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US Geneticist Discusses North Korea Trip With Dennis Rodman
sciencehabit writes "If you happened to catch any of the news coverage of Dennis Rodman's trip to North Korea last week, you might have spotted in the big man's entourage a white guy with an Amish-style beard, as in clean-shaven cheeks and no mustache. That's Joseph Terwilliger, 48, a statistical geneticist who splits his time at Columbia University and the University of Helsinki. He's now visited North Korea three times with the basketball star. He sat down with Science Magazine for a Q and A about how he got involved with Rodman and whether the trips are helping--or hurting--U.S. relations with the country."
..what is this doing on Slashdot?
Is this the current Slashdot meme? Can't you find some subtile but helerious (in a geeky way) tie-in with Natalie Portman? Good grief, put some effort into it, man!
But to answer your question, the man is not just a geneticist, but a statistical geneticist, so that qualifies for the minimum needed geek factor for a poorly edited Slashdot "story".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Let me guess, the water park slides all end in shark tanks?
They build a bunny slope with a 100 foot cliff at the bottom and this guys comments on how kind they are to have stopped him from going over in his inner tube. I do not think I would have seen it that way. I'm pretty sure I would have called them a bunch of morons.
Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number...and make that a little louder?
I then kept moving in the tube and five other Korean men also were knocked to the ground in their effort to stop my tube from going off a 100 foot cliff that was located at the bottom of the bunny slope.
North Korea, the only country where humans are cheaper than a fence.
Must be a slow news day. I don't think nerds give a fsck about either Rodman, or the 2 bit dictator of NK
Its certainly not stuff that matters
No, it doesn't. Didn't read the whole thing or even most of it, did you? I didn't get much whiff of pretense in it. I'm a hardcore cynic, yet I expect I'd like the guy if I met him.
Beside "both are really nasty regimes," the comparison isn't particularly apt. The NK regime is highly internally repressive (to a level only dreamt of by Nazi security forces), but also extremely isolationist (compared to the aggressive expansion and conquest used by Hitler to secure internal support for his programs). Visiting this crazy fat asshole is more like visiting Kim Jong-Il in 2010; the NK dynasty represents its own unique variety of crazy.
1. North Korea is probably the most interesting bit of foreign policy, which does appeal to nerds.
2. Look at the picture, the guy is clearly a nerd.
3. More importantly, from TFA: “Most of my work has been on trying to identify natural experiments that mimic experimental conditions in a way that might help us to understand the genetics of normal human variation in health and disease." The article is focused on stuff that has a more general interest, but North Korean genetics are absolutely interesting to a bio nerd as a "natural" experiment in the sense that it's not setup specifically to be an experiment.
It would be very interesting, for example, if you could show rapid human "evolution" in response to the shit that's going on there. I've heard that north koreans are on average a foot shorter than South Koreans. They've only been separated by two or three generations. Presumably a lot of that is due to malnutrition, but it's not too hard to imagine that some of that is due to people who are genetically predisposed to being shorter would survive better. How fast is that happening? Are there genes which correlate to "speaking out against tyranny" that are being selected against?
There are definitely very interesting questions that can be answered by north korea. It goes without saying that I wish this experiment were not occurring, but since it is, may as well collect data from it (though there are issues with informed consent probably).
I think it is a bit different. He's interested in N. Korea because human experimentation has been happening, and sees an opportunity to get data that would be otherwise unavailable, even unethical. His acquiring the data however, is not the cause of that unethical treatment and if he abandoned his studies, that treatment would continue unabated.
In a similar way, medical scientists study the effects of people's habits, for example, what happens to people who smoke, who run, who work in coal mines, who eat only vegetables, etc. etc. The scientists aren't the ones inducing people to engage in any particular behavior, but they see an opportunity to gather data by looking at various groupings. So while it would be one thing to set up an apparatus that made a person breathe coal dust for a decade, it is another thing altogether to acquire data from people who for some other reason unrelated to the scientist or the study, breathed coal dust for a decade.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Well, what you said is a more humorous version of my thoughts. What I was thinking was that if they didn't stop his tube and he did go over the cliff, 6 Korean men would find themselves living in a prison camp.
Further, the guy keeps talking about how nice the Korean people are to him and Rodman. Is this because if they were not nice they would be in the gulag? I'm sure that my views of DPRK are biased, because they mostly come from a biased media. That said, I have read reports from South Korea from people that escaped, so my view is not _that_ biased.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I read the whole thing, and it absolutely does.
There was an entire anecdote attempting to describe how nice the citizens were by risking their lives to prevent him from flying off of a cliff while he was having fun sledding. But of course he completely misses the irony that he and the rest of the North Korean elite were enjoying a newly build *ski resort* (quite literally "trampling" the workers in the process) while a significant portion of the population is near-starving, and any citizen who points that fact out is sent to a forced labor camp. If that isn't a perfect metaphor for the North Korean situation I don't know what is.
And of course he makes no mention whatsoever of Kim Jong Un or any of this colossal waste of the little resources NK has because he doesn't want to jeopardize his future fun...
Japan will wage another massive war against a reunified Korea rather than see Korea become the other dominant force in the area (second to China). Japan is an incredibly racist and fascist State. It pretends that, despite the rise of China, Japan is still 'top dog'. It will NOT allow its old slave colony of Korea to gain greater power than Japan itself, not least for fear that Korea will eventually seek revenge for the deplorable history of crimes against the people of Korea by the Japanese.
Japan has far more to worry about from the PRC than Korea, unified or otherwise.
Population of Japan: 127.6 million
Population of South Korea: 50 million
Population of North Korea: 24.7 million
A unified Korea starts off with less human capital than Japan. That's without accounting for the generations long project of bringing North Korea out of the stone age. It cost trillions of dollars and took more than a generation to bring East Germany up to West Germany's standard of living. North Korea starts out from a much worse state than East Germany. East Germany had a relatively educated population, a decent industrial base, and preexisting trade relationships. North Korea has none of those.
Bottom line, Korea isn't going to overtake Japan in any meaningful measure of power (hard or soft) within the 21st Century, unification or not. Japan has a fairly deplorable history in Korea that they still haven't owned up to, but their actions in China during WW2 were arguably worse, and China actually has the soft and hard power to give Japan a run for her money. Of course, Japan + the United States + Australia + the Philippines + New Zealand + Korea is a different story. Beijing will be contained the same way the USSR was contained, by an alliance of like minded Democratic counties.
Remember how when WW2 began, Russia was an aggressor (and partner of Nazi Germany in the invasion of Poland) and NOT a victim.
The Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, and Lithuanians are sympathetic to this argument. Of course, you've vastly oversimplified matters. Hitler had designs on the Soviet Union before he ever came to power (read Mein Kampf) and one could easily argue that Stalin's ruthlessness towards his small neighbors bought needed strategic depth that saved Moscow in 1941. Germany was coming regardless of Stalin's treatment of his smaller neighbors.
The bigger lost opportunity was the chance the Western Powers had to enlist Stalin in a containment alliance directed against Germany, France tried to make this happen, but the UK was ambivalent about dealing with Stalin for obvious reasons. Whatever slim chance existed evaporated after Munich, when Stalin concluded that the West lacked the backbone to stand up to Germany. Once the balloon went up Eastern Europe was screwed regardless of what happened on the battlefield. The UK couldn't impose its will on the USSR, France was a spent force, and the United States wasn't going to absorb another million battlefield casualties for the sake of Poland and the Baltic States.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Also I'd think that the Korean War, economic sanctions, etc., have done more harm to US - NK relations than these visitors ever will.
You're right. After all, we started a war of aggression, attempting to unify the country at gunpoint. Once we were defeated by the free and brave North Korean people we spent the next half century engaging in terrorist attacks against them. We even sent commandos across the border in an attempt to assassinate their President once upon a time. Heck, just a few years ago a United States Navy Submarine torpedoed and sank a North Korean ship on the high seas, killing dozens of innocent North Korean sailors just to make a political point. That's not the only hostile action on the high seas, one time we captured a North Korean ship in international waters, then held the crew hostage and tortured them for nearly a year before releasing them.
The history of American aggression towards North Korea is truly astonishing. Thank you Anonymous Coward for bravely stating the truth, which shall set us all free!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No, but sledding accidents by statistical geneticists with funny beards, now that is important nerd business!
It isn't that sort of experiment. The "experiment" is that the North Koreans kill or remove from the breeding population a large number of people, using different selection factors than normally exist in the human population. This is not some sort of set-up experiment; it is a political situation with real consequences where the data is simply the result of the political situation, not some "experiment" set up by the researcher.
You might want to slow your skimming down, and think about the difference for a minute.
They can't possibly be moving their missile program forwards without some solid scientific training, at least for the technical elites. Look how many other countries, with more money and less sanctions, have so much more trouble pushing that tech forwards. I doubt they are investing a lot of time in "pure" science, but in that case they probably have a large number of scientifically-minded engineers who are ripe for exposure to western scientific culture.
A lot of what he says is totally bogus stuff, and I'm sure he knows it. They (him and Rodman) are probably correct that individual exposure to friendly Americans in non-political settings is a good thing.
There is very little danger here, because if you watch the media coverage, lil Kim doesn't really get any sort of political advantage out of it. He ends up looking a bit like a big spoiled kid. So it doesn't help the baddie, it doesn't really hurt much else, and other than the people who have to throw themselves under buses to save these schmucks, everybody else comes out ahead.
I also agree with the US response, to mildly criticize it without trying to interfere.
Of course none of your *ahem* observations while reading the article could possibly be due to personal bias or cynicism?
No, *observations* are based on facts (e.g. he described an anecdote in the interview, he was at a new ski resort, NK citizens are some of the most oppressed in the world and just went through a horrible famine, and he didn't mention anything about this or the massive numbers of NK human rights violations even though it was a big controversy during Rodman's trip).
*Opinions* can be based on bias or cynicism. Though in this case the metaphor of workers being injured while the elites play is such a great metaphor for the NK class hypocrisy it mostly just wrote itself.
Dude, you need to use a sarcasm tag or something... I wasted thre of my lifetime quota of clicks following your links, thinking "he's got it completely opposite"
That's not a selective force though: bullets and bombs kill you no matter what your genetics. They don't provide an advantage to any genes, since no one has "bulletproof" genes or anything like that. It's fairly arbitrary in terms of genetics.
You could make the case that only the cowards who ran from battle survived, and so the french are now more surrender prone... but that would only be a joke.
The North Korea situation on the other hand, people DO survive famine and prolonged periods of malnutrition. Those genetically able to survive on little food could in theory survive and reproduce better.