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There is a fundamental problem with economics. Well, actually I am sure there are many, many problems with this pseudo-scientific discipline of resource management (which is fetishistically concerned with money instead of value). However, this particular problem lies at the crux of the discipline’s inability to predict human behavior or bring about valuable outcomes. We will briefly explore why we should care about economics at the end of the post, but let’s get right to the thesis and baldly state the problem which economics does not appropriately address: humans are more concerned with status than with substance at least when they are not under mortal duress (and if they are in fear of their lives, their behavior will be irrational anyway).
The usual metaphor for rational economic thought involves pie (probably because the round pastry is irresistible and because it resembles pie charts, which economists love). According to conventional economic theory: if you get an allotted slice of pie, what matters is how big your slice is, not who gets the rest of the pie. If an economically rational being is faced with a scenario where he gets pie for some reason, he will happily take his pie and worry about how to make the pie bigger (even if a grotesque bully hogs the majority of the pie and then doesn’t even eat it). From this reductionist fable we can then move on to other scenarios like increasing the participant’s slice relative to other participants (zero-sum pie?), contractual niceties of pie eating, seasonally adjusted pie indexes, or twisted game theory dilemmas…or whatever.
Yet any parent can tell you that if one sibling gets one small slice of the pie and the other sibling eats the rest, it is going to be a problem. Children understand that pie allotment is a proxy for social worth (which is worth more than the pie). Economists get twisted up in unnecessarily complicated numeric models (or in facile metaphors of resource allocation) and tend to overlook the real thing people are after.
Kids innately understand that money is a red herring for status, and status is true currency. A Hollywood A-lister can wander into a bar and never pay for anything and leave in a limousine with the best-looking person present. Their status stands above money. Likewise, the pope or some slimy cult leader or the “communist” prime minister of a failed state does not really need to truck in naked dollars and cents.
I was arguing about the affairs of the world with one of my college friends (he has an honors degree in economics from the University of Chicago and was managing George Soros’ fortune at the time). He was worried that populism would vitiate the rewards of globalism. “People will vote to get a bigger slice of a smaller pie rather than a smaller slice of a bigger pie (even if the latter is a much larger relative slice)!” he exclaimed angrily.
As moneyed interests capture all available levers of power in our troubled democracy and economic productivity drops, his words seem prescient. I assumed then that he was talking about silly plebs, but I now wonder whether he was really talking about rapacious financiers. I guess it doesn’t matter: both these factions are now backing the current leadership’s agenda of corporate amalgamation, tax-giveaways to the super rich, isolationism, and protectionism—things which ultimately decrease the pie, but make it seem larger for the moment.
Oligarchs and reactionaries both would prefer a smaller pie—so long as they have a bigger slice for themselves. The pie doesn’t matter—it is not a metaphor for goods and services, like economists think, instead it is a metaphor for pecking order. If someone tells you that you are ranked 300th among the 300 people who matter to you, what does it matter what is happening in China or whether tariffs will undo national prosperity? The fundamental metaphor is not apt, and thus economists are misunderstanding why people make the choices they do. Our fundamental problems: stagnant productivity, inequality, and political deadlock come from the fact that power brokers are busy making castes and setting them in stone…not baking pies.
Human societies have always been hierarchical and probably always will be, so why should we care if the economists get this metaphor wrong? It matters because the pie actually should matter! The fact that everyone is jockeying for status by betting on short-term stock gains (or even scammier things) is impairing our ability to do important things. We are baking the wrong sort of pies Our system is not producing medicines it is churning out drugs. We are not researching, we are marketing. The “makers” are busy making monopolies and cartels rather than space robots and immortality serums. We really would be better with a small delicious pie made of summer fruit and real butter than with the monstrosity made of saccharine, corn starch, and cellulose. This monstrous confection is the result of the fact that our system is some weird & debased celebrity contest (our leader is a conman and a reality tv star!). Economists need to wake up to the fact that we aren’t even baking pies…we are all in a bad reality tv show or a nightmarishly catty high-school clique.
One of the great mysteries of neurobiology is how memories are stored. We have a few tantalizing clues, but the precise biological mechanism for how memories are created and where they are stored in cells is still unknown. All of your lost loves and childhood dreams, your family’s birthdays and preferences, your own name and darkest secret…nobody knows where they are in your head. And, um, we still don’t know…however, thanks to research on sea snails, we have some new clues.
Scientists have long believed that memories are stored within the structure and connective patterns between the synapses which connect neurons. The new experiment suggests that this may prove to be a misconception.
Scientists trained a particular sort of sea snail (which have “small” brains with only 20,000 neurons) to respond in certain unusual ways to electrical shocks. Then the team removed ribonucleic acid (RNA), from nerve tissue of the trained snails and injected it into the circulatory system of untrained snails. Other “control” snails which were untampered with responded to electrical shocks naturally, however the snails which were treated with RNA from snails taught to curl their tails for prolonged periods immediately demonstrated this unusual behavior.
The findings suggest that our conjecture about where memories are stored may be quite wrong…or at least disturbingly incomplete. The snail research indicates that, at some fundamental level, memories are stored in the nuclei of neurons. Now scientists will try to replicate the results in other animals to test this hypothesis. Everything in this sort of research ends of being more complicated and interlinked than initially thought, so don’t forget about those synapses just yet. We are still at the beginning of this tantalizing scientific quest.
Today, through the magic of the internet, Ferrebeekeeper is visiting a graveyard halfway around the world in Armenia (alas, I am visiting through words and images only; as always, my body remains stubbornly in New York City shackled to an office chair and a bunch of elusive dreams). This exquisite spot is Noratus Cemetery, beside Lake Sevan, in eastern Armenia, not far from the Azerbaijan border. This region has been a crossroads for people for millennia. Although Noratus is today a small village, during the Middle Ages it was a large prosperous town. A bronze-aged hillfort stands nearby. Prehistoric travelers passed through this region on humankind’s great migrations, and the region is not far from the first palace civilizations of the ancient world. Persians, Greeks, Romans, mysterious steppe peoples of all sorts, Turks, Mongols, Russians, caravan folk from east and west, Chinese, Soviets, and contemporary world travelers have all passed through the region. However, this post is not a history of Armenia (thank goodness: I could never begin to explain the beautiful tangled chronicle of that crossroad nation): we are talking about Noratus Cemetery. The oldest stones in the complex date back to the 10th century, but the cemetery has been utilized off-and-on right up to the present.
The most famous stones of Noratus are the khachkars—the cross stones. These are intricately carved stele with Christian crosses carved upon them in syncretic Asian styles. Once upon a time (by which I mean, in the nineteen nineties), the greatest concentration of ancient khachkars was in the Armenian cemetery in Julfa (in Azerbaijan), but the Azerbaijan government destroyed these beautiful ancient works in order to further some self-aggrandizing lie or another, so today, the largest concentration of medieval khachkars is in…Noratus cemetery.
You can see here how the maelstrom of cultures has influenced khachkar makers from over the centuries. The mysterious gravestones look, by turns, Scythian, Romanesque, Persian, Indian, and even Jewish: yet they are none of these styles (although they are influenced by each)—they are Armenian. But beyond the ancient exquisite graves, and the Romanesque chapels, look at the mountains and the lake beyond. I have stolen these pictures from around the internet so I don’t really know what is in each (apparently the cemetery is easy to visit (if you are in the hinterlands of eastern Armenia) but badly labeled so it might take some specialists in Eastern medieval art to unravel the meanings and eras of these stones anyway, but their artistic excellence and spiritual splendor is readily evident.
Let’s talk about the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) which is a sort of tragic mascot of the animals driven to extinction by humankind. Dodos lived on Mauritius, an Island in the Indian Ocean to the east of Madagascar. The first written record of dodos comes from Dutch sailors in 1598 and the last sighting of a live dodo was in 1662 (or maybe in the 1680s). They are regarded as victims of the age of colonial exploration: Mauritius was located on the trade route which lead from Europe, around Africa, to the silks and spices of the East. The poor dodos were at a convenient island in the hungry middle stretch.
The dodo has historically been regarded as clumsy, fat, and foolish—an animal which perhaps didn’t deserve to exist. It now seems like this may be equivalent to what motorists say when they kill pedestrians and cyclists–which is to say an obviously self-serving calumny meant to disguise true culpability (although in fairness, colonial explorers weren’t particularly clear on whether other humans had any right to exist–to say nothing of flightless turkey-like birds which lived on an island stop over). Ecologists and ornithologists now regard the dodo as admirably evolved to its island habitat. Standing 1 meter (3 ft) tall and (probably) weighing 10-17 kg (23–39 lb) the dodo lost the ability of flight, thanks to Mauritius’ lack of predators. It had powerful legs which suggest it could run quite quickly, and it was not small (so perhaps the dodo took over the niche of some of those missing predators). The birds’ diet was predominantly fruit, whit it digested with the aid of large gizzard stones, although, if analogous creatures provide a clue, it probably also ate insects, small vertebrates and sundry bites of carrion, tender shoots, and eggs. Speaking of eggs, it seems that the dodo, like many penguins, raised a single egg in a large nest. They could live up to 20 years. Who really knows though? The people heading through Mauritius in the 17th century were not there to study birds. It has been speculated that the dodo may have suffered from a lack of fear of humans (which is not unknown in certain modern birds found on remote Pacific islands). The dodo was also reputedly quite disgusting (to humans) to eat. It seems like the real culprit behind the extinction of the dodo were deforestation (the birds lived in Mauritius’ forests which were quickly leveled) and other invasive species such as rats and pigs which came to the island via boat.
During the 18th and 19th century, there was substantial controversy over what sort of bird a dodo actually is (was?). Taxonomists, not unreasonably, suggested they were related to ostriches, rails, vultures, or albatrosses, however the real clue turned out to be in the Dodo’s leg bones which bore unmistakable similarities to those of pigeons. Other details of facial anatomy and beak structure corroborated this: the dodo was a giant pigeon (although sadly no good DNA specimens now exist to find out further details or resurrect the extinct bird). Though gone for more than 300 years the dodo clings to a strange ghost life as a symbol of a whimsical bygone era. Lewis Carrol was apparently fond of them, and Alice in Wonderland greatly popularized the extinct fowl. Additionally they are seen as a ominous warning for extinctions yet to come if humankind cannot cure its insatiable appetite or find a way to live in greater harmony with nature. It is ironic that the great missing birds of yesteryear—the dodo and the passenger pigeon—are so closely related to the rock pigeon, the consummate omnipresent nuisance bird of human cities. Island species are often the first to go extinct: their specialized traits make them unable to compete with ruthless generalists. Yet the dodo’s sadly comic appearance and the touching stories of its friendly openness to sailors do make it an ideal symbol of the danger faced by innumerable species in the Anthropocene.
Do you ever miss the 70s? That time will never return (although stagflation and oil crunches might make an unexpected comeback from the weird devil’s brew of bad economic and geopolitical policies which we are experimenting with) however there is a more positive reminder of the age of disco in the very heavens themselves. At present, there are three disco balls in orbit around Earth. The first and most significant is actually a 70s artifact: LAGEOS (Laser Geodynamics Satellite) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on May 4th 1976. The 408 kilogram (900 pound) satellite has no electronic components ore even moving parts: it is a brass sphere studded with 426 jewel-like retroreflectors. 422 of these retroreflectors are made from fused silica glass (to reflect visible light), however the remaining 4 are germanium, for infrared experiments.
Orbiting the entire planet every 225.70 minutes, LAGEOSl is a pretty stupendous piece of space art in its own right, however it was designed for a serious scientific purpose. Lageos provides an orbiting laser ranging benchmark. To quote space.com:
Over the past 40 years, NASA has used LAGEOS to measure the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, detect irregularities in the rotation of the planet, weigh the Earth and track small shifts in its center of mass via tiny changes in the satellite’s orbit and distance from Earth.
Measurements made using LAGEOS have also been used to confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity, since measurements made on this scale demonstrate a measurable “frame dragging effect” (which you are going to have to figure out with some help from your favorite physicist). The satellite also illustrates the Yarkovsky effect, which explains how an object is heated by photons on one side will later emit that heat in a way which slows the object. This latter effect will eventually cause LAGEOS’ orbit to deteriorate and bring it tumbling to Earth. Scientists estimate this will happen 8.4 million years from now, so there is still time to contemplate this sphere. Also there is a small time capsule on board to capture certain scientific truths and human ephemera for the long ages.
LAGEOS was so useful and proved to be such a success that NASA launched an identical sister craft in 1992 (how did I miss all of these interesting events?). This still leaves one disco ball satellite unaccounted for. The final craft is “The Humanity Star” which serves no purpose other than being art. Launched on January 21st of this year (2018), the humanity star is a regular polygonal solid with 65 triangular sides. It is made of carbon fiber embedded with enormously reflective panels and is meant to be seen twinkling in the night sky to make humankind collectively reflect on our shared home, the Earth. The Humanity Star orbits much lower than the LAGEOS satellites. They are 5,900 kilometres (3,700 miles) from Earth’s surface, whereas the humanity star is only 283.4 kilometers (176.1 miles) away from the planet at its perigree. It whips around the Earth every 90 minutes on a circumpolar orbit (which means it is visible from everywhere at some point. You could look up where it is online and go out and find it with fieldglasses. The object glimmers and shimmers in unusual ways, sometimes appearing as bright as Sirius (the brightest star save for the sun), but usually twinkling like barely visible stars. The Humanity Star won’t last long—it is scheduled to fall into Earth’s gravity well and burn up in fall of this year, so check it out before it is gone. The craft was controversial: some serious aerospace mavens objected to launching an object into orbit to serve no purpose other than art, yet, as an artist I am happy to know it is out there. Maybe go look at it and let me know if it inspires you.
Days in May pass so quickly (well maybe not the part in the office…but the part when I got home and was supposed to write my blog). Instead of writing an essay I am going to put up one of my flounder pictures for you. This one is a cellular flounder–a reminder that whenever we look at a living thing it is made up of much smaller individual living things. It is a truth which is hiding in plain sight (like the flounder) but it is continuously astonishing to me. This amoeba flounder reminds to think on the microscopic level too, as we contemplate the world.
Ferrebeekeeper has written about nanosatellites—tiny swarms of lightweight & (relatively) inexpensive satellites which mimic the functionality of big pricey birds. That article was enthusiastic about the tiny spacecraft, however the FCC (which reviews communications satellites and approves/denies satellite launches) has some reasonable reservations about the idea, particularly considering all the of space junk which is already whipping through near-earth orbit at 28,000 kilometers per hour (17,500 miles per hour). Last year Swarm Technologies, a mysterious and shadowy start-up founded in 2016 and based in Los Altos, California applied to the FCC to launch 4 little satellites called BEEs (which, in the inane blather of forced acronyms, stands for “Basic Electronic Elements”). The FCC turned down the request, concluding that the functionality of the satellites (which are maybe for some sort of network?) did not make up for the safety risk they posed. Yet Swarm Technologies launched them into orbit anyway in mid-January, in a rocket which blasted off from India. Each Bee is 10 centimeters in length and width, and 2.8 centimeters in height.
National security agencies (which have substantial technologies for monitoring Earth orbit), are able to track the “bees” but it is an open question whether they are fully dark or whether they are producing little pings and chirps for their well-heeled private masters here on Earth.
This is an unprecedented first for the FCC and other space agencies which have never been so blatantly flouted by a scofflaw corporation (although given the brazen, lawless, and dangerous conduct of America’s highhanded corporations and lordly oligarchs, it will probably not be the last). The satellites lack propulsion systems and they will probably fall back into Earth’s gravity well within 10 years and burn up (I suspect an astrophysicist could tell you something less approximate, but this timeframe should serve for general purposes).
If Swarm could have held their horses a bit, they may have been able to reapply: Lockheed Martin is currently building a much more sophisticated radar system to monitor small objects in orbit. I wonder if this is a glimpse of the privatized future of space which everyone is always touting. If so it is not a particularly compelling picture.
Portrait of the Hon. Mrs Ernest Guinness (Frank Dicksee, 1912) oil on canvas
Of all the colors in my paintbox I am most dissatisfied with blue. There are a lot of strong greens and there are vivid cadmium yellows, oranges, and reds. There is ivory black which as dark as the depths of the void and dioxazine violet which is a great purple, but blue is a difficult color. The brightest blues of the sky are from sunlight which has been scattered by the atmosphere. The blues of bird feathers and butterfly wings are from careful refraction of light from reflective structures in the wings: if you ground peacock feathers fine enough there is no more blue….
The main blue pigments in the painter’s palette are cobalt blue (which is ancient and robust but a trifle subdued) ultramarine blue (a sulfur-containing sodium-silicate) which inclines toward purple, and cerulean blue a sky blue cobalt stannate which is painfully expensive. Oh! there is a manganese blue out there in the paint stores, but I never used it until I bought a little tube a month ago, so we’ll see how it turns out: it is sort of a tropical powder blue. They are each beautiful but they each have their problems and none is the pure royal blue in the center of the spectrum which is bright, non-toxic, and lightfast (although the poisonous cobalts and…ultramarine too… last through the long ages). This is why I was excited when my old painter friend Brendan (a raven painting specialist) sent me a link to an article about a new blue pigment.
YInMn blue
The new blue is called YInMn blue. Discovered a couple of years ago by Robin Young, the new blue is lightfast, stable, and seemingly nontoxic (although sometimes in the past problems have taken a while to become evident). The new blue is made of yttrium oxide, indium oxide, and manganese oxide. It seems to be extremely lasting, and best of all it is very very blue. Unfortunately, right now it is expensive (and the paint companies are still testing it out), but I have a feeling it might hit the market soon, and whatever its faults it can’t be worse for one’s health than carcinogenic cobalt.
Kudos to Robin Young for the new color. I can’t wait to get a tube and paint some truly blue flounders…speaking of which, i better head back to the easel.
I really miss Sir Terry Pratchett. Looking at the news (and the comments to the news) makes me wonder if this be-hatted weirdo who wrote about witches, imps, and golems was actually the last great humanist…
Today, let’s talk about a concept from one of Pratchett’s later books “Making Money”. Halfway through the novel, two of the characters are trying to unravel a deepening financial mystery which is threatening to derail the economy of the fantasy microcosm which the novels are set inside. The fictional sleuths investigate the late Chairman of the Royal Bank and find that his wardrobe is filled with very specific boudouir costumes. Staring at this excess and pondering the depths of the human psyche, one of the characters forms a social hypothesis which is outlined below (I copied the following verbatim from a Pratchett wiki):
The Horseradish Sauce Hypothesis runs thusly.
Everyone likes a beef sandwich, right?
But just to vary the flavour one day, you put a little horseradish sauce on it.
You discover you like horseradish sauce, so the next time you do a beef sandwich you put a little more sauce on it.
Then a little bit more.
Then a little bit more.
Until one day, you put so much horseradish sauce on the sandwich that the beef falls out.
And you don’t even notice.
I am going to say nothing of truly addictive things like fentanyl, nicotine, lechery, or alcohol (which everyone already knows are habit-forming), and instead write about how society is being conquered by dangerous, low-grade flavors of horseradish. This sounds harmless enough (after all, everyone has to get through their meaningless day jobs), yet, as in the sandwich example above, you don’t notice when the meat falls out. One goes from “reading the news” to internet troll without recognizing it, and it’s happening to all of us.
The internet is the all-time expert on horseradish. It knows the specific variety that everyone likes: shopping, gambling, esoteric adult material, cat photos, Farmville, getting angry about ANTIFA, reading diatribes about how the earth is flat, or whatever. It’s all there. The special sauce which makes the internet so addictive is that it knows what rewards give your brain a little jolt of dopamine and it can administer these little jolts every 5-12 minutes all day. Most people spend all day in semi-isolation in beige cubicles doing meaningless & stressful tasks for distant masters. The internet is to such people what cocaine-laced water bottles are to depressed and lonely laboratory rats. The little razor-hooks can find the cracks in everyone’s façade because they dangerously mimic life’s true sources of meaning and joy. If you squint cross-eyed at the list in the second sentence of this paragraph you can imagine how these things are sad substitutes for friends, romance, knowledge, status, and a sense of belonging.
This is not how I would build a society. It is sad that people have gambling problems instead of fulfilling life quests, or naked pictures of women instead of girlfriends, but I guess it moves stocks, diet pills, and plastic novelty hats well enough to keep the world economy chugging along. The real problem is that the internet has moved beyond being a private venue for embarrassing vices to being the main venue for news and political discourse. It is where society collects and disseminates information and opinions. The internet is now where we self-select into groups. This is not resulting in a golden age of clubs and volunteering, instead it is transforming the country into a boiling cauldron of tribal anger. It feels good to be furious…or maybe not good, but at least it feels like something and one seeks it out every day until the beef in the sandwich is gone and all that is left is the empty calories of spicy sauce.
I try not to write about our déclassé president, because I regard him as a symptom of this problem rather than the problem itself (and also because granting him attention makes him stronger). Yet he is apparently a near-univeral flavor of internet horseradish. People back home in West Virginia can feel the righteous joy of punishing smug coastal elitists by joyously watching that fellow destroy the whole country and rob us all blind. People in Brooklyn can feel the righteous joy of being angry about this mendacious hustler. Getting worked up by the news becomes a dollop of horseradish and we all need more each day. I know I now check to see what grotesque enormity the president has committed before I check anything else. If child poverty in Central Asia dipped four fold or the UN seriously curtailed human trafficking or something I would probably not notice, but I moronically know every dumb thing the President tweeted.
There has always been a degree of degraded spectale to American politics–it’s part of democracy…part of humankind!–but it these piquant empty calories are taking the place of vital nutrients for the body politic. As we stare in horror or glee at the political theater, our problems are not getting solved. New discoveries are not being made. Compromise and reform are not being achieved. When Trump is gone in 2020 or 2024 (assuming the republic survives), we are still going to have this dangerous fascination with outrage.
Making the news into addictive “infotainment” is dangerous. It is less an inquiry into truth and more like the ill-concealed traps and lures within infomercials aimed at the elderly or the ignorant.
There is a quote from Anais Nin which succinctly and poetically summarizes the horseradish hypothesis: “Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.” It seems deceptively straightforward until you think about it, and then its tragic power becomes evident. Really think about how you look at the news lately…are you trying to determine the truth of what goes on or are you looking for a dollop of outrage to push you forward to the next sensational click?
The beef is falling out of society’s sandwich in a lot of ways right now. I concentrated on political problems because they are top-tier troubles, but the other ignoble horseradish is part of this too. Everybody needs some special zest, but if the banquet is nothing but novel jallop, we all begin to starve!
Regular visitors know that my alter-ego/spirit animal is the flounder (or, at any rate, the flatfish is definitely the leitmotif of this period of my ecology/history themed art). During lunchbreak or on the train I work on little “lesser” flounder drawings. In the near future I plan to put them all on a little internet store…along with some of the prints of the intricate flounder I have been drawing. Also there will be an interactive online flounder…it will all be the glorious artistic unveiling I have been hinting at for a while. You are going to love it!…erm…hopefully. In the mean time though, here are three of the most recent small flounder drawings I do during my busy Midtown days to keep from going crazy. The one at the top is some sort or oracle emerging from the underworld depths of the flounder itself. I don’t know what secrets this augur has…or even what gender they are, but they have brought unfathomable mysteries to light from the cave depths. A vile chef-beast lurks to the right roaring of appetites which can never be sated, while, at left a young mother nurses an infant: the next generation arises to take a place within the great weal, yet always there is appetite.
Speaking of which, this second flounder is meant to evoke the ifrits which always pop out of of ancient middle eastern oil lamps. A mysterious world of gauzy spirits, mystery beasts, and apparitions swirl around the lit lamp, but whether any of these blue spirits offer helpful advice or magical munificence is unclear.
Finally, I made a flounder which represents the bloodstream (my very first readers will recall that I had a childhood epiphany about the nature of living things based on blood). The cells stream forth to build the organism and carry out needed maintenance, but strange viruses swirl within the plasma. most ominously a parasitic tapeworm stares in hunger at the feast of little lives. It is unclear whether the aristocratic woman is a parasite or whether she is the host. This is a whole little ecosystem with the long-suffering flounder in the middle.
I will add all of these flounder to my Instagram feed (which you should follow), but you can see them here first, and read the perplexing explanations I have offered.
ferrebeekeeper 