Investors Have Been Making the Same Mistake for 300 Years

The Atlantic, August 23, 2020

Early in august 1720, Sir Isaac Newton was faced with a choice. In a year when London’s stock market was roaring upward in an utterly unprecedented boom, should he sell the last of his safe investments to buy shares in the South Sea Company? Since January of that year, shares in the firm—one of the largest private companies in history—had gone up eightfold, and had made paper fortunes for thousands.

Already a wealthy man, Newton was usually a cautious investor. As the year began, much of his money was tucked away in various kinds of government bonds—reliable, uneventful investments that delivered a regular stream of income. He did own shares in a few of the larger companies on the exchange, including South Sea, but he had never been a rapid or eager market trader.

That had changed in the past few months, though, as he bought and sold into the rising market seemingly in the hopes of turning a comfortable fortune into an enormous one. By August, he’d unloaded most of his bonds, converting them and other assets into South Sea shares. Now he contemplated selling the rest of his bonds to buy still more shares.

He did sell nearly all of them. It was a disastrous choice….

Game Over, the Chinese have won

from The Boston Globe, April 4, 2019

IN EARLY 2019, American journalists sounded a warning: China was about to — no, scratch that — has figured out how to monopolize the 21st century economy by seizing control of 5G, the next generation of super high speed internet. Critics fear that because the Chinese developed it first, they will have exclusive access to the technology behind a new, fully interconnected version of the Internet, delivering it through a network of Chinese-only fiber-optic connections designed to work only with Chinese made equipment.

Game over; the Chinese have won.

Writing in Wired, Susan Crawford warned that if the Chinese take control of the 5G ecosystem, “American companies don’t stand a chance,” while David Brooks in The New York Times proclaimed that “It’s become increasingly clear that China is a grave economic, technological and intellectual threat to the United States and the world order.”

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Research on gun suicides shows: The enemy is inside the house

from The Boston Globe, November 2, 2018

Many Americans presume that those bent on inflicting violence upon others or themselves will go through with it, no matter what. We can never legislate the hate out of people’s hearts or deadly compulsions out of their heads. But is there nothing else we can do to keep our fellow citizens from becoming gunshot victims?

By keeping guns mostly out of the public square, many other nations have largely managed to prevent those consumed by bigotry and rage from doing the irreversible harm suffered by innocents in Louisville and Pittsburgh. But here, as we’ve seen after so many past massacres, the debate on gun regulation quickly devolves into political kabuki. For the last 40 years, the view that the Second Amendment guarantees an almost unlimited right to bear arms for personal protection has dominated. Yet a close reading of the data on who dies by the bullet reveals that, for all the talk of keeping malevolent intruders at bay, guns kill those closest to them: Two out of every three people who die by a bullet each year do so at their own hands — 22,938 of us in 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available. In other words, those most likely to suffer gun violence are gun owners and those close to them.

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Evolving story of evolution

Book Review from The Boston Globe, August 2, 2018

In 1837, Charles Darwin made a sketch: a single line at the bottom, then a branch, and another, and branches on those branches. He used that diagram to help crystallize his ideas about how species emerged and diverged from preceding forms.

That image, the tree of life, proved such a powerful metaphor, that in the 20th century it morphed from being a map of evolution into an origin story.

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The world defeated smallpox. Why does polio still exist?

from The Boston Globe, March 9, 2018

ALI MAOW MAALIN was a handsome man. You can see that in a photograph taken in 1977, when he was just 23. He’s shirtless, standing erect, his head tilted forward as he peers towards something the viewer cannot see.

Those good looks aren’t what drew the photographer’s eye, though. The image centers on a scattering of blemishes running up his right arm and across his chest. The blisters are more or less round, and it’s possible to pick out the indentations in many of their centers — obvious signs for those few who still knew how to read them.

Maalin had put himself in harm’s way. A health care worker responding to an outbreak of infectious disease in southern Somalia, Maalin had driven two sick children to an isolation camp in a nearby town. The three were together in the car for perhaps 15 minutes — long enough, it turned out, for the infection to pass from passengers to driver.

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Human health needs a common defense. Too bad we blew it

from The Boston Globe, March 5, 2017

They found it: Klebsiella pneumoniae, a bacterium that occurs naturally in soils and can live quite peaceably in human guts, mouth, or skin. If it makes its way elsewhere, it can cause disease — often pneumonia, but a number of other conditions as well. Until recently, the treatment for a K. pneumoniae infection was simple and effective: Give the patient one of a range of common antibiotics. Accordingly, her medical team tested the patient’s bacterial samples to see which drug would work.

The answer came back: none of them. Her microbes were resistant to all 14 antibiotics available in Reno. The hospital sent samples to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the tests there showed that these bugs were resistant to 12 more drugs. That was it. There was nothing else available in the United States that could touch this disease. (For more details on this unsettling case, see Helen Branswell’s coverage in The Boston Globe’s sister publication, STAT.)

In January, the CDC reported that the woman had died in early September, killed by a superbug for which there is no cure.

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The Scientist and the Fascist

From The Atlantic 

In September 1930, Germany held its first national elections since the Great Crash of 1929, and the National Socialists won a stunning tally: 6,400,000 votes—10 times their total just two years before—and 107 seats. They were now the second largest party in the Reichstag. The word “Nazi” no longer evoked images of the madhouse, as one commentator wrote. Suddenly the party was almost respectable.

Even so, it still seemed to many as if Hitler’s support was tenuous. For Albert Einstein, Hitler’s sudden rush to prominence confirmed his historic distrust of the German body politic. But at this time, he did not see Hitler or National Socialism as a lasting danger. Asked in December of 1930 what to make of the new force in German politics, he answered that “I do not enjoy Herr Hitler’s acquaintance. He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important.” Initially, he felt that no action at all would be needed to bring Hitler low. He reaffirmed for a Jewish organization that the “momentarily desperate economic situation” and the chronic “childish disease of the Republic” were to blame for the Nazi success. “Solidarity of the Jews, I believe, is always called for,” he wrote, “but any special reaction to the election results would be quite inappropriate.”

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Why we need NATO — in a single bullet

 

From The Atlantic 

In September 1930, Germany held its first national elections since the Great Crash of 1929, and the National Socialists won a stunning tally: 6,400,000 votes—10 times their total just two years before—and 107 seats. They were now the second largest party in the Reichstag. The word “Nazi” no longer evoked images of the madhouse, as one commentator wrote. Suddenly the party was almost respectable.

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Human health needs a common defense. Too bad we blew it

From The Boston Globe 

IT BEGAN with a broken leg. On a long journey through India, a Nevada resident in her 70s fractured her femur. Complications took her to several Indian hospitals. Eventually, she returned to the United States, but her problems followed her home. In August of last year, she had to be hospitalized once again. In Reno, she presented with systemic inflammatory response syndrome — a condition that can produce a racing heart, frantic breathing, and other symptoms. The syndrome often marks a powerful immune response to an infection. So her doctors looked for a microbe that might have provoked her increasingly devastating response…

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Let’s waste more money on science.

From The Boston Globe 

TWO MEN came to Zurich in the spring of 1913, Max Planck and Walther Nernst, both future Nobel laureates. Their mission: to persuade Switzerland’s best-regarded young physicist, Albert Einstein, to join them in Berlin. As the three of them talked, Planck asked Einstein what he was working on at the moment. Einstein replied that he was wrestling with a new theory of gravity that would, if he could work it all out, supplant Isaac Newton’s universal law of gravitation — the most famous idea in the history of science.

Taking pity on the younger man, Planck broke into his pitch. “As an older friend,” he told Einstein, “I must advise you against it, for in the first place, you will not succeed; and even if you succeed, no one will believe you”…

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Astronomers Have Found Planets in the Habitable Zone around a Nearby Star

From The Atlantic 

The robot telescope settles on its target, a star that sits closer than all but a tiny fraction of the tens of billions of stellar systems that make up the Milky Way. Its mirror grabs light for 55 seconds, again and again. The robot telescope—called TRAPPIST—will observe the star for 245 hours across sixty-two nights, making 12,295 measurements. Eleven times, it will see the star dim, ever so slightly. This dip in luminosity, called a transit, has a straightforward astronomical explanation: It’s a planet passing in front of the star, blocking just a bit of its light. In this case, the transits tell us that 3 planets orbit the star.
“So what?” you might think…

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