Category: Science

*FIxing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control*

by  Tyler Cowen in

For centuries, farmers in Austria shot consecrated guns at storms in attempts to dispel them.  Some guns were loaded with nails, ostensibly to kill the witches riding in the clouds; others were fired with powder alone through open empty barrels to make a great noise — perhaps, some said, to disrupt the electrical balance of the storm.  In 1896, Albert Stiger, a vine rower in southeastern Austria and burgomaster of Windisch-Feistritz, revived the ancient tradition of hagelschiessen (hail shooting)  — basically declaring "war on the clouds" by firing cannon when storms threatened.  Faced with mounting losses from summer hailstorms that threatened his grapes, he attempted to disrupt, with mortar fire, the "calm before the storm," or what he observed as a strange stillness in the air moments before the onset of heavy summer precipitation.

That is from the new and quite good book by James Rodger Fleming.  If you are wondering, Windisch-Feistritz is now in Slovenia and it is known as Slovenska Bistrica.  It looks like this.

Should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Treat this as a balanced budget question, so it's not about fiscal policy.  Alternatively, imagine yourself as a benevolent philanthropist: should you support this area of research if you can do so as a free lunch?  Or should you try to hinder it?

I believe no one understands the underlying science much at all.  But there is some chance that the old science fiction movies are correct and that by time-traveling you alter the course of history, thereby obliterating the universe we used to have.  I'll count that as a net negative, while noting there is some chance we end up with a better universe.

On the plus side, the human race will die out anyway.  Time travel seems to yield a fairly safe haven.  As disaster approaches, keep going back in time a few days, or decades, and that asteroid will never hit you.  This is especially appealing if you are transporting back a body (upload?) which is programmed to be more or less immortal and you can take the technology with you, so as to keep on going back as time progresses.

On one side: immortal life for many of the last humans and thus immortality for the human race.  And with time they may learn how to thwart the asteriod.  On the other side: some probability of swapping universes.

So should we subsidize or tax research into time travel?

Since I cannot reread Heinlein, I should not read a biography of Heinlein

by  Tyler Cowen in

But I can browse one.  William H. Patterson's Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Learning Curve 1907-1948, would appear to be definitive.  The very thick volume one — over six hundred pages with notes – stops at 1948.  It is very well written and engaging and connects Heinlein to broader American history.  There is plenty on Heinlein and free love, Heinlein and H.G. Wells, Heinlein in the Navy, Heinlein and Missouri, and many other topics.

Why all the dead animals?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here's a list of the major cases.  Here is a Google Map.  From National Geographic, here is a responsible account.  Loud noises, fireworks, crashes, and an availability cascade seem to be the major hypotheses under consideration.  Cold weather and poisoning and hypoxia have been cited as well.  Don't forget the dead fishes and crabs; the world seems slightly more sub-Malthusian than before.

Here is Twitter on #deadbirds.  In Germany and Schweiz they are talking about "Vogelsterben" and fog; Schweiz had some previous cases over the last few years.  Here is a 2009 report from Western Australia, no one seemed to pay heed at the time.  There was talk of poison pesticides.  Here are many other reports of group animal deaths.  

This guy thinks it is all a strategy to scare people.

I'll chalk it up to two or three different causes, combined with coincidental clustering.  Is there betting on how many more cases will surface?

We are less willing to help the victims of man-made disasters

by  Tyler Cowen in

People are more willing to donate money to help victims of natural, as opposed to man-made, disasters. Hanna Zagefka and her team found this is because people generally perceive victims caught up in man-made disasters to be more responsible for their predicament and to be less active in helping themselves, as compared with victims of natural disasters.

There is much more here.

*The World in 2050*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Laurence C. Smith and the subtitle is Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future. 

This book is excellent on at least two questions:

1. Which environmental problems remain real, even taking into account the dynamic adjustment properties of markets?

2. Why the northern countries will grow in economic and political importance over the next forty years.

Excerpt:

Extraction industries will favor projects nearer the water.  Looking ahead, our northern future is one of diminishing access by land, but rising access by sea.  For many remote interior landscapes, the perhaps surprising prospect I see is reduced human presence and their return to a wilder state.

My main criticism of this book is that it does not direct enough criticism at government water subsidies and their role in worsening this environmental problem. 

Here is the book's rather non-Hayekian close:

No doubt we humans will survive anything, even if polar bears and Arctic cod do not.  Perhaps we could support nine hundred billion if we choose a world with no large animals, pod apartments, genetically engineered to algae to eat, and desalinized toilet water to drink.  Or perhaps nine hundred million if we choose a wilder planet, generously restocked with the creatures of our design.  To be, the more important question is not of capacity but of desire: What kind of world do we want?

Definitely worth the read.  I don't agree with everything here, but this is a book (very well-written by the way) which should be making a splash.  For the pointer I thank a loyal MR commentator.

A sexual selection model of schizophrenia

by  Tyler Cowen in

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder marked by an evolutionarily puzzling combination of high heritability, reduced reproductive success, and a remarkably stable prevalence. Recently, it has been proposed that sexual selection may be crucially involved in the evolution of schizophrenia. In the sexual selection model (SSM) of schizophrenia and schizotypy, schizophrenia represents the negative extreme of a sexually selected indicator of genetic fitness and condition. Schizotypal personality traits are hypothesized to increase the sensitivity of the fitness indicator, thus conferring mating advantages on high-fitness individuals but increasing the risk of schizophrenia in low-fitness individuals; the advantages of successful schzotypy would be mediated by enhanced courtship-related traits such as verbal creativity. Thus, schizotypy-increasing alleles would be maintained by sexual selection, and could be selectively neutral or even beneficial, at least in some populations. However, most empirical studies find that the reduction in fertility experienced by schizophrenic patients is not compensated for by increased fertility in their unaffected relatives. This finding has been interpreted as indicating strong negative selection on schizotypy-increasing alleles, and providing evidence against sexual selection on schizotypy.

That is from Marco Del Giudice and for the pointer I thank Harpersnotes.

What falsehood would you most likely think is true?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Is that the best way to sum up the question?  S.L., a loyal MR reader, asked:

What is the thing that would with highest likelihood be true if you didn't know it was probably not?  This is extremely interesting but also too broad to get a handle on—easier to think about in certain areas. E.g. what is the economic non-fact that satisfies this, or the physical ("god does not play dice" is up there).

I will try "that the universe as we know has not been there forever."  When I was a kid it seemed obvious to me that the sky and stars had always been there, albeit with some recycling of content, much like they changed the TV shows every few years or so.  I was surprised to learn about the Big Bang, at first held out hope for steady state matter theories, and now again see that some form of constancy may survive at the level of the metaverse.

How about in economics?  I am surprised how little power real interest rates have to predict investment.  I am surprised how few investors can consistently violate/beat the weak efficient markets hypothesis (aren't lots of people simply smarter than the marginal investor?).  And I am surprised that the Industrial Revolution ever took place, after not having taken place for so long.

Your picks?

Catch Shares

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Catch Shares are expanding in California, Oregon and Washington starting in January.

Under the catch-share system, fishery managers set an overall catch limit at the beginning of the season. Each fisherman will own a percentage of that catch. Just like shares in the stock market, the quotas can be traded or sold. The idea is that a market-based system will give fishermen more flexibility.

Not everyone is happy. Larry Collins, president of the Crab Boat Owners Association in San Francisco, is doubtful.

Collins is concerned that a market-based system will bring market manipulation. Under the rules, you don't have to be a fisherman to buy fish quotas, so it's possible that speculators or even environmental groups could buy into the market.

"You want hedge fund managers deciding when the people catch fish? Is that who you want to own your fish, or do you want to own them?" Collins asks.

Collins is also concerned about fishermen who make smaller catches. In Alaskan fisheries that use catch shares, some smaller boats opted to sell their fish quotas.

"That concentrated the resource in fewer and fewer hands. Now, I tend to think that public trust resources should be used to employ as many people as possible," he says.

Both of these features are benefits not costs. It's true that speculation can create bubbles and other problems but speculators also make the market more future-oriented and this will help to avoid the collapse of fishing stocks by making prices a better early warning system. Moreover, if environmentalists want to buy catch shares to increase the fishing stock then I am all for it.  In Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss how we bought and retired some SO2 making the air cleaner for everyone (you are welcome! :)). 

Fewer, larger boats is also a benefit not a cost. Under the current system the influx of small boats is simply a form of rent-seeking which raises net social costs–too many fisherman chasing too few fish. Catch shares reduce over-capitilization in the industry raising productivity (see also Modern Principles on this point).

The main problem with catch-shares is setting the size of the catch, which inevitably is a politicized process. Massachussetts congressmen, for example, are trying to withold funds from NOAA until catch shares are increased. Nevertheless with so many fishing stocks nearing collapse it is clear that some limits are needed. Moreover, before catch-shares are put in place few people in the industry appreciate that temporary limits can lead to long-term increases in catch as the fishing stocks recover to sustainable levels. After catch-shares are put in place, however, it is sometimes the fishermen who lobby for greater limits not for monopoly reasons but as they come to recognize that a smaller limit leads to a larger stock and larger profits.

Here is my previous post, Reversing the Decline in Fish Stocks, on catch shares with more links.

Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.

Papua New Guinea fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

And who are they?

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago…

Here is the article.  It is suggested that the Denisovans are quite distant from both humans and Neanderthals.  Here is the first cut take from Gene Expression.  Here is more, from John Hawks.  And more here.  Ongoing updates here.

Ahead of their tenure clock

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.

Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist‘, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.

The class (including Lotto’s son, Misha) came up with their own questions, devised hypotheses, designed experiments, and analysed data.  They wrote the paper themselves (except for the abstract), and they drew all the figures with colouring pencils.

One version of the story is here, which offers an excellent account and lots of background detail.  The experiment had not been done before.  The abstract was the one part of the paper they could not write on their own.

The paper is here.  There are no statistics and no references to previous literature.  The first paragraph of the introduction is this:

People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them.

What economics project could you imagine eight-year-olds doing and publishing?

For the pointer I thank numerous sources on Twitter.