Notes

0 Free the market Essential outline: Misfortune befalls some group of people. They appeal to their legislators and civil servants to help them, who in turn oblige (for support) even if their policy harms others. But there's a disconnect between the intentions of a policy and its actual outcomes. (These outcomes include the good and bad things that happen, as well as the good and bad things that they prevent from happening.) Much rhetoric will be aired by politicians to emphasize the policy's intentions. However, the policy that enters effect addresses an observed and hated manifestation of underlying causes of the problem (e.g., executive compensation, rather than human propensity to form bubbles). Frequently, people find more creative ways to do what they were doing before or get what they want anyway. Another crisis soon strikes, and the process is repeated. Eventually we arrive at a Soviet-style centrally planned state (with or without the totalitarianism), where any economic activity must be done in accordance to layers upon layers of regulation. This decreases people's wealth (by slowing down their wealth growth) and leads them to wonder why things aren't as good as they used to be. (Answer: because it was too easy to convert localized short-term economic pain into policy changes.) At any point in this cycle, the crises can be correlated (i.e., a previous one is a partial cause of the current one). The right thing to do would be to remove policy and the layers of regulation that block competition. (It'd be way cool if I could integrate co-ment with this editor.) -1 Talebian-style reasoning 1. In the 30s and 40s, studies came out with impeccable logic and empirical evidence proving that blacks or Jews were sub-human. What does that tell you about studies? 2. 'An old man of the name of Chunglang, which means "Master of rock", had a small plot of land in the mountains. [One day, a horse wandered onto his property. His neighbors came and joyously congratulated him on his good luck. "You can now plow so much faster with this horse!" But the old man said, "Why do you think this is good fortune?"] In a few days, the horse ran away. His neighbors then expressed their condolences for his misfortune. But the old man asked them: "Why do you think that is a misfortune? " And then a few days later the animal returned, followed by a horde of wild horses. Again the neighbors appeared, to congratulate this time on this good fortune. But the old man retorted: "Why do you think that is good fortune? " The horses having become very numerous, the son of the old man got into horsemanship, but one beautiful day he broke the leg. Then, once again, the neighbors presented their condolences and again the old man responded to them: "Why do you think that is an unhappy accident? " The following year, the commission of bigwigs came to the mountain. It recruited strong men to become footmen of the emperor and to carry his chair. The son of the old man, with the gimp leg, was not selected. Chunglang could not repress a smile.' (Herman Hesse, by way of NNT) How do you reason, how do you do decision-making, or to be Hawkinsian, how do you explain perplexity under this kind of uncertainty? Textbooks Three pieces of evidence. I was reading an older version of the standard bio101 textbook by Campbell/Reese and was stunned at how formulaic, condescending, dry, and uninspired the exposition was. I was thumbing through Ridley's popular bio paperback 'The Agile Gene' and learned about how a single cell-adhesion molecule's gene in the fruit fly has 95 distinct exons which the cell can choose to express in many hundreds of different ways (out of up to 40k combinations) to produce many hundreds of different proteins! In thumbing through the preface of a personal memoir type book on game theory, the author Lazslo Mero says of it, "This book is in the form of an essay. It is intended to be read rather than studied. Therefore I did not stick to the fundamental rules of textbook, writing namely that the material be east to learn, easy to teach, and easy to examine on---usually at the expense of being slightly boring. Rather my aim was to meet the demands of the reader seeking mental adventure." AHA! I knew it, that's how textbooks are written. SO! do you know of a biology "text" that isn't written to be easy to memorize for exams that are easy to write? Which throws out amazing connections like popular books, except does cover the material from an (upperlevel?) intro bio text? Behaviors If there are more ways to create value than entrepreneurs, and more niches than organisms to occupy, maybe there are more behaviors open to exploration than people willing to self-experiment.  Ekman's face reading Betty Edwards' drawing Speed reading Fractal polyphasic sleeping (Programming) (Strenuous physical activity) (From Dawkins' portraits of brineshrimp and upside-down catfish: "Major transitions in evolution may have begun as changes in behavioural habit, perhaps even non-genetic learned changes of habit, which only later were followed by genetic evolution. ... A change of habit by an adventurous individual is later followed by a long evolutionary catch-up and clean-up." [Ancestor's Tale] Natural science's glib explanations are starting to tire me---rather, their excessive downside risk. Not aesthetic at all.) 2. We all want to avoid being the turkey (mistaking good times for impending doom), but I think I mentally think of it as detecting current theories and behaviors that in the future will be discredited. But maybe I should also worry about these discreditors in the future are wrong about those things. 3. In the future, maybe we'll work hard to protect ourselves from reality pollution. There is already so much to interest us, we risk getting caught being mediocre at everything. The solution to that might be to try to limit one's intellectual diet, and to actually value missing connections between fields of interest, because a connection is so much more likely to lead to another interest than help an existing interest. This is all so dogmatic.

Little people discuss other people Average people discuss events Big people discuss ideas (from Kalman) 3 Ruts? Is starting to shave in the same spot every day an example of a rut, like my 7th grade technical arts teacher thought, something normally to avoid? I tried to reverse my shaving process and it caused some discomfort. Maybe, I thought, it's not a rut, and I've actually optimized my shaving for minimum discomfort. That idea affiliates itself with optimization theory. A totally different possibility: maybe it's cumulative advantage: the parts of my face that I started with when I first began to shave as a teenager toughened more than the rest, so I kept starting at that spot, which toughened it more, etc. This idea affiliates itself with Watts' rich-get-richer winner-take-all network theory. 1Operating parameters Kalman reported having seen this in a pub and identified with it his whole life: Little people discuss other people Average people discuss events Big people discuss ideas Since the time that people have been designing engineering systems, there's probably been this idea that the human body is a hypercomplex system designed with operating parameters and that you need to treat it as such. E.g., this notion that after you go running, you have to cool down---the analogy is that you can't bring a running motor to a sudden halt, it has to be slowed down. The human body doesn't have operating parameters like a motor does. It's been designed for an almost complete lack of operating parameters---to engage in extremely stressful activities. Weiner in a book on cybernetics mentioned how people first thought of animal bodies as clocks, then Carnot-style heat engines, then computers, as the technology of their time changed their analogies. Ideas can be as bad as they can be good. Best to avoid them and Taleb it up: be an empiricist, whatever that means. 7 On using Mandelbrotian finance to produce a useful portfolio I return to finance briefly by studying Mandelbrotian finance (links therein). I plotted the daily price moves of the SNP for the last 60 years and saw how clearly non-Gaussian it was, and specifically that a Gaussian fit greatly had a much wider mainlobe than the histogram, indicating fat tails, and that the standard deviation greatly understates the likelihood of a catastrophic loss. Some hints have been scattered through Taleb and Mandelbrot's work about possibly using an ensemble of Levy fits to get a better estimate of risk, and with this build a diversified portfolio. 8 Digital cognizances will dream dreams unfathomable by mere humans Any two organisms alive today, by simple logic, once shared a common ancestor. Emily and Ahmed's common ancestor probably lived 20k years ago. Emily and our houseplant's common ancestor probably lived 300 million years ago. Emily and a cyanobacteria named Bob's common ancestor: maybe a billion years ago. (This common ancestor might be biologically almost identical to Bob.) What do you think Bob thinks of his great-great-...-great-grand-cousin Ahmed? What leaps of complexity exist between Bob and Ahmed! especially given that Bob's biology might have only barely changed since their common ancestor (unlike Ahmed's). And the gulf between a 10'000 year old Ahmed and his intellectual great-great-...-great-grandchild, a digital cognizance, some creature that exists on supercomputer nodes scattered between the stars... this gulf I ponder today. 11 Summary: June 2009 My interests seem to have have generalized to the sources and effects of randomness in complex systems, our ability to reason about them and make decisions in them, the philosophical system of skepticism, and validating ideas from these by studying biology and business. The central problem is that frequently our observations can be explained by multiple competing models (and their combinations), each of which suggest different decision-making schemes, some of which will be "right" (under some environmental conditions) and others which will be "wrong" (under some environmental conditions), and I want to eliminate all sources of error in thinking about these things. I have hope that eliminating all sources of error is not congruent with intellectual paralysis or inaction. Supporting Gould and proving contingency 'Fitness for existing conditions does not ensure long-term survival, especially when conditions change rapidly, and that the survival of many species depends more on chance events and features ... fortuitously beneficial under future conditions than on features best adapted under the present environment' (from wiki). This is apparently contentious among biologists, but obvious to probability engineers in networks, economics, finance, etc. 1. There may be many more ways to create value than businesses (or humans) to fill any significant number of them. Similarly, there may be many more ecological niches to exploit than species (or individual organisms) to exploit them all. 2. The central effort I think should be formalizing this idea of rewinding the tape of life and considering the ability to predict the future at any point in time. Our establishined inability to predict might have little to do with what the tape of life, rerun, would show, but I think the two are very linked because all we can do right now is predict what the tape of life would show.  Alternatively the argument need not be about prediction at all, only on divergent paths and for example Polya urn models.  3. Examples of contingency in human networks: de Vany's Hollywood Economics and the popcorn effect; Watts' MusicLab experiments; Arthur's work on path dependence and increasing returns. In all of these, early random happenings play a disproportionately large role, whether driven by true randomness (thermal noise; quantum mechanics) or by chaos (the semblance of randomness in divergent trajectories due to uncertainty in initial conditions and parameters). 4. Thermal noise (much more than quantum randomness) affects point mutations, which can greatly change the path taken by life via, 1) epidemics caused by parasitic viruses, fungi, or bacteria---the "path" taken by life may be assumed to be multicellular organisms with differentiated cells. Also, 2) near-neutral mutations exploring the neutral space in different directions and thus completely altering the intersecting timelines of ecological roommates. Some will undoubtedly become greatly more numerous than others, and these differences cascade and introduce increasing divergences. Convergent evolution involves using existing genes in novel ways---as Hox genes in chickens, people, and fish so well demonstrate, but going before Hox genes, such possibilities would not exist.  5. This has to be formalized because I thoroughly mistrust human abilities to reason. Natural science gives us excellent narratives to explain experimental evidence, but those narratives invariably must change as new instrumentation becomes available (the Galileo route to obsolescence), as new experiments are conceived (the Mendel effect), and as old perspectives are replaced by new ones (the Harvey method---the ancient Egyptians observed the same hearts with the same eyes as Harvey and all following doctors saw something different). Today's natural science is tomorrow's myth. Only formal methods can be safeguarded from this end as myth: people propose ways to link abstract formal concepts to the world and use them in science or technology. Formal mathematics is not the language of nature---that link is made by fallible scientists and engineers. People put on engineering hats to make products exploiting (and testing) the connections made by people wearing science hats, connections between formal structures and the natural world.

6 Bicameralism and HTMs?   In that the prediction is focused by a "director"? 5 More Popperianism "Yoshiki Kuramoto of Kyoto University and colleagues subjected Physarum polycephalum, an amoeba, to three regularly-spaced dips in temperature and humidity, and found that its locomotive activity decreased. Thereafter, they noticed that a single dip was sufficient to elicit this response. This implied that the amoeba anticipated that other such dips might be forthcoming from the memory it learned. Such response did not occur when the temperature and humidity changes were irregular." Even the lowly amoeba appears to expect patterns in its surroundings. (Or we as researchers are just blinded by our pre-existing theory that it ought to and are thus looking for data that simply confirms that hypothesis.) (researchblogging link) Languages: Mandarin zhao3 shang4 hao3: good morning wan3 shang4 hao3: good evening 2008-11-29 Non-PhD programming status Todo: Squeak, Ruby+Shoes, Amazon-derived Bookfile app, Erlang intro Musician Corps 1. The Obama administration should not place a floor underneath musician salaries by placing many music teachers in grade schools. The underlying goal, to have a cultured and broadly balanced society, is not remotely assured by this. What may serve this goal better may be encouraging 6-hour workdays so parents can take children to music lessons. 2. Politicians and entrenched interests want you to think that governmental regulations are needed to prevent companies from getting rich gouging you. However, regulation and bureaucracy keep politically-connected companies safe from competition and allow them to continue mistreating customers. 3. "Most people look at an animal and have some trouble believing that it's a product of a random process. Most people look at a car and have just as much trouble believing that it is the product of an even more random random process" (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/04/taleb_on_black.html) 4. Since few think the politicians and civil servants who comprise the American government to be paragons of morality (far from it), whenever I hear about this torture memo affair, I wonder who the elected officials want to convince that the American government is a moral actor? Do they think the American people want a government that pays lip service to morality? Who is not content with America being the world's economic and military power, and wants to it to be the world's moral force too? (2009-5-13) 5. I am hoping everyone realizes that knowing politics or history has nothing to do with American creativity and work ethic---Americans don't need to know who the Supreme Court justices are, or who our allies were in WW2, to be the most industrious people in the world. There is no reason to get upset that celebs are better known than elected officials, as condescending elitists are wont to do. 6. As a free society gives up its ability to use force and instead institutionalizes it by giving it to politicians, police officers, and soldiers, these three groups of people are the most likely to subjugate the rights of a free people and enslave them. Their vocations are thus very thankless---although they provide an essential service (the brokering of power and force), they will always be mistrusted by their fellow free citizens and frequently not recognized for their good actions or even wrongly punished. This mistrust of the agents of force (politicians, police, and soldiers) is an integral part of our free society; whenever a subgroup of free citizens allows infractions against their freedoms by these agents of force, the rest of the citizenry is immediately made very alert, for many an agent of power has enslaved a free people in this way. 7. epiphany: Democracy 1.0 politics makes so much more sense if political parties are viewed as gangs, and the nation as just inner-city DC. Who cares if the Deuces or the 357s are in control? they both provide similar threats and benefits to civilians, but otherwise just angle for power. 8. Obvious factoid: a changing of the guard is inevitably triggered by technology breakthroughs, resource discoveries, disasters, or just people's changing interest. Industries, classes, and regions fall into disfavor and after a period of confusion, society finds the new sources of wealth creation. Recessions are the economic manifestation of this changing of the guard, and are almost always prolonged by governments (be they communist, autocratic, or Democracy 1.0) clinging to the old guard. The current recession is a changing of the guard from finance and NYC to automated sensor exploitation. Hussman Recessions are not caused by a general shortfall in spending, but instead by a mismatchbetween the mix of goods and services supplied by the economy and the mix of goods and services demanded. Though demand shifts away from some kinds of output that the economy produced in the prior expansion (as we saw with tech and telecom in 2000-2002 and are seeing in housing today), we often see continued demand in other sectors, but the mismatch takes time to correct, and output and employment suffer as a result. Most job losses during a recession are typically concentrated in a small number of industries, while other industries experience growth and even growing backlogs and rising employment. So the next recession, whenever it occurs, will probably feature a good amount of dispersion. Most likely, we'll observe particular weakness in housing-related industries (and associated finance sectors), while a variety of sectors ... may be better situated (though such stability still may not prevent stock price weakness). (http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc071001.htm) 6 The customer is always rational 1. People are never irrational, I have recently become aware of, through Drucker's Management. Calling someone's behavior irrational is just a Platonic excuse for nor able to quantify the objective utility function they are maximizing. Consider the most "irrational" of markets: teenagers. The objective function for the teenage segment seeks continual novelty and random peer effects. Or consider the impulse splurge: this is done out of habit and foregoes discipline. Some of these objective functions may be highly random, other more deterministic, but one thing remains clear: the customer is always rational. 2. The funny polyphasic sleep blogger had this to say: "It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the real purpose of a business is to create value. While it’s possible to make money in the short run without creating much value, in the long run it’s unsustainable. Even criminal organizations have to create value for someone. When you know your business is just sucking value away from others without providing anything in return, it will erode your self-esteem, and the business won’t be much fun to run." (He also suggests to be unafraid of turning down possible contracts; to expect contracts to be broken; link) 3. The [productivity] standards still express the mechanistic fallacy---of which Marx, to the permanent disability of Marxian economiss, was the last important dupe---that all human achievement could eventually be measured in units of muscle effort. Increased productivity in a modern economy is never achieved by muscle effort. It is always the result of doing away with muscle effort, of substituting something else for the laborer. (Drucker) 9  When we hear a theory proposed in business or politics, we want to know if it will work. But given the time-variant nature of life, the same technique might work some times and not work others (this happens all the time in wetware biology; an experiment yields some result today, another result tomorrow). That is, the future is a set and not a point, and you'd have to be confident that a theory will work under all conditions (difficult to do outside of physical science and statistical signal processing). And during the times that it does work,  randomness might have played a larger role than the operation of the theory (which might just as well have not worked). These two issues tell me that although asking for rationally-founded theories to improve our well-being is a natural thing to do, and would be very nice, it may be a futile task, especially in the business and politics domains. We return to Pyrrhonism. 10 the coolest bits from biology Oxygen catastrophe Microbes discovered almost all biochemical reactions 1.5 billion years ago (except flowers' essential oils and snake venoms) Ring species The closest relatives to hippos are whales Horizontal gene transfer in bdelloid rotifers, which are a huge family in the insect kingdom that peculiarly reproduce asexually Random notes: "[viral] change is effected by elimination of the ill adapted of the moment, not on the prospect of building something better for the future" (virology blog) I realize that in biology, there is rarely a constant cost function: efficiency can be bad: 'the microbiomes of obese individuals have reduced numbers of Bacteroidales spp., and transfer of these microbiota into germ-free mice resulted in obese mice, theoretically because these microbiota were more efficient at releasing calories from food' (madscientistjunior.blogspot) Food preservatives: the stuff we put in our food so even bacteria won't eat it (paraphrased from Aaron Brown)

Reading

To read:

• Sornette's book and http://www.ess.ucla.edu/faculty/sornette/catastrophies.asp#catastrophies
• Euler's Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology by David S. Richeson

On Skepticism of the Pyrrhonist kind

I seek to reproduce the opening paragraphs of Mates' fantastic "The Skeptic Way" (1996) as an introduction and summary of Greek skepticism, a way of life that has persevered with Western culture through the ages and will resonate immediately with many South and East Asian ways of life.

The Skeptic Way as offered by its practitioners, the Pyrrhonean skeptics, as a way of life leading to ataraxia, peace of mind, inner tranquility. In contrast to the reigions, with their multifarious mythologies, belief in which was supposed somehow to contribute to well-being or at least the avoidance of disasters, the Skeptic Way required no belief in anything at all; indeed, the very absence of belief was presented as what would be largely responsible for liberation from the worries, fears, confusions, and other inner troubles from which ordinary mortals as well as philosophers seek relief.

This renunciation of belief set Pyrrhonism at odds not only with religion but also with the dominant philosophies of the day---those of the Stoics, Epicureans, and later Peripatetics---each of which, while not putting forward a set of crude mysteries or absurdities in which its devotees were to believe, nevertheless had its own special and hard-to-understand philosophical doctrine to advance. These doctrines had in common a certain core, which Sextus calls "the philosophical logos," the supposition that on the one hand there are the appearances, which are subjective and mind-dependent, and on the other hand there is an objective and independently existing real world; and, further, that in one way or another (there was no agreement on the details) it is possible to extract from the appearances the information we need about the real world in order to be wise and to live happily. Like the religions, these philosophies would have us striving to cope with a more or less recalcitrant "reality" that pretty much goes its own way regardless of what we do. But in the philosophical story the obstacle with which we are left to contend is not a supernatural god or gods but rather phusis, nature itself, the "external world."

Accordingly, the Pyrrhonist sympathizes with the disinclination of sober and reasonable people to believe in the existence of fantastic beings of any sort and with their reluctance to suppose that human happiness can depend in any essential way on such beliefs. He points out, however, that the so-called "external world," as described by the various philosophers and even as accepted in an inchoate way by the common man, seems in effect to be nothing more than just another domain of invented entities with which we imagine ourselves required somehow to get along.

So the Pyrrhonist's message, insofar as he has one, is something like this: "At ease! The notion that in order to live well you have to have beliefs about a supposed reality that transcends all appearances is just a mistake. Go by the appearances; put aside your worries about whether they correspond to that so-called 'external world', which the philosophers never manage to describe in a consistent or fully intelligible way; suspend judgement about all such matters and you will reach the equanimity that we all desire."

Some modern (and ancient non-Pyrrhonist) skeptics reject the existence of an external world, or posit that we can never know anything about it. This would be considered dogmatism by a Pyrrhonist, who makes no such claim: "It is not directly concerned with knowledge at all, but only with justified belief. In Pyrrhonism there is no talk of doubt (although that term is occasionally and mistakenly used in translating certain passages of Sextus); but doubting is almost definitively characteristic of the modern skeptic. By contrast, the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonist is one of aporia, of being at a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied. This state of mind is said to arise from the apparent equipollence of the considerations that can be brought for and against any assertion purporting to describe how things are in an external, mind-independent world. Unlike doubting, aporia does not imply understanding; when assertions are made that claim to describe the external world, the Pyrrhonist is at a loss as to whether to classify them as true, as false, or more important, as neither."

Note that the "external world" not only might correspond to the physical realities but also moral, ethical, and political realities which exist beyond the reach of one's senses. So when I was reading, in an article about the recent Chinese crackdown on internet activism, that internet activism doesn't advance democracy (or does), I was at peace, finding it impossible to rationally justify one hypothesis over the other.

I seek a more concise summary of Pyrrhonism, but in the mean time, this will hopefully suffice.

From Popper

This is to me the essence of Conjectures and Refutations.

• " ... most dissectors of the heart before Harvey observed the wrong things--those, which they expected to see. ... We may hesitate to accept any statement, even the simplest observation statement; and we may point out that every statement involves interpretation in the light of theories, and that it is therefore uncertain. There can never be anything like a completely safe observation, free from all dangers of interpretation. (This is one of the reasons why the theory of induction does not work.)"
• "Without waiting, passively, for repetitions to impress or impose regularities upon us, we actively try to impose regularities upon the world. We try to discover similarities in it, and to interpret it in terms of laws invented by us. Without waiting for premises we jump to conclusions."

It was inevitable, but I have found a (strong) bit in Popper that speaks to HTM technology: "'A hungry animal', writes Katz, 'divides the environment into edible and inedible things. An animal in flight sees roads to escape and hiding places. . . . Generally speaking, objects change. . . according to the needs of the animal.' We may add that objects can be classified, and can become similar or dissimilar, only in this way--by being related to needs and interests." (He goes on to say normal Popper stuff---"This rule applies not only to animals but also to scientists.")

From Drucker

• US demographic projections from the Census Bureau! (Reading Management: TRP on iTouch.)
  

From Mlodinow

In "Drunkard's Walk" on randomness and cognitive bias, Mlodinow says that if each of 10 Hollywood executives flips a fair coin 10 times, there's 2/3rds chance that at least one of them gets 8 or more heads or tails.

Matlab check?

N=1e5;
r = uint8(rand(10,10,N));
s = squeeze(sum(r,2));
sum( max(s) >=8 | min(s) <=2) / N % --> 0.68508

"One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results." Jakob Bernoulli.

If every CEO has a 60% cut-and-dry success rate, over the last five years, 333 of the Fortune 500 CEOs would have exhibited performance that did not reflect their true ability. We should expect, by chance alone, about 1 in 10 of the CEOs to have five winning or losing years in a row.

From Watts

On flexible specialization and the second industrial divide: “The Second Industrial Divide” of Piore & Sabel have an answer to hierarchical industrial organization & vertical integration (which works in low-change markets) being flexible specialization capturing economies of scope rather than of scale. I am reading about this in Duncan Watts' "Six Degrees" book about the Toyota group.

Further valuable discussion was found at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Engineering-Systems-Division/ESD-342Spring-2006/LectureNotes/index.htm

From Bonner

"Traditions are not created in the course of a single generation. What makes them valuable is that they develop little by little, wrought by heat and cold, beaten into a serviceable shape by countless pounding over many generations, through many complete cycles. ... Knowledge costs time and effort. Wisdom can take decades. Rules and principles---such as 'love thy neighbor' or 'buy low, sell high'---can take centuries to evolve." (Financial Reckoning Day, pp. 161-162)

From Mendelsohn

In Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1990), Mendelsohn talks about the many ills introduced by medicine as a church. He does not blame the drug companies, their salesmen, the government agencies that police medicine, or the patients who badger their doctors for pills. He blames doctors who have the facts and indiscriminately prescribe drugs (paraphrased).

He's talking about anti-arthritis drugs and their horrible side-effects: Naprosyn's maker Syntex was found to have falsified records of tumors and animal deaths during safety tests, but the FDA was unable to remove the drug without long proceedings. This piqued my interest and led to some discoveries: it was a drug from the late 60s http://nzsm.webcentre.co.nz/article763.htm (Search for 'syntex'). The testing company made up data; the drug company said it wasn't good enough to pass regulatory hurdles and asked that the data be further "corrected": the full story http://planetwaves.net/contents/faking_it.html. Good news is, naprosyn (called naproxen now) is still being prescribed, although I suppose (but cannot verify) that the tests were redone. A company history is available at http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Roche-Bioscience-Company-History.html.

From Dawkins and Shubin

Incredible bullet points to delve into much further from Shubin's Your inner Fish and Dawkins' abridged audiobook of Ancestor's Tale

• Statement: molecular dating confirms comparative embryologists' belief in the major schism between protostome and deutrostome. Popperian counterstatement: what if the observations that support existing theories are being published? We should try and predict which modern theories will be refuted the soonest.
  
• species are two types of animals that don't interbreed or can't interbreed? One is a behavioral thing (the grasshopper's tale in Dawkins), the other is statistical.
• Ring species!
• Hox genes involved with fin, limb, and wings
• Shark jaw bones and human ear bones: "Bones that support upper and lower jaws in sharks are used in us to swallow and hear."
• The first bones were just thousands of teeth fused together! And the chemical method of making teeth is today used to make scales, hair, sweat glands, mammary glands, and all internal organs!
• Hippos and whales... wow

From some excited corresondences with Mr Hatem: I'll just quote another reviewer (http://www.sptimes.com/2008/03/09/Books/_Your_Inner_Fish__rev.shtml):

Readers might be surprised to learn that teeth appear in the fossil record before bones. Shubin tells the story of how conodonts, the plentiful fossil from ancient oceans, puzzled 19th century scientists who debated whether they were animal, vegetable or mineral.

One day a paleontologist discovered what looked like a lamprey fossil. Inside the mouth of this primitive, jawless fish were rows of conodonts - teeth! Those teeth, the earliest on record, had been observed 150 years before anyone realized what they were. ...

Those first bony-head skeletons, which belonged to a group of fish called ostracoderms, looked "like hamburgers with fleshy tails," writes Shubin. The fossilized skulls of these fish are shiny, like teeth or fish scales. When this skull is studied under a microscope, "the whole shield is made up of thousands of small teeth fused together."

Basically teeth came first to eat things with. Then the smaller things started developing bony armor, where the bones were just thousands of teeth that fused together. Talk about using the same genes in many ways!

Also, it turns out that teeth were the first organs made in a specific way, involving two tissues that come together and secrete proteins to form internal organs. Today, every single internal organ we have is made that way. Shubin analogizes it like so: once plastic injection was discovered, all kinds of things, from car doors to yoyos were made with it.

From Zimmer

Here's a glorious anthropomorphist excerpt from ZImmer's Microcosm (recent):


Margulis' Microcosmos-related article: How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life (http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=673)

(This might be a good time to log this: Yoonhee asked, "I need an update on Hatem!" I responded, "As of 2am this morning, he was writing me an email explaining enzyme kinetics, in order to avoid studying for his test today on phyla and classes." (Sep 18, 2008) May his biohackfu be strong!)

From Ducasse, Squeak: learn programming with robots

"Where complexity is a central issue, architecture dominates materials." (Alan Kay, foreword, xix)

From Toynbee

I shelved Study of History after adopting an empiricist view of history. However, I think there is a lot of worth in it despite its post-hoc theory-fitting, e.g., how all the Greek city-states responded to the pressures of population differently, Corinth by colonization, Athens by trade, Sparta by its peculiar way of life characterized by helot-slavery and martial life, etc.