OverMatter

'nuff said

"Trailing for the first time after successive defeats in eight states since Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton has renewed her call for the result of last month's Florida primary to count in the final reckoning. If she gets her way, it could yet push her back to pole position, assuming the contests in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania fall largely in her favour.

'Sure, she has a big hill to climb, but never count a Clinton out,' said Don Fowler, a former national chairman of the Democrats and a prominent supporter of her campaign.

The Florida lifeline would be thrown if the party's national leadership rescinded a decision that was supported by Obama and Clinton when it was made last summer. The Sunshine State decided it was too important to wait until after the Super Tuesday voting of 5 February and brought forward its primary to 29 January. As punishment for the breach of party rules, the state's 210 delegates were barred from August's convention.

Clinton won the ballot with 50 per cent of the vote to Obama's 33 per cent, and the same thing happened in Michigan, which Clinton won with 55 per cent of the vote and where Obama's name was not on the ballot, excluding another 156 delegates.

'The people of Michigan and Florida spoke in a very convincing way, that they want their voices and their votes to be heard,' Clinton said. 'The turnout in both places was record-breaking and I think that should be respected. They have a right to be heard just as much as anyone else.'

Obama, who leads by about 100 delegates and is 700 short of the winning post of 2,025 after victories last week in Maine, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, unsurprisingly takes a different view, given the advantage those delegates would restore to his rival.

'At the 11th hour, the Clinton campaign is trying to rewrite rules that were firmly established and I don't think there's a lot of appetite for that,' said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager.

But Obama has said he would be happy for the two states' delegates to attend the convention providing their participation did not affect the result. 'I think even my six-year-old would understand it would not be fair for Senator Clinton to be awarded delegates when there was no campaign,' Obama said."

(Gore emerges as power broker while Clinton hopes for a lifeline | World news | The Observer)

Floating Against the Current

"Find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. Though simple solutions are better, they don't seem as impressive as complex ones. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. Delivering solutions in an informal way means that instead of judging something by the way it's presented, people have to actually understand it, which is more work. And starting with a crude version 1 means your initial effort is always small and incomplete.

I'd noticed, of course, that people never seemed to grasp new ideas at first. I thought it was just because most people were stupid. Now I see there's more to it than that. Like a contrarian investment fund, someone following this strategy will almost always be doing things that seem wrong to the average person.

As with contrarian investment strategies, that's exactly the point. This technique is successful (in the long term) because it gives you all the advantages other people forgo by trying to seem legit. If you work on overlooked problems, you're more likely to discover new things, because you have less competition. If you deliver solutions informally, you (a) save all the effort you would have had to expend to make them look impressive, and (b) avoid the danger of fooling yourself as well as your audience. And if you release a crude version 1 then iterate, your solution can benefit from the imagination of nature, which, as Feynman pointed out, is more powerful than your own...

Reddit is a classic example of this approach. When Reddit first launched, it seemed like there was nothing to it. To the graphically unsophisticated its deliberately minimal design seemed like no design at all. But Reddit solved the real problem, which was to tell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. As a result it became massively successful. Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they're merely floating downstream.

So when you look at something like Reddit and think "I wish I could think of an idea like that," remember: ideas like that are all around you. But you ignore them because they look wrong."

(paulgraham.com)

All Glory to the Hypnotoad!

For all who can't wait for the next Futurama movie...

Germs may help our bodies fight tumors

"In the 1890s, a New York surgeon named William Coley tested a radical cancer treatment. He took a hypodermic needle teeming with bacteria and plunged it into the flesh of patients.

After suffering through weeks of chills and fevers, many showed significant regression of their tumors, but even Coley himself could not explain the phenomenon.

His experiments were sparked by the observation that certain cancer patients improved after contracting infections. One patient experienced regression in a tumor in her arm after developing Saint Anthony's fire, a streptococcus skin infection.

Doctors at the time considered Coley's bacterial mixtures to be more black magic than medicine, and with the advent of radiation therapy, the well-meaning doctor was soon consigned to the annals of quackery.

But today, some scientists think Coley had it right: Germs can teach our bodies how to fight back against tumors. Dr. John Timmerman, a cancer immunotherapy expert at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center, says this revolution has produced "the most exciting sets of compounds in cancer immunology.""

(Cancer and the bacterial connection - By Brendan Borrell - February 18, 2008 - Los Angeles Times)

Availability Entrepreneurs

"You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels...

When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy"

(Predictions for 2008 - Climate Change - Global Warming - John Tierney - New York Times)

Terra Preta

"Ancient tribes in South America's tropics applied one of the most simple and beneficial ways to convert carbon stored in tropical forests into greater food production.

Using earthen firepits to create charcoal from jungle trees and undergrowth, they mixed raw charcoal into their tropical soils. This "biochar" provided microscopic niches for microbes and fungi, touching off a bloom of soil biological life which supported food crops for centuries. This "Terra Preta" or "dark soil" has been rediscovered by ecologists in the past couple of decades. Terra Preta soils remain productive despite the heat and moisture of the tropics, which otherwise oxidize organic matter and leach away crop nutrients from tropical clay and sand.

The low-tech building of biochar almost vanished after 1491, when European diseases arrived in South America and killed most of the indigenous population."

(Will Media Expose Global Warming Con Job?)

What's so radical about our Constitution?

"We can fundamentally change our idea of what our government should be, and return to constitutional principles. Ron Paul's position is that the government shouldn't coddle us from cradle to grave. Central bankers like the Federal Reserve, which isn't part of the federal government, shouldn't have the power to manipulate the worth of our currency and thus our way of life. His position is that we shouldn't police the world or unconstitutionally interfere through bureaucracies like the CIA. Only Congress has the power to declare war. Plus, we can't afford it anyway. We don't need the IRS harassing American citizens and taking our hard earned money and sending it out for destinations unknown. In fact, let's eliminate it. We'll pay for it by bringing home our soldiers from around the world, saving over a trillion dollars. While you're giving us our taxed dollars back, we'd also like you to return those civil liberties you've been whittling away at so you can give lucrative contracts to the homeland security/military industrial sector company you're going to quit the government to start, run, or lobby for.

Much is said about the national constituency of Ron Paul, more often than not describing them as "young 9-11 truthers," or "hillbilly Libertarian whackos," but the campaign that Ron Paul has built is a revolution, and it is growing. Ron Paul, despite being ignored by mainstream press, trounced republican opponents with over 18 million in grassroots fundraising last quarter alone. Rudy Guiliani could drop out after coming in third in Florida. Mike Huckabee doesn't have the funds to finish. John McCain, despite a voting record similar to Clinton, will most likely lead the delegate count with Romney trailing close behind. What will be the interesting story is Ron Paul staying in the race (he leads in fundraising, he also leads in contributions from active military personnel), bringing a significant enough number of delegates to the convention to possibly decide who becomes nominee. After canvassing in New Hampshire and South Carolina, I'll tell you that most people are undecided and will vote for whomever the tv tells them to. Ask Ron Paul supporters and they'll tell you that Ron Paul's success may not be seen by him gaining the most votes in this election, but his ability to positively influence the Republican party's platform now and in the future.

Doctor Paul is indeed curing apathy. In fact, listening to him speak, at times, can be like receiving a medical diagnosis. I had never been active in the political process. Nor had most the people I'd met for that matter. They were all just curious to hear this man with so many seemingly common sense ideas that the establishment branded radical. What's so radical about our Constitution? The Constitution was written to restrict the government, not the people. Give me a choice between three lawyers and an ex-Air Force flight surgeon that's delivered four thousand babies. I'll take the doctor anyday."

(Heath Calvert: Why I Support Ron Paul - Politics on The Huffington Post)