voluntaryXchange

Bernard Goldberg On Liberalism

David Mamet's conversion to conservatism generated a lot of interesting letters to the editor in The Wall Street Journal.

From Bernard Goldberg came this opinion about liberalism:

Most of us "defectors" have one important belief in common: That liberalism deserted us and not the other way around. Liberals, I fear, forgot how to be liberal.

This struck me pretty early:

• Age 9: my teachers didn't like to be satirized, and responded like controllers
• Age 10: even little religious things - like the golden rule - weren't acceptable to some of my peers
• Age 12: my father started to reject idealism in favor as his politics moved towards the Democrats
• Age 13: no matter how cool I thought the counterculture was, I had more respect for America than some of Carter's folks
• Age 14: our liberal family friends couldn't properly place the country whose revolution they were in favor of
• Age 15: decentralization seemed like a pretty good thing to me and just about no one else

I didn't like Reagan until 1983, but I was already fertile ground as a 16-year-old in 1980.

College Student Writing Example

I received this e-mail this morning:

is are final thur @ 9? I freaking out I will go tomorrow and see but if not sorry I am a little slow.

I just thought for some reason it was tuesday

The Element from the Island of Stability - Hiding In Plain Sight?

How's that for a movie title?

Here's the skinny: Israeli scientists found a new element. A really heavy one.

Finding elements was a big deal prior to the 20th century. Interest tapered off because of nuclear fission: once elements get too heavy they break apart quickly on their own.

Work has continued on this because new elements might have interesting new chemical properties. But, they've been creating them the hard way - with expensive labs and materials.

Enter the island of stability. It has been hypothesized for quite some time that the nuclear instability of elements past around 90 might end when we got up around element 120.

The thing is, how do we find such an element?

Cheap science is often elegant science, and in this case the Israeli led team decided to take stability at face value: if the island of stability really exists, atoms of those stable elements should be sitting around already, just waiting to be found.

So they took some thorium (element 90, and still pretty common) and weighed every single nucleus. They found lots of thorium, lots of other trace contaminants, and several nuclei consistent with either element 122 or 124.

Extrapolation shows that a pound or so of thorium appears to contain literally billions of these super-heavy nuclei.

The working name for the stuff they found is ununbibium.

NASA's Top Ten Photos of Earth

In honor of Earth Day, the top ten photos of Earth from recent space shuttle missions. Via TechRepublic.

Technorati Tags: nasa,top,ten,photo,earth

T-Rex = Chicken

New protein evidence confirms the suspicion that Tyrannosaurus Rex was more closely related to modern birds than to lizards or crocodilians (see here, non-gated versions are not yet available).

This soft tissue evidence should get everyone to stop saying the dinosaurs died out. They're still here - in fact, they're doing the nasty outside my office window as I write this.

This also explains how terror birds became the top predator immediately after the K-T extinction event that killed most of the dinosaurs - a few small theropods survived and grew in size to fill the niche left by the extinction of larger carnivorous dinosaur species.

P.S. A more precise dating of the K-T boundary came out this week too: 65.95 million years ago, plus or minus about 150,000 years.

Technorati Tags: dinosaur,tyrannosaurus,rex,chicken,ostrich,k-temperature,boundary,event,extinction

Entrepreneurial Disingenuousness

In a business school, I get an opportunity to talk to a lot of entrepreneurs.

I think the successful ones prevaricate.

I'm not sure that's the right word though - I'm not sure they intend to fib, or are even aware that they do it.

What gets me is the systematic understatement of the risks they've undertaken or imposed on others.

Speaking engagements by successful entrepreneurs are very common. In these, you never hear about their friends from their young adulthood. That's a problem.

Entrepreneurs are a breed apart. They like to hang with other entrepreneurs. Business schools are full of young entrepreneurs roaming in packs.

The thing is, in each of those packs, there's someone who is going to be speaking to students a generation from now, about how they became successful.

They'll do this without bringing their old friends on stage. Doing so might clarify the risks involved in entrepreneurial activity.

Not doing so sells the idea that all entrepreneurs need is dreams and willpower.

Nothing could be further from the truth. A lot of entrepreneurs fall by the wayside - personally or financially broken, dreams shattered, and willpower dissipated.

I think that most of society understands this. It's part of the reason there are so few entrepreneurs. But, do we do our business students a disservice by de-emphasizing that people in other lines of study might have more of a clue about how the world works?

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur,risk,return

Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

Wikipedia has a page on the hypothesis that what separates humans from other great apes is that we spent some time evolving in or near water.

Since I first heard about this, I've had a hard time stomaching the traditional trees to savannah story of human evolution.

Via New Scientist's "Life Changing Books: Recommendations from 17 Leading Scientists". One of the people asked was Elaine Morgan who has been pushing this idea for 35 years.

Technorati Tags: aquatic,ape

Messy Climate Data

Patrick Michaels notes this about the revisions to our temperature numbers:

There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small. [emphasis added]

I'd go a bit further: the null hypothesis that revisions to temperature data are neutral can be rejected.

Then there's those ice sheets in Greenland:

...Greenland's last decade was no warmer than several decades in the early and mid-20th century. In fact, the period from 1970-1995 was the coldest one since the late 19th century, meaning that Greenland's ice anomalously expanded right about the time climate change scientists decided to look at it.

Is it any surprise its been getting smaller when serious observation started from a local maximum?

Then there's that newly uncovered island off Greenland:

... A year ago, radio and television were ablaze with the discovery of "Warming Island," a piece of land thought to be part of Greenland. But when the ice receded in the last few years, it turned out that there was open water ...

... Chip Knappenberger found an inconvenient book, "Arctic Riviera," published in 1957 (near the end of the previous warm period) by aerial photographer Ernst Hofer. Hofer did reconnaissance for expeditions and was surprised by how pleasant the summers had become. There's a map in his book: It shows Warming Island.

Gosh, I just don't remember those hysterical reports in the legacy media about the new island being retracted. Do you?

Technorati Tags: anthropogenic,global,warming,temperature

Plane and Car Safety Factoid

Airlines prefer to tout the number of deaths per passenger mile because it puts them in a good light.

But, in terms of deaths per time spent in the vehicle, cars beat out planes. In a billion hours, the expected number of deaths on planes is 1,450, while in cars it is 1,200.

Read the whole thing in the letter from Craig Getzloff to The Wall Street Journal.

Technorati Tags: airline,airplane,car,auto,death,rate,hour

FAA Factoid

From Holman Jenkins "Plane Wreck":

Here's a historical fact: The FAA's safety function was originally and explicitly created to compensate for the effects of economic regulation, which protected carriers from the competitive consequences of accidents. Then came deregulation. There have been 15 years since the late 1920s in which passenger deaths fell to single digits or zero, 14 of them since deregulation in 1978.

Why regulate at all? Because of the practices of the predecessors or passenger airlines - passenger ship lines.

Businesses don't exist unless they can cover their costs, and yet airlines exist. ... commercial aviation is a hugely valuable product without a close substitute. But profits are chronically elusive. Why? ... because the seats must fly whether they are empty or full, so competitive pressure drives carriers to provide more seats than they can fill and then to fill the seats by cutting fares ...

... Steamship operators who were unfettered by certain modern regulatory notions devised a solution to the circumstances they encountered: They engaged in price fixing.

Such price fixing did not make scheduled shipping excessively profitable, but it did discourage shipowners from cutting rates below cost to fill up their ships before their scheduled departures. And their customers actually benefited, because it made the reliable service they sought economically viable.

... Railroad regulation, and indeed airline regulation, in their day were also attempts to solve the same problem ...

In general, this is a good article for use in managerial economics classes, where the idea that there are some lines of business that are doomed to fail doesn't occur to some students without providing some examples.

It's also a good piece for discussions of regulation, given that passenger shipping continues to engage in legal collusion to fix prices.

Technorati Tags: airline,merger,delta,northwest,FAA