that I think are attractive, and they really are not anything like the convential beauty standard. But I continue to judge myself by that convential standard! Which sucks. And then on top of that, when guys are not considered conventially attractive, they have full permission to ask out whoever they want!

It seems like only white women who are capable and career-driven are being asked to stay home and be mothers, while single, poor, uneducated minority women living on government assistance are being asked to actually leave the home and their children (God forbid!) to pursue a career. I ...just ...don't ...get it.

The blogger writing a book.

Richardson says it is a choice, or not

At the Democrat debate:

Perhaps the most surprising moment of the night came when Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, causing a visible stir in the audience, replied to a questions about whether he believed being gay was a biological fact or a personal choice.

"It’s a choice," Mr. Richardson said, a view that is contrary to the position of many gay rights advocates. He added, "I don’t like to answer definitions like that that are perhaps grounded in science or something else that I don’t understand."

Richardson had to backtrack:

"Let me be clear — I do not believe that sexual orientation or gender identity happen by choice," Mr. Richardson said in the statement. "But I’m not a scientist, and the point I was trying to make is that no matter how it happens, we are all equal and should be treated that way under the law."

Richardson does appear far too inept politically to be President, but his comments here are not totally stupid. It is entirely possible that homosexuality is a choice, that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that the questions are properly answered by choosing some definitions and doing a scientific study. The term homosexuality usually refers to behavior, and there is certainly some choice about it. The term "sexual orientation" was concocted to reflect a part of human nature that is not a choice.

It is the gay rights advocates who want their personal views to supersede science. If there were some scientific proof that homosexuality is not a choice, then they could just cite the scientific papers.

The is a similar controversy over whether obesity is a choice. Just in the last week, NewScientist reported that kids can get fat because a leptin deficiency gives them a food addiction. A New England Journal of Medicine article claims that obesity is contagious. This latter paper is so goofy that it has to have a glossary of its own jargon:

Ego: The person whose behavior is being analyzed.
Alter: A person connected to the ego who may influence the behavior of the ego....
Induction: The spread of a behavior or trait from one person to another.

I wonder what these politicians would say if asked whether being fat is a choice.

Needing a wife

The NY Times reports:

Married men and women, on average, earn more than those who are unmarried, with part of that possibly attributed to career and wage advancement as workers mature (and are more likely to be married). But the gap is significantly larger for men than for women. Married women make an average 17 percent more than unmarried women, according to 2005 B.L.S. data on the median earnings of full-time workers, while married men make 42 percent more than unmarried men.

A more statistically rigorous analysis published in 2004, using the Minnesota Twins Registry, tried to isolate the effect of marriage on earnings. It found that holding education and genetics constant, married male twins made 26 percent more than their unmarried brothers.

It is not as clear what effect marriage has on women's careers and earnings, but having children is, over all, an impediment. "There's a well-documented motherhood penalty: women with children are paid less than women without children," controlling for other factors, said Mary Blair-Loy, a sociologist and author of "Competing Devotions," a study of executive women who kept working versus ones who discontinued their careers.

Fathers, however, are not similarly disadvantaged and might even benefit at the workplace from being parents, according to more than one study, including one published in March in The American Journal of Sociology.

No, these studies don't control for the other factors. (And no, the "Minnesota Twins" are not baseball players.) Maybe married men make more than single women because women would rather marry a man with a high earnings potential. Or the men work harder to support their families. Or the wives nag their husbands to earn more.

The article suggests that married men get more domestic support from their wives, than working women get from their husbands. But the studies don't distinguish housework that wives to support their husbands, from housework the wives do for their own purposes. The article quotes a husband saying, "I assume most bachelors don’t worry about how clean their houses are." If so, then those men aren't getting much benefit from housecleaning. The wives are doing it for their own satisfaction.

Kolata disputes sex studies

Noted NY Times science reporter Gina Kolata writes:

Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. ...

Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. ...

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.

It is about time for mathematicians to set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

No, there is no logical contradiction. It is quite plausible that men have a higher median number of sex partners, as I've discussed here. It can be explained by a small number of women having a lot of sex partner. That is, most men have more sex partners than most women, but a few slut outdo everyone by a wide margin. That's the way it is with the people I know, anyway.

Kolata gives the explanation that men exaggerate while women minimize their misbehavior. But she ignores other possible explanations, such as men having a different definition from women. These surveys don't usually define a sex act or sex partner, and people really do have different definitions.

Update: A reader cites this:

Women are more likely than men to lie about their sex lives, reveals a new study. ...

Women change their answers depending on whether or not they believe they will be caught out not telling the truth, the researchers found. The number of sexual partners a woman reported nearly doubled when women thought they were hooked up to a lie detector machine.

The reader also gives an example where the median can be different from the mean. A small number of sluts can increase the averages, and increase the median for men, but not affect the measured median for women. But Kolata says:

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just "reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females."

The suggestion here is that the study authors are publishing inconsistent data, and failing to even notice that the problem. But that is just not true about the govt study cited above. Here is the USA CDC study. This AP story on it even has a correction:

(This version CORRECTS that figures for lifetime sexual partners were median figures, not averages.)

Now Kolata and Gale should issue a correction because the CDC study measured the median, and it probably is true that men have a higher median number of sex partners than women.

I mentioned this CDC study before here. Justoneminute makes a similar point, and gives a nice explanation as why median and mean are different in this case.

Germinal movement to abolish the Electoral College

The NY Times reports:

Further, there is a germinal movement to effectively abolish the Electoral College, awarding the White House instead to the winner of the national popular vote. Maryland recently became the first state to have such legislation passed and then signed into law, although legislatures in several other states have passed similar measures.

No, that is not correct. The proposal is not to award the White House to the winner of the national popular vote, but to whoever gains a plurality of the popular vote. If the proposal is adopted, it will make it less likely that the President will have won the popular vote.

Baby videos may hinder infant language development

Univ of Wash. research:

Despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVDs and videos such as "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby."

Rather than helping babies, the over-use of such productions actually may slow down infants eight to 16 months of age when it comes to acquiring vocabulary, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The scientists found that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age. The study was published today in the Journal of Pediatrics.

"The most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVDs and videos and there is some suggestion of harm," said Frederick Zimmerman, lead author of the study and a UW associate professor of health services. "The bottom line is the more a child watches baby DVDs and videos the bigger the effect. The amount of viewing does matter."

Co-authors of the study are Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrics researcher at Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute and a UW professor of pediatrics, and Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the UW's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

The paper is part of a larger project looking at the trajectory of media viewing in the first two years of life and examining the content of what is being watched and its effects on young children. A paper published last spring by the same researchers showed that by 3 months of age 40 percent of infants are regular viewers of television, DVDs or videos and by the age of 2 this number jumps to 90 percent.

For both papers, the researchers conducted random telephone interviews with more than 1,000 families in Minnesota and Washington with a child born in the previous two years. Television, DVD and video viewing were divided into four categories: baby DVDs and videos; educational TV programs, DVDs and videos such as "Sesame Street, "Arthur" and "Blue's Clues"; children's non-educational television shows and movies such as "Sponge Bob Square Pants," "Bob the Builder" and "Toy Story," and adult television such as "The Simpsons," "Oprah," and sports programming.

The researchers found no positive or negative effects on infants of either age group from viewing educational and non-educational media or adult television programs.

I never used the Baby Einstein stuff. I am not surprised that studies would show them to be worthless. But I don't think that it follows that all TV is harmful at this age. My guess is that an hour or so of the right TV shows could be beneficial to one-year-olds.

Kids like McDonalds food

NewScientist reports:

Dina Borzekowski at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and her colleagues asked 63 preschoolers, aged three to five, to sample two meals, each consisting of a chicken nugget, a quarter of a hamburger, french fries, two baby carrots and a small cup of milk.

Although both meals came from a local McDonalds, only one of them appeared in its original packaging. Researchers presented items from the other meal in plain wrappers, which lacked the company's distinctive logo.

In most cases children said they tasted a difference between the two meals, and they overwhelmingly preferred the McDonalds-branded foods.

So little kids can be manipulated. I'd like to see this studied with adults.

Grownups seem more irrational about food branding than kids, to me. People will think that food is good just because it is expensive, or was served in a fancy restaurant, or is marketed to those with sophisticated tastes.

Other claims that Barry Bonds cheated

Michael Witte adds to the claims that Barry Bonds cheated:

Beyond his alleged steroid use, Barry Bonds is guilty of the use of something that confers extraordinarily unfair mechanical advantage: the "armor" that he wears on his right elbow. Amid the press frenzy over Bonds’ unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed.

This is unfortunate, because by my estimate, Bonds' front arm "armor" may have contributed no fewer than 75 to 100 home runs to his already steroid-questionable total.

Others complain that Bonds uses a black maple bat, while baseball players have traditionally used ash bats.

All this is supposed to help explain the seemingly improbably fact that Bonds had his best hitting year at age 37. But is that even so improbable? By one well-regarded measure, Ted Williams had the 9th best year anyone that anyone ever had at age 38, and Hank Aaron had his best year at age 37.

I think that Bonds just outsmarted everyone. When he was younger, he was a golden glove fielder and a base-stealing champ. As he slowed down, he decided to concentrate on power hitting. He lifted weights in the gym for four hours every day. He gained about 50 pounds. He stopped trying to hit to the opposite field. He used the BALCO drugs (the cream and the clear) at a time when they were not banned. He testified that he didn't know that they were steroids, and that ought to be defensible because no one else knew that they were steroids either. He used a maple bat and a bulky elbow guard.

Bonds is the greatest home run hitter ever. He is far greater than Aaron. He is breaking the career record in the face of more adverse public pressure than any athlete I can think of. If his performance was helped by his own ingenuity, so much the better for him.

Mandatory arrest is killing people

The NY Times reports:

TWO decades ago, in an effort to curb domestic violence, states began passing “mandatory arrest” laws. Police officers responding to a call for help would no longer need to determine whether one person was truly violent or out of control; every time someone reported abuse, the police would simply be required to make an arrest. ...

But 20 years later, it seems the mandatory arrest laws are having an unintended, deadly side effect. The number of murders committed by intimate partners is now significantly higher in states with mandatory arrest laws than it is in other states.

I don't think that this should be called an "unintended" consequence. The law essentially says that you cannot call the cops to just break up a fight and not arrest anyone. Every time these laws get debated, someone always points out that if it is impossible to call the cops to just break up a fight, then it is a predictable consequence that the law will deter some people
from calling the cops.

The law should be obviously foolish anyway. 22 states must have legislatures that think that cops should spend their time going around busting up marriages.

Anti-nuclear paranoia

Paul Josephson writes:

Since the 1950s, the nuclear industry has promised energy "too cheap to meter," inherently safe reactors and immediate cleanup and storage of hazardous waste. ... Thankfully, after public protests, the federal government did not approve Consolidated Edison's 1962 request to build a reactor in Queens, N.Y., three miles from the United Nations.

Maybe some of those protesters didn't want the UN to get any more power!

Nuclear energy never got too cheap to meter, but it did become the safest and cheapest source of huge amounts of electricity. The only thing more efficient is the gas electricity/heat cogeneration plants, in areas that can use them. Unfortunately, nuclear power is made more expensive by excessive costly regulation, and the fossil fuel plants get subsidies and avoid paying carbon and pollution externalities.

Why physicians make more money

This NY Times article:

Doctors in the United States earn two to three times as much as they do in other industrialized countries. Surveys by medical-practice management groups show that American doctors make an average of $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Primary care doctors and pediatricians make less, between $125,000 and $200,000, but in specialties like radiology, physicians can take home $400,000 or more.

In Europe, however, doctors made $60,000 to $120,000 in 2002, according to a survey sponsored by the British government in 2004.

prompted some letters, including this:

American doctors make more, in part, to offset the astronomical cost of medical school. Medical students now graduate with an average of $130,000 in academic debt from undergraduate and professional school.

No, American physicians do not make one extra dime to offset their debts. Once they get out of school, they are subject to market forces. Those with debt compete against those without debt. Their employers pay them market rates, whether they have debt or not. Radiologists manage to make a lot more than pediatricians, but debt has nothing to do with it.

The causality is the other way. Medical students are willing to incur large debts because they know that they can easily pay them off later.

Obesity is contagious

Fumento explains:

The basic premise of obesity as contagion is simple: The more something becomes prevalent, the more it becomes acceptable and the more of it you get. In a vicious cycle, more divorces begat more divorces, more unwed pregnancies begat more unwed pregnancies, more tattoos and piercings begat more self-mutilation (er, "body art") and so on. Obesity isn't just a physiological problem of too many calories in and too few out; it's a long-term social problem.

I am wondering if stupidity is contagious.

Study attacks abstinence education

The UK BBC reports:

Sex abstinence programmes do not stop risky sexual behaviour or help in the prevention of unwanted pregnancy, a research team has concluded.

The Oxford University team reviewed 13 US trials involving over 15,000 people aged 10 to 21.

They found abstinence programmes had no negative or positive impact on the rates of sex infections or unprotected sex, the British Medical Journal said. ...

The latest study, which included trials comparing young people attending abstinence-only programmes against those receiving no sex education, raises questions over whether they work in developed countries.

Researchers found none of the abstinence-only programmes had an impact on the age at which individuals lost their virginity, whether they had unprotected sex, the number of sexual partners, the rates of sexually transmitted diseases or the number of pregnancies.

Actually the study also compared against regular sex eduction programs, and even "safer sex" programs, and found no difference in effectiveness. While this study will be used as evidence against abstinence sex education, it does not give any evidence in favor of safer sex education. Maybe they are all a big waste of money.

Smarter people have less sex

The study on the 237 reasons people have sexual relations has gotten a lot of publicity, but it missed a few reasons, such as low IQ. GNXP has theories for why smarter people have less sex:

One reason we might guess that smarter people in high school, or in more challenging colleges or majors, delay their sexual debuts is because they are delaying gratification in expectation of future reward. Sexual behavior (or at least the investment needed to procure a partner or sustain one) may compete with time/resources required for other goals, and intelligent people may have more demanding goals. ...

Another idea is that smarter people are more risk averse, and delaying these activities is a byproduct of enhanced concerns about unwanted pregnancy and disease. While not avoiding sexual behaviors, per se, they are just less likely to seek it out or consent to it for fear of the potential consequences.

Another idea is that smarter people are more religious or more ethically conservative, and are trying harder to wait for marriage to have sex.

Another idea, consistent with popular media portrayals of geeks and nerds (males at least), is that intelligent people actually want to have sex, but are simply less likely or unable to obtain willing partners because they are disproportionately viewed as unattractive or undesirable as partners.

Another idea is that intelligent people have lower general sex drives. This shouldn't be confused with the first theory, where their sex drives would be normal and they have greater self-restraint.

Apparently more research is needed.

Who’s Minding the Mind?

The NY Science Times reports:

More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.

The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm. ...

In another experiment, published in 2005, Dutch psychologists had undergraduates sit in a cubicle and fill out a questionnaire. Hidden in the room was a bucket of water with a splash of citrus-scented cleaning fluid, giving off a faint odor. After completing the questionnaire, the young men and women had a snack, a crumbly biscuit provided by laboratory staff members.

The researchers covertly filmed the snack time and found that these students cleared away crumbs three times more often than a comparison group, who had taken the same questionnaire in a room with no cleaning scent.

More than previously known? Conventional wisdom favors unconscious and subconscious explanations for all sorts of things that have never been scientifically shown. The evidence in the article is rather meager, and I'm not sure any of it has been replicated.

Learn math to learn science

USA Today reports:

Philip M. Sadler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Robert H. Tai of the University of Virginia surveyed 8,474 students taking introductory science courses at 63 U.S. colleges and universities. Their findings are reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science. ...

Using a scale of 0-to-100 points, Sadler and Tai found that every year of high school math a student took added 1.86 points to their grade in college chemistry. Taking chemistry in high school added 1.72 points to the college grade, but taking biology or physics in high school had no significant impact on the college chemistry grade.

Likewise, students taking college biology got a 1.84 point boost for each year of high school math. Taking high school biology got them an extra 1.35 points, but high school chemistry and physics had no significant effect.

And for physics, each year of high school math added 1.28 points, high school physics gave a 1.32 point boost, while high school biology and chemistry had no impact.

In other words, if you want to be a scientist, then study as much math as you can. You can learn science in college.

Update: A reader points out that maybe taking high school math and getting good college science grades are just both symptoms of a hardworking overachiever.

Freakonomics and Freedomnomics

I enjoyed the Freakonomics book, and now just just got its rival, Freedomnomics. Freakonomics is based on the work of hot-shot economist Steve Levitt, who is mainly famous for the theory that legalized abortion reduces crime. Freedomnomics is written by John Lott, who is best known for his study showing that guns deter crime.

Both Levitt and Lott have had their embarrassments. Levitt had to admit that his abortion study had a critical coding error that made the abortion/crime effect seem much larger. Lott once lost some data with a hard disc crash.

Levitt trashed Lott in his book and elsewhere, and now Levitt has had to retract some of what he said. Levitt put down a Lott article as not being peer-reviewed, when in fact it was and Levitt himself was one of the reviewers!

Update: Sailer has more info.

Update: Here is more on the abortion-crime dispute:

Further, in 2005, The Economist magazine reported that two economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston determined that the Levitt-Donohue study was filled with statistical errors. The magazine opined, "To be politically incorrect is one thing; to be simply incorrect, quite another."

Levitt was traveling this week and deferred comment to Donohue.

In a written statement, Donohue did not comment on either study. He instead raised questions concerning Lott's research methods and said, "I am a social scientist, however, so Lott's behavior has in my mind, put him outside the bounds of scientific discourse."

I think that it is a little strange that Levitt uses a spokesman to make a personal attack on Lott, instead of just defending his own research.

Rise of hedge funds

I thought that big company CEOs were overpaid, but read this:

A study by Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh finds that it's not corporate honchos who are filling up the ranks of the filthy rich. It's hedge fund managers. Or, as Kaplan and Rauh put it, "the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined." The hedge fund guys are profiting not because there's been a shift in social norms favoring the mega-rich. It's just that a few superstars are now handling so much capital.

This New Yorker article says that the hedge funds are making their managers rich, but the funds aren't necessarily doing that well for investors.

Update: Here is an example of a hedge fund doing badly. The Harvard endowment invested $500 million in Sowood's Alpha hedge fund, and the fund lost most of its value just in the last month.

Explaining Ohio domestic violence

The Ohio supreme court has dismissed a domestic violence indictment because of Ohio's Defense of Marriage Amendment. I expect the gay lobby to soon be arguing that resistance to same-sex marriage is allowing men to beat their girlfriends in Ohio.

Assault and battery are still crimes in Ohio, just as they are elsewhere. What is really peculiar about the law in Ohio and some other states is that the domestic violence lobby has convinced them to punish spousal battery more severely than stranger battery. I think that the idea is that betrayal by a spouse is somehow worse than being attacked by a stranger.

I don't really agree with the premises behind these domestic violence laws, but if you accept them, then the Ohio court ruling is not surprising. The court is merely saying that if the greater penalty is based on the partners being married, then the law requires that they really be married before that greater penalty is applied.

This court ruling is not an unintended consequence. It is merely distinguishing those who are married from those who aren't, and that is apparently what the people of Ohio wanted to do.

NASA doesn't think Moon landing was a hoax

Here is an interview with the head of NASA:

Question: I live about 200 miles down southeast of here, at the home of slapstick living and most of the folks down there are convinced that the Moon landing were a hoax, and wrestling’s real. [Laughter] Do you have any ideas on how to speak to these people?

Griffin: I don’t. [Laughter] [Applause] I mean, what can we say? I mean, all the guys who were still alive and a couple of the ones who are not have all become personal friends of mine, and in the intervening decades. I don't think they're lying to me. I just don’t. I don’t know what to tell people who say the Moon landings were a hoax.

Weak answer. He doesn't think that the astronauts are lying?! And how is he making friend with dead astronauts anyway?

Bad mom sues rink for neglecting her delinquent son

Here is a silly lawsuit:

Van Dusen is the mother of the notorious 10-year-old involved in the Amherst Pepsi Center dispute. Charles Schmidl and his 5-year-old son were at the center for a mid-April skate when, he said, the 10-year-old taunted him, shot hockey pucks at him and his son and dared him to do something about it.

Schmidl, a 38-year-old autoworker, said he searched for 40 minutes in vain for staff, security or the boy's parents before taking matters into his own hands. He dragged the obnoxious kid off the ice, at which point Charlene Van Dusen appeared and had him arrested.

Amherst cops say witness accounts largely confirm Schmidl's story. They also say the 10-year-old has a history of trouble at the rink and that his family is "familiar" to Amherst police, and not for the right reasons. ...

The plot thickened Friday, with the news that Van Dusen -- mother of the wayward kid -- intends to sue the Town of Amherst and its Recreation Department. She claims that the lack of supervision at the rink resulted in "physical injuries and emotional trauma" to her son.

Essentially, Van Dusen is suing the town for not doing her job.

Too bad no one is allowed to drag the mom out of town.

Companies cannot give H-1B numbers

A letter in today's Si Valley paper says:

H-1B visas driven by desire, not need

It is often stated that this nation is in dire need of highly skilled foreign workers. How would we know that? A recent article in the Mercury News (Page 1A, July 15) interviewed a number of people regarding H-1B visas. Among them were representatives for Cisco and Hewlett-Packard. Interestingly, none of them were able to state the number of visas needed. State and federal representatives were just as ill-informed.

Filing multiple visa applications for the same position or applying for an over-estimated number of visas suggests that the companies first get as many H-1B visa employees as they can and then fill the rest with the locals. Perhaps this is not the way the program should be used.

Zoltan Lukman
Santa Clara

He's right. The companies just want cheap labor. If the foreigners were really filling a labor shortage, then the jobs would go unfilled when the H-1B quotas are filled. But no, the companies are always able to hire local engineers when they cannot get the H-1B visas.

Why do they hate us?

Pakistani-American Mohsin Hamid tries to explain:

The residue of U.S. foreign policy coats much of the world. It is the other part of the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" Simply because America has -- often for what seemed good reasons at the time -- intervened to shape the destinies of other countries and then, as a nation, walked away.

In other words, they hate us because we are not more imperialist in imposing our values on Third World countries. They realize that they'd be better off if America ruled the world.

Checkers is mostly solved

The NY Times reports:

Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, set out on his checkers-playing quest in 1989, aiming to write software that could challenge the world checkers champion. He and his colleagues finished their computations 18 years later, in April.

"From my point of view, thank god it's over," Dr. Schaeffer said.

Even with the advances in computers over the past two decades, it is still impossible, in practical terms, to compute moves for all 500 billion billion board positions. Instead, the researchers took the usual starting position and then looked only at the positions that would occur during the normal course of play.

"It's a computational proof," Dr. Schaeffer said. "It's certainly not a formal mathematical proof."

Then it is not a proof at all. A proper computational proof would have examined all the possibilities, and proved that those really were all the possibilities. It appears that Schaeffer just computed end-game scenarios for some list of likely positions, and didn't prove anything at all about the other positions.

That is not a proof.

Here is another description of what they did:

The Alberta researchers exhaustively checked the final stages of play for any arrangement of 10 pieces or less, identifying which of the 3.9 x 10¹³ positions won, lost or drew.

Next they identified 19 representative opening sequences and searched through subsequent moves for the easiest-to-find connections to final positions—win, lose or draw. To save time, they ignored pointless back-and-forth moves or those that did not turn a draw into a win.

This doesn't sound like a proof to me.

German language is dying

Stefan Klein complains that the German language is on the verge of atrophy among scientists:

By now, English is the sole language used in lectures in 250 out of 1,976 advanced educational fields in Germany ("master's degree" programs). Should this development continue, it would mean certain death for German as a language of research.

German scientists speaking in Germany at a German conference to a mostly German audience will usually speak in English. He also complains about the difficulty in translating concepts like the "long-distance ghostly effect".

The trend is inevitable. English is the world's standard language.

America No Longer Tallest Country in the World

AP reports:

America used to be the tallest country in the world. From the days of the founding fathers right on through the industrial revolution and two world wars, Americans literally towered over other nations. ... But just as it has in so many other arenas, America's predominance in height has faded. ...

And those height differences translate into real benefits. A number of studies have shown that disease and malnutrition early in life -- the same things that limit a person's height -- increase a person's chances of developing heart disease and other life-shortening conditions later on. Though tall people are more likely to get cancer, they suffer less mortality overall than short people.

International statistics bear it out. Life expectancy in the Netherlands is 79.11 years; in Sweden it's 80.63. America's life expectancy of 78.00 years puts it in somewhat shorter company, just above Cyprus and a few notches below Bosnia-Herzegovina. ...

"American children might consume more meals prepared outside of the home, more fast food rich in fat, high in energy density and low in essential micronutrients," wrote Komlos and co-author Benjamin E. Lauderdale of Princeton University. "Furthermore, the European welfare states provide a more comprehensive social safety net including universal health care coverage."

In the United States, by comparison, an estimated 9 million children have no health insurance.

See also this 2004 New Yorker article, and this 2006 Komlos-Lauderdale paper, and this 2007 paper.

This is being used as an argument for socialized medicine.

The obvious explanation is that the USA has had massive Mexican and Oriental immigration. The study authors don't control for this directly, but have an argument that it is not the explanation. Besides, they argue, except for African pygmies, any population can grow as tall as any other.

I am not convinced. Some European countries have longer life expectancies also, but it is not necessarily because of better diets or better health care. The Dutch used to be shorter that other Euros, and now they are taller, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with health care.

Poll shows liberals want to censor political web sites

A Rasmussen Poll reports:

Americans are evenly divided as to whether or not the government should "require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary." The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 41% favor that proposal and 41% are opposed. The concept, known as the "Fairness Doctrine" in legislative circles, has been gaining ground on Capitol Hill ever since public opposition forced the Senate to back down on the immigration issue.

Immigration? The immigration bill failed when the Democrats who control Congress failed to cut off debate on the subject. They tried to get a vote with no debate, and their plan was ruined by a public debate on radio and elsewhere.

An interesting dynamic of the public debate is that liberals are more supportive of the "Fairness Doctrine" than conservatives. ... A separate survey found that the general public tends to believe that major broadcast networks have a liberal bias. ... Even those who are politically liberal are more likely to see the New York Times as biased in favor of liberals than conservatives.

So this liberal push for "fairness" appears to be driven by an attempt to censor opposing viewpoints. Here is the real kicker:

A large segment of the public would like to extend the concept of the Fairness Doctrine to the Internet as well. Thirty-four percent (34%) believe the government should "require web sites that offer political commentary to present opposing viewpoints." Fifty percent (50%) are opposed.

Wow. These folks really want the govt to censor the political content of web pages?! How would that even work?

Origin of the zero

SciAm magazine reports:

The first recorded zero appeared in Mesopotamia around 3 B.C. The Mayans invented it independently circa 4 A.D. It was later devised in India in the mid-fifth century, spread to Cambodia near the end of the seventh century, and into China and the Islamic countries at the end of the eighth. Zero reached western Europe in the 12th century.

There was no year zero. The year 1 BC was followed by the year 1 AD. That is because the zero had not been invented yet. So when was it invented? It turns out that, as far as we know, it could have been invented in what would have been the year zero!

Decline of civilization

Pat Buchanan on McLaughlin Group today says:

The rise of women to power in a civilization is very often the mark of its decline.

Eleanor Clift is flabbergasted.

Ten pop psychology theories

Sailor recommends a fun pop psychology article with theories for:

Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)

Most suicide bombers are Muslim

Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce

Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Some of this sounds bogus to me, but the theories are amusing anyway.

Spinning US Census data

WSJ reports:

Census demographer Martin O’Connell explained that the survey results are weighted by age, race and gender. If a 26-year-old black man is married to a 35-year-old white woman, and if 26-year-olds and blacks are underrepresented in the survey sample, then his interview may be weighted more heavily than hers. "There's no final step to make sure the number of husbands and wives is exactly equal," Mr. O’Connell told me. "If we did that, we would have to reweight the data again, and the data would endlessly spin around.” Nonetheless, he says of the American Community Survey numbers, "They are the best numbers you will ever get, any place."

They are already spinning the data.

There was some controversy over whether the 2000 Census should weight the data for Congressional apportionment. As you can see, spinning the data has some adverse consequences that are subject to political manipulation.

Females bear grudges

The John Horgan George Johnson video blog has good commentary on current scientific news. Among other things:

Females bear grudges more than males. My pet theory attributed this to boys playing team sports, but Horgan says that the same thing has been observed in monkeys, chimps, and bonobos.

The new studies are puzzling, and the old ones on things like the Flynn Effect still have no good explanation.

Evolution by natural selection is a tautology. There won't be any more paradigm shifts because evolution can absorb any truths that might be discovered.

Mindreading terrorists

Security technology writer Bruce Schneier writes:

the theory says that people infer the motives of an actor based on the consequences of the action. So people assume that the motives of a terrorist are wanton death and destruction, and not the stated aims of the terrorist group ... This certainly explains a great deal about the U.S.'s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Many people -- along with our politicians and press -- believe that al Qaeda terrorism is different, and they're just out to kill us all.

The question is whether we should judge al Qaeda terrorists by what they say or what they do. The cited paper says that terrorists are ineffective because governments ignore the stated wishes of the terrorists. (Here is a sample of what al Qaeda says.)

I don't believe in mindreading, and I don't believe in assuming that the stated goals of a bunch of terrorists are their real goals. Why believe that a bunch of terrorists are telling the truth? If they are willing to murder innocent civilians to advance their agenda, then they are surely also capable of lying.

If ignoring the stated goals of the terrorists is causing them to be ineffective, then so much the better. Schneier seems to be arguing that this means that we are wrong about al Qaeda, but as I see it, it implies that we are right.

Bomb ended the war

AP Tokyo reports:

The Japanese defence minister, Fumio Kyuma, came under fire for saying the US atomic bombings of Japan during the second world war were inevitable. In a speech on Saturday, Mr Kyuma said: "I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn't be helped."

He stated the obvious. Not only did the atomic bomb end the war, it saved millions of lives, kept Japan from Soviet domination, and helped keep the peace for 50 years.