Can molecular memories of our ancestors’ experiences affect our own behaviour and physiology? That idea has certainly grabbed hold of the public imagination, under the banner of the seemingly ubiquitous buzzword “epigenetics”. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is the idea that a person’s experiences can somehow mark their genomes in ways that are passed on to their children and grandchildren. Those marks on the genome are then thought to influence gene expression and affect the behaviour and physiology of people who inherit them.

The way this notion is referred to – both in popular pieces and in the scientific literature – you’d be forgiven for thinking it is an established fact in humans, based on mountains of consistent, compelling evidence. In fact, the opposite is true – it is based on the flimsiest of evidence from a very small number of studies with very small sample sizes and serious methodological flaws. [Note that there is, by contrast, very good evidence for this kind of mechanism in nematodes and plants and in specific circumstances involving transposable elements in mice].

To save you the trouble, I dig into the dismal details below.

http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2018/05/grandmas-trauma-critical-appraisal-of.html?m=1

The economic analysis in my last post led me to read some more articles from the author’s blog. He’s a liberal/progressive economist, with solid-seeming creds. Here are two of particular interest.

The first is a follow-up to that previous post, and looks at concrete ways to improve wealth distribution in the US:

An earlier post on this blog looked at the proximate factors which took substantial growth in GDP per capita (which grew at about the same pace after 1980 as it had before) down to median wages that simply stagnated. As discussed in that post, this was principally due to a shift in distribution from labor to capital, and a shift within labor from the lower paid to the higher paid. (Demographic effects, principally the increased participation of women in the labor force, as well as increases in the prices of items such as medical care relative to the prices of other goods, were also both important during this period. However, both have now become neutral, and are not factors leading to the continuing stagnation in recent years of median wages.)

The purpose of this blog post is to look at concrete policy measures that can be taken to address the problem. The issue is not slow growth: As noted above, per capita growth in GDP since 1980 has been similar to what it was before. The problem, rather, is the distribution of the gains from that growth, which has become terribly skewed.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/06/20/concrete-measures-to-address-real-income-stagnation-of-the-poor-and-middle-classes/

The second is an explanation of Baumol’s Cost Disease, which I had not heard of before, and which provides a pretty convincing explanation of why the costs in certain sectors, like healthcare and college education, have increased so dramatically over the decades:

A point on which all agree, whether conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, is that the cost of government keeps rising. Whether it is the cost of building new roads or new military jet fighters, or the cost of schools or health services, the cost now is much more than in the past. And this is not simply general inflation. The cost of government services has risen at a significantly faster pace than general inflation.

This is true. But what is not generally recognized if the fundamental cause, nor the implications as we as a nation have struggled to maintain government services. The fundamental cause is not waste and corruption, nor lazy government workers. Rather, it lies in the nature of the goods and services used for the public services the government provides.

This blog post will first review the facts on what has happened to expenditures on government goods and services (which for brevity, will hereafter often simply be referred to as government goods) over the past 60 years. The 60 year period is taken so as to encompass most of the post-World War II period, but to begin once the numbers had stabilized from the very high levels during the war and the immediate post-war fluctuations.

The post will then review the fundamental cause, drawing on the work that has come to be called “Baumol’s Cost Disease”. The post will discuss how this applies to the government sector, and the implications.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2013/09/10/the-big-squeeze-on-government-consequences-of-baumols-cost-disease/

Useful info.

As the diagram above shows, real median wages have been stagnant since at least 1980, despite real GDP per capita which is 78% higher now than then. Real median wages are only 5% higher (and in fact unchanged from 1979). In a normally developing economy, one would expect real GDP per capita and real wages to move together, growing at similar rates and certainly not diverging. But that has not been the case in the US since at least the early 1980s.

Why has such a large wedge opened up between worker earnings and GDP per capita? This blog post will look at the immediate factors that lead from one curve to the other. This will all be data and arithmetic, but will allow one to decompose the separation into several key underlying factors.

https://aneconomicsense.org/2015/02/13/why-wages-have-stagnated-while-gdp-has-grown-the-proximate-factors/

The standard, near-universal type of photosynthesis uses the green pigment, chlorophyll-a, both to collect light and use its energy to make useful biochemicals and oxygen. The way chlorophyll-a absorbs light means only the energy from red light can be used for photosynthesis.

Since chlorophyll-a is present in all plants, algae and cyanobacteria that we know of, it was considered that the energy of red light set the ‘red limit’ for photosynthesis; that is, the minimum amount of energy needed to do the demanding chemistry that produces oxygen. The red limit is used in astrobiology to judge whether complex life could have evolved on planets in other solar systems.

However, when some cyanobacteria are grown under near-infrared light, the standard chlorophyll-a-containing systems shut down and different systems containing a different kind of chlorophyll, chlorophyll-f, takes over.

Until now, it was thought that chlorophyll-f just harvested the light. The new research shows that instead chlorophyll-f plays the key role in photosynthesis under shaded conditions, using lower-energy infrared light to do the complex chemistry. This is photosynthesis ‘beyond the red limit’.

Lead researcher Professor Bill Rutherford, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: “The new form of photosynthesis made us rethink what we thought was possible. It also changes how we understand the key events at the heart of standard photosynthesis. This is textbook changing stuff.”

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/186732/new-type-photosynthesis-discovered/

‘…Deutch’s argument that “technology might kill us, but nature will definitely kill us, so it’s rational to take the bet on tech.”‘

Bloom's 2 Sigma Problem (Wikipedia)
byu/astrotige inslatestarcodex

In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect classical works into short melodies — quotable passages severed from their original context — assembling a menu of musical leitmotifs to bolster their message with a desired tone, mood, or association. Like artificial flavoring for the ear, these symphonic excerpts infuse scenes with the synthetic emotion of choice. Need a touch of European elegance? Mozart will make that minivan commercial suddenly suave. Concerned a slow sequence leaves your audience snoozing? Wake them up with the “William Tell Overture” for instant adrenaline. Does your pancake promo lack punch? Reroute Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from Valhalla to the International House of Pancakes.

The artistic consequences of such practices are devastating. Conscripting Wagner’s Valkyries as pancake saleswomen necessarily lowers their impact at the opera house. Some pieces are quoted so often that their secondary associations overtake and cheapen the original music. Carmina Burana exists as a permanent musical cliché. Orff’s “O Fortuna” evokes only kitsch; under which circumstances can a listener now have an authentic encounter with that choral-chanting calamity?

Such a sound-bite culture negates the definitive value of classical composition: the extended development of complex musical themes. Extended musical forms allow the listener to appreciate the subtle interplay of motif and movement — and it is exactly this nuanced appreciation that quote-clipping nullifies. There is a two-part mechanism to extract and transplant a tune: detach a 15-second theme from a 45-minute symphony (where it functioned as an integrated part in an organic whole) and attach it to an alien subject. Uproot “O Fortuna” from a Latin cantata, so it can be grafted onto a Domino’s Super Bowl spot. These transplants produce jarring mashups that trigger another insidious side effect: by always quoting works out of the context the public forgets that they have a context. The spectator forgets that “O Fortuna” could be glorious in its original context because it’s absurd hyping Domino’s Pizza. In sum, in the remix media ecosystem, famous compositions degenerate from serious music into decorative sound, applied like wallpaper to lay a poignant surface over banal intentions.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bach-at-the-burger-king/

No big surprise, but oh well. Would have been cool. Neat test setup, though!

It was bound to happen eventually. A group of researchers that may actually be competent and well-funded is investigating alternative thrust concepts. This includes our favorite, the WTF-thruster EM-drive, as well as something called a Mach-Effect thruster. The results, presented at Space Propulsion 2018, are pretty much as expected: a big fat meh.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/nasas-em-drive-is-a-magnetic-wtf-thruster/

What even is privacy, what does a right to privacy mean, and rest on?

Possibly the discussion is using the wrong vocabulary. “Privacy” is an odd name for the good that is being threatened by commercial exploitation and state surveillance. Privacy implies “It’s nobody’s business,” and that is not really what Roe v. Wade is about, or what the E.U. regulations are about, or even what Katz and Carpenter are about. The real issue is the one that Pollak and Martin, in their suit against the District of Columbia in the Muzak case, said it was: liberty. This means the freedom to choose what to do with your body, or who can see your personal information, or who can monitor your movements and record your calls—who gets to surveil your life and on what grounds.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/06/18/why-do-we-care-so-much-about-privacy

Haven’t found the original source for the image, but now I’ve discovered the Trapped In Amber subreddit!

A few other good ones from the subreddit:

100 million years old spider-like creature found trapped in amber (x-post from r/WTF)
byu/Pece17 intrappedinamber

Researchers found a 98-million-year-old Horned Vampire Ant encased in amber. It had a horn reinforced with metal and jaws that appeared to be designed to draw blood.
byu/abc69 intrappedinamber

Tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur
by intrappedinamber

…and to what extent is it good or bad?

A core idea that Donald J. Trump has embraced throughout his time in public life has been that the United States is losing in trade with the rest of the world, and that persistent trade deficits are evidence of this fact.

In this accounting, the $69 billion United States trade deficit with Mexico or $336 billion gap with China is something of a scorecard reflecting diminishing American greatness.

The vast majority of economists view it differently. In this mainstream view, trade deficits are not inherently good or bad. They can be either, depending on circumstances.

As the president’s emphasis on trade deficits puts the United States at odds with allies — in this case at the Group of 7 leaders meeting this weekend in Canada — the trade-offs in making this an overwhelming focus of economic diplomacy are becoming more clear.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/upshot/what-is-the-trade-deficit.html