Because miracles are just one scientist away:
_
_
Friday, 30 September 2011
First off, Farhad Manjoo has posted a week-long series on robots entering more and more complex (read: high-paying) job markets, like robot pharmacists and robot lawyers. Some of the articles are quite good, and they all deserve at least a skim.
But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:
The point here, is that what the robot lacks is curiosity. It doesn't go out and look for answers. It isn't "interested" in solving problems. Maybe if I asked the future super-powered scientist/robot of Manjoo's article to "explain climate change" it would chug away at climate data for a few weeks and then barf out an explanation, God be praised. But it doesn't sit there, in a lab, and suddenly think to itself "I wonder how climate change works?" And because of that, a sentient scientist will always be required. Maybe in the future scientists will become more like philosophers, and spend more time ruminating and coming up with questions. Then they'll hand the question over to the supercomputer, it'll go all Wolfram Alpha, and then the scientists can get busy trying to sort out the implications of the answer. Less lab book time and more time for creative thinking won't diminish the work of scientists, it will elevate it. Because its not like 350 years ago scientists said "I don't understand this gravity thing" and then Newton explained it and they all threw up their hands and declared their careers obsolete and went and became plumbers. Asking questions, finding an answer, then asking more questions based on that answer is the fundamental scientific process of humanity, and until we have a computer that can embrace ambiguity and synthesize its own curiosity...human scientists will remain pivotal...regardless of how quickly a computer can derive equations.
_
But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:
The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music when beads were placed on it. Half of the children saw a version of the toy in which the toy was only activated after four beads were exactingly placed, one at a time, on the top of the toy. This was the “unambiguous condition,” since it implied every bead is equally capable of activating the device. However, other children were randomly assigned to an “ambiguous condition,” in which only two of the four beads activated the toy. (The other two beads did nothing.) In both conditions, the researchers ended their demo with a question: “Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?”
Next came the exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads. One of the pairs was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.
Here’s where the ambiguity made all the difference. Children who’d seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair. As a result, they were unable to figure out which beads activated the toy. (In fact, just one out of twenty children in that condition bothered performing the so-called “experiment”.) By contrast, nearly fifty percent of children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the beads and attempted to learn which specific beads were capable of activating the toy. The uncertainty inspired their empiricism.
The point here, is that what the robot lacks is curiosity. It doesn't go out and look for answers. It isn't "interested" in solving problems. Maybe if I asked the future super-powered scientist/robot of Manjoo's article to "explain climate change" it would chug away at climate data for a few weeks and then barf out an explanation, God be praised. But it doesn't sit there, in a lab, and suddenly think to itself "I wonder how climate change works?" And because of that, a sentient scientist will always be required. Maybe in the future scientists will become more like philosophers, and spend more time ruminating and coming up with questions. Then they'll hand the question over to the supercomputer, it'll go all Wolfram Alpha, and then the scientists can get busy trying to sort out the implications of the answer. Less lab book time and more time for creative thinking won't diminish the work of scientists, it will elevate it. Because its not like 350 years ago scientists said "I don't understand this gravity thing" and then Newton explained it and they all threw up their hands and declared their careers obsolete and went and became plumbers. Asking questions, finding an answer, then asking more questions based on that answer is the fundamental scientific process of humanity, and until we have a computer that can embrace ambiguity and synthesize its own curiosity...human scientists will remain pivotal...regardless of how quickly a computer can derive equations.
_
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
A lot of people are trumpeting as one of its features "that are better than the iPad 2" the fact that it weighs 14.6 ounces and the iPad 2 weights 21.6 ounces. It causes me intestinal distress to defend an Apple product, but...
Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"
Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"
Ratio: .70
Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 oz
Weight of iPad 2: 21.6 oz
Ratio: .68
Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.
My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading at 1 am after a long day at the office. I wanted a tablet to replace my computer but knew it wouldn't replace my books. I wanted a Kindle to replace my books but knew it wouldn't replace my computer. The Kindle Fire is straddling a barbed wire fence, at its own peril.
_
_
Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"
Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"
Ratio: .70
Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 oz
Weight of iPad 2: 21.6 oz
Ratio: .68
Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.
My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading at 1 am after a long day at the office. I wanted a tablet to replace my computer but knew it wouldn't replace my books. I wanted a Kindle to replace my books but knew it wouldn't replace my computer. The Kindle Fire is straddling a barbed wire fence, at its own peril.
_
_
Hitch hates Christianity, this much is known. But here he really takes a stab at American Christianity as the reason the Death Penalty survives in America:
_
The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.) Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.)Sullivan linked to it, then he got this absolutely brilliant reader response, which I am pasting in full:
I don't really have anything to add to that, other than that the death penalty is expensive and ineffective, like so many other government institutions that the GOP argues should be abolished. But you almost never hear them argue for abolishing the expensive, ineffective practice of killing criminals.In 2010, as far as I can tell, these five states executed the most people:
1. China (2000+)
2. Iran (252+)
3. North Korea (60+)
4. Yemen (53+)
5. USA (46+)
Two of the top three entities are explicitly atheist. Hitch's assertion that we can ignore Chinese executions because they are a "very nervous oligarchy" can easily be used for Iran considering, you know, they actually have a demonstrable REASON to be nervous - the 2009 protests/Green Movement, hostile relationship with the world's only superpower, etc - and because any analyst of Iran worth his salt will tell you that their government is an extremely Byzantine oligarchy, not a true dictatorship. In other words, you don't get to throw China out and retain the Iranians while making this argument. Yemen is a barely functioning state of tribes. Surprise.
As for us, maybe "God" has something to do with it. But I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest something risky: perhaps it has more to do with a very particular brand of Protestant Christian theology than it does with "God".I didn't see Hitch accounting for ultra-Catholic South America, where Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have explicitly abolished the death penalty. There are also a handful of countries that have de facto abolished the practice, having not carried out an execution for at least the last two decades: Dominica (1986), El Salvador (1973), Grenada (1978), Jamaica (1988), Peru (1979), Suriname (1982), Brazil (1876). Most of these nations retain the death penalty for possible use in cases like treason or crimes against humanity. Somehow one of the most religious continents in the world seems to have escaped Hitch's sight.
I get it. Hitch hates God. But this seems like a classic case of him beginning with his own very well-known assumptions and then hastily assembling the best argument he can make to support it. Religious conservatives will always point to communist dictatorships. Liberal atheists will point to religious theocracies. Both are capable of great evil. You don't need to believe in God to murder. And just because you believe in God doesn't preclude you from being a murderer. More than anything, it is just simply absolutism in something that deludes people into murder.
_
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Somehow a scientist has created a "crack" in the fabric of the universe that leads back 85 million years ago to a much younger Earth. Okay, so when people go through the time portal, it's apparently a one way trip, with no way back. How do they know what is on the other side of the portal? At one point they show a "probe" they sent through first, remarking (in order to silence time travel critics like myself) that after sending the probe back 85 million years, they could not find it in the present (2149 AD) which led them to believe the past was a "different time stream." Well fine, pull a Star Trek.
Nevertheless, they warn travelers about to go through the portal that "the high oxygen levels on the other side (part of the reason insects and dinosaurs could get so big was that the atmospheric oxygen level in the Cretaceous period was much higher than it is in the current Neogene period) but how did they know this? Once again I ask: how did they know what was on the other side of the portal? Remember in the movie Stargate when they send a robot through the portal and try to track where it goes?
Some of the science and background in this show has been great; they completely kneecapped time travel critics when they proposed an alternative timeline. Most of the dinosaurs I've seen in the show are contemporary; shows involving dinosaurs often make the mistake of picking and choosing neat-looking/plot convenient dinosaurs at random while those dinosaurs might have lived on different continents or millions of years apart.
But here's the problem I really had: by my count they unloaded nearly 2,000 rounds at or into the attacking carnivorous dinosaurs in these two episodes and yet not a single dinosaur died, or even showed signs of injury. Were dinosaurs effectively bullet-proof? And if they were, why bother sending the "pilgrims" back with bullet-based weapons? Why not send them with tasers, RPGs and tanks or whatever it takes to bring down a Carnotaur? At one point in the episode, two characters unloaded fully-automatic assault rifles from a range of less than twenty feet at a dinosaur that stood roughly 7 feet tall. The dinosaur turned and fled, apparently unharmed by mere bullets.
Now, I'm willing to accept for the sake of this show's admittedly absurd plot that these dinosaurs have really thick skin. But five minutes after these two characters fail to stop the dinosaur with hundreds of bullets, another character mentions using tranquilizer guns. If a point-blank-range bullet will not penetrate the skin of a dinosaur, neither will a sub-sonic tranquilizer dart.
I realize that they can't think of everything when making a show, and when it comes to scifi shows (that over the last decade have shown an increasing special effects budget at the price of good writing) its hard to vet every single bit of every single episode. Nevertheless, the seeming bullet-proof aspect of the dinosaurs really bothers me, because the hulking, slow dinosaurs would have otherwise provided the "pilgrims" with a great source of protein. As the armored vehicle was being chased across a field with a Carnotaur right behind it (let's ignore the impossible biomechanics of a 50 mph dinosaur), unloading .50 BMG rounds into it from a turret and a dinosaur finally went down, I thought "that Carnotaur is going to be DELICIOUS!" and then the Carnotaur got back up, miraculously, and continued the chase.
That kind of firepower should cut through the engine of an armored vehicle. Not killing a 2-ton dinosaur with them is pretty stupid.
_
Nevertheless, they warn travelers about to go through the portal that "the high oxygen levels on the other side (part of the reason insects and dinosaurs could get so big was that the atmospheric oxygen level in the Cretaceous period was much higher than it is in the current Neogene period) but how did they know this? Once again I ask: how did they know what was on the other side of the portal? Remember in the movie Stargate when they send a robot through the portal and try to track where it goes?
Some of the science and background in this show has been great; they completely kneecapped time travel critics when they proposed an alternative timeline. Most of the dinosaurs I've seen in the show are contemporary; shows involving dinosaurs often make the mistake of picking and choosing neat-looking/plot convenient dinosaurs at random while those dinosaurs might have lived on different continents or millions of years apart.
But here's the problem I really had: by my count they unloaded nearly 2,000 rounds at or into the attacking carnivorous dinosaurs in these two episodes and yet not a single dinosaur died, or even showed signs of injury. Were dinosaurs effectively bullet-proof? And if they were, why bother sending the "pilgrims" back with bullet-based weapons? Why not send them with tasers, RPGs and tanks or whatever it takes to bring down a Carnotaur? At one point in the episode, two characters unloaded fully-automatic assault rifles from a range of less than twenty feet at a dinosaur that stood roughly 7 feet tall. The dinosaur turned and fled, apparently unharmed by mere bullets.
Now, I'm willing to accept for the sake of this show's admittedly absurd plot that these dinosaurs have really thick skin. But five minutes after these two characters fail to stop the dinosaur with hundreds of bullets, another character mentions using tranquilizer guns. If a point-blank-range bullet will not penetrate the skin of a dinosaur, neither will a sub-sonic tranquilizer dart.
I realize that they can't think of everything when making a show, and when it comes to scifi shows (that over the last decade have shown an increasing special effects budget at the price of good writing) its hard to vet every single bit of every single episode. Nevertheless, the seeming bullet-proof aspect of the dinosaurs really bothers me, because the hulking, slow dinosaurs would have otherwise provided the "pilgrims" with a great source of protein. As the armored vehicle was being chased across a field with a Carnotaur right behind it (let's ignore the impossible biomechanics of a 50 mph dinosaur), unloading .50 BMG rounds into it from a turret and a dinosaur finally went down, I thought "that Carnotaur is going to be DELICIOUS!" and then the Carnotaur got back up, miraculously, and continued the chase.
That kind of firepower should cut through the engine of an armored vehicle. Not killing a 2-ton dinosaur with them is pretty stupid.
_
Monday, 26 September 2011
Let me ask you something. Consider a future scenario in which:
1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and
2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.
In short, immortality and complete freedom from health issues is now possible...but expensive. Would you say that only the wealthy deserved the right to become immortal? Do you think that the middle class and poor should be resigned to normal mortal ills like cancer and gum disease and tetanus while the wealthy look on with timeless, perfect, robotic eyes? It seems like the right thing to do is to have the wealthy be required to subsidize the immortalization of the poor, for everyone's benefit. Right? Society would be maximally benefitted from maximum numbers of immortals; that's a huge number of productive workers paying income and capital gains taxes! Forever! So I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone - and I mean everyone except the rich - would want to tax the rich to subsidize the immortalization of the poor.
Now let's try another scenario:
1) Medicine has advanced to a point at which you can take a "universal cure pill" that, if taken once a month, will cure every ill in your body, flushing out cancer, plaque (both tooth and arterial), etc. thus maximizing your health, and
2) the universal cure pill is really expensive.
Would it really benefit society if only the rich were able to cure their ills in this convenient way? Would society really be tolerant to the idea that the middle class and/or poor would need to suffer through conventional medical treatment (or no treatment at all)? The case for immortalization was more obvious; an ethical society wouldn't let the rich live forever while the poor died in piles. But this is simply a less extreme case of the same thing. The rich would be afforded a level of health care that pushed them as close as a human could go to immortality, while the poor would be doomed to mortal ills. Ancient wealthy would go skydiving while poor people half their age suffered through dementia and died. Yet if the society subsidized the universal cure pill, everyone could achieve the stratospheric health for their entire lives. People could have 80-120 year careers, and pay income taxes that whole time!
Eventually you could imagine these scenarios backwards from the future until you arrive at present day, where a high level of medical care is available if you can afford it. If you can't, you die. And yet, the wealthy in this country seem to see their subsidization of health care for the poor as an affront to their personal liberty. And bad for the country. And an enabler of laziness in the lower classes.
But in the case of immortality via Singularity, or near-immortality via super-drugs, the argument seems pretty clear to me: the more healthy people we have in this country the more the country benefits. Why is this so hard to accept in the present tense?
_
1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and
2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.
In short, immortality and complete freedom from health issues is now possible...but expensive. Would you say that only the wealthy deserved the right to become immortal? Do you think that the middle class and poor should be resigned to normal mortal ills like cancer and gum disease and tetanus while the wealthy look on with timeless, perfect, robotic eyes? It seems like the right thing to do is to have the wealthy be required to subsidize the immortalization of the poor, for everyone's benefit. Right? Society would be maximally benefitted from maximum numbers of immortals; that's a huge number of productive workers paying income and capital gains taxes! Forever! So I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone - and I mean everyone except the rich - would want to tax the rich to subsidize the immortalization of the poor.
Now let's try another scenario:
1) Medicine has advanced to a point at which you can take a "universal cure pill" that, if taken once a month, will cure every ill in your body, flushing out cancer, plaque (both tooth and arterial), etc. thus maximizing your health, and
2) the universal cure pill is really expensive.
Would it really benefit society if only the rich were able to cure their ills in this convenient way? Would society really be tolerant to the idea that the middle class and/or poor would need to suffer through conventional medical treatment (or no treatment at all)? The case for immortalization was more obvious; an ethical society wouldn't let the rich live forever while the poor died in piles. But this is simply a less extreme case of the same thing. The rich would be afforded a level of health care that pushed them as close as a human could go to immortality, while the poor would be doomed to mortal ills. Ancient wealthy would go skydiving while poor people half their age suffered through dementia and died. Yet if the society subsidized the universal cure pill, everyone could achieve the stratospheric health for their entire lives. People could have 80-120 year careers, and pay income taxes that whole time!
Eventually you could imagine these scenarios backwards from the future until you arrive at present day, where a high level of medical care is available if you can afford it. If you can't, you die. And yet, the wealthy in this country seem to see their subsidization of health care for the poor as an affront to their personal liberty. And bad for the country. And an enabler of laziness in the lower classes.
But in the case of immortality via Singularity, or near-immortality via super-drugs, the argument seems pretty clear to me: the more healthy people we have in this country the more the country benefits. Why is this so hard to accept in the present tense?
_
Friday, 23 September 2011
If tau neutrinos could travel faster than light, then we should be able to regularly measure them doing that from a constant source of tau neutrinos - like the Sun. Except, we never have.
The news quickly latched onto this finding with claims "interstellar hyperspeed travel is once again a possibility." Oh please. A neutrino has almost zero mass, so the energy required (E = mC^2) is relatively minor, in fact neutrinos traveling much slower than light speed is pretty weird.
A little background on neutrinos: they're pretty poorly understood. The mass has never been measured, but it was previously assumed they had zero mass which would mean they would only travel at the speed of light and no slower. However they've been found to wobble between "flavors" blah blah blah they're really damn light but still have a tiny mass. Interestingly, if neutrino mass is higher than about 1.5 eV, then Dark Matter cannot exist.
But going back to the idea that neutrinos can zip along at a speed faster than light seems doubtful to me. Nevertheless, let's pretend its true. It changes nothing for massive humans and their monstrously heavy starships. The energy required to send an essentially-massless particle at or above the speed of light compared to the energy required to get Luke Skywalker to the Degoba System is like the size of a single atom compared to the size of the Universe. Literally.
_
The news quickly latched onto this finding with claims "interstellar hyperspeed travel is once again a possibility." Oh please. A neutrino has almost zero mass, so the energy required (E = mC^2) is relatively minor, in fact neutrinos traveling much slower than light speed is pretty weird.
A little background on neutrinos: they're pretty poorly understood. The mass has never been measured, but it was previously assumed they had zero mass which would mean they would only travel at the speed of light and no slower. However they've been found to wobble between "flavors" blah blah blah they're really damn light but still have a tiny mass. Interestingly, if neutrino mass is higher than about 1.5 eV, then Dark Matter cannot exist.
But going back to the idea that neutrinos can zip along at a speed faster than light seems doubtful to me. Nevertheless, let's pretend its true. It changes nothing for massive humans and their monstrously heavy starships. The energy required to send an essentially-massless particle at or above the speed of light compared to the energy required to get Luke Skywalker to the Degoba System is like the size of a single atom compared to the size of the Universe. Literally.
_
Thursday, 22 September 2011
Here, John Dabiri suggests vertical-axis wind turbines are much safer for birds and migratory bats:
Because while Dabiri brags about potentially saving 500,000 birds/bats a year...nearly 1 BILLION die from hitting buildings every year. And that's just in the United States. So for every bird killed by a wind mill...2,000 are killed by buildings.
But let's concentrate on the safety of wind turbines.
_
Big [horizontal] turbine blades have long been blamed for bird and bat kills. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency officials are investigating what happened to six golden eagles found dead last month near a 3-year old wind farm near Tehachapi, Calif. The agency estimates windmills kill a half million birds a year, however the American Wind Energy Association, an industry group, disputes those figures. Dabiri says 30-foot vertical windmills are much less dangerous since they don't use propeller-like blades to capture wind, but rotating open-framed cylinders.I don't mean to pick on Professor Dabiri, but horizontal windmills aren't really an existential threat to any species of animal. I realize minimizing the lethal effects of wind farms is important. But if "changing the game" in regards to animal deaths due to human activity is really a concern, maybe we should really change the game and ban windows on buildings. And then write building code that requires a soft layer of padding on the outside of every building.
"These smaller windmills are below migratory levels for birds and bats," Dabiri said. "It can be a real game changer.
Because while Dabiri brags about potentially saving 500,000 birds/bats a year...nearly 1 BILLION die from hitting buildings every year. And that's just in the United States. So for every bird killed by a wind mill...2,000 are killed by buildings.
But let's concentrate on the safety of wind turbines.
_
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Surely J.K. Rowling didn't realize she was an innovator when she imagined the magic portraits of Harry Potter's universe. But nevertheless, the feasibility of a magic, animated portrait that can interact with real humans approacheth. Wednesday night Mrs. TAE and I saw Harry Potter 8, or Deathly Hallows Part 2 or whatever the last damn movie was called, and I enjoyed it. The epilogue was awkward and terrible, but the rest of it was tense and good, if a bit (necessarily) brief and topical.
Nevertheless, when I watched HP, Ron and Hermione sneak into Hogwarts through a passage behind a magic, animated portrait of Dumbledore's long-dead sister, I couldn't help but think "animated portraits would be pretty easy and would require no magic."
Animated portrait basics:
1) The first part is a thin LCD screen with sufficiently high resolution to show a nice image. Those currently-sold digital picture frames are pretty crappy. Give me 1080p at least.
2) Using a facial motion capture system, get an animated layout of a person's face as they go through a 2 minute barrage of expressions.
3) Using simple feedback AI, like a chatbot, interact with people when they walk up to the portrait.
4) When no one is "at" the portrait, have the character just sort of go through a repeating animated cycle of...whatever.
Pretty much done. As long as the person viewing the portrait didn't ask something to complicated, the animated portrait could do a decent job of responding. And as chatbots get smarter every day, eventually an animated portrait could pass the Turing test and...well yikes.
_
Nevertheless, when I watched HP, Ron and Hermione sneak into Hogwarts through a passage behind a magic, animated portrait of Dumbledore's long-dead sister, I couldn't help but think "animated portraits would be pretty easy and would require no magic."
Animated portrait basics:
1) The first part is a thin LCD screen with sufficiently high resolution to show a nice image. Those currently-sold digital picture frames are pretty crappy. Give me 1080p at least.
2) Using a facial motion capture system, get an animated layout of a person's face as they go through a 2 minute barrage of expressions.
3) Using simple feedback AI, like a chatbot, interact with people when they walk up to the portrait.
4) When no one is "at" the portrait, have the character just sort of go through a repeating animated cycle of...whatever.
Pretty much done. As long as the person viewing the portrait didn't ask something to complicated, the animated portrait could do a decent job of responding. And as chatbots get smarter every day, eventually an animated portrait could pass the Turing test and...well yikes.
_
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Of course, I've covered monogamy here at TAE several times, mostly from the standpoint that the tribal culture of our early species, combined with the long gestational period, seems to indicate to me that monogamy was probably the preferred (though admittedly not always followed) sexual construct for our species tens of millennia ago. Typically when I write those posts Ben will chime in that even if I'm wrong it doesn't matter because humans have free will and can choose monogamy anyway.
Here, Ben wrote about Dan Savage's no-nonsense approach to his sex advice column. Read it. Here, Joe Carter points to the Dueholm piece as evidence of the decline of the liberal church, or America, or Western Civilization, or whatever even worse thing exists that can decline because of liberal (and there for sexually-devious, obviously) preachers and their coordinated attack on the Church's teachings.
Disclosure: Ben Dueholm is my brother-in-law. Further disclosure: I have contributed to the Lutheran e-zine that Dueholm edits when he isn't perpetrating a shadowy war on Christian Ethics.
And because of my close relationship with him, I can share all the intimate details of this rogue's depraved marriage ethic and the faithless way he disparages monogamous relationships with every exhale of his toxic breath. Unfortunately there aren't any. I have not one example of a time when Ben has chosen a path other than monogamy, and knowing my sister as well as I do, I must admit that he's probably been tempted. Together thy have raised a delightful, intelligent child, and take another under their roof in foster care, where she has thrived. All part of Ben's plan, obviously, to indoctrinate a stranger's child in his perverse sense of Christian values.
Obviously I kid. What Mr. Carter is missing is a sense of history. A couple millennia ago, the Bible made it totally clear that Jesus would return any minute and get busy with his sword of justice. And yet it didn't happen. Revelation was re-read a little less strictly, and the Church survived. A couple centuries ago, the Bible made it patently clear and obvious that the Earth was a flat rectangle around which the sun faithfully spun. And yet scientific progress sort of blew that one up. The Old Testament interpretations were loosened, and somehow the Church survived. 150 years ago Darwin took a shot across the bow of Genesis, and the liberals embraced a new version of Christianity, where the lesson of Genesis, but not the word, was important. And somehow the Church survived. Then some liberal mainline churches decided to let women preach. What an atrocity! And yet the Church survived. Now the free-thinking liberals are trying to destroy the Puritanical monogamy (that has worked so well for Catholics, right?), and Carter seems to think that if they succeed then the Church will suffer or flat out disappear. I humbly submit that Carter needs to relax. The Church has survived for hundreds and hundreds of years, despite the vile, bellicose undermining that Ben is clearly guilty of.
Then there is the fact that Mr. Carter is flat out wrong. I live in Kansas, in the suburbs of Kansas City. My state finally managed to drive out the last cursed Democrat from Congress, now we bask in the purity of our ultra-conservative GOP Senators, GOP Representatives, and GOP Governor. Evolution is continually barraged with attacks, and the Governor is doing everything he can to ban abortion (another evil that somehow destroys liberal mainline churches).
And yet, the three largest churches in the area are all liberal mainliners. They embrace and support their gay members, some going so far as to allow gay clergy! Blasphemy! Shouldn't these churches be declining? Or disappearing? Instead they are spreading, creating "branch locations" which quickly fill their pews, as Christians flock to hear their message that seems to say "worry about your own Christianity before you start judging others."
I guess I should write some catchy, witty conclusion to this but I really don't have one. The point is that when people try to subjugate their peers into matching their opinions or suggest they be banished...they always lose that fight. When you embrace the diversity of the opinions of the human race - you grow.
_
Here, Ben wrote about Dan Savage's no-nonsense approach to his sex advice column. Read it. Here, Joe Carter points to the Dueholm piece as evidence of the decline of the liberal church, or America, or Western Civilization, or whatever even worse thing exists that can decline because of liberal (and there for sexually-devious, obviously) preachers and their coordinated attack on the Church's teachings.
Disclosure: Ben Dueholm is my brother-in-law. Further disclosure: I have contributed to the Lutheran e-zine that Dueholm edits when he isn't perpetrating a shadowy war on Christian Ethics.
And because of my close relationship with him, I can share all the intimate details of this rogue's depraved marriage ethic and the faithless way he disparages monogamous relationships with every exhale of his toxic breath. Unfortunately there aren't any. I have not one example of a time when Ben has chosen a path other than monogamy, and knowing my sister as well as I do, I must admit that he's probably been tempted. Together thy have raised a delightful, intelligent child, and take another under their roof in foster care, where she has thrived. All part of Ben's plan, obviously, to indoctrinate a stranger's child in his perverse sense of Christian values.
Obviously I kid. What Mr. Carter is missing is a sense of history. A couple millennia ago, the Bible made it totally clear that Jesus would return any minute and get busy with his sword of justice. And yet it didn't happen. Revelation was re-read a little less strictly, and the Church survived. A couple centuries ago, the Bible made it patently clear and obvious that the Earth was a flat rectangle around which the sun faithfully spun. And yet scientific progress sort of blew that one up. The Old Testament interpretations were loosened, and somehow the Church survived. 150 years ago Darwin took a shot across the bow of Genesis, and the liberals embraced a new version of Christianity, where the lesson of Genesis, but not the word, was important. And somehow the Church survived. Then some liberal mainline churches decided to let women preach. What an atrocity! And yet the Church survived. Now the free-thinking liberals are trying to destroy the Puritanical monogamy (that has worked so well for Catholics, right?), and Carter seems to think that if they succeed then the Church will suffer or flat out disappear. I humbly submit that Carter needs to relax. The Church has survived for hundreds and hundreds of years, despite the vile, bellicose undermining that Ben is clearly guilty of.
Then there is the fact that Mr. Carter is flat out wrong. I live in Kansas, in the suburbs of Kansas City. My state finally managed to drive out the last cursed Democrat from Congress, now we bask in the purity of our ultra-conservative GOP Senators, GOP Representatives, and GOP Governor. Evolution is continually barraged with attacks, and the Governor is doing everything he can to ban abortion (another evil that somehow destroys liberal mainline churches).
And yet, the three largest churches in the area are all liberal mainliners. They embrace and support their gay members, some going so far as to allow gay clergy! Blasphemy! Shouldn't these churches be declining? Or disappearing? Instead they are spreading, creating "branch locations" which quickly fill their pews, as Christians flock to hear their message that seems to say "worry about your own Christianity before you start judging others."
I guess I should write some catchy, witty conclusion to this but I really don't have one. The point is that when people try to subjugate their peers into matching their opinions or suggest they be banished...they always lose that fight. When you embrace the diversity of the opinions of the human race - you grow.
_
Thursday, 15 September 2011
io9 asks: "Where do you stand on the subject of human enhancement?" By this they mean do you believe it is ethical to give someone a brain implant that gives them direct access to wikipedia, as an arbitrary example.
Such a question is on par with asking "where do you stand on the subject of smartphones?" And by that I mean "smartphones are here, your opinion is irrelevant to the inundation of culture with the technology. It's here, its not going anywhere. The penetration of (insert technology here) will only increase.
Because lets be honest with ourselves. Human enhancement went from zero to hero with the advent of wireless internet access. Honestly wireless transfer of data will be looked back on as the greatest innovation of the 20th Century, of that I have no doubt. The internet was great, it connected us all, contained an exponentially growing volume of human knowledge, but really when we could carry it in our pocket - anywhere - is when it really unleashed its potential. I can know almost anything, almost anywhere, with a few clicks on my phone. For 30 bucks a month. "You can't get everything on the internet," you argue. Well actually I just asked my Wolfram Alpha app and it told me that in fact, I can get 98% of everything ever on my phone. So there.
The point is human augmentation isn't a moment, its a process. And the process is so completely amongst us already arguing it as a standalone concept isn't really germane, at least not anymore. If we want to discuss ethics and human augmentation, we need to talk about the ethics of keeping it capitalistic. Because obviously the rich kids will get the cool implants first. And its a pretty slippery slope between that and having Double Plus Alphas and Epsilon Minuses, based on how much money your parents had when you are born.
Of course this quickly digresses into a sci-fi novel, right? But we live in the sci-fi novel our parents read, and not even Wells could imagine a smartphone.
In any case, I built myself a 2 milliamp transcranial direct current stimulator that runs a sub-lethal applied current across my prefrontal cortex and out my primary motor cortex. Sometimes I use it at work, and if literature is right then its responsible for the incredible rate of speed at which I am learning to code in Objective-C. When I get the implantable version done I'll let you know. It'll be restrictively expensive, but then again, all cool new gadgets should be.
_
Such a question is on par with asking "where do you stand on the subject of smartphones?" And by that I mean "smartphones are here, your opinion is irrelevant to the inundation of culture with the technology. It's here, its not going anywhere. The penetration of (insert technology here) will only increase.
Because lets be honest with ourselves. Human enhancement went from zero to hero with the advent of wireless internet access. Honestly wireless transfer of data will be looked back on as the greatest innovation of the 20th Century, of that I have no doubt. The internet was great, it connected us all, contained an exponentially growing volume of human knowledge, but really when we could carry it in our pocket - anywhere - is when it really unleashed its potential. I can know almost anything, almost anywhere, with a few clicks on my phone. For 30 bucks a month. "You can't get everything on the internet," you argue. Well actually I just asked my Wolfram Alpha app and it told me that in fact, I can get 98% of everything ever on my phone. So there.
The point is human augmentation isn't a moment, its a process. And the process is so completely amongst us already arguing it as a standalone concept isn't really germane, at least not anymore. If we want to discuss ethics and human augmentation, we need to talk about the ethics of keeping it capitalistic. Because obviously the rich kids will get the cool implants first. And its a pretty slippery slope between that and having Double Plus Alphas and Epsilon Minuses, based on how much money your parents had when you are born.
Of course this quickly digresses into a sci-fi novel, right? But we live in the sci-fi novel our parents read, and not even Wells could imagine a smartphone.
In any case, I built myself a 2 milliamp transcranial direct current stimulator that runs a sub-lethal applied current across my prefrontal cortex and out my primary motor cortex. Sometimes I use it at work, and if literature is right then its responsible for the incredible rate of speed at which I am learning to code in Objective-C. When I get the implantable version done I'll let you know. It'll be restrictively expensive, but then again, all cool new gadgets should be.
_
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
I see a young man, about 25, wearing ripped-knee-levis and a graphic t-shirt that references an 80's cult classic movie via a humorous quote. He's got Chucks on his feet and white earbuds hanging out of his ears. He is wearing a knit stocking cap slightly askew and too loosely to actually provide thermal insulation. In short, he is cool. He strolls down the street, preoccupied with the Grace Potter's cover of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."
At an intersection he stops and waits for the "walk" sign. Next to him, and elderly woman drags two bags of groceries. Spotting her, he reaches out and touches her arm, then asks "how far am I carrying these for you?" She gives him the groceries and then takes his arm and he helps her across the street. People smile as they see the two, though bystanders cannot possibly know if the young man and the old woman are related. At her front steps, he gives her the groceries, and a hug, and continues on his way, though switching to some Eddie and the Tide song from The Lost Boys soundtrack.
What I envision is a counter-counterculture, where the coolness that my generation derives from materialism has been augmented by a coolness derived from moralism. How to create this scenario is not something I can possibly describe here; I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of how coolness and charity could be parallel but also how can we possibly create this world, given the skepticism of young people to buy into the idealist bullcrap that people like Bono hypocritically trumpet?
I dunno, yet. I really don't. But if saving the world was easy, we'd have done it already.
_
At an intersection he stops and waits for the "walk" sign. Next to him, and elderly woman drags two bags of groceries. Spotting her, he reaches out and touches her arm, then asks "how far am I carrying these for you?" She gives him the groceries and then takes his arm and he helps her across the street. People smile as they see the two, though bystanders cannot possibly know if the young man and the old woman are related. At her front steps, he gives her the groceries, and a hug, and continues on his way, though switching to some Eddie and the Tide song from The Lost Boys soundtrack.
What I envision is a counter-counterculture, where the coolness that my generation derives from materialism has been augmented by a coolness derived from moralism. How to create this scenario is not something I can possibly describe here; I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of how coolness and charity could be parallel but also how can we possibly create this world, given the skepticism of young people to buy into the idealist bullcrap that people like Bono hypocritically trumpet?
I dunno, yet. I really don't. But if saving the world was easy, we'd have done it already.
_
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Here's the usual "scientists complaining that changing environmental conditions might cause changes in animal populations":
Nevertheless, I repeat the mantra I have preached time and time again: whether anthropogenic climate change is true or natural cyclical climate change is true or cosmic ray-induced climate change is true...the common denominator of all the above is that climate change is happening. So while I lament whenever human introduced invasive species wreak havoc, like giant anacondas taking on gators in Florida or asian carp kamikazes on the Missouri River, the tendency of warm-water crabs to move into new regions that now exist because the water is warming is a little less ignominious.
_
The research team [is] worried for Echinoderms — animals like sea urchins and starfish that Smith says constitute a significant portion of the seafloor life on the Antarctic shelf — which have disappeared from regions inhabited by the crabs, and will likely continue to be wiped out if the crabs continue to colonize new areas of the shelf.Apparently the ocean is getting warmer and now the giant (and might I say delicious-looking!) crabs are invading previously-too-cold areas and trampling the local flora and gobbling the local fauna. Which I am sure is unfortunate for the locals.
Nevertheless, I repeat the mantra I have preached time and time again: whether anthropogenic climate change is true or natural cyclical climate change is true or cosmic ray-induced climate change is true...the common denominator of all the above is that climate change is happening. So while I lament whenever human introduced invasive species wreak havoc, like giant anacondas taking on gators in Florida or asian carp kamikazes on the Missouri River, the tendency of warm-water crabs to move into new regions that now exist because the water is warming is a little less ignominious.
_
I woke up, that Tuesday morning, about 8 am (CST). I remember getting up and brushing my teeth then going to Zac's room (I lived at a fraternity house; I was a sophomore in college) to watch a little Sportscenter before I showered and headed to class. When I got to Zac's room, he did not have Sportscenter on. Maybe he had ESPN on, but what was on his TV was not sports. It was calamity.
Later that afternoon, full of rage, I drove with a pledge brother to the recruiting station in town to enlist. It was closed, and I later calmed down and decided to finish college.
A few months later, I remember watching the Super Bowl with a bunch of friends and the Rams fans in the room were complaining that "this thing is fixed...like they'll let a team named "THE PATRIOTS" lose after 9/11!"
You know, I was born in 1982. World War II was 40 years in the past. Vietnam was more than a decade ago. American culture had, to be sure, been fundamentally shaped by these two events. But not me. I never sat glued to a radio listening to Roosevelt, never watched Nixon disappear into that helicopter.
This disconnection from the past's current events is evident in my continued call for catharsis at NASA. I never watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon and so he is not a hero to me. In my lifetime, Neil Armstrong has been a wizened public figure from a bygone era constantly begging the Federal government for more Moon missions, and nothing more. Sure, the stories of my grandfather, navigator in a B-25 during WWII are thrilling and interesting. But they are someone else's stories.
My daughter was born on October 25, 2007. As such, she will never know the feeling of sitting in a room expecting to see the highlights from Monday Night Football on TV only to find images of New York City in ruin. It will all be disconnected from her, part of her cultural heritage but not part of her personal psyche.
And that's probably for the best. I seriously doubt any parent or grandparent actively wishes their progeny would better understand them by having suffered the same terrible epochs of human history that they had to endure.
If anything, I wish that no terrible event will occur during my daughter's lifetime. This is not because I wish to spare her the awful feelings of confusion and rage I felt that terrible day and the days afterward. It is because once you have suffered your lens gets cloudy and the objectivity you previously enjoyed is forever gone. When my child looks back on the first decade of the new millennium, I want her to be critical of us. I don't want her to empathize and say "well, you had suffered, so the torture of detainees, the keeping people in secret prisons and refusal to let them see lawyers, the waterboarding, the drone attacks on American citizens, the illegal hacking of people's phones and email, the racism towards American muslims, the hyped up but obviously porous security, the radicalization of the Right and complacency of the Left, and the Empire-building interventionism are understandable." I don't want her to understand. I want her to look me in the face and ask my why I didn't do more to calm people down. Why I got swept up in the post-9/11 fervor like everyone else. I won't have an answer for her, other than "I was young, and stupid."
What's your excuse?
_
Later that afternoon, full of rage, I drove with a pledge brother to the recruiting station in town to enlist. It was closed, and I later calmed down and decided to finish college.
A few months later, I remember watching the Super Bowl with a bunch of friends and the Rams fans in the room were complaining that "this thing is fixed...like they'll let a team named "THE PATRIOTS" lose after 9/11!"
You know, I was born in 1982. World War II was 40 years in the past. Vietnam was more than a decade ago. American culture had, to be sure, been fundamentally shaped by these two events. But not me. I never sat glued to a radio listening to Roosevelt, never watched Nixon disappear into that helicopter.
This disconnection from the past's current events is evident in my continued call for catharsis at NASA. I never watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon and so he is not a hero to me. In my lifetime, Neil Armstrong has been a wizened public figure from a bygone era constantly begging the Federal government for more Moon missions, and nothing more. Sure, the stories of my grandfather, navigator in a B-25 during WWII are thrilling and interesting. But they are someone else's stories.
My daughter was born on October 25, 2007. As such, she will never know the feeling of sitting in a room expecting to see the highlights from Monday Night Football on TV only to find images of New York City in ruin. It will all be disconnected from her, part of her cultural heritage but not part of her personal psyche.
And that's probably for the best. I seriously doubt any parent or grandparent actively wishes their progeny would better understand them by having suffered the same terrible epochs of human history that they had to endure.
If anything, I wish that no terrible event will occur during my daughter's lifetime. This is not because I wish to spare her the awful feelings of confusion and rage I felt that terrible day and the days afterward. It is because once you have suffered your lens gets cloudy and the objectivity you previously enjoyed is forever gone. When my child looks back on the first decade of the new millennium, I want her to be critical of us. I don't want her to empathize and say "well, you had suffered, so the torture of detainees, the keeping people in secret prisons and refusal to let them see lawyers, the waterboarding, the drone attacks on American citizens, the illegal hacking of people's phones and email, the racism towards American muslims, the hyped up but obviously porous security, the radicalization of the Right and complacency of the Left, and the Empire-building interventionism are understandable." I don't want her to understand. I want her to look me in the face and ask my why I didn't do more to calm people down. Why I got swept up in the post-9/11 fervor like everyone else. I won't have an answer for her, other than "I was young, and stupid."
What's your excuse?
_
Friday, 2 September 2011
Sharon Weinberger is doing some incredible work over at Danger Room. Know outrage.
_
It was time for a change, Pentagon officials thought. In 2010, they had just wrested control of a $1 billion contract to train Afghan policemen from the Pentagon, and they thought the work should go to Xe Services, the infamous private security firm formerly known as Blackwater.
The deal, an umbrella-style contract, would come from an unlikely, obscure Army bureau called the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, or CNTPO, that brings new tech to foreign allies’ counternarcotics efforts.
One problem: The new task slotted into the CNTPO contract — known as an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract — had nothing to do with counternarcotics or technology. Afghan police needed training in basic skills like shooting straight and controlling riots.
But the CNTPO contract, first awarded in 2005, was already held by Blackwater and four other companies. Using it meant the Pentagon could slip Blackwater into the training job — and avoid holding a new full-and-open competition.
Another problem: Rival security firm DynCorp already held the existing training contract, which was run out of the State Department, not CNTPO or any other Pentagon arm. DynCorp didn’t want to give up its lucrative training business. But since DynCorp wasn’t among the five companies that held the CNTPO award, it couldn’t even compete for the work it was already performing.
_
Thursday, 1 September 2011
In a relevant post, Sharon Weinberger points a damning finger at sole-source government contracts.
It's not like Sharon and I are the only people who realize this is a problem, either:
_
But even worse, here's this little quotelet:
The Air Force planned to award a multibillion-dollar contract for a new tanker, based on the Boeing 767, as a “sole source” — meaning there would be no opportunity for a formal competition. The unusual lease-to-own deal would have cost the Defense Department approximately $37 billion, according to one government estimate.
But the tanker lease contract never went through. The deal derailed after it came to light that Darleen Druyun, a senior Air Force official involved with the tanker negotiations, had also conducted job talks with Boeing’s then–chief financial officer, breaking federal conflict-of-interest laws. Almost 10 years later, Boeing won the tanker contract — this time, in a full and open competition.
The nearly decade-long tanker battle is typically viewed as a fiasco. But taxpayers actually benefited from it. According to EADS, Boeing’s European rival, the competition saved the Air Force $16 billion by driving down Boeing’s offer price. The Air Force, for its part, says that it got a 20 percent cost reduction from Boeing by holding competition, which still places the savings in the billions of dollars.
"The vast majority of the dollars on sole source contracts are simply follow-ons to large contracts,” said Jacques Gansler, who served as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics from 1997 to 2001."If you've been following this thread you'd understand how absurd this sounds. A company that won a mega-contract gets a second even larger (continuation) mega contract without any competition.
It's not like Sharon and I are the only people who realize this is a problem, either:
Competition helps in a lot of ways, ranging from price to quality, according to Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight. “If you know somebody else can step in, it acts as an incentive for the incumbent to do good, because the next contract could be awarded to someone else,” he told Danger Room. “To play the skeptic, if you know no one else is out there, will the contractor be performing at 110 percent?”But the problem isn't solved just by making competition for the contract competitive. There really does need to be a heavier incentive to complete the tasks of the contract in the given time and budget. One way to increase the incentive is to increase the penalty for failure.
_
Got a great comment this morning: "Your post was awesome and eye opening. I agreed with it completely but your recommendation for the penalty was maybe too harsh. I think the risk vs reward ratio would be too high for companies because you'd essentially bankrupt them if they failed at a large project."
Of course, I'm not the ultimate authority on the ideal way to structure effective government-funded R&D. The specifics of my proposal should be ignored in content but not in principal: the lack of punishment for failure decouples the worry an innovator might normally have about his/her success.
Think about it: let's say the government funded a project to create a new super-awesome Humvee. In a worst case scenario currently, the company that won the contract would have their funding cut off early because they failed to meet mid-program deliverables. In the best case scenario they finish the program with a new SuperHumvee they can sell in quantity. But once again, there is no "punishment" beyond having your paychecks cut off if the company fails to meet deadlines.
This seems comical if you look at it from the outside. The government wants something, a company proposes to give it to them, the government pays that company money, and then the company isn't really legally/financially penalized if they don't deliver the government anything. And then the company asks for more money. Honestly it seems incredibly unethical. But its normal!
Maybe the commenter is right: a 364% penalty for failure might be too high. But what about a 25% penalty? If a company wins a contract they either fulfill it to the letter or they pay back all the money plus a quarter of the contract value. That $75 million DARPA contract either gets fullfilled or you pay DARPA $94 million back with a letter of apology and the publicized humiliation of being a failure.
I really don't think this would endanger government-funded R&D. People will always bid on projects. But right now there is this plague in the system where industry seems intent on winning follow-on work, which basically requires a project to not be complete. It's like there is an unspoken goal, both on the contractor side as well as the government side that "follow-on work" will occur if the project goes well. This simply shouldn't be the case.
This is what I mean by "stop being okay with patience." The Government needs to lose its patience with contractor cheekiness. And the American taxpayer needs to lose patience with government projects that sound glamorous but never yield anything but perpetual industrial stimulus.
_
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
