From Yahoo News: WASHINGTON - The economic costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are estimated to total $1.6 trillion — roughly double the amount the White House has requested thus far, according to a new report by Democrats on Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

The report, released Tuesday, attempted to put a price tag on the two conflicts, including "hidden" costs such as interest payments on the money borrowed to pay for the wars, lost investment, the expense of long-term health care for injured veterans and the cost of oil market disruptions.
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Fair enough, actually, as an estimation of the *costs* of the war. But they haven't attempted to balance that with the *gains* of the war, so really it's meaningless. What about spurred economic activity due to the war, military manufacturing, jobs created for Americans, and the potential returns from investsments that have been made in reconstruction efforts? I'm not an economist, and I have no idea what these "hidden gains" might be, but I'm sure they total to more than $0.00, which is what the Democrats are implying when they went about tallying hidden costs.

If they'd made a good-faith effort to look at gains as well as losses, the net loss would be a much more potent statistic.

It's not just the war either. Climate change folks need to do this. Sure there may be increased costs to society from the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, land lost to rising seas, species loss, and a slew of public health problems due to flood conditions, increased energy expenditures for heating and cooling, etc. But perhaps grasses or C4 plants (that includes corn and rice) are more productive under higher temperatures? Perhaps growing seasons for some temperate crops will be extended? All plants need CO2 to photosynthesize, but when they open their stomates (basically air- and water- tight pores in the leaves that can open and close) to let CO2 in, they lose water vapor as it evaporates out. Under low water conditions, plants may not be able to photosynthesize as much as they could if they didn't have to conserve water. But with more CO2 in the air, the plants can get more bang for each second they have their stomates open. Under some conditions of heat, water availability, and sunlight, some crops may grow better with more CO2 in the air. (This benefit is NOT likely to be of the same magnitude as the costs of climate change, but it may be a real, measurable effect).

Any attempt to tally costs without equal zeal spent on discovering off-setting benefits is an unscientific and political scam. Same goes for reporters or former Presidents elect Presidential candidates who quickly hand-wave away the potential benefits while schooling us on the costs. That won't do. Give us a *number* for the benefits, say 4 cents on every dollar of costs, and more people will listen. Make the effort to always always report the offsetting number (benefits, when you're reporting about costs; costs, when your reporting on benefits). Should be journalism 101, but I rarely see it done in practice.

In One City: A Declaration of Interdependance (kindof a Meditation 101, for the iPod generation), Ethan Nichtern confesses: Sometimes I have to mindfully watch myself fall into the damaging rut of a particular habit around twenty million times before I begin to not crash into it so easily. That's a potent demonstration of free will, if you ask me. Making a decision between soda A or soda B might be the working of free will, or of random chance, or of ribonucleic pre-destiny. Who knows? But if one can watch a habit that's so ingrained that one continually falls prey to it despite wanting desperately to change, and over the course of so many failiures that any reasonable empiricist would declare defeat, notice an inkling of change, well that my friend, is the power of will prevailing over habit, destiny, or hard-wiring.

There are many ways in which I fail to change myself. Reminding myself of them just might make a difference on the twenty-millionth iteration:

1. I'd rather sit at a bench as a pipette-monkey, potentially helping a lab learn something new, than be a code-jockey
2. I'd rather clean droppings out of the Baboon exhibit at the zoo (that's a reference to David Brin's Earth by the way), in the company of (and with access to) vets, wildlife biologists, conservationists, scientists, and general students and lovers of The Creation, than be a pipette-monkey.
3. Meditation is a powerful agent of both change and acceptance for me. It is demonstrably, for me, The Answer. I hardly ever practice it with the zeal that I apply to physical training like skating or martial arts though. That's bass-ackward.
4. Mind matters most.
5. connecting with others is deeply important to me. I find it easiest to connect through writing. So why the fuck am I not making my writing more important in my life than just leaving behind a trail of throw-away blog postings?
6. much more to come

After several translations, it still makes sense:

Mind proceeds all phenomena,
Mind matters most,
Everything is mind made.


If within an impure mind,
You speak or act,
Suffering follows you,
As the cartwheel follows,
The foot of the draft animal.

If with a pure mind,
You speak or act,
Then happiness follows you,
As a shadow that never departs.

- First words of Dhammapada

When I read that as a kid it sounded frightening: "follow moral authority, or karma will punish you". When I read it as a college student, it sounded simplistic: "don't drink, don't fuck, don't masturbate, or else. Or else what? Or else some force that doesn't exist will punish you using mechanisms that are physically impossible and for reasons that are psychologically suspect". I hadn't discovered meditation yet. As a meditor, it reads like "Just observe: your possibilities are far far beyond anything you can concieve, and so keep watch on your own limitations, moment to moment, welcoming them with love, till they fucking dissolve. Momentarilly. Or perhaps not at all, this time. Just Observe".

On page F6 in the health section of Tuesday's New York Times is an aprox. 200 word article: "Abstinence-Only Programs Not Found to Prevent H.I.V.". I'd skimmed the main "A" section of the paper that gives international and national stories, and hadn't seen an article there. Surely this is bigger news, in a country that still practices abstinence-only health education, than the front page article devoted to Brooke Astors' passing?

Anyway, the facts reported in The Times are that a study was published in the August issue of the British Medical Journal comparing abstinance-only programs to various controls, including no treatment. Abstinence-only had no effect positive or negative towards STIs, pregnancy, unprotected sex, or the age of first sexual experience. I'll have to take a gander at the actual journal article to tease out what exactly their control groups included in addition to "no treatment" groups.

The lead author of the study is quoted in The Times as saying: "It appears that this evidence base is frequently neglected in debates over abstinence-based prevention". No kidding.

Since I wasted time reading the NYT most e-mailed article, which was about the science of religion, I might as well share my reactions, which I conscientiously wrote up while reading, thinking the article would be worth the many pages it was printed on. Ultimately, the article fell short of expectation. Studying the evolution of religion is interesting, but it's both harder than, and secondary to, studying the science of how religion, brain, and culture intersect in today's world. Whether or not religion was evolutionarily adaptive is independent of how religion affects practitioners and non-practitioners today. The biological evolution of religion is also an incredibly complex study, and valiantly try as the author did, sie could not do it justice in the space provided hir.

Indeed my favorite part of the article had nothing to do with the topic of religion; it was the ( biographical note about how Atran decided to become an Anthropologist )

And now, my reactions to some the article, which if they are worth anything, will convince you not to waste even more of your time in reading the full text of the NYT Magazine piece:

( "To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.”" )

Begs the question of emotion. If emotional attachment evolved first, perhaps belief in afterlife eased the emotional transition at times of death, which might have otherwise led to non-adaptive conditions (depression, or perhaps shying away form future emotional attatchment). Perhaps, *cognitive* religious belief is an epiphenomenon of *emotional* realities?

( "An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold." )

Ok, but first part of this (swaying, singing, bowing…) talks about a practice that isn’t nec. Linked with religion. ALSO “religion" is too big a word. Need to discern various functional components of it operating at different levels (physiological/fMRI, logical/cognitive, social, emotional). If studying evolution of “religion” need to look at evolutionarily primitive aspects of religion, not modern ones. Studying developmental psych is important, but don’t confound childhood psychology with psychology of adult hominids evolving religion (or the physiocultural infrastructure for it).

"…according to Wilson. For the group, it might be that a mixture of hardheaded realists and symbolically minded visionaries is most adaptive and that “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel."

Non-sequitur from biological group selection to cultural evolution.

"Even if Wilson is right that religion enhances group fitness, the question remains: Where does God come in? Why is a religious group any different from groups for which a fitness argument is never even offered — a group of fraternity brothers, say, or Yankees fans?"

Exactly.

"Even some neo-atheists aren’t entirely opposed to religion. Sam Harris practices Buddhist-inspired meditation."

Hello? I bet some atheists practice yoga too. Does that make them “unopposed to religion”?

"No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition."

How does that follow from the rest of the article? Does the writer truly belive this, or was sie explicitly trying to please hir readership, or was sie unwittingly impelled to make a theistically defined poetic conclusion to an article about “the human condition”?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7442915

Apparently alligators respond to the note b-flat.

What the story misses, is that the frequency used for B-flat has varied by several notes-worth through history, and will vary from orchestra-to-orchestra as well. So which frequencies are they talking about?

NPR also did a story on an experimental study in Child Development showing students have higher achievement when trained believe that intelligence is not a fixed quantity and that it can be trained. I heard about this last semester at a conference on the Science of Diversity. In addition to the long-term achievement effects described in the NPR article, at the conference Nalini Ambady presented an experimental studiy on short-term effects of identity-framing. Female Asian college students were "primed" to the identity of "girl" "control/neutra" or "asian" by taking a questionaire (respectively: "gender?", a survey on campus phones, and "what language do you speak?"), and then asked to take a math test. Girls primed as "asian" did better, followed by the controls, and the gender group worst.

I took pretty good notes on the Science of Diversity conference, and have been meaning to post about it for months (since November!). Someone please bug me about it until I do. But first, I must go skate. :)

Check out the second page of the comic that Neil Gaiman posts an FYE about: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/for-your-enjoyment.html

OK, down to business:

Here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination make the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival".~E.O. Wilson, The Creation

Apparently biologist Richard Dawkins new book, The God Delusion, is a bestseller. My apartment-mate is reading it. Unlike prior books of Dawkins', which described biology, albeit sometimes with decidedly unapologetic arguments against religious objections to evolution, the current book seems to be a polemic against religion's foibles.

In apparent contrast, another star biologist, E.O. Wilson, has written a book titled The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. Some chapters are written in the style of a letter to a Southern Baptist Pastor. Despite what Wilson says are irreconcilable differences, he maintains that he speaks "in a spirit of mutual respect and good will", sharing "many precepts of moral behavior". "Perhaps," he continues, it matters "insofar as it might still affect civility and good manners, [that they] are both Southerners".

Perhaps indeed; while Wilson repeatedly maintains that he is being respectful, much of the book goes on to lay out ecology and evolutionary biology, rather concisely, but in terms that seem to dispense with any literal reading of the Bible, "would God have been so deceptive as to salt the earth with so much misleading evidence?". I suppose it's a Southern thing that two people can completely disagree with each other with smiles on their face and respect in their handshakes?

Why bother? Well, the creation needs taking care of, and Wilson finds that religion and science are the most potent forces able to do so. Perhaps once the ashes of the straw man of intelligent design have been interred, the two forces can find commonality again: the world is wonderful in its workings and we humans really ought to be more respectful of it.

I haven't read it all yet, but Wilson, writing very much from the heart, seems to lose the thread of the argument at times. At such times it seems like yet another biologist writing in praise of nature and pleading for wise conservation. The word "creation" in the title seems to just be marketing -- what enables Wilson to publish redundant information.

But humans don't act on information alone. Al Gore's film succeeds because it invokes emotion. Wilson is very aware of this, and finds it to be the answer to why humans at putting creation in peril. Whence his fanciful quote of the wise alien observer of earth's evolutionary history perceiving H. sapiens as a chimera.

Wilson includes chapters on how to learn and teach biology (big, cross-disciplinary principles first, details to follow) and indeed a chapter on "how to raise a naturalist". Wilson tries for inspiration, and hits the mark at times: "Commit yourself. Returning to passion as the driver of learning, a teacher's dedication is most effective when expressed through both the art of teaching and the demonstrated love of the subject for its own sake... students seek their personal identity, but they also yearn for a cause larger than themselves... Nature is a theater for which such mental development is inherently suited".

I'm not a regular newspaper reader, but when I remember to, I like to buy the NY Times on Tuesdays to check out its Science Section.

This week is a bit of a let-down. The lead article, taking up more than half the front page, is an article about cosmetic hair-transplantation. The text takes up a single column, with the remaining 4/5's of the space taken up by a huge color photo of a balding patient-to-be and some graphics illustrating the process.

Under this "breaking" science story is one recounting that NASA's Cassini probe is nearing the end of its 7 year voyage to explore Saturn and its moons (31 of which are known to exist). Filling out the page is a story describing (and for the most part making light of) how the Americas Psychological Association now suggests writers to replace the word "subject" with "participant" in the case of experiments on humans, and "individuals" in the case of experiments on non-humans.

Page 2 is dominated by passages about pattern recognition haphazardly excerpted from a Dianne Ackerman book. I liked the writing itself, "Many animals scout their surroundings ... But not all. Blue-green algae do not ...". In particular I liked Ackerman's exposition of neurology: a 2nd person account of a person recognizing her mother, from the point of view of neurological events -- "It's not a wolf. It's a woman. The parietal lobe helps you focus on the woman. ... activity in many different regions... [of the brain] feels like a single concept: Mom!". Haphazardly tacked-on to all this are 3 concluding paragraphs about Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, an Austrian actress who left the Reichstadt for Hollywood and in time invented an anti-jamming technology for radio guided torpedoes that is used today to enable wireless communications. Am I weird for thinking that this biographical note could have been a feature story in and of itself?

Page 3 has an interesting biographical story about an retired NASA scientist who is now the director of Seattle's new Science Fiction Museum, and below the fold is short comemntary on some interesting topics: coral death and regeneration (due to algal simbionts), Echolocation as a possible mechanism for sympatric speciation, and the discovery of the youngest known supernoval remnant. However, page 3 also devotes 20% of its space to a seemingly pointless commentary by James Gorman on a Science article that Goman had already done straight reporting on. This seemed extraneous to a Science section.

From what I'm reading in the book A Field Guide for Science Writers, it's becoming increasingly hard for scienc writers to compete succesfully for page space in newspapers, and must find a precarious balance between scientific integrity and relevance on the one side, and public appeal and publishability on the other. Still, it worries me that the weekly Science Section of one of the leading US daily papers must include as much fluff as it did this week.