Comfort Kills

My uncle is dying. In less than a month, he would probably be gone. The doctors say he’s dying from cancer. But, in truth, is he’s dying from fear and superstition.

It was almost two years ago that he was diagnosed with kidney cancer. A low-danger tumor. He was invited to schedule an operation. A simple operation. But my uncle panicked. He contacted a Chinese herbalist, who promised him that, indeed, no operation would be necessary. Those western doctors, she assured him, know nothing. All he has to do is keep a healthy life style and take her herbs. A year went by. His pains grew stronger and more frequent. The herbalist did some psychic tests and “discovered” that his tumor is shrinking. These are shrinkage pains, she told him. And he believed her for a simple reason: he was afraid of going through an operation. “It is risky”, he kept saying to everyone who would listen. “One can die from complications. One can go through an anesthesias and never wake up”.

It took the tumor months to grow malignant. It enered his spine, most of his abdomen, and both legs. The pain is now so excruciating that my uncle can barely speak. He has been given morphine, because no other sedative is strong enough to deal with the pain. But his Chinese herbalist convinced him that morphine is bad for his health (remainder: the man is dying!), so he takes none of it. Even now, when his only hope is experimental hypothermia combined with chemotherapy, he still clings desperately to a strange “healer” who promised him imminent cure with crystals.

As much as I would like to strangle that Chinese herbalist with my bare hands, as much as I loath her, I do not think that she is the essence of the trouble. If it were not for her, it would have been another healer, a UFO, or even a fatalist priest. The trouble stems only from this fact: that my dear uncle kept looking for comfort, where he should have been looking for a cure. The “western” way, with hospitals, and doctors, and operations, demands that he grows up to become an adult, and that he faces inconvenient truths (his mortality, his sickness). He would have non of that. He demanded comfort. He got death.

Mascagni’s widow

For his 30th birthday, Pietro Mascagni bought himself a girl. It was 4 years since the premiere of his short opera Cavalleira Rusticana, which made him a celebrity by night. He was now director of the Scuola Musicale Romana, in Rome, and his status at the high society in Rome demanded something more presentable than a mistress. As lovely as she was, Anna Lolli was no more than that. He needed a wife. A presentable wife.

Elmira De Ville was 14 years old when she became the lady Mascagni. Her patrician, proud and destitute family was all to happy to marry her off to a man of considerable wealth. But the inferior musician was way beneath the dignity of young Elmira. She loathed him.

Waste my blog

Both avid readers of my blog have surely noticed that I have been silent for a long time. I have been building a home, and have moved. You are most welcome to visit. And I need some net help.

When we built the house, we put the local soil (which we dug to build the house) nearby, in the thought of reusing it as garden soil. Unfortunately, it was all stolen by a contractor working nearby. So I had to pay for soil from the valleys. And guess what I got? Construction waste!

So here is my question: I have aluminum blocks (Itung), cement, and plastic sheets buried in the ground. Does anybody know what to do with soil rich in construction waste? What materials are toxic for plants and for trees? What materials can be left in the ground?

If I find any help, I promise to write an organized table here on this site.

Some good takes on the baking catastrophe

Although they were posted nearly a year ago, they are just getting more and more relevant.

Welcome Bird and Fortune – SubPrime Crisis:

And – Bird and Fortune – Financial adviser:

Both are great. And, unfortunately, very true.

If you want a mathematician’s take on these matters, better look at Mark’s blog:
Mortgage basics 1
Mortgage basics 2
How disaster came about

I hope I will have time to add a bit myself in the near future.

A philosophy-of-science proof of the afterlife

Matt Springer has a nice (and very confused) take on the problem of scientific proof. Following him I have devised this amazing scientific proof to the existence of an afterlife:

There are two possibilities:

1. Proposition 1: There is no after-life. I do not exist after my death.
2. Proposition 2: There is an after-life. I would still exist after I die.

As Matt rightly spots, Proposition 1 is unverifiable. If you don’t exist after you die, then you cannot know it.
Hence, it is disqualified under the pretense of being unscientific.
Proposition 2, however, is verifiable, because if it were true, then I would clearly know that when I discover I have died and retain my existence. But if proposition 2 was false, then proposition 1, which is unscientific, would be true. But if truth is only scientific truth, then proposition 1 cannot be true.

Q.E.D.

Can you spot the errors?

Brother, can you spare me a viable Economic Theory?

Prof. Robert Nadeau, through Scientific American claims that current economic theory is a severe (and irrational) hindrance to fighting global warming.
(the exact link is:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brother-can-you-spare-me-a-planet ).

The claim is:

1. Current (neo-classical) economics is based on false premises.
2. These false premises include this important premise: That nature is irrelevant to economic growth (and that natural resources are boundless).

Because the irrelevance of nature is a premise of Economic Theory, it is not surprising that it pops up as an outcome of Economic Theory. Given the type of models they work with, economists have to claim that fighting global warming is economically inviable. And when they do so, it’s a tautology – what they are actually saying is: “since we assume that nature is irrelevant to Economics, no action to save natural reasorces could possibly be cost-beneficial”. A claim which is, of course, absurd.

More power can be much less

Some people I’ve been talking with have been wondering how an extremely mediocre person such as Ulmert got to be the prime minister of Israel. Well, it is nigh time I start writing on subjects I fully comprehend. So, I present to you another lesson in election theory – when can more power mean less power?

We’ll take an example from voting theory, because it is a nice example with interesting lessons, and it demonstrates several aspects of game theory. Suppose we have three people on a committee: Alex, Bob, and Chris. They need to choose between options a, b, and c. A very reliable method of voting is the simple majority vote. In this method, each committee member gives his vote to one option. The option with the largest munger of votes wins.

The trouble is, what happens on a tie? Say Alex votes a, Bob votes b, and Chris votes c. Then each option got 1 vote, and it’s a tie. How do you break a tie?

There are two obvious (and common) tiebreaker rules. The first is to define some option as the default. In case of a tie, that specific option wins. Slightly more common is to define one of the committee members as chairman – giving him the right to decide in case of a tie.

The true, sad story of a data analysis expert

And then I was suddenly awake. It was the middle of the night, and something was wrong. Terribly wrong. I felt it in by bones. I felt it in the dark room closing around me. I was aware of a terrible inconsistency in the way I slept. It took me a few minutes to understand: the way I used to sleep was misguided. My configuration was terrible. All my inner organs were misplaced. My muscles were all strained. This was no way to sleep. I no longer knew the correct way to sleep. In fact, it dawned on me, I never did. It was always wrong. I didn’t know how to sleep. I never did.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought nagged: “Man”, it said, “you were just sleeping a minute ago. You slept well last night, and you have done so for every night for thirty years now. Surely, you do know how to do that”. But the thought did not linger. I could not sleep. I did not know how to do so.

For a long time I lay down in the dark, squirming around in vain, looking for the correct geometric configuration, squeezing my body into impossible shapes, and running algorithm after algorithm in my mind. To no avail. Sleep evaded me. It took me an hour to give up. I stood up, exhausted, and suddenly, I had a revelation:

I am no data series. I do not need to an efficient data compression algorithm to sleep.

Findings of the week

From Janne in Osaka – when does a political party become mindless?

And a study in the benefits of bounded rationality from the New York Times: sometimes, learning is costly, so it’s only for the environmentally challenged. Hey, damn it! We humans are environmentally challenged. Are we smart enough for it?

Back from Hell, or the Wonders of Connectivity

The couple of avid readers I have (dear, dear people, what’s life worth without you?) might have noticed my month long silence. I wasn’t home. I was in Miluim. Military reserve duty.

I was in the Palestinian Occupied territories. It was hell, for all the wrong reasons. I should (and will) write about it soon. But for the time being, I only wish to remark upon the wonders of modern connectivity.