Category Archives: Business

Yiddish newspapers and talking cows, a case for Jewish education

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Jewish education is a mess according to the Times. Most anyone outside it, who’d look in would agree: Ancient books, pre-science outlooks, anti-inclusive, and taught in a garble of languages, Yiddish, English, Aramaic, Hebrew. The New York Times has runs regular editorials claiming that Jewish education robs children of a future, or an entrance to society, producing adults who know nothing of geometry or higher math, or modern history, incapable of voting intelligently in today’s elections (they often vote Republican). The Times’s experts, are often the products of this education, but claim to have risen above it, only because of extra work. As a proof, they often cite the Talmud as a source of useless knowledge of ancient Jewish law, rejected Bible history, and only the most basic views of math. By way of a response, I’d like to quote something I’d heard in synagog a couple of weeks back:

“I’m so glad that I learned geometry in school, and not taxes. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.“

The speaker was an accountant, and the point of the joke is that there is no parallelogram season. There is a tax season, though, and tax law follows a bizarre logic that is not geometric, but is somewhat talmudic. As for the useless languages, they are all in use, both as spoken languages and written languages, no less useful than Latin, and certainly more alive. There are currently 5 yiddish-language newspapers being published in New York alone, see below. They compete with each other for readers, while competing also with the Times, the Post, and with another ten or more Hebrew and English journals, several of them Jewish, either published on paper or as web-journals. People read them, though the Times prefers to ignore their existence.

There are five newspapers published currently in Yiddish in New York. The Forward (Tony Curtis and duck) and the Vort are left-leaning, the Algeminer, the Blat, and the Zeitung, are more right and center. There is a readership. Why a duck?

And that brings us to the subject matter, Talmud. Much of Jewish learning is Talmud, either distilled or pure, study of a set of books written between 1000 and 2000 years ago in Israel, Babylon, and France mostly, with commentaries from Spain, Morocco, Egypt, Germany, and Poland. Those who learned talmud tend to find it useful. The legal organization and approach resonates to them in the understanding of taxes, contracts, building, damage assessment, marriage, ethics, even in dealing with alcoholism. Talmud is so useful that it’s common for working, orthodox Jews to continue their learning it throughout their lives. A common practice is to learn a page every day in synchrony with other Jews. Today’s page, when I started writing this post, was Nazir 10. It includes a talking cow, just the sort of section that the Times likes to cite to show the uselessness of it all. I’ll forgive their lack of understanding, but not their laziness for not even bothering to try to understand.

Nazir 10 begins by saying: “If a cow says, ‘I will be a Nazir (that is, I will give up wine for a month) if I stand up’. Then, if it gets up, one school of rabbinic thought (Bais Shammai) says he is a nazir. Another school of thought (Bais Hillel) says he is not a nazir.” The page goes on to speak about taking doors, but I’ll stop here after the first 2 sentences and will try to explain what the Times does not care to examine.

Notice that cows are female, and they typically don’t speak, but here you find a “he” who might have to give up wine. This “he”, this male, is understood to be a person looking at the cow, likely a person with an alcohol problem. He sees a cow lying on the ground (in the mud figuratively) and identifies it to himself. That is, he sees himself lying in the mud. He thinks it’s impossible for the cow to get up because he imagines that he himself can not get up. (This is just the Talmud’s way of discussing things). According to Bais Shammai, the person is understood to have said to himself, “if that cow can get up, I will take it as a sign that I can get up, and I will take it on myself to avoid wine and wine products for a month.” Now, according to Bais Shammai, if the cow gets up, the man is obligated to stop drinking for a month.

“I love television, and find it very educational. When someone turns it on, I go read a book.” G. Marx

Bais Hillel says he is not obligated at all. They say that a drunk who wants to change, must do more than be inspired, he must make a real verbal commitment. He must verbally obligate himself to give up drink. We follow this latter opinion, but learn Bais Shammai’s view too, because there are important ideas about self-identity.

Those are just the first two lines of the page. In secular school, you learn stories too, sometimes stories with talking animals, but these are usually modern stories, where the challenges are external, bullying say, but in a sense such stories are sanitized. The internal demons are removed, and these are often the hardest to battle. Even dealing with external problems is often pushed on an external authority, a teacher usually. You are considered to be too weak to deal with a problem. Sometimes that’s true, usually there is at least some part you could deal with. The lack of self-obligation leaves modern school stories flat. Few kids enjoy them, or feel they get anything from them. A result in Detroit is that schools have <50% attendance. Kids leave barely literate with appalling math skills. We blame the teachers and the subject. It’s the book: Sally has 15 tomatoes and wants to give 4 to a friend, how many will she have left? is this relevant? Does this excite?

Talmud teaches some logic, some math, and some geometry, but only for measuring distances and volumes, the application that geometry was named for (geometry = measuring the earth). They learn the rest as needed, and often learn quite a lot.

As Groucho Marx said: “My education is self inflicted.”

The products of Jewish education become successful, often in business, hiring their better-educated brothers. Some become lawyers, accountants, writers, businessmen, or psychologists — more than our share in the population — or mathematicians and scientists. Some even excel in academics or journalism. The Times does not mention this.

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl Marx

My three children all went to Jewish, religious school and got the education that the Times calls abuse. So far, my son (31) has two masters degrees, both in artificial intelligence/ computer science. My older daughter (28) is getting her PhD in Psychology, and my younger daughter (23) is working on her masters in epidemiology. I suspect they benefited from the education. My suggestion to the Times, is in another Marx quote: “If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.”

Robert Buxbaum, March 1, 2023. “History may not think with its feet, but it certainly doesn’t walk on its head.”– Karl Marx, the less-funny, Marx brother. Jewish educated, he became a journalist.

Social science is irreproducible, drug tests nonreplicable, and stoves studies ignore confounders.

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Efforts to replicate the results of the most prominent studies in health and social science have found them largely irreproducible with the worst replicability appearing in cancer drug research. The figure below, from “The Reproducibility Project in Cancer Biology, Errington et al. 2021, compares the reported effects in 50 cancer drug experiments from 23 papers with the results from repeated versions of the same experiments, looking at a total of 158 effects.

Graph comparing the original, published effect of a cancer drug with the replication effect. The units are whatever units were used in the original study, percent, or risk ratio, etc. From “Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology,”
Timothy M Errington et al. Center for Open Science, United States; Stanford University, Dec 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601.

It’s seen that virtually none of the drugs are found to work the same as originally reported. Those below the dotted, horizontal line behaved the opposite in the replication studies. About half, those shown in pink, showed no significant effect. Of those that showed positive behavior as originally published, mostly they show about half the activity with two drugs that now appear to be far more active. A favorite web-site of mine, retraction watch, is filled with retractions of articles on these drugs.

The general lack of replicability has been called a crisis. It was first seen in the social sciences, e.g. the figure below from this article in Science, 2015. Psychology research is bad enough such that Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, came to disown most of the conclusions in his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow“. The experiments that underly his major sections don’t replicate. Take, for example, social printing. Classic studies had claimed that, if you take a group of students and have them fill out surveys with words about the aged or the flag, they will then walk slower from the survey room or stand longer near a flag. All efforts to reproduce these studies have failed. We now think they are not true. The problem here is that much of education and social engineering is based on such studies. Public policy too. The lack of replicability throws doubt on much of what modern society thinks and does. We like to have experts we can trust; we now have experts we can’t.

From “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” Science, 2015. Social science replication is better than dance drug replication, about 35% of the classic social science studies replicate to some, reasonable extent.

Are gas stoves dangerous? This 2022 environmental study said they are, claiming with 95% confidence that they are responsible for 12.7% of childhood asthma. I doubt the study will be reproducible for reasons I’ll detail below, but for now it’s science, and it may soon be law.

Part of the replication problem is that researchers have been found to lie. They fudge data or eliminate undesirable results, some more some less, and a few are honest, but the journals don’t bother checking. Some researchers convince themselves that they are doing the world a favor, but many seem money-motivated. A foundational study on Alzheimers was faked outright. The authors doctored photos using photoshop, and used the fake results to justify approval of non-working, expensive drugs. The researchers got $1B in NIH funding too. I’d want to see the researchers jailed, long term: it’s grand larceny and a serious violation of trust.

Another cause of this replication crisis — one that particularly hurt Daniel Kahneman’s book — is that many social science researchers do statistically illegitimate studies on populations that are vastly too small to give reliable results. Then, they only publish the results they like. The graph of z-values shown below suggest this is common, at least in some journals, including “Personality and social psychology Bulletin”. The vast fraction of results at ≥95% confidence suggest that researchers don’t publish the 90-95% of their work that doesn’t fit the desired hypothesis. While there has been no detailed analysis of all the social science research, it’s clear that this method was used to show that GMO grains caused cancer. The researcher did many small studies, and only published the one study where GMOs appeared to cause cancer. I review the GMO study here.

From Ulrich Schimmack, ReplicationIndex.com, January, 2023, https://replicationindex.com/2023/01/08/which-social-psychologists-can-you-trust/. If you really want to get into this he is a great resource.

The chart at left shows Z-scores, were Z = ∆X √n/σ. A Z score above 1.93 generally indicates significance, p < .05. Notice that almost all the studies have Z scores just over 1.93 that is almost all the studies proved their hypothesis at 95% confidence. That makes it seem that the researchers were very lucky, near prescient. But it’s clear from the distribution that there were a lot of studies that done but never shown to the public. That is a lot of data that was thrown out, either by the researchers or by the publishers. If all data was published, you’d expect to see a bell curve. Instead the Z values are of a tiny bit of a bell curve, just the tail end. The implication is that these studies with Z= >1.93 suggest far less than 95% confidence. This then shows up in the results being only 25% reproducible. It’s been suggested that you should not throw out all the results in the journal, just look for Z-scores of 3.6 or more. That leaves you with the top 23%, and these should have a good chance of being reproducible. The top graph somewhat supports this, but it’s not that simple.

Another classic way to cook the books, as it were, and make irreproducible studies provide the results you seek is to ignore “confounders.” This leads to association – causation errors. As an example, it’s observed that people taking aspirin have more heart attacks than those who do not, but the confounder is that aspirin is prescribed to those with heart problems; the aspirin actually helps, but appears to hurt. In the case of stoves, it seems likely that poorer, sicker people own gas, and that they live in older, moldy homes, and cook more at home, frying onions, etc. These are confounders that the study to my reading ignores. They could easily be the reason that gas stove owners get more asthma toxins than the rich folks who own electric, induction stoves. If you confuse association, you seem to find that owning the wrong stove causes you to be poor and sick with a moldy home. I suspect that the stove study will not replicate if they correct for the confounders.

I’d like to recommend a book, hardly mathematical, “How to Lie with Statistics” by Darrell Huff ($8.99 on Amazon). I read it in high school. It gives you a sense of what to look out for. I should also mention Dr. Anthony Fauci. He has been going around to campuses saying we should have zero tolerance for those who deny science, particularly health science. Given that so much of health science research is nonreplicable, I’d recommend questioning all of it. Here is a classic clip from the 1973 movie, ‘Sleeper’, where a health food expert wakes up in 2173 to discover that health science has changed.

Robert Buxbaum , February 7, 2023.

Use iodine against Bad breath, Bad beer, Flu, RSV, COVID, monkeypox….

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We’re surrounded by undesired bacteria, molds, and viruses. Some are annoying, making our feet smell, our teeth rot, and our wine sour. Others are killers, particularly for the middle aged and older. Despite little evidence, the US government keeps pushing masks and inoculations with semi-active vaccine that does nothing to stop the spread. Among the few things one can do to stop the spread of disease, and protect yourself, is to kill the bacteria, molds and viruses with iodine. Iodine is cheap, effective even at very low doses, 0.1% to 10 parts per million, and it lasts a lot longer than alcohol. Dilute iodine will not dye your skin, and it does not sting. A gargle of iodine will kill COVID and other germs (e.g. thrush) and it has even been shown to be a protective, stopping COVID 19 and flu even if used before exposure. On a more practical level. I also use it to cleanse my barrels before making beer — It’s cheaper than the Camden they sell in stores.

Iodine is effective when used on surfaces, and most viruses spread by surfaces. A sick person coughs. Droplets end up on door knobs, counters, or in your throat, leaving virus particles that do not die in air. You touch the surface, and transfer the virus to your eyes and nose. Here’s a video I made. A mask doesn’t help because you rub your eyes around the mask. But iodine kills the virus on the surface, and on your hands, and lasts there far longer than alcohol does. Vaccines always come with side-effects, but there are no negative side effects to sanitization with dilute iodine. Here is a video I did some years ago on the chemistry of iodine.

Robert Buxbaum, February 1, 2023. I don’t mean to say that all bacteria and fungi are bad, it’s just that most of them are smelly. Even the good ones that give us yogurt, beer, blue cheese, and sour kraut tend to be smelly. They have the annoying tendency to causing your wine to taste and smell like sour kraut or cheese, and they cause your breath and feet to smell the same. If you’re local, I’ll give you some free iodine solution. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy it through REB Research.

Birth dearth in China => collapse? war?

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China passed us in life-expectancy in 2022, and also in fertility, going the other way. In China lifespan at birth increased to 77.3 years. In the US it dropped an additional 0.9 years, to 76.8. US lifespans suffered from continuing COVID and an increase in accidents, heart disease, suicide, drugs, and alcohol abuse. Black men were hit particularly hard, so that today, a black man in the US has the same life expectancy as he would in Rwanda. China seems to have avoided this, but should expect problems due to declining fertility and birth rates.

China passed us in life expectancy in 2022.

Fertility rates will eventually burden the US too, as US fertility is only slightly greater than in China, 1.78 children per woman, lifetime, compared to 1.702 in China. But China has far fewer people of childbearing ages, relatively, and only 47% are women. Three decades of one child policy resulted in few young adults and a tendency to abort girls. Currently, the birthrate in China is barely more than half ours: 6.77 per 1000, compared to 12.01 per 1000. And the proportion of the aged keeps rising. China will soon face a severe shortage of care-givers, and an excess of housing.

Years of low birthrate preceded the “Lost decades” of financial crisis in Japan and the USSR. Between 1990 and 2011, business stagnated and house prices dropped. China faces the same; few workers and more need for care: it’s not a good recipe.

Beginning about 1991, Japan saw a major financial collapse with banks failing, and home values falling. China seems over-due.

Few children also signals a psychic lack of confidence in the country, and suggests that, going forward, there will be a lack of something to work for. Already Chinese citizens don’t trust the state to allow them to raise healthy children. They have stopped getting married, especially in the cities, and look more to have fun.

Affluent women claim they can’t find a good man to marry: one who’s manly, who will love them, and who will reliably raise their standard of life. Women seem less picky in China’s rural areas, or perhaps they find better men there. However it goes, urban women get married late and have few children, both in China and here. China produces great, sappy, soap operas though: a country girl or secretary in a high-power job meets a manly, urban manager who lovers her intensely. A fine example is “The Eternal Love” (watch it here). It involves time travel, and a noble romance from the past. Japan produced similar fiction before the crisis. And a crisis seems to be coming.

While Japan and Korea responded quietly to crisis and “the lost decades,” allowing banks to fail and home values to fall, Russia’s response was more violent. It went to war with Chechnya, then with Belarus and Ukraine, and now with NATO. I fear that China will go to war too — with Taiwan, Japan, and the US. It’s a scary thought; China is a much tougher enemy than Russia. There is already trouble brewing over new islands that they are building.

Robert Buxbaum January 25, 2023. If you want to see a Korean soap opera on the Secretary – manager theme, watch: “What’s wrong with Secretary Kim”. (I credit my wife with the research here.) I suspect that Americans too would like sappy shows like this.

Almost no one over 50 has normal blood pressure now.

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Four years ago, when the average lifespan of American men was 3.1 years longer than today, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology dropped the standard for normal- acceptable blood pressure for 50+ years olds from 140/90 to 120/80. The new standard of normal was for everyone regardless or age or gender despite the fact that virtually no one over 50 now reached it. Normal is now quite un-common.

By the new definition, virtually everyone over 50 now is diagnosed with high blood pressure or hypertension. Almost all require one or two medications — no more baby aspirin. Though the evidence for aspirin’s benefit is strong, it doesn’t lower blood pressure. AHA guidance is to lower a patients blood pressure to <140/90 mmHg or at least treat him/her with 2–3 antihypertensive medications.4 

Average systolic blood pressures for long-lived populations of men and women without drugs.

The graphs shows the average blood pressures, without drugs in a 2008 study of the longest-lived, Scandinavian populations. These were the source of the previous targets: the natural pressures for the healthiest populations at the time, based on the study of 1304 men (50-79 years old) and 1246 women (38-79 years old) observed for up to 12 years. In this healthy population, the average untreated systolic pressure is seen till age 70, reaching 154 for men, and over 160 for women. By the new standards, these individuals would be considered highly unhealthy, though they live a lot longer than we do. The most common blood-pressure drug prescribed in the US today is atenolol, a beta blocker. See my essay on Atenolol. It’s good at lowering blood pressure, but does not decrease mortality.

The plot at left shows the relationship between systolic blood pressure and death. There is a relationship, but it is not clear that the one is the cause of the other, especially for individuals with systolic pressure below 160. Those with pressures of 170 and above have significantly higher mortality, and perhaps should take atenolol, but even here it might be that high cholesterol, or something else, is causing both the high blood pressure and the elevated death risk.

The death-risk difference between 160 and 100 mmHg is small and likely insignificant. The minimum at 110 is rather suspect too. I suspect it’s an artifact of a plot that ignores age. Only young people have this low number, and young people have fewer heart attacks. Artificially lowering a person’s blood pressure, even to this level does not make him young, [2][3] and brings some problems. Among the older-old, 85 and above, a systolic blood pressure of 180 mmHg is associated with resilience to physical and cognitive decline, though it is also associated with higher death rate.

The AHA used a smoothed version of the life risk graph above to justify their new standards, see below. In this version, any blood pressure looks like it’s bad. The ideal systolic pressure seems to be 100 or below. This is vastly too low a target, especially for a 60 year old. Based on the original graph, I would think that anything below 155 is OK.

smoothed chart of deaths per 1000 vs blood pressure. According to this chart, any blood pressure is bad. There is no optimum.

Light exercise seems to do some good especially for the overweight. Walking helps, as does biking, and aerobics. Weight loss without exercise seems to hurt health. Aspirin is known to do some good, with minimal cost and side effects. Ablation seems to help for those with atrial fibrillation. Elequis (a common blood thinner) seems to have value too, for those with atrial fibrillation — not necessarily for those without. Low sodium helps some, and coffee, reducing gout, dementia and Parkinson’s, and alcohol. Some 2-3 drinks per day (red wine?) is found to improve heart health.

I suspect that the Scandinavians live longer because they drink mildly, exercise mildly, have good healthcare (but not too good), and have a low crime rate. They seem to have dodged the COVID problem too, even Sweden that did next to nothing. it’s postulated that the problem is over medication, including heart medication.

Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2023. The low US lifespan is startling. Despite spending more than any other developed countries on heath treatments, we have horribly lower lifespans, and it’s falling fast. A black man in the US has the same expected lifespan as in Rwanda. Causes include heart attacks and strokes, accidents, suicide, drugs, and disease. Opioids too, especially since the COVID lockdowns.

Coffee decreases your chance of Parkinson’s, a lot.

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Some years ago, I thought to help my daughter understand statistics by reanalyzing the data from a 2004 study on coffee and Parkinson’s disease mortality, “Coffee consumption, gender, and Parkinson’s disease mortality in the cancer prevention study II cohort: the modifying effects of estrogen” , Am J Epidemiol. 2004 Nov 15;160(10):977-84, see it here

For the study, a cohort of over 1 million people was enrolled in 1982 and assessed for diet, smoking, alcohol, etc. Causes of deaths were ascertained through death certificates from January 1, 1989, through 1998. Death certificate data suggested that coffee decreased Parkinson’s mortality in men but not in women after adjustment for age, smoking, and alcohol intake. They used a technique I didn’t like though, ANOVA, analysis of variance. That is they compare the outcome of those who drank a lot of coffee (4 cups or more) to those who drank nothing. Though women in the coffee cohort had about 49% the death rate, it was not statistically significant by the ANOVA measure (p = 0.6). The authors of the study understood estrogen to be the reason for the difference.

Based on R2, coffee appears to significantly decrease the risk of Parkinson’s mortality in both men and women.

I thought we could do a better by graphical analysis, see plot at right, especially using R2 to analyze the trend. According to this plot it appears that coffee significantly reduces the likelihood of death in both men and women, confidence better than 90%. Women don’t tend to drink as much coffee as men, but the relative effect per cup is stronger than in men, it appears, and the trend line is clearer too. In the ANOVA, it appears that the effect in women is small because women are less prone Parkinson’s.

The benefit of coffee has been seen as well, in this study, looking at extreme drinkers. Benefits appear for other brain problems too, like Alzheimer’s. It seems that 2-4 cups of coffee per day also reduces the tendency for suicide, and decreases the rate of gout. It seems to be a preventative against kidney stones, too.

There is a confounding behavior that I should note, it’s possible that people who begin to feel signs of Parkinson’s, etc. stop drinking coffee. I doubt it, give the study’s design, but it’s worth a mention. The same confounding is also present in a previous analysis I did that suggested that being overweight protected from dementia, and from Alzheimer’s. Maybe pre-dementia people start loosing weight long before other symptoms appear.

Dr. Robert E. Buxbaum, and C.M. Buxbaum, December 15, 2022

My hero, Peter Cooper of New York, 1791-1883.

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Peter Cooper

It’s good to have hero, someone whose approach to life, family and business you admire that you might reasonably be able to follow. As an engineer, inventor, I came to regard Peter Cooper of New York as a hero. He made his own business and was a success, in business and with his family without being crooked. This is something that is not as common as you might think. When I was in 4th grade, we got weekly assignments to read a biography and write about it. I tended to read about scientists and inventors then and after. I quickly discovered that successful inventors tended to die broke, estranged from their family and friends. Edison, Tesla, Salk, Goodyear, and Ford are examples. Tesla didn’t marry. Henry Ford’s children were messed up. Salk had a miserable marriage. Almost everyone working on the Atom Bomb had issues with the government. Most didn’t benefit financially. They died hated by the press as mass-murderers, and pursued by the FBI as potential spies. It was a sad pattern for someone who hoped to be an inventor -engineer.

The one major exception I found was Peter Cooper, an inventor, industrialist, and New York politician who was honest, and who died wealthy and liked with a good family. One result of reading about him was to conclude that some engineering areas are better than others; generally making weapons is not a path to personal success.

Tom Thumb, the blower at right is the secret to its light weight per power.

Peter Cooper was different, both in operation and outcome. Though he made some weapons (gun barrels) and inverted a remote control torpedo, these were not weapons of mass killing. Besides he but thee for “the good side” of the Civil War. And, when Cooper made an invention or a product, he made sure to have the capital available to make a profit on it too. He worked hard to make sure his products were monopolies, using a combination of patents and publicity to secure their position.

Brand management helps.

Cooper was a strong family man who made sure to own his own business, and made sure to control the sources of key materials too. He liked to invest in other businesses, but only as the controlling share-holder, or as a bond holder, believing that minor share-holders tend to be cheated. He was pro monopoly, pro trusts, and a big proponet of detailed contracts, so everyone knew where they stood. A famous invention of Cooper’s was Jello, a flavored, light version of his hide-glue, see the patent here. Besides patenting it, he sold the product with his brand, thus helping to maintain the monopoly.

Cooper was generous with donations to the poor, but not to everyone, and not with loans. And he would not sign anyone’s note as a guarantor. Borrowers tended to renege, he found, and they resent you besides. You lose your money, and lost them as a friend. He founded two free colleges, Cooper Union, and the Cooper-Limestone Institute, plus an inventor’s institute. (I got my education, free from Cooper Union.) Cooper ran these institutions in his lifetime, not waiting till he was dead to part with his money. Many do this in the vain hope that others will run the institution as they would.

Peter Cooper always sought a monopoly, or a near monopoly, patenting his own inventions, or buying the rights to others’ patents to help make it so. He believed that monopolies were good, saying they were the only sort of business that made money while allowing him to treat his workers well. If an invention would not result in a monopoly, Peter Cooper gave the rights away.

The list of inventions he didn’t patent include the instruments to test the quality of glue and steel (quality control is important), and a tide-powered ferry in New York. Perhaps his most famous unpainted invention was a lightweight, high power steam locomotive, “The Tom Thumb”, made in 1840. Innovations included beveled wheels to center the carriage on its rails, and a blower on the boiler fire, see photo above. The blower meant he could generate high-power in a small space at light weight. These are significant innovations, but Cooper did not foresee having a monopoly, so he didn’t pursue these ideas. Instead, he focussed on making rails and wire rope; he patented the process to roll steel, and the process for making coke from coal. Also on his glue/jello business. Since he made these items from dead cows and horses, he found he could also sell “foot oil” and steam-pounded leather, “Chamois”. He also pursued a telephone/ telegraph business across the Atlantic, more on that below, but only after getting monopoly rights for 50 years.

Cooper managed to stay friends with those he competed with by paying license fees for any patents he used (he tried to negotiate low rates), or buying or selling the patent rights as seemed appropriate. He also licensed his patents, and rented out buildings he didn’t need. He rented at a rate of 7% of the sale price, a metric I’ve used myself, considering rental to be like buying on loan. There is a theory of stock-buying that matches this.

The story the telegraph cable across the Atlantic is instructive to seeing how the pieces fit together. The first significant underwater cable was not laid by Cooper, by a Canadian inventor, Frederick Gisborne. It was laid in 1852 between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Through personal connections, Gisborne’s company got exclusive rights for 30 years, for this and for a cable that would go to Newfoundland, but he didn’t have the money or baking to make it happen. The first cable failed, and Gisborne ran out of money and support. Only his exclusive rights remained. This is the typical story of an inventor/ engineer/businessman who has to rely on other peoples’ money and patience.

A few months after the failure, a friend of Cooper’s, Cyrus Field, convinced Cooper that good money could be made, and public good could be done, if Cooper could lay such a cable all the way to London. One thing that attracted Cooper to the project was that the cable could be made as an insulated iron-copper rope in Cooper’s own factory. Cooper, Field, and some partners (see painting below) bought Gisborne’s company, along with their exclusive rights, and formed a new company, The New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, see charter here. The founders are imagined* with a globe and a section of cable sitting on their table. Gisborne, though not shown in the painting, was a charter member, and made chief engineer. Cooper was president. He also traveled on the boat with Gisborne to lay the cable across the St. Lawrence – just to be sure he knew what was going on. This cable provided a trial for The Trans Atlantic cable.

The founding individuals to lay a transatlantic cable. Peter Cooper at left is the chairman, Cyrus Field is standing, Samuel Morse is at the back. Frederic Gisborne, a founder, does not appear in the paining. Typical.

Samuel Morse was hired as an electrician; he is pictured in the painting, but was not a charter member. Part of the problem with Morse was that he owned the patent on Morse-telegraphy, and Cooper didn’t want to pay his “exorbitant” fees. So Cooper and Field bought an alternative telegraph patent from David Hughes, a Kentucky school teacher. This telegraph system used tones instead of clicks and printed whole letters at a time. By hiring Morse, but not his patents, Cooper saved money, while retaining Morse’s friendship and expertise. The alternative could have been a nasty spat. Their telegraph company sub-licensed Hughes’s tone-method a group of western telegraph owners, “The Western Union,” who used it for many years, producing the distinctive Western Union Telegrams. With enough money in hand and credibility from the Canadian trial, the group secured 50 years monopoly rights for a telegraph line across the Atlantic. Laying the cable took many years, with semi-failed attempts in 1857, 1858, and 1865. When the eventual success came in 1866, the 50 years’ monopoly rights they’d secured meant that they made money from the start. They could treat workers fairly. Marconi would discover that Cooper wrote a good contract; his wireless telegraph required a widely different route.

I should also note that Peter Cooper was politically active: he started as a Democrat, helped form the Republican Party, bringing Lincoln to speak in NY for the first time, and ended up founding the Greenback-Labor Party, running for president as a Greenback. He was strongly for tariffs, and strongly against inflation. He said that the dollar should have the same value for all time for the same reason that the foot should have the same length and the pound the same weight. I have written in favor of tariffs off and on. They help keep manufacturing in America, and help insure that those who require French wine or German cars pay the majority of US taxes. They are also a non-violent vehicle for foreign policy.

Operating under these principles, through patents and taxed monopolies, Peter Cooper died wealthy, and liked. Liked by his workers, liked by much of the press, and by his family too, with children who turned out well. The children of rich people often turn out poorly. Carnegie’s children fought each other in court, Ford’s were miserable. Cooper’s children continued in business and politics, successfully and honorably, and in science/ engineering (Peter Coper Hewitt invented the power rectifier, sold to Westinghouse). The success of Peter Cooper’s free college, Cooper Union, influenced many of his friends to open similar institutions. Among his friends who did this were Carnegie, Pratt, Stevens, Rensselaer, and Vanderbilt. He stayed friends with them and with other inventors of the day, despite competing in business and politics. Most rich folks can not do this; they tend to develop big egos, and few principles.

Robert Buxbaum, November 30, 2022. I find the painting interesting. Why was it painted? Why is Gisborne not in it and Morse in the painting — sometimes described as vice President? The charter lists Morse as “electrician”, an employee. Chandler White, holding papers next to Cooper, was Vice President. My guess is that the painting was made to help promote the company and sell stock. They made special cigars with this image too. This essay started as a 5th grade project with my son. See a much earlier version here.

The main building block of Alzheimer’s research was faked. Now, what.

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Much of health research is a search for simple, bio-molecular causes for our medical problems. These can result in pill-solutions. Diseases tend to be more complex, but Alzheimers seemed to work that way, until this summer when it turned out that the data supporting the simple theory was faked. Alzheimer’s is a devastating cognitive disease that is accompanied by a degenerating brain, with sticky, beta-amyloid plaques and tangles. About 16 years ago, this report, published in Nature seemed to show that a beta-amyloid, Aβ*56, caused the plaques and caused cognitive decline independent of any other Alzheimers indicators. 

The visual difference between an Alzheimer brain and a normal brain is that the former has shrunk. Maybe fat is relevant, fat body leads to a fat brain, and less AZ, maybe?

We were on the way to a cure, or so it seemed. Several studies by this group backed the initial results, and much of Alzheimer’s research was directed into an effort to fill in the story, and find ways to reduce the amount and bonding of this amyloid and others like it. Several other groups claimed they could not find the amyloid at all, or show that amyloids caused the symptoms described. But most negative results went unpublished. The theory was so satisfying, and the evidence from a few so strong, that the NIH poured billions into this approach, over $1B in this year alone. The FDA approved aducanumab, a drug from Biogen, on the assumption that it should work, even though it showed little to no benefit, and had some deadly side effects. Other firms followed, asking for approval of related anti-amyloid drugs that should work.

When news of the fraud came out, detected by Matthew Scragg and a few lone curmudgeons, stock prices plummeted in the drug companies. It now appears that the original work was made up, presented to journals and to the NIH using photoshopped images. For the group that did the fake work, it may mean jail time, for most other groups, the claim is that their work is still relevant. Doctors still prescribe the medications as they have nothing better to offer (Aducanumab therapy costs $50,000 per year). Maybe it’s time to start looking at alternative approaches and theories, sidelined over the last 16 years.

Some alternative theories posit that another molecule is responsible, particularly tau, associated with the tangles. Another sidelined theory is that amyloids are good. For example, that it’s the loss of soluble amyloids that causes Alzheimer’s. Alternately, that inflammation is the root cause, and that the amyloid plaques and tangles are a response to the inflammation, a bandage, perhaps. These theories could explain why the anti-amyloid drugs so often resulted in patient death.

It could be that high bmi protects from dementia. Either that or the diseases that cause weight loss cause dementia. It’s debated here.

It’s also possible that the inability of nerve cells to dispose of waste is the cause of AZ. In heathy people, waste is removed through acidic enzymes within lysosomes. Patients with decreased acid activity have a buildup of waste that includes amyloids. Perhaps the cure is to restore the acid enzymes.

My favorite theory is based on statistical data that shows that fat people are less likely to develop Alzheimers. This might lead to a junk-food cure. The fitness industry is very much against this theory–It’s debated here. They tend to support the inflammation model, claiming that diseases cause Alzheimer’s and cause patients to loose weight first. Could be. I note that Henry Kissinger is the only active politician of my era, the early 70s, still alive and writing intelligently.

Robert Buxbaum, November 17-19, 2022. I hope that Matthew Schragg comes out OK, by the way. Ben Franklin pointed out, that “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Tests designed so that the Ivies pick preppies.

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Elite colleges strive to be selective, and they are, just not for the hard-working scholars they claim to select for. They claim to be color-blind, income-blind, and race-blind, aiming for the best: the most intelligent, most ethical, and hardest working scholar-candidates. Then, to their surprise and satisfaction, all the ivies find that the vast majority of the chosen come from the same rich families and prep-schools as 100 years ago. That happens because the selection is crooked with measures tilted to the rich, Protestant, and preppy.

Through most of the 1900s, most of the ivies had a Jewish quota, enforced formally or informally. They also did their best to discourage middle class, black, and Catholic students in the interest of maintaining the proper student mix. Under Woodrow Wilson, Princeton went further and admitted not one black student. When quotas became illegal, schools began to rely on athletics and tests, with blatant cheating as revealed by the “Varsity Blues” sting operation. In that sting, a dozen or more athletic coaches and high-school administrators were caught taking SAT tests for their richer, connected students, and/or making up phony athletic achievements. The Ivies claimed shock after the cheating was revealed, but it is beyond belief that no one had noticed that these top brains and athletes were neither.

Many top athletes are diagnosed as asthmatic. Some actually are. With the right doctor, you can get an advantage

Another version of this is that richer kids can get extra time to do SAT and ACT tests. The extra time doesn’t show up on the SAT or ACT score, you need a doctor to certify that you are dyslectic or have severe ADHD. Most boys are diagnosed with ADHD these days, itself something of a scam, but most boys don’t get extra test time. You need the right doctor and the right documentation, plus enough money and connections to get the test given by certified test-giver in your own private room. It used to be that the SAT and ACT would report the extra time, but this changed in 2004. Now the extra time, and the disease is not documented, just the higher score. There have been complaints, but the scam goes on. Similar to this, top Olympic athletes can be diagnosed with asthma, and allowed to use performance enhancing, anti-asthma steroids. Again complaints, but no change.

Ivy League schools also tilt to the right families by requiring signs of the right sort of leadership as evaluated by an interview and an essay (see my post on John Kennedy’s essay). You score high on leadership if you helped your relative run for governor. By contrast, if you organized a ping-pong or basketball tournament at your Catholic or Jewish school, you’re the wrong sort of leader. Eagle Scout is sort-of the right sort, and speaking against climate change on TV is. Greta Thernberg and Chelsea Clinton are climate leaders; you, probably are not.

The Ivys explicitly state that they choose for athleticism, but not all sports are equal. All the Ivies claim to need a good women’s lacrosse team, a good crew team, and some good high-divers. Are these sports unavailable at your high-school? What a shame, you’re not a real athlete. You can still try to get in based on extreme leadership and academics.

The Princeton alumni of 1993-1994 were primarily white, rich and preppy. Favoring their children helps insure that the class of 2024 is that way too.

There is no real reason that Harvard needs a top crew team, or needs to excel at women’s lacrosse or high-diving. Sport was not an admission criteria in the 1800s. It was added in the 1900s to avoid admitting Catholics, Jews, and Asians who tended to score well but could not compete on the selected sports. The president of Harvard, Abbot Lowell wrote, “Somehow or other the enrollment of the Jewish students must be limited”. The method he chose, and that all the Ivies came to use, included these tests of leadership and sport, plus a preference for legacies. The children and grand-children of alumni are given significant preferential selection at all the ivies. At Harvard, the acceptance rate for legacy students is about 33%, compared with an overall acceptance rate of under 6%. Since legacies are mostly white, rich, protestant, and preppy, the next generation is guaranteed to be the same.

The Ivies’ methods have been challenged many times over the years. Quotas were found to be illegal as early as 1964. Since then there have been claims of effective quotas, a cause that was pushed under the rug until Donal Trump took it up. Most recently, Harvard, Princeton, and UNC were sued by Asians. One of these, from a poor background scored at the top of his class with a 4.4 GPA and had near-perfect SAT scores, but was rejected for no obvious reason beyond race. The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in 2023. Ahead of this decision, all eight Ivies have decided to dispense with testing for at least for now. The ivies claim that, by making tests optional, they will avoid locking out students who are great (though somewhat illiterate and innumerate). The real purpose seems to be to lock out pushy Asians who might sue them or be so bright they make the legacies feel dumb.

None of the above would matter if the Ivies were not so wonderful, at least the better ones are. I went to Princeton grad school, see photos. It was great despite its waspy leanings. If you can go there, or to Harvard, Yale, Cornell or Penn, go. My feeling for Brown and Columbia are rather the opposite: they’ve gone to the extreme and voted for BDS, see the text here for Brown’s version. Not only did they vote to boycott Israelis and Israeli produce, the “B” of BDS, the’ve also committed to suppress Zionists everywhere. That’s Jews who support Israel. Several, non ivy schools, have committed to the same. In their view, for open debate to flourish anywhere, proud Jews must be excluded. These are no longer colleges, but Klavens.

Robert Buxbaum, October 20, 2022.

John Kennedy’s Nazi spy lover

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Photo and biographical background from Julian Wiles

Kennedy was a well-liked president with several character flaws. The most famous were his sexual dalliances. One these was with a Nazi spy, Inga Marie Arvad, “Inga Binga”. He continued with her, on and off, from his days in Naval Intelligence through his election to congress in 1946 despite being informed of her background by the navy and the FBI. When they began their relationship, Inga Marie was beautiful, 28 and married. That didn’t seem to matter, as she was beautiful, the ex-Miss Denmark, charming and instantly in love with Kennedy. She was also a close friend of Hitler, Goring, and Göebbels, and in the employ of both The Washington Times-Herald and of Axel Wenner-Gren, a suspected Nazi spy master who owned the largest private yacht in the world. It was suspected that the fuel Wenner-Gren bought for his yacht was used to refuel German U-boats in the area.

Before becoming involved with Kennedy, Ms Arvand had married Kamak Abdel Nabi, an Egyptian diplomat, and then Paul Fejos, a Hungarian film-maker. She traveled the world with Fejos, financed by Wenner-Gren, meeting, greeting, and film-making. Still married, she left Fejos in 1936 to move to the US and study journalism at Columbia University. Getting a job at the Washington Times-herald, she wrote light hearted articles based on interviews with the movers and shakers of DC, supported by $5000 checks from her friend, Wenner-Gren.

The affair with Kennedy began in the fall of 1941. Kennedy was working at the Office of Naval Intelligence, a post he’d gotten with influence from his ambassador father, “Big Joe Kennedy”. Joe was an opponent of going to war. Ms. Arvand heartily agreed. She met Jack Kennedy through his sister, Kathleen, “Kick”.

The office of Naval Intelligence had rules against adulterous relationships. Kennedy ignored them. In this case it was particularly problematic as Inga was married, Protestant, and an associate of Hitler. The navy told Kennedy to stay away, and transferred him to Charlestown with orders to stay there, “not to venture more than 50 miles”. Ms Arvad visited him there often under an assumed name, Barbara White. They stayed together, took in movies, plays, and golf. The FBI watched as Arvad was thought to be a spy. Kennedy was again told to stay clear; he did not. Eventually, Hoover intervened and got Kennedy transferred to the South Pacific despite his bad back and other health problems. Inga broke off with Kennedy though he continued to write love letters. She ignored them. Perhaps she thought Kennedy was no longer interesting, even a liability. She was trying to get a job with US overseas intelligence, the forerunner of the CIA.

Inga with husband, and two children. Note that the older, Ronald, looks like J. Kennedy. Photo from Geoffrey Gray.

When Inga didn’t get the job, she moved to Los Angeles where she continued in journalism, working for Harpers Bazar, interviewing the movers and shakers in LA and New York, generally pushing for peace. In January, 1944, she started writing to Kennedy again. He was a hero with political ambitions. She reunited with Kennedy in LA, for a private interview, published, about the sinking of his PT boat. They continued dating well into 1946, after Kennedy was elected to congress. Inga got pregnant from someone (Kennedy?) and left to marry an actor she’d been dating, Tim McCoy. Some months later, Inga gave birth to a boy who looks a lot more like Kennedy than like her husband, see photo.

While Inga no longer contacted JFK, nor JFK her, it seems that Inga was a major factor influencing Kennedy to go into politics — where he could make the world more peaceful. Inga died of Colin cancer in 1973. She only revealed her part of the affair to her eldest son, the Kennedy look-alike, near the end of her life.

The FBI’s knowledge of this story this emerged from the private files of J. Edgar Hoover, recently unsealed, reported by investigative writer, Geoffrey Gray. He speculates that Hoover used his knowledge of Kennedy’s affairs to keep from having to retire, though well past retirement age. Hover was eventually removed by Nixon, and FBI got back at Nixon by leaking as much negative as they could to the press, and more-recently helping the Democrats bug the Trump campaign, then helping spread Russian collusion documents. Also, according to the BBC they were behind the plot to kidnap MI governor Whitmer — a crime they immediately “solved”. I’m not convinced that the FBI, isn’t more of a danger than a protection. See a previous essay, “who will protect us from our protectors?”

Regarding John Kennedy, I’m less-bothered by his sexual dalliances, than by his tendency to suddenly reverse himself. Kennedy called for an attack on Cuba, then reversed while the attack was in progress, dooming the attackers. He reversed again in South Vietnam, first first supporting the government then overthrowing it, and on civil rights. Vigorous persistence, even in the face of criticism is a good trait in a president, something I liked about LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, and Reagan.

Robert Buxbaum, October 14, 2022.