One of the most talked-about films of 2014 was Richard Linklater’s epic Boyhood, which gives a blow-by-blow account of the maturing of a young man in twenty-first-century America. While the film covers over 4,000 days of the growing-up of the film’s star, Mason Evans, Jr., the actual filming took just 39 days of shooting. Linklater describes his film as an “epic of the intimate,” which is very descriptive as we see the hero deal with various life trials that a young man confronts in early twenty-first-century America.
Tag: Roger Jones
Social Mood and Complexity Overload
On the night of November 12, 1993 at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Royce Gracie was the last man standing in an eight-man martial arts tour- nament, which is now known as “The Beginning.” These fights were more like a street brawl with no rules, other than no biting and no eye-gouging. This tournament was televised on pay-TV, and served to introduce the new phenomenon of “ultimate fighting,” which turns out to have a huge world- wide following, as evidenced that by 2011 the Ultimate Fighting Cham- pionship (UFC) was estimated to be worth around $2 billion by Forbes magazine. Commentators have noted that the fascination with this form of combat dates back to ancient Greek and Roman gladiators who fought in the Roman Colosseum and elsewhere for the entertainment of spectators. It would appear that over the last several millennia people have not lost the urge to see violent combat between two humans engaged in a battle to the death. These ultimate fights serve as extreme examples of both complexity mismatches and social mood bias at the level of individual interaction. Let’s see why.
Drivers of social change
At a random moment in time, the generic behavior of any social system is to be in a trending pattern. In other words, if you ask how will “things” (e.g., the GDP of an economy, the financial market averages, the political climate) look tomorrow, the answer is that they will be just a bit better or a bit worse than today, depend- ing on whether the trend at the moment is moving up or down. This is a large part of what makes trend-following so appealing: it’s easy and it’s almost always right—except when it isn’t! Those moments when it isn’t are rare (infinitesimally small in the set of all time points, actually) and the event is usually surprising within the context of the situation in which the question about the future arises. These special moments when the current trend is rolling over from one trend to another are the critical points of the process. And if that rolling over involves great social damage in terms of lives lost, dollars spent, and/or existential angst, we call the transition from the current trend to the new one an X-event. In the natural sciences, especially physics, such a transition is often associated with a “flip” from one qualitatively different type of structure or form of behavior to another, as with the phase transition from water to ice or to steam.
It came from outer space
TIME: 65 million years ago.
PLACE: What is now the Yucatan Peninsula in eastern Mexico.
EVENT: The crash of an asteroid 20 kilometers across.
EFFECT: The end of the dinosaurs and most other life forms on Earth at the time.
Suppose you were a lumbering triceratops. What would your walnut-sized brain have registered when this fiery crash occurred? Answer: Basically, almost nothing beyond an unbelievably intense light in the sky before you were instantaneously reduced to a heap of ashes, or even obliterated entirely if you happened to be in the impact zone. Here’s the scenario.
Self-infanticide
Gödel did something very clever. He found a solution of Einstein’s field equations in which the world lines circled back on themselves. This means that if you were traveling along a world line you would eventually encounter yourself as a baby. Suppose you kill yourself as a baby. Would you still be alive? It would be disturbing if you were both alive and dead. Unlike quantum mechanics, Einstein’s theory does not address ambiguity explicitly. The great challenge of modern physics is to unite the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. This has not yet been done.
Eddies in the Stream
What is there about matter, energy, and information that leads to the spontaneous creation and continued existence of complex systems of which we humans are an example? Does life need to composed of carbon atoms as we are? Can life be made out of other types of molecules? Or to take the questioning deeper, does life require chemistry at all for its existence? Can life exist in a nuclear reactor or in a neutron star or in very cold solids near absolute zero or in the memory units of a computer? And what are these things we call consciousness and awareness? And what in the world is a soul?
Healthcare Patents and Hot-Dog Vendors
While patents on medical devices seem normal, patents on drugs and chemical entities may seem like a stretch. I am not sure that the law makers in Venice in 1474, who invented the legal concept of a patent, envisioned the need to patent molecules. In fact, molecules were not even envisioned at that time. We all know that a patent allows an inventor time to commercialize his or her product, but are patents really needed for the economic viability of healthcare? Shouldn’t healthcare be all about saving lives and promoting health and not about making money on people who desperately need healthcare? Do patents have a benefit to patients, not just the patent holders? I think the answer to this question is “perhaps.” Patents promote diversity of products in the healthcare market place by forcing inventors to develop drugs outside the domain of currently patented products.
Musings of a Curious Atheist: What does the Bible say about life after death?
Election season is the time that the crazies come out. We have seen the serial adulterer and Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, thumb her nose at the law of the land by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She says she wants to uphold the sanctity of marriage as specified by her religion. There is the ironic case of the mistake of a 14 year-old Muslim geek for a bomb-making terrorist in Irving, Texas. The mayor of Irving is the woman who is trying to protect the U.S. from Sharia law. In older news, Joe Barton (R-Texas), says that man had no effect on climate change because the Great Flood was climate change and man-made hydrocarbons were not involved in that extreme event. The 2012 Republican Party of Texas platform declared that critical thinking should be discouraged in Texas schools—they threaten long-held beliefs. (If it looks like I am picking on Texas, it is just because they are such an easy target.)
Goats, Cars, and Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine will change the way physicians diagnose. With every person able to map his or her own gene, the complication in personalized diagnosis will increase beyond normal human mental capabilities. How will physicians of the future cope? The solution to the problem may start with something as incongruous as goats, cars, and game shows.
A Tutorial on the Regulation of the Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical market place is not entirely a free market. The extreme demand for lifesaving products can make standard economic assumptions inoperable. Therefore, regulatory mechanisms have emerged to protect patients and to provide patients access to affordable medications. There are three aspects of pharmaceutical operations in the U.S. that are regulated by the government:
Population Explosion and the Demographic Transition
A mathematical model (Core Model) is presented that describes the gross dynamic behavior of the demographic transition—falling death rates lead to population increase, temporarily rising birth rates,
temporarily increased population growth, decreased fertility, aging of the population, and finally a steady
population size higher than the initial population. Core Model captures these features. The model is based on three fundamental observations 1) people are born, 2) people die, some at a young age, the
rest at an old age, and 3) people give birth more often when conditions are favorable than not favorable.
In addition to boundary conditions, Core Model has one free parameter, which is associated with the rate at which fertility adapts to changing conditions. Core Model predicts that aging populations are a
natural consequence of the dynamics and the speed at which the population fertility adapts to changing
death rates. The model captures the qualitative features of actual country demographic dynamics with
European countries making up most of the post-transition populations and Sub-Saharan Africa making
up those countries just entering the transition.
Two Visions for Healthcare
Last week I attended the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City. Over 200 healthcare leaders converged on Lincoln Center to discuss and forecast the future of healthcare in the U.S. The heady atmosphere of the conference will provide material for a number of blogs. In this blog I would like to focus on two different visions for the future that emerged in the conference. The first vision is an extension of our current trajectory in which space-age technology yields dramatic, but expensive, health outcomes. The second vision is one in which common-sense medicine produces low-cost very good health over a large segment of the population, but is not necessarily designed to accommodate specialized high-technology procedures.