The Body Clock: Why You're So Tired All The Time

Full disclosure: as a night owl I am actively waging a campaign to 'debunk the social stigma around late risers'.

For more on this topic here's a good read.

h/t Counterparites

Video: The Great Stagnation vs. The Singularity

For anyone who missed Tyler Cowen's presentation at the Singularity Conference from earlier this year.

My $0.02 on Krugman's and Delong's Inflationista Potshots

Here's Delong's OH BOY: NIALL FERGUSON PRACTICING ECONOMICS WITHOUT A LICENSE DEPARTMENT

And my comment (which for some reason won't load onto Brad's blog so I'm posting it here):

I'll readily admit that I'm not an expert on CPI methodologies, and I am inclined to believe that the BLS has many well intentioned and highly educated professionals using defendable methodological practices. However, I share Ezra's feeling that something doesn't smell right on inflation numbers.  

Over the past decade how can official cost of living figures have gone up so little when they supposedly take into account the following items: 

-Housing
-Medical
-Fuel
-Food
-Education 

These are some of the largest cost items for most consumers, and in the last decade up to the financial crisis many saw double digit price increases (in some cases in a single year). 

The BLS's CPI calculator says that $1 in 2001 has the same buying power as a $1.17 in 2007, so yes, the BLS is picking up at least some of the perceived inflation in these categories. However, do the BLS number capture the full picture? 

One thing is for certain: the CPI was utterly useless with respect to the housing bubble as it does not include housing prices, only rent. This despite the fact that nearly 70% of all American homes are owner occupied.

It's convenient to dismiss anyone questioning official government statistics as a conspiracy crank. However, under reporting of inflation by a government bureaucracy would be useful in terms of reducing that same government's expenses in the form of lower cost of living adjustments for government workers and TIPs expense. Under reporting inflation also provides ammunition for the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed to not have to raise interest rates and thereby dampen exuberance. 

In other words, many stand to benefit from the under reporting of inflation. It is therefore reasonable to cast a skeptical eye on these numbers, especially when they fly in the face of everyday experience.

A final point I'd add is that economics is too important to be left to economists, particularly with most of the 'license' holders (econ PhDs) having completely failed to identify in advance the biggest economic event since the Great Depression.

Software Is Eating The World

The tech world was roiled this week by Google's acquisition of Motorolla and HP's corporate makeover. Here's a good read from Marc Andressen (HP board member, VC and Netscape co-founder) on the current state of tech and where things are headed.

Video: Ray Kurzweil on Bill Mahrer

Real Time With Bill Maher: Overtime - Episode... by HBO

Video: Ray Kurzweil on Jimmy Kimmel

Was putting a man-on-the-moon peculiarly un-American?

First-image of ISS docking by a soon-to-retire U.S. space shuttle

The Economist has an interesting read on the 50-year anniversary of President Kennedy's speech which set a goal of putting a man-on-the-moon within a decade.

Here's the key excerpt:

He (Kennedy) set out to make America’s achievements in space an emblem of national greatness, and the project succeeded. Yet it did not escape the notice of critics even at the time that this entailed an irony. The Apollo programme, which was summoned into being in order to demonstrate the superiority of the free-market system, succeeded by mobilising vast public resources within a centralised bureaucracy under government direction. In other words, it mimicked aspects of the very command economy it was designed to repudiate. 

That may be why subsequent efforts to transfer the same fixity of purpose to broader spheres of peacetime endeavour have fallen short. If we can send a man to the moon, people ask, why can’t we [fill in the blank]? Lyndon Johnson tried to build a “great society”, but America is better at aeronautical engineering than social engineering. Mr Obama, pointing to competition from China, invokes a new “Sputnik moment” to justify bigger public investment in technology and infrastructure. It should not be a surprise that his appeals have gone unheeded. Putting a man on the moon was a brilliant achievement. But in some ways it was peculiarly un-American—almost, you might say, an aberration born out of the unique circumstances of the cold war. It is a reason to look back with pride, but not a pointer to the future.

Barring a crisis or existential threat, are the prospects for the U.S. undertaking an ambitious, focussed transition to a sustainable energy based system, or an affordable healthcare system, extremely remote?

In short, was the U.S.'s Race to the Moon success, as The Economist puts it, a 'glorious one-off'?

Video: U.S. Debt Limit Cartoon

New Blood Test Tells You How Long You'll Live

The test costs under $1K. Story here.

Graphic: Why Healthcare in America is so Expensive

For a quick chart-view on just how much more Americans pay for healthcare click here.


Via: Medical Billing And Coding

Video: U.S. Government Using Your Tax Dollars to Poison Food

At 1.3 million views and counting, below is the video highlighted in the recent NY Times article on how sugar is toxic.

This is a familiar story for anyone who has read the excellent Omnivore's Dilemma or seen the movie Food, Inc. (both can be found in the 'Good Books and Films' box on the right side of this blog). What may be less familiar is the fact that the U.S. federal government is directly supporting the poisoning of the American public through fructose (corn syrup) subsidies to Iowa farmers.

Please allow me to repeat that: our government is helping to poison us with our own tax money.

While some members of Congress are working to put an end to this deplorable policy, Big Food, the farm lobby and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have thus far successfully fought off cuts to corn subsidies.

A perhaps more fundamental way to get a handle on this problem is by replacing the income tax with a consumption tax (which I've written about here).

As an aside, has anyone out there heard Warren Buffet, Coca-Cola's largest investor, address what Dr. Lustig calls the 'Coca-Cola Conspiracy'? It would seem that Warren is turning a blind eye to the fact that he is financing one of the nation's (and now the world's) fastest growing and most serious health epidemics.

Video: Transcendent Man Movie Trailer (Featuring Ray Kurzweil)

Chart of the Month: Healthcare Bang (or lackthereof) for the Buck

This one is so outrageous that it deserves more heft than the usual Chart of the Day, or Week title.

(click to enlarge)

In fact I almost dubbed it Chart of the Year, but to be prudent I wanted to to wait a little a longer to see how this chart plays out.

Education Site: Those interested in careers in healthcare and healthcare reform, might be interested in Guide to Online Schools degree and certificate programs in the medical field.

2045: The Year Science Makes Humans Immortal?

Ray Kurzweil

For my money it just doesn't get any more bleeding edge than the 'Singularity'.

A good read published in Time yesterday on this topic, and radical life-extension, featuring inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, Cambridge Professor Aubrey de Grey, investor Peter Thiel, and others at the forefront of this (for lack of a better term) movement.

From the article:

The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls? 

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English.

The idea of the Singularity first hit me like a lightning bolt a little over a decade ago when I read Sun Microsystem co-founder Bill Joy's alarming Wired article titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. I've been fascinated and trying to wrap my mind around the many potential implications of exponential technological development and living indefinitely ever since.

The Antithesis of Idle Chitchat

If you're looking for a way to spice up your next dinner party or bar conversation then I encourage you to trot out the idea of science making immortality a reality within your lifetime.

As noted by Kurzweil, people can more easily accept the idea of superhuman HAL-like computer artificial intelligence in the foreseeable future than banishing death. Based on limited anecdotal observations women in particular seem to have an almost viscerally negative, knee-jerk response when first confronted with the notion that the necessary technological advances could arrive in their lifetime.

In fact I have yet to encounter a single woman that responds positively at first blush to the idea of living forever. Perhaps the only thing this reveals is a homogeneity amongst my circle of female friends and acquaintances. But it has led me to wonder whether there is something fundamental to radical life extension which makes it more appealing to men?

Personally, I don't think so. Rather I think this is a case of a big, hard to fathom idea traumatically upending the perceived natural order of life's apple cart. Once you get passed initial concerns over things like quality of life (living long but as a gimp or vegetable) or what this means for romance (and concepts like soul mates) then some women soften up their initial distaste for life extension.

I for one love the idea of extending life indefinitely! There is so much I would love to learn, see, and do; to one day catch a sunrise on planet Mars and then climb Olympus Mons, a mountain almost three times as tall as Everest!

So far as I can imagine there is simply nothing else which would more profoundly alter life as we know it than the Singularity and radical life extension. However, their prospect raises tectonic moral, philosophical, socioeconomic, and security implications. Joy's concerns, which are shared by Kurzweil, must be addressed.

Below is a video of a 17-year old Kurzweil during his 1965 television appearance on I've Got a Secret, and here is a link to his most recent television interview on Charlie Rose where he describes the Singularity.

Graphic of the Day: The U.S. Fiscal Crisis

Accompanying article at the FT.

Video: Niall Ferguson -- Empires on the Edge of Chaos

Featured on FORA.tv, broken out in subject chapters in the links below. Be sure to check out the Q&A.


01.    Introduction    09 min 09 sec
02.    Niall Ferguson Opening Remarks    01 min 40 sec
03.    Historical Cycles of Empire Decline    07 min 07 sec
04.    Complexity Theory    08 min 20 sec
05.    Implications for the United States    06 min 22 sec
06.    Interest Payments as a Share of US Revenue    01 min 56 sec
07.    Failure of Perception    02 min 43 sec
08.    Debt Payment Overtaking Defense Spending    06 min 58 sec
09.    Q1: Healthcare Reform    04 min 10 sec
10.    Q2: China's Military Sustainability    02 min 38 sec
11.    Q3: Gold Investing    01 min 24 sec
12.    Q4: Political Stability of China    02 min 42 sec
13.    Q5: Children Teaching You About Debt / Radical Islam    03 min 57 sec
14.    Q6: Advice to Obama    02 min 40 sec
15.    Q7: Limits of Keynesian Stimulus    03 min 46 sec
16.    Q8: Better Leadership in the West    03 min 27 sec
17.    Q9: Fear of Hyperinflation    05 min 09 sec