Christmas Break

I'm going to take a week off, or so, for the Holiday. I know I can't complain about being burnt out from prolificity; I barely post enough as it is. But I have other things to concentrate on the next week. When I get back, I'll review 2010, my prediction that 2010 would be The Year of the Human Machine Interface, and make my bold prediction for what tech trends we'll see next year.

If anyone needs any last minute Christmas gift ideas for me, I really want the Kindle Wifi.


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Merry Christmas from TAE

To all you out there, from me here, a verry Merry Christmas. Remember its the giving that matters, not the getting.

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Weekly Devotional

Once again I come around in the rotation for St. Andrew's Weekly Devotional series.

Typically, these weekly devotionals are very good. They are introspective, uplifting, and direct. I feel like maybe I should violate the "rules of devotionals" a little, as my own birthday present for Jesus.
As we celebrate Christmas this week, and as we move towards 2011 the next, I humbly ask that each and every one of you declare 2011 "The Year I Become a Hero." Jesus, of course, typifies heroic behavior: stoically true to his principles, altruistic like no other, encouraging of similar behavior in others, and at the end, completely self-sacrificing with zero chance of reciprocity. Sure, Spiderman saving Manhattan from the evil Dr. Octopus is a heroic tale (and makes a good movie). But it stands pretty pale against the Man From Nazareth who saved the entire human race.
Being a hero isn't easy, so I know I am asking a lot. We live in an age of abject selfishness, where we can see people on reality TV shows obsessed with themselves, then turn off the TV and post the latest tidbits and minutiae about our lives onto Facebook, imagining that everyone on Earth is sufficiently interested that they should care and read about us. Movies like "Wall Street" suggest that although greed is evil...it's not that evil because it is necessary for the American economy to be so strong. My entire generation has been labeled "The Me Generation," a name I find incredibly depressing. We can "tweet" our thoughts, we can write blog posts about our feelings, we can post YouTube videos about our lives. Modern technology has essentially become a vessel for our narcissism.
Enter the hero. Heroes are not born; they are made. Dr. Phil Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, has suggested that a scientific method can be designed and implemented to create heroes. First, he suggests, we must train future Heroes to recognize fatal human flaws that can allow "evil to flourish." Second, we must train them not to be a willing bystander to evil acts. Next, he suggests, future Heroes must study past heroes in order to identify with them and eventually emulate them. The final act, and perhaps the most important, is when potential Heroes go out into the world and begin performing small heroic efforts, which will gradually train their behavior to one decidedly for good and not one of evil or unhelpful neutrality.
I believe we can simplify it even further and so here is my challenge for you: in 2011, do one thing every day that is purely altruistic and cannot be reciprocated. Compliment the bus driver. Visit your grandpa. Help your mom make dinner. Drop a dollar in the red bucket. Pray for someone and let that person hear you doing it. If your recipient tries to reciprocate and perform an act of kindness back to you, refuse it, and suggest they instead pay it forward to someone else. The way I see it, none of us can shoot webs from our arms, none of us have super strength. Also, none of us is the immortal human incarnation of God. But there are 800+ members of Saint Andrew, and many of them will receive this devotional in their Inbox. And in my wildly optimistic utopia, all of the recipients hear me and perform 365 miniature acts of heroism next year. That's 292,000 acts of heroism. Just from our little church.
And while I find nearly three hundred thousand acts of kindness a delightful outcome, what I am seeking is more important than that. This time next year, I will write another devotional, around Christmas. I want to write then about the 800+ self-made heroes we have right here in Kansas City. I want to write about how each and every member of Saint Andrew, carefully and modestly, cultivated a heroic spirit in them over the last year and my goodness, what a great place our church is because of it! I want to see our membership swell, as downtrodden and saddened people of this town are compelled and uplifted by the power and altruistic nature they see in us. I want them to say, "I know they are Christians by their love." And most of all, I want to write a year from now about how my wildly optimistic utopia turned out to be a very practical and achievable reality.
So please. Go be a Hero, every day. I'm not asking you to save Manhattan. I'm asking you, tiny little act by tiny little act, to save the world.

I'd expand that to my few, precious readers. Do something good, next year. You don't have to change the Earth's rotation. Just do some little thing, some tiny, insignificant thing, each and every day. Add them to the pile. I guess what I am dreaming of is crowdsourced salvation.


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A thought for your Tuesday - Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic...

Reading is a noun or verb. Writing is a noun or verb. What is the verb form of Arithmetic?


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Hello, Dream Job

R&D Engineer 2, Los Alamos National Lab

I wonder if Mrs. TAE would like Sante Fe?

Or maybe she'd prefer Albuquerque?
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XKCD, I love you

I could not have said it better.


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The End of DADT

I was having a really lousy weekend. News of this made everything better. Go America. Know hope.


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Friday Poetry Burst

I've used this before, yes I know, but I just had a huge setback at work, and needed the words.
Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.


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Quote for the Day

"Any lab that is government certified has oversight." - Ryan in the comments here.

Chortle.


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The Worst Science Idea of 2010 - Genspace Now Open For Disaster

Here's the idea:
Let's build a lab where anyone, literally anyone, can come and tinker with microorganisms. Better yet, let's make this lab have no oversight whatsoever. Then, let's call making transgenic bacteria (in an unsecure environment) a "fun and educational" project.

Then, let's complain that University research (in a secure environment) is undemocratic and held under the tight tyranny of professorial dictators.

Then, let's encourage people to use the lab to test themselves for genetic conditions. If it turns out they have a genetic condition that will eventually cost them (and their insurance provider) thousands millions, I am sure these people will report it to their HMO immediately, and not try to hide it.

And while some people use the lab space to carry out work that might have serious IP and future revenue implications...let's secure it with no more than a sliding patio door.

Way to go Genspace! You have won TAE's coveted "Worst Science Idea of the Year" award.


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Back Once Again To Monogamy

TPI (for the purposes of disclosure, TPI has the quiet distinction of being married to my favorite sister) points to an interview with Mick Jagger, in which Jagger clearly has all the answers:

[Jagger] goes on to talk, in a rather rambling way, about the animal kingdom and how human mores regarding marriage and fidelity correspond to what we know of primate behavior. “If you have studied or have even a passing knowledge of animal behavior, it’s hard to see how our rules and regulation fit in,” he says at one point.

There are swans, he is reminded.

“Oh, yeah, I love it when women say that,” he replies. “I always have a joke with L’Wren about that. Women tend to say these things more than men do, don’t they?” He affects a sentimental whisper: “ ‘They mate for life, you know.’ ” He chortles heartily at this piece of feminine nonsense. “Yeah,” he muses, when his laughter dies away, “it’s swans and there’s one other. What is it? Albatross, or something.”

TAE delights in his knowledge of animal behavior (a B.S. in biological engineer and and a M.S, in biomechanical engineering may have included a passing knowledge of animal behavior) and relishes the beautiful moments when people who don't have "biology" in their academic major attempt to explain biology. You certainly don't see any blog posts from TAE on music composition. But I want to leave the hard work to TPI on this one:

You know, Jagger is right that primates aren't so interested in monogamy. But you know what else they're not interested in? Living intercontinentally, playing guitars and pianos, reading (much less writing) books, designing camera angles, spending hundreds of hours in a studio making a record, plotting break-even points, concerning themselves with decades-long creative partnerships, and exercising. And anyone who has studied, or even has a passing knowledge of animal behavior, knows that the chimp is no damned good at sitting still through lectures on "wave and sand formations." Just think about the massive cultural effort that goes into creating even one of these enjoyments. Consider the endless, orgasm-less hours that went into creating the simple electric guitar and the social milieu in which it can be played and heard. Your wearier voices of modernity spent their lives trying to answer the question of just how the blundering meatsacks that we humans are have managed to channel our effort into such apparently useless things as grand pianos and scientific lectures. And as unsatisfying as the work of a Freud or a Marx might ultimately be, they at least felt the need to account for the vast difference between humanity as we know it and the primitive state in which they imagined our true selves to have been forged.

Not so with the practitioners of evolutionary astrology. Why do we like to screw around? Bonobos. Why do we like to mate? Swans. Our true self, the key to our correct and rational conduct, is buried in our genetic history and that's all there is to it. Whereas once we danced on strings held by the stars, now we are the dysfunctional captives of some primitive human prototype. The terrifying thought that we might truly be conscious and truly free is banished either way.

In its core this is a wonderful counterargument. Because Jagger asks us to look at other animals behavior, we must look at our own species behavior as a guide to judging monogamy. However, what TPI is proposing is that modern humanity's freedom to behave as we wish also gives us the freedom to be monogamous, to marry, and to love one person our whole life.
But here's the question I have: if monogamy is a social construct of free will, why did it come about? We've always had Mick Jagger-esque people in society. We've always had Casanovas, Lolitas, various other polygamous subcultures. How did monogamy win the day for our society of free will? To hear some talk, not only is monogamy "unnatural" but it even can cause unneeded social conflict. Seems to me that if polygamy were a feasible option (in pre-monogamy-culture) we'd all have done it and never abandoned it. Sex is awesome, right! And not at all a distraction!
I go back, again and again and again, to the belief I have that the human species, despite our racy bonobo cousins, was a monogamous one. The argument for us being sex-crazed polygamists goes like this: bonobos have tons of sex for fun, for social connectedness, and for procreation. We are genetically closest to bonobos and chimpanzees (another promiscuous species), so we must also be genetically prone to promiscuity and polygamy as well. But the geniuses of animal behavior like Jagger want you to stop there. Please, please don't ask them the following question: why do Bonobos live in a matriarchal society but their next closest cousin, the gorilla, lives in a strict patriarchy? How can this be? Didn't the Bonobos get the memo that patriarchal society is what their cousins do, so they should naturally do it to?
Or could it be that ecological, physical, mental, and social changes (the very changes that brought about speciation of Pan from Gorilla also were the ones that caused Bonobos to have different sexual characteristics than their nearby cousins?
You cannot ask that question of these wizards of animal behavior because they know you will then extend that question to Pan vs. Homo. Could the massive physical, mental, and ecological changes that split us from our shared Hominini ancestor have also pushed our current species to become monogamous? Or at least provided the necessary environmental and social challenges to make monogamy advantageous over polygamy? TAE thinks, ardently, that this is so.
Almost unique to the entire animal kingdom, the females of our species have 12 menstrual cycles a year. Also strange: their menstrual cycles do not happen at the same time. Gather a random sample of 200 women and you'll have about a quarter of them "in heat" at any given time. Imagine, then, a primordial human male, faced with a tribe of constantly fertile females! Monogamy makes sense for females in this world, because it becomes the only social structure available for them where they don't face constant threat of rape.
Now imagine you are a male, in a tribe full of other males, faced with these constantly fertile females. Is there any hope for your tribe not destroying itself from within other than if each male is "assigned" a female to which he has sole mating rights? Surely we've all seen imagery of bucks, clashing with each other over mating rights during the rut. Imagine that 24/7/365.

TPI is right. Humans (and perhaps humans alone) have a choice to be polygamous or monogamous, just like we have a choice to play electric guitar or acoustic. But the argument seems to be coming down to "we can choose to ignore our sex-crazy nature and be monogamous or not" when I cannot accept that our species was successful in evolving as a polygamous one. Rather, I have to believe that the choice we free humans have is "should we choose to act like monogamous humans or act like polygamous bonobos?"


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In which I ask why my dad is a Republican.

TAE has a lot of friends and family members that are both Republicans and avid Conservationists. Many are hunters, and consider preservation of wild areas specifically and the environment in general an important part of their core value system. However, as Republicans, the freedom and ability to develop individual wealth as a member of a free-market capitalist economy is also wildly important to them. TAE suggests these two concepts are directly in conflict, and have been since the 80's.

And I'm not alone. Slate writer Daniel Sarewitz writes:

It is no secret that the ranks of scientists and engineers in the United States include dismal numbers of Hispanics and African-Americans, but few have remarked about another significantly underrepresented group: Republicans. No, this is not the punch line of a joke. A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.

Doctor Science at Obsidian Wings responds:

I think the first shift of scientists to the political left happened around April 22, 1970 -- the first Earth Day. After that, as I finished high school and went on to college, when I said I was studying "ecology" people made immediate, forceful assumptions (one way or the other) about my political views. I remember going to a panel discussion in the mid 70s about science and politics, science and religion, where the speakers agreed that "science is not politically on the right or left" -- and I know they were wrong, because I was an ecologist and that was a political label more than a scientific one, at that time
My memory of the 70s and 80s is that Republican Party was *not* particularly anti-evolution at the time. There were discussions and debates about "Evolution and the Bible" and such, but they didn't have a particularly partisan character yet.
What I recall being much more significant were environmental issues. Although the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act were passed under Nixon, by the time the Reagan administration rolled into town the Republicans were pretty strongly on the side of pollution and extinction. Many of you are probably too young to remember Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, but that Wikipedia article covers the high points. Basically, he was completely on the side of extractive industries (including forestry and mega-agriculture). He justified it with Christianism: God wants man to have "dominion" over the earth, and besides, Jesus was coming back any day now.

There are two key claims he raises here. The first is that Republicans choose the economy over the environment, starting with the Reagan Administration, and the second is that the Republicans are more of a religious party than a political one. He goes on to suggest the former is what caused the exodus of scientists from the GOP:

Basically -- because even the short version is getting to be too long -- I think that in the 80s the Republican powers saw even the hardest of hard scientists, the physicists and geologists and NASA, take positions that impeded the core Republican value of Making Money.

Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is money to be made in science, too. The drug industry makes millions (billions?) in profits every year. Were American interests so composed, a very large amount of money could be made converting homes and businesses into more energy efficient versions. Cap and trade could make a lot of people rich. Cutting edge energy technologies could not only power the American infrastructure, but also power the American economy and provide us with another layer of dominance in the global game. That should appeal to Republicans.
No, I think the source of the exodus of scientists from the GOP is not due to Republican greed. Rather, the Republicans, for at least the last 15 years, have seemed to have a crusade going against science. Because Making Money sounds good to scientists, too. I wouldn't leave the GOP because they were greedy. I can be greedy too. But when my hardened, GOP-loyal-forever elders tell me that I am going to Hell for believing the Earth was formed over a period of billions of years, I subconsciously and consciously distance myself from them. I want to make millions, one day, in a free market where people can buy my product with minimal taxation or regulation. One thing I plan to invent requires a high-performance computer running evolutionary algorithms. How can I do that, but not believe in Evolution? Creationism is almost a uniquely Republican trait in my lifetime. And then you have issues like stem cell research, which hold the very real promise that before I die of old age I could see functional, perfect human organs grown on a petri dish in a laboratory. But the ethics of using a gamete cell to do this has become a clearly "Christian vs. UNChristian" battle when in fact the ethics of American stem cell research should be a-religious and should not be decided in the realm of what "faith tells us to do." Especially not in a country where the very Republicans who tout their Christian beliefs on stem cell research are the same ones that bandy around the Constitution and Bill of Rights at any and all convenient moments.
But coming back around to where I started, I have to wonder how my dad can be a Republican when they so aggressively pursue economics over the environment? When they use Al Gore as a convenient scapegoat to laugh away actual efforts to prevent climate change? In the 90's, especially, and of course around the time Mr. Obama was running for election, my dad rallied with others against the "certain" restrictions on firearms that Democrats were bound to enact. Clinton certainly enacted some firearms legislation. So as a hunter, I can see a purist hatred of Democrats being feasible, given the illusory belief the NRA seems to project that Democrats = Gun Control. But my dad is a pretty smart fella, surely he's realized that anti-democrat doesn't have to mean pro-Republican. The proof is at the top of the post: 32% of scientists identify as independent.
But climbing into my dad's truck six long years ago, Bush Cheney 04 sticker proudly displayed on his back window (right next to the Ducks Unlimited sticker), I was very confused. How could he support people that actively want to rape the Earth for every drop of oil with no attempt - literally zero attempt - to force America off oil dependence? Bush was all about "ending dependence on foreign oil" with heavy emphasis on the word "foreign."
Four years later I watched with chagrin as my dad seemed to support McCain over Obama. This was easier to understand; the fear that a Democrat President would come for our guns (despite the fact that a Republican President had passed the Patriot Act and basically given himself the privilege to do just that) loomed very real in the hearts of any active hunter, including myself. But could my dad really believe that a Republican stooge rogue hack who went from ardent conservationist to Kyoto-hater in about 5 minutes and from claiming in 2007 that global warming was "a serious economic and security concern" and "not a Hollywood invention" to saying in February 2010 that "80% of global warming science is based on fraud and misinformation" would have done a better service to hunters and conservationists than Mr. Obama? McCain supported cap and trade right up until he won the Republican nomination for President, at which point he became an ardent critic of it.
I realize, dear readers, that there are many subtle nuances at play in the choice of political affiliation, and probably my dad is a Republican because of one of them. But I've known the man for 28 years. His three loves are 1. His Wife 2. His children 3. Hunting. Given those priorities, I just don't understand how he could be a Republican.

Update: This is an interesting, and telling list of the least conservation-friendly politicians. Note the political party trend.
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The Hero Project

Jonah Lehrer reports on Phil Zimbardo's latest project (remember the Stanford Prison Experiment?) in San Fransisco: a school for heroes.

The goal of the project is simple: to put decades of experimental research to use in training the next generation of exemplary Americans, churning out good guys with the same efficiency that gangs and terrorist groups produce bad guys. At first glance, this seems like a slightly absurd endeavor. Heroism, after all, isn’t supposed to be a teachable trait. We assume that people like Gandhi or Rosa Parks or the 9/11 hero Todd Beamer have some intangible quality that the rest of us lack. When we get scared and selfish, these brave souls find a way to act, to speak out, to help others in need. That’s why they’re heroes.
Mr. Zimbardo rejects this view. “We’ve been saddled for too long with this mystical view of heroism,” he says. “We assume heroes are demigods. But they’re not. A hero is just an ordinary person who does something extraordinary. I believe we can use science to teach people how to do that.”

Um, awesome! TAE suggests this is a great idea. However, what makes me sad is that Zimbardo thinks we need such schools, which implies current school curricula is lacking in heroic (moral) education. Give the whole article a read, it's interesting.
Zimbardo suggests a curriculum to foster ordinary heroes: increased awareness of personal faults that could become "evil," study and admiration of historical and fictional heroes, and eventually performing real life acts of kindness and integrity.
I'm reminded of a scene from one of my favorite movies, Sam Raimi's Spiderman 2:

Henry Jackson: Hi Peter!
Peter: Hi Henry. You've grown tall!
May Parker: You'll never guess who he wants to be...Spiderman!
Peter: Why?
May: He knows a hero when he sees one. Too few characters out there, flying around like that, saving old girls like me. And Lord knows, kids like Henry need a hero. Courageous, self-sacrificing people. Setting examples for all of us. Everybody loves a hero. People line up for them, cheer them, scream their names. And years later, they'll tell how they stood in the rain for hours just to get a glimpse of the one who taught them how to hold on a second longer. I believe there's a hero in all of us, that keeps us honest, gives us strength, makes us noble, and finally allows us to die with pride, even though sometimes we have to be steady, and give up the thing we want the most. Even our dreams.

Zimbardo is apparently dreaming big:

One day, though, Mr. Zimbardo hopes to have a hero project in every city. “One of the problems with our culture is that we’ve replaced heroes with celebrities,” Mr. Zimbardo says. “We worship people who haven’t done anything. It’s time to get back to focusing on what matters, because we need real heroes more than ever.”

Huh, ya think?
Here's the thing, and both Zimbardo and Sam Raimi  nail it: heroes must be cultivated. Peter Parker became a hero after gaining his spider-powers, yes, but the ethics and morals that compelled him to "do good" were fostered in him by his Uncle since he was a kid. "With great power comes great responsibility," his Uncle had told him for years.

TAE posits the following: to teach someone to be a hero, you need only teach them altruism. And unsurprisingly, TAE has previously written that perhaps altruism is the single trait (if a single trait could be identified) that defines us as human. Especially in the sad modern culture of America, selfishness has become a way of life. "Greed is good," Gordon Gekko intones. Reality TV tells us we should have cameras, following us constantly, documenting our lives (because we are so interesting). Facebook enables us to broadcast ourselves, our every activity and interest (with pictures) for the world to see. These activities are all fine, sure. I'm not saying everyone that uses Facebook is a "villain." Rather, I am saying what the world needs is regular lessons and reminders that once you turn off Facebook, turn on your altruism. Once you stop watching reality TV shows, start remembering that other people on this planet exist besides yourself and they could probably use a little help.
As Zimbardo says: "Though real heroes take risks...one can’t begin with reckless acts of altruism. Courage requires practice." Would that we all practiced, daily.


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The Large Hebron Collider

Earlier this morning, Israeli physicists announced plans to build the Large Hebron Collider, a giant circular ring designed to hurl Israelis and Palestinians at each other at speeds nearing the speed of light. Israeli scientists hope that by smashing individuals of the two groups together, they might successfully detect the MOT Particle, which they have nicknamed the "One True God particle," putting to rest several thousand years of debate over the exact conditions at the formation of the West Bank.


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Business

Back from the conference, new posting soon.


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Dear TSA

Dear TSA,

I'm no terrorist. In fact, I'm surely the opposite. Evidence for this being the fact that I really don't mind so much when I get zapped with x-rays in the name of safety, or the fact that I maintain a high-level security clearance with not problem.
The enhanced pat-downs and the x-ray scanners with naked pictures are lame, sure, but I'd rather have 'em than a terrorist on an airplane.

That said, I have to call into question one of your current policies: laptops. I noticed, yesterday, as I was flying from Kansas City to New Orleans that I had to pull out my laptop and put it in a separate bin from my satchel, for some reason. That's fine. But why didn't you check my laptop charger?
Because my laptop is pretty old, my laptop charger is a brick, approximated 4" x 3" x 1". It has cords running out of both sides, one ends with a DC port, the other cord runs to an AC adapter plug. It seems to me that I could have stored a sizeable block of C4 inside that charger and you'd have let me do it.
In fact, I am sitting here looking at it. Based on my measurements, I could package a 0.75" X 3" X 1.75" block of C4 inside the charger. The cord that runs from "the block" to my laptop could easily have been the detonator cord (the detonator having already been pressed into the C4), that I spray painted black to match the block.
Now, take me and three of my friends, all with "laptop chargers" in their satchels on the same plane. One of us has a simple Arduino board (that also went right through security no problem) to use as the trigger. Lo and behold, we could VERY easily take the airplane down.

Now, I am not advocating this. Terrorism is heinous and evil and not a productive way to bring about social change, unless chaos is the social status you wish to achieve. I am just suggesting to the TSA that maybe they think about how dumb it is to scan laptops in the x-ray scanner but not the charger block.


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Murder

I spotted him about 4:45 pm. He was tall, and looked in pretty good shape. He certainly towered over the others around him. He showed up where I hadn't been expecting him. I'd assumed he be further down the hill, further away from traffic.
In any case, there he was. Looking all proud of himself around the ladies. Some other dudes were nearby, but he clearly was being territorial, being alpha. From where I was, he didn't see me. Which was lucky, I suppose, because I wasn't trying extraordinarily hard to remain hidden. As he'd gotten in view I'd perked up from where I was hunkered down. Now I slowly reached down and lifted my rifle onto the shooting sticks I had lain in front of me. He still didn't see me. Unfortunate for him.
He was moving now, following 'his' girls. Didn't seem in a particular hurry. Arrogant. That'd cost him. Through the scope of my rifle I could clearly see his face. He kept nonchalantly looking over his shoulder at the other boys, seemingly to confirm they were being sufficiently submissive. We'll see if he finds hot lead submissive.

I'd been waiting for him, for quite some time. Most of the year I'd been planning when and where I would kill him. I dreamed about it. Thought about it. Even talked to my dad about it. I'd worked out a game plan. Chosen a place to kill him. Imagined walking up to his still body. Imagined standing over him, seeing that lifeless gaze in his eyes. Seeing the drips of blood coming off his chest from the bullet wound. Maybe I'd press on his chest, I daydreamed, and hear the shuddering wheeze of a destroyed thoracic cavity.

So there he was, standing there all proud and fearless, in my scope. I took off the safety and held my breath. The lack of a breathing rhythm froze the muscles in my chest, making the gun steadier. Also, by holding my breath, my heart rate dropped - making my aim even steadier. The cross-hairs rested right on his chest, just below the shoulder. The kill zone. I gently squeezed the trigger.

A muzzle flash filled the scope, and I blinked. Like always, I didn't feel the gun recoil at all. I watched him take off running. The girls he had been with scattered like quail. The other boys, elsewhere on the hillside, stood there trying to figure out what was happening for a moment, then took off running too. He stumbled and fell, got up and ran, then stumbled and crashed to the ground, spinning a half circle. He struggled a few times, there, on the ground...then lay still.
Even from 200 yards away, I heard his crashing fall. Even over the hammering of adrenaline-powered heartbeats in my ears. A surge of emotion went through me. I had just killed. I had just ended a life. The calm serenity of his life had been shattered by me, by the thoughtless energy of my rifle, and by the steady efficiency of my ability.
I loaded another cartridge into the chamber. Perhaps he'd rise again. Or perhaps I could kill another. A double kill seemed too much to hope for. My breathing slowed, I hadn't realized I had been gasping for breath. It had all been over in seconds. The hillside was empty now, save for me and the heap of flesh laying a ways in front of me.

Walking up to a dead body is always a weird experience. Will the body suddenly rise? Perhaps he's not dead; perhaps he's just gathering strength for a counter-attack. As is my nature, I don't keep a gun ready at those moments. If he had the strength left to fight back, it'd be just my physicality versus his. But he lay there, still. The only movement was the slight blowing of his hair in the wind. The only sound was my breath.
I stood over him. I saw, as I had imagined, the lifelessness in his eyes. He was gone. Gone forever. I had...I had murdered him.

What else can you call it? He was innocent, he had done me no harm. But I, well honestly, I delighted in his death. I was proud of it. I was looking forward to telling people about how I had killed him. How deadly accurate I was. How I had waited for the perfect shot. How I had taken him, right through the heart. I had known, from the distance, that he was a big boy. But up close, he seemed huge. I wondered how, out there alone, I would take care of his body. Loading it into the back of my truck was going to be a nightmare. Maybe I could just use ratchet straps; tie them around him, then just lash him to the tow hitch and drag him up to the barn. Hang him up in the barn and let the blood drip out of him.

I got out my knife. Best just field dress him right here. He'd be lighter, that would help. The crows and coyotes can have his entrails. As I split him from sternum to hips, his guts poured out. They were hot. Steamy and hot. The smell of them was strong, stronger than I had remembered since my last kill. I took care: if you are careful the whole abdominal cavity will just sort of pour out. Don't want to puncture the stomach...contents always reek. Cut the bottom end of the intestine to release it from the anus.
Then I cut through the diaphragm. Blood poured everywhere. Working blind, I reached up past his lungs and heart (I could tell his heart was in pieces) and cut his windpipe and esophagus. His lungs came out, and his heart sort of poured out. My shot had been good. He had been dead before he knew the bullet hit him. With that, the work was mostly done. I elevated his head and back, to let the majority of the free blood pour out onto the ground. Man, big boys like this can sure bleed. Then I began the onerous work of heaving him into the back of my pickup.

A half hour later he was hanging by his neck in the barn, blood lazily dripping onto a tarp below. I'd let him hang, and cool, for a couple days, then with dad's help I'd grind him up and put him in the freezer. We'd drag the bones and sinew down to the hedgerow for nature to clean up.

From a single shot fired on that hillside to hanging that deer in the barn had been less than an hour. The gruesome efficiency gave me a strange sense of satisfaction. I am an apex predator. I proved it.


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The Definition of "Discovery"

I have to admit, before I get into this, that I am a little jaded. I got excited, like everyone else, by Kottke's implication that yesterday's NASA announcement might be the discovery of E.T. Then, when it turned out to be a horrifying well-performed press conference that was a strange concoction of part roundtable, part lecture, and part press release...I must admit that I had furrowed brows. Maybe even a scowl.

That said, I think we need to discuss whether or not it is a huge misnomer to call Wolfe-Simon's GFAJ-1 bacteria a "discovery." Let us pretend, for a moment, that I took an algae, maybe some monocell from the chlorophyta division, and added DNA for a green phosphorescent protein. Presto, change-o, I've got glowing algae. Should I announce I have "discovered glowing algae"? Or would a better word be "created"? Or suppose I took a flu virus, and weakened it until it was harmless in terms of symptoms, but still provided the immune system with a response that would give a host later immunity to the same flu virus at full strength (this is a common method of making annual flu vaccines). Should I announce I've discovered a "cure for flu" or should I say I've "created" a flu vaccine?
The point I am driving towards is that while the ability of a living organism to seemingly thrive in the absence of phosphorous is truly amazing, the fact that it was not a naturally occurring phenomena makes the idea of it being a "discovery" less certain.

Extremophiles - bacteria and microorganisms that seem to thrive in awful conditions - are prevalent all across this planet. From sulfur-loving organisms living on volcanic vents on the pitch black seafloor, to algae growing in hot springs in Yosemite, to whole ecosystems living under the ice in Antarctica, you name the place...there are bugs there, delightfully thriving, pushing the limits of what a "hostile environment" really is.
And each of these organisms leads to the obvious conclusion that life on other planets might not need a perfect oasis of nutrients, water, and sunlight in order to exist.
But TAE wonders: though life can exist in a hellish, arsenic-laden place like Mona Lake, California - can it also evolve there?
It'd take a better biologist than I to tell you which came first...the thermophiles or the rest of us, but go far enough back, to the Primordial Ooze, and you have to eventually find "The First" which spread into life on Earth.
I think what we should be focusing on here is not the fact that "The First" used Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Sulfur, and Phosphorous as its essential 6, but rather that The First appeared precisely when the Earth was at a chemical state conducive to it's appearance. And that chemical state included the most biogenic chemical compounds, which were created from the most biogenic atoms available.

Expand this view to other worlds, or their moons (like Titan), and while the cocktail of chemicals on that moon does not necessarily, in my view, eliminate the possibility that life might evolve there, the state of those chemicals as well as the state of the moon itself lead me to believe that Titan is a lifeless hydrocarbon-laden rock. I'd like to believe in methanogenic mice, skittering around pools of acetylene and playing on the frozen water rocks strewn all about...but I just can't see that such a place would allow for the development of a First.

So what of this arsenic-eating bacteria "discovered" at Mono Lake? Sadly, I have to believe that the fact that it needed laboratory coaxing to achieve phosphorous-free status actually weakens the chances of E.T. evolving on an arsenic world.


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New Life Discovered! (on Earth) - UPDATED

Cat is out of the bag:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

It is not an overstatement to say this may be the biggest discovery in my lifetime. More to come.

UPDATE: I stand a little underwhelmed by the news. Researchers basically took a bacteria from an arsenic-rich environment and coaxed it a little further, until it didn't need the phosphorous at all. The bacteria wasn't already phosphorous free.
The smoking gun in exobiology will be the discovery of a bacteria that violates the current HONCSP requirement without tampering by humans. While this does have huge and far-reaching implications, it really isn't the thunderous breakthrough I was hoping for.
Sadly typical of NASA...


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Life on Titan

What if Kottke is right? What if this afternoon NASA announces the discovery of living organisms on Titan (a moon of Saturn)? I find it unlikely, mostly because I do not believe we have the equipment orbiting Titan to conclusively prove little critters are moving about. Sure, the Huygens craft landed and took pictures, but barring a webcam video of some sort of Titan-dwelling, methane-powered mouse skittering about, I highly doubt we've found evidence of life.

My instinct, considering this is NASA, is that they will have no conclusive results, but will call for massive, open-ended funding to plan a long-range mission back to Saturn to do further analysis of Titan to inconclusively determine that there might be the conditions for some sort of life form to maybe have evolved, maybe be evolving, or may yet to evolve. NASA will get a cadre of experts, as Kottke has outlined, and they will describe a test method by which living organisms might be detected, then NASA will announce that the mission will take tons of money and years and Boeing or Northrup-Grumman will be the prime on the mission.

But what if there was life on Titan? What if methane-based gas creatures flitted about the sky, drinking acetylene, and occasionally eating the methanogens that skittered around the hydrocarbon ponds on the surface? Not only would it be the most important announcement in the history of our species, but it would drastically change the "definition of life" and make us reevaluate (and almost certainly increase) the number of star systems we believed to be habitable. Certainly, humans could not live on Titan, nor could any other carbon-based life form. But if other forms of life could exist on these bizarre worlds...imagine the possibilities when the Universe may have not 22 sextillion stars as previously estimated...but three times that many!


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Game Changing Ideas, and their Impossibility

There are probably a dozen, maybe a hundred even, people on Earth who have an idea that could really change things for the better. An example would be Robert Bussard, who's Polywell fusion reactor could potentially provide clean, cheap, endless energy for humanity. Or it might not. In any case, they have basically no funding, so it doesn't really matter.
Federal research funding, it appears to me, is broken. In the first place, it is too broadly applied. While I am sure many important advancements in science have occurred in the last few decades, the fact is, it is extremely hard to get anything accomplished with 1 year and $50K. There are a zillion well-qualified researchers out there, who upon receiving Federal funding, immediately go about working on the next round of funding. This is a waste of their talent, constantly having to search for money to fund their research.
The second problem is that the Universities that host these researchers take an inordinate amount of their money. 35% or higher is actually pretty typical of the amount of skim the university immediately takes as soon as the researcher gets their check. Some schools take more than 50%.

Look, I could go all over this topic, and there are so many problems with The System now, which has basically become a means by which taxpayers augment the salaries of PhDs, but this has been covered,  and by better writers than I.

Instead I'd like to propose an impossible, practical solution: massive funding for few people. Let us pretend, for a moment, that the NIH had 3.5 billion dollars in money to dole out to quality research each year. Spread in $100k allotments, that figures to basically 35,000 researchers, nationwide, per year. How bout instead we give 350 researchers a year a grant worth ten million a piece. Those researchers would then be ineligible for other grant funding for 20 years. Certainly, the shakedown would be immense. First, only one in a hundred researchers would have funding that are currently being funded, so there'd be incredible competition. Second, all the researchers who didn't win would be forced to...I dunno...work for the winners? The schools could still skim their cream, the PhDs would still get paid...
But there would be this intense condensation of plausible ideas into funded ideas. Suddenly a researchers idea to tweak a tiny mouse protein and "see what happens" would get flagged as too inconsequential; the bold researcher who plans to genetically engineer mice capable of carrying human host organs gets funded, the protein tweaker goes and works for him/her.
The way I see it, instead of a zillion researchers on their little, poorly funded islands, each harboring a pet project or idea, you'd instead conglomerate the system, and by funding genuinely promising, game-changing ideas you'd end up with not only less bad ideas funded...but more researchers working on the good ideas.
Make sense?

Proceed to poke holes.


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A Thought for Thanksgiving Break

A device able to combust dark matter and convert it to mechanical energy will be the single most important invention in this millennium.


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Adult Time

Katie Roiphe:

Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the 1970s and '80s? I can remember my parents having parties, wild children running around until dark, catching fireflies. If these children helped themselves to three slices of cake, or ingested the second-hand smoke from cigarettes, or carried cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words, they were not noticed; they were loved, just not monitored. And, as I remember it, those warm summer nights of not being focused on were liberating. In the long sticky hours of boredom, in the lonely, unsupervised, unstructured time, something blooms; it was in those margins that we became ourselves.

I remember similar things, as a child. Getting home from school and hopping on my bike, and riding wherever I wanted until dinner time. I remember dad setting me down at the farm with a .22 rifle, a box of shells, and telling me to have fun while he went and mowed the pasture. "Only kill it if you are planning to eat it," he'd say. I remember, as Katie does above, being dragged to adult parties and set loose in the backyard, told to stay out of the way unless called for.

Mark Oppenheimer agrees with Katie:

More to the point, I think these [overbearing] kinds of parents are striving to rule out eccentricity. Nobody, after all, is striving to engineer a lovable nerd, or a spacey dreamer, or an obsessive collector. But the world needs such people; in my life, I need such people. What is more, until we have a perfect science of happiness, which seems not to be coming any time soon, we have no right to assume that the Ivy-educated, well-rounded over-achiever is necessarily the happiest type; what if the chess geek is? Or the comix collector? In the meantime, over-controlling parents are just acting out their own best hunches, or, more likely, their own failed fantasies.

Too right. Where would the world be without a lovable nerd like me?!

These articles run with what appears to me to be fair regularity. Someone writer gets irritated at a parent feeding their child organic applesauce or sees a parent put anti-bacterial goop on their kids' hands every five seconds or hears about a mom who is still breast-feeding her three-year-old and thinks "back in my day..." and writes an article like this. I suspect the backlash we see here is similar to the backlash we saw amongst men a few years ago.

All of a sudden, "metrosexual" was cool, and dressing like a pansy seemed to be very popular. Manly men rebelled, and wrote articles about dressing "retrosexual" i.e. whatever Connery wore in the 60's and drinking hard alcohol. Then you got Mad Men, which basically is a huge retrosexual diatribe against modern male femininity. I imagine parents, myself included, who do not like constantly watching their child will not embrace over-parenting. A hands-off approach seems good enough to me.

And frankly, I just don't have time to constantly stimulate my daughter. She's great. Really, she is. And I love spending time with her. But I have work. I have to cook dinner. I have to clean. And then I have the things I want to do, like finish that sous-vide cooker or those Steampunk goggles. And work out. And watch football. And maybe go fishing. I have proposals to write. My own future to plan. My dreams to accomplish. My friends to hang out with.

Yes, my daughter is a priority in my life, but hey, if once in a while I can get her to zone out to an episode of Little Einsteins while I get a little more "adult time" then I'll just take the rap as a modern "bad parent" and we'll see in a few years just how horribly 'ruined' she is. I have a feeling that her over-supervised, over-stimulated peers will not have outpaced her. So I drag her along to the river once in a while, and let her get filthy. She gets cuts on her knee. She almost falls in. So what? Sue me. When she's 20, and her appreciation for nature (having been immersed in it for her entire life) makes her a better conservationist with no fear of mud or ticks or murky water than her coddled, suburban peers...we'll see how awful it was for me to "risk her life" in order to get her a little counter-culture. Maybe I'll sign her up for Scouts soon. She's three now. About time to start learning to make a fire.


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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 3

Love is a funny thing, at least for me. The strength of love in me is not at all a constant thing. It ebbs and flows, sometimes filling me, and sometimes it seems altogether vacant from my person. My heart, it would seem, comes in a variable size.
There are times when I am so filled with love it almost chokes me. I want to love everyone. I want everyone to know that I love them. I get this foggy feeling in my head and my eyes wet, and I believe, really believe, that if we all just had a little more love in us then hate, rage, loneliness, war, fear, and greed would all fade like yesterday's bruises. We'd all just need to take care of each other, we'd all empathize with one another, we'd all just...love each other.
But then there are the times when I love no one, not even myself. I push away. I resent. I boil. People's kindest words are meaningless and almost ironically stupid to me. I wonder what happened to the love I used to feel in me.
I know other people have these ranges too. Whether their love fluctuates like mine is another question altogether. But I imagine it does. Love is a hard thing to feel all the time.
By no stretch of the imagination do I think this is a topic I am the first to cover. Love has been with us since the beginning. Love is, quite possibly, the unique trait of humanity that lifts us above any other species. Sure, members of other species can be affectionate to one another, or even miss them when they are gone. I've seen my parents dog sulk about their house for days when my dad goes on hunting trips without her.
But uniquely, we have the power to turn on and off huge reserves of love for perfect strangers.


I wonder if love (and many other emotions) falls under the rule I learned in high school tennis: practice like you want to perform. Doesn't it make sense that if a person, especially a person like me who does not love especially easy, practices loving a bunch, then the act of love-practice will eventually lead to actual loving? The idea seems sound, and just logical enough that I could attempt it. And wouldn't I be blessed if at the end of this experiment I found myself in a state where I perpetually was filled with love, for everyone? Think of the good I could do, with my mind so oriented.
But my mind recoils from such an idea. Why is it that I so enjoy the feeling of love, either received or given, but yet I also cherish the ability to cleanly and tidily not love someone? What makes me want to retain that right? Why would I possibly want to not love?
Perhaps the reason is that love is a scary thing when you cannot control it. What do you do with yourself if you love your enemy? If someone wrongs you, but you love them...how do you simultaneously hate them? How can you enjoy schadenfreude if you love someone that suffers? How can you hold a deliciously overlong grudge, if you love someone?

It seems to me, that if I practice hard, and learn to love all the time, I may have to give up on evil. That is a heavy price to pay for happiness.


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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 2

When I was a junior in high school, I ran for senior class President. It was on a whim, really, because I didn't have huge aspirations for myself politically, nor did I have any especially great ideas for improvement at the school. What I did have was a cutting-edge strategy for getting elected: comedy comedy comedy. High school kids really don't care about issues. At least, not as much as they care about laughing. So posters like "Do you like air? So does Alex Waller, vote for him to continue free breathing." and "Vote For Waller To End The Vietnam War" were met with almost universal praise.
Come the day of the election, we gave speeches. My speech waxed hilarious, and included excerpts from the final speech given by Chris Farley at the end of the movie "Tommy Boy." I suggested in my speech that my impending election was the only thing that could prevent the coming invasion of robotic couch potatoes. People rolled in the aisles. I felt victory was at hand.
Unbeknownst to me, two of my competitors had seen blood in the water. After the votes were cast, but before the results were announced, they made a quiet trip to the Principal's office and convinced her to "pool" their votes; they want to be co-Presidents. Later, we were told that because of this the votes for class president had to be recounted: it was now too close to call. I thought quickly, and grabbed another class president candidate and told the Principal that he and I had decided to "pool" our votes, which would guarantee a victory for me, and as he had not been close enough to matter, would guarantee a huge coup for him. The Principal, paragon of fairness...said "no, Alex." Needless to say, I lost the election to those two "co-Presidents."
I still remember the feeling in my gut. My mother would call it "moral anger." Clearly I had been cheated. The after-the-polling shenanigans, combined with the unfairness of not allowing me the same shenanigan rights, had caused a clearly unfair result.

What drives me, all too often, to make long-term judgements about people, is rage. Rage does not fill my life. Rage does not own me. I spend most of my days in a state of permanent bemusement, or perhaps cynicism. Often I force my self into intentional naivete or optimism in order to power through rough times.
But once in a while, I get the rage.

Fortunately, I am not alone. Rage is a cascade effect, when a person's brain has become so overwhelmingly saturated with adrenaline and other hormones, and the situation seems inescapable. In the terms of nature, rage is when we emotionally are asked to choose fight or flight, and boy do we choose fight. It does not surprise me that rage has long-term effects: strong emotions lead to stronger wiring of synaptic pathways in the brain. I cannot possibly name 20 people from my high school class of over 400, but I can easily name the two people who combined votes to win over me in that election. I can describe their faces.

I'm not going to now write about the need for people to try to avoid rage. Or to make it fade quickly when it comes. Rather, I am going to say this: when rage fills you, embrace it. Let it wash over you. Rage lets you know you are alive. Don't try to calm yourself down. Don't try to deny how you feel. Rage proves that you can feel. Now, actively pursuing rage is probably not a good idea. The aftereffects of repetitive rage are pretty hard on the body and mind.
But should I just have rolled over after the election was taken from me? Should Jesus have kept his mouth shut on the Cross, or was his cry of rage "My God, my God why have You forsaken me?!" totally justified? Imagine Jesus calmly and politely asking the moneychangers and sellers of doves to vacate the temple, at their convenience. Rage, like logic and serenity, can be a tool too.
Rage is like that Tanqueray commercial where "Tony Sinclair" says "everything in moderation." True rage, when it comes, is a wonder to behold. But when it comes, it must expend itself in order for its host to recover, and move on.
So have I moved on? Am I still pissed about that inconsequential, stupid election for a pointless position? The fact that I was angry about losing seems laughable now, as both of the co-Presidents had been expelled by the middle of senior year. Which led to another emotion altogether: schadenfreude.


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The Emotions That Rule Me, Part 1

Earlier in the year, I wrote a soliloquy musing on darkness. In it, I described that when darkness fell on me during an overnight fishing trip, the weight of the world pressing in on me was enormous, and overwhelming. Perhaps part of being human is a fear of the dark...and that is all it was. But instead (and since I've never really known a real great fear of the dark), I wonder if what pressed in on me was loneliness.

There are times in my life when loneliness creeps in, and it usually has nothing to do with the number of other people around me. For instance, one vivid memory is on the bus ride home from Science Olympiad State Championships in 1998, when like a rushing wave I was struck by incredible loneliness, even though I had a dozen teammates all around me on the bus.
Or there is the time I spent a day at work chatting online with a great friend. We talked about everything. Then I went home and we chatted some more. It was great. It was one of those rare moments when you and someone else are so exactly on the same page about...well, everything...that the conversation flows freely and honestly, and never dulls.
The next day, I was back at work, and my friend was not online. All day I felt incredibly lonely, sitting there at my desk, trying to get work done. A couple times I just stopped working and sat there, staring at the screen and musing on the hollow cavity in my chest. How do you do a job alone today that you did with a companion right there with you yesterday? Even though my friend and I were miles apart during our chat, the social interaction had apparently been critical to my emotional state. Why was that?

I wonder, perhaps, if this is all just chemicals in my head. But I also wonder if loneliness proves I have a soul. Because some part of me, that day, needed to talk to my friend. I was at work, surrounded by people, literally hundreds of people, many of whom are close to me. I could have socialized with any of them. Yet none of them would do. My soul ached for my friend whose soul was a mirror of my own.

So I wonder: do we share connections with each other that are hard to separate? Could it be that the interaction of two souls intertwines them, in some way, such that loneliness is in fact the sensation we feel when that knot is unraveled? Perhaps the same way absence of a drug leads to a painful withdraw, absence of a soul leads to a similar state; we crave what we had grown accustomed to accessing easily.
I do not struggle daily with loneliness. Perhaps that is why when it does afflict me it is all the more poignant. And the rarity of it is what makes me stop and evaluate my relationships with the people I long for. Makes me wonder how they have become such a strong influence on my happiness. And makes me scheme a way to get them back.


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Dehydrato

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I coined the now-famous term "Godzillionaire" which is defined as a person with a net worth of at least 1 Godzillion dollars.
And, yes, Godzillion is also a TAE trademarked word, meaning "the amount of money required to genetically engineer or irradiate a small lizard so it turns into a 200-foot long, fire-breathing, immortal monster capable of destroying Tokyo yet somehow morally against it." I imagine that would take a lot of money to accomplish.
This google search will reveal that Godzillion and Godzillionaire are used extensively on this site.


Another TAE invented word is "Wallerite" which is "a futuristic bulk material with the mechanical properties of aluminum but the insulative properties of foam board insulation."

There are a few others that I shall not name here. Instead, I'd like to introduce my first musical term. Last night I had a couple beers, and that, combined with a mild cold, woke me up with an incredibly baritone voice. For some reason, when I drink and get dehydrated, I wake up temporarily able to sing lower than I should, at least until my throat gets well lubricated. This makes the morning commute fun, as I can sing a baritone harmony to the radio that normally eludes a person of my tiny stature.
Hence the following phrase: "Ugh, I woke up this morning, and I was singing really dehydrato."

Dehydrato: singing artificially lower than normally possible via dehydration. Common methods for dehydration include binge drinking, chain smoking, or viral infections.


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Matt Yglesias and Engineering

Yglesias:

The real problem with overspending on defense, by contrast, is that the defense establishment competes for people with civilian sectors of the economy. The guys who are building these cool military exoskeletons, for example, are obviously very talented. And the supply of talented engineers isn’t all that elastic. When they supply their talents to defense-related projects, the civilian economy is starved of talent.

While I admit, my cool, defense related job has starved the civilian community of my daring and copious engineering talent, I have to say that it seems very blind to assume that no engineer that works in the defense industry is making a real, quantifiable contribution to private industry. Defense research spending (or it's brother, the academically-geared NIH spending which could be lumped into a "government research spending) accounts for a huge number of genuine, beneficial innovations, both incremental and breakthrough. Part of the reason for this is because things that work really well for soldiers, like the ability to use a satellite tracking system to know their location and altitude anywhere on Earth, also happens to be really handy for boats, cars, hikers, etc. But the other part of this is that a private corporation simply can't afford to lose money on 19 out of 20 ideas. If I had gone to the CEO of my last company, a private engineering firm that specialized in designing the guts (ductwork, piping, and electrical lines) of buildings, and said to him "Duane, I've got an idea, supported by some cutting edge science, that would save 30% of the electrical bill for a building. All we need to do is set up a basic metallurgical shop and mix the following ratios of ores." I would have been laughed at.
However, if I take that same idea, packaged in a "white paper" to the Navy Research Lab or DARPA, and the idea seemed sound, they're likely as not to throw a $500k bone my way, and in a year they might have a new product, Wallerite, that has the mechanical properties of aluminum ductwork but the insulative properties of foam board insulation. In which case, the government would buy a ton of it at cost (via Bayh-Dole) and I wouldn't make a lot of money off that...but then companies like my former one would spec that super ductwork in their designs and courtesy commercialization efforts (also funded by a STTR), I might make billions. Now, for every 1 engineer that makes Wallerite and really does some good, we do get 19 engineers working on the F-35, the biggest boondoggle in military acquisition history. Nevertheless, if the government were to cut the $500k out of the Defense budget that I would need to develop Wallerite, then not only does the world (and environment) miss out on my cutting edge new ductwork material, but the national economy loses a lot of potential revenue (and tax dollars). Or, as Tony Stark says in the first Iron Man movie:

Tell me, do you plan to report on the millions we’ve saved by advancing medical technology or kept from starvation with our intellicrops? All those breakthroughs, military funding, honey.

Later in his post, Yglesias drops a weird doozy

The Manhattan Project involved a huge proportion of the world’s finest scientific minds and rightly so. But undertaking that kind of civilian to military brain drain all the time can be very harmful.

I think he's misrepresenting the Defense Budget if he blankets it under "military" brain drain.
That all said, I am in favor of cutting the Defense budget. Only, let's not cut the research budget (I admit bias), instead, let's cut back on unjustified empire-building in faraway countries where the locals despise us.


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The Post-Labor Era

Megan suggests that while we "lose jobs to China," we in fact are still maintaining jobs...we just create different ones:

For an individual with a job in a textile factory, there may indeed be displacement.  Yet over the centuries, our economy has "lost" millions of jobs.  Weavers no longer ply their trade in front of a hand loom, threshers don't stride through the golden fields of wheat with their scythes, and wheelwrights and blacksmiths have lost their livelihoods to the horseless carriage.  Yet unemployment has not shot up to 100%; over time, we've found jobs to replace all of these specialties.

Perhaps someone will protest that we lost those jobs to technology, rather than trade, but what's the difference between competing with a Chinese laborer, and competing with a machine?  Either one can cause distressing temporary dislocation, but both of them make us more productive, boosting our lifestyle (and, thankfully, the lifestyle of the Chinese laborer).

Now, I feel this needs a qualifier. While in general I agree with her; if the US gave up a manufacturing job and gained a tech-sector job, then both US and China would benefit. However, not every vacated job in the last 100 years was replaced by a fitter, smarter job that provided the employee with enhanced happiness. How many manufacturing jobs, given this lose one - gain one scenario, have been replaced by high-stress jobs in real estate, or in mutual funds? Jobs that, for some, might provide a paycheck and nothing more. How many lost manufacturing jobs are replaced by volatile jobs at companies that fire and rehire with a libertarian-loved reckless disregard for anything but the bottom line?

Here's my bottom line: until we can successfully educate the American people to a point where they all take productive, stable jobs in technically demanding fields, we will need manufacturing jobs to keep unemployment down. 

More on this to come.

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Axed

I'm taking Curious Cat off my blogroll, as it has degraded to hackery and advertising.


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Ending Cars?

After several months of arguing in favor of autonomous cars...I feel its about time to start tackling mass transit. This comes on the heels of me reading a report that for every ten barrels of oil that enter the United States, seven of them power automobiles. That's a lot of oil. And subsequently, it is a lot of CO2.

The solution to this abject waste of natural resources would of course be to expand mass transit, and streamline it, and make it more personal, so that large number of people gave up on their cars. This, of course, assumes that Transfer Booths and Stepping Disks cannot be invented in the short term.

Now, in the event that not every city will want to reorganize into a "totalitarian hellscape" with optimized subway systems and zero streets, an eventuality must be that:
1. The distance from your personal starting point to the mass transit approaches zero.
2. The mass transit system day to day deviation in arrival and departure time approaches zero.
3. The distance from the mass transit to your destination approaches zero.

Of course, we cannot realistically expect every mass transit system to run exactly on time every day, and often, they pad the departure times so that delays in the arrivals disappear. This leads to inefficiencies in the system. You end up with variations of this, like when subways basically run as fast as possible, without the expectation of pre-timed departures. Or you have busses, which often have published departure times from various stops, and a small amount of dead time at each stop accounts for late arrivals. Early arrivals mean a bus often idles, wasting gas.
So what causes an early or late arrival of a bus? Traffic lights and traffic would be the most obvious reasons. What if these were eliminated?  The easiest way to eliminate traffic lights would be to eliminate cars.

Think of it: a city where the streets are completely covered with buses. By eliminated the congestion of cars, it frees up a massive amount of road surface that can be occupied by buses, which now can run at more stops, increasing the customization and helpfulness of the mass transit system by dropping you off closer to your destination. Further, the massive increase in demand for bus services should thereby decrease the price. Or at least make the bus service more efficient.

Imagine, if you will, that the whole city transit system can be reorganized into a giant fractal pattern. Or like a tributary system for a massive set of rivers that all flow into a central lake. Every morning it "rains" people, who hop on the nearest mass transit object, be it a bus or train or trolley or whatever. Then then amalgamate into a critical mass that requires a larger mass driver to move them further towards the central hub. This is, unfortunately, exactly how mass transit systems are designed in theory but never in practice. Part of the reason for this is that the mass transit system is usually built around the highway system for a city, that is, it runs along the most convenient routes possible given that the actual most convenient routes are already occupied by mega-super-highways. What if your ten lane super highway was instead occupied by nine lanes of mass transit and one lane of opposed flow mass transit, for the rare birds that travel from city to suburb to work? Can you really tell me that such a system would be slower for people's commutes? Don't make me laugh.

Taxi drivers will rail against what I am about to say: cities should ban cars. It is really any more farfetched than driverless cars? In the case of driverless cars, the added cost of the autonomous driving electronics package would be offset by the decrease cost of gas and the decreased cost of car insurance, as you basically wouldn't need it. In the case of city-wide car bans, the added cost of taxes to subsidize the huge surge in number of mass transit entities would be offset by the individual savings found in most cases by eliminating gas from the budget completely, as well as the car itself (and insurance).

Of course, none of this will ever happen. But what if...


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Busy

Like TPI, I have been pulled away from my hobbies as of late, due to familial obligations and certain temporary extra-curriculars. Forgive me, dear readers, but posts may be a bit light - for a bit longer.

Just to keep you in the know, I am working on two proposals, worth $50k each, to develop clean energy technologies. I can only write so much a day...and those proposals involve a lot of writing.

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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd

Tim Lee has made a bet with Ryan Avent:

I bet you $500 that on your daughter’s 16th birthday, it won’t be possible and legal for someone with no driver’s license to hop into a self-driving car in DC, give it an address in Philly, take a nap, and wake up at her destination 3-4 hours later (depending on traffic, obviously).
The car must be generally commercially available–not a research prototype or limited regulatory trial. It can be either purchased or a rented “taxi.” And obviously there can’t be anyone helping to guide the vehicle either in the car or over the air.

Of course TAE has an opinion about this. I think it is naive to believe that one day soon we'll all just "switch over" to driverless cars. Instead, I imagine that Lee will win the bet but Avent will win the war: by 2026, vehicles will be available with certain levels of autonomy that continue to incrementally increase safety for passengers. Perhaps his daughter will still need a driver's license, but won't need to use her driving skills except in the event of severe weather, or in parking lots or National Parks or somesuch.

For more on driverless cars, see my entry here and embedded links. We've been over this a lot at TAE.
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To my friend

When I was a kid, I had this mental image of the woman I believed would eventually be my wife. She was blonde, about 5'4", loved hunting, was a genius, and did lots of outdoorsy stuff. She also was great genetics for my five blonde sons who were essentially "Little Alex" X 5.
When I got to college, this woman evolved a little, to having red hair and freckles. However, a penchant for the outdoors and a sharp mind were still just as essential. I had in my head this hilariously (in retrospect) improbable image where I'd be in my pickup driving to some outdoorsy location to do something outdoorsy with my dog and she'd pull up in her Jeep, headed to the same place, with her dog. We'd get there and fall in love and do outdoorsy things. She'd turn out to be a biochemistry major, accepted to med school.

Later on, when I was a little older and a lot less stupid, I realized that what I thought would make me happy was in fact a woman that was no more than just "me with a vagina." I didn't want a partner, someone who would be different than me and challenge me to do new and different things, and to see the world in a different way. What I thought I wanted was a clone of myself because hey, I'm pretty cool, wouldn't be fun if I could hang out with myself? I was so content with my lifestyle, so clear about what I enjoyed doing, that I just wanted a female facsimile of myself to do the stuff I already enjoyed doing with me. Or so I thought.

Then I met my future wife. She was just the opposite of me. She liked 70's music, I hate it. She liked the beach, I hate it. She liked art, I never cared for it. She hates ticks so strongly that she'll avoid going outdoors if they are a factor, I consider them inconsequential. I love football, she thinks it is boring. And yet, her sharp mind and hilarious wit kept me around. And with blondes and redheads in my sights, she was (of course) a brunette.
And so its funny that she is perfect for me. She stretches me. She forces me to exit my comfort zone. She teaches me to be patient with others, to not be afraid to dress funny.

In any case, my friend, I know that you are out there, looking for a wife. I know that you think that you will find a woman that will share some of your interests, and if she does that is great. But just don't expect a female you to come along and be perfect for you. Imagine what you want in a wife, and then check off any of those things that sound more like something you'd find in a dude than in a dudette. Replace them with the exact opposite of what you had written.

I'm not saying I'm perfect, or that my wife is, or that our marriage is perfect. We fight. Her penchant for watching episodes of Supernatural when I want "adult time" drives me nuts. My dislike for cuddling, ever, frustrates her to no end.

But she makes me happier than a female TAE ever would.


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Friday Poetry Burst

The Early Purges, by Seamus Heaney

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, 'the scraggy wee shits',
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.

'Sure, isn't it better for them now?' Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens' necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:

'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.


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Cars that Drive Themselves, Ctd - Video Edition

I think the need for driverless cars can be completely justified by this guy:


The double irony being that the guy recording this video and the driver are also not paying very good attention to the road.


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Electrocuting Yourself To Get Smarter

Remember, dear regular readers, back in April when I reported that scientists had induced a mild current in someone's head while they tried to do complicated tasks? It turned out that their memory but more importantly people showed faster rates of learning.

Now those results have been repeated by a group in England. They isolated a section of the brain that contributed to math skills and applied a mild current while the volunteers practiced math. Turns out the volunteers had enhanced memory. Turns out that enhanced memory lasted for months:

"This isn't going to turn you into a genius," says Cohen Kadosh, "but it could be turned into a device to help children with poor numeracy skills improve their mathematical abilities".

How long until this is a consumer device? How long until poor parents complain that rich kids are benefitting from this technology and their children aren't?


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Staying abreast of technology

TAE thinks that it is a good idea to embrace every new technology that emerges, be it Twitter, Facebook, mp3s, tablet PCs, and now the new Microsoft Kinect. Occasionally I will look foolish, like when I was using "livejournal." But by embracing new tech, and staying comfortable with it, I will avoid the following situation when I am 65:

TAE to his grandson: Will you please fix this quantum-shift voice-coil replicator?
Grandson: **EYE ROLL** Grandpa, this is a boson-phase-shift replicator. No one has used quantum shift replicators in at least 5 years. (Grandson pushes some buttons on the display) Looks like it is toast. You're gonna need a new one. You might as well upgrade to the new ArcTech.
TAE: ArcTech?
Grandson **EYE ROLL**


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In Defense of Not Voting - UPDATED

When I was a senior in high school, some years ago, I took a trip with Brian Knapp to Washington D.C. to learn all about the government process. The trip was part of the "Close Up: Washington, DC" program for kids, and involved round table discussions, lectures, and trips to important monuments. It was January and man was it cold.
Anyways, Brian and I got into this entertaining routine of choosing the minority opinion whenever we, as a group, were discussing an issue. Didn't matter the issue, we just looked for which side was the minority opinion and ardently and vocally supported that side.
One issue that came up was whether or not it was okay to not vote. Basically, the moderator had anyone who felt that skipping the vote was okay go to one side of the room. Everyone who thought not voting was wrong was to go to the other side of the room. Unsurprisingly, Brian Knapp and I found ourselves alone on one side of the room. The 'vote skippers' side. This was probably unsurprising to the other students there because we'd both been making waves with our "controversial" opinions all week. I had argued that the United States had done a lot to reduce nuclear arms (which was clearly spelled START in our reading assignment, dummies) while everyone else there seemed to think America was committed to a massive and unchanged nuclear arsenal.
Anyway, the moderator asked us why we thought it was okay to not vote. Brian responded: "why should I vote for the candidate I dislike the least?" I expanded his response: "if, in the election, there is literally no candidate I feel is qualified or even close to competent enough to hold their potential office...if there is no proposition that I feel is important, no amendment, no tax, and no issue that really compels me left or right, why should I waste my time voting?" Then Brian: "Non-voting is basically a vote for no one. You are actively voting, just, you aren't voting for anyone." Then me: "Honestly, what percentage of people vote? At best, it's like 30-35%. Doesn't the 65% of people so apathetic or jaded or stubborn that they don't vote tell the elected officials something?"

Then Brian: "voting is a right, not a duty. Calling it a civic duty is unfair to people who simply cannot endorse one candidate over the other."

Sure, we were 18. But the truth of it is, even now, by the time November rolls around, I usually am saying "I don't want to vote for any of these assholes." So why should I? Even if I disliked one candidate more than I disliked the other, I don't want my vote to be misconstrued as a vote of support for one of them. Maybe I should still go to the polls, and write in a candidate. But how is that any different than not voting at all? Not voting for either candidate has the exact same effect as writing in a candidate.

Now, I am certainly not saying we all shouldn't vote. I brazenly voted for Mr. Obama in 2008. I actually like(d) Mr. Obama, and I definitely was voting for him, not against Mr. McCain. But in the 6 elections I have been old enough to participate in, I really have only been compelled a couple of times to vote for people. And I think I'm not alone.

So no, I didn't vote yesterday. I didn't have any reason to.

Update: Jason Brennan agrees:

I argue that while citizens have no duty to vote, if they do vote, they must vote well—on the basis of sound moral and empirical beliefs in order to promote the common good—or otherwise they are morally obligated to abstain. Though individual votes make no significant difference to political outcomes, bad voting violates either a duty not to participate in collectively harmful activities or a duty not to participate in collective activities that impose undue risk upon innocent people.

 Will Wilkinson also agrees:

The idea that we should vote well if we vote at all sounds innocuous enough. However, Mr Brennan's corollary argument that if we are not in a position to vote well, then it is wrong to vote runs counter to the civic religion of unconditional democratic participation. This argument will also surely make members of the political party most likely to benefit from high voter turnout hotly indignant. But when one considers that bad policy can be immensely harmful to the general welfare, and that the participation of poorly-informed voters makes the adoption of bad policy more likely, the duty of the ignorant to refrain from exercising the franchise does not seem so easy to rebut.

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Modifying SETI for Earth Hunting

Let's assume the number of exoplanets being found continues, as expected, to increase. Let's then assume that increased technology also allows, as expected, finer details about those exoplanets to be discovered. It's fairly safe, based on this and simple statistics, that the chances of finding a rocky planet in the habitable orbit zone around its star asymptotically approaches one very rapidly.

Give this data, should we not release probes out of our own orbit to observe our planet from afar, to determine what, if any, characteristics of a "planet inhabited by intelligent life" can be observed? Rather than speculate on what, if any, way we'll know if a planet is inhabitable, or inhabited...why not gather empirical evidence of what an inhabited planet looks like by launching a very fast, rear-facing probe deep into space?


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Why My Marriage Works

Things that I loathe, like, loathe to the point that I actually get depressed and just want to sit on the couch and eat chips until the cops come find my body...are exactly the things my wife sets to with a frenetic glee. For example: moving. In my youth I typically waited until 11 pm the night before I moved to pack everything, in a chaotic explosion of random, unsorted boxes. I cared not what went where, never labeled the boxes. I just hated packing so much. Then, when I got moved to my new destination, only 50% of the boxes ever got unpacked. Typically the rest just lay open and I'd take things out of them one at a time as I needed them.

Insert my wife. Weeks ahead of time, she was planning, getting boxes, labeling things, packing fragile items in paper, scheduling utilities being turned off, and generally being awesome. I unhelpfully moped. Now we are moved, and she is in an unpacking blitzkrieg. I prefer to go to work and write about how much I hate unpacking.


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DARPA and the Human Machine Interface

In a BAA released yesterday, DARPA announced their Reliable Peripheral Interfaces (RPI) program:

DARPA seeks to develop reliable in-vivo peripheral motor-signal recording and sensory-signal stimulating interfaces. Such efforts will involve design, fabrication, testing, and analysis of new materials and technologies to demonstrate substantial improvements in reliability and quantity of peripheral motor-signal information. Ultimately DARPA desires to develop clinically viable technologies, enabling wounded service members to control state-of-the-art prosthetic limbs.

Here's the good stuff:

Technical Area 1: Demonstrate clinically viable reliable-tissue interfaces to peripheral nerves or muscles. These interfaces must enable stable, robust, and high-performance recording of motor-signal activity.

Technical Area 2: Demonstrate the clinically viable tissue-interface electronics necessary to enable the development and testing of reliable peripheral interfaces designed to control many-DOF prosthetic limbs.

Technical Area 3: Demonstrate clinically viable algorithms and subsystem for reliably decoding motor-control signals from detected peripheral signals.

How ironic this BAA releases in TAE's Year of the Human-Machine Interface! What was it I said? Oh yes. "All you need is drivers." That would be technical area 3. I wrote, in a previous blog post about hijacking the nervous system, that you could essentially read and write all five senses if you found a way to directly interface with the nervous system. That would be Technical area 1. And here, in February, I discuss the idea that electronics that integrate with the human nervous system could revolutionize information retrieval. That would be technical area 2.
So don't worry, DARPA, I've got you covered.

Seriously, though, this is good research. While it is probably impossible for most federal agencies to get ridiculous research funded, not so for DARPA. However, by cloaking what I really think is their ultimate goal: cyborg soldiers, behind a veil of beneficent "help the walking wounded" research, they can really kill two birds with one stone. Sure, they want to have prostheses that are more actively and reliably responsive to the actual neural commands of the amputee. That would be fantastic if concepts like Dean Kamen's "DEKA" arm could have better musculoneural feedback. Or the RIC arm could have a better interface than pectoral stimulation.
However, what would be even better would be if a soldier could plug into a supersuit and control it with his muscles directly, and receive external information, like ally/enemy positions via integrated electronics. He could control targeting systems with his nerves directly, without moving. He could send vocal commands and feedback to his teammates via radio...without speaking into a radio. He could plug himself into a USB port at the end of a mission and download his memories of the mission as a high-tech version of a mission report.

While I really laud DARPA for funding this research to help injured vets, what I really feel could be the bread and butter here would be breaking the code of human nerve to digital electronics communication. That would revolutionize and open up a whole new frontier in bionic interfacing. Sign me up.


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Electric Vehicles

TAE predicts the need to recharge electric vehicles on cross country trips could predicate a resurgence in public rest stop use, if states are smart and get self-service charging stations in place quickly.


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Marketing the iPad rival

The smartest name I can imagine so far is the "Motorola Everything." Or "Samsung Universe." Or "HTC Nuclear."

The name should not invoke any references to feminine hygiene, to be sure.


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Adventures in Rare Metal Supereconomics

What if China decided, one day, to not sell rare earth metals (in which it basically dominates the world market) to any company that did not have its corporate headquarters in China? In a day, Apple, Motorola, RIM, and a cadre of other cell phone manufacturers would fall to their knees. HTC would be fine.

Southwest Airlines cheap flights, for many years, was partially due to the fact they'd locked in a multi-year gas pricing agreement, and as gas prices surged, they could still get their gas cheap. If I were Apple, or Dell, or Garmin, or anyone really that uses OLED or LCD screen technology or gallium-based electronics...I would be working out a long-term rare earth metal supply agreement with the Chinese government.


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Steve Jobs' Logic Adventures

The iPad isn't selling as well as hoped...because it doesn't have enough competition.


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nom nom.


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Adventures in Airport Security

TAE's (bad) Idea: Tape aluminum foil stencils of funny images to your chest before you go through the fully body scanner.


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Brain-Mounted Computers/Active Contact Lens Displays

Adam Ozinek has an interesting article (cited on Sullivan) about what he sees as an inevitable future:

Let me describe it extreme layman’s terms (the only terms I know): you’ll have a powerful computer in your future iPhone-like-device that is connected to a special contact lens that so that screens floats in front on your face, and you steer the whole thing with your brain. The most important facts about this technology is that a) nobody will be able to tell whether you’re looking at your computer or not, and b) it will always be available to you. Why is using this device a dominant strategy? Choosing to use it is simply expanding your memory and factual knowledge to include everything on the internet. As far as anyone who knows you can tell you will never misspell a word,  not know a fact, forget the words to a song, or know any piece of data. Quick: what was the per-capita GDP of Guatamala in 1976? Anyone with a brain mounted computer will be able to tell you.

This sounds vaguely familiar to something TAE published back in February:

After a moment, a red arrow appears in front of me on the ground, and the words "150 yards" appears below the arrow. I follow the direction of the arrow, which disappears when I pass over it. Further ahead, a second arrow appears, signalling a turn right out the concourse into the stadium seating area. I follow it. Of course, I am the only person that can see these red arrows. The information is being fed directly to my eyes via active contact lenses with tiny LEDs and circuitry printed directly on them. The contact lenses give off no magnification; my eyesight is fine. The circuitry is powered by radio waves beamed from a control unit in my hat. I follow the arrows until a "ding" in my ear informs me that I am near my wife. An arrow in the sky, pointing downward, indicates her location. I go meet up with her.

During the game, the down and distance, first down line, and various player stats are all displayed on my "heads up display" contacts. Mrs. TAE and I got $2 discounts on our tickets, but in exchange for this, during half-time Coca-cola beams a commercial directly to our eyes, even with our eyes closed we see the images. Coke, pouring out of a glass bottle (I mention to Mrs. TAE that glass bottle soda is impossible to find outside of Mexico) into a big glass fills our vision, but by now we are so used to ads being beamed in that we ignore it and enjoy conversation and the band out on the field.

I go further:

Back up in the seating section, I am enjoying a new feature: the football has a tracking device in it, and it glows bright red in my contact lens HUD during plays. This allows me to see where the ball is, and laugh when the defense is duped by a fake hand-off.

After the game, my HUD leads me to my car. While we are walking, Mrs. TAE suggests we consider upgrading from our red monochrome contacts to newer contacts with 7 colors. I suggest we wait a little longer, I have read that the new 256 color contacts are expected to reach consumers within the next two months.

 Now, far be it for me to suggest that I am ahead of the curve on predicting the future. Rather, let me just say that I completely agree with Adam, that eye-mounted computer displays are the future. But he misses something that I didn't: the advertising. Why did Google want to develop the Android OS for cellular phones? So they could advertise on your phone! Any new display technology is of course going to be immediately trolled for all its worth by hungry corporations looking to get in your face with their products. To me, it makes perfect sense that you might buy your contacts from a manufacturer, and then subscribe to a wireless network service, like Verizon or Sprint or AT&T, and subsequently you'd get access to the internet on the surface of your eyeballs but in exchange you might be forced, at certain times, to watch commercials, or have part of your eyeball-mounted display have an ad bar.

One further thought: in that article I wrote back in February, I also suggested that along with contact lens displays, sound would also be accessible by implanted ear bud devices:

Arriving at the football game, I call my wife. I pull my Droid out of my pocket and find her number in the speed dial. I dial her, then put the phone away. A ring sounds in my left ear. Last month, I had a wireless device implanted on the surface of my ear drum, that strikes a tiny "mallet" on my drum, creating sounds where there are none. "Hello" I hear her voice.
"Update your location, I can't find you." I reply. "Okay," she says and I hear the hanging up noise.

Because whats the fun of watching Youtube videos while you are supposed to be paying attention to a meeting...if you can't hear the sound in the video too?


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