Later On

From Obama Foodorama:

Much of the peanut butter e mail we’ve received recently is from worried readers who want to know if the organic peanut butter they’re eating is “safe.” Well, “safe” is a moving target, if the salmonella peanut butter congressional hearing we attended last week is any indication. And though we write about food safety almost daily, we’re newly impressed at the miracle that America has been collectively experiencing—the miracle that the death rate from food borne disease outbreaks in the US is “only” at around 5,000 people annually. Because seriously… our elected officials simply are not doing anything proactive about food safety in any kind of reasoned, science-based and expeditious way, despite the recent pronouncements of the lovely Rep. Rosa DeLauro and our charming, eating-disordered Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

So peanut butter lovers, watch out, because here’s what’s buried in the bankruptcy filings of Peanut Corporation of America: The Texas branch of the company was Certified Organic. Correct, Certified Organic by the USDA…

Continue reading. There’s quite a bit more, and it’s interesting and informative.

Email from the Center for American Progress:

A soon to be completed internal Justice Department report condemns the legal reasoning offered by Bush administration lawyers to justify waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. The report is the culmination of over a year of research led by H. Marshall Jarrett of the DOJ’s watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), aiming to determine if the Bush team’s legal advice permitting unprecedented interrogation methods "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." It focuses primarily on the legal memos authorizing torture written by three top Bush officials: Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury. A draft of the report submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration prompted the sharp criticism of then-attorney general Michael Mukasey. "OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]," he said. "They’re not constitutional scholars." Attorney General Eric Holder will have to decide whether or not to approve the findings and make the report public. But Holder’s expected response to this report remains unclear. During his confirmation hearing, he explicitly stated that waterboarding is torture, but he has declined to say whether he will pursue charges against Bush officials who authorized the the technique.

Interesting post from Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

Brian Wansink’s latest paper is an analysis of the increasing size of servings and meals through multiple editions of the classic cookbook, Joy of Cooking. These, he finds, have increased by 35%.  My former doctoral student, Lisa Young, looked at how portion sizes began to balloon in the early 1980s in parallel with increasing calories in the food supply (from 3,200 to 3,900 per day per capita) and with rising rates of obesity.  She showed how readers using identical recipes were instructed to make far fewer cookies in newer editions of the Joy of Cooking and wrote about this phenomenon in her book, The Portion Teller.

I wrote about this last year in a letter to the New York Times: “To the Editor: I could not resist looking up the calories for the gorgeous chocolate chip cookie recipe given on July 9. That recipe calls for about 4 pounds of ingredients to make only 18 cookies, each of which runs 500 calories — one quarter of the amount needed by most people for an entire day. I’d call one of those cookies lunch or share it with three friends. By the way, a similar recipe in the 1975 “Joy of Cooking” made 45 cookies with just half the ingredients. These would be just under 100 calories each.”

The point of all this: larger portions have more calories! And you need no further explanation for rising rates of obesity.

I bought a pound of lovely wild shrimp yesterday, and I’ll cook them for lunch/dinner (cook once, two meals) using this recipe from Mark Bittman, cutting it half, more or less:

Shrimp in Green Sauce

Green sauce means different things to different cooks, but I like the Iberian interpretation best. It draws its color from parsley and its impact from chilies, scallions, and, mostly, garlic. I find it difficult to use too much garlic here; my recipe calls for six cloves, but twice that amount is not unreasonable.

Yield 4 servings; Time 30 minutes

You’ll make far more broth than you need here, and it’s worth saving, because it’s wonderful as part of the liquid used when making risotto or fish stews.

• 6 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 6 scallions, trimmed and chopped
• 1 cup parsley, leaves and thin stems
• 2 pounds shrimp, peeled
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 4 dried chilies or a few pinches of crushed red chili flakes, or to taste
• 1/3 cup stock (shrimp, fish or chicken) or white wine or water.

1. Heat oven to 500 degrees. Combine garlic and oil in a small food processor and blend until smooth, scraping down sides as necessary. Add scallions and parsley and pulse until mixture is minced. Toss with shrimp, salt, pepper and chilies.

2. Put shrimp in a large roasting pan. Add liquid and place pan in oven. Roast, stirring once, until mixture is bubbly and hot, and shrimp all pink, 10 to 15 minutes. Serve.

UPDATE: Truthfully? Not worth the effort. Take the same sauce ingredients, chop everything finely, sauté briefly in a little olive oil, add shrimp, sauté each side briefly, add stock, cover, and simmer till done. That would be as tasty and a lot less effort (and with no dirty food processor to clean).

Last night I enjoyed a sort of ad-hoc dinner—a smoked trout fillet broken up in a little bowl with lemon juice squeezed generously over it, roasted Brussels sprouts tossed with olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt, pepper, Old Bay Seasoning, and ground chile de arbol, and pears with goat cheese for dessert.

I suspected that the Brussels sprouts would cook much faster than usual because I was using a baking sheet (sides 3/4" high) instead of a roasting pan (sides 2 1/2" high). I figured that the oven air at 400º would cool after transferring heat to the sprouts and thus pool in the roasting pan (cool air heavier than hot), whereas on the baking sheet, with low sides, the cooled air would just slide off into the bottom of the oven. And indeed the sprouts were well done at 35 minutes instead of 45 minutes. So now I’m roasting veggies on the baking sheet.

You’d think that they would have worked out some ground rules about these investigations ahead of time. Marisa Taylor and Margaret Talev of McClatchy report:

The Obama administration is asking for two more weeks to weigh in on whether former Bush White House officials must testify before Congress about the firings of nine U.S. attorneys.

The request comes after an attorney for former Bush political adviser Karl Rove asked the White House to referee his clash with the House of Representatives over Bush’s claim of executive privilege in the matter.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., has issued a subpoena requiring Rove to appear next Monday to testify about the firings and other allegations that the Bush White House let politics interfere with the operations of the Justice Department.

Michael Hertz, the acting assistant attorney general, said in a court brief released Monday that negotiations were ongoing.

"The inauguration of a new president has altered the dynamics of this case and created new opportunities for compromise rather than litigation," Hertz wrote in the brief dated Friday. "At the same time, there is now an additional interested party — the former president — whose views should be considered."

Members of the committee have been seeking the testimony of Rove and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers since the spring of 2007.

Last July, a federal judge in Washington agreed with the House that Miers didn’t have the right to ignore a subpoena from Congress. District Judge John D. Bates’ 93-page ruling was considered a significant setback for the administration, which had asserted a broad executive-privilege claim that would have protected Miers from appearing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit later delayed the effect of the ruling until after the November elections.

Since then, Rove’s attorney has indicated that …

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Marisa Taylor reporting for McClatchy:

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet to fly to Bogota, Colombia, last fall instead of taking one of the agency’s 106 planes.

The DEA paid a contractor an additional $5,380 to arrange Acting Administrator Michele Leonhart’s trip last Oct. 28-30 with an outside company.

The DEA scheduled the trip as the nation was reeling from the worst economic crisis in decades and the national debt was climbing toward $10 trillion. Three weeks later, lawmakers slammed chief executive officers from three automakers for flying to Washington in private jets as Congress debated whether to bail out the auto industry.

William Brown, the special agent in charge of the DEA’s aviation division, said he’d asked DEA contractor L-3 Communications to arrange the flight because the plane that ordinarily would’ve flown the administrator was grounded for scheduled maintenance. He said he didn’t question the cost at the time.

"Was it excessive? I guess you could look at it that way, but I don’t think so," he said.

"I understand the concern about costs for these things. But we do our best to keep costs under control. I think the DEA is very conservative compared to other agencies."

Last fiscal year, the DEA’s aviation division spent about $76 million. The agency flies its planes for law enforcement operations and drug surveillance throughout the nation and the world, according to the DEA’s Web site…

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Another cold, dark, rainy day—and with nickel-sized hail in the Santa Cruz mountains. I’m staying indoors, though I’m tempted to make another pear run. The pears at Whole Foods are remarkable right now: perfectly firm and ripe, juicy and delicious. I have avoided pears for some reason, but I can’t get enough of these: Bosc and Red Anjou pears are on the dining room table for snacks, but not enough of them. I have various kinds of goat cheese (goat gouda, goat cheddar, bucheron) to have with them. Man! they’re tasty. I originally bought a couple of Bosc pears to poach, but before I got around to that, I ate them. That’s what started it. More useful pear info here (including recipes).

The Wife will try to find tamarind concentrate while she’s up in Palo Alto today. If that fails, I’ll just order it. I’m eager to make the Worcestershire sauce, especially since I can then tinker with the recipe. I’m already thinking that one anchovy is certainly not enough.

I am actually wanting to start walking again—too much sedentary gets old, I guess. Won’t be walking today, though.

A reader wrote to me, commenting that the brew time for White Tea on the Zarafina seems just too long. I checked, and he’s absolutely right. So I’m writing to Zarafina today.

Perhaps better known under his stage name Louie Bellson, he was one of the great jazz drummers and said that Duke Ellington called him the greatest drummer in the world. The NY Times has a good obituary, from which this extract:

Mr. Bellson was a dynamic, spectacular soloist known for his use of two bass drums, a technique he pioneered as a teenager and developed from a novelty into a serious mode of expression. But he wasn’t strictly a solo exhibitionist: his attentiveness and precision made him a highly successful sideman, and he was capable of extreme subtlety.

He always proudly maintained that Duke Ellington had called him the world’s greatest drummer. During his tenure with the Ellington band in the early 1950s he was often granted a long drum feature, which he attacked with relish and poise. He also wrote compositions like “The Hawk Talks” and “Skin Deep” that were regularly performed by the band. Later, in 1965, he participated in Ellington’s first Sacred Concert.

Before joining Ellington’s band, Mr. Bellson logged time with the top-flight orchestras of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Harry James. He later worked briefly with Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. As a regular on the impresario Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tours in the 1950s, he appeared in combos with all-stars like the trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, the alto saxophonist Benny Carter, and the pianists Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson.

In 1952 Mr. Bellson married the singer and actress Pearl Bailey, who had a Top 10 hit that year with her version of “Takes Two to Tango.” He became her bandleader, and their high visibility was significant at a time when interracial relationships were far from common.

Here’s an example of his work:

Nancy Boy products (“Tested on boyfriends, not animals”) are excellent overall, and the shaving cream is particularly nice. They now have two fragrances, but I haven’t yet tried the newer. Their products even serve as a mental-health measure: the more a guy feels uncomfortable about using a product with the brand name “Nancy Boy” and the more he feels called upon to make jokes about it, the more it indicates that he could benefit from therapeutic counseling to improve his acceptance of human diversity.

That being said, I got yet another excellent shave. Nancy Boy shaving cream is not really a lathering shaving cream, though I do apply it with a brush and work up a little lather. It has a great fragrance and seems quite kind to one’s skin. The Simpsons Duke 3 Best did a fine job, as did the Classic 1904, using a Treet Classic blade. New York seemed a suitably debonair aftershave.

Great start to the day, and I already have a cup of tea beside me.

When I first saw the Zarafina, I thought it was just a gimmick. Au contraire, it is a surpassingly good and efficient tea maker, automatically brewing a pint of tea within minutes, and it allows you to specify whether you want the tea strong or not, whether you are making black, oolong, green, white, or herbal tea, and whether you are using loose tea or tea bags. It then adjusts the brewing temperature and time to match what you specified. I’m currently using it several times a day, using a Starbucks cup that also holds a pint.

Note that for white and green tea, you should drink it with lemon juice to maximize health benefits.

One should always be careful about press accounts of technical information. Dean Baker comments on the reporting on the stimulus package. Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, and received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

Okay folks, this is 2-year stimulus, not a 1-year package. (Actually, as the Republicans were fond of pointing out, much of the spending will not take place until 2011, year 3 of the package.) That means that there is a word to describe the Post’s claim that the package is more than 5 percent of GDP: “wrong.”

Of course, if the Post was interested in accurate reporting it might also have noticed that the package saved the government $140 billion by reversing a change in the tax code put in place by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that allowed banks to write off the bad debts of banks that they acquire. That would substantially reduce the long-term cost of the stimulus.

If might also have been helpful to put some of the items highlighted by Republicans in context so that their importance would be clearer to readers. The $198 million for Filipino World War II veterans comes to 0.024 percent of the stimulus package. The $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts is 0.006 percent and the $25 million for the Smithsonian is equal to 0.003 percent of the stimulus.

Another post by Dean Baker:

Has the Post Ever Had a Headline About the “Whoppingly” Inefficient Health Care System?

Probably not, since it has no interest in health care reform that could jeopardize the incomes of the insurance industry, the health care industry and highly paid medical professionals. Therefore, the Post would never use a word like “whopping” or its derivatives in a headline about the health care system.

On the other hand, since it the editors have no qualms about using the news section to push its crusade for balanced budgets, it has no qualms about using “whopping” in a headline for an article about the budget deficit.

In addition to the unusual adjectival choice for a news headline, it’s also worth noting that the other half of the headline is wrong. The stimulus did not grow, it shrank. President Obama originally proposed a bill that was over $800 billion. He got a bill that was less than $800 billion, including a $70 billion fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax that everyone had anticipated whether or not there was a stimulus.

When it comes to providing information, the first paragraph does no better than the headline. What does it mean to tell readers: “But one thing is certain: It will blast another big hole in an already tattered federal budget.”

What is “big?” What is a “hole in the budget?” The only information readers get from this paragraph is that the Post is unhappy with the size of the deficit. That’s fine for the opinion page, but it doesn’t belong in the news section.

To round out its analysis, the Post tells us, among things, that among the issues that President Obama wants to tackle is “assuring that Social Security will survive for future generations.” It would be interesting to learn whether President Obama used this phrase or whether it originated with the Post, because it makes as much sense as saying that he will ensure that Ohio survives for future generations. It’s theoretically possible that both Social Security and the state of Ohio will cease to exist, but on what basis would any reasonable person expect either event.

The article concludes by presenting analysis from two budget hawks to balance out the piece.

Dean Baker is obviously a commenter worth following.

Excellent news:

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill approved by Congress will, for the first time, provide substantial amounts of money for the federal government to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same illness.

Under the legislation, researchers will receive $1.1 billion to compare drugs, medical devices, surgery and other ways of treating specific conditions. The bill creates a council of up to 15 federal employees to coordinate the research and to advise President Obama and Congress on how to spend the money.

The program responds to a growing concern that doctors have little or no solid evidence of the value of many treatments. Supporters of the research hope it will eventually save money by discouraging the use of costly, ineffective treatments.

The soaring cost of health care is widely seen as a problem for the economy. Spending on health care totaled $2.2 trillion, or 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, in 2007, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, without any changes in federal law, it will rise to 25 percent of the G.D.P. in 2025.

Dr. Elliott S. Fisher of Dartmouth Medical School said the federal effort would help researchers try to answer questions like these: …

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Not good:

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

"I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in "pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown. One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later.

Iraqi leaders are convinced that the theft or waste of huge sums of US and Iraqi government money could have happened only if senior US officials were themselves involved in the corruption. In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. Iraqi officials were blamed for the theft, but US military officials were largely in control of the Defence Ministry at the time and must have been either highly negligent or participants in the fraud.

American federal investigators are now starting an inquiry into the actions of …

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The Archdruid writes some good posts. Here’s a recent one:

Two weeks ago, in The Ecology of Social Change, I suggested that the great flaw in most of today’s schemes for social change is their failure to grasp the ecological dimensions of human society. That flaw has been almost impossible to avoid, because it is not simply a matter of consciously held beliefs; many of the people drafting plans for social change these days have learned quite a bit about ecology. It’s the unexamined and often unconscious presuppositions underlying most such plans that blind them to ecological reality – and the struggle to confront one’s own presuppositions is very challenging work.

One of the things that makes the end of the industrial age so difficult for many people today, after all, is the way that it drives a wedge between science and what has often been called scientism. Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other. Science and scientism are not the same, but it’s one of the most common habits of modern thought to assume their identity – or, more precisely, to fixate on science and fail to notice that scientism as a distinctive worldview exists at all.

This is not a new thing; most sets of intellectual tools have given rise to their own worldview and values. Classical logic followed the same trajectory. Greek and Roman philosophers took logic as their basic toolkit, defined reality as whatever could be reduced to verbal statements and analyzed by logical means, and consigned the rest to the apeiron, the realm of the formless and unknowable. The results predetermined most of the successes and failures of the ancient world’s intellectual history. It’s easy enough to condemn the old philosophers for their failures – the debates about justice, for example, that never quite stopped to ask if there might be something wrong with the ancient world’s economic dependence on slavery – but of course equivalent blind spots pervade modern thinking as well.

What verbal statements were to classical logic, quantification is to the scientific method: …

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Good question, eh? More information here:

Almost 40 years ago, American scientists took their first steps in a quest to break the world’s dependence on plastics.

But in those four decades, plastic products have become so cheap and durable that not even the forces of nature seem able to stop them. A soupy expanse of plastic waste – too tough for bacteria to break down – now covers an estimated 1 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean.

Sensing a hazard, researchers started hunting for a substitute for plastic’s main ingredient, petroleum. They wanted something renewable, biodegradable, and abundant enough to be inexpensive.

Though they stumbled upon a great candidate early on, many US chemists had given up on it by the end of the 1990s. The failed wonder material: lignin, the natural compound that lends strength to trees. A waste product from paper production, much of the lignin supply is simply burned as fuel.

But while many scientists turned to other green options, a German company, Tecnaro,  says it found the magic formula. Its “liquid wood” can be molded like plastic, yet biodegrades over time.

Now, Tecnaro’s success could revive interest in lignin and propel the search for better and cheaper bioplastics.

“The lignin itself was misunderstood completely by [leaders in the field] and the majority of people,” says Simo Sarkanen, an environmental science professor at the University of Minnesota. …

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And not just mathematical equations: chemical equations also are a problem. Interesting article on the topic:

The world wide web was invented at a physics laboratory, and the first users were scientists and engineers. You might think, therefore, that this new channel of communication would be especially well adapted to scientific discourse—that it would facilitate the expression of ideas like [and here you need to click the link to see the equations – LG]

If only it were so! The truth is, the basic protocols of the Web offer almost no support for rendering mathematics or other specialized notations such as chemical formulas. Presenting such material on a Web page often requires software add-ons or plug-ins to be installed by the author or the reader or both. Fine-tuning the display of mathematics can be a fussy and finicky process, not much easier than formatting equations with a typewriter. The results sometimes render differently—or not at all—in various Web browsers. This is a sad situation: As the Web has evolved into a thriving marketplace and playground, the scholarly and scientific community that created the technology has not been well served.

The confused state of online mathematical typography is worrisome as well as sad. In years to come the Web will surely be the most important conduit for scientific information. Already it is a major channel for distributing publications and preprints in many disciplines, and it is becoming a venue for less-formal jottings and conversations—everything from homework assignments to blogs. Ideally, the Web would serve as an extension of the blackboard where people gather to talk about science and math during coffee breaks. We need chalk for that blackboard.

The problem is not one of simple neglect. Over the years there have been many earnest efforts to build a reliable facility for writing and reading mathematics online. The trouble is, no one solution has yet gained the kind of widespread adoption that would make it a standard, supported in mainstream Web servers and browsers. Still, there’s room for hope. We have technologies that work, if we can agree on how to use them. And a minor change to the infrastructure of the Web might smooth the way for more online math…

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Very interesting article in New Scientist. It begins:

For those physicists and philosophers puzzled by nature’s fourth dimension, Patrick Gill has a wry response. "Time," he says, "is what you measure in seconds."

For Gill, that is a statement of professional pride. He is what you might call Britain’s top timekeeper. Within the windowless – and largely clockless – cream-brick confines of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), near London, Gill and his colleagues are busy developing the next, staggeringly accurate generation of atomic clocks. These tiny timepieces are the devices that ensure radio, television and mobile-phone transmissions stay in sync, prevent the internet from turning into a mess of missing data packets, make GPS accurate enough to navigate by, and safeguard electricity grids from blackout. They are, in short, the heartbeat of modern life.

These are momentous times for Gill and others like him in timekeeping laboratories around the world. A new generation of atomic tickers, known as optical clocks, have just wrested the record for accuracy from the ensembles of oscillating caesium atoms that held it for half a century. Soon, the new technology will be so refined that if such a clock had ticked away every second since the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, it would not yet have missed a beat. That is an awesome accomplishment – but it’s also a problem. At this astonishing precision, we might have to rethink not only how we measure time, but also our concept of time.

For most of us, the closest we get to thinking about the nuts and bolts of time is watching the seconds tick away on a wristwatch or wall clock. Thinking a bit deeper, we might light on the idea that those seconds we are counting ultimately just subdivide a natural unit of time: the time it takes our planet to turn once about its axis, a day. That is indeed the historical logic of timekeeping (see diagram). But Earth’s rotation is an imperfect metronome. As time has become an ever more important governing factor in our lives, we have sought faster, more stable beats against which to measure its passage.

A leap forward came in 1955 when, building on the work of Isidor Rabi of Columbia University in New York, and prototype clocks at what is now the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, NPL physicist Louis Essen …

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Obviously, a myth can be based on reality, but the evidence for a gigantic flood is missing. There may have been local floods that grew in the telling (like the six-foot drifts of snow people my age had to walk through—five miles!! with wolves following us!!!—to get to school). At any rate, the Big Flood into the Black Sea didn’t happen:

The ancient flood that some scientists think gave rise to the Noah story may not have been quite so biblical in proportion, a new study says.

Researchers generally agree that, during a warming period about 9,400 years ago, an onrush of seawater from the Mediterranean spurred a connection with the Black Sea, then a largely freshwater lake. That flood turned the lake into a rapidly rising sea. (See a map of the region.)

A previous theory said the Black Sea rose up to 195 feet (60 meters), possibly burying villages and spawning the tale of Noah’s flood and other inundation folklore.

(Related: "Noah’s Flood" May Have Triggered European Farming" [November 20, 2007].)

But the new study—largely focused on relatively undisturbed underwater fossils—suggests a rise of no more than 30 feet (10 meters).

New Flood Evidence

Marine geologist Liviu Giosan and colleagues carbon-dated the shells of pristine mollusk fossils, which the researchers say bear no evidence of epic flooding.

Found in sediment samples taken from where the Black Sea meets the Danube River, the shells "weren’t eroded, agitated, or moved," said Giosan, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. "We know the mud is exactly the same age as the shells and so can determine what the sea level was about 9,400 years ago."

The results suggest the Black Sea rose 15 to 30 feet (5 to 10 meters), rather than the 150 to 195 feet (50 to 60 meters) first suggested 13 years ago by Columbia University geologist William Ryan and colleagues. Ryan declined to be interviewed for this story…

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Related:

• The Search for Noah’s Flood
• Noah’s Ark Discovered in Iran (July 5, 2006)
• Noah’s Ark Quest Dead in Water —Was It a Stunt? (September 20, 2004)

Interesting article by Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post:

Last year, as the financial meltdown was getting underway, a scientist named Yaneer Bar-Yam developed a computer model of the economy. Instead of the individuals, companies and brokers that populate the real economy, the model used virtual actors. The computer world allowed Bar-Yam to do what regulators cannot do in real life. It allowed him to change the way actors behaved and then study how those changes rippled through a complex ecosystem.

The fundamental principle behind the model was simple. Human beings regularly solve problems by imagining how particular behaviors can lead to specific outcomes. Regulators, managers and leaders try to do the same thing on a bigger scale. But in a system as complex as the economy, where feedback loops of rumor, fear and misinformation regularly trigger panic and herd behavior, the ability of individuals to forecast outcomes can diminish rapidly. The normal rules of human intuition break down: A positive intervention — the federal government announcing it is going to pump trillions of dollars into the economy — can be greeted by a plunge in the stock market. Trivial things can get amplified and assume gigantic proportions.

Bar-Yam wanted to understand why the economy was so unstable. Commentators were focused on the housing crisis, but Bar-Yam was not sure whether the bursting of the real estate bubble was upstream or downstream of the instability in the economy. It seems intuitively obvious to say the housing crash destabilized the economy, but isn’t it possible that some underlying instability in the economy preceded the housing crash — and amplified its effects? If you take away one of the supports of a house built on stilts and a storm knocks the house down, the problem is not the storm but the missing support. If you rebuild the house on its shaky base — but put in expensive new storm windows — you are unlikely to fare better when the next storm rolls around.

Bar-Yam’s model suggested a different explanation for the instability in the economy: …

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