It’s “fifty years”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/3781481.stm since the death of mathematician, code-breaker and computer pioneer “Alan Turing”:http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/index.html. Turing committed suicide after being forced to take estrogen for a year to “cure” him of his homosexuality. I read Andrew Hodges’ “excellent biography”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671528092/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ of Turing when I was in College. I remember Hodges noting that from about 1935 to his death he had a new and basically unprecedented idea about every five or six years. A remarkable character.
From the monthly archives:
June 2004
Since the obituaries and eulogies for Ronald Reagan have now been read, I think it’s reasonable to take a critical look at his historical contribution. It’s often argued that Reagan accelerated the end of the Cold War by raising US military expenditure, thereby forcing the Soviet Union to increase its own military expenditure and crippling its economy. I think this argument has some plausibility in relation to the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself, though not in relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Communist governments in Eastern Europe[1].
So granting that this analysis is correct, should Reagan be praised? For the argument to work, the buildup must have raised the probability of nuclear war, unless you suppose (improbably) that the Russians were absolutely convinced of the peaceful intentions of the West and responded to Reagan purely to build up their own offensive capability[2]. Let’s suppose that the annual risk of war was raised by one percentage point. Then over the eight years Reagan was in office, there was a cumulative 8 per cent chance of a war that would certainly have produced tens of millions of deaths, probably billions and possibly the extinction of the human race. Against this, the early collapse of the Soviet Union produced benefits (mixed, but still positive on balance) for people in the Soviet Union, and perhaps also a reduction in the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war in the period since 1990. These benefits are small in relation to the potential cost.
As I’ve argued previously, if you think that a good policy is one which, in expectation, has good consequences, Reagan’s policy fails this test. On the other hand, standard accounts of consequentialism say that a good policy is one that has good actual consequences. If you accept this, and the assessment of the facts given above, Reagan’s historical record looks pretty good.
fn1. It had been obvious for many years that these governments were sustained only by the threat of Soviet military intervention. Gorbachev still had the military capacity to intervene in 1989 (in fact, on the argument presented above, the Russians had a bigger military than they would have had if Reagan had not been elected), but he chose not to do so. As soon as this became evident, the Communist bloc governments collapsed.
fn2. As an aside, in debate at the time, it was widely asserted that the Soviet government was actively planning an attack on the West, to be undertaken if Western defences could be weakened sufficiently. Has the collapse of Communism produced any archival or similar evidence on this? I would have thought that the Warsaw Pact countries would have had to have had a fair degree of involvement, and, since they are now in NATO, there would be no reason to keep any secrets.
Structured procrastination, oh yeh. I have an unfinished review of Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy” on the computer in front of me, which is looking like taking me longer to write than he took to write the book, plus James Surowiecki‘s new book is out, covering a couple of areas which he’s argued with us about on CT[1]. And what am I reading and reviewing? The latest work by that noted metaphysician, David Icke. “Tales from the Time Loop”. Icke is a bit of a guilty pleasure for many of us here at CT, and a few others. But I’m rather afraid that with this latest one, he’s jumped the shark. See below the fold for my Amazon review, which to be honest I’m not anticipating getting posted. I’ve added a few links so that non-Icke fans can get up to speed. I don’t know why I’m so bright and breezy today btw, it’s actually rather sad.
Update Richard Kahn in comments points me to this forthcoming paper for the Journal of Utopian Studies. Opinions on this kind of free-wheeling, name-dropping postmodern cultural studies writing are somewhat split on CT, but I’m inclined to be a bit softer than the median. When this sort of thing comes off, it’s really good, and I rather think that Richard’s Icke paper comes off pretty well.
With all the “hoopla over D-Day remembrances”:http://news.google.com/url?ntc=0M1A0&q=http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/06/07/west_honors_d_day_sacrifices, I found myself wondering whether remembering the anniversary had become more or less important in the last twenty years. To this end, I spent twenty minutes getting “LexisNexis”:http://web.lexis-nexis.com/ to email me _New York Times_ stories mentioning D-Day since 1980, running it through the world’s kludgiest Perl script to clean it and drop irrelevant entries[1], and looking at the data in “R”:http://www.r-project.org.
The result is the figure to the right, which shows the number of stories per year over a 25-year period, though of course the 2004 data only go to June 6th of this year. 
The number of stories per year varies from zero to 120 with a median of about 17. The two biggest years by far are 1984 and 1994, the 40th and 50th anniversaries respectively. A “smoothed regression line”:http://geography.anu.edu.au/GEOG2009/guide/tutorials/loess/ picks out a gentle but consistent upward trend in coverage. There are more stories as time goes by. It’s not surprising that the big anniversaries are the most covered. Beyond that, coverage seems to be increasing as the D-Day cohort ages. The contemporary political benefits of making a big deal of such a praiseworthy event probably amplify this trend. This would lead us to expect the D-Day commemorations to decline as time goes by, though on the other hand World War II lives on in our culture (as a good war as well as the biggest one) in a way that most other wars do not.
Of course none of this tells us anything about the _substance_ of the commemoration and whether that’s changing over time. Historical events are remembered in the light of present-day concerns, and very well-commemorated events or major monuments are reinterpreted or “forgotten”:http://www.grantstomb.org/tdr2.html as circumstances change. I wonder how long this upward trend will continue: it’s a question of whether D-Day is tied to the cohort who fought it, or whether its commemoration is attached to its veterans or whether it will become a more general event as time goes by. Probably the former, but it’s hard to say.
fn1. Mainly paid death notices of people who had served on D-Day — casual Lexis-Nexis queriers should beware of this kind of thing.
Eszter’s post has put me in mind of the excellent Financial Times preview of the latin oration on the (hypothetical) occasion of Bill Clinton assuming the Chancellorship of Oxford University:
bq. Sed Eheu! Magnum disastrum suscepit sua maxima culpa. Per noctem, Novembre MCMLXXXXV Alia Occidentalis Domus Albus laborante, sibi pizza donata est a Monica Lewinsky, puella pulchrissima, sensuosa californicante, fellatrix superiore.
bq. ‘Non coitus est cum hac femina,’ dixit. Sed, per laborem longus et penetrante Kennethi Starri, procurator independentus, et senatoribus Republicanis agitates, testimonia inculpata; togam maculatam, cigarrus grandus, revelata sunt. Domus Representatis imperator Clinton defenestrare tentavit. Senatus, 50-50 divisa est, absolvit.
The “full text is here”:http://www.memefirst.com/article.php?story=20030109203721830 .
A post about exams? Not quite. Belle already blogged about this NYTimes Magazine article a few days ago, but I thought it was worth some more discussion. The piece is about how widespread oral sex seems to be among high school students and how casually teens approach the topic. (I should note that it’s not clear how representative the sample on which the author draws is of high school students in general, but the topic is worthy of consideration even if it represents only a fraction of students, I think.) I am certainly not in favor of abstinence-only education and am all in favor of teaching teens about safe sex. My concern is about the one-way approach many teens seem to be taking. In the following sentence, Belle addresses the problem of girls performing oral sex on guys without any reciprocity: “If letting some guy just show up at your house so you can suck his dick is empowering, then I’m Henry Kissinger.” In case that doesn’t make that much sense out of context, be sure to read Belle’s post with a relevant quote from the article. By the way, for an additional reality check, note that this is not only a high school phenomenon, it seems to start in middle school for some. Also, for those (including a commentator on Ogged’s blog) who think that you can’t get STDs through oral sex, this may be worth reading.
UPDATE: I should have mentioned this when I wrote this post. There is a great data set that addresses lots of related issues and has led to lots of publications: Add Health. There’s room for more work on the new data especially, if anyone’s interested.:)
I spent the beginning of last week at my graduation at Princeton. (Although I defended almost exactly a year ago, I had missed the deadline for marching in the ceremonies last year.) I am really glad I went back. I had always envisioned graduation from grad school as a fairly anonymous event where I would be hooded amongst lots of people I did not know. This was not at all the case. It turns out that I knew many of the people finishing at the same time and that made the ceremonies all that much more special. (And as usual, I was hanging out mostly with economists.. go figure.)
Princeton usually does not have a Commencement speaker although the President of the University does say a few words. However, the senior class has a Class Day the day before Commencement to which they do invite a speaker. Last year I got to see Seinfeld this way and this year Jon Stewart gave quite a funny speech kindly sprinkled with local references as he is from that area. The unexpected celebrity sighting had come during Reunions on the Friday before though. I was waiting for the green light to cross Washington Road just in front of the Woodrow Wilson School when I spotted a security guard right next to me. I knew it was Reunions weekend and there are enough big deal Princeton alums that there could be all sorts of reasons for this so I was not that surprised. Nonetheless, it is not too common to see such obvious out-of-a-movie security personnel. So I thought I would glance to his right to see if I could spot someone famous. I did. Donald Rumsfeld was waiting for the green light as well (not something he is necessarily known to do…), back for his 50th I guess. Although Jon Stewart did mention in his Class Day speech that no matter who wins the presidential elections this year we can blame Yale, I’m afraid that doesn’t leave all Princetonians exempt from related responsibilities…
My mom, still right about everything. In a previous post, I explained her immediate skepticism about the Brandon Mayfield arrest. From the NYT today:
…the F.B.I. at one point told federal prosecutors that Spanish officials were “satisfied” with their conclusion.
But in interviews this week, Spanish officials vehemently denied ever backing up that assessment, saying they had told American law enforcement officials from the start, after their own tests, that the match was negative. The Spanish officials said their American counterparts relentlessly pressed their case anyway, explaining away stark proof of a flawed link — including what the Spanish described as tell-tale forensic signs — and seemingly refusing to accept the notion that they were mistaken….
Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police’s science division, said he was also struck by the F.B.I.’s intense focus on Mr. Mayfield. “It seemed as though they had something against him,” Mr. Corrales said, “and they wanted to involve us.”
The FBI continues to maintain it was just a random mistake by an examiner who didn’t even know Mayfield’s name, much less his religion, that initially led them to focus on Mayfield. I continue to maintain that’s total BS. Finally, does this fingerprint examiner have a family? Because I bet they would really, really like more time to be spent with them.
Statistical Update: This 2001 Washington Post article lists some widely varying estimates as to how many Muslims live in the US. The highest number was produced by a group of Muslim organizations and has been the subject of some doubt (numbers in millions).
Mosque Study Project: 6 to 7
2001 Britannica Book of the Year: 4.1
National Opinion Research Center: 1.5 to 3.4
CUNY Religious Identification Survey: 2.8
Reading the article, the methodology of the Mosque Study Project was obviously pretty bad. The total U.S population, according to the census bureau, is 293, 425, 566. So it seems as if probably more than 1% but substantially fewer than 2% of Americans are Muslims. I think that in the original article the FBI said the computer provided them with 50 close matches, from which Mayfield’s print was chosen as the best by an examiner (again, allegedly, without reference to his personal details).
The best-selling song in Ireland at the moment is a strike for local terms of abuse over international ones. A group from “Cork”:http://www.peoplesrepublicofcork.com — Ireland’s second-largest city, its real capital, and my home town — is dominating “the charts”:http://www.rte.ie/2fm/charts/singles.html with “The Langer,” outselling such international cursers as “Eamon”:http://www.mtv.com/bands/az/eamon/artist.jhtml and “Frankee”:http://www.frankee.com/furb.asp. “Langer” is a Cork term meaning — well, it can mean a lot of things, but “this clip from the song”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/oddments/langer.mp3 gives you the primary meaning. The song itself isn’t destined to be a classic of contemporary folk music, but seeing as recent political events have caused me to use the word myself a few times to uncomprehending Americans, I can now point them towards this. The song is also notable for being the first with a full verse _as Gaeilge_ to reach number one in Ireland. Appropriately the verse is about langers who think only they can speak Irish. Full lyrics are below the fold, courtesy of “The Cork Diaries”:http://www.sparkpod.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/sparkpod.woa/wa/view?1010566.
If you take the problem of climate change at all seriously, it’s obviously necessary to consider what, if any, role nuclear (fission) energy should play in a response. I discussed this on my blog not long ago and concluded that “it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.” However, on the basis of my rather limited survey of the evidence, I suggested that, as a source of electricity, nuclear energy is about twice as expensive as coal or gas. If so, conservation is the first choice, and we should only move to alternative sources of electricity when the easy conservation options are exhausted.
By contrast, Mark Kleiman says that “Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner”, Brad DeLong says “He’s 100% completely correct”, and Matt Yglesias takes a similar view.
Kleiman cites the example of France, which I don’t find entirely convincing, since the French have always given substantial subsidies to nuclear energy. He argues that the US made a mess of nuclear energy for regulatory reasons, but doesn’t say anything about the British experience, which didn’t have the same problems and was still an economic disaster. I’ve looked briefly at Canada’s CANDU program, where experience appears to be mixed at best.
Can anyone point me to a reliable source of comparative information on this? Is there general agreement, or a partisan divide between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates ? I’d also be interested in comments on the general question raised in my opening sentence.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden “takes a contrarian line”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005309.html on a story about Michael Gunn, an English student who “got caught for plagiarism”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/3753065.stm but is now suing because claims he was not informed it was wrong and was shocked — shocked — to be told it was. “I hold my hands up. I did plagiarise. I never dreamt it was a problem” says the guy, “but they have taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished. If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough. But all my essays were handed back with good marks, and no one spotted it.” Teresa says:
bq. My first reaction was “Nice try, kid.” On second thought, he does have a point. It’s not enough of a point, but he has one.
I don’t think he has a point.
As a devotee of “structured procrastination”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/procrastination.html I am constantly on the lookout for things to be doing instead of whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. As long as what you’re doing has some value (even if it has less value than what you’re supposed to be doing) then you can end up accomplishing a reasonable amount, except for that thing you avoided doing. But I’ve learned the hard way that installing and, especially, upgrading software does not fall into the category of Inadvertently Productive Activity. Upgrading is basically guaranteed to not work properly, break something or otherwise create some unexpected and unpleasant effect. Upgrading can be perversely satisfying because you then have to fix whatever it is that got broken, which can involve a considerable amount of clever diagnosis and problem-solving to bring you back to the point where you were yesterday, before you upgraded. But this is not a healthy approach to life.
This is all common knowledge amongst software developers so I’m surprised that no-one told “The Royal Bank of Canada”:http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040603.wroyal0603/BNStory/Front/ about it.
How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?
* A major improvement in health in poor countries, saving millions of lives each year
* Substantial progress in reducing the rate of climate change, preventing large-scale species extinctions and other environmental damage
* New and improved advertisements for consumer goods
The results of the Copenhagen Consensus are out, and as predicted, that is, with climate change at the bottom of the list. I’ll give a more detailed response later on, but I thought I’d respond to this point in the Economist
The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto.
These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.
On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable[1], as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.
Check out the “speech”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230169,00.html made by art critic Robert Hughes at Burlington House last night, and note the following judgment:
bq. I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.
I wonder what they’ll make of that over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ ?