“It is more easy to write on money than to obtain it; and those who gain it, jest much at those who only know how to write about it.” – Voltaire (1694-1778) (OBoM, p. 170)

“O sacred hunger of pernicious gold!/ What bands of faith can impious lucre hold?” – Virgil (70-19 BC), Aeneid, book iii, tr John Dryden, 1697 (OBoM, p. 252)

“‘I dislike money,’ Magritte said, ‘both for itself and for what it can buy, since I want nothing we know about.’” – Rene Magritte (1898-1967) (OBoM, p.335)

FYI, the new bout of summer blogging begins soon.  The staff at The Modest Proposal has been very busy lately–moving to new flats, doing PhD visits, finishing Master’s theses, finishing books, having allergies, writing grants, etc, etc–but we’ll have a pretty busy summer of writing and all that ahead.

I.

I spent my Feb. 12, 2009 rather uneventfully working through a recently published mathematical model of adaptation.  Models similar to this one more or less got their start from Ronald Fisher’s thinking about the organism’s optimal phenotype (morphology, physiology, etc.) as a single point in a high-dimensional landscape, since many traits simultaneously contribute to fitness.  While there are other ways to model the relationship between genes, phenotypes, and fitness, the crux of Fisher’s model and many that have followed from it, is that beneficial mutations are exceedingly rare and small.  This is because in a high-dimensional space with a single optimum, most changes, esecially large ones, will move an organism further from that optimum, while only a few, generally smaller, will move you closer.  The situation is complicated by the fact that beneficial mutations of larger effect are less likely to be lost due to random processes.  Newer models, like the one I was reading about on Feb. 12, and additional data have for some time been challenging the highly idealized Fisherian view.  However, even the newer  models make many assumptions, do not provide a clear predictions about some aspects of adaptive genetic changes, and invoke parameters that are phenomonlogical rather than derived from first principles.  All this is to say that we have a lot of work left to do.

The oddity of the situation struck me some time during the day: 150 years after Darwin published a convicing account of adaptation via natural selection that has since been corroborated countless times by new data, we still only have a rudimentary mathematical framework for making general predictions about adaptation.  This state of affairs is not a problem for the fact of evolution or the mechanism of adaptation (natural selection), but, in my opinion, does pose a problem for the scientist trying to design studies that deepen our understanding of adaptation.  Without rigorous models to test, crucial experiments are either not performed or undertaken in a conceptual vacuum, making them difficult to interpret.

II.

I was also contemplating the latest in the line of Gallup polls on evolution and creationism:The results are not surprising; the percentages have stayed nearly constant since Gallup began the poll in 1982.  Further data collected in this poll implicates the usual culprits: lack of education and religious belief (the latter being a stronger predictor than the former).  What I do find a bit odd in the reporting is that many see the results in a half-empty light (e.g. “less than 4 of 10 accept evolution”), failing to note the large fraction of people (36%) with no opinion.  While I am personally incredulous that over a third of the adult population could not care about the fact of evolution, I suppose there is little harm.  I’m sure that many musicians are equally dismayed that I have no opinion or knowledge of Opera, but I can’t bring myself to care.  Anyway, the results are still disappointing since so many people deny the facts and even the agnostic can still be easily enough swayed to allow teaching of creationism under the pretense of “hearing both sides”.

III.

On a note of self-congratulation, my first peer-reveiwed paper appeared online the night of Feb. 12 (the print edition didn’t arrive until the next day).  You can read the abstract here.  I’m author 7 of 18 – very Borgish.

Since his election, the president has been roundly criticized by bloggers for using “I” instead of “me” in phrases like “a very personal decision for Michelle and I” or “the main disagreement with John and I” or “graciously invited Michelle and I.”

What raised my hackles slightly was this excerpt, employing a common trope that sees grammar as a 19th-century Victorian obsession born of too much time studying that inflexible and boring old language Latin:

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that language mavens began kvetching about “I” and “me.” The first kvetch cited in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage came from a commencement address in 1846. In 1869, Richard Meade Bache included it in his book “Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech.”

Why did these 19th-century wordies insist “I” is “I” and “me” is “me”? They were probably influenced by Latin, with its rigid treatment of subject and object pronouns. For whatever reason, their approach stuck — at least in the rule books.

I don’t know anything about the authors of those rulebooks, but the “I vs. me” subject-object distinction does not owe itself to Latin or the 19th century: it appears in the very earliest written English.  Back in the old days (prior to 1100AD) English was an inflected language.  For I, we had “ic” — the nominative; the form of “me” was either “me” or “mec” — the accusative. Over time we lost most of our inflections, but a few hang around: he versus him, she versus her, and yes I versus me.  This has nothing to do with Latin.  True, Latin has inflections but so did all Indo-European languages at some point in their past.

And as for Latin itself, how can a language with no word order be considered rigid?  One of the reasons there’s so much incredible Latin poetry is that it’s a very flexible idiom. The following are all perfectly grammatical ways to write “Caesar loves me,” a comforting sentiment,  in  classical Latin:

1. Caesar me amat.
2. Amat me Caesar.
3. Me Caesar amat.
4. Amat Caesar me.
5. Me amat Caesar.
6. Caesar amat me.

In English, of course, there’s only one way to write this. So which language is really rigid when it comes to personal pronouns?

On a final note, I admit that language is more or less arbitrary and changing all the time, but I still don’t think “Shakespeare broke this rule” is a good argument against prescriptive grammar. Shakespeare, we would do well to remember, also didn’t use regularized spelling. Grammar is a convention that allows us to understand each other and be understood by future generations who might like to read what we’ve left behind. What’s so bad about that?

In case that sounds a bit boring, let me assure you that it isn’t. MacKay’s writing is witty and lucid, if at times a bit sarcastic, and the calculations are kept simple without talking down to the non-scientist. This book tells you everything you could possibly want to know about energy consumption and generation and still manages to be entertaining. If that’s not a coup, I don’t know what is.

Sadly after several hundred excellent pages and as if on cue, when he gets  to policy suggestions MacKay runs aground. You see, MacKay thinks the best way forward is government mandates. It should be illegal to produce products that don’t meet said energy-efficiency standards; businesses that have green potential should be heavily subsidized and protected from competition in their infancy. I probably don’t even have to tell you that these are terrible ideas.

Mackay is skeptical of market solutions (like carbon taxes or pollution permits) because he believes that people are irrational, markets won’t reflect true costs and benefits, and (bizarrely) that markets are bad at allocating resources across time.  Of course we’re irrational, but we’re not stupid.  If a tax were to triple the price of gas at the pump, does anyone actually believe that consumption wouldn’t fall? How about quadrupling the price? Mackay is concerned that, favoring small gains today over large savings tomorrow, consumers won’t invest in energy efficient technology. Again, if you quadruple the price of energy with a carbon tax, does any reasonable person believe that consumers would not take energy efficiency into account when buying appliances?  Eventually, demand has to slope down.  If you raise the price high enough, people will buy less, if only because they run out of income to spend!

MacKay gives the following example.  Bob owns an aparment and rents it to Susan.  Susan has no incentive to improve the energy efficiency of the apartment because any appliances she installs would become a permanent part of the home she doesn’t own.  Likewise, Bob has no incentive to make the place greener, since he doesn’t pay the energy bills.  Ergo, market failure: it doesn’t matter how high energy prices go, neither of them has an incentive to improve the situation.

But things aren’t quite this simple. When I go shopping for an apartment, and I’m sure I’m not an abberation in this respect, the first question on my lips for the previous tenants is: “how much do you spend in utilities?” Again, do we assume that Susan is so incredibly irrational that she doesn’t account for utilities when choosing an apartment? And if energy prices were to rise in such a way that the $1000/month energy-efficient apartment became cheaper (inclusive of utilities) than the $500/month Victorian-era place she’s living in now, do we really think she’d stay put? MacKay asks us to believe that consumers are not only irrational, but completely ignorant of the incentives they face.

As for markets being a bad way to allocate resources over time, have we run out of gold? How about copper? Silver? All of these are in fixed supply, but the price system gives consumers the necessary incentives to conserve at the same time as it gives suppliers the necessary incentives to find more minerals or develop more efficient technologies to extract them. The problem with energy is that it’s a broken market, one in which the true costs are not reflected in the price of oil, for example. A carbon tax is designed to correct precisely this deficiency.

The 20th century gave us a grand lesson in bottom-up versus top-down economic organization: it was called the Soviet Union. Even if you think markets are imperfect, which I by the way do, this does not mean that command and control is the solution. An imperfect market-based solution is still likely to be better than a situation in which government chooses exactly which technology each plant must use to reach its emissions target, exactly which appliances and automobiles consumers will be allowed to purchase, and which firms should be subsidized and protected from competition. No government, and for that matter no individual, is omniscient. The beauty of markets is that they aggregate information impersonally, and provide incentives for people to use this information in ways that improve their lives. We don’t just want to reduce emissions, we want to do so cheaply. Reaching a sustainable rate of carbon emissions is going to cost us in terms of living standards. Carbon taxes and tradable permits provide a way to lessen the pain while still attaining our emissions goals.

Ok, that was a bit of a rant. Perhaps I should cut MacKay a bit of slack. He’s a physicist after all, not an economist or public policy expert. I suppose the real answer here is to let scientists do the science (as MacKay has so excellently done in this book), and leave economists do the economics. Let me close by emphasizing that my critique above applies to only a few pages of an otherwise wonderful book. You should most certainly read it.

What I’ve been thinking is this: As giant media companies like Clear Channel, Houghton Mifflin and Hearst crumble, they’ll leave a vacuum which will be quickly filled by tiny startups, passionate artists and excited businessmen who rebuild the entertainment industry in a new way. As Nash puts it, the recession is an opportunity to rid publishing and other industries “of a lot of cant and laziness and arrogance.” I’m totally excited to see the publishing industry, especially, at a better fighting weight.

It’s Darwin: small, independent media companies are perfect for weathering recessions. As the publisher of a small press company, Nash says that a lot of the techniques big publishers are using to survive are the same techniques his small company has always had to use:

So in a sense these challenges that we’ve faced for our entire existence likely have us better prepared for the current challenges . . . we can’t take anything for granted, and the proof of your faith in your editorial judgment lies solely in the willingness of the reader to embrace it.

So … anybody want to start a business with me? Yeah? Yeah.

The exhibit is organized chronologically and excludes the nearly surreal Avedon portraits I’m familiar with.  Instead, focusing on artists, activists, and politicians, the exhibit shows portraits of people “battered by engagement with the world.”

The portrait of Barack Obama, however, does not look battered at all (Has the man ever looked battered? He’s never looked better).

Richard Avedon had a knack for photographing future presidents; 'Portraits of Power' shows Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Obama, all with such prestigious titles as "Director of the CIA" and "Former Governor of California.

And at the end, you get to take your own portrait.  The Corcoran’s “Portrait Project” has set up a photo booth, complete with black-and-white, crisp digital filters that are incredibly flattering.  Which is nice, because after your picture is taken, it’s projected in the museum on a six-by-eight foot screen.  You can also email the pictures to your account to save forever.

“There are the trees,” said the Beaver. “They’re always listening.  Most of them are on our side, but there are trees that would betray us…”

A sign I passed on campus today, evidently left over from yesterday, read “Listen to the inaguration on the Stuart Collection’s Talking Trees!”  Yes, hidden in the woods near the UCSD library is a pair of trees encased in metal to which speakers have been fitted.  You can read more about this unusal art installation here.  My favorite piece of public art on campus remains the megalithic teddy bear.

I hesitate to comment on a book I haven’t read, but this one has really thrown me for a loop.  Danica McKellar, of the Wonder Years, has written a math book for teen-age girls.  While the book’s jacket cover certainly exaggerates when it calls her a mathematician, McKellar does hold a undergraduate degree in math from UCLA.  And judging by the enthusiastic reviews on Amazon — over 90% of the 104 posted reviews are 4 stars or above — people seem to enjoy her book.

I recognize that people are concerned about young girls’ supposed lack of interest in math, but this approach worries me.  The idea of teaching math as though it were Teen Cosmo honestly strikes me as sexist.  Are young girls really so warped by popular culture that all they can relate to is a fashion magazine?

But at the same time, what if it works?  From what I’ve been able to glean, McKellar tries to promote positive values, for example encouraging young girls to be proud of their intellect, not to “act dumb” to impress boys.  Maybe the book is a kind of Trojan Horse: you might need to stoop to the level of a fashion magazine to reach some girls, but these are the ones most in need of guidance.

For my own part, the book that got me to stop hating math, was Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh.  I’m still taking math classes to this day.

Journalist Johann Hari has a thought-provoking piece over at Slate.  Ostensibly it’s a review of a recent book of American environmental writing edited by Bill McKibben.  However, like me, Hari uses the review as a jumping off point for expounding on his own views.  The crux of his essay is that many influential American environmentalists, though united by a common cause, come from fundamentally different intellectual and philosopfical backgrounds that cause them to arrive at radically different policy prescriptions.  Hari and other rationalists (like myself) follow the Enlightenment tradition.  Careful and objective analysis of scientific data clearly reveal anthropogenic environmental degredation and provide a framework for remediation.  It is difficult for me to farily describe the Romantic position since it sounds like sophisticated, but nevertheless confused, nonsense to me.  I think that the basic point is that humans have an essential, spiritual connection to nature, and that we commit injury to both ourselves and the earth through contemporary, technological living.

One point Hari makes is that individual environmentalists do fit neatly into one camp or another, nor do they often realize the distinction:

Wes Jackson offers the most romantic fantasy of the book—but he is a distinguished scientist. Al Gore offers the most lucid popular summary of hard climate science we have—and then attributes the disaster, in an unexplained leap of logic, to a “spiritual crisis.”

As a biology graduate student, I can attest to the fact that many scientists working in ecology, evolution, conservation, and related fields are similarly confused and often contradictory about the environmental philosophy.  The schizophrenia emerges, I think, from the fact that many scientists working in environmental fields arrive at their career choice through a love of nature that stems from the Romantic tradition.  The choice to pursue a scientific career enforces the methodology and rigor of the Rationalist tradition, and much of one’s ebullient love of nature is recast in this framework.  Most biologists adopt materialism and philosophical naturalism, but never quite get over the sense a “spiritual” connection with nature.  I imagine the situation is far worse for the contemporary environmental writer who, similarly Romantically inspired, reports on but never conducts  scientific analyses.

In a perfect world, the Romantics, Rationalists, and all those in between would recognize their differences, but nevertheless arrive at similar practical solutions to environment problems.  Unfortunately, like two planes that arrive together at a hub and then go their separate routes, environmentalists from different philosophical traditions promote not merely different, but mutually exclusive ways of mitigating against anthropogenic insults.  Hari mentions the fact that Romantics in the US (I think Michael Pollan fits here) emphasize the need to move out of cities and reenter a pastoral, agriculture-based lifestyle (the 2st century version of Rousseau’s noble savage), while the data indicate the densely populated cities like New York have the lowest carbon footprint per capita.  Many environmentalists believe that transgenic or GMO crops are “unnatural”, while data conclusively show that transgenic technology has and will reduce chemical inputs and increase yield.  Environmentalists of a religious bent believe that nature is a gift from god and that we are earth’s stewards, yet environmental successes seem to be the result of quite material incentives – government regulation and taxes.  Thus, the problem for me of compromising with well-meaning, but irrational environmentalists is not a stubborn defense of ideals.  Compromise may mean subscribing to policies that have the exact opposite of their intended effect.  Argh.

A view of the Eiffel Tower from Sacre Coeur (December 27th, 2008)