Wilbur Chocolate Factory

Old cans from the museum and store.

Pig stomach

Kate brings it out. It's stuffed with sausage and potatoes.

Saturday

Nice road trip so far. The MBL course ended on Friday, when I noticed that my car was leaking coolant. It was one of the hoses, right where it was clamped. Since it was a spring clamp, there was no way to tighten it, and the hose itself was warped and also needed to be replaced.

This gashed my plans -- instead of hitting the road early Saturday morning, I had to go to a dealership at 8:00 am. They sent a runner to Boston for the part I needed, and I didn't get out of there until 1:20 pm. It put me five hours behind schedule.

The cool thing about it was that the owner of the dealership came over to talk to me, and we ended up talking for hours. He talked about his friendship with Michael Jordan, his celebrity golf tournaments, and most of all, his kids -- it was clear that he was tremendously proud of them. He has a daughter who happens to be a phenomenal violinist, and an academically gifted son who sings and plays guitar. We watched some YouTube videos of their performances.

I also got a primer on the auto industry and what the Big 3 need to do to thrive. All in all, it was a great way to spend a few hours -- I love talking to interesting people from different walks of life.

Once I was able to hit the road, I drove through Massachusetts and Rhode Island, making my first stop in New Haven, CT. On the way up to Woods Hole four weeks ago, I had tried to eat at Frank Pepe Pizzeria (#12 in America), but the line snaking outside was too long. Coming back down on Saturday was my second attempt to experience this place -- the line down the block was even longer this time, and I could afford delays even less than before. I tried some pastries at the Italian bakery down the street, and continued on to New York City.

Traffic was bad entering NYC, but eased up once I hit the surface streets. I parked on Columbus and walked over to Central Park. I was amazed by all the different kinds of people I saw in a 30 minute stroll: Russian models, joggers, kids, old-school Latinos, street toughs, gay couples, guys in weird muscle shirts, students, and people listening to Michael Jackson music. You might have to go to LA to experience the kind of easy diversity that New York offers.

Next, I drove to Famous Joe's Pizza (#20 in America) for a slice of New York. This is where I think Alan Richman lost his way -- it really wasn't all that good, maybe a 6 out of 10. I'm sure there must be much better street pizza to be had in the Big Apple, and a little old Italian lady came up and told me as much. We talked for a good ten minutes -- she told me all about Joe, the owner, and all the neighborhood restaurants and pizza joints that she recommended I try. This lady occupied that space where you're not quite sure if you're talking to a crazy person. I think our society sees far too much as "crazy" and works to narrow the bounds of the normal, so I have a high tolerance for aberrant behavior. Again, I love interesting conversations with people from other walks of life, so I talked with her for as long as she wanted to talk -- and when she asked for a piece of my crust, I gave it to her.

My last stop in NYC took me to Brooklyn. When I found Lucali (#2 in America), there was a sign on the door saying that it was temporarily closed due to a small fire. My hopes dashed, I drove into New Jersey and crashed at a hotel in Somerset.

I've always seen New York as an intimidating place. Now I see it differently. I see it as a place where I could live, and even prosper. I'm not sure that I'd want to raise children there, but it doesn't seem impossible anymore.

Truth without necessity

Shelby Steele is a better writer than I am:

Working to keep pace, I suddenly felt a familiar doubt. Let’s call it the black conservative doubt—the feeling that one is talking into a void, that one might be right, might even have a compelling piece of truth, but that it is a truth unattached to any necessity, a truth with no means of enforcing itself. Often people don’t listen as much for the truth as for the necessity that will hold them accountable to the truth. Failing to hear any such necessity, they can conclude that the truth itself has no relevance.

The great problem for the black conservative is that the necessity of his or her truth is hidden so that it seems irrelevant, academic. What keeps it hidden is the symbiosis between whites and blacks by which they agree to let victimization totally explain black difficulty. Whites agree to stay on this hook for an illusion of redemption, and blacks agree to keep them there for an illusion of power. I can say that these investments are illusions, that whites have no real redemption, and that blacks have no real power, but then what do I have? That’s really what the young journalist was saying to me as we walked to her car. Government, corporate America, universities, foundations—they were all in the business of seeing blacks as victims, of trading an illusion of power for an illusion of redemption. Everybody was practiced in these negotiations, so the fact that they encouraged helplessness in blacks, kept them mired in a victim-focused identity, gave them a disinvestment in success and an investment in failure . . . well. The black conservative is at odds with a very cozy and very functional symbiosis, and there is always something to be said for function. He may believe that there are bodies under the floorboards, but until that truth is more widely understood, there is not much necessity in what he says.

You can read the entire essay here, which was written in 1999. I think the election of a black President changes the symbiosis a bit -- and Obama's themes of hope and optimism are a welcome change from one of victimization.

Political religions

I think an interesting fact about our political ideologies is that we rarely, if ever, experience real-world feedback on their truth.

We can vote (repeatedly) for tax hikes, tax cuts, cap and trade, abortion restrictions, gay marriage bans, more banking regulations and never tangibly experience the consequences of those policies.

One reason for this is that those consequences tend to be generalized and diffuse, especially the economic consequences of many of those policies. It's incredibly hard to build models sophisticated enough to tease out the societal impact of any particular policy, much less the individual impacts.

Even in the case of tax cuts/hikes -- which should be simple math -- the picture is often muddled. Partisans of the left constantly obsfuscate the benefits of tax cuts. Although the personal impact of Bush's tax cuts was easy enough to measure via the handy tax cut calculators put out by conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, how many Americans used them? Even if you pocketed an extra two grand per year from those tax cuts (a common impact level), year-over-year changes in one's other financial variables (income, deductions, etc.) can obscure the impact of tax cuts (and hikes).

People can vote for stimulus bill after stimulus bill (or for politicians who will), and never encounter any salient negative impact from the accruing debt. A reduction in our rate of economic growth in 2018, or an increase in the rate of inflation, is only salient for people who are comfortable with the real-world meaning of abstract information, and who understand basic statistical concepts.

Beyond the economic impacts of ideological positions, the non-economic impacts of our ideologies are even harder to test against reality. As such, I think political ideologies operate a lot like religions in this respect. Christianity offers a non-verifiable heaven in the next life. Political ideologies offer a better world in this life, but I don't think most people are verifying that their ideologies have made the world better.

Journey?

You know you're getting old when other students do not know who Journey is.

In answer to their puzzlement, I patiently explained that Journey was the greatest band ever, and that they also invented science.

The rule of law

The Wall Street Journal's Maria Anastasia O'Grady sounds like a voice of reason on Honduras.

I still haven't come across an argument contesting the legality of Zelaya's removal from office.

On a boat

Last Thursday, I went out on the MBL boat. Her name is Gemma, and they use her to collect specimens for research -- squid mostly (because of their large axons), along with dogfish and a variety of other marine life.

The summer course I'm taking here at the MBL is focused on neuroscience, research ethics, and professional development skills. It has nothing to do with marine biology, or with collecting specimens, so my joining the boat on a squidding mission was just an extracurricular adventure for me.

For some reason, I expected the guys manning the boat to be young sporty types -- a couple of tanned dudes with wavy hair and flip-flops. Instead, it was a couple of old-timers -- clean-cut former commercial fishermen who have probably never owned a pair of flip-flops in their lives.

I had a wonderful time talking to these men for the five hours that we were at sea. It didn't exactly start off well. I showed up at 5:45 a.m. as instructed, walked up the dock to the Gemma, and saw a man working on the deck. I said "Good morning. Can I go out with you today?"

He wasn't enthused. These guys probably don't want a bunch of smarty-pants student types bothering them when they're doing their work at sea. So I tried my best to stay out of their way at first, and help only when it clearly wouldn't interfere with their system.

Eventually, they warmed up to me and started talking more and more. I learned a lot about the history of commercial fishing in New England, dating back to the 1940s. Their fathers were fishermen too. I also learned how recent federal regulations had hurt small, independent fishermen and favored larger corporate enterprises. This is a typical dynamic with government regulation of commerce, and I related to them how regulations have differentially impacted small businesses in other sectors, like farming, because large enterprises have an easier time bearing the costs of compliance with regulation. These guys understood this principle very well.

We talked about Arizona, seafood, the movie The Perfect Storm, Martha's Vineyard, and guns. The oldest of the two related how when he was a boy, he used to shoot a .22 rifle off the cliffs, and how now it would be a federal case for a kid to do that. It was an interesting reminder that Massachusetts is not exclusively populated with urban liberals. There are still plenty of working stiffs who intuitively understand the kind of place America is supposed to be, people who are skeptical of the regulatory state and who do a dollar's work for a dollar's pay.

It was good time, and another indicator of how a big part of me is still more comfortable with blue collar people than with academic types. I grew up in small copper-mining towns in the Arizona desert. The mine workers in those towns had the same rough hands and clean virtues as these New England fishermen. No surprise there.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (6)

We caught three of these small sharks, called dogfish. MBL uses these for research as well.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (5)

Up close.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (4)

Storing the squid -- we need to keep them alive, which commercial fishermen wouldn't worry about.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (3)

Bringing in the catch. Surprisingly (to me), almost everything we caught was squid. I had expected a mixed bag. These guys know what they're doing.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (2)

Sinking the net.

Out on the MBL specimen boat (1)

Dropping the squid net.

Hippie religionists crying over trees

The clip seems legit, and it feels like the documentary was taped in the early 80s or late 70s.

I was on a boat

Envy

I was extremely pleased to see a fresh contribution to emotions research centered on the emotion of envy, which I've always thought was underexposed.

The paper is Leveling Up and Down: The Experiences of Benign and Malicious Envy, by Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters, and it's in the journal Emotion (Vol. 9, No. 3).

Here's the abstract:

Envy is the painful emotion caused by the good fortune of others. This research empirically supports the distinction between two qualitatively different types of envy, namely benign and malicious envy. It reveals that the experience of benign envy leads to a moving-up motivation aimed at improving one’s own position, whereas the experience of malicious envy leads to a pulling-down motivation aimed at damaging the position of the superior other. Study 1 used guided recall of the two envy types in a culture (the Netherlands) that has separate words for benign and malicious envy. Analyses of the experiential content of these emotions found the predicted differences. Study 2 and 3 used one sample from the United States and one from Spain, respectively, where a single word exists for both envy types. A latent class analysis based on the experiential content of envy confirmed the existence of separate experiences of benign and malicious envy in both these cultures as well. The authors discuss the implications of distinguishing the two envy types for theories of cooperation, group performance, and Schadenfreude.

Honduras

The President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was being term-limited -- their Constitution limits Presidents to one four-year term. After that, adiós.

He tried to use a referendum to allow himself to run for another term. The Supreme Court ruled his attempt illegal, and he was removed from office (by the military).

How is this a coup? Why all the outrage? I haven't seen any arguments against what the Honduran Supreme Court did, and I'm genuinely interested in learning of them.

Given the history of American intervention in the region, and the ill will it's caused in some camps, I can imagine a realpolitik strategy wherein Obama realizes that the worst thing he could do for the supporters of the Constitution in Honduras is to endorse their cause. This is similar in structure to the purported rationale for Obama's careful dance regarding the Iranian protests.

However, in the case of Honduras, Obama seems genuinely outraged, and so many other leaders in Latin America are uniting in favor of Zelaya that I'm left stumped. Is there an argument that the legal process that unfolded in Honduras was corrupt?

For a couple of days, the mainstream media accounts that I read made no mention of the issue of the Honduran Constitution and the Supreme Court ruling -- it was simply billed as a military coup. This AP story on MSNBC.com is the first I've seen that mentions those things.

The last one to go

This letter is framed in the MBL library. It was written by a Japanese scientist during World War II. The American troops that took the island respected his wishes and left everything alone. (You can click on the image for a closer look.)

Transformers 2 is racist

Imagine two Autobot characters who only speak in urban slang -- not just any urban slang, but the most dumbed-down urban slang.

Imagine that these characters are always acting stupid, horsing around, and even getting into brawls with each other.

Now imagine that these characters have buck teeth -- one white and one gold-plated.

Finally, imagine a scene in which they are asked to read some ancient Transformer symbols, and they respond with something like "read? aw naw, we ain't into readin', you know?".

I've never seen blacks stereotyped so uncharitably and gratuitously in a film before. I makes me wonder what would motivate the director to do something like this.

I want to write a letter to somebody. I even thought of going back to the theater to ask for my money back, but I decided that I don't have a moral case: One of the several reviews that I saw for the movie mentioned the harshly stereotyped robots, so I had some inkling in advance that there might be a problem (although no idea of the severity of it). And I stayed through the whole film.

Competition

Lately, I've repeatedly encountered the idea that competition is a defining feature of capitalism. People who hold this view seem to think that capitalism is largely about competing against other people, and they often talk about how it yields "winners and losers".

Competition is a feature in any social system. People in communist countries competed for power, party rank, jobs, sports recognition, and under-the-table food rations. It was the same drill in fascist countries, monarchies, tin-pot dictatorships, etc.

In almost any modern society, people compete for college admissions, jobs, romantic partners, etc. None of this has anything to do with capitalism. Colleges, jobs, and romantic partners exist in pretty much all cultures.

Most of the Americans I've known in my life don't have a particularly competitive mindset. People in business do seem more focused on competition, but this competitive dynamic is an artifact of something more fundamental to capitalism: freedom of trade, and the private property rights that underlie it.

The idea that capitalism = competition is tightly related to the idea that capitalism is a zero sum game, which is a topic for another post.

Modern science [Updated]

Bruce Charlton recently penned an essay asking "why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition?"

His short answer:

because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational ‘revolutionary’ scientists in favour of industrious and socially adept individuals better suited to incremental ‘normal’ science. High general intelligence (IQ) is required for revolutionary science. But educational attainment depends on a combination of intelligence and the personality trait of Conscientiousness; and these attributes do not correlate closely.

You can read his full answer here. For those of you outside of psychology, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are two personality factors from the Five Factor Model. The other three are Openness, Extraversion, and Neuroticism.

I think this might be true of some fields more than others. Stephen Hsu doesn't think it applies to physics.

[UPDATE] Although he's making claims about modern scientists in general, Charlton seems to be referring to biomedical fields when he talks about the need for 10, 15, or 20 years of postdoctoral training before achieving any semblance of independence (and how that training weeds out creative or bold thinkers). In social psychology, people can often move straight from the PhD to a tenure-track faculty position at an R1 university. Sometimes -- perhaps most of the time -- people do a post-doc for 1 to 3 years before moving into a faculty position. This seems typical in some of the physical sciences as well (geosciences, physics, etc.).

I'd been mulling over Charlton's thesis for a couple of weeks, and then came across this New York Times piece today. It details how the National Cancer Institute's grant system might be impeding significant advances in curing cancer. The NCI is part of the NIH, and entire domains of science in America are almost exclusively fed by NIH grants.

The article claims that the NCI funds only safe, unambitious research while ignoring transformative or "risky" ideas. Here's one part of the story:

For 25 years, Eileen K. Jaffe received federal grants to run her lab. As a senior scientist at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, with a long list of published papers in prestigious journals, she is a respected, established researcher.

Then Dr. Jaffe stumbled upon results that went against textbook explanations, suggesting that it might be possible to find an entirely new class of drugs that could disable proteins that fuel cancer cells. Now she wants to find chemicals that might be developed into such drugs.

But her grant proposal was rejected out of hand by the institutes of health, not even discussed by a review panel. She had no preliminary data showing that the idea was likely to work, something reviewers always want to see, and the idea was just too unprecedented.

Dr. Jaffe epitomizes the scientist who realizes that if she were to single-mindedly pursue her unorthodox idea, her “career may be ruined in the process,” in the words of Dr. Brawley of the American Cancer Society

Then we hear about someone who is taking a different approach to funding:

At the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Dr. Ewa T. Sicinska knew she would have a similar problem with her research. She wanted to grow human cancers in mice. Unlike Dr. Jaffe, though, Dr. Sicinska did not even apply for government money.

It is not that the project was unimportant.

“Rather than have to start a human clinical trial to test new drugs, we want to test them first in mice with real human tumors,” said Dr. George D. Demetri, who leads the research group supporting Dr. Sicinska.

Researchers have studied mouse cancers but, they acknowledge, they are just not the same as human cancers — they are much easier to treat, and drugs that cure mice often do nothing in people. So, over the years, scientists have tried to implant human cancer cells in mice, but with little success.

“Everyone told us that if you take tumors out of patients and put them in mice, they don’t grow,” Dr. Demetri said. The tumor cells usually were put in a plastic dish before being implanted in mice. “We said — wait a minute. The cells are not growing in the plastic dish. They probably are dying. What if we bypass the dish?’”

With that idea in mind, Dr. Demetri, convinced it was too speculative to get federal money, tapped an unusual source, the Ludwig Fund. Endowed by Daniel K. Ludwig, one of the world’s richest men in the 1960s and 1970s, the fund supports unfettered cancer research at six medical centers in the United States, including Dana-Farber, to be used at the institutes’ discretion. That put Dr. Sicinska in a very different position from that of Dr. Jaffe. She could try something chancy without a grant.

If modern scientists are indeed unambitious compared to their predecessors, I think their growing dependence on government funding sources isn't helping matters. A diverse and creative froth of ideas is probably best served by diverse sources of funding. Government funding might have already crowded out a lot of private money, and in so doing, might have served to regiment science.

Michael

I'm not sure if I've ever been as affected by a celebrity death as I've been by Michael's. Times like these remind me of the sheer absurdity of death. One day he's Michael Jackson, dancing and rehearsing for his tour, animated by that thing which only animates Michael Jackson. The next day that same body lies lifeless on a coroner's table, extinguished forever.

Watching the We Are the World video (see below) brought me back to a different time. I can't believe they got all that talent together for one song. Michael, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Kenny Loggins, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Paul Simon, Huey Lewis, and on and on. It was an amazing testament to how supreme the 80s were.

We Are the World

Iran

Like all of you, I'm inspired by the protesters in Iran. What I'd like to emerge is some way to help them.

Enough with the talk of respecting the "sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran" (are you listening, Mr. President?). Any ethical or political theory that hands out moral legitimacy to every totalitarian government simply because said government exists is a morally bankrupt theory. Governments do not have primacy over people. Power is not a validation.

Street science

I recorded my first ever action potential in today's electrophysiology lab. We had a speaker hooked into the oscilloscope -- action potentials sound like popcorn. A lab mate recorded the audio on his iPhone, and wanted to use it as his ringtone.

To spice it up, he had me record an introduction, "You're listening to the action potential, ese.", in my streetest Chicano voice. He's using it as his ringtone now. If I can figure out a way to post the audio file here, I will.

HK burpees

I didn't know what Kirez was talking about when he would verbally describe his new twist on the burpee exercise: the Hello Kitty Burpee.

He decided to demonstrate it -- check out the video. Now I get it.

By the way, this is probably the only CrossFit video where a person removes an insulin pump before getting started. Awesome.

New math

I've noticed several times that President Obama and various reporters are misstating current and proposed income tax rates in a way that makes his prospective tax increases look smaller than they are.

The current top federal income tax rate is 35%.

Obama wants to raise this to 39.6% (along with raising the next highest bracket), which is where it was under Clinton.

The difference is 4.6 percentage points. If we want to round it, we'd call it an increase of 5 percentage points.

Obama, in his conversation with Joe the Plumber, said he was going to raise the top rate from 36% to 39%. He misstated the current rate and his proposed rate (or violated basic rounding rules), each misstatement serving to shrink the difference between the two rates and the magnitude of the proposed tax hike.

Several mainstream media reporters have done the same thing. This has the effect of presenting a 5 percentage point tax hike as only 3 percentage points -- subtle but not psychologically insignificant at all.

Relatedly, I'm amazed to discover that no one I've asked knows what our current federal income tax rates are, ballpark. People will readily say that they support or oppose an increase in those rates, but they have no idea what the rates are. For the record, the rates are 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and 35%.

Hopefully, one day soon, we'll junk the income tax altogether. It offends the spirits, and is wildly incompatible with the principles of autonomy, self-ownership, and consent that a free society must rest on.

Beach work / lobster / men

This morning, I performed one of the workouts that Kirez posted. It's called the Brazen Tramp, and I did it with a fellow student at MBL who is somewhat Kirezzian himself -- a former wrestler and triathlete with some exposure to CrossFit already.

5 rounds for time
100 meter sprint (100 meters is approximately 135 paces)
5 HK burpees
10 pushups
15 squats

We went to the MBL beach, to a stretch that had some hard-packed sand, and paced out 50 yards. It wasn't a long enough space to mark out 100, so we just did the sprints out and back. As for the burpees, I still don't know what an HK burpee looks like, so we just did the regular CrossFit burpees.

I was gassed pretty early, and my "sprints" in the later rounds were not very sprinty. This kind of workout tells me how out of shape I am -- it took me 15 minutes to finish. My boy finished in half the time.

Afterwards, we ate lobster for lunch at Landfall here in Woods Hole. It was my first time having an entire lobster on my plate, and having to extract the meat myself. Fun times. Downed perfectly with a Sam Adams Summer Ale.

Relatedly, everything I've expressed about how feminine academic men are -- and how alienated I've felt by the phenomenon -- doesn't seem to hold true with the crew here. The men are men. They're all coming from more of a straight neuroscience / biology track, so perhaps it's just psychology and social science that's so feminized. The cultural difficulty -- and even barriers -- in academia facing Latino men is something I plan to write extensively about in the future.

Leadership

Michael Silver details the real reason behind the release of my boy Terrell Owens:

The bottom line, team executive vice president Stephen Jones said Thursday, is that he and his father came to this conclusion: For the team’s highly paid quarterback to become a truly influential leader, the big man on campus had to be jettisoned.

“It’s hard to take over leadership when you’ve got a strong personality like Terrell,” Jones said. “If you look back at our old teams [from the 1990s], a lot of people would say maybe Michael [Irvin] was the leader. Then you might say, ‘He was a receiver. What about Troy [Aikman]? He was the quarterback. Wasn’t he the leader?’ And the answer is, yeah, Troy was a leader. But if Michael wasn’t supportive of him, Troy would’ve had problems.

In other words, Tony Romo isn't a strong enough leader to handle a charismatic wide receiver. This is disappointing.

I've been a deflated Cowboys fan since January. I'm tired of Jerry Jones' flawed business model -- you're not going to win championships with a weak head coach. And, generally speaking, coddling your quarterback seems like another losing strategy.

Being a passionate Cowboys fan is an integral part of my identity, as much as my being Mexican-American or a lover of liberty, and so I suffer. The Bills are now my second-favorite team though.

Data

I was talking to a friend recently. He's a public policy analyst and a lobbyist, and one of the most thoroughly educated people I know (esp. economics, history, politics, languages).

Something that has stumped me is why Keynesian economists exist -- why people who seem to essentially believe in magic are able to work as economists, get jobs, advise Presidents, etc. The Austrian School seems to stand on much more solid theoretical ground, and doesn't lack for empirical support. Even the more "pragmatic" Chicago School looks to be a more credible framework for an economist.

I don't know the ins and outs Keynesian economics -- I'm sure there must be some rich body of work to occupy graduate students, for instance.

So I asked my friend -- why do Keynesians have so much influence, compared to the Austrians?

His answer: graphs. Keynesians are much more computational, perhaps econometric. They produce lots of graphs and charts that politicians can feast their eyes on. And in those graphs lie a multitude of promises of debt-driven prosperity and free money. My friend noted that Austrian economists essentially have nothing to say to a politician or government that wants to engineer prosperity -- they have nothing to offer. Constrained by an unbending reality, and by theories that hew to it, they can only offer the truth. There's nothing to graph.

This speaks to a bigger issue surrounding the nature of empiricism, and the presumed relationship between theory and reality. In the academic community, there's often a commitment to a flawed empiricism -- a philosophy of science treats data as a primary and theory and principles as unreal. This sort of empiricism is often blind to larger principles at work, and systematic levels of analysis. Of course, proponents of these deeper levels of analysis should have no trouble validating their theories with data, be they in economics or social psychology -- but I don't think many scientists are trying to do anything like this.

What this gets us in economics and public policy is the veneer of science -- data, lots of data, in the form of slick presentations full of numbers and graphs. The tricky and trippy part is that you can do bad economics like we're doing right now, and never get kicked in the ass by reality's feedback mechanism. The harm caused by the stimulus bill and massive government debt is likely to be long-term and diffuse. It will slow our growth. It will cost (or forego) millions of jobs in aggregate, but no one will ever be able to attribute their lost job in 2019 to it, or the non-existence of a job that would have otherwise existed. If we suffer another crunch or reckoning in a decade or two, we know who liberals / the media will blame: capitalism, Wall Street, the free market, and probably still, George W. Bush.

MBL

I'm at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This is an intense setup. My neuroscience program goes for one month, and it's nonstop 12-hour days: 9:00 am to 9:00 pm every day except for the occasional Sunday.

We got to see some amazing marine biology facilities, even though our program has nothing to do with marine biology. They have a bunch of tanks for various live specimens of marine life that will be used by one scientist or another -- squid, dogfish, mollusks, and much more. There's a boat that goes out two or three times a week to collect these specimens, and we have a standing invitation to go out on that boat anytime we want. You can bet that I will be on that boat.

I might make it out to Martha's Vineyard on Sunday if we get a break. It will be my first time back since I flew there with Amanda P, Mike Huemer, and some other dude on the free day of SumSem 2003 / Waltham.

Road food

I drove from Garrison, NY to Woods Hole, MA yesterday. Relatedly, GQ Magazine's Alan Richman lists the 25 best pizza places in America, which is to say -- the world. My secondary mission in life is to eat at every single one of these places. I made sure that my route yesterday took me through New Haven, CT and Providence, RI. Both cities have two pizza restaurants listed in Richman's top 25.

I planned to try Frank Pepe (#12) in New Haven, and Bob & Timmy's (#5) in Providence.

I drove into New Haven, and saw a line snaking out of Frank Pepe. I had already blown an hour at a local Borders Book Store, so I didn't time in my itinerary to spend two hours at Frank Pepe. Sadly, I decided to hit them up on my way back next month.

Bob & Timmy's was a cinch. No line. Sat down, read my book, and a little while later the pizza arrived. I ordered half to be the Classic, and half to be the Margherita (see above). Downed it with a Stella. It was wonderful. The thing with Bob & Timmy's is that they grill their pizza. Richman calls the crust the best flatbread he has ever tasted. He might be right.

Hangover

I neglected to mention that I saw The Hangover on Friday.

Noam and I decided that it's the best movie since 1940. I left the theater dumbstruck. I've never seen anything quite like this. If this film were a bowl of punch, it would be Bachelor Party mixed with Old School, spiked with The Royal Tenenbaums. It's an insane movie, and interesting. Four stars.

War games

From Fox News:

A senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee is accusing the Obama administration of quietly ordering the FBI to start reading Miranda rights to suspected terrorists at U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan.

The move is reportedly creating chaos in the field among the CIA, FBI and military personnel, according to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich.

We really need to decide whether or not we are at war. I think we should have formally declared war back in 2001 -- against al Qaeda (no reason why we can only declare war against states) and against the Taliban / Afghanistan.

If we are at war, then we aren't going to be reading enemy soldiers their rights. Miranda rights are an artifact of a criminal justice system in a free country. They have no place on the battlefield.

More broadly, I think we need a better philosophical account of what it means to be at war, and how we should treat enemy soldiers / terrorists. This war has us all mixed up -- some people want to fight a war, and some people want to treat al Qaeda the way we would treat the mob -- as a criminal justice matter. We need to decide.

Nature

This was me at the Harley-Davidson dealer in Fairfax, VA on Saturday. The steel horse is a 2009 H-D Road King. Motorcycles feel like the natural and proper devices to propel a man through his life, and one day -- yes, one day -- it will be just me, my ride, and the clear blue sky.

Search

I'm fascinated by Wolfram Alpha, a new knowledge engine. They want to make all of the world's "systematic knowledge computable by anyone".

I'm still trying to understand what that means. So far I've used it for unit conversions.

Also, Bing is now online, which I think replaces Live Search. Not sure yet how it compares to Google.

Temporary sanity

Here's some good news on the story of the neo-feudalistic and socialist San Francisco government's attempt to keep a brother down, courtesy of Jake.

Mind and Life

I'm at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. The theme this year is Scientific and Contemplative Perspectives on the Self.

The lifestyle side of things is interesting...The food is all lacto-ovo vegetarian. The dorm rooms have no locks. There is particular attention to the importance of silence -- no noise allowed after 10:00 p.m., and all of Wednesday will be a silent day of meditation.

Today we heard from a Buddhist scholar on what selflessness means from one particular Buddhist perspective. It doesn't mean what we might think, certainly not what a recoiling Objectivist would think. By his account, it means recognizing the self in the context of its relation to its environment, including other selves.

There was also some discussion of how the actions of the self can impact things outside of the self. Here a sort of straw man was presented -- a "reified" egoistic self that thinks nothing of consequences. This isn't the account of self or individual that an Objectivist would recognize. This happens a lot -- a Nietschean or even pathological view of self is presented as egoism as such.

In fact, for years I've thought that there are some interesting compatibilities in the Buddhist and Objectivist views. The problem stems from how Buddhists use and arrange words -- their precepts don't really mean what they seem to mean at first blush, not when you ask them to elaborate.

San Francisco tyrants harrass enterprising homeless man

From the Chronicle:

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

It gets worse.

Pork

I've received hundreds of letters asking for my ranking of North Carolina barbecue joints.

1. Lexington Barbecue (Lexington): Known to locals as the honey monk, their tender, smoky chopped barbecue tastes so good you'll want to slap your mama, and all of your ancestors.
2. The Pit (Raleigh): Delicious. Upscale environment in downtown Raleigh. Sumptuous desserts. Ed Mitchell, the pitmaster, comes out and circulates among the diners.
3. Twelve Bones (Asheville): Damn fine pulled pork and chicken. So good it ruined Thanksgiving.
4. The Barbecue Joint (Chapel Hill): Wonderful barbecue. Good coleslaw. Good homemade pickles. No hushpuppies.
   
5. Bullock's Bar B Cue (Durham): Great barbecue. The best hushpuppies of any joint on this list. Excellent fried chicken too.
6. Allen and Son (Chapel Hill): Nice old school hole in the wall barbecue. Good dessert options.
7. Allen and Son (Pittsboro): Started out under the same ownership as the Chapel Hill location, but they are separate entities now. Good place, frequented by straight-up rural working stiffs.
8. The Q Shack (Carrboro): It's fine, but the gulf between this place and Lexington Barbecue is vast.

Want some gift ideas for me? Buy me Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue by John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed.

Stem cells

Next Big Future reports on contact lenses spiked with stem cells to treat repair damaged corneas. Awesome.