April 2008 Archives

This is pretty amazing if it's true... "extra-cellular matrix" powder that can regrow a fingertip. With pictures, some gruesome.

Scientists are claiming an amazing breakthrough - regrowing a man's severed finger with the aid of an experimental powder.

Four weeks after Lee Spievack sliced almost half an inch off the top of one of his fingers, he said it had grown back to its original length.

Four months later it looked like any other finger, complete with "great feeling", a fingernail and fingerprint.

I'm skeptical, but hey, if it's real then it's an amazing breakthrough. I'm sure we'll hear more about this "pixie dust".

Update:

Looks like my skepticism was justified.

But Professor Stephen Kaye, a consultant plastic and hand surgeon at Leeds University, poured cold water on Dr Badylak's claims.

Asked if he was surprised that Mr Spievack's finger "grew back" he said: "Not in the slightest."

Prof Kaye added: "The pictures I've seen on the web show a wound I would have expected to heal and regenerate in any case.

"The end of the finger is extremely good at regeneration. The pictures we've seen on the web show no evidence of loss of bone, nerve or tendon material, but regeneration and repair of skin - which is exactly what the fingertip does."

He added that the photographs appeared to portray a "very commonplace transverse amputation of the very end of the fingertip" and not someone who had lost the last phalanx of his finger, as Dr Badylak claimed.

Well yeah, if there was no loss of bone, nerve, or tendon, then the regrowth is much less interesting.

This stuff is child's play for an expert blogger such as myself, but I feel obligated to fan the flames as Barack Obama is hoisted by his own petard. Here's Obama in his "Lincolnesque" speech on race from March 18th, 2008.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.

And here's Obama disowning Jeremiah Wright yesterday, April 29th.

"At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that's enough," Obama said.

"That's a show of disrespect to me. It is also, I think, an insult to what we've been trying to do in this campaign.''

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw.''

Perhaps it's fitting to let Jeremiah Wright have the last word:

We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.

John Derbyshire shows us how to build a treehouse, with pictures! I've always wanted to build one... my wife doesn't understand why, but maybe these pictures will explain it.

In the wake of last year's catastrophic failure in AIDS vaccine research (in which vaccine recipients actually had a slightly increased incidence of contracting the disease) it's eminently reasonable to consider other approaches to the problem. Considering the gazillions of dollars we've invested into AIDS vaccine research with no benefit, why not try redirecting our money away from the failing scientists and simply pay people not to get AIDS?

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

The programme, jointly funded by the World Bank, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Population Reference Bureau and the Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund, marks an important step in the fight to tackle Aids, which claims 2m lives a year.

In spite of billions of dollars spent annually on treatment and prevention worldwide, there were about 2.5m new HIV infections in 2007, predominantly in Africa.

Carol Medlin from the University of California, San Francisco, one of the researchers, said: “We hope this ‘reverse prostitution’ will make people think hard about the long-term consequences of their short-term behaviour.”

Sounds worth a shot. It would be surprising to me if a few dollars would provide much additional incentive to avoid a fatal disease, but then it's surprising to me that anyone contracts AIDS from sex or drug use anymore. If these payments reduce the infection rate by even 1% then they'll be more effective than all the research into AIDS vaccines thus far.

I predict that over the next 5-10 years our society will need to address what will grow into a major controversy: should we dig up Albert Einstein (and other famous scientists, historical figures, etc.) and clone them? It's likely that we'll be able to extract sufficient DNA from Einstein's corpse to create a clone of him who could grow from infancy into a normal adult. Presumably Einstein's heirs could veto such an effort (if they wanted to), but what about cloning George Washington. Who has a legitimate claim on his DNA now, hundreds of years after his death?

It may sound silly to us in 2008, but we'll be addressing this issue within our lifetimes.

Yesterday I wrote that software engineering is one of the most mentally challenging tasks that humans perform, and this article about optimistic programming might help non-programmers understand why.

I remain astonished that so many developers continue to write code that assumes relations like1+1=2 are true. In fact, 1+1=0fe23b9, sometimes. Or -65535. Or any of innumerable other values.

1+1=2 only when everything works perfectly. Do your programs work perfectly all of the time? The evidence suggests that most of us create imperfect code. Lots and lots of bugs.

Yet when writing the code, we labor under the assumption that there will be no bugs. Bugs are largely treated reactively: Chase 'em down when they appear rather than anticipate how they may arise and appropriately taking defensive action.

1+1!=2 if any of the parameters are globals and a reentrancy problem stomps on part of a value. Badly encapsulated data has the same problem. A null pointer passed to a summing function can return utterly unpredictable results.

Apparently, gauged by the code I see, none of us has ever dereferenced a null pointer.

Computer programs are literally chaotic systems: they are deterministic (i.e., they do exactly what you tell them to, every time) and tiny changes can have wide-ranging effects (change of a single bit will completely alter the behavior of the program). Not only are there an infinite number of errors that could occur, there are an infinite number of right ways to reach a goal as well. Navigating between these two infinities is hard. A program may have bugs that only appear once every thousand years, or bugs that result in very subtle output errors that are difficult to notice. Oftentimes a programmer will see an erroneous result but be unable to find the place in the code that's causing it.

One of the simpler problems to explain to a non-engineer is the halting problem. Everyone has experienced it: you're using a program and it suddenly becomes non-responsive: it crashes, goes into an infinite loop, or otherwise just stops responding to you. These are all examples of a halt, and the halting problem is the question of whether or not it's possible to determine if a particular program will ever halt. More formally:

Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.

Alan Turing proved mathematically that the halting problem is undecidable. That means that even if you have the source code for a program and know exactly what input will be put into it, there are some programs for which it is still impossible to determine whether or not they will halt. Typically, it's easier to determine if a program will halt than if it won't. If you run it, and it halts, then there you go! However, if you run it and it doesn't halt, you can't know that it won't halt if you just wait a little longer. How long do you have to wait? There's no way to know. The second after you stop waiting and decide that the program won't halt, it might halt. (Because actual computers have finite memory it is theoretically possible to determine whether a program will halt or not simply by enumerating every possible memory state, but practically this cannot be accomplished because there are far more memory states than there are atoms in the universe.)

So there's a very high-level description of one kind of bug that is known to be unsolvable. By being very careful, very smart, and very thorough it's possible to limit the number of bugs in a program to a level that doesn't render the program unusable, but improvements are asymptotic. The first 90% of the bugs take 10% of the time, the next 9% of the bugs take 10% of the time, the next 0.9% of the bugs take the next 10% of the time, and so on, until you've spent far more than 100% of the time alloted!

And remember: because the system is chaotic a single bug can result in catastrophic failure. Jaron Lanier has written extensively about Gordian software and why we need to move towards a non-chaotic software paradigm that is inherently fault-tolerant, but there's essentially zero progress on that front at the moment. Software bugs are here to stay.

Here's an uplifting human events story for you: high school student Gregg Fox survives brain cancer, re-learns how to read and talk, and then scores a perfect 36 on the ACT.

Four years ago, after Gregg Fox was treated for a brain tumor, he had to learn to speak and walk again.

He's made remarkable progress, and now the Ladue Horton Watkins High School junior has the test score to prove it: He earned a perfect 36 on the ACT college entrance exam.

Fox, 17, is one of four Missouri students to earn a perfect score out of the almost 20,500 statewide who took the test in December.

"Mentally, I've made a full recovery, I guess," says the humble Fox.

His success is a testament to his tenacity and strength. Congratulations!

101 computer programming quotes and 101 more. Those are "one-hundred and one", not "five".

It's funny that non-programmers tend to perceive programmers as cocky and arrogant, when in my experience a programmer's humility always increases with their skill. The best programmers I know are quick to admit their mistakes and trumpet their horrific learning experiences; they also tend to be some of the most cynical people I know, readily admitting to the inevitability of future catastrophic failures of their work product. Maybe it's my own vanity, but I think computer programming is probably among the hardest professions, along with being a general or a fascist dictator.

(HT: GeekPress and MetaFilter.)

It's frustrating to me when people wrongly attribute substantial disagreements to a "failure to communicate". Here's Barack Obama speaking:

"I am confident that when you come to a general election, and we are having a debate about the future of this country -- how are we going to lower gas prices, how are we going to deal with job losses, how are we going to focus on energy independence -- that those are voters who I will be able to appeal to," he said.

"If I lose, it won't be because of race," Obama said. "It will be because ... I made mistakes on the campaign trail, I wasn't communicating effectively my plans in terms of helping them in their everyday lives."

No matter who wins the race for the presidency, the losing party should concede that they lost on substance, not merely on process. In the quote above, Obama basically asserts that voters cannot possibly reject him for the presidency once they understand his plans for America. In Obama's mind, if he loses it's because he just didn't articulate his ideas clearly enough, not because America both understood and disliked his ideas. An Obama loss would be due to process -- "mistakes on the campaign trail" -- not substance. He admits no possibility that his ideas are unappealing to voters. Anyone who doesn't vote for me doesn't really understand my positions.

I don't mean to pick on Obama, because this sort of phrasing is common among politicians and "commoners" alike. Sometimes it's legitimate. Most of my disagreements with my wife are due to miscommunication... but some are the result of real differences. Whether the dispute is domestic or international, it's important to recognize when it can be resolved by clearer communication and when there are substantial issues that need to be addressed through compromise, disengagement, violence, or whatever means are appropriate.

When conflict is wrongly attributed to a "failure to communicate" but there are actually substantial differences to be resolved, the conflict becomes harder to deal with from both sides. Unless you're willing to recognize that there's a substantial disagreement, how can there be resolution? Additional "clarification" is pointless when there's already both understanding and disagreement. Furthermore, the other party will be insulted by your continuing insistence that the disagreement is merely a product of their ignorance.

Part of the reason presidential campaigns drag go on for so long is to ensure that voters get all the information they need to cast their votes based on substance, not process. As Obama has pointed out, he and Hillary have debated each other 21 times -- by now voters have the measure of the man. If Obama loses to either Hillary or McCain, he would be wise to consider that his ideas, and not merely their delivery, may be to blame.

BBC North American editor Justin Webb reports from Missouri on the tranquility and safety of gun-toting America:

Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.

Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.

It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquility and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.

I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.

It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

That's the difference between American citizens and British subjects. A free and armed population can police itself.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Just started playing Travian, a little village-simulator kind of game. Looks fun, and doesn't take a much daily attention.

I'm normally skeptical about claims of corporate interference/conspiracies having much effect on the behavior of government, normally because government, industry, and the general population all have similarly-aligned interests: maximize productivity and wellbeing. Some individuals and cabals are focused on maintaining and extending their own power (see: Congress), but generally even this goal is pursued by attempting to improve the lives of the population as a whole (generally, in the net, on average). However, this article about lobbying and environmentalism shows just how dangerous the government can be when We The People allow it to exercise so much power that it can create whole industries for its corporate buddies.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

Wind turbines are a great example. GE describes itself as “one of the world’s leading wind turbine suppliers.” Absent subsidies, however, there might be no windmill industry, because windmills cannot reliably produce energy, and certainly not as affordably as traditional fuels such as coal. ...

GE’s coal gasification, solar power generation, electric cars and biodiesel businesses are the same: Consumers and investors acting with their own money would not patronize these technologies, but Congress, acting with your money, will. GE’s $20 million annual lobbying budget sees to it. ...

But sometimes it pours it on a bit thicker. Tuesday morning, Tom Brokaw went on NBC to give a talk about the first Earth Day. “It was a massive success,” Brokaw explained, because “the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act quickly followed. President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency.”

There’s the rub. Everyone who rolls her eyes at “Earth Week” or lectures from Schwimmer on “going green” was bracing for that. Environmentalism today almost always means government intervention. Government intervention means higher costs and higher taxes. And as this column has documented for more than a year, government intervention usually means profits for a well-connected special interest.

In the long run, market forces will smooth out these minor artificial inefficiencies, but that doesn't make the graft less offensive in the short run. What's more, blithely accepting this corruption opens the door to stifling the liberty that allows market forces to work at all... and in the long run we'll all be dead.

I just finished reading "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, and it was brilliant. If you enjoy space opera, intrigue, a complex cast, twists, and a satisfying ending then I highly recommend it.

Next up: "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe.

In what appears on the surface to be a clumsy attempt at espionage, a Mexican official stole several BlackBerries from Presidential aides during a high-level meeting.

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attache was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, whose first name is Rafael, took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush.

Everyone entering the room was required to leave their cell phones, BlackBerries and other such devices on the table, a commonplace practice when high-level meetings are held. American officials discovered their missing belongings when they were leaving the session.

The Secret Service caught the fellow at the airport as he was preparing to leave the country with his "accidental" loot. Looks like an obvious attempt to steal American secrets, either for the Mexican government or personal gain. Our officials should be more careful with their equipment, and one can only hope that they're using encryption and properly locking their devices when not in use.

The National Part Service is planning to deepen Castle Rock cut on Lake Powell in order to shorten transit times when the water level is low. Not that relevant to most people perhaps, but if you look at the lake on Google Maps at two different zoom levels you can see the effect of the water level on the lake surface topography. Neat!

At this zoom level you can see Castle Rock cut submerged. The small, scorpion-tail island to the northeast of Wahweap is Castle Rock. When the water is high, boaters can go directly east from Wahweap to the northern parts of the lake.

This zoom level shows Castle Rock cut exposed. As you can see, boaters are forced to loop through that snake-like path to the south in order to access the eastern parts of the lake, which I'm told adds 12 miles and over an hour to the commute of many lake employees.

Here's an NPS brochure that explains the plans for deepening Castle Rock cut.

Something about this story sounds fishy... John McCain is collecting disability payments based on injuries he sustained when shot down, imprisoned, and tortured during the Vietnam War.

Sen. John McCain has long said he is in robust health and is strong enough to hike the Grand Canyon, but he also is receiving what his staff Monday termed a "disability pension" from the Navy.

When McCain released his tax return for 2007 on Friday, he separately disclosed that he received a pension of $58,358 that was not listed as income on his return.

On Monday, McCain's staff identified the retirement benefit as a "disability pension" and said that McCain "was retired as disabled because of his limited body movements due to injuries as a POW."

McCain campaign strategist Mark Salter said Monday night that McCain was technically disabled. "Tortured for his country -- that is how he acquired his disability," Salter said.

There's no question that McCain served America heroically, but from what I've seen he doesn't appear to be disabled. In fact, he appears to be far more robust than many younger men. Maybe military disability payments don't work according to my intuition, but shouldn't they be used to compensate people who are unable to work because of their injuries? McCain has been drawing a Senatorial salary for decades, which would appear to undermine a claim that his injuries have hindered him professionally.

On the other hand, maybe military disability payments are intended as compensation for injuries, regardless of their effect on a person's productivity. Are they just ongoing payouts for transitory pain, suffering, and disability? Should McCain be getting paid because he is still unable to raise his arms above his shoulders? I don't know the answers to all these questions, but it seems odd to me that a man capable of serving as a US Senator is considered to be so disabled that he requires disability payments to sustain him.

(Note: If someone were to propose it, I could potentially support a system that gives monetary rewards to American troops who act with great heroism, but I don't think disability payments are an appropriate way to accomplish that goal in an unofficial manner.)

Despite being outspent 3-to-1 by her opponent Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton has won the Democrat's Pennsylvania primary by a convincing margin.

But for the second time in seven weeks, first in the Texas and Ohio primaries and now in Pennsylvania, Obama did not deliver a decisive blow against Clinton when he had an opportunity to bring the race to an end, despite heavily outspending her and waging an aggressive and negative campaign in the final days. His advisers had hoped to hold Clinton's victory margin to mid-single digits and appeared to have fallen short of that goal.

"He broke every spending record in this state trying to knock us out of this race," Clinton told her supporters in Philadelphia last night. "Well, the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas."

Obama's loss in Pennsylvania raised anew questions about his ability to win the big industrial states that will be critical to the Democrats' hopes of winning back the White House in November. In the coming days, Clinton's camp will try to play on those doubts with uncommitted superdelegates -- who have been moving toward Obama over the past two months -- urging them to remain neutral until the primaries are over.

As I wrote after Hillary's big wins on Super Tuesday, if the Democrats ran their primary as a winner-takes-all system like the Electoral College Obama would have lost a long time ago. Based on CNN's Democrat scorecard and 270toWin, my calculations give Hillary a hypothetical electoral vote lead of 284 to 202 for Obama, with 52 votes still undecided. Of course, it only takes 270 votes to win.

What's more, Obama hasn't won any of the critical battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, New Mexico, and others all went to Clinton. Obama tends to win in states that are already guaranteed to one party or the other in the general election. If The Democrats' primary system reflected the electoral college, Obama would be seen for what he is: a popular regional candidate with narrow appeal and little chance of winning the presidency.

Rather than focusing on net worth, My Money Blog suggests the Financial Freedom Ratio as a more meaningful barometer of your financial health and positioning for retirement.

If someone tells you that they have a net worth of $1,000,000, you might be impressed. But what if they spent $150,000 per year? If they stopped working, the money wouldn’t last very long. However, if they only spent $15,000 per year, they might already be set for life. In other words, your income doesn’t matter. Your expenses do. It may be assumed that the two are related, but that is not necessarily true. We all have the power to disconnect the two.

I’m sure somebody somewhere has already coined this term, but until told otherwise I will call it the Financial Freedom Ratio (FFR):

FFR = Liquid Net Worth divided by Annual Expenses

By liquid, I simply mean you can sell it for cash while not affecting your expenses. (Don’t count your car if you need it for work.) For example, if you had $200,000 but only spent $20,000 per year you would have the FFR value of 10 as someone with $1,000,000 but spent $100,000 per year. This also calls into focus how important spending patterns are when talking about financial freedom. Let’s say you had the 200,000 net worth and you wanted to increase your FFR from 10 to 11. You could either

• increase your liquid net worth by $20,000 and spend the same,
• decrease your annual spending by $1,820 and not earn any more money,
• or some combination of spending less and accumulating more.

Sure, it can be very difficult to keep slashing expenses, but this ratio keeps you honest as to how close you are to financial independence.

He also does some estimates of what a "good" FFR would be based on annuity pricing, and comes up with a suggested FFR of 25. (This value is pretty obvious, considering the conventional wisdom that you can safely withdraw 4% of your savings per year without eating into your portfolio.)