Why I got two degrees in bioengineering.

Because miracles are just one scientist away:

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I, for one, embrace our Robot Scientist overlords.

First off, Farhad Manjoo has posted a week-long series on robots entering more and more complex (read: high-paying) job markets, like robot pharmacists and robot lawyers. Some of the articles are quite good, and they all deserve at least a skim.
But today's article about computer scientists seems to me to fly directly into the face of empirical evidence also reported today by Jonah Lehrer:

The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music when beads were placed on it. Half of the children saw a version of the toy in which the toy was only activated after four beads were exactingly placed, one at a time, on the top of the toy. This was the “unambiguous condition,” since it implied every bead is equally capable of activating the device. However, other children were randomly assigned to an “ambiguous condition,” in which only two of the four beads activated the toy. (The other two beads did nothing.) In both conditions, the researchers ended their demo with a question: “Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?”
Next came the exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads. One of the pairs was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.
Here’s where the ambiguity made all the difference. Children who’d seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair. As a result, they were unable to figure out which beads activated the toy. (In fact, just one out of twenty children in that condition bothered performing the so-called “experiment”.) By contrast, nearly fifty percent of children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the beads and attempted to learn which specific beads were capable of activating the toy. The uncertainty inspired their empiricism.

The point here, is that what the robot lacks is curiosity. It doesn't go out and look for answers. It isn't "interested" in solving problems. Maybe if I asked the future super-powered scientist/robot of Manjoo's article to "explain climate change" it would chug away at climate data for a few weeks and then barf out an explanation, God be praised. But it doesn't sit there, in a lab, and suddenly think to itself "I wonder how climate change works?" And because of that, a sentient scientist will always be required. Maybe in the future scientists will become more like philosophers, and spend more time ruminating and coming up with questions. Then they'll hand the question over to the supercomputer, it'll go all Wolfram Alpha, and then the scientists can get busy trying to sort out the implications of the answer. Less lab book time and more time for creative thinking won't diminish the work of scientists, it will elevate it. Because its not like 350 years ago scientists said "I don't understand this gravity thing" and then Newton explained it and they all threw up their hands and declared their  careers obsolete and went and became plumbers. Asking questions, finding an answer, then asking more questions based on that answer is the fundamental scientific process of humanity, and until we have a computer that can embrace ambiguity and synthesize its own curiosity...human scientists will remain pivotal...regardless of how quickly a computer can derive equations.


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A Quick Point about the Kindle Fire

A lot of people are trumpeting as one of its features "that are better than the iPad 2" the fact that it weighs 14.6 ounces and the iPad 2 weights 21.6 ounces. It causes me intestinal distress to defend an Apple product, but...

Size of Kindle Fire screen: 7"
Size of iPad 2 screen: 10"
Ratio: .70

Weight of Kindle fire: 14.6 oz
Weight of iPad 2: 21.6 oz
Ratio: .68

Any questions? There is no miniaturization breakthrough here, just product shrinkage.

My personal opinion? The reason I got a Kindle was because the e-ink screen is easy on the eyes when I am reading at 1 am after a long day at the office. I wanted a tablet to replace my computer but knew it wouldn't replace my books. I wanted a Kindle to replace my books but knew it wouldn't replace my computer. The Kindle Fire is straddling a barbed wire fence, at its own peril.


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Christian Death Mongers

Hitch hates Christianity, this much is known. But here he really takes a stab at American Christianity as the reason the Death Penalty survives in America:

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.) Once we clear away the brush, then, we can see the crystalline purity of the lex talionis and the principle of an eye for an eye. (You might wish to look up the chapter of Exodus in which that stipulation occurs: it is as close to sheer insane ranting and wicked babble as might well be wished, and features the famous ox-goring and witch-burning code on which, one sometimes fears, too much of humanity has been staked.)

Sullivan linked to it, then he got this absolutely brilliant reader response, which I am pasting in full:

In 2010, as far as I can tell, these five states executed the most people:
1. China (2000+)
2. Iran (252+)
3. North Korea (60+)
4. Yemen (53+)
5. USA (46+)
Two of the top three entities are explicitly atheist. Hitch's assertion that we can ignore Chinese executions because they are a "very nervous oligarchy" can easily be used for Iran considering, you know, they actually have a demonstrable REASON to be nervous - the 2009 protests/Green Movement, hostile relationship with the world's only superpower, etc - and because any analyst of Iran worth his salt will tell you that their government is an extremely Byzantine oligarchy, not a true dictatorship. In other words, you don't get to throw China out and retain the Iranians while making this argument. Yemen is a barely functioning state of tribes. Surprise.
As for us, maybe "God" has something to do with it. But I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest something risky: perhaps it has more to do with a very particular brand of Protestant Christian theology than it does with "God".

I didn't see Hitch accounting for ultra-Catholic South America, where Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have explicitly abolished the death penalty. There are also a handful of countries that have de facto abolished the practice, having not carried out an execution for at least the last two decades: Dominica (1986), El Salvador (1973), Grenada (1978), Jamaica (1988), Peru (1979), Suriname (1982), Brazil (1876). Most of these nations retain the death penalty for possible use in cases like treason or crimes against humanity. Somehow one of the most religious continents in the world seems to have escaped Hitch's sight.
I get it. Hitch hates God. But this seems like a classic case of him beginning with his own very well-known assumptions and then hastily assembling the best argument he can make to support it. Religious conservatives will always point to communist dictatorships. Liberal atheists will point to religious theocracies. Both are capable of great evil. You don't need to believe in God to murder. And just because you believe in God doesn't preclude you from being a murderer. More than anything, it is just simply absolutism in something that deludes people into murder.

I don't really have anything to add to that, other than that the death penalty is expensive and ineffective, like so many other government institutions that the GOP argues should be abolished. But you almost never hear them argue for abolishing the expensive, ineffective practice of killing criminals.


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Terra Nova S01E01 and S01E02 Review

Somehow a scientist has created a "crack" in the fabric of the universe that leads back 85 million years ago to a much younger Earth. Okay, so when people go through the time portal, it's apparently a one way trip, with no way back. How do they know what is on the other side of the portal? At one point they show a "probe" they sent through first, remarking (in order to silence time travel critics like myself) that after sending the probe back 85 million years, they could not find it in the present (2149 AD) which led them to believe the past was a "different time stream." Well fine, pull a Star Trek.
Nevertheless, they warn travelers about to go through the portal that "the high oxygen levels on the other side (part of the reason insects and dinosaurs could get so big was that the atmospheric oxygen level in the Cretaceous period was much higher than it is in the current Neogene period) but how did they know this? Once again I ask: how did they know what was on the other side of the portal? Remember in the movie Stargate when they send a robot through the portal and try to track where it goes?
Some of the science and background in this show has been great; they completely kneecapped time travel critics when they proposed an alternative timeline. Most of the dinosaurs I've seen in the show are contemporary; shows involving dinosaurs often make the mistake of picking and choosing neat-looking/plot convenient dinosaurs at random while those dinosaurs might have lived on different continents or millions of years apart.

But here's the problem I really had: by my count they unloaded nearly 2,000 rounds at or into the attacking carnivorous dinosaurs in these two episodes and yet not a single dinosaur died, or even showed signs of injury. Were dinosaurs effectively bullet-proof? And if they were, why bother sending the "pilgrims" back with bullet-based weapons? Why not send them with tasers, RPGs and tanks or whatever it takes to bring down a Carnotaur? At one point in the episode, two characters unloaded fully-automatic assault rifles from a range of less than twenty feet at a dinosaur that stood roughly 7 feet tall. The dinosaur turned and fled, apparently unharmed by mere bullets.
Now, I'm willing to accept for the sake of this show's admittedly absurd plot that these dinosaurs have really thick skin. But five minutes after these two characters fail to stop the dinosaur with hundreds of bullets, another character mentions using tranquilizer guns. If a point-blank-range bullet will not penetrate the skin of a dinosaur, neither will a sub-sonic tranquilizer dart.
I realize that they can't think of everything when making a show, and when it comes to scifi shows (that over the last decade have shown an increasing special effects budget at the price of good writing) its hard to vet every single bit of every single episode. Nevertheless, the seeming bullet-proof aspect of the dinosaurs really bothers me, because the hulking, slow dinosaurs would have otherwise provided the "pilgrims" with a great source of protein. As the armored vehicle was being chased across a field with a Carnotaur right behind it (let's ignore the impossible biomechanics of a 50 mph dinosaur), unloading .50 BMG rounds into it from a turret and a dinosaur finally went down, I thought "that Carnotaur is going to be DELICIOUS!" and then the Carnotaur got back up, miraculously, and continued the chase.

That kind of firepower should cut through the engine of an armored vehicle. Not killing a 2-ton dinosaur with them is pretty stupid.


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Universal Health Care For Wealthy Androids

Let me ask you something. Consider a future scenario in which:
1) Robotics, nanotech, and human-machine-interface technology had sufficiently advanced to a point where we could upload our consciousness into solid-state memory and become Intelligent androids. This process is really expensive, and
2) Replacement parts, double redundant backup of your memory (aka brain), upgrades, etc are all readily available to enable your android self to achieve immortality. However these things are also really expensive.

In short, immortality and complete freedom from health issues is now possible...but expensive. Would you say that only the wealthy deserved the right to become immortal? Do you think that the middle class and poor should be resigned to normal mortal ills like cancer and gum disease and tetanus while the wealthy look on with timeless, perfect, robotic eyes? It seems like the right thing to do is to have the wealthy be required to subsidize the immortalization of the poor, for everyone's benefit. Right? Society would be maximally benefitted from maximum numbers of immortals; that's a huge number of productive workers paying income and capital gains taxes! Forever! So I think it's pretty safe to say that everyone - and I mean everyone except the rich - would want to tax the rich to subsidize the immortalization of the poor.

Now let's try another scenario:
1) Medicine has advanced to a point at which you can take a "universal cure pill" that, if taken once a month, will cure every ill in your body, flushing out cancer, plaque (both tooth and arterial), etc. thus maximizing your health, and
2) the universal cure pill is really expensive.

Would it really benefit society if only the rich were able to cure their ills in this convenient way? Would society really be tolerant to the idea that the middle class and/or poor would need to suffer through conventional medical treatment (or no treatment at all)? The case for immortalization was more obvious; an ethical society wouldn't let the rich live forever while the poor died in piles. But this is simply a less extreme case of the same thing. The rich would be afforded a level of health care that pushed them as close as a human could go to immortality, while the poor would be doomed to mortal ills. Ancient wealthy would go skydiving while poor people half their age suffered through dementia and died. Yet if the society subsidized the universal cure pill, everyone could achieve the stratospheric health for their entire lives. People could have 80-120 year careers, and pay income taxes that whole time!

Eventually you could imagine these scenarios backwards from the future until you arrive at present day, where a high level of medical care is available if you can afford it. If you can't, you die. And yet, the wealthy in this country seem to see their subsidization of health care for the poor as an affront to their personal liberty. And bad for the country. And an enabler of laziness in the lower classes.
But in the case of immortality via Singularity, or near-immortality via super-drugs, the argument seems pretty clear to me: the more healthy people we have in this country the more the country benefits. Why is this so hard to accept in the present tense?


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Faster-Than-Light

If tau neutrinos could travel faster than light, then we should be able to regularly measure them doing that from a constant source of tau neutrinos - like the Sun. Except, we never have.

The news quickly latched onto this finding with claims "interstellar hyperspeed travel is once again a possibility." Oh please. A neutrino has almost zero mass, so the energy required (E = mC^2) is relatively minor, in fact neutrinos traveling much slower than light speed is pretty weird.

A little background on neutrinos: they're pretty poorly understood. The mass has never been measured, but it was previously assumed they had zero mass which would mean they would only travel at the speed of light and no slower. However they've been found to wobble between "flavors" blah blah blah they're really damn light but still have a tiny mass. Interestingly, if neutrino mass is higher than about 1.5 eV, then Dark Matter cannot exist.

But going back to the idea that neutrinos can zip along at a speed faster than light seems doubtful to me. Nevertheless, let's pretend its true. It changes nothing for massive humans and their monstrously heavy starships. The energy required to send an essentially-massless particle at or above the speed of light compared to the energy required to get Luke Skywalker to the Degoba System is like the size of a single atom compared to the size of the Universe. Literally.


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