Hack The Body

I have a short lunch today so I must be brief, but I wanted to point to these two articles, both published today:
Monkey controls robot hand through brain implants
Prosthetics Breakthrough Might Fuse Nerves With Fake Limbs

So many times on this blog, I've talked about the "next great technological revolution" being the fusion of man and machine. And I'm not the only one to say so. When I was reading that Danger Room article about the prosthetics breakthrough, I was reminded of 15 years ago when 3D printers were still cutting-edge tech. Now one can be in your living room for about $300 and there will probably come a day in the next decade where having one is standard issue for many engineering students, just like a laptop/PC is now.
So you can imagine how I feel like we're on the precipice of the man-machine revolution. And here we are, right in the middle of it. When my grandfather was born in 1924, the first televisions were just becoming commercially available. When he died this past week, I could watch high definition video on my phone wirelessly beamed to where ever I am. I was born in 1982 when...imagine what 2070 will be like! I humbly submit that by 2070 people will watch videos that are directly beamed into their brains. It sounds absurd, perhaps. But 87 years ago smartphones belonged only in the dreams of science fiction novelists.


_

Read More

The Mizzou-Kansas Sports Rivalry: Good Riddance

While I recognize that my opinion is amongst a tiny minority, I have to say that I unequivocally despise sports rivalries. I have the distinct pleasure of holding a degree from the University of Missouri and another from the University of Kansas, two schools which anyone around here will quickly tell you are locked in a "bitter rivalry" that has lasted more than a century. Writers like Joe Posnanski, as they discuss the annual basketball game or football game where the two teams clash, love to dredge up pre-Civil War interstate politics, and talk about Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, or John Brown.

Here's the first problem: when Mizzou and Kansas play a sport against each other, people bring that Civil War stuff up like its relevant. But when jobs are poached by one state from the other, like when AMC moved its headquarters from Kansas City, Missouri to Overland Park, Kansas last year, no one said "John Brown's Holy War takes interesting twist." And Missouri's liquor laws, which are less strict than Kansas, is never accused of "raiding Kansas liquor sales like Quantrill raided Lawrence." In fact, most of the world realizes that the Civil War was over 150 years ago, and that basketball wasn't even invented until the Civil War was a generation old. All year long, people in Kansas and Missouri freely drive around Kansas City - a two-state-spanning metropolitan area - and blithely cross the state line at hundreds of points, not once noticing that they've "entered/left a slave state."
And yet, in 2005 my parents were attending the MU-KU football game in Lawrence (in Mizzou clothing) and 18-year-olds shouted at them "go back to Missouri, slavers!" as though it isn't patently absurd (and embarassing) that someone who's great-grandfather wasn't even alive yet when the Civil War ended is yelling that.
The truth is that sports needs hype. By creating a "rivalry" you generate greater fan interest. Greater fan interest equals greater fan investment (i.e. dollars). And there's the heart of the matter: people keep a rivalry alive because its a good revenue source. And so the specters of racism and human slavery are kept alive to make money.

Here's the second problem: you can't argue against these sports rivalries and be taken seriously. I can already imagine the arguments people will hedge against me: "What's wrong with being a fan of something? Don't you have a favorite band?" or "You're just bitter because you are a Mizzou fan and KU wins most of the basketball games and look how many more amazing things Kansas basketball has done than Mizzou basketball."
Nothing makes me less excited about humanity than watching people gloat about a basketball game they took no part in that was played by students at two colleges they never attended. I am not saying its wrong to be a fan of the sports team of a school you haven't attended. What I am saying is that feeling like you, a person that was neither on that team nor attended that school, should have "bragging rights" towards fans of the other school is beyond ridiculous.

While I will miss the MU vs. KU games (they are always exciting and both teams typically show up with their best effort - making the contest intense and memorable) I will not miss the "rivalry" or the "hype" that surrounds the "Border War."


_

Read More

A Eulogy

I was humbled to have the privilege of giving a eulogy at my grandfather's funeral Friday morning. By posting it here, it becomes immortal, and so does the man the words describe.

The man had many names and titles.

Loren Glenn Waller. Glenn. Occasionally “Glenn E. Waller”. Son. Brother. Husband. Dad. Uncle. Grandpa.  G-Pa. Lieutenant. Captain. Major. Colonel. Pledge Brother. Big Red. Entrepreneur. Navigator. Guardsman. Veteran. Advisor. Mentor. Investor. Surveyor. Conservationist. Hunter. Neighbor. Friend. Colleague. Gardener.  Philanthropist. Methodist.

I could go on and on, couldn’t I? The truth is, each of us had a different set of names for my grandfather.

As a young boy, I grew up with this image of my grandfather as a half-god, half-monster. I was always small for my age, and he always seemed colossal. He always seemed larger-than-life. And he always seemed immortal. 

About five years ago, when he first got cancer, something changed. I was in my twenties, right smack dab in the middle of the age where I considered myself an immortal too. We went to visit my grandparents here in Oregon for Thanksgiving, and Grandpa was different. All my life he’d had a straight back and a razor-sharp gaze. Now his back was hunched as he sat in a soft padded chair, and he’d look at me with soft, misty eyes. I’d grown up watching him push a lawnmower around the yard like it was a toy. Now he pushed a walker around like it was hard work. As a kid he had often given me advice – about girls, about saving money, and about life in general. After he got cancer his advice took on a flavor of urgency, as though the wisdom he wanted to impart was more than his time would allow.

What had happened was my grandfather had become mortal like the rest of us. And seeing him like that: smaller, weaker, more human…it dawned on me that I was a mortal too. “Grandpa is going to die someday,” I realized, “and someday I’ll die too.”  But even during his first bout of cancer…even when he had his heart problems a couple years ago…he never seemed afraid of his fate. It wasn’t like he was embracing his death. On the contrary, perhaps the truth was that he was embracing his afterlife.

Because of all the words I could use to describe my grandfather, of all the titles anyone has ever given him, the one he would want me to use today is “Christian.” Glenn Waller, Christian. He’d want me to point out that the long span of his life was marked by two constants: his love for his family and his love for Jesus.  Glenn wouldn’t want us to worry about remembering how he fought in the war, or how he worked at a grain elevator, or how well he’d done in the stock market, or how he was a member of Alpha Gamma Sigma in college. Those were important events in his life, certainly. But they were just the small stuff. What he wants us to remember is that he was a Christian.

A month ago I wrote in an article for the Kansas City Star, in which I discussed how I did not feel connected to God when I prayed. But while out in nature, while hunting, while spending time with my family, and when I am at church…the Holy Spirit is evident to me.

It occurs to me now that the times I feel close to God are the times I am doing something that I’d done with Grandpa. Growing up I hunted with him, spent time outdoors with him, saw him at family gatherings, and went to church with him. Is it a coincidence? Or could it be that the one important, lasting contribution that my grandfather made to my life is that he connected me to God? If that is so, I find it extremely satisfying.

I want to tell one story and then I’ll stop talking. Actually, Glenn is going to tell the story. A couple years ago grandpa sent me the working draft of his “memoirs”, and at the time it went from 1924 to 1972. Here’s an excerpt he wrote about a Boy Scout trip he took with Jeff and Steve to Philmont, New Mexico:

A couple of days later we visited a site where the rangers gave the boys instruction and experience in rappelling down a rock face. The location was high on the side of a mountain looking several miles across a beautiful alpine valley. While we were there a small thunderstorm formed and proceeded to drift down the valley on the prevailing winds. It was several miles from us and we were in position on the side of the mountain to see the entire storm from a side view that you do not have in the plains country where we lived. You could see the lacy ice clouds at the top of the storm and the rain falling from the cloud base as it drifted along. It was a unique chance to see the Lord's world at work and we watched it for some 45 minutes as it drifted past.

That’s what he did. He spent 87 years watching the Lord’s world at work. It was a pleasure to know him.

_

Read More

The Greatest Generation

Lost one of its greatest, last night. God speed, Grandpa.


_

Read More

I, For One, Welcome Our Robot-Avatar Overlords

Where to begin on this one? Well, first off a disclosure. I formerly worked at MRIGlobal, which was formerly known as Midwest Research Institute. We had a large contract with Boston Dynamics as the systems integrator developing the robot mentioned here. I'm assuming I'm not breaching my still-enforced security clearance because that info is readily available on BD's website. Anyway, when we got the contract, and my boss told me the government was paying tens of millions of dollars to build an incredibly accurate anthropomorphic robot - for no other reason that to put it in chem suits - I laughed. "Surely, Joe, you don't think that's the real purpose of this program? How many other organizations in the DoD are salivating for a man-like robot? How long until DARPA funds "PETMAN...with a gun"?" Joe agreed that maybe this program had integrity, they really did want the robot to test chem suits, but that I was right too: other government agencies would want to use the robot for less civilian purposes.
Over the weekend I saw this article on Danger Room. Here's an excerpt for the busy:

In [DARPA's] $2.8 billion budget for 2013, unveiled on Monday, they’ve allotted $7 million for a project titled “Avatar.” The project’s ultimate goal, not surprisingly, sounds a lot like the plot of the same-named (but much more expensive) flick.

According the agency, “the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

These robots should be smart and agile enough to do the dirty work of war, Darpa notes. That includes the “room clearing, sentry control [and] combat casualty recovery.” And all at the bidding of their human partner.

Freaky? Um, yes. But the initiative does strike as the next logical step in Darpa’s robotics research. For one thing, the agency’s already been investigating increasingly autonomous, lifelike robots, including Petman (a headless humanoid), designed to mimic a soldier’s physiology

Hate to say I told you so. But the question we need to ask is "is spending money to eliminate foot soldiers a good investment? Development of UAVs provides a good comparison here, as "getting pilots out of dangerous airspace while still maintaining an air presence" was one of the justifications for UAV development and deployment.
But UAVs have been one of the biggest foreign relations disasters of all time. Drones are almost universally hated by the people - even the good people - who live in countries where they are deployed. On the other end of the spectrum, stories of soldiers on the ground interacting successfully with the locals and winning their trust are numerous.
Look, I don't want Americans (or really any other person) killed in battle and if a robot can make that avoidable by serving as a proxy soldier, I guess I can't complain. But on the other hand the reality of Americans dying is one of the major reasons we pursue an endgame for our military conflicts. If we have no Americans in harms way, either in the sky or on the ground...we might just keep on fighting wars forever.


_

Read More

A Political Scientist, Ctd

I think we just need to acknowledge that the political process is unappealing to scientists. Imagine two physicists, trying to determine the molecular mass of a particle. One thinks it is X and the other thinks it's Y. They do research, present findings, and the scientific community eventually settles on either X or Y or a later determined mass Z. In politics, the "goal" is to start with X and Y and end with (X+Y)/2 aka a middle ground compromise. That just doesn't work for scientists. Scientists believe that given enough facts there is one right answer to every question, and once the facts have been found the community will adopt that right answer.

It is my guess that scientists, engineers, and technical people in general who run for Congress do so not because they want to be politicians, but rather because they want to advance the cause of science funding.


_

Read More

I wish you would call me.

You were one of my best friends. You still are one of my favorite people. I know we disagreed at times about how you should launch your business and I know that there was tension in there somewhere that maybe made it hard to hang out. And I know you had your brothers as your go-to best friends when you needed someone to hang out with.
Now you've got a little baby I'd love to meet, and more than anything I just want to see you again and laugh with you. You always made me laugh, with your cherubic attitude and your indomitable optimism.

Sorry for doing it this way, but you never answer when I call. I miss you.


_

Read More

A Political Scientist

John Paulos asks why more scientists (chemists, biologists, physicists) and engineers aren't in politics:

Among the 435 members of the House, there is one physicist, one chemist, one microbiologist, and 6 engineers.

His reasoning for this is clear: scientists and mathematicians are secretly dismissed by the American electorate because technical-minded people are elitist.
Let's pause for a minute here, and please someone tell me how a microbiologist is an elitist but Mitt Romney isn't? Your average mid-career scientist probably makes around $56,000 as a salary. That's how much Mitt Romney makes in a single day. But the scientists are the elitists. You know, because they solve problems instead of create them.
Paulos goes on with this gem:

Politicians, whose job is in many ways more difficult than that of scientists, naturally try to sway their disparate constituencies, but the prevailing celebrity-infatuated, money-driven culture and their personal ambitions often lead them to employ rhetorical tricks rather than logical arguments.

My italics. Yes, yes...politicians are the ones with the difficult jobs. Back when I was in grad school (long before I became the jaded, vindictive jerkblogger I am today) I had a research professor that mentored me. He had a wife and four kids, and lived in a modest home in a decent area. His research involved the upper extremiti - the arm - and building 3D models of the bones in them without having to take xrays or do surgery. Using this method, if he could achieve it, the source of people's arthritis and other maladies could be sourced much quicker and more cheaply.
But getting funding was difficult. Many funding sources focus on the lower extremity, because knee problems are so prevalent in this country and where the problem is, the money goes. On one occasion he and I attended a bioengineering conference in San Diego. The lower extremity was divided into four 1-hour sessions, one for the foot, one for the hip, and two for the knee. At the knee sessions, there were hundreds of people and it was standing room only. The next day Upper Extremity was held in the same room, and including my professor and me, twelve people were in attendance. After the presenters finished, everyone stood around and talked about the difficulty of funding, and how ridiculous it was. How strange that humans can get around in a handicap-accessible world with bad legs (or even no legs) but if you lose your arms you are almost helpless. And yet NIH funding, VA funding, and NIBIB funding went largely to "the knee people."
It was a battle for my professor to feed me. One semester he couldn't, and I had to teach a class and generally scrape through with student loans. But my two years with him was the culmination of a five-year effort to extract validation data for his model. The specimens my predecessors and I tested and the results obtained allowed him to finally win an NIH R01 which guaranteed him five years of solid funding. At which point, he'll be back at zero unless he finds more money to continue his work.

But no, Paulos is right, politicians are the ones with the difficult job.

One more criticism about this piece. Paulos claims some of the blame for the "culture chasm" between scientists and politicians lies at the feet of the scientists:

Too few scientists are willing to engage in public debates, to explain the relevance of their fields clearly and without jargon, and, in the process, to risk some jeering from a few colleagues. Nevertheless, American scientists do more on this front that those in most other countries.

The thing about science, though, is that it is a international concept. While Federal debt is a sovereign problem...lupus infects humans all over the world. I submit that Paulos need only attend a scientific conference on...well anything...to see that not only do scientists regularly engage in public and sometimes raucous debate, but when they do so they often need translators because of the number of foreign scientists that attend these events. I know this because I have been to them. Since 2005 I have attended three major and two minor conferences on biomedicine, and during each the format was the same: scientist gave 15 minute lecture on his/her research, then for five minutes anyone...literally anyone...in the audience could come up to the microphone and ask a question. Often rival scientists would come up and try to poke holes in the theory; a befuddled grad student presenting work that was but a cog in the gear of their sponsoring professors' decade long work would wilt under the hammering criticism. Then the professor would stand up and the two (or more) rival colleagues would go after each other in loud voices and thick accents. This was often the case in the aforementioned knee sessions. A lot of grant money was sitting in that room, and being right was fiscally prudent.

Nevertheless, on some things Paulos is right. For instance:

Skepticism enjoins scientists — in fact all of us — to suspend belief until strong evidence is forthcoming, but this tentativeness is no match for the certainty of ideologues and seems to suggest to many the absurd idea that all opinions are equally valid. The chimera of the fiercely independent everyman reigns. What else explains the seemingly equal weight accorded to the statements of entertainers and biological researchers on childhood vaccines? Or to pronouncements of industry lobbyists and climate scientists? Or to economic prescriptions like 9-9-9 and those of Nobel-prize winning economists?

The answer is that stupid people get to vote, but they don't get to award grants. If we were to consider a politician's election campaign (and the promises made therein) and a scientist's grant application (and the research topics proposed) as apples to apples, one quickly sees that the politician must promise whatever it takes to win voters. The scientist, on the other hand, has to convince a bunch of PhD grant reviewers that the work will produce significant social progress, is feasible and timely, and can be produced within a budget.

Let me finish with this: I am not trying to trash the vocation of politicians. I just want to point out that I find it less likely that scientists are unelectable in America, and more likely that scientists in America simply aren't interested in getting elected.


_

Read More

Deficit Spending Is A Matter Of National Prestige

When it comes to space exploration, long-time readers know I fully support internationally-backed robotic missions. But I also have strong criticisms for manned missions to the Moon and/or Mars because they seem less like genuine plans and more like excuses to provide Brevard County, Florida with economic stimulus.
One thing that really bothers me is when space exploration is justified by the need for national security - or worse - nationalism is used to try to buoy support for it. With NASA about to cut Mars exploration by a hefty chunk in their 2013 budget, here's former NASA associate administrator, Edward Weiler:

"We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue."

Now I can almost submit that quote without further comment but let me just say this: space is international waters. Space is free. Space isn't something that you claim as "American" or "Other Than American" and build security policy around it. And furthermore, arguing we need to spend tens of billions to retain "national prestige" is one of the most offensive ideas I've heard in a while. Getting a colony on Mars, or finding life on other planets, or even just keeping people in the ISS...its not about protecting America - its about creating technological advancements that will both benefit all of Earth's population but also working towards a goal of guaranteeing the survival of our species by diversifying our population beyond a single star system.
Prestige is something you worry about cultivating if you know your life will end and you want to be remembered. I don't want humanity to end, I want it to thrive - here and elsewhere.


_

Read More

3D Pod Racing

Yes, yes, the first three movies were awful, the plots were weak and discontinuous, the characters were lame and the acting was poor. The amount of CGI vs. the awesome campiness of the original trilogy was obnoxious too. Spare me, I know what people say about them and mostly I agree.

But...

Back in 1999, when Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace came out I went and saw it in the theater, opening night, seduced as all geeks were by the irresistible pull of Anything-Made-By-George-Lucas. After the movie yawned through the first half hour, the little kid climbs into a "pod racer" and suddenly the movie was FREAKING AWESOME. Please, someone...I dare you to claim that when Sebulba's podracer was bearing down on Anakin, and the entire theater shook with the LOBLOBLOBLOBLOB of Sebulba's massive engines, that you weren't excited.
Honestly, I join the pack of "disappointed" when it comes to the first three movies, as well as the "digitally remastered" versions of the original trilogy. But this weekend The Phantom Menace comes out in 3D, and while the idea of redoing movies in 3D seems REALLY lame and just a profit-making vehicle, I think I want to go. Just to see the podracing.


_

Read More