Recommended Reading

The universe is immensely large.

To try imagining how big, place a penny down in front of you. If our sun were the size of that penny, the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 350 miles away. Depending on where you live, that’s very likely in the next state (or possibly country) over.

In our ever expanding knowledge of: animals are basically just like us. Rats appear to have empathy. Also in the article, rats will share food and give up chocolate in order to help another rat.

Who are the 1%? They tend to vote Republican even if they aren't more conservative. They tend to have far more education with a simple caveat - being highly educated doesn't guarantee vast membership in the top 1%:

This is not to say that college degrees guarantee vast wealth. To the contrary, only a small fraction of all Americans who report having a postgraduate education (1.5%) or an undergraduate degree but no postgraduate education (0.8%) fall into the top 1% category.

And Some videos in order of educational - funny.

Via Freakonomics:


Via GOOD:

Backlog of Readings

Stuff White People Like - #34 - Architecture.

The secret world of Trader Joe's.

Short mockumentary on plastic bag migration.

Letter grades for vehicle efficiency.

HP hold The Navy hostage to the tune of 3.3 billion (3,300 millions).

Apparently Microsoft thinks it's a good idea to let people pirate their stuff because, you know, it increases your market share. In fact, they didn't let people pirate Vista and it hurt Microsoft somewhat badly, or perhaps no one wanted to steal such a terribly designed OS.

The Chinese envision a double decker bus with cars passing underneath.

Young, single, childless women earn more than men their same age. So further proof that the vast majority of the wage discrepancy is due to the fact that womens' priorities shift after having a child.

Scientists have built a computer program that suggests potential research hypothesis after doing a complete reading of the relevant literature. Pretty awesome.

Mayor Daley will not seek reelection.

Short - it's actually quite hard to tell if someone is drunk.

Sustainable building at 301Monroe.com.

Death Tax Part II

A while ago I wrote about the fact that this year the death/estate tax for 2010 would be repealed, and for a while it looked like Congress would fix it. Somewhat shockingly the law, part of the Bush tax cuts, is still in place. Just to make sure we're all on the same page - this only affects the very wealthy which I consider anyone who stands to inherit a million dollars or more. There are 3.1 million millionaires in the US or about 0.6% of the population, so that's who the Bush tax cuts were helping in this instance (trickle down theory still doesn't work).

Just as a refresher:
In 2000 anything over 1 million was taxed at 55% and in 2011 same rules, without adjusting for inflation, come back into play, and between those periods the law changed to 3.5 million and 45% and this year just nothing.

Freakonomics wrote about it, then Krugman picked it up and pointed to an article he wrote in 2001. They're both calling for wrongful death suites and the like when people pull the plug on granny in late December this year. Government tax policies will literally give incentive to people to commit homicide. Should be interesting.

Interesting retro photo website called Myparentswereawesome about peoples parents before they got married.

Apple is getting sued over a typical design flaw-cover up that they're denying. Basically when held a certain way the new iPhone 4 drops calls and Apple is refusing and sort of refund at the moment.

France is trying its hand at a sort of affirmative action that would bump the number of underprivileged/minority students from 10 to 30% at its top Ecoles. Which, by the way, if you get into you're basically guaranteed a good job for life. What I find interesting is that throughout the article the French repeatedly refer to their country as the most fair free place on earth... really? I got a real sense of racism and caste there - even from the young - that doesn't exist in the US.

Scientists have made the worlds most powerful xray that they are using to probe single atoms. They're trying to essentially take time lapse videos of how atoms behave in a number of ways but currently are running into problems of you know... the laser vaporizing the atom. This has huge implications for science though.

Wired runs an interesting series of cockpit photos.

Google purchases a travel search data aggregation company started by MIT scientists that is used by Bing, Kayak, and the like... oh, for $700 million. The FTC still has to okay the deal.

Eco Cities

This is Masdar City in Abu Dhabi (Map). The idea is to build a 2.3 square mile city starting from desert based on zero carbon emissions standards. It's designed by Foster and Partners and is actually getting built. Some photos can be seen here (the better ones are near the end), and here's its wiki page.

Dongtan (great article) outside of Shanghai (Map). This is designed by Arup and looks like it isn't getting built.

Both of these cities propose to construct a more sustainable built environment by starting from scratch and avoiding the milieu of mistakes that generally plague typical development. It's a novel approach for sure, and the research done for Dongtan is incredible. Here's a bit from the Wired article on how density was determined for Dongtan:

"Their first decision was big. Dongtan needed more people. Way more. Shanghai's planning bureau figured 50,000 people should live on the site — they assumed a green island should not be crowded — and the other international architects had agreed, drafting Dongtan as an American-style suburb with low-rise condos scattered across the plot and lots of lawns and parks in between. "It's all very nice to have little houses in a green field," Gutierrez says. But that would be an environmental disaster. If neighborhoods are spread out, then people need cars to get around. If population is low, then public transportation is a money loser.

But how many more people? Double? Triple? The team found research on energy consumption in cities around the world, plotted on a curve according to population density. Up to about 50 residents per acre, roughly equivalent to Stockholm or Copenhagen, per capita energy use falls fast. People walk and bike more, public transit makes economic sense, and there are ways to make heating and cooling more efficient. But then the curve flattens out. Pack in 120 people per acre, like Singapore, or 300 people, like Hong Kong, and the energy savings are negligible. Dongtan, the team decided, should try to hit that sweet spot around Stockholm.

Next, they had to figure out how high to build. A density rate of 50 people per acre could mean a lot of low buildings, or a handful of skyscrapers, or something in between. Here, the land made the decision for them. Dongtan's soil is squishy. Any building taller than about eight stories would need expensive work at the foundation to keep it upright. To give the place some variety and open up paths for summer wind and natural light, they settled on a range of four to eight stories across the city. Then, using CAD software, they started dropping blocks of buildings on the site and counting heads.

The results were startling. They could bump up Dongtan's population 10 times, to 500,000, and still build on a smaller share of the site than any of the other planners had suggested, leaving 65 percent of the land open for farms, parks, and wildlife habitat. A rough outline of the city, a real eco-city, began to take shape: a reasonably dense urban middle, with smart breaks for green space, all surrounded by farms, parks, and unspoiled wetland. Instead of sprawling out, the city would grow in a line along a public transit corridor."

Why had no one done this before?

These cities are essentially huge experiments which require both a huge purse and some optimism that people will flock there. Which I think they will if they're done right, and of course if they're cost effective it'll be pretty incredible. My only reservation is that the cities are planned all at once which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing being things like Masdar City's raising the entire city on concrete piers so that all transportation can take place underneath. This sort of design feature is only available if you plan everything beforehand, or at least it's many times cheaper to do so. The curse is a bit harder to explain, but it takes the same vein as a free market versus a socialist economic system type argument. It isn't easy to determine exactly what people are going to want in a city. Whole parts of it may fall into disuse if the preferences of future inhabitants aren't interpreted properly such as was the case with Boston's West End.It was demolished because it was considered a slum although not by residents. Yet it worked and people lived there in a functioning community whereas it was replaced by and urban renewal project that served few and was considered excessive.

I tend to think of cities as a sort of biological organism that is constantly growing, contracting, dying, and regenerating. The buildings are the cells, the streets the capillaries, the highways and subways the veins and arteries, and people the blood cells moving about bringing life to everything. I'm skeptical that any amount of planning can fully account for the complexity that time brings to the development of a city. Then again maybe if built small enough (Masdar City is not huge) it may be possible. Perhaps it can be expandable or maybe just the infrastructure could be built with zoning requirements similar to the New Urbanism ideas of Seaside, FL. Either way it should be interesting to see how these perform as they come online.

Income Ineqaulity, Revisited With an fMRI This Time

I don't get this... Okay, so some scientists at Caltech found that the human brain responds to income inequality in a new and fascinating way; sort of, but first a side note.

A while ago I posted about an experiment where monkeys were given different rewards for the same tasks (pressing a lever a certain number of times). As long as the reward was the same, either a grape (preferred) or cucumber, the monkeys would keep working, but if the researcher gave one monkey a cucumber and the other a grape the monkey given the cucumber would soon refuse to work. If only these experiments were done prior to the Fall of 1917... it reminds me of Pike's work post John Rock (holy tangent). The point of all this being that insights into this sort of thing are both to some degree innate in at least primates and not unknown.

So back to the Caltech work. The researchers basically found that people who were better off/richer responded with greater brain activity (were happier) when less advantaged people were given money as opposed to themselves. That is, rich people felt better/reacted more strongly when poor people were given money instead of themselves. The researchers then extrapolate that this must be due to some sort of altruism. But the evidence against altruism is piling up fast. Even searching for it scientifically at this point is to some extent and act of faith.

Isn't it more likely that the rich people reacted more strongly because the poor people getting something means that the less advantaged people are then less likely to seek out the rich and take their stuff? Or to put it like an evolutionary psychologist, which of course I'm not - Caveman makes a kill and the hungry people start staring uneasily. Wouldn't it be nice if they got some meat of their own so that they'd leave you alone? I don't know, maybe I'm completely wrong. Obviously more testing needs to be done.

Why are different disciplines, even within one field such as psychology, so unwilling to look for explanations beyond their own scope? How does this change? I'm finding that very few people care to take on issues too far beyond art or design within architecture, and that crowd would be in charge of everything if they could.

Reading

The irony of "green" technology (I just dislike the term, not the idea) is that you still have to plunder the earth to make the stuff. Here's how we'll be getting all that lithium from the Bolivian Andes.

This is an article about some newly researched bio-materials. The last three slides are of a sponge animal...? Their internal skeletal structure is glass. Really obscenely strong, better-than-anything-we-can-build glass. So many implications for anything from nanotechnology to aeronautics and architecture.

The courts say that cops using tasers to force victims/citizens/suspects to comply with the officer's will will from now on be frowned upon... in certain places.

Humorous article about how cheap economists can be. Good ending too. I loved that Milton Friedman would call reporters back collect, so classic.

GDP is still one of the best predictors of overall happiness for a nation.

I love when researchers have to prove something that all of us deviants already know. Apparently the clearer a liquor is the less of a hangover you get - shocking.

Monkeys Participate in the Free Market

Or - I'm a right wing pundit.

Seriously though. From Aid Watch via NPR:

"In a recent experiment, a team of scientists trained a vervet monkey to open a container of apples, a task no other monkey in her group could do. She was well-compensated for this service by the other monkeys, who began to spend a lot of time grooming her (apparently, grooming is the monkey unit of exchange). Then, the scientists trained another monkey in the group to get the apples, and the “price” for the service (ie the amount of grooming the apple-providing monkeys received) went down. NPR Correspondent Alex Bloomberg explained:

[W]hen there was a monkey monopoly on the skill, the monkeys paid one price. But when it became a duopoly, the price fell to an equilibrium point, about half of what it had been. And this all happened despite the fact that we’re talking about monkeys here. Monkeys can’t do math.

What’s the point, other than research studies are really bizarre? Acquiring a sought-after new job skill leads to a higher income, even among monkeys. And, monkey markets can still set prices, even though the market participants can’t add, sign contracts, or talk. And, perhaps, complex markets can be the product of an unintentional, spontaneous order: Out of the chaos of many monkeys running around hitting one another on the heads, pulling nits off each other’s fur, following only the simple rules of monkey hierarchies and monkey appetites…a functioning market emerges."

Of course this serves my ideas which is why I'm drawn to this study. None the less, it is interesting supporting evidence for the existence of a market economy in the absence of any structured economic system. As I've said before - a market economy is what happens when nothing else exists to take its place. Although I understand the many downsides of capitalism, it is essentially brutal evolution after all, I don't understand the criticism. It's just what is. No one criticizes the water cycle or electromagnetism, so what gives? My hunch is that it's another case of people confusing/not understanding issues (as if I really do either). It's like getting mad at Muslims when really you're mad at extremist religions.

Backlog of Readings

Now every time I post one of these obnoxious lists I'll point out the best article, or at least the one's that you can't skip.

Required Reading - This is a great (and lengthy) article by Malcolm Gladwell on brain damage and football. Kind of glad I never played.

Google says they overpaid when they purchased YouTube to the tune of 1 billion (they paid 1.65 billion for the site). Best part, they knew they were doing it.

According to Krugman the Fed, even under really rosy circumstances, won't raise rates for at least 2 years.

Ever hear of Conservapedia? They're hilarious, but now they've outdone themselves. They're going to rewrite the Bible to "remove the liberal bias."

New York City made a law requiring restaurants to show calorie counts on menu items. Oddly, the new law doesn't seem to be changing the amount of calories that people purchase in any given transaction.

New theories on altruism vis a vie termites.

A Nobel in medicine this year went to three scientists who discovered telomerase, an enzyme that allows a cell to divide perpetually without dying. It has implications for future cancer research.

Krugman says healthcare reform will happen.

Google's Android OS is about to tip. By the end of the year it'll be available on 12 phones.

Ugh, this wasn't even half of my list... more later.

Required Reading

Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.

Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...

More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short

More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.

Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.

Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!

Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.

Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.

New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.

Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.

Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.

Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.

Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.

Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."

Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.

A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.

A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.

A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.

The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Reading from Wired

Cool British guy makes vertical hydroponic-type vertical gardens that cover buildings. Really pretty; not sure if it has an advantage over ivy. More water transpiration maybe?

Two budding conflict photojournalists talk about one anothers work (there's even mention of the format I shoot in, medium format).

Monkey music. Must read/hear.

Craigslist kicks everyones ass. This article explains how and why; basically just very simple yet counter intuitive business thinking.

... and Paul Krugman on debt now versus WWII. Really short.

Tons of Links

"I believe in arithmetic." - Ben Bernacke when asked how he felt about Bush's tax cuts. According to Paul Krugman the Bush years are responsible for roughly 20% of our national debt.

Astronomers discover a HUGE sun.

Windows 7 might not suck like just about everything else Microsoft. Even Bing isn't too bad.

Olympus came out with a camera that I think is a step in the right direction. See, point and shoot cameras (the small ones that just about everyone has) are awesome in a number of ways. They're small (so you always have them), relatively inexpensive, and are really powerful (most image sensors on point and shoots aren't much worse than my nice DSLR). But they lack manual control and nice lenses. Here's Olympus's solution... not amazing, but definitely worth noting.

A crazy smart mathematician solves an age old math problem (video, kind of long).

Crows are amazingly smart as demonstrated here. Then it turns out they're not only smart but also better than us at recognizing members of another species. Both are must reads/watches for the truly dorky.

Starbucks goes incognito to look like a local coffee shop.

Neatorama

Musicians can pick out sounds and hear better in crowds than the non-musically gifted.

More On the Beginnings of Life

I first reported a few weeks ago that scientists had recreated the basic ingredients of RNA in a laboratory setting similar to that of primordial earth.

Well now some scientists have recreated tPNA, "a transitional stage between the lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life."

"'Ghadiri’s important and highly innovative new work potentially relates to the origin of life as we don’t yet know it,' said Sutherland. Life’s emergence took billions of years, a process now being compressed into the passage of a few human generations. 'The possibility that humans could come up with an alternative biology that outdoes that which produced us is a mind-freeing and mind-bending concept,' he said."

What I assume he's talking about here is the rise of computers and AI. One day, 2045 according to Raymond Kurzweil, computers will be autonomous and smarter than human beings. This event is inevitable and it's easy to be somewhat scared by the idea. I once read that Kurzweil said that these machines will look at humans as their ancestors. Much like how we think of chimps Which is good or bad depending on how you look at it.

"Asked how long it would take before fully synthetic life could be coaxed from an inert chemical mixture, Ghadiri said, 'Soon. If not in our lifetime, then the next. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be longer than that.'"

Yeah, that's pretty mind-bending.

A Natural Experiment for the Death Tax

In 2010 the death/estate tax is repealed for one year. In my mind this will create a natural experiment. The name is fairly self explanatory.

Anyways here's what the death tax rates are for various years for an individual estate:

2005, 1.5 million, 47%
2006, 2 million, 46%
2007, 2 million, 45%
2008, 2 million, 45%
2009, 3.5 million, 45%
2010, exempt
2011, 1 million, 55%

So for example if someone dies today (2009) with a net worth of 5 million their heirs will pay 45% of 1.5 million - $675,000.

There are many reasons for and against the death tax, not that it matters, but I tend to be in favor of it. The fact that currently you can inherit 3.5 million dollars tax free is pretty insane. Regardless of the political consequences of all this the fact remains that in 2010 there is no death tax.

There may be no effect at all but you have to imagine that at least a few 80 year olds in bad health will be dropping dead at their own hands in late 2010. Maybe? It's possible at least.

Hydroponics Update #2

So remember that lettuce and basil garden I was working on? The lettuce has finally taken off and it's growing pretty fast. I think the basil is a week or two behind. I still have some modifications to do to the whole setup too.

These pictures are taken 25 hours apart:


Notice the new set of leaves on the basil in the upper-left hand corner.


And that's three posts about food in a row...

Logan = Lab Rat

I've been toying around with this one for a while now. The idea is to see how cheaply I can feed myself while maintaining healthy eating habits. Now don't get me wrong, I could live for $1.50 a day and eat nothing but rice and vegetable oil. The idea is to maintain a semi-normal lifestyle for a fraction of the cost (as I've always claimed was possible). The experiment will last 4 weeks starting tomorrow morning. I'm going to shoot for about 2,400 calories a day. Generally 1,800 is recommended for women and 2,200 for men, but I'm a bit bigger so whatever. I'm going to the grocery store as soon as I finish this post and here's what I intend to buy:

Hot Cereal (aka gruel)
Dried Black Beans
Wheat Pasta
Prego Traditional
Skim Milk (whole would be more economical)
Cereal
PBR
Potatoes
Quinoa
Brown Rice
Olive Oil
Eggs
Soybeans (edamame)
Garbanzo Beans (to make hummus)
Tomatoes
Avocados
Corn
Peanut Butter
Onions
Garlic
Wheat Bread
Flax Seed (pre-ground)
Apples (the one and only granny smith)

The list will be modified of course. The idea was to pick foods that were high in fiber (to keep me full) and filled some nutritional gap. Yes, beer is necessary. Interestingly, the list of foods appears to be vegetarian and almost vegan... odd. This won't be too scientifically rigorous. I'm sure I'll end up going out to eat and getting drunk on a large bottle of expensive vodka, but these experiences will just further elucidate how wasteful my day to day lifestyle is. I'm shooting for less than $5 a day. Again, I could make it cheaper but I'd have to exclude alcohol, fruits, and vegetables.

And to any of my friends that read this; the day after this experiment is over (Wed. Feb. 11th) will be taco night at my house.