Scientifically-literate piece from Time.com about how human evolution is proceeding these days.
Stearns' team examined the vital statistics of 2,238 postmenopausal women participating in the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the medical histories of some 14,000 residents of Framingham, Mass., since 1948. Investigators searched for correlations between women's physical characteristics; including height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels; and the number of offspring they produced. According to their findings, it was stout, slightly plump (but not obese) women who tended to have more children. "Women with very low body fat don't ovulate," Stearns explains - as did women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Using a sophisticated statistical analysis that controlled for any social or cultural factors that could impact childbearing, researchers determined that these characteristics were passed on genetically from mothers to daughters and granddaughters.
If these trends were to continue with no cultural changes in the town for the next 10 generations, by 2409 the average Framingham woman would be 2 cm (0.8 in) shorter, 1 kg (2.2 lb.) heavier, have a healthier heart, have her first child five months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later than a woman today, the study found. "That rate of evolution is slow but pretty similar to what we see in other plants and animals. Humans don't seem to be any exception," Stearns says.
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Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist at University College London who has previously held that human evolution was nearing its end, says the Framingham study is indeed an important example of how natural selection still operates through inherited differences in reproductive ability. But Jones argues that variation in female fertility, as measured in the Framingham study, is a much less important factor in human evolution than differences in male fertility. Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men. "While it used to be that men had many children in older age to many different women, now men tend to have only a few children at a younger age with one wife. The drop in the number of older fathers has had a major effect on the rate of mutation and has at least reduced the amount of new diversity - the raw material of evolution. Darwin's machine has not stopped, but it surely has slowed greatly."
Bad news for guys in 500 years; all the chicks will be short and dumpy. On the other hand, there's a clear mandate here for tall, slender women. You must breed more frequently to ensure the future beauty of the human race! (Since current standards of beauty are sure to endure for another four centuries.)
The article is useful for what it does, but it doesn't even attempt to address technology or culture, which are likely to be far more important factors than just reproductive evolution in shaping humans 10 or 15 generations down the line. Everyone might be 7 feet tall in a century, once scientists learn which gene to click to control height. Such changes would probably not be inheritable, but it's easy to imagine a society (especially in America, the last bastion of resistance to universal health care) where the rich can have their children perfected by some simple gene therapies in utero, giving them stronger muscles, greater height, disease resistance, etc.
Or not, if there's religiously-fueled opposition to human genetic engineering. Or we could refuse to transition to a post fossil fuels era and hit oil shocks and worldwide economic ruin, resulting in mass starvation and poor childhood nutrition, and shrink down to 5 feet, like our blighted ancestors in the Dark Ages. Forecasting today's conditions forward 500 years, without assuming massive technological and other changes seems almost pointless, when you look at the changes human society has undergone in just the past century.
Not that scifi predictions have a place in simple articles about potential, gradual, incremental evolutionary changes in human beings, but considering some of them provides more than enough reason to largely ignore the article's safe, sane, and highly unlikely conclusions.
Perhaps this has become, unbeknownst to me, common practice for rock bands, but I found these videos on the Nine Inch Nails channel of Vimeo, fairly amazing. They're taken with a mini-cam from right on stage during live performances, by a camera man who has full access. He's right there on stage, looking out over the audience, at arm's length from Trent as he bangs away on a computer or keyboard, walking up behind the guitarist, all but leaning over the drummer's shoulder, etc. The fact that the images and sound are DVD quality gives it an amazing, "you are there" sort of feeling, which is what I liked. I never watch concert videos, since it bores me just watching them march around on stage. These are fascinating since it's what the band sees, and the different perspective is novel. If I ever had dreams about being in a rock band, they would probably look a lot like this.
I watched all 14 of the videos, and I don't even like going to concerts. I do, however, like NIN's music, which certainly helped me get through the experience. If the videos were for like, Coldplay or some other wimpy band, I'd still have watched a few, but with the sound muted. One is embedded below, though I doubt the image quality will be as good as it is viewing them directly from the Vimeo channel. Which I suggest you click through to.
In one of those mysterious quirks of the human brain, I woke up this morning with the jingle for Freedent Gum running through my head.
Freedent's the one that takes the stick out of gum ...and puts the fresh in your breath. It also moistens your mouth... Yeah Freedent's the one!
I've been sick since the weekend with the worst sore throat I can imagine (I literally double over in pain every time I swallow, even with the heavy doses of painkillers and penicillin I'm on), so I'm not sleeping (or doing anything else) very well, and when I do doze off (frequently) I keep having weird dreams. And waking up with remnants of them in my head. None so far have been as weird as a 20 year old commercial for a brand of gum I never once tried and that probably doesn't even exist any longer.
The jingle, once accessed, stuck, and as I showered and gargled and spit in pain, I found myself turning the lyrics over in my head. How odd that they never even claim it tastes good? Isn't that pretty much a prerequisite for a mouth-based product, especially one that people are going to naturally assume tastes awful? Sure, it would be a lie, since it probably does taste awful, but you'd think they would at least make the effort; all other inedible diet products do.
So there I was in the shower, trying to decide if the exclusion of any "tastes great!" type lyrics were some sort of very rare modesty/honesty in advertising? Did consumers back in the 90s not need to be lied to so blatantly? Could adults back then decide to buy a gum for practical reasons, without needing ridiculous lies about amazing, long-lasting flavor? Or is the failure to tout the taste a mark of a failed ad? (But how can it be failed if I remembered it, unprompted, two decades later? On the other hand, I've never bought the product, so the success of their theme song as a lasting meme is kind of irrelevant if it doesn't spur market share.)
Naturally, I had to look it up on YouTube, and the tune was just as I'd remembered, though the commercial was far, far, far cheesier than I would have believed. It plays like a parody of itself, or something from a Black Studies class about how White People see themselves.
I haven't watched TV in a few years, so I'm pretty oblivious to current trends in non-Internet advertising, but unless we've hit some surge of 80s nostalgia, I have to think everything in that commercial struck you as oddly as it struck me. It's hard to believe it was meant to be taken seriously? The whitest man ever seen on TV, in those clothes, pretending to play golf before sort of idly dry-humping the whitest woman ever seen on a TV... It's amazing. I had to watch it twice, since my mouth was just hanging open the first time and I couldn't absorb the details.
But yeah, Freedent's the one. Or was. I don't think they exist any longer, or at least not with that marketing angle, since there are tons of "adult" chewing gums now with no calories, and they all freshen breath and actually taste fairly good. And none of them are prone to sticking to dental work, at least not in my experience with a lot of brands of gum and quite a few crowns in my mouth. Or perhaps there have been dental appliance improvements since 1990, and the amount of people with ill-fitting dentures has dropped to the point that marketing special brands of gum just for them is no longer viable?
The Greatest Investment in the History of the World?
So an art collector bought a painting last year for $19,000, largely on a hunch. Extensive analysis eventually turned up an actual palm print from the artist, a fairly well known Italian artist from the fifteenth century, and bingo, the painting is appraised for one-hundred and fifty million dollars.
There are some nice quotes in the article, too. Nicer than the picture itself, which is entirely unremarkable, and doesn't even approach the quality of work you see in some of Leonardo's seemingly simple sketches. One of which I attached below, for the sake of comparison.
Biro examined multispectral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.
"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."
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Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought "La Bella Principessa" — or "The Beautiful Princess" — at the gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about nine years after buying it at auction for a similar price.
One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million.
If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.
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Silverman said the Swiss collector first raised suspicions about the drawing, saying it didn't look like 19th century artwork. When Silverman saw it at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, although the idea seemed far-fetched. He hurriedly bought it for his Swiss friend and then started researching it.
"Of course, you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around,'" Silverman said. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci."
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Silverman described the Swiss collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold."
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As for the possibility of finding other Leonardo works, "there are thousands of lost works of Leonardo, mainly pages from codexes or drawings," Vezzosi said, but discovering a lost or undocumented painting would be "much more difficult."
It's mostly a curiosity, since it's not a very good piece and the only value comes from the fame of its alleged artist. (Who created many other wonderful works of art... just not so much this one.) But what a value!
I addressed that in the title of this post, but seriously... if the identification holds, a sale is made, and the appraisal proves accurate, was buying this painting for $19k the best single investment in human history? Plenty of purchases appreciate in value, astronomically in some cases, but have any ever gained so much, so quickly? Stock values sometimes increase by billions in a single day, but that gain is spread over millions of shares, and they usually had some substantial value to begin with. This painting increased in value approximately 7895x, and had an absolutely gain in value of nearly $150,000,000m.
The only thing I can compare it to is a lottery ticket. Those cost about $1, and sometimes pay over $300m on the biggest jackpots in the US. But that's not really a fair comparison since no one (sensible) buys lottery tickets as an investment, and there's no inherent value to a lottery ticket. It's either a winner and worth lots, or (in the vast majority of cases) it's a loser and worth nothing. This painting was worth about $20k, and had been sold for that much in the past. Suddenly, just by changing the artist's identity, it's damn near priceless. And it's an investment since this clever agent just snapped it up for his rich Swiss client, and he brought about the price inflation by researching it and proving the pedigree. Great success to him. Great jealousy for the rest of us.
Since I previously posted about an informative Economy 101 type article by Paul Krugman, I figure I'm obligated to link to this new one. It actually is an Economy 101, where Krugman replied to a couple of dozen questions from readers, on various basic, elementary aspects of the economy and finance.
There's not much editorializing in it, for better or worse, but if you want fairly short and straightforward expert answers to common questions in all sorts of financial areas, this is a good read. The questions are grouped into sections like, Definition of "Economy", Signs of Recovery, Stimulus Money, Rescue Efforts, End of the Recession, and so on, so you can easily click just to the field you're most curious about, if you lack patience/time to just read the whole thing.
In recent months, I've been thinking and reading a lot about the current, scorched-earth, fact-free state of political "discourse" in the US. I've not often blogged about it because um... words are hard. Well, more accurately words are hard when I want to semi-concisely sum up a vast and sprawling issue; a task that would require a great deal of "and this other guy said" type commentary, since I'm highly unlikely to find/make the time to dig up links for everything.
Too much real life work and writing, weekends spent primarily engaged in recreation with my new girlfriend Elle, etc. This past weekend was more of the same, with Elle overnight at my place on Friday night, much romping on Saturday, before we attended a wedding of a friend of hers from grad school on Saturday. I stayed over there that night, and we crashed fairly early since we hadn't gotten much sleep the night before. I left her place earlier than usual Sunday afternoon (usually it's dark by the time I depart after an overnight), but the problem with the Bay Area on a nice weekend is hella traffic getting into/out of The City. Thus was my return trip twice as long and ten times as frustrating, and by the time I got home the neck ache I'd awakened with was much worse, and I was feeling weird chills and sudden patches of goosebumps all over my body. I took a hot bath, had a bowl of chicken soup and some fruit, and drank some OJ, but by 10pm I was definitely on a downward spiral. Not that I'd have blogged something then anyway, but I had hoped to spend a few hours on fiction.
I crashed by 10:30, shivering and unable to get warm even with heavy clothing on and wrapped tightly in warm covers. I woke up at 2, predictably soaked in sweat, partially thanks to Jinx's fully-extended, log-like presence between my thighs/knees/ankles. Extracting myself and crawling out of bed was a torturous exercise, made somewhat easier by the fact that I was back to sleep 10 seconds after I threw down my sweaty clothing and returned to bed.
The rest of the night, morning, and afternoon went pretty much like that. I'd wake up every couple of hours, sweaty and under Jinx, take a long drink of water from the bedside bottle, move over a few feet and flip over the pillow in search of a dry spot, and fall instantly back to sleep. This charade continued well into the day, and it wasn't until near 1pm that I felt capable of rising and functioning. I've felt fairly okay all day, though still obviously not well. Periodic chills and painfully sore muscles (neck and back mostly), a condition which several hot showers and a delicate, yoga-intensive evening gym visit did something to ameliorate.
And now I'm quite eager to get back to bed (despite sleeping 13+ hours last night) making a (presumably) quick blog post just to throw in a couple of links to recent, trenchant, political articles that have been squatting in browser tabs for the last several days. Worse yet, I've got a long-awaited 1-on-1, 30-minute phone interview with the lead designer of Diablo 3 tomorrow morning, and I really need to spend at least a couple of hours further paring down, honing, and prioritizing my overlong list of questions.
Incidentally, they say it takes misery and despair to spur good writing, and while that's overrated (since misery and despair much more often spur lethargy), but any reader of this blog would be excused for agreeing with that concept, based on my recent performance. I wasn't posting a great deal over the past year+, but at least back when I was girlfriend-less and vexed by the cock-teasing and mixed-messages I chose to ignore/overlook/misinterpret from the IG, I semi-regularly wrote something amusingly-anguished and self-absorbed about my psychological state. Now that I'm in a happy and stable relationship with code name Elle, I'm not writing much about it, and I'm busy every damn weekend which leaves me no time to blog anyway.
May your audience's online reading happiness exist at a directly inverse proportion to the contentedness in your own personal life.
That digressed, here's the political news posts I thought worth sharing.
This first one sums quite well, I think, the scorched earth approach of the modern Republican party to virtually every political issue. When there is massive celebration of America failing to score an Olympics hosting gig, the sort of behavior that would have prompted enough "Anti-American!" cries from those self-same celebrators if done by leftists under a Republican administration, we have entered some sort of bizarro political world.
Perhaps the single most profound change in our political culture over the last 30 years has been the transformation of conservatism from a political movement, with all the limitations, hedges and forbearances of politics, into a kind of fundamentalist religious movement, with the absolute certainty of religious belief.
I don't mean "religious belief" literally. This transformation is less a function of the alliance between Protestant evangelicals, their fellow travelers and the right (though that alliance has had its effect) than it is a function of a belief in one's own rightness so unshakable that it is not subject to political caveats. In short, what we have in America today is a political fundamentalism, with all the characteristics of religious fundamentalism and very few of the characteristics of politics.
For centuries, American democracy as a process of conflict resolution has been based on give-and-take; negotiation; compromise; the acceptance of the fact that the majority rules, with respect for minority rights; and, above all, on an agreement to abide by the results of a majority vote. It takes compromise, even defeat, in stride because it is a fluid system. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once put it, the beauty of a democracy is that the minority always has the possibility of becoming the majority.
Religious fundamentalism, on the other hand, rests on immutable truths that cannot be negotiated, compromised or changed. In this, it is diametrically opposed to liberal democracy as we have practiced it in America. Democrats of every political stripe may defend democracy to the death, but very few would defend individual policies to the death. You don't wage bloody crusades for banking regulation or the minimum wage or even healthcare reform. When politics becomes religion, however, policy too becomes a matter of life and death, as we have all seen.
I also thought Krugman's new editorial hit the nail on the head, as he took the fairly amazing, "they even hate the Olympics?" issue and segued it into a discussion of the Republican opposition to Obama's health care reform efforts.
The Politics of SpiteTo be sure, while celebrating America's rebuff by the Olympic Committee was puerile, it didn't do any real harm. But the same principle of spite has determined Republican positions on more serious matters, with potentially serious consequences -- in particular, in the debate over health care reform.
Now, it's understandable that many Republicans oppose Democratic plans to extend insurance coverage -- just as most Democrats opposed President Bush's attempt to convert Social Security into a sort of giant 401(k). The two parties do, after all, have different philosophies about the appropriate role of government.
But the tactics of the two parties have been different. In 2005, when Democrats campaigned against Social Security privatization, their arguments were consistent with their underlying ideology: they argued that replacing guaranteed benefits with private accounts would expose retirees to too much risk.
The Republican campaign against health care reform, by contrast, has shown no such consistency. For the main G.O.P. line of attack is the claim -- based mainly on lies about death panels and so on -- that reform will undermine Medicare. And this line of attack is utterly at odds both with the party's traditions and with what conservatives claim to believe.
Think about just how bizarre it is for Republicans to position themselves as the defenders of unrestricted Medicare spending. First of all, the modern G.O.P. considers itself the party of Ronald Reagan -- and Reagan was a fierce opponent of Medicare's creation, warning that it would destroy American freedom. (Honest.) In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich tried to force drastic cuts in Medicare financing. And in recent years, Republicans have repeatedly decried the growth in entitlement spending -- growth that is largely driven by rising health care costs.
But the Obama administration's plan to expand coverage relies in part on savings from Medicare. And since the G.O.P. opposes anything that might be good for Mr. Obama, it has become the passionate defender of ineffective medical procedures and overpayments to insurance companies.
I'd add discussion, but um... 24-hour semi-flu. More later, mortality permitting.
Another long weekend of dating type activities with Elle, and here's a brief, very partial report.
Elle, the non-IG, drove up here Friday night, fairly late. I cooked a pizza and we talked and did the other sorts of things that young, healthy heterosexual members of the opposite sex do in the privacy of their own home(s). Said activities went on (as they are wont) for hours longer than initially anticipated, and as a result we weren't up and around until mid-day on Saturday. Thus were our plans for morning wine tastings scuttled!
We did get packed up and out the door in time to drive way north to Calistoga, for the newly-opened, largely-magnificent, Castle di Amorosa. We had reservations for a tour in the afternoon, (which was wise, since it was all sold out) and it was quite nice. The castle is huge; far smaller than a real, functioning one built 700 years ago would have been, but for something built by a private individual as a dream home/business activity, it was gigantic. Far, far larger than any of the castle-type exhibits you'd see at Disneyland of Harry Potter World or the like.
It's the centerpiece of an active winery, and on the tour you get to go down into underground tunnels that they dug for wine aging, but mostly because the owner loved castles and wanted his own with as much verisimilitude as he could afford. (Quite a bit of it, as it turned out.) Included deep within the vaults are lots of museum-type rooms with suits of armor, mounted weapons, and even a large and practically functional torture chamber/dungeon. Lots of photos of the property can be found via google, and it's every bit as cool as it looks.
The tour includes a private wine tasting for your group in one of the custom-built tasting rooms deep below the castle surface, and while none of their wines are remarkable (the whole thing is still quite recent and the wine vines haven't had time to mature yet), it was a great wine tasting architectural faux-cultural experience. Made slightly more enjoyable by the fact that I knew more than the tour guide about most of the wine-related things of which he spoke.
For our evening activity we adjourned to the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America has a campus in norther Napa Valley, and besides occupying a fantastically gorgeous structure, they run a professional gourmet restaurant, which, in partnership with the Wine Spectator magazine and most of the best vineyards in California, boasts an eye-boggling, 25-page wine list. PDF link, but it loads fairly quickly, and it's worth it just to skim over the prices. Some affordable vintages can be found, but that's not the funny part. They've got numerous years of Opus One, whose Cab is generally the most expensive wine in America ($250+ a bottle), and those aren't even in the top 50 priciest they list. I'd never seen a $2000 bottle of wine before. And I still haven't, other than listed on their menu, but it was fun to see it there. If $500 for a glass of old grapes is out of your price range, they've got plenty of other limited edition vintages in the $500-1000 range.
We didn't get any wine, cause um... money. But we did get an amazing appetizer dish, and I got a pasta dish with mushrooms and spinach that was more or less exquisite. I don't have a good enough memory to list the best pasta dishes I've eaten in my life, but this one is definitely going into the top 5.
We ended up not staying overnight in the area, since nothing is affordable in Napa, and since the only reasonable hotel options were in Vallejo. Which is way south of Napa, and only about 40 miles from my apartment. And since we felt like we'd done enough wine stuff for the weekend, it seemed pointless to drop $70 on a hotel that was less than an hour from my apartment. So I drove us back here while Elle napped, which gave her energy for more active pursuits upon our return.
Sunday we got up a little earlier, and after brunching at a restaurant where I could obtain an order of my coveted huevos rancheros, I drove us down to the Golden Gate Bridge. Elle has lived in the Bay Area her whole life, but she lives down on the peninsula, south of The City, and had somehow only been over the world famous GGB 2 or 3x in her life. (I've been dozens of times, almost all since moving to the North Bay 2.5 years ago.)
If you've not been in the Bay Area, it's not that unusual for locals to have never or seldom passed over the Golden Gate Bridge. It's maybe the most famous bridge in the world, and is guaranteed to appear in any movie or TV show set in the area, but it's quite possible to never need to travel over it. I never did when I lived in the East Bay with Malaya, and had only seen it when doing tourist stuff when relatives visited. I have many times in the last 2.5 years since I've lived in the North Bay, but unless you're going from northern SF to the North Bay, or vice versa, taking the Bay Bridge is usually a better option. There's little population north of the city, Napa and Sonoma and Sacramento and other attractions are far inland/east, and reaching the GGB through downtown SF is usually hell, since there aren't any highways or freeways there. Just dozens and dozens of blocks of city streets.
As you can see, the GGB isn't even Google's recommended route from San Rafael to San Mateo. Taking 101 over the GGB and through western SF is a shorter route, but 101/19th street is about 8 miles of fairly constant stop lights. I counted once, when taking that route to Elle's, and there were 30 or 31 stop lights over that 8 mile stretch of 25-35MPH road. It's not bad late at night, when I'm usually coming home from her place, since one can catch maybe 22 or 24 of the lights. But in the daytime it's crowded with other cars and you're lucky to make half the lights without slowing down or stopping. I'd rather drive 7 miles further on fast freeways than 7 mile less on city streets. But YMMV. (Do people use YKMV in those progressive nations infected with the Metric system? Or is the acronym translated without translation?)
Well, actually your mileage/kilometerage won't vary, but your tolerance for slow traffic and stop lights may.
At any rate, Elle didn't cross the GGB on Sunday either. It was a gorgeous, hot Sunday, so we had to park way up on the scenic hills above the bridge, where we walked around the old military gun fortifications, before descending to the bridge itself. We walked out along the bridge to the first huge tower, took lots of photos, looked over the edge at all the dropped hats and water bottles and such that land on girders just below the surface but out of reach of any sane mortal, and enjoyed the howlingly-gusty wind. Numerous pictures were taken then and all throughout the weekend, and may be posted at some point, though you'd probably be wise not to hold your breath for that.
After the GGB visit we drove a few miles north to Sausalito, site of one of my earlier, unsuccessful internet dating site first dates. This one went better, though Elle and I basically recreated past events. She kept asking what I'd done with that other woman and where we went, and since that previous Sausalito visit mostly consisted of walking along the boardwalk and ducking into the various art galleries and souvenir shops, it wasn't real hard or exciting to recreate it. The company was better this time though, and we had fun. We even hit the same restaurant for dinner, though the one thing I'd had there that was great, a sort of apple pie dessert, was tragically sold out that day. That they were unable to make more, at 7pm on a Sunday, didn't speak well of their chefs, or their ability to make their own desserts rather than just ordering them in, pre-prepared and frozen at some distant processing location.
The clam chowder was awesome, though. I always like clam chowder, but most times there are these inedible, chewy, rubbery chunks of something all strewn through it. I assume they are there for flavoring, but they are just bowl-clogging dreck in most cases. This time there were slightly rubbery things in it, but in larger chunks and they were not difficult to masticate into a form that could be swallowed without danger of suffocation. Bonus points for that.
There was a lot more fun stuff over the weekend, but typing this update has already taken me well beyond the time I'm allocating for blogging these days, so you'll have to use your memory. Or go read one of the countless thousands of blogs that are run by people who actually deserve your patronage.
Don't feel too neglected, Sunday evening I caught a glimpse of a the TV in the restaurant bar, and realized that I was in the process of passing the first autumnal weekend in my adult life that didn't involve at least checking (and generally watching) quite some amount of college and/or professional football. Watching is out, since I've not had a TV in a couple of years, but even checking highlights wasn't a priority when I had Elle to do stuff with. And if I'd had an hour or two to of computer time during the weekend, I'd have spent it more productively than skimming espn.com for scores and highlights anyway. (Not that I'm perfectly able to avoid the siren seductions of football; I spent a couple of hours early Monday morning watching NFL highlights while I sipped a potent concoction and tried to let lethargy come over me.)
As for the weekend's other fungal growths, check out these pictures. They're from my garden, of a huge pot I've got a fairly-healthy Star Jasmine growing in. Last week a little cluster of mushrooms appeared, turned bright yellow and swelled up to about a hand in height. They soon withered and deflated, but were sort of replaced by another bunch of the same fungi, pushing up through the straggling remains of a once proud cluster of parsley. Now, just as those are withering, there's been an absolute explosion of new yellow growths. Dozens and dozens of them, pushing up out of the roots of the star jasmine all across the center of the large pot, like whiteheads from the face of a sugar-addicted teenager.
The photos don't really capture the three dimensional nature of these things, but they are almost scary in their inexorable, irresistible, Sorcerer's Apprentice-like advance. If even 10% of them carry on for another few days, the entire center of the plant will be solid with the swollen yellow growths, the jasmine and the other things growing in it choked and muffled like sticks in a bowl of swollen mushrooms.
I'll try to get a picture to preserve the moment.
All those yellow dots are incoming fungi.
Closer view of the current blooming crop as it practically pushes through the dying second wave. They're rather penis-y, eh?
Update: Appropriately, (she's a research scientist) Elle hunted around online and found information about these growths. They're almost comically known as Yellow Houseplant Mushrooms, with a scientific name of leucocoprinus birnbaumii (luke-o-kuh-PRY-niss burn-BAUM-eee-eye). As expected, they are poisonous. No word on their hallucinogenic properties, but if I ate some I might see some interesting sights on the way to the emergency room?
It's Friday night, well, very early Saturday morning, and I'm going down to see the new GF Elle Saturday evening. I'll stay over night with her, then we'll do fun stuff on Sunday, before I drive back up here Sunday evening. Elle's not much on sleeping late, and her bedroom isn't much on dark curtains, so it's fairly certain I'll be awake at the ungodly hour of 7am Sunday morning. Which is why I'm trying to get to bed semi-earlier tonight, and why I'll be setting my alarm to wake up @ 10 this morning, so I'll be tired earlier Saturday night, and can go to bed with her and not be dead on Sunday after waking up @ 8am. Or did I say 7am? Dunno.
The gist of all that is that I had a beer, and then a fairly (un)healthy splash of vodka in a cup of melted strawberry smoothie, in a so-far unsuccessful effort to make myself sleepy this late evening. And I'm typing this since I'm too buzzed to do any productive work, and since I couldn't think what else to do with myself for the next half hour until I do get sleepy enough to... sleep.
Hence the post title. And man I'm making a lot of typos. Peril of drunken typing. Going to wearout the backspace at this rate. Drunken emails I just let the typos fly, but here I'm trying to maintain some publishing standards. Which is ironic, sicne this is written more or less for a few hundred strangers online, while emails go to dear friends in RL, who I should, in theory, worry more about. More about their reception of my drunken ramblings.
Anyway, I was last buzzed enough to be borderline drunk on September 4th. 15 days ago. I know this since I remembered sending the IG a drunken email then, and I just went into my sent folder and searched on her (real) name, and there was the email. Sept 4th, 10:18pm. I got an earlier start that day since I was over at Elle's house the night before, and then after driving home in the early morning I had fasted all afternoon since I had to do so before giving blood (for a physical, not for charity). And after that was over it was nearly 6pm, thanks to various delays at the doctor's office. And when I came home I had a big glass of white wine with some chicken and rice, and with 18 hours of nothing in my system, it went right (the fuck) to my head.
Which doesn't explain why I felt compelled to send the IG an email, but she used to always enjoy my drunken emails, so I figured I'd send her one for old time's sake. My previous email to her was August 8th, and she hadn't replied to that one either, so doing that math, and all but taking off my shoes to do so, it's been 6 weeks since we've spoken. And I doubt we'll ever speaken again. During the 2 years we were good friends and hanging out constantly, she turned on 2 of her other friends, one an ex-boyfriend, and in both cases she decided she would never speak with them again. I think she did speak with both of them again eventually, but it was months and months before she did so. Her M.O. was to cut off people who troubled her entirely, and I suppose I troubled her when our bestie-ship ended.
The irony is that I really don't have anything to say to her. Reading the drunken email I sen her 2 weeks ago, it's just a rambling mess without any real point or content. And sure, you might expect that of a drunken email, but she always liked my drunken emails since they were very content rich. Most of my emails were, but in the rare drunken ones I dove right into some subject and got right to the heart of it, rather than beating around the busy with prolifically wordy effusions. You know, the kind that typify my usual blog posts.
Much like that last paragraph, actually. Was the email.
The other irony is that I don't really have anything to say to Elle, when I'm drunken. She hardly drinks and has never been drunken in her life, and we've got a very good and healthy, communicative relationship. Not a lot of hidden agendas and mixed messages and cock teasing, of the sort that typified my relationship with the IG. So with her drunken emails were useful, and almost necessary, since I could say things that weren't said otherwise. Cut to the chase, sorta.
With Elle there's not a need for that, at least not yet, which brings me back to the raison d'etre of of this blog post. No one to email when drunk, not sleepy enough to sleep, nothing to say to the IG (ever again?), in no condition to do productive fiction or D3 site work, and yet restless and unable to sit still or just read things. So I wanted to type, and here I am. Typing.
Happily, the soporific action of fingers on keys seems to have soporoficed me, and now I'm going to brush my teeth and crash. Hope it was good for you too? Kbyethx.
Long, thorough, informative, and I dare say vital financial/economics article by recent Noble Laureate Paul Krugman in the latest NYTimes Magazine. It's written for people like you and me, who have some financial knowledge but who don't exactly study economics, but who want to know more. The piece is spurred by the ongoing worldwide recession and the various real estate and financial market bubbles that created it, but it's not really about that. It's more historical in nature, and that's what I found so valuable about it.
Krugman neatly summarizes the two prevalent schools of thought in modern economic theory (Keynesian vs. Freidman/Smith), and discusses how those are/were represented in American economic scholarship and instruction (freshwater vs. saltwater), and then analyzes the core issue, the (ir)rationality of investors and markets.
That's the part that I was most surprised by. I vaguely knew that Freidman's theories were ascendant during the economic boom of the mid-00s, and that they were worshipful of the invisible hand and of the wisdom of the market, but the way the freshwater Freidmanites simply disregarded real world evidence that didn't fit their idealized theory seems impossible to believe.
By 1970 or so, however, the study of financial markets seemed to have been taken over by Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse. The field was dominated by the "efficient-market hypothesis," promulgated by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, which claims that financial markets price assets precisely at their intrinsic worth given all publicly available information. (The price of a company’s stock, for example, always accurately reflects the company's value given the information available on the company’s earnings, its business prospects and so on.) And by the 1980s, finance economists, notably Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School, were arguing that because financial markets always get prices right, the best thing corporate chieftains can do, not just for themselves but for the sake of the economy, is to maximize their stock prices. In other words, finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a "casino."
That concept, that markets are rational and logical, so utterly contradicts everything I've ever observed about human psychology, especially mob behavior when motivated by greed, that it seems like a theory cooked up a really bright computer that has no subroutines to evaluate human behavior. I almost can not believe anyone seriously argued that. My conception of the "invisible hand" concept (a very Freidman-esque belief) is that most investors are irrational and foolish, but that on the whole their foolish irrationality averages out to something like a group wisdom. I thought the theory was that markets wee dumb, crazed beasts, but that they could generally be herded in the desired direction by clever financial policy. Reading that one of the leading economic theories argued that investors are always rational (admittedly it's Krugman's description, and he's profoundly Keynesian) is, for me, like reading that geologists were seriously debating flat vs. globe for the shape of the earth. I'm literally shocked to learn of it.
More jaw-dropping revelations from the article.
But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don't happen. What's striking, when you reread Greenspan's assurances, is that they weren't based on evidence -- they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can't be a bubble in housing. And the finance theorists were even more adamant on this point. In a 2007 interview, Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, declared that "the word 'bubble' drives me nuts," and went on to explain why we can trust the housing market: "Housing markets are less liquid, but people are very careful when they buy houses. It's typically the biggest investment they're going to make, so they look around very carefully and they compare prices. The bidding process is very detailed."
What? Has that guy ever read a single post on the Irvine Housing Blog? During the bubble years of 2004-2007, there were countless reports about the utter laxity of lending standards, studies showing that virtually no one actually had the income to afford the payments on the houses they were buying (to flip), and plenty of warning in regular newspaper reporting. Remember all those articles about people camping out for days in advance to reserve their spot to buy condos in new housing developments, solely on the belief that the prices would skyrocket and they could resell in six months for a huge profit? Who thought that was sustainable, when housing prices were rising at 10x wages? (Not that wages were actually rising at all, during the 00s/Bush years, except for the top 10%, who got so much richer than they skewed the average across the board.)
Everyone I talked to about the flipping, including people who were doing it, agreed that it was a bubble and unsustainable. They just hoped they'd get rich quick while it was expanding, and be able to unload in time before it popped. (Most of them were delusional on both fronts.)
Krugman's conclusion seems so obvious that bothering to type it is almost belaboring the point, but clearly a great many economic experts disagree with it, and billions of dollars were lost by supposedly savvy investors who followed their disagreeing advice. So I guess it needs to be said.
So here's what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit -- and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes -- that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they'll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.
Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: "There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong."
When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won't be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.
