How Cheap are Economists?

"You might be an economist if you refuse to sell your children because they might be worth more later."

-Yoram Bauman

State of the World 2010

Bruce Sterling gives his annual State of the World interview on the Well.

Quick summary: Something of a downer--we aren't facing groovy teenage problems like a war or a natural disaster, so much as we're facing middle aged crises of befuddlement and general worn-down-ness. Your best option is to move to Brazil and join some kind of post-post-modern tribe of artisans and disaster recovery experts.

MMX

Welcome to the new year, people.

Look sharp, and remember to be kind.

Bigger, Faster Bioprinter

Organovo and Invetech announce new 3-D organ and tissue printer.

To Irony and Back Again

Morgan Meis on Zadie Smith and the nature of writing in the current age:

The trick then is to be incredibly serious about the need and incredibly flexible about the means for getting there. In these days of collapsing boundaries and standards, it is essential both to keep your cool and to keep throwing yourself in the mix. This requires a certain intellectual nonchalance. But that nonchalance should never be confused with indifference or cynicism. There's a term I sometimes throw out among friends. I first heard it from the lips of my sometimes Sybil-like wife, the miraculous Shuffy: neo-sincerity. To me, the most important thing about neo-sincerity is the fact that it is earned. It is sincerity gained after first having lost it. The neo-sinceritist is therefore self-aware, lacks the genuine naivety of the first-time sinceritist. In neo-sincerity, you can never really be innocent of anything. But you've been through the washer of absolute irony and have ended up back at the doors of sincerity with the genuine desire to be let inside, warts, wounds, and all.

One of the two essays that have been passed to me repeatedly this year, along with Brian Eno on the Death of the Uncool. Really great writing about really great writing.

Every Known Photograph 1836-1853

(via DM)

Dresden in 26G pixels

The Canon 5D is possibly the coolest camera ever made for the professional/consumer market*. Here, Holger Schulze captured a 26 gigpixel photomontage of the city of Dresden. (It's zoomable.)

(via Guy K)

*Cooler cameras include the one on the Hubble and some of the repurposed movie cameras Kubrick used, but you are unlikely to get your grubby hands on those, now are you?

The Economists Hit Pandora

Mighty God King reviews Avatar:

ME: You know, I have to admit – the Nav’i look totally natural.
FLAPJACKS: There is no uncanny valley.
ME: You only know that concept because of that one episode of 30 Rock.
FLAPJACKS: So?
ME: I’m just sick of critics who learned a new phrase thanks to Tina Fey and want to show off.
FLAPJACKS: Speaking of that episode of 30 Rock, I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to see the blue aliens doing it.
ME: Oh, quit whining. You barely saw anything.
FLAPJACKS: But now it’s in my head.
ME: Okay, the scientists are totally going about this the wrong way with Giovanni Ribisi, Businessman. They should have been all “this entire planet is a gigantic biological computer more advanced than anything we’ve ever imagined. Think about how much that would be worth.”
FLAPJACKS: Wouldn’t work. Giovanni Ribisi, Businessman, is all about the quarterly profit report. I know this because he said “it’s all about the quarterly profit report” at the start of the movie. He is an Exxon-type guy and you are presenting a Google-type business plan. Ne’er shall the two meet, because despite what people might say about Google, Google is never going to hire mercenaries to kill aliens.
ME: They might hire mercenaries to spy on aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Well, that’s Google for you.

The scary thing is, I heard the phrase about a planet scale biological network that can upload the consciousnesses of the dying, and thought, "they should really tell the business guys that that could be really valuable, so don't, um, fuck it up."

The Year in Reading 2009

The best books of the year, unranked, grouped by Borgesian principles.

Kicking things off at the start of the year, Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes is fantasy the way it should be done. It's a uniquely voiced view of a fully realized world filled with compelling characters. Old North English diction drives an initially fragmented story into coherence; it's like having folk songs sung to you while you rise into dreams. Like everything else from Small Beer Press, it's excellent. Also from Small Beer, Geoff Ryman's The King's Last Song reveals the Cambodia of the 1960's, 1990's and 1100's, through the life story of Jayavarman VII.

Another set of books involved various young people not wanting to go to Brown. Peter Cameron's Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You follows 18 year old James Schweik (aka Bryce Canyon) around Manhattan in search of love, or maybe just some peace and quiet. In a nonfiction effort, Brownie Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple, takes a semester off from Brown to go to Liberty University for his semester abroad. Hanging behind the book are the questions of whether there are two groups of people (saved and unsaved) or only one? Is your membership in the group dependent on your own choice, or does someone else get to choose for you? The spiritual cliffhanger hinges on whether a nice liberal boy from Oberlin, Ohio will wake up one day to find himself converted on the one hand, or whether the Liberty kids will move closer to mainstream America on the other. The same questions of identity lie behind Chandler Burr's You Or Someone Like You. Main character Anne Rosenbaum draws her strength from literature, and from being, simply, human in the face of family trials. I recommended this book to more people than any other this year. Lev Grossman's Quentin Coldwater forsakes Princeton rather than Brown to attend Brakebill's College of Magical Pedagogy in The Magicians. It's been described as JK Rowling and CS Lewis meet Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt by too many reviewers, but...there you go. If Hogwarts were populated by snarky twentysomething malcontents with encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture (and Etruscan linguistics), it would look like Brakebills. Marvelous and also Very Bad Things ensue.

Books about books filled much of the past year. Nicholas Basbanes' true stories of book collectors, librarians, publishers and others of the "gently mad" and Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night are the sort of nourishing books that give one new perspective and the vim to face the day.

Elsewhere in nonfiction, out of a number of very good books about strategy, thinking and human endeavor, Winifred Gallagher's Rapt and Daniel Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky proved the most insightful of the bunch, covering attention and neurovariant thinking as well as broader issues of cognition and strategy. In history, The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham, covers an era that I had little prior knowledge of (I guess that's why they call them the Dark Ages, nudge, nudge.) In history of science, The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson about uber-scientist and gadfly Joseph Priestley and The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes cover the 18th/19th century scientific revolution in thrilling detail.

Carl Jung was, quite literally, a wizard, or as much of one as it was possible to be at the start of the 20th century, based on the contents and construction of his Liber Novus/Red Book, which represents both a harrowing journal of his encounter with the unconsious mind using techniqes of active imagination (in which dream imagery is brought up ito te conscious mind), and a stunningly beautiful work of art. An illuminated manuscript kept in the family vaults for fifty years following Jung's death, the story of how it came to be published was also one of the best articles of the year.

On the to-read stack are several widely recommended books: Let The Great World Spin, by Colum McCann is up next.

Liberman, Landrieu are Too Tired to Do their Jobs

Perhaps they, and the other whining "centrists" should retire if the Senate is too hard for them.

Why CDO's Can't be Priced

Paper of the day:

Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products Arora, et al.

via Felix. Interesting passage from his commentary:

...the solution to model risk isn’t more complex models, its less reliance on models altogether. And anybody who applied a simple smell test to the mortgages underlying the CDOs in question — rather than deciding instead to trust various quants both in-house and at the ratings agencies — would have come to the right conclusion without any computing power at all.

In other words, strategic thinking beats statistical thinking here too.

Quote of the Day

Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first glass and giving them free drinks.

-Bruce Schneier

Overtime

Merry Christmas from Charlie Stross.

Obama's Inherited Deficit

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Some critics charge that the new policies pursued by President Obama and the 111th Congress generated the huge federal budget deficits that the nation now faces. In fact, the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the economic downturn together explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years

As Ezra Klein notes, Congressional Republicans want to use the huge deficits to browbeat the Democrats into...what, exactly? More tax cuts? Bigger deficits? Electoral defeat, yes, but there doesn't seem to be any realistic plan coming out of the minority to budget responsibly. In fact, short term frugality (through near-term spending cuts) will lead to a crippled recovery, and therefore a larger deficit in absolute terms along with a smaller economy for the coming decade.

That's not fiscal conservatism. That's holding your breath to try to get your way.

Happy Festivus!

For the rest of us.

And now, the airing of the grievances.

The Future Is Now, Vol LXXVIII: Waking Up the Stem Cells

Amy Wagers wants to isolate the wound healing factors that are present in young animals that promote rapid healing and recovery.

Recently she has discovered a “partial pathway,” previously undescribed in the blood system, that is involved in the process of repair. “The reason we thought the factor that awakens muscle stem cells might be in the blood,” she explains, “is that organ systems decline globally with age, which implies that any signal has to reach many different locations.” A good place to look for a universal signal such as that, she reasoned, is in the blood.

In fact, her work has already shown that exposing an old animal to the blood of a young animal restores function to progenitor cells in a variety of tissues, not only in skeletal muscle. She is now collaborating with other Harvard laboratories to study such effects in the pancreas, liver, brain, and heart. “This might be a more broadly applicable mechanism,” she says, “an inroad for discovering pathways that can enhance repair activity.” In some cases, Wagers thinks, induced repair mechanisms that fail with age might overlap with genetic disorders, so that studying these pathways could advance research on cures for certain diseases. At the very least, she suspects that the “kinds of molecules we discover that enhance endogenous repair activity” could someday play an important role in readying tissues for cell therapy, once that field is mature. Adds Melton, “This has gotten us thinking more about not just fixing the human body when it is broken, but about how to harness the natural activity of stem cells for homeostatic repair to keep us healthy. We’re not there yet, but I think that is where we are headed.”

(via 3QD)

Danny MacAskill & His Bike vs. Edinburgh

(via NYmag)

The Biology of the Na'vi

The Na'vi, Avatar's humanoids, were built for looks, not so much for their local environment. For example, they have breasts, big eyes and sternocleidomastoids because human moviewatchers like these features, even though the Na'vi are described as being non-mammalian in other respects.

If you look closely, you'll see that the Na'vi have a little muscle running down their necks. We've got them, too—it's called the sternocleidomastoid muscle—and it's a uniquely mammalian feature. Ours make a very distinctive V-shape, and when creature designers want an alien to seem attractive and familiar to its human viewers, they often slap one on. "Even C3PO has it, in the form of little pistons on his neck. Watch Star Trek: The good guys always have them, and the bad guys don't. It's a classic alien designer trick."

Actually, I wonder if they aren't actually plants, a la the Delvians of Farscape, another bunch of blue skinned, sexy aliens.

More: Mark Morford on the kinky hotness of the Na'vi.

Burning the Brand

Obama came in with the best brand as a candidate in the last fifty years; through mismanagement, he's frittered a lot of the value away. It costs a lot to create a brand, and once it's gone, it's almost impossible to rebuild. Here's neuroscientist Drew Westen on the topic:

Somehow the president has managed to turn a base of new and progressive voters he himself energized like no one else could in 2008 into the likely stay-at-home voters of 2010, souring an entire generation of young people to the political process. It isn't hard for them to see that the winners seem to be the same no matter who the voters select (Wall Street, big oil, big Pharma, the insurance industry). In fact, the president's leadership style, combined with the Democratic Congress's penchant for making its sausage in public and producing new and usually more tasteless recipes every day, has had a very high toll far from the left: smack in the center of the political spectrum.

What's costing the president and courting danger for Democrats in 2010 isn't a question of left or right, because the president has accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center. If this were an ideological issue, that would not be the case. He would be holding either the middle or the left, not losing both.

What's costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting.

The problem is not that his record is being distorted. It's that all three have more than a grain of truth. And I say this not as one of those pesky "leftists." I say this as someone who has spent much of the last three years studying what moves voters in the middle, the Undecideds who will hear whichever side speaks to them with moral clarity.

Read the whole article.

Keith Olberman on the Healthcare Bill

Ruined Senate bill is unsupportable.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good for Keith.
(transcript)