“The complexity of a particular system is the degree of difficulty in predicting the properties of the system if the properties of the system’s parts are given.”
- Warren Weaver, Scientist and Mathematician.
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Tags: Quotation
I was watching Nightline last night and there was a story on interesting animal hybrids. These include Zedonks, Beefalos, Wholpins, and–as made famous in Napoleon Dynamite–ligers. Besides the obvious appeal of creating something never seen before, is it worthwhile to create these hybrids?
One “expert” said that creating these crossbreeds upset the natural order of things. Why do humans need to create these species mixes for their own entertainment?
Nevertheless, I support the liger. Any individual liger would certainly not argue that they didn’t have the right to exist. Just because the liger appears “odd” or “unnatural” to certain experts, doesn’t mean that the liger isn’t equally as worthwhile of recognition as the more popular lions and tigers. In fact, the man who bred the ligers said that they appear to be larger, stronger, and to live longer than either a lion or tiger. Ligers may be weird, but they are not unnatural.
In the human world, the “breeding” of blacks and whites to create mulattoes was once seen as against the natural order as well.
Tags: Liger
Quango noun, acronym:
- Quango or qango is an acronym (variously spelt out as quasi non-governmental organisation, quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation, and quasi-autonomous national government organisation) used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power. In the United Kingdom the official term is “non-departmental public body” or NDPB.
The Healthcare Economist will be taking a break from blogging. I’ll be on vacation in Israel (Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv) and Egypt (Cairo) for two weeks. Blogging will return in the new year.
Here is some information on each country:
Egypt
- Hello: as-salam alaykum
- Language: Arabic
- Population: 80.5 million
- GDP: $469 billion
- GDP per capita: $5,900.
- CIA World Factbook Summary: The regularity and richness of the annual Nile River flood, coupled with semi-isolation provided by deserts to the east and west, allowed for the development of one of the world’s great civilizations. A unified kingdom arose circa 3200 B.C., and a series of dynasties ruled in Egypt for the next three millennia. The last native dynasty fell to the Persians in 341 B.C., who in turn were replaced by the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. It was the Arabs who introduced Islam and the Arabic language in the 7th century and who ruled for the next six centuries. A local military caste, the Mamluks took control about 1250 and continued to govern after the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. Following the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Egypt became an important world transportation hub, but also fell heavily into debt. Ostensibly to protect its investments, Britain seized control of Egypt’s government in 1882, but nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Empire continued until 1914. Partially independent from the UK in 1922, Egypt acquired full sovereignty with the overthrow of the British-backed monarchy in 1952. The completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1971 and the resultant Lake Nasser have altered the time-honored place of the Nile River in the agriculture and ecology of Egypt. A rapidly growing population (the largest in the Arab world), limited arable land, and dependence on the Nile all continue to overtax resources and stress society. The government has struggled to meet the demands of Egypt’s growing population through economic reform and massive investment in communications and physical infrastructure.
Israel
- Hello: shalom
- Language: Hebrew
- Population: 7.3 million
- GDP: $207 billion
- GDP per capita: $28,600.
- CIA World Factbook Summary: Following World War II, the British withdrew from their mandate of Palestine, and the UN partitioned the area into Arab and Jewish states, an arrangement rejected by the Arabs. Subsequently, the Israelis defeated the Arabs in a series of wars without ending the deep tensions between the two sides. The territories Israel occupied since the 1967 war are not included in the Israel country profile, unless otherwise noted. On 25 April 1982, Israel withdrew from the Sinai pursuant to the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. In keeping with the framework established at the Madrid Conference in October 1991, bilateral negotiations were conducted between Israel and Palestinian representatives and Syria to achieve a permanent settlement. Israel and Palestinian officials signed on 13 September 1993 a Declaration of Principles (also known as the “Oslo Accords”) guiding an interim period of Palestinian self-rule. Outstanding territorial and other disputes with Jordan were resolved in the 26 October 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace. In addition, on 25 May 2000, Israel withdrew unilaterally from southern Lebanon, which it had occupied since 1982. In April 2003, US President BUSH, working in conjunction with the EU, UN, and Russia – the “Quartet” – took the lead in laying out a roadmap to a final settlement of the conflict by 2005, based on reciprocal steps by the two parties leading to two states, Israel and a democratic Palestine. However, progress toward a permanent status agreement was undermined by Israeli-Palestinian violence between September 2003 and February 2005. In the summer of 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, evacuating settlers and its military while retaining control over most points of entry into the Gaza Strip. The election of HAMAS to head the Palestinian Legislative Council froze relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Ehud OLMERT became prime minister in March 2006 and presided over a 34-day conflict with Hizballah in Lebanon in June-August 2006 and a 23-day conflict with HAMAS in the Gaza Strip during December 2008 and January 2009. OLMERT, who in June 2007 resumed talks with PA President Mahmoud ABBAS, resigned in September 2008. Prime Minister Binyamin NETANYAHU formed a coalition in March 2009 following a February 2009 general election. Direct talks launched in September 2010 collapsed following the expiration of Israel’s 10-month partial settlement construction moratorium in the West Bank. At the end of 2010, diplomatic initiatives are underway to revive negotiations through proximity talks.
Tags: Vacation
I like maps. Here’s different versions of how different federal agencies create regions which aggregate U.S. states into regions. These include:
- Census Regions,
- Standard Federal Regions, and
- Federal Reserve Districts
“As the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks…The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy.”
- from “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times, 17 Dec 2010.
Tags: Quotation
Using Google Maps, you can find the shortest route to drive from point A to point B. This will certainly be true if there is no traffic on the road. However, during rush hour, should you trust the Google Maps (or Mapquest or Yahoo) directions? If people increasingly rely on Google Maps for directions, this may decrease the variance in routes taken and thus concentrate traffic in certain highways. For most worker’s daily commute, people often experiment on the fastest ways to get to work, so reliance on online tools for directions to the office may be mild.
What about sporting events or concerts? This type of travel is both infrequent (from the drivers point of view) and causes a lot of traffic. Unlike your daily commute to work, drivers are relatively uninformed of the quickest means to travel to a stadium or concert venue. Thus, many of these people may rely on online software to map their route. If Route A is faster on average than Route B on a typical day, it may actually be the case that Route B is faster during sporting events when Route A is congested with traffic. Thus, it may pay to ignore Google Maps when other people pay attention to it.
…then again, Google Maps has traffic info too. What hasn’t Google thought of yet?
Tags: Traffic
Today it was announced that my favorite football player, William Henderson, will soon be inducted into the the Green Bay Packers Hall of Fame. Henderson was a fullback on the Packers Super Bowl team in 1997. He also made the Pro Bowl in 2005.
I came across this essay from Paul Graham and it truly an excellent piece of insight about how one’s identity informs your opinions. Are you Jewish? You’re more likely to support Israel in any debate. Are you a Moslem? Then you are more likely to side with Palestinians. This is true almost regardless of the specific topic being discussed or the merits of either side. Mr. Graham’s essay below elaborates on this idea. I have reprinted it in its entirety.
“I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
What’s different about religion is that people don’t feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone’s an expert.
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there’s no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there’s no back pressure on people’s opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.
But this isn’t true. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost. But the more precise political questions suffer the same fate as the vaguer ones.
I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people’s identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.
Which topics engage people’s identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn’t. No one would know what side to be on. So it’s not politics that’s the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people’s identities.
Tags: Identity
“It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all.”
Tags: Quotation
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