Posts Tagged ‘science’

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Global Warming and acupuncture

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

It looks as though the sun is entering a new dormant period, similar to the Maunder Minimum which led to the Little Ice Age.

This will almost certainly end the global warming hysteria in a few years. The people who continue to cling to this sort of hoax, will be looking for the Next Big Thing. I don’t mean to imply that the earth did not warm over the past century. The Little Ice Age ended about 1850 so a warming trend is expected following such an event. The hoax is the contrived evidence that humans are responsible. I was skeptical about that from the first. The forces involved are too large. If humans affected climate, it probably began with the development of agriculture. Perhaps we have had no ice age in the past 10,000 years because of the effects of agriculture and forest changes. I have previously discussed this and nothing has changed my mind.

The next question is what will replace global warming as the religion of the bored classes ? There are signs that it may be “New Age” medicine. This sort of thing is common in certain circles and has considerable similarity to the global warming arguments.

The Center for Integrative Medicine, Berman’s clinic, is focused on alternative medicine, sometimes known as “complementary” or “holistic” medicine. There’s no official list of what alternative medicine actually comprises, but treatments falling under the umbrella typically include acupuncture, homeopathy (the administration of a glass of water supposedly containing the undetectable remnants of various semi-toxic substances), chiropractic, herbal medicine, Reiki (“laying on of hands,” or “energy therapy”), meditation (now often called “mindfulness”), massage, aromatherapy, hypnosis, Ayurveda (a traditional medical practice originating in India), and several other treatments not normally prescribed by mainstream doctors. The term integrative medicine refers to the conjunction of these practices with mainstream medical care.

Here we have what may become the replacement for AGW in the minds of the exquisite privileged class. It has all the requirements.
1. America is corrupt and inferior ? Yes.
2. Capitalism is corrupt and inferior ? Yes
3. Only the truly intelligent and sensitive can appreciate it ? Well.

You might think the weight of the clinical evidence would close the case on alternative medicine, at least in the eyes of mainstream physicians and scientists who aren’t in a position to make a buck on it. Yet many extremely well-credentialed scientists and physicians with no skin in the game take issue with the black-and-white view espoused by Salzberg and other critics. And on balance, the medical community seems to be growing more open to alternative medicine’s possibilities, not less.

That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could find out what the agent was in a sick patient and attack the agent medically.” To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against even the most challenging of these agents—as the taming of the AIDS virus attests.

But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent. Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. “We face an entirely different set of big medical challenges today,” says Blackburn. “But we haven’t rethought the way we fight illness.” That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery.

A science blog states the case for scientific medicine.

Speaking of bad ideas, in contrast to his previous article, in which he managed at least to get the gist of what Ioannidis teaches but merely spun it in what I considered to be an annoying fashion, the entire idea behind Freedman’s new article channels the worst fallacies of apologists for alternative medicine. The whole idea behind the article appears to be that, even if most of alternative medicine is quackery (which it is, by the way), it’s making patients better because its practitioners take the time to talk to patients and doctors do not. In other words, it’s a massive “What’s the harm?” argument. Yes, that’s basically the entire idea of the article boiled down into a couple of sentences. Deepak Chopra couldn’t have said it better. Tacked on to that bad idea is a massive argumentum ad populum that portrays alternative medicine (or, as purveyors of quackademic medicine like to call it, “complementary and alternative medicine” or “integrative medicine”) as the wave of the future, a wave that’s washing over medicine and teaching us cold, reductionistic doctors to care again about patients and thus make them better. Freedman even contrasts this to what he calls the “failure” of scientific medicine. I kid you not. Worse, Freedman makes this argument after having actually interviewed some prominent skeptics, including Steve Salzberg and Steve Novella, in essence, missing the point.

I expect to see more and more of “alternative medicine” because it appeals to the science illiterate and it damns another traditional source of authority, scientific medicine. Global warming hysteria attacks capitalism and prosperity. Alternative medicine is also going to be useful to Obamacare as a way of cutting reimbursement for traditional care. That will be a powerful wind behind it.

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Posted in climate, global warming, health reform, medicine, science | 3 Comments »

What a tsunami looks like

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

This video, from Al Jazerra of all places, shows what a tsunami looks like;

The movie, Hereafter, does an excellent job of simulating the tsunami that hit Thailand two years ago. No one, I suspect, thought they would have another real example soon.

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The coming energy crisis

Friday, January 14th, 2011

The Obama administration is still in the throes of global warming mentality. They have cancelled leases for oil and gas in the huge deposits in western states like Montana. The vast boom going on just to the north in Alberta has not impressed Interior Secretary Salazar. They want to take millions of acres out of the energy search by naming them wilderness, just as Bill Clinton created a huge wilderness area out of good potential energy fields at the end of his administration. They have not made nuclear power plants any easier to build. The Gulf oil leases are still blocked and the moratorium, while allegedly ended, continues in a slow down. The only energy and his acolytes are interested in is “renewable” such as wind and sun. These are boutique power sources and even these are being blocked by Democratic politicians.

But the project is hardly shovel ready. Several regulatory hurdles remain, and opponents of the wind farm have vowed to go to court, potentially stalling Cape Wind for several more years.

For years the Cape Wind project has been the focusof pitched battles splitting politicians and environmental groups. While some environmentalists are prepared to go to court to stop the project, other major groups, including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, support it.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose family compound overlooks Nantucket Sound and who died last year, had opposed the project, saying it was a giveaway to a private developer.

It has taken nine years to get this far. In California, another lefty state, a big solar project is being fought by enviros and Democrats. I wonder if the left wants any energy developed. It seems insane but we are getting very close to a tipping point when there will not be time to build new projects and find more oil and gas.

The Democrats, and the vast array of “activists” whom they enable, have demonstrated hostility to all practical forms of energy production and distribution. This is not just a matter of oil & gas drilling: as we have discussed many times on this blog, the U.S. electrical system faces a problematic future. There is every likelihood that, under a Democratic administration/Congress:

a)The building of new coal plants would go from “difficult” to “impossible”
b)The building of nuclear plants would continue to be virtually impossible
c)Even the building of new natural-gas-fired plants would be severely delayed by environmental lawsuits and regulatory maneuvering based on the CO2-is-a-pollutant theory.

Solar and wind, beloved of Democrats, have their uses, but they also have their limitations. I see no evidence that either Obama or the Dem Congressional leadership has any interest in understanding the technical and economic factors that govern the extent to which these technologies can be practically employed. The intermittent nature of wind and usable sun, the difficulty of storing electricity, the supply-chain constraints which govern the large-scale introduction of any new technology–there is much less interest in these things than in the glib repetition of catch-phrases. And even the use of environmentally-blessed technologies will be greatly inhibited by environmentalist protests against the transmission lines required to connect these systems to the cities that need their power. These activists would, of course, gain great impetus from a Democratic administration.

Obama talks a lot about the middle class. The existence of a large and affluent middle class is enabled by widely available and reasonably priced energy, especially electricity. If electric rates are driven up by a factor of 2X or 3X, as is entirely possible with Democratic policies, there will be not only a direct effect on consumers, but an effect on virtually all workers as U.S. businesses–especially manufacturing businesses but also things like data centers–become less competitive.

Lenin once remarked that “Communism is Soviet power plus electrification.” Our present “progressives” seem more interested in de-electrification. Where the New Deal (and the Soviets) wanted to build hydroelectric dams, today’s “progressives” are, for the most part, more interested in destroying them.

Remember, electrical infrastructure is a long-leadtime item, and if we dig outselves into a deep hole in this matter, it will take a long, long time to dig ourselves out..

That was written in 2008. Read the whole thing. It did a pretty good job of predicting the Obama administration’s policies.

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Posted in energy, global warming, politics, science, technology | Comments Closed

The education bubble and science

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

I like George Will’s writing and his insight. I watch the ABC Sunday news commentary show to see him make pithy comments containing more wisdom that the rest of the commentary combined. His column this week is an example of his insights.

Deborah Wince-Smith of the Council on Competitiveness says: “Talent will be the oil of the 21st century.” And the talent that matters most is the cream of the elite. The late Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod said, “Ninety-nine percent of the discoveries are made by 1 percent of the scientists.”

With populism rampant, this is not a propitious moment to defend elites, even scientific ones. Nevertheless, the nation depends on nourishing them and the institutions that sustain them.

U.S. undergraduate institutions award 16 percent of their degrees in the natural sciences or engineering; South Korea and China award 38 percent and 47 percent, respectively. America ranks 27th among developed nations in the proportion of students receiving undergraduate degrees in science or engineering.

He goes on to recommend support of the “elite universities,” by which I suppose the Ivy League. I think there is another point of view that should be considered.

There’s a lot of work ahead to enable the United States to meet the coming challenges. I’m reasonably confident that we remain the best placed large society on earth to make the right moves. Our culture of enterprise and risk-taking is still strong; a critical mass of Americans still have the values and the characteristics that helped us overcome the challenges of the last two hundred years.

But when I look at the problems we face, I worry. It’s not just that some of our cultural strengths are eroding as both the financial and intellectual elites rush to shed many of the values that made the country great. And it’s not the deficit: we can and will deal with that if we get our policies and politics right. And it’s certainly not the international competition: our geopolitical advantages remain overwhelming and China, India and the EU all face challenges even more daunting than ours and they lack our long tradition of successful, radical but peaceful reform and renewal.

No, what worries me most today is the state of the people who should be the natural leaders of the next American transformation: our intellectuals and professionals. Not all of them, I hasten to say: the United States is still rich in great scholars and daring thinkers. A few of them even blog.

The number of hard science and engineering students at major and/or “elite” universities is a small fraction of the total enrollment. Harvard, for example, only recently revised its engineering curriculum.

The A.B. in engineering degree teaches students how to solve problems and builds confidence doing so, explains Cherry Murray, dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The degree is a good bridge to further education such as business, law, government, architecture, and medical schools, she says, and draws people who might not normally be interested in more narrow engineering subjects. Another benefit of the broader curriculum: Murray says 38% of the A.B. enrollees at Harvard are women, almost double the national average in regular engineering programs.”

I’m sorry to say that doesn’t sound like a rigorous engineering program. What about MIT ? The list of majors is reassuring, although I don’t know why anyone would major in Theater Arts at MIT.

My own personal favorite is Cal Tech. In 1956 I was accepted and even had my dorm room assigned but my father refused to provide any financial information so I was not able to get a scholarship and there were very few loans in those days. It’s one of two missed chances that I cannot forget. Cal Tech is serious science and engineering education. I’m sorry to have missed it.

There are many excellent state university engineering programs so the emphasis on “elite” universities is an example of provincialism on Will’s part. Stanford is considered elite these days and has excellent engineering programs. The University of Southern California, where I was a student, has good engineering programs, especially chemical and petroleum engineering. In the days I attended it was an inferior program but I had a scholarship so that’s where I went. I eventually switched to medicine and that was excellent for the times.

The biggest problem, and one hinted at by critics of the “Education Bubble,” is the plethora of weak majors, like the “studies” programs, which enroll students with weak scholarly skills and produce graduates with large student loans who cannot find a job. A recent book by Charles Murray, of Bell Curve fame, makes the point that too many students are attending college today under the fallacious impression that all are equally entitled to a college degree. His theory is that there is a minimum IQ below which a college education is probably a poor choice. There are many trades that can provide a good stable income and real pleasure in performing tasks that suit one’s ability. The role of vocational education has been minimized the past 40 years and there are few vocational high schools anymore that teach the basics of manual trades. This may suggest that the smaller number of male college students, compared to female, may in fact be the result of better choices on the part of the young men.

Women fill the classes in weak majors like Women’s Studies and Sociology. Many undergraduates in big universities are expected to digest a steady diet of leftist politics before they can get to the serious part of their major field of study.

There is something to be said for limiting student loans to certain fields of study. Engineering and hard science should be eligible for loans without restriction. For other majors, especially the weak ones, the loans should be limited to those with high grades. If a student wants to continue in a weak major, they or their parents should be responsible. Limits on student loans might even bring tuition inflation under control.

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Posted in economics, education, politics, science | 5 Comments »

Bacteria, Bowels and Health

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Most people do not understand that we live in a sea of bacteria. There are bacteria, and related organisms called Archea, at the bottom of the sea and probably deep into the earth. The vast majority of these bacteria do us no harm and, in fact, some are necessary for health and even life. For example, if a patient has been taking antibiotics for several weeks, their blood clotting may be seriously impaired. This is because vitamin K is manufactured in the gut by bacteria, which are killed off by antibiotics.

Antibiotics have another undesirable effect on bacteria in the gut. The bacteria which are sensitive to that antibiotic are killed off and this leaves room for more dangerous bacteria, which are resistant to the antibiotic, to take up residence. My professor of surgery had a theory, which I have not seen proven, that harmless bacteria are the best adapted for life in the gut. If they are killed off by antibiotics and replaced by pathogenic organisms, removal of the antibiotics will allow the harmless organisms to reestablish themselves, displacing the pathogenic strains. I saw evidence of this in his and my own patients.

He kept a pure culture of Escherichia coli, a common colon bacterium, in the hospital lab. This strain was sensitive to all antibiotics so would be quickly killed off in their presence. Many of his elective surgery patients would come in for surgery with highly antibiotic resistant organisms in their colon. This was because they had been taking antibiotics, usually for diverticulitis. If these patients developed an infection postop, most common antibiotics would be useless. What he did was to stop all antibiotics and give the patient a dose of the lab E. coli in a malted milkshake. On admission, we would take a culture of the patient’s stool and have the lab check sensitivity to the common antibiotics. Usually, we found that the stool organisms were resistant. A couple of days after the dose of sensitive E coli had been given (I never asked the patients if they knew what was in the milkshake), the stool culture was checked again. In almost all cases, we found that the resistant organisms had been replaced by sensitive ones.

The residents at the County Hospital used a variant of this method on elective colon surgery patients. Since the lab was not about to keep a culture of sensitive organisms for us, we used an alternate source for them. Patients coming in for simple surgeries, like hernia repairs, who had not been on antibiotics and who had not been around hospitals, had a stool sample taken. That stool specimen was mixed with a malted milkshake and given to the colon surgery patients. Needless to say, they were not told the contents of the milkshake. We were less able to test the effect because the labs were very uncooperative with any of these exotic concepts. Still, I think it worked although we now know that the bowel flora is actually not what we thought it was in the 1960s. The anerobic organisms, like Clostridia, were not well understood and Bacteroides had not been discovered. It is now known that 90% of colon organisms are anerobic, meaning they cannot survive in an oxygen containing atmosphere. Many species have not been discovered because they cannot be cultured. They also produce nutrients, like fatty acids, that are essential for the health of the colon mucosa. There is even a disease called “diversion colitis” that is due to diversion of the fecal stream, by a colostomy usually, from the lower colon.

Why am I bringing up these old war stories ? There is a lot of interest right now in how colon bacteria affect normal health. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is much in the health news. There is a theory that it is caused by bacteria in the bowel that produce too much gas and cause other irritating conditions.

Researchers have built a strong case that bacteria may be the actual culprit. Mark Pimentel, M.D., a colleague of mine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center who heads the GI Motility Program, has spent the last decade studying IBS, specifically the role bacteria may play in causing the condition. He and his colleagues unveiled the results of a large clinical study during Digestive Disease Week earlier this year in New Orleans. This study showed an antibiotic is effective in providing long term relief of IBS symptoms – excellent news for a large number of IBS sufferers.

If an antibiotic is helpful, what about other bacteria that may not cause the irritation ? WE hear a lot the past few years about “probiotics” on the radio. What are they ?

Our bodies are a complicated ecosystem full of flora. In fact, the bacteria outnumber our own cells by 10 times. There are around 10 trillion cells that make up the human body, and we have around 100 trillion bacteria cells in our digestive tracts.

As more people become increasingly aware of the importance of this “good bacteria,” hundreds of products in recent years have attempted to catch our eye by promising to help our troubled stomachs. Probiotics, defined as “live microorganisms which, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host,” have become a big business. During a casual flip through the television channels, I frequently encounter commercials filled with attractive women gushing that their digestion has never been more regular thanks to certain yogurts or other products.

There may be something to some of those claims.

Probiotics include both yeastlike members of the saccharomyces group and teria, which usually come from two groups: Lactobacillus or Bifidobacterium. Probiotics are sold as capsules, tablets and powders, as well as in a growing number of foods. Among them, yogurt, yogurt drinks, kefir, miso, tempeh, as well as some juices and soy beverages. Sometimes the bacteria were present originally, and sometimes they are added during the preparation of the foods.

I have for many years prescribed yogurt and lactobacillus containing milk, available in the supermarket, for my patients recovering from conditions in which they took antibiotics.

Despite its narrow range of participants, the study confirmed that probiotic yogurt aided many of those involved. “We have shown that simply giving a probiotic drink to elderly patients who are prescribed antibiotics reduces their risk of getting diarrhea,” says Mary Hickson, a research dietician at Imperial College in London and the lead author of the study.

Gastrointestinal illness is a common side effect in an antibiotic’s battle against bacterial infection. Antibiotics don’t just go after the bad guys — they also kill some of the beneficial or neutral place-holding flora in our digestive tracts. This collateral damage allows deleterious organisms to establish themselves, often inflicting abdominal distress and discomfort as a result. Yogurt, like other “probiotic” foods, helps to promotes the growth of favorable bacteria in our digestive tracts. These microorganisms assist us in absorbing nutrients from our food and also occupy valuable real estate so that pathogens cannot proliferate and make us sick.

It’s nice to see the theory catch up with practices that I and others have been using for 40 years. Those patients who got the fecal milkshakes never knew how advanced the therapy they were getting really was.

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Posted in medicine, science | 9 Comments »

Is an ice age coming ?

Monday, December 20th, 2010

There is a great deal of argument about the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Al Gore is on one side and the weather seems to be on the other. People are even talking about the “Gore Effect.” This is unexpected cold weather that seems to follow Al Gore around. If he comes to town to give a speech about how the world is warming, expect a cold snap or even snow.

Right now, Britain, and much of Europe, are enduring a terrible winter. This has been called the worst winter in Britain in 100 years. The British Met Office predicted a warm winter. London, however, was prepared for snow. A lot of snow. The result has been that London has kept up quite well with the weather except for Heathrow Airport which has been closed for two days. Why did London city do better than Heathrow and most of the rest of Britain ?

The Mayor explains. He uses a private weather forecaster who is getting more and more respect from people who have to know about the weather, like farmers and business people. And the Mayor of London.

Is it really true that no one saw this coming?

Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

Many of us climate skeptics believe that the sun controls our weather and Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.”

Are we now in a Dalton Minimum ?

Well, it doesn’t look good. How long before the climate science people open their eyes ?

it is a full two years since the month of solar minimum, this was a good opportunity to update a lot of graphs of solar activity.

Read the whole thing.

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Posted in climate, energy, global warming | Comments Closed

Cyberwarfare

Sunday, September 26th, 2010

We may be entering an era when cyberwar is a real threat, at least to some. I was a computer programmer in 1958-59 but that is the stone age of computing. The machine I programmed was An IBM 650 which was so primitive that it did not use hexadecimal code. This was even before FORTRAN was written so I claim no current expertise. Later, after medical school, I took some computer science courses and learned to program in Pascal and C. Still later, I learned Visual Basic but never got very far in C++ so I am pretty much a neophyte in Object Oriented Programming. The term, often abbreviated to OOP, is a way of creating small pieces of code that can be reused over and over without rewriting it and the attendant risk of error. It is also faster. This also applies to modular programming and the differences are explained in the wiki entry.

It now appears that a new “worm” has been created by someone that is capable of attacking the Iranian nuclear program. Roger Simon is the only one I have seen so far discussing it and its implications. This involves small devices called PLCs, or “Programmable Logic Controllers” some of which run your washing machine. They are the heart of computer controlled machinery, such as the 30,000 Iranian centrifuges that are purifying Uranium 235. What if all those 30,000 centrifuges went crazy, spinning so fast that they self destructed ?

This brings up the subject of Stuxnet, a computer “worm.” It attacks one specific system, the Siemens company’s SCADA systems. It happens that Siemens designed and built the SCADA systems that run its nuclear program. What a coincidence !

Has the war with Iran already begun ? Maybe.

But just as television news was transformed by technology before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and politics was transformed by social networking before it appeared that Twitter would bring about a second Iranian Revolution, process and progress need crystallizing events, where the political and cultural significance of technological innovation becomes indisputable.

Such a moment came in July with the discovery of a worm known as Stuxnet, which sought out a particular version of the Siemens’ SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems that control power grids and industrial plants. According to Ralph Langner, an expert in industrial control systems who published a study of the worm last week, Stuxnet was capable of taking over SCADA controls in order to deliver a kinetic attack by causing critical systems to physically malfunction. The systems infected weren’t randomly targeted: a majority are in Iran.

It’s an interesting idea. A lot of Windows 7 code was written by Israeli engineers. Maybe their target is more than the nuclear program.

Stuxnet is an even more dramatic transformational event: warfare is never going to be the same, at least while the underlying protocols governing the Internet create these kinds of systemic vulnerabilities. But even if there was agreement to rewrite these protocols starting tomorrow, such a project would take a decade. So, let the damage assessment begin. Who knows? By demonstrating how Iran could so very easily experience a Chernobyl-like catastrophe, or the entire destruction of its conventional energy grid, the first round of the “war” may have already been won.

Unfortunately, the Chinese have been working very hard at the same sort of thing and we had a determined cyberattack on the Pentagon e-mail system two years ago. This may be what war looks like in the future.

UPDATE: Some body is noticing.

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Posted in energy, espionage, Israel, middle east, military, technology | Comments Closed

The Tyranny of the Credentialed

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

There is an interesting post today on the blog of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph. Why is it that we get better coverage of the US economy and government from British newspapers than our own ? Don’t bother to answer as that question has an obvious answer (aside from economic illiteracy of US writers). A junior member of the Federal Reserve Board economics staff, Kartik Athreya, senior economist for the Richmond Fed, has written a ridiculous letter complaining that economics blogs should be suppressed because the bloggers do not have economics PhDs.

“Writers who have not taken a year of PhD coursework in a decent economics department (and passed their PhD qualifying exams), cannot meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy.”

I especially like how he invites ridicule by emphasizing the quality of his own education at U of Iowa.

“The response of the untrained to the crisis has been startling. The real issue is that there is an extremely low likelihood that the speculations of the untrained, on a topic almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects, will offer anything new. Moreover, there is a substantial likelihood that it will instead offer something incoherent or misleading.”

Yes, we can’t have incoherent of misleading statements flying about the internet. I would include the statements of Nobel Prize winning economist Pail Krugman who wants to spend much, much more but who am I to question such an expert ?

“Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that’s just peanuts to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn’t blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it’s so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns.”

I won’t argue with that. Nuclear physics is hard, too. Even Medicine can be difficult at times. Mr Evans-Pritchard (not doctor), however, has some strong opinions that, I suspect, do not agree with Dr Athreya’s.

The current generation of economists have led the world into a catastrophic cul de sac. And if they think we are safely on the road to recovery, they still fail to understand what they did.

Central banks were the ultimate authors of the credit crisis since it is they who set the price of credit too low, throwing the whole incentive structure of the capitalist system out of kilter, and more or less forcing banks to chase yield and engage in destructive behaviour.

They ran ever-lower real interests with each cycle, allowed asset bubbles to run unchecked (Ben Bernanke was the cheerleader of that particular folly), blamed Anglo-Saxon over-consumption on excess Asian savings (half true, but still the silliest cop-out of all time), and believed in the neanderthal doctrine of “inflation targeting”. Have they all forgotten Keynes’s cautionary words on the “tyranny of the general price level” in the early 1930s? Yes they have.
They allowed the M3 money supply to surge at double-digit rates (16pc in the US and 11pc in euroland), and are now allowing it to collapse (minus 5.5pc in the US over the last year). Have they all forgotten the Friedman-Schwartz lessons on the quantity theory of money? Yes, they have. Have they forgotten Irving Fisher’s “Debt Deflation causes of Great Depressions”? Yes, most of them have. And of course, they completely failed to see the 2007-2009 crisis coming, or to respond to it fast enough when it occurred.

The present policies of this administration are based on the recommendations of credentialed idiots like this letter writer and they scare the hell out of me.

The error was for the Fed to buy the bonds from the banking system (and we all hate the banks, don’t we) rather than going straight to the non-bank private sector. How about purchasing a herd of Texas Longhorn cattle? That would do it. The inevitable result of this is a collapse of money velocity as banks allow their useless reserves to swell.

Nicole Gelinas, in her book, After the Fall blames credit rating agencies and lack of regulation but she also writes that there was a brief period when an auction of non-performing assets was begun and could have set prices for the Mortgage backed bonds but this was short circuited by the Fed paying the banks full price in TARP. That ended the auction since who would sell for less than par when Uncle Sam was there paying retail ? Then, it turned out no one could decided what the retail price was since it was obvious the bonds were worth a quarter or less of the face value. The auction approach might have worked but it was aborted by government intervention, once again !

The 20th Century was a horrible litany of absurd experiments and atrocities committed by intellectuals, or by elite groupings that claimed a higher knowledge. Simple folk usually have enough common sense to avoid the worst errors. Sometimes they need to take very stern action to stop intellectuals leading us to ruin.
The root error of the modern academy is to pretend (and perhaps believe, which is even less forgiveable), that economics is a science and answers to Newtonian laws.

Here is the take-home lesson, as they say in medical school; Economics is NOT a science.

Economics should never be treated as a science. Its claims are not falsifiable, which is why economists can disagree so violently among themselves: a rarer spectacle in science, where disputes are usually resolved one way or another by hard data.
It is a branch of anthropology and psychology, a moral discipline if you like. Anybody who loses sight of this is a public nuisance, starting with Dr Athreya.

It sounds like economics shares some problems with climate science.

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Posted in economics, financial | Comments Closed

Working with tools.

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

UPDATE: It now appears that a plumber in Kansas has provided a major design improvement to the BP oil well cap. He designed a cap using a flange arrangement similar to that used in high pressure hotel sewage lines. Once again, American ingenuity to the rescue as the tool user saves all the PhDs from their mishap.

I have previously posted my concern about the low status of manual arts in the educational and vocational fields in this country. This also applies to science but to a lesser degree. That previous post was obviously prior to the encounter between Barack Obama and Joe the Plumber.

One major point is the fact that Joe is making $250,000 a year at that point. How many law school graduates made that much in 2008?

Even in the field of innovation, it does not require a PhD to innovate in design or manufacturing. The basic problem, to me, seems to be the lack of manual skills with tools. People who make things, or can fix things, are the bedrock of a society that needs to design and manufacture quality objects. There is even a connection to the ability to do science. I wonder how many engineers cannot take apart and reassemble the things they design or work on. The same applies to surgery. Manual dexterity should be a basic requirement for the surgeon.

Today, there are a lot of unemployed people with useless degrees who would be better off learning plumbing or auto repair. In World War II, we benefited from the technical skills of the American soldiers who had learned to work with tools and many of whom could fix cars. The solution to the hedgerows of Normandy was an American army sergeant who devised a hedgerow cutter for the front of the Sherman tank. His name was Curtis G Culin and he was one of the heroes of World War II.

Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of the United States, in a January 10, 1961, speech to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers:
“ There was a little sergeant. His name was Culin, and he had an idea. And his idea was that we could fasten knives, great big steel knives in front of these tanks, and as they came along they would cut off these banks right at ground level – they would go through on the level keel – would carry with themselves a little bit of camouflage for a while. And this idea was brought to the captain, to the major, to the colonel, and it got high enough that somebody did something about it — and that was General Bradley — and he did it very quickly. Because this seemed like a crazy idea, they did not even go to the engineers very fast, because they were afraid of the technical advice, and then someone did have a big questions, “Where are you going to find the steel for all this thing?” Well now, happily the Germans tried to keep us from going on the beaches with great steel “chevaux de fries” – big crosses, there were all big bars of steel down on the beach where the Germans left it. And he got it – got these things sharpened up – and it worked fine. The biggest and happiest group I suppose in all the Allied Armies that night were those that knew that this thing worked. And it worked beautifully.

One of the reasons I like Neville Shute’s novels is because he has that theme in several of them. One, titled “Round the Bend” has as its theme the development of a new religion among men who work on airplanes. It is set in Asia and concerns the religions of Asia such as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. The chief character is an airplane mechanic who teaches other mechanics that to do a careful, flawless job in working on an airplane is the same as praying. His interpretation of Islam (The novel was written in 1951) becomes extremely popular in the Persian Gulf region as the imams see this as a new view of religion that attracts the young men who have become interested in mechanics and science and have drifted away from traditional life. His new creed is equally popular with Buddhists and Hundus, all of them aircraft mechanics and pilots. The resulting increase in quality of the work is appreciated by the airlines and he becomes a cult figure.

Like many of Shute’s novels, the engineer, even without a degree, is the hero. I wish we had more of this. Shute knew what he was writing about as he was a successful aeronautical engineer who had owned his own company. I titled my other post, The Manual LIfe. I wish it was more appreciated.

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Posted in education, science, technology | 3 Comments »

The Ice Age cometh

Monday, January 11th, 2010

The world is experiencing a severe cold spell. This is what Britain looks like now from the weather satellite. Florida is seeing temperatures that haven’t been seen in decades. What is going on ?

This is not a welcome answer.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007– and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

Whoa ! I thought “the world’s most eminent climate scientists” were all telling us we were about to fry. What happened to those swimming polar bears with no ice to rest upon ?

It really is ironic that the year the CRU scam collapsed, we start a severe cold trend. This sort of thing only happens in fiction, right ? This may be more than a cold snap.

Fossil evidence clearly demonstrates that Earth’s climate can shift gears within a decade, establishing new and different patterns that can persist for decades to centuries. In addition, these climate shifts do not necessarily have universal, global effects. They can generate a counterintuitive scenario: Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates.

I think this statement is a bit of ass covering in 2003 when the warmists still held sway and were perfectly capable, as we have seen, of spiking any “skeptic” piece submitted to a journal. The “regional” theory might be a sop to the warming fraternity who might otherwise have had a word with the editors at Wood’s Hole to spike this paper.

This new paradigm of abrupt climate change has been well established over the last decade by research of ocean, earth and atmosphere scientists at many institutions worldwide. But the concept remains little known and scarcely appreciated in the wider community of scientists, economists, policy makers, and world political and business leaders. Thus, world leaders may be planning for climate scenarios of global warming that are opposite to what might actually occur.

So maybe this is the first year of a new ice age. A 100 year “Gore effect.” Of course, the “Little Ice Age” lasted 1000 years.

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Posted in science | 4 Comments »

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