How To Get the Church's Stock Returns

And now for something different: Today my attention was drawn to news articles highlighting the Church's U.S. stock holdings (via Ensign Peak Advisors) [1]. To my eye, the articles have a bit of a sensational air to them, intended to impress (and perhaps anger [2]) people who don't pay attention to the stock market and/or have limited financial literacy. So I thought some added context was warranted [3]. Let's take a look.

Ensign bought GameStop in Q4 of 2020, turning $870,000 into about $8.7 million, a 900% gain. Wow, what a profit!

What is $8.7 million in proportion to the size of the portfolio? Answer: 0.019%. On a normal trading day the portfolio fluctuates that much, or more, almost with every heart beat. That's like writing a news story that someone made $20 off of penny stocks as part of their $100K next egg. Also note that it's still an unrealized gain. If GameStop went belly-up tomorrow, the Church would lose all $8.7M...and the portfolio wouldn't even notice. By the way, what is GameStop's weight in the Russell 3000 index? Answer: 0.02%.

Ensign increased its Tesla stake by 39% after growing it 3,500% last year. Wow, the Church really believes in Tesla!

Again, what proportion of the portfolio is that? Answer: 0.93%. Let's compare that to Tesla's weight in the S&P 500: 1.28%. How about in the Russell 3000: 1.07%. So the Church's "agressive" purchase of Tesla brings it to a portfolio weight that is...less than in two of the major U.S. stock indicies. Still impressed?

During a pandemic year the Church's portfolio gained 16.5%, and in the first quarter of this year it has already gained 5.5% Wow, Ensign must employ some real financial whizzes. If only I could get in on the action!

Let's compare the annual and quater-by-quarter performance of Ensign to the S&P 500.

It looks to me like the Church has built a diversified portfolio that more-or-less tracks the S&P 500 [4]. The good news for you is that you don't need the whizzes at Ensign after all [5]. You can easily and cheaply invest your money in the S&P 500 or Russell 3000 using one of a number of ETFs or mutal funds.

Notes:
1. Ensign has been reporting its U.S. stock holdings quarterly to the SEC for just over a year. I assume that Ensign also holds international stocks that are not included in these reports.
2. Some people have strong opinions about how the Church manages its money. I consider it none of my business.
3. All of the analysis, and any errors therein, are mine.
4. We don't know what kind of moves Ensign makes during each quarter, so their actual returns may be more or less than it appears.
5. As a general statement, you shouldn't be trying to match the Church's investments anyway. It is a large institution with long-term goals that will make it's risk profile different than yours. In fact, it's entirely possible that the Church's overall asset allocation is too conservative for what you need.

Continue reading...

Make America Better by Leaving - A Potent Image

My family and I visited the Statue of Liberty in the fall of 2011. The presidential race was in full swing, and of course we now know that Mitt Romney would ultimately win the Republican nomination but lose to Barack Obama in the general election. As I toured the museum in the base of the statue, I was struck by the following display (click to enlarge):

Given the prominence of immigration in political debate at the time, I immediately thought it came from an earlier era of anti-immigrant sentiment and was displayed because of its renewed relevance. However, as I looked closer I saw that it was an advertisement for the Peace Corps. The ad suggested that the things people would learn and perspective they would gain while serving abroad in the Peace Corp would make them better people, and therefore make America better. Amused by the potency of the image and my misunderstanding of it, I took a picture.

I had no idea that in five years this image could serve as a blunt political cartoon capturing with uncanny accuracy the campaign slogan and policy proposals of the next presidential nominee of the Republican party.

---

Continue reading...

The Only Time I Met Elder Scott it was Kind of a Disaster

In memory of Elder Richard G. Scott, I thought I would share my only personal interaction with him.

While attending BYU as an undergraduate I got a job at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) helping to provide audio/visual support for the various programs. Each week there was a Tuesday evening devotional which was produced by our team. The speakers ranged from leadership within the MTC to members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Usually the work was pretty straightforward: setting up equipment, doing the camera work, and so on. However, there were occasional special requests.

One week Elder Scott was the scheduled speaker and we got word he had some Powerpoint slides that he wanted us to project during his talk. Rather than send them ahead of time, Elder Scott was to personally deliver the file on a disk. At the appointed time I met him in the lobby to receive the disk. I asked him how he wanted to handle the presentation; did he want to advance the slides himself? He said no, he wanted us to take care of that and explained that he would tell us when it was time for the slides to be shown. He then showed me the signal he would use to indicate that the slide should be advanced. He held his right arm up in front of him, his elbow bent and palm down, then swung his hand out to the side--like a pianist running his fingers up the keyboard. I vaguely remember suggesting some alternatives, but that was the signal he wanted to use.

I dutifully took the disk to the control booth and loaded the file on the computer. Usually I liked to spend some time getting familiar with a speaker's presentation so that I could have a sense of what was in it and how it would flow. However, on this occasion I didn't have much of an opportunity to look it over. Elder Scott had arrived only a few minutes before the beginning of the devotional, and before long it was time to start the production.

The program progressed and eventually Elder Scott stood to speak. After some introductory remarks he got into the substance of his talk and eventually requested that we show the first slide. I was manning the computer in the control booth across the room, and brought the slide up to view. I soon discovered that, like most of us, Elder Scott made gestures with his arms and hands as he spoke, and it was not always clear whether he was giving his special signal or simply moving his arm while talking. This difficulty resulted in some bumps in the flow of the presentation. Even worse, as he continued his talk the slides were evidently not in the order he expected them, or perhaps some were missing. At a certain point he asked for the next slide, which I advanced to. But it wasn't the one he wanted. So I advanced to the one after that. After a few (eternal) moments of playing a game of bouncing around the slides, Elder Scott abandoned the slides altogether and we stopped showing them. I think it's a good bet that all the missionaries attending thought I was incompetent.

I didn't have an opportunity to speak with Elder Scott afterward, but what was I going to say anyway? That it was his fault I couldn't always discern his signal or that the slides weren't quite right? If memory serves, we later got word from our boss that someone up the chain wasn't happy with our performance that night. I explained what had happened and I think that was pretty much the end of the matter--at least as far as I was concerned.

I don't know if there's a moral to the story, it's just what happened [1]. Looking on the bright side, in a weird way I counted it a privilege to have looked foolish on behalf of an apostle (i.e. nobody was blaming him for the difficulty), and it turned the relatively routine experience into a story. But a smooth presentation would have been better.


Notes:
1. Standard caveats about memory.

---

Continue reading...

BYU Tears Down Another Piece of My Past (WIDB)

It seems like every time I visit my undergraduate alma mater another construction project has destroyed a building of significance to me. Most recently, the Widtsoe building (WIDB) was torn down in May/June after the new Life Sciences building was dedicated. As a microbiology major, I spent a lot of time in the WIDB (and waiting for the elevator). And since most of that time was in my junior and senior year, I also associate it with the vast career unknown that lay before me at the time.

Here's a fun memory: As part of a micro lab class we had to culture the aerobic and anaerobic bacteria in our own poop! When the time was right, I took the little cup I was given to a bathroom in the southwest corner of the sixth(?) floor and...ready, aim, fire. This was all kind of awkward, but really, would you rather culture your own poop or someone else's? I then nonchalantly (I like to think) walked over into the lab and swabbed my specimen onto agar plates. (Meanwhile, over in the Tanner building, students were learning how to make money.)

I recognize the need for the university to update facilities, but it would be nice if they could leave a few buildings more or less the same so that I can show my children and grandchildren the actual locations of my memories. 'I once cultured my own poop in a building that used to be right there' just doesn't have the same punch.

Here is a time-lapse video of the demolition of the WIDB.

---

Continue reading...

Voting Your Conscience: Old LDS Edition

This week's U.S. election gives me an excuse to share some material from Church history I recently found.

In the April General Conference of 1907, with the Reed Smoot hearings finally over, a declaration written by the First Presidency under Joseph F. Smith was read to the congregation titled, "An Address: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the World." The purpose of the declaration was to correct misunderstandings about the Church and assure people that even though Mormons believed in revelation to a prophet, they were simultaneously loyal citizens of their countries, and the United States in particular.

Following its reading, President Francis M. Lyman, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated that the address was endorsed by the Council of the Twelve Apostles and moved that the address be adopted "as an expression of the principles and policy of the Church that we will advocate and sustain." After the motion was seconded by Elder John Henry Smith, the congregation was asked to signify approval by standing. Then those objecting were asked to do the same, of which the Conference report stated there were none. The declaration was included in the Conference report and printed in the May issue of the Church's magazine, Improvement Era.

The document makes for an interesting read because it reveals the public pressures felt by Church leaders at that time. One of the points addressed was the charge of 'arbitrary power' in the Church. After reciting well-known passages from D&C 121 about the righteous exercise of priesthood authority, the First Presidency wrote:

Nominations to Church office may be made by revelation; and the right of nomination is usually exercised by those holding high authority, but it is a law that no person is to be ordained to any office in the Church, where there is a regularly organized branch of the same, without the vote of its members. This law is operative as to all the officers of the Church, from the president down to the deacon. The ecclesiastical government itself exists by the will of the people; elections are frequent, and the members are at liberty to vote as they choose. True, the elective principle here operates by popular acceptance, rather than through popular selection, but it is none the less real. Where the foregoing facts exist as to any system, it is not and cannot be arbitrary.

The notion that the Saints could freely express their will with respect to ecclesiastical government was encouraged in a number of General Conferences in that first decade. For example, in the April conference of 1905 President Joseph F. Smith prefaced the sustaining vote with these words:

As this is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the day on which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized, we will present the general authorities of the Church for your vote this afternoon, and I would like to say that it is expected that all the Latter-day Saints will exercise their right to vote for or against those whose names are submitted. We would like you to exercise perfect liberty and freedom in the expression of your own thought and faith and fidelity in the lifting of your hands.

Well, times change and as the Encyclopedia of Mormonism put it,

The principle of common consent has functioned in the Church since its inception, though the actual practices incorporating this principle have evolved significantly.

Most recently we were instructed that there are no elections in the Church and that we do not vote on Church leadership at any level, but rather sustain them. In practice there is probably little difference from over a century ago. I would guess that the sustaining vote of 1905 was about as routine as that of 2014 [1]. It seems clear, however, that Joseph F. Smith's portrayal of the sustaining vote as a non-arbitrary 'elective principle' is long gone.

Notes:

1. Almost. The April report states: "All the voting was unanimous with, two exceptions; and President Smith invited those who had so voted to state their grievances to the proper authorities, and they would be considered."

---

Continue reading...

How Climate Change Skeptics Made Me Feel Better About Ebola

The bad news is that the Ebola outbreak is awful and is likely to get worse in western Africa. I'm feeling a little impish, so here are reasons not to worry based on the kinds of things global warming skeptics say.

1. Cases of Ebola are down in some villages, and in most of Africa and the rest of the world they remain at record lows.
2. Disease epidemiological models can be manipulated to get inflated results. They also can't take into account future medical advances.
3. Scientists who study Ebola are totally dependent on government funding. They have an incentive to make Ebola seem like a crisis.
4. The earth, and humans in particular, have experienced disease outbreaks before. They're still here, and they will adapt.
5. Resources sent to Africa are a drain on our economy.
6. The Ebola scare is an excuse to give the government and the United Nations control over people's lives.
7. Even if we do contain this outbreak, Ebola will pop up somewhere else.
8. It could be that other factors like poor nutrition are more to blame.
9. Intervention efforts may actually kill more people than would die if the epidemic was left to burn itself out.

See? Problem dismissed.

Obviously this is satire, but it's worth pointing out that most of the above statements are true. How can they be both true and wrong? The answer is: context.

On the other hand, maybe there really is reason to worry. Just for fun I did a search for Ebola conspiracy theories. Should I be surprised that the Tea Party was claiming that the outbreak is part of a plot to take away our freedoms (i.e. guns)? And for the sheer fun of sheer madness, watch this:




I like how he repeatedly said, "pathenogens".

---

Continue reading...

Blessed Are the Nerds

My Saturday web surfing alerted me to a small controversy over the role of nerds in American culture. National Review's July cover story was a piece by Charles C. W. Cooke attacking scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson and America's sanctimonious nerds. To the extent that the piece is a reminder that smart people can fall prey to their own biases and that data alone cannot drive decisions, I suppose it is a useful commentary. But I have to say that, to my eye, the whole piece drips of bitterness and projection.

One part insecure hipsterism, one part unwarranted condescension, the two defining characteristics of self-professed nerds are (a) the belief that one can discover all of the secrets of human experience through differential equations and (b) the unlovely tendency to presume themselves to be smarter than everybody else in the world. Prominent examples include MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Rachel Maddow, Steve Kornacki, and Chris Hayes; Vox’s Ezra Klein, Dylan Matthews, and Matt Yglesias; the sabermetrician Nate Silver; the economist Paul Krugman; the atheist Richard Dawkins; former vice president Al Gore; celebrity scientist Bill Nye; and, really, anybody who conforms to the Left’s social and moral precepts while wearing glasses and babbling about statistics.

No condescension here! You might also notice that all of the nerds mentioned come from the Left [1]. I guess that makes sense on the article's own terms because Cooke asserts that "First and foremost, then, “nerd” has become a political designation." That the word had been redefined to carry primarily political meaning was news to me, but since I only moderately identified with the term in the first place, I don't have much investment in the definition. Someone should inform high school students, though.

How smug are the nerds?

These are the people who insisted until they were blue in the face that George W. Bush was a “theocrat” eternally hostile toward “evidence,” and that, despite all information to the contrary, Attorney General Ashcroft had covered up the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice because he was a prude. These are the people who will explain to other human beings without any irony that they are part of the “reality-based community,” and who want you to know how aw-shucks excited they are to look through the new jobs numbers.

I can see how calling yourself "reality-based" might be off-putting. On the other hand, maybe it should be pointed out that the term was coined by a Bush aide (thought to be Karl Rove) as a term of derision.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Given the history, is it any wonder that "reality-based community" has been adopted by nerds as a term of honor?

Cooke's piece has come in for criticism, but I guess you would expect that from those jerk-nerds of the Left. Personally, I liked this bit from Andrew Leonard at Salon:

Cooke argues that leftists are embracing the nerd-designation because it says to the world what they are not: “… which is southern, politically conservative, culturally traditional, religious in some sense, patriotic, driven by principle rather than the pivot tables of Microsoft Excel, and in any way attached to the past.”

Oh NO! Cooke dares attack nerdish chart-love! That really stings. But you know what? It’s not the fault of liberal nerds that Ken Hamm’s Creation Museum, which claims that dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 4300 years ago, is in the South. And for better or worse, it’s not the fault of liberal nerds that large swathes of Republican politicians in the South have lined up behind the breath-taking rejection of the scientific method that is symbolized by the Creation Museum.

I might also add that those are some gratuitous assertions on Cooke's part.

Cooke ridicules nerd identification as a fad adopted by posers.

“Ignorance,” a popular Tyson meme holds, “is a virus. Once it starts spreading, it can only be cured by reason. For the sake of humanity, we must be that cure.” This rather unspecific message is a call to arms, aimed at those who believe wholeheartedly they are included in the elect “we.” Thus do we see unexceptional liberal-arts students lecturing other people about things they don’t understand themselves and terming the dissenters “flat-earthers.” Thus do we see people who have never in their lives read a single academic paper clinging to the mantle of “science” as might Albert Einstein. Thus do we see residents of Brooklyn who are unable to tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with Harry Reid on climate change.

This is interesting. My wife's education was in the liberal arts, so I guess she isn't allowed to assert the value of childhood vaccination to her stay-at-home-mom peers. But more interesting is that Cooke chose to pit Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. against Harry Reid. Really? I think what Cooke meant to say was "rolling their eyes at Bjørn Lomborg or Roger Pielke Jr. because he disagrees with many climate scientists and economists, whose work has informed Harry Reid's views." You see, nerds would know that Lomborg and Pielke's reputations have very little to do with what Harry Reid thinks. (As an aside, Cooke seems to have taken Pielke's departure from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight as a personal slight. In searching the web for information about Pielke, I found this note by Cooke lamenting the terrible vitriol of the Left. It's not the Left's fault Cooke apparently crushed on a guy that has gained a reputation for distortion.)

Cooke also calls out progressives for themselves believing some unscientific things:

Progressives not only believe all sorts of unscientific things — that Medicaid, the VA, and Head Start work; that school choice does not; that abortion carries with it few important medical questions; that GM crops make the world worse; that one can attribute every hurricane, wildfire, and heat wave to “climate change”; that it’s feasible that renewable energy will take over from fossil fuels anytime soon — but also do their level best to block investigation into any area that they consider too delicate.

First of all, I thought we were talking about nerds, not progressives in general. Second, just this last week Chris Mooney at that lefty magazine Mother Jones highlighted a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson--the man Cooke chose as his nerd symbol--telling anti-GMO folks to "chill out." Also, nerds would not simplistically attribute every hurricane, wildfire, or heat wave to climate change. Rather, they would bend over backwards to explain that climate change will statistically increase the frequency and severity. Unfortunately such efforts seem to be lost on Cooke and his non-nerds and, for their part, they like to use every snow storm or regional cold snap as an opportunity to remind everyone that Al Gore was wrong [2]. What is it with them and Al Gore?

Look, if conservatives like Cooke are losing out to the nerds, it's mostly their own fault. In the wake of the Great Recession and the election of Barack Obama, the Right has run to the fever swamps, leaving behind (or actively expelling) politicians and commentators who refuse to follow (i.e. "RINOs"). If you've lost the nerds, maybe that should tell you something.


Notes:
1. More or less.

2. I did a quick search to see if Cooke had ever done something like that. He had. Granted he was more nuanced in his commentary than most, but I took an interest in this claim: "The 1990 IPCC Report promised an increase in sea level of around 120 millimeters [or 12 cm] by 2014." A nerd might have a copy of the 1990 IPCC report and bother to look up what it said. Would it surprise you if the only justification I can find for Cooke's statement is an uncharitable reading of a graph? What the report actually says is, "Under the Business-as-Usual scenario, the best estimate is that, for the year 2030, global sea level would be 18cm higher than today. Given the stated range of uncertainty in the contributing factors, the rise could be as little as 8cm or as high as 29cm."

---

Continue reading...

Nature Doesn't Care About Your Morality

A few days ago Slate.com published a fun (in a bit of a perverse kind of way) article, The Most Adorable Animals Engage in the Most Reprehensible Behavior. My favorite line:

There is no animal that is made of rainbows and kisses and goodness all the way through.

This is something I think we all would freely acknowledge. Yet because we urban dwellers live a life largely removed from the wild--or even farm life--it's easy to forget that the world is not like a Primary lesson on the creation.

Further, we can talk about moral guides to human behavior, but the moment you start talking about what is "natural" or enlisting examples of animals in your exhortation, you are on thin ice indeed.

What is natural is not inherently good or evil: It simply is, and we’d be fools to take such examples as models of right or wrong. The dark side of superficially cute animals is a part of their nature that reminds us that the wild does not exist for our entertainment and whimsy. We can find beauty and poetry in nature, but we can also find terror and savagery, all essential parts of the entire picture.

---

Continue reading...

Yellow Rain: The Chemical Attack that Probably Didn't Happen

Current events in Syria--the alleged use of sarin gas--have brought the opaque methods of intelligence gathering to the national attention again. This seems like as good a time as any to briefly recount the story of "yellow rain."

In 1981 the United States accused the Soviet Union of having backed the use of chemical weapons on the Hmong people, who had allied with the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Hmong refugees described aircraft spraying a yellow liquid over them, which was followed by sickness and death. Yellow spots on leaves and other materials were collected and sent to the U.S. and elsewhere for analysis, with a lab at the University of Minnesota confirming the presence of trichothecene mycotoxins, toxins produced by fungi. Combined with eyewitness testimony, including both victims and a defected Lao pilot, these results formed the foundation of the U.S. accusation. The Soviets dismissed the accusation as a lie.

Things took a strange turn as scientists, doctors, and others began investigating. The yellow spots were found to contain local pollen, other labs were unable to reproduce the initial chemical analysis, and the eyewitness testimonies turned out to be shaky. It turns out that yellow rain, as it was called, was most likely bee feces from the mass defecation of swarms of bees, but the chaos of war combined with bias and differences in language and culture turned a strange natural phenomenon into evidence of chemical warfare. The U.S. has never withdrawn the charge, and of course there are a number of documents that remain classified, including a CIA critique produced a few years ago.

I don't think anybody would put it past the Soviets to facilitate chemical warfare, but there seem to be significant problems with the evidence behind the original accusation. Although a definitive conclusion may never be forthcoming, outside of the government the sentiment is largely (but not exclusively) one of skepticism.

You can read a 2008 book chapter by one of the leading scientific skeptics here.

Radiolab did a fascinating episode on yellow rain that turned out to be somewhat controversial because the Hmong interviewees felt attacked by the journalists.

Does any of this have anything to do with the current situation? I don't know; probably not. Mostly I find it interesting on its own. But then again, it might.

---

Continue reading...

My Plan for Stopping Tornadoes

What, if anything, should we do about tornadoes? James P. Pinkerton at The American Conservative thinks that the mainstream media are too wrapped up in sentimentalism and green ideology to be interested in practical solutions.

So these are the two dominant media narratives: sweetly sentimental and greenly ideological. And it’s a safe bet that the green agenda will resonate in the MSM long after reporters have lost interested in heartwarming stories from plucky survivors.

It might prove to be the case that climate change is the greatest threat that humanity faces. Maybe the American people can be persuaded that the changing climate is a more urgent problem than terrorism, or poverty, or joblessness. Maybe, also, the Chinese and Indians can be persuaded to forgo economic growth by reducing their carbon footprints. And even poorer peoples, too.

Yet even so, it still couldn’t hurt to give some consideration to shorter-term threats, such as people being killed, and places being wrecked, by tornadoes.

That is, whatever the future of climate-change efforts, we could have a dynamic, science-based discussion about reducing the lethality of tornadoes.

I'm willing to grant that the MSM can be a little ridiculous in the way they cover tragedies. And of course we'll have lots of tornadoes whether or not the globe continues to warm. So what about this science-based discussion?

But if we could pretend for a moment that tornadoes were threatening Washington, DC, and not some place in flyover country, we could then start thinking about next steps, beyond warning and basement-building.

We could, and would, think about actually stopping tornadoes. Ideas for stopping tornadoes are, in fact, abundant. Yet in the wake of this deadly tornado, the media will offer little, if any, discussion of such ideas. Why not? Why this lack of interest?

Perhaps it’s because, as we have seen, media bandwidth has been allocated to narratives of sweet sentimentalizing and green ideologizing. Either the storm proves the moral worth of Sooners, or else it proves the need for action on climate change. But that seems to be all. In other words, new action to stop tornadoes from killing is sort of beside the point; it’s certainly outside of the twin narrative.

The links are in the original piece. The first is a link to an online physics discussion forum and, while I didn't read all 6 pages, in my perusal I didn't find anything much more than arm-chair speculation. The second link is an interview with a tornado scientist where the last question addresses this question, and the answer is extremely vague--probably because of the enormity of such a task. The third link is to some guy's patented idea for shooting a water mist over a city to cool the air. Folks on that physics forum appear to be of the opinion that misting the air would only make things worse. I think it's also fair to ask whether that's a wise use of water in a place already under drought stress.

So in spite of the abundance of ideas, those are the three evidences offered by Pinkerton. He goes on to admit that we don't even know if stopping tornadoes is possible, but who knows what technology will bring?

...new technology will always confound the conventional wisdom. Such confounding is the nature of scientific revolutions, and it would help if the media, the great collective maker of conventional wisdom, could make room for that reality. That is, if the media could add a third narrative idea—the idea that we can apply science to solve deadly problems, even in the short run.

So let me get this straight. Renewable energy sources that reduce our contribution to CO2-mediated warming are the fevered dream of green ideologues, but if we would just put on our thinking caps we might find a way to stop tornadoes and save people now.

This is just silly, and it's pretty thin gruel for MSM bias--to the point that it's almost a parody of such complaints. I know this is crazy, but maybe nobody is chasing this angle because it is as impractical as moving Mt. Everest to Nebraska. I'm all for practical solutions, but stopping something that develops with little warning and has the energy of multiple nuclear bombs is a tall order. Why, at this point, should we expect the MSM to take this seriously?

But not to worry, because a solution is already at hand. We just need to get Pecos Bill better transportation than a horse.

---

Continue reading...

Why Good People Do Bad Things

NPR did a story yesterday, Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things. Go read or listen to it; I think it's very interesting. Here are a couple of money quotes.

Over the past couple of decades, psychologists have documented many different ways that our minds fail to see what is directly in front of us. They've come up with a concept called "bounded ethicality": That's the notion that cognitively, our ability to behave ethically is seriously limited, because we don't always see the ethical big picture.

We like to help each other, especially people we identify with. And when we are helping people, we really don't see what we are doing as unethical.

This doesn't really surprise me. Perhaps it explains something that occurred to me a while ago, which is this: Depending on how a story opens (especially a movie) otherwise moral people root for criminals. You know the kind of story I'm talking about--the bank robbing bandits who elude police, the prisoner trying to escape, the scammers who take on a casino, etc. If the story can get us to identify with the main characters, we root for their success even if it happens to be in conflict with the law and with our own moral principles.

Is there a practical application to all of this?

Now if these psychologists and economists are right, if we are all capable of behaving profoundly unethically without realizing it, then our workplaces and regulations are poorly organized. They're not designed to take into account the cognitively flawed human beings that we are. They don't attempt to structure things around our weaknesses.

Something to think about. It makes me glad that Mormons are often reminded of the need for honesty. (Some occasional spectacular failures notwithstanding.)

---

Continue reading...

Do Human Races Exist?

While the stir over the Bott gaffe on race was playing out last week, there was, coincidentally, a concurrent discussion in the science blogosphere about whether human races even exist, in a biological sense. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne recently took up the issue, and gave his view that races do exist, but they are hard to define and probably not of much biological relevance except occasionally in medicine. Nick Matzke responded at The Panda's Thumb (see Matzke's post for links to Coyne) and argued that genetic clustering that is sometimes interpreted as demarcating race is actually an artifact of incomplete sampling. You can read a similar debate between anthropologists here.

It seems like this question is the kind of thing that can be argued over endlessly, in part because the answer depends on how you define your terms. This isn't my field, but to my mind the answer seems to be both yes and no. Yes, humans in a geographic area can share a genetic history leading to genetic differences from other geographic areas, a small part of which is manifested in outward (or skeletal) appearance. So it's obvious that native Scandinavians are different than native Africans. But no, there are not any discrete demarcations that allow firm categorizations (or that determine how many categories there should be), and most differences change gradually over geographic distance. So there's no such thing as a genetically "pure" Scandinavian or African. And of course in today's mobile society everything gets even more confused as formerly geographically isolated people are able to intermingle and have children together.

So it seems to me that to speak of biological races is to use a contextual term of convenience, but it's prone to misunderstanding because for most people races are cultural identifiers (whether they realize it or not). My two cents.

---

Continue reading...

The Book of Mormon as a Quasispecies

Sometimes it's fun to find commonality between otherwise unrelated things.

One of the problems faced by all organisms is the need to replicate their genetic code with fidelity. Too many mutation can be lethal. The enzymes that replicate genomes occasionally make errors, and many organisms have proof-reading enzymes that help to identify and correct mistakes. However, many viruses, such as HIV, get by without this proof-reading ability. In fact, the lack of proof-reading is actually advantageous to them because mutations help to keep them nimble in the face of the onslaught of the immune system.

If you were to chemically synthesize the genome of one of these viruses (so that you knew the precise genetic sequence), introduce it into a host, and then sequence the genomes of the progeny virus. You would find lots of variants from the original genome sequence. In fact, there is a sense in which the virus does not have a single genome sequence. Rather, the virus exists as a cloud of variant sequences called a 'quasispecies.'

The quasispecies concept is a model rooted in mathematics, and although many virologists are familiar with the term, my sense is that most don't really understand the mathematical underpinnings. (Neither do I.) Nevertheless, the quasispecies model has interesting implications. Some mutations are advantageous and some are deleterious, and we usually think of natural selection as weeding out unfit individuals and promoting the more fit ones. However, in the quasispecies model selection acts on the cloud of variants as a unit, and it's possible for a cloud of less-fit genomes to out-compete a single, more-fit genome. And if you were to align the sequences of all of the individual genomes and create a consensus sequence by using a majority vote at each position, you might find that the consensus sequence is not represented in any individual genome.

The 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon is kind of like a quasispecies because it turns out that it is not a single text. As the sheets were being printed, mistakes--both human and mechanical--were noticed and corrected. At least 41 changes are known. However, the already printed sheets were not discarded, and so there was a mixing of mistakes which were scattered throughout the 5,000 finished copies. It's possible that you could come up with a consensus text that is not found in any single copy.

There's no profound meaning here--I guess that's about the extent of the similarities. I just figured that introducing the quasispecies concept along with Book of Mormon trivia was more fun than doing them independently.

---

Continue reading...

CES? I Don't Think So

What? Consumer Electronics Show? Nevermind.

---

Continue reading...

The Scientific Views of LDS Presidential Candidates

[Update: See also news stories in the Deseret News and The Daily Beast.]

It's been an encouraging week for Mormon fans of science. In response to comments by Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry dismissing evolution as just a theory and global warming as as a fraudulent grasp for research funding, fellow candidate Jon Huntsman tweeted:

To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

Huntsman elaborated on ABC's This Week.

I think there’s a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party – the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science – Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

The Republican Party has to remember that we’re drawing from traditions that go back as far as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. And we’ve got a lot of traditions to draw upon. But I can’t remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a – a party that – that was antithetical to science. I’m not sure that’s good for our future and it’s not a winning formula.

Mitt Romney gave his view on global warming two months ago,

“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course,’’ Romney said. “But I believe the world’s getting warmer. I can’t prove that, but I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that … so I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and the global warming that you’re seeing.’’

As for evolution, during the last presidential contest Romney was clear:

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

As governors, both Romney and Huntsman opposed the teaching of intelligent design as science in public schools.

The bottom line here is that of the current GOP presidential candidates, only the Mormons have affirmed their acceptance of two hot-button scientific subjects that puts them at odds with virtually all of the other candidates and with many in their political base.

Maybe the elders of Israel will save science from hanging by a thread. ;-)

---

Continue reading...

Now THAT's Hot! Proof of Global Warming

I have to give my wife credit for this one. Yesterday she was watching an MSNBC online video and saw the following ticker-tape message:

Exreme heat in the eastern region of the U.S. becomes worse as temperatures go above boiling point in some areas

Um, OK.

[Update: The Associated Press screwed up too.]




Here's the video clip.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

---

Continue reading...

Stoning False Prophets

I've been traveling for work lately, and was lucky enough to spend some time in Europe, which is why things have been so dead around here for the past few weeks. While there I went to a museum that contained a piece that represented the solar system in both the Copernican (heliocentric) and Ptolemaic (geocentric) forms. As I was about to move on, a tour group swarmed around and the tour guide began to tell about the piece. In discussing the Ptolemaic portion of it, she briefly gave some background about how medieval beliefs were backward, including the belief that the Earth was flat. Then she spoke of how people had believed that the solar system revolved around Earth, but that Copernicus had come along and said that that was ridiculous.

Although her tour group probably wouldn't care, I felt that the guide did them a disservice by giving such a cartoonish picture of science history. For starters, the notion that medieval people thought that Earth was flat is a myth. It's one of those things that everybody knows, but that isn't true. Beyond that is the implied notion that geocentrism was self-evident nonsense. It is easy for us to look back at beliefs that we now know to be wrong and sniff at what imbeciles people who held those beliefs were. But aside from being uncharitable, this tendency reinforces (and perhaps derives from) a cartoonish version of how science works and progresses--that it's a simple matter of smarter people coming on the scene.

In truth, the path of scientific knowledge and understanding is often crooked, with many false turns and dead ends. Science is a matter of evidence, and it turns out that geocentrism had a lot going for it, in spite of Copernicus. (Thanks to Mormon Metaphysics, for bringing the linked post to my attention.) Heliocentrism was the new kid on the block, and it would take time before it would prove its worth. That it ultimately succeeded does not nullify its need to do so in the first place, and the same holds for any successful theory that was initially resisted (e.g. plate tectonics)--something that is often missed by cranks pushing self-proclaimed revolutionary ideas.

It seems to be human nature to want to stone false prophets. We see it in politics constantly. In science there is no dishonor in being wrong (or at least there shouldn't be), as long as the mistake is one of pure intention in the quest of discovery. Being wrong is often a step toward being right.

---

Continue reading...

Obama's Birth and the Falsification Gods we Worship

This is not about politics. He that hath an ear, let him hear.

The release of Barack Obama's long-form certificate will likely settle the question of his birthplace for most people. However, I want to point out that the matter has not been settled with a high level of scientific certainty. This is because the hypothesis that Obama was born in the U.S. is not falsifiable. He could have been born in Kenya, or anywhere else, but because of poor record keeping we don't have any way to know.

True, the birth certificate is strong evidence and the newspaper announcement of his birth is also significant. However, the newspaper announcement was not a prediction of the hypothesis, and if it had not been discovered, it would not have altered support for the hypothesis. People would simply have made excuses for the lack of corroborating evidence.

Instead of simply looking for evidence that confirms their hypothesis, Obamists should carry out a rigorous test that can address both possibilities. Obama's deceased mother needs to give birth to him again under public observation. Only in this way can we truly know which country he is born in.

In the meantime we should not condemn Obamists. Given the evidence at hand, theirs is the most strongly supported scientific hypothesis. It's ultimate worth, however, will be determined by whether they carry out a definitive test and what its results are. Birtherism is a perfectly rational and philosphically legitimate position to take, and the longer Obamists choose to simply assert their dominance rather than carrying out a definitive test, the more apparent it will be that the emperor has no citizenship.

---

Continue reading...

Well, I'll Be Darned

The first I ever heard of Richard Sherlock, a professor of philosophy at Utah State University, was when I purchased the book, The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism. His historical chapters treating the spectrum of reactions to evolution and the B.H. Roberts/Joseph Fielding Smith/James E. Talmage argument were among the best of the book. Later I was a little disappointed when he defended intelligent design in the FARMS Review, which I took issue with on this blog. I was also a little disappointed when, in his founding essay for Square Two, he came out strongly against embryonic stem cell research. "Well," I thought, "I guess we disagree on some things, but those evolution essays were great." Meanwhile I saw his name pop up here and there, such as at FAIR, etc.

Now I see that Sherlock has converted to Catholicism. Another curve ball in life, I guess. I hope he finds fulfillment in his choice, but for not otherwise knowing him from Adam, I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed.

So once again, I guess we disagree on some things. But those evolution essays were great.

---

Continue reading...

Peak Oil

I've been casually reading a little bit about the issue of 'peak oil'. It seems like this topic doesn't get much attention--or as much as it, perhaps, deserves. The general concept is pretty simple: The easy sources of oil have mostly been found and the rate of their discovery is declining. When a new oil field is discovered and developed, the rate of oil production increases from zero to a certain point where oil cannot be extracted any faster. And then the rate of production begins to fall. You haven't run out of oil, but you can't produce it as quickly any more.

Here's a little analogy that helps me to think about this. Imagine a towel soaked with water. As you begin to wring it out, the water flows increasingly fast until it pours out at a maximum rate, then begins to decline. You rest a moment, and then try again. A lot of water comes out, but not as quickly as before, and each subsequent attempt yields less and less. Your rate of water production from the towel has peaked, and although you can continue producing water, the rate of production is diminishing.

This basic scenario applies on a global scale. When you aggregate all global oil fields together and consider that the rate of discovery of easy sources is declining, you are set up for the worldwide rate of production to peak, and then decline. This is a problem if demand for oil continues to increase, as it is expected to as the world population increases by billions and India and China become more prosperous, because supply will not be able to keep up with demand.

The main tricky part is uncertainty of timing because there usually isn't much warning that an oil field's peak is coming, so you don't know that you've hit the peak until after you've already passed it, and the same applies on a global scale. Although it remains uncertain, a lot of forecasters see the world hitting peak oil within the next 20-30 years. The rate of oil production in the continental U.S. peaked in the 1970s, and in the U.K. it peaked in 1999. A news article in the March 25 issue of Science opens with this:

Five years ago, many oil experts saw trouble looming. In 10 years or so, they said, oil producers outside the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) would likely be unable to pump oil any faster and OPEC would gain an even stronger hand among the world's oil producers. Five years on, it appears those experts may have been unduly optimistic—non-OPEC oil production may have been peaking as they spoke. Despite a near tripling of world oil prices, non-OPEC production, which accounts for 60% of world output, hasn't increased significantly since 2004. And many of those same experts, as well as some major oil companies, don't see it increasing again—ever.

Those major oil companies include Shell and ExxonMobil. In fact a graphic from the article (shown below) comes from an ExxonMobil energy outlook report.



Now for a little perspective. How much of the world's produced oil does the U.S. use? Answer: about 22%, with a little over half of that coming from imports, as shown in this graph [source]:



At this point you might think (aside from, "Hey, that looks like Pac-Man!"), "Well, we better pull out all the stops and drill everywhere we can in the U.S." Aside from the negative side-effects such an approach might have, there is one little problem which is illustrated with this graph:



As you can see, U.S. oil reserves are diddly-squat compared to the rest of the world--about 1.4% [source]. Here is another way to look at it [source]. (Click for large):




This, then, is what it means to say that we cannot drill our way out of the problem of oil dependence.

---

Further Reading:

For more, see the Hirsch Report, published in 2005 at the request of the Department of Energy. The summary version [PDF] is quite readable.

---

Continue reading...