Results for “water” 1132 found
Global Warming and the US Economy
Laurie David, comedy developer turned environmental activist, writes in the Huffington Post:
Last week at the G8, President Bush restated his favorite global
warming canard: that mandatory curbs on fossil fuel pollution will “cripple the U.S. economy.”WELL, WHAT DOES HE THINK GLOBAL WARMING WILL DO TO THE ECONOMY!?!?
I wish there was an even bolder bold on this computer to emphasize how
insane this logic is. Non-stop flooding, killer heat waves, energy and
food shortages: what will these do to the economy?
Actually Laurie, and PGL of Angry Bear who links to David, the best study of the issue indicates that global warming is most likely a net benefit to the US economy. Carbon dioxide and greater temperature makes plants grow faster. The author, Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn writes:
Climate change is likely to result in small net benefits for the United States over the next century. The primary sector that will benefit is agriculture. The large gains in this sector will more than compensate for damages expected in the coastal, energy, and water sectors, unless warming is unexpectedly severe. Forestry is also expected to enjoy small gains. Added together, the United States will likely enjoy small benefits of between $14 and $23 billion a year and will only suffer damages in the neighborhood of
$13 billion if warming reaches 5C over the next century. Recent predictions of warming by 2100 suggest temperature increases of between 1.5 and 4C, suggesting that impacts are likely to be beneficial in the US.
Speaking personally, I have undergone a greater shift in mean temperature by moving from Canada to the US than will occur in 100 years of global warming and I like it! My fellow Canadians, still stuck in the frozen north, will be glad to know that in the future they too can have warmer temperatures without giving up their prized health care system.
For the developing world the effects of climate change are most likely negative but not so negative that further development – combined with some modest changes in first-world technology, such as greater use of nuclear power – is not the best solution.
Why do people gamble?
Lucas Wiman, an MR reader, tries to explain gambling to me, using evolutionary psychology:
I think gambling is a result of a cognitive adaptation caused by the scarcity of certain kinds of resources. Imagine that an individual has need for two resources (say fruit and water). Fruit is obtained from bushes which bloom at irregular intervals, and is quickly eaten by other animals after it ripens, while water is always available at the creek. In this circumstance, it is rational (from an economic perspective) to devote more time to checking whether there is fruit available than water. Water can be easily obtained as needed, but given the irregularity with which fruit is available, it makes sense to check frequently and horde for later usage. This applied a selective pressure, so that utility was increased simply by checking whether an occasionally-available reward exists, whether it was found or not. Gambling is then a system designed to exploit this odd utility curve–by producing an occasional reward, a slot machine activates this system. After someone wins once at slots, they get a utility boost from checking whether the reward is there again.
Theism vs Evolution II
Rather than answer all the objections put forward to my theism and evolution post let me state the argument in another way which should make it clear that I am (obviously) correct.
Suppose that God came down from the heavens tomorrow in all his glory, throwing thunderbolts, raising the dead, turning water into wine, whatever it takes to convince everyone of his existence. If this were to occur I have no doubt that even Richard Dawkins, precisely because he is a rational scientist, would say ‘hmmm, perhaps I wasn’t quite right about all this evolution stuff.’ My point in the post is that many religious people don’t need the demonstration – they already believe and in so doing they logically question evolution just as Dawkins would if he came to believe as they do.
Markets in everything
It’s sold as a must-have accessory to give urban SUVs a whiff of the outback. But U.K. officials say drivers who use spray-on mud to avoid identification by police speed cams face hefty fines for obscuring their license plates.
Targeting self-conscious 4×4 owners whose rugged vehicles seldom see obstacles bigger than a speed bump, the enterprising British e-tailer behind Sprayonmud sells the scent of the countryside in a squirt bottle.
For 8 pounds (about $14.50), buyers get 0.75 liters (.85 quarts) of genuine filthy water, bottled from hills near the company’s premises on the rural England-Wales border. The aim, says the website, is "to give your neighbors the impression you’ve just come back from a day’s shooting or fishing — anything but driving around town all day or visiting the retail park."
"The mud is from Shropshire," said Sprayonmud proprietor Colin Dowse, a financial consultant who has been selling the product in the United Kingdom for 12 months. "It contains mud plus some secret ingredients to improve stickability so that it dries before it runs off the paintwork."
But, while the site promises SUV owners a route around social stigma flung by a growing anti-4×4 lobby, motorists of other stripes are thought to use the same technique to freely flout speed limits.
Tipsters in motoring forums advise canny drivers they can smear mud over their license plate to avoid detection by police speed cameras, which photograph plates’ registration details to ID lawbreakers using a national vehicle database. A few squirts of dirt, and snapped speeders would become as good as invisible.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Joseph Weisenthal for the pointer. By the way, this example is too ridiculous to deserve its own installment of "Markets in Everything."
*Intelligent Life*
Yes there is a new magazine from The Economist, here is the (partially gated) on-line version. So far I give it thumbs-down. Most of the articles are about culture and trends, but there is little novelty. I "learned" that the Internet is empowering car buyers, luxury goods are spreading to the general population, the world is getting noisier, art fairs and "world music" festivals are spreading, and the Internet will make "music flow like water." Calling the issue "Summer" makes it impossible to keep current; besides how can they beat the blogosphere for news of the new?
Five books I am embarrassed not to have read
Matt Yglesias offers his list, and Will Wilkinson passes the meme to me. So here are my choices:
1. Summa Theologica: A classic, yes. But I am neither a Catholic nor an Aristotelian. Get this randomly chosen excerpt: "There is nothing to prevent a thing which in one way is divided from being another way undivided, as what is divided in number may be undivided in species; thus it may be that a thing is in one way one, and in another way many."
2. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – This can seem intriguing when I browse it, but then I have the urge to pick up Pascal and I never come back. I haven’t finished Heidegger’s Being and Time either, but I am not embarrassed by that fact.
3. Harry Potter, various installments – I can’t get through them, and yes I have tried the deeper and darker #3.
4. Gibbon on Rome – I read volume one, but stopped paying attention somewhere in the middle. The main thesis — that Christianity wrecked the Roman empire — simply isn’t true, and I don’t find the prose mesmerizing, at least not in a positive fashion.
5. Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water. This is the only one on the list I decided I should start reading. It is superb and gripping, and my guilt will be gone soon.
Some people will flagellate themselves with such a list, others attack the books. The real question is which one this exercise induces you to pick up.
Amish futurists
The title of the post is not an oxymoron. The Amish have been enthusiastic adopters of genetically modified crops. Ironically, the higher productivity of the crop substitutes for the fact that the Amish harvest it by hand. Less ironically the GM crops use fewer pesticides and herbicides.
Amish scholars say genetically enhanced
crops are not inconsistent with the simple life that is central to Amish
beliefs because it helps them continue their ties
to agriculture, allowing families to
work together.
Hat tip to Stewart Brand’s recent essay Environmental Heresies which also contains this insight on a question that has long bothered me.
Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and
“frankenfood” by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that
fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops
from corporations. If the origins had been reversed–as they could have
been–the positions would be reversed, too.
Seth Roberts is Utterly Mad (but in a good way)
Seth Roberts is a psychologist at Berkeley who for the past twelve years has obsessively kept data on himself in an effort to generate and test new ideas. In a recent paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences he explains some of his methods and findings (a number of comments, most of which I think are blah, blah, blah are also included).
Roberts, for example, drank 5 liters (!) of water every day for 4 months to test a theory of weight loss (he lost weight but he couldn’t keep up the drinking!). He also began standing for more than 8 hours a day, initially to test the affect on weight loss but instead he found that standing, especially 10 hours or more a day, dramatically improved his sleep. Eventually, he did find a novel form of weight loss involving fructose water (read the paper). Some of his findings seem bizarre, such as watching faces on tv in the morning improved his mood the next day but lowered it that night.
It’s tempting to dismiss all of this (especially before reading the paper and looking at the care with which Roberts kept his data) and clearly, I wouldn’t take any experiment with 1 subject as definitive. Roberts, however, is making the case that careful measurement of self-response is a way of generating new ideas. Roberts, for example, did not set out to test the idea that viewing faces improved mood this was a surprising discovery.
A virtue of self-experimentation is that it doesn’t take a million dollar lab and a bevy of graduate students, with some willpower and a willingness to carefully document and measure results, anyone can do cutting-edge science.
April Fools Day
The Washington Wizards are 40-30.
But no, seriously, this time it is true. Really…
And by the way, water would not splash on the moon…
Markets in everything: A Dog’s Life
Now it is bottled water for your dog or cat:
Jason, a spaniel-retriever mix, is now the chief product tester for…PetRefresh for finicky critters nationwide…
It’s also costly to slake a pet’s thirst from bottles. With the average 60-pound dog drinking a liter of water a day, that’s a roughly $400-a-year habit at $2.29 per 2-liter bottle of PetRefresh.
The company is now selling about 50,000 bottles a year. And Jason, by the way, is no longer drinking from the toilet bowl (in fact the water tries to mimic some qualities of the ever-loved toilet juice, poochies like coolness too). That is from Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and thanks to Courtney Knapp for the pointer; here is the link, here is her blog. NB: The product is also considered safe for people.
Addendum: Jacqueline Passey (whose excellent blog relates the gripping and dramatic story of her life) sent me this NPR article and clip about music and songs for your dog. Apparently dogs don’t like percussion, or the word "no" in songs.
Are economists better at games?
"In poker, world champion of poker, Chris "Jesus" Ferguson, has his PhD in Computer Scientist from UCLA and his father teaches game theory there. He and his father have co-authored an article on Borel and von Neumann’s models of poker, and from what I’ve been able to gather, Ferguson’s style of play draws heavily from game theory. He and his father also show why the very best poker players in the world play a very aggressive game (actualy, Borel and Nash showed it, but Ferguson and his dad helped translate it for me) where optimal playing is actually to bluff *a lot* (more than you might think), even though every single book out there that teaches you how to play Texas Holdem recommends a conservative "tight aggressive" strategy. Game theory suggests to raise (in limit poker) with your absolute dead worst hands a lot more than people usually feel comfortable doing – but this is exactly the behavior of the greatest, like Doyle Branson, Gus Hansen, and TJ Coultier. So, I can buy that economics and game theory more generally should make one the better player. But, it’s also interesting to note that the world’s best poker theorists (David Sklansky) is criticized for not being able to pull it off in real play. It’s not enough to actually know the opimal move; it takes a certain level of openness to variance to be truly great at poker. So I suspect it’s a mix of heart and head, and game theory can only take you to the water, but not help you drink."
Bad Rap
In his Washington Post column Eugene Robinson viciously attacks Larry Summers for his recent comments.
First, is there a pattern here? When Summers arrived at Harvard, one
of his first acts was to dress down one of the university’s best-known
black scholars, Cornel West, for spending too much time on outside
projects and not enough on research. Offended, West decamped to
Princeton University. But Harvard is lousy with peripatetic rock-star
professors. One of Summers’s most vocal defenders is Harvard law school
professor Alan Dershowitz, who found time amid his busy academic
schedule to serve on the O.J. Simpson defense team, for heaven’s sake.
Why start with West? Was he doing anything his white colleagues don’t
do?
Oh, this one is just too easy. Why yes, Cornel West’s colleagues were not cutting rap albums with Derek "DOA" Allen and Killa Mike. (“In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history”). Nor were they appearing in the movies as wise Councilor West of the last free human city of Zion, or leading a leading a political committee for Al Sharpton’s presidential campaign. (Sharpton helpfully threatened to sue over the Summers-West donnybrook.)
I’m open to the argument that West is practicing an unorthodox but compelling form of pedagogy. At the very least he isn’t resting on his laurels but however you slice it the comparison with Dershowitz is bizarre. Dershowtiz teaches criminal law. For him to be involved in the "trial of the century" is directly relevant to his work and redounds to Harvard’s advantage. Who wouldn’t want to study defense law from a master?
Robinson may be offended by Summers’ remarks but his insinuations are unfair and irresponsible.
Why Do Women Succeed, and Fail, in the Arts?
Given the recent brouhaha over Larry Summers, I have posted my 1996 essay "Why Women Succeed, and Fail, in the Arts." Here is one brief excerpt:
Eleanor Tufts (1974), in her highly regarded book on women artists, presented biographies of 22 of the most prominent female artists in Western history. Biographical research reveals that of the first 14 painters surveyed, 12 had artist fathers.
Women with artists in the family had opportunities to receive training, critical feedback, artistic materials, and studio space. Without strong family connections, women had few means of painting at all…Male artists, who had superior resources and superior access to outside training, were not generally sons of artists…most prominent male artists received formal instruction from an art school or a private teacher. If the development of male artists had been restricted to those who had learned from their families, the artistic record of males would be far poorer than what we observe.
The likelihood of having an artist father, however, declines precisely when training opportunities open up; women then achieve greater success in the nineteenth century art world. The paper also finds that women have achieved much greater representation in "Naive art," (which does not require formal training), watercolors (which involve lower capital costs), and that women have done far better in painting and photography than in sculpture or architecture (the latter two involve higher capital costs and require more cooperation from other people). Leading female painters tend to have been childless, although the remarkable Rachel Ruysch had ten kids. In the textile arts, which are often complements to child-rearing, women have a superior record to that of men.
/modersohnnursing.jpg){kind=link}
Read the whole thing; I am arguing that remediable external obstacles have prevented women from achieving close to their maximum potential. I am not trying to argue there are no intrinsic differences between the sexes.
Markets in everything
I find most of the installments in this series sad:
…the 3 tablespoons of water said to have been touched by The King at a 1977 concert…recently sold on eBay for $455. Then, someone else paid thousands for a "guest appearance" by the cup that held the water from which Elvis sipped nearly 30 years ago.
In recent years, someone paid nearly $1,500 for a billiard ball from Elvis’ pool table. A hanging macramé plant holder from Graceland, complete with a plastic fern, went for $633. And someone else paid $748 for a tree limb that "mysteriously" broke off and fell to the ground during Presley’s funeral at Graceland in 1977.
We all know that Elvis’ fans can be wacky, and Elvis himself has pride of place in the dead-celebrities pantheon. But does that explain the excitement surrounding the Feb. 15-17 tag sale of ordinary household items that belonged to the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? (Related story: Nothing too icky to sell)
Sotheby’s expects to raise at least $1 million auctioning such things as her glass jars, wicker baskets, duck decoys and dirty oven mitts. And some experts think that estimate is way low – that many items will go for 10 times the estimates. Spending big bucks on an authentic antique that once belonged to the Kennedys is one thing, but spending hundreds of dollars for a couple of Jackie’s Mason jars?
"There are a lot of bored and lonely people out there, and this would be their one little thing they can say was once part of a Kennedy estate," says Lynn Dralle, author of The 100 Best Things I’ve Sold on eBay.
Here is the story. And how about this one?
Justin Timberlake…made an appearance on a New York radio station and failed to finish the French toast he was served. The partially eaten toast sold on eBay for more than $3,100.
My favorite things French
I do one of these every time I go somewhere. I’ve held off on France out of fear of excess choice, but here goes:
French opera: Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande is ravishing, try to find the old version conducted by Roger Desormiere. Messiaen’s St. Francis wins an honorable mention; my favorite piece of French music might be Messiaen’s Vingt Regards.
French restaurant: I’ve yet to get into Pierre Gagnaire, considered the world’s greatest restaurant by many. For quick notice, I’ve done well at the Michelin two-stars Savoy and Hotel Bristol, the latter is even open for Sunday lunch, a Parisian miracle.
French novel: Proust is the only writer who makes me laugh out loud.
French pianist: Yves Nat has done my favorite set of Beethoven sonatas. These recordings are brutally frank and direct, and deep like Schnabel, albeit with fewer wrong notes. Few aficionadoes know this box, but it stands as one of my desert island discs. Note that French pianists are underrated in general.
French artist: I find much by the Impressionists sickly sweet and overexposed. I’ll opt for Poussin (this one too), Seurat’s black and whites, and Cezanne watercolors. Right now I would rather look at Chavannes and Bouguereau than Renoir or Monet. As for the most underrated French artist, how about Delacroix? A few years ago some of his small canvases were selling for as little as $60,000.
French popular music: Serge Gainsbourg is often called the "French Bob Dylan," but he is more like "the French Beck." Buy this set for a truly eclectic mix of styles.
French movies: If you don’t usually like French movies, you still should watch Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, Jean Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (a big influence on John Woo, also try Le Samourai), and Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.