Industrial biomimicry

Spencer Beebe spoke at Long Now.

Biomimicry: We don't copy nature, we are nature.

Our economic system is a part of the ecological system.

Designing a system where our natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not as a matter of conscious altruism. (Paul Hawken)

Design our economy to sustain and protect.

Headline example-- forestry management. Cut the way Nature does. Small-scale, don't take the best trees, leave the snags. In the end, you make more money, produce higher quality wood, more jobs, can have additional revenue via "tourism" or sports/recreation use of the land, and it lasts FOREVER.

Clearcutting gets you more immediate cash value, but kills all future value of the land.

Daniel Janzen-- Long term "wilderness" conservation

The wilderness is in quotations because DJ does not believe true wilderness exists, at least not in North America since the megafauna was eated some 9000 years ago...

Daniel Janzen speaking at the Long Now foundation, about his role and vision in/for the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in Costa Rica. This is a small patch of land which contains as many species as all of North America, and then some, and which covers a number of habitat zones.

His model for conservation is farming. The wild area should be treated and managed as a farm. He starts with the obvious crop: ecotourists, who pay big bucks to visit, and whose dollars represent a larger part of Costa Rica's income than do all of its other agricultural products combined (and the residents are acutely aware of this). Next, waste management-- he had an orange juice company dump their rinds on old clearcut land, in a layer about a meter deep. The mulch killed all the invasive grasses which had corrupted the land, and soon was full of larvea from a local fly species which eats rotting fruit. The birds were also happy, with so many flies to eat. After one year it was a horrid black ooze. After two, it was a rainforest with a rich loamy soil.

His next big idea-- biological literacy. By this, he means
1) indexing all life by a fixed michocondrial gene (this is being done, worldwide)
2) Cheap, portable sequencing machines so that you, a tourist in the field, can "drop a leg of the bug" into your box and get the species as well as the encyclopedia/field guide/etc knowledge on this bug. My analagy is it would be like a digital camera.

My final thought on biological literacy links it to Jeremy Rifkin's Third Industrial revolution. If the first was based on print, and the second on telephone, and the third on peer-to-peer, then would the fourth be biological literacy?

Middle ages

The middle ages were, for most people, a vast improvement over the axial age. The collapse of empire broke the war/bullion/slavery complex. This also lead to increased political stability, and a localization of political power. The abandonment of the cities meant that each agricultural worker has less mouths to feed. Farm productivity also improved. Coinage evaporated, but the law codes imply a fairly strong credit-based market emerged.

Slavery was widely abolished during this period, not to be re-instituted until the colonial age.

A side question-- where did all the coins go? In India at least, they went into the temples and were melted down to make statues and gilding. Thus to re-create them, an (evil) emperor would have to melt down holy items. Which some did, of course.

coinage and spirituality.

The concept that spirit and flesh were separate seems to emerge with coinage. A tree is living thing, but can be abstracted as wood, which carpentry can turn into a chair, or some other object. A coin is even more abstract, since it turns metal into a collective promise. All in the community agree to accept it, making it transmutable into anything.

Thus peace and community are not things which emerge spontaniously, but need to be stamped onto our baser material nature, just as divine insignia stamped into a block of metal turn it into money. Yet what is money?

Graeber adds that the revolution in spirituality which coincided with the introduction of coinage was NOT the introduction of the concept of a spiritual realm, but rather the introduction of the material realm.

investment ideas/pick of the week

Two companies:

Weight Watchers (WTW), because of their new points plus system.
Today's price: 70.36.


Both Smartwater and Selectamark are privately held. Damn.

The axial age (800 bc-600 ad)

The name comes from Karl Jaspers, German philosopher. The axial age behind with Zoroaster, and Graeber ends it with the death of Mohammed in 632.

Pythagoras, Buddah, and Confucius all lived at the same time, 570-480 bc. The early iron age was a pause between empires, when the world was a chequerboard of diminutive kingdoms and city states. Externally at war, internally filed with political debate, and the formation of dropout culture.

For the first time, the great questions were investigated with reasoned inquiry. And no new philosophical ideas have been added since.

The trinity of philosophers was matched by the development of coinage. Metal moved out of the great storehouses of temples and kings, was broken into tiny pieces, and into everyday use. Why? War.

Coins to pay mercenaries, gold looted by soldiers... The phoenicians, the great merchants, resisted coinage for centuries.

Credit vs bullion

Gold can be distinguished from credit by one essential feature. It can be stolen. More seriously, it requires less trust and less commitment. Hard currency predominates in uncertain times.

Graeber describes long cycles which alternate between virtual and metal money.
3500-800 bc. Credit. Early agrarian empires.
800 bc-600 ad. Metal. Axial age, the rise of coinage.
600-1450 ad. Credit. Middle ages.
1450-1971. Metal. Capitalist empires.

Liberty

Is it the right to do as one will? Our the right to enter into relationships with others?

If the first, then as I own my body, am I my own slave?

Mesopotamia

In early Sumerian society, 3000-2500 bc, women have status roughly equivalent to today. They are well represented in the ranks of all professions, including rulers. Over the next millenia, all this is lost.

War, states, and markets all feed off each other, creating debt, which turns human relationships into commodities. no man wants to see this happen to his women (wife/sister/daughter) and moves to protect them and mark them as not for sale.

Theme park Napolean

Another great idea from my neighbors to the south. From The Economist.


Napoleonland. One ride could recreate the 1812 Russian campaign.

At Moscow’s gates, he suggested in a blog, visitors might don skis and glide down snowy battlefields and later across the Berezina river, scene of a disastrous battle, “surrounded by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses”.

Theme parks are a French political speciality: Puy du Fou, featuring medieval battles, Vulcania, a scientific park, and Futuroscope, boasting new technology

Market vs human economies

A human economy is an economic system primarily concerned with the creation, destruction, and rearrangement of humans. By contrast, a market economy is primarily concerned with gathering wealth.

Maker economies are a relatively new idea.

An ancient use of "money" is to "buy" a bride.  But this is not an ordinary purchase. Rather, the price paid can be seen as an acknowledgment of an unpayable debt. Only another woman is worth a woman. The same with bloodgeld, which, coincidently, often is about the same as brideprice.

These original forms of money are usually closely linked to items of adornment, the clothes which turn a naked body into a social being.

When a market economy meets a human economy, and esp when the market economy is both militarily superior and needs cheap labour, the human economy is turned into a mechanism to produce slaves, generally via these same unpayable debts.

The moral grounds of economic relations

Fundamental moral principles are invoked whenever items are exchanged. The difficulty is that these principles contradict each other. Moral though is founded on this tension.

Reciprocity, justice as a set of scales, is a prime motive of the moral life. Yet when a debt is paid, the two parties can part ways. The relationship is severed. Reciprocity also assumes equality between the two parties, which is not true for many moral relationships.

Graeber proposes 3 main moral principles which can support economic relationships: communism, hierarchy, and exchange.

Communism: common ownership and common management of collective resources. Sharing. No accounts are kept. And it is more than morality, shared pleasures are superior.
Baseline communism is the raw material of society. At this level, reciprocity is vague at best, but mutual responsibility is absolute.

Exchange: a process of interaction tending towards equivalence, in which each side is striving for advantage or to outdo the other. There is no long term commitment. The parties are also equals, and autonomous.

Hierarchy: based on clear lines of superiority. Precedent is the rule. Items or services exchanged are not presumed to be of equal value, nor is it even possible to compare their values.

Side note: the nanny state has its basis in conquest.

HPV biology

151 known types of HPV. Most have no symptoms.

DNA virus, 3 genera. Genera is determined based on presence/absence of e5 gene. The high risk type has cancer risk rate of 97%. Type 16 & 18 cause cancer, and are blocked by the vaccine. Another vaccine blocks 4 serotypes. Including 6 & 11.

HPV and skin cancer?

10-15 % of cancers are caused by infection, usually a virus. HPV may cause skin cancer. HPV 5 & 8 are found in 90% of non melanoma skin cancers. But it is also common in the general population.

Zinc is a coactivator for many virus.

Phylogeny-aware p-value

Running statistics down a p-tree.

If you have exchangeability on each branch, this should work

Myth of barter

Barter is institutionalised battle, ritual war.
with friends, you exchange gifts.

States create markets. In a cartoon version, a king creates a supply of gold coins. He gives them to the army paymaster. He then demands that every household on the kingdom give him X gold coins per year. To get the coins, the houses have to give things to the soldiers. Z market is born.

Debt as religion

In Homer, values of ships, armour, ect is measured in oxen. But oxen are never used as a medium of exchange. Because the oxen, as sacred/sacrificial animals, represent absolute/eternal value?

the debt as religion theory holds that we are born in debt, either to the gods who gave us life, or the kings who represent the gods, or to the society which allows us to be who we are.

Primitive money is not used to create market economies - gift giving handles the exchange of goods - but to pay moral debts (arrange marriages, settle disputes, rec omstate from injury)

The english word pay comes from pacify.

Law codes from the 600-900s give very specific values for common day things, but few of these were marketed (roof beams?)

Yet this also includes great hubris. How can I be separate from the universe, and thus negotiate one-on-one with it? If I did repay this "debt"  would I then achieve an autonomous existence, outside of all creation??

Space Cowboys

Opening dialog and theme song lyrics from my favorite radio drama, Sparks Nevada, Marshal on Mars.

Narrator: Kids! Shine yer astro-spurs and don yer robot fists. It's time for our thrillin' adventure... Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars.

Justice rides a rocket steed across the crimson plains of the fourth planet. Where one man bring fear to robots and aliens, and hope to the humans who make this frontier planet their home. He is Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars.

Sparks Nevada: I'm from Earth.

Narrator: Sparks Nevada rights the outlaw wrongs on Mars.

Sparks Nevada:
When theres varmints need a catchin'
And youngins need a savin'
On my rocket steed I race across the stars.
For I've worn by the burs of my astro-spurs,
To right the outlaw wrongs on Mars.

Chorus (Yes he rights the outlaw wrongs on Mars.)

Sparks Nevada:
Oh, the hyper-cattle's hummin'
And the Martian's savage drummin'
Are as beautiful as comet bugs in jars.
Yeah, I'm from Earth.
But I right the outlaw wrongs on Mars.

Chorus (Yes he rights the outlaw wrongs on Mars.)

Sparks Nevada:
On the plains of the red planet I uphold the law.
And I do it with a pair of robot fists (POW!)
For evil extermination I have wished
For my robot ropes they hardly ever miss!

Chorus (Hardly ever miss)

Sparks Nevada:
I reckon I'll be ridin' in the name of truth and justice
For as long as I can count the shootin' stars
For I've sworn by the burs on my astro-spurs
To right the outlaw wrongs on Mars.

Chorus (To right the outlaw wrongs on Mars.)

Sparks Nevada: And I'm from Earth!

Lasers: Pew! Pew!

Narrator: We open on our hero as he speeds across the red plains in search of a pack of escaped robot outlaws.

2012 investment themes (Shilling)

Courtesy of the Big Picture:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/01/shilling-2012-investment-themes/
The drivers:

1. Reduced consumer spending in the US
   
2. Financial deleveraging
   
3. increased government regulation
   
4. low commodity prices
   
5. rising protectionism
   
6. housing market decline
   
7. deflation
   
8. contraction of state/local government
   

Positives:

1. Long-term T-bills. They are the only safe haven in the storm, even if not all that safe.
   
2. High-quality stocks with dividends. (consumer products, utilities, dividend > 3%)
   
3. Small luxeries. i.e Starbucks
   
4. Consumer staples/foods
   
5. Dollar vs other currencies, esps commodity dependent countries (Aussie, Canada).
   
6. Health care providers and medical office building REITS
   

   We also favor investments in medical office buildings (MOBs). This includes related outpatient facilities such as ambulatory care facilities, surgery centers, ambulatory surgical centers, and outpatient cancer and wellness centers. MOB demand is forecast to expand 19% by 2019, 11% of it due to the new law and the rest from population growth. The 64 million square feet are required to meet the demand of the new law and compares with a 2010 build of 7 million square feet.

7. Rental apartments (also REITS)
   
8. Productivity enhancers. (I'm looking at you, oracle)
   
9. North American engery
   

and some negatives:

1. Major country stock markets
   
2. Home builders & related
   
3. Home ownership
   
4. Big-ticket discretionary
   
5. Consumer lending
   
6. banks
   
7. junk bonds (since yeilds are now low)
   
8. emerging market bonds
   
9. emerging market stocks
   
10. commodities
    
11. capital equipment
    

Depopulation-- Philip Longman 2004

Philip Longman discusses the depopulation problem:

The current main driver of human population growth is not new births, but the cessation of "early" death. Almost all countries now have birth rates below replacement levels-- well below if one includes pandemic or disaster induced loss.

Note that environmental disease implies that many of these older people will be on disability.

The clear picture of the future is a world of elderly.

Japan's decades long recession correlates to its demographic aging and falling population.

Old societies trend to have high tax rates, needed to pay for public services to all the old people. But this induces high youth unemployment.

We have a pressing need to recreate or economy to incorporate childbirth and childrearing into the economy.

Raising a child is estimated to cost 200,000 dollars, before college. The lost income from the caregiver raises this to over one million. Yet the economic benefit is near nill. Contrast to an agricultural society where the children provide a net economic benefit  from their second decade.

Increased television viewing is strongly correlated with decreasing birth rates, both accross regions as tv is introduced and within families, comparing the number of hours watched with the number of children.

My rather grim prediction: society will cease to value and respect the elderly. In rural france 100 years ago they were also a burden, and were encouraged to starve so the rest would have enough food for the winter.

Ending aging. Michael West

Michael West wants to use stem cell technology to end aging.

Summary of his talk:
He starts with ancient myths, first written as Oris and Isis. Life is immortal. Some types of cells are immortal.

As multicelled organisms developed, cells began to specialize. The germ line retains its immortality. Other cells sacrifice themselves, becoming somatic cells which shield and protect the germ cells but in the process loose their immortality.

We start aging in the womb.

One of the keys is the telemeres, the bits at the end of the chromosone which somatic cells cannot fix. But germ cells can. An enzime, telemerease, can restore the telemeres. In fact, plant the nucleus of a somatic cell into an egg cell (the current tech behind cloning, aka Dolly) and the egg cell will repair the telemeres to even younger than birth.

He has successfully implanted newly young blood system generating cells into old cattle, giving them both a young immune system and their vascular walls begin to rebuild. This tech could end coronary heart disease. Further, he has re-grown heart tissue, repairing the damage of a heart attack.

Regarding the ethics: A fertilized egg does not become a biological individual until about 14 days after fertization.

words of wisdom

you can’t argue people out of positions that they weren’t argued into.

Stephen Lansing, rice farming in Bali

Stephen Lansing describes using self-organizing systems to show that Bali's thousand year old system of agricultural management would occur naturally.

The dynamcis-- irrigation/upstream control of water, coordinated flooding of fields reduces damage from pests. Upstream people are worried about pests, downstream people are worried about water.

If each farmer follows the same planting schedule as the best of his 5-13 nearest neighbors, the whole population soon finds an optimal solution where almost all farmers are at peak harvest capacity. Everyone does very well.
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This is what the Balinese have, and it is supported by an intricate network of religion and ritual.

On the drive home tonight I will hear how the World Bank screwed it up.

Mapping Time-- David Rumsey

Talk is from the Long Now.

David Rumsey collected old maps with a passion. Then, after the passion had run its course, he committed himself to sharing the maps via his library.

pimco paranormal

Some fun hyperbole from pimco

The New Normal as PIMCO and other economists would describe it was a world of muted western growth, high unemployment and relatively orderly delevering. Now we appear to be morphing into a world with much fatter tails, bordering on bimodal. It’s as if the Earth now has two moons instead of one and both are growing in size like a cancerous tumor that may threaten the financial tides, oceans and economic life as we have known it for the past half century. Welcome to 2012.

Followed by some actionable advice

This new duality – credit and zero-bound interest rate risk – is what characterizes our financial markets of 2012. It offers the fat-left-tailed possibility of delevering - or the fat-right-tailed possibility of central bank inflationary expansion.

The dollar is king with a left-tailed delevering scenario – pauper in a right-tailed global reflationary expansion.

Epidemic spread in adaptive networks with multitype agents

by Wang2011
J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44 (2011) 035101 (9pp)

Adds rewiring probability to SIR formulation. rewiring allows a susceptible person to break off contact with an infected, thus reducing the transmission probability from I to S.

Rewiring slows disease transmission.

I don't understand if they have an actual network or only a mean-field approximation. I suspect it is only MF. But they claim that rewiring can create susceptible clusters with large variance in degree distribution, to explain the bistability of their results.

This is one possible journal for the zombie paper (except impact factor is 1.64)

investment timing

Mebane Faber wrote a paper “A Quantitative Approach to Tactical Asset Allocation.” which showed that using a 10 month moving average to time entry/exit positions resulted in highly signifcant improvement in returns over buy and hold, with few false signals or whiplash.

The method assumes bulls and bears are symmetrical, while tops tend to be long events and bottoms move faster towards a crash.

The decline of diffidence

Thoughts on Rick Salutin's editorial in the Toronto Star

I paraphrase him:
The last year has seen a collapse of respect for the conventional repositories of authority and respect. Arab Spring --> government. The West --> big business & finance.

And the big reason for the change:

But there were other factors in the decline of authority. I doubt it has ever shocked people to learn that their era’s main deciders were incompetent. But someone had to do it and you hoped for the best. What’s often been lacking is a sense that there are other plausible ways to reach decisions. That sense of an alternative way to run things is what the Internet may have implanted.

The power of authority diminishes when you can hear credible, contesting voices. Print tends to be monotonal and univocal, unlike the oral tradition that preceded it. But the Internet, though it often lacks actual speech, is oral in the sense of interactive, like a Socratic dialogue. In oral mode, less is often more because speech is so laden with gesture, tone etc.; even something as short as a tweet can suffice. That too diminishes normal authority, which likes to rumble on.

I put this in the context of the third industrial revolution. Communication in the first was print. In the second it was the telephone. In the third it is the internet.

Dynamic network of disease phenotype-- Hidalgo 2009

Another pub from one of the kings of networks.

Has a huge clinical database. Makes a network of most stated diseases in database, where a link indicates that the two diseases occur in the same patient at a higher than chance frequency.

He uses two measures of association which have opposite biases.
Relative Risk (RR)-- overestimates relationships involving rare diseases while discounting common ones
Phi-correlation (phi) accurate for diseases with the same frequency, discounts comorbidity between rare and common disease

The network's predicitive power is on the same order as family studies and/or some genetic studies.

Some discussion on inferring directionality

Statistical mechanics of money-- Dragulescu 2000

Meh.

If you make a large number of unrealistic assumptions, then you can treat money as a closed system in which the Boltzmann-Gibbs law applies. This law says that the probability distribution of X (originally energy, but here money) follows a power law:

C e^{- epsilon/T}

T is temperature, and C is a normalizing constant

In short, any conserved quantity in a large system will/should have an exponential distribution at equilibrium.

This paper would be interesting if:
money had an equilibrium
money was conserved

the LTV squad

The LTV squad explores NYC.

Reminds me of an idea I had to photograph "forbidden Seattle" back in my misspent youth. The linked blog tracks where that project would have lead.

UE urban exploration. google it

Police state

Just some clips from around the web

Police in ND using predator drone to aid arrest of local citizens accused of holding 6 cows which strayed into their land.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/10/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211

Obama signs indefinite detention of US citizens without trial into law, specifically the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/president-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-law
"The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield."