Selene of Alexandria

I just might get this book for free.  If you're interested, try Selene Giveaway .  Just click on the "Selene of Alexandria" link and you'll get a synopsis of this historical fiction set in the time of Hypatia ("SELENE is bright, impulsive, stubborn, and a little spoiled by her father, a city councilor.  Since her mother’s death, she longs to forgo the privileges of her class to become a physician—an impossible dream for upper class girls who never engage in a profession. ").

I enjoyed the author's commentary on the movie Agora (set in the same time), so I'd look forward to reading her work..

Genocide - what's the big deal?

The question is raised on The Volokh Conspiracy, not for the first time.  Nobody is saying genocide is OK - but there is an obsessive attempt to draw a line between genocide and "mere" mass murder.  If somebody wants to make the point that Stalin was a much nicer guy than Hitler because - despite Stalin maybe* being relatively responsible for more deaths - Stalin's deaths were just murders rather than genocide, I am not going to be especially impressed.  Nor, for that matter, am I going to be impressed with somebody who argues that Hitler is nicer than Stalin because his death-count was lower.  Both Hitler and Stalin were quite bad enough, and the idea of some sort of contest between them is macabre.

The issue came up because of the book Stalin's Genocides, which argues - well, it is pretty clear from the title what it argues.   Apparently, the issue is important from the standpoint of international law because if a country is committing genocide then it is legitimate to interfere, but if a country is only slaughtering millions of its own people without regard to ethnicity (kill all the educated people or all the rich people), then that is an internal matter.   It's pretty clear something is a bit off with international law here, but it's hard to get people to accept a definition that makes their own country guilty.














*I've heard figures going both ways.

Chimps gone wild....

They may not be all that great at acquiring human language, but they do pretty well at those obscene gestures.

Quote of the Day

I am not, of course, a believer, but if I were, I’d prefer to imagine a deity occasionally plagued by these thoughts—an agnostic God who sometimes doubts Himself.
 - Julian Sanchez

Things you learn reading Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars"....

Regarding the fittings for urine collection in space suits: "To avoid mishaps caused by embarrassed astronauts opting for L when they are really S, there is no S.  'There is L, XL, and XXL', says Hamilton Sundstrand suit engineer Tom Chase."

Teach like an Egyptian

Saw Agora last night at the Little Theatre.

I'd read a lot about it, and already knew there were some historical inaccuracies (and unfounded plot points, such as crediting her with the discovery of elliptical orbits), but I wasn't much bothered by having the satellite view include the Aswan dam.  It is a story about a leading female intellectual from a time where females where better off staying out of the limelight, blended with religious strife between Christians, Pagans, and Jews.

Hypatia was acted brilliantly, and the movie had quite a few high points.  Overall, I found it dragged in parts, and a few other parts seemed a bit preachy - but I was still impressed and touched.  At the end of the movie, a manly tear welled in the corner of my eye, but I managed to stop it from spilling.

I'd recommend it to anybody fascinated by the subject matter, but not to everybody.

The Doctor's Dilemna

Enjoyed the play (newly knighted doctor falls in love with 20-years-younger wife of a sick artist who is a scoundrel - is it best the husband die?).  The director's notes in the program was some frightful twaddle of a paean to socialized medicine.  To be fair, Shaw himself was an unapologetic commie.  He had the intellectual honesty to admit that for his ideal to work, it was understandable and necessary to have people shot when they were shirking their duty, but didn't seem to come to grips with the downside of that concession - apparently the people that would be doing the shooting were all fair, reasonable and altruistic.  Although Shaw mentioned the concept in the play, this was a tangential mention - the play was really about the value of life and the decisions we have to make.  The saving grace of the program notes were luscious photographs, including many of great artists killed by tuberculosis.

Next play, after dinner, is John Bull's Other Island.

Programmers vs. System Administrators (or NOT vs.)

I love this post describing the difference between programmers and system administrators:

Programmers are like vampires. They're frequently up all night, paler than death itself, and generally afraid of being exposed to daylight. Oh yes, and they tend think of themselves (or at least their code) as immortal.

System Administrators are like werewolves. They may look outwardly ordinary, but are incredibly strong, mostly invulnerable to stuff that would kill regular people -- and prone to strange transformations during a moon "outage".

Haven't posted an XKCD for a while....

But I was sharing his work with my brother-in-law David (also known as "Fred", his vanity plate reads "YABADO"), and so:

Original here.

Liberatarianism (or Liberaltarianism) is actually doing well?

It doesn't usually feel that way, especially when you look at poll results, but a good case is actually made here.

Now I think that a lot of gains have been made that are actually being lost, but I suppose one should not forget the gains.

HT MR

Monkey business...

I thought I blogged this before, but it looks like I was only intending to.  I mentioned at a party today a study in which economists found similar behavior to ours in monkeys - areas in which monkeys are not only as irrational as we are in our decisions, they are actually irrational in the same way.

Laurie Santos describes the study in this talk here.  Of course, in order to study how monkeys use money, first they have to be taught to use money in the first place.  And once monkeys understand the value of money, they engage in thievery (as described in the talk above) and even prostitution.

If you don't want to watch the whole video, the Freakonomics guys describe the same experiment here, including:

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

Quote of the day

"The world's worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities."

 - Robert Baker, quoted in "Whole Earth Discipline"

Quote of the day

Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists stopped carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe (except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear).  Greens caused gigatons of carbon dioxide to enter the atmosphere from the coal and gas burning that went ahead instead of nuclear.  I was part of that, too, and I apologize.

--- Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

How would you like it if your spouse bought THIS?

Another great "Markets in Everything" post from MR.

MR brings home the headline bacon.....

Indeed, these two are more than worthy:

Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

and
Mongolian neo-Nazis: Anti-Chinese sentiment fuels rise of ultra-nationalism



Click through above for details such as

Their right hands rise to black-clad chests and flash out in salute to their nation: "Sieg heil!" They praise Hitler's devotion to ethnic purity.

But with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich's Aryan ideal. A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.

Glad I wasn't coaching North Korean kids.....

Apparently losing is very bad:

The broadcast of live games had been banned to avoid national embarrassment, but after the spirited 2-1 defeat to Brazil, state television made the Portugal game its first live sports broadcast ever. Following ideological criticism, the players were then allegedly forced to blame the coach for their defeats.

HT MR

The living Buddha and benefits fraud....

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be a celebrity. Records showed that Sogen Kato was, at 111 years, the oldest man in Tokyo. But when officials went to visit him in order to congratulate him, they found (after some resistance from his relatives) only his mummified body. Apparently he had been dead 30 years while his checks were still being cashed.

Mr Kato's relatives told police that he had "confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha," according to a report by Jiji Press.

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.

The pension fund had long been unable to contact Mr Kato.

HT MR

Things you didn't know about men and women.....

If this sounds odd (excerpt):

Given that men are, on average, physically weaker than women: It's hard to see how they're going to win wars without troops, and survive walking the streets without alpha females willing to protect them. Among alpha females, chivalry is dead. If beta females are chivalrous, so what? Even if beta females had the courage to pull a rapist off of her victim, would she have the fortitude? Considering that the beta female wouldn't even be physically fit enough to join the U.S. Army, it's hard to imagine her stopping a wolf pack.

it has been regendered. HT Prettier Than Napoleon

Life as an adventure

Tyler Cowen from Marginal Revolution ponders one of his favorite philosophers (just follow the link, boys and girls) who compares literary adventures (where the main characters often follow a path that has been mapped out for them by either a living guide or a trail of clues) with real life careers.

His Robin Hanson quote is worth quoting again:

If you want life paths that quickly and reliably reveal your skills, like leveling up in video games, you want artificial worlds like schools, sporting leagues, and corporate fast tracks. You might call such lives adventures, but really they pretty much the opposite. If you insist instead on adventuring for real, achieving things of real and large consequence against great real obstacles, well then learn to see the glorious nobility of those who try well yet fail.

Those exotic Antarctican accents really turn me on!

If you've heard about the recent spy case, the Russians were able to divert suspicion by pretending to have Belgian accents (if you follow the link, there'll be a bit of a rant on how we are not only disadvantaged here in not knowing foreign languages, we are provincially ignorant of the outside world). One spy even convinced a college friend she was from Antarctica (although she came clean later and told her she was actually from Russia - some spy)!

Now Quebec ... THAT makes sense.