Death from natural causes

I am often in a conversation with someone about some medicine, dietary supplement, or food additive when they make some point like "its not chemical, its all natural, it's from a plant so it can't be bad for you!" At this point a little bit of me dies and I get the urge to go track down their high school biology or chemistry teacher and demand they do a better job.

Plants have had several billions of years experience with chemical warfare. Under most circumstances they really don't want to be eaten so they have developed some of the nastiest poisons known to man to protect themselves. A great example is the hemlock that killed Socrates. Others include Ricin, which you will likely hear about in connection to terrorism and Nicotine. Tobacco kills more people than any other plant I know of... Really, we all know this. Very few of us go out in fields and eat random plants, even I usually know what I am eating when I do because it is really dangerous. Extract any chemical out of one of these random potentially deadly plants and put it in a bottle. Suddenly legions of people will buy into its safety with no further thought.

Skills verses Information.

I played Rock Band the other night. Despite having not played in many months it was nowhere near as painful as the first time I played. In fact it was hard to tell from my playing that I ever took a break at all...

This is hardly a new observation, anyone who has tried to ride a bike after a break of a decade or longer has seen much the same thing. It seems reasonable to me that skills do not degenerate at anywhere near the rate of knowledge. I realized long ago that I seem to be forgetting knowledge at nearly the rate I am learning it. This was easiest to see in my colege bowl scores. Despite learning a great deal in undergrad, my scores in trivia competitions were about the same every year. I forgot my history nearly as fast as I was learning science.

If this is the case it seems that I should be trying as hard as I can to learn new skills rather than new information. Getting better at things like computer programming, drawing, math, public speaking, and so on seems like one of the best uses of my time.

Competing With Peers

I just saw a Bob Herbert article about unemployment rates:

Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

It really does amaze me how much of my competition in dating is really not putting up a fight. College graduation rates are rapidly approaching a 60:40 female to male ratio. A fifth of my age group is unemployed, stuck in endless education, in prison or has given up looking for work. It really does make sense why the girls I date never seem lacking in stories about how pathetic some of their ex boyfriends are.

Over-confidence

Malcolm Gladwell is among my favorite writers. So I may as well pass along this new article of his about overconfidence.

Our criminal justice system has gotten way out of line. It needs to face up to the fact that its primary goal should be turning unproductive members of society into productive ones. Sure there are a few people too dangerous to rehabilitate, but these people are serving life sentences. If we release them we want them to rebuild their lives and be productive. When people have stable lives they are far less likely to comit crimes so everyone comes out safer when we do this.

From this perspective the sex offender policies are insane. How are people expected to rebuild their lives with that hanging over their heads? What is worse, most people on those lists were nonviolent. Common fairly harmless crimes like streaking or statutory rape get you lumped with someone who raped and murdered a six year old. I guarantee your neighbors will assume the later, not the former when they see your name on the list though.

Anyways, the Economist has a great article on this subject.

Decline of War

Slate's article about how we live in the most peaceful time in twelve thousand years says nothing I didn't know. Still I am always excited to see articles that agree with me.

Slaves verses Nukes

The amount of power a person is capable of producing can be easily calculated. Assume a 2000 Calorie diet, convert to Joules then divide by the number of seconds in a day:

[(2000 Calories)*(1000 calories/Calorie)*(4.19Joules/calorie)]/[(24 hours/day)*(60 minutes/hour)*(60 seconds/minute)]= 96W

So round up to 100W to make the math easy.

Now there were about four million slaves in America at the time of the Civil War. A reasonable approximation of the most work those slaves could do is four million times 100W or 4 x 10^8W or 400MW


The San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant that Southern California Edison owns is capable of generating 2150MW(2 reactors). So this Single power plant does more than five times the work all the slaves in the south did! Since slaves can't work nearly the hours of nuclear reactors, many of those slaves were too old or young to work, and are notoriously lazy the gap is actually much bigger. No wonder just about the only slaves remaining are sex slaves, it is a whole not cheaper to build a nuclear power plant than feed and house twenty million slaves. Sex is about the only thing a slave can provide for less cost.