The Neo-Paleo Gourmet

Violence is on the outs

Steve Pinker's excellent article on the long-term decline in violence is up at Edge.

"The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one."

Hat tip to Lauri Tahtinen who sent me the original article, published in The New Republic.

Thursday

8:45am
Seeds, a few nuts, and raisins
Grapefruit

2:40pm
Tilapia with sun dried tomatoes, beef tenderloin with red peppers and a little hollandaise sauce
Asian greens salad, zuchini rolls stuffed with veggies, broccoli, cauliflower, okra
Melon, strawberry, pineapple, lots of red grapes

(It was half off by weight, and it cost over 7 bucks.  That's a lot of food.  And the amazing thing is that even though it was probably more than I needed, I didn't crash after eating it.)

9pm
Worked out at my normal gym

9:45pm
Two lean turkey burgers (bought ground turkey, not just frozen patties) with chopped garlic on the inside, sauteed mushrooms
Salad with sliced pears, red peppers, celery, cucumbers with half a lime and olive oil
A small apple

Prioritizing Problems: Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg is phenomenal.  If you have twenty minutes today, watch this video.  It's all about cost-benefit, and being smart about solving world problems.

There is ZERO dead air, it's jam-packed with great ideas, and moves briskly -- you'll want to give it your devoted attention.  The TED Talks search function is also great -- you can search for a topic, and it will search the actually video for mentions of the topic, then show all videos that match.  AND it allows you start the video at the point its mentioned, though I recommend watching these start to finish -- they're that good.

Hummer v Prius update

I'll direct you to a very thoughtful comment regarding the Hummer/Prius article.  Even if Prius' come out on top, I don't think enough people do a serious cost-benefit analysis when making these types of purchases.

More on that soon...

TED Talks

The TED Conference is now posting some of their talks online.  I was in disbelief when I came across this.  I don't even know where to start.  Bjorn Lomborg?  Robert Wright?  Richard Dawkins?  Steven Johnson? Dan Dennett?

I'm delirious.

Wednesday

8:30am
Worked out at my usual gym

9:15am
Part of a hamsteak
Two large stalks of celery
Two scrambled eggs, a little salsa
Sauteed green and red pepers, mushrooms
A small orange, a small apple
(Whew!)

12:30pm
Shrimp salad with endive and some other mysterious leafy greens
A few olives

9:30pm
Sea bass with grilled vegetables
Arugula salad with pears and walnuts

11pm (shouldn't be snacking this late)
Two small apples
Two large stalks of celery

Does a Hummer cause less environmental damage than a Prius?

                      VS.

 

 

This article questions which is less damaging for the environment, a Toyota Prius (a hybrid) or a Hummer.   I don't know whether he gets the right answer (he says a Hummer), but he's asking the right questions.

"Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.

"The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare.

...
"All of this would be bad enough in and of itself; however, the journey to make a hybrid doesn’t end there. The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery. Are these not sounding less and less like environmentally sound cars and more like a farce?"

Found via Art De Vany.

A Cold Shower

Great post by Art De Vany on the beneficial effects of exposure to cold.

"I have long practiced forms of cold exposure. The brief shock of cold encourages a stress response and increases adaptive capacity to those exposures that are unplanned and more lengthly or severe. The adaptive capacity extends to other stresses as well and, thus, may protect you against a heart attack or a life-stressing event. Warm and cozy all the time is one of the many pathways to obesity in this comfortable, physically non-demanding we live in."

This morning I started with a warm shower, then turned the knob to blue for a few minutes.  Wow!

Here is a photo of The Polar Bear Club of Coney Island, circa 1994.  Makes you have second thoughts about this whole cold exposure thing.

Tuesday

9am
One small apple
One small orange
A large amount of mixed nuts

11am
One small orange

2:45pm
Tilapia, salmon, calamari
Tehboulleh, watercress, green peppers, a date

10:30pm
Chicken curry, a few side sauces
Some basmati rice
Spinach with a little bit of cheese
One small chocolate

A Communist lurks in every American family!

Communism has been discredited as a method of allocating resources in large scale economies.  But what about small scale economies?  What about the nuclear family?

Joseph McCarthy would hate to admit it, but he probably ran his household according to Marx's classic dictum, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy paid the bills, children got free room and board, and gradually were expected to work as they grew older and more capable.

Not only is communism the dominant form of economic exchange within families, but IT WORKS PRETTY WELL.  I certainly wouldn't recommend a market-based family economy (though it would be interesting to imagine what it would look like).  Hayek was onto something when he distinguished between the intimate order (of recurring interactions with small numbers of related people as occurred in our evolutionary past) and the extended order (of anonymous exchanges with  people you may never see again).

"One of Hayek's most challenging propositions is that our evolutionary past has 'hard-wired' us for norms appropriate for small group settings, while modernity and the extended order of the 'Great Society' requires us to adopt norms and morality appropriate for anonymous interactions."

The bottom line: Let's give communism it's due.  In doing so, we can better recognize why markets are necessary to govern large scale interactions.

 Quotation from here.