Through some intensive Google searching (and a one-year period meditating in the desert), it turns out that everything we've been experiencing for the past x thousands of years is a controlled experiment by a distant and ancient species. Who'd have thought it? Abstract follows:

This work investigates the anti-inflammatory activity of methanol extracts of four endemic Stachys (Labiatae) taxa from the Sol region: S. beckeana Dorfler & Hayek, S. anisochila Vis. et Pancic, S. plumosa Griseb., and S. alpina L. subsp. dinarica Murb. As a model of acute inflammation, carrageenan-induced hand edema in humans was used. Extracts, applied at doses of 50, 100, and 200 mg/ kg p. o., exhibited dose-dependent activity. S. beckeana and S.anisochila extracts were the most active ones ( ED50 154.52 and 162.24 mg/ kg, respectively), with the activity comparable with indomethacin at doses of 2 and 4 mg/ kg. S. plumosa extract has shown less-pronounced anti-inflammatory effect ( ED50 220.81 mg= kg). Extract of S. alpina subsp. dinarica had the highest efficiency, attenuating inflammation more than 50%.

I'm off to the Wirral for a few days, so this incessant blogging should stop for a bit, thank God. Anyhoo, only two stories for today:

Samuelson at the Washington Post has been reading Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms:

Clark suggests that much of the world's remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can't take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can't overcome this bedrock resistance.

... Two words I believe effectively describe blog entries / articles-plus-comments like this Naomi Wolf piece. Useful because it reflects the habit of glancing to the scrollbar and quickly inferring just how many loons, ranters, trolls and occasional eloquent, passionate voices have been prompted to wiggle their opinion-fingers over a keyboard. As in:

Maaan, that piece was so totally scrollbar, dude.

or

Scrollbar-bait if ever I saw it.

It might even make a plausible insult for people who do stimulus-response rants on a range of easily predetermined topics. As in:

Al Jazeera reports today from Kabwe in Zambia. The town used to be a big mining area until Anglo-American left. The workers were left to rot, and scrape a living from selling salvaged lead and scrap metal. Their children have no choice but to drink lead-poisoned water. The town doesn't even have facilities for testing for lead poisoning.

Just in case you were wondering whether large firms are generally naturally inclined towards 'community development' and corporate responsibility. When no-one's looking, this one at least takes what it can and then leaves its workers and their children in a poisonous pit.

I've written to them, but I've worked in Corporate Communications: its a whole team's job to put truth through a 'make-the-company-look-good-at-all-times' filter. Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to see what they say. They're actually in a position to deny everything, since they know I have no way of directly checking.

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no intrepreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of my maps.

From E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, quoted in Miller & Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: an Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life

I've been reading Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd, a plant-science populariser in the form of a diary. He studies the fruit fly of the plant world, Arabidopsis Thaliana (common name: Thale-cress), the same plant my girlfriend Sue spent her PhD examining. In it, he introduces the reader to plant biology and genetics in a way that conveys not only the mechanisms, but the wonder he finds in telling others about it. He also takes you through his day to day life as a scientist, and his struggle to get past a rut in the work:

Science is always like this. There are peaks and troughs. I've experienced both. But the problem with being in a trough is that it is a place from which the view is limited. There is the feeling of being trapped with no way out. And always the question of how long the entrapment will last. A self-sustaining state: at the time when new vision is most needed, it is most unlikely to come.

I recently read Flowers for Algernon, a very powerful, involving little 1966 book. From Wikipedia:

The story centers on Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded janitor who volunteers to take part in an experimental intelligence-enhancing treatment. His progress parallels that of Algernon, a laboratory mouse who had been "enhanced" earlier. The story is told from Charlie's point of view and written as a journal, in progress reports (or progris riport as he initially spells it), which he keeps as part of the experiment. Succeeding entries trace Charlie's ever-increasing comprehension and intelligence in the aftermath of the treatment, as he passes through "normalcy", and then reaches super-genius level, becoming vastly more intelligent than the doctors who invented the procedure (he learns 20 languages, reads books at one page per second, writes a piano concerto, and disproves the hypothesis of the experiment that he was the subject of, among other accomplishments).

I've been sitting here today thinking, gosh - I think I go through a similar, but more compact, swing on the Algernon scale myself. Which is to say, I never accidentally learn twenty languages, but I can often look at code I've written the day before and think, 'oooh shit, that's just a bunch of letters and numbers... wtf???' There is one factor, one magic elixir that can turn the seemingly random string of coloured text back into a shining machine of organic perfection: coffee. Its mildy alarming how true this is. I think I'm going to have to get used to the notion of self-medication, for without coffee, I am nothing. Nothing, I tell you.

This article in Prospect by Ha-Joon Chang is a great summary of the history of selective protectionism in the success of growing economies - and the failure of the Washington Consensus in Africa and Latin America. There's one sublime quote in it:

There is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponents—if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.

So I'm in the process of hammering out the spec for my first agent-based economic model, and have been gettin' down with another Econ 101 textbook - a much less patronising one than Mankiw's, though I'm amused by just how much Mankiw seems to have lifted directly from this older undergrad workhorse.

Anyway, the authors - William Baumol and Alan Blinder - end a chapter on demand and elasticity with an example: the 1989 court case between Polaroid and Kodak where Polaroid sued Kodak for patent infringement. Kodak had put out their own instant pic camera. Baumol himself was a witness in the case, testifying on behalf of Kodak. Polaroid were after something like $9 billion in lost sales. Kodak conceded the point, but thought the amount should be closer to $450 million. How were these figures arrived at?

I'm currently making a start on wading through a popular economics textbook by Greg Mankiw. Mankiw is big on economics as science, and big on distinguishing positive, testable statements from normative ones. From his preface:

Economics combines the virtues of politics and science. It is, truly, a social science. Its subject matter is society - how people choose to lead their lives and how they interact with one another. But it approaches the subject with the dispassion of a science. By bringing the methods of science to the questions of politics, economics tries to make progress on the challenges that all societies face.

A little later (after expounding on the comparisons between scientific and economic discoveries) Mankiw gives a section entitled 'why economists disagree'. His first reason: differences in scientific judgements. Citing the examples of heliocentrism and more recent arguments over global warming, he says:

Economists often disagree for the same reason. Economics is a young science and there is still much to be learned.

Ummmmm. OK. 'Differences in values' then makes an appearance. His example has Peter and Paul on $50,000 and $10,000. How much should they be taxed? Should it depend on whether its inherited wealth? On whether one works much harder than the other, etc, and concludes:

Perfecting the science of economics will not tell us whether it is Peter or Paul who pays too much.

But Mankiw's third reason is the most interesting for me: he lists 'ten propositions about economic policy' that, supposedly, illustrate how much economists share a consensus. I won't list them all, but they range from 'a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing available' (supported by 93% of respondents) to 'effluent taxes and marketable pollution permits represent a better approach to pollution control than imposition of pollution ceilings' (78%) with a range of percentages in between.

Its tempting to scoff, but that would be leftie laziness. (Though perhaps resisting the temptation to scoff is how it starts. Perhaps Mankiw is Emperor Palpatine to my Anakin...)

Ahem, anyway: can a discipline with this level of disagreement lay claim to being scientific? If anyone in an engineering firm attempted to use a theory they were 93% sure of, let alone 78%, they'd quickly find themselves on the dole. But of course they would be able to test their models in ways economists can only dream about.