Doctor Science

by Doctor Science

Last Tuesday, information activist Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading almost the entire contents of JSTOR. This arrest is prompting a lot of discussion about the massive fail that is current academic publishing.

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Paul Krugman often wonders why the public and policymakers seem so deathly afraid of inflation. I don’t know about policymakers, but I know why at least one member of the Regular Public (me) is afraid of it: because I don’t *believe* in wages going up, but I sure believe in prices going up. This is possibly another post in which I will demonstrate that I don’t understand economics.

In a multi-blog discussion about whether the Fed should open the inflation spigot a trifle, Mike Konczal at Rortybomb talked about

a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense.

Paul Krugman says:

That has to be right. It doesn’t necessarily take the form of pure cynicism; it’s more a matter of the wealthy gravitating toward views of economic policy that make immediate sense in terms of their own interests, and politicians believing that only these views count as Serious because they’re the views of wealthy people.

The context is a discussion about inflation — Krugman describes the current situation as

So, terrible growth prospects; low inflation; oh, and low interest rates, with no sign of the bond vigilantes. Ordinary macroeconomic analysis tells you very clearly what we should be doing: fiscal expansion and monetary expansion by any means we can manage; in fact, the case for a higher inflation target pops right out of just about any model capable of producing the kind of mess we’re in.

Konczal and Krugman agree that the Fed should be aiming toward a slight increase in inflation, largely because it means that the wealthy people and corporations who are currently sitting on cash reserves would have an incentive to move them into the economy.

I commented:

I’m sure you’re correct in a macroeconomic sense that Inflation transfers real resources away from those whose income is money and towards other agents in the economy, and that it thus can be a way of getting wealth out of the hands of wealthy hoarders and into productive circulation.

But I think you are *radically* underestimating how much this prospect frightens regular (non-wealthy, non-economist) people, whose income comes in the form of money (wages) or money (SS and other retirement funds). We’re *petrified* of inflation, and we’re more petrified when, as now, our incomes have gone down (because so many of us are un- and under-employed).

Any talk of inflation, for us regular people, translates to making the little we’ve managed to hold on to worth even less. For us to be sanguine about even 3% inflation would require us to be sanguine about the prospect of wages and employment going up.

From your POV as an economically secure economist, this may translate to our fear of the lag time between when inflation starts to press on the wealthy and when they free up their resources. From my POV as a regular person, this fear is perfectly justified — I assume the wealthy will resist, with all their great economic and political power, doing anything that reduces that power.

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DC Comics is launching a “reboot”, for which they state that The target audience are men age 18 to 34 though they do realize that they have readers in other demographics. Leigh at the Hathor Legacy is only one of many female comic fans wondering

why DC is marketing toward an audience they seem to already have, and why marketing to expand their female audience isn’t a higher priority.

I hypothesized:

I agree that this is perplexing if their goal is to sell comics. It is, though, quite comprensible if they are changing their business model, and now intended to sell *advertising*. In that case, a renewed commitment to that elusive 18-30 y.o. male demographic may be just what the actual customers (the advertisers) are looking for.

My idea is that if they make comics more like “porn that bears no relation to the laws of physics”, they might sell highly-targeted ad space: “getcher impulse-driven young males here! No additives, no paying for eyeballs you don’t want!”

And they might be planning to get more revenue from online ads, as well, and using the comics to generate a demographically pure product.

It’s either that or a “cootie” theory.Here’s what I mean by porn:

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I shall attempt to make a brief post about the debt ceiling meltdown, despite barely knowing what I’m talking about.

I’m basically a Krugmanite, because

• I figure he knows more than me
• we live near each other(comparatively speaking)
• our life choices were inspired by the same writer.

No, this is not the *real* cover, this is Mighty God King’s version. But it sums it up pretty well.

Anyway, one of the things Krugman often talks about is the confidence fairy theory, which states that businesses aren’t hiring (despite record cash reserves and low interest rates) because they lack “confidence”. The way to give them “confidence” is to cut government spending; once that happens, businesses will regain confidence, hire more people, and the economy will recover.

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PZ Myers is a Minnesota zoologist who studies squid professionally, and who also blogs at Pharyngula as a scientist, skeptical atheist, and opponent of creationism. He has also demonstrated that he is a mensch.

PZ demonstrated menschlichkeit as the atheist/skeptic/rationalist blogosphere has *exploded* over the weekend. The spark of the explosion was almost unbelievably small, but apparently there was a lot of gas hanging around just waiting to go up.

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There’s been a high-profile debate the past week about sex-specific abortion and the problem of “missing women” in Asia. When I put my evolutionary biologist hat on, the striking thing about the problem is that it happens at all. I believe it proves that human beings do not, generally speaking, have children for the purpose of reproduction. Children are not “offspring” as biologists think of it.

Unbalanced sex ratios IMO occur because, in many societies across time & space, children are social security more than they are offspring. Faced with a choice between having support in old age and grandchildren, people generally choose the support and ditch the grandchildren. From an evolutionary POV, human awareness of our impending old age makes us too smart for our own reproductive good.

There’s an actual bright side to this view of sex-selection. It turns out to be much easier and faster to remove the pressure for an unbalanced sex ratio than I would have expected. If a society has a real, non-familial social security system, the sex ratio can snap back to 1:1 in only a generation.

It’s really hard to find pictures to illustrate “female infanticide”. This is a picture of the Wilis from the ballet Giselle. They remind me of the Chinese custom of ghost marriage, the only kind of marriage many Chinese men can look forward to, given that country’s distorted sex ratio.

Let’s start by looking at the current debate.

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When I was a young ‘un (you whippersnappers), summer was for Goofing Off. The only kids who did homework over the summer were ones who had flunked in the spring and were trying to catch up.

The natural consequence of this care-free time was that we came back to school and had to spend most of September getting up to speed. Nowadays, students get homework assignments for the summer — a set of math problems they’re asked not to start until a few weeks before back-to-school (ETA: the Sprogs inform me that this is a middle school thing, it only happens sometimes in high school; also, there is sometimes social studies homework), and reading lists. The idea — and it’s a good one — is for the students to “warm up” before classes start, so they don’t have to re-learn to think like students, as we did.

I find it interesting to see what makes the reading list. This one is for Sprog#2’s sophomore honors English class, in a very good suburban NJ public school:

Required assigned reading: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston

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has bent once more toward justice.

(by Doctor Science)

from twitpic

As Andrew Sullivan says, “This is the moment that marriage for gay couples became irreversible in America.” New York is too big, too rich, and too important for marriages made there not to be accepted elsewhere in the country. And the NY State Senate has a *Republican* majority, and the bill was promoted by a *Republican* NYC mayor.

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The United States is no longer a First World country, not all the way through.

A meme-engendering 1895 cartoon in “Punch”, by George Du Maurier.

We’re not a First World country because we no longer have one of their most important characteristics: a high and steadily-increasing life expectancy. A study released this week shows that in significant areas of the US life expectancy is no longer increasing, and in a shockingly large part of the country the life expectancy for women is actually decreasing.

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Now that Anthony Weiner has made a noise like a hoop and rolled away, I’ve been able to get someone to tell me, coherently, what he *did*. During the melee last week it was impossible for me to get information about the most important issue, because it was so hard to find anyone who would talk about it. I felt as though the entire news media was playing a game which I’m told is quite popular on middle-school buses these days, which (for the sake of your spam filters) I will call “the P Game”. At least 11-year-olds *know* they’re playing it for the thrill of saying R-rated words.

There was also the fact that news was broken by Andrew Breitbart & associates, and if Bretibart said water was wet I’d insist on getting a second opinion.

Now, let me be clear. For me, the *only* important issue is, “Did Weiner send inappropriately sexual pictures to women who weren’t expecting them?” That’s it. The *only* thing that matters in the public sphere is the recipients’ consent.

“Rooster Rock, Columbia River” by George Ottinger. Unexpected rooster is unexpected … and I rather think the name of the rock is a pun, don’t you?

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While I’m working on something longer and more solid, a few sidenotes on historical topics.

Yesterday’s Metropolitan Museum Image of the Day was this picture:

The Met’s page on the picture (where you can do all kinds of fancy zooming) gives the date only as “1940s”, but in the spirit of Andrew Sullivan’s View from Your Window Contest, I wondered if I could narrow it down much, much further.

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Hilzoy appeared in the comments to the previous post, saying

Wrong of me to say "it would be a mistake", just like that. I was responding on TNC’s thread, and should have said (what I meant): it would be a mistake not to read him because of what you see on this blog", which is what the person I was responding to said s/he was planning to do. I don’t think, and should not have implied, that there is any such thing as a book that’s good for everyone. (Personally, I am allergic to Wordsworth. I am reliably informed that I shouldn’t be, but there we are.)

Fair enough.

A Trinidadian friend told me that many people in Trinidad no longer read Naipaul’s books after his visit to the country in 2007, where he insulted and publicly humiliated schoolchildren who had been invited to a Q&A with him. At least some Trinidadian schools no longer have Naipaul on the high school reading list — in his tirade he said that literature is for adults, not children, anyway.

Derek Walcott, who numerous commenters at that Trinidad&Tobago News site mentioned as someone who they can respect whole-heartedly, wrote a poem, The Mongoose, expressing his view of Naipaul:

After its gift had died and off the page its biles exude the stench
of envy, "la pourriture" in French
cursed its first breath for being Trinidadian
then wrote the same piece for the English Guardian
Once he liked humans, how long ago this was
The mongoose wrote "A House for Mr Biswas"

Textile art by Clara Applewhaite-Mitchell, of Trinidad and NJ.

I could write about how knowing things about the author changes (or doesn’t) how we view a text, but I just don’t feel like it right now, it involves too much talking about people’s failings. Feel free to discuss in comments, but for the moment I want to talk about authors and authority.

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It’s not often that I disagree with either hilzoy or Ta-Nehesi Coates, and rarer still for me to disagree with both of them at once, but today I do.

The source describes this as “1892 woman writing impressionist painting”, but I haven’t been able to figure out who it’s by. It’s in the style of Gauguin, but I can’t find it in any of the Gauguin archives online.

Backstory: V.S. Naipaul, Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian writer, is known to be a giant, flaming dick. In an interview this week

Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

He felt that women writers were “quite different”. He said: “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me.”

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women’s “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”. “And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too,” he said.I don’t see that there’s any doubt about which body part to compare him to.

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Stephen Bridenstine is a grad student at the University of British Columbia studying the image of Indians (aka Native Americans) in non-Native American culture. He noticed (h/t Sociological Images):

Sometime between the first week of February and the last week of May, American Indian reservations disappeared from Google Maps!

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Since my last post here about Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam’s A Billion Wicked Thoughts we’ve had more Fun Times together. Some of the ensuing discussions have been very helpful for me in clarifying things I "just know", and in spotting the problems with some of other people’s conventional wisdom: for instance, that men are "sexually more visual" than women.

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It’s going to be another very, very bad weather day in the Midwest:

From the National Weather Service.

Specifically:

From Weather.com; more details there.

If you are in the zone, please make sure you are never more than 15 minutes from a solid, preferably underground tornado shelter this afternoon. Monitor local TV/radio closely! And when the sky gets that sickly greenish color, you know what to do. I did part of my growing-up in Champaign-Urbana, IL, and I’ve never forgotten what tornado weather looks like.

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So, it’s Rapture Weekend! As Fred Clark says at slactivist, it’s not altogether all that funny — the people who really believe are truly suffering, and worse is to come. The formula is clear: half will despair, and half will double down.

A lot of people are posting links to their favorite “end of the world” songs today, and here’s my nominee:

at YouTube
By chagrined, using audio from Great Big Sea’s version of “It’s the End of the World”, video from “Life After People”. Even if all us humans disappear tomorrow, there’s plenty of life to go on.

If you don’t believe the Rapture will happen real soon now, it behooves you to listen to Real Climate Scientists warning that “Earth, unlike Alien, has no sequel”:

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by Doctor Science

In which I follow up some of the discussion in the comments to The Women Men Don’t See, for once disagree with Fred Clark (slacktivist), and talk about sluts and the walk of not-shame.

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As you may have heard, last week a Brooklyn Chasidic Jewish newspaper, Der Tzeitung, printed the iconic “Situation Room” photo with the women carefully Photoshopped out:

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In my earlier post about the ‘obesity epidemic’ I talked about Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. This book really changed my thinking about a number of aspects of food, cooking, and human evolution, but the very best part about it is what Wrangham says about BCBs.

BCBs, as every reader of Terry Pratchett knows, are Burnt Crunchy Bits.

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This vid, a celebration of (shall we say) a certain lifestyle with which I am familiar, is just starting to go viral:

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

What’s kind of boggling to me is how good the editing and special effects are for something with little money behind it, and how bland and repulsive the high-end pro video it’s parodying seems by comparison:

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What many, many of us (myself included) imagine when we hear the word “royalty”:

Via: Screen Rant

The reality:

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I’ll get back to some of the topics I’ve kind of left dangling, but first I need to put up a review of Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, And Warfare in a Transformative Age by William Wayne Farris before Inter Library Loan wants it back.

This is what I think of Inter Library Loan, btw:

this image taken, by me, from Dürer’s "Triumphal Chariot of Maximilian I". (I got distracted into putting together a better version of the whole thing, but I’ll post about that later. I digress.)

Japan’s Medieval Population is just the sort of history book I love. It’s a broad, rapid tour through material I knew basically nothing about, but with a framework I’m very familiar with. Farris uses crucial principles from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, which is one of the books that’s shaped my thinking, as well.

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A few months ago, I read Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. Wrangham marshals many lines of very good evidence to argue that humans are physically adapted to cooked food. One unexplored prediction of his theory is that, when proto-humans starting eating cooked food, they must have experienced a true "obesity epidemic".

I’m cutting this because discussions of weight, etc., are so fraught.

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The Public Religion Research Institute’s recent report, Catholic Attitudes on Gay and Lesbian Issues (pdf) was widely linked — I heard about it from Andrew Sullivan first, IIRC.

As someone raised (mostly) Catholic who has many, many Catholic relatives, I was all fired up to love this report. Alas, I believe it to be meaningless — or at least, to not have the meaning ascribed to it by the authors, Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox.

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Yesterday President Obama ordered the Justice Department to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act. In honor of the occasion, I decided to read the copy of What Is Marriage? by Robert George (and two male grad students) I’d downloaded when I saw various people talking about it as a serious, intellectual defense of the DOMA position. Robert George is a Princeton politics full professor who is supposed to bring the big guns in conservative thought, a guy who can argue for natural law like a latter-day Aquinas. Or so they tell me.

Now I’ve read it, and if this is the best they’ve got, no wonder the Traditional Marriage people are in trouble. No wonder the defense in the trial against California’s Proposition 8 was unable to field a single witness the Judge found “expert”. This paper is, technically speaking, bunk.

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This post is about the attack on Lara Logan, and rape as a weapon of war and policy.

Summary: Sexualized violence, rape, and even gang rape are not just signs of bestiality, barbarism, or boys inevitably being boys: they can be military and police tactics, and they are part of the toolbox of U.S. as well as Egyptian military/intelligence forces.

SERIOUS TRIGGER AND RAGE WARNING.

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