Month: April 2013

Bitcoin: The Currency of Mistrust

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Felix Salmon has a very good post on Bitcoin (and the potential bubble associated with it). The gist of his argument is in these two paragraphs:

If you hold dollars, you’re trusting the US government not to destroy your wealth. Bitcoin, by contrast, is based on mistrust — it’s specifically designed so that it’s every man for himself. All in Vain was blamed by many in the bitcoin community for his stupidity: what was he thinking, keeping his wallet on a Windows computer attached to the open internet?

But even with bitcoin, people nearly always end up trusting someone – and the entity they’re trusting often turns out to be unreliable. MyBitcoin, turned out to be a fraud; Mt Gox was hacked. The latest hot new bitcoin company is Coinlab, but given how much money can be made by hacking into these companies, and given that law enforcement authorities are unlikely to make any attempt to go after the perpetrators, there will always be a pretty substantial risk that clients will lose their money.

In related news: Henry Blodget didn’t publish his take on April Fools’ Day.

On Patent Law, Life, and Nature

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Did you know that genes are patentable? Because I hadn’t until I read Michael Specter’s New Yorker piece summarizing patent law as it applies to life:

Traditionally, patents have applied solely to inventions, granted as a reward for ingenuity and to encourage innovation. Naturally occurring substances, like DNA, were exempt from such laws. Then, in 1980, Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a scientist working for General Electric, filed an application for a patent on a bacterium that he had modified genetically so that it could consume oil. The Patent and Trademark Office rejected Chakrabarty’s application on the ground that the bacterium was a product of nature. Chakrabarty sued, arguing that, by altering the organism, it was his ingenuity that made the bacterium valuable. The case ended up before the Supreme Court, which, by a vote of five to four, ruled in favor of the engineer. “The fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for the purpose of patent law,” the Court wrote. Chakrabarty’s creation became the first life-form to receive a patent.

Since then, genes considered to have been “isolated from their natural state and purified” have been eligible for patent protection. The first such patents were issued for DNA that had been altered to produce specific proteins, such as the insulin used daily by millions of diabetics. Those patents were rarely controversial. Over the years, however, patents have also been granted to people who have identified genes with mutations that are likely to increase the risk of a disease. Any scientist who wants to conduct research on such a gene—even on a small sequence of its DNA—has to pay license fees. The practical effect has been chilling. According to public-health officials and academic leaders, it has stymied research into many types of disease.

This seems particularly outrageous:

A patent on a product of Nature would authorize the patent holder to exclude everyone from observing, characterizing or analyzing, by any means whatsoever, the product of Nature.

In the end, this is big business (but with a cost):

Moreover, when a company patents a gene, it also patents the rights to what that gene (or any fragment of its DNA) might tell us about our health, including our chances of living or dying. A woman who inherits a harmful version of either of the genes that Myriad has under patent, for example, is five times more likely to develop breast cancer than a woman who does not. She is also at significantly greater risk of developing ovarian cancer. Women who want to know whether they possess those harmful mutations have just one way of finding out: by taking a three-thousand-dollar blood test offered by Myriad Genetics.

Terrifying.

Mark Bittman on a Healthy Fast Food Joint

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From a good Mark Bittman piece in The New York Times, who shares his vision for an all-healthy fast-food joint:

I’m not talking about token gestures, like McDonald’s fruit-and-yogurt parfait, whose calories are more than 50 percent sugar. And I don’t expect the prices to match those of Taco Bell or McDonald’s, where economies of scale and inexpensive ingredients make meals dirt cheap. What I’d like is a place that serves only good options, where you don’t have to resist the junk food to order well, and where the food is real — by which I mean dishes that generally contain few ingredients and are recognizable to everyone, not just food technologists. It’s a place where something like a black-bean burger piled with vegetables and baked sweet potato fries — and, hell, maybe even a vegan shake — is less than 10 bucks and 800 calories (and way fewer without the shake). If I could order and eat that in 15 minutes, I’d be happy, and I think a lot of others would be, too.

Some statistics:

In recent years, the fast-food industry has started to heed these new demands. Billions of dollars have been invested in more healthful fast-food options, and the financial incentives justify these expenditures. About half of all the money spent on food in the United States is for meals eaten outside the home. And last year McDonald’s earned $5.5 billion in profits on $88 billion in sales. If a competitor offered a more healthful option that was able to capture just a single percent of that market share, it would make $55 million. Chipotle, the best newcomer of the last generation, has beaten that 1 percent handily. Last year, sales approached $3 billion. In the fourth quarter, they grew by 17 percent over the same period in the previous year.

Close to where I live I have discovered one food joint that has tasty food that’s inexpensive: Zoe’s Kitchen. Here’s their menu of entries under 500 calories, for example.

Bieber Fever in Norway

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School administrators on the west coast of Norway are preparing to deal with the return of “Bieber fever” by rescheduling exams in order to avoid conflicts that may arise due to the Beebs’ upcoming concert in Oslo. From The Wall Street Journal:

 Students at five schools in the town of Alesund will have their midterm exams moved to April 10 and April 11, a week earlier than scheduled. After all, Justin Bieber has a concert scheduled at the Telenor Arena in Oslo on the original testing dates of April 16 and April 17.

“We considered that this was a battle that we could not win this time,” Roar Aasen,  the principal of the Blindheim secondary school in Alesund, told national broadcaster NRK. He expects Mr. Bieber’s upcoming show to lead to sparse classroom attendance.

This year, half of the girls at Mr. Aasen’s school are expected to attend one of Mr. Bieber’s Oslo shows, according to interviews done by NRK. The Norway stop is the beginning of a Nordic leg of his current tour, which will take him through Copenhagen, two stops in Sweden and Helsinki.

Ridiculous.

Brian Doyle on Hearts and Lifetimes

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“Joyas Volardores” is an essay published in 2004 in which Brian Doyle considers the heart:

No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside…

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

Beautiful.

Michael Moynihan on Trusting Wikipedia with Your Life

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Journalist Michael Moynihan was inspired to start a newspaper in Prague—or so his Wikipedia entry states. Never mind that he’s never been there. He investigates the perils of trusting the online encyclopedia when you’re a nobody—and when another guy with your name is identified as a “neo-fascist.” He expresses his thoughts in this Daily Beast piece:

It’s possible to quibble with or contest every second sentence in my encyclopedia entry, which quickly cratered my confidence in the website. But there are plenty of studies suggesting that Wikipedia is, despite its ability to be edited by anyone with excess free time and an Internet connection, about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It also has the benefit of being up to the minute: when news breaks, when a public figure dies, details are added to Wikipedia almost immediately. A fact check of important subjects with multiple editors—Darwinism, Squeaky Fromme, the Boxer Rebellion—suggests that the website is broadly trustworthy, terrific at aggregating links, and a worthy springboard to better material.

But what of those entries covering the hopelessly insignificant, like me? I won’t bore you by cataloguing all the mistakes in my entry (I found about a dozen), but the results weren’t terribly impressive. I’m unsure how long it remained on the page, but according to Wikipedia’s edit log, my biography once claimed that I had a “vagina” and—pardon the language—“love the cock.” The only people who can refute the first point are, I hope, biased in my favor and wouldn’t be trusted by Wikipedia as “reliable sources.” The second point, also difficult to disprove, seems irrelevant to the job of polemicist.

Great conclusion:

But just so we’re clear, Wikipedia: I’m not a fascist, I’ve never been to Prague, and I am currently an anatomically correct male. If any of this changes, I’ll find two corroborating, reputable sources and ask a friend to make the appropriate changes to my page.

Los Angeles Synchronizes Traffic Lights

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The New York Times reports the city of Los Angeles has synchronized all 4,500 traffic lights:

Now, in the latest ambitious and costly assault on gridlock, Los Angeles has synchronized every one of its 4,500 traffic signals across 469 square miles — the first major metropolis in the world to do so, officials said — raising the almost fantastical prospect, in theory, of driving Western Avenue from the Hollywood Hills to the San Pedro waterfront without stopping once.

Will the move reduce the number of accidents in the city?

The New York Times Haikus

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What is this, New York Times? A clever April Fools’ ruse? My favorite:

You famously learned

to read and write English by 

reading Nabokov.

Love it.  See all the entries here.

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Edit: apparently not a joke. From the about page, these haikus are real but generated via a computer algorithm scanning syllable counts of NYT articles:

How does our algorithm work? It periodically checks the New York Times home page for newly published articles. Then it scans each sentence looking for potential haikus by using an electronic dictionary containing syllable counts. We started with a basic rhyming lexicon, but over time we’ve added syllable counts for words like “Rihanna” or “terroir” to keep pace with the broad vocabulary of The Times.

Not every haiku our computer finds is a good one. The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can’t distinguish between an elegant verse and a plodding one. But, when it does stumble across something beautiful or funny or just a gem of a haiku, human journalists select it and post it on this blog.