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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