Science

Jurisdynamics argues that if anyone deserves the Congressional Gold Medal, our nation’s highest civilian honor, Norman Borlaug does. Ponder for a moment one of the reasons:

Dr. Borlaug has saved more lives than any other person who has ever lived, and likely has saved more lives in the Islamic world than any other human being in history.

His importance will, I suspect, be better understood as history contrasts our time with others. (Instapundit noted this.)
Update: Nominations for the anti-Borlaug.

Update: It passed. And the figure here for lives saved is a billion. Sometimes even the House is able to share bipartisan gratitude and respect.

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

There’s evidence that asteroid impacts may have occurred much more frequently, and recently, than anyone previously thought. Of course evidence isn’t proof — there may be a better explanation for the apparently-related “chevrons” (huge inland flow-molded sedimentary deposits) and undersea craters, from which proponents of the asteroid-impact hypothesis infer mega-tsunamis — but it might be a good idea to reconsider the odds of asteroid impacts in light of this new information.

And speaking of odds, why is global warming more of a threat than asteroids? I’m not saying it isn’t. I am saying that our public-resource allocation decisions ought to be driven by realistic comparisons of the expected aggregate costs (i.e., the odds that an event will happen or its incidence in the population, multiplied by the cost of the event if it happens) of each class of events. What are the expected aggregate costs of

-Global warming?

-Asteroid impacts?

-Breast cancer?

-Prostate cancer?

-Diabetes?

-AIDS?

-Automobile accidents?

-Gun accidents?

-Nuclear or other WMD attacks?

Not all of the information necessary to make such comparisons is available, but in cases where it isn’t (asteroids, global warming, WMD attacks) we can stipulate wide ranges of odds and possible costs and use these ranges in our comparisons.

Comparing risks in this way might lead to a different set of public priorities than does our current societal practice of responding to the most publicized and dramatic risks.

OTOH, there is little if any incentive for public officials to evaluate relative risks on their merits. The political incentives are all for response to spectacular risks and risks that have organized constituencies.

I suspect that better public education is the only effective remedy for this classic problem of public choice. Citizens are more likely to demand rational allocation of public resources if they better understand science, probability and statistics, and history — IOW, if they have the tools to make more-realistic risk assessments.

(Cross-posted on the Chicago Boyz Forum.)

If you stop and think about it for a moment, the human preoccupation with gold seems very odd.

We are so used to gold being, well, Gold, that we don’t stop to think about it. Since the dawn of history, gold has served as a universal trade good. Every human culture, from the simplest hunter-gathers to space-faring modern industrial, trades for gold. In the arts of every culture, gold symbolizes the best, the purest and the most desired. Lust for gold has driven exploration, technology, war and individual murder. An alien anthropologist studying human history might easily conclude that humans need gold for some critical function. The alien would reason that gold must be a vital nutrient, a medicine or serve a central role in our technology.

Yet the alien would be wrong. Gold serves next to no functional purpose. Prior to the electronic age, people made only sparing use of gold’s corrosion resistance to line drinking vessels and such. Many cultures used gold to make monetary tokens but that use evolved out of gold’s existing role as a universal trade good. Coins were merely standardized chunks of a universal trade good. People didn’t covet gold so they could make coins from it, they accepted gold coins in trade because they valued the gold in the coins. People murdered for gold long before anyone thought to make money out of it.

So the human lust for gold presents us with a riddle. Why do we so universally value gold? What function does gold serve that makes it so sought after?

The answer is simple:

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Today’s installment of Scientists You Should Know is brought to you by the color purple. Mauve, in fact. This past April marked 150 years since mankind stopped relying on plants and bugs to supply the colors of its world, and mauve was the first of those artificial colors. Before you snicker, consider that mauve was once such a novelty that an entire decade was named for it.* Before the discovery of purple dyes derived from coal tar, literally thousands of shellfish had to be slaughtered to obtain a few grams of purple – making it so expensive that it became a royal color in ancient times.

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