Best interest of the economy

Jon Stewart asked Nancy Pelosi how he can get some TARP money, and asked about the allocation rules. She answered:

That is a Treasury Department decision, and that's what's in the best interest of the economy, they tell us.

Now there is a meaningless phrase. Since when does the economy have its own interest? This silly jargon reminds of another meaningless phrase, the best interest of the child, also known as BIOTCH. Nobody knows what that is either.

Fat women are less successful

A Scotland paper reports:

Being fat is fine for men in the business world, but it might just weigh down women's prospects for promotion, research suggested yesterday. ...

Researcher Mark Roehling, an associate professor of human resource management at Michigan State University, said that the attitudes appeared to contribute to the glass ceiling.

"The results suggest that while being obese limits the career opportunities of both women and men, being 'merely overweight' harms only female executives – and may actually benefit male executives."

The results echo previous research showing that among white, middle-class communities, women faced "harsher weight standards" than men, Prof Roehling said.

No, it doesn't show that at all. Maybe thin men are treated just as harshly as fat women.

Income in the USA is correlated with weight. Rich folks tend to be fat men and thin women. Poor folks tend to be thin men and fat women. There are a lot of explanations that have nothing to do with a glass ceiling.

Silly quiz about Indian car

My newspaper prints a Globalist Quiz every week. Here is this week's quiz:

Which of these facts about the Tata Nano is correct?

A. Its horsepower is comparable to that of a lawnmower
B. It is inspired by the Model T
C. It is a relatively safe car
D. All the above

The Tata Nano generates 10 times the horsepower of most lawn mowers, has nothing to do with the Model T, and fails to meet European and American safety standards. So I would say that all are incorrect. The paper says that the correct answer is that all are correct! This quiz is terrible.

How to get fired as a soccer coach

A small Mass. USA newspaper reports:

A girls soccer coach who told parents of his 6- and 7-year-old charges that he expected his players to “kick ass” has resigned.

Michael Kinahan says he “meant to give parents a chuckle” but that people took his message on a the team he dubbed “Green Death” the wrong way.

This paper actually shows the text of Kinahan's original e-mail and resignation.

Some big city papers have printed this story, but they don't give a link to the actual email. This is yet another reason that they are going bankrupt. None of them has learned to use the web effectively. I predict that as soon as we have a major city with no major newspaper, we will see a whole new kind of newspaper web site.

The teenage slut gene

NewScientist mag reports:

Sexual precociousness is in our genes, new research suggests. A unique study of twins separated at birth finds a genetic link to the age at which a person first engages in sexual intercourse. ...

However, determining the extent to which sexual precociousness is inherited is trickier than making a similar calculation for height. A common family environment – whether it promotes or hinders early sex – could cause scientists to overestimate the effect of genes.

Social effect
By studying 48 pairs of twins raised apart, as well as 23 individual twins, Segal's team sidesteps this confounding factor. "This gives us a pure estimate about how much genes affect behaviour," she says. ...

Segal's team also found that female participants who felt unhappy and unfulfilled in their home life were more likely to have sex at a younger age.

The estimate cannot possibly be that pure. There could be a gene that causes a girl to be "unhappy and unfulfilled" if she also has a lousy home life. Most behavior is probably partially genetic, but pure estimates are nearly impossible.

Benefits of spanking adults

Here is the lastest research on spanking therapy:

Spanking is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That's the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging. ...

Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, UK, says the results are interesting, but future studies should control for whether participants experienced orgasm, ...

I guess Neave wants to know whether the benefit comes from the spanking or the orgasm. I will be looking for the followup research.

Zoo apes found throwing rocks

This study got a lot of press as a big breakthru:

Planning for a future, rather than a current, mental state is a cognitive process generally viewed as uniquely human. Here, however, I shall report on a decade of observations of spontaneous planning by a male chimpanzee in a zoo. The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included stone caching and the manufacture of discs from concrete, objects later used as missiles against zoo visitors during agitated chimpanzee dominance displays. Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals.

Maybe these zoo chimps just happen to like collecting rocks, and throwing rocks at targets. Maybe they are bored and have nothing else to do.

The particularly far-fetched claim is that the chimps are planning for a future mental state. The theory is that they are only collecting the rocks because they anticipate being upset when the zoo visitors arrive, and that they will want to throw the rocks when they are in an upset mental state. This is anthropomorphism.

Humans might buy a bottle of aspirin in anticipation of having a headache later. Is this really supposed to be analogous behavior in chimps? I think that there are leaner explanations. Maybe the chimps collect the rocks because they want to throw them, and then hide them when they cannot find any targets. When the targets show up, they throw the rocks. No mental state analysis is necessary, except that these chimps like to throw rocks.

The article also says:

The behaviours also hint at a parallel to human evolution, where similar forms of stone manipulation constitute the most ancient signs of culture. Finds as old as 2.6 million years suggest that hominins carried and accumulated stone artefacts on certain sites, presumably a case of future need planning.

I think this guy has been watching Planet Of The Apes.

Crisis blamed on blue eyes

Brazil news:

Speaking in Brasília at a joint press conference with U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva blamed the global economic crisis on white people. ...

“This crisis was caused by the irrational behaviour of white people with blue eyes, who before the crisis appeared to know everything and now demonstrate that they know nothing. I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other should pay for the crisis."

There are areas of Brazil with no white people. Maybe Lula should move there, and see how she likes it.

JAMA goes nuts defending psycho drugs

A WSJ blog:

Editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association, better known as JAMA, can be a little thin-skinned when it comes to outsiders taking issue with studies published in the prestigious medical journal.

Jonathan Leo, a professor of neuro-anatomy at tiny Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., posted a letter on the Web site of the British Medical Journal this month criticizing a study that appeared in JAMA last spring. The study concerned the use of the anti-depressant Lexapro in stroke patients. In addition to identifying what he said was an important omission in the paper — that behavioral therapy worked just as well as the drug when compared head to head in the study — Leo also pointed out that the lead author had a financial relationship with Forest Laboratories, the maker of Lexapro, that was not disclosed in the study.

Leo says he received an angry call from JAMA executive deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa last week, shortly after Leo’s article was published on the BMJ Web site. “He said, ‘Who do you think you are,’ ” says Leo. “He then said, ‘You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry. Your school will be sorry. Your students will be sorry.”

Seth’s blog nails it. It is amazing to read what JAMA still has to say in defense of blackballing Leo for some legitimate criticism.

The JAMA author was quoted in the press:

I hope I don't have a stroke, but if I do, I would certainly want to be on an antidepressant.

Leo pointed out two problems with this claim: the study did not show that anti-depressant drugs had any statistically significant advantage over non-drug therapy, and the author had an undisclosed conflict of interest.

Taking the aisle seat

From yesterday's paper:

DEAR ABBY: Last night, I went to the movies and took an aisle seat in the back row. Two different couples came in late, and each one asked me to move over so they could sit together. I said, "I got here early, and I like this seat." I did not go on to explain ... Couldn't those people spend two hours separated by one seat from their spouse? -- MARSHA IN SAUSALITO, CALIF.

This doesn't even make any sense. If she took the aisle seat, then she would not have separated other seats.

I agree that she should not explain why she took the aisle seat. No one wants to listen to her problems. But she should not complain about latecomers climbing all over her to get to the available seats, either.

Bear market movies

During bull markets, the Hollywood movies are uplifting movies with happy endings. I just saw the new movie Knowing. It is a bear market movie. Roger Ebert gives it 4 stars, his top rating (with a spoiler):

"Knowing" is among the best science-fiction films I've seen -- frightening, suspenseful, intelligent and, when it needs to be, rather awesome. ...

The plot involves the most fundamental of all philosophical debates: Is the universe deterministic or random? Is everything in some way preordained or does it happen by chance? If that questions sounds too abstract, wait until you see this film, which poses it in stark terms: What if we could know in advance when the Earth will end?

Yes, the world comes to an end. Everyone dies. The only ones who escape are 3 sinister space aliens and the 2 kids they kidnap.

The remarkable thing is that no one shows any interest in saving anyone. The atheist scientist and his Christian preacher father make no effort to survive. Most people spend their last hours looting. They are all morbid and depressed all the time, and completely fatalistic that horrible things are going to happen and there is nothing that they can do about it.

Sugar is sugar

I keep hearing people complain about how unhealthy High-fructose corn syrup, and how it is much worse than ordinary sugar. Here is the story.

The two simplest sugars are glucose and fructose. Ordinary table sugar is sucrose. Each sucrose molecule consists of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule joined together. When you eat sucrose, the first thing your body does is break it down into 50% glucose and 50% fructose. All of these sugars occur naturally in many plant foods.

High-fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose and 45% glucose, plus some water to make it liquid. It is cheaper than sucrose because Iowa grows corn and Cuba grows cane sugar, and the USA has policies favoring Iowa farmers. It is easier because it is liquid.

I don't see how HFCS could be any less healthy than sucrose. It is essentially the same stuff once it gets into your body.

Update: Here is some new research:

Two papers in the journal PNAS in 2007 and 2008 showed that glucose and fructose act quite differently in the brain (hypothalamus) - glucose decreasing food intake and fructose increasing food intake. ...

The fact that fructose metabolism by the brain increases food intake and obesity risk raises health concerns in view of the large and increasing per capita consumption of high fructose sweeteners, especially by youth.

I don't know if this is significant or not. It seems to me that all good-tasting foods make me want to eat more, and bad-tasting foods make me want to eat less. So maybe that makes good-tasting foods fattening.

College donation brainwashing

The Dilbert cartoonist writes:

Suppose you hire a plumber to fix a leak. You pay him for his work and he leaves. A year later he calls back and asks if you would consider giving him additional money because you continue to get benefits from the repairs. In addition, he argues, you could help subsidize future customers that would otherwise not be able to pay for his services. Would that seem appropriate?

Now imagine he calls back every few months for the rest of your life, asking the same frickin' question every time. Would you be okay with that practice?

Private colleges do this sort of thing all the time and somehow it seems okay. It makes me wonder what-the-hell kind of brainwashing goes on in those institutions.

No, it is not okay. The college I attended used to ask for class dues in order to fund the alumni magazine subscriptions. Then the administration took over the magazine and made it more officially a fund-raising rag. They still call it a weekly, even tho it only comes out once or twice a month. And they still ask for class dues. It would make more sense to donate to AIG.

Map of Science

Los Alamos brags:

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world's first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services.

According to their map, the most isolated branch is Child Psychology. Apparently people in that field don't rely on much real science in related fields.

Teenagers say arguing is normal

The Boston Globe reports:

Of those questioned, ages 12 to 19, 71 percent said that arguing was a normal part of a relationship; 44 percent said fighting was a routine occurrence.

The results of the survey, conducted by the Boston Public Health Commission across the city and equally among boys and girls, are startling for local health workers who see a generation of youths who seem to have grown accustomed, even insensitive, to domestic violence. ...

Health counselors are specifically concerned with teenagers' views of the controversy. Of the teens questioned, more than half said both Brown, 19, and Rihanna, 21, were equally responsible for the assault. More than half said the media were treating Brown unfairly, and 46 percent said Rihanna was responsible for the incident.

So what is so startling? Do the local health workers somehow know whether or not Rihanna is responsible for the incident?

Britain pays women to make rape allegations

Pierce Harlan, Esq.

Sexual assault advocates in the United Kingdom are constantly lobbying for changes in the law to jack up the UK’s purportedly low conviction rate for rape.

Sexual assault advocates also refuse to discuss a dirty little secret: some women in the UK likely lie about rape because they have a financial interest to do so. The UK compensates victims of non-forcible rape and even inappropriate touching over clothing. Consistent with the double standards so prevalent in this area, the UK does not compensate men who were falsely accused of rape, no matter how terrible their victimization.

British women get paid $15k for a rape, and $1400 for a claim of inappropriate touching. The claims do not have to be proved in court, and they rarely are.

Many people assume that sex crimes are underreported, but I suspect the opposite. When you give people incentives to make false claims, then people will make more false claims.

Getting a bathroom whupping

A Chicago newspaper reports:

Fewer topics are as culturally divisive as spankings. If you are black, you probably call the act of disciplining a child with corporal punishment "a whupping." ...

Schandelmeier-Bartels claimed that after she complained, an African-American program coordinator told her "It's a black thing: We beat our children."

Later, when she took the matter to Andrea Adams, her supervisor, she was again told: "This is how we discipline our children in our culture." ...

For those of you who don't know, a "bathroom whupping" usually happens after a child has acted out repeatedly in school or in public. In this case, the 6-year-old boy had gotten five write-ups for bad behavior during the summer program. A phone call was made to his mother, and his aunt picked him up.

The aunt asked Schandelmeier-Bartels "where the bathroom was."

When she returned to where she left the boy and his aunt, Schandelmeier-Bartels said she heard "Whack" "Ow" "Whack" "Ow" "Whack" "Ow" several times, according to the suit. She reported what she considered abuse to the state and the police.

The next day, the boy's aunt complained to Andrea Adams, the supervisor at the cultural center.

Schandelmeier-Bartels said her supervisor "yelled at" her, and told her to get out of her sight.

"Just because you don't beat your child doesn't mean she can't beat hers," Schandelmeier-Bartels said she was told. "Who are you to tell her how to raise her child?"

The complainer (Schandelmeier-Bartels) was fired, and then won a federal lawsuit.

Pediatricians give bad TV advice

Reuters reports:

CHICAGO - Whether watching television hurts or helps babies' development has divided researchers and parents. A study released on Monday concluded it does neither.

The study of 872 children found no correlation between the amount of time they had spent viewing television before they reached 2 years of age and their progress at age 3. ...

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children younger than 2 never watch screen media, ...

People usually assume that pediatricians have some scientific data to support their recommendations. They often don't. They never had any scientific support for this TV recommendation.

Americans have goofy ideas about dreams

The NY Times reports:

The psychologists began by asking college students in three countries — India, South Korea and the United States — how much significance they attached to dreams. Relatively few students believed in modern theories that dreaming is simply the brain’s response to random impulses, or that it’s a mechanism for sorting and discarding information. Instead, the majority inall three countries believed, along with Freud, that dreams reveal important unconscious emotions.

These instinctive Freudians also considered dreams to be valuable omens, as demonstrated in a study asking them to imagine they were about to take a plane trip. If, on the eve of the flight, they dreamed of the plane’s crashing, they were more likely to cancel the trip than if they saw news of an actual plane crash on their route.

I would have thought that American college students would be less superstitious than Indians. I have run into otherwise educated and rational people who did not know that Freud's theory of dreams was complete nonsense. And your dreams are probably nonsense also.

UK domestic violence crackdown

A UK newspaper reports:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was left ashen-faced at the launch of the Government's domestic violence campaign today when a campaigner accused her of using 'gimmicks' and 'spin'. ...

A poll carried out for the Home Office found that one in five people approved of men slapping wives or girlfriends for wearing revealing clothes in public. Some 6 per cent said it was always acceptable and 14 per cent said it was sometimes allowed.

Almost one in seven said women who nagged their husbands deserved to be hit.

The MORI Poll, which covered more than 1000 people nationwide, found around 13 per cent of those asked said assaults were sometimes justified if the woman was flirting with other men.

Ms Smith said the domestic violence campaign, which is touring England in March and April, would challenge the view that it was ever acceptable to attack your partner.

While they are at it, I think that they should launch a campaign against nagging, flirting, and wearing revealing clothes by wives and girlfriends.

Physicians want to tax chocolate

The Scotsman newspaper reports on the British Medical Association’s Scottish local medical committee conference next week:

Chocolate should be taxed in the same way as alcohol to tackle the obesity crisis, Scottish doctors will be told next week. Dr .David Walker, a Lanarkshire GP, … said increasing the price of products containing chocolate would help reduce consumption and bring in more money which could be used by the NHS to deal with the health problems caused by obesity….

"But babies and young children are on their way to being addicted to chocolate before they can even walk." Dr Walker said the government should look at defining products with certain levels of chocolate in them and tax them extra.

Maybe they should also tax low-calorie foods to help skinny people avoid them.

Do men objectify women?

SciAm reports:

Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske presented findings from a new study this past Sunday, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, where she and her colleagues compared, "...heterosexual men’s perceptions of scantily clad women, scantily clad men, and fully clothed men and women."

And what they found is the 21 male subjects had the best memory for photos of sexy bikini-clad women. ...

Fiske explained that the areas, the premotor cortex and posterior middle temporal gyrus, typically light up when one anticipates using tools, like a screwdriver. ...

Fisk also tested the men for levels of sexism and found a surprising effect those who scored high on this test, "...the hostile sexists were likely to deactivate the part of the brain that thinks about other people's intentions.

This is feminist research that attempts to classify normal men as diseased. Fiske is mindreading the men to claim that they are not doing enough mindreading of the women! Sometimes mindreading is not necessary.

Red state porn consumers

NewScientist reports:

A new nationwide study (pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between states.

"When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School.

However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds.

"Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says. ...

"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

No, not exactly. The study found that a few more people subscribe to porn in Utah than Montana, and other studies found that more attend church in Utah. But we don't know that any church-goers are subscribing to porn, or that anyone is simultaneously consuming porn and outraged by porn.

Maybe people in Utah attend church more in order to pray for their non-church-going neighbors who are addicted to porn. Maybe also some porn consumers would rather have less porn on the internet. It would take a lot more research to show some sort of repression theory.

Failure of low-fat diets

Another big medical study failed to show that any diet is healthier than any other diet. I think that they were trying to show that a low-fat diet was better for losing weight. It is not.

Anderson shows his loyalty

Here is the 2005 SFGate story about the Greg Anderson conviction:

Greg Anderson, 39, weight trainer to San Francisco Giants' star Barry Bonds, was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of home confinement for conspiring to distribute steroids to professional baseball players. ...

The sentences were the result of a plea deal ...

Judge Susan Illston expressed frustration that the law didn't allow tougher sentences for Conte and Anderson.

At its heart, Illston said, BALCO was about athletes who knowingly broke the rules of their sports by using performance-enhancing drugs.

"They were cheating, and you helped them cheat," Illston told Conte, saying he set out to provide sports stars with "disguising agents that would make the drugs difficult or impossible to detect" on doping tests.

She called Anderson's steroid dealing "criminally wrong and morally wrong" and faulted him for continuing to protect the baseball stars to whom he provided drugs.

"Mr. Anderson is not naming names," she said. "... He doesn't want to harm his friends."

So the judge really wanted to punish Anderson for helping baseball players violate the baseball ethics, for not naming names, and for his loyalty to his friends. But she could only punish him for his guilty plea. Helping to break home run records is not a crime.

It seems to me that the judge was acknowledging that Anderson's plea bargain allowed him to avoid naming names. If so, then he should not have to name names now at the Barry Bonds trial.

This same judge now says that most of the evidence against Barry Bonds suffers from the same flaw -- the feds don't have a witness to testify about the link to Bonds. The feds need Anderson to double-cross him, just as a couple of Bonds's former associates have double-crossed him.

Mark Purdy, a local Bonds-hating sportswriter writes:

And so the judge, the Honorable Susan Illston, will have to make a choice. She can send Anderson back behind bars yet one more time. Or she could tell Anderson "thanks" and send him home, telling prosecutors they don't have a case. Or she could think about it awhile. And bet on the prosecutors seeking yet another trial delay. As we all know, baseball has no time limit or clock. Neither does the Balco trial, apparently.

In fact, right about now, the government must consider the Bonds case one of those fixer-upper houses that has turned into a bottomless money pit. But there has been so much dough invested in the project — millions and millions of taxpayer dollars — that no one in charge wants to blow up the house and walk away.

Some people might even be rooting for Anderson at this point, admiring his loyalty. But shouldn't he be more loyal to his country? The American legal system is based on witnesses not lying in court.

Yes, I admire Anderson's loyalty. He is not lying in court. He is not breaking his deal. He is obeying the law. He cooperated with the feds by pleading guilty and supplying the testimony that shut down Balco. What he is not doing is cooperating with a multimillion dollar effort to discredit some baseball records. Good for him.

The feds are the ones who have broken their deals. Their deal with Anderson was that he would not have to name names of baseball players. Their deal with Bonds was that they would keep his grand jury testimony secret. Their job was over when they shut down Balco.

Update: The feds decided today to postpone the Barry Bonds trial, while they hunt for more admissible evidence. I think that they should just give up. There must be some more serious crimes than breaking home run records.

Social neuroscience voodoo

Seed mag reports:

That area of research is the burgeoning subfield of social neuroscience, which seeks to understand the neurobiological basis of social behavior. Using neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI, researchers correlate neural activity with social and behavioral measures in order to pinpoint areas of the brain associated with social decision making or emotional reactivity.

The paper argues that the way many social neuroimaging researchers are analyzing their data is so deeply flawed that it calls into question much of their methodology. Specifically, Vul and his coauthors claim that many, if not most, social neuroscientists commit a nonindependence error in their research in which the final measure (say, a correlation between behavior and brain activity in a certain region) is not independent of the selection criteria (how the researchers chose which brain region to study), thus allowing noise to inflate their correlation estimates. Further, the researchers found that the methods sections that were clearing peer review boards were woefully inadequate, often lacking basic information about how data was analyzed so that others could evaluate their methods.

I think that the trick to publication is to include some pretty pictures of brain scans, and to have some data claiming to find some correlations. Science editors are just dying to believe that modern science is figuring out the brain.

Avoid teachers with education degrees

Public school teachers get pay raises from gaining seniority and from getting a master's degree in education. According to a recent Bill Gates lecture, those teachers with master's degrees in education actually do worse on the available performance measures.

Brits deny that marriage is good for kids

A UK mag reports:

As a result of increased break-up, a third of British 16-year-olds now live apart from their biological father. ...

For example, when asked whether ‘Married couples make better parents than unmarried ones’, 40 per cent of respondents to the British Social Attitudes survey disagreed, compared with 28 per cent who agreed. When asked whether divorce should be harder if children are under 16, 30 per cent agreed, 38 per cent disagreed, and 26 per cent were equivocal. The vast majority of respondents (78 per cent) agreed that: ‘It is not divorce that harms children, but conflict between their parents.’

For centuries, people have believed that it is better for kids if their parents are married. It appears that most Europeans do not believe that anymore.

New caller id service

Here is a complaint about a new Caller ID service:

The service comes as bad news to advocates for domestic violence victims, who fought hard to make free blocking an option in the early days of Caller ID. "I have huge concerns about that,” says Cindy Southworth, director of technology at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, in Washington, D.C. Southworth fears that abusers will use the new service to locate partners fleeing a violent relationship. ...

The problem is serious, because domestic violence victims who've fled an abusive relationship often have to stay in contact with their abuser by phone, particularly in situations where the former couple share custody of their children,” Southworth says.

"The judge will require that the victim contact the offender to discuss where they’re dropping the children off, for example," says Southworth.

Someone is mixed up here. Caller ID just sends the caller's phone number, and not the address. If two parents share child-rearing responsibilities, then they need to be able to talk to each other. Caller ID just helps the other parent return a phone call, and does not give a location. Some phone numbers are listed with addresses in the phone book, but the caller can always use an unlisted number or a cell phone. Domestic violence is a non-issue.

A commenter writes:

If a battered wife wants to talk directly to her abusive husband, then she is absolutely stupid. Sorry. Battered wives should talk to abusive husband thru lawyers and police officers only. ...

Battered wives must be isolated from their abusers quickly, swiftly and irrevocably. If the system does not do that, they go back to him, many times because they think that they don't have marketable skills / enough money to raise the kids or to live, sometimes because religion tells them that they must cope with that, sometimes even because they were conditioned by the abuser to think they deserve to be beaten.

If she made it to the shelter, she calls 911 (999/190), the police gets her kids wherever they are, and they go thru the system. For the night, they don't stay with the abuser. She does not call him. Her lawyer/public defendant/the DA gets the abuser arrested, and the judge will see if it is enough a court order for him to be out of the house.

IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES should abuser and abused exchange words directly. If visitation is granted to him (normally after some time), the victim should arrange for other person (relative, neighbor) to deal with the exchanges of the kids, and should call 911 (etc) at once if the abuser disobeys any terms of custody and/or visitations, because he does not want to go to jail in contempt.

This is women's rights protection 101, ...

So women's rights consist of assuming that women are too stupid to decide who they want to talk to, and using the law to prevent them from calling their boyfriends? Weird.

At any rate, none of this should concern anyone. If you are concerned, just get a cell phone. If someone calls you back and you don't want to talk, then just don't answer the phone. It is that simple.

Advice on proper eating habits

Today's bad advice:

DEAR ABBY: My boyfriend of 10 years, ... Simon is 30 now and eats only hamburgers, french fries, pizza and other fried or carb-loaded food. He includes absolutely no vegetables or lean protein in his diet. ... I love all kinds of foods. What can I do to bring Simon over to my side? -- WORRIED ABOUT SIMON IN CONNECTICUT

DEAR WORRIED: Until your boyfriend is willing to face the fact that he has a problem, and is willing to do something about it, there is nothing you or I can do. Simon may eat the way he does because he has abandonment issues or because he never learned proper eating habits in the first place. But until he's willing to face up to what's eating him and change the way he is eating, nothing will change.

If the concern is about Simon's health, then she could present scientific evidence that his diet is harmful. If she just wants to be taken to fancier restaurants, then maybe she can offer to exchange favors.

There is no proof that vegetables or lean protein are essential to a healthy diet.

Vitamins are worthless

The NY Times reports:

In the past few years, several high-quality studies have failed to show that extra vitamins, at least in pill form, help prevent chronic disease or prolong life.

That's right, there is no scientific evidence that vitamin pills have any benefit to typical Americans.

The only exceptions I know are people with rare medical problems, and people who don't get much sunlight. There is some evidence that people who lack sunlight would benefit from more vitamin D. I don't know how much sunlight or vitamin D is needed. But otherwise, vitamin supplements appear to be worthless.

UK gives bad fat advice

The Half Sigma blog writes:

The UK government says you need to give your children less fat:

Children should be stopped from drinking full-fat milk from the age of two to prevent clogged arteries and heart disease in later life, the Government's Food Standards Agency will say today.

But the very same day, the government of the Netherlands says that children need to eat fat. ... I’m with the Netherlands on this one. They have the world’s tallest people, so they must be doing something right.

He's right. Kids need fat. We have a lot of fat kids, but it is not from eating too much fat.

At odds with the feminist establishment

Christina Hoff Sommerswrites:

For the past two decades I have devoted myself to studying the influence of feminism on American culture-—with a special focus on campus feminism ... What I am is a philosophy professor with a respect for logic, clear thinking, rules of evidence and –- I hope –- a strong sense of fairness. In fact, I think it’s my bias toward logic, reason, and fairness that has put me at odds with the feminist establishment.

State workers are whining

The SF Calif paper reports:

More than 200,000 state government employees were off the job Friday as California imposed its first furloughs in state history to save money during an unprecedented fiscal crisis. ...

Shelia Byars, 47, a hearing officer at the DMV office in Van Nuys, said she would lose $200 in pay on Friday and about $400 a month. She was among about a dozen union members who protested under drizzling skies outside the downtown Los Angeles DMV office.

"It feels like we're being punished because we chose a career in state government," she said.

Punished? Three million Americans have lost their jobs in the last year. Millions more have lost much of their life savings. Meanwhile, California state salaries have grown uncontrollably. The state is spending twice what it was spending just ten years ago. There would be no fiscal crisis if the state would just cut back to what it was spending a couple of years ago. The state employee unions are extremely greedy.

Local papers hate Bonds

A San Jose newspaper editorial writes:

"The fact that someone should write in the newspaper is, I've never failed a drug test." — Barry Bonds, Sept. 18, 2005

... Court documents released Wednesday showed that he tested positive for three types of steroids from 2000 to 2003.

Some argue enough is enough. Now that it's clear Bonds was juiced, stop wasting taxpayer money on trying to convict him. ... That would be acceptable if Major League Baseball were seriously trying to clean up the sport — and if Bonds had come clean to the grand jury and to fans.

The above Bonds quote is true, or at least it was true at the time. Bonds passed that 2003 drug test. It has now been reported that Alex Rodriguez failed it, but Bonds passed it. The feds now say that Bonds's sample contained THG, but no one knew how to test for that in 2003. Bonds did admit in 2003 to taking what is now known as THG.

MLB is now testing for steroids and other drugs, and punishing players who test positive. It is cleaning up the sport. I don't know why the local reporters hate Bonds so much, but I don't think that they should accuse him of lying unless they can show that he made some false statement.

Novel with math plot

I somehow missed this book:

The plot centers on a Sri Lankan mathematician who, dissatisfied with Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, comes up with his own, simpler proof. But then the mathematician takes a back seat in the story as a group dedicated to stopping wars takes center stage and an alien armada threatens to attack Earth. "Disappointingly, the disparate plot threads never mesh," the review says.

Maybe they will mesh in a sequel.

Evidence against Barry Bonds

It is getting harder to defend Barry Bonds, now that the feds have disclosed their evidence:

(02-04) 17:57 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- Former Giants slugger Barry Bonds used the BALCO designer steroid "the clear" during the 2003 baseball season and at the same time was taking a female fertility drug that can help beat steroid tests, federal prosecutors say.

Bonds' trainer, Greg Anderson, was secretly tape-recorded that same year describing the regimen of undetectable banned drugs that baseball's all-time home run leader was using, the prosecutors said in documents made public Wednesday.

I still don't see a smoking gun. Bonds tested negative for steroids in 2003, and the sample was supposed to have been destroyed. The feds raided the MLB samples, and claim to have found Bonds' sample, even tho it does not have Bonds' name on it. They retested it, and found THG. But Bonds had admitted that he used what Balco called the Clear, and what is now known to have contained THG.

The tape-recording was almost certainly illegal, and inadmissable as evidence. It is also hearsay, unless Anderson testifies, and it appears that he will not. Even if the tape is admitted, it is only evidence about what Anderson knew, not what Bonds knew.

Everyone in the SF Calif area predicts that Bonds is going to prison. All the local reporters say the case against Bonds is a slam dunk. I am not so sure.

I do know that Bonds was subpoenaed to testify to a grand jury about whether Balco was selling drugs without FDA approval. Bonds was promised immunity and secrecy for his testimony. The promise was not kept, as his testimony was leaked to local reporters who hated him and wrote nasty articles and books about him. Maybe Bonds lied to preserve his public reputation, but he did not impede the Balco investigation. Balco was shut down. The principals went to jail. The feds got what they wanted. Maybe Bonds realized that the feds were not going to keep their secrecy promises. It seems to me that the feds just didn't like Bonds breaking home run records, and they spent five years trying to figure out a way to break him.

Congress offers job security for whiners

MND Vox Populi reports:

As lawmakers tediously debate the economic stimulus plan, Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California is pushing for change that we can really believe in. It’s called the Security and Financial Empowerment Act – SAFE for short – a bill that she and Rep. Ted Poe of Texas introduced in the Congress this past week.

The concept is so simple, it’s amazing no one dreamed this up before.

Here’s how it works: All you have to do is trot down to the local courthouse and convince the judge your husband or boyfriend did something that caused “substantial emotional distress or psychological trauma” – those are the words from the SAFE bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h111-739

The bill never defines those words. So exactly what is emotional distress or trauma? ...

If passed, the bill will entitle you to take 30 days of emergency leave every year. That will allow you to obtain counseling, seek legal assistance, move to a new house, or, as explained by the bill, take “other actions to increase the safety of the employee.” Obviously a little vacation jaunt to Florida can do wonders to protect you from your abuser.

And what if you simply don’t want to work? Again, Rep. Roybal-Allard offers hope! Because Title II of the bill amends the Internal Revenue Code to grant you a new entitlement to unemployment compensation.

My guess is that most women have a complaint about a husband or boyfriend causing emotional distress.

20 worst foods

Men's Health magazine lists 20 of the worst supermarket foods, and the worst packaged food is a chicken pot pie.

The main complaint seems to be that the package contains 2 530-calorie servings, but the editor thinks that someone will eat both portions himself and get far. So it recommends a lower calorie chicken dish instead.

This is crazy advice. If you don't want to get fat, then don't eat so much. A food does not become bad just because two portions are in a package.

Kids banned from snow-covered parks

News from the British nanny state:

Camden Council in North London decided to lock all of its gated parks because the snow has made paths slippery.

It meant that children enjoying a day off because of school closures could not take advantage of the deepest snow for 20 years in at least four popular parks.

A spokesman for the council said that grit put down on the pathways on Sunday had not been enough to cope with the heavy snowfall overnight, so the parks had been closed on safety grounds.

Of course snow can be slippery. That makes it fun for kids.

Salt fascists are coming

The NY Times reports:

After a string of victories over smoking, trans fats and calories, Dr. Frieden, the commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is waging a new campaign: to lower the amount of sodium America eats. ...

Lowering salt consumption, along with stopping smoking, are two areas in which a broad public health effort can have the most impact on the most people, Dr. Frieden said.

Key to the plan is a gradual reduction in sodium levels. The theory is that if the salt disappears slowly enough, consumers will not notice. ...

But public health officials say there is a strong consensus that salt leads to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes.

That consensus alarms Dr. Michael Alderman, editor in chief of the American Journal of Hypertension, who thinks more clinical studies need to be done. And, he says, wild swings in dietary regulation haven’t always worked out.

Even trans fat, in the form of margarine, was once promoted by health officials as healthier than butter. It turns out that trans fats were worse for heart health than saturated fats.

“Diet is an incredibly complicated business,” Dr. Alderman said.

That last point is correct. The whole reason trans-fats were introduced into our diets was that diet do-gooders claimed that it was healthy. They never had any good scientific evidence that trans-fats were any healthier than anything else, but no one questioned them.

Now they are after salt. Dire warnings like the above come from others such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Again, there is no evidence of any measurable overall health benefit to lowering salt intake.

Unless you have high blood pressure or hypertension, there is no reason to be concerned about sodium at all. If you are on blood pressure lowering drugs, then your salt intake may have a slight effect on how much of the drug you might have to take to bring your blood pressure down to normal levels. If you are in that position and that matters to you, then go ahead and lower your sodium intake. But for everyone else, salt is good for you, and it is silly and harmful for public health officials to wage a war against sodium.

Update: Medical prof Michael Alderman responds:

If such a large reduction were actually to be achieved, however, New Yorkers would consume less sodium than people in most other developed countries do. And there is a possibility that such a big change in one element of their diet might have unintended harmful consequences. Prudence requires that logic and good intentions also be supported by strong evidence that such an action would be safe.

Throughout history, efforts have been made to reform the human diet by changing individual characteristics of it, and some of these changes have had unexpected harmful effects. In the 1950s, for instance, pregnant women were urged to strictly limit their weight gain to avoid pre-eclampsia, a syndrome characterized by high blood pressure, fluid retention and kidney problems. Enough women apparently followed this advice that the number of underweight babies — and of infant deaths, some attributable to low birth weight — increased.

More recently, the federal Dietary Guidelines have been criticized by medical researchers as contributing to an increasing prevalence of obesity in the United States, in part by encouraging people to eat too much low-fat food.

In both instances, respected authorities instituted reasonable ideas without having the evidence to know whether their policies might backfire. ...

Only one such rigorous clinical trial on salt intake has been reported so far, and it focused on patients with fairly advanced heart problems. As it turned out, the group that adhered to a lower sodium diet actually suffered significantly more cardiovascular deaths and hospitalizations than did the one assigned to the higher sodium diet.

The AMA says:

The American Medical Association applauds the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for embarking on a campaign to urge processed-food manufacturers to voluntarily reduce the salt content in their products. ...

A national reduction in the amount of sodium in processed foods is clearly needed ...

The AMA has a very poor record on nutritional advice. I am going with the scientific studies instead.

Women Have More Nightmares Than Men

ScienceDaily reports:

A researcher from the University of the West of England was inspired by her own nightmares and a chance encounter at a lecture to examine more closely the stuff that dreams are made of. Her PhD study has focused on an astounding discovery that women suffer more nightmares then men. ...

Women had more unpleasant dreams than men and unpleasant dreams contained more misfortune, self-negativity and failures.

“Women’s dreams contained more family members, more negative emotion, more indoor settings and less physical aggression than men’s dreams. ...

Men’s dream contained more references to sexual activity.

This was astounding? Maybe she will study waking thoughts next, and discover some more surprises.

Here is some
more research on sex differences:

LITTLE girls may be made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but their armpits smell of onions. And while free of slug or snail odours, men's armpits pack a powerful cheesy whiff.

That's the conclusion of research in Switzerland that involved taking armpit sweat samples from 24 men and 25 women after they had spent time in a sauna or ridden an exercise bike for 15 minutes.

The researchers found marked differences in the sweat from men and women. "Men smell of cheese, and women of grapefruit or onion," says Christian Starkenmann of Firmenich, a company in Geneva that researches flavours and perfumes for food and cosmetics companies.

Aptly named man in the news

Openly gay Portland Mayor Sam Adams had a 17-year-old intern boy named Beau Breedlove. You can guess the rest. Yes, that is his real name.

It is funny to see folks in the news with apt names. Like Bernard Madoff, who made off with a lot of money from rich New York City Jews.

40 false rape allegations against her ex-boyfriend

A UK newspaper reports:

A BBC personality has shattered her ex-boyfriend's life by falsely accusing him of rape.

The woman, who has broadcast to television audiences of millions, accused him of raping her 40 times throughout their two-and-a-half-year relationship.

He was arrested, held in a police cell and handcuffed as police searched his flat for evidence of his crime. But she retracted her allegation weeks later, and the officer investigating the claims described them as 'inconsistent' and 'not credible'.

Despite the lack of evidence, the incident remains on the Police National Computer thanks to a legal loophole, which campaigners say is blighting the lives of falsely accused men.

Even if the 'victim' withdraws their allegation, it will show up under enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks that are undertaken regularly on people who apply for jobs with employers such as the NHS or schools. It will also prevent them from travelling to the United States.

The boyfriend cannot be identified to protect his accuser's anonymity, but wants to make his case public.

He said: 'The lies she told have ruined my life. Yet, while I have lost out on jobs and been left paranoid and scared of women, she has got away without punishment. We're not even allowed to reveal her identity. Rape is a horrific crime, and there is no way I am capable of committing it.

'I don't care how successful she is, she should be sent to prison. Of course, the BBC doesn't know what she has done. But if they were to find out I would like to think they'd sack her.'

Fewer than six per cent of reported rapes result in a conviction, but according to Tim Murray of the False Rape Society, this case is typical.

The allegations were obviously false. He should not have even needed those videorecords that proved his innocence No one gets raped 40 times by the same guy, and then only reports it after the 40th rape. The accused should be publicly exposed and punished.

Teach the pleasure of gay sex

A UK newspaper reports:

Children as young as five should be taught to understand the pleasures of gay sex, according to leaders of a taxpayer-funded education project.

Heads of the project have set themselves a goal of 'creating primary classrooms where queer sexualities are affirmed and celebrated'. ...

The stated purpose of the project - which is operating in 14 primary schools - is to stop bullying and prejudice aimed at homosexuals.

However, at a seminar at Exeter University tomorrow, supporters of the group will go beyond the anti-bullying agenda and discuss 'pleasure and desire in educational contexts'.

Get used to it. This is an evitable consequence of the gay marriage movement. So is legalized polygamy:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Canada’s decision to legalize gay marriage has paved the way for polygamy to be legal as well, a defense lawyer said Wednesday as the two leaders of rival polygamous communities made their first court appearance.

Criticizing polygamy may soon be illegal in Canada and Europe. Dutch politician Geert Wilders is currenly on trial for making movie that is allegedly offensive to Mohammedans:

Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better." ...

The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.

His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."

The core of the court case against him seems to be that the movie compared Islam to Nazism, and the Koran and Mein Kampf.

In the USA and on the internet, calling someone a Nazi is just another way of saying that you disagree with him. Here is a Michigan lawyer who got into trouble for calling judges Nazis.

DETROIT - A federal appeals court threw out a lawsuit Tuesday by Geoffrey Fieger, who claims his criticism of Michigan judges is protected by the First Amendment. ...

"The Michigan Supreme Court emphasized that Fieger violated the rules, not because he criticized judges, but because he made vulgar, personally abusive comments about participants in a pending case," the appeals court said.

Fieger said the judges who reversed his medical-malpractice verdict were "three jackass ... judges." He likened them to Nazi leaders and said Judge Jane Markey was "Eva Braun," wife of Adolf Hitler.

He lost 4-3 in the Michigan Supreme Court and 2-1 in the US appeals court, but all he got was a formal reprimand for violating rules of professional conduct. He was not fined or jailed, and he did not get his law license suspended. I would think that he would be happy that someone bothered to notice his incivil remarks, since he does not seem to have any regrets about what he said.

Only 13 FLDS YZR kids in court custody

Salt Lake City Utah news:

Only 13 children remain under court jurisdiction in the ongoing custody case involving children from the Fundamentalist LDS Church's YFZ Ranch in Texas.

Texas Child Protective Services has officially "nonsuited" 426 children, leaving only 13 left in what was once the nation's largest child custody case. Agency spokesman Patrick Crimmins confirmed to the Deseret News on Tuesday the four remaining legal cases involve children from three mothers.

It appears that child abuse was just an excuse for the state to shut down this religious sect. They should not grab 426 kids to get 13 suspects.

Mathematicians are the best

The WSJ reports on a study saying that the best occupation is Mathematician, and the worst is Lumberjack. Furthermore, most of the top 20 jobs are mathematical.

The methodology is strange. It considered mathematicians to have easy jobs because they sit in air-conditioned offices all days and never have to use any physical exertion or breathe fresh air.

Mathematics requires more mental exertion than the other jobs on the list. I guess that they decided that mental stress is a good thing. Weird.

Bush presidency started and ended in recession

The leftists Media Matters complained that this AP story is not anti-Bush enough because it includes the word "strictly":

BUSH: "In terms of the economy — look, I inherited a recession, I'm ending on a recession. In the meantime, there were 52 months of uninterrupted job growth."

THE FACTS: There have been two recessions during Bush's time in office. The first was a relatively mild downturn that began in March 2001 and lasted eight months, ending in November 2001. Since the first one did not begin until after he took office in January 2001, it is not strictly accurate to say he "inherited" it.

The USA economy started tanking in the Spring of 2000. By election day in Nov. 2000, the stock market had crashed and we had lost many thousands of tech jobs. Yes, we were in recession and the recession helped elect G.W. Bush just as the current recession helped elect B. Obama. The AP story has a anti-Bush bias, not a pro-Bush bias.

BTW, Obama was just sworn in as Barack Hussein Obama. This is the name by which he wants to be known. Carter was sworn in as Jimmy, and Clinton as Bill. Obama could have been sworn in as Barry or anything else he wanted. Apparently he wanted to make a statement that he has a Mohammedan name, and he wants the public to use that Mohammedan name.

But if you give your child an offensive middle name, CPS might take your kids away from you:

It’s been almost a week since the state of New Jersey took Deborah Campbell’s three children from her home and she says officials have yet to tell her and her husband why. But Campbell suspects it has something to do with the names they bestowed upon their kids.

Not sure when she will be able to see her kids again, Deborah decided to break a judge’s gag order and make a public plea for the return of her children.

"They belong home with their mother and father. They don’t belong out there in a stranger’s home," Campbell told NBC10’s Mike Strug Monday night.

Officials from the NJ Division of Youth and Family Services took the children -- Adolf Hitler Campbell, 3, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, 1, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, who will turn 1 in April – from the Campbell’s home in Milford, N.J. last Tuesday, saying only that they felt the children were in danger.

CPS would only say that "they would never remove a child from a home just because of the child's name." This suggests that CPS has the power to take kids away just because of a name, but whenever it does, it stalls for a couple of weeks while it concocts some mumbo-jumbo about danger to the child.

California motorist charged for injuring cyclists

The LA Times reports:

A Brentwood physician who allegedly injured two cyclists last summer by slamming on his car brakes in front of them on Mandeville Canyon Road pleaded not guilty today. Prosecutor Mary Stone alleges that Christopher Thomas Thompson hit his brakes after a confrontation with cyclists who were riding down the narrow road.

The resulting impact flung one cyclist through the car’s rear window and the other to the pavement. Thompson, 59, allegedly told police during the July 4 incident that he stopped his red Infinity sedan in front of the cyclists to “teach them a lesson.” The physician complained that cyclists frequently traveled the residential street in Brentwood and that he was “tired of them,” Los Angeles police Officer Robert Rodriguez testified during a preliminary hearing last month.

Thompson is charged with one felony count of reckless driving causing injury and two felony counts of battery with serious injury, two counts of causing “great bodily injury” to the cyclists while attempting to commit a felony and one count of mayhem for other severe injuries to one of the cyclists. He also faces one count of misdemeanor reckless driving causing injury in an incident with another cyclist on the same road in March.

A reader responds:

My sympathies are with the doctor. Far too often I see pretentious idiots wearing tights who think they are Lance Armstrong ... The fact of the matter is that these bicyclists were riding way too fast and were a hazard to everybody on that road. By their own admission when the doctor told them to ride single-file (AS REQUIRED BY LAW) ...

No, California law does not require bicyclists to ride single-file. The physician should do some hard time in prison.

Kids are telepathic

From today's comics:
Bernie wins the bets. The kids jabber nonsense and communicate by mindreading.

Phony Amber Alert

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

Mark Porter, the San Jose man who was charged Friday with kidnapping and child abduction, is steadfast that he is innocent and said he had permission to pick up the 8-year-old girl he considers a stepdaughter.

It sounds as if they are charging him in order to justify bothering the whole city with an Amber Alert.

I think that the public is going to ignore these Amber Alerts when they figure that they are nearly always false alarms.

Mannequins now have rights

Florida news:

FORT MYERS — Florida Gulf Coast University has suspended a well-known professor without pay following a sexual harassment investigation released Thursday.

An internal investigation determined that David Lounsbury, an associate professor in the Division of Justice Studies, fondled and made inappropriate comments about anatomically correct mannequins during class.

Lounsbury was using the mannequins as part of a death investigation course.

University Provost Ronald Toll suspended Lounsbury for the remainder of this semester.

“The university has reached this decision because you have been found to have made inappropriate, sexually related comments and engaged in inappropriate behaviors that appear devoid of educational purposes or content,” Provost Ronald Toll wrote in a Jan. 14 letter to Lounsbury.

So mannequins now have rights to be free from sexual harassment? Every professor's comment must have an educational purpose? Can he tell a joke?

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

The impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been using literary references in his public statements. He quoted If by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

He also quoted Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson:

... tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

He said that he felt like the main character in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

I don't know whether he committed any crimes or not, but I am impressed by his ability to stand up to his enemies and to perform his public duties. A lot of people assume that he is guilty, but we really have no evidence that he has ever taken a dime in bribes.

McClish waits for DNA evidence

Here is news about a local crime:

Michael McClish will face the evidence on April 6 in the double homicide case of Joanna “Asha” Veil and her unborn daughter.

McClish, who is accused of double murder, will appear for a preliminary hearing in Santa Cruz County Superior Court. Judge Samuel Stevens set the date on Dec. 22 after several delays in processing DNA evidence. ...

The body of Veil, a cashier at the Ben Lomond supermarket where McClish also worked, was found in September 2006 on remote Love Creek Road.

Several delays? The murder was in 2006 and they still have shown the DNA evidence? This is fishy.

McClish, who is imprisoned on an unrelated sexual assault conviction that he is appealing, has been in county jail since his arrest in May.

Unrelated? McClish was framed on the sex charge because the County could not prove that he murdered Asha.

Maybe McClish killed Asha, but I doubt that 2.5 years of evidence cooking is going to prove it. McClish was a married man with a nice family. Asha's unborn baby belonged to someone else. Why would McClish kill Asha?

Why are there so few female chess grandmasters?

Cancer researcher Ed Yong writes:

Bilalic smelled a rat in Irwing's contention that men dominate the higher echelons of chess because of their innate ability. In an elegant new study, he has shown that the performance gap between male and female chess players is caused by nothing more than simple statistics.

Far more men play chess than women and based on that simple fact, you could actually predict the differences we see in chess ability at the highest level. It's a simple statistical fact that the best performers from a large group are probably going to be better than the best performers from a small one. Even if two groups have the same average skill and, importantly, the same range in skill, the most capable individuals will probably come from the larger group. ...

The model revealed that the greater proportion of male chess players accounts for a whopping 96% of the difference in ability between the two genders at the highest level of play. If more women took up chess, you'd see that difference close substantially. ...

So why are there so few female chess grandmasters? Because fewer women play chess. It's that simple. This overlooked fact accounts for so much of the observable differences that other possible explanations, be they biological, cultural or environmental, are just fighting for scraps at the table.

It is that simple? Wow, I wonder why no one else thought of that.

If it were that simple, then the same analysis could be applied to other games. Some games, like the word game Scrabble, are more popular among women than men.

Here is some other goofy research that was applied to other data to give nonsensical results. Some well-publicized research a few months ago declared obesity to be like a contagious disease; you get fat because your friends get fat. This blog debunks the study:

Recognizing the implausibility of the social networking theory of obesity — as well as social networking increasingly being used to explain other implausibly related physical traits and conditions — Jason M. Fletcher, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, along with Boston economist, Ethan Cohen-Cole, Ph.D., designed an ingenious study. They selected conditions that no one would seriously believe were spread by social networking and online friendships: height, headaches and acne. They then applied the same standard statistical methods used in Christakis and Fowler’s social networking research to “find” that acne, height and headaches have the same “social network effect.”

Yes, of course. You get fat because you eat too much, not because your friends get fat.

Apple did not invent flash memory

Wired mag writes:

Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008
7. Flash Memory

When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives.

Huhh? Other companies were selling ipods with flash memory for years before Apple even entered the market.

Is the USA in decline?

The LA Times reports:

Bush presided over decline of U.S.'s global influence

... Bush has been widely blamed for the erosion of American prestige. ...

A vivid illustration of the power shift came Nov. 15, when Bush convened world leaders in Washington to lay plans for dealing with the global economic crisis. In the old days, experts said, he would have limited the meeting to a handful of major industrial powers. But Bush realized that the world economy now has a larger cast of influential players, and invited all members of the so-called Group of 20, which includes countries such as Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey.

A decade ago, the United States might have been able to bring enough economic pressure on its own to force an end to Iran's disputed nuclear program, said Nikolas K. Gvosdev, professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

That's the evidence? It seems to me that this is just evidence that American influence is as great as ever. The USA has a financial crisis, and the whole world goes into a panic. More countries than ever come running to Washington just to hear what we are going to do.

Iran has been unfriendly to the USA for about 35 years. For 60 years, there have been countries with rogue nuclear programs that we would have liked to shut down. I don't see how anything is any worse now.

All my life I've heard people proclaim that American power and influence has been declining. But where is the hard evidence? It is true that not many countries were willing to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, but that is a sign of their weakness, not their strength.

What I hate about Thunderbird

Mozilla Thunderbird is supposed to be the most advanced and full-featured free email program, but I am baffled at how such a program could be so badly designed. Here are the main things I don't like about it.

It is completely unusable if you have a large mailbox and a slow connection. It insists on downloading your entire inbox, whether you like it or not.

The defaults are destructive. If you set up a new email account on it, it will immediately start deleting messages from your mail server. Yes, you can change the settings to stop it, but the defaults should be non-destructive.

It is extremely tedious to setup new email accounts. You have to manually process dozens of menus, filling in lots of obscure settings, and there is no way to automate it. If you want to install Thunderbird on another computer, you have to do it all over again.

It allows you to separate your incoming and outgoing accounts, but it is extremely confusing. Eg, if you setup an incoming account, the first thing it does is force you to give a name for your outgoing messages. It would make more sense to set your outgoing settings when you setup your outgoing account.

Domestic violence propaganda

An Indiana newspaper reports:

In a recent interview, Brown said "on average, at least half" of victims in local domestic violence cases eventually make some efforts to halt prosecution of their alleged abusers.

"It's an ongoing problem," said Delaware County Prosecutor Mark McKinney, who has taken steps, with others, to make it more difficult for cases of domestic battery to be swept under the rug.

McKinney said he and officials in law enforcement and the local victim advocate's office "have come up with a strategy" to pursue prosecution when possible in cases "even if the (domestic violence) victim didn't want to cooperate."

Part of the effort includes police officers who are sent to the scene of alleged domestic abuse compiling much more detailed reports than in the past.

Alleged victims of domestic battery seeking to have charges dropped against their significant others must first complete 10 hours of classes "to teach them the cycle of violence," before such a request would even be considered, McKinney said.

And under a new policy, those who actually recant earlier allegations of battery will likely find themselves the target of a criminal investigation, facing the possibility of charges ranging from obstruction of justice to false informing.

"It's very upsetting to me," Brown said of taking statements from apparent victims retracting their earlier accounts of abuse. "I try to remain neutral. ... I feel horrible about (pursuing charges against perceived victims). But it's also my job."

There is something sick about prosecutors trying to put someone in jail when the people involved say that no crime occurred. Wives should not have to be forced to watch video propaganda on why they should leave their husbands.

Jerry Brown supports judicial supremacists

The San Jose newspaper reports:

Saying Proposition 8 violates constitutionally protected liberties, Attorney General Jerry Brown on Friday asked the California Supreme Court to strike down the same-sex marriage ban, ...

"There are certain rights that are not to be subject to popular votes, otherwise they are not fundamental rights," Brown said in an interview. "If every fundamental liberty can be stripped away by a majority vote, then it's not a fundamental liberty."

Prop 8 did not, and can not, strip away any constitutional rights. The so-called right to same-sex marriage is based on the constitutional right to equal protection of the laws, as in the USA and California constitutions. P8 only amended the California constitution. If the courts really believed that same-sex marriage rights were a consequence of the equal protection guarantees, then they would rule so based on the USA constitution. They have not and they will not.

"In doing what they are doing now, they are showing the world what their true agenda is: to harm lesbian, gay and bisexual people," said Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California. "No one could think it's morally acceptable to destroy a legally existing marriage."

This is wrong on many levels. First, P8 did not harm any gays or lesbians. They continue to have all the substantive rights they had before, as the California domestic partnership law still applies. Second, no true marriages were destroyed. While some same-sex couples had California marriage licenses, those couples were not married under federal law, and they could not file joint federal income tax returns or share Social Security benefits.

Third, if you consider P8 to be destroying existing marriages, then the California Supreme Court has already shown that it is willing to do exactly that. It unanimously invalidated all the same-sex marriages that SF Mayor Newsom authorized.

Fourth, claiming harm to bisexuals is a little strange. Is he arguing that P8 is a barrier to some sort of group marriage? Is there some reason why bisexuals cannot just get married just like everyone else? That one has me baffled.

Proposition 8 opponents filed suit the day after the marriage ban passed, arguing that the initiative process was legally flawed. ... Normally, the attorney general would defend existing state law.

If the initiative process were flawed, the time to act would have been before the election. It is too late to complain now. The people have spoken. (I believe that there was a challenge before the election, and the courts dismissed it.) Jerry Brown should defend P8, just as he once defended the California property tax initiative Prop 13 even after opposing it before the election.

I am getting a little tired of people being called bigots just for opposing same-sex marriage. It is not just Republicans who oppose same-sex marriage; it is also all of the major Democrat candidates including Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Nearly every vote for President in the past several elections has been for a candidate who explicitly campaigned in opposition to same-sex marriage.

Redefining parenthood to solve black illegitimacy

The NY Times reports:

The number of black children being raised by two parents appears to be edging higher than at any time in a generation, at nearly 40 percent, according to newly released census data. ...

The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.

The reported 40% is up from 38% in the year 2000. The boyfriend-of-the-week is not a parent. They have pretended to solve a problem by changing a definition.

Ambiguous Sudoku

Today's San Jose Mercury News (print edition) has an ambiguous Sudoku:

2-8--3--9
----8-4-5
-6------7
--12-----
-9-4-1---
-----98--
9------4-
5-2-4-1--
6--3--9-2

The solution can have 5 or 7 in each of the entries in Rows 1 and 6, Columns 4 and 5.

Real Sudokus are supposed to have unique solutions. Sometimes the uniqueness is useful in finding a solution.

Update: As a comment below shows, I was wrong about this. The solution is unique as it is supposed to be.

Out of wedlock births

Here is a chart of births to unmarried women, as a percentage of all American births, by year. The data came from here. Half Sigma argues that it is leading to the decline of Western civilization.

As you can see, the rate of out-of-wedlock births is on a long-term uptrend, and is headed toward 50%. The percentage is already over 50% in some European countries.

Gov. Blagojevich's crimes

Wonder what Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich's crimes were? He was charged with two crimes:
(1) conspiring to commit mail fraud by not giving the people of Illinois his honest services.
(2) soliciting a bribe by telling a newspaper that he wasn't going to do them any special favors as long as they were writing editorials demanding his impeachment.

For this he was arrested at 6 AM at his home in his pajamas, and released on $4.5k bail. He has not yet even been indicted.

I think that the DA should have let Jesse Jackson Jr. or a govt informant pay a suitcase full of cash for Obama's senate seat, and see whether Blagojevich accepted it or not. As it is, they have him saying embarrassing things like, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f***ing golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for f***in’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there.”

We will never know whether or not Blagojevich would have actually accepted a bribe. He may argue that he was only looking to make a political deal of a sort that is entirely legal, or that he was describing his legal personal ambitions in a clumsy way.

A federal DA should not have this much power. I wonder if Pres. Bush approved the arrest. The DA could have just taken his evidence to the Illinois legislature, and let it decide whether to impeach the governor.

Update: Now the Illinois attorney is trying to get the governor removed on grounds of disability. That is ridiculous.

Corn syrup is harmless

A press release says:

A supplement in the December 2008 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that reviews the history and development of high fructose corn syrup finds no scientific support for the hypothesis that high fructose corn syrup is causally linked to obesity in the United States or globally any more or less than other caloric sweeteners.

Following a symposium that brought together scientific leaders on this
topic from varying backgrounds, including former high fructose corn syrup
critics who had earlier expressed concern that high fructose corn syrup might pose unique problems, a consensus is emerging that this sweetener is in fact indistinguishable from sucrose in its metabolic effects.

Americans consume a lot more corn syrup than sugar because of sugar tariffs and corn subsidies. Some people say that sugar tastes better. Some people also claim that corn syrup is particularly fattening or is otherwise bad for you, but that has never been proved.

Defining obesity in Bombay

A food blog reports:

On Tuesday, Health Ministry officials in India released the country’s first Guidelines for the Prevention and Management of Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome. It begins by making significant departures from World Health Organization definitions for overweight and obesity. According to new cutoffs enacted by Indian health officials, anyone with a body mass index of 23 kg/m2 is now labeled as overweight. And a BMI of 25 and over is now defined as obese — considerably more stringent than the international cut-off of a BMI 30. ...

As the Daily News & Analysis in Mumbai (Bombay) reported, men with waistlines of 35 inches or more and women with waistlines of 31.5 inches or more are now considered obese by the new norm. These, too, are well below the WHO cut-offs of 40.2 and 34.6 inches, respectively.

I am now considered obese by Indian standards. So are most professional athletes.

Obama and the Apes

Even since Barack Obama was elected, it seems as the Planet Of The Apes is the only thing on TV. The basic cable channels like AMC, FOXMO, SciFi, FX, Encore, and TMC have all been showing Apes movies over and over. The original was made in 1968, and three sequels were made in the early 1970s. There were also a few TV episodes, and a 2001 remake.

It is always fun to hear Charlton Heston say, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape." But why are these movies being shown dozens of times now? Is someone trying to say something about Obama? Or maybe these movies had been scheduled months ago, but held up until after to election for fear that people would think that they were in poor taste?

Update: The Apes movies are still showing with the start of 2009. Someone suggested that it could be commemorating the death of Charlton Heston, but he died on April 5, 2008. Why all the Apes movies now?

Why election recounts fail

Here is a NY Times op-ed by Charles Seife on the folly of repeated recounts in a close election:

Minnesota’s instruments for counting votes are simply too crude to determine the winner in a race this tight. ...
Luckily, Minnesota’s electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It’s hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.

That won't solve anything. The loser of any close election will just keep requesting recounts, and then request a coin toss. They will never be able to fairly decide whether the election was close enough to justify that coin toss. It would be better to just accept the first count.

Saife has written on mathematics elsewhere, saying silly things like:

Zero and infinity are eternally locked in a struggle to engulf all the numbers. Like a Manichaean nightmare, the two sit on opposite poles of the number sphere, sucking numbers in like tiny black holes.

College-aged kids are crazy

A psychiatry journal claims:

Results Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year. The overall rate of psychiatric disorders was not different between college-attending individuals and their non–college-attending peers. ... These findings underscore the importance of treatment and prevention interventions among college-aged individuals.

Do they really want to treat half of all 20-year-olds? No, I don't believe that DSM-IV disorders are that common. I would have guessed 5% have DSM-IV disorders.

Crazy shrink

Ever wonder how crazy a big-shot psychologist might be? Try reading this essay by Lauren Slater. She writes about dishonesty and betrayal and acts like it is a good thing. It is amazing that her husband puts up with her.

Dreaming in color

The NY Times reports:

And yet for a small segment of the population, drifting off at night means reverting to a world of monochromatic hues.

Childhood exposure to black-and-white television seems to be the common denominator. A study published this year, for example, found that people 25 and younger say they almost never dream in black and white. But people over 55 who grew up with little access to color television reported dreaming in black and white about a quarter of the time. Over all, 12 percent of people dream entirely in black and white.

Go back a half-century, and television’s impact on our closed-eye experiences becomes even clearer. In the 1940s, studies showed that three-quarters of Americans, including college students, reported “rarely” or “never” seeing any color in their dreams. Now, those numbers are reversed.

This is silly. No one dreams in black-and-white. The invention of TV did not change brain function. TV may have affected how people describe their dreams to researchers, but it did not affect how people dream.

Latest research on sexual preferences

The San Jose newspaper reported today:

Growing research suggests being gay is not 'a choice'

Compared with straight men, gay men are more likely to be left-handed, to be the younger siblings of older brothers, and to have hair that whorls in a counterclockwise direction.

Researchers are finding common biological traits among gay men, feeding a growing consensus that sexual orientation is an inborn combination of genetic and environmental factors that largely decide a person's sexual attractions before they are born.

Such findings — including a highly anticipated study this winter — would further inform the debate over whether homosexuality is innate or a choice, an undercurrent of the recent Proposition 8 campaign in which television commercials warned that "schools would begin teaching second-graders that boys could marry boys," suggesting homosexuality would then spread. ...

"In the past decade, I think the pendulum has swung more toward biological theory and biological causes," said Richard Lippa, a psychology professor at California State University-Fullerton, who has studied hair patterns and other biological traits in gay men."

Here is Prof. Lippa' research:

In a new study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard and California psychologist Richard Lippa extended recent research on handedness, birth order, and sexual orientation by analyzing data from over 200,000 men and women who completed a survey posted on the BBC Science and Nature website. Survey participants reported their sexual orientation, their degree of right- versus left-handedness, and how many older brothers and sisters they had.

Some of the major findings of the new study:
* More gay men than heterosexual men reported being left-handed (13% versus 11%).

This is unconvincing. There is no proof that left-handedness is genetic, or even inborn. Even if it were, the correlation with homosexuality is slight, and not necessarily inborn. Professional baseball players might be 30% left-handed, but that would not show that being a baseball player is not a choice.

It is possible that there is a gene for right-handedness, and those without the gene are equally likely to be right or left handed. About 3% of men are homosexual, according to some surveys. If so, then maybe 3.5% of left-handed men are homosexual, and 2.9% of right-handed men are. That would be consistent with the about study. But that says nothing about whether being gay is a choice, or whether being gay is inborn.

There is no scientific proof that being gay is inborn, and no evidence that being gay is any more likely to be inborn than a lot of other human behaviors. Nearly all such behaviors are a subtle combination of nature and nurture. The details are not well understood.

Even if it were proved that homosexuality were inborn and not a choice, that would not necessarily have any bearing on political opinions about whether same-sex marriage should be taught in the schools. The anti-P8 campaign dishonestly claims that same-sex marriage would not be taught, or that parents could opt out. It is already being taught in the public schools in my district. My guess is that the schools are also teaching that scientific evidence shows that homosexuality is not a choice. The newspapers print such propaganda, but it is just not true.