Month: February 2005

We’re just back from seeing the movie Hotel Rwanda at the Angelika in Greenwich Village.  The (true) story is about a Belgian-owned hotel in Rwanda where about 1000 people take refuge from the mass slaughter of Rwanda’s 1994 civil war.  As with Schindler’s List there is a background of killing but hardly any of the people featured in the movie are killed.  Perhaps this is the only way to make a commercially successful movie about genocide.

[Note to business folks who might be thinking of investing in Africa…  the one person in the docudrama who was both competent and honest emigrated to Belgium.  This was a sad echo of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari travelogue in which any African who developed the skills necessary to help Africa immediately emigrated to Europe.]

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A Colombian friend asked me the other day how Chile was.  I said “It was strange to be in a Latin American country where they don’t blame the U.S. for whatever ails them.  In Chile, instead of bitching about George W., they just quietly go to university, build factories, plant farms, and sell their products worldwide.”  She took this as an implication that other Latin Americans were lazy and, instead of working, preferred to complain about the U.S.  She said that all of the poverty or wealth of nations can be explained by distance from the Equator (more is better) and distance from the sea coast (closer is better).  Bolivia, therefore, is a guaranteed loser.  Most of Africa likewise.  What is it about the Equator that is so deadly for economic development in her view?  Tropical diseases and a difficult growing climate.

How do we like this theory compared to the alternatives?  Alternative 1 is my personal theory, which is that wealth comes from investment and that countries with stable governments and efficient courts are the ones where people feel comfortable investing [this has some troubling implications for the U.S. because corporate managers are taking most of the profits from public corporations home as salary, thereby reducing the amount of capital available to invest and decreasing investor confidence].  Alternative 2 is Jared Diamond’s, put forward in his book Guns, Germs and Steel.  Diamond claims that economic development only works well in continents that are oriented east-west like Eurasia.  This way an agricultural technique that is invented in one place can be spread throughout the continent.  North-south oriented continents such as Africa don’t have this advantage because a technique that works in the plains of South Africa won’t work in the central jungle or northern desert.  The lack of development of North America, which is oriented east-west, is explained by the fact that humans came here suddenly and wiped out all the animals that might otherwise have been domesticated.

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Six of us T’d down to the New England Aquarium’s IMAX theater (not the distorted curved Omnimax of the Science Museum) last night and watched Aliens of the Deep (3D), in which James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, goes 3000′ to 10,000′ down into the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to film the unusual forms of life living next to thermal vents.  Precious few details are offered about the animals in question.  Much time is spent on computer-generated speculation about a mission to the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a 16-mile covering of ice and below that, some intelligent big-eyed snails who’ve built themselves an underwater brightly lit Indian casino.

Larry Summers should see this movie because nearly all of the scientists shown are women.  In fact they are nearly all young buff women of color (or with Hispanic surnames anyway).  Maybe this is why we are able to hire scientists for $35,000/year.  Sadly for Science, it seems that in a world where all scientists are women no math is done and you never learn anything about the phenomenon studied except “this is really cool” or “this is really beautiful”.

We were all disappointed that Celine Dion was not featured on the soundtrack.

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My friend getting a master’s in public health said that he wanted to do a presentation showing how many tsunamis worth of human life were being lost on a continuous basis because of poor public health in countries such as Mali where the life expectancy at birth is 45 years.  My response was that he should add in a calculation of the equivalent lives lost doing personal computer system administration.  For example, if I wanted to upgrade my desktop PC (vintage 2002) it would cost me a week of time re-installing applications such as Adobe Photoshop and my flight planning tool.  A week lost to sysadmin is actually worse than a week lost at the end of one’s life when one would be less vigorous.

The question then arose “What sorts of activities in a Western society are so boring that they should count as a reduction in our life expectancy?”  Friends at dinner immediately offered “doing taxes” and “sitting in a traffic jam”.  Are there others?  And do we have so many that our useful life expectancy is substantially reduced?  And could it be reduced to the point that some African men might have more hours of actual life available to them than American men?  (Women in Africa are saddled with lots of chores that are as tedious as Windows sysadmin, e.g., carrying water.)

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Over breakfast at a favorite little French cafe in Harvard Square today a friend who is getting a master’s in Public Health at Harvard mentioned that under Saddam Hussein Iraq’s entire health care system had a budget of $18 million and that under U.S. occupation this has subsequently grown to $1.8 billion.  How well did Saddam do with his $18 mil?  http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html shows Iraqi life expectancy at birth to be 68 years versus the U.S.’s 77 years. Those extra 9 years are nice, of course, but they come at a cost of about $1.9 trillion per year or 100,000 times Saddam’s budget.

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After three weeks of hanging around like an unwelcome in-law, the filthy grey snow banks are finally melting here in Boston.  With the advent of warmth and sunshine I would have expected everyone  along Alex’s Harvard Yard/Square dog walking route to be grinning with happiness.  Yet people did not seem any happier than usual.  To explain this phenomenon it is necessary to turn to TIME magazine’s January 17, 2005 “The Science of Happiness” issue.  According to TIME, “sunny days [do not make us happy though] a 1998 study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy California are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too.”

Friends and family make people happy as does “contributing to the lives of others” (tough for folks in Vero Beach, FL given that it is tough to find anyone within a gated community facing a more important decision than whether to play golf or tennis).  When asked “do you often do any of the following to improve your mood?”, TIME’s own poll revealed that 38 percent of women checked off “playing with pet”; only 18 percent checked “have sex”.  As the favored pet among America’s ladies is the cat, from this we can conclude that cats are more satisfying to women than men are.

[Additional sources: World Values Survey at http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/; BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3157570.stm]

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Out in Harvard Square on Saturday night a bunch of us ate dinner next to a birthday party of 10 Wellesley College students.  The birthday girl happened to be black, which did not surprise us.  All 9 of her friends were also black, which did surprise us.  After the girls had left the restaurant the question arose “What are the odds that 100 percent of a Wellesley student’s friends would be of the same race?”  One of my dinner companions offered the following explanation: “Colleges have special pre-enrollment programs for black students.  They show up in July and make a lot of friends.  When the whites and Asians show up in September the black kids already have a complete social circle and don’t need to make friends among the ‘new people’.”

[Some clever readers wondered in the comment section whether an all-white group of students would have been as surprising.  Let’s see if we can remember our 8th-grade math…  Wellesley College reports that 6 percent of their student body is black (source).  If the other 94 percent were white the probability of a white girl who chose her friends at random having 9 white friends would be 0.94^9 or 57 percent (not to the 10th power because we fixed the first girl as white).  So about half of the groups of 10 that you observed would randomly be all-white.  If a black Wellesley student, on the other hand, chose 9 friends at random the chance of them being all-black would be 0.06^9 or 1 in 9.9 billion (i.e., if you saw 20 student groups per day it you’d need to wait for about 225 million years before seeing a group like we saw on Saturday night).  In practice, of course, Wellesley is like most other good colleges in having a lot of Asian-American and Asian-Asian students.  Whites, including those with Hispanic surnames, constitute only 52 percent of the students.  The probably of an all-white group of 10 being assembled randomly is therefore around 1/10th of 1%.  This is consistent with casual observations around Cambridge, where it is very unusual to see a group of 10 undergraduates without any Asian-Americans.]

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About 15 of us trundled over to Harvard’s Science Center last night for
a talk by David Haig, a newly tenured biology professor.  This is
part of Harvard’s flagship series of science lectures for
non-specialists.  Haig was purporting to explain conflict within
an individual’s mind by showing that paternally-derived genes and
maternally-derived genes may have conflicting goals within the same
person.  Haig’s age and physique would have led you to expect him
to use as an example of conflict a person who couldn’t decide between
golfing in North Carolina and visiting the grandchildren in
Sheboygan.  Instead he said “Suppose that I am considering an act
of sexual infidelity…” and proceeded to work out the pluses and
minuses.

The rest of the talk covered father-daughter incest (the school radio
station has a Saturday morning country/bluegrass show called “Hillbilly
at Harvard” but Haig did not mention it).  In theory the parts of
the daughter’s brain controlled by genes she inherited from her father
might be less opposed to incest than the parts of the brain controlled
by genes she inherited from her mother.  But this presupposes that
warring genes can get hold of distinct parts of the brain, something
that nobody has demonstrated.  And really how does dwelling at
such length on an example that is tied up with genetic propagation and
birth defects help us understand day-to-day indecision such as “should
I get a Big Mac or Chicken Selects?”

Haig showed some interesting slides of mouse embryos in which only
genes from males or only genes from females were cobbled together
inside one egg.  It turns out that genes from a male are
responsible for the embryo making large demands on the mother’s womb
for nutrition, etc.  It is currently very difficult to make a
viable baby with two moms or two dads (genetically).  It seems
that genes are imprinted somehow with the sex of their previous owner
and the same genetic sequence will behave differently depending on
whether it came from a male mouse or a female mouse.  Once all of
this is figured out we will be able to create human children from two
mothers fairly easily (since they already have the egg and the womb and
just need some DNA gluing and imprinting).

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The continuing Larry Summers debacle has brought forward an old quote from Patti Hausman, a behavioral scientist writing in Science circa 2000, out of the woodwork…

“The question of why more women don’t choose careers in engineering has a rather obvious answer: Because they don’t want to.

“Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. . . . Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”

I love that last line [emphasis added].  It summarizes precisely how my hip cool friends regard all MIT nerds.  It must be someone’s job to make sure the tires don’t fall off of their car, just as it must be someone’s job to clean the bathroom, but obviously it couldn’t be the job of anyone important.

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Florida has a fantastic network of airports, each of which comes with a full complement of long runways, instrument approaches, gas stations, maintenance shops, etc.  It all makes sense until you ask the question “Why would someone want to go from one town in Florida to another?”

Town A:  flat landscape, warm humid climate, strip malls, Walmart, chain restaurants, gated communities.

Town B: flat landscape, warm humid climate, strip malls, Walmart, chain restaurants, gated communities.

Why would a Floridian go through the trouble of moving from one place to another?

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