Youtube, books, movies -- a very rich life

I watched "The Sorrow and The Pity" this week. Long documentary about the occupation of France. Interviews with every part of the political spectrum, and also the German Captain of the Wehrmacht who ran the occupying force.

Very powerful. First, the camera work and the interviewer are very good. People can't lie very well, the camera reveals every twitch of their mental squirming. Second, I don't see how a Jew can stand to learn French. France was the only nation in all of Europe that collaborated with the Nazis as a government. Cooperated enthusiastically in the case of rounding up the Jews for deportation to slave camps and gas chambers.

Finished "The Bridge At Remagen" by Ken Hechler. Presidio War Classics for WWII. Very good at explaining what a huge handicap a dictator of a totalitarian government is when it comes to fighting a war. Good story of how US Army allowed lower levels to have the initiative and how higher command backed it up to the extent of changing the grand strategy for the invasion of Germany. Very good discussion of problems the Germany army was having managing the retreat and attempt to regroup in the face of Hitler's orders to fight to the last man.

About 25 years ago I worked for a company in Palo Alto that was headed by a Ph.D. EE. The guy had worked for military/industrial group doing proof of concept prototypes for weapons electronics. In one of the conversations over lunch, he commented that it was very difficult to understand how Germany could have lost, given that it had all of the advantages of a Dictatorship. Some school in his life should be deeply ashamed. The company was bought by Murdoch's News Corp, and Stan ascended to corporate executive-dom. No doubt he learned a lot.

Finished "New Drugs -- An Insider's Guide to the FDA's New Drug Approval Process" by Lawrence T. Friedhoff. He is a consultant helping companies through the approval process. I "Inside the FDA" by Fran Hawthorne a couple of months ago.

Friedhoff has a vested interest in the FDA and its elaborate process. He has no particular criticism of it. Hawthorne is generally approving, discusses the evolution of the FDA, differences in approach between the various divisions, etc. Neither tackle the very difficult question of "what is the real cost of this regulation?" In fact, the cost of a new drug is $500B to $1000B. When I took drug development courses 10 years ago (the 2001 recession), the first thing the instructor said was that no drug could be considered unless it had probable sales of $1B per year. It would require twice that now.

There are relatively few diseases with a market that large. Thus, no drugs are developed to cure them. For example, the drug companies are forced to develop broad-spectrum antibiotics. As bacteria now become resistant to those within 3-5 years, it no longer pays to develop antibiotics.

We now die of no drugs or no profitable drugs, rather than unsafe drugs. Examples abound : The reovirus, and about 10 other viruses, kill 2/3rds of all cancers due to an inherent metabolic defect in the cancer cell. The reovirus itself, when injected IV, might make you feel under the weather for a week or so. However, there is no way a drug company can make a profit on a natural herb or virus, so clinical trials are small and slow. Smoking has been known to cause disease since about 1950. For all that time, the FDA has prevented sales of other ways of delivering nicotine. As nicotine has effects on the rain similar to ritalin, and is extremely important for some people to work, smoking has declined very slowly. The FDA is responsible for the 50% of all deaths that are related to smoking. There are many, many other examples. DCA, artimisinin, ...

As a large part of the world's drug research is done in the USA, the FDA is a leading cause of death around the world. Quite a perverse result, but a normal outcome for attempts of government to regulate.

I watched a lot of Youtube over the last few weeks : David Angus A New Strategy in the War on Cancer Cancer treatment hasn't improved the statistics very well. This is one of the rare people from inside the profession that is critical of the situation. Dealing with my mother-in-law's MDs, I see a lot of specialists who have deep knowledge, can't see over the edges of the rut they are in. The treatments are much more sophisticated, much more expensive, and the MDs make much more money. Perhaps they don't want to see the big picture, it would be too dismal.

Patients Like Me
Jamie Heywood The Big Idea My Brother Inspired
This is a complete replacement for the FDA. It only requires MDs and patients put their records into this analytical system. I am sure this could be done anonymously.

Some might object that this abandons the scientific method, exemplified by the FDA's double-blind clinical trials. Before the 1960s, drugs that had been tested in-vitro and using animal models were first tried on the sickest patients. These people bore the most risk because they had the most to gain. As cures were observed, the drug was given to less-sick, etc. Medicine progressed quite far using this model, even without much quantitative analysis. Given the new tools, it is hard to see what is gained by double-blind trials, and easy to see that the delays cost lives.

Eric Dishman Take Health Care Off The Mainframe Nice discussion of low-tech alternatives to hospital-centric medicine, and how much more quantitative info can be collected. This is the kind of thing that the whole gov-funded and gov-regulated system of medicine prevents. Nobody is really concerned with costs, the system operates with the same rules as cost-plus contracts.

Was reading a far-beyond-my-ken math paper just to see what I could understand. Good quote : "A good mathematician sees analogies between proofs, but a great mathematician sees analogies between analogies." Atiyeh

Sam Harris Science Can Show What Is Right
Very nice discussion of science providing moral values. He takes on the Moslem religion because that is easy (Moslem fundamentalists have retained barbaric customs and legal remedies longer than the other major religions) and popular. However, the argument applies to religions in general, and I think his audience gets that. This talk makes a better impression than I got from his book.

I had heard, and marveled at, the various Youtube videos of 'Canon Rock'. Finally learned the history: Wikipedai Canon Rock
NYTimes list of URLs

These people are immortalized to the same extent as Beethoven, I think. Once something gets N-million views, it becomes a permanent meme just because others will want to watch something that has N-million views, now become N-million + 1 views.

'Canon Rock' is also a great example of how culture builds, mixes, re-aggregates. The composer was Japanese. FunTwo, the kid who did a better version and gained a NYTimes article at about 10 million views, but now has 71 million, is Korean. The meme spread around the world very quickly, and there are now dozens of versions on all sorts of instruments.

I was also involved in a long thread on one of the political groups I follow. An apparently sincere fundamentalist Christian asked how to reconcile his very conservative social beliefs with a libertarian stance. A net-friend did a very good reply, was immediately attacked by 2 rabidly anti-gay posters. I was one of half-dozen who dealt with that. We were quite polite, given the substance and style of their arguments.

Toward the end, I re-read Lysander Spooner's "Vices Are Not Crimes - A Vindication Of Moral Liberty”, important for any high schooler. I realized that educated people could not have had the debate about whether to pass laws controlling moral behavior 100 years ago. In Spooner's time, the intellectual life of the nation was mostly handled by theologians. The brightest minds therefore became preachers and theologians. Now, the brightest minds go to science and technology, theology is a backwater. Our ideas of religion and God have devolved. Karen Armstrong has written about this.

I made 3 arguments I like. “Anti-gay bigots are sinning within their own belief system. Christians have gay children at the same rate as the rest of us. Many Christian gay children kill themselves as a direct result of the hostile environment they are raised within. For me, it is a sin to consciously make the world a worse place for anyone.” “Believe what you like, but you can't think what you like. Thinking and thinking about thinking have a very long history and have achieved great sophistication. Our entire civilization rests on that foundation. You may not invent new facts, new logic or new rules of evidence to support your point of view, as you will weaken that foundation.” “We are opposing you because you are promoting an anti-human agenda, not because you are Christian. You want to confuse those two issues.” Also, of course, the standard “this is an issue of human rights, and no entity has the standing to reduce anyone's human rights for any reason”. Not quite true, that, as there are diminished-capacity exceptions.

I have been doing a lot of research and thinking about education, which will be put into another post.

David Drake : “The Military Dimension”. Short stories, mostly good, mostly with a Vietnamese War thread. The VN references and slang probably make it unsuitable for my 13-year-old.

E.L.Doctorow's “Ragtime”. Very impressive writing I thought, and now find it is rated as one of the 100-best American novels by Time magazine. That counts against it, IMHO. Lots of real historical figures, so good for A. He will need to do a little research to figure out who is real and who isn't.

Charles Stross's “Iron Sunrise” and “Accelerando”. Both excellent. Accelerando is probably best. Both fairly advanced SciFi, “Accelerando” is a must-read.

Stephen Coonts' “Fortunes of War” and “Saucer”. “Saucer” is a boys coming-of-age book, A. likes it a lot. “Fortunes of War” is outdated in its future, interesting view of the technology of fighter jets.

Several other TED talks seemed important :
Neil Gershenfeld Ted Talk
This describes MIT's FabLab. They have a good web page, description of the software and hardware tools they use. I wonder if there is a business in running such a lab, charge $N / hour for use of the machines. Connections with schools ? I think they don't have funds these days.