Paul Krugman has a piece on oil. This is as good a time as any to put up a long post I’ve been working on about oil and whether it’s finally going to run short, points on which I broadly agree with Krugman.

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There’s “a fascinating piece in the Economist”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2647052 about the 17-year cicadas that are about to emerge — in “a plague of biblical proportions” — all over the eastern United States, why they (and their 13-year cousins) have prime-numbered life-cycles, how parasites evolve strategies to match, and other cool stuff. Enjoy!

The debate I went to last weekend (Resolved: That John Kerry should replace George Bush in the White House) was quite interesting and had some especially good tid-bits. Here is one: The Negative suggested that at other times when the country was at war during the presidential elections the country stayed the course and it should do so this time around as well. The Affirmative responded that had people realized in 1864 that there was no slavery or had people noted in 1944 that there were no concentration camps then perhaps the results of the elections would have been different.

Philosophical Quarterly has announced an essay competition with a prize of £1000. Here is the announcement:

This is to let you know that the Philosophical Quarterly has an essay competition on the topic of Severe Poverty and Human Rights. The essay prize is £1000, and we’ll produce a special issue of the best essays if there are enough good submissions. The deadline is November 1st 2004, and the maximum length is 8000 words. Electronic submissions are especially welcome, to: pq@st-andrews.ac.uk, or they can be sent to: The Executive Editor, The Philosophical Quarterly, The University of St Andrews, KY16 9AL, Scotland. Please email Dr Elizabeth Ashford at ea10@st-andrews.ac.uk if you’d like any further information.

The UK’s new Sexual Offences Act (2003) came into force this week. This is the law which criminalizes whole swathes of normal behaviour (such as “teenagers kissing”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3672591.stm ). But we’re not supposed to worry about that because the Home Office will issue guidance to the Crown Prosecution Service not to proceed in such cases (and to block any private prosecutions). There’s something disturbing about legislators legislating with the prior intention of issuing guidance not to apply the law, and there’s a lot disturbing about the content. But that isn’t the only remarkable fact. I read the following in “a rather good piece in the Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=517661 by John Spencer, Professor of Law at Cambridge:

bq. despite conducting “extensive consultations” and a formal review that consumed £17,500 of public money on research and £31,025 on conferences, the Home Office devised the new law without troubling to obtain or consider any solid information about what is normal in the sex lives of children and young persons.

bq. The review document also contains the following disarming statement: “We also tried to test the opinion of some young people and, at a fairly late stage in the review, had discussions with some Year 10 and Year 11 pupils (aged between 14 and 16) at one school (sadly lack of time meant we could not undertake a wider consultation).”

Despite Spencer’s “despite”, the figure of £48,525 means the Home Office spent _nothing_ on research into this important area. And they only had time to interview a few kids in one school! Unbelievable.

The Food and Drug Administration has rejected over-the-counter availability of the morning-after pill. As I have mentioned here before, easier access to such emergency contraception could reduce significantly the millions of unwanted pregnancies in the US. In case anyone is wondering whether the decision was political, consider the following:

The decision was an unusual repudiation of the lopsided recommendation of the agency’s own expert advisory panel, which voted 23 to 4 late last year that the drug should be sold over the counter and then, that same day, 27 to 0 that the drug could be safely sold as an over-the-counter medication.
[..]
The “not approvable” letter was signed by acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Steven K. Galson, not by members of the FDA review team, as is usual. Former officials of the FDA said that generally means that the review team had made a different recommendation.

I don’t have much to say about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners that isn’t obvious; I’m just another guy who’s depressed and heartsick at the images on my screen. Just one point:

I don’t know what the Administration was thinking when they appointed John Negroponte, infamous for his role in Honduras in the 80s, as the ambassador to the new Iraq. I don’t know what they thought he could accomplish. I have my suspicions, but they might be unfairly colored by my general impression of the Administration.

At this point, hopes are irrelevant. Negroponte will be a massive detriment to the mission in Iraq. His story will be told again and again in the Arab press, and he will be a crystallizing symbol for anti-American forces who don’t believe in American goodwill. If the Administration wants to demonstrate its concern for the hearts and minds of Iraq, it will be necessary to find a replacement for Negroponte. (Among others.)

UPDATE: Tim Dunlop beat me to this point. The more, the merrier.

UPDATE: As is usually the case, Dwight Merideth has some thoughts that are well worth reading.

UPDATE: More from Jacob Levy on Rumsfeld:

Whatever credibility Rumsfeld had left has now been fatally undermined. It’s time to demand that he take responsibility and resign; he can no longer do his job anyways. The failure of the White House to understand that seems to be tied to a sense that, while Bush can judge Rumsfeld, no one else has any business doing so. Utterly obtuse.

Or maybe weaseled out of military duty. Naw, that’d be puissant quit-scutage majeur. So I think the following definitely supports John’s point. Maybe.

Never forget that tenure by sochemaunce seisined by feodo copyholds in gross and reseisined through covenants of foeffseignory in frankalpuissance –

The Plain People of Ireland: That sounds like dirty water being squirted out of a hole in a burst rubber ball.

– is alienable only by droit of bonfeasaunce subsisting in free-bench coigny or in re-vested copywrits of seisina faci stipidem, a fair copy bearing a 2d. stamp to be entered at the Court of Star Chamber.

Furthermore, a rent seck indentured with such frankalseignory or chartmoign charges as may be, and re-empted in Mart Overt, subsists thereafter in graund serjaunty du roi, eighteen fishing smacks being deemed sufficient to transport the stuff from Lisbon.

The Plain People of Ireland: Where do the fishing smacks come in?

Myself: Howth, usually.

The Plain People of Ireland: No, but what have they got to do with what you were saying?

Myself: It’s all right. I was only trying to find out whether ye were still reading on. By the way, I came across something very funny the other night in a public house.

The Plain People of Ireland (chuckling): What was it?

Myself: It was a notice on the wall. It read: ‘We have come to an arrangement with our bankers. They have agreed not to sell drinks. We, on our part, have agreed not to cash cheques.’

The Plain People of Ireland: O, Ha Ha Ha! Ho Ho Ho! (Sounds of thousands of thighs being slapped in paroxysms of mirth.)

Myself: Good. I knew that would amuse you.¹

¹ Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien), The Best of Myles

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Like Jon Mandle, I was repulsed by Garrett Hardin’s 1974 article Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor. The idea that large sections of humanity were doomed and should be abandoned forthwith was quite popular at the time. The Paddock brothers prominently advocated a policy of “triage”, cutting off aid immediately to countries like India which were, they argued, doomed to starvation in any case. Judging by this 1996 interview, Hardin (who died last year) didn’t change his views much over time.

Having reacted against this piece by Hardin, I was glad to discover that his more famous contribution to the environment debate, the Tragedy of the Commons was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.

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There’s “a nice little piece in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2004/05/05/ecfgorilla05.xml&pos=portal_puff1&_requestid=347199 about the psychology of visual perception and how we fail to notice all kinds of things because our attention is directed in particular ways (of course conjurors have always exploited this). The article refers to the striking gorilla-suit experiment:

bq. Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.

bq. Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

bq. However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.

There’s also a link to a “page where you can watch the gorilla video”:http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/dailytelegraph.html . (For that video on its own go “here”:http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html .)

I shouldn’t, but what the heck.

Steven Den Beste has a long post in which he articulates his view that:

we are actually engaged in a three-way war. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important consequence of it is simply the recognition and acknowledgement that it is a three-way struggle.

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While all the epistemologists were “safely tucked away in Moscow”:http://www.class.uidaho.edu/inpc/7th-2004/, Massachusetts tried to slip some unreasonable provisions into its draft death penalty statutes.

bq. One of the major recommendations is raising the bar for a death penalty sentence from the normal legal standard of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” to a finding of “no doubt about the defendant’s guilt.” (“New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/national/03DEAT.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1083769665-5fdOsijTKGYxWSfW2htAmw)

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This is a more personal note although certainly related to topics discussed on CT and I’ll add some stats to give it some context. Congrats to my Mom for being elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences this week! The Academy has been around since 1825 and in all that time has had a total of eighteen women elected to its membership. The three women elected this week boosted the number up from fifteen. My Mom is only the second female chemist ever to become a member. The Academy altogether has no more than 200 members younger than 70 years old at any one time. (Members 70 or older do not count toward the 200 so there are just less than 300 current living members.)

Apparently the gender ratio is similarly abysmal in the science academies of other countries. Tabulations have shown that although in a few countries (e.g. Norway, Finland) the percentages are a bit higher around a whopping ten percent, among many other countries such as the UK, Germany, Israel, Denmark, France the figure is around four percent.[1] The state of things is especially striking given that nowadays women often make up more than fifty percent of those getting college degrees (although that’s distributed quite unevenly across fields). Sure, it takes time for people to go through the ranks, but a significant number of women have been getting degrees in science for a while yet the pipeline narrows for women at every step of the way from college degrees to graduate degrees to post-docs to assistant professorships to full professorships to membership in science academies.. all the way to the Nobel Prize.

fn1. Joan Mason: “Not much room at the top for women”, Forum, Journal of the Association for Women in Science and Engineering, No.8, Autumn/Winter, 1999/2000, p.3.

So Bristol was great up to the point where the hotel phoned me at 7:30 this morning saying that my car had been broken into. Back window knocked out and crap everywhere. They didn’t steal the “Ligeti CD”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001804.html.