Robert's Rationale

How much longer do compact fluorescent bulbs last?

2008-01-03T12:19:00.001-05:00

Though a CFL bulb costs more than a standard light bulb, it has two features that make it cheaper in the long run: It uses less electricity per hour of use, and it burns for more hours before dying. I had been under the impression that both of these features would, in and of themselves, save enough to make up for the initial higher price -- this makes them doubly a good deal.

The electricity argument is true so far as I can tell, but a new Wall Street Journal piece claims that "The light bulb that costs 10 times as much does, it is true, last four times as long." This itself deviates from numbers from earlier in the article, which said regular bulbs cost 50 cents, as opposed to $3 for CFLs (six times the cost, not 10).

Wikipedia seems to agree with my initial impression:

Modern CFLs typically have a life span of between 6,000 and 15,000 hours, whereas incandescent lamps are usually manufactured to have a life span of 750 hours or 1000 hours.

The lower-end difference is eight times; the higher-end is 15 times. Both are higher than six times.

Every source I can find says that CFLs last longer to at least (approximately) the degree they cost more. Consumer Reports says the initial cost is closer to $2 per CFL. The American Lighting Association says CFLs both cost and last 10 to 15 times what normal bulbs do. The government says CFLs last up to 10 times longer.

Where did the WSJ get its numbers?

UPDATE: In The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson writes, "With proper care and moderate use, they can last as much as six times longer than a typical incandescent. Even if you consider their higher purchase price--six or seven times the price of a traditional bulb--CFLs can lower your monthly lighting bill by as much as 20 percent." No citation there either, but that sounds more reasonable. (There's some mercury hysteria in the piece, though. Some states in fact allow CFL disposal in regular garbage, and the options for recycling are growing as CFLs become more popular. 3 mg of mercury will not kill you, so calm down.)

I totally beat The New York Times

2008-01-02T15:04:00.001-05:00

With this article from The American about the Wii's exercise potential. A new study shows that the Wii burns more calories than other video game systems do, but that it (shocker!) doesn't burn the same calories as actually playing the sports the games imitate would.

In fact, I think I'm still one step ahead of the NYT: Like the study I cited in my piece (contrary to what the NYT says, data was not "lacking" until now), the new one used Wii Sports, which demands an unusual amount of movement for a Wii game. With most other games, you point the controller at the screen and push some buttons, as opposed to moving around and acting out sports maneuvers. Thus Wii-playing in general isn't all that great for your health, and the story totally misses the boat.

Finally, I have a hard time believing that tennis is the "most active" Wii Sports game -- for me, boxing caused a lot more aches and pains.

Mercury = death!

2008-01-02T13:32:00.001-05:00

I hate environmental crusades as much as the next guy, but the right-wing attempt to vilify compact fluorescent light bulbs is starting to grate on me. Numerous times in the past few weeks I've read about how, because the bulbs contain a little bit of mercury, you'll have to call in the authorities! if you ever happen to break one.

It's too bad, because usually it's conservatives who put chemical risks in perspective: The dose makes the poison. There's about 3 mg worth of mercury in a bulb, about enough to cover the ball point of a pen. If you break a bulb, all you have to do is open a few windows, sweep it up and wipe the area with a damp cloth. Not a big deal, and not a deal at all if you don't break your light bulb.

Let's put that in perspective. A common guideline for fish is that you can have .5 mg of mercury for each kg (1,000,000 mg) of fish. A 6-oz can of tuna converts to 170,000 mg. A back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that, if you consume a can of maximum-allowed-mercury tuna once a week for two years, you will have eaten the amount of mercury that's in that light bulb. Certainly it won't kill you to simply handle it for a bit.

Rather than pretending CFLs are a bad idea on net, conservatives should lobby against making them mandatory. Competing with standard light bulbs forces CFL makers to (A) convince the American people of the substantial cost benefits, (B) find ways to make the product cheaper and (C) work to cut down on the annoying brightness some (in particular, morons who can't spell "fluorescent") find with the bulbs.

UPDATE: I guess I missed this American Spectator piece when it came out, but it's about perfect on the issue.

Guns and the election article up at The American Spectator

2008-01-01T00:43:00.001-05:00

Here it is.

Main point:

When Americans nominate their presidential candidates next year, the Second Amendment won't be the first thing on their minds. The issue didn't even appear in a recent CNN poll that found that the economy, Iraq, health care, immigration, and terrorism are the nation's biggest concerns.

But in a country where 36 percent of Democrats and 48 percent of Republicans have firearms in their homes, the issue is still a locked and loaded one for candidates of both parties.

Parenting and school performance

2007-12-26T19:23:00.001-05:00

The Freakonomics blog has a post from Ian Ayres, who observes from a New York Times article:

...researchers used four variables that are beyond the control of schools: the percentage of children living with one parent; the percentage of eighth graders absent from school at least three times a month; the percentage of children age 5 or younger whose parents read to them daily; and the percentage of eighth graders who watch five or more hours of TV a day. Using just those four variables, the researchers were able to predict each state's results on the federal eighth-grade reading test with impressive accuracy.

It turns out that, in this regression, single-parent families have no significant correlation with test scores, and that's the point of Ayres's post. But of course, no one bothered to factor in something else schools can't control: students' races. I did so, expecting to find that, as usual, race is the elephant in the room. I was largely wrong.

Ayres is nice enough to provide the spreadsheet with which he proved single-parent families to be statistically insignificant. Here's my update of it, using the three variables he found useful and adding Census figures for the percentage of kids who were black and Hispanic in 2006. Some of the states were not available in both data sets, so I removed them, leaving me with 44 observations. For some reason these tended to be whiter states with high test scores, so this could weaken the correlations with the racial variables.

(I used American Factfinder to make a state-level custom table of total males 10-14, black males 10-14 and Hispanic males 10-14, then divided blacks and Hispanics by the total. I'd have included all kids instead of just males, but I couldn't find that number already made, and it seemed silly to clutter up the spreadsheet with six more columns that are almost the same as three already there. The black male share of the 10-14 male population will be virtually equal to the black share of the total 10-14 population.)

The result: The two race variables alone explain .43 (adjusted r-squared) of the variation, statistically significant but worse than Ayres's .63. In fact, when you put all five variables in one regression, "percent black" and "percent read to" become statistically insignificant. I toyed around with the numbers quite a bit, and the best adjusted r-squared I can get where all the variables have statistically significant effects is .66, a two-variable one with TV watching and percent Hispanic -- these are the only two variables that stay significant no matter what they're paired with.

The key with the Hispanic data is to remember that the test is of reading, so students who grew up with Spanish are at a significant disadvantage. Thus their population explains much of the variation in state test scores.

Also, the information implies that heavily black states' low scores are explained better by parental behavior (especially monitoring the TV) than by race itself. State-level data can be tricky, so this is far from conclusive, but score another one for nurture over nature.

Merry Christmas from the AP

2007-12-25T20:50:00.001-05:00

A reporter named Libby Quaid (or maybe her editor) writes:

"I'm on Social Security now, and I don't like the idea that it's going to immigrants when I paid in it all my life, and they just swam across," says [retiree Judie Cain of Council Bluffs ]. In fact, only legal immigrants are entitled to Social Security benefits, and illegal immigrants pay millions of dollars a year in Social Security taxes.

Not to go crazy over the media bias stuff (that's so five years ago), but I highly doubt, when talking to Democrats, an AP reporter would pick out a factually errant statement by someone outside the party apparatus -- Cain is just a regular voter -- and use it against her. If the Iowa Republican Party president says something stupid, by all means point it out, but otherwise, talk to some other people and get a quote you can use. In other words, do your job and stop using your position to insult people.

I don't do much interviewing now that I'm in opinion journalism, but as a newspaper and magazine reporter I heard plenty of people say plenty of stupid things, from both sides of the aisle. An honest journalist, and in fact anyone with any integrity, won't draw attention to non-media-savvy people's silly off-the-cuff remarks.

And it's not even that silly. Quaid's correction is true by and large, but there are exceptions within the Social Security system, and illegal immigrants get plenty of government benefits.

This is obnoxious

2007-12-24T14:46:00.001-05:00

I keep my headphones as quiet as possible, both for my hearing and for those around me, but I'd find this really annoying:

Amid growing fears that listeners could cause irreversible damage to their hearing - the highest setting is as loud as a chainsaw - Apple is developing an automatic volume control.

A new patent reveals that the next iPods and iPhones could automatically calculate how long a person has been listening and at what volume, before gradually reducing the sound level.

The device will also calculate the amount of "quiet time" between when the iPod is turned off and when it is restarted, allowing the volume to be increased again to a safe level.

I suppose this could get them out of lawsuits, though. If an iPod goes that loud, listening to it at that volume might constitute using the product as it was intended, making Apple liable. Different recordings are mastered to different volumes, so to work properly the device will have to measure the output volume, not just the position of the volume knob.

I'd like a CD player or iPod that has a different kind of automatic volume control: One that matches the headphone output to the surrounding noise; it would need a microphone. That way, it would turn itself up when subway noise got ridiculous, but it wouldn't inflict unnecessary noise on your eardrums once everything quieted down. It would also act as a compressor, bringing up the quiet parts of songs so you can hear them without making the loud parts even louder.*

I'd like a computer to substitute for me fiddling with the volume my whole trip home. I don't need a computer to tell me it's loud.

*On a total side note, another thing I'd like to see is separate masters for home stereos vs. headphones (it's Christmas time, so I'm all gimme-gimme-gimme). iPod listeners want the crap compressed out of their music (I'm talking audio compression, not computer file compression) for this very purpose -- a wide dynamic range means that in order to hear quiet parts through the din, you have to turn the volume up, which in turn kills your ears when everything gets loud again. By contrast, a home stereo has little else to compete with, so there's no need to sacrifice dynamic range for an all-the-time loud recording. This would be a nice ceasefire to the loudness wars.

A critikal error

2007-12-20T19:33:00.001-05:00

A Breitbart headline:

Seven-Year-Old Killed by Teen, Boyfriend Reenacting 'Mortal Combat'

Are you kidding me? If you're like, 90, you can see what the error is here.

One more fake hate crime

2007-12-20T16:06:00.001-05:00

Apparently conservative college students want a piece of the action too.

Smoke vs. mirrors

2007-12-19T13:26:00.001-05:00

I've mentioned before that liberals get bent out of shape over the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences -- they point out that there's no "scientific" reason for this and blame racism, but in fact the reason crack is more heavily punished is because, at the time the laws passed, the crack cocaine trade was much more violent than the powder cocaine trade was.

In Reason, Jacob Sullum avoids the racism! reflex for the most part, but here's how he explains it:

Two decades after fear of a new drug fad drove Congress to establish draconian crack sentences...

Fear of a new drug fad? I think it would be more accurately called the fact of an extremely violent drug fad.

There's evidence that modern crack dealing and use causes less crime, so maybe we should bring the two closer to parity (and for that matter, I'm all for ending the drug war entirely), but the original laws were quite reasonable given the circumstances.

Huckabee's FairTax: Something out of nothing!

2007-12-18T16:12:00.001-05:00

From his site:

The FairTax isn't intended to raise any more or less money for the federal government to spend - it is revenue neutral.

Expert analyses have shown that the FairTax lowers the lifetime tax burden of all of us: single or married; working or retired; rich, poor or middle class.

Anyone care to explain how you can take less from everyone and have the same amount of money?

UPDATE: A lot of very intelligent responses in the comments, and thanks for that. Two quick things. One, many of the comments mentioned that the FairTax will bring this or that tax base (say, the informal economy) into the system -- great, but then it increases their lifetime tax burden, so you're not truly taking less money from "all of us."

Two, some comments have claimed that this will more equitably distribute the burden, but as I've showed before, the president's tax commission found quite the opposite. Relative to the current system, only the very rich and the very poor pay less, and everyone else pays more:

[M]ost people would pay more than they do now. The report's Figure 9.4 looks at the difference between today's tax law and a "full replacement retail sales tax proposal with prebate by income level" (which may differ in the particulars from Boortz's proposal). The FT is better only if you're in the $0-$15,000 or $200,000+ categories. Looking at the data in terms of deciles, the lowest-earning 20 percent and highest-earning 10 percent of Americans would benefit.

He'll be a good boy now

2007-12-17T11:09:00.001-05:00

Man, the PC Army really cowed William Saletan. Regarding a new study that showed human evolution is accelerating due to cultural differences, he wraps up with this ridiculous qualifier :

You can accept or reject these particular evolutionary explanations as you like. But the underlying message is worth taking home: Much of what now passes for "natural selection" isn't exactly natural. It's social. As such, it deserves no presumptive respect as a validator or promulgator of objective fitness. Nor does the discovery of a genetic basis for this or that trait prove it's more than a social construct. In the era of cultural selection, many genes are a social construct. Which makes them no less real.

Everybody is equal in all ways! Even if they're not!

In evolutionary terms "objective fitness" simply means the ability to survive and have children who survive. If a gene does that via cultural means, it's still objectively fit. If he means that culture-based evolution doesn't convey the moral rightness or wrongness of the cultures that survive, he's right -- but no form of evolution makes any judgments about morality to begin with. (There's a name for the act of breaking this rule, the naturalistic fallacy.)

Two, no gene is a social construct. It's an identifiable physical phenomenon. Social factors may increase or decrease the prevalence of a gene, but they don't construct it.

Finally, every trait with a genetic base is indeed "more than a social construct." A given gene may not absolutely guarantee a social phenomenon, but if it contributes, that means the phenomenon isn't just social.

Are Republicans smarter than Democrats, conservatives dumber than liberals?

2007-12-13T15:01:00.000-05:00

There was a big uproar over a fake study once where someone claimed red states had lower average IQs than blue states did. I thought this was stupid -- a well-designed study (even a fake one) would look at individuals and their party preferences, not whole states. I've noticed The Inductivist does a lot of work with the General Social Survey, so I followed his lead.

After doing so, I found that Half Sigma once did something similar. He kept his results to party ID, where mine also include political ideology. He also looked at trends (concluding Democrats are getting smarter relative to Republicans), where I just used the current data.

The GSS does two measures of IQ, vocab and reasoning. It also asks for party preference. Running a simple correlation matrix, I found that the number of words someone got right on a vocab test correlated with their proximity to the Republican side of the spectrum (.111). The reasoning test is broken down into individual questions, and most aren't significantly linked to party, but the ones that are point the same way. Republicans are smarter.

The weird thing is that when I replace political party with political ideology (conservative/liberal), I get the opposite result, though weaker. There's a -.029 correlation with vocabulary. (None of the reasoning tests gives a significant result.)

Why the different results? The first stereotype to come to mind is Southern Democrats who have low IQs and consider themselves conservative. And the Republican/conservative, Democrat/liberal link isn't as strong as you'd think for most Americans -- there's only a .310 correlation.

It's all quite disconcerting, because I consider myself much more conservative than Republican.

Gladwell retracts

2007-12-13T09:26:00.001-05:00

Steve Sailer has the scoop on the first error I pointed out in this post. No word on the others, though those are more mischaracterizations than errors.

MSN stops posting episodes of Arrested Development online

2007-12-12T22:04:00.001-05:00

They were adding three episodes every three weeks until the whole series was up ... then they stopped with half of Season 3 left, with no warning or explanation I've been able to find. Why?

I was really getting into the show, and I loved being able to watch it whenever I wanted without paying for DVDs. It seemed like they were selling ads well, too, so I don't get it. Unless they're trying to move copies of Season 3 -- the price is down to $14.99 on Amazon, which I'd find tempting if it weren't for the network promising and then not delivering.

I am such a nerd

2007-12-12T16:11:00.001-05:00

I saw a reference to "the birthday problem" today (if you have n people in a room, what are the odds that at least two of them have the same birthday?), and the Wikipedia page didn't make much sense to me, so I worked at it until I solved it on my own. My answer is formulated differently than Wiki's, but setting it equal to .5, I get the right answer -- if you have 23 or more people in the same room, odds are at least 50-50 that two will have the same birthday. If you have 22 or fewer, the odds are that they all have different birthdays.

Since I wasted a lot of time, I figured I'd share my reasoning. Here's my solution:

1 - [( 364 / 365 ) ^ (( n ( n - 1 )) / 2 )]

Here's my method, as well as I can explain it. Whenever you're trying to figure out the odds of a group of people matching once or more, it's easier to find the odds of no one matching and subtract it from 1. With any two people, the odds of them not matching is 364/365.

So (1 - 364/365) is the answer when there are only two people in the room. When there are three people in the room, there are three possible matches -- AB, AC and BC -- so then the answer is 1- [(364 / 365) ^ 3]. Four people, six matches (AB AC AD BC BD CD), 1 - [(364 / 365) ^ 6]. For each new match, you have to multiply by 364/365 again, because each match reduces the odds that no one's shared a birthday yet.

When counting up the total matches, think of it as matching the first person in the room with everyone else, then matching the second person with everyone except the first person, with whom he's already been matched, and so on. Look back at the combinations for four people -- A is matched to B, C and D; then B still has to match with C and D; then C has to be matched with D. Our answer will be 1 - [(364/365) ^ total matches]

The biggest problem is converting the exponent into a formula. I looked at it like this: Using the matching idea, you multiply by 364/365 (n - 1) times (the first person in a group of four needs to be matched with three people), and then (n - 2) times, and so on, until (n - whatever) reaches 1. This looks like (364 / 365) ^ (n - 1) * (364 / 365) ^ (n - 2), etc.

When you're multiplying the same number with different exponents, you add the exponents. For example, (2 ^ 3) * (2 ^ 4) = 2 ^ 7. So to find the exponent, we have to summarize (n - 1) + (n - 2) + (n - 3) ...

The first question is how many "n"s we'll have once we've added all the terms. When n = 2, there's only 1, in (n - 1). (In this case, n - 2 = 0, so there's no point in adding 0.) And when n = 3, there are two "n"s, (n - 1) + (n - 2). In the formula, there is always one fewer "n"s than n's value. From this we get n(n - 1).

What I found most difficult was figuring out how to make the subtracted numbers add up. When n = 2, we subtract 1. When n = 3, we subtract 3 -- (n - 1) + (n - 2). Here's the table:

n   Subtracted number
2   1
3   3
4   6
5   10
6   15

Basically, you start out subtracting 1, and then you always subtract 1 more than you did last time. Formula-wise, and annoyingly enough, this is a repeat of the previous problem, (n - 1) + (n - 2), etc. I didn't really know where to go from here, so I decided to take a closer look at the way I starting solving the problem last time -- with the "n"s. Recall that answer was n(n - 1). I figured that this formula must be adjusted in some way to calculate the subtracted number based on n, so I wrote it out:

n   n(n - 1)
2   2
3   6
4   12
5   20
6   30

Not sure how you'd discover this algebraically, but visually it's easy to see that n(n - 1) / 2 equals the subtracted number in the exponent. And of course, this is subtracted from n(n - 1), and any number minus half of itself equals half of itself. So the exponent is n(n - 1) / 2.

To set the formula equal to .5, multiply it out and use logarithms (just type, for example, "log .5" in a Google search) and the quadratic formula .

Journalists are so awesome with statistics, part two

2007-12-12T13:09:00.001-05:00

From The New York Times:

When Mr. Nutter takes office on Jan. 7, he will face a crime wave that has left at least 355 people dead so far this year and that gave Philadelphia the highest homicide rate of any big city in the country last year, with 406 killings — more per capita than even New York City, which has six times the population.

The whole point of a "per capita" (or "per person") statistic is that it doesn't matter what the population is. If a town of 10 people has one homicide and a town of 100 has 10, each has .1 homicides per capita. It's the same principle as the homicide rate, except that's usually calculated per 100,000 people -- consequently, since the writer already said Philadelphia has the highest homicide rate, it's redundant to say it has more murders per capita than New York does.

At first I thought the reporter meant to say that Philadelphia has a higher absolute number of homicides than the Big Apple, even though it has one-sixth the population. That would mean its per-capita homicide count is more than six times New York's. But that's not true -- a few weeks ago, NY already had 433. It's amazing that two big cities could be so close in count when they're so far apart in population, so the NYT's point stands, but it's obvious a math major didn't write that sentence.

Finally, Giuliani's crime cleanup left New York incredibly safe for a big city, so some context would be nice. If I were to rewrite the sentence, I'd either leave out New York altogether, or put a period after "406 killings" and add: "New York City, often considered a model of successful crime control, has a homicide rate about one-sixth of Philadelphia's."

Dawkins, right and wrong

2007-12-12T10:18:00.001-05:00

Dave Weigel points to this part of a story:

Prof Dawkins, who has frequently spoken out against creationism and religious fundamentalism, replied: "I'm not one of those who wants to stop Christian traditions.
"This is historically a Christian country. I'm a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
"So, yes, I like singing carols along with everybody else. I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.
"If there's any threat these sorts of things, I think you will find it comes from rival religions and not from atheists."

Dawkin's personal view is mine exactly. But I think the very last line couldn't be more wrong: Many challenges to public religious displays come from atheists. American Atheists publicly takes a hard line on church-state separation, and a state director of theirs sued over a Christian display. A similar thing happened in my hometown. The opposition to "Under God" in the pledge came from an atheist.

It's true that rival religions and liberal bureaucrats (some of the latter even Christians themselves) join in, but to claim there's no organized atheist attempt to undermine Christian culture is absurd.

Ewww

2007-12-11T12:58:00.001-05:00

Is this really such a promising fact?

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it's easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk.

I don't mind the occasional fast food dinner when I have to go straight from work to some event or whatever, and I do that more than I should, but on average, close to 1 in 5 meals comes from a fast-food restaurant?

Even if eat-out-for-every-meal people are skewing the average, it seems high, and in 1995 the number was only 9 percent (another 5 percent of meals came from non-fast-food restaurants).

Awesome idea

2007-12-11T10:44:00.001-05:00

Some college really should try this:

Harvard would simply collect (for the sake of argument) 1% of the student's income for the thirty years after graduation. Those going to hedge funds and law firms will pay more while those pursuing teaching or public interest work will pay less over time. ... it would place the burden of paying for higher education on the person who benefits most directly from the education: the student, rather than the parents.

Another benefit is that schools would spend less money on fields that are neither charitable (education, public service) nor profitable (banking).

Hoo boy

2007-12-11T10:01:00.001-05:00

Steve Sailer has a veritable flood of information about a new academic paper.

From the press release :

"Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, "and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then."

I'll be reading the paper and posting thoughts if I have them. Sailer's work is enough to keep anyone busy for awhile, though.

This does, of course, lend plausibility to the thesis that human populations differ significantly in the prevalence of important genes, including genes that influence IQ.

Malcolm Gladwell on IQ

2007-12-10T15:45:00.001-05:00

The piece is just rife with inaccuracies:

[I]n 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in "The Bell Curve," notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a "high-tech" version of an Indian reservation, "while the rest of America tries to go about its business."

No. No they did not propose this. They feared it, because in older times, even very smart people ended up working on family farms and in factories -- nowadays, we're more IQ-segregated than ever, and if this continues, we'll have a world where the bright and dull interact even less than they already do. They proposed a return to a world where neighborhoods, rather than governments, provided services, so people with lower IQs could find places in each community. See a more accurate quote/paraphrase job here.

Then this:

To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

Wrong again. IQ fundamentalists, to the degree they exist, think IQ is stable over a person's lifetime, after age 5 or so, not that it is "impervious to environmental influences." It is simply a fact that environment influences IQ, and even the most hardcore IQ-philes know this. You'd have to ignore gigantic bits of evidence to claim otherwise.

And then:

From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability.

Nope. No one who knows what he's talking about automatically assumes that every IQ difference is genetic. There are a variety of ways to test where exactly the gap comes from, and both sides have some evidence.

For example, once could posit that the black-white income gap creates the black-white IQ gap -- but when you look at the data, whites and blacks with incomes of (say) $45,000 will still differ in their average IQs. Newer research looks at specific genes related to cognition and has found at least some of them to be unequally distributed through humanity. Some no-genetic-component arguments here. I'm an agnostic on the question, but this is an incredibly dishonest way to put the genetic-component side's view.

Next:

Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion.

He's studied that, and it is a bit absurd. But it's just as absurd to say he "specializes" in this very specific question. His specialty, I'd say, is racial IQ differences in general.

The one positive thing I can say about this article is that it provides a decent summary of James Flynn's work.

Ballot-box shopping

2007-12-10T15:01:00.001-05:00

This American Prospect article takes a pretty liberal definition of the word "disenfranchisement." It decries efforts to dictate to college students where they'll be voting, not whether. This issue has affected me -- for four years I went to school in Illinois but lived in Wisconsin over the summers, so I could pick which state to vote in.

The problem the article doesn't address: I personally witnessed explicit, organized attempts to get students from swing states to vote in their home elections. The current system actually gives students extra power. A law mandating that students vote at home or at college would solve this, and college towns' attempts to discourage student voting have the same effect.

However, there's no fair way to decide which way to force the issue. Many students go to an out-of-state school, but then return home, so they have an honest reason to vote in their home elections. But if you force everyone to do this, college students get no say in the communities they spend nine months of the year in.

It's an interesting issue worth taking sides on, but the story could have used a lot more nuance.

Nurture scores a hit

2007-12-10T14:09:00.001-05:00

The New York Times has a terrific opinion piece making the case that racial IQ differences are completely environmental.

Most compelling argument:

[An] adoption study ... one not discussed by the hereditarians ... looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore's finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.'s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.

...Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Cynthia Holland of Cuyahoga Community College tested blacks and whites on their knowledge of, and their ability to learn and reason with, words and concepts. The whites had substantially more knowledge of the various words and concepts, but when participants were tested on their ability to learn new words, either from dictionary definitions or by learning their meaning in context, the blacks did just as well as the whites.

At the very least, this proves that environment can hugely influence the gap (which, of course, no one really disputes). If there is a genetic component, this would indicate it's a small one.

As I've mentioned before, though, this method of analysis is quickly becoming obsolete. It's simply not that effective to control for this, that and the other thing when instead you can look at specific genes, what they do and how they vary by race. This research is underway and will be reasonably thorough in 10 to 15 years. The writer sidesteps one current piece of evidence along these lines (calling it "indirect"!):

There is, for example, the evidence that brain size is correlated with intelligence, and that blacks have smaller brains than whites. But the brain size difference between men and women is substantially greater than that between blacks and whites, yet men and women score the same, on average, on I.Q. tests. Likewise, a group of people in a community in Ecuador have a genetic anomaly that produces extremely small head sizes — and hence brain sizes. Yet their intelligence is as high as that of their unaffected relatives.

Brain size doesn't correlated with intelligence so much as brain size relative to body/head size does, as the man/woman and Ecuador/relative comparisons attest, and as Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man argued. Women have smaller bodies to go with their smaller brains, and thus do not have lower IQs. The Ecuadorian folks have smaller heads and smaller brains.

By contrast, blacks have bigger bodies and similar-sized skulls, yet smaller brains, when compared to whites -- at the very least, to say this doesn't create a genetic IQ difference, you'd have to re-think the relationships between head size, body size, brain size and IQ, because our current explanations don't lead in that direction. There's plenty of room in which to do this re-thinking, since the science is so unclear, but the article makes the brain-size evidence look a lot weaker than it is.

War games

2007-12-10T10:29:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty sympathetic to the thesis that video games succeed where other mediums fail -- for example, many games produce the amazing visual experience that's lacking in modern "art." But if there's any area where video games are lacking, it's in plot, with only a few exceptions (Eternal Darkness is one). The stories and dialog are of the comic-book-for-13-year-olds vein, even in games rated for ages 17+.

So I think Glenn Reynolds's reader is wrong when he writes:

Did you know that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the video market has moved 3 million copies...that' s a 'box office' of 150 million.

And it's about the current war against terror...

So, if as Hollywood whines that the public doesn' t want Iraqi War movies, why is this selling so well, top of the rental lists, and ever so popular? At this rate it'll be the successful game companies, that gives the pubic what they want, who'll buy out the studios for their IP and name. Hollywood appears to have missed the impact of the technological shift as badly as MSM has. The public is getting the entertainment they crave, just not in the form that the old gatekeepers dispense.

Here's where this goes off course: "The public" doesn't buy "Call of Duty 4"; young, explosion-loving, military-admiring males do. It's possible that these same guys would see a movie in high enough numbers to make it worthwhile, but there's no reason to assume they would. Game-based movies are pretty risky to begin with.

Also, comparing a total sales figures between a $50 video game and a $10 movie ticket isn't exactly fair -- to match the two, you'd have to get five movie viewings for each game sold.

More thoughts on the 200-year test

2007-12-07T13:10:00.001-05:00

(This of course refers to the previous post about the question, Will any pop music made since 1950 last 200 years?)

*Pop music with lyrics, as opposed to, say, instrumental classical music, depends not just on quality but also on context. It captures listeners' lives and attitudes -- and lives and attitudes can shift dramatically in 200 years. For a song to last two centuries, it must have a quality that's so high it makes up for a near-zero in the context category, a hurdle that was lower in centuries past. Therefore, Murray might be wrong that "accomplishment" in music is declining; music is perhaps just becoming more context-dependent, with a new song for each situation.

*Partially for this reason, most people stick with the music they heard growing up. Everyone who grew up between 1950 and today will be dead by 2200.

*Some people are able to pass these tastes on to their kids, but this weakens with each generation. The question: If my dad listens to a lot of Beatles and I listen to a little Beatles, will my great-great-whatever grandchildren listen to any Beatles at all? In other words, will interest in the best music from the last 50 years even off before reaching zero?

*If something does last 200 years, we shouldn't assume it will be something that was fully appreciated in its time. Bach wasn't. Maybe some independent-label band from the mid-1980s will finally get the respect it's due in 2185. Or maybe the Bach of Pop died last year, and his wife is discovering his home recordings in the attic as you read this.

Lord no

2007-12-07T07:22:00.001-05:00

Charles Murray once proposed that the number of artistic works since 1950 that would survive 200 years was close to zero. He suggested that, each time you think of a contender, you have to ask yourself, "Seriously?"

Steve Sailer points to a list of possible exceptions from The Man Who is Thursday. Pop music is my only real area of expertise here -- and the list includes Nirvana. Seriously?

Nirvana added absolutely nothing to pop music. Did they write some catchy songs? Sure. But they didn't break out of the pop mold, and their kickstarting the "grunge" movement was sheer luck. Other bands with similar sounds had been around for years. If you had to pick a grunge band whose work would endure, and I'm not saying any of theirs will, you'd have to go with Alice in Chains (much better vocal harmonies) or maybe Soundgarden (cool use of time signature shifts).

Excepting drummer Dave Grohl, Nirvana members couldn't play their instruments. Allowing that they had some decent vocal harmonies here and there, their compositions lacked innovation and depth. Mindlessly catchy songs come and go. They were an OK band, but they've been overrated since their breakthrough.

Through their toned-down image and dirty sound, they offered an escape from hair metal -- much as Green Day's happier, brighter sound offered an escape from Nirvana a few years later -- and without that lead-in their appeal disappears. People who lived through that era (me included) will always like hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the radio, but in 200 years we'll all be dead, and the thrill will be gone.

Mentioning Nirvana in the same breath as The Beatles, Bob Marley and Bob Dylan? Seriously?

AK-47 facts and fiction

2007-12-06T14:28:00.001-05:00

I have to say this every time there's a media storm around a multiple-victim public shooting, but the gun used in Nebraska was not a real AK-47, as some media outlets have been implying. An AK-47 is an automatic weapon, meaning when you hold down the trigger it fires continuously and rapidly (in other words, a machine gun). Civilian versions, far more common in the U.S., are semiautomatic, meaning they fire once for each pull of the trigger.

In fact, the gun wasn't even a civilian AK-47. It was an SKS, a semiautomatic rifle that preceded the AK-47. The LA Times even calls it both in the same article.

Also, John Lott points out that the incident occurred in, not surprisingly, a "gun-free zone" where people can't defend themselves.

UPDATE: The LA Times has removed the SKS reference from its article, leaving only the AK-47. Different outlets are calling it different things, so I'm no longer sure it was an SKS rather than an AK-47 -- I suspect as much, since if half the media has it wrong, it's probably the half that's using the menacing-sounding, well-known name. Regardless, my main point stands: There is no evidence from any report that the gun was a true AK-47, even if it was an AK-47 in name. It was semiautomatic, making it no more or less lethal than a hunting rifle.

UPDATE II: It appears the LA Times got it right; it was an AK-47, "which [investigators] initially had identified as an SKS assault rifle." I'm really of two minds about a few grafs from the story:

The AK-47 is a semiautomatic assault weapon that generally is used by the military or collected by gun enthusiasts.

It is not accurate for long-range shooting, which makes the gun impractical as a hunting rifle. The automatic version is popular for military use because it is dependable and easy to manufacture.

On the plus side, it makes it clear that the gun was semiautomatic (as opposed to the military version), but it doesn't define the term. Also, it doesn't mention that it uses a bullet size comparable to that of a hunting rifle -- same bullets + same firing speed + less accuracy = less dangerous, so that's important information. It seems like the writer cared more about the "you can't use this for hunting!!!!!" argument than the "this gun is no more dangerous than regular hunting guns" fact.

Abstinence debate, meet scientific method

2007-12-06T12:22:00.001-05:00

I won't claim to have read every study of abstinence education, but to my knowledge it's never been shown to reduce sex-related problems like STDs and pregnancy.

Still, people need to cut it out with the garbage arguments. The teen birth rate rose in 2006, and The New York Times takes seriously the question of whether abstinence-teaching caused it. Lawyers, Guns and Money thinks so. Matthew Yglesias piles on.

Let's take a closer look. Federal funding has been rising, sometimes slowly and sometimes by leaps and bounds, since at least 1997. 2006 marks the first time since 1991 that the birth rate rose -- in other words, it's the first year in at least a decade that the raw data has run counter to the "abstinence ed decreases the birth rate" thesis.

Experiments (taking three comparable groups and putting one through abstinence education, another through regular sex ed and the last through no program) and regression analyses (looking at what education kids are getting and whether they get pregnant, and controlling for variables like income, race, etc.) are far better ways to answer this question, so of course this doesn't prove abstinence education works. But the left needs to stop overreacting whenever data even slightly supports its ideas.

And as an aside, the increase is small; judging by the graph, the birthrate is about as high as it was in 2002-3 or so. In addition, blacks seemed to demonstrate the most dramatic 2006 spike, and they experienced an equally dramatic 2005 valley -- once a given statistic gets very high or very low, it's hard to drive it further in that direction, so a minor setback shouldn't be taken as evidence of failure. Finally, in some small part Hispanic population growth is causing this, as they have double the average teen birth rate and are both immigrating and reproducing rapidly.

UPDATE: At Reason, Kerry Howley weighs in helpfully: "...kids are not as malleable as supporters of comprehensive sex ed policies make them out to be. The available evidence suggests that abstinence-only programs have no impact whatsoever. Kids might as well spend the 40 minutes staring at a brick wall. ... You could argue that schools ought to convey accurate rather than inaccurate information about the subject. I would agree with you. But as far as I know, there is no solid evidence that 'comprehensive' sex ed--the relevant alternative--has any impact on sexual behavior either. That's the conclusion of UC Berkeley sociologist Kristin Luker's extremely thorough book on the subject, where she explains why she can't find a single study robust enough to back."

Survival of the fittest and prediction

2007-12-06T11:28:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I attended the Robert Taft Club's "Darwin, Genetics, and Conservatism" event, featuring Charles Murray, John Derbyshire, Ron Bailey and Tom Bethell. (Full disclosure: I've been to several events and enjoyed them, so I joined the club.) Bethell made a point that Ann Coulter once did: In "survival of the fittest," the fittest are defined as those who survive. Thus, one can make up an explanation for anything, and it's not useful.

If a certain species is aggressive, it must have faced situations where it needed to be aggressive. All you have to do is find a situation where that would be the case (say, fighting a predator or capturing prey) and voila, you've explained it. You don't have to prove that the value of aggression actually outweighed the value of passivity (getting along with others, not being detected by predators in the first place) -- natural selection is assumed, so the fact that aggression "won" is proof enough.

However, I think it's plainly obvious that as a concept, "survival of the fittest" has a lot of value. If a certain trait leads to premature death in an organism, that organism won't be able to pass its genes on. If you introduce a predator that runs fast enough to kill off many lizards, the remaining lizards will have longer legs (on average), and the next generation will likewise have longer legs than the previous one did.

Thus, survival of the fittest is more testable when it predicts the future as opposed to explaining the past. With the past we already have the outcome -- Species A is aggressive -- so we can only assume that natural selection took place and try to figure out how. It serves more as an analytical framework than a testable hypothesis, unless you happen to have ridiculously detailed information about a species' environment through history, allowing you to weigh the advantages of two different traits.

At this point there's no doubt that some aspects of evolutionary theory are true. DNA tests show common descent, and we have seen genetic mutations and "survival of the fittest" occur. The big question is whether these concepts can explain all of evolution, or if there's another mechanism involved. Positing some designer, as Intelligent Design folks do, is a bit of a cop-out (we don't know how it happened, so let's say there's this really smart thing that directed it), but I wouldn't be surprised if scientists discovered some process that complements the established genetic mutation/natural selection theory.

If that happened, it would prove both Darwinists (mutation and selection explain everything) and ID people (there is no way this could have happened without a designer) wrong.

Too smart for your own good

2007-12-05T15:46:00.001-05:00

Tyler Cowen points to this article on how to raise bright children:

Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children ... who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.

In other words, we need to knock smart kids down a peg.

This is true, but not all that groundbreaking. It relates to the psychology concept "locus of control" -- someone who has an internal locus of control believes his behavior affects his life; someone with an external locus of control believes things just happen to him. If you tell a kid he's doing well in school because he's just plain super, he'll take later struggles to mean his super-ness has worn off. If instead you encourage a kid to work hard, and present him with material that challenges him, he'll learn that his effort, as opposed to just his biological endowment, is connected to his performance.

Charles Murray once noted another reason smart children should be taught lower self-esteem:

[C]hildren who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones.

A little humility goes a long way.

Whoopi Goldberg, Ron Paul and multiple-abortion statistics

2007-12-05T14:00:00.001-05:00

Reason magazine highlights a clip of Ron Paul debating abortion on The View. Whoopi Goldberg points out how she really doesn't like abortion, but it should still be legal. The logic: No one wants to have one, so when they choose to, it's the result of careful consideration.

One way to test this theory is by looking at multiple abortions -- if a woman sees abortion as something to avoid, and then a decision to (ahem) labor over, one wouldn't expect her to have to use it more than once.

But as of 1998, if you picked a random woman walking into an abortion clinic, there was almost a 50-50 shot she'd already had one. The number hasn't changed much. And as I've previously noted, a woman will have an average of .9 abortions before she turns 45, though only 1 in 3 women aborts even a single child by that age. Combine those two facts, and there are almost three abortions for each woman who aborts at all.

If a fetus is not a human life, this presents no problem whatsoever. But this nuanced position -- abortion is bad, and no one wants to have one, but it's only done with careful consideration, so we should keep it legal -- doesn't work with the facts. Too many abortions take place with women who've had at least one chance to learn.

Don't get MADD, get a machine

2007-12-05T12:59:00.001-05:00

Stephen Dubner is back with an interesting story, but some lightweight analysis:

[There is] a machine you can put in a bar or restaurant that lets you measure your blood alcohol level so you know if you're fit to drive or not. This takes the guesswork out of a guessing game that has been going on for generations. It has been introduced in the U.S. by Federico Forero, a longtime manager of a probation office in Atlanta, who saw the machine in use in bars in Europe.

So far so good, but:

Also, the way it's configured, a customer has to pay to use the machine — that's how the bar owner is supposed to make his money back, by collecting fees for use. But will people be willing to pay, even a small fee, to find out news that they might not want to know? Would you weigh yourself in the bathroom every morning if your home scale cost $.50?

Uhhhh... bathroom scales do cost money, and people pay for them. Also, if the "news that they might not want to know" is "you can get out of a huge ticket, or even a fatal accident, by not driving right now," people would probably pay 50 cents for it. (If that is indeed the cost for a use.)

Also, one time I was visiting home in Wisconsin, one of my friends told me about a bar there with a Breathalyzer. Not sure how many lives it saved, but he said some people took it as a competition. So that's another concern.

More on the not-so-fair tax

2007-12-04T15:44:00.001-05:00

Awhile back, on Jeremy Lott's blog, I wrote about the revelation that the Fair Tax (a flat national sales tax to replace the current income tax) would actually be regressive. Poorer people spend a higher proportion of the money they earn, so a consumption tax affects them disproportionately.

Throw in a monthly "prebate," and the tax becomes progressive relative to consumption (those who consume more pay a higher percent of consumption in taxes), but not necessarily relative to income.

Neal Boortz, one of FT's biggest advocates, keeps denying basic math:

By way of example, using current poverty statistics the "prebate" for a household of four people would be $506.00 per month. Add that $506.00 to the fact that no household will see anything deducted from their checks for income taxes or for Social Security or Medicare taxes … and you see a substantial rise in real income ... The president's own tax reform commission stated that the FairTax was the only tax reform plan out there that would completely untax the poor (at the federal level).

Actually, the poor are already pretty much untaxed at the federal level -- in fact, due to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other breaks, people in the $0-$15,000 and $15-$30,000 categories, on average, get back more than they paid. One third of income tax returns are from people with no tax liability, and a third of those even worked full-time all year.

Also, the commission Boortz mentions dedicated chapter nine of its report to the proposal and did not recommend FT. Its very first objection was that "absent a way to ease the burden of the retail sales tax on lower and middle-income Americans, [it] would not meet the requirement ... [of being] appropriately progressive."

Its second was, "Although a program could be designed to reduce the burden of a retail sales tax on lower-income and middle-income taxpayers by providing cash grants, such cash grants would represent a new entitlement program -- by far the largest in American history. [This] would cost approximately $600 billion to $780 billion per year and make most American families dependent on monthly checks from the federal government..."

Even under such a Fair Tax, most people would pay more than they do now. The report's Figure 9.4 looks at the difference between today's tax law and a "full replacement retail sales tax proposal with prebate by income level" (which may differ in the particulars from Boortz's proposal). The FT is better only if you're in the $0-$15,000 or $200,000+ categories. Looking at the data in terms of deciles, the lowest-earning 20 percent and highest-earning 10 percent of Americans would benefit.

Those earning beneath that range get more back in the "prebate" than they would in the current Earned Income Tax Credit (because they're not earning much income), and those making more than that spend low percentages of their incomes, thus paying little sales tax.

The report noted other concerns as well. For example, when you collect all your tax in one place, you need a huge tax, and a huge tax is worth a lot of effort to evade. Between enforcement and constantly sending out checks, the federal government could spend as much administering this system as they do the current one.

**

On to the second part of Boortz's article, a response to Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani opposed FT because, in today's real estate market, people need to be able to deduct mortgage costs. Deductions happen on income taxes, and there's no mechanism in place for deductions off the Fair Tax (in theory, you could set it up so people apply for bigger prebates, but that further diminishes FT's simplicity).

Boortz:

[L]et's approach one of these home owners and ask them a simple question. Would you rather have a nice income tax deduction so that your taxes would be lower, or would you not have to pay income taxes at all? The point here is so ridiculously easy even a politician can understand it --- a tax deduction is of no value whatsoever to someone who does not owe taxes! Under the FairTax all income taxes are gone! You are never going to find someone whining that they wish they owed some taxes so that they could make use of a tax deduction.

What Boortz misses, of course, is that no matter which system we use, the government will get its money somehow. If it gets it through an income tax, you can deduct your mortgage. If it gets it some other way, you can't. Therefore, the income tax is friendlier to people who use big deductions (and correspondingly less friendly for people who don't).

The better question to ask this homebuyer is: Say you could pay $5,000 in sales tax, or you could owe $5,200 in income tax but use a mortgage deduction to save $500. In the latter scenario, the money you don't pay is made up by people who don't have deductions, or who earn much more income. Which would you choose?

(For the record, I'm anti-deductions. They are regressive . We should replace them with tax credits or eliminate them altogether. Read about the difference here.)

I like parts of the Fair Tax -- it rewards earning and saving, and discourages spending. A limited national sales tax, coupled with lowering other taxes, might work to even out incentives. But it's just not good enough to replace virtually every tax we have.

Stephen Metcalf: Bringing us back to 1997

2007-12-04T10:45:00.001-05:00

...in his new article about race, genetics and IQ. He spends the whole time playing statistics games, trying to find studies that control for this or that and conclude the IQ gap is completely environmental. He finds problems with studies that give different results.

Sorry, but that method of analysis is so last decade. Current research is working to locate specific genes that increase and decrease IQ, and then looking to see how those genes differ by population. Half Sigma has been documenting the studies, and while the results aren't in completely in yet, it's now an absolute fact that some of the pertinent genes vary by race. For example, William Saletan, in the article series Metcalf is responding to, pointed out the head-size genes. Metcalf doesn't even bring this up.

Metcalf also ( again) displays his outright ignorance of Arthur Jensen, one of the most important researchers on this issue:

Arthur Jensen has spent the last 40 years arguing against "compensatory education," or the idea that programs like Head Start have any efficacy in alleviating black underachievement.

Actually, no. As Thomas Sowell (who's on Metcalf's side of the debate) wrote:

Unlike others on the heredity side of the argument, Professor Jensen saw no need to dismiss environmental factors or to claim that some races were fit only to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.

One of the ironies of Jensen's landmark article was that it argued that the educational performances of children from disadvantaged groups could be greatly improved, even if there was no corresponding improvement in IQ scores.

There's a difference between criticizing Head Start and claiming that no educational technique can narrow the achievement gap -- everyone agrees that the gap is at least part environmental, including Jensen.

And then this load of hogwash:

Does it feel as though researchers like Jensen and Rushton, the so-called "race realists," have spent their careers examining a range of competing hypotheses for the black-white IQ gap, and carefully scrutinizing the quality of the research at their disposal? Or have they been attempting, at all costs, to prove a single hypothesis—that blacks are congenitally dumber than whites? Shouldn't researchers on any highly charged subject be required to show a minimum of clean hands?

Rushton is debatable, but Jensen most definitely has been researching with an open mind. He discovered the "environmental cumulative effect" when he observed that, in rural Georgia, older black siblings have lower IQs, and this doesn't happen with whites. The more children are subjected to bad environments, the lower their IQs get, and this plays a role in the race gap.

And back to Sowell:

Professor Jensen pointed out back in 1969 that black children's IQ scores rose by 8 to 10 points after he met with them informally in a play room and then tested them again after they were more relaxed around him. He did this because "I felt these children were really brighter than their IQ would indicate." What a shame that others seem to have less confidence in black children than Professor Jensen has had.

Also, again, no one supports a "heredity-only thesis"; the only debate is whether the gap is partially or completely environmental.

Steve Sailer has more here.

A self-tuning guitar?

2007-12-03T23:16:00.001-05:00

It'll probably be 10 years before this becomes standard -- if it ever does -- but it could really make guitar playing a lot more fun. I hate tuning, especially when I just want to play a few notes in between other tasks. Also, in college I played in a band that did "You Shook Me All Night Long," and one time my G string slipped a bit flat before we started (for non-players: that's really, really bad).

It could also spark a resurgence of alternate tunings. I've messed around with them at various points in my evolution as a player, but once you've tuned your guitar to (as I once did) Eb G Db G Bb F, you can't play your stock riffs until you put it back into "normal" mode. This would make the process a breeze.

Instruction manual here.

Um, OK

2007-12-03T15:32:00.001-05:00

Supergenius Stephen Dubner of the Freakonomics blog writes:

What I don't understand is why Imus got fired for his sins, albeit temporarily, while Family Guy rolls merrily along. I am not saying that Family Guy should be canned, or that Imus shouldn't have been, but it's a pretty curious situation.

He's not saying there's any reason anything should have gone differently. It's just curious it didn't!

He goes on to admit never watching Family Guy, and then demonstrating same for good measure, including an assertion that the dog is homosexual -- actually, the male dog dates human women, and it's the infant around whom the connotations fly.

He offers up these reasons for the "curious" phenomenon that shouldn't be any different:

1. Imus is human and Family Guy is a cartoon.

2. Imus is non-fiction and Family Guy is fiction (although it often has non-fiction elements).

3. Imus aspires to some level of intellectual sophistication while Family Guy is brazenly juvenile.

4. Imus is live talk while Family Guy is taped entertainment.

5. There is no real difference between the two, but the kind of big public storm that resulted in Imus being fired is essentially a random event, unpredictable and nearly inexplicable, and it typically arises when political, social, and media pressures all align just right. It can't be concocted, or controlled. It happened to Imus because it happened; and it hasn't happened to Family Guy just because it hasn't.

Well, for starters, humans write Family Guy. And if anything, taping something offensive, mulling it over and choosing to release it is worse than an off-the-cuff remark.

How's this: Imus singled out specific people who were not legitimate targets (the basketball team), said derogatory things about them and did so in his own voice. Family Guy makes fun of celebrities and wide, indiscriminate groups of people (say, whites or blacks in general) and does so through characters who behave inappropriately. There's nothing curious about it.

Here come the health-care stormtroopers

2007-12-03T10:18:00.001-05:00

Slate quotes John Edwards:

[My plan] will require proof of insurance when income taxes are paid and when health care is provided. Families without insurance will be enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip or another targeted plan or be assigned a plan within new Health Care Markets. [These are regional markets Edwards would create in which private insurers would be invited to compete with public health care plans.]

Families who lose coverage will be expected to enroll in another plan or be assigned one. For the few people who refuse to pay, the government will help collect back premiums with interest and collection costs by using tools like the ones it uses for student loans and taxes, including collection agencies and wage garnishment.

I really don't have a dog in the health-care fight -- my proposal would be universal vouchers, and no one seems to support that -- but Edwards doesn't sound all that American here. It's the ultimate government intrusion into health decisions.

Second Amendment piece up at The American Spectator

2007-12-03T10:02:00.001-05:00

Here it is. It's a response to The Harvard Crimson's editorial arguing for the Second Amendment's repeal.

Main point:

It's rife with problems, but the editors get more right than most of the gun-control movement does.

When it comes to guns and the Constitution, there are three main areas of importance: Historical (in what context was the Second Amendment written, and how has that context shifted?), legal (precisely what forms of gun control does the amendment proscribe?) and practical (does the Second Amendment prohibit more good policies than bad, and therefore, should we repeal it?). All told, the paper is about half-right.

They get half a cheer for their history (the context in which the Second Amendment passed has changed, as they argue, but they get the particulars wrong), a full cheer for their law (to pass strict gun control, we'd need to repeal the Second Amendment) and no cheer for their practical arguments (there's no case that the Second Amendment does more harm than good).

Sheesh

2007-12-02T22:06:00.001-05:00

The poor media keeps reporting horrible bias incidents, then having to follow up with stories like this:

A firefighter who reported finding a knotted rope and a threatening note with a drawing of a noose in an East Baltimore station house last month had placed the items there himself, city officials said yesterday.

Brief review of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles

2007-12-02T14:33:00.001-05:00

I finally finished the Wii game on normal difficulty today (except the ridiculous gallery minigame you unlock), and I have to say, on the whole, I found it very enjoyable. Addictive, even.

A few observations:

--I took about 20 hours. Each stage you beat earns you stars (even if you re-play stages you've already finished), which you can use to upgrade your weapons. The 20 hours includes re-plays of beaten stages, as well as multiple tries at first-time finishes.

--The graphics are OK, but nothing spectacular like those on RE4.

--In the early stages especially, the music is pretty terrible. Techno is not scary. In fact, one the whole, the game is more arcade shooting than horror -- there are some scenes that can creep you out a bit, but nothing makes the heart beat fast like much of RE4 (and the other RE titles) did.

--There's a surprising amount of strategy for a point-and-shoot light-gun-style game. You have to conserve ammo, decide when to pick up health when you have multiple chances to, make split-second decisions for dealing with enemies getting ready to hit you, etc. (Shooting them in the legs works well.) The bosses, while frustrating -- I should tally the swear words it takes to beat each game I play -- force you to develop strategies for dealing with each attack. Once you figure it out, you can beat them without taking very much damage at all.

--Many reviewers have decried the difficulty of getting "critical" or one-shot-kill hits; you have to shoot the zombie at the top of its head. It's true enough, and this makes it hard to get a good ranking on some stages (you're awarded stars based on whether you got an S, A, B or C), but it's very possible to beat any stage without a single critical hit. Once you get a knack for them (maybe 30-50 percent success?), they work well for conserving ammo -- the pistol has unlimited bullets, so if it can instantly pop zombies' skulls, you can use your heavy-duty stuff on a boss instead.

--It's kind of stupid that the boss of the game is in a hidden stage (get an A or S ranking on Raccoon's Destruction 3, then beat the stage that unlocks to get to Dark Legacy 2). It's also weird that beating him unlocks yet another stage.

--There are some frustrating glitches that really should have been fixed. For one, when you "retry" a stage, you can't pick a different weapon, so once you decide on a gun, you're stuck beating the whole stage with it, even if it turns out to be a bad match. Similarly, once you start a stage, you can't abort and try a different one instead, at least without going through a screen that implies it will delete your entire game. Maybe I'm misreading, but I didn't want to risk it.

--The health system is too primitive. You get a health bar, and when it's depleted, you're dead. You can pick up herbs that replenish more than half of it, and you can get first aid sprays that refill the whole thing when it runs out. The two don't interact well -- essentially, the game creates a needless dichotomy around whether you get to an herb before you need your first aid spray. Say a health bar is equivalent to 50 damage (the game assigns no numbers) and an herb refills 35. I have a first aid spray and a full bar (100 total health), and I have to go through a bunch of enemies to get to an herb. If I take 51 damage from those enemies, the first aid spray gets used and I'm down to 49 total health. When I get the herb it hardly does anything, because you can't fill your bar beyond 50. However, if I take 49 damage, the herb will increase my health from 1 to 36, and I'll still have the first aid spray for 86 total health. Taking 2 extra damage costs me 36.

All told, I'd give it 4/5 stars.

UPDATE: I've been getting some Google hits asking how to use the first aid spray. You don't use it; it automatically re-fills your bar when you run out of life.

It's easy to lie with statistics...

2007-11-30T13:15:00.001-05:00

...though as Richard Herrnstein once pointed out, it's a lot easier to lie without them. Thus The New York Times is able to pick apart Giuliani's misuse of numbers.

I cited a similar NYT story (about how Giuliani twists New York's abortion and adoption statistics) in this Spectator piece.

Do the pokie-pokie, stay out of the pokey?

2007-11-30T11:13:00.001-05:00

Apologies for the title.

Lately, Slate has been writing about a very promising research design: When two variables tend to go together, and you want to see if one causes the other, check to see if they're linked in identical twins, too. Such twins share both DNA and a home environment.

In a new study, the connection between early sexual initiation and later delinquency was at issue. If sex in and of itself causes delinquency, when one twin has sex earlier, he should be more likely to get in trouble later on.

But that twin is actually less likely to become delinquent, according to the study. It seems there are genetic and/or environmental factors that contribute to both sex and delinquency, and once those factors are present, the kid's bound to act out in one way or another. If he chooses to act out via sex, sometimes it's apparently out of his system when it comes to delinquency.

Of course, the left is going crazy with this "sex-positive" finding, acting like we've uncovered a major benefit to teen sex. But the core message is still to create an environment that discourages all misbehavior -- presuming genetics don't completely determine one's actions, this will reduce the odds of both early sexual initiation and delinquency. This study doesn't change the fact that the two are linked in the population at large, meaning that eliminating the underlying factors will cut down on both problems.

I'd like to see similar studies looking at the impact of early sex on (say) emotional and psychological problems. All this one shows is that, if you have a child, early sexual encounters won't actually cause future delinquency, though they still predict it.

Puddle of Mudd review up at antiMusic

2007-11-29T18:41:00.001-05:00

I remember seeing these guys tour with Korn after their first record, and it seems they're still around. Here's my take on Famous.

Main point:

A few years back, Puddle of Mudd pushed all the right buttons with Come Clean. Their early-'90s throwback sound netted them a few hits, and they toured with the best in the business.
At that point, they should have called it quits – or at least severely adjusted their extremely grunge-derivative sound. Instead, they kept trying to put out the next Nevermind. The new Famous is exactly what you'd expect from them, meaning it's always inoffensive, often catchy and never innovative.

Penetratoring Huckabee

2007-11-29T16:00:00.001-05:00

Note to Adam Thierer: You cannot use Ted Nugentisms like "The Harder they Come, the Harder I Get" and "If You Can't Lick 'Em ... Lick 'Em" to make a serious point. Sorry.

P.S. You missed "Bridge Over Troubled Daughters," "My Baby Likes My Butter on her Grits" and "Sexpot."

Still more on IQ and race

2007-11-29T15:40:00.001-05:00

Jim Manzi has a good point: Playing statistics games -- using clumsy regression analyses to try to disentangle genes from environment -- is over. Science has reached the point where we can identify the genes that determine IQ and figure out if they're more common in some races than in others.

However, I think he's a little too quick to go with complete agnosticism. As Half Sigma has been documenting, researchers have found some of those genes, and they're not evenly distributed by race. Also, as William Saletan's article pointed out, brain size itself varies by race, and we've identified those genes. There's still what I've called "wiggle room," but the preliminary evidence is pointing (or at least gesturing) in one direction.

Also, regarding that Saletan article series, Ross Douthat notes a correction in which Saletan apologized for citing J. Philippe Rushton. Saletan realized:

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to "the scientific study of heredity and human differences." During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime ("Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous") and heresy ("Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people"). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

Douthat's right -- it's hard to believe Saletan researched and wrote a whole IQ article without realizing Rushton was controversial. It's troubling that the Pioneer Fund supported such a fringe group and Rushton speaks at its conferences.

But I would like to point out that the fund has played a major role in mainstream studies:

Two of the Pioneer Fund's most notable recipients are the Minnesota Twin Family Study and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families.

Any psychology student has heard of those two, so let's not discount Pioneer entirely.

New immigration data

2007-11-29T11:40:00.001-05:00

The immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies has a new analysis of Census data. There's nothing all that shocking in it, but it's a great update -- it shows once again how immigration is providing a disproportionate influx of low-skill, uneducated people:

Of adult immigrants, 31 percent have not completed high school, compared to 8 percent of natives. Since 2000, immigration increased the number of workers without a high school diploma by 14 percent, and all other workers by 3 percent.

One can make all sorts of economic arguments about immigration (it's probably about a wash for the native-born, who benefit from cheap labor but lose jobs and pay for immigrants' social services), but to me the best point is social. Intelligence and skills are distributed unevenly through the population, so some Americans have to work in low-skill occupations; bringing in other countries' poor people to compete with them is not in our nation's best interest.

It's true that technological progress has moved lots of Americans out of these low-level positions and into other fields -- in previous generations, even the very intelligent often worked on family farms. When good jobs will go unfilled otherwise , it's not a problem to bring in immigrants to replace the now-white-collar folks. But when American high school dropouts enter a who-can-work-cheapest contest with Third Worlders, immigration poses a threat in the forms of social instability, poverty, unemployment and racial tensions.

Hat tip: Borjas blog.

A pack of cigarettes costs $222!!!!

2007-11-28T15:43:00.000-05:00

Not exactly, for those who've seen articles about the study. Basically, the researchers took a very subjective notion, the "value of a statistical life," and extrapolated it.

The idea behind VSL is that people value their lives at a certain dollar amount -- for example, if it would take $1 million for someone to risk 1:1 odds of dying, one could say he values his life at $2 million. Economists have calculated this figure (for example) based on people who take pay cuts to get safer jobs.

What annoys me the most is, the coverage doesn't make it clear that the costs aren't real. You won't actually spend $222; you'll lose time off your life that you'd have valued at $222.

Also, no one's been kind enough to post the full study online, so it's hard to critique the methodology. Some statements from what I've been able to find, like "smoking increases the mortality risk throughout a smoker's life, not just at the end of the smoker's expected lifetime," are ridiculous (show me a verifiable smoking death of a 30-year-old and I'll retract that).

Finally, "[a]t discount rates of 15 percent or more, the cost decreases to under $25 per pack." Not quite sure how that works.

If you don't want the strings, don't take the money

2007-11-28T13:41:00.001-05:00

The above line is often given as a defense of government regulations that accompany subsidies. What typically happens is that the federal government steals your money, then refuses to give it back (not even to you, but to your state government) until you pass the laws it thinks you should. If you don't want your state to have stricter drunk-driving laws, well, then you should just refuse federal transportation money and get nothing from the federal tax you paid. That's fair!

It seems a DA in San Diego is using the same tactic with welfare recipients:

[The] D.A.'s office has been sending agents to conduct suspicionless, warrantless searches on the private homes of welfare applicants.
Yes, applicants were free to refuse the searches ... [but that] means forfeiting welfare benefits.

This is a little different from the tax example -- the welfare money didn't come from the welfare recipients the way that transportation money comes from the taxpayers it's being denied to. But it's the same bribe-them-to-give-up-their-core-rights principle, and it's sad the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The government shouldn't use poverty relief as leverage against the Fourth Amendment.

Explaining state crime rates

2007-11-28T10:02:00.001-05:00

Steve Sailer has an interesting discussion, so I'd like to re-post a similar analysis I once did. I edited the original post to match the selection below (I've learned a little more about statistics and was able to make it more accurate).

Being a complete nerd, I've been fascinated lately by my discovery of Gnumeric, a free spreadsheet program that does multivariate statistics.

I've been messing around with crime data. Using the FBI's list of violent crime rates per 100,000 by state as the dependent variable, I factored in race, diversity, income and toughness on crime:

*Race (four variables). Proportions of a given state that are black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American. If a state is 10 percent Hispanic, for example, that figure is .10.

*Diversity. The ELF for that state, or the odds that two randomly chosen people will be of different ethnicities. Calculated by squaring each race's proportion and adding them together, then subtracting that number from 1. A higher ELF means more diversity.

*Income. The average, adjusted for cost of living.

*Toughness on crime. Average time served in months for a violent offense.

The raw correlations are about what you'd expect -- states with higher proportions of whites, low diversity, high incomes and tough sentences tend to have low violent crime rates. But once you throw them all into one regression equation, the results are interesting.

A disclaimer: I'm pretty good at math but don't have much formal training in statistics. Numbers are on the spreadsheet. (One thing Gnumeric does not do well is export files that Google Spreadsheets can use, so I had to do it in html. E-mail me, and I'll send a .xls file as an attachment.)

Here are the coefficients:

% Black: 1902
% Hispanic: 1213
% Native American: 1941
% Asian/Pacific Islander: 175*
Diversity: -308*
Income: .000021*
Tough on crime: -1.14*

The starred results are statistically insignificant, with P values > .05 and/or t-stats between -1.96 and 1.96.

Two very weird things. One, income has no significant effect.

Second, once one takes into account where diversity is coming from, diversity in and of itself doesn't explain the crime rate either (if anything, higher diversity means lower crime). I think this says something for immigration -- the problem isn't that we're taking in people who are different than we are; the problem is that we're drawing from specific populations that commit crimes (or have kids who commit crimes).

This squares with an international analysis I did once failing to find a correlation between diversity and murder rate. (I also found, oddly enough, that diversity and incarceration rate were related -- having different people side by side makes them distrust each other and likely to throw each other in prison, but it doesn't make them kill each other, assuming my results are right and mean something.)

This can't be serious

2007-11-27T13:58:00.001-05:00

From the American Prospect, about state ballot initiatives banning racial preferences:

In Colorado...affirmative action supporters sued to keep the "Civil Rights Initiative" off the ballot altogether, claiming its language was misleading. A 3-to-3 State Supreme Court decision in Colorado led to approval for Connerly's organizers to move forward there...

What was that "misleading" phrase that so divided a state supreme court? This:

It said state universities, colleges, and public employers should not "discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting."

Which of course, means exactly what it says. How do liberals want the initiative to read, "Vote NO on this measure. PLEASE."?

Arbitration nation

2007-11-27T12:23:00.001-05:00

Mother Jones has a pretty good piece about mandatory arbitration. Basically, when you buy a car, the contract stipulates that any dispute you have with the company goes through an arbitration firm -- which the company picks. The evidence is pretty solid that these firms tend to find in favor of the company and lose business when they don't. The article speaks favorably of legislation to ban this.

Two quick points. The first is that, frustrating as this is, it's a market outcome. Car companies save money on lawsuits this way and use the difference to offer consumers lower prices. If people were willing to pay significantly more to get rid of the arbitration clause, car dealers would start offering that option. That doesn't seem to be happening.

But two is that "arbitration" has a specific meaning, and it's not "the car company automatically wins." Even if a contract defines "arbitrator" as one chosen by the company, the word still stipulates (or at least heavily implies) neutrality.

If a contract promises arbitration, there has to be some way for a court to determine whether the company met that obligation. Currently, there's "no right to appeal," and "unlike court proceedings, arbitration is secret, with no transcripts or written decisions, so that nosy reporters or other potential plaintiffs can't learn what's going on behind closed doors."

If the companies simply want to say that all their customer-service decisions are final, regardless of what the customer was promised and whether the companies delivered, they should write that into the contracts (good luck finding customers). But they cannot have customers sign over the right to sue and claim to replace that right with "arbitration" if the service provided does not meet the definition of "arbitration."

Activists should focus on making sure arbitration is real, rather than on banning arbitration altogether and hurting freedom of contract.

Serj Tankian review up at antiMusic

2007-11-21T14:19:00.001-05:00

Here is my take on "Elect the Dead."

Main point:

Though most musicians see a solo album as a chance to experiment, Serj Tankian has used Elect the Dead to get back to the basic System of a Down sound. Fans who complained about guitarist Daron Malakian stealing Tankian's vocal spotlight on recent records will love it.
All the trademark ingredients show up – the tense, minor key melodies; the abrupt changes in dynamics, feel and mood; the quirky, spastic outbursts; the punky, breakneck tempos. Tankian's unique voice, bizarre personality and leftist views hold it all together.
What stands out most about Elect the Dead is its remarkable consistency in every sense of the term; virtually every track impeccably showcases the aforementioned strengths. Beautiful melodies, clean guitars and piano backgrounds run headlong into zany blasts of distortion and crazy lyricism everywhere – but this is especially true on "Money," the best composition here.

Welcome postgraduate degree holders!

2007-11-21T14:17:00.001-05:00

According to The Blog Readability Test, that's what you have to be to understand this page. Kinda funny, because that means I'm writing at an education level I haven't myself achieved. If you only have an undergraduate degree (like I do), you might find Rob Zombie reviews a little difficult, apparently.

That makes you guys about as smart as Jeremy Lott's readers -- a smarter audience than The Corner and George Borjas get, but not quite as bright as Daniel Larison's readership.

McDonald's to wage coffee war on Starbucks?

2007-11-20T13:17:00.001-05:00

I share Neuromarketing's skepticism: When I stop at a Starbucks, it's usually to kill some time and read. Mickey D's just doesn't have the same atmosphere, so the upscale coffee-shop clientele won't go for it. Fifty cents isn't much of a price difference for an extended visit, either.

The blog suggests that McDonald's change its atmosphere, which could work to increase coffee sales -- but it might decrease sales of the standard food items, which may benefit from the utilitarian, no-frills presentation.

I think the bottom line is that McDonald's and Starbucks serve distinct niches, and neither is well-advised to try to capture the other's. The fast-food joint might sell enough coffee beverages to turn a profit, and might even steal a few Starbucks customers who get their drinks to go, but significantly cutting into the coffee giant's market share is unlikely.

Zombie Live review up at antiMusic

2007-11-20T11:11:00.001-05:00

Here it is.

Main point:

Rob Zombie's studio recordings depend on production trickery – movie dialogue excerpts, techno flourishes and guitars processed to sound far bigger than they could naturally. And his live shows earned their notoriety for shock theatrics. So it should surprise no one that Zombie Live captures the best aspects of neither.

It's actually quite stunning how the simple requirement of live performance can suck the life out of these tracks. The crowd seems to be enjoying itself, and the stage explosion pictured on the cover looks pretty cool, but a few microphones just can't take in the energy. Even if, for a live album, the sound quality is quite good.

...

That isn't to say it's all bad. A full 18 tracks make the CD, giving fans a decent value for their money. Also, the old White Zombie material always had more of a live feel, as did Zombie's last solo release, Educated Horses.

IQ and race again

2007-11-20T10:21:00.000-05:00

Another quick note on William Saletan's IQ series. He points out how the debate in general has shifted rightward over the last few decades or so -- before, those on the right blamed black culture for the IQ gap, and those on the left blamed racism. Now, those on the right speculate some combination of culture and genes, where those on the left blame culture alone.

But what strikes me is how, over the last few years, many on the right have come back toward agnosticism on the question. "Wait 10 or 15 years for the genetic information" has become the mantra. Even Charles Murray switched from "innate" to "intractable."

What got left behind is the skull measurement study finding racial differences in brain size that correspond to IQ gaps. I myself had read about it before (in fact, it was one of the first Steve Sailer posts I ever saw) but basically joined the "hold on a minute" chorus as it faded from memory. As I said yesterday, there's still some wiggle room, but perhaps Saletan's biggest contribution is pushing this fact front and center again. It really drives home his point that we probably have to get ready for some uncomfortable findings.

Slate.com's belated James Watson support

2007-11-19T13:49:00.001-05:00

William Saletan has a rather rigorous defense of James Watson. It gets into some research I hadn't thought about in awhile:

How could genes cause an IQ advantage? The simplest pathway is head size. I thought head measurement had been discredited as Eurocentric pseudoscience. I was wrong. In fact, it's been bolstered by MRI. On average, Asian-American kids have bigger brains than white American kids, who in turn have bigger brains than black American kids. This is true even though the order of body size and weight runs in the other direction. The pattern holds true throughout the world and persists at death, as measured by brain weight.

...

Scientists have already identified genes that influence brain size and vary by continent. Whether these play a role in racial IQ gaps, nobody knows.

I would urge caution on this because there's a lot more to IQ than brain size, especially when you're talking about genetic group differences -- for example, men tend to have bigger brains than women, but do not have a higher mean IQ. The difference in body size might explain this, and the same explanation wouldn't work for the racial gap (men are bigger than women and have bigger brains, while blacks are bigger than whites and have smaller brains), but as Saletan points out, there's still a lot to be uncovered.

Saletan also uses twin studies to argue that individual differences in IQ are mostly genetic (identical twins reared apart have more similar IQs than fraternal twins reared together), an analysis I've expressed skepticism in thusly:

[As James Flynn has argued, heritability estimates based on twin studies] ignore the "multiplier" effect -- if one fraternal twin has a slight advantage in a given skill early in life, he tends to work on it intensely. For example, if he's a little taller, he'll not only be naturally better at basketball, but he'll spend more time playing basketball because he's better and likes to win. This makes fraternal twins have very different skills, and researchers wrongly conclude that their genes, not the different environments they created for themselves even though they were reared together, caused the gap.

If individual IQ differences are far less genetic than we'd thought, it's very possible that racial IQ differences aren't genetic at all.

Saletan's going to follow up with some points against a genetic basis for the gap.

Warrantless searches!!!

2007-11-18T09:01:00.001-05:00

The Drudge headline "Boston police look to search homes without a warrant" drew me to this story. It's a misleading link if I ever saw one -- by "without a warrant" he means "with the consent of the homeowner."

Apparently there's a new program where the cops try to search kids' bedrooms for guns by asking the parents for permission. Now, if I wanted my kid's room searched for guns, I'd do it myself, and if the police had no evidence my child had a gun (in other words, no warrant), there's no way I'd let them in. But this does not raise a constitutional issue.

6.2 percent of your income goes to war?

2007-11-15T14:15:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan links to this Foreign Policy analysis:

A new report, "Hidden Costs of the Iraq War," by the Democratic staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, estimates that the costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 through 2008 will total $1.6 trillion. That includes "hidden costs," such as the amount of interest on money borrowed to pay for the war, the cost of long-term health care for veterans, and how much disruptions to the oil markets are costing. It's twice the amount that the Bush administration has requested.

How much of that burden is being borne by U.S. taxpayers? According to the report, the cost averages out to $20,900 for every family of four. Using a very rough formula, let's take the current median household income of $48,201 and multiply it by the seven years covered in the report for a total of $337,407. Then take that $20,900 of war costs per household and divide it by that $337,407.

Yeah...it's a little convenient that it doesn't take account of the fact that we have (A) a progressive tax system and (B) a lot of very rich people. Add the two together, and the top half of taxpayers pay 97 percent of taxes. So by the time you hit that median household, there isn't much to pay, so this estimate is way off.

A better way to start is to look at the mean, rather than median, household income. That's $60,528. Multiply by seven and divide $20,900 into it, and you get about 5 percent of all income would go toward the war if we were to pay all the future costs, like veteran health care, right now (still a lot).

But of course, the upper half of taxpayers take care of almost all of it (they're still "taxpayers," but the post tries to make it sound like everyday families are really feeling the financial crunch). Imagine two households, one representing the upper half of taxpayers, the other the lower half. Their total income is $120,528 (two times the mean), and their total payment toward the war is $41,800. The upper half will pay 97 percent of the payment, or $40,546. The remaining $1,254 is the average payment of the lower half of taxpayers. The exact amount paid will scale based on tax bracket -- the very poorest don't pay taxes, or even get back more than they pay -- but for the average Joe, the total won't come close to 6.2 percent, or even 5 percent.

So once you strip away the populist rhetoric ("borne by U.S. taxpayers," using the median household income), the point boils down to "this war costs the rich a lot." Not quite as strong a point as " 6.2 percent of your income."

Is Paul Krugman stupid?

2007-11-14T11:13:00.001-05:00

The Wall Street Journal makes the point that:

The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.

Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.

In other words, sure there's tons of inequality. But the people creating the inequality -- the rich and the poor -- are often the very same people, only at different points in their lives. If you start out poor, odds are you'll gain skills, work experience, reputation and seniority, and you'll make more money eventually.

To which our supergenius economist responds (citing his own column from more than a decade ago):

Imagine an economy in which in any given year half of the families earn $100,000 and the other half earn $200,000. And imagine also that this economy fits the blender model, so that a family that starts in the bottom half has a 50 percent chance of being in the top half ten years later, and conversely.

Now do the WSJ calculation. Families that start in the bottom half begin with $100,000; ten years later, on average they have $150,000, so they gain 50 percent. Families that start in the top half begin with $200,000; ten years later, on average they also have $150,000, so they lose 33 percent.

But has the distribution of income gotten more equal? No: it is unchanged. All that we see is the familiar statistical phenomenon of "regression toward the mean." Essentially, the initially rich have nowhere to go but down, the initially poor nowhere to go but up. So if the income distribution were stable, any income mobility would inevitably produce the WSJ result; and it is not surprising that we still get it even when income inequality is rising.

Am I missing the revelation here? The WSJ didn't say that the income distribution was changing or staying the same, or that inequality was falling. It said that, whatever the distribution is, people cycle through it over time -- when inequality rises, it basically means that people are a little richer and/or a little poorer at some point in their lives, not that some consistent group ("the rich," "the poor") get better or worse off.

New piece up at the Spectator

2007-11-14T10:07:00.001-05:00

Here it is. It's an abortion-policy piece suggesting that Giuliani or Romney should propose an adoption subsidy.

Basic idea:

--Both candidates say they want to reduce abortions and increase adoptions, even if abortion remains legal. However, their policies for doing so show little promise.

--Instead, they should set up a program that pays women for giving healthy babies up for adoption.

Modern racism article up at Doublethink

2007-11-12T14:07:00.001-05:00

Doublethink has a rather extensive piece of mine about modern racism. It draws on numerous social science findings.

Main points:

--Modern white people do have negative opinions of minorities, and they act on them.

--This is wrong, though the actions are not always irrational.

--This doesn't make liberal social policy the best solution.

The piece doesn't directly address genetic cognitive differences between races, but it dovetails nicely with this important New York Times piece. In the spirit of their science reporter, Nicholas Wade (who didn't write it), it takes the notion seriously and grapples with it.

Assuming the worst happens in 10 to 15 years, and we discover that different races have higher or lower concentrations of IQ genes, I think a few concepts from my article could come into play.

For one, it's important to know the difference between statistical trends and individual attributes -- someone of one race might be more likely to have a low IQ than someone of another, but that doesn't mean he does. Likewise, it's important to differentiate "rational" and "moral." It may make sense for a business to concentrate on recruiting members of a certain race (say they're more likely to have the required skills), but that doesn't make it right to ignore people of other races who are qualified.

In addition, such a finding on racial IQ differences would demolish all sorts of concerns about the "achievement gap." The current assumption is that the gap is caused only by environmental factors, and if we improve the schools and end poverty it'll go away. Hopefully, though, people won't over-interpret scientific findings to say that the entire gap is genetic -- bad schools, illegitimacy, etc., most certainly contribute.

I'll be with you shortly

2007-11-12T09:37:00.001-05:00

Over at Slate, Tim Harford has a pretty interesting piece about how, at coffee shops, women tend to wait 20 seconds longer for their drinks. The trend persists even when controlling for the complexity of the beverage. An all-male wait staff means a longer delay, and with an all-female staff the gap just about disappears. He attributes the phenomenon to mindless discrimination.

What he doesn't mention, though, is the tip factor: Isn't it possible that men tip men better than women tip men? If that's the case, men wait on men faster because the 20 seconds has a bigger payoff on a male customer. I don't think this is necessarily the answer (if so, I would think the discrepancy would be even bigger when the wait staff is female, because sometimes guys leave big tips for cute waitresses), but it's a rather important variable that needs controlling.

I wonder why Madison is such a drinking town

2007-11-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

Maybe City Data's new graph can teach us something about it:

Hmm...

Don't Tase him while he's sleeping, bro

2007-11-08T10:18:00.000-05:00

I've been critical of police use of Tasers in the past, but it's kind of frustrating that no one is hesitating at all in judging the officers in the Shawn Hicks case. So far as I can tell, no one's even gotten the cops' side of things.

I mean, seriously, if Reason's description is actually how it happened, these officers and their superiors are inhuman:

Earlier this year, North Braddock, Penn. resident Shawn Hicks came back from a night out and plopped down on his own couch in his own home. Unfortunately, he failed to deactivate the silent alarm on his home security system. According to Hicks, two police officers responded to the alarm, entered his home, and woke him with a taser between the shoulder blades. When Hicks tried to explain that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and that the officers were in his own home, they tasered him again. They next checked his wallet and ID, which confirmed his name and address. Then they tasered him again. The police then removed the taser pellets from Hicks' bloody back, refused to get him medical treatment, and arrested him for "being belligerent." They threw him in a holding cell until 5 am the next morning, when they released him without filing any charges.
...They were cleared of any wrongdoing.

A new insight on interracial dating

2007-11-08T10:00:00.001-05:00

In Slate, a researcher who ran a speed-dating service and kept stats on it. He found men tend to go more by looks, women by smarts. Also:

[A] clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference.

My only problem with this is that I personally know white men with Asian preferences, and that stereotype certainly didn't come from nowhere. They may not be enough to show up statistically as a "white male preference for East Asian women," but the notion is not a "myth."

Also, it's pretty interesting that, regarding interracial dating, women are more racist than men. Which is kind of odd, because often times it's a male figure (the cranky father, say) who's portrayed as wanting racial purity.

Blame Canada

2007-11-07T13:47:00.001-05:00

Michael Medved puts forth a rather weird argument in his latest column:

Those who claim that the United States has become a rapacious, arrogant, destructive, domineering and imperialistic power must somehow explain the continued independent existence of the nation of Canada.
Alongside our allegedly bellicose, land-hungry and bellicose empire, the Maple Leaf Republic has flourished for more than two centuries --- vast, under-populated, resource rich and virtually defenseless. Unlike our Mexican neighbors to the south, the Canadians presented no substantial cultural or linguistic differences to sour the prospect of swallowing the Great White North. On three different occasions, Americans attempted or considered a push to absorb all or part of Canada: in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and during the complicated Venezuela Boundary Crisis with Great Britain in 1895. Nevertheless, the Yankee imperialists stopped well short of conquest and in the 21st Century era of unchallenged US hegemony, Canada has gone its own quirky way more notably than ever before, reveling in its separate destiny and distinctive institution.
The history of U.S. respect for Canada's continued sovereignty hardly comports with the prevailing anti-American clichés, suggesting that Americans long to impose on all the world the same "genocidal" approach we deployed against the Indians.

This is, of course, a straw-man argument: No one is promoting the "anti-American cliches" Medved attributes to "those." The argument from the left and isolationist right isn't that America wants to take over the world (bwa ha ha!) but that, through an overaggressive foreign policy, it seeks to impose its way of life on as much of the world as possible. Medved himself notes that Canada already shares our culture and language, so it's not much of a counterexample to the argument.

Macs are cheaper?

2007-11-07T10:42:00.001-05:00

That's the argument on Salon.com:

Why this should be has to do with an economic truth that has not recently mattered much in the computer industry, but that, in an age of eBay and unyielding obsolescence, is now crucial. It is resale value. Macs fetch far more on the aftermarket than do PCs -- and after years of use, you can offset that cash-register premium by selling your Mac for a better price than you could your PC.

That seems to be true, but how many people really sell their computers when they're done with them? The situation the article bases its calculations on -- keeping a computer for a year and selling it -- seems very unlikely.

In fact, I'd guess I'm pretty rare in that I switched computers when my four-year-old one was still functioning (I started recording music in high definition, so I needed something that could process mountains of data in real time). Most people probably run their PCs into the ground; in the U.S., we throw out 30 million computers annually, though it's unclear how many had multiple owners before biting the dust. Even if you bought your computer five years ago, unless it's virused-up to the point of being useless, it probably still does the basic stuff (high-speed Internet, word processing) as fast as you really need.

To me, a better price argument in favor of a Mac would be that it lasts longer, so you spend less per year of use, if in fact that is the case. (Macs are less prone to virus infections, but anecdotally, the Dell PC I started college with outlasted the Mac my girlfriend did.)

Another fake hate crime

2007-11-06T15:57:00.001-05:00

This century, I have not heard of a campus graffiti hate crime that was solved -- and turned out to actually be the work of a bigot. It seems they're quite frequently the product of minority students looking for attention.

A Fox station, via Michelle Malkin:

After evaluating evidence from a hidden camera positioned in response to the swastika postings in [GWU's] Mitchell Hall, University Police have linked the student who filed the complaints to several of the incidents.

Sarah Marshak was the student "faking anti-Semitic hate against herself." This is GWU's second fake hate crime this year.

UPDATE: Now I have heard of one:

Racial intimidation is a crime that needs to be taken seriously, regardless of which race the perpetrators happen to be. It is important to note, in that regard, that the George Washington University student's confession came a couple of days after another student, a male whose name also was withheld, was charged by campus police with painting a swastika on a door in another dormitory after a hidden camera caught him in the act.

You're my Playmate of the year

2007-11-06T14:16:00.001-05:00

It's the return of my nerdy statistical tinkering!

Over at Reason, Steve Chapman takes a look at a study positing that Internet access, through pornography, reduces rape. I blogged about that myself here and here.

He does a good job in questioning the thesis:

That, of course, is only a theory, and the evidence he cites is not conclusive. States that were quicker to adopt the Internet may be different in ways that also serve to prevent rape. It's not hard to think of other explanations why sexual assaults have diminished so rapidly -- such as DNA analysis, which has been an invaluable tool in catching and convicting offenders.

Changing social attitudes doubtless have also played a role. Both young men and young women are more aware today of the boundaries between consensual and coercive sex. Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, thinks the credit for progress against rape should go to federal funding under the Violence Against Women Act and to education efforts stressing that "no means no."

However, he takes the study as disproof of the opposite thesis, that pornography increases rape. He writes:

As raunch has waxed, rape has waned.

This is part of a broad decrease in criminal mayhem. Since 1993, violent crime in America has dropped by 58 percent. But the progress in this one realm has been especially dramatic. Rape is down 72 percent and other sexual assaults have fallen by 68 percent. Even in the last two years, when the FBI reported upticks in violent crime, the number of rapes continued to fall.

Those numbers are based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, a random survey that asks people about their experiences with crime, whether they reported it to police or not. However, my computations from this table (the FBI's Crime in the United States, which only tabulates reported crimes) reach the opposite conclusion: From 1993 to 2006, the reported violent crime rate fell from 747.1 to 473.5 (per 100,000). Reported rape fell from 41.1 to 30.9. Violent crime as a whole fell almost 37 percent, but rape only fell 25 percent.

In fact, the ratio between total rapes and incidents of every single individual violent crime the FBI included increased to some degree in that time, excepting larceny/theft (the ratio wavered a little, but ended up right about where it started). This means reported rape did not fall as much as any of these crimes did.

This could, of course, be due to the fact that while there are fewer rapes, a higher percentage of them are reported. Chapman writes, "In fact, given everything that has been done to educate people about the problem and to prosecute offenders, victims are probably more willing to come forward than they used to be." However, there's such a big gap between reported crime and the NCVS (the FBI says violent crime as a whole fell 50 percent more than rape did, while the NCVS says rape fell 25 percent faster) that it strains credibility.

Also, Steve Sailer pointed out how, in the '60s and '70s, porn availability increased as rape did the same. So given all the uncertainty -- survey data is notoriously iffy, and in this case it doesn't square with the other information available -- there's no reason whatsoever to dismiss the thesis that pornography could increase rape.

Are children is learning.

2007-11-06T10:33:00.001-05:00

Edwin Rubenstein makes a point I've made before -- given the students the U.S . educational system has to work with, it's doing OK. International rankings don't take into account the fact that our schools have to deal with issues (race, immigration, foreign languages) that other countries' systems don't.

Of course, this isn't to say there aren't some real failures, especially in low-income communities. But by and large, the picture isn't as bad as some would have you believe.

Interesting moral dilemma of the day

2007-11-06T09:44:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit late on this news, but in honor of the one-week countdown to Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles for the Wii, I'd like to get into a controversy Resident Evil 5 (a future release now only slated for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360) has raised.

First, some background. The whole point of Resident Evil is that a team of agents travels around killing zombies. The first four games (RE Zero through 3) were set in the Midwest, so you killed undead American whites. In Resident Evil 4, some folks in Spain had gotten a virus that made them into zombie-ish creatures, so you killed infected Spaniards.

And apparently, in RE5's current state of development, at least part of the story takes place in Africa. (Violent video here.)

Obviously, there isn't much of a rational reason to oppose this. You're not killing them because they're black; you're killing them because they're zombies. And there's a real racial double standard if you can only make video games where you kill white people (or undead people who were white before their skin started rotting). But given the history of white colonialism of Africa, this clearly has some rather dark connotations. To get away with this, the developers will probably have to couch it into a storyline that's sympathetic to Africans.

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say the Japanese developers will realize the intonations and change the product. Either they'll set the whole thing elsewhere, or at least they'll make the playable character black to avoid the whole racial subjugation thing.

Normally I'd bemoan the political correctness, but I can see why it would feel wrong to play a white character who saves Africa by massacring natives-turned-zombies. I prefer my wholesale slaughter free of bigotry!

In a related debate, Alternet absurdly accuses the entire RE series of "nakedly racist overtones" and "very dangerous depictions of nonwhites." The best part is this quote:

The most recent Resident Evil movie is based on extremely popular video games like last year's smash-hit Resident Evil 4, which places players in the position of fighting parasitically controlled Spaniards (called "Los Ganados" or "the cattle") with stereotypical Mexican accents.

It also refers to the game "targeting immigrants for extermination."

Well, I can't differentiate between Mexico- and Spain-dialect Spanish. But, um, dude...they're in Spain. They're not "Mexican" and they're not "immigrants." And they're not "nonwhite" (another violent video here).

UPDATE: Welcome Spectator readers! I replaced the embedded videos, which stopped working, with links to YouTube.

Girls rock the boys

2007-11-05T14:47:00.001-05:00

Grammy.com has a look-the-other-way article about how there are just so many women in heavy metal:

If the clichéd debate over the presence of women in rock music isn't dead, the often gothed-out females fronting a number of today's metal bands should literally put the last nail in the coffin.

The key word here is "fronting." There are female singers here and there, but men play the guitars and drums, even in those bands. Let's take a look at the numbers; in fact, why don't we only look at the first 10 bands the article specifically mentions. It turns out that not one of them has a female member besides the frontwoman:

Evanescence (1/6 female)
Lacuna Coil (1/6)
Flyleaf (1/5)
Arch Enemy (1/5)
Within Temptation (1/6)
In This Moment (1/5)
Leaves' Eyes (1/6)
Agonist (1/4)
Within Temptation (1/6)
Epica (1/6)

Total female: 10/55 or 18 percent

OK, so...bands chosen for mention in this article specifically because of their high-female membership were 18 percent female. What overwhelming parity!

Gender-equality advocates can be glad that there's a style of metal that calls for female vocals. And in blues-based rock, there have even been all-female acts like the Donnas and Crucified Barbara. But as long as rock as a whole depends on testosterone-addled songwriting and fleet-fingered, big-handed guitar playing -- and not to mention that musical accomplishment has been primarily male through history -- it will be first a man's game. The last nail in the coffin? Hardly.

Hat tip: Blabbermouth.

Megadeth review up at antiMusic

2007-11-05T10:22:00.001-05:00

Here's my take on the four-CD-plus-DVD set Warchest.

Main point:

Seriously, $64? A true fan already has virtually all these songs in some form or another – the promotional blurbs claim 33 unreleased tracks, but those are mostly demos and live performances – and a newcomer would do far better heading online and ordering used copies of Peace Sells…But Who's Buying; So Far, So Good...So What; Rust in Peace; Countdown to Extinction; Youthanasia; Cryptic Writings; and The System has Failed. He'd get far more material, organized as it was originally intended, for about the same price. If he shopped carefully, he could probably snag the band's whole catalog.

My old review of The System has Failed is here.

Social Security smoke and mirrors

2007-11-05T09:47:00.001-05:00

I don't write about Social Security all that much, but I think Jim Antle makes an important point in today's Spectator:

The Social Security trust fund is a polite fiction, an accounting gimmick. The system's surpluses have been used to augment general revenues and spent on other budget priorities. Preserving those surpluses will probably do more to perpetuate this trend than promote long-term solvency, ensuring that every so many years it will be 1983 all over again.

This is absolutely true: When you look at your paycheck, you see a certain amount has been taken out for "Social Security." This is more than actually is spent on SS, so the rest is put into a trust fund. Except not really: The government spends the money on other programs and replaces it with IOUs.

The bottom line is that SS taxes are just like other taxes -- surplus SS revenues go into the general budget, and in 2017, when SS will cost more than the taxes collected in its name, the difference will come out of the general budget. Earmarking certain dollars as "for Social Security" has no effect whatsoever.

The year 2041, when the surpluses accrued before 2017 will equal the deficits accumulated since, is meaningless as well. Again, the trust fund that will supposedly be exhausted isn't real. SS can't be bankrupt if it doesn't exist as an independent entity.

What matters is that Social Security is going to get more and more expensive until it drives us into fiscal crisis, not that it will cross some magical financial boundary.

Dispatches from the engagement-ring front

2007-11-02T18:05:00.001-05:00

Swishhhhhhhh.

What's that sound? Oh, it's a bunch of money flowing from my bank account into the coffers of Blue Nile. Your loyal pundit has, at long last, made the most important purchase of his life (OK, the Wii was close).

The decision took a great deal of research, so I figured I'd synthesize what I learned for my millions of readers (hi Mom!). First and foremost, do not buy an engagement ring from a jewelry store . They jack their prices up and then haggle, making it very difficult for an unsophisticated consumer to get a fair offer. They also use annoying, high-pressure sales tactics. (On a Saturday I told a saleswoman I'd call her sometime the next week about a ring, despite her insistence that they could only give me the best deal if I plunked down the money right now. On Monday she took the initiative and pestered me instead. I hung up on her.)

If it weren't for these unsavory practices I'd feel bad saying this, because stores do legitimately have overhead costs they're recouping, but the best bet is to try on rings at a bunch of stores to see what you like, and then order online. I heard about Blue Nile from this excellent Forbes profile, and their selection, pricing and Web site navigation are terrific. I haven't received the ring in the mail yet, but I will update when I do.

As I see it, when picking out a ring, there are three things you want to decide: Band, diamond configuration and a specific diamond.

When picking out the ring itself, the choices are gold, white gold and platinum. If you want a gold-colored ring, obviously go with gold. For a silvery color, pick platinum or white gold -- the former is far more expensive and shows scratching a little more easily, but the latter is darker in color and needs to be coated to shine the way you see it in a store. Over time the coating wears off, and you have to either live with a darker ring or have it re-coated. If a platinum ring gets scratched, it's quite easy to restore.

The diamond configuration is a more daunting choice. Oftentimes a simple solitaire (one diamond in the middle) will do the trick, but there are other setups that use more diamonds. One type I particularly dislike uses little bits of diamond around the band to add sparkle. It looks like gravel. My girlfriend and I settled on a five-stone configuration (four side, one center).

Cost is actually an advantage, in my opinion, for multiple-stone rings. The reason is that the price of a diamond increases exponentially with its size. It's much cheaper to have a .7-carat center diamond with four .15-carat side diamonds than it is to have one 1.25-carat solitaire diamond. More bling for your buck.

Which brings us to picking out the diamonds themselves. The "four Cs" are cut, color, clarity and (as already discussed) carat. The best way to balance them is to put in your price range on Blue Nile, and then adjust the parameters until you've narrowed it down to a couple really good deals.

The one dimension I would minimize is clarity, or the measure of "inclusions" in the diamond. As long as you stay in and above the SI ("slightly included") range, inclusions are not visible to the naked eye. So it's mainly a tradeoff between sparkle (cut), shade (color) and size (carat). Introducing the three Ss.

And consider paying by money wire. Blue Nile offers a slight discount, and many rings are expensive enough that the savings will more than make up for the cost of wiring money. If you pay with a debit card, check with your bank first to make sure there isn't a per-purchase limit.

If I'm bicurious and I'm somehow made from God, then I figure God must be a little bicurious himself

2007-11-02T10:10:00.001-05:00

Jeremy Lott finds a hilarious quote from the Westboro church's anti-homosexual Web site. A jury recently found against the church for protesting military funerals with hateful signs:

WBC engages in daily peaceful sidewalk demonstrations opposing the homosexual lifestyle of soul-damning, nation-destroying filth. We display large, colorful signs containing Bible words and sentiments, including: GOD HATES FAGS, FAGS HATE GOD, AIDS CURES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR AIDS, FAGS BURN IN HELL, GOD IS NOT MOCKED, FAGS ARE NATURE FREAKS, GOD GAVE FAGS UP, NO SPECIAL LAWS FOR FAGS, FAGS DOOM NATIONS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, FAG TROOPS, GOD BLEW UP THE TROOPS, GOD HATES AMERICA, AMERICA IS DOOMED, THE WORLD IS DOOMED, etc.

Legally, though, he comes down on the side of the church, on First Amendment grounds. I'm a little more on the fence. Certainly, it's important for people to be able to speak on public property, even when they're saying something ridiculously offensive.

But to me, there's something to be said about the choice of venue. They're not in front of courthouses, they're in front of funerals, and there's a privacy angle to funerals even when you're protesting from public property. And they weren't found guilty of "hate speech"; they were found guilty of invasion of privacy and causing emotional distress. The slippery slope makes me queasy (if we prosecute these people on vaguely defined charges, where do we draw the line?), but by the same token, a military family really is entitled to a decent ceremony. It's hard for me to get too uptight about a court ruling making that possible.

What is this, 1999?

2007-11-01T09:10:00.001-05:00

My latest Amazon.com e-mail advertises all those cutting-edge music groups: "Britney Spears, Andrea Bocelli, Backstreet Boys, Levon Helm..."

HIM review up at antiMusic

2007-10-31T12:06:00.001-05:00

Here it is.

Main point:

In the eternal struggle between alienating longtime fans and releasing the same album over and over again, HIM strikes a decent balance with Venus Doom. It's far more guitar-centric than previous releases – plenty of Sabbath-esque riffs and even some shredding solos, popping off the speakers thanks to returning producer Tim Palmer. But the band's appeal still revolves around Ville Valo's dark, catchy, gothic vocals. The haunting-yet-upbeat atmosphere and romantic themes remain as well.
In terms of quality, Venus Doom is perhaps the most consistent HIM record to date. 2005's Dark Light lost its momentum about halfway through, and most of the band's other CDs include good helpings of filler. Unfortunately, this also means there's no unstoppable standout like "Killing Loneliness" or "Your Sweet Six Six Six," but it's worth the tradeoff to have an album that's listenable straight-through.

The most important issue of our time

2007-10-31T10:48:00.001-05:00

Over at Galley Slaves, Jonathan Last has been chronicling the failure of the PlayStation 3 . It's not that surprising to me -- of the three current-generation consoles, it's the most expensive and has the fewest unique features. I own a Nintendo Wii myself, but I at least understand the case for Xbox 360. I can't imagine advising anyone to buy a PS3.

The Wii has numerous advantages. It's the cheapest system and the only one that relies on motion-sensitive controls (for example, in a baseball game, you actually swing the controller like a bat). Nintendo has some pretty good first-party games (titles that are not available on the other systems), including the Zelda and Mario franchises. It's backward-compatible to the GameCube, and you can download old NES, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis games to it pretty cheaply. (If you'd rather a bikini-clad model explain the Wii's advantages, go here.)

Xbox 360 has better graphics than Wii does, and it has the best of all first-party games in the Halo franchise. It's backward-compatible to the original Xbox.

Playstation 3 shares Xbox's graphics, and some third-party games are only available on PS3 and Xbox 360 -- when a game is designed for a regular controller, it's hard to "port" it to a system that uses motion controls. But PS3 has nothing that isn't available on one of the other systems. Even its backward compatibility to PS1 and PS2 is iffy. Offhand I can't name a first-party game (though I once noted this one), so certainly none are must-haves.

By the way

2007-10-30T11:15:00.001-05:00

Buy the current issue of Outburn; it has a bunch of CD reviews from me in it. The text isn't online.

Here are the albums I wrote about:

Watershed, Three Chords and a Cloud of Dust II
Rosetta, Wake/Lift
Between the Wars, Death and the Sea
Terra Diablo, Deluge Songs
Amorphis, Silent Waters
From the Shallows, Beyond the Unknown
Drop Dead, Gorgeous, Worse than a Fairy Tale
Bedlight for Blue Eyes, Life on Life's Terms
Nodes of Ranvier, Defined By Struggle

If it's uncomfortable, just don't think about it

2007-10-30T10:20:00.001-05:00

Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder have a willfully naive Spectator piece about race, intelligence and the James Watson controversy today.
First they write:

Apparently a subject that has attracted scientists is the question of the correlation between race and intelligence. Now don't get us wrong. We believe that basically this is an area of wasteful analysis. In our lives, we don't deal with "races," we deal with individual people. For instance, if science has determined that Jews are smarter than Buddhists, the fact is if we needed an operation, we would rather have a smart Buddhist picking up the scalpel than a dumb Jew.

Sure, there are some situations in which individual performance, not statistical trends, matters most. But in other cases -- say, a given group is underrepresented in a high-IQ field, and someone proposes quota legislation to fix that -- public policy demands accurate group profiles.

Then they make the same mistake Watson did: They claim to know the answer to the question at hand.

[W]e believe it is not [true]...[this is] psuedo-science

At this stage in the game, there is simply no way to tell. I propose that, for 10 to 15 years, we call off the debate while we wait for the genetic testing results.

On the one hand, it is an absolute fact that some genes are more common in some races than others. Researchers are in the process of sorting through what those genes are and what they do, and it would be rather surprising if none pertained to cognitive function at all. Also, intelligence testing has shown large gaps by race that persist over time and don't go away when you statistically control for various environmental factors.

Further, twin studies indicate that identical twins reared apart have far more similar IQs that fraternal twins reared together; from this, heritability estimates tend to say an individual's IQ is mostly genetic. This doesn't mean that racial IQ differences are mostly genetic, but it means that environmental differences would have to be very severe to account for the entire racial gap.

But on the other hand, as James Flynn has been arguing lately, those estimates ignore the "multiplier" effect -- if one fraternal twin has a slight advantage in a given skill early in life, he tends to work on it intensely. For example, if he's a little taller, he'll not only be naturally better at basketball, but he'll spend more time playing basketball because he's better and likes to win. This makes fraternal twins have very different skills, and researchers wrongly conclude that their genes, not the different environments they created for themselves even though they were reared together, caused the gap.

If individual IQ differences are far less genetic than we'd thought, it's very possible that racial IQ differences aren't genetic at all.

And they get their history wrong:

Watson's position is eerily similar to that of Professor Arthur Jensen, who wrote an article in 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review wherein he postulated that racial differences in intelligence test scores may have a genetic origin. He suffered the same fate as Dr. Watson.

Sure, Jensen got the same protests. But he didn't grovel, retired on his own terms and still sits on academic journal boards.

For a lesson in logic...

2007-10-29T21:55:00.001-05:00

...just read Chuck Colson's latest column on pornography. It's one example of bad reasoning after another.

Now, it's probably true that violent pornography can put ideas in people's heads, and that the people who participate in pornography tend have severe personal problems. This isn't a "pro-porn" post, though I think the government should stay away from consensually created adult materials with proper content warnings.

But just read what Colson has to say:

A teenage girl was recalling what her childhood had been like—a childhood marred by porn. "When I was eight years old," she wrote, "my father made me look at [pornographic] pictures" involving sex acts he wanted her to perform. "I went along with him, not knowing any better," she said.

For years this girl's father raped her while using these pictures—and at age 16, she had a sexually transmitted disease. "I may die of this disease," she wrote sadly. "Pornography has ruined my life."

So much for the claim—often made by porn advocates—that pornography is a victimless crime.

Obviously, this girl's childhood was marred far more by rape than by porn. It's far from clear that, absent the pornographic pictures, the girl's father would have left her alone. By this logic, if at any time in history someone has been raped while Beethoven played, that would lay to rest the claim that listening to classical music is a victimless crime.

Colson just doesn't grasp the distinction between correlation and causation; in fact, to him, correlation proves causation beyond "any doubt":

There is no longer any doubt that pornography inspires crime. Most child molesters admit that they consume hard-core porn on a regular basis.

Actually, there's quite a bit of doubt. One fairly recent study even concluded that pornography decreases rape, though I was skeptical of the methodology. Regarding the fact that child molesters watch hard-core porn, it's hard to tell whether the urge or the visual stimulation inspired the other. Given the growing body of evidence that sexual preference is biological, I'd guess that sick sexual tendencies lead to sick porn consumption, not the other way around.

Then, for good measure, Colson intentionally lumps child pornography in with consensual adult pornography:

And those who create porn are now victimizing even the youngest children. Police who seize pornographic films and pictures note that they are seeing X-rated images of toddlers and even babies—this is sickening.

Yes, that's sickening, but it's "those who create child porn" that are doing it, not porn producers generally.

Finally, on a lighter note, I'd question the wording here:

As surprising as it may seem, sexual addiction—like all addictions—represents a deep hunger for God.

Some really smart Ron Paul analysis

2007-10-29T10:30:00.001-05:00

That's really smart as in Stewie from Family Guy. You know, reeeeaaally smaaaaart.

Courtesy AOL's Political Machine:

these libertarian ideas have traction with many Americans, including those who want to keep the races from mingling.

Yup, that's what libertarians stand for! The government telling you who you can and cannot mingle with!

Super-size me (but warn me first)

2007-10-29T10:08:00.001-05:00

This is un-libertarian of me, but I like Matthew Yglesias's case for prominent calorie lists in restaurants:

After all, this won't prevent anyone from buying a Big Mac or some KFC — the only reason for thinking it would be bad for business is that these businesses believe that consumers wouldn't want to eat their products if they were better-informed about them.

My problem with most regulation is that it steps between consenting parties. This just requires that one party be given better information, which at the very least isn't nearly as bad an intrusion.

The only issues would be (A) whatever aesthetic blight a list imposes, especially on fancier places, and (B) the fact that when people indulge an unhealthy instinct -- and face it, the guy walking into a McDonald's already knows its not good for him -- they'd rather not be constantly reminded of it. Without a new law, if someone who's health-conscious really wants a list, he can request it or look it up online. Or do what he knows is healthiest and avoid restaurant food whenever possible.

Somebody shoot me

2007-10-28T15:18:00.001-05:00

Reason.tv has Ron Paul's New Hampshire ad. Boy is it bad. Bad acting, bad script, bad organization, bad choice of talking points, bad directing. Bad.

Let the bodies hit the flooooooooor

2007-10-24T13:04:00.001-05:00

I remember, from my days as an Iraq war-supporting college student, heading out with some fellow conservatives to counter a bunch of anti-war protesters. We played a CD -- including Saddam's "I Can Change" song from South Park -- but it wasn't until we got there that we realized we should have added Drowning Pool's heavy-metal hit "Bodies" ("Let the bodies hit the floor!").

Anyhow, apparently a lot of military folks got the same idea, and the band even has a new pro-soldier song, Shawn Macomber reports in the Spectator. It's a very interesting story; they say they get a great response whenever they play near a military base.

I was supposed to see the band open for Disturbed around the time "Bodies" came out, but they had to cancel to shoot a music video. At the show, a bunch of members of all the other bands came out to play "Bodies" in Drowning Pool's stead, which was pretty cool. If I recall correctly, the bill also included Systematic and Stereomud.

Chuck Norris: Don't pick president based on hotel rooms

2007-10-24T10:12:00.001-05:00

From his WND column on Huckabee:

It's time to quit choosing our leaders based solely upon charisma or one strong suite...

Grammar tip here. I am such a jerk.

Everything ever reported about the Jena 6 was wrong?

2007-10-24T09:07:00.001-05:00

This CS Monitor story by a local reporter seems a bit far-fetched, but the guy's been covering the case since the very beginning, so he'd be the one who'd know about this stuff.

Among the more explosive accusations of media incompetence:

--There was no "whites-only" tree at Jena. When a student asked about it, it was as a joke to drag out an assembly. The next day, when nooses were found hanging from the tree, they were a prank by white students aimed at other white students on the rodeo team. According to the expulsion committee, the white kids had "no knowledge that nooses symbolize the terrible legacy of the lynchings of countless blacks in American history. When informed of this history by school officials, they became visibly remorseful because they had many black friends. Another myth concerns their punishment, which was not a three-day suspension, but rather nine days at an alternative facility followed by two weeks of in-school suspension, Saturday detentions, attendance at Discipline Court, and evaluation by licensed mental-health professionals."

--The DA didn't make intimidating comments toward black students. "When District Attorney Reed Walters spoke to Jena High students at an assembly in September...according to Walters, 'two or three girls, white girls, were chit-chatting on their cellphones or playing with their cellphones right in the middle of my dissertation...I said, "Look, I can be your best friend or your worst enemy. With the stroke of a pen I can make your life miserable so I want you to call me before you do something stupid."'"

I'm not sure how much to believe some of this. A high school student in a biracial community -- which, by all accounts, has had its share of racial incidents -- doesn't know that nooses have racial significance? Also, if the media story was so off that there isn't even a tree known for the white kids hanging around by it, why did it take so long for someone from the community to say so?

Journalists are so awesome with statistics

2007-10-23T12:06:00.001-05:00

Megan McArdle quotes a correction from the AP:

LONDON (AP) — In an Oct. 11 story about a study examining global abortion trends from 1995 to 2003, The Associated Press erroneously reported that nine out of 10 women will have an abortion before age 45. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute in the United States and the World Health Organization calculated that an average woman would have 0.9 abortions in her reproductive lifetime (between the ages of 15 and 44), given currently prevailing rates. The figure was arrived at by combining higher abortion rates in some areas and lower abortion rates in others; some women have multiple abortions and others have none. The rate is an average and it does not mean that nine out of 10 women worldwide have abortions.

For the record, in the U.S., about one in three women will have an abortion before turning 45. Which is disturbing, because to raise the total abortions to .9 per woman, the average woman who has a single abortion has to have almost three of them.

We don't need no (Ivy League) education

2007-10-23T10:48:00.001-05:00

Thomas Sowell has an interesting NRO piece about how the "top colleges" aren't always the best places to learn:

Big-name professors are unlikely to be teaching you freshman English or introductory math. Some may not be teaching you anything at all, unless and until you go on to postgraduate study.

In other words, the people who generated the prestige which attracted you to the college may be seen walking about the campus but are less likely to be seen standing in front of your classroom when you begin your college education.

That's certainly true. Prestige and rankings are not good measures of professor performance.

There are few if any value-added measures used to evaluate colleges; I didn't have to take a standardized test before and after getting my journalism degree so people could see how much I learned. Instead, most rankings measure input, or the high-school successes of each year's freshman class. And as Sowell points out, "selectivity" is determined by the percentage of applications rejected, so colleges encourage kids to apply even when they certainly won't get in.

But I think he overstates his case:

Some students get sunk deep into depression when they are notified in April that they have been rejected by some Ivy League school that they had their heart set on. When they are accepted, some parents go deep into debt to finance the education of their offspring at the college of their dreams.

Seldom is either reaction warranted.

Even if a big-name college doesn't teach you anything a different college couldn't have, (A) it has brand recognition and (B) it's proof that you had high enough test scores to get into a big-name school. Most companies aren't allowed to do, say, IQ tests on potential employees, so they use degrees as a proxy. If you apply for a job, an Ivy League name will improve your chances.

Still, this is the first time I've seen some actual data indicating that Ivy League degrees might not be all that necessary, even for high-level accomplishment:

You may never have heard of Harvey Mudd College but a higher percentage of its graduates go on to get Ph.D.s than do the graduates of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or M.I.T. So do the graduates of Grinnell, Reed, and various other small colleges.

Though to play devil's advocate, where do they get those Ph.D.s? In what fields? And how do the incomes match up? I know that some people will go on to graduate programs just to get a big name on their resumes, where B.A.s from the same big-name university can get by without extra schooling. Maybe its not that Harvey Mudd better prepares you for graduate school, but that Harvey Mudd graduates feel like they need another degree to do what they want.

Health care idea

2007-10-22T10:52:00.001-05:00

From Slate:

McCain is challenging fee-for-service medicine, though not to the point of mandating that doctors be put on salary.

I'm against the government mandating that, but wouldn't that be a selling point for a private clinic? Insurance companies, and people buying their own care, would flock to it: "At most clinics, doctors make more money for prescribing more drugs, which means sometimes they give you medicines you don't really need. But at Incentives Care, we pay our doctors on salary so we can keep your costs down."

Is there a good reason this doesn't already happen, or is it just the medical racket at work?

Hitchens a ride to the atheism debate

2007-10-22T08:53:00.000-05:00

I'm all about bashing Christopher Hitchens in The American Spectator, but I disagree with much of this essay from James Bowman.

Here's his idea:

The Hitchens argument in essence boiled down to this: if God existed, He would have to be as much of a liberal humanitarian as I am. Since the misery in the world and the violence in the Bible show that He obviously isn't any kind of a liberal humanitarian, it must be equally obvious that He doesn't exist. Q.E.D. The tautological nature of this argument appeared not to have been noticed...

First of all, a tautological argument is by definition true, provided its component parts are true. To disprove Hitchens, rather than playing logic games (you can't make that argument! It says so right here, in my textbook!), one must argue that (A) God exists, but is not a humanitarian, just like it says in the Bible or (B) the Bible, written by men, does not depict God with perfect, literal accuracy. I'm an agnostic, but personally I'd go with (B). If God really killed the entire human population save Noah and thought it was OK to sell one's daughter into slavery, I'm not sure I'd want to go to heaven.

Bowman prefers (A):

The Biblical characterization of God as "Lord" was explicitly based on...social hierarchies, since it was obvious to everyone up until relatively recent times that the rules applying to lords, if any, were completely different from those applying to ordinary people. Likewise, the metaphor of God's fatherhood drew on the general assumption that fathers could as a matter of course not be bound by the same rules they naturally laid down for their children.

God can treat us like garbage, but we can't do the same in return. As a factual assertion that's fine -- as I said, it's one of the powerful arguments against Hitchens -- but it doesn't speak all that well of worship. Why would I bow to someone who treats me like garbage? Even if I obey him, the rules he's bound by won't make him reward me as he said he would.

Also, Bowman twists words here:

If the law has any force, someone must be above it. Who decides to invoke it, when he does so, and what he decides to do with it are questions that can only be determined by someone who is above it, at least to that extent. The law does not enforce itself.

In common parlance, being "above the law" doesn't mean you're a police officer or a judge who's enforcing the law; it means you can break the law and get away with it. They're two completely different things.

BET lets Jena Six defendants present award?

2007-10-20T07:44:00.001-05:00

I've said before that the Jena school handled racism poorly, and that attempted murder charges against the Jena Six were a bit much. But that certainly doesn't mean the six kids who ganged up on one, knocking him unconscious, are civil rights models.

BET disagrees:

As Jones and Purvis walked onto the stage at the Atlanta Civic Center, where the awards show was filmed on Saturday, they were greeted by a standing ovation.
"They don't look so tough, do they?" [Katt Williams, the comedian who introduced them] joked as the teens stepped up to the podium.

I wish I had something incisive to say about what this means for racism and anti-racism in our country, but I'm just flabbergasted. This cannot help their cause -- if anything, it promotes the O.J. trial notion that the black community will stand by its members even when they're guilty.

Williams offered this as a disclaimer:

By no means are we condoning a six-on-one beat-down.

By giving two of the kids who administered said beat-down a platform? By enabling them to meet and give an award to Kanye West, one of the biggest names in hip-hop? Yes you are.

On universal health care done right

2007-10-18T13:00:00.001-05:00

Someone from a Republican campaign, please read this Ronald Bailey article. Please.

The newest (old) non-racism story

2007-10-18T08:40:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reports:

Home buyers in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods in New York City were more likely to get their mortgages last year from a subprime lender than home buyers in white neighborhoods with similar income levels, according to a new analysis of home loan data by researchers at New York University.

...

The analysis showed that even when median income levels were comparable, home buyers in minority neighborhoods were more likely to get a loan from a subprime lender.

But oh, wait:

The data does not include details on borrowers' assets, down payments or debt loads, all key factors in mortgage lending. And comparing neighborhoods is inexact; the typical borrower in one may differ from a typical borrower in another.

What exactly is the point of such a study, if not to push a political agenda in the media? Data has shown time and again that blacks and whites of the same income levels differ in other indicators of credit-worthiness. Thomas Sowell called this an old story two years ago.

Kudos to the NYT, though, for at least pointing out the severe flaw. Even if the paper headlined the story "Study Finds Disparities in Mortgages by Race."

Hat tip Steve Sailer.

Ministry review up at antiMusic

2007-10-16T13:55:00.001-05:00

antiMusic has my review of Ministry's latest.

Main point:

Ministry managed to create an entirely engrossing body of work with a perfectly lifeless rhythm section. The computer-generated drums are never meant to sound anything but. The guitars, always recorded through a ridiculously brittle distortion, hammer their repetitive riffs home with metronomic precision. With every track, Ministry sticks a finger in the eye of the basic, sloppy, improvisational rock 'n' roll ethic.

...

All told, after a few listens, Ministry's music is quite innovative and even catchy. So it's a little disappointing that their new release, The Last Sucker, is their last - the record's an hour-long blast of furious, Bush-hating energy that showcases all the above strengths.

A fast-track take on Coulter

2007-10-16T08:35:00.001-05:00

I haven't said much yet about Ann Coulter's shocking belief that her religion is the right one, so in a perfect world other people would convert to it. By this point other people have basically explained my thoughts, so I'll quote them.

From the Spectator:

In fact, the only one exposing blind spots in his education was the host. If he does not know that Christians believe Jews are lacking something by not accepting Jesus as a savior, if he does not know that Jews believe Christians are to one degree or another in error by believing Jesus can save them, he is ignorant of the most basic facts of religious life.

It's funny to me how tolerant-of-all-religions secularists are, until someone actually believes the basic tenets of her faith. If you don't think your religion is the right one, why would you invest so much time in it? And if you had that belief and cared about other people, why wouldn't you want them to convert? I'm not religious, but that doesn't make any sense to me.

And David Bernstein on why this isn't offensive to Jews:

In any event, my understanding is that the official position of the Catholic Church until Vatican II was that to be "saved" Jews needed to convert to Christianity, and that this remains the official position of some, but not all, Protestant denominations. As a Jew, this doesn't bother me in the least, so long as my non-Christian status doesn't lead to discrimination, but is merely a matter of theological dispute. If Christianity is a proselytizing religion that believes that all people should become Christians because that's what God wants, and that Jews are not exempted from that general principle, why should I care? Christians don't have to think my religious tradition is valid, just so long as they don't make me wear a yellow star or ban me from owning land (common medieval restrictions on Jews resulting from religious discrimination).

Explaining the Africa-U.S. AIDS discrepancy

2007-10-15T08:37:00.001-05:00

For awhile I've been kind of confused about the differences in AIDS between America and Africa. Here, victims are primarily homosexual males, but in Africa there's a heterosexual epidemic.

Finally, an explanation:

Epstein's view is that the cause of the AIDS crisis in Africa is what has now become known in AIDS jargon as "concurrent" relationships. Africans have about the same number of sexual partners as anyone else; they are just more likely to have more than one long-term partner at a time. Crucially, both men and women have multiple partners, in contrast to other poor societies where men may often stray but women's monogamy is jealously guarded.

...

For many reasons, concurrent, long-term sexual relationships are much more dangerous for the spread of AIDS than serial monogamy. When both men and women have concurrent relationships, they are part of a huge web of sexual partners by which the HIV virus moves through the population. Long-term relationships are much more likely to spread AIDS than one-night stands because of the low probability of a single sex act spreading the virus.

...

Her explanation based on concurrent relationships has gained broad acceptance and has been confirmed by mathematical modeling and by surveys of sexual habits in various countries; but one still wishes the evidence was a little more extensive for such a critical issue.

Not sure I understand the writer's skepticism -- it sounds like there's quite a bit of evidence for this theory indeed -- but there you have it.

Hat tip Steve Sailer.