Calling an IPO a "flop"

You haven't "lost" any money if you don't sell. Hold on to those shares, people. The big investment firms are just trying to shake your confidence so you sell for a loss, then they'll scoop up all those shares...and when the stock price inevitably goes back up...guess who wins?


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HULC Exoskeleton

Of course, normally I would do everything possible to not to mention something Lockheed-Martin is doing. Long-time readers know that TAE finds Lockheed-Martin to be probably the most despicable corporation in America, capable of basically any engineering feat possible...but dedicated to producing weapons and gouging tax payers for massive profits while continuously stretching deadlines.
Nevertheless, the HULC exoskeleton is pretty cool. What's more, its lack of ambition makes it actually feasible. While the Sarcos-Raytheon super suit seems more badass, it is also  more complex and cannot run without a tethered connection to a hydraulic system and a power supply. This HULC setup needs no external connection.

Here's what I really wish they'd do: make it take a wounded soldier home. Imagine some infantryman in the field, wearing this suit, and he or she gets wounded by enemy fire. Instead of crumpling to the ground with a heavy metallic suit (which will make it even harder for comrades to evacuate them) what if the suit could detect the user going limp and it would instead take over walking duty completely. The suit could then essentially "carry" the soldier either to a place of safety or better yet, to the nearest paramedic.

Just throwing that out there, L-M. You know what to do with it.


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A question

If the U.S. government is paying SpaceX $400 million for two ISS supply missions, and SpaceX has no other non-government clients...how can we call this the first private space mission? Space travel appears to be about as privatized as mail delivery.


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How to be a hypocrite

Bash Edison for not being the "real" inventor of the light bulb and claim Edison merely made it practical, then get pissed when someone points out Tesla wasn't the "real" inventor of A/C and then defend Tesla for "making A/C practical."

Or as Armstrong states it: Aaaand it looks like @Oatmeal is whining that everything he said is true and where it's not he gets a free pass 'cause he's a cartoonist.

People need to learn that when they go a little overboard and get called out on it...the worst thing they can do is double down.


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Another great article on Tesla/Edison

Tastefully named Alex Knapp uses the most tasteful sources!


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Chill, people.

Textbook fear mongering:

On the horizon is the expanding field of brain-digital interface. Devices have already been built that use brain activity to control basic machinery, such as a prosthetic limb.This can be achieved either through implantable devices that directly interface with the brain, or external neuro-modulation, perhaps integrated into a helmet. 

... 

As innovation in this field proceeds, Moreno also wondered whether we risk entering a human arms race, with militaries competing to have the most highly enhanced super soldiers. Such an arms race would have profound ethical implications, both for test subjects of the research and for how we view the balance between soldier as citizen and soldier as tool.

I feel like I've seen this movie. I think it starred Jean-Claude Van Damme. Get over yourself. Re-imagining tired scifi tropes and calling it journalism?


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This Tesla Love-Fest Has Got To End

Over at The Oatmeal, a popular online comic, there's a sprawling, gushing graphic about Nikola Tesla. Inside it, Edison is referred to as a "douchebag," a "bloated, misguided ass," and a "f-ing idiot."

First, let me disclose: I have read three different biographies on Edison and two on Tesla. I know my shit. The author's depiction of Edison reminds me of FoxNews' depiction of President Obama.

But let me start with one minor detail. The author suggests Tesla, not Edison, is the "father of the electric age" and buoys this claim by pointing out that alternating current (Tesla's invention) "powers the world" and not direct current (Edison's invention).
The irony here is that the computer that the author used to draw this graphic runs on DC power. The author's cell phone also runs on DC power. In fact, if the author went around their house and looked at all the electronic devices (coffee maker, microwave oven, clock, television, laptop, stereo, etc.), they would notice that almost every single one requires a conversion from AC power to DC power before it can be used. This is because while alternating current is indeed great for long distance transmission of power...it's shit for powering electronics. So perhaps I could suggest a compromise: if Tesla is the Father of the Electric Age, then Edison is the Father of the Electronic Age.

Let me break this down even further. The author blatantly lies to the audience by suggesting that alternating current is Tesla's invention. But alternating current (and direct current) were first demonstrated before Tesla was even alive, by a Frenchman named Hippolyte Maxii. And he got the idea to create alternating current from the pioneering work of Faraday. Further, alternating current was already being used in Europe by the time Tesla was born. Which explains why Tesla was able to study it in college.
People forget that Edison dropped out of school after 3 months of kindergarten, and never received formal education after that point. Tesla, on the other hand, studied electrical engineering in college.

The author credits Tesla with "the modern electric motor" although a prototype was demonstrated by Galileo Ferraris three years before Tesla "patented" it.

Enough of this. Here's my point: innovation is a convoluted, collaborative, bloody, competitive process. It is almost impossible to credit one person with one thing. Literally two dozen people were trying to make light bulbs before Edison. He made the first affordable one. Not the first one. Almost a hundred years before Tesla built an A/C motor, Faraday had proven it would work on paper.

Here's a recent example from my own work. We're developing a device that was brought to us by a doctor. He'd seen a similar device that was used in a different procedure, and realized that with a few modifications we could make it work in our application. We made some design changes, did some testing, and are about to submit for FDA approval.
So who is the inventor? My engineering outfit? The doctor? Or the device we're modifying...its inventor? The truth is there is probably a long chain of inventors and trying to separate one out is nearly impossible.

Which brings me back to Edison. His real innovation - and the reason he's so much greater than Tesla - is that he developed and perfected the "industrial research lab" where a bunch of smart people all worked together, collaborated, and through an evolutionary process developed the inventions that drove the industrial age. Tesla was a brilliant scientist. I give him full credit. But to make graphics where he is painted as a superhero and Edison as a greedy scamp is disingenuous and unfair.


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Nothing will "never" Happen

Tastefully named high school acquantance of TAE, now famous Forbes blogger Alex Knapp writes about the lack of likelihood that we'll build an artificial brain equal in power to the gelatin-consistency one we have in our heads:

The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain. So building an artificial intelligence with the same level of complexity as that of a human intelligence isn’t a matter of just finding the right algorithms and putting it together. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are. Getting back to the question of artificial intelligence, then, you can see why it becomes a much taller order to produce a human-level intelligence. It’s possible to build computers that can learn and solve complex problems. But it’s much less clear that there’s an easy road to a computer that’s geared towards the type of emergent properties that distinguish the human brain. Even if such properties did emerge, I’m willing to bet that the end result of a non-human, sapient intelligence would be very alien to our understanding, possibly to the point of non-comprehension. Electric circuits simply function differently then electrochemical ones, and so its likely that any sapient properties would emerge quite differently.

The article isn't long and is worth a scan, but you do sort of have to be entrenched in this stuff to really be interested. The way I see it, Knapps has two points: building the brain is hard because its circuitry is plastic (as in changeable) and self-adapting, and its hard because it cannot easily be done purely with software or hardware, but rather a much-more-difficult mesh of the two. So imagine if you will, a helicopter. It flies into the deep Amazon rainforest and picks up a few people from an isolated indigenous tribe. They are then transported to Cape Canaveral, Florida and are witness to a shuttle launch. One minute they are hunting for food and the next moment they are witness to one of the greatest engineering feats in history. It is then explained to them that inside that colossal structure (that is now flinging itself upwards at approximately a hundred times the speed of their fastest arrow) are six human beings who will soon be among the stars. "Can you build this?" the translator then asks the Amazonians.

Well of course they can't. Yet. But in the long arc of history the engineers who built the shuttle had ancestors too, who were incapable of even imagining a "space shuttle." And yet, less than 75 years after the first human being flew a fixed wing aircraft across a beach, we were launching people at bullet speed into space.

Knapp is right: building an electronic device that perfectly emulates the human brain is impossible...today. But when the first attempts at artificial intelligence are 75 years come and gone, will people of 2085 take artificially intelligent computers for granted? Will it barely make the news?

I disclose, with 100% egotism, that the human brain is the most complicated known object in the Universe. It contains 300 billion different parts. It can change itself at will. But unlike faster-than-light space travel or anti-gravity or pulsed arc reactors on Iron Man, we have a functioning example in nature off of which we can build our first crappy prototypes. Then we can improve those prototypes.

If you look at the long arc of history that went from Kitty Hawk to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and draw a parallel to developing artificial intelligence...we're not even off the ground yet. We're this guy. Give it time, Alex, give it time. We've got good brains working on this.


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Atlas Shrugged

"I had a hard time with Ayn Rand becuase I found myself agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore be a huge asshole to everyone.' -Randall Munroe


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Tax the Rich

First, read this. I'm going to discuss Will Wilkinson's response at length, but please, read King's article in full before you read any more of my post.

Here's Wilkinson's response. Meat:

Mr King's ultimate objection seems to me to blur together two separate thoughts. First, he seems to think there is a class of problems that belong to the nation as a whole. Then there's the thought that problem-solving efforts financed by gifts from the rich people will prove ineffective, while efforts financed by taxes can work.

And potatoes:

To Mr King's claim that "charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny", I'd point out that tax revenue won't help much either. Asia's growing economies, greenhouse-gas emissions, and demand for oil aren't the sorts of thing American policy can do much about.

First, Wilkinson is ignoring the fact that a "Protocol" was signed by dozens of nations promising to curb greenhouse gas emissions and the United States is a perennial non-signer. And its comically misrepresentative to say American policy can't lower the price of gasoline. If we actually passed laws that said that EPA mpg requirements would go up in a shorter timeline than 2050 (far enough in advanced that no current Congresspersons will have to actually deal with the consequences) we'd see a surge of consumer movement to hybrid/electric vehicles. Further, the number of solutions to our nation's oil dependency are too numerous to list.  Most require simple Congressional effort: Electric vehicle charging stations at rest stops, high speed rail, and carbon tax are just a few. Of course, these things are rendered less simple when the rich pay K Street a fortune to derail these "job killing" strategies.

What Wilkinson refuses to acknowledge in his response to King is that there are a cadre of wealthy people in this country who do not believe that they are in it with the rest of us. As King states sardonically:

Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own.

That last bit has to be especially distateful to a libertarian, doesn't it.

I have a dear friend who believes that if taxes were decreased then charitable donations would rise. My response to such a naive dream is that the very traits that allow a person to become extraordinarily wealthy are the very same traits that preclude them from being charitable. You don't give your coworkers a leg up and become the CEO. You don't acquire, gut, and sell companies for profit and also find it fulfilling to volunteer at a job fair.

Instead of King's idea: raise taxes for the rich, I propose the opposite. Let's lower their taxes. Let's put all Republicans and Tea Partiers and Libertarians in office this November. Let's do everything the GOP wants, universally. Let's give the greedy everything they ever wanted, which is...everything. Let's lower the tax rate on income above $250k to 0% and let's eliminate the capital gains tax. Let's quadruple the tax deduction for mortgages and let's increase the ceiling on it. Let's lower the corporate income tax rate to 0%. Let's subsidize the price of gasoline by eliminating the gas tax. Let's cut school funding completely, and privatize schools. Let's ban abortion. We can privatize our utilities too, espeically water. Let's get rid of the FDA and the EPA. Food stamps? Gone. WIC? Gone. We'll completely cut off Federal/State dollars for Universities, and instead relax regulation on private lenders of student loans (and increase the amount of loans a student can take). What else does the GOP claim it wants? What else do the rich want? Whatever it is, let's do that too.

And then let's see if the economy booms. What's your guess? I have mine.

Here's my bottom line. Wilkinson says "[King] seems to think there is a class of problems that belong to the nation as a whole." On the contrary, there is but one problem here: the current tax code is set up so that Americans who are only in it for themselves thrive, and those Americans that believe in shared sacrifice lose.


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Exnovation

Is there a term for the opposite of innovation? And by "the opposite of innovation" I mean when someone tries to do something innovative and it produces a product that is lower in quality to the previous version. I know of no word, other the devolution, but even that misses the mark.
And so I humbly suggest we adopt "exnovating" and "exnovation" as meaning "innovation that produces the opposite of the hoped for improvement."

As in "The Weather Channel's new site redesign is a real exnovation." or "Google is really exnovating with this new Blogger interface."

If someone has a better term for innovation that backfires, be sure to let me know.


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Does Knowing Tony Stark's Background Get Me Laid?

Andew O'Hehir:

I know, I know. I’m profaning sacred ground here. Once upon a time, and a very long time ago it was, the teenage boys (and occasional girls) who grew into adults and kept on reading superhero comics were viewed as oddballs or outcasts. When Hollywood began to rediscover the pioneering DC and Marvel superheroes of the 20th century, it was refreshing and delightful at first, and for a while: the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, Tim Burton’s “Batman,” Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, the X-Men series. All were lots of fun, all descended into fatal decadence — as exemplified by Joel Schumacher’s “Batman & Robin,” quite possibly the worst film ever made in any language or tradition — all have since been zombified and ripped from the grave for another go-round, with emphatically mixed results. There’s nothing new about any of that, arguably. One of the defining characteristics of Batman and Superman and all their kind is their malleability, their immortality, their apparently endless recyclability.

But for the love of Christ, at what point is the triumph of comic-book culture sufficient? Those one-time comic-book pariahs are now the dominant force in pop-culture entertainment, and their works are deemed to be not just big but also relevant and important, much the way that Cecil B. DeMille’s crap-history spectacles were in another day.

And this from Freddie DeBoer:

I look forward with interest to the Avengers, but Andrew O'Hehir is perfectly right about the continued pretense that comic book fans are somehow an oppressed minority. You can't have the biggest movie of all times made for you and continue to complain that you're marginalized.

Years ago (literally 20 years ago) when I read comic books daily, I was obsessed with the X-Men. Like so many of my peers, I role-played (usually I was Wolverine, occasionally Gambit). Here's some fun tidbits for you: Wolverine actually had bone claws all along, and they were coated with adamantium when he got his adamantium skeleton. He had a wife, but when she died, his healing factor was so powerful that it "healed" the nerves in his brain and made him forget he was ever married. At one point Magneto literally ripped the adamanium out of Wolverine. It then turned out that Wolvie's healing factor was way stronger, but the constant biocompatibility battle his body had been in against the adamantium had weakened it. After the adamantium was gone, he was essentially indestructible. For a time he becomes one of Apocalypse' Four Horseman, mutates into a feral monster, and eventually rejoins the X-Men.
Did you read all the way through that? Do you want to have sex with me now? Knowing that stuff in 1992 made me an outcast. Since then, there have been 3 X-Men movies and a Wolverine "origins" movie (which resembled nothing of Wolverine's comic book origin). So four movies have come and gone which allowed mainstream America to accept nerd-lore. Do you really think that if I were sitting at a bar with some friends and started babbling excitedly about the Extremis Virus and its potential to be in Iron Man 3 that people would care? Can I now pick up chicks with my exhaustive knowledge of Tony Stark's background? If I told a girl she was "prettier than Bethany Cabe" would she take it as a compliment or wonder what the hell I was talking about?
They'd care, only if they were nerds too. Most people would politely stay quiet until I was done and promptly not care. What Andrew and Freddie aren't admitting is that the genre of the nerds is being hopelessly prostituted by Hollywood. We comic-book nerds go along with it because we literally spent years of our life daydreaming about an impossible fantasy where The Avengers became a movie. But when America's May Avengers Bender is over, and everyone goes back home and waits for Prometheus or Dark Knight Rises or Dark Shadows or Brave or Ice Age 9 or Madagascar 5 or whatever else goes through this summer's pipeline, those of us who still buy Invincible Iron Man and Avengers vs. Xmen on Tuesdays will be left alone again, like we were before CGI advanced to the point that mainstream America could stomach Marvel/DC movies.

Look, we nerds are really happy society has turned to our beloved genre for entertainment. We always found it entertaining. Welcome aboard. But O'Hehir is kidding himself if he thinks society has welcomed us in as well. Did you know that "Jarvis" the A.I. construct in the films Iron Man and Iron Man 2 wasn't in the comics, but was a bastardization of Tony Stark's butler, Edwin Jarvis? Do you really care? If I tried to start a discussion with you about how the origin story of Iron Man was based on a battery powered suit, not an arc reactor powered one...how long could I keep your attention?

"Hey nerd! I was gonna kick your ass when I saw you reading Daredevil comic books, but now that Daredevil the movie has come out, instead I'm going to acknowledge you as my equal." - said no one ever.


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