Category Archives: Science

Sheldon Cooper’s Distrust In The Dismal Sciences Validated

“The social sciences are largely hokum,” asserted one great wit, perhaps the only one on TV.

In this tradition, some “scientists” have decided to reconfirm the trend to which Professor Robert Putnam’s longitudinal studies speak: “For four decades, a gut-level ingredient of democracy – trust in the other fellow – has been quietly draining away.”

These days, only one-third of Americans say most people can be trusted. Half felt that way in 1972, when the General Social Survey first asked the question.
Forty years later, a record high of nearly two-thirds say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people.

Dr. Putnam had long ago established that the trend toward distrust is correlated with diversity, and that diversity immiserates—utterly. (His recommendation: enforce it nonetheless. The cuisine is great.)

In diverse communities, Putnam observed, people “hunker down”: they withdraw, have fewer “friends and confidants,” distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, expect the worst from local leaders, volunteer and carpool less, give less to charity, and “agitate for social reform more,” with little hope of success. They also huddle in front of the television. Activism alternates with escapism, unhappiness with ennui. Trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.'”

This latest nonsense-filled piece features social “scientists” who’ve thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the causality quagmire, when Putnam had already done the necessary legwork on distrust in American democracy.

What we can conclude from this latest iteration in studies tracing the “decline in the nation’s overall trust quotient” is this: the new crop of social “scientists” has not come to terms with the data and deductions produced by the old crop (Putnam).

And that, no doubt, is in support of the great Sheldon Cooper’s opinion about the social sciences: “largely hokum.”

Low-Wattage US President Clueless About Rolling Blackouts In South Africa

Affirmative Action, Africa, Foreign Aid, Free Markets, Regulation, Science, South-Africa, Technology

Our low-wattage president, Barack Obama, is clueless about the reasons for “rolling blackouts”—“’load shedding’ is the local euphemism,” in South Africa, where, since “freedom,” the electrical grid has been degraded at every level: generation, transmission, and distribution. Distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities.

Dumbo has pledged to borrow some more from China, $7 billion to be precise, “to help combat frequent power blackouts in sub-Saharan Africa.”

You’ll find explanations to some of the problems in Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (pages 99-100):

…pylons and poles are routinely flattened, stolen, and then smelted. Indeed, blackouts and blowouts are intricately connected to the breakdown of law and order. “Up to 100 miles of cables may be going missing every year, destined for markets such as China and India where booming economies have created insatiable demand for copper and aluminum,”[26] reports Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “The result has been entire suburbs plunged into darkness, thousands of train passengers stranded, and frequent chaos on the roads as traffic lights fail.”[27]
As The New York Times saw it, “[t]he country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply.”[28] (My emphasis.) Not quite. I’ve lived through Highveld thunder storms and Cape, South-Easter, gale-force winds. Few and far between were the blackouts. (I purchased a generator in the U.S., after experiencing my first three-day power outage.) No, Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE. “‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,”[29] reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008, and uncovered by the Carte Blanche investigative television program. The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from “other” suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.[30]

Ideally, the power grid ought to be privatized:

Unlike private firms, state-mediated utilities need not respond to profit and loss signals. So long as they have taxpayer funds to make good their errors, these hydra-headed creatures have the option to produce at a loss. Thus, in a market in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the information they relay in an unhampered market, and will invariably fail in guiding producers to meet consumer demand. Electricity is best entrusted to fully free markets. Only private enterprise raises initial capital voluntarily and applies careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavors. Left to their devices, entrepreneurs will, in the long run and in response to price signals, build more capacity—electricity-generating plants—and prices will inevitably fall. Only entrepreneurs in competition with one another have the incentive to satisfy the customer, on whom they depend for their very survival.

From “HOW NOT TO ‘PRIVATIZE’ THE POWER GRID.”

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Self-Mutilation In Pursuit Of Certainty

Celebrity, Healthcare, Hollywood, Intellectual Property Rights, Pseudoscience, Science

Angelina Jolie tells of undergoing a radical procedure, a “preventive double mastectomy,” to remove all her healthy breast tissue, so as to mitigate against the possibility of future disease. Jolie carries the “‘faulty’ gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases [the] risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.” She writes:

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.
Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.
Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer …

In response to an earlier spate of such surgeries, Karen de Coster spoke out against “Big Pharma and a medical establishment that has … [built up] a tremendous level of hysteria that has people lining up for quick solutions to complex problems that have yet to materialize.”

… this has nothing to do with a noble choice between life and “beauty.” Allyn, like so many other women, was frightened into this procedure by the medical establishment that has so much to gain from these costly interventions that insurance companies agree to cover. Yet, try getting your insurance company to cover $500 worth of acupuncture or non-standard physical therapy. The government’s cancer institute gently promotes this procedure, as well as the satellites of Big Cancer.

And back in 2009, Karen panned the “truly sick development of the modern medical state. Women who are told they are at-risk for breast cancer choose major, invasive surgery, based on these risk conclusions, when they are perfectly healthy”:

Cancer organizations recommend genetic counseling before and after the test, produced by Utah-based Myriad Genetics. During the past 13 years, the company has tested thousands of blood samples, and revenues have grown 50 percent in the last year, though the company declined to reveal details about the number of tests taken each year.
Myriad is the sole source of the test, for which it holds a gene patent — a controversial issue that is being challenged in federal court in New York by numerous medical groups, including the American Medical Association, which argue that granting a patent for a part of the human body impedes research and treatment.
So there is one company that can conduct the test, and it holds a patent to keep out competition?

These are poignant questions.

The Dumb Generation’s Hand-Held Devotional

Education, Family, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Pseudo-intellectualism, Science, Technology

In “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” it was observed that, while “Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages that the older generation has nothing on the youth, especially when it comes to technology smarts—this is manifestly false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain-wave activity are made, for the most, by ‘older people’ with advanced engineering degrees.”

In my opinion, the reason highly creative individuals in hi-tech are able to create for The Kids is that they have enjoyed the benefits of a less laissez faire, more traditional education, involving a core curriculum—and if lucky a literary canon—the hardest of sciences, discipline, all coupled with parental moral instruction and guidance.

Now it appears that these hi-tech elites are designing gadgets that stunt an already stunted generation.

WARNING. This NYT article about the effects of time spent interacting with electronics on socialization and intellectual development is itself a product of a disorganized mind. The writer seems incapable of deciding—and developing a systematic argument—as to whether a child’s focus on these passive, quick-fix electronic stimuli detracts from overall healthy socialization or stunts the ability to be alone.

Missing is a line or two as to the two states-of-being—solitude vs. togetherness—being facets of a healthy psyche.

I live with an individual who is intimately involved in the design of some wonderful gadgets. Yet he himself hardly uses them in the little spare time he steals for himself. They frustrate him; they don’t seem to satisfy his creativity or sate his intellect. His greatest pleasure is found in composing and playing complex thematic pieces of music in his home studio. To do so he follows eternal, timeless rules of composition. Low-tech, if you like.

Myself, I have no interest in hand-held devices. I use my well-appointed PC for work. Away from the PC—during a jog, for instance—I think. Ideas flood my mind during physical exertion and solitude. On the rare occasions that we both go away on vacation, we do not take our work along.

More @:

“Your Brain on Computers.”