September 2005 Archives

Lest anyone think American politics is exceptionally corrupt, take a look at the vote-buying scandal undermining Brazil's ruling party.

Now, even the modestly progressive elements of these reforms have now been overshadowed by the corruption scandals that exploded in June 2005 after a revelatory TV interview by a member of congress from a small party allied to the PT, Roberto Jefferson (who has himself fallen victim to the process he unleashed). It is generally admitted that the cúpula (group at the top) of the PT bribed political parties of the right to join their parliamentary alliance and gave monthly payments to congressmen of the right to support their legislation.

The corruption extended also to the PT's strategy for winning the 2002 election. This, it turns out, was based on a secret slush fund or caixa dois (literally "a second cash till") sourced by donations from businesses contracted by PT municipal governments, public companies and private companies seeking government contacts. The publicist responsible for Lula's 2002 advertising campaign admitted he had received money from these PT funds through an illegal account held by the PT in the Bahamas.

Despite the ethics problems of our representatives, if anything they may be far more honest than the politicians plaguing the rest of the world. For Brazil, corruption is a way of life that reaches back centuries.

As a result of this tradition of corruption, people in Brazil seem to have become quite lax about the problem. In fact, there are politicians who have been re-elected after many evidences of corrupt behaviour. On certain occasions it seems that corruption has even enhanced the popularity of the politician.

This might be true for the case of Adhemar de Barros, the governor of São Paulo in the 1950s and 1960s. Voters knew that he liked very much to steal public money, but kept voting on Barros for considering him a 'generous' leader for themselves. Believe it or not, the slogan of Governor Barros during his political campaigns was 'Rouba Mas Faz' ("He Steals but He Makes Things Happen"). ...

In another and more recent scandal, the Workers' Party (PT) has been found paying bribes to members of other political parties in return for their votes in Congress. The case started being unveiled when a political appointee who works at the postal service was filmed telling two bogus businessmen that they could win public contracts by paying bribes to Roberto Jefferson, the parliamentary leader of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB).

In an attempt to deviate the attention of the media from himself, Jefferson ended up disclosing another and more serious scandal. On June 15, 2005, he told a congressional ethics' committee that the PT was paying a monthly allowance of US$ 12 thousand to some parliamentarians, in return for their support to government-sponsored law proposals. If the allegation is confirmed, as it has been on an almost daily basis, the PT government has built a 'de facto' parliamentary majority by means of bribery.

Fascinatingly dysfunctional.

It looks like the Simputer is facing some American competition in the ultra-low-cost computing market.

One man in Boston has a plan that he hopes will bridge the world's gaping digital divide - and quickly. The visionary is Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his idea consists of a new kind of laptop computer that will cost just $100 (£57) to buy. ...

In fact, he expects to churn out about 15 million of them within one year, shipping most of them at first to children in Brazil, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa.

Describing the unusual design of his sub-laptop yesterday, Mr Negroponte insisted that it would "have to be absolutely indestructible". The mission is to create a tool that children almost anywhere can use and can easily carry between their classrooms and their homes. For that reason, for instance, the AC adaptor cable will double as a shoulder strap.

Few things will improve the quality of life around the world more than cheap computing.

Bill Bennett is in trouble for suggesting that, although it would be "morally reprehensible", aborting more black babies would reduce crime.

"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down," said Bennett, author of "The Book of Virtues."

He went on to call that "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Interestingly, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, specifically saw blacks as "unfit" and argued that they should be prevented from reproducing, "by force if necessary".

Planned Parenthood’s founder and matriarch, Margaret Sanger in the 1930s ingeniously promoted her ideology that the "unfit" should be prevented from reproducing, "by force if necessary." Since the economic plight of many Blacks placed them and their families in the position of living in an environment that Sanger believed breed "unfit" individuals, her organization zeroed in on the "Negro" population. Establishing the "Negro Project," Sanger and her cohorts set out to push their birth control agenda which as she writes "is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives" (The Pivot of Civilization written by M. Sanger)

In November 1939 a "Negro Project" leader feared that the project would be in "a great danger" of failing because "the Negroes think it a plan for extermination." Therefore, "let’s appear to let the colored run it ...." (Gamble memo "Suggestions for Negro Project" excerpted from pamphlet issued by the African American Committee, A.L.L.) Sanger later wrote him back saying, "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population ..." She goes on saying that use of the Negro minister would effectively "straighten ... any rebellious members." (Letter from Sanger to Gamble, excerpted from pamphlet issued by the African American Committee, A.L.L.) "With social service backgrounds, and engaging personalities" the "hired ... Colored Ministers" would "propagandized for birth control ... "through a religious appeal." To help maintain control, the colored ministerial staff would be carefully controlled. "A project director lamented ‘I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with ... a clinic. Our experience causes us to doubt their ability to work except under White supervision’." Through her Negro Advisory Council, Sanger’s dream of discouraging "the defective and diseased elements of humanity" from their "reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning" has been successful. (Excerpts from Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood)

The difference is that Mrs. Sanger didn't find the idea morally reprehensible, but laudible.

Israeli politicians are warning the West that Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons. Their fear is pretty rational, considering that many Iranian mullahs have openly called for nuclear strikes against Israel. From 2001:

One of Iran’s most influential ruling cleric called Friday on the Muslim states to use nuclear weapon against Israel, assuring them that while such an attack would annihilate Israel, it would cost them "damages only".

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world", Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in Tehran.

He's wrong though, of course, because the first time Muslims use nuclear weapons will also be the last.

Further, the US might be playing good-cop/bad-cop with Iran, casting Israel as the bad cop. The Muslims hate Israel more than the US already, so if someone has to take action it may as well be them. Afterwards the US can step in, protect Israel, and try to cool the situation down. This sort of strategy gets more difficult as the Islamic world starts to hate America more and more.

Here's my take on how you should vote on the various propositions that will be on the ballot in November, 2005.

Yes! on Proposition 73 -- Waiting Period and Parental Notification Before Termination of Minor's Pregnancy. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Yes! on Proposition 74 -- Public School Teachers. Waiting Period for Permanent Status. Dismissal. Initiative Statute.

Yes! on Proposition 75 -- Public Employee Union Dues. Restrictions on Political Contributions. Employee Consent Requirement. Initiative Statute.

Yes! on Proposition 76 -- State Spending and School Funding Limits. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Yes! on Proposition 77 -- Redistricting. Initiative Constitutional Amendment.

Soft yes on Proposition 78 -- Discounts on Prescription Drugs. Initiative Statute.

Soft no on Proposition 79 -- Prescription Drug Discounts. State-Negotiated Rebates. Initiative Statute.

Both 78 and 79 look confusing and bloated, I doubt we need either.

No! on Proposition 80 -- Electric Service Providers. Regulation. Initiative Statute.

What does it say about our society when these three women are mentioned in the same paragraph?

Angelina, Condoleezza and Hillary combined their considerable star power Wednesday night to cast a spotlight on the international effort to fight HIV and AIDS.

For one night, the campaign against HIV trumped the buzz over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's re-election bid, speculation over whether Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will run for president, even gossip about actress Angelina Jolie's relationship with Brad Pitt.

First off, isn't calling them all by their first names a little diminutive? Secondly, society is pretty screwy when two of the most accomplished women of our times have to share a stage with someone who makes her living by playing pretend and has been otherwise described as couch-like.

At least this illegal immigrant really wanted to learn English, unlike many legal immigrants. How long till America falls behind the rest of the world in speaking our own language? I'm all for legal immigration, but is really too much to ask that immigrants learn English?

Doug Kern explains why he thinks he washed out of engineering school, but while criticising his teachers (often justly) I think he too-hastily dismisses what may have been the real reason for his failure.

I am an engineering washout. I left a chemical engineering major in shame and disgust to pursue the softer pleasures of a liberal arts education. No, do not pity me, gentle reader; do not assuage your horror and dismay at my degradation by flinging a filthy quarter into my shiny tin cup. Instead, hear my story, and learn why the United States lacks engineers.

Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science. You will have cause to forget that fact very soon.

Being "real good" at math and science isn't the most important thing for engineers. I know engineers who are brilliant mathematicians, but many aren't. I've taken years and years of calculus, but whenever I have to apply it to a difficult problem I need to scour the internet for pointers. As for science, most science classes are just memorization.

As Clayton Cramer recently wrote, it takes more to succeed as an engineer than just intelligence.

When my wife and I first met, she asked me what I did for a living. I explained that I was a software engineer. She was impressed, and assumed that it was a very difficult job, requiring exceptional skill. I told her that I thought you could almost teach chimpanzees to do it. I was exaggerating for dramatic effect, but my perception was that the skills that I had were really very widespread.

I've since found out that not ony can't you teach chimps to do this, you can't even teach a lot of very smart people to do this. My wife is a very bright, very thoughtful, very logical person. With my encouragement, she took a programming class when she was attending Santa Rosa Junior College. For reasons that I could not understand, this very smart woman that I am married to just didn't get it--and I've discovered that she is not alone in this respect. It is apparently somewhat harder to learn how to program, at even a very simple level, than I realized.

... Most important of all, from the standpoint of wage rates, most people seem to lack something fundamental that allows them to be effective software engineers. They may be able to write simple programs--or even write programs that should have been simple, and turn them into steaming piles of incomprehensible crud--but they will never be a software engineer. Hence, wage rates are pretty darn good for this line of work.

Engineering requires a certain attitude: a morbid cynicism mitigated by can-do; deep curiosity with ruthless practicality. Most people don't have it. As an engineer myself, I think it's pretty fun, and I wish more people thought like engineers... we might not end up with so many stupid messes. But then again, most artists wish others thought like them; it takes all kinds.

Mr. Kern goes on to lament what sounds like a rather pathetic engineering school at Smartypants U., but I don't think his experiences are atypical in America or abroad. The qualities that make for good engineers are often orthogonal to those that make for good teachers, which makes such combinations rare. The result is that most engineers, even highly-educated ones, are significantly self-taught; a person who can't bootstrap himself into engineering probably won't make a good engineer. Many of the best engineers I've known, however, weren't engineers by training or profession.

NASA chief Michael Griffin made a startling admission yesterday, echoing what many private space pundits have been arguing for years (including myself): the Space Shuttle program was a mistake.

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

In a meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board, Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

“It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path,” Griffin said. “We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.”

As many have argued, the right path is for the government bureaucracy to open up space to private industry, and to encourage innovation and exploration through the use of prize money. If space is worth exploring but isn't yet profitable, prizes are the most efficient form of subsidy possible because they prevent the government from picking the recipients and they allow market forces to choose the methods.

JV sends along a link to The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. In short:

1. "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation."

Similarly, P. T. Barnum once said, "You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

2. "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

The main problem I have with the second law is that it doesn't admit that self-selected groups may contain a disproportionate number of stupid people.

This idea was hard to accept and digest but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women's Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionately as numerous among men as among women. The underdeveloped of the Third World will probably take solace at the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the Law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the head-hunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself into a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people - which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.

There's a difference between the group of headhunters and the group of monks: headhunters don't normally make a decision to join their group, they're just born into it, whereas monks do. And stupid people are, obviously, inclined to join stupid groups. In fact, I'd argue that the Second Law is fundamentally wrong-headed, since membership in a destructive, stupid, self-selected group is one of the best ways to identify stupid people before they can hurt you.

3. "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."

That's a pretty good definition. The author (Carlo M. Cipolla) also defines three other types of people: bandits, who help themselves while hurting others; helpless people, who hurt themselves and help others; and intelligent people who, who help others while helping themselves.

4. "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

5. "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person."

PZ Myers misconstrues Mark Steyn's appreciation for small differences and goes on to argue both that small differences are of little significance, and that small differences illustrate that mankind does not rule the planet.

[PZ Myers is quoting Mark Steyn, but with a link that no longer points to the source material.]

Well, I dunno whether it's right-wing rubbish, and I'm not much into the intelligent-design debate. My view on genetics and evolution was stated in my Crick obituary for The Atlantic. Some geneticist had pointed out that man (and woman, oops) is 89% identical to the pumpkin. If that's so, then clearly it's the 11% difference that's key, not the 89% similarity. Likewise, with our 98% or whatever identity with the ape. The remaining one or two per cent is so awesome in its difference as to make you wonder whether a scale of measurement that produces those percentages is really terribly useful. The fact is that this is a planet overwhelmingly dominated and shaped by one species, and our kith and kin – whether gibbons or pumpkins – basically fit in in the spaces between. That's pretty much the world the Psalmist outlined in the Old Testament thousands of years ago. By comparison, the evolutionists' insistence that we're just another "animal" seems perverse and irrational and refuted by a casual glance out the window. I am coming round to the view that hyper-rationalism is highly irrational.

That's a truly remarkable upchuck there, and it's impressive how much he got wrong.

We aren't 89% identical to a pumpkin. If you use a very loose determination of homology (so loose, that mice and people are nearly 100% identical, having the same suite of genes), we're about 20-25% homologous to plants.

I seem to have just summarized the latest assessment of genetic similarity with chimpanzees. There is only a few percent difference…but rather than something "awesome", most of it is in the immune system, recognition proteins in sperm, a few obscure regulatory proteins, that sort of thing. Our differences aren't awesome at all, but subtle.

The thing is, as any engineer realizes, subtle changes tend to be the most awesome. Changing a single line of code can turn a program into incomprehensible garbage; a single subtle systemic change can mangle the code itself into indecipherability. Adding or removing resistors -- mere hunks of metal or ceramic -- can completely change the operation of a circuit. A few quarts of oil will drastically affect the performance of a vehicle weighing several tons. A single skipped heartbeat, out of three billion in an average lifetime, constitutes an awesome yet subtle difference.

Later, PZ Myers goes on to ridicule the idea that mankind rules the earth, but each of his points falls flat.

His last ideas—that he lives in a world dominated and shaped by his species, as he can tell simply by looking out his window—are chilling. They reveal differences far greater than can be found between Homo sapiens and Cucurbita pepo.

He must not possess a gut populated by intestinal bacteria. We are at their mercy; without them, we suffer horribly for a while and die.

We're not at their "mercy", since bacteria have no will; using that word anthropomorphizes unconscious biological machines. Bacteria don't process our waste out of generosity, but because their own survival depends on it.

He must live in a world without parasites or other small creatures. I'm a home to all kinds of interesting invertebrates nesting in my eyelashes and pores and crawling on my skin.

None of which, presumably, impede PZ Myer's actions even slightly.

He must not have any wooden furniture in his home, or plastic…made from the carbon left by ancient forests.

These implements are, in fact, perfect examples of how man has brought nature under his dominion. We are not ruled by our furniture, rather we rule it.

He must not eat. We human beings are heterotrophs, entirely dependent on the production of other organisms as an energy source.

Energy which we grow and harvest according to our tastes and whims.

It's a good thing he doesn't eat, or he'd have to excrete—without any bacteria or fungi or nematodes or flatworms, the shit would just pile up (this would explain his written output, though).

Again, animals that process our waste, generally in locations designed by humans for that purpose.

Steyn must never, ever have a cold, or the flu, or an infection.

All dominated by man through the use of medicine; they're still a threat, but only because our control is not yet complete. It may never be, but who's winning?

Good ol' dirt. It's made by the action of wind and sun and ice on rock, processed by bacteria and fungi and more of those tiny creatures invisible from Mark Steyn's window. We didn't make it. They did.

So what? We use the dirt however we want, and no other organism has a say in the matter.

And oh, my gosh…oxygen! Our entire atmosphere is the product of action by billions of years of work by bacteria and algae and plants! There must not be any air where he lives.

Ironically, oxygen is a waste product of the plants and bacteria PZ Myers just praised for processing our waste. We take care of theirs, and they take care of ours. The difference is, we could make our own oxygen if we wanted to.

He must not have ever watched lizards bask in the desert sun, or seen the life swarming in a rich Pacific tide pool, or stood in an old growth forest and listened to the wind blowing through the hemlocks, or seen fish darting in a Cascade lake so clear it was like canoeing on glass, or watched salmon thrash and spawn in an icy cold mountain stream. I'm sure he's never put his eye to a microscope to see what lives in the puddle outside his door, or split slate to expose 400 million year old fossils. There's a world of millions of species living outside my door, built from the struggles of millions more over billions of years, and all he sees is one.

No; if I may speak for Mr. Steyn, he sees one species that dominates all the others, and that power is due to an awesome 2%.

(HT: Chris Bertram.)

I haven't been neglecting to mention my desire for a pro-life Supreme Court nominee because I'm hoping for one to fly in under the radar, but rather because I figure that my desire goes without saying. However, Manuel Miranda -- whose Supreme Court nominee articles have been invaluable -- suggests that pro-life Republicans have allowed themselves to be sidelined by the Bush Administration, and that we should speak up.

Preparing for the Supreme Court fight, pro-lifers were told by White House surrogates to stay out of the light and out of the newspapers, to be quiet so as not to scare the horses. Even before Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement this summer, while liberal reporters worked to connect conservative concern over the Supreme Court with the abortion issue, pro-lifers were measuring their words, beating each other up, and trying not to appear too demanding of the president that, in the small margins that matter, they had elected.

Ever so smoothly, pro-lifers were corralled and managed, so that if the president appointed yet another Republican disappointment to the Supreme Court, it would be too late after the fact to do anything about it. It isn't that pro-life leaders don't trust President George W. Bush. They do. They trust what they think is a working internal compass. Yet there is the fear that for some who surround him "Roe versus Wade" are merely two alternative means of exiting New Orleans.

Not that I'm any sort of "pro-life leader", but I'm not sure how much I trust President Bush. He's been pretty reliable when it comes to moral issues, granted, but his prolifigate spending has made me wary in general. So, for whatever it's worth, let me throw in my $200 billion and urge the President to nominate someone who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade on legal grounds.

Our Constitution should be construed to protect federalism, and Roe v. Wade violated that principle and laid the groundwork for ever-more intrusive government intervention into local politics. As Charles Krauthammer wrote, has any other judicial decision ever disenfranchised so many?

In our lifetime has there been a more politically poisonous Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade ? Set aside for a moment your thoughts on the substance of the ruling. (I happen to be a supporter of legalized abortion.) I'm talking about the continuing damage to the republic: disenfranchising, instantly and without recourse, an enormous part of the American population; preventing, as even Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, proper political settlement of the issue by the people and their representatives; making us the only nation in the West to have legalized abortion by judicial fiat rather than by the popular will expressed democratically.

The corruption continues 32 years later. You could see it played out hour by hour in the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge John Roberts. Question upon question that pretended to be about high constitutional principle was really about abortion in ill-concealed disguise.

End the farce. Let the people vote.

And when we can, I will do my best to convince people to vote to protect the sanctity of life.

I've just been thinking that the political spectrum is a lot like a giant rubberband, with politicians stretching it in every direction, pulling against each other. One significant characteristic of this metaphor is that only the movements of the politicians on the outside are constrained, in that it's hard for them to push the rubberband out further from the center of mass. Politicians on the inside can move around freely until they bump up against the rubberband, and those on the outside can move away from the band, possibly allowing the band itself to move inwards. For instance, as we've seen with the Bush Administration, it's easy to Republicans to become big spenders because the Democrats' constituents want the money, so the Dems can't oppose spending even if they don't like it. Likewise, as with Bill Clinton, Democrats can declare war on anyone they want because Republicans are eager to exercise American military might to protect the country.

The flaw with the rubberband model is that even inlying politicians affect the size and shape of the rubberband, so maybe we should picture the entire thing sitting atop a balanced table of some sort that shifts as the politicians move around. The problem is that I don't like the idea of a fixed fulcrum, since the political "center" moves around in correpondence with the edges of the rubberband.

I usually like statistics, but what I've come to realize is that I only like reading statistics, I don't like calculating them. I've spent most of my school time for the past few days trying to figure out how to calculate confidence intervals and p-values for some data sets I've generated as part of my dissertation project. Aside from not knowing how to do this for simple cases, my sets of data are far from simple.

Briefly, I've got dozens of trials, each of which produces, among other variables, a score for each tribe of animats (artificial life agents) in the trial. However, this score is actually the average of 1,000 intermediate scores taken at 1,000 second intervals (total of 1,000,000 seconds per trial). Further, the animats in each tribe change over time, as animats are born and die; an animat dies and a new one is created, in each tribe, every 20,000 seconds. So, there are 50 distinct (overlapping) sets of animats per tribe over the course of a trial, and complete turn-over within a tribe every 200,000 seconds (since there are 10 animats per tribe). This yields five non-overlapping sets of animats per tribe per trial, but they aren't independent because the whole point of the experiment is that animats transmit knowledge and behavior (culture) across generations.

Whew. So, I have a bunch of data, and some experiments consist of only 20 trials. However, because of my setup, I think that these 20 trials have the statistical significance of nearly 100 shorter trials because of the non-overlapping sets and multiple tribes per trial. I have calculated correlation coefficients between scores and other measurements, and between scores and various animat characteristics that I want to test the usefulness of, but I am getting thoroughly lost as I try to figure out the statistical significance of my numbers, if any.

Here's a good example of the difference between theory and practice: The St. Petersburg Paradox.

The St. Petersburg game is played by flipping a fair coin until it comes up tails, and the total number of flips, n, determines the prize, which equals $2ⁿ. Thus if the coin comes up tails the first time, the prize is $2¹ = $2, and the game ends. If the coin comes up heads the first time, it is flipped again. If it comes up tails the second time, the prize is $2², = $4, and the game ends. If it comes up heads the second time, it is flipped again. And so on. There are an infinite number of possible ‘consequences’ (runs of heads followed by one tail) possible. The probability of a consequence of n flips (‘P(n)’) is 1 divided by 2ⁿ, and the ‘expected payoff’ of each consequence is the prize times its probability. ....

The ‘expected value’ of the game is the sum of the expected payoffs of all the consequences. Since the expected payoff of each possible consequence is $1, and there are an infinite number of them, this sum is an infinite number of dollars. A rational gambler would enter a game iff the price of entry was less than the expected value. In the St. Petersburg game, any finite price of entry is smaller than the expected value of the game. Thus, the rational gambler would play no matter how large the finite entry price was. But it seems obvious that some prices are too high for a rational agent to pay to play. Many commentators agree with Hacking's (1980) estimation that "few of us would pay even $25 to enter such a game." If this is correct, then something has gone wrong with the standard decision-theory calculations of expected value above. This problem, discovered by the Swiss eighteenth-century mathematician Daniel Bernoulli (1738; English trans. 1954) is the St. Petersburg paradox.

Similarly, and more simply, no one would risk their life savings of (say) $100,000 on a one-in-a-million chance to win $100 billion, or even $200 billion. Remember: in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they aren't.

(HT: Daniel Davies I think, somehow.)

JW points me to a Lloyd Grove article about the new Steve Rosenbaum movie "Inside the Bubble", which promises to finally give John Kerry and his campaign the attention they deserve.

It features, among other not-ready-for-prime-time moments, Clinton scowling and rolling her eyes over an apparent Kerry gaffe during a presidential debate; Kerry pretending to interview himself and babbling in Italian while waiting for a real interview to begin; Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) cursing at reporters during a campaign stop, and Kerry message guru Robert Shrum confidently declaring a few days before the 2004 election: "Zogby [a prominent pollster] just announced who's gonna win. Us!"

Sounds like a blast! I expect that, similar to "Fahrenheit 9/11", most of the enjoyment will come from how terrible it makes the other side look, but hopefully unlike the earlier movie this one will be at least loosely based on reality.

Interestingly, I can't find any reference to "Inside the Bubble" on the Internet Movie Database.

Last year I noted that a giant pro-abortion protest appeared to consist of nothing but old, infertile women, and this year the old folks are at it again, protesting everything under the sun, and particularly President Bush, despite the fact that he'll never run for anything again. Stupid on the surface, yes, but once you dig deeper you'll see that it's even stupider underneath.

Connie McCroskey, 58, came from Des Moines, Iowa, with two of her daughters, both in their 20s, for the family's first demonstration. McCroskey, whose father fought in World War II, said she never would have dared protest during the Vietnam War.

"Today, I had some courage," she said.

Oh yeah, it takes a ton of courage to walk around Washington DC for an afternoon. How did you manage to avoid Karl Rove's stormtroopers? Weren't you scared that Donald Rumsfeld's death squads would hunt you down? You were really brave to be quoted by name in a major newspaper! Bravest move of all: waiting to protest till your father died.

While united against the war, political beliefs varied. Paul Rutherford, 60, of Vandalia, Mich., said he is a Republican who supported Bush in the last election and still does _ except for the war.

"President Bush needs to admit he made a mistake in the war and bring the troops home, and let's move on," Rutherford said. His wife, Judy, 58, called the removal of Saddam Hussein "a noble mission" but said U.S. troops should have left when claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction proved unfounded.

"We found that there were none and yet we still stay there and innocent people are dying daily," she said.

Right, and if we had left once we'd proven proven that, I'm sure Iraq would be Disneyland Middle-East now and all the ba'athists would be too busy singing "It's a Small Dar al-Islam, After All" to meet their rape quotas and top off Saddam's mass graves.

Anyway, the ages of the people quoted in the article are: 58, 60, 58, 47, whatever age Cindy Shi'ite is (103?), and 48. One has to wonder what government program is enabling all this pointless protesting -- I highly doubt that people who earned their own living would now be wasting their time on this nonsense.

Louise Story has a fascinating article about young women in my generation preparing for motherhood and recognizing early that the feminist dream is an illusion and that they can't really have it all.

Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

I'm very happy that my own fiancee is more concerned with our future family and children than with her future career. I have no doubt that she will make an outstanding geologist, but I also know that she will rear our children better than any nanny could. I'm eager to be actively involved with our children as well, and family will always come before work, but I'm enormously blessed to have a woman whose desires complement mine so well.

Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.

"I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it," said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.

Indeed it is. In my experience working with children, there's often a very large difference between those raised by mothers and those raised by hired help. Go figure! For one particular example, consider the results of the Milwaukee project.

At the beginning of the project, Heber selected forty newborns from the depressed area of Milwaukee he had chosen. The mothers of the infants selected all had IQ’s below 80. As it turned out, all of the children in the study were black, and in many cases the fathers were absent. The forty newborns were randomly assigned, 20 to an experimental group and 20 to a control group. ...

The experimental group entered a special program. Mothers of the experimental group children received education, vocational rehabilitation, and training in homemaking and child care. The children themselves received personalized enrichment in their home environments for the first three months of their lives, and then their training continued at a special center, five days a week, seven hours a day, until they were ready to begin first grade. The program at the center focused upon developing the language and cognitive skills of the experimental group children. The control group did not receive special education or home-based intervention and enrichment.

By the age of six all the children in the experimental group were dramatically superior to the children in the control group. This was true on all test measures, especially those dealing with language skills or problem solving. The experimental group had an IQ average of 120.7 as compared with the control group’s 87.2!

Yes, these improvements were the result of teaching the young children largely at a "special center", not at home with their mothers, but most kids don't have access to such "special centers" at any price. Energetic, enthusiastic, loving mothers could be in abundant supply, if our society would quit insisting that our young women become something else.

I can't remember how I found this article, but Wendy McElroy recently raised an issue I wrote about earlier: will science trump politics with regards to the abortion issue?

For better or worse, new reproductive technologies are redefining the ground rules of reproduction. (And, no, the force of law can not hold back scientific 'progress,' as authorities have discovered repeatedly since Galileo's day.) ...

This possibility becomes more likely in the presence of two factors.
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First, viability is being established at ever-earlier stages of pregnancy.

Recently, doctors have been successful in administering perflubron — a liquid that replaces the amniotic fluid — to babies as young as 23-weeks-old, with a 70 percent survival rate.

Second, ectogenesis [growing an embryo outside the mother's womb] seems to be experiencing breakthroughs.

In 2002, a team at Cornell University used cells from a human uterus to grow an artificial womb. When a fertilized human egg was introduced, it implanted itself in the uterus wall as in a natural pregnancy. After six days of gestation, the experiment was halted due solely to legal constraints.

Meanwhile, half-a-world away, Dr. Yoshinori Kuwabara of Juntendo University in Japan has been removing fetuses from goats and keeping them alive for weeks in clear plastic tanks of amniotic fluid with machine-driven 'umbilical cords'.

The point is, it won't be long until there are more choices available than birth or abortion. Currently, mothers of unwanted children can't really be rid of them without abortion until after birth. However, upcoming technology will allow a woman to have her baby removed and grown elsewhere from a very early age, even as soon as the pregnancy is discovered.

That sounds like a fascinating possibility, but it also raises a lot of questions.

1. Is there a segment of the population that currently believes in abortion rights, but would be in favor of outlawing abortion if the mother could simply have the baby transferred out of her body without harm? Such a procedure would probably be invasive, even if no incisions had to be made. Even if not required by law, such a procedure would likely dramatically reduce the number of abortions.

2. Who would pay for these procedures? If abortion were outlawed, would the public have a duty to pay to remove unwanted babies, or would the mothers be forced to pay (just as they pay for a birth or an abortion)? Who would pay to preserve the babies in artificial wombs? Who would pay to support the babies after "birth" if they aren't adopted?

3. Should the federal government get involved? State laws requiring transplant instead of abortion would certainly depend on a reversal of Roe v. Wade, but aside from that should there be federal standards for the programs? Should there be a federal baby-care program?