Rhinocrisy

For the greatest voice on radio is back with a new show. I may have found out four months after he started, but not a day too early! I’m through two episodes so far. Listen! Enjoy! Laugh! Gasp!

Recently it has come to my attention that other blegs are in the habit of posting light, entertaining things on Friday afternoons, to, I assume, massage the kinks of stress out of your shoulders in time for the weekend. (Actually, this didn’t really come to my attention RECENTLY, per se, so much as A LONG TIME AGO, but I thought that was a nice way to start this paragraph. Sometimes writing style must take precedence over content and factual accuracy.) Bob Harris, for example, pioneered “pudublogging”, wherein he posts pictures of absurdly cute ungulates. Don’t look, unless you’re prepared to make the “Awwww” noise. Other bloggers whom I otherwise respect are in the habit of posting the first ten songs on their iPod playlists, as if this could possibly interest anyone. Maybe I say this because I am bitter about being musically illiterate and recognize, on average, 0.03% of the songs/artists posted.

Anyway, I can’t participate in this farce, because it’s late, and I’m still not ready to deliver the data for my time-sensitive assignment to my Canadian taskmasters. Commensurate with my bitterness, please savor this picture of a scorpion.

Good news: President Bush says he reads the paper. More good news: He “questions” rules that will make the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada even more ridiculous human-rights-and-sanity-free-zones.

“When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly the day crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” Bush said when asked about the new rules at an American Society of Newspaper Editors convention. “I thought there was a better way to expedite the legal flow of traffic and people.”

Bad news: Neither he nor anyone else outside the world of blogs and tech-geek websites seems to care that mandatory new passport rules are to go into effect in a couple months that will make anyone with a passport into a sitting duck for identity thieves, terrorists, and surveillance geeks. Go figure: American with passports didn’t vote for the guy. At least some commie, god-hating homo-lovers have decided to defend basic human dignity along with travelers’ physical safety.

In case you still want to know which came first, I hope this satisfies your curiosity. Now, riddlers have two options. Either ask a more specific but totally annoying question, like, “Which came first, the chicken or the chicken-egg?” or come up with a new line of questioning altogether. Suggestions are welcome.

George Bush listens to “My Sharona” on his iPod, apparently! And I listen to “My Sharona”! (I’m listening to it right now… god, that guitar solo is SWEET! meedleep… meep meep meep…) So, that’s something we have in common. I think this thing just might work out!

Some of you, at some point in your lives, may have owned a dog. If it was a purebred dog, say, a dachshund, you’re probably aware of the high prevalence of genetic disease in purebred populations. People often joke about how inbreeding produces weird, mutant offspring. This is true: every individual has (by some estimates) roughly 500 to 2000 alleles for a deleterious phenotype. Most of the time this is no problem, since you have two copies of every gene and the effect of most of these alleles will be masked by a compensatory “good” copy. However, your kids might have problems if you’re unfortunate enough to mate with someone who has the same allele. If it’s a relatively frequent allele, present in, say, 1 in 1000 people, each one of your offspring has about a 1 in 4000 chance of ending up with a genetic disease. Fortunately, the vast majority of those deleterious alleles are going to be VERY rare, what’s called “private mutations” (meaning, essentially, only you have them), so that we don’t end up being riddled with genetic disease. For best results, marry someone from the other side of the planet.

Now, consider what would happen if you mated with your parent. Don’t consider it too hard, just keep it abstract and hypothetical, so we can get through this. This is regularly done by breeders, to reduce the number of variables in the breeding process. You can be sure that you’re not introducing any new, unwanted alleles if you breed against a parent. In this case, since you share 50% of your genetic material with your parent, the odds of acquiring a genetic disease go way, way up. Suddenly, your offspring have a 1 in 8 chance of ending up with two copies of a deleterious allele, even if it’s a very, very rare private mutation. Multiplied out over 500 to 2000 alleles, you’re looking at some very sick puppies.

This can have drastic effects on a population. If genetic diversity is too low, disease can prevent a population from expanding. I read a study about a population of Norwegian (maybe Finnish) wolves crippled by low genetic diversity for years – until the population suddenly began to explode, thanks to the genetic diversity contributed by a single foreign interloper.

So: inbreeding, bad. Genetic diversity, good.

Unless you’re a breeder. In that case, genetic diversity is bad. You’re trying to create an archetype here, not maintain a healthy population. Variation is a nuisance.

This is especially true in industrial agriculture, where breeders wish to maximize productivity of meat, milk, fur, etc., and hence profits, and minimize variation, which interferes with the standardization of industrial processes. Agricultural populations, though enormous in census size (there are something like 1.5 billion cattle worldwide), can have the same level of genetic diversity as a vastly smaller normal breeding population – as little as a few dozen individuals. This is because a single stud bull’s semen can be used to impregnate thousands of cows artificially.

And here’s the punchline: apparently, this level of uniformity is not good enough. No, now we’re going to start cloning our meat. 22,000 identical rump-roasts, anyone?

On the other hand, maybe a fragile industrial farm animal population is a good idea. If all the industrial cattle in the world are suddenly wiped out by a bovine plague, think of all the boons: less pesticide and animal-waste runoff, less cow-flatulant contribution to global warming. And all the genetically modified corn and soybean we can eat. Woot!

With tax day coming in the USA, it’s a good time to think of all the things I bought with my taxes this year. Here’s my latest favorite, from everybody’s favorite website for posting photos of ex-girlfriends. Here is a recent page called Gitmo-bound. Oh! Gotta run, that Schedule C takes a while to finish!

A year ago or so (when he was still living with me), Dan and I put together a list of things that the U.S. should have done if it wanted to do right by Iraq. It’s actually replicated in the first post ever on this blog. I still think it was a good list, and if we had put some effort into publicizing it and spreading it around it might even have done some good. Now it’s just a muttered “told ya so”.

Case in point: Juan Cole talks about how the American contractors are flubbing everything.

The American contractors that did the work, did it in the American way. The Iraqi engineers and technicians had their own techniques and equipment and spare parts. After the Gulf War in 1991, they were able to get the electricity grid back up, using indigenous methods, in less than a year.

It was widely alleged that the Americans spent far too much on the work done, and that local Iraqi firms could have done it better, cheaper and more quickly. And the problem of putting in a lot of unfamiliar American equipment may well be that Iraqi technicians don’t know how to work it or keep it up without special training.

A horoscope from this week’s Onion:

Scorpio: (Oct. 24—Nov. 21)
Hope can sustain a person through excruciating personal trials, but unfortunately, there’s no real reason to believe that the new Star Wars movie will be tolerable.

For a while I’ve been pining for a good economic analysis of the descending curve of peak oil. I’ve finally got something like it, courtesy of the IMF – an analysis of what impact high oil prices (over $80/bbl) would have on economic growth worldwide.

Now that I’ve got it, I realize that I don’t actually know enough about economics to evaluate it. Crumb. Anyway, I can see well enough what assumptions the IMF is making: they don’t seem to believe in peak oil. Their projections are based on a spike above $80 in 2005 and a subsequent decline until 2009 as production increases and demand fades. Both of these are pretty stupid assumptions. Everyone in the world agrees that demand is going to go up, and how. It’s possible that we’ll see wild production increases coming out of Iraq, which presumably ought to be able to match the 9-11 Mbd that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia produce. But not soon, and probably not apace with rising demand.

The result? Well, apparently not much. Average GDP hit for rich countries: 0.6%. Average GDP hit for “developing” countries: 1.5%. Considering China is supposed to see 8% GDP growth rates in coming years, this oil problem maybe doesn’t seem like a show-stopper.

I don’t put too much stock in this report, given the shaky assumptions. But there’s some interesting stuff to glean: for example, the United States does worse than other industrialized nations (taking a 0.8% GDP hit) because of its comparatively higher oil intensity. Read: our cars are bigger and boozier than theirs are. It’s been said a billion times, but I’ll say it again: fuel economy, fuel economy, location. Err, I mean, fuel economy.

Postscript: Incidentally, while I’m commenting on things I don’t understand very well: it’s always irked me that economists point to increasing efficiency as a sign that oil shocks now won’t be as bad as they were in the 1970s. Oil intensity is measured in consumption per unit of GDP – but this seems to ignore the possibility that not all oil consumption is going to be equally productive. E.g. driving my car to the beach to surf is obviously not as useful as driving my tractor across an acre of farmland. So similar reductions in oil intensity could have drastically different effects depending on which sectors see the most dramatic conservation. In an extreme case, the most critical productive sectors may be increasing their intensity while the country as a whole sees conservation. I’m not saying this is necessarily what’s HAPPENED, merely that I think existing analyses are too crude to consider this possibility, and I’m not confident this hasn’t taken place.