"The Brain" -- De Salle and Tattersall

I am trying to make sense out of how a brain works and why. I listen to lots of experts and read lots of articles and books. The current book, "The Brain" by DeSalle and Tattersall, continues the reading.

To me, this book is useful, interesting, and annoyingly uneven.

The authors do not seem to understand physics or chemistry. They do not seem to know what an ion is or how a current carried by chloride ions in a neuron differs in important ways from a current carried by bare electrons in a wire. This lack of understanding drove me crazy until about page 80 when the authors went on to other topics. I almost gave up on the book multiple times. At a different level, the authors routinely overinterpret sparse data. They make strong conclusions about the meaning of brain areas from endocasts of skulls (plaster casts of the inside shapes of skulls, striking me {and Wikipedia} as modern phrenology with little underlying basis). They routinely draw conclusions about evolution from evolutionary trees while ignoring that all members of the tree evolve not just the humans (for instance, if coelocanths did not evolve for 300 million years; there should be a strong reason for this lack of evolution. The authors never consider this.)

On the other hand, between page 80 and the epilogue, I learned a lot. I was ignorant of brain structure across species and across time. I did not know the names of various gyri and sulci in an adult brain or that the brain develops its wrinkly look before birth and keeps a similar look while a human learns all it can learn. Why does it do this? What is the meaning of each wrinkle? I really liked the description of Kandel's experiments on habituation and conditioning in sea slugs as well as the extension of these results into long term potentiation and long term depression as well as, potentially, into microRNAs.

Once the caveats listed above are taken away, what is left is an up to date and very useful book.

Whither NNSA?

Today it was announced that Tom D'Agostino is stepping down from his role as director of NNSA. He is to be replaced by Neile Miller, a person who has done accounting and clean up oversight at DOE and who has no science, weapons, or military training. She was appointed as deputy secretary by President Obama and has a BA from Vassar in political science and a MA in international relations. She comes to DOE and NNSA from Obama's Office of the Budget where she was a senior examiner of budgets. She was a consultant to Sandia in the past.

What might her appointment as acting director of NNSA say about the current administration's commitment to nuclear weapons and to science at the national weapons labs? What might it say about the stability of the budgets at these labs? My expectation is that her marching orders are to cut these budgets. I have no actual data yet on these marching orders but the best guess in Los Alamos is that the Lab's yearly budget will be cut by another $400,000,000 on top of last year's $300,000,000 direct cut with an additional income of $500,000,000 from rebuilding CMRR to be delayed indefinitely.

If these are her marching orders, the future looks bleak for towns like Los Alamos, NM; Hanford, WA; Oak Ridge, TN; Livermore, CA; Albuquerque, NM; and Amarillo, TX that depend, sometimes completely, on Federal weapons funding. The future also looks bleak if you read about the political deal making that occurred between the Department of Energy and the White House as part of the stimulus plan (in the 200s in the pages of "The NEW New Deal" where the deal was made for renewable energy and against nuclear energy and especially against funding nuclear weapons sites to do anything except clean up the old mess.)

The darkness seemed to intensify some with this article from Scientific American about the pointlessness of nuclear weapons.

These towns will need some new sources of employment or they will dry up and blow away.

It was pointed out to me yesterday that the title of this post has at least two meanings. 'Whither' can have the meaning of where is NNSA going. It can also have the meaning of shrink and die. The second meaning seems more likely given the retirement of John Kyl, the growing movement against nuclear weapons, and the internal political dynamics of the agency itself and its GOCO sites.

Here NNSA tries to hide a mistake the size of the Solyndra fiasco.

In a surprise development, on 17 May 2013, Neile Miller announced that she would step down as acting head of NNSA and leave government entirely. I have no idea what to make of this. My guess is that there are many more scandals that will soon surface.

First version of this post published on 21 December, 2012.

Rituals work. Who knew?

We all do rituals, especially before stressful events. Some of the rituals seem silly to others. On the other hand, they work.

Adam Lanza and mental illness

The newest pieces are at the bottom. The latest post is about our growing ability to spot murderers through fMRI patterns and genes.

Like many people, I have been having discussions about the tragedy in Newtown, CT. I started to worry that Adam Lanza not the gun may have been the lethal weapon. This post comes in a few sections. First are thoughts from people who are in an 'Adam Lanza' family. Then there are references to effectiveness (or not) in attempts to use gun control laws to curb sporadic violence. Next are some broader insights into why killers kill followed by some interesting but random articles and then studies on mental illness overall and from the point of view of the ill person. These point of view book were revelatory to me.

Here is a great post laying out the mental illness dangers that have led to Adam's and others' violent behavior. Here, here, and here are three posts from a person who could have been Adam Lanza. Maybe it is time for all of us to deal directly with the violent mentally ill. We seem to nearly have the tools to do it decently.

A number of people, including our president, have come out saying that they will pass laws that prevent gun violence. Others have said that there should be a cop in every school, or maybe not. I understand the political and emotional forces ("Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Rahm Emanuel. Especially if it distracts from the fiscal cliff.) but I don't get it.

There are multiple studies that show that laws against gun violence don't prevent gun violence and that concealed carry laws don't increase gun violence. I don't think that Adam Lanza would have, all of a sudden, become sane and non violent if there were more laws against guns. He would just have used a different weapon as the recent killing of 6 children in China by a young man wielding a knife suggests.

The classic example, from Illinois, of gun control laws not having the intended effect was a law that made it a capital crime to kill someone with a gun in Illinois. In Indiana, right next door to Illinois, it was not a capital crime. Even with this strong incentive to move mob hits to Indiana, no mob hits were moved from Illinois to Indiana to avoid Illinois' death penalty. As of January 2013, stringent gun laws in Chicago have resulted in more gun related homicides not fewer. The bad guys just drive an hour to somewhere else, buy a gun, and then come back to Chicago and kill somebody. There is also the publishing of a list of the location of gun permit holders near New York City, which has been hailed by burglars as a great resource for the burglars. An article has just come out saying that while the data on who applied for gun permits was public, publishing it was not really journalism so much as link bait. Maybe one of these points is what the argument is really about.

Multi death rampages have been decreasing over the last ten years not increasing. So the rare ones that there are are more likely to make the headlines. How does this statistic fit into the evolving picture of what we as a society should do next?

Another article, this one from Scientific American on why the killers kill. Three insights are that these killers learn from and try to outdo previous such killers (so strong media reporting not only sells papers and magazines, it also trains the next generation of killers), that they tell others about what they are going to do, and that they just want more respect and less bullying in their school.

Here is a good article from Keith Kloor. Here is an article from the New York Times. Here is another take. Here, from the NYT, is a nice article not on mental illness but on existing and proposed gun laws and another on the arguments, which I did not understand before I read the article, on gun laws around the world and their driving forces. There may be some good examples of effective gun control in this article about gun control laws in Australia. I do not know whether Australia's example applies to the US because I don't know much about social dynamics or mental illness in Australia.

There are posts on this blog about mental ilness. One is Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Two others are on forgiveness, an opinion piece and a novel, "Four ways to forgiveness." A third is "The Dyslexic Advantage." A fourth is about self deception. Another is about teen age brain development.

There is also "Predictably Irrational" about ways that all of us act incorrectly with respect to economics and "Genderspeak", about implicit bullying in which we talk to each other in ways that are very hurtful to others though we do not see the hurt. Then there is "The Art of Mingling", which is a great primer on key social skills and Pease' book on reading others' body language and one on how to detect lies. The reason that all these posts have appeared is that we are developing an accurate model of learning and memory and need to know about all these things.

There are also books about mental health as viewed by the person having the problem, such as "Night Falls Fast" (about suicide), "The Center Cannot Hold" (about schizophrenia), William Styron on depression, and "Look Me in the Eye" about Asperger's (including the insight that people with Asperger's don't look you in the eye when they are talking because they can't look at you and maintain their train of thought) and wonderful work on autism by Temple Grandin. Especially disturbing is a book about people whose personalities are always on the border of dissolving and who, in self defense, strike out at others,"Stop walking on eggshells."

On the other side of the story is Armstrong's "Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life."

Here is a discussion about whether gun control or mental health changes is the best path forward and an interesting discussion on beliefs that correlate strongly with each other, one on ideologically motivated beliefs, and another post on the predictability of sporadic violence, including terrorist attacks, of a certain size.

Here, in an eery coincidence, is a post that I made about Richard North Patterson's book "Balance of Power", a novel about the reactions of various U.S. politicians to the gunning down of the President's wife's family by a crazed brother in law using a large clip semi-automatic weapon. Here is another Patterson book, "In the name of honor." about the relevant topic of post traumatic stress disorder.

This post has been updated about thirty times. The published on date reflects the date of the most recent update. The first post occurred on 16 December 2012.

I would much appreciate people's thoughts on how to respond to Newtown and other tragedies caused by the sporadically violent.

I would like someone to explain to me what should be done next if new gun control laws are passed and crime increases. If gun control is not a solution to the problem of sporadic violence, should it be repealed and something else done? Don't we have enough evidence so far to know whether a particular new gun law would actually decrease the problem of sporadic violence? If we do, I would like old laws to be enforced and new laws to use this evidence in their wording.

Here is the latest set of thoughts from Vice President Biden. And here is some information saying that the banning of 'assault weapons' as in 1994 is only symbolic. It stirs up the voting base and gets more Democrats elected but does not actually accomplish anything.

A deeper problem in controlling sporadic violence has been raised in a New York Times article. The authors state that warning signs of mental instability leading to sporadic violence are not very predictive. These warning signs would, if applied in the way that some states are trying to do now, indict all the residents of a state and say that everyone is likely to kill everyone else. This prediction is, of course, not true. Also, if states implemented strong background checks on everyone and strong reporting requirements for all psychologists and psychiatrists with respect to people who 'might' do something violent, then the people who would do something violent will just stop going to psychologists just as people with very serious psychological problems such as BPD already avoid psychologists now. On a related tack, this article lays out the idea that what may connect mass murderers is not guns nor crazy behavior but the rare adverse reactions to drugs designed to curb crazy behavior. In order to reach a good conclusion on how to proceed on sporadic violence, we may have to listen to experts who are honest brokers and not ideological advocates. This article gives some insight into how to be an honest broker and not be perceived as an advocate who is distorting the facts.

Ok, I have no idea why, in the face of gun control laws, the department of Homeland Security needs more than one billion bullets, enough for them to fight an Iraq style war in the U.S. for 30 years, all of which they have purchased in the last year. Or why the White House thinks that it is reasonable for them to kill American citizens without any oversight or review.

What should be done differently if the murderer is a woman? Here is the letter from Evan Todd.

Here here, and here are reasoned responses from various churches to Newtown and related issues.

Apparently Adam Lanza had been planning the murders at Newtown for years. This would make the attempt to control such violence much harder.

The Senate is trying to ban purchasing guns for people to give to criminals (straw purchases) but does not have enough votes to ban 'assault' weapons. (Assault is in single quotes because these weapons are not really fully automatic weapons that armies use but low end rifles that look a bit like assault weapons.)

In an interesting development, the UN has just passed sweeping gun control bills. Some have hailed this passage as a great step forward. I am skeptical since I do not know of any evidence that the UN peacekeepers have ever kept the peace. I am also dubious since some members of the UN commission on human rights are the world's worst murderers.

Here is an interesting piece saying that gun control is not about gun control at all but about culture and the ability to buy and own an object that makes the owner feel satisfied and powerful. For some these objects are guns, for others they are guitars, bottles of wine, or shoes. So gun control is part of an ongoing culture war and not about the facts on either side.

The proposed Senate gun control bill will have no effect on more Sandy Hook massacres says one aide. It is about extending government control.

The gun control bill may include a section of mental health care.

The D.C. optics around this issue are sadly amusing. When a gun control bill failed in the Senate, the losing side tried to blame the winning side for having no guts. Imagine a basketball game, say Heat versus Knicks, in which the losers yelled at the winners for not deliberately playing badly and throwing the game. The object of politics is to win for yourself and your constituents not to throw the game so that your constituents and you lose.

President Obama lost big on the gun control legislation. Then he appeared to want to be the scold to others instead of figuring out why he lost.

Are there detectable physiological causes of crime? Maybe.

Here is an article summarizing big pieces of the current law covered by the second amendment.

In this fascinating study, the authors found that many Americans were in favor of a number of new regulations, for instance on gun control, but did not trust the members of the opposing political party to implement the new regulation without trying to distort it for ideological reasons. For instance, Republicans were certain that Obama would immediately try to convert reasonable limits on magazine size into taking away all guns. On the other hand, maybe the complaint that voting for the gun control bill was political suicide was nonsense.

A small Florida town gets $1,000,000 in a one time grant to try to find the sporadically violent before they are violent.

From Dan Kahan at Cultural Cognition comes a key question, 'Why are shootings of small children viewed as dispositive for banning 'assault' weapons when other dangers to small children, such as drownings in swimming pools, have no response at all?' There are far more drownings than shootings.

Gun homicides and violent crime are actually way down not up in the last ten years.

This bit is amusingly sad. The Department of State has asked a person in Texas to remove from the Internet a file that would allow a person owing an $8,000 3D printer to print a revolver that might or might not work. It is amusing because the first and second amendments to the constitution seem to directly forbid the State Department from controlling the Internet this was. It is sad because the design file was already downloaded 100,000 times and is still available outside the U.S. at a number of sites. With respect to the rest of this post, I would be more impressed if the State Department had done something that had even a small hope of reducing sporadic violence.

Much to my surprise, you may be able to spot murderers through fMRI scans and genetics.

Dark matter is diverse

There may not be a single dark matter particles but lots of them. Repeat data from deep underground at the Soudan mine fits with many different kinds of dark matter particles including dark antimatter.

First published on 17 April 2013.

Disgust, repulsion, harm, culture and politics

Dan Kahan, whom I have mentioned before, is having an interesting set of postings on 'disgust.'

He is starting to talk about why various people are disgusted by one thing, such as guns, while others are disgusted by something else, such as same sex marriage. Kahan's cultural cognition question is not about who is 'right' but about what drives and maintains the feeling of disgust. It is not clear to me what drives the intensity of the feeling, when it develops, and whether it predictably changes over time.

Diversity PR vs. diversity results

Many governmental organizations talk about giving more work to minority contractors. Here is a report on how things are going nationally. The results do not match the rhetoric. The simple reason is that it is easier to make a press release about demographically balanced contracting than it is to do the follow up and see if the contracts are now going to someone new.

Homomorphic encryption

Say that you wanted to search a database in the Cloud but the database was encrypted. It used to be that your Cloud provider would decrypt the database and your search terms, do the search, reencrypt everything, and send encrypted results back to you. Now, thanks to an open source program from IBM the search may be able to be done with both the search terms and the data still encrypted. This is called homomorphic encryption. Pretty cool.

It will be a while before I understand the mathematics or the computer implementation enough to say anything more. I think I know some biological examples of homomorphic encryption. It also seems that there will be uses of rapid homomorphic encryption beyond databases, possibly in games or in security. We will see.

Anti-science on the left and right

Keith Kloor interviews Alex Berezow, author of "The Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left", on how progressive and conservative ideologues distort science in pursuit of political power. This is a nicely balanced article.

Glass ain't no liquid

Many of us were taught that glass is a very slow moving liquid and flows toward the earth in time scales of hundreds of years. This is apparently wrong. Research at Texas Tech has found no such movement in samples of glass and of amber where the amber was 20,000,000 years old. I love it when clean experiments show that received wisdom is not correct.

Obama throws money at nuclear weapons labs

President Obama has increased funding by 30% to the nation's nuclear weapons facilities during his presidency. There is no one to bomb and there are no new designs. The most supportive Senators have left government. Morale and scientific achievement at the weapons labs and at DOE are way down. NNSA asking for more and more money in a time of no testing and budget tightening seems crazy. What is going on?

A single language yielded the current plethora

Instead of Indo European languages coming from a different root than Tamil or Japanese, they all come from one mother tongue.

Burning plants chemically germinate dormant seeds

Forest fires result in a burst of seed germination and plant growth. A simple guess would be that the fire releases nutrients into the soil, heats the seeds and starts them (e.g. jack pines), or allows sunlight to hit the soil, warming it and providing sunlight for the new seeds. These guesses do not quite fit the facts.

Now a team at the Salk Institute in San Diego has found a strong trigger. Karrikins are generated and released by the burning plants. These chemicals stay in the soil and bind to seeds in the soil. This binding is a trigger for the seeds, even very old ones, to germinate under the right conditions in the spring. So, the fire sends a direct chemical signal to seeds in the burned area.

Red Smith -- On Writing

Red Smith was a non pareil sportswriter for the New York Times. Here is his thought on writing. "Writing is simple. All I have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

Not happy about 'happy'

It seems that the more we try to understand what causes us to be happy, we find that we do not really have a viable definition of 'happy.' Kahneman (see other posts) has been looking for a definition of 'happy' for a decade now without success.

A unified theory of physics? Maybe not

It may be harder to make a unified theory of physics than physicists had hoped. It may not be possible to construct an instrument that can detect what needs to be detected. For instance Freeman Dyson has calculated that only really large pulses of gravity will be detectable in even the best LIGO instruments. These pulses are bigger than detection of individual quanta of gravity, which may not exist, and so do not point, experimentally, in the direction of a unified theory.

"To detect a single graviton with a LIGO apparatus, the mirrors must be exactly so heavy that they will attract each other with irresistible force and collapse into a black hole. In other words, nature herself forbids us to observe a single graviton with this kind of apparatus."

Reviving neurons in stroke patients, decades later

I had no idea that this approach, treating stroke patients with hyberbaric oxygen, would work, but now that it does I need to learn more. Like everyone else I was taught that neurons damaged in stroke were gone and not merely sleeping. Guess that was wrong.

Business cliches for you.

The only trouble with following this link is that you may laugh out loud in your next business meeting.

Why American companies leave money abroad

If you are a retail business, you may pay 35% in Federal taxes. If your company has a lot of intellectual property, you can move the property to a low tax country and license this property to your subsidiaries in high tax countries. Since it is never clear what this property is worth, you can transfer profits in a high tax country to the low tax country. American tax law makes it foolish for a company to bring these profits back to America. Just saying.

Where to grow a business, state by state

If you try to measure what state your business should be in to grow well, you need a credible and complex metric. Here is a good one from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.