In Vitro Meat, Snakes

As a vegetarian, I've been thinking a lot about the case for in vitro meat.

Essentially, this is grown meat that was never a part of an animal in the first place. So no animal had to be killed to make use of the steak - it's meat grown on trees (sort of). Unless you are an anti-stem cell person. I guess. But even then, you best be a vegetarian anti-stem cell person to take issue with this.

Anyway, I was curious as to how old-guard vegetarians (like my mom) would react. Surprisingly enough, she seemed down to eat in vitro meat.

One thing is strange though. I think it was on Tyler Cowen's blog - though it is too late at night/early in the morning to remember right now - that I was reading an interesting perspective on this. Consider the life of a milk cow versus a steak cow. The steak cow roams free for X years, and then is promptly executed. But during those X years, it nicely roams the pastures and lives ok. The milk cow - though - well - just picture what a milk cow endures to make sure her udders are always full. Safe to say, while both are alive, the milk cow endures a more painful life, no? So the argument that Cowen (I believe) was putting forth went as follows. Imagine somehow that in vitro meat does become feasible and comes on the market, replacing slaughtered meat. Now you have a bunch of cows on farms that cannot be killed - but certainly, more cows now can be milked. It would work like an increase in a factor of production of milk, so more milk would start to be produced, and more cows would be milked. So a bunch of these cows, that would have lived happy for X years now live unhappily for X+Y years. So, sure, the cow lives longer - but probably is unhappier all the while.

I guess that makes a case for veganism > meat eating > vegetarianism without veganism.

I have to say, I did enjoy Snakes on a Plane. It was surprisingly funny in that over-the-top, cheesy, mocking-the-action-genre way. What I find a little strange, however, is that despite how popular it has become on the blog-o-sphere, it is more or less tanking at the box office. I believe that one factor is that the target market for SoaP was more or less bloggers. But this demographic is also the most likely to watch pirated movies in the first place. Of course, that would hardly be the only factor - mediocre reviews certainly contribute, and the gore/horror genre is not very big in the first place.

Foucualt and ODE

Does anyone else get the idea that a nice language to describe Foucault's views on discourse is through a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (and the flow being the solution flow of such a system)? The solution, of course, can be potentially chaotic and yet completely deterministic (like the Lorenz attractor). For a long time now, I've sort of felt that that's been the best way to picture it - but I could be way off base here.

In unrelated news, I plan to see Snakes on a Plane tonight.

Why Are Quants Not Very Socially Conscious?

I was looking through facebook and was shocked at the number of math grad students who were listed as politically apathetic. Most of these guys would seem to fall under the umbrella label of liberalism - but they don't seem to give a crap by and large.

And then I realized that the same thing was happening with me. A pretty sad thing to admit, no?

I'm not really sure what it is - or even if it is unique to this field. But at least for me, I know that I end up getting lost in this web of material with no connection to the real world. Don't get me wrong - the stuff I study has zillions of applications to the real world. The point is, I don't interact with any of those applications. So it ends up sort of parting my worlds. And with more stress and effort needed in this mathematical world, it becomes easy to forget about the other world. Anyway, I hardly think this description (a lack of time and energy) is the reason why most math-heads are politically apathetic. Also, it's probably worth clarifying that I haven't stopped being interested in the social sciences. I just noticed that my frequency of checking blogs, posting, talking to people about political issues, etc has declined considerably.

There's probably one other contribution to my growing apathy - and that is a sense of jadedness about about the political process as well as the quality of policy implemented.

That said, I found this interesting. Here's the quote:

It appears that the family of Jared Guinther, an 18-year-old from Oregon, was trying to get him released from the army, which recruited him in spite of the fact that he is autistic. Guinther, who rarely speaks, "wasn't even aware of the war in Iraq until a recruiter enlisted him last fall to be a calvary scout, the Army's most dangerous job". Guinther's mother tried to intervene, but the recruiter told her that he himself was dyslexic and that Jared "doesn't need mommy to make his decisions for him".

Well, isn't that amusing.