Proptech: Opendoor

Opendoor, a start-up that flips homes, attracted attention in June when it announced it had raised $325 million from a long list of venture capitalists. The financing valued the four-year-old company at more than $2 billion.

That was only an appetizer. Three months later, Opendoor has more than doubled its cash pile. On Thursday, the company said it had gotten a $400 million investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The valuation for Opendoor remains the same.

The so-called mega-round for Opendoor was not the Vision Fund’s only major real estate-related deal on Thursday. The firm also co-led a $400 million investment in the high-end brokerage Compass that valued the company at $4.4 billion.

The hauls are part of a race by investors to pour money into technology for real estate, or what Silicon Valley now calls proptech.

Having watched tech start-ups upend old-line industries like taxis and hotels, venture capitalists are casting about for the next area to be infused with software and data. Many have homed in on real estate as a big opportunity because parts of the industry — like pricing, mortgages and building management — have been slow to adopt software that could make business more efficient. (...)

Opendoor’s goal is to make moving as simple as the click of a button, according to Mr. Wu. While that remains a far-off reality, the company has simplified the process of selling a home. It uses a combination of data, software and a team of 50 human evaluators to assess a home’s value. If a customer accepts Opendoor’s value for their home, the company will buy the property, charging a 6.5 percent fee on average.

The company said it offers sellers certainty — many conventional home sales fall through — and flexible closing dates, helping them avoid paying double mortgages. It also eliminates the need for a real estate agent. Opendoor employs 100 licensed real estate agents to advise customers if they request it.

Opendoor only buys homes built in 1960 or later, worth $175,000 to $500,000, and not in need of major renovations or repairs. Operating in more than a dozen cities, mostly in the South, it bought $316 million of homes in August, up from around $100 million in January. After some light fixes, it sells the homes in an average of 90 days.

Before its latest cash infusion, Opendoor planned to expand into one new city a month. Now it plans to double that pace. The company said it expects to be in 22 cities in the United States by the end of the year.

Its growth has spawned competitors: OfferPad and Knock offer comparable services to Opendoor, and Zillow and Redfin, which are both publicly traded, have entered the house-flipping market as well. (...)

Opendoor’s business model has not been tested by a major dip in the housing market, causing some skepticism about whether it can work over the long term.

“The vast majority of investors who hear about it initially think it’s a bad idea,” said Stephen Kim, an analyst at Evercore ISI, a market research company. But the skepticism often fades as they realize Opendoor makes money by providing a service to home sellers, rather than on price appreciation, Mr. Kim said. Even if the company breaks even on a sale, the transaction fees are a meaningful business.

by Erin Griffith, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

Bomba Estereo

Video: YouTube

‘This Guy Doesn’t Know Anything’: The Inside Story of Trump’s Shambolic Transition Team

Chris Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said Lewandowski.

Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.

And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.

Christie viewed Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. (...)

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition. (...)

Chris Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him. “You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called. His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared the crap out of the president-elect.

Not long after the people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump was like ... I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about, and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but also stepped down from his job.) (...)

In the days after the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building.

It wasn’t just Christie who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”

They were about to take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?

The department of agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent, among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.

All these people had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American experiment was underway.

by Michael Lewis, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Nathalie Lees

Judge Kavanaugh Has Taught Me So Much About How the World Works

I can’t stop reading about Judge Kavanaugh. I am learning so much about how the world works.

His yearbook from high school is horrifying. There were derogatory jokes about women throughout the pages. Everyone knew, but the boys were rich, and they were going to top colleges, so it was okay. I didn’t know there were yearbooks like that.

I knew that in those rich-kid private schools the teachers decide who goes to which school. I know that, for example, Yale takes a certain number of kids from Choate, and Choate tells Yale which kids will be the best fit. There is a symbiotic relationship. Choate can say they always get kids into Yale. And Yale knows they’ll get the best kids for Yale without having to do much searching.

What I didn’t know was that the most coveted clerkships work the same way. Judge Kavanaugh always takes law students from Yale. The symbiotic relationship there is that Yale can say their students always get great clerkships, and in exchange Yale law professor Amy Chua makes sure Kavanaugh always has a stream of female law school students who look like models. Really. Click that link.

Kavanaugh fed law clerks to Judge Alex Kozinski. That’s part of what made Kavanaugh such a great place to start a law career. Kozinski was famous. For power. But also for harassment. Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, also a Yale law professor and also already under investigation, knew about the harassment. It was common knowledge among Yale faculty.

That feeder system is done. Kozinski was forced to resign. And Chua is on mysterious, emergency medical leave, not even able to write her own emails to the press.

People like to hire people who are like them. We have so much research that supports that. The only way to get around that is to be way, way better than everyone else (black men often do this) or to be really hot. Middle-aged men do not have access to young, hot women except when they pay for it, or it’s their daughter’s friends. But if the men have power they can have access to those women at work.

I knew there were not a lot of female staff in the Senate. But I did not realize that every time there was a female issue, the male Senators sent a woman to deal with it. The all-male Republican judiciary committee does not want to have to question Kavanaugh’s accusers. They think the optics are bad. So they want a female staff member to do it. But the female staff are saying no.They say it’s part of a Senator’s job to know how to work with women. The female staff are sick of doing it for the male Senators.

I have done this job for men my whole career. I have stepped in to tell my boss that there are women in the company not making as much as their male counterparts and we have to fix it. I have told male leadership that we have a client who keeps harassing the women in the company. I thought it was my job to take care of lower-level women because I knew leadership would not. I did not even know I was doing that. I never expected the men to look out for the women.

I’m not doing that anymore — I will ask the men why they are not making sure themselves. I will show them how to do it. It’s a mentality. To know what to look out for. It is not the job of women like me. It’s the job of all of senior management.

I didn’t know that women so bright and successful as Christine Blasey Ford got derailed for years after sexual assault. I got derailed for years from sexual assault. But I thought it was because I was weak. I thought I was making too big a deal out of it. I am shocked that the time in her life when she finally told her husband, in couples counseling, is similar to the time in my life I finally told people about my experience.

I was shocked that Debbie Ramirez was so ashamed of having been forced to touch Kavanaugh’s penis that she never talked about it with anyone. I am shocked because I was forced to touch someone’s penis. But, like Ramirez, I wasn’t sure how to talk about it. I’m still not. I mean, I was there with a penis in front of me. And I said no, get away from me, gross. But I still touched it. I am shocked that it’s hard for Ramirez to put a coherent story together. I thought not having a coherent story meant maybe what I thought happened didn’t happen.

But now I understand that not having the words to describe it is part of the problem. We have no word in the English language for being so stressed and so full of shame that you start trying so hard to block it out the minute you get way. Of course we have no word for that. Because it’s only women feeling a loss of power who need that word.

by Penelope Trunk |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. Update: Jesus, just look at the videos: In Emotional Hearing, Kavanaugh and Blasey Present Senators With Stark Choice. Fuck you, Lindsey Graham. See also: "I Was Ashamed": After Ford's Accusation, Holton-Arms Alumnae Wrestle With Their Own Truths-Together.]

Chicken Francese: The Single Best Thing to Cook With Chicken Breasts

There are people who never get tired of breaded chicken cutlets. (I know, because some of them live in my house.)

For the rest of us, finding a higher purpose for boneless, skinless chicken breasts is a lifelong mission. Their virtues are well known: They are quick-cooking, high-protein, crowd-pleasing, low-fat. As are their drawbacks: They are dry, tough, tasteless. A really well-seasoned, crunchy chicken cutlet is a fine thing to eat, but many other cooking methods — marinating, grilling, searing, poaching — only take the cut from bad to worse.

Chicken francese, with its butter lemon sauce, is the single best thing you can make with chicken cutlets. Chicken and lemon are a classic combination that almost every meat-eater likes. And it is one of those rare restaurant dishes that is truly easy to make at home.

“It’s one of our most popular dishes, but I have no idea where it came from,” Lisa Bamonte said at her family’s 118-year-old restaurant, Bamonte’s in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where the chicken francese is considered one of the best in the city. Four generations of her family, including Ms. Bamonte, have worked in the kitchen, so she is more than familiar with the recipe’s signature elements: a flour dredge, an egg wash and a bright, plentiful sauce.

Like piccata, Marsala and saltimbocca, francese was originally made with veal cutlets. Those dishes are Italian classics, and they all work the same way: A thin cut of meat gets a light coating of flour, then just enough time to brown in oil, then a drizzle of instant pan sauce. It is a fast but challenging formula. The veal or chicken must cook through in a flash to avoid scorching the coating, and you must immediately make the sauce and serve the dish, or it will be cold and dry.

Francese is a more forgiving dish, and here’s why: It has an egg coating to keep the meat moist, and a plentiful pan sauce to keep the whole dish comfortingly warm. A dip in beaten eggs is traditional for European fried chicken (yes, there is such a thing) and classic dishes like Wiener schnitzel and fritto misto. During cooking, egg proteins form a thin but critical coating that protects the meat or fish from drying out. An egg-batter crust is not as crunchy as an American-style one, which adds a thick layer of flour or bread crumbs.

But that’s O.K., because you’re going to tuck the cooked cutlets back into the pan anyway, to reheat them and to give them a nice coating of sauce. And that means the dish is not such a split-second operation; you can cook the cutlets and make the sauce a few hours ahead, then reheat them just before serving.

by Julia Moskin, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.

Recipe:

INGREDIENTS
2 eggs
2 tablespoons whole milk
1 teaspoon salt, plus more for seasoning
½ teaspoon ground black pepper, plus more for seasoning
1 cup all-purpose flour
⅓ cup olive oil
⅓ cup vegetable oil
4 to 6 large boneless, skinless chicken cutlets (buy the cutlets thinly sliced, or buy regular boneless breasts and slice them in half horizontally to make thin pieces)
3 to 6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 lemon, thinly sliced, seeds removed (optional)
½ cup dry white wine
Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon, more to taste
2 cups chicken stock
3 to 4 tablespoons freshly minced parsley

PREPARATION
In a wide, shallow bowl, whisk eggs, milk, salt and pepper until blended. Place the flour in a separate bowl. Line a baking sheet with paper towels.

In a wide skillet, heat olive and vegetable oils over medium heat until shimmering.

Working in batches to avoid crowding the pan, lightly dredge the chicken in flour and shake off any excess. Dip into egg batter, let excess batter drip back into the bowl and place in the skillet. Fry, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 4 minutes per side. Adjust the heat as the cutlets cook so they brown slowly and evenly, with a steady bubbling. Transfer to the paper-towel-lined pan and repeat with remaining cutlets.

When all cutlets are browned, remove the pan from the heat and pour off the oil. Wipe out the pan with paper towels. Return the pan to low heat. 

If making the lemon slices (if not, skip to Step 6 below): Melt 3 tablespoons of the butter and then scatter the lemon slices over the bottom of the pan. Cook, stirring gently occasionally, until the lemon slices are golden and browning around the edges, about 3 minutes. Scoop out the lemon slices and set them aside. 

Add 3 tablespoons of butter, the wine and lemon juice and bring to a boil. Boil until the liquid is syrupy, 3 to 4 minutes. Pour in the stock, bring to a boil and cook until thickened into a sauce, about 5 minutes. (It will thicken more when you add the cutlets.) Taste and adjust the seasonings with lemon, salt and pepper; it should be quite lemony and not too salty.

Reduce the heat, tuck the cutlets into the pan and simmer very gently until the sauce is velvety and the chicken pieces are heated through, about 4 minutes. Turn the cutlets over occasionally in the sauce. Place the browned lemon slices on top. Sprinkle with chopped parsley and serve, spooning some of the sauce over each serving.

Read more (with video):

Vote

[ed. See also: The Future Of 1.4 Million Floridians With Felony Convictions Is On The Ballot In November and Will Florida’s Ex-Felons Finally Regain the Right to Vote?]
Image: Mike Luckovich

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Maison Margiela Fusion Sneaker

Nordstrom: Maison Margiela Fusion Sneaker - $1,645 (free shipping)

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How You Can Invest in Dire Straits Royalities

Starting today, you can invest in a unique manager’s share of sound recording royalties generated by the entire epic catalog of rock legends Dire Straits, as well as the solo catalog of former members Mark Knopfler and John Illsley.

This catalog has been earning royalties since the band released their first album in 1978. Since the beginning, the band sold 140 million records around the world, won four Grammy awards, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.

The royalties aren’t shabby either.

Although the band broke up in 1995, this catalog keeps earning royalties, and will for the life of the copyright. In fact, the catalog’s royalties grew 60% over the last 2 years.

Keep reading to learn all of the details of the catalog, including the financials, and how you can take part in this offer. (...)

About the Offering

This Private Syndicate investment opportunity features access to the manager’s commission of sound recording royalties earned by the complete recording catalog of legendary British rock band Dire Straits, as well as certain solo releases from band members Mark Knopfler and John Illsley.

This includes all six studio albums (most notably, the smash Brothers In Arms), hits like “Sultans of Swing,” “Money For Nothing,” and “Walk of Life” (along with their music videos), live albums, and any existing or future best-of compilations.

It also includes solo work of frontman Mark Knopfler, which among other releases includes soundtracks to movies like the beloved classics “The Princess Bride,” “Local Hero,” "Wag the Dog," and others. Click here for a list of the full catalog

Like all iconic catalogs — Dire Straits is actually growing faster than the industry at large. We want to bring you assets like this, and that’s why we’re so excited to announce this offer. Popular songs come and go, but classics like those in the Dire Straits catalog have uncommon longevity. As you’ll see in the Financials section below, this catalog’s earnings are not only still growing, but are outperforming the growth of the broader music industry.

Buying units of this Syndicate entitles you to these growing earnings generated from an epic music collection that stands the test of time. We are projecting a 10-year annualized IRR between 12%-15%.* (...)

Unique Earnings

These earnings have several unique elements worth noting.

First, they take the form of the manager’s commission earned by Dire Straits’ and Mark Knopfler’s former manager Ed Bicknell. Unlike typical manager agreements, where commissions expire in the early years after the management contract ends, Mr. Bicknell’s commission lasts for the perpetuity of the copyright — the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. This management agreement has been updated to ensure the Private Syndicate receives these commissions going forward, per an amendment signed by Knopfler and Illsley.

Under this scenario, the Syndicate will own 85% of all payments collected through this agreement as of July 1, 2018.

Second, the catalog collects public performance royalties on the sound recording from terrestrial radio airplay (called neighboring rights) outside the United States. The U.S. is one of the few countries that does not pay public performance royalties on terrestrial radio airplay, and as such U.S. recording artists don’t receive the same for radio airplay outside the U.S. But since Dire Straits is a U.K. act, it receives this royalty for radio airplay outside the U.S.

This is significant because Dire Straits is proportionally more popular outside the U.S. than it is domestically. According to an analysis by ChartMasters.org, the band's European sales alone are nearly triple that of its U.S. sales, which speaks volumes to international demand.

by Private Syndicate, Royalty Exchange |  Read more:
Image: Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms

Alejandro Escovedo

[ed. Nice to see him get the recognition. See: Alejandro Escovedo’s Return to the Border. (And, from the new album: Sonica USA).]

Giving Malaria a Deadline

Malaria is among the world’s worst scourges. In 2016 the disease, which is caused by a parasite and transmitted by mosquitoes, infected 194 million people in Africa and caused 445,000 deaths.

But biologists now have developed a way of manipulating mosquito genetics that forces whole populations of the insect to self-destruct. The technique has proved so successful in laboratory tests that its authors envisage malaria could be eliminated from large regions of Africa within two decades.

A team led by Andrea Crisanti, a biologist at Imperial College, London, altered a gene that disrupts the mosquito’s sexual development; the females become infertile but the males remain able to spread the debilitating gene to an ever-dwindling number of progeny. Dr. Crisanti found that laboratory populations of mosquitoes can be driven to extinction within 11 generations, he and colleagues report in Monday’s issue of Nature Biotechnology. Wild populations could be made to crash in about four years, according to computer models.

The technique involves equipping mosquitoes with a gene drive, a genetic mechanism that forces a gene of choice into all of an organism’s offspring. (Normally, sexual reproduction would pass the gene to only half the progeny.) Genes carried by a gene drive therefore can spread very rapidly through a population, which makes the technique both powerful and potentially dangerous. No gene drive has yet been released in the wild. (...)

Launching a gene drive into the wild is risky. Once released, it can’t be recalled or easily disabled should anything go awry. In 2016, the National Academy of Sciences called for extensive tests and public consultationbefore any gene drive is released.

The theory of how gene drives could be used to control pest populations was laid out in 2003, in an article by Austin Burt, a biologist at Imperial College, London, and a co-author on the new paper. He hopes that a small-scale field trial can be started in Africa in five years.

by Nicholas Wade, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dr. Tony Brain/Science Source
[ed. Bad idea, and not just because of mission creep. See also: The Law of Unintended Consequences (of which, biological intervention has had more than its fair share of historical failure). As Ian Malcolm would say "life finds a way".]

Public Shaming And The Disposable Society

Public Shaming And The Disposable Society (子曰、君子不器)

by Leanne Ogasawara, 3QD |  Read more:

Image: Bui Huu Hung

Hit Like a Girl

This past spring, the internet was gleefully stunned by the drum stylings of Yoyoka Soma, an 8-year-old girl from Japan whose size suggests she could comfortably cradle herself inside her kick drum, if she preferred hide-and-go-seek to rock ’n’ roll. In the viral video, Soma flawlessly traverses the pounding nuances of her favorite song, the Led Zeppelin classic “Good Times, Bad Times.” Knocking the cowbell centerpiece metronomically and grinning widely, the adorably bobbed Soma miraculously mimics the drum track laid 50 years ago by John Bonham, the burly, beer-swigging Brit who’s considered one of the greatest rock drummers of all time. Upon seeing the video — which has garnered well over three million views — Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant marveled at her talent, saying, “That’s a technically really difficult thing to do.” Speaking on behalf of his departed drummer, Plant added, “I think he’d be amazed.”

Soma’s clip is just one of thousands of videos submitted from around the world over the past seven years to the Hit Like a Girl contest, an amateur female drumming competition designed to inspire female empowerment and spark a rebound in the struggling musical instrument industry. Contestants create a user profile on the Hit Like a Girl website, then upload an approximately three-minute performance video to YouTube. There are several categories — straight drum-set performance, concert percussion, marching percussion and others — and separate contests for adults and girls under 18. A panel of industry executives and esteemed female drummers serve as judges, with the results of public votes also considered. Scholarships to performing arts programs, free gear and other prizes supplied by more than 60 sponsors are up for grabs.

“We have girls from as young as 7 to women as old as 70 that participated in the contest this year,” says Hit Like a Girl co-founder David Levine, who owns the cymbal manufacturer TRX Cymbals. Levine adds that more than 50 countries and a wide variety of musical genres were represented among this year’s 500-plus contestants — an all-time high. He says he hears gratitude for the existence of Hit Like a Girl from participants and others just learning about it, “pretty much every day.”

by Michael Stahl, Narratively |  Read more:

Image: Hit Like a Girl

Joni Mitchell

[ed. Turn it up.]

The European Union Versus the Internet

Earlier this summer the Internet breathed a sigh of relief: the European Parliament voted down a new Copyright Directive that would have required Internet sites to proactively filter uploaded content for copyright violations (the so-called “meme ban”), as well as obtain a license to include any text from linked sites (the “link tax”).

Alas, the victory was short-lived. From EUbusiness:

Internet tech giants including Google and Facebook could be made to monitor, filter and block internet uploads under amendments to the draft Copyright Directive approved by the EU Parliament Wednesday. At their plenary session, MEPs adopted amendments to the Commission’s draft EU Copyright Directive following from their previous rejection, adding safeguards to protect small firms and freedom of expression… 

Parliament’s position toughens the Commission’s proposed plans to make online platforms and aggregators liable for copyright infringements. This would also apply to snippets, where only a small part of a news publisher’s text is displayed. In practice, this liability requires these parties to pay right holders for copyrighted material that they make available. 

At the same time, in an attempt to encourage start-ups and innovation, the text now exempts small and micro platforms from the directive.

I chose this rather obscure source to quote from for a reason: should Stratechery ever have more than either 50 employees or €10 million in revenue, under this legislation I would likely need to compensate EUbusiness for that excerpt. Fortunately (well, unfortunately!), this won’t be the case anytime soon; I appreciate the European Parliament giving me a chance to start-up and innovate.

This exception, along with the removal of an explicit call for filtering (that will still be necessary in practice), was enough to get the Copyright Directive passed. This doesn’t mean it is law: the final form of the Directive needs to be negotiated by the EU Parliament, European Commission, and the Council of the Europe Union (which represents national governments), and then implemented via national laws in each EU country (that’s why it is a Directive).

Still, this is hardly the only piece of evidence that EU policy makers have yet to come to grips with the nature of the Internet: there is also the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into effect early this year. Much like the Copyright Directive, the GDPR is targeted at Google and Facebook, but as is always the case when you fundamentally misunderstand what you are fighting, the net effect is to in fact strengthen their moats. After all, who is better equipped to navigate complex regulation than the biggest companies of all, and who needs less outside data than those that collect the most?

In fact, examining where it is that the EU’s new Copyright Directive goes wrong — not just in terms of policy, but also for the industries it seeks to protect — hints at a new way to regulate, one that works with the fundamental forces unleashed by the Internet, instead of against them.

by Ben Thompson, Stratechery |  Read more:

Image: no image

[ed. A Big Deal (and complex). Important.]

Treating the Prodrome

A prodrome is an early stage of a condition that might have different symptoms than the full-blown version. In psychiatry, the prodrome of schizophrenia is the few-months-to-few-years period when a person is just starting to develop schizophrenia and is acting a little bit strange while still having some insight into their condition.

There’s a big push to treat schizophrenia prodrome as a critical period for intervention. Multiple studies have suggested that even though schizophrenia itself is a permanent condition which can be controlled but never cured, treating the prodrome aggressively enough can prevent full schizophrenia from ever developing at all. Advocates of this view compare it to detecting early-stage cancers, or getting prompt treatment for a developing stroke, or any of the million other examples from medicine of how you can get much better results by catching a disease very early before it has time to do damage.

These models conceptualize psychosis as “toxic” – not just unpleasant in and of itself, but damaging the brain while it’s happening. They focus on a statistic called Duration of Untreated Psychosis. The longer the DUP, the more chance psychosis has had to damage the patient before the fire gets put out and further damage is prevented. Under this model it’s vitally important to put people who seem to be getting a little bit schizophrenic on medications as soon as possible. (...)

After learning more about the biology of schizophrenia, I’ve become more willing to credit the DUP model. I can’t give great sources for this, because I’ve lost some of them, but this Friston paper, this Fletcher & Frith paper, and Surfing Uncertainty all kind of point to the same model of why untreated schizophrenia might get worse with time.

In their system, schizophrenia starts with aberrant prediction errors; the brain becomes incorrectly surprised by some sense-data. Maybe a fly buzzes by, and all of a sudden the brain shouts “WHOA! I WASN’T EXPECTING THAT! THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING!” Your brain shifts its resources to coming up with a theory of the world that explains why that fly buzzing by is so important – or perhaps which maximizes its ability to explain that particular fly at the cost of everything else.

Talk to early-stage schizophrenics, and their narrative sounds a lot like this. They’ll say something like “A fly buzzed by, and I knew somehow it was very significant. It must be a sign from God. Maybe that I should fly away from my current life.” Then you’ll tell them that’s dumb, and they’ll blink and say “Yeah, I guess it is kind of dumb, now that you mention it” and continue living a somewhat normal life.

Or they’ll say “I was wondering if I should go to the store, and then a Nike ad came on that said JUST DO IT. I knew that was somehow significant to my situation, so I figured Nike must be reading my mind and sending me messages to the TV.” Then you’ll remind them that that can’t happen, and even though it seemed so interesting that Nike sent the ad at that exact moment, they’ll back down.

But even sane people change their beliefs more in response to more evidence. If a friend stepped on my foot, I would think nothing of it. If she did it twice, I might be a little concerned. If she did it fifty times, I would have to reevaluate my belief that she was my friend. Each piece of evidence chips away at my comfortable normal belief that people don’t deliberately step on my feet – and eventually, I shift.

The same process happens as schizophrenia continues. One fly buzzing by with cosmic significance can perhaps be dismissed. But suppose the next day, a raindrop lands on your head, and there’s another aberrant prediction error burst. Was the raindrop a sign from God? The evidence against is that this is still dumb; the evidence for is that you had both the fly and the raindrop, so your theory that God is sending you signs starts looking a little stronger. I’m not talking about this on the conscious level, where the obvious conclusion is “guess I have schizophrenia”. I’m talking about the pre-conscious inferential machinery, which does its own mechanical thing and tells the conscious mind what to think.

As schizophrenics encounter more and more strange things, they (rationally) alter their high-level beliefs further and further. They start believing that God often sends signs to people. They start believing that the TV often talks especially to them. They start believing that there is a conspiracy. The more aberrant events they’re forced to explain, the more they abandon their sane views about the world (which are doing a terrible job of predicting all the strange things happening to them) and adopt psychotic ones.

But since their new worldview (God often sends signs) gives a high prior on various events being signs from God, they’ll be more willing to interpret even minor coincidences as signs, and so end up in a nasty feedback loop. From the Frith and Fletcher paper:

Ultimately, someone with schizophrenia will need to develop a set of beliefs that must account for a great deal of strange and sometimes contradictory data. Very commonly they come to believe that they are being persecuted: delusions of persecution are one of the most striking and common of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, and the cause of a great deal of suffering. If one imagines trying to make some sense of a world that has become strange and inconsistent, pregnant with sinister meaning and messages, the sensible conclusion might well be that one is being deliberately deceived. This belief might also require certain other changes in the patient’s view of the world. They may have to abandon a succession of models and even whole classes of models.

A few paragraphs later, they expand their theory to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. That is: advanced-stage schizophrenics tend to end up in a depressed-like state where they rarely do anything or care about anything. (...)

I think what they are saying is that, as the world becomes even more random and confusing, the brain very slowly adjusts its highest level parameters. It concludes, on a level much deeper than consciousness, that the world does not make sense, that it’s not really useful to act because it’s impossible to predict the consequences of actions, and that it’s not worth drawing on prior knowledge because anything could happen at any time. It gets a sort of learned helplessness about cognition, where since it never works it’s not even worth trying. The onslaught of random evidence slowly twists the highest-level beliefs into whatever form best explains random evidence (usually: that there’s a conspiracy to do random things), and twists the fundamental parameters into a form where they expect evidence to be mostly random and aren’t going to really care about it one way or the other. (...)

The Frith and Fletcher paper also tipped me off to this excellent first-person account by former-schizophrenic-turned psychologist Peter Chadwick:

At this time, a powerful idea of reference also overcame me from a television episode of Colombo and impulsively I decided to write letters to friends and colleagues about “this terrible persecution.” It was a deadly mistake. After a few replies of the “we’ve not heard anything” variety, my subsequent (increasingly overwrought) letters, all of them long, were not answered. But nothing stimulates paranoia better than no feedback, and once you have conceived a delusion, something is bound to happen to confirm it. When phrases from the radio echoed phrases I had used in those very letters, it was “obvious” that the communications had been passed on to radio and then television personnel with the intent of influencing and mocking me. After all betrayal was what I was used to, why should not it be carrying on now? It seemed sensible. So much for my bonding with society. It was totally gone. I was alone and now trusted no one (if indeed my capacity to trust people [particularly after school] had ever been very high). 

The unfortunate tirade of coincidences that shifted my mentality from sane to totally insane has been described more fully in a previous offering. From a meaningless life, a relationship with the world was reconstructed by me that was spectacularly meaningful and portentous even if it was horrific. Two typical days from this episode I have recalled as best I could and also published previously. The whole experience was so bizarre it is as if imprinted in my psyche in what could be called “floodlit memory” fashion. Out of the coincidences picked up on, on radio and television, coupled with overheard snatches of conversation in the street, it was “clear” to me that the media torment, orchestrated as inferred at the time by what I came to call “The Organization,” had one simple message: “Change or die!” Tellingly my mother (by then deceased) had had a fairly similar attitude. It even crossed my (increasingly loosely associated) mind that she had had some hand in all this from beyond the grave […] 

As my delusional system expanded and elaborated, it was as if I was not “thinking the delusion,” the delusion was “thinking me!” I was totally enslaved by the belief system. Almost anything at all happening around me seemed at least “relevant” and became, as Piaget would say, “assimilated” to it. Another way of putting things was that confirmation bias was massively amplified, everything confirmed and fitted the delusion, nothing discredited it. Indeed, the very capacity to notice and think of refutatory data and ideas was completely gone. Confirmation bias was as if “galloping,” and I could not stop it. 

As coincidences jogged and jolted me in this passive, vehicular state into the “realization” that my death was imminent, it was time to listen out for how the suicide act should be committed. “He has to do it by bus then?!” a man coincidentally shouted to another man in the office where I had taken an accounts job (in fact about a delivery but “of course” I knew that was just a cover story). “Yes!” came back the reply. This was indeed how my life was to end because the remark was made as if in reply to the very thoughts I was having at that moment. Obviously, The Organization knew my very thoughts. 

Two days later, I threw myself under the wheels of a double decker, London bus on “New King’s Road” in Fulham, West London, to where I had just moved. In trying to explain “why all this was happening” my delusional system had taken a religious turn. The religious element, that all this torment was willed not only by my mother and transvestophobic scandal-mongerers but by God Himself for my “perverted Satanic ways,” was realized in the personal symbolism of this suicide. New King’s Road obviously was “the road of the New King” (Jesus), and my suicide would thrust “the old king” (Satan) out of me and Jesus would return to the world to rule. I then would be cast into Outer Darkness fighting Satan all the way. The monumental, world-saving grandiosity of this lamentable act was a far cry from my totally irrelevant, penniless, and peripheral existence in Hackney a few months before. In my own bizarre way, I obviously had moved up in the world. Now, I was not an outcast from it. I was saving the world in a very lofty manner. Medical authorities at Charing Cross Hospital in London where I was taken by ambulance, initially, of course, to orthopedics, fairly quickly recognized my psychotic state. Antipsychotic drugs were injected by a nurse on doctors’ advice, and eventually, I made a full physical and mental recovery.

Chadwick never got too far along; he had all the weird coincidences, he was starting to get beliefs that explained them, but he never got to a point where he shifted his fundamental concepts or beliefs about logic in an irreversible way. As far as I know he’s been on antipsychotics consistently since then, and has escaped with no worse consequences than becoming a psychology professor.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:

[ed. Interesting, how schizophrenia takes hold.]

Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People

Addiction experienced in the first-person feels like watching a movie shot entirely in extreme close-ups. No matter how hard you try, you can’t see the world beyond the frame. A tolerance builds after a while and you grow used to the shaky, nauseating ride. We couldn’t have possibly known it at the time, that we weren’t the stars in our very own drama. The content of our stories differed in the details, but the tone was uncannily similar: how prescription painkillers first took hold; after pharmaceuticals became scarce and expensive, how we, as a generation in unison, playing a fucked up game of Red Rover, beelined toward heroin. Another thing we had in common was a lot of dead friends.

Really, we were just extras in a vast plot. Data points in a decadeslong “mass casualty event.” Epidemics are sort-of defined after the fact. After enough emergency room physicians start connecting the dots, after economists quantify labor participation and all-cause mortality, after a small hamlet’s population begins to shrink, after the morgue runs out of freezer space, after the president goes on TV.

What kicked off addiction on such an enormous scale has become an Odyssey for epidemiologists and journalists (like me), as well as parents and siblings who’ve lost loved ones. Grieving families and activists have turned up the heat on politicians and cops, urging a unified public health response that would reverse course. But how we define the origin of the crisis, its root causes, invariably informs which solutions are prioritized. Decades in, with each year deadlier than the one before, and no end in sight, what’s it going to take? The answer depends on who’s asking the questions.

***

Drenched in shame and broken by stigma, the impulse to blame ourselves for our addictions felt like a natural turn inward. Journalist Beth Macy’s new book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America, isn’t interested in victim blaming, as the title suggests. The villains, familiar to those following the news, are doctors cum dealers duped by Purdue Pharma’s marketing that downplayed the risk of addiction for their blockbuster drug, OxyContin. And after painkillers had their run, the story goes, enterprising heroin dealers tapped a hungry market outside the city, “picturesque” and “bucolic” markets demanding relief after years of physical labor and economic distress metastasized into despair. (...)

The real tragedy of Dopesick isn’t that young people are using drugs. It’s that when they’re drowning and begging for help, they’re callously thrown deflated life preservers. The numerous attempts at treatment throughout the book — typically at abstinence-based facilities, a dangerous move for someone with an opioid use disorder — become maddening. These are places that prefer to give patients heart-shaped rocks instead of the two FDA-approved medications that reduce the risk of fatal overdose by 50 percent or more.

All the treatment failures in Dopesick read like screams into the void of America’s outdated patchwork of shoddy care. Macy finds just the right details that’ll make you pull your hair out. A police officer picks up Jesse’s cellphone at the scene of his fatal overdose, and on the other end is a treatment center (that he’d already been to once before, that doesn’t believe in medication) calling to confirm Jesse’s arrival. If you’re wondering why so many of us are still dying, in-patient, residential “treatment” is one place to start looking. (...)

The villains in Dopesick are the usual suspects. In 2015, Los Angeles Times crime reporter Sam Quinones wrote one of the first major books about the modern day opioid crisis, Dreamland, in which he sketches out the mechanics that drove the first wave of painkiller overdoses in Ohio and the Rust Belt. Quinones calls Ohio the epicenter of the crisis; Macy calls Virginia the epicenter of the crisis. But both Macy and Quinones find the same culprit: Purdue Pharma’s false marketing, which assured doctors that their time-released opioid analgesic rarely addicted patients.

Central to the origin story of the crisis in both Dreamland and Dopesick is the over-supply of OxyContin, dulled out by sometimes well-intentioned but misinformed doctors, or in bulk at greedy pill mills diverted for street sale. Either way, in the late ’90s and into the aughts, during a climate of deregulation and a “patient-centeredness” movement obsessed with smiley-faced rate-your-pain scales, these drugs flooded vulnerable regions of America.

Both Macy and Quinones look intently at the supply of drugs. But did flooding the market with opioids create the demand? Drugs, after all, are like any other product: people have to like and want it or they won’t buy it. So, can a doctor create addiction in their patients? Can a drug company addict an entire country? Only if you believe opioids are like mosquitos carrying Malaria, and whoever touches them comes down with the disease.

The vast majority of people who use opioids do not become addicted to them. A conservative estimate for rates of addiction among pain patients is less than 8 percent (still much higher than Purdue’s < 1 percent claim). But among those who do become addicted, they’re typically using diverted medications that were never prescribed to them, or had misused illicit drugs and were well on their way to addiction prior to receiving a prescription, thanks to trauma, mental health, and other factors that increase one’s risk. Nobody walks into a doctor’s office with a clean slate. (...)

As satisfying the feeling is to rail against Big Pharma and unenlightened doctors, the iatrogenic (doctor-caused) narrative isn’t without caveats and shortcomings, which are becoming painfully evident as the government rolls out strategies to rein in the supply of opioids. A recent study out of Stanford that modeled public health policy shows that aggressively controlling the supply of prescriptions, in the short-term, is actuallyincreasing overdose deaths by the thousands. Other strategies to reschedule drugs like Vicodin also backfired, new studies are finding. In a powerful commentary by public health experts, “Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to its Social and Economic Determinants,” they argue wrangling the supply of opioids fails to address root causes. Targeting supply is important, the authors of “No Easy Fix” agree, but doing so without addressing people’s pain is one of the reasons things are this bad. (...)

America’s draconian conception of drug policy has life and death consequences. Jesse, the football player in Dopesick, preferred to inject pharmaceutical oxycodone. This was true for my friends and me. Jesse, like my friend Alex, didn’t survive the leap to heroin. This isn’t retold to condone the misuse of prescription painkillers. The moral world of addiction is shaded with greys. And the fact is, injecting a regulated pharmaceutical of known dose and purity is less risky than injecting a bag of white powder purchased on the street. Bags of dope come with no proof of ingredients. At the end of the day, an 80 milligram OxyContin is always 80 milligrams. It may not be pretty, and Purdue executives might be dead-eyed ghouls, but at least there was measure of safety. That safety’s gone now. Hello, fentanyl.

Unfocused anger at Big Pharma also winds up harming a different vulnerable group, one that’s typically an afterthought in stories about opioids: chronic pain patients. In the name of “battling the epidemic,” patients who need opioids are being abandoned by their doctors. With Jeff Sessions and the DEA breathing down their necks, they’re afraid of prescribing any narcotic. In response to the opioid crisis, the prescribing pendulum has rapidly swung. Doctors who treat pain are receiving threatening letters to prescribe fewer opioids, patient outcomes be damned. As a result, some of these patients are killing themselves, which has caught the interest of investigators at the Human Rights Watch, who are documenting patient abandonment in the new, restrictive climate. A sweeping package of opioid legislation recently passed by the Senate will also be studying whether opioid prescribing limits have led to patient suicide. (...)

Macy calls this game “Whac-a-Mole,” with new dealers and more dangerous products popping-up after each bust, otherwise known as the Iron Law of Prohibition: painkillers replaced by heroin, and heroin replaced by fentanyl. Choking off the supply of prescription painkillers early on in the crisis, without first installing a safety net to catch the fallout, was a major policy failure that worsened America’s opioid problem by orders of magnitude. What would such a safety net look like? In Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction, Canadian journalist Travis Lupick exhaustively details the architecture of a demand-centered strategy that prioritizes saving the lives of active drug users.

Lupick rarely mentions supply-side interventions in his book. Instead, he stays close to people actively injecting heroin and cocaine several times per day, learning what makes them desire drugs in the first place, listening to what they say they need. Fighting for Space, more than anything else, is a testament to the organizing power of drug users. In 1997, with the help of compassionate public housing and healthcare workers on the Downtown Eastside, where poverty and trauma are heavily concentrated, drug users came together to form a union called the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). Rather than flinch at their drug use, Lupick portrays Downtown Eastside users as they truly are: fierce but flawed heroes. Like the manic energy of user-activist Dean Wilson, whose injection cocaine habit made him an untiring debater, dunking all over City Hall’s bureaucrats. He was one of VANDU’s early presidents.

For the uninitiated, Lupick’s harm reduction history might read like inside baseball. But as you slowly come to meet the activists, like the recalcitrant Ann Livingston and the mysterious heroin-poet Bud Osborne, you can’t help but root for them as they break all the undignifying rules that make life a living hell for those addicted on the street. From an American perspective, Lupick’s encyclopedic history also reads as a blueprint.

Treating addiction like the public health issue that it is didn’t happen because Canadians are naturally nicer and friendlier toward drug users. After decades of highly organized, politically strategic activism by a dedicated, at times disabled and tense group of drug users and health care providers, Vancouver’s most marginalized community was seen and heard. They didn’t merely get what they wanted; they got what they needed by fighting for their space: their space to do drugs with dignity, in the presence of radically compassionate nurses, but also space at the policymaking table where decisions about their fate are made. “Nothing about us, without us,” the saying goes. Canadian drug users had the insight to make their needs political, and had the stamina and support to sustain pressure on the city.

Reminiscent of ACT UP during the HIV epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s, VANDU targeted the media and politicians who seldom made a peep about their friends who overdosed alone behind dumpsters in the alley, or others who died from untreated AIDS and Hepatitis C.

by Zachary Siegel, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Bob Dylan

An Early Outtake Of Bob Dylan's 'If You See Her, Say Hello'

[ed. Nicely captures the creative process.]

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Growth Rate

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Growth Rate
via:

[ed. Sorry humans. Not only are you not doing anything to make things better, you're making things worse. Maybe this is a rat-thropic universe after all. See below.]

Anthropic Arrogance

Welcome to the ‘anthropic principle’, a kind of Goldilocks phenomenon or ‘intelligent design’ for the whole Universe. It’s easy to describe, but difficult to categorise: it might be a scientific question, a philosophical concept, a religious argument – or some combination. The anthropic principle holds that if such phenomena as the gravitational constant, the exact electric charge on the proton, the mass of electrons and neutrons, and a number of other deep characteristics of the Universe differed at all, human life would be impossible. According to its proponents, the Universe is fine-tuned for human life.

This raises more than a few questions. For one, who was the presumed cosmic dial-twiddler? (Obvious answer, for those so inclined: God.) Second, what’s the basis for presuming that the key physical constants in such a Universe have been fine-tuned for us and not to ultimately give rise to the hairy-nosed wombats of Australia, or maybe the bacteria and viruses that outnumber us by many orders of magnitude? In Douglas Adams’s antic novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), mice are ‘hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings’ who are responsible for the creation of the Earth. What if the Universe isn’t so much anthropic as mouse-thropic, and the appearance and proliferation of Homo sapiens was an unanticipated side effect, a ‘collateral benefit’?

For a more general perspective, in The Salmon of Doubt (2002), Adams developed what has become known as the ‘puddle theory’:

[I]magine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’

It appears that Adams favoured a puddle-thropic principle. Or at least, the puddle did.

But perhaps I should be more serious about an idea that has engaged not just theologians and satirists but more than a few hard-headed physicists. The Australian astrophysicist Brandon Carter introduced the phrase ‘anthropic principle’ at a conference in Krakow, Poland in 1973 celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus. Copernicus helped evict the Earth – and thus, humanity – from its prior centrality, something that the anthropic principle threatens (or promises) to re-establish. For Carter, ‘our location in the Universe is necessarily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers’. In other words, if the Universe were not structured in such a way as to permit us to exist and, thus, to observe its particular traits, then – it should be obvious – we wouldn’t be around to marvel at its suitability for our existence!

In A Brief History of Time (1988), the late British physicist Stephen Hawking described a number of physical constants and astrophysical phenomena that seem at least consistent with the anthropic principle. Hawking noted that ‘if the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the Universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size’. In short, a change so small it challenges the imagination, and the Big Bang would have turned into a kind of Big Crunch.

Albert Einstein considered the ‘cosmological constant’, which he introduced in 1917, his ‘biggest blunder’. Considering the emergence of the anthropic principle, however, it seems prescient. Einstein was troubled by the fact that gravity would cause the Universe to collapse onto itself (that Big Crunch), so he surmised a constant – essentially out of thin air – that pulled in the opposite direction, causing the cosmos to remain stable. The American physicist Steven Weinberg – not a religious believer – points out that if this now-confirmed constant were just a smidgeon larger, the Universe would be vaporously insubstantial. It would never have stopped expanding at a rate that precludes the formation of galaxies, never mind planets or mammals such as ourselves.

In 1961, providing even more fodder for the anthropic principle, the American physicist Robert Dicke noted that the age of the Universe reflects a kind of Goldilocks principle. Dicke suggested that, at an estimated 14.5 billion years of age, our Universe stands at a ‘golden interval’, neither too young nor too old, but just right. Any younger – ie, if the Big Bang had occurred in the more recent past – and it would not have allowed enough time for nucleosynthesis to stock the Universe with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. There would be no medium-size, rocky planets and thus, no us. By the same token, if the Universe were substantially older than it is, most stars would have matured into white and red dwarfs. They would be too old to remain part of what astrophysicists call the ‘main sequence’, and unable to support stable planetary systems. The four fundamental interactions connecting mass and energy – gravitation, electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, and the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ nuclear forces – also appear balanced precisely as needed to produce matter and, ultimately, life. Put it all together and there appears to be a significant case for the anthropic principle.

Not everyone, however, agrees that the necessary conditions for a life-supporting Universe are so delicate. ‘The parameters of our Universe,’ writes the astrophysicist Fred Adams at the University of Michigan, ‘could have varied by large factors and still allowed for working stars and potentially habitable planets.’ What to believe?

It’s important to note that the anthropic principle exists in two primary forms, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. Over-simplifying, the weak principle is teleological. It holds that, as Carter had pointed out, whatever conditions are observed in the Universe must allow the observer to exist. In short, if these constants weren’t as they are, we wouldn’t be around to worry about them. To this, Hawking added that even slight alterations in the life-enabling constants of fundamental physics in this hypothesised multiverse could ‘give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty’. The weak version of the anthropic principle thus poses a logical conundrum.

The strong version is very different; it is in essence a religious expression, maintaining that some divine being created the Universe for human life. An even stronger version has been called the final anthropic principle, namely that ‘intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, will never die out’. Martin Gardner, a former maths and science writer for Scientific American, dubbed it the ‘completely ridiculous anthropic principle’ (CRAP).

The anthropic assertion, whether in its weak, strong or final version, has generated some more serious, and interesting, responses. One is contained within Einstein’s remark: ‘What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.’ Posing whether ‘God had any choice’ was Einstein’s way of asking if the manifold characteristics of the physical Universe, such as the speed of light, the charge of the electron and the proton, etc, are fixed or susceptible to alternatives. If fixed, they might appear to have been organised with carbon-based life in mind, but were actually not ‘free parameters’ in the first place. Note that Einstein was asking if the deep laws of physics might have in fact fixed the various physical constants of the Universe as the only values that they could possibly have, given the nature of reality, rather than having been ordained for some ultimate end – notably, us. At present, we simply don’t know whether the way the world works is the only way it could; in short, whether currently identified laws and physical constants are somehow bound together, according to physical law, irrespective of whether human beings – or anything else – eventuated.

The Universe is a big place and despite our understandable fascination with the anthropic principle, the stark truth is that nearly all of it is incompatible with life – at least our carbon-based, water-dependent version of it. Given the abundance of other possible locations, if humans existed simply as a result of chance alone, we’d find ourselves (very briefly) somewhere in the very cold empty void of outer space, and would be dead almost instantly. Might this, in turn, contribute to the conclusion that our very existence is evidence of a beneficent designer? But we’re not the outcome of a strictly random process: we find ourselves occupying the third planet from the Sun, which has sufficient oxygen, liquid water, moderate temperatures, and so forth. It isn’t a coincidence that we occupy a planet that is suitable for life, if only because we couldn’t survive where it isn’t. It’s no more amazing that the Earth isn’t a hot gas giant than the fact that no matter how tall or short a person might be, her legs are always precisely long enough to reach the ground.

Then there is another question – not necessarily deeper, but perhaps more perplexing. More than three centuries ago, in his chapter on ‘The Principles of Nature and of Grace, Based on Reason’ in Philosophical Papers and Letters (1714), the German philosopher, mathematician and physicist Gottfried Leibniz noted that ‘the first question which we have a right to ask will be, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”’ (Here, I’m especially fond of the American philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser’s reply to Leibniz, that ‘if there were nothing you’d still be complaining!’) But there is something, and of course, if there weren’t, there wouldn’t be any opportunities for complaint. This is not only an answer to the question of whether the Universe has been fine-tuned for us; it also points to a more general merging of statistics, logic and common sense, namely the difference between probabilities before and after an event.

For example, the English-Canadian philosopher Niall Shanks asks us to imagine shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them out, face down. What is the likelihood that someone could predict the entire sequence, in advance, and without any hanky-panky? The chance of getting the first card correct is 1 in 52. The chance of getting the first two cards correct is 1/52 x 1/51 = 1/2652, so that the probability of guessing the entire deck in the proper order is 1/52 factorial. This is an unimaginably small number, something like 1 in 10 followed by 60 zeros. And yet, among the near-infinity of possibilities, they had to come out some way, and – miracle of miracles – they did!

Consider the probabilities before versus after a simple event, such as the position of a golf ball before compared to after a golfer hits it. It would take a near-miracle to identify precisely where that ball will eventually come to rest. But the outcome – wherever the golf ball ends up – isn’t a miracle at all. Neither is it evidence of divine intervention, nor of the golf course having been designed so as to arrange for that particular eventual placement of the ball, since it had to be somewhere. For us to marvel at the fact of our existing (in a Universe that permits that existence) is comparable to a golf ball being amazed at the fact that it ended up wherever it did.

by David P Barash, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gregg Newton/Reuters