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:

Read more

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.

Read more

The Nobel Prizes are announced in October each year. The scientific awards, starting with Medicine, begin tomorrow. Economics will be awarded a week from Monday, and the Peace prize on lucky Friday, October 13. None of the Chicago Boyz contributors have been nominated this year, so I feel free to make some predictions. France will probably not win its second Economics prize, since that discipline is so lightly regarded and little practiced there. Many of the prizes for actually discovering something will go to Americans, and the prizes for doing things that make Europeans feel good will go to anti-Americans (Rigoberta Menchu, Peace, 1992; Yasser Arafat, Peace, 1994; Harold Pinter, Literature, 2005). In his Nobel lecture, Pinter had the following helpful remarks to make, among others: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Perhaps his prize should have been in Medicine, for having discovered such widespread but unsuspected mental illness; perhaps he will spend some of his prize money on a subscription to the Guardian. That way he can check from time to time to see whether anyone has yet noticed that large, Engish-speaking evil empire.

But on to the good stuff. The real action will be in Cambridge MA, where the Improbable Research institute will begin awarding the Ig Nobel Prizes next week. Good seats are still available. In the interest of Bad Science, here are some random links to show that the mission of Improbable Research has not been accomplished. Long may they mock!

• The persistent belief that the Apollo moon landings were faked is proof that skepticism can be as foolish as credulity.
• The Flat Earth Society may have fallen on hard times, but the remaining few struggle nobly against the moon hoax and the pernicious Copernican doctrine.
• Others believe that the moon landings were real, but have a different explanation for how they were accomplished. The adjustment is necessary to account for the belief that there is no gravity in space. (See the other scientific myths at the site and vote for your favorite. Some of them turn out to be true.)
• UFOs, alas, are not related to anything outside our planet, according to recently-released archives of the British Ministry of Defence. This will no doubt convince no one.
• Try not to miss this site devoted to Bad Science. The guilty parties handing out erroneous information often turn out not to be hairy patchouli-intoxicated crystalmongers, but science teachers and textbook writers.
• The James Randi Educational Foundation goes after frauds of the occult with a glee that is almost painful to see. He is following in a distinguished tradition.

Have fun!