Edgy David Brooks

George Caleb Bingham, "Raftsmen Playing Cards", 1847. Saint Louis Art Museum via New York Times. David Brooks at left in the green trousers, left out because he's a four-flusher and can't count.

Shorter David Brooks, "At the Edge of Inside", New York Times, June 24 2016:

When you are located neither in in the core of an organization nor outside it, but just at the edge of the core, you could be a genuine reformer, like Senator Lindsey Graham or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some people might not like you very much, but we need such people now more than ever. Lincoln, too, and the behavioral economist Richard Thaler, co-author, with Cass Sunstein, of Nudge (2008), whose theories can "make it easier for people to save money, eat healthily and more," according to the TED Radio Hour, which shows you just how edgy-on-the-inside he is.

Actually that's not what Brooks says about Thaler. He says,

When the behavioral economist Richard Thaler uses the lessons of psychology to improve economic modeling, he is operating just inside the edge of his own discipline and making it better.

But I don't feel that's 100% accurate. I think you could say Thaler uses the lessons of psychology to explain what's wrong with economic modeling as it's done (its presumption of rationality on the part of homo economicus), rightly I'm sure, but he doesn't use it to improve modeling; he does it to justify his own work as a purveyor of interesting anecdotes instead of models, and assert that you can do useful work even if you're no good at math:

Insult or compliment? God knows.

William Blake, God judging Adam. Via SHAFE.

Everybody wants to be a critic—

Jeffrey Goldberg:

Critics of the Jews have often called us stiff-necked, but sometimes this insult can be understood as a compliment.

Yahweh:

Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. You are a stiff-necked people. If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you. Now take off your ornaments and I will decide what to do with you. (Exodus 33:3)

Anti-Semitic or just snarky? You be the judge. Wait, no, better not. One thing for sure, faint praise is probably not a good sign.

Sim pathogen

Scientists at Stanford University and the J. Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts. (NYTimes, 7/20/2012)

I am curious-mycoplasma. From The Inquisitor.

Mycoplasma genitalium, whose full-time job is causing an STD, has the simplest genome of any known organism, at 525 genes (compared to 4,288 for E. coli, and a bit over 23,000 for a mouse or a man), but it takes 128 computers to run the simulation.

The inevitable theological part, for me, is like this: if this is the handiwork of a god, the watchmaker who left his watch on the beach x many millennia ago, why is it so absurdly complex? Why so roundabout in getting where it's going, why so profoundly inelegant? Why is there no engineer's pride here?

The scientist never knows quite how to say this, but if it isn't God, that's because it's better than God! More true to life, funnier, more original, in the end more beautiful.

So congratulations to the folks at Stanford and Venter. Not sure I want to live to see the simulated mouse (by the time it's ready, I suppose, it'll be down to a couple of dozen computers, while our phones will be holding things like the international Zagat, self-updating star and planet charts,  and the complete bloodlines of all the thoroughbreds that ever lived).