Competitiveness of solar PV power improves

http://www.bnef.com/WhitePapers/download/82  

• Solar photovoltaic (PV) panels is now much closer to competitiveness with conventional electricity generation than many policy-makers and commentators have realised.
• Average PV module prices have fallen by nearly 75% in the past three years, to the point where solar power is now competitive with daytime retail power prices in a number of countries.
• The metrics generally used to measure the economics of solar power against alternative power generating technologies are often inadequate, and may introduce bias against the deployment of PV technology.

The paper was written by 10 authors with exceptional insight into the economics of solar power.

Sex and Housework

From a biological perspective, the primary reason for anyone to have sex is to procreate. Sex does have some additional value in social bonding but if procreation wasn't driving the show there would be zero sex. Your own or anyone else's interest in sex is a structural expression of biological requirement for procreation. Of course, this isn't the feeling or narrative interpretation we put on sex but why would it be? We are built by evolution not to understand ourselves and the world but to have capabilities and impulses that work - or, more accurately worked on the plains of Africa 100.000 years ago.

The biological value proposition of sex for males is quite different for males and females. At the minimum inputs, a male contributes a teaspoon of semen to "produce" a child while a female (human) contributes contributes 10+ years of physiological expenditure: gestation, birth, lactation, care, food sharing, protection, etc.  This is actually more or less the way things work in chimpanzee society. The males spend a lot of time fighting over the females in order to have sex and the females look after the kids. A female chimp won't let her child out of her sight for it's first six years or so; apart from external predators, other chimp mothers may treat it as a protein supply for their kids. She is the quintessential obsessive mother.

How far have we evolved from this chimp model? Obviously, co-parenting is adaptive or we wouldn't have taken it up. On the other hand, the (new) cost of co-parenting falls mainly on the males so the females had to make it attractive to males.  How? The obvious candidate here is the male obsession with sex. Human females have evolved continuous sexual receptivity and hidden fecundity - features which are AFAIK otherwise unknown in megafauna.  It's a pretty good guess that this evolved to facilitate a deal: coparenting for sex. To augment the deal, we can expect layers of domestication. As the dog that protects the family but doesn't bite the kids was selected, so women selected men who demonstrated personalities compatible with reliable parenting, and in the other direction, men may have selected fidelity and enhanced sexuality. The permutations of these qualities, and the ensuing cultural constructions provide serious entertainment for us, both as observers and participants.

Like all deals, the prospects for cheating and backsliding are ever present: men will skip the housework or the home and women will skip the sex. I'm not proposing any particular solution to this but I do recommend that we acknowledge the basic biological deal, and it's problematical nature. From an evolutionary perspective men are newcomers to childrearing as women are newcomers to recreational sex. It's a deal that kinda works but it's going to require our ongoing efforts to make it work well. If Evolution has Intent, it surely isn't to ensure that every man gets his desired frequency of sex or that women get their toilets cleaned at their preferred frequency. This may require some conscious effort and even a little guile.

(Originally posted as a comment on this article http://wheelercentre.com/dailies/post/d6d50e247f8b/)

Avoiding negatives you're stuck with

System justification theory is a scientific theory within social psychology that proposes people have a motivation to defend and bolster the status quo, that is, to see it as good, legitimate, and desirable.

According to system justification theory, people not only want to hold favourable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and their own groups (group-justification), but they also want to hold favourable attitudes about the overarching social order (system-justification). A consequence of this tendency is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged.
[Wikipedia]

Johnson and Fujita took this a step further to investigate whether people's willingness to see negative information about a system was related to their perception of the systems changeability.  The idea being that if a system was believed to be unalterable people wouldn't want to know about its downside - so avoid a locked-in feeling - but if the system was perceived to be changeable, then they wouldn't avoid negative information.

Result: Yes.  People avoid negative information about systems they believe cannot be changed.

http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/133

Zoom everything

This is pretty cool: how big stuff is zoom from the biggest to smallest:

http://htwins.net/scale2/

Testosterone promotes abstract thought

Testosterone levels during development has been associated with increased risk taking, various physical abilities, and digit length ratios.  This new research also find it also correlates with capacity for abstract thought (measured with Raven's Progressive Matrices).

Organizing Effects of Testosterone and Economic Behavior: Not Just Risk Taking
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0029842

Danger and Creativity

Mueller et al demonstrate in a couple of experiments that

People often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal.

This makes sense.  According to Read Montague, brain scans of our reactions to familiar things have the same signal as when we react to actually good things. In a risky environment this seems powerfully adaptive to me. On the other hand, a capacity take unnecessary risks indicates a biological surplus so should be a plus in the sexual selection stakes provided it doesn't happen to kill you.

For example, this lad is demonstrating a biological surplus.  Of course, he may not describe it like that.  

Sex and personality, methodological error alert

In conclusion, we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated [due to deficient methodologies and sloppy statistics.]

The primary problem is a poor multivariate distance measure.


The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029265