An Entrepreneurial Proposal

Many museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, sell replicas of some of the historical jewelery in their collection. Typically the quality of the replica is significantly lower than the quality of the original—cast when the original was constructed, sometimes using glass instead of the original gemstones. Typically the replicas are expensive.

For quite a long time, I have been seeing imported jewelery, usually in silver, coming from places such as Bali and India, with a quality of execution comparable to that in historical pieces—precise filigree, some of it possibly done by the fusion/colloidal hard soldering technique developed in antiquity to do fine filigree and granulation without having the details blurred by solder. Such jewelery is, materials aside, better than the museum replicas—and much less expensive.

This suggests an interesting possibility for an entrepreneur with an interest in historical jewelery and suitable contacts somewhere in the third world. Put together, and web, a collection of pictures of pieces of historical jewelery. Locate craftsmen willing and able to make copies of those pieces. Offer to make, for online customers, any piece in the collection, at a suitable price. For a somewhat higher price, guarantee never to make another copy of the same piece.

This particular example occurred to me because I happen to be interested in historical jewelery. But there must be many other market niches of the same sort, categories of goods for which the combination of online marketing and hand-craft technology would make it possible for customers to get unique items of special interest to them, while providing profitable work for craftsmen in low income parts of the world.

More Fun with Jewish Law

I've been reading Maimonides and came across two things that I found interesting.

Part I

Suppose you kill someone who is dying of a lethal disease. Maimonides concludes that that isn't really murder, since he would have died anyway—while pointing out that you have to be really sure he was dying of a lethal disease.

Now suppose someone who is dying of a lethal disease kills someone else. If, being a helpful sort, he commits the crime in the presence of the court, he has committed murder and can be convicted of doing so. If, however, he only commits the murder in the presence of witnesses, there is a problem.

Witnesses, in this case or others, might lie. In other cases, one thing discouraging them from perjury is that if it is discovered that their false testimony led to the execution of an innocent defendant, they will be found guilty of murder and themselves executed. But if their testimony leads to the execution of an innocent defendant who is himself dying of a lethal disease, they won't be executed, because killing someone who is dying of a lethal disease isn't murder.

Since the witnesses are not at risk of execution for perjury, they might commit it, so their testimony can not be trusted—cannot be taken as sufficient evidence to convict someone of murder. So if someone who is himself dying of a lethal disease commits murder, and doesn't do it in the presence of the court, he cannot be convicted.

There is a certain beautiful logic to this very screwy result.

Part II

In Maimonides' discussion of what we would call tort law, he considers a number of borderline cases—cases where it is not clear whether the tortfeasor owes the victim a damage payment equal to half the damage or a quarter of the damage done. His conclusion in such cases is that the court can only award the plaintiff quarter damages. If, however, the plaintiff has seized property of the defendant amounting to half damages, the court will not make him give it back.

Part of what is going on here seems to be a rule holding that the court will not transfer property unless it has good reason to do so. It can't award half damages, because it isn't sure that more than quarter damages are owed. But it can't make the plaintiff who has acted on his own to collect half damages give part of the money back, because it isn't sure that half damages aren't owed.

A different way of looking at this is that it represents a hybrid of a conventional legal system, with action by the state or analogous authorities, and a feud system, in which parties act on their own, within some set or explicit or implicit rules, to enforce their rights. I get the same impression looking at the legal rules applied to killing. Under some circumstances, a killer cannot be convicted and punished by the court. But the "avenger of blood," the kinsman of the victim who, in a feud system, would be expected to avenge the killing, can kill the killer with impunity. His right to do so is complicated by various rules, in particular the existence of cities of refuge; once the killer gets to one of those he is in theory safe.

I should probably add that Maimonides is writing at a time when there are no cities of refuge and have been none for a thousand years or so. Substantial parts of his legal code describe what the rules were back when the kingdom of Israel was a going concern and the Temple still standing. One possible explanation is that he believed that that situation was going to be reestablished in the not too distant future—so legal scholars ought to be prepared.

AIDS in Africa: Disturbing Evidence

In the U.S. and Europe, AIDS transmission via vaginal intercourse seems to be very low, with sexual transmission occurring mainly via anal intercourse—one reason why the infection rate is much higher among male homosexuals than in the general population. It is widely believed that this is not true in Africa, that, due perhaps to the prevalence of genital sores, vaginal transmission rates are high enough to provide much of the explanation of the very high rates of AIDS infection.

As a result of references in an online discussion, I recently came across two published articles which offer evidence that this explanation is wrong, that vaginal transmission rates in Africa are not substantially higher than elsewhere. They go on to suggest that what is really going on may be iatrogenic, doctor caused, disease, that much of the transmission may be due to sloppy medical procedures, in particular the reuse of needles for injections. The evidence is in part from the pattern of infection—rates are apparently much too high among young people who have not had sex and whose mothers are not HIV positive, suggesting a non-sexual transmission mechanism. In part it is from studies that try to measure the transmission rate via vaginal intercourse. In part it is from regional patterns that don't fit the patterns of the supposed causes.

The articles are:

Evidence of iatrogenic HIV transmission in children in South Africa

and

HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa not explained by sexual or vertical transmission

My non-expert impression is that they represent serious scientific work, and that the evidence presented is pretty convincing. The implication is that this is a case of people trying to do good and doing harm instead, always disturbing. Does any reader know of later work either confirming or rebutting the argument?

Dishwasher Woes

A while back, we replaced our dishwasher, which came with the house when we bought it some fourteen years ago. The new one, selected on the basis of a positive online discussion of the previous model in the (Bosch) line, turned out to be in almost all ways worse than the old. It held fewer dishes, cleaned less well, dried much less well. It's only significant advantage, so far as we could see, was that it was quieter. It is bad enough so that we are considering simply throwing out our new dishwasher and replacing it with another, after doing a more thorough job of research.

It occurred to me to wonder whether part of the problem had to do with pressure, either from the market or from regulation, for energy efficiency. The external dimensions of a built-in dishwasher are fixed. One way of making it more energy efficient is by putting on more insulation to make it easier to keep things hot while they are being washed—which also makes it quieter. More insulation is likely to mean thicker insulation, which means less space for dishes. Along similar lines, the new dishwasher, unlike the old, doesn't have the option of hot air drying—dishes are dried (or not dried) only by the residual heat from the washing. That saves energy, but makes the dishwasher a good deal less useful.

Does anyone reading this know enough about dishwasher engineering to say whether new dishwashers are, typically, worse than old for these reasons? Whether, if so, the problem is energy efficiency standards set by regulation, or merely the advantage of being able to advertise energy efficiency and low noise?

And For the Real Enthusiasts in Jewish Law, A Story

It occurred to me, writing my previous post, that it might be read by someone who actually knew something about the subject, and who would object that I was in one way or another distorting the facts or biasing my discussion. To divert the attention of any such reader, here is a story which, I have concluded, must be the original of a more familiar version along similar, if less academic, lines.

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The young scholar came to the Rabbi and he said "Rabbi, I have been studying the Mishneh Torah of the learned Moshe ben Maymun, and it is a trial and a tribulation to me. He goes into great elaboration over the heave offering, and the first tithe, and the heave offering of the first tithe, and the second tithe, and the poor man's tithe, and gleanings, and the corners of the field, and I know not what else, and I cannot follow the tenth part of it all. What am I to do?"

And the rabbi said to him, "Do you know anyone who has a copy of the Mishnah that you might study?"

And the young scholar answered, "my uncle has a scroll of the order "seeds," and no doubt would permit me to study it."

"Then go," said the rabbi, "and for the next month study the Mishnah, and then return to me."

A month later, the young scholar appeared before the rabbi, still more distraught and unhappy.

"Rabbi," he said, "This Mishnah is a terrible confusion. It gives one rule from one sage and another from another, and a third from a third sage, and it tells me that the school of Hillel said this and the school of Shammai said that, and I cannot tell for all it says what the law is or how I am to act. I am weary and confused and know less of the law than I did before I began to study it. Rabbi, what am I to do?"

"Do you" the Rabbi asked "know anyone who possesses scrolls of the Talmud, and would let you read in them?"

"My wife's brother, Rabbi, possesses scrolls of one of the orders of the Talmud, and no doubt would permit me to study it."

"Then go, and for the next month study Talmud, and when that time is done return to me."

And the young scholar did as he was told. A month later he returned to the Rabbi.

"Oh Rabbi, this Talmud is a terrible confusion and mess and tangle, and I can make nothing of it. For not only does it give one answer from one sage and a different from another, but those commenting on the answers offer two explanations for the first, for neither of which any rhyme or reason is presented, and three for the second, and make the two sages to agree on one rule, or agree on the other rule, but never tell me what the law is, and if there is any in the whole community who knows less of the law than I do after reading for a month in the Talmud I cannot guess who it could be. Rabbi, what am I to do?"

"Have you still a scroll of the writings of the Rambam?"

"Indeed I do, Rabbi."

"Take them down and read from them, that you may learn the law."

A week later the Rabbi met the young scholar, and he said to him "How go your studies."

"Wonderfully well, Rabbi. I have been studying the Mishneh Torah, and nothing could be clearer. For each case it gives one rule, not two or three, and it spends no words at all on explaining away the disagreements of the sages, but merely tells what the law is in plain words."

Jewish Law and Constitutional Interpretation

For some years, I have taught a law school seminar on legal systems very different from ours. Systems covered range from modern gypsies to classical Athens and imperial China. Curious readers may want to look at a past year's web page for the class.

After teaching the seminar for several years I got bored with covering the same material, so decided to add something new. I have accordingly been studying Jewish law. It is a fascinating subject, probably the longest span of well documented history of any legal system—about 2500 years of rules, arguments, opinions.

Part of the fun of the course is seeing how the same issues arise in unrelated systems. There are, for instance, obvious parallels between problems faced by the legal system of classical Athens and similar problems in modern legal systems. In both, successful litigation could be profitable, creating an incentive to litigate not in order to punish violations of the law but in order to collect (in our context) punitive damages or be paid off with an out of court settlement. One of the solutions the Athenians found for that problem was a rule under which a (private) prosecutor who failed to get at least 30% of the (large) jury to vote for conviction was fined—an automatic punishment for abusive litigation. It might be worth considering.

The parallel I am writing this post to discuss involves a broader issue—how the law is determined. One can view Jewish law, at least at first glance, as simply working out the implications of a divinely inspired text—the written Torah, aka the Pantateuch, aka the first five books of the Old Testament. From this perspective, the job of the legal scholar is simply to figure out what legal rules that text implies. Disagreements among scholars are not disagreements about what the law should be but about what the law is.

This approach to the law raises obvious problems. The divinely inspired text may contain rules that you do not want to enforce, such as capital punishment of a son who curses his parents, or the rule canceling all debts every seventh year. It may lack rules you think are needed. And it may impose requirements for conviction that you conclude are too stringent, such as the requirement that, in order for anyone to be convicted of a capital offense, he must have been warned that it was a capital offense by two different people immediately before he did it.

All of these problems were at various points solved, either by creative interpretation of the text or by claims that the text itself authorized the making and changing of legal rules—by scholars learned in the law and by communal authorities acting as substitutes for the no longer existing king. An example of creative interpretation is Maimonides argument that the rule on the disobedient son could only apply to a son aged between thirteen years and one day and thirteen years, three months and a day—on the theory that by the latter age it was logically possible that the son could have impregnated a woman as soon as he became an adult (13 years+1 day+2 pubic hairs), that by three months later she could be known to be pregnant, and hence that a son of thirteen+three months+1 day might be a father, and as such one to whom the rule on sons did not apply.

My favorite example of the combination of additional legislation plus creative interpretation has to do with requirements for marriage. It had been held that the communal authorities could rule on secular matters but not religious matters. Marriage was a religious matter—and some secular authorities wanted to impose requirements for marriage, such as additional witnesses, beyond those provided in religious law.

If the secular authority held that a woman was not married because its additional requirements had not been complied with and so was free to marry someone else, it was permitting the marriage of a woman who, under religious law, was already married, thus engaged in a serious violation of religious law. The solution was for the communal authority to declare that, if a marriage was conducted without meeting its requirements, it would retroactively confiscate the wedding ring. Ownership of property was a secular matter, so under its authority. If the groom did not own the wedding ring (or equivalent) used in the ceremony, the ceremony was, under religious law, invalid. Hence they were not married.

The problem of canceling debts—it is hard to get someone to lend you money if he knows you are not going to pay it back—was dealt with in a more direct fashion. The rabbis (specifically Hillel) came up with a legal procedure (Prossbul) by which a creditor took his claim to the court and got a written statement that the seventh year cancellation would not apply to it. By Maimonides' day, a little more than a thousand years later, the prossbul had become the default; if a creditor couldn't provide evidence that he had one for his loan, the court would simply assume that it existed but he had lost the document. Thus a clear provision of Torah had been effectively eliminated from the law.

One view of Jewish law is that it consists of working out the implications of a known set of divine commands. Another, at the opposite extreme, is that it consists of legal scholars and communal authorities deciding what the law ought to be and then fudging up some excuse, based in at least a tenuous way on the text, for claiming that that is what the law is. The truth may be somewhere between the two, but these examples, and others I could offer, make the second view not entirely implausible.

All of which should be familiar to anyone who has been involved in controversy over constitutional interpretation in the U.S.. According to one view, it is the job of the justices of the Supreme Court to figure out the implications of a set of legal rules, the Constitution, which, if not divinely inspired—opinions on that question might differ—is at least to be treated as if it were. An alternative view is that the job of the Justices is to figure out what the law ought to be and then come up with the best argument they can, however implausible, to claim that that is what the Constitution requires, or at least permits.

In this case again, I am describing two polar positions; the reality is probably somewhere in between. But if one considers how handgun restrictions in Chicago and New York are to be made consistent with both the Second Amendment and the Doctrine of Incorporation, or how a farmer growing crops to feed to his own animals can be regulated under the clause of the Constitution giving Congress authority over interstate commerce, it is hard not to conclude that Justices of the Supreme Court have been just as willing to stretch their text to what they think current needs require as the rabbis were.

Wanted: A Computer for the Bath

I enjoy taking long baths, soaking in the hot water. For entertainment, aside from my thoughts, I can read a book—preferably a paperback, and one that I am willing to take some risk of getting wet.

Much of the rest of the time, my entertainment consists of doing things on my computer—arguing with people on Usenet, browsing the web for information, playing World of Warcraft. None of that is very practical while bathing. I could put a board across the (large) bathtub and put my laptop on it, but dropping my laptop into the bath would be a more serious risk than dropping a paperback in. With enough ingenuity I could probably cludge up a more practical setup, using a computer and large screen somewhere else in the room and a wireless keyboard and mouse, or mouse equivalent, preferably waterproof. But I suspect that setting such a thing up would be expensive in both time and money.

Surely I am not alone in my preferences. Surely there is a market niche here waiting to be filled.

Science, Journalism, and (self) Censorship

I was recently struck by the contrast between two news stories on the same event, the publication of thousands of emails and documents from a climate research group in Britain, obtained by hacking into their computers. The Wall Street Journal story described the contents of what had been taken and published to the internet:

"In several of the emails, climate researchers discussed how to arrange for favorable reviewers for papers they planned to publish in scientific journals. At the same time, climate researchers at times appeared to pressure scientific journals not to publish research by other scientists whose findings they disagreed with."

...

"More recent exchanges centered on requests by independent climate researchers for access to data used by British scientists for some of their papers. The hacked folder is labeled "FOIA," a reference to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by other scientists for access to raw data used to reach conclusions about global temperatures.

Many of the email exchanges discussed ways to decline such requests for information, on the grounds that the data was confidential or was intellectual property. In other email exchanges related to the FOIA requests, some U.K. researchers asked foreign scientists to delete all emails related to their work for the upcoming IPCC summary. In others, they discussed boycotting scientific journals that require them to make their data public."

The other story was from the BBC, currently my first source for online news. It discussed the successful hacking—and said nothing at all about what was found.

I was reminded of the verse by Humbert Wolfe (of whom I know nothing else—I encountered it in something written by George Orwell).

"There is no way to bribe or twist
Thank God the British Journalist.
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to"

------------------------------
A few more quotes
(added to the post later)

I noticed a few more quotes, this time from the Washington Post, and wondered how those defending the emails in comments here would react to them:

In one e-mail, the center’s director, Phil Jones, writes Pennsylvania State University’s Michael E. Mann and questions whether the work of academics that question the link between human activities and global warming deserve to make it into the prestigious IPCC report, which represents the global consensus view on climate science.

“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” Jones writes. “Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

In another, Jones and Mann discuss how they can pressure an academic journal not to accept the work of climate skeptics with whom they disagree. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann writes. . . .

Is pressuring a journal not to accept work you disapprove of by getting colleagues not to cite papers published in that journal a legitimate tactic?

Europe and American Politics

In a recent discussion of E.U. legal issues, someone proposed a hypothetical—the U.S. joining the European Union. It occurred to me that reactions to that scenario provide an interesting slant on U.S. attitudes. To some, probably including a majority of those in the room, it sounds like a dream too good to be true. To others it sounds more like a nightmare.

It is one of the lines along which Americans divide. Many see western European societies as more civilized, humane, intelligent than ours. Others see them as conservative, sclerotic, boring—a warning of what we could, and shouldn't, become. Roughly speaking, it is the same line that divides us politically. I would guess that most in the first group voted for the Democratic candidate in the last few election and a majority in the second for the Republican. As Charles Murray wrote somewhere, we now know what Barack Obama is. He's a Swede.

It would be interesting to look at the same division from the other side. It is surely true now, as it has been true for a very long time, that many Europeans look on America as only half civilized, with much to learn from older and wiser cultures. It is surely also true that many see it as where things are happening. I remember a conversation with some English students some forty years ago; one, I believe a dental student, commented that all the new stuff in his field was coming out of America.

Reading Dick Francis, a very popular English novelist, it is pretty clear that he and his protagonists are in the second category, that they see America as almost literally a breath of fresh air. For a more ambiguous view, consider a book by Scottish science fiction novelist Ken MacLeod, set in the mid-21st century. His protagonist sees America as an immature, irresponsible, wasteful culture, insufficiently concerned with energy conservation and the like. But when, fleeing political difficulties at home, he escapes to America, he says that it feels as though he has spent his life living under a low roof and it has suddenly been lifted.

Wanted: Retro Servers

Over the past few years, World of Warcraft has had two major expansions. Each raised the top limit on character level, added new areas to play in and new quests to do—targeted mainly at high level characters, since they were the ones who had already done most of the interesting stuff in the previous version of the game.

This raised a problem for a new player or a player with a new character. Before getting to the fun new stuff he had to spend a lot of time "leveling" his character to get him up to the necessary level. To solve that problem, the expansion modified the existing material, typically by making everything easier, reducing the cost in time and effort of getting a new character up to a reasonably high level.

The downside of that change was to lower the quality of the lower level material. Quests that used to provide an interesting and enjoyable challenge were now only a test of whether you had half an hour free to do them. Some players responded by persuading, or paying, higher level characters to walk their low level characters through the quest, cutting it from half an hour to fifteen minutes—and, incidentally, eliminating any point to doing the quest other than as a way of leveling the character.

Not everyone was happy with the changes; some players miss the challenges of the earlier versions. The obvious solution is for Blizzard to provide, in addition to its regular servers running the current version of the game, a few retro servers. A classic server would run the game as it existed prior to the first upgrade, a Burning Crusade server the game as it existed prior to the second upgrade. A player who wanted the fun of working through the early quests could create a character on one of the retro servers, a player who preferred the later could have a character there, and one who enjoyed both could have characters on both sorts of servers. A character from a retro server could, perhaps when he reached the maximum level, transfer to a less retro one. Transfers in the other direction would presumably not be permitted, since the new material and higher levels from the current version of the game would not fit well into the early versions.

Is anyone from Blizzard reading this post?

My Recent Lectures

This year I have been recording my public lectures—when I remember—and webbing them. So if you want something to listen to while driving, or in the bath, feel free.

Alternatively, you could listen to the podcasts of my novel.