Octopodial Chrome

Research indicates that body odour is as unique as fingerprints, and that changing diet does not change one’s fundamental smell. Could have some interesting implications for criminology.

Today is election day here in America. Unlike many others, I will not encourage you to just vote. You have that right, of course, but you also have the right to stand on a sidewalk claiming that Martians are running Major League Baseball. No, I’m going to encourage you to vote wisely. Vote for men and women who will faithfully discharge their duties under the constitutions of both the United States and your individual state. Vote for ballot issues which are consistent with those same constitutions. Vote wisely, having done your research. If you’ll vote foolishly, then please: don’t. Exercise your right not to vote. But if you will vote soberly and seriously, with an intelligent grasp of the issues at stake, then please: head down to your nearest polling station and vote.

Edward Cardinal Egan asks that you just look. Look at that picture, and answer three simple questions.

That’s all there is to the debate over infanticide. Is the infant a human being? Yes, it is. Is it an innocent human being? Yes, it is. Are the authorities in a civilised society duty-bound to protect innocent human beings should someone wish to kill them? Yes, they are so bound. End of story—nothing else matters.

Up to 45 million years ago, a Lebanese weevil was trapped in amber in what is now Burma; inside its body it harboured a colony of bacteria and yeast which was extracted a decade ago and is now used to brew beer. Prehistoric yeast: how cool is that?

I just found a great article on how large corporations become functionally indistinguishable from the State: the full impact of economic decisions is not understandable and hence poor decisions are made. An example in the article is Home Depot centralising all purchasing from fifty states to Atlanta, Georgia and then exporting it to India. On paper it looks like a great idea: lower purchasing costs. But the actual impact is a multitude of problems as the India purchasing agents don’t understand the lingo of American purchasing. The decision has costs that were not apparent.

This isn’t really surprising when one thinks about it. The State is just another large corporation (albeit one with a monopoly on force). It’s perfectly natural that if the State cannot make wise economic decisions then neither can other large corporations.

Have you ever considered how much you pay to store all the stuff you have? I’m ashamed to say that I still have stuff in my loft that hasn’t moved since I moved in. I have videocassettes that I’ll never watch because I’ve not hooked up my VCR. I still have the VCR too. I have a giant brewpot which I never use because it’s 15 gallons and I do 6½ gallon boils. I have books that I was going to get rid of by selling on eBay or Craigslist—but there were no takers. Yes, that’s right: no-one else on the face of the planet wants them, and yet I keep them still.

Methinks this weekend is time to clean house.

Surgeons at Denver Children’s Hospital are cutting out the hearts of infants disconnected from life support after their hearts stop beating but before their brains stop functioning. They are then transplanting them into other children.

A more grotesque and evil procedure is hard to imagine. It’s disgusting. It’s indefensible.

The excuse, of course, is the transplantation: they really just want to save lives. So instead of waiting for actual death to occur, they wait until the heart stops. The same criterion is being pushed for with adult donors as well.

This is pure evil. Those responsible should be tried, convicted and executed for murder.

It’s also illustrative of how widespread organ transplantation coarsens a society. It’s one thing for someone living to give an organ (e.g. a kidney or part of a liver) to another; it’s another thing entirely to desecrate a body, rendering a man down for parts like some animal. But men are not animals, and we are more than the sum of our parts.

I hope that if my own organs failed I would have the moral strength to resist the appeal of buying my own life with another’s death.

It turns out that Royal Navy’s four-century collection of captains’ logs is yielding historical climate data. Apparently they made meticulous observations of air pressure, wind strength, air & sea temperature and other weather conditions, all of which is helping climate scientists study how the global climate has changed over time.

Rather unsurprisingly, the observations demonstrate that there’s nothing new under the sun: phenomena which have been attributed to global warming actually did occur well before there was any such thing—indeed, during the Little Ice Age.

The American Medical Association—known previously for such absurd positions as opposing gun rights—now wishes to outlaw home births because they are riskier than hospital births. That may or may not be true; I’ll accept that it probably is. But that’s immaterial: free citizens in a free society have the fundamental right to weigh the evidence and make their own choices.

I’m perhaps a bit biased: my youngest brother was delivered by midwives at home and my mother looks back on the experience fondly. Later those same midwives were driven out of business by the local physicians.

If parents wish to have their children at home, that is their business, not mine, not the medical profession’s and definitely not the State’s.

It appears that there is a novel drug-shipping method: ship the drugs to an innocent party, then have them retrieved by the deliveryman. Knowing this was going on, when a package containing 30 pounds of marijuana was addressed to the wife of the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, the county police did the only logical thing: he got a no-knock warrant, invaded the mayor’s home with a SWAT team, killed the mayor’s two black labs then bound & interrogated the mayor and his mother-in-law for hours. Because just executing a normal warrant would have been crazy: someone like a mayor has nothing to lose and might stage a shoot-out. Or he might flush thirty pounds of dope down the toilet in as many seconds. And of course if they’d executed a normal warrant then the mayor might have tied up his dogs, and what’s point of executing a drug raid if you can’t shoot someone’s pets?

Seriously though—while SWAT teams have a very valuable purpose to serve, this is not one of them. And while it is appropriate in some circumstances to shoot pets (say, if a suspect sets his dogs on one), shooting them as a precautionary measure is hardly called for. And while there are legitimate reasons for no-knock raids, this was not one of them. Besides, if they already know that there’s a false-shipping operation in town, mightn’t they have suspected that might be involved here?

William Deresiewicz—and Ivy League graduate and professor—write on the disadvantages of an Ivy education. An interesting perspective from inside the system.

I think he’s very correct that the elites are much more insulated from the consequences of their actions than most of the rest of us. When’s the last time that one saw a politician with a ruined career cast out into the street begging for change?

As we all know, assimilation is key to successful immigration: foreigners immigrate, assimilate and their grandchildren are just as American as those whose forebears came over on Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery. Unfortunately, immigrants from Mexico are not assimilating; in fact, assimilation is reverse in some cases. This is hardly healthy.

A disturbing statistic is that one in ten children born today has a mother born in Mexico; of those half never completed high school. This is not at all good for our republic: 10% (at least) of our citizens have roots in a culture which is not at all republican, and half of those come from uneducated families. The survival of our republic and our liberties relies upon an electorate which is cognisant of its history—what will happen when it feels more affinity for the failed policies of a failed state (Mexico is the very definition of a failed state: it has gotten so bad that it openly encourages the emigration of its citizens) than for those principals which made our union great?

On the 18th of June a young man was arrested by police; he died on Sunday. He certainly deserved to be arrested, but the manner and the results are unacceptable. While celebrating a home-team win, he and some friends passed a cluster of 10–12 police officers; he sarcastically commented, wow, it seems like there’s a lot of crime on this corner. Very dumb, considering that he was breaking the law by drinking in public. Kids, if you’re going to mock the police, don’t do it while breaking the law. But the police—from reports—violently over-reacted: eight officers and a supervisor piled onto him, beating him and driving off his friends. In the struggle, he stopped breathing, was rushed to a hospital and eventually died of his injuries.

As I noted, he deserved to be cited or arrested, for blatant stupidity if nothing else. But the right thing to do would have been for two or three policemen to have approached him and then cited or arrested him. The wrong thing was to pile on. If he had resisted arrest, then it would have been appropriate to subdue him.

We are free citizens in a free republic: the police are our public servants. They should use politeness first, and force only when necessary. They should not see us as cattle to be herded.

This ties in with the abuse of SWAT teams and warrant-serving by force. By default, warrants should be served by a few officers: knock on the door, serve the warrant and get on with life. Sending a SWAT team to arrest an optometrist for a non-violent crime escalates matters unreasonably.

Yes, there are instances (many instances, perhaps) where force is necessary. But when force becomes the default; when law enforcement is held to a lower standard of accountability (note that the eggshell skull rule holds that you’re responsible even for unforeseeable consequences—but it’s not applied to the police), when citizens are routinely slain by their public servants—in that case, something has to change.

Today is a great day, a red-letter day, a triumph for sanity and a victory for reason. Today a majority the Supreme Court of the United States decided to actually read their copies of the Constitution (something the justices too-rarely do). Today the Court affirmed that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

As the decision noted, the public-safety impact—whether positive or negative—is none of the Court’s business. All that matters is the constitutionality of a total gun ban. Those of you who hate guns: amend the federal constitution if you wish. I’d oppose your efforts, but I’d also applaud your honesty. If you don’t like what the Constitution says, change the Constitution—don’t pretend it says something else.

We have decades more work ahead of us before things change for the better. The next thing we need to do is to prove that the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Fourteenth and thus binding on the states. After that, we need to prove that onerous and expensive licensing requirements are unconstitutional (under decided law, one cannot license a right—can you imagine having to get a speech license, or a voting license?). Then we will need to demonstrate that machine guns, grenades, bazookas and other military arms are legitimately protected by the Second Amendment.

Only then will Americans once again be free with respect to firearms. If course, there are a lot of other things we need to work on (e.g. the over-expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause). But this is excellent news for almost everyone: excellent for gun owners, who are free to move into Washington, DC; excellent for the poor, who are most subject to violence and can now defend themselves; and excellent for women, who can better defend themselves against assailants. It’s only bad news for criminals, whose victims will now be armed, and for gun control advocates. Personally, I’m quite happy to see members of either or both of those groups have a rotten day.

Sorry for the paucity of blog updates the past few months. I’ve been working an exceedingly time-consuming project at work and have had very little personal time.

Here’s a good read about the decline of American manufacturing. It argues–convincingly IMHO—that the business philosophies of the 1970s destroyed our economic might.

Elaine McArdle reports that gender disparity in science and technology may be a result of gender preferences—that is, two different studies show that men and women seek different things (big surprise, huh?). Of course, anyone who actually dealt with men and women would know this, but I guess it has taken science time to move from thinking of women as defective men, to thinking of them as the same as men, and finally to thinking of them as something different from but no less important than men. This is progress.

The details of the studies are interesting: one found that men preferred working with tools and women preferred dealing with people; another found that math-precocious men preferred to work with inorganic stuff while math-precocious women preferred working with living stuff. This led to more men in engineering and more women in medicine and biology.

It turns out that sunblock kills coral reeves (yes, I prefer reeves to reefs). So it looks like the choice is to burn and get cancer, or to kill coral—or to stay in the shade. I choose the shade.

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

Since the black date of 11 September 2001, many folks have been concerned about nuclear, biological or chemical terrorist attacks on American soil. A retired US Army sergeant dispels many of the myths about NBC warfare. Basically, as long as you don’t die immediately and keep your head, you’ll be okay. A must-read.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

Those of us who grew up camping and hiking in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly warned of the dangers of giardia lamblia and giardiasis. We were cautioned that if we ever drank water from a stream without first purifying it we risked our health and perhaps our very lives. Giardiasis was reputed to cause six months of uncontrollable diarrhœa; it was supposedly found in almost any stream, river or lake; it was bad juju.

Upon reflection, this didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Old books are full of ways to find good water—they aren’t full of ways to purify water (although they might recommend boiling when in doubt). It always seemed a bit strange to me that the purported symptoms lasted for six months, a curiously round figure. Wild animals drink wild water, and they rarely seem to be suffering from intestinal trouble. Our ancestors—and many in the uncivilised world—drink wild water all the time. And then there are many of our fellows who do the same. I’m proud to say that I’ve been drinking water from streams for years, and I’ve never had a problem yet.

Well, it turns out that the giardia threat is massively overblown. Back in the 1980s some testing of wild water in the Sierra Nevadas was done: it turns out that the most contaminated water was purer than that found in San Francisco and that all but the two worst sites purer than that in Los Angeles. Even in other parts of the country, at the very worst sites one would need to drink almost 3 gallons of water in order to have a 50% chance of getting consuming enough giardia to have an effect.

Worse, it seems that 1 in 14 people have giardia in them already, and that the most likely path of contamination when camping is by food. Whoops.

All that said, there are plenty of other nasty microörganisms which can be found in water, and one needs to exercise some care. Areas which are commonly used by people are less safe than isolated areas; water that is stagnant is less safe than running water; it’s always safest to purify water one way or another. But really, it’s just not that big a deal.

I don’t really plan on carrying a purification kit. If I need to, I can boil it. And there’s something wonderfully tasty about ice-cold, crystal clear water from a mountain stream which runs through a stream bed lined with leaves. Iodine-tainted, bleached, boiled or filtered water are not the same thing.

Mark Gimein argues that the mortgage crisis will worsen considerably, especially in California. Apparently year-over-year prices have dropped 28%. One might wonder if they’ve bottomed out, but there’s an issue which will result in an even worse drop. It turns out that the fall in prices (due to the sub-prime crisis) means that it will become economically sound for prime mortgagers to simply leave their homes rather than owe (and pay for…) twice their market value.

This in turn will lead to still more foreclosures and abandonments. It could be a real estate perfect storm.

The president of Blue Jeans Cables recently received a cease & desist letter from Monster Cable. His response is a stunning smackdown of them, their claims and their business. The best line is perhaps this: Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it. It’s a long read, but every bit is worth it.

Joel Spolsky applies a lesson from his infantry days to business. A bit gimmicky, but he has a point.