Rocky Point Water Temperature and the Failure of a Defintion of Rationality

What is rationality? As good a definition as any I've heard is: someone who doesn't give away money.

A preference set [A>B, B>C, and C>A] is not logical because you would pay money to trade C for A, B for C, and then A for B until you've spent all your money to end up no better than you began. Unfortunately, one of the first results of game theory is that exactly such a preference set can be expressed by groups of (at least three) voters, each of whom has an individually rational preference set. For example, in a recent election, voters preferred Gore to Bush, Bush to McCain, and McCain to Gore.

If the human mind is composed of parts that interact or "vote" to make decisions, with no Kantian Captain making a final logical check, individual actions would be just as irrational. And thanks to Nicole, I am now convinced that rationality is overrated -- it doesn't explain human actions. The reasons we give for our actions ARE important (we can't look just at actions for meaning) even if they're not logical. If our reasons are nonsensical, that itself is no reason (or at most, a reason on par with any other possibly countervailing "reason") to discount our words.

Furthermore, logic can be used to force certain responses, for example, giving 100 dollars away: True or false: you will either give me 100 dollars or you will answer false? If you say false, you are an irrational liar, no better than the man who trades A for B, then B for C, and (because he prefers C to A), C for A. But if you say true, you didn't say false, so you have to give me 100 dollars. To which Sanjay issued his infamous "f*ck you!!!!!!!!!!!!!".

How could it be rational to give away money?

Disease and pH

What is your pH?

"Whereas the median pH value in normal tissues is 7.5, in many tumor tissues the extracellular pH is more acidic, and may be as low as 5.8 (Tannock and Rotin, 1989).

"This is a consequence of a high rate of lactic acid production in tumors even under aerobic conditions (Tannock and Rotin, 1989; Boyer and Tannock, 1992; Gatenby and Gillies, 2004).
The intracellular pH of mammalian cells is normally maintained within a narrow range, i.e. from 7.1 to 7.3, and is tightly regulated by specific ion exchangers and this also holds for tumor cells (Moolenaar et al., 1984; Boyer and Tannock, 1992). As a consequence, tumor cells are exposed to a pH gradient, which can enhance the toxicity of certain weak acid drugs and impair the uptake of weak bases (Tannock and Rotin, 1989; Boyer and Tannock, 1992;
Kozin et al., 2001; Mahoney et al., 2003; Greijer et al., 2005). The idea that cancer is a disease of pH and anaerobic conditions was first proposed by Nobel laureate Otto Warburg, more than 50 years ago.

Different proteins have isoelectric points (are most stable) at different pHs. The near-neutral pI region has presumably been depleted by selective pressure -- cytoplasmic proteins are least soluble at their isoelectric point. Proteins may be evolutionarily trapped on one side of the valley or the other.

For example, human pepsin A has a pI of 3.4, consistent with its expression in the highly acidic stomach; human cytochrome c has a pI of 9.6 appropriate to binding negatively-charged membrane phospholipid.


A theory of diet related to the effects of foods on body pH:
In addition to testing bodily fluid pH, the doctor recommends: respiratory rate and breath holding ability as key indicators of the pH of body fluids. This has to with the role of CO2 in the acidification of blood. "A person with an acid imbalance will generally have a resting respiratory rate of 19 or more and if they take a deep breath will only be able to hold it for 40 seconds or less. Why? Because carbon dioxide is used by the
body to regulate pH."

Orwellian Cognitive Science

The scariest thing about cognitive science is its discovery and quantization of human behavior -- raising the specter of controlling human behavior. Behaviorism is dormant, not dead, and at casual luncheons graduate students and their advisers wonder aloud if that wasn't the ghost of BF Skinner they saw over near the punch bowl. Advertisers already correlate our unconscious (evolutionarily-based?) color biases to make us think orange and blue detergent is cheap and powerful.

[insert more examples]

If you're not scared by biology, the science of understanding the secret underpinnings of life, you don't understand it. And if you're not scared of neuroscience, the science of understanding the secret foundations of the human mind, you don't understand it. Our only hope is that it may prove impossible to understand.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense. Henry Miller

Lesson Plan #1. Relationships: Analogy and Resemblance

Relationships: analogy, resemblance

In education, we teach you what kind of assumptions you can make.
Everyone has seen the kid who sees a bird and then thinks that he can fly.
This is false.
Unless he can generate sufficient lift to overcome gravity. Orbits, bernouli, etc.

Now: correspondence. When are two things equal? Equivalent: right and left hand.
Cardinal number (e.g. 5 or infinity) natural numbers vs. transfinite cardinal numbers
Name an infinite set: the set of all natural numbers
Denumberably infinite set is given a name: aleph-null.
Other examples: all even numbers (show correspondence)
All pairs of natural numbers; [therefore rational fractions]
Arranged diagonally: ((1,1)>(2,1)>(1,2)>(1,3)>(2,2)>(3,1)>(4,1))

Aren’t all infinite sets denumerably infinite then?
No: real numbers
Start simple: between 0 and 1
Make a correspondence: 0.20746….=1
0.16238….=2
0.97126….=3

Until you have a countably infinite list. But now construct a new decimal whose first digit is different from 1, whose second is different from 2, whose third is different from 3, etc. Continue until you have a decimal that is different from the infinite number already given. Obviously you could do this at least 8 other times, and then a new order would suffice to let you do it again, and again, and again…

Thus the set of natural numbers and the set of real numbers are not equivalent
The set of real numbers is called transcendental numbers. It is equivalent both to a line (or any size) and the plane(!), or a space of any dimension.

A new tool for making bigger infinities: The set of all subsets.

What if biologists studied the wind?

"Biocultural Diversity"

"Areas of high biodiversity (diversity of plant and animal species and their habitats) tend to coincide with a high number of distinct ethnic groups speaking different languages."







The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based group, has recently acknowledged that there needs to be an Endangered Species Act for languages and cultures. For thought-provoking shock value I've included some of my favorite drawings of ice age and post-ice age Europe.

Fractals, manufacturing, and biomimicry

Fractals are interesting -- I just read a story by Oliver Sacks about a boy with autism who could draw perfect replicas of the style of a building, while making mistakes about the number of smokestacks or windows for example. Styles might correspond to some sort of fractal. I do a lot of brain dissections -- the trachea that sheath the brain are obviously fractal, and as I zoom in to get a better look at different structures I see the same patterns repeated over and over. Afterward, if I close my eyes, I see similar fractals that shift -- they are not actual images of what I saw, but imaged generated based on what I saw.

Biomimicry is an interesting field -- lately I've bifurcated from thinking about biomimicry purely in physical or visual (ie the fractals you can look at) ways to thinking about it in terms of systems engineering design. There are a number of japanese design concepts that are now enshrined in American manufacturing. Muda, Poka-Yoke, "Batch and Queue" Vs. "Just in Time" (I think there are japanese words for these also but I can't find them).

I've been thinking alot about HOW science is done, what the bottlenecks are, and how that corresponds to biology. You know the standard gene-->RNA-->protein? I'm wondering how similar that manufacturing process is to the manufacturing of cars. I know mistakes are made and that error-detection systems exist in both. Interestingly, I just learned about the "go/no-go" action initiation checkpoint in the mind/brain. At some point you decide whether or not to move your arm (about 1/2 second before you actually move it, at least in some studies) and that processing step has been localized to an anatomical substrate.

End of the World?

• Declining sperm concentrations
• 1 in 3 children in America today will get diabetes
• Cancer rates
• mental illness rates, % of kids on psychotic medicine
• 80% infected with CMV; latent but we don't know why

awesome maps and references
http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/human-conditions.php

How to Get High Free

[image from book...?]

Pkhenz Anopsology

"Food stood on the table, steaming and stinking. The sadism of cookery has always amazed me. Would-be chickens are eaten in liquid form. The innards of pigs are stuffed with their own flesh A gut that's swallowed itself garnished with stillborn chickens--what else, when you think of it, is scrambled egg with sausage?"

"Wheat is treated more unmercifully still: they cut it, beat it, crush it to dust." Pkhenz. Andrei Sinyavsky

Manduca sexta Head Man

Special Thanks to Gretchen Suding.

What's Inside the World?

A century ago people didn't know what the interior of the Earth looked like...but they had many ideas, extrapolated from what they did know: thousands of miles of jungle caves?? Feel free to contribute your own rendition of what's inside. The psychological importance of the Earth and our conception of it can be read off mind-maps like these. They say more about what is inside each of us than what is outside. But what is inside the Earth?

Light and Color in the Open Air

"Light and Color in the Open Air" by M. Minnaert is one of the best books ever, one of the few great classics, destined to be carried into innumerable bomb shelters and deserted desert island hermitages.

To the left is an image of the shadow and penumbra of Mt. Wrightson, 9500', at sunset. To the right is the diffraction pattern of a street light through a tree. Minnaaert explains:

"One sees at night, when a street-lamp is shining just behind a tree, that the light is reflected here and there by the twigs; these shining patches are, in reality, shorter or longer lines of light, and all these lines lie in concentric circles round the light-source. Owing to perspective we see branches that lie parallel to the plane of incidence greatly shortened, whereas those at right angles show their full length. Since there are as many branches to be found in either direction, we shall see light lines mainly at right angles to the plane of incidence. Each shining ring can be traced to a definite branch or twig. " [paraphrase]

This has some similarity to x-ray diffraction.

Raw Diet = Self Knowledge

People say if you knew how animals are slaughtered you wouldn't eat meat. But if you knew how margarine or soy milk were made you probably wouldn't eat those either.

Eating raw is about knowledge (self/other). Amazing how even the most basic things are a mystery -- like kinds of bananas, the origin of seedless grapes, or whether raw nuts are actually raw. What is raw? If a nut has to be flash-roasted to remove the shell, dried at 180 degrees, boiled in lye, and then washed in salt water and dried again, is it still raw? Simplify, simplify.

The difference between wild and feedlot animals is apparent in their ratios of fatty acids -- which are directly assimilated into your own cell membranes and axon sheaths. You have the same fatty acids as the food you eat. Free range cows have as much omega-3 as fish, more than twice as much as feedlot. And the difference between wild animals and feedlot is even more profound.

Being aware of your own body (the wonder!): maybe its not as simple as a fat/calorie 2nd order differential equation, that if you eat more than you excrete or burn as fuel you'll gain weight. Maybe there are more subtle mechanisms at work; maybe the human body is more complex than just needing fat, carbohydrate, protein, and a few vitamins. By eating raw, I believe that I've substituted the external art of cooking for the internal art of knowing my instincts.

What would caveman eat?

Heavy Metal Antibiotics: The Oligodynamic effect and Homeopathy

That silver, copper, and possibly germanium (and many other metals) have antibiotic properties is known as the oligodynamic effect, and is widely used in sterile gauze and other mainstream medical applications. Interestingly, these same toxic metals may have growth-stimulating effects in ultra-low doses; known as the Arndt-Schultz law ("small doses stimulate; medium doses inhibit; large doses kill"), from homeopathy.

On a related note, what is the shiny stuff on the new $20 bill? Copper? Gold? Plastic?

Old Truths Die Hard

An old, oft-repeated truism: The size of the finest detail that can be resolved is proportional to L/NA, where L is the wavelength of the light and NA is the numerical aperature (related inversely to f number (f/#)).

BUT: Confocal, I5M, and the new 4Pi can go far beyond this. 4Pi resolves detail below 100nm using a system of genius parallel high NA (~1.4) optics and deconvolution.

CF.
superlens
left-handed material, metamaterial

negative refractive index
"evanescent" waves
optical diffraction limit
deconvolution

Schlieren, shadowgraph and interferometric techniques have been used for many years to study the distribution of density gradients within a transparent medium.

Molecular Mechanism of Laser Wound Regeneration

The postulated molecular mechanism for the action of near-infrared lasers on wound healing and seed viability is photoactivation of enzymes: Primary photoacceptors, which are activated by laser, are thought to be flavins, cytochromes (pigments in the respiratory chain of cells) and porphyrins. These mitochondrial enzymes can convert laser energy into electro-chemical energy. The relevance of this to intra-protein electron transfer reactions?

During my summer internship with Dr. Hoopes' lab I decided to assay the absorbance spectra of proteins in order to discover which protein(s) were absorbing the near-infrared laser light. I assumed, as this review apparently does, that the coherent properties of the laser were or secondary importance, related only to the intensity of light delivered. I am still looking for a good reference work that charts protein absorbance spectra for a truly systematic analysis of the problem. Unfortunately, it appears likely that the color of proteins is determined by a number of factors, most notably the entire state of the cytoplasmic matrix.

I am also not sure what the relevance, if any, of autofluorescence or autolasing is to this.

On the clinical side, with the advent of cheap multi-spectra LEDs the range of this NASA-discovered therapy can only increase.

DETAILS: It is postulated that the following reaction is activated by laser (1): Low doses of laser stimulate ATP activation of the Ca++ pump in mitochondria. Ca++ enters the cytoplasm (via ion channels) and eventually(?) activates cell mitosis and cell proliferation. Higher doses of laser stimulate hyperactivity of the Ca++/ATPase pump and exhaust the ATP reserves of the cell, leading to inability to maintain osmotic pressure and apoptosis.

At work today...

To get the "fly"-through interactive animation to work, download the plug-in:

Architecture

I've been creating maximal strength sculptures using string dipped in glue. I tie the strings into a network and hang them from the underside of a table. It stretches into a perfect parabola that redistributes the weight equally onto all supports. This is a good tool to design buildings that use a minimum amount of materials while maximizing space. The glued strings are not very strong (you can easily bend them between thumb and forefinger) but because they are in perfect compression (everything in this model is in compression - my explorations of building with tensegrity haven't gone as well) along their length, they do not bend.

Note: because this structure was still wet when turned it over, this picture shows it slightly bent.

Two Species?

Will the human race split a la HG Well's Time Machine into two species, one pale (or artifically tanned), indistinguishable from the interconnected network of pipes, florescent-lit loading docks, tunnels and cages of industrial agriculture, the other wild and loose, roaming large on the fat of the land, eating nuts and berries running with the quick in their blood? One that maintains a sort-of-sanity with Prozac and Adderal and Viagra, the other with meditation, self-knowledge, and vitality?

I think someday we might remember laughing at the idea that we would ever live in a completely artificial/virtual environment, and, as we suckle contentedly from the omnipresent cacaphanous artificial teat, wonder that we thought we were free.

The expression of pain and remorse on this right eye of the rattlesnake we killed made the meat feel less like slimy chicken and more like that of a human as it slid down my throat.

My cousin Sanjay is an artist

The Environment Creates the Organ

Lamarck Elaborated

The Greeks were wrong who said our eyes have rays;
Not from these sockets or these sparkling poles
Comes the illumination of our days.
It was the sun that bored these two blue holes.

It was the song of doves begot the ear
And not the ear that first conceived of sound:
That organ bloomed in vibrant atmosphere,
As music conjured Ilium from the ground.

The yielding water, the repugnant stone,
The poisoned berry and the flaring rose
Attired in sense the tactless finger-bone
And set the taste-buds and inspired the nose.

Out of our vivid ambiance came unsought
All sense but that most formidably dim.
The shell of balance rolls in seas of thought.
It was the mind that taught the head to swim.

Newtonian numbers set to cosmic lyres
Whelmed us in whirling worlds we could not know,
And by the imagined floods of our desires
The voices of Sirens gave us vertigo.

-Richard Wilbur. [thanks]

e.g.

"Olfactory systems, unlike the visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems, encode stimuli with discontinuous features. Odorants are discriminated not by spatial wavelength, temporal frequency, or the topography of the receptors they activate, but primarily by discrete molecular attributes, such as carbon chain length and the presence and orientation of specific side-groups. This is reflected in the typically discontinuous, modular nature of the primary olfactory neuropils in both vertebrates and higher invertebrates"

Democracy ahead of Greed?

Arizona Proposition 200: Voter Reward Act would have paid up to $1 million in unclaimed lottery money to one randomly selected voter. We voted it down, in spite of the personal incentive, because apparently we value informed voters over those seeking a free lottery ticket.

But if we don't want uninformed, greedy voters, does that mean that we really want informed voters? Should we have an IQ test, or a voter competency test? My idea is an "entrance-exit poll"; voters are asked to recall their votes fifteen minutes after casting them: if they can't name the candidates and propositions they voted for, maybe those votes didn't matter very much to them and shouldn't matter very much to us. In this way the wheat (knowledgeable votes) would be separated from the chaff (random votes) with a minimum of hassle. The "random" votes could be subtracted from the significant votes in the final tally.

However, in the interests of honesty, I should mention that I cannot recall if I voted for or against Proposition 200...

I am an HISTOLOGIST: I seek to understand things.

Life is almost completely transparent. Histology has the goal of making it less transparent and hence more tractable. Why does 'transparent' mean obvious, easily understandable?

There are two parts to histology; fixatives and stains. Fixatives "freeze" the tissue by cross-linking proteins. Stains are dyes or inks, many borrowed from the textile industry. They work in sundry ways, but the idea is that each is only "sticky" to a certain substrate. I remember learning in O-Chem that even nitrile gloves are porous to some fluids, although latex is sufficient to stop them. And it turns out that the most useful glues and adhesives are those that are selectively sticky, not universally so. (The tape-stuck-on-the-hand syndrome). Antibodies are the most selectively-sticky glues, and in the past 30 years we figured out how to grab them with our dyes.

I wonder if any dyes ARE antibodies? A good candidate to investigate this would be tannins.

(Toluidine blue was used to dye the cervical connective in Manduca Sexta).

classification schemes and the limits of knowing

This is a great website on the computational side of logic rules in human and artificial intelligence

And of course they apply their method to poisonous mushrooms.

Growing forms, like mushrooms, show a complex morphologic system. Can you recognize these shapes?



Is the human brain complex enough to understand its own complexity? Are we smart enough to understand ourselves? Do these schemes, schemas, classes identify things in the world, or are they merely useful heuristics that may confuse us later? The apparent shape of crystals are classified in a wonderful schema, a schema that is a reflection of the underlying atomic structure. I hope to have an entry on x-ray crystallography as soon as I learn it.

What I am suggesting is that the eye was made to fit the world, just as the fish's fin was fit to the sea...[Richard Wilbur]

Should we analyze things based on rules or based on fuzzy logic?

Explain this, Mr. String Theorist

The Brazil Nut Problem, imaged with MRI. Why do the large nuts rise to the top in a shaken can of mixed nuts? This work shows that it is NOT because the small nuts squeeze under the big ones, with a net upward movement of the big ones bouncing on top. Instead, this shows that a convective flow develops and that ALL nuts move upward, while only the smaller ones are able to enter the corresponding downward flow (visible along the sides of the second image). See a nice review of theory and experiment.

This is still a very active area of research, and corresponding to the title, the results can not yet be explained based on first principles. This is an emergent property of nuts, people, and (often) beer.

Movie Thoughts

Yojimbo, (1970) by Kurosawa is a great film, with enough to mull over for days beyond the fantastic architecture of a japanese town (implicitly compared to the shanty fascades of a western town). Why does the great samurai hero who loves to drink and fight not enjoy women? Does he not thank the old man at the end because now "they are even", although that phrase was used interchangeably throughout the movie to mean, "I screwed you and there's nothing you can do about it".





A wallpaper.

Hidden Fortress by Kurosawa is also a great film.
And Rashomon (better than Waiting For Godot).

BBC vs. NPR and PBS

I remember staying awake to listen to the BBC radio program BBC World Service. I heard the intro trumpets blaring, and I was transported from my bed in dark and rainy and cold Washington State to far-off Africa, India, Malaysia. The accents were thick, the jungles steamy, and the news, well, completely new. I had never heard, let alone imaged, the wars and disasters that crackled from the tiny speakers. As far as I know, I was privy to information that wasn't fit to print in the New York Times, too messy for the local paper, and too polysyllabic for the nightly news.

...although Democracy Now is a worthy bearer of the American torch of journalism, and its surprising how many things are reported here that don't make the so-called 'liberal' NPR. What gives NPR?

I am actively looking for a conservative "balance" to Democracy Now, a show that combines intellectual honesty, in-depth reporting, and a conservative emphasis. Please let me know if you find something like this.

BBC is just better than American radio. (e.g. the Material World)

BBC is better than American [Reality] TV (e.g. Rough Science)

Airline Reservations -- an Information Arms Race

Some of the first supercomputers purchased by the private sector were used to calculate airline schedules and fares. Today, the customer is fighting back, first through search engines like Orbitz and Travelocity, then through meta search engines, and finally through some sweet AI.

Here's the website I'd always wanted to make, in beta of course: farecast.com

Once flyspace.com works for more cities it could be even better. Who knows? maybe the economists' models will someday be vindicated and the customer really will have access to "perfect information".

On the flip side, some airlines are giving up on the substantial overhead of algorithmic airfares and are offering unvarying flat rates.

Scientific Images

Art is science, and science art...that is all I know, and all I need to know.

Nikon and Olympus screen savers
http://www.microscopyu.com/software/screensavers/smallworld2006.html
http://www.mic-d.com/software/index.html
Scientific Image Contests



http://www.olympusbioscapes.com/
http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk/f-winners.htm
http://whyfiles.org/coolimages/archives.html%3Fcat=1.html

Please feel free to post your own favorite galleries.

Update: Math
http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/aburns/bridges06/bridges06.html

We're way up there, towards the top...

This is stolen from Tolweb. Try clicking up and down the tree to get an idea of the scale just of the butterfly family

Why study a particular model organism? Fruit Fly, Mouse, Rat, Chimp, Chinese Hamster, Barn Owls... most animals are chosen for convenience, rarely for the question being asked. Rather, the tool determines the sorts of questions the lab can ask. A bad example of this is a lab
studying olfaction in a species that is not known to use smell for any ecologically-relevant behavior. A good example of this was when Konishi used barn owls to study auditory processing.

Many jokes are made about whether scientists are studying mice or vice versa, but the truth is that learning the techniques, terminology, and temperament of an organism has a steep learning curve, and often the survival of the postdoc and his mice are yoked together.

My Home: Tucson

The Tucson Valley as seen from the Rincon Mountains in Saguaro National Park East. Also visible are the Tucson Mountains to the left and the Santa Catalina Mountains to the Right. Tucson hugs the desert at the intersection of the Rillito and Santa Cruz Rivers. Photocredit: Annika Silvernoinen.

At work today...

At work today I sectioned the thorasic ganglia and cervical connective of the moth Manduca sexta.

Netflix Offers One Million Dollars for Better Suggestion System

There are basically two approaches that I have seen, which I'll label AMAZON and PANDORA for ease of use. In the first you collect user data and suggest what other people with similar "profiles" selected. This is problematic in Amazon where you might be buying gifts that don't reflect your taste, but in Netflix it should be fairly robust. The other is much more labor-intense, and involves semantic coding of the artwork. In the case of Pandora, they invested hundreds of thousands of man hours listening to music and creating a 'genome' for each work, which allowed them to objectively correlate the songs in n-dimensional factor analysis.

Oops, two more approaches: There is also the flickr / del.icio.us use of tags, a FOLKSONOMY, and I think currently Netflix is using a fourth hybrid system which I'll call GOOGLE because they seem to use some database (say, IMDB) that lists directors and they just harvest the relevant links. Hell, maybe Netflix even uses Google to find the top 100 pages that come up for "Kill Bill" and then they just compare all the words in all those pages with all the titles of movies in their database, assuming that movies that are mentioned on the same page are in some way relevant to one another.

But these three options assume that "better" is already defined. Is that an objective property of a suggestion? Its hard to imagine what that would mean. Instead, is it most user-friendly? Which opens the whole FORM-FUNCTION debate. I mean, maybe just a better GUI ("better" would be defined as "more user selections"=more clicks) would satisfy that requirement.

And then there is the question of why they'd really want a better suggester. Their profits are not linked to the number of movies someone rents. So is the million just self-promotion? Or philanthropy to the unemployed programmers of the world?

Now that Google has Youtube, everyone is wondering what they're going to do with it. How do you make money off of indexing a huge database of free movies? Two ways, either LEECH (ie targetted advertizements) or CHARGE (micropayments for content). Micropayments haven't caught on yet, but with the continuing expansion of Google content (ie one login for calendar, email, personalized google search, etc) similar to Yahoo, it shouldn't be too hard to set up micropayment accounts.

Paying for content isn't all bad; according to economic theory, value equals money, and vice versa. If you pay money for something you create valuable information. If it cost a small fee to link another website from your site, the average quality of links would go way up. Similarly, if the post office raised the bulk (junk) mailing rate from 13 cents closer to first class (39 cents) the average amount of bulk would decline, but both because of decreased information overload and because of the recognition of the cost inherent in the medium, people would pay alto more attention to the bulk mail (currently 50% is thrown away unopened). So this would not necessarily be bad for the advertisers. Perhaps the same logical structure could entail for micropayments on media content, although I can't quite see how right now. http://econ.arizona.edu/downloads/Seminars/AndersonF06.pdf

Anyway, information markets are still the best way to self-organize information. More later.