General – Page 49 – Letter Never Sent

Science — Comments Off
23
Aug 05

Absolutely amazing anemones

We are living among aliens and we barely know them. I would be very interested to read more about the evolutionary strategies of species at the group level. Anemone Armies Battle to a Standoff via robotwisdom.

Clashing colonies of sea anemones fight as organized armies with distinct castes of warriors, scouts, reproductives and other types, according to a new study.

The sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima lives in large colonies of genetically identical clones on boulders around the tide line. Where two colonies meet they form a distinct boundary zone. Anemones that contact an animal from another colony will fight, hitting each other with special tentacles that leave patches of stinging cells stuck to their opponent.

(Snip)

When the tide is out, the polyps are contracted and quiet. As the tide covers the colonies, “scouts” move out into the border to look for empty space to occupy. Larger, well-armed “warriors” inflate their stinging arms and swing them around. Towards the center of the colony, poorly armed “reproductive” anemones stay out of the fray and conduct the clone’s business of breeding.

When anemones from opposing colonies come in contact, they usually fight. But after about 20 or 30 minutes of battle the clones settle down to a truce until the next high tide.

It’s not just polyps along the border between two clones that clash. Polyps three or four rows away from the front will reach over their comrades to engage in fights, Grosberg said.

General — 2 Comments
22
Aug 05

Werewolf

This game, Werewolf, sounds really fun:

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I’d call it a party game, except that it’s a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.

I like party games like this, although I have no idea who I could play it with.

General — Comments Off
19
Aug 05

Corporate psychopathy

Is Your Boss a Psychopath?:

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it’s extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego — something he promotes rather than plunders. “The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self,” Babiak says. “A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game.” That was the profile of Fastow and Dunlap — guys out to profit for themselves without any concern for the companies and lives they were wrecking. In contrast, Jobs and Ellison want their own companies to thrive forever — indeed, to dominate their industries and take over other fields as well. “An entrepreneurial founder-CEO might have a narcissistic tendency that looks like psychopathy,” Babiak says. “But they have a vested interest: Their identity is wrapped up with the company’s existence. They’re loyal to the company.” So these types are ruthless not only for themselves but also for their companies, their extensions of self.

The issue is whether we will continue to elevate, celebrate, and reward so many executives who, however charismatic, remain indifferent to hurting other people. Babiak says that while the first line of defense against psychopaths in the workplace is screening job candidates, the second line is a “culture of openness and trust, especially when the company is undergoing intense, chaotic change.”

Europe is far ahead of the United States in trying to deal with psychological abuse and manipulation at work. The “antibullying” movement in Europe has produced new laws in France and Sweden. Harvard’s Stout suggests that the relentlessly individualistic culture of the United States contributes a lot to our problems. She points out that psychopathy has a dramatically lower incidence in certain Asian cultures, where the heritage has emphasized community bonds rather than glorified self-interest. “If we continue to go this way in our Western culture,” she says, “evolutionarily speaking, it doesn’t end well.”

The good news is that we can do something about corporate psychopaths. Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just as much as they are born among us. But unless American business makes a dramatic shift, we’ll get more Enrons — and deserve them.

Software / Internet — Comments Off
18
Aug 05

GOOG

Google just announced it would be introducing $4 billion worth of new shares into the market in order to raise capital for acquisitions while the stock price is still high. Of course, this has the unfortunate problem of diluting the share value of anyone who holds Google stock (I’m not one of them). This article makes several good points:

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it would use some of the cash to make unspecified acquisitions, while the rest would be used for general corporate purposes. But it?s no secret that Google?s success has made it a target of large technology firms such as Yahoo and Microsoft, among others. And now the company is essentially admitting it needs more money to develop new products to fight off competition.

Also there was a good analysis of an appropriate valuation for the stock:

To look at Google, Damodaran fired up that same valuation model, which he designed specifically for valuing fast-growing firms. It employs a two-stage growth model that includes a single high-growth period followed by a stable growth period. (After all, no company can grow faster than the economy forever.) And it takes into account everything from operating leases that grant the use of equipment and other assets to future dilution from outstanding stock options. Using numbers from Google’s most recent quarterly financial report, Damodaran made several optimistic assumptions. He assumed revenues would climb 60% annually for the next three years before gradually declining to a stable growth rate of 4% a year after ten years (for a compounded average of 27% per year). He also assumed that pre-tax operating margins would decline gradually to 20% in ten years, from a current 32%, which is even more optimistic since that would yield operating income of almost $10 billion.

In the end, Damodaran’s analysis produced a value that’s far less than the current stock price. He figures Google is currently worth just $110 per share. And this assumes that the company will grow like gangbusters, taking in $49 billion in sales by mid-2015, compared with just $3.2 billion last year—an increase of some 1,400%.

For his part, Damodaran is baffled that anyone would pay close to $300 per share for Google. To justify paying this much, he says, you will need compounded revenue growth of about 40% a year, which would generate revenues of $135 billion and operating income of almost $30 billion in ten years. “If you believe this can happen, the stock is a good buy,” he says. “Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? I don’t think so.”

General — Comments Off
18
Aug 05

A little dose of laughter

Yesterday’s Onion is just fantastic:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory
Rumsfeld Makes Surprise Visit To Wife’s Vagina
And my personal favorite: “Dog befriends Roomba”.

From Waxy, I learned of Flying Spaghetti Monster in Wikipedia, which also made me laugh out loud.

Science — Comments Off
16
Aug 05

This alien world

Crocodile blood may yield powerful new antibiotics:

Scientists in Australia’s tropical north are collecting blood from crocodiles in the hope of developing a powerful antibiotic for humans, after tests showed that the reptile’s immune system kills the HIV virus.

The crocodile’s immune system is much more powerful than that of humans, preventing life-threatening infections after savage territorial fights which often leave the animals with gaping wounds and missing limbs.

“They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection,” said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory.

Science — 12 Comments
15
Aug 05

Provocative results on male / female arousal

Via robotwisdom and article: What Makes People Gay? I’m curious in what other ways men, gay men, and women experience things differently:

Researchers at Northwestern University, outside Chicago, are doing this work as a follow-up to their studies of arousal using genital measurement tools. They found that while straight men were aroused by film clips of two women having sex, and gay men were aroused by clips of two men having sex, most of the men who identified themselves as bisexual showed gay arousal patterns. More surprising was just how different the story with women turned out to be. Most women, whether they identified as straight, lesbian, or bisexual, were significantly aroused by straight, gay, and lesbian sex. “I’m not suggesting that most women are bisexual,” says Michael Bailey, the psychology professor whose lab conducted the studies. “I’m suggesting that whatever a woman’s sexual arousal pattern is, it has little to do with her sexual orientation.” That’s fundamentally different from men. “In men, arousal is orientation. It’s as simple as that. That’s how gay men learn they are gay.”

Arts — 2 Comments
12
Aug 05

Horned man

old man

I think it would be cool to have horns or antlers like this old man I altered in Photoshop. When you walked up to your friends you could bow your head and rattle antlers. It would be the equivalent of a high five. If you were frustrated you could scrape your antlers on a tree.

Literature — 3 Comments
10
Aug 05

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake

Good moralistic sci-fi satire from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This book has been an eery trip, very cold and numb, and depressing… yet funny. This passage gives you the flavor.

When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?

But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.

the old stuff