In defense of drinking milk

A hilariously inept article on why "adults should not be drinking milk" has inspired me to incompetently defend the vulgar and glorious drink I love so much. Full disclosure: I drink milk every day, I always have milk when I eat sweet starchy foods (cake, cookies, pancakes), and nothing will stop me from drinking milk.

Let me dissect this article point-by-point so that I might respond:

No other species can digest milk after babyhood.

There are plenty of things I'm going to keep doing, even though no other species can do it. Speak. Use modern medicine. Participate in a society. Develop and use tools. Kara Brown is free to eschew these things if she wants, although her picture shows her - gasp - wearing clothes! No other species can do that!

Fewer than 40 percent of humans on earth can digest lactose post-childhood, and only 5 percent of Asians and 25 percent of African adults can properly digest milk. In case you're keeping score at home, those continents have most of the humans we got.

No one is trying to force lactose-intolerant people to drink milk. But just because a slim majority of adult humans can't digest milk, I should stop drinking - why? Out of solidarity? Will that help those poor unfortunate souls?

You know what the number one killer of adults in America is? Goddamn heart disease. If you enjoy living, put the milk down.

The average American drinks 44 gallons per year of soda, compared to 20.4 gallons of milk. I'll concede it possible that, for an adult with a healthy diet, milk is a less-healthy choice than water. But often it's replacing soda or juice. On top of that, many people choose low-fat or skim milk.

Point: You can get calcium from plenty of other foods.

True. For most adults I believe you can get a healthy amount of calcium from a well-planned  dairy-free diet. So if you're eating plenty of spinach, kale, collards, or okra every day, then you're getting enough calcium. Everyone else should consider having some cheese or milk occasionally.

Point: It's gross.

I love the mental image Kara Brown must have of people like me. Cut to a black-and-white scene of me sitting in the dark, alone in a large unfurnished room, pouring a big glass of milk with a look of dread. "Milk is so gross, I hate it. But I - must - drink it for some reason! Why oh why is the world like this?" In reality, those of us who drink milk do it because - news flash - we LIKE it. We don't think it's gross.

Too lazy to "Occupy"? Hit the ATM.

When the "Occupy" movement first started, I felt like there were some legitimate claims buried in somewhat incoherent message. To me, the most compelling complaint is related to the increasing separation of wealth, how "the rich get richer". For example, since Reagan took office, the increase in after-tax income has leapt significantly for the richest Americans (much of which can be explained by Reagan slashing taxes for the richest Americans), while rising only modestly for the bottom 80%.

Source: Congressional Budget Office

What is causing this increasing separation of wealth? Why are the rich getting way, way richer, while everyone else is making only modest gains? Well that growth in the top 1% starting from 2002, which as you can see is not reflected among the poorer 99%, corresponds roughly with the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy. It just seems like a shameful state of affairs when companies consider the "Return On Investment" for lobbyists and campaign contributions. The wealthy spend some of their money on influencing politicians, who devise laws that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Everybody wins!

But I didn't really want to talk politics too much today. I guess it's just the little things that bother me. The banks offer you and me 1% cash back for using their credit cards, but they charge the vendor 3%, which the vendor turns around and charges us, through increased prices, even for those of us who use cash. In fact it's against the law to charge a higher price for consumers who use credit cards; guess who wrote that law? So we're stuck in a cycle where the banks make 3% on every transaction, for doing almost nothing.

Now, when the Occupiers started Occupying, I figured "I have a job, I don't have time to stand around complaining all day." But now I can see one small way we can all support income equality, without quitting our day jobs: visit the ATM. The bank earns nothing on cash transactions. When you use your credit card for $100, you are basically hiring the bank to walk over to the ATM, withdraw $100, and give it to the cashier, and you are paying $3 for this service. If instead we all visit the ATM once a week and pay most of our transactions in cash, we save that money, resulting in lowered prices for consumers and higher revenues for business which actually produce economic value. For a person making the median personal income in the USA, $32,000, who spends 30% of their income through their credit card, they are paying almost $300 per year to the banks.

If you want to combat the growing wealth disparity in the USA, and help ensure that less money is paid to companies that don't actually produce any economic value, hit the ATM once a week. 

A closer look at FiveThirtyEight's Presidential Election Simulator

I've always been a fan of the presidential election simulator they've developed over at FiveThirtyEight. Essentially they use a pretty complicated model to give a prediction of which candidate will win in which state, and then run some simulations to predict which candidate will win the overall election. It seems like most of the work goes into re-calibrating the results of polls and combining some pretty complicated factors that I won't go into here (since I'm not too familiar with their methodology on that level), but what they've done with that second part is what I'd like to suggest an improvement on. They use their current estimate about which candidate will win each state, then run simulations to predict the overall winner. The histogram from their website looks like this:

Based on my experience with simulations, you shouldn't normally have a few peaks much taller than the rest; this is a symptom of an illness I like to call Not-Enough-Simulations. If they just run more iterations, they'll get a much nicer and smoother curve. To demonstrate, I went through and grabbed their current prediction for the odds that Pres. Obama wins each state or district (for ME, NB, and DC), and just ran some simulations where for each state I randomly choose who wins, weighted by those odds, and tabulate the totals. I want to point out here that the model at 538 has some extra features which mine doesn't have, like how states don't vote independently, regional and economic influences, poll movements, and others, I'm sure. So this is purely for demonstrative purposes. Anyways, for three hundred simulated elections, this is what it looks like:

Does that look familiar? For reference, in my code that I just knocked together in a few minutes, that takes way less than one second. For one billion runs (which admittedly takes a few minutes), this is what I get:

It's a nearly perfect, beautiful bell curve. This represents the true result of their statistics. Another result of running more simulations is that the odds of who wins the overall elections is measured more accurately, and the number changes a little bit. Their "now-cast" function, which is what I'm actually mimicking, predicts what would happen if the election were held today. It gives Obama a 64.7% chance of winning. Instead, it should be a 64.2% chance, if you collect enough data. That's a small difference, but here's one more. They also calculate the chance of a 269-269 tie in the EC, which they give as 0.6%. But with less-noisy data, it's actually 1.5%, more than twice as likely.

It's a shame to see all the hard work the people at FiveThirtyEight put into their model at the state-level, just to have it under-sold with such a simple bug in their nation-wide model. They need more simulations!

An unqualified summary of alternative energy

Hey guys! I'm no Energician or anything, but I do have some BS degree from this one school in the south, so I'm going to just go ahead and offer my (in)expert opinion on alternative energy.

When you come right down to it, most of our energy sources are solar energy in disguise. Coal, oil, and natural gas were formed when plants stored the sun's energy in their biomass and then decomposed. Hydroelectricity is available when water is flowing downhill, and we force it to turn our turbines; but that water was transported to the top of the hill when it was evaporated by sunlight, and fell back down from the sky. Wind exists on Earth only because of local variations in temperature, caused (for the most part) by sunlight. And, of course, solar panels directly harvest the sun's energy. In fact, the only sources of power I can think of that don't originate from the sun are nuclear power and (arguably) geothermal.

One very interesting energy harvesting scheme is called "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion". Essentially you have a huge pipe that goes down into the ocean to a depth of about 1,000 m, where the water is colder, about 5 C. At the same time you use water from the surface, which will be around 22 C. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that the heat will flow from hot to cold, but we put our devices in the way so that, like water falling down a hill, the whole process powers our machinations. And they say that the oceans provide a "limitless" supply of cold and hot water (maybe a dangerous idea).

Direct solar energy has a lot of promise. The above map shows the average intensity of sunlight. The blue dots represent the total area required, with current technology, to completely provide the current global demand for electricity. I think the map looks pretty neat.

However, as time wears on, our energy demands will tend to grow exponentially. Some guy made what's called the Kardashev Scale, which classifies how "advanced" a civilization is based on how much energy it can produce. To quote wikipedia, "a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its solar system, and Type III of its galaxy." We are estimated to have a rating of 0.72. Looking at the plot, which is on a logarithmic scale, our energy development over time is a straight line, which indicates exponential growth. Extrapolating from the data in just the last 110 years, it will take another 200 years or more to reach a rating of 1. Let's work on that, everybody.

EDIT: So on the Kardashev Scale, a Type 2 civilization will use roughly the energy output of an entire star. Freeman Dyson imagined what is now called a Dyson Sphere, a shell around a star that collects all the energy from that star. Dyson spheres have a few problems, though: If you build a solid shell around the star, then it wouldn't interact gravitationally with the star, and the two would slowly drift apart until they collided. If, instead, you build a swarm of space ships that orbits the star, then occasionally one would block the sun from the other. As you increase the number of spaceships, this happens more and more, until it becomes almost impossible to harvest all the star's energy.

Forrest's incompetent money advice

Welcome to the first installment of what I hope will be a long series of articles containing my incompetent advice, on many issues. Today the topic is money.

I won't cover the (much more important) issue of actually obtaining money in very much detail. Suffice it to say that there are many different ways to get it, and to spell them out would just be ... trivial. To list just a few examples: donation of haploid cells (if you happen to be a genetically fortunate male), having rich older relatives, and marrying "up". Or you could stick with the traditional "get a job" route, but that wouldn't be nearly as easy or fun as the aggregated average of my three examples.

Now that you have lots of money, what should you spend it on? If, like the majority of Americans your happiness is a linear correlation with your rate of spending, you should spend it all at once, and also max out your credit cards. If, however, you happiness production curve is more reasonable, there's an optimal amount of money you should spend in a typical week on frivolous things like ice cream, new clothes, or that kidney transplant you've been putting off.

As you can see, the more money you spend on nice things for yourself, the happier you get. But consider this example: You could spend $1000 on a small, shoddy-looking, used motorcycle and have some fun riding around and running errands, or you could spend $10,000 on a shiny new motorcycle and have a bit more fun impressing your friends and bothering the neighbors with your engine noise. On the other hand, you could spend $2 on bus fare, have to get up early every day, and miss the bus sometimes. Your choice depends on how much you would enjoy each thing, and also on how much money you had in the bank. Except for explaining what's going on, I can't offer any extra help on what to spend your money on. As my most loyal readers will note, I spend most of my money on bacon.

No, the topic that interests me today is what to do with money you're saving. Where should you keep it? The first option is in the bank. For many people, keeping the majority of your money in the bank is the smart thing to do. The bank will never lose your money (or if they do, Uncle Sam will cover it). You'll never* lose money at the bank. (* some restrictions and fees apply to low balances, too many transactions, using other banks' ATMs, or trying to access your money). Banks will even give you a small amount of interest, as a reward! Note, however, that this interest rate is generally not much better than the rate of inflation, and often (like right now) much lower. What this means is that yes, you won't lose money if you keep it in the bank, but you will lose value. You'll be able to buy fewer motorcycles with that money when you withdraw it in 5 years than you could have today. The moral here is that banks don't really keep your money "safe".

The next option is to keep all your money at home. You could either keep it as cash, which would be like a bank only without the fees, interest, and inconvenience. Or you could keep it as a commodity, like gold. Gold (in theory) is not subject to inflation. No more gold is ever created (yes, I know more gold is mined, but ignore that for a second). You can buy the same number of motorcycles in five years with the same lump of gold (or, like me, a small fraction of a motorcycle). However, you keeping stuff in your house isn't safe against robbery, and gold is inconvenient to change into cash.

The third option is to invest your money. The word "invest" branches into a lot of other things, but the underlying principles are the same for each type: you essentially gamble your money, hoping the value of your investments will rise. With higher risk comes higher reward: you know for sure that in the bank, your money will be worth almost as much as it is now, when you withdraw it in five years. With an investment, you run the risk of losing value, but that earns you the possibility of gaining value. Now different investments are in different places on the "risk - reward" spectrum.

As you can see from this image I pulled straight from wikipedia, with higher risk comes higher reward. The light blue line represents possible investment choices, and the dark blue line, which is unique to each individual, represents a line of constant "utility", which pretty much means "happiness". Some people are young and OK with more risks, so their dark blue line shifts up-right. Others might be planning to buy a house soon, and have the right amount of money, so they don't want to lose that money. Their dark blue line shifts down-left. Yet other people might want to help save humanity by investing in green energy or something, which would change their "happiness" curve in various ways.

Diversification: Buying stocks can give you a good return, but there is a way to lower the amount of risk without compromising the amount of return: Diversification (that's right, Diversification). Let's say you buy $100 worth of google. Google's stock will roughly follow that of all stocks in its main area, like microsoft and apple. But sometimes when google does poorly, apple does well. If you buy a collection of several stocks from that sector, like microsoft, apple, and google, then the value won't jump around as much, but it will still rise when the sector rises. But you can take this one step further and say "when tech stocks fall, sunblock stocks will rise!" (because all those WoWers and googlers have pale, pale skin) and also buy some shares in the sun-block sector. Taking it even further, you might note that when stocks do poorly, bonds do well, so you could buy some of those.

In fact, a while ago some people had the great idea to put all their money together and hire someone to decide what to invest it all in (so they didn't have to quit their jobs and watch the stock market all day). That's called a mutual fund. Various other types of investments exist, filling niches of the risk-reward spectrum and offering different amounts of diversification.