The obscure diseases that I or someone close to me has are totally real.

The obscure diseases that other people have are just bupkis.

(This is meant to be read ironically.)

I'm particularly sympathetic to this point since the article he's taking issue with starts with a swipe implicitly comparing depression to ordinary sadness, which is rather like comparing the flu to sneezing because you inhaled some pepper grains. Personal interests aside, the more fundamental issue is the way we treat the term disease. If something is a "disease," it is worth treating. If it isn't a "disease," you should just live with it. But why? Why not treat a biological condition you just don't like? (I'm assuming that you are directly or indirectly paying for the treatment.) We don't have to call Restless Leg Syndrome a disease to acknowledge that it disturbs some people's sleep and that those people would like relief. Contrary to what you may have heard, the only sort of character suffering builds is the ability to suffer--a useful ability in a world where suffering is the routine nature of life but not a virtue that makes the world a better place.

I shouldn't be surprised, given my experiences with old-fashioned optical character reading--a.k.a. reading with my eyes--as I've tried to make out various mysterious characters to enter my many Diet Coke purchases My Coke Rewards. Each bottle cap or 12-pack box has a code that you have to enter on Coke's overdesigned site. The code is long series of random letters and numerals, seemingly chosen for minimum readability and maximum ambiguity--Is that an A or an R? A G or a 6? An M or a W or an N? I routinely take two or three tries to enter the sequence correctly, especially if a bottle cap with a plastic liner is involved. But I drink so much Diet Coke, I figure it's worth it for the free movie tickets. Besides, I might get a blog post out of it.

At 76, Ann McGuirk seems an unlikely candidate to make waves, but the great-grandmother is taking a step as radical as it gets in suburbia. She's having the outside of her Santa Monica home painted a color bolder than beige. A lot bolder. A crew of painters is putting the finishing touches on a cobalt blue deep enough to dive into.

"It's very blue," says a jogger, shuffling by on the tree-lined street of rehabbed Craftsmans and Tudors.

July is peak home-painting season, and you can drive through neighborhoods from Malibu to Palm Springs and find the few, the brave, the festive -- people such as the McGuirks who are unafraid to let the block know that life is better in living color. There's the day-glo orange home lighting up a corner of Venice, the sapphire-soaked adobe with a luminous tangerine wall in Mar Vista, the home in Santa Monica that's lime green with blue trim.

Mark Shaw calls these beacons of vivaciousness "Easter eggs," and he's never too excited to see one. When he spots an egg house shining on brightly, "it's like, there goes the neighborhood," says Shaw, a real estate agent for ReMax who used to live near a home painted pink and purple. "It's equivalent to a house that's been run down. If it's in an urban area, it's a little better, but if it's in a suburb, it really sticks out."

Via Apartment Therapy.

First, if this paint is as great as it sounds, I would expect there to be a big demand for it in hot or sunny places, where any edge against a broiling car is desirable. Is the paint superexpensive? Does it require some special application process or equipment that other auto paint doesn't? Is it just too new to have been marketed well? What's the problem? Why aren't new car buyers looking for cool paint as an option? Why isn't there an aftermarket for repainting cars with cool paint?

Second, new cars account for a tiny fraction of the cars on the road. From a policy point of view, shouldn't the emphasis be on getting cool paint on old cars? Does it not work if it's painted over not-cool paint? If it does work, a much more effective policy would be to encourage people to repaint their old cars through tax incentives, subsidies, etc. Aside from the immediate advantages, a time-limited incentive program would spread the word about cool paint and help create demand for it in the future. But, of course, targeting consumers with incentives rather than manufacturers with regulations would require doing something where the costs are obvious to the California budget rather than hidden in the prices of new cars or the reduced profits (and shakier pension plans) of automakers.

That's me, quoted by Tim Harfod, author of The Undercover Economist, in a BBC Radio broadcast on "repugnant markets." (Link is a summary article. The audio and a full transcript can be accessed here.)

Regulating pollution is not only about science. It is also about economics. And scientists, no matter how smart or educated they may be, are not necessarily the best people to tell us how their findings should be weighed against the other needs of society.

If the state really wanted to fight smog, for instance, it could ban the private automobile. But no one (or almost no one) is recommending such a thing. The reason: The car is an integral part of our lives, and without it, the economy would grind to a halt. Millions of people would be far worse off, even if a few might live longer if they were not exposed to the tailpipe exhausts that cars emit.

Banning the car is an extreme example. But the point is that nearly every regulatory decision involves trade-offs that science alone cannot resolve.

Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists' preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can't tell you which tradeoffs to make.

From Ross Douthat: Maybe had Powell won more bureaucratic battles, everything would have gone swimmingly in Iraq, and the fact that it didn't is all Donald Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney/George W. Bush's fault. But given that he was present at the creation, not just part of the government that took us to war but one of its leaders, there was something a little off-putting about his self-justifying explanation that he tried to stop it, and besides it was the right thing to do, and anyway the fact that it fell apart is somebody else's fault.

From Clive Crook: If the world did everything C.K. [Prahalad] recommends to act on poverty, within-country inequality in China and India would likely continue to increase. In other words, alleviating poverty and reducing inequality are two quite separate issues. Using success on the second as a yardstick to measure progress on the first is an error.

From James Bennet: It turned out that on separate occasions in recent months both of our lunch-table companions had been invited very late at night to play the card game "Oh, Hell" with Clinton. One of our companions declined, preferring to go to bed. The other played until 2 a.m. before begging off and turning in -- even though it was the former president, not he, who planned to be up at 6 for round of golf.

Plus commentary on the speeches by Bill Clinton and Karl Rove.

Assuming it's a real trend, it likely reflects the attitude the WaPost's Robin Givhan evoked in her article on Liz Claiborne's recent death: "Where once Liz Claiborne was celebrated for helping young women go into the workforce looking like adults, now adults are interested in looking like adolescents."

Take Melissa Chiu, the museum director of the Asia Society in New York, talking this morning about "Chinese Culture: The Tensions and Trends of Contemporary Chinese Society." In remarks that desperately needed photos but were otherwise fascinating, she recounted the evolution of the contemporary Chinese art world. Delayed by a phone call, I came in as she was addressing the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, in which art students were heavily involved. The subsequent crackdown led to a large diaspora, particularly to the U.S., which accepted 30,000 Chinese students, and Australia, which took 20,000. (Chiu is from Australia.) During the 1990s, travel and communication between Chinese artists abroad and those at home was limited, and artists within China found it difficult or impossible to exhibit their works. Beginning around 1994, the Web became an important place for "virtual exhibits" that allowed artists within China to show the rest of the world their work. And as China opened more and more to the world for business reasons, the art world opened as well. The year 2000 was something of a turning point, as the Chinese government decided that avant garde art was OK. Chinese artists gradually began moving back to China and even those who remained abroad travel there more frequently.

The result has been a "New Renaissance" that Chinese artists compare to the great T'ang Dynasty period. Those who stayed in China have become "art entrepreneurs," operating large-scale studios with many employees and in some cases producing very large-scale works. "It's a great time to be a Chinese artist," said Chiu, noting that artists have far better facilities than their New York counterparts. "As China has become a manufacturing center in the world, so has it become an art manufacturing center," she said. The combination of commerce, craftsmanship, and culture really does sound like the Italian Renaissance.

Art has become an expression and source of national cultural pride, and Chinese artists increasingly incorporate and adapt national iconography: pandas, Chinese flags, Tiananmen Square, and, especially among younger artists who didn't experience the Cultural Revolution, images of Mao. (Where are PowerPoint slides when you need them?) When moderator Jim Fallows asked for examples of "xenophobic" art, however, Chiu said she couldn't think of any. In the art world at least, it sounds like Chinese pride is manifesting itself as positive, self-affirmation rather than negative, foreigner-bashing.

Satisfying my yen for photos, The Atlantic's website features slide show on Chinese contemporary art, with narration by curator Britta Erickson. (No subscription required for slide show.)

The great Manolo gets the same family-friendly rating. Reason's Hit and Run, on the other hand, rates an NC-17--not for its propensity for bad language but for the wonky drug policy posts.

[Via PG-rated Dan Drezner.]

On The Atlantic's Aspen blog (where, demonstrating the organization's dedication to impeccable honesty, they've cross-posted my rant about the opening session), my colleague Clive Crook has an interesting account of two sessions on energy. Chevron's Peter Robertson made a good point in response to an audience member's question about oil spills: "Hurricanes Rita and Katrina had destroyed more than 100 oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and not a drop of oil leaked." That's progress.

The Aspen audience is, as Clive notes, very green, at least in the style sense. But, as the photo illustrates, that doesn't mean the place hates oil companies.

The nadir may have been water expert Peter Gleick's proclamation that "less is more," which started with the presumption that conventional production and economics assume more is always more--more resource consumption, more people, etc.--but that fresh water is a finite resource. Yet toward the end of his three minutes he mentioned that the U.S. actually uses less total water each year than it did 30 years ago. What a paradox--except to those who understand the difference between an input, where less is more (profitable), and an output. Economic competition is all about finding ways to offer more value at a lower cost, and one way to do that is to reduce inputs, including water. We don't need some kind of new economic system to produce that result; the old one works just fine. If the Aspen Institute wanted to present this big idea in a serious way, it would have invited someone like Jesse Ausubel, who has spent decades studying dematerialization. Or it could have picked a random economist, strategy professor, or business person. As Jonathan Rauch demonstrated in this January 2001 Atlantic article about oil, there are great stories to be told about how we've come to do more with less.

The Gleick talk also illustrated a bizarre lacuna in the conference in general: a distinct lack of social scientists. The absence of economic thinking is glaring, especially given its dominance in the rest of public discourse, but it's not as though the lineup is full of sociologists or psychologists either. The presumption seems to be that anyone can opine on those topics, especially if they're experts in something else, and that there are no new ideas or discoveries to be found in the social world.

The example made me wonder, Would Einstein have developed his theory if trains--or some other rapid form of transportation--hadn't been invented? Or was the familiar technology of high-speed travel essential to the intuitive leap? We usually think of technology driving science through new tools like Galileo's telescope or the electron microscope. But by changing the everyday background in which science is done, technologies can also create new sources of scientific inspiration.

In the other research, scientists have developed a compact, precision-magnetic microscope based on a new state of matter. The technology, the researchers said, is as effective as current imaging devices such as MEGs for the brain and MCGs for the heart, which require a hospital visit because the devices are large and expensive.

It's made possible by a state of matter discovered just 12 years ago called the Bose-Einstein condensate.

Physicists at UC Berkeley have developed the device by harnessing a special property of Bose-Einstein condensates: Because they are cooled close to absolute zero, they are as free of vibrations and thermal noise as a quantum system can be, and are thus like a quiet, acoustically pristine concert hall. Tiny magnetic fields that might be unobservable in other systems are easily picked up.

Dan Stamper-Kurn, assistant professor of physics at Berkeley, and his colleagues published the work in the May 18 issue of Physical Review Letters. Unlike the superconductors that power current magnetic imaging, Stamper-Kurn's device is cooled not by gigantic refrigerators but by lasers -- making the prospect for miniaturization bright.

"I don't know when will come the day that you can strap a Bose-Einstein condensation experiment to your head," Stamper-Kurn said. But, he added, both the lasers and the vacuum chambers needed to make a condensate are shrinking fast.

Not so in Aspen, where I've come for the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by The Atlantic, which has its own Festival blog, where I'll be cross-posting if we can overcome some technical issues. (I'll be moderating a couple of panels.) Here, judging from the ads in local magazines, air travel has recaptured its glamour, thanks to fractional jet ownership. The images are fascinating for the way they express different ideals of travel. (Click photos for larger images.)

AEXjet, an Aspen-based company, provides the most glamorous shot, evoking effortless cruising to unknown destinations. The company's strategy is based on its ability to get in and out of Aspen when other private jets can't.

Bluestar ads another classically glamorous element, with little emphasis on the actual idea of travel. Delta, by contrast, emphasizes the destination and barely shows you a plane.

Finally, Flexjet promises to make you the perfect preppy dad, complete with soccer field right next to the runway. It's the least glamorous ad, and the most obviously calculated to make luxury spending seem like the Right Thing to Do. It's for the kids!