Cost of Living

The first cost you see when moving to a new area is rent. So seeing that rent in LA was significantly more expensive than in Ithaca I assumed the total cost of living would go up by a similar amount. So far as I can tell the opposite is true. Costs of most things here seem cheaper. For example when buying tires for my car I managed to get them for half what they were in Ithaca. Plane tickets are substantially cheaper. At a store of similar quality food is around the same price. There are however more low end stores that cater mostly to immigrants. These seem to be a lot cheaper and really aren't of that poor quality. Restaurants generally seem the same price, gas is more expensive but not by a stunning amount. Since my rent trippled I imagine I will spend more here, but it really isn't by a huge amount.

Spanish Radio

My iphone stubbornly refuses to play Audiobooks, and I really have trouble stomaching most radio stations. So I started listening to a Spanish music station. I don't speak Spanish, two years of high school Spanish taught me a few words but even a conversation using only those few words is too much for me to handle. I just can't think as fast as they can talk. I also can not understand much of what is said well enough to know whether or not i know the word.

After a few weeks of this a few interesting things have happened. First, it is a lot less annoying. Now the station I listen to plays an absurd amount of Shakira, so it isn't quite polka, but it still started out being really hard to listen to. Now I seem to constantly having Spanish songs stuck in my head and it is starting to make sense how people willingly listen to this stuff

My brain is also starting to put in gaps between words. People hear gaps between words not because they objectively exist, on an oscilloscope they can't be seen, but entirely because our brain adds them. So when I first started listening it was a jumbled mess. Now it is turning into distinct words. This means it at least is theoretically possible for me to google words until I understand what they are talking about.

401k

I finally am signed up for a retirement plan for the first time in my life. I put 6% of my income into it and SCE puts in another 6%. I will likely up that to 9% at some point but by far the best investment I can make is to pay off my credit card debt. After that I will worry about whether my retirement savings should be higher.

I think what I did with my contributions might make some financial planner lecture me, but I am willing to take the bet that I know enough I won't get burned. Pretty much I am trying to be as diversified as possible while paying as low of fees as possible.

The bulk of the money, 70%, went to an index fund. Philosophically these are my favorite investment. On average after fees they are something like the 65th percentile of mutual funds. They however will never be the best mutual fund because they only track the market, while other mutual funds are roughly normally distributed just below the market average meaning a random few significantly beat the market in any given year while most match the market only before fees are taken out. My index fund only wastes 0.05% of its money in fees, where as some of the other funds were paying over 1%. Which means i lose a lot less money to wall street. Even though 1% doesn't sound like much after compounding forty years it is huge!

Diversification makes a lot of sense to me. Let the good investments balance the bad. For that reason my next 20% of contributions went to international mutual funds. It was split between one primarily investing in European stocks and one primarily in Asian stocks. To pick the funds I wanted I again simply found the international options I had with the lowest fees, 0.6% and 0.75%

The last 10% went to bonds. I know nothing about bonds. I simply looked at the graphs to find the three that seemed to fluctuate the least and split the 10% between them. Really I don't like the idea of investing in bonds at my age. But if the stock market chaos continues I would like to know I at least have some retirement savings that beat inflation. I imagine in a decade or so I will retreat from putting as much new money into stocks and buy bonds. Stocks are great if you have forty years to wait but over a twenty year period I don't feel so safe. Over a ten year period stocks terrify me.

Space Elevator on the Moon

While camping I was discussing the idea of a space Elevator on the Moon. Justus quite rationally pointed out that unlike the earth there is no way to put something in geosynchronous orbit around the moon. This is because it is tidally locked with the earth and doesn't spin. This means there is nowhere to put a space elevator on the moon. Now, i was sure i had heard plans about putting a space elevator on the moon, so it took me a while to believe him, but the more I thought about it the more obvious it was he was correct.

So i went to wikipedia's page on a lunar space elevator. Sure enough, Justus was correct, it can't be in Geosynchronous orbit. However I was right that it is feasible. It just has to have its center of mass at L1 or L2. At these points on either side of the moon the gravity from the Earth and moon, as well as centrifugal forces add up to zero. What makes this idea most exciting is that it could be made from Kevlar! Many existing materials are strong enough to build it.

Cancer Grants

The cancer grant system is a bit funny. The other day the New York Times had an interesting article on the subject. Some of it I found rather absurd while at Cornell:

Some experienced scientists have found a way to offset the problem somewhat. They do chancy experiments by siphoning money from their grants.

“In a way, the system is encrypted,” Dr. Yamamoto said, allowing those in the know to wink and do their own thing on the side.

Great discoveries have been made with N.I.H. financing without manipulating the system, Dr. Klausner said.

“But,” he added, “I actually believe that by and large it is despite, rather than because of, the review system.”

This was really my experience. You can't get a grant without preliminary data. You can't get preliminary data without a grant. That chicken and egg problem often gets solved by using your last grant to fund your next research. Usually this means just a little siphoning on the side, but sometimes it gets more absurd. I have even known of professors who would complete research before even submitting the grant request. Then they would use their new grant to fund a new set of completely different research. This way they develop a track record of doing exactly what they say they will. They also don't get bogged down in doing only research that they can get grants for. Really though, that is the state the system encourages. Until they make grants entirely for "preliminary data" easier to get things stay that way.


The bigger issue with cancer specifically is that they waste too many resources on research that is too theoretical. The research I was doing for example wasn't going to matter for decades if ever. Instead they need to be throwing as many patients as possible into clinical trials to test every minor thing that can be done to improve care.

Evolutionary Psychology didn't go Anywhere.

There seems to have been a few articles trying to bash evolutionary psychology recently. They make it sound like the field has died and is being replaced by something else. In reality no such thing is happening. Simply scientists are testing evolutionary psychology and figuring out what is actually in our evolutionary interest. Here is an example using rape:

But how to test the claim that rape increased a man's fitness? From its inception, evolutionary psychology had warned that behaviors that were evolutionarily advantageous 100,000 years ago (a sweet tooth, say) might be bad for survival today (causing obesity and thence infertility), so there was no point in measuring whether that trait makes people more evolutionarily fit today. Even if it doesn't, evolutionary psychologists argue, the trait might have been adaptive long ago and therefore still be our genetic legacy. An unfortunate one, perhaps, but still our legacy. Short of a time machine, the hypothesis was impossible to disprove. Game, set and match to evo psych.

Or so it seemed. But Hill had something almost as good as a time machine. He had the Ache, who live much as humans did 100,000 years ago. He and two colleagues therefore calculated how rape would affect the evolutionary prospects of a 25-year-old Ache. (They didn't observe any rapes, but did a what-if calculation based on measurements of, for instance, the odds that a woman is able to conceive on any given day.) The scientists were generous to the rape-as-adaptation claim, assuming that rapists target only women of reproductive age, for instance, even though in reality girls younger than 10 and women over 60 are often victims. Then they calculated rape's fitness costs and benefits. Rape costs a man fitness points if the victim's husband or other relatives kill him, for instance. He loses fitness points, too, if the mother refuses to raise a child of rape, and if being a known rapist (in a small hunter-gatherer tribe, rape and rapists are public knowledge) makes others less likely to help him find food. Rape increases a man's evolutionary fitness based on the chance that a rape victim is fertile (15 percent), that she will conceive (a 7 percent chance), that she will not miscarry (90 percent) and that she will not let the baby die even though it is the child of rape (90 percent). Hill then ran the numbers on the reproductive costs and benefits of rape. It wasn't even close: the cost exceeds the benefit by a factor of 10. "That makes the likelihood that rape is an evolved adaptation extremely low," says Hill. "It just wouldn't have made sense for men in the Pleistocene to use rape as a reproductive strategy, so the argument that it's preprogrammed into us doesn't hold up."

First thing to note is that what they did is figure out what was evolutionary the best thing for members of that society to do. This is exactly what evolutionary psychology tries to do, meaning that if this study is to be taken seriously evolutionary psychology is doing just fine. All that is happening is we are fine tuning our understanding about what selective pressures are within our history.

The results are otherwise blindingly obvious. They found a society with no rapes, and found that rape wasn't an evolutionary advantage for those people. Sounds to me like the people are exactly following what you would expect based on evolutionary psychology. The rapists were bred out of that particular culture. To then say that rape is never an evolutionary advantage based on that example is quite silly though. To have any interest at all you would have to look at a situation where there were actual rapes, preferably lots of them. For example: did the Russian soldiers who raped something like a million Germans during their invasion of world war two gain an evolutionary advantage over those who abstained? Almost certainly, there were no significant costs as they would never face retribution from these women, and many of them ended up with children they never would have had otherwise. This has been true in times of war for as long as history has been recorded. Another great example would be slave masters in the south. They faced no costs, and significant evolutionary gain by being rapists.

All this study shows is that people are pretty good at evaluating costs and benefits from behavior. In a civilation like the one they studied, or ours for that matter, rape is rarely going to get you anywhere. So the vast majority of men are quite predictably not rapists.

The evolutionary psychology does have a great deal of predictive power: It explains why the vast majority of rapists are male, and vast majority of victims female. It explains why the median age of a rape victim is 23 which not coincidently happens to be right about at peak fertility (for comparison the median age of a murder victim is 29). It explains why women over 50 are only 3% of rape victims despite being a third of the population. It also happens to explain why most men are not rapists, just as it explains why some are. Sure the predictions of evolutionary psychology will change as further experimental evidence comes along. But the field as a whole will still exist, and explain a great deal.

Still Getting Fatter

For some reason I was under the impression that obesity rates had stabilized. Apparently I was wrong:

Adult obesity rates increased in 23 U.S. states last year and did not fall in a single state, an annual survey released on July 1 found. Adult obesity rates now exceed 25% in 31 states, up from 28 states last year and 19 the year before that.

Adult obesity rates now exceed 20% in 49 states plus the District of Columbia. Only Colorado, where 18.9% of the population is obese, falls below the 20% mark. Still, in 1991, no state had an obesity rate above 20%.