Links

I've been terribly swamped with work the last week, and when I wasn't working, I was loudly defending gun rights. Subsequently, the lack of actual content on this site has been lacking. Here's some links to make it up to you, dear readers.

This is a great technology.

Telemedicine is the future, especially when the phone in your pocket is a fully-functional computer.

Google's Ingress game would be a lot more fun with this.

A great read about bionics and neural interfaces.

I know I promised a statistical comparison of engineering unemployment rates and the unemployment rates of all college graduates, but I'm having a time trying to dig up reasonably well-cited data for engineering. Everything I've found so far is either annual rates (too vague) or anecdotal (low quality) so I haven't quite put the finishing touches on it. But I will say this: engineering degrees are no guarantee of employment.

Happy Christmas!


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Guns, Damned Guns, and Statistics

I started digging up statistics. For the following graph, I used data from the FBI and CDC's Vital Statistics Report. All numbers represent 2011. 2012 data is not yet fully available obviously.

Figure 1. Number of Americans Killed in 2011 By Major Cause

You'll notice that cigarettes cause 44,300 deaths for every one person killed by an assault weapon. Will the President announce a "cigarette control task force"?

And then this:

Figure 2. Gun-related deaths in 2011.

For "mass murderers" I am using the Mother Jones definition of "any homicide event that has 4 or more victims, not including the shooter." In which case in 2011 there were five: Tuscon, Yuma, Copley Township, Grand Rapids, and Carson City with a total of 30 non-shooter deaths. In all five cases, handguns were used. In only one case (Tuscon), high-capacity clips were used.

I feel it is worth at least quickly pointing out that for every person murdered by a gun, there are about 2 suicides. Most people are surprised by this, but the anti-gun side of the argument prefers to just lump the two groups together into a large pool of "deaths by gun."

I won't really add any more comments, I think these statistics speak for themselves. I'm just trying to make a point here: if we write sweeping, knee-jerk legislation due to a single statistical outlying event that tugs at our heartstrings...we will almost certainly regret it.


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One Last Thing About Guns

For $10, these and many other deaths from guns could be completely prevented. It's called a "gun lock" and it completely neutralizes a gun. Many guns come with them for free.

People are talking about guns with RFID, guns with biometrics, gun bans, gun regulations...and on and on but I haven't heard one person mention that if Adam Lanza's mom had put a gun lock on her AR...not one of those kids would be dead.


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Whom Shall We Blame?

Since the finger-pointing is in full effect, here's why I think this issue is a teensy bit complicated.

So back in 1996 then-nobody Barack Obama urged a statewide ban on assault weapons in Illinois. Then, in 2004 while debating Alan Keyes he argued President Bush erred to not renew the assault weapons ban. Then in 2008 while running for President he suggested that reinstating the assault weapons ban was extremely important.
Then he got elected. And when actually could reinstate the assault weapons ban...he deferred. I don't care whether you are pro-ban or anti-ban. The man spent 13 years arguing for an assault weapons ban, then when capable of enacting it...he punted. Oh and he also started shipping assault weapons to Mexico.

Meanwhile, the NRA, while seemingly motivated by 2nd Amendment protectionism, occasionally makes some tactical errors. In April they supported a bill that would repeal the need for background checks for individuals wanting to buy a firearm. That was April 2012. Two months later: Aurora movie theater shooting. And back in 2011, the NRA successfully defeated a measure in Connecticut that would have banned high-capacity magazines like the one used in last Friday's shooting.

I could go around and around the room, pointing fingers at everyone. But eventually, once I went around the room long enough...I'd be pointing at you.
We live in a violent, violent culture. The highest-selling video game of all time, Call of Duty: Black Ops, is a celebration of the art of killing. Of the top ten highest grossing games of all time, three are military shooters, and one is "Grand Theft Auto 4" which is a game in which breaking the law is the purpose. Our most popular sport is a bloody, injury-prone, concussion-inducing grudge match so violent that most humans can only play it for 5 or less years. Many athletes are driven literally insane by it. Our national interest in regulating weapons is at an all-time low. Currently popular television shows include Dexter, where the protagonist is a serial killer; Breaking Bad, a show about drug dealing; Sons of Anarchy, a show about a lawless group of motorcyclists, fifty million "crime dramas" that typically have a murder in the first two minutes of the show, and a bevy of other violence-centric programming.
The top 10 movies for 2011 included The Avengers, where superheroes battle aliens and most of New York City is destroyed; The Dark Knight Rises, where once again most of New York is destroyed; The Hunger Games, where children ages 12-18 are forced to murder each other, and Skyfall, where James Bond kills no less than 20 people, the antagonist is stabbed in the back with a knife, and a man is eaten alive by a large lizard.
Look. Violence is part of American culture. It just is. We grow up shooting Nerf guns at each other. We play laser tag. We play paintball. We quote movies like Dirty Harry (the scene before he shoots the bad guy at point blank range, obviously) or Scarface (the scene where he snorts a lethal dose of Coke and then goes on a wild shooting rampage and is violently killed, obviously).

The question is: do you try to legislate around this culture? Do you try to change it? People point to the efficacy of gun laws in Australia (but we are not Australians). People point to the low rate of gun murder in the EU and their gun bans (but we are not the French). America is different. Just ask plucky ex-Brit Andrew Sullivan, who says:

Gun violence is one of those things that an immigrant is first amazed by in America. The second thing a non-American is shocked by is the sheer passion of those who own and use guns in this country.

I've come to accept that I am going to witness a debate I find almost absurd in a mind shaped first of all by British culture. I understand the constitutional resonance of an armed citizenry vis-vis its potentially abusive government. And I can also see why this makes America different.

 That's just it: we are Americans. We are violent. Take away the guns and we are still violent Americans. Change us into less violent creatures? That's much harder. Systemic change always is. 

So really there's three options: 1) forcible removal of what the majority of Americans see as an explicit freedom, 2) gradual, difficult cultural change into a more peaceful society, or 3) acknowledg that in America's violent, free culture there will occasionally be psychopaths who get their hands on weapons and perpetrate violent acts and that we as a society are choosing to accept those occasional tragic deaths in exchange for what we consider sacred.


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There's Still No Good Alternative To Hard Work

I read with some mirth this article by Dan Lyons reporting on the retraction of Series A financing in Silicon Valley to software and app startups:

PandoDaily is reporting on the “Series A crunch” in which companies that have raised seed funding now are discovering (presumably to their utter amazement) that actual venture capitalists aren’t as stupid as the angels who gave them their first bag of cash, and, given the opportunity to invest in their pointless companies, the VCs have decided to politely decline. Thus, now we are facing a “nuclear winter" (!) where thousands of companies will go out of business.

There's a deeper issue here and I'll just cut right to it: STEM careers are not an economic silver bullet. More importantly, they never have been and they probably never will be. While it is empirically true that STEM careers are on average higher-paying technical professions that are less likely to get obsoleted by robots in the near future, there isn't a limitless supply of open jobs for STEM majors when they get their diploma. And despite what is popularly claimed, there aren't hordes of employers desperately seeking STEM hires.

The simple truth is that grouping any and all college majors related to STEM into one category complicates the picture more than it should. And that the term itself, "STEM" unnecessarily invites vague definitions of what types of careers and college majors qualify as STEM. Fortunately, the U.S. Immigrations and Customs office keeps a list of applicable job categories. And while it's popular for us to think of "nerds in lab coats" when we hear "STEM" it includes things like "business statistics" and "wildlife biology."

In any case, let's get back on topic. The President, Congress, and even private industry (see: Bill Gates) have all touted STEM careers as the penicillin for our ailing economy. Further, they continuously argue at a near panic that India and China are graduating engineers/scientists/job stealers at an alarming rate. And yet, the actual numbers suggest this is patently false.

Let's focus, for instance, on my home ground of engineering. If there was a shortage of engineers, then one or both of two things would happen:  the average salary would go up (finite supply + high demand = higher price) and/or the available supply would go down (i.e. low unemployment). Yet, neither of these are occurring. The average salary for engineers has not increased much in the last ten years, barely keeping up with inflation. And while unemployment for engineers is low, it's not zero. Nor is it really even that much lower than the average unemployment rate across all career fields. The unemployment rate for electrical engineers in 2010, for example, was 5.4%. This is twice the estimated unemployment rate during "full employment."The national average unemployment rate for anyone with a bachelor's degree at that time was 5.1%, and no one is talking about this.

Meanwhile, the evidence mounts that a glut of technically-savvy people doesn't guarantee an economic boom:

Here’s some stunning, Earth-shattering news: You know all those hundreds of incredibly stupid startups that have been raising seed money in Silicon Valley despite the fact that the people running those startups have no experience doing anything, ever, and have no idea at all how to generate revenue (let alone profit) with their lousy ideas, because, in fact, there is no way to make money with their lousy ideas, because in fact their ideas are lousy?   

What really offends is that smart young people have been conned into thinking that starting a company is akin to buying a lottery ticket or rolling dice at Las Vegas -- the odds are long but you never know, you might get lucky and strike it rich. So make something up, throw it out there, and see what happens. "Spray and pray," it's called.

There's two more things I want to say about this.
First, STEM careers are a good choice for the right people. If you have a curious mind, are a hard worker, like solving problems, like math and science, etc etc. Then by all means go into STEM fields. But let's not pretend like a market flush with STEM graduates will guarantee American Dominance nor should we act like its the ticket to a flush economy. We have a pretty good crop of STEM graduates right now, we did before the recession, and we did before that, too.

Second, there will never be a substitute for good, honest, hard work. Why are we pretending there is a STEM graduate shortage that doesn't exist while there IS a shortage of skilled laborers. Our culture pushes this idea that "everyone should have the chance to go to college" but the truth is maybe 30% of people actually should. Not to offend the other 70% of you, but you'd end up dropping out anyway. Or you'd get a degree you'd never use (and student loan debt galore). Or you'd get a job because of your degree and you'd hate that job.
Whatever the case may be, our culture completely marginalizes skilled non-collegiate labor. High school guidance counseling is entirely focused on helping students find the right college. Students with a C-average are routinely pressured into college.
Meanwhile, a machinist that can run a 3-axis mill can pull in $60,000 a year, easy. That's a decent paycheck for anyone, regardless of how many sheets of paper you have framed on your wall.
But we've got this cultural idea that a guy running a mill is a sub-human. But any mechanical engineer worth his salt will tell you that a good machinist is worth every dime.

Look, I could go on and on about this. And I'm not trying to downplay the opportunities STEM graduates have. I just want people to understand that the kid with an IQ of 103 might make a really good HVAC technician, and he'd make $50k doing it, and he might be really happy. But conscripting every kid with an iota of scientific interest into going into STEM majors in college is a huge mistake on the front end and the back end.


Stay tuned for part 2 of this topic, in which I chart the unemployment rate of engineers against the unemployment rate of "anyone with at least a bachelor's degree." I think you'll be surprised what we find.
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Vaporware In It's Purest Form

So a "small British company" claims to have built a jet engine that is going to make jet engines look like propellor engines [relevant]. All they need is $400 million to build a bigger prototype.

Once in a while, we hear about these sorts of scenarios. A good example was Bussard's Polywell Fusion Reactor, which promises unlimited, clean, terrorist-proof, electrical power generation at low cost. They had a small prototype and just needed one Godzillion dollars to build a bigger prototype and move towards commercialization.

Yours truly is a big fan of breakthrough tech. In my lifetime, I'm hopeful I'll get to upload my brain to a computer. I'm hoping powered exoskeletons become a commodity. I'm hoping driverless cars become the only legal kind. I'm hoping a cheap injection of nanobots will cure anyone's cancer. I'm hoping that neural interfaces allow us to access the internet directly from our brains. I'm hoping widespread deployment of breakthrough solar energy along Earth's equator makes electricity free, robust and ubiquitous.

But...

Do we really need to get from Tokyo to New York in 4 hours? How many business transactions require intercontinental commutes that cannot be as easily accomplished via video conferencing and/or email? And were we to invest hundreds of millions on a prototype, then assuredly billions of dollars on actual aircraft that utilized this hypersonic engine...how much would tickets have to cost to recoup the development costs as well as return a profit to the investors? While they develop a really fast, really expensive 4-hour intercontinential flight, elsewhere fiber optic lines, satellites and increased data integrity allow better-than-ever teleconferencing. If it cost...say $5,000 a ticket to take this hypersonic flight, how much video-conferencing equipment could be bought in lieu?

And in the meantime: what other projects could take that $400 million investment and dramatically increase the quality of life for human beings? I realize that I sound a bit Young Idealistic when I ask this. But the (as an anecdotal) truth is my company has 24 medical device projects in our development pipeline that could help with diseases ranging from heart valve failure to autism to infant scoliosis and cancer. With $400 million I am 100% sure I could have all 24 devices on the market in the next five years and then return $380 million back to the investors unspent (not to mention the massive profits they'd realize from the 24 devices).
An engineer I know at another company in town is leading an effort to build a groundbreaking device that should make brain aneurysms a thing of the past, but needs $12 million in venture capital to get the device through clinical trials.

Or the venture capitalists could spend $400 million on a hypersonic aircraft prototype.


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Apex Predator Predation

So it's a tragedy if African Lions are being massively depopulated, and "there has to be a political commitment to protect wildlife," but trust me, no one in Kansas is super eager to return roving packs of wolves and a sizable population of cougars to our area. Lions are an apex predator. So are humans. One per area is a pretty safe bet.

"But there should be lions in Africa - for tourism," one might counter-argue. Fine. Then (for tourism) there should be wild packs of wolves on the Plains, widespread black bears east of the Mississippi, Grizzlies from Montana to New Mexico, etc etc. Show after show portrays the depopulation of elephants, rhinos, and their ilk as some sort of colossal tragedy that must be corrected by a concerted, international effort. Where is the rush to restore America's bison herd? Where is the "political commitment" to restore the Atlantic cod population? Where are we asking Americans to build higher fences around their cattle pastures so that the wolves can roam free?

In the United States...in fact in most of the First World...if you want to see wild animals and engage in tourism of that sort, then you go to the zoo. We've adopted the cultural understanding that wild apex predators are not a good thing for stable economies. And while I appreciate that "traveling to Africa to see lions" is a commodity some are willing to pay (an extremely large sum of money) for, it is not for us wealthy Westerners to decide the actions of the indigenous population of West Africa. If the march of human progress in their country includes increasing agriculture, then with them we will lament the gradual taming of the landscape and the loss of wild populations as a result. But that was what we did here in America 200 years ago, and we claim that as our proud cultural heritage.

The truth here is that there is a double-standard. It's pretty obvious. We want Africa to stay Africa. We don't want the deadly predators to be wiped out. We don't want people to ambitiously build more farms and eventually towns and eventually power stations and eventually cities and eventually high-rise offices where they design a better future for themselves and engage the global economy. That's our job. Their job is to support our tourists. And occasionally get eaten by a lion.


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Gun Control (IL)Logic

Jason Whitlock suggests that guns are to blame for Jevon Belcher's murder/suicide Saturday morning:

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. 

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Because as former-NFL player OJ Simpson can tell you, it's impossible to kill your wife/girlfriend/ex with a knife. And former NFL-player Antonio Bryant definitely didn't get arrested in September for strangling his ex-girlfriend. And former NFL-player Larry Johnson didn't get arrested in October for strangling a woman.
And it's simply impossible to commit suicide without a gun, as this wikipedia article on "suicide methods" shows.

Anyway, back to reality. Studies in Australia showed that decreased gun ownership does indeed decrease the rate of gun-inflicted suicide, meanwhile other types of suicide like hanging go up. FBI data indicates that present-day America, with its relaxed gun laws and "gun culture" is actually at its safest level since 1968.


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Iron Man 3: Extremis and Ray Baughman's Carbon Nanotubes

By now the general consensus is that the third Iron Man movie, due out May 2013 (is it too early to camp out for the midnight showing?) will cover, in some form, the Extremis storyline from the Iron Man comic book circa 2005. What was Extremis? Carbon nanotubes. An injection of special carbon nanotubes "rewrote" the brain's internal map of the human body. The person injected then went into a coma, formed a cocoon of scar tissue, and emerged 2 or 3 days later a super-enhanced, fire-breathing, hyper-aggressive killing machine. 

With Guy Pearce confirmed as Aldrich Killian, the inventor of Extremis, and Rebecca Hall as Dr. Maya Hansen - Extremis' co-creator, the plotline is fairly evident. In the Extremis storyline, the Mandarin plans to infect everyone on earth with the Extremis serum. Ben Kingsley is playing Mandarin in Iron Man 3...will we see a similar plot?

In any case, the point I wanted to make was that the Extremis storyline came out in 2005 and was based around carbon nanotubes, which at the time (was 2005 really that long ago...?) were still a nebulous, fantastic substance with unknown but seemingly magical and endless properties. The future belonged to carbon nanotubes! We'd be making superconductors out of it, bullet-proof clothing out of it, ultra-strong bridges out of it...people even speculated that it could be used in a space elevator ribbon. Ignorance vis-a-vis imagination.

I've written three or four times on here about the limiting factors of the Iron Man "highly advanced prosthetic": power supply, human machine interface, and artificial muscle.

And here's where the two arcs meet: Ray Baughman. Baughman is a researcher at the University of Texas in Dallas who has been turning seemingly useless (bear with me) carbon nanotubes into elaborate yarn. 

I've pointed to his research before. Now Baughman has apparently given up on his floating carbon nanotube aerogel sheets as an artificial muscle and is pursuing paraffin-wax impregnated carbon nanotube yarn. His latest research is promising. Apply heat (2,500 Celsius!) and the yarn contracts (technically it expands outward and by the law of conservation of matter the outward expansion causes a lengthwise contraction).

But you have to read these things carefully. Because there is always a catch. In the case of Baughman's nanotube yarn muscle, it is the contraction percentage that breaks the heart. By ramping the yarn up to 2,500 degrees Celsius he is only able to achieve a 7% contraction. By contrast, human muscle operates at a brisk 37 Celsius and contracts 30 - 40%. 

So the problem with the paraffin-impregnated nano-yarn is that you'd need a muscle five times as long in order to achieve human-analogue muscle contractions. Not to mention that you'd incinerate the human being using the artificial muscle just from the proximity to scorching substance.

Carbon nanotubes are really neat. There's still a lot to learn about them. Maybe Baughman will one day achieve the universally-sought goal of a reliable, cheap analogue to skeletal muscle. Maybe an injection of carbon nanotubes like Extremis will one day give us super-strength.

In the meantime, apparently they are toxic to aquatic creatures?

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Media Bias

While the media slobbers violently all over the Patraeus/Allen scandal, here's three questions to take into your Wednesday:
1) Why were the names Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley ever made public in the first place? These women are not guilty of a crime. The Grand Jury system exists (partially) to protect the anonymity of those loosely involved with a potential crime but should they be cleared of wrong-doing, their anonymity is supposed to remain intact. There are media vans parked 24/7 outside Paula Broadwell's house for no reason whatsoever.

2) And while the anonymity of these two women has ceased to exist (with no explanation as to why their names were released), the FBI agent/friend who sent Jill Kelley a shirtless photo of himself and apparently started this whole brushfire remains anonymous. Why?

3) While the media gushes constantly in our faces about the scandal, asking how it effects Benghazi, how it effects Obama's agenda, how it effects the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan...you have assuredly not heard from anyone that the incoming CEO of Lockheed-Martin (the largest defense contractor in the world) had to resign this past week due to an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate.
Long-time readers know I have nothing but bad things to say about Lockheed-Martin. That their internal ethics investigation found evidence of unethical behavior from their top executive...causes me exactly 0.0001 seconds of surprise. But the question I have is why does no one seem to care about this? People might say "well Patraeus/Allen is a public servant and he is privy to secure, classified information that he might have leaked." You don't think the CEO of the largest defense contractor wasn't also privy to secure, classified information? Ethical lapses of judgement can lose you your clearance, believe me, as someone with security clearance, I would know. And just as Patraeus/Allen is perhaps accountable to all of us as a civil servant in our military, isn't the CEO of a company that gets TRILLION DOLLAR contracts (entirely tax payer funded) equally accountable to Americans? Yet we ignore this private sector scandal and focus on the one involving military men.


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Young Idealism Is Not Misguided, Ctd 2

I have to ask it: what would Robin Hanson tell a 25-year-old kid, who "had a vague inkling about how to make a difference but didn't know how to do it." Would he have empowered that young man to achieve every inch of his possibility, to embrace every chance for greatness, to throw his energy and intelligence at idealist causes?
If that 25-year-old came into Hanson's office and said "I want to 'attach myself' to causes like helping kids get an education and helping people who are living in poverty to get decent jobs and work. I want to make sure people don't have to go to the ER just to get health care." Would Hanson have told him "well then, you should not waste your time with charity, but instead you should learn and network. Save your money and let interest compound for charities later."
And when the 25-year-old kid doubled down and said "But a group of churches is willing to hire me to be a 'community organizer, should I take the job?" would Hanson have said:

News flash: you are just one of seven billion, so you aren’t going to personally make much difference. The world will have nearly as many problems worth solving then as now, with or without your help.

I am sure glad Hanson wasn't around to say that to this guy.

While my vitriol about many of Mr. Obama's policies remains intact, I am incredibly grateful that a man with a sturdy rudder and a patient brain is in charge of our country. I am grateful to those churches, 28 years ago, who hired a skinny kid to go throw his life away on altruism. I am grateful that people like Mr. Obama exist: people who want to improve the human condition in the present. People who don't think that progress of the Top 1% pulls the rest of society upwards, but rather that by raising the rest of society up from the bottom, the Top 1% is allowed to rise higher as a result.

But perhaps most of all I am grateful to my parents, for never once putting a damper on my own wild dreams and absurd hopes for the future.

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"World's Most Advanced"

First, watch this video. It's only 3 minutes long. Back? Okay let's get started.

First, that thing looks awesome. Independently articulating fingers, carbon fiber shell, neat whirring noise as it articulates, battery integrated into design and not externally worn...everything about it looks sweet. Even the carbon black color gives it an almost sinister, technological appearance.

But.

I watched that video and waited for the magic moment when I'd be impressed. Like, I kept hoping the hand would crush a can of soup or an orange, or he'd start playing Moonlight Sonata, or cop a feel on his wife, or even the individual fingers would wave at the camera. That magic moment never happened.
But I had expected it to. Because when someone calls a device "the world's most advanced" I have a level of expectation of being excited by what I'm about to witness. If someone posted a video of "the world's most advanced car" I don't want to see a humdrum Honda Civic - but with a new stereo!

I've written many times before on TAE about the various difficulties in producing a practical, functional upper extremity prosthetic (or exoskeleton for that matter). The human hand has more than a dozen muscles controlling it, all perfectly aranged inside the forearm where all the wrist muscles hide as well. Each muscle has been carefully evolved to give humans a unique, high speed, high control, high endurance system for moving their fingers. A perfect example is that I am blazing away at almost 100 words per minute on this blog post, making few errors, not watching my fingers, and my arm muscles show no signs of fatigue. Concert pianists play Rachmaninoff. Mechanics change alternators.
Honestly, the brilliance of human anatomy is typified in our hands, and the wide breadth of motions we can produce with them.

This beBionic arm is great, for many reasons. But I was disappointed. An amputee, forces to dress with one arm, forced to hold his kids with one arm, forced to zip his fly with one hand...he probably finds this technology wonderful, and the happiness of the man featured in the video is evident.
But as I watched that guy have to use his "good" arm to click his prosthetic into a different mode, and I watch the prosthetic slowly whirr into a different grip, I felt frustration.

I felt frustration because we can do better.

There will come a day when a person is in a serious car accident. Unconscious, they are rushed to the hospital and their shattered arm is amputated. A simple procedure will mount a socket on their new stump, and microscopic electrodes will detect the nerve endings and interface with them. A prosthetic arm will be attached to the socket. After several hours, the patient will awaken and their new prosthetic arm will function exactly like their other biological one. There will be no training or rehab or calibration necessary. Like trading in an iPhone 4 for an iPhone 4s.
Then there will come a day when we will attend concerts where pianists will have willingly traded out their biological arms for prosthetic ones because it allows them to play faster, longer, better. Larger prosthetic hands will give them a greater range on the keyboard.
And there will come a day when prosthetic hands look and feel just like real ones. We'll know friends for years and never realize they were an amputee. Then one day they'll disconnect their arm and it'll scare us senseless and then we'll laugh about it. It'll be a party gag.

Every day there are more engineers. Every day we get more advanced technology to play with. And in the years to come a thousand prosthetic arms will be produced, each a little more advanced than the last. Each smarter. Each more real. It's naive to pretend that we can go from point A to point B without the long journey in between. But its okay to be impatient too.


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Young Idealism Is Not Misguided, Ctd

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." -Chuck Palahnuik

Hanson gratiously responds. And now that I know he is listening I just want to say I find him an incredible person and am a devoted and long-time reader. His article on Unfriendly AI led me to read Singularity Rising, which I enjoyed. Nevertheless (and probably because I am a fan and subsequently hold him to a high standard), I stand by what I wrote regarding his post. I appreciate his response.

But I must say the whole of his last two posts has given me chills, mostly due to the raw fatalism Hanson is exhibiting:

News flash: you are just one of seven billion, so you aren’t going to personally make much difference. The world will have nearly as many problems worth solving then as now, with or without your help.

This, from a blog entitled "overcoming bias"! Hanson started this whole thread by stating that Young Idealists ask for his advice. Is his advice, like the Palahnuik quote above, that none of us is capable of anything significant and the world will always be messed up, so why bother? Is he really suggesting that if a Young Idealist, bright-eyed and full of energy and talent, went out to lunch with him and said "to what charities should I donate?!" the correct response of a Middle Aged Person is "you will probably not make a difference in the world." Because essentially that is the advice he has given me.

Actually, I really don't think that is Hanson's advice. Or at least it wasn't in September. And here's where the cognitive dissonance is starting to bother me. On September 24th, Hanson published a post entitled "Covert virtue - the signal that doesn't bark?" (in my opinion the most important thing he's written in 2012) in which he concludes that "private giving, far from being consistent with a pure and virtuous motivation, is actually deeply suspicious." Further, he suggests:

Firstly, it means we are less inclined to talk about and share the information we have about which causes are most valuable and effective. Given that donations to charity and other approaches to making the world a better place vary in cost effectiveness across many orders of magnitude, this is a huge loss. 

Secondly, if people can’t gain social acceptance from altruistic acts, those acts will tend to be crowded out by alternatives that are unavoidably conspicuous – impressive cars, holidays, degrees and so forth – that will do a better job of signalling how rich, noble and interesting they are.

Let me explain. No, that would take to long. Let me sum up. Hanson wants:
1. People to publicize their charitable giving so that others can aggregate this information, derive value from it, and make informed charitable gifts themselves.
2. Publicizing individual charity will make it more socially acceptable and subsequently decrease the social value placed upon consumptionism and material wealth.
3. People under age 40 should not take part in 1 or 2.

See the problem yet? If, as Hanson states in both his original treatise and his response to me, altruism can be used to broadcast attractiveness - but Young Idealists should refrain from charitable giving until their interest compounds - then they have no better way to project attractiveness other than through conspicuous consumption of material goods during the age broadcasting attractiveness is most important to them.

On the other hand, if we were to take Hanson's arguments a different way, here's a much better alternative: Middle Agers who make charitable gifts publicize it. This allows Young Idealists to see what are intrinsically valuable charities per the advice of the Middle Agers, and allows the Young Idealists to know behind which causes they should throw their zeal.

Reimagine the above scenario. The Young Idealist goes to lunch with Hanson, and rather than getting told they aren't a unique snowflake, rather than getting told to cool off and spend two decades networking and learning, instead they can talk about Hanson's well-publicized charitable gifts, and how that Young Idealist might contribute their mental and physical energies on those same charities...while they wait for the interest to compound.


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Young Idealism Is Not Misguided

Over at Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson writes:

Humans have long lives. We are unusually dependent on our parents when young, and we then slowly gain competence over a lifetime, usually reaching peak productivity in our forties and fifties. Most of the time we are aware of this. For example, we count on our peak earning years by taking out loans as young students, and later saving for retirement. And we prefer leaders at those peak ages.

But when people get idealistic, they tend to forget this.Young idealists often ask me and others what they can do to most help the world. Which is a fine question. But such folks tend to be impatient – they want to know how to most help the world in the next few years, not over their lifetime. So when they consider joining an idealistic project, they focus more on whether the project will succeed than on what skills and contacts they would acquire.

Yet young folks shouldn’t expect to have their biggest influence when young. Yes young folks have higher variance, and so sometimes get very lucky, but they should expect to prepare and learn while young, and then have their biggest influence in their peak years.

I'm a Young Idealist, I guess. I'm 30. And I definitely agree I'm not in my "peak earning" age of 40 or 50. That's my disclosure. Hanson's, though unwritten in his post, is that he's 53 and conveniently smack in the middle of his hallowed peak years.
So of course my gut instinct here is to dismiss what he says as another "the younger generation is a bunch of entitled hippies!" article. That's not why he's wrong, but he is wrong.

His argument boils down to this: "a human has their peak ability to positively change the world when they are in their middle years, and therefore young people should concentrate on getting educated and networking, so that when they become Middle Aged, they have the skills and connections necessary to enact change."

Here's the problem: when I'm 50 I don't really want the world to be the way it is now. I don't want to bide my time and merely learn and network idly for another decade or two while someone else is responsible for enacting positive change in the world. Hanson's generation isn't exactly hard at work on social progress.

Let's say I was the CEO of a small corporation that developed medical devices. Should I invest 100% of my resources in projects with immediate payout? No, because a sustainable revenue stream requires projects with a variety of timelines. Similarly, I shouldn't only invest my company's resources in a project with a huge payout that will take 15 years. In order to grow, I need revenue now, in five years, in ten years, and so forth.
Back to the human case. It would be simultaneously imprudent for Hanson to suggest that a Young Idealist is impotent to enact social change immediately as well as for me to suggest that they should only concentrate on those immediate social programs. Rather, what Hanson should be suggesting to Young Idealists is that they need a portfolio of social changes that they want to see enacted and want to support that fall along a variety of timelines. Let me give an example.
A Young Idealist might take annual summer trips to El Salvador to build houses. They might do evening tutoring for inner city kids (as a Young Idealist, they don't have a family yet to take up their evenings like a Middle Aged Idealist does). They might invest in a Kickstarter program that wants to provide basic chemistry sets to children in schools in developing nations. They might work for a political campaign for a candidate that shares their basic social values. And they can do all of these things now. But in doing several of them now, they are planting the seeds of future social changes they wish to see bear fruit when they are 50. Fast forward 20 years, and the political candidate they supported is a Supreme Court Justice who strikes down a law that has rankled the No-Longer-Young Idealist for a generation. And because of the networking that individual did as a Young Idealist, they are appointed to a political position which expands their own personal influence, right during Hanson's "peak performance" years. A child who got one of those chemistry sets in Africa is now a PhD student at MIT doing research on solar-powered desalinization. Some inner city graduated high school because of the Young Idealist's tutoring, they are now a Young Idealist, pushing for further social change and tutoring kids as well.

Hanson's advice that we squirrel away the money we'd be spending on the "current needy" so that compound interest allows us to better help the "future needy" (while being incredibly cynical) breaks down quickly when one plans to spend that money now to create social changes that help future needy as well. Hanson elicits skepticism in the idea that social changes enacted now will positively impact the future, without justification. However, I'd counter-argue that his position is just as weak: name someone who is making better-than-inflation on their investments in the last 11 years? How many people's 401k's have completely rebounded to pre-2007 levels (or rarer yet, exceeded them)? Has anyone's savings accounts actually resumed 7-8% growth? My savings account can't even keep up with inflation. How am I supposed to turn that into massively-compounded growth that I can unload in 20 years?
And more importantly, that entire argument is completely illogical. If I am to put off charity for 20 years to compound interest, why not put it off 40 years to compound even more? Why not put it off for 100 years? Why not just keep compounding interest on our investments forever so that we are infinitely capable of enacting social change for the needy infinitely far in the future?

One last comment. Hanson totally misguides when he suggests that Young Idealism is sexually motivated:

One plausible explanation is that a habit of extra youthful altruism evolved as a way to signal one’s attractiveness to potential associates. People tend more to form associations when young, associations that they tend more to rely on when old. And potential associates like to see altruism, because it correlates with generosity and cooperation (as near-far theory predicts).

Then what explains extra altruism in the old? And how does he explain youths that are extremely sexually-motivated but not idealistic? Are they outliers? How many outliers is one allowed before statistical significance reverts to anecdote? Can't a guy drop a coin in the Salvation Army bucket without looking to get laid?

The most simple answer is usually the right one. Young Idealists see how messed up the world is and don't really want to grow old in that world. And because Young Idealists are more likely to make bold, sweeping structural changes to society that would harm the status quo, and therefore the status quo works against them to keep them at the margins of influence. The Young Idealist grows into the Old Self-Interested, and the cycle continues.


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Zomney

For those of you who don't know who Joss Whedon is, he most recently directed The Avengers.


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Syzygy

Finally, an excuse to explain this word!! Syzygy (pronounced sis-zeh-gee) is when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all form a line. This happens twice a lunar cycle, once during full moon and once during new moon. During Syzygy, the tides are stronger. Much stronger.

This is relevant because Hurricane Sandy's storm surge should be crushing Long Island Sound right about the time the Syzygy-induced high tide rolls in.


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Headline of the Century

Why Penis Worm Anuses Are Getting Evolutionary Biologists All Hot And Bothered


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The Moral Case Against Obama

Andrew Sullivan, with his usual bravado, provides three reasons why morally he thinks the right thing to do is to vote against Mitt Romney. TL;DR:

On the universality of access to healthcare, on torture, and on pre-emptive war, my conscience therefore requires me to withhold support for the Republican candidate. I disagree with him on many prudential policy grounds - but none reach the level of moral seriousness of the above.

Of course, on these three things I agree with Sullivan. Absolutely I believe that health care is a peculiar institution in the way that basic freedom is: the right to live is in the core of our Constitution and Bill of Rights from sentence 1. Torture is hilariously ineffective, barbaric, and is intolerable for the same reasons as denying health care is (see previous sentence). And with regards to pre-emptive war with Iran, sure. Terrible idea. As terrible as a decades-spanning war with Iraq and within Afghanistan. 

However, Obama isn't exactly a Boy Scout. I need to pre-empt what I am about to say with two things. The first is that I am not saying Mitt Romney would succeed in a morality game a snail's whisker farther than Mr. Obama would. Second, it has long been my opinion that borders are stupid. They are the antiquated methods by which we define an "us" and a "them" for purposes of statism, nationalism, exclusionism, and "Pentagon budgets."
If Sullivan is going to get all preachy about the morals of two men and thereby elect the world's leader, then one must step a bit farther back and look not just at the United States of A, but rather at the world in general. And when you step across the invisible lines that (separate us from our genetically identical neighbors but nevertheless) define us as a nation, President Obama's touted morality seems to rapidly diminish.

Therefore, here are three counter-reasons that the morality of Barack Obama is just as questionable, if not more so, than Mitt Romney's.
1) During the last four years, the United States has expanded our drone attack program into several nations without even the tiniest pretense of Congressional approval. Essentially what has occurred is the Defense budget has become Congress defining the size of President Obama's sword, which he then wields with a complete absence of jurisprudence (it should be noted that this unilateral deployment of our forces/drones/etc abroad goes against the War Powers Act interpretation of Barack Obama himself). During his tenure, the citizens of Pakistan have become completely terrorized by the daily presence of drones which may or may not rain death down upon them with extremely bad aim.
What stinks about this is not just that lawless robotic killing of innocent people in foreign nations would be cause for war if it were innocent Americans being killed via lawless robots from above but our nation tends to act as complicit accomplices to this atrocity, but even more so that President Obama is completely unapologetic about it while proclaiming his amazing power at "drawing down" the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Replacing soldiers (who have their own internal moral code built in as human beings) in two countries with robots who feel no guilt as they wipe schoolchildren off the face of the Earth in two other countries is not a drawdown, it is an evolution. And during the last four years, the President has transformed our military efforts in the Middle East from a colossal mistake into an evil one.
When futurists like myself looked into the glass ball and saw future wars, they were certainly fought with drones. But it was drones fighting drones. Not drones raining missiles down on kids.

2) One piece of news that got a LOT of play everywhere - everywhere except at the Daily Dish  - was a Washington Post report detailing the development of a "disposition matrix" which is a fancy way of saying "kill list." This list includes terrorist suspects and the methods being used to hunt them down. While I believe the pursuit of evil people and the attempts to bring them to justice is an important process, one of the fundamental principles of human rights is habeas corpus - the right of a suspected criminal to be brought forth for trial.
Mr. Obama's use of an extrajudicial kill list - and his obvious plans to expand the list - while CIA director David Patraeus  pushes to expand the deployed drone fleet further (see item 1) represents a deep gouge in the face of morality. If one believes in freedom, as I am 100% sure Andrew Sullivan does, then one wants that freedom (and the rights that go with it) to extend to everyone, regardless of what crimes they are suspected of committing. Regardless of what invisible lines are used to define them as citizens.
It should be noted that this extrajudicial kill list - I mean disposition matrix - can (and has) include(d) U.S. citizens.

3) Remember young Barry Obama, smoking pot with his teenage friends? Remember candidate Obama touting the urgency with which he would repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell as President? Candidate Obama did a pretty good job of painting "L is for liberal" on his shirt back in 2008. But then Rahm Emanuel cracked down on marijuana and unions, Federal agents "on a drug raid" started smashing people's doors down and shooting them before they confirmed if they were even the right person, and Don't Ask Don't Tell lasted until midnight 2011. WHERE DID YOU GO, BARRY?
The answer, of course, is that Mr. Obama had flip-flopped. His apologists are quick to defend: "repealing DADT requires Congress, too, asshat." Yes but did he even try before the lame duck? Gates called it "on the back burner." Even Sullivan (while furiously spinning it into "leading from behind") admits that Obama drug his heels on DADT.
In any case, the moral question is of course how a man can smoke pot and then grow up to aggressively prosecute pot smokers. How a man can champion liberal ideals and then morph into a right-leaning centrist February 1, 2009?
And how can we trust the barrage of brown, foul-smelling promises he defecates now? Fool me once, shame on you.
The Left happily pounces on Mitt the Waffle, pointing to his spontaneous combustion on October 2nd and Phoenix-like rebirth as a moderate at the Oct. 3 debate. "The man has no moral compass! He'll say anything to get elected!" or so trumpets Andrew Sullivan.
Sully, which candidate are you talking about?!

When these charges are leveled against President Obama, and believe me - I'm not the first nor the last to point out the egregious human rights violations our President recklessly perpetrates in the Middle East - Sullivan's defense always boils down to "But but but Mitt Romney would be so. much. worse. If you don't vote Obama you're effectively helping Romney."
If an EF4 tornado has just wiped your barn off the map and it is rapidly heading across the pasture towards your house, as you flee to your storm shelter, do you really want some brilliant and helpful person to shout to you "at least it isn't an EF5!!"


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Off the Wagon

Hillel Fuld:

This kind of cheap and inaccurate marketing on Apple’s part is to me a clear indication that it knows its tablet dominance is for the first time, being threatened. 

It knows the iPad Mini cannot compete with the competition if you take all factors that matter including performance, graphics, and price into account, and it planned this launch accordingly...

I hate to say it again and state the obvious but this kind of product launch and cheap marketing tactic would never have happened if a certain someone was still running this company. Low, Apple. Very low.

Now, in terms of disclosure, I have a Galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I'm obviously well immersed in the Android ecosystem. That said, I want to jump down Mr. Fuld's throat here.
Predicting the future is pretty hard. Predicting what products people will gobble up is pretty hard too. Steve Jobs was pretty good at both. Which made him a rare man.

But in addition to the rare combined skill of prescience and intuition, Jobs had one other skill: the sell. When the iPhone 4 came out, its specs weren't that amazing. Off the top of my head I could think of three different Android phones that had hardware that matched or exceeded the iPhone. When the iPad 2 came out, it met (but didn't exceed) the specs of its Android competitors. But Jobs could sell anything, as long as it looked great and was part of the Apple ecosystem.
And that's the key here. the iPad Mini is indeed, as Mr. Fuld rants, a sub-par piece of hardware. But it's part of the Apple ecosystem. My friend Josh likes to read books on his iPad, then switch to his iPhone. Something I don't understand makes it so whatever page he's on consistent across both devices. Pretty neat. There are a million things like this in the Apple ecosystem. The iPad Mini gets that. It gets iTunes and iCloud and iWhateverElse. The Nexus 7 certainly wins the hardware battle. But the iPad Mini gets a software leg up.

Was it disingenuous for Schiller and Cook to compare the two tablets and declare the iPad Mini "better"? Perhaps. But not because it isn't. Just because they said it was better for the wrong reasons. The iPad Mini isn't a more powerful tablet than Google's Nexus 7. It's power comes from its software, which continues to be unrivaled in the Android ecosystem. Trust me, I know.

Jobs sold equal-or-less-than hardware for the last 5 years of his life. Get over it.


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Speciation

January 18, 2016. My device works. Building on the brain-machine interface work done by Parviz, Hanson, and others, I developed a coding language that could translate neural signals to digital 1's and 0's, and translate the other direction as well. The oversimplified description is a biological AC/DC converter. I didn't have any research money to do a clinical study yet, so I implanted it in myself. In my right arm. I hijacked the signal to and from my index and middle fingers, then wrote script in the ADC to "right click" and "left click". Double clicking happens with a thought. Then I plugged myself into my computer. Using a mouse, I could move the cursor around the screen. Then I "thought" about clicking a link...the link opened! I right clicked, opened a page in a new tab...it works perfectly. I need to hijack the whole motor array of my arm though, so I don't have to use this stupid mouse for on-screen navigation.

February 1, 2016. Hijacking the arm signal was too much work. The forearm remains the greatest challenge in human musculature. Instead I decided to hijack my eyeball. The computer screen works as a 2D array of X and Y coordinates so I can basically just translate muscle contractions in the orbital complex into X and Y output. Combined with the finger hijack, I can now browse the internet, work, read, check and write emails...all without moving from this slouched position in my Herman Muller Aeron chair.

June 6, 2016. Investment! Had some VC guys in. I can't really abide their type, showing up to these business deals in jeans and a graphic T, but whatever. Their initial investment bid was $160 million for 70%. I countered for double that money for the same equity, and we settled for $210 million for 60% and I get to choose the Chairman of the Board of the company formed. Everything is going black until FDA submission, stay tuned.

April 11, 2018. After two years of development, the first clinical trial is done. We could not really adapt this technology to animals beyond biocompatibility studies (how do you teach a chimp to connect to the internet?) so we modified the system by reducing its capabilities and its implant location and got the FDA to agree to a small trial. Which went flawlessly. We've submitted a total of 14 patents on the initial technology and the VC queens want another 7 based on changes made and additional future possibilities. They also showed up with another $80 million and bought 10% more. Fine with me.

March 1, 2019. Submitted to the FDA for approval. So frustrated that these people involved in the clinical trials are essentially Gods, but I can't legally get the technology myself yet.

July 4, 2021. I chose Independence Day as the day to have my implant done. It seemed fitting. The surgery only took about two hours, because the device adapts once it is in. There's no nervous system connection for the surgeon to worry about, that's all integral to the device post-implant. The nervous system intrusion took another hour, during which I was paralytic. Then muscle control was restored and the device started learning. I held out another hour, then jacked in.
I can't really describe what it was like. Partially due to disclosure requirements and partially due to the inability to articulate it in words. Try describing 3D to a creature that lives in a 2D world. The whole of human knowledge is available to me. Geography is meaningless when your brain can operate at the speed of light.

August 8, 2021. We launch the product tonight. The VCs have put together a huge event. Details of the tech were leaked to the press. The New York Times is calling it "The Singularity" which isn't true but I appreciate the ego boost.

August 9, 2021. In the last 12 hours, 191,000 people have put their name on the waiting list for the surgery. The surgery costs $250,000 and we get a 10% fee on that. The device sells for $121,000 and of that 60% is margin. Which means we made 18.6 billion dollars in 12 hours. What's more, as innovation allows the price to come down, our margin will go up...and more people will be able to afford this. Time to celebrate!! Human progress, realized!

March 8, 2028. The Board voted me out today. I pushed for lower margins but as they all sat there, jacked in, discussing in a mental chat room the ramifications of widespread adoption of the implant something shifted and they decided it was better to make less money overall by keeping the technology restrictively expensive. I rallied against it, and by a 12-3 vote they decided on a new Chairman. Tonight I'll submit a request to cash in my shares. By tomorrow night I should be the world's first "trillionaire."

March 10, 2028. I've been asked to stay on as Chief Science Officer. I agreed, both because I love this technology but also so that I can steer them away from anything I consider immoral. Like this talk of putting the device in fetuses. I understand the benefits of it, but people should have the free will to choose if they want the implant, not be born with it.

January 18, 2031. Fifteen years since my first successful test. Now we have three versions of the implant, a wired version, a wireless version, and a new sub-net version. Turns out when you give a bunch of smart people the ability to immerse themselves in the Net and each other, they come up with new technologies pretty fast. The sub-net is sort of an internet gateway without electromagnetic radiation. It's hard to describe. It's an energy level that was always there, but the stupid, slow, un-jacked versions of us never thought to look for it. Or use it.
I'm increasingly concerned with the "have/have not" aspect of this technology. Approximately 0.5% of the human population has gotten the implant. The implant price has tripled. Those that have it are increasingly separating themselves mentally from the rest of the world, both in terms of their mental capacities and in terms of their intentional isolation.

June 6, 2031. The Board voted approval of fetal implant development. I tendered my resignation, effective immediately.

April 15, 2046. The world is splitting. Everyone that has an implant is getting one in their kids, their babies, their fetuses. Kids that were born with them five years ago are already PhD-level scientists, engineers, theoretical physicists, electronic geniuses. Imagine that, a five year old that knows more about quantum mechanics than I ever will...and I have an implant! Meanwhile, this "upper" echelon has completely begun to disregard the 99.3% of humanity that does not have implants. The "left behind" can do nothing. Attempts to organize against the Uppers fails miserably, as the interconnectivity and near-omniscience of the Uppers makes thwarting rebellion trivial. Attempts by the Left Behind to procure charity or government-subsidized implants of their own are met with hostility by the Uppers. Because most of the government officials in the world had procured their own implant within the first ten years.

July 4, 2046. I was humbled today to be honored at a ceremony of Uppers paying tribute to my original innovation. The ceremony took a turn, however. One I had foreseen but was still not ready for. First an Upper child, about 9, gave a delightful speech extolling my biography and describing that first implant I performed on myself. Then I gave a short speech, discussing that my rationale from inception had been human progress. Humanity must progress, I said, and technology allowed it to do so more than biology ever could.
As though I had planned this, another Upper child who looked about 13 came in with a box the size of a toaster. The Uppers had done it: they had developed an electronic brain that could outperform a human one. The Upper then gave a speech. "The iterative progress of innovation all started with our implants." The Upper went on to describe, as he plugged his implant into this box, how the box would scan the Upper's brain, make an exact copy of it, and presto! immortality was achieved.
The crowd was silent, but only because no one used their mouths to talk anymore...everyone was gabbing loudly on the Net. And without further ado, the Upper child turned the box on, stood still for a monent, then collapsed on the stage, dead. But not dead. Through the Net, we all were immediately aware that the Upper was still present.
25 years to the day from when I got my implant, biology was dead. And the Left Behinders truly were left behind.


March 8, 2048. I am the last. The last Upper with a biological shell. Uppers uploaded themselves in droves. A central repository was formed and a dedicated power station was allocated. The area was walled off from Left Behinders (wouldn't want them to pull the plug!). The chatter on the Net accelerates every second. The intelligence level of the Uppers has reached a point where I cannot keep up with it. I need to either upload myself and join them...or shut down my implant. I took a walk through a Left Behinder town yesterday. Children were playing, the sun was shining...it was just like it had been 32 years ago before I started this snowball down the mountainside. It made me smile to know humans could be happy without the tech. But then, after a half hour of walking, I found myself in front of a strange laboratory. I went in. Inside, Left Behinder scientists were picking apart an implant, still partially attached to human flesh. At some point, they had captured and killed an Upper. They were trying to reverse engineer it. Before they noticed me, I saw it was a Gen 7, so advanced that their attempts would be useless. The tools they used were so crude, their brains so feeble. I didn't realize how far I had come from their level. Then I felt a surge of fear: the Gen 3 in the back of my head would be easier for them to copy, if they could obtain it. I quickly fled, and returned to the Upper Zone.
And so this will be my last post. I have realized that humanity will endlessly seek to improve itself, and the idea that the Left Behind will be satisfied with their non-jacked lifestyle is a myth. Joining them by unplugging myself would not lead to a contented, utopian life...I'd be in that lab helping them. And the whole cycle would continue. But without me...without the key I held in my hand 32 years ago...they may never unravel the mystery of the implant.
And so I am going to upload myself. For them. To spare them from this accelerando of an existence, where we're all meshed in a hazy yellow cloud of electrons. The Uppers have found what they believe is a transmission source on another distant planet, which includes codecs to transmit away from here...to there. As I write this, they are preparing a massive data transfer. I think I'll join them. Leave Earth to the Earthlings.


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Commercialism, Or How The World Was Lost

A quietly unadvertised truth is that there are resources on this planet that are being exhausted that don't involve your car or your wallet. We hear all the time about "peak oil" or "peak coal" or the depopulation of various fish species.
Less often we hear about the increasing rarity of "rare earth metals" specifically neodymium.

One resource we are rapidly depleting but you never hear about is helium. It turns out that there's not a lot of helium on Earth. Most of what we have is trapped in natural gas pockets and has to by extracted in a fairly expensive process. The good news last century was that in the early 1900's America thought the future belonged to blimps and dirigibles, so we stockpiled billions and billions of liters of helium. Then, when planes won the air, the U.S. released its reserves of helium, the gas became a commodity, and children's birthday parties featured cheap, fun balloons for decades.

Those decades are over. Most of the U.S. reserve of helium has been exhausted, and modern technology increasingly uses helium as a cold source. For example: liquid helium reaches an incredibly low -454 degrees, which supercools - and allows superconduction of - the magnets used in MRI scanners. No helium: no MRIs. Another use for helium is to cool the magnets in the CERN particle accelerator. Another use for helium is in TIG welding. There are tons of other uses, mostly in scientific research where no alternative element exists.

So yesterday, when I saw that Red Bull had sponsored Felix Baumgartner's 128,000 sky dive, I was a little incensed. Most people talked about the incredible technology used, like his pressurized suit, or the ultra-thin balloon. Others talked about how he'd gone 1.24 Mach, being the first skydiver to break the sound barrier. Still others talked about how he'd reached a height greater than that reached by jet aircraft.

What no one talked about is that his balloon was filled with 30 million cubic feet of helium. After the successful jump, the balloon is emptied - into space.

Thanks, Red Bull. Hope this stunt helped sell your product.


By the way: helium is currently impossible to synthesize. When Earth's supply runs out, the nearest available alternative will be strip-mining the moon.
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Hilarious Oversimplification

Here's a video out by Thomas Peterffy.

Here's a link to the wikipedia article that explains what "socialism" in Hungary was like during Thomas Peterffy's childhood.
An excerpt:

The name [goulash communism] is a semi-humorous metaphor derived from "goulash", a popular Hungarian dish. As goulash is made with an assortment of unlike ingredients, it represents how Hungarian communism was a mixed ideology and no longer strictly adhering to Stalinist interpretations as in the past. Sometimes described as "the happiest barrack in the socialist camp," Hungary in this particular period enjoyed many amenities not available to other socialist states in the Eastern bloc.

I won't pretend like socialism in Hungary was great. But then again, that is my exact point. If you built a multi-billion dollar fortune trading stock options during the greatest economic expansion in human history while enjoying continually decreasing marginal tax rates and financial deregulation, you better have more than just vague portents to back up the claim that America is collapsing into Eastern-bloc, secret police-enforced, grocery-store-queue socialism.

What makes this video especially painful is that at the end he finishes with "and that's why I am voting Republican." I'm sure he doesn't mean the Republicans that opened secret prisons, tortured people in Abu Ghraib, wiretapped American citizens, instituted vast Congressional redistricting to game elections, and held people in detention facilities for a decade without bringing them to trial or even charging them with a crime.
No, not those Republicans of Yesterweek...he probably means the current Republicans...the ones who are trying to get complex voter ID laws in place to prevent specific groups of Americans from voting, who are pushing for Christianity as the de facto official State Religion, who want expanded surveillance of minority groups...you know, those Republicans!
It's those nasty Democrats that have all the Socialist cards in their deck.


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One Nation...

How cynical do you have to be to hope that the unemployment numbers would turn out bad so that your guy will get elected?

We're all in this together folks. Unemployment isn't a zero-sum game.


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Evolutionary Politics

If President Obama is reelected I see a clear example of specialization-elimination in effect here.

Let's say each of the GOP primary candidates represented a group of the same species of bird, all in a suddenly-secluded valley (isolated ecosystem for this example). They each compete with each other for food and mates. Because they are isolated, they begin to specialize. And so in order to win the most mates, each group employs strange tactics, either by evolving absurd plumage or by doing a dance/song/nest-building ritual. 

And let's assume that at this point they have no outside predator, so they can get away with this specialization explosion. 

Each group of birds tries to outperform the others, and they become increasingly absurd. The evolutionary term here is "unfit." The secluded environment and lack of predators allows these GOP birds to become almost caricatures of real birds.

Then Primary season ends and the General Election season starts. Or, in our example, the isolated valley suddenly is not isolated anymore. A new Democrat predator comes pouring in, and where it was a decent bird hunter before...now the GOP Birds of Paradise are easy pickings. Their flight feathers don't work well, their loud songs make them easy to spot, and their large, plumage covered legs taste delicious.

And so in the end, the specialization that occurred in the GOP birds in order to win the Primary season made them unfit to survive the General Election that occurred afterward.

On the other hand, if President Obama loses I see the exact opposite ending to the same story. The GOP Primary season yields sympatric speciation, as above. Eventually, one new species of GOP bird dominates the valley. Only this time, when the isolated environment opens up and the Democrat predator comes in, it is unfit to catch any of them.

The strength of the GOP primary process here is that it gives them time to evolve the candidate most likely to survive. Not the smartest. Not the best. The fittest to survive. Meanwhile, the Democrat predator has not coevolved, as there is no pressure on it. 

What would happen here is that the GOP had sufficiently evolved (from a plurality of 'species') a candidate that appealed to more voters than the Single Democrat Choice.

I find the first scenario more likely: isolated environments tend to weaken species. But either way there is a lot of evolution in politics.

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That Sarcos Iron Man Suit We Never Hear About Anymore

An update on the Sarcos Exoskeleton I mentioned:

"With a tethered power source, you could likely see [the exoskeleton deployed] within five years," says Fraser Smith, vice president of operations for Raytheon Sarcos, located in Salt Lake City. "For a suit that operates on its own power, it's probably more like a decade away."

I've cross-referenced this XKCD comic, for your reference.


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Iron Man's Hands

Building an Iron Man suit is hard (of course). That's why Sarcos/Raytheon's suit disappeared into vaporware, why the HULC exoskeleton barely registers google searches, and why no one is pulling them out of suitcases out at grand prix race and defeating guys with plasma-powered whips.

But if you're going to build it, you have to start somewhere. Here's something I find completely astounding, for two reasons. Reason Number One is that it is almost the exact design I proposed to my friend Josh a month ago and am pleased to see that I am good at conjecturing how to build powered arms. Reason Number 2 is that its not just a prototype - people are actually using it.

Festo's design has a key feature: pneumatics. This presents one advantage and one disadvantage. The advantage is that a pneumatic actuator and its peripheral support systems are much smaller than hydraulics. The disadvantage, as any good engineer will tell you, is that gas is compressible, so controlling a pneumatic actuator is a nightmare compared to a hydraulic one.

"What do you mean?" says the non-engineering-background reader. Well, let me explain. Let's say you had a bike pump and you wanted to air up your tires. The bike pump is basically an pneumatic actuator: you apply a force and the air moves. Ever pushed down really fast on your bike pump? It bounces back. That basically means it is "hard to control." Now let's move to hydraulics. If you've ever used a hydraulic jack to lift up a car (because you had a flat) you know that there's not that bounce. You apply a force, the jack moves. Apply a force quickly and the jack moves quickly.
This is an over-simplified case, but the truth is universal. People have been messing with pneumatics for prosthetics for years. McKibben Artificial Muscles are basically Really Well Engineered Balloons that are rapidly inflated or deflated to simulate muscle motion.

So the Festo hand system intrigues me. But at the same time, as an anatomist I see a problem: their actuators are two way.

"What do you mean?" says the non-anatomy-background reader. Well, let me explain. In the human body, every muscle does the same thing: it contracts. So our bodies have an "antagonist" muscle to pair with every "agonist." The simplest example is the bicept in your arm (flex it tough guy, I dare you) and the tricep, whose job is to do the exact opposite thing the bicep does. In your thigh, the quadriceps and the hamstring act as an agonist-antagonist pair.
This Festo system uses a single actuator for both. And therein lies the reason for the convoluted design. This is an unnatural way to create an artificial hand. I mean, I laud Festo's efforts. Their powered glove is beautiful and functional.

But its not perfect.


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Driverless Cars, Ctd

The Atlantic pays Alexis Madrigal a lot of money to basically outline what I outlined for free TWO YEARS ago.

This isn't a knock on Madrigal. I think he's a great writer and I like many of his articles. But they should pay him to produce quality original content, not to regurgitate what thinkers in this field have been touting as obvious for years.


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Not to be a jerk but...

Can we all please agree that stick-on mustaches, mustaches on sticks, and fake monocles are officially over?

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J.K Rowling

Is a good writer. Not so good at doing interviews.

But you know what, I’m proud I was writing under the conditions under which I was writing.

That makes my head hurt to read.

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About 9/11...

Dear kids of America under 15:

If you were 3 when it happened, I am more than happy to have you post something memorial about 9/11 on your Facebook wall.

But please, please stop saying "Never Forget." You were probably still in diapers. You can't forget something if you weren't aware it happened.

It'd be like me saying "Challenger explosion: never forget."

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Jason

Out here at work, we've got a pop machine and a snack machine. The prices are outrageously high. It used to be just a pop machine, but then they added the snack machine, asking $0.90 for the smallest of items. This made me angry, both because of the slow roll of inflation but also because I could buy two of the same item at a grocery store for that price - was the convenience charge really 100%?
So I fashioned a hilarious meme to put on the vending machine. I was going to print it and tape it to the machine...I figured the rest of the folks out here would find it hilarious. Of course they would! I'm hilarious! I left it here on my desk Friday when I went home, and forgot to put it up.

I was down in the break room, heating my lunch today, when two men came in. One appeared to be in his fifties, the other in his late 20's. The younger one, I immediately noticed, had a strangely-shaped skull, and as the older man talked to him kindly...slowly...a picture began to form in my head and the crushing weight of shame descended.

"Jason" is a mentally-challenged person about the same age as me. His job is to ride around in a van he cannot legally drive and refill the vending machines at various businesses here in the southwest corner of Kansas City that have signed up to have their machines filled by a cooperative called Johnson County Developmental Supports. The older man is his guide in this: he drives the van, helps count the money, helps Jason load the right cans of pop back into the machine and the right snacks into the other machine. And off they go to their next location. It's inefficient, meticulous - and completely explains the high vending machine prices.

And there I had stood, last Friday, smugly chuckling to myself about my hilarious yet-to-be-deployed meme.

It's a tough thing for me to do, writing this. I'm a proud man. I have a master's degree in engineering. I am the star engineer at my company. I've got everything going for me, and I knew it all weekend as I strutted around the city with an arrogant confidence that one gets when one has nothing to fear and turns a blind eye to his own weakness(es).
Then there's Jason. What separates me from him? A few tweaked genes is probably all. A dice-roll, and 3 billion base pairs, and I sailed through unhindered. Him? Not so much. And so I get to live my charmed life, work hard at a job I love, make lots of money, raise a family, create the future, while Jason's life is one spent filling vending machines and living in a group home.

And what of the selfless soul - the older man - who is helping Jason put soda in a machine? How can I possibly look a man of that caliber in the face? I am a shadow of this man. Had I put the picture up on that vending machine its meaning would have been lost on Jason, of that I'm sure (thank God). But the kind older man...he'd have seen it, and my heart clenches like a fist thinking of him internalizing my sarcastic complaint.

"Whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me."

Eyes wet with tears of shame, I went back down to the break room, asked Jason for a Coke while the machine was still open, gave him my dollar, and thanked him. I hate feeling like this. I hate it. But every time I do, it's my own damn fault.
I am not ashamed of being smart. I am ashamed that I take it for granted.

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Triple Post-Humanity Article Day

Three articles that all showed up on my feed this morning:

Article 1: Man Walks With Aid of Brain-Controlled Robotic Legs

Article 2: Researchers Hack Brainwaves to Reveal PINS, Other Personal Data

Article 3: What Will Happen to Humanity After We Upload Our Brains?

Hello future.

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Genius Engineers: Don't Settle.

"It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest." - Buckminster Fuller, 1970

Two disclosures. First, I'm an egotist. I've worked really hard to get where I am and that has helped me, but my character is a proud one and I feel like I matter in the sense that my actions have far-reaching consequences, good or bad. I like to think I am a growing influence in the world of engineering, in Kansas City, and in the world. Second, my first engineering job after grad school was laying out ductwork and plumbing at a MEP firm in Lenexa, KS. It was honest work, and I loathed every minute of it. Worse yet, I did not proudly walk out of there to a better job; I was laid off in 2009, and only by a stroke of luck (and a couple good interviews) landed one of the best engineering gigs in the city. It's all been a party since.

All that being said, I want to speak an irritated word of lament for a promising young engineer who settled. I met this young engineer when I was at KU in grad school, and she was an incoming freshman. I mostly noticed her because she was pretty, and pretty girls in an engineering school stick out like the Woman in the Red Dress.  I bravely introduced myself, at some point, but that was about it. Four years later, she was featured on the cover of the KU Engineering magazine, carrying the Engineering School banner at graduation, beaming. I found out she'd basically aced life, and had decided to go to grad school. Score! Another engineer bucking the easy way out (entry-level industry) and diving into a more dedicated path of continued specialization. She told me she was going into computational mechanics, or something. I honestly don't remember it exactly, but I got that she was analyzing mechanical designs on very powerful computers using very advanced mathematics. I remember being impressed.

So I hatched a plan. I was going to hire her. Maybe it was selfish of me, but I dreamed that I'd be in a managerial role by the time she finished whatever advanced degree she wanted to get (she suggested she'd go all the way: PhD) and I could hire her. I thought "now there's the kind of human being I want to have working with/for me: a socially adept, genius engineer that excels at basically everything and clearly has ambition.

I found out a couple weeks ago that she took a mechanical design job at XXXXXX.* Two caveats. First, working at XXXXXX is a pretty glamorous job here in Kansas City. It's supposedly a great workplace, it has great benefits, and the company is healthy and vibrant and utilizes leading edge technology. Second, I don't want some XXXXXX engineer to read this and go "what a shitty asshole" because I clearly appear to be gearing up to trash XXXXXX engineers. Look, someone made the computer on which I am typing this, and for that I am grateful. Someone designed the roads on which I drive, and for that I am grateful. Someone builds GPS units that make the world a safer place for transit, and for that I am grateful.

Nevertheless, XXXXXX is a place for engineers who want to do a job designated to them by someone else, making products designed by someone else, so that other people get credit for their hard work. XXXXXX engineers are cogs in a large corporate machine. At XXXXXX, your managers hype team-building nonsense like "Corporate Challenge" and management periodically has all-staff meetings (live-streamed to everyone's desk so they can keep working while they listen in). No engineer at XXXXXX right now, especially not an entry-level one, will make a breakthrough that will support ten thousand.

That is why I lament my young engineer friend going there. The engineering world was her oyster. She had stellar grades, two degrees, was the toast of KU's engineering school (literally) and at the end of that run she planted herself in a cube in someone else's large, ponderous company. She could have been the one in ten thousand that shook the world.

Part of me is bitter. I have high hopes for my company and for the engineering department, and I am irritated a really good engineer slipped through my fingers. But the other part of me is...disenchanted at finding someone with all the tools and none of the ambition.

Granted, it's early in her career. She's been a real engineer 2 weeks. Maybe in a year or two she'll visit my company website and drop her resume. And I'll get my wunderkind.
<
But please. You in the back. Yes, you. The 19 year old engineering student with the bright eyes and the messy apartment. I read you have a 3.9 GPA and are thinking about double majoring in electrical and computer engineering just for kicks. And because its easy for you.

Send me an email. You'll never be just a cog in my machine.



*The original version of this named the company. After thinking about it, I've redacted the company name out of respect for a great man I knew named Paul. I will say it is a company of about 5,000+ employees that is headquartered in Olathe, KS.
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