The first of God’s creatures

Polly Samson’s playlist: 10 songs from my travels | Greece holidays | The Guardian

The line about the sonar got me.

I was seven months pregnant with my first child when his father and I went to Dingle to swim with the wild dolphins. It was September 1989, and though the sea must have been freezing (and no wetsuit could be found that would accommodate my bump) I don’t remember being cold because it was so exhilarating. We spent a month there, swimming with the dolphins every day (“the first of God’s creatures to see our baby” said his father, referring to their sonar) and in the evenings the music in the pubs was so good: all the traditional Irish instruments – fiddles, whistles – and this song remains with me as part of that happy time.

Physics envy

What’s next for physics’ standard model? Muon results throw theories into confusion

Physicists should be ecstatic right now. Taken at face value, the surprisingly strong magnetism of the elementary particles called muons, revealed by an experiment this month, suggests that the established theory of fundamental particles is incomplete. If the discrepancy pans out, it would be the first time that the theory has failed to account for observations since its inception five decades ago — and there is nothing physicists love more than proving a theory wrong.

There is still something special about the Queen of Sciences. Cast all those dull RCT meta-analyses aside.

That sort of business model

Why Joe Biden Punched Big Pharma in the Nose Over Covid Vaccines – BIG by Matt Stoller

On an investor call last month, the CEO of Pfizer, Frank D’Amelio, discussed what would happen to revenue from his vaccine product as the Covid pandemic ends, what he called the “durability of the franchise.” He told analysts not to worry. People in rich countries will need annual booster shots, and that is where Pfizer will make real money.

For these annual treatments, Pfizer will be able to charge much more than it does now. The current price for a covid vaccine, D’Amelio noted, is $19.50 per dose. He told analysts of his hope Pfizer could get to a more normal price, “$150, $175 per dose,” instead of what he called “pandemic pricing.”

The ghoulish part, however, is why there will need to be annual boosters. It’s not because the vaccine strength wanes over time, though that might happen. It’s because, as D’Amelio told Wall Street, there will be new variants emerging from abroad that can evade the vaccine. And how will variants emerge abroad? Well as outbreaks occur in non-vaccinated parts of the world, new strains will naturally occur as the virus mutates. If the rest of the world gets vaccinated, however, new variants won’t arise.

Defining addiction: they should know

6th May 2021. Cycling | Food – Just Two Things

Via Andrew Curry.

One of the critical issues—if you’re going to assert that food companies encourage addictive behaviours—is how you define addiction.

Moss has a helpful piece of evidence here: the definition offered as testimony under oath by a CEO of the tobacco and food company Philip Morris: 

A repetitive behaviour that some people find it difficult to quit.

And a nice turn of phrase:

While regulators are less likely to get involved in the US than in the UK, you can’t help but feel that sooner or later empty calories will turn into empty profits. 

Quote of the Day

A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.

John Shedd

Changing course

The geopolitical fight to come over green energy – Engelsberg Ideas

From Helen Thompson

The ‘energy transition’ tag is a misnomer. Radically reducing fossil-fuel energy will represent an energy and an economic revolution. The difficulty is not a matter of political will or money, but physics. As the Czech-Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil – the one energy realist that techno-optimist Bill Gates takes absolutely seriously – has repeatedly pointed out, a green energy revolution would be qualitatively different than any energy change in human history because it involves moving from more concentrated to less concentrated energy, rather than in the opposite direction.

Even more difficult than dealing with Scottish Power.

On the ignorance production factor

The cost of scientific patronage | Science

We need more historical scholarship on how powerful entities produce ignorance as well as knowledge, and Oreskes provides a model for doing so. As an intellectual and institutional history of postwar oceanography, Science on a Mission will interest historians and practitioners of the marine sciences, historians of Cold War science, and scholars of epistemology, and it deserves a wide readership. Moreover, as an exposé of how navy-sponsored oceanographers wound up constraining their own research agendas and believing their own myths, the book should give pause to all scientists who consider themselves immune to the potential influence of their funders, or who romanticize the golden age of military scientific patronage.

Compatible scholarship gets funded, and what gets funded…

Two quotes for another day

The political class copies. It seldom thinks.

Aristotle suggested that the opposite of anger is play, or if not its opposite, it’s antithesis. It’s an astute observation.

Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, in Angrynomics

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze · The Gatekeeper: Krugman’s Conversion · LRB 22 April 2021

Terrific essay by Adam Tooze in the LRB reviewing Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future. Three passages that caught my attention.

What sets Krugman apart within this cohort is the way he has, since the 1990s, stopped being a gatekeeper of the status quo and instead become its critic.

The basic idea of the MIT school of the neoclassical synthesis as defined by Samuelson was that Keynesian macroeconomics and neoclassical microeconomics were not contradictory but complementary. As Krugman put it, if you can get macro right then micro will follow. ‘In the Samuelsonian synthesis, one must count on the government to ensure more or less full employment; only once that can be taken as given do the usual virtues of free markets come to the fore.’ It was a dichotomised view of the world, with two different modes of analysis enshrined in separate textbooks and separate career paths for micro and macroeconomists. But as Krugman insisted, ‘inconsistency in the pursuit of useful guidance is no vice. The map is not the territory, and it’s OK to use different kinds of map depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.’ [emphasis added]

The Great Depression, Krugman wrote, ‘ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler. He created a human catastrophe, which also led to a lot of government spending.’ ‘Economics,’ he wrote in another essay, ‘is not a morality play. It’s not a happy story in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished.’

Follow the Link that is here

xkcd is here

Academic grade inflation: quite the opposite!

John Cash: former director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service, who warned against imported blood products | The BMJ

At Edinburgh University, he was secretary to the rugby club and won a gold medal for his essay on hospital infection, spending the prize money on an engagement ring for his future wife, Angela Thomson, a physiotherapist he had met at a church youth group.

I am just trying to do the sums. Times have indeed changed.

The male of the species

Threats | No Mercy / No Malice

When young women feel shame and rage, they don’t turn to AR-15s. The most dangerous person on the planet is a bored, broke, lonely young male. The U.S. is producing too many of them.

As I used to say to med students, melanoma may be one of the commoner cancers in young adults, but it is not nearly as deadly as the male of the species. Next time you let one of them drive you to the beach party you have more than remembering the sunblock to worry about.

Just a great heading

Climate crisis has shifted the Earth’s axis, study shows | Climate change | The Guardian

The massive melting of glaciers as a result of global heating has caused marked shifts in the Earth’s axis of rotation since the 1990s, research has shown. It demonstrates the profound impact humans are having on the planet, scientists said.

Probably not of the same magnitude as that induced by a Welsh victory over England at Cardiff.

Nice to be able to afford to go up market

23rd April 2021. Economics | Museums – Just Two Things

I was also struck that the paper appeared in Nature rather than an economics journal. It wouldn’t surprise me if bypassing the economics journals was a deliberate strategy, since they tend to be a source of conservatism in the discipline, not of innovation.

The story is about a paper by the noted Irish economist Brian Arthur. The paper is here. I suspect there are differences but the example in medicine I always think of is the paper by John Wennberg and Alan Gittelsohn that was bounced by the NEJM but ended up (as in, up, literally) in Science. Sadly, my work has always been shoved in the other direction. Drat!

What we thought was a cat was, to them, a cash cow.

Going to the vet: what happens when private equity invests in a cottage industry | Financial Times

The (great) title is from a comment on the above article (excepts below are from the article).

IVC have been gradually buying up all the vetinery practices near us. The pattern is always the same. A light-touch rebrand, and a massive increase in drug prices. But they make even more money on unnecessary diagnostic procedures. Our pets are well insured. What we thought was a cat was, to them, a cash cow. [emphasis added]

The story is not an unfamiliar one. The traditional professions — or more accurately— the professional model that some of us want to believe is essential to the practice of the professions is being bought out by cheap debt. The article reminds that if you are selling practices, prices are high, but time will tell if the corporate efficiencies just translate as rip-offs or merely getting fat on asymmetry of information. The article shows a group of youngish vets with the comment:

supporters of Europe’s largest vetcare provider say that in an industry traditionally dominated by men, it offers a career path more suited to younger women juggling families with careers.

I suspect that this is just another intergenerational transfer.

On silent pandemics

From a comment in the FT (apologies I can’t find the original source, as comments do not appear searchable).

These new materials are already used in catheters, ventilator tubes and even wound dressings. They are preventing and resolving infections as a result. As we have seen with the coronavirus pandemic, new innovations are vital—this also applies when the pandemic is “silent”.

I like the phrase silent pandemics; they are the ones you have to watch out for.

On certification

Professor: ‘certification’ mania hobbles Middle East development | Times Higher Education (THE)

Students in the Middle East and North Africa are too often more interested in “acquiring” a degree than developing the understanding that should come with it, a leading scholar has warned.

“Students – and the parents who bankroll them – are often more interested in acquiring professional certification than truly understanding the world and the role of an educated citizen within it,” said Professor Masri.

Gee. Well, all I can say is that the Middle East must be a very big place. I wish it were otherwise.

 EI! OK! GOK!

Appointment of Founding Dean of the Medical School at University of Worcester

The School’s planned curriculum emphasises problem-based learning, early consultations, programmatic assessment, and professional, emotionally intelligent communication at every stage. The Dean will be responsible for overseeing the GMC approval process and instituting an ambitious strategy that will ensure that the School becomes a highly successful new medical school.

Medical education has a lot in common with the catwalks of Paris and Milan, and airport business books.

The pleasures of rejection

Writing a grant proposal is like doing your taxes, except that you can’t pay your accountant to do it for you.

Paul J. Silvia

Although I do remember stories of academics who outsourced their online training modules in which mouse movements were the only outcome measure (unconsciously of course…)

BGGD

Standard Life Aberdeen to change name to Abrdn | Scotland | The Guardian

Standard Life Aberdeen has announced it is changing its name to Abrdn, in an attempt to give the venerable UK asset manager a 21st-century makeover.

The Edinburgh-based company, which dates back to 1825, said that the change reflected a “modern, agile, digitally-enabled brand”. The name, however, which is pronounced “Aberdeen”, has not been well received.

BGGD as they might say up North. And of course:

The new identity, developed by the branding agency Wolff Olins, will be rolled out this summer “alongside implementation of a full stakeholder engagement plan to manage the transition”. The company would not reveal the cost of rolling out Abrdn, which will replace five brands the company had been using across its business.

Education may or many not scale but wealth does

Break Up the Ivy League Cartel – BIG by Matt Stoller

Meanwhile, as of 2020, the aggregate value of the endowments of the richest 20 U.S. schools rose to over $311 billion, all of which are subsidized by taxpayers through the tax-free treatment we offer nonprofit educational institutions. The common joke, that Harvard is a hedge fund with an educational arm, is not so far off.

According to the IMF, the value of these endowment funds is greater than the GDP of New Zealand, Finland, or Chile.

In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five percent. In 1970, it was twenty percent. This year, for the class of 2025, it was 3.4 percent.

(author: Sam Haselby)

Citizen of nowhere

Prince Philip’s scaled-back funeral marks shifting times for UK’s royals | Financial Times

Looking from askance, the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole, said what was more remarkable was how uncomfortable, in all the “orgy of coverage”, commentators had been to address the very European nature of Prince Philip’s story.

“He was a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, one of Theresa May’s citizens of nowhere: Greek, Danish, German . . . British. He changed his name, his religion, his citizenship, his identity,” said O’Toole.

“In that there’s this deep contradiction of Englishness. The monarchy, guarantor of the ‘island nation’, is a multinational firm. No one embodied this more than Philip.”

And I guess he didn’t shop at John Lewis, either.

Graphically gynaecological

Whereas the Economist throws in some historical asides:

Prince Philip and the dynasty factor | The Economist

A royal marriage could reshape international alliances. Hilary Mantel describes the politics of Henry VIII’s reign as “graphically gynaecological” because it was dominated by the king’s desire to produce a son. Modernity is built on the negation of all of this.

The theatre of monarchy is not primarily a theatre of works performed and duties fulfilled. It is a theatre of majesty. The only way to fully modernise the monarchy is to abolish it: the point of the institution is to act as a counterbalance to the everyday world of value for money and performance targets. Monarchy is romance or it is nothing.

The propaganda machine

NHS faces exodus of doctors after Covid pandemic, survey finds | NHS | The Guardian

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “There are record numbers of doctors, nurses and NHS staff [in England] – over 1.18 million – and there are now more medical students in training than at any point in NHS history.

“We are backing our NHS with an extra £7bn for health and care services this year, bringing our total additional Covid-19 investment to £92bn, including £1bn to support NHS recovery by tackling waiting lists.”

It released figures last week showing there are record numbers of doctors working in the NHS in England. There are more than 123,800 doctors, almost 6,300 more than a year ago, and more than 303,000 nurses, more than 11,200 up on last year, it said.

Nothing beats not so much the lies of the Dept of Health but the insincerity with which is shouts at you with statements that are often both 90% accurate and 100% wrong. Its aim is to dissemble. Those who work there must know it, too.

The messiness of the real world

“It’s quite easy to keep all your principles intact and end up with a result which is not what you wanted.”

Classicist Mary Beard, in an interview with the Financial Times, 1 May 2021. (h/t to John Naughton).

Down the drain

UK water groups pour £26m down the drain in dispute with regulator

Consumers pay an average of £400 a year for water and sewage, of which around 20 per cent goes on financing debt and providing a return to shareholders, according to the CMA.

Research by Greenwich University has shown that water companies had taken on £51bn in borrowings and paid out £56bn in dividends by 2018 after being privatised free of debt in 1989. This suggested that the bulk of borrowings were used to pay returns rather than invest in network infrastructure.

The beauty and power of that Queen of Sciences

For a change, a hint of new physics does not fade away | Science

A potential chink in physicists’ understanding of fundamental particles and forces now looks more real. New measurements confirm a fleeting subatomic particle called the muon may be ever so slightly more magnetic than theory predicts, a team of more than 200 physicists reported this week. That small anomaly—just 2.5 parts in 1 billion—is a welcome threat to particle physicists’ prevailing theory, the standard model, which has long explained pretty much everything they’ve seen at atom smashers and left them pining for something new to puzzle over.

“Since the 1970s we’ve been looking for a crack in the standard model,” says Alexey Petrov, a theorist at Wayne State University. “This may be it.”

My response: pure envy.

On that fundamental faith

Adam Curtis: my hope manifesto | Financial Times

What passages or reading material do you turn to for reassurance, or optimism? The activist David Graeber, who sadly died last year. He invented the idea of “bullshit jobs”. But he also wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” I also like Malcolm X’s observation: “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” [emphasis added]

Good spelling is just politics writ large

The Economist

A big reason spelling systems never seem to get overhauled in more liberal societies is that those in a position to change the rules have learned the old ones. Put another way, the type of folk who were once good at spelling bees now run the world. Those who would benefit most from reform, meanwhile, hardly have a voice, being either children or illiterate adults whom politicians can safely ignore. For the broad middle who muddle through, technology has made it easier to hide what they don’t know. It seems the illogical systems are here to stay. In which case, politicians had better learn to spell-check their tweets.

On the late Chick Corea

The Economist | Music without limits

As ever, some beautiful cadences in an obituary in the Economist. This one is of Chick Corea.

Sometimes he wrote phrases down, or composed at a keyboard so they were stored. All too often, though, he couldn’t catch them. Music, like a waterfall, never stayed still, and nor did bands. But that was good. Every change of players brought in something fresh.

He treated music more like a swimming pool, where he just jumped in and had fun.

In short, he was not to be tied down, not even to success

Arlene Foster faces DUP revolt that could topple her as leader | Arlene Foster | The Guardian

Critics said she frittered away unprecedented levels of goodwill and made strategic errors over Brexit. “Her intransigence, petulance, arrogance, lack of generosity, and political myopia have been catastrophic for unionism,” tweeted Deirdre Heenan, a social policy professor at Ulster University.

Northern Ireland’s unhappy centenary | The Economist

Northern Ireland’s founders viewed the link between religion and constitutional preference as essentially fixed at birth. Ninety years later, 21st-century unionists saw those two issues detach to an extent which would have astonished their forefathers. By 2016 there was significant Catholic support for the union; not enthusiastic, certainly not flag-waving, and rooted in self-interest. They didn’t want to give up the free health care of the National Health Service or to risk well-paid public-sector jobs. Since the Good Friday Agreement (gfa) of 1998, which brought peace and set up a devolved government in Belfast, residents could be legally Irish, enjoying taxpayer support for Irish sports, culture and language while territorially within the uk.

And then unionism’s leaders blew it. In five years Arlene Foster, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has arguably done more to advance Irish unity than the 72-year-old Gerry Adams, former head of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (ira).

And then there is Boris.

Fintan O’Toole: Boris Johnson’s gibberish may be surreal but it’s also dangerous

It’s not when Boris Johnson is lying that you have to have to worry. If he’s lying, that just means he’s still breathing. No, the real danger sign is the gibbering. It’s what he does when he can’t be bothered to think up a lie. [emphasis added]

In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly | Rafael Behr | The Guardian

Third, Johnson’s character. The prime minister approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there.

Owen Bennett-Jones · Pissing on Pedestrians: A Great Unravelling · LRB 1 April 2021

According to Tom Bower, who has written more on him than anyone else, [Robert] Maxwell once lost his temper with Ghislaine after she provided him with what he considered an inadequate account of a dinner she had attended on his behalf. Having been reduced to tears by his outburst, she wrote a memo: ‘I should have expressed to you at the start of our conversation that I was merely presenting you with a preliminary report of the evening and a full written report was to follow.’ She went on to list everyone at the dinner who had praised him, adding that she herself had been honoured to represent him.

By the end, the man who had always been able to turn on the charm at will was so egotistical that his company was unbearable. Cruel, grandiose, self-absorbed and ludicrously boastful, he lived in a flat at the top of Maxwell House, his appetites, sexual and otherwise, serviced only by people he paid. His need for food became so excessive that on one occasion he broke into a locked larder and ate a pound of cheese, a jar of peanut butter, two jars of caviar, a loaf of bread and a whole chicken in a single sitting. True, when he picked up the phone, the world’s most powerful people would take his call. But, for all that, he ate his last meal sitting on his own in the corner of an empty dining room in a Tenerife hotel.

Words fail.