Musings From A Muser

The New Larmarckism

2008-07-23T20:37:00.000-07:00

One of the most remarkable developments in biology in years is the discovery of epigenetics. A more technical discussion is down below, but let me start with an analogy.

DNA has often been described using a recipe metaphor. The recipe is just some words on a piece of paper, but describes how to combine ingredients in the environment to produce a dish.

A chocolate cake is quite different in looks and taste to the ingredients that go into it. And we all know that the quality of the ingredients, as well as the skill of the cook combining them, can dramatically influence how that cake turns out. Even though the recipe is exactly the same.

It's the expression of the recipe that makes the difference between good cake and OHMYGODITSDELICIOUS! cake.

This last idea is Epigenetics. That is isn't just our DNA (recipe) that determines how we will develop. How that DNA is read and expressed has just as much to do with the outcome as the basic recipe does.

Which means that what you eat, drink, smoke, huff, shoot, and accidentally expose yourself to can affect not just your body for that hour, day, or week, but how your cells will develop from then on. And more importantly, it can affect how your kids will develop as well, long after the exposure.

(For you Intelligent Design advocates out there, if you think the recipe analogy makes the case for an Intelligent Chef being necessary for the meal, I'm afraid you are once again confusing scintillating metaphor for scientific method. They are not the same. One is a useful method for predicting outcomes, the other is just words that tell a story. Sound familiar?)

More Technically...

[Wikipedia] ...the term epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression that are stable between cell divisions, and sometimes between generations, but do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism.[1] The idea is that environmental factors can cause an organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently, even though the genes themselves don't change.

This is huge.

Your environment (which includes what you eat and breathe, as well as what you *do*, like exercise, read, think) can cause a change in gene expression. This concept has been around a couple decades, and is being exploited in all kinds of genetic therapy ideas (viral, miRNA, siRNA).

What's new and interesting is that these changes can be permanent. They can stick around through cell replication, so all new cells of that type now behave differently in the same way. This is epigenetics.

And what's truly new and remarkable is that it has been shown that these permanent markers that change gene expression can also modify germ cells (sperm, and probably eggs) in the same way. Meaning that what happens to you in your environment can not only change you, it can change the genetic legacy you pass on to your children!

Early indications are that many forms of cancer, schizophrenia (and other mental health failures), obesity may be caused not only from your environment, but could have been caused by experiences of your parents or grandparents.[link - requires subscription]

For example, if Mom smoked before getting pregnant, but quit and never smoked again once she had you, your genetic expression will still be different than if she had never smoked at all.

This is just the teeny, weeny beginning of a whole new understanding of how evolution and genetic expression works. Soon we will not only be able to cure our own genetic disorders, we can make these fixes permanent and inheritable. A further understanding will allow actual improvements to your existing genetic recipe. And these can be passed along to the next generation as well.

Have you ever thought, "If I could change anything about myself, what would it be?"

Start making your wish list.

Tortured Dreams

2008-07-15T23:40:00.000-07:00

"Wake up Kalid."

I heard my name from a great distance. I tried to move, but could not. I tried to open my eyes, and succeeded - somewhat. Progress. The light was painful, but I could make out a man with a beard and an umamah. Another prisoner?

"Keef halak, Kalid," I heard. How are you? I realized I was hearing my own language again. Another prisoner, to be sure. Do I know him? He seems to know me.

"Sho...," I try to say "Who are you?" but only a raspy croak emerges from my parched throat. "Sho Ismak?"

"Insh'allah," I hear. "You survived!" The face comes into view again, closer this time. He looks familiar. Why can't I think?!

"Kalid, listen to me. You were hurt in the escape. Your neck...can you move at all?"

Escape? No, I try to shake my head, but feel nothing. "Nothing..." I try to say.

"Ok, lie still. We have to move you again, get to a safe place. Stay with me, brother!"

Brother...brother...I fade again into unconsciousness.

Some uncounted time later I awake again. The light is dim, making it a little easier for me to see. I still can't move - not even my head. A rising sense of panic wells up within me, and the frustration when I cannot even flail my arms adds to the wave of fear that has taken hold of me. Am I paralyzed? Will I ever move again? What has happened to me?

I hear someone coming closer, and once again a vaguely familiar visage crosses my field of view. Brother...Ahmed! My brother? It cannot be - he is far away, fighting the infidels in Afghanistan. When I was captured he was still living out of his safe refuge in the mountain caves of Pakistan.

"Can you hear me?" he asks.

"Ahmed?"

A broad smile takes over his face. "God is truly great. Yes, brother, it is I. You are safe now."

Safe? How can this be? I am trapped in this land forsaken by God, undergoing interrogation day by day. A trick! This is another trick?

"It cannot be you," I finally say. I close my eyes to slits.

I don't feel him grab my shoulders, but the room shakes around me. "Kalid - it is me. I shall explain when you feel better. Now rest."

A trick...I sleep again.

When I awake nothing has changed. Still I cannot move. Still the ceiling of the cave is the only thing I can see. I shout "Where are you!" but my voice is still muffled in my ears. Weak. I shout again. And again. Eventually I hear someone coming, but they don't come to where I can see them. "Who is there?"

"I am Abdul. Can I get you something?"

"Water, please." I feel the trickle of coolness on my lips, and I open my parched mouth to drink in what is given. "More..."

"I must go get your brother, he will want to know you are awake," I hear the man called Abdul say, and I hear him leave. Not long, I hear another approach.

"Kalid, I was told you were awake. How are you feeling?" It is the voice of the man who claims to be Ahmed.

"I cannot move. What have you done to me?" I ask.

"Brother, brother...I am so sorry. We were betrayed, and you were hurt in the attack. I am trying to get a doctor, a real doctor to come and look at you, but it is difficult."

"Betrayed? Explain."

I see the face of Ahmed again briefly as he leans over me, then settles somewhere on my side, perhaps sitting. "You were released as part of a trade. We had some of their soldiers, one of them the son of one of their lying politicians. We worked out a deal."

Then his voice bitter, he said, "But those spawn of Satan tried to trick us! As you were coming across to us, they shot you. In the back, Kalid! In the back! Cowardly dogs!" He stops, and I hear him breathing hard. "But we knew their perfidy, we were ready. Our men came out of hiding, and we managed to get you out."

A long pause. I felt the slightest of pressure on my hand. A feeling! As gladness starts to reenter my soul, I hear. "Kalid. Da'ud was killed in the escape."

Da'ud. My friend from the time of our childhood. Captured the same time as me, I saw him only once more at the prison. Even beaten and abused, his smile when he saw me managed to sustain me for weeks.

"I don't remember any of this," I said.

"What do you remember?" asks Ahmed.

"I remember being captured. I remember being tortured - the dogs, the drowning, the beatings where no one could see."

"Kalid. I am so sorry, my brother." A long pause. "Kalid?"

"What?"

"I want to give you the time you need, but we must know. What did you tell them?"

Was this truly Ahmed? I was already starting to think of him so. But so many tricks... "Ahmed, when we were children, our mother...what was the last thing she told us before she died?"

"Our mother is dead?! This cannot be - I saw her only days ago! Kalid, why do you say this? What do you know?"

I relaxed. The Americans could not know this - our mother had been in hiding for almost as long as we had.

It was my brother. I was free. The horror of my captivity done.

"Ahmed." I sobbed, and once started couldn't stop. The weeks of torture, fear, loneliness came flooding over me. "Am I really free?"

Once again the slight pressure on my hand. "Yes, Kalid. You are safe. You are back with us, thanks be to God." He leans over me, and I can see him once again. "Now please, Kalid - it is important to get this in time. We must know what operations to shut down, who to move. What did they get out of you? Do not be ashamed. Many of our brothers break down, denied the chance to be martyrs. But we must know - many lives depend on it."

I sighed. "I told them next to nothing, Ahmed. Only operations long over, brothers long ago captured, cells we already know were blown."

Ahmed smiled. "That is wonderful, brother. Now let me catch you up. What do you remember about The Fist of God?"

The Fist of God. In the works for two years, it would bring a crushing blow down upon our foes.

"I remember the planning. I remember the date. I remember dreaming of the day."

"We've had to make some changes, Kalid. We've had to change the date as well. What was the last you remember?"

"The date? It is no longer to be on the anniversary of our first strike? But that was when their politicians were supposed to be in full session! Their President is only speaking there that one day."

A pause. "Somehow they got wind of the date, Kalid. We've had to find a new date. We may not be able to get their President. And we may need a new volunteer to carry out the final phase."

"What happened to Ali?"

"We think he may be compromised," said Ahmed.

"Ali? Never! I don't believe it! His cover as a page was perfect!" I remembered their conservative senator, so proper in public, so soft with his pretty boy Ali - our pretty boy Ali - in private.

"Perhaps, brother. But it has been difficult to get close to him since you were captured."

"Why? That makes no sense! It was Da'ud that he trusted most." Da'ud. My Da'ud. My dead Da'ud.

Suddenly I felt so heavy, so tired. Confused. "I think I must sleep some more Ahmed. Let us talk more on this later please."

"Of course, Kalid, of course. Rest now." I drifted off once again.

I did not see or feel the men tear the helmet off my head, pull the straps from my limbs. I did not feel or see them as they moved me to a gurney and started to wheel me out of the room, the room that no longer sounded like a cave.

But in my dreams, my endless nightmare, I hear them...

"That was a pretty close call with the Mother thing. How did you know she was still alive?"

"That was the easy part - didn't you ever listen to the tapes of his drug sessions? She was all he talked about for a while. Must have been quite a momma's boy."

A laugh. "Well, we have a lot to go on. We had nothing on that Fist operation, and now we may have enough to roll it up completely! I gotta hand it to you - I never thought that high-tech sci-fi crap would work for shit."

"Ye of little faith. Not like our boy here. Time to put away your water boarding and guard dogs, Billy. That's so medieval. And useless. You see how much more we get with a little twenty-first century tech."

"I do now. Who would have thought that those virtual reality video games had such a promising future in prisoner interrogation?"

"Me, for one. And what's even better, those Red Cross weenies can't even complain - nothing "cruel and unusual" in letting a prisoner play a little immersive video game, is there?"

Another laugh. "You're too much, man. Let's get this intel to ops pronto - and get this sand monkey back into his cage. I'm thinking it's maybe Da'ud's turn next. What do you think?"

"I'm thinking I have a new convert. Go get Da'ud, buddy - I'll run this stuff up to ops."

My nightmares...Allah, hast thou forsaken me? What have I done? Da'ud! Ahmed!

My nightmares are my reality...

Interlude

2008-06-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

Yes, I disappeared for a while. But I only heard from a few of you to start writing again, so I didn't give it much thought. (If no one hears the sound of a blog disappearing, was it ever really there?)

I'm thinking of writing again. I keep getting these vivid visions of people and events that take place in a near future dystopia, and it feels like I should be trying to capture them.

Writing is a very self-indulgent exercise. It takes time away from family, friends, and work. And when your work also involves a large amount of writing, which mine does, it is tough to get back in front of the screen at night.

But to paraphrase another, if not now, when?

Fare Thee Well

2007-10-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

I've started using Farecast.com to help me decide when to buy an airline ticket. Using strong statistical algorithms, this site is better that Orbitz (or Kayak, etc) because it tells me what the lowest fare should be, and the probability that it will go up or down in the next 7 days.

This is yet another capability brought to us by using the power of statistics to make better decisions. (I'm reading the book Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres. I'll have a lot more to say about this book and its implications later this week.)

Jena

2007-10-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

I was catching up on some random blogs and found these pictures and video of some white kids giving their rendition of Jena 6. It made me ill.

I was fortunate to be brought up largely free of racism. The small town in California in which I was raised didn't suffer from the black-white divide that I would see only on television. (Although in retrospect, there was a current of racism against hispanics in that community stemming from strained relations with the migrant worker population that would come to work the fields).

My first blatant exposure to racism, the incident that forced me to confront its ugly reality, occurred when I went away to college. One of my roommates was (and still is, I believe) of African-American descent. Black. A bright kid studying biology at UC Berkeley, he was raised in another small town in California in a middle class family as I was. We became good friends when we met in the dorms, then moved into an apartment the next year.

It was while we were still in the dorms that he was getting ready to head to the airport on a trip. He was dressed in a suit, and had his small travel bag and suit carrier in his hands. We were walking to the parking lot when I joked that this girl he'd been trying to avoid was approaching, so he broke into a laughing run to the parking garage.

Coming up the street at the time was a Berkeley Police Department vehicle. As my friend ran into the parking garage, this cop turned on his flashers and whipped into the parking lot after him. Pulling his gun, he told my friend to halt. Which he did.

As I jogged up, the cop was questioning my friend, having him open his suit carrier and asking him where the suits came from. Shocked, I stormed up and shouted at the cop something about WTF was he doing, this guy lived in the dorms across the street, etc. The cop wheeled around and told me that unless I wanted to go to jail too, I'd better shut up and move away. "On what charge?" I asked. "Obstructing a police officer, and whatever else I come up with. Now step away!"

I was stunned. I had never come face to face with such blatant racism and abuse of power before. (And this was nothing, I realize. But it was my first exposure to this aspect of the real world.) My sense of helplessness, the horrible pain of empathy as I saw the look of anguish and humiliation on the face of my friend...

It made an impression.

Since then, I've managed to get some experience on the "other side". Traveling around the world, being the only white face in a restaurant or a plane, being ignored or treated poorly. Americans certainly aren't the only ones in the world who suffer from racism.

But it does appear to be deeply rooted in the formation of our country. And 300 years later, in the midst of universal education, globalism, and the village of the internet, it still amazes me to see behavior like that in the video.

Fear Leads To Hate...

I believe "fear of other" is the basis of most forms of racism. I think this sort of fear is tied to ignorance. I've noticed that people are usually only racist in the abstract.

By this I mean that most people I have met who make what I consider to be racist comments only make them about a generic stereotype of people they haven't met. These same people can be very racist against blacks (or, as in Texas and California where I grew up, hispanics), but be very kind and friendly with an individual of that same persuasion. In fact, they point to the fact that they have "a black friend" to demonstrate how they couldn't be racist. You know..."I'm not racist! I love black people. I took one to lunch just the other day..."

They seem to view any individual they know and like as an exception to whatever racist stereotypes they've formed. But strangers of that race are guilty of a big bag of negative associations, until they prove that they're "like me."

As George Lucas once said (via a muppet called Yoda), "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the Dark Side."

Racism, homophobia, religious jihads...they all stem from fear and insecurity. Given the strong selection advantage that fear provides a species, I'm afraid (pun intended) that we'll never solve these disgusting tendencies.

We can only strive to recognize the Dark Side, and intentionally choose against it.

The Necessary War

2007-10-05T08:40:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching the Ken Burns documentary on World War II.

As you'd expect, there are a number of parallels, and stark differences, between that war and the war that we're fighting today.

A few things really stood out.

The people supported the war, because they felt we had no choice. We were attacked. When you are attacked, you have no choice but to defend yourself or die. Japan attacked us, so we fought back. Germany declared war on us and started sinking our merchant ships, so we fought back. We went into the war reluctantly, because going out of our way to kill other human beings wasn't something most people thought they'd ever do. But we went, because we had no choice.

Even when attacked, to ensure that the will of the people and the integrity of constitution, President Roosevelt went to Congress and asked them to declare war. On record, a vote was taken whether or not to go to war, and against whom. The mandate was clear, as was the accountability.

I compare this to the recent past, where military forces were committed by the President before any request to Congress to support said actions (although in almost every case, the Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of force - after the fact. When your troops are already in harm's way, is there really much choice?).

I'm not just talking about President Bush - this has been the mode of operations for every military action taken since WWII. And it's also clear that the popular support for the actions varied dramatically from that for WWII. As did the outcomes. Can history teach us any lessons here?

We can't say it isn't a war. If a nation bombed the U.S., or sent troops across our borders, what would we call it? I do think the enemy is different. Whether you believe our enemy is a terrorist group or Islamo-facism, it is definitely a different enemy than a nation's leaders who decide to attack. Yet we use the same tactics that we used when we fought nations. We respect borders, we invade a specific nation, we remove that nation's leadership, and we cause destruction and death among the civilian populations of those nations. Our tactics are those of WWII.

The fact that the nature of the enemy is different should suggest different approaches to countering the enemy. Are WWII type bombings and invastions effective against terrorists? Is "War" the wrong paradigm for countering a terrorist threat?

The parallels to WWII all regard the horror of war - just how much happens that is so far from the realm of day to day thought, just how brutish and barbaric man can become when he throws off the constraints of civilization. I don't have the words to describe the atrocity and horror.

I recommend, though, that you watch the series. Everyone should understand what it really means to be in a war. And no one should have to come any closer to that understanding than the arms length distance a documentary provides. To gain any better understanding is to live the nightmare and be forever changed.

Yet it seems that almost every generation has to learn this over again. Not being exposed to the horrors of war, it appears all too easy to glamorize and oversimplify the use of military force. Admittedly, some of those who actually serve in battle do the same. And although I have served in the military, I was never under fire, so I won't presume to understand or explain this thinking.

But it does seem to me that the majority of those who are most adamant and vocal about the use of force are those who have never served.

Slave to Safety

2007-10-05T08:11:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day

"I would gladly give up my freedom if it meant my kids would be safe." - Overheard at a Starbucks

While I could envision a scenario where this would be true for me (e.g., "come with us now or we will shoot your kids"), I'm pretty sure this wasn't how it was meant by this person. He was talking about his willingness to give up democracy and his unalienable rights if it would guarantee the safety of his children.

Noble. And perhaps morally right. But it struck me as too simplistic, too reactionary...this statement, for me, boiled down so many of the platitudes, certitudes, and questions that the War On Terror seems to elicit.

Platitudes to "keep America safe" ...at any cost? Are there some prices too high to pay for safety? Or is safety the trump card, taking priority over the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? Is the life I want to pass on to my children one in which they are slaves?

Certitudes that everything is black and white; you either love the U.S. or hate the U.S.; you either want to win the War On Terror or you want to cut and run; you're either for us or against us; Good or Evil.

Questions...how to regain the concepts of dialogue and discussion; how to reverse the trend toward fear, illogic, and irrationality; how to get out of either/or and into options a, b, and c; how to get people to think and to solve problems.

As talk of war with Iran starts to bubble into the mainstream, can we perhaps have a public discussion? Can we see Congress debate the myriad of questions (Is the threat real? What other options are available to remove the threat if we determine that it is real? How did going to war in Iraq work out for us? Did it remove the perceived threats? Can our military support even the missions in front of them without breaking, let alone a new front? Does refusing to talk help or hurt the problem?)

I don't have (all) the answers, but I do have legitimate questions. Can they be asked without causing a reactionary pigeonholing? Can we have a discussion?

Mind Games

2007-09-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

We have so many misperceptions of the world. Contributing to this are "blind spots" in the way our bodies and brains have evolved.

Here is a list of some fun sites that explore various sensory "blind spots."

(You can't trust your eyes)
Your brain will make stuff up
And it may ignore what's actually there
Things can change right in front of you and you won't notice
You can miss huge gorillas
http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/index.html
And lots of other interesting misperceptions of color, contrast, and shade

(you can't trust your ears)
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/highest_note/ex.about.fr.html
http://www.kyushu-id.ac.jp/~ynhome/ENG/Demo/illusions2nd.html

How our expectations affect what we hear:
www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech

Vision/Sound systems affecting each other:
www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html (Look for McGurk effect under Demonstrations)
www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/soundInducedIllusoryFlash2/index.html

How thoughts and emotions can affect how you perceive things:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit

So...How do you feel about witness testimony in your trial?

By George, I Think He's Got it

2007-09-25T12:51:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Something That Will Surprise the World: The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers.

It amazes me how many of the pitfalls and foibles of our system of government were anticipated by these learned gentlemen.

Take this bit from George Washington's farewell address when he left the office of President (given Sep 19, 1796).

Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.

This spirit, unfortunately, is inseperable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human Mind. It exists under different shapes in all Governments, more or less stifled, controuled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction more able to more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of this own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
...
It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the Community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

Sound like any political party system you know? How about this one from Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1.

And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives....History will teach us...that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

I particularly like this next one (again from Hamilton, Federalist No. 70). Not only is it applicable to politics, I've seen it time and time again in other setting that it must be a fundamental failing of human nature...

Men often oppose a thing, merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. But if they have been consulted, and have happened to disapprove, opposition then becomes, in their estimation, and indispensable duty of self-love. They seem to think themselves bound in honor, and by all the motives of personal infallibility, to defeat the success of what has been resolved upon contrary to their sentiments. Men of upright, benevolent tempers have too many opportunities of remarking, with horror, to what desperate lengths this disposition is sometimes carried, and how often the great interests of society are sacrificed to the vanity, to the conceit, and to the obstinacy of individuals, who have credit enough to make their passions and their caprices interesting to mankind.

Don't you wish we could vote for someone with the education and insight that these men demonstrated? Someone who uses history and human nature as their guide (as opposed to truthiness :-).

I know that if I'm to learn anything from history myself, it's to apply these lessons to my day to day life. Next time I oppose a plan, I'll look a bit deeper within for the reasons why. And next time I propose a plan, I'll try to figure out how to get buy in for the particulars before launching the generality in an attempt to keep from poking this temperamental button.

Blade Runners of Glory

2007-09-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm excited as only a true science fiction geek can be about the upcoming release of a new cut of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

I've always thought the original Blade Runner (1982) (BR)was one of the best science fiction movies ever made. There are a lot of movies that have some great element(s): story, script, acting, effects, production values - but BR had it all.

The story, using an old noir detective type device, explored what we mean when we use the word "human." How easily we draw the line between us humans and those less-than-human, and how blurry (or non-existent) that line is in reality. We humans seem to be built to dehumanize.

The script, even the one with the hokey voice overs, was intelligent. I should say that the script, combined with the set design visions of Ridely Scott, was intelligent - prophetic some might say. Taking a complicated Philip K. Dick novel (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and boiling down multiple story lines to the essential parts so they could be told visually.

The actual dialogue of the screenplay was bare, with the story told primarily by visuals. But it couldn't have been told well with just special effects (witness any of the past few Star Wars movies). Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Joanna Cassidy, Sean Young and Daryl Hannah ... while each may have had a particular finer moment in some other film, each delivered a great performance in their roles for BR.

The movie was shot before digital effects had really taken off, and therefore the sets had to be "real" (or as real as sets and props get). Because of this, it all looked and felt real, like you were really looking at the streets of San Angeles some decades in the future. CGI is powerful, but it still doesn't come across the same as real 3-D set work. The production values were extremely high throughout. Were there mistakes? Sure, but only a supergeek would notice.

25 Years after it's initial release, Ridley Scott has put together the movie he originally wanted to make - no compromises, happy endings, voice overs - a hard movie that doesn't give anything away freely, and rewards that much more because of it.

I hope.

I'm looking forward to it. December 18th! (Can you say early xmas present?)

Life Support

2007-09-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

I made some comment the other day about the Iraq war, and a staunch defender of Der Fuhrer in the group gave me a shot about "not supporting the troops."

Why is it that any anti-war comment is taken as "not supporting the troops," but anything pro-war - whether it's extending tours, staying indefinitely in Iraq, attacking Iran - is somehow supporting the troops?

Repeating tours so that those lucky enough to make it out alive the last time get another shot at getting shot? (Pro-troops?)

Extending tours so that troops spend more time in combat than they do with their families? (Pro-troops and Pro-family)

Shutting down public debate on options to get out of the horrendous mess? (Pro-democracy, pro-free speech)

How is it that Senator can vote against a bill that would allow our troops some time at home, away from a war zone, and be considered as supporting the troops?

There is no support for the troops, just those who want them to stop dying and those who think their goals are worth the ultimate sacrifice of others. There is no debate, only two sides that won't listen to the other. There is no victory, only attempts to keep things from getting worse. There is no end, only years of death and suffering.

There is no making sense of the messes we make. Not yet, anyway. Maybe when we understand ourselves and our motivations better, we can behave better.

Here's a debate for you that is relevant to the war, I think, but hopefully one that doesn't evoke the knee jerk reactions that the war does.

Take one second to imagine a person behaving the way some countries do. After all, a person is a group of cells and organs. A country is a group of a group of a group, just an entity at a larger level of organization.

What do we think of individuals who threaten others? What do we think of individuals who won't play well with others, who always want things their way? What do we think of someone who pulls a gun to get what they want? What do think of individuals who bully others, who beat them up and leave them broken and bleeding?

We use sociopath, bully, crazy, dangerous, criminal as words to describe people who act like this. What do we call countries who act like this? How have we come to expect such deviant behavior from countries?

Should we continue to allow countries a lower standard of moral behavior than we demand of individuals?

Crazy Monkeys

2007-09-19T10:26:00.001-07:00

In David Sloan Wilson's book Evolution for Everyone, he tells a story about crazy monkeys, and the evolutionist explanation for why this behavior, though seemingly contra-survival, can keep coming up in a rhesus monkey population.

Here are the basics (paraphrasing the book). Every generation, a small faction of males in a rhesus monkey colony active as if they are out of control. They take insane risks in jumping between branches. They bully and rebel, can't be controlled by their mothers or by their peers.

The first theory the researcher, Dr Stephen Suomi, was that perhaps this behavior conferred an advantage to the psycho males - they could enter a new group, take over with their bullying and crazy behavior, mate with the females whether they liked it or not, and thereby perpetuate their genes.

But experiments showed that this theory was wrong. Rejected by family and friends, the psycho males never learn to compete well with other males or to fit into a group. Rejected, they typically lead a miserable solitary existence until they die. So why doesn't this sort of maladaptive behavior die out?

The answer appears to be that the same gene that causes males to go crazy turns out to produce confident, capable females who achieve high status within their groups. These females breed more, and, just as important, due to their enhanced abilities are even able to raise sons with the "crazy gene" to be fine young monkeys. Mothers lacking the gene who gave birth to sons having the gene (thanks, Dad) weren't so effective, and the crazy gene expressed itself to produce crazy monkeys.

So the gene stays active in the population, and due to the statistical dynamics, about 10% of male rhesus monkeys get the crazy gene, with a smaller percentage of these not having the advantage of corresponding super mom who end up acting...crazy.

The basic story of the crazy monkey - adaptations that thrive work for the group (or species), not necessarily for an individual. Certainly, at an individual level they can't be too destructive or they would die out in a population. But they don't have to be individually helpful, and can sometimes be individually hurtful.

For the longest time I've wondered about religion, and how some of the craziest acts of humans seem to come from religious extremists.

Initially, I used simplistic explanations. In searching for better answers, I looked to neurobiology. Antonio Damasio has produced some great work on how emotions work (and are in fact necessary) in reasoning. Better yet was Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, which went into some evolutionary origins concepts for religion, and did pretty good job of explaining what religion was (and wasn't), and how our brains dealt with it.

But this only got into the proximate reasons for religious tendencies (meaning that it helped explained why people act religious, but not why these brain structures and cultural structures developed in the first place). For the trait to become so widespread in our species, it must have some larger effect that helps species survival. (In evolutionist terms, proximate causes are the immediate biological or physical mechanisms that cause a behavior or outcome. Ultimate causes are the species level reasons why such a behavior or outcome propagates through the generations more effectively than others).

In Darwin's Cathedral, David Sloan Wilson gets into these proximate and ultimate causes of religion. In his theory, the ultimate cause of religion is that it is adaptive at a group level. In other words, religion is a mechanism that causes people to group together with common purpose. (Clearly there's more to it than that - otherwise he couldn't fill a whole book. But the gist is that religious tendency in the human brain is a proximate cause which supports an ultimate cause of forming groups that perform better than individuals, or even of other groups that aren't so cohesively knit).

Getting together into cooperating groups doesn't require religion. And certainly having religious feelings and irrational beliefs don't always result in forming a cohesive group. But individuals who initially developed the genetic variation producing the god module portions of the brain had powerful feelings, and connecting with other individuals with similar feelings (to the exclusion of those who didn't) made sense. And because these feelings evoke such powerful emotions, this mechanism provides a very strong social glue for like individuals. Groups who can collectively whip themselves into a religious fervor can feel more connected, and more cohesive, than those who group based on less emotional drivers.

This is finally a reason which makes sense to me, and which is consistent with known facts of religion. This is a group-supporting behavior, like altruistic punishment, that provides survival and propagation benefit to members of the group over members outside of it.

Personally, I may not like the fact that the mechanisms of religiosity periodically result in a crazy monkey. But I can understand the selection advantage to groups with strong binds and common purpose, which religion historically has provided.

Free Market Fodder

2007-09-18T10:07:00.001-07:00

Article today in WSJ about cancer research. The article is about company scientists (or academic scientists who's research is funded with corporate dollars) won't share data with each other.

Sharing data is pretty fundamental to how science works. At the core of science is the Scientific Method (which is basically hypothesize, design experiment to prove/disprove, collect data, publish results showing how data is consistent with new or old theory). No scientist can afford to test a theory completely. But collecting data across the experiments of multiple scientists, theories can be explored and supported or disproved. Having other scientists able to repeat the results of an experiment also validates that the data is meaningful, and not just a fluke or product of some other unknown variable.

When scientists don't share ideas, then multiple experiments aren't run in parallel (which dramatically slows the pace of advancement). When scientists don't share data, then repeatable experiments aren't run, placing the data and the conclusions in doubt.

When scientists don't share data, multiple theories abound, each consistent with a couple experiments, but probably not with the full body of evidence collected across the community. Meaning that it's likely that each theory is wrong in some way.

Which not only means that science and human knowledge doesn't advance as rapidly. In the medical field, it means that drug companies and doctors are providing treatments based upon incomplete and possibly incorrect theories.

Which is bad for you.

But that's our system as it sits today. Companies will not release information until it is patented. Also, scientists competing for grants will not release information until it gets them grant money. Patents take years to award. And once a patent is awarded, other companies are dissuaded from trying to repeat the experiment even if it is then published, since it won't buy them anything. And unless the research is something that affects lots of people (thereby increasing the potential payoff), the research won't even get funded in the first place.

Which is why we still treat many forms of cancer with blunt instruments, blasting our way through healthy cells to get the few bad cells. Which is why we still treat cancer like witch doctors, scratching our heads when a treatment that worked for one patient doesn't work the same on another, then trying some new magic incantation handed down from the archipelagos of medical research.

Which is why some hedge fund managers are freeing up $1 million (a pittance, really) to try some new approaches to funding research.

ACL Wrap

2007-09-18T08:17:00.000-07:00

Every year, Austin City Limits hosts ACL Fest - over 130 bands over 3 days. Always hotter than hell, in so many ways.

Here is my quick take from this year. (Warning - all of these reviews were subject to time of day, heat, state of mind, and personal preference. Your mileage may vary).

New bands I found I liked:
Sahara Smith
Kaiser Chiefs
Young Love
Rose Hill Drive
Butch Walker
Cary Ann Hearst
Ike Reilly Assassination

Shows I enjoyed more than I thought I would:
DevotchKa - known for slow stuff, their fast stuff they did live was fun
Regina Spektor - she was clearly blown away by the crowd, full of spark, and funniest damn lyrics
Arctic Monkeys - I like most of their songs
MIA - good show, high energy
Ghostland Observatory - Muse meets Prince, which sounds weird till you see them, but it works.

Disappointing-
The Killers - the old songs I still like, a lot - the new stuff, not so much
Queens of the Stone Age - 3 good songs - still only 3 good songs
Dax Riggs - As Dead Boy he blew me away - as Dax, he's a downer

Ok to see, but didn't make me wanna buy their albums:
Bloc Party
My Morning jacket
One Mississippi
Peter Bjorn and John

I'm not really going to comment on Blue October, Joss Stone, Spoon (which were all fine, just not my favorite live performances); neither will I comment on Bjork, Arcade Fire, Muse, Bob Dylan - they have plenty of fans already.

A couple other notes...some bands are good in studio, some are good live, and some are both. And even those who are usually good live can have a hard time at ACL, where you are at a large outdoor venue in front of 30,000 to 60,000 people on a hot, sunny stage.

Which makes those that were good that much more impressive.

Oh yeah - the fire was impressive too. I was there right after it started, before they started a perimeter, and it was big and scary. You look at this raging inferno that is getting bigger by the moment as more propane tanks and porta potties explode, and realize that there's no amount of willing people with fire extinguishers that can do a damn thing to contain it. Then the police and festival staff start clearing a perimeter, and everyone is very cooperative and wants to help, but can't. You all start looking around nervously for the fire department hoping they'll get here soon because you really don't want Zilker to burn down (or ACL to get cancelled). Then they finally do show up, winding their way through the crowds, and quickly contain what is now a raging inferno as tall as the trees. And you realize how freakin' awesome the fire department is, the police, the ACL staff, and all the very cool crowd that shows up for this event every year (even if all your friends think you're an idiot for running over to video the fire...).

If you haven't been to ACL Fest, I highly recommend it.

Colonial Expansion

2007-09-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

To understand how intelligence can emerge from groups of simple cells, it helps to have examples of other emergent behaviors.

Hive animals, such as ant and bees, work in ways similar to the ways in which cells in our body work, but because they are "bigger", they're easier to study.

Let's look at how bees manage to figure out the best place to go get nectar every day.

Bees look for nectar that they then take back to the hive to make into honey. The higher the sugar content of the nectar, the more efficient the bees are at making the honey. Bees are pretty good at finding the best sources of nectar, even when those sources change. How is this done? Is there some guiding intelligence that takes the reports back from the worker bees and decides to send all the other workers to the best spots?

In a sense there is a guiding intelligence, but it is an emergent intelligence, based upon statistics and feedback loops in a system. Here's how it works for bees. The worker bees head out in random directions looking for nectar. When a bee finds nectar, it collects some then comes back to the hive. It then does a little "dance", which other worker bees at the hive can watch to learn the directions to the nectar.

Different bee species have variations on the dance, but basically the orientation of the dance correlates to the relative position of the sun or the direction of the nectar relative to the hive, and the length of the "waggle" portion of the dance is correlated to the distance from the hive. The worker bees in the audience can head out in the correct direction and the approximate distance, then look for the nectar source.

Ok, neat, this is how other bees can find nectar more efficiently than just every bee randomly searching each time. But when you have lots of different nectar sources, how do most of the bees go to the best nectar source? If they're all coming back and dancing about random nectar locations, then the audience bees should also be spread out among the random sites.

But...the time spent on the dance is driven by the richness of the nectar. The bee gets a buzz on, and the better the buzz, the longer he can dance. With bees coming and going all day, those bees that dance longer will have a larger audience of bees - more bees will catch their act if they perform it ten times rather than just once. So all those bees go find the better buzz, and they too come back and perform longer dances, which grows exponentially to send even more bees to the better source.

Each bee just follows a few simple rules. Step one - get ready to leave the hive. If you see a bee dance while leaving the hive, stop and watch it, then orient yourself in the right direction and fly ten waggles thataway. If you don't see a recital going on, just leave in a random direction. Remember to count how many waggles you fly, and in what direction relative to the hive (or sun).

Now look for nectar. If you find some, take it back to the hive. Pass the nectar to another type of bee, then go perform. Perform as long as you feel the energy to perform.

Go back to step one.

If you model this, you see that no matter where the best source of nectar is in a given day, most the bees will end up heading for it, thus optimizing the nectar collection for the hive.

No single bee made a decision. Nobody passed along the information to the (nonexistent) decision makers. The dance says nothing (directly) about how good the nectar is. Nor is there any "debate" among the bees about the relative merits of the different nectar locations. It was purely the inherent mechanism that the better the nectar, the longer the bee could dance, and the statistics inherent in that fact that drove the "intelligent" behavior of the hive.

"That is real intelligence," you say. Well, it's a smart move on the part of the bees, certainly, but it isn't how humans make decisions. (Or is it? I'll come back to how groups of humans make decisions in a later post).

What this example highlights is how separate "cells", each just doing what comes naturally, can create a higher order "emergent" behavior when the cells are in a group. Studies of human organs indicate similar sorts of statistical emergent behaviors in blood cells, liver cells, and even brain cells, where the normal biological functions of the cells and the chemical byproducts of these functions create a form of communication between cells. Groups of cells (an organ) also work with other organs for even higher order emergent behaviors. Our organs use chemical signaling (such as nitric oxide, hormones and neurotransmitters) and electrical signaling (such as potassium and sodium ion channels).

Understand that all of these mechanisms develop over time through the evolution of genetics. Those mutations that provide better survival and breeding in a given environment become standard in the later generations. Bees that could dance longer given good nectar statistically attracted more bees to the right place, so the hive outperformed other hives that didn't have workers with this trait. Over time, only those hives who had workers with this trait were the only ones around.

Evolutionary theory isn't just for biology, although it's pretty amazingly useful to help understand how and why organisms are the way they are. This powerful concept can be applied at any level of organization - including brain organization, and even human social organizations. The exact same principals apply.

I'll try to put together examples of each of these in the following weeks.

Woman jailed for serving salty burger to police officer

2007-09-11T19:31:00.000-07:00

The police officer said that after he ate the burger, he nearly threw up. Bull wonders why the officer didn't he throw it away after taking a bite? By the way, the McDonald's gives free meals to the police who eat there.

Boing-Boing article

Taliban Qwikie Mart

2007-09-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

Here's a story about a girl with no ID trying to buy alcohol. Fortunately, she was caught in the act and prevented from doing so, thanks to new laws and policies requiring ID for those who may look too young to drink.

The "girl" in this case was 65 years old. (And I have some friends who want the number of her plastic surgeon).

The first absurdity that struck me was the obvious one - in how many ways can we attempt to replace good sense with arbitrary and ridiculous laws? The Maine State Legislature "passed a law that requires identification from those who look under 27 years old." Not to be outdone, this particular supermarket chain implemented a rule to card "anyone who looks under 45 and wants to buy alcohol."

(Rumor is that their competitor down the street, not wanting to lose all the MADD mom's in the neighborhood, is considering an "id required for anyone who looks under 100 and wants to walk by the cold beer section" rule).

I really shouldn't make fun of these stores. They're just reacting to the incredibly absurd laws passed around the country regarding "underage drinking." Laws that arrest bartenders and 7/11 clerks if they sell to a minor, even if that minor has a valid looking ID. Laws that close businesses if their patrons get intoxicated - not before driving, not even outside on the street, but in the bar. Laws that lock-up parents and send the kids to foster care if those parents allow kids to drink - even the safety of their own home, even if they allow no one to leave the house till the next day.

I could go on. I could start citing the evidence around drinking age laws, but these arguments have been presented well by people like former college president John McCardell, to no effect.

Instead, I'll just do what I do best. Laugh at the absurdity of people, particularly those who make the absurd laws that generate even more absurd behavior.

You know the old saying..."If you can't laugh at yourself, make fun of other people." (attributed to Bobby Slayton)

Taliban Airlines

2007-09-07T10:56:00.000-07:00

As we continue our travelogue on the country's journey to intolerance and fascism, I offer this little tidbit.

Apparently being young and hot is against airline policy at Southwest Airlines. Miss Kyla Ebbert, wearing attire more conservative than I see on the UT campus every day, was asked to change clothes or leave the aircraft because someone thought she was dressed inappropriately for a plane flight. (I suppose "appropriate" would have been wearing a leather cap, goggles, and an aviator jacket?)

You can see the "scandalous" outfit on this CNN video or the San Diego Union-Tribune story that originally broke the news. (I like the CNN video, which juxtaposes the original Southwest Airlines flight attendant hot pants outfits with the more conservative white skirt worn by Kyla Ebbert).

Here are the facts as stated in the newspaper article:

She arrived at Lindbergh Field wearing a white denim miniskirt, high-heel sandals, and a turquoise summer sweater over a tank top over a bra.

After the plane filled, and the flight attendants began their safety spiel, Ebbert was asked to step off the plane by a customer service supervisor, identified by the airline only as “Keith.”

They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage.

“I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive,” she said. “The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.' ”

Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

This sort of sexist, hypocritical bullshit has always bothered me. I've noticed that it is always the attractive young women who get targeted for being called out for "dressing inappropriately." This happens a lot in office environments, but I've also seen it in restaurants, cultural events, and other locales.

My guess here...some bitter old bitch who's husband just dumped her for his new stripper girlfriend saw Kyla and decided that she was going to get back at everyone who had ever done her harm (which would be the entire category of women who are younger, cuter, and more tolerant than Taliban Bitch). She complained, and Keith, who apparently isn't very bright (or who could never get the hot girls in school to talk to him) decided he would pull an authority power trip over poor Miss Ebbert.

(These are usually the same people who say of rape victims, "well, she had it coming, dressing like that...")

This attitude, which appears to be common in the U.S., even shows in the article and CNN piece, in which somehow the fact that Miss Ebbert is a waitress at Hooters is relevant to the fact that she was arbitrarily bullied on an aircraft.

And those of you out there who think I'm wrong, who actually think you're the arbiter of appropriate, you fashion police of teh interweb...go look in a mirror, and ask yourself for the real reason you hate Kyla Ebbert.

I Love The Taste Of Your Genes

2007-09-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

From New Scientist...

So says George Gallup at the State University of New York, Albany, who surveyed 1041 students on their attitudes to kissing (Evolutionary Psychology, vol 5, p 612). Some views verged on the predictable: women, for example, placed more emotional importance on a kiss, valuing kisses during and after sex, and throughout a relationship. The men tended to see kissing as a means to an end - sex - and placed less importance on kissing as a relationship progresses. Just over half the men said they would have sex with someone without kissing, compared to 15 per cent of women. And more men than women said that a good kiss was one with tongue contact, where the partner made moaning noises.

But Gallup says the first kiss a couple share could make or break the relationship. In a separate survey, 59 per cent of men and 66 per cent of women reported on occasion finding themselves attracted to someone, only to lose interest after kissing them for the first time. "The complicated exchange of information that occurs during a kiss may inform evolved, unconscious mechanisms about instances of possible genetic incompatibility," Gallup says.

Free Will To Highest Bidder

2007-09-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

I read an article in New Scientist that once again questioned whether or not humans have "Free Will."

I think the debate is again asking the wrong questions. We use undefined terms such as "free will" and "conscious" or "voluntary" actions.

If we look at the brain as a collection of independent but connected subsystems (or a society of mind as Minsky phrased it), there are structures that are responsible for different acts of reasoning and behavior. If we look at the concept of "consciousness" as being the portion that is responsible for modeling the behavior of ourselves and others (the mirror neurons and other supporting structures), then it makes sense that this model can inform the other "unconscious" structures of the brain and that actions can in fact be taken as a result of the actions of structures other than the modeling structure. In such an organization, many times the modeling structure would be informed of actions "after the fact" - and would then incorporate this new data into the model of self and others and continue to inform and influence the other "unconscious" structures.

This is consistent with the experiments of Libet. In fact, Libet's later experiments showed that once the awareness of the pending finger movement made it into consciousness, the subject could "choose" not to lift the finger - could "cancel" the command already given by another part of the brain to lift the finger. Although Libet developed a theory of Conscious Mental Field to explain this, I think a better explanation is in a way simpler.

His results are completely consistent with a model that says the motor section of the brain starts to lift the finger, and then this input is factored into the model of self (consciousness), which then can further influence the other sections of brain depending upon the "choice" of the model. (In fact, since the subjects were asked to lift a finger in the first place, it is likely that the modeling subsystem created the impetus for the Readiness Potential that was measured).

This concept of consciousness is also consistent with experiments of Haggard, and even Wegner. Haggard did some interesting experiments around how the brain perceives cause and effect, and the time allowed by the internal model between cause and effect. Wegner did some interesting stuff with our sense of "agency" where two people are moving a mouse at the same time and how at times one individual may think they are the agent of control when in fact it is the other individual - the modeler gets confused when the inputs closely resemble, but not quite fit, the expected inputs of the mirror neurons. Both are explainable by separating the modeling subsystems from the motor control subsystems, and tying "awareness" to the modeling subsystems.

All of these have been used, incorrectly, to question whether humans have "free will." I think it is a confusion of sloppy definitions, and therefore a red herring.

(Adding a huge amount of additional confusion are the religious authorities, who freak out at the very notion of a lack of free will, since this choice to be "good" or "bad" is at the heart of many religions. As I've said in previous posts, books such as Moral Minds show how this too is framing the discussion in the wrong paradigm - there is no inherent "good" or "bad", except in the context of an organization, an environment, and a goal).

I think there are still a number of mysteries unexplained by this conceptual framework. But for the scientific evidence we've been able to produce so far, it is a consistent theory of mind.

(What are the unexplained mysteries? Well, in a sense I just isolated the mystery into a smaller black box, then left the workings of the black box unexplained. The "modeling" portion(s) of the brain are well and good, supported by evidence - but how do they work? And ultimately, how does the modeling engine decide which actions will best accomplish the goals?

I don't think we need to stop here and resort to the supernatural for explanation, however. I think creating similar modeling engines using computer simulations that are driven by these neurological experiments, and experimenting with a more complex set of "goals" driving the engine, we could probably start to explain how this black box actually works. In fact, that sounds like really fun work - I wish I had the time and resources to pursue it.)

Moral Relativity

2007-09-05T17:35:00.000-07:00

Whether or not something is "good" depends entirely upon the level of organization and the environment in which is exists.

You, as a normal human being, are a social organism made up of a lot of other living entities. Large groups of cells, whether organized into tissue or organs, or living in colonies like bacteria, "cooperate" to form your body. In the same way, each cell depends upon even smaller (although still complex) structures, such as mitochondria, ribosomes, membranes, and many others. (In fact, a mitochondrion is really itself a separate organism, living inside your cells...but this story is for another day).

If a cell is "misbehaving" (such as in a cancer or other harmful mutation), what's best for the organ (and organism - you) is to kill the cell. From the cell's perspective, this option really sucks.

But why would a cell risk being killed? Lots of reasons. A lot of what the cell does as a whole is driven by the "cooperative" behavior of all those cellular structures we talked about - mitochondria, DNA, RNA, membranes, and such. If something changes in the behavior of one of these members, then the overall behavior of the cell may also change. And the immediate rewards may encourage such behavior, such as unchecked replication and growth.

But as with most dynamic systems, the surrounding community of cells (or some specialized cells) may take action against the non-conformist cell, perhaps bringing it into line, perhaps just killing it. (Sometimes the cell itself will commit suicide!) Thus a tendency toward the status quo, an inherent conservatism built into a stable organization.

At each level of organization, it isn't immediately obvious to the individual components what "good" behavior is. And good is, obviously, relative. It really depends upon the level of organization, the environment, and the "goals" that determines "goodness" (where I define goodness as furthering the progress of the organizational level toward set goal).

Without defining the organizational level, goal, and environment any concept of "good" or "bad" ascribed to behavior is meaningless. It just is. The cell changed - it now made copies of itself unchecked. Good for the cell. But probably bad for the larger organism/organization in which the cell lived. So the cell was killed. Good for the larger organization. Bad for the cell - no matter what its goal was, it's sure not going to achieve it now. (Unless the goal was death - in which case, Way To Go, Cell!)

The parallels to social theory are obvious, and have been used quite a bit in the last century. The good of the individual human being vs the good of the group has been ripe ground for applications of theories in social structure. The group can be a family unit, a neighborhood, a community, city, a state, even a species.

Benefits can accrue to individuals who attempt to cooperate in a larger group. The level of group "allegiance" can vary quite a bit from individual to individual, and game (and evolutionary) theory has a lot of fun trying to work out the relative cost/benefit equations for these trade-offs.

And humans are well adapted to this sort of group cooperative behaviors. Evolutionary theory would say that's obvious. If working as a group confers advantage to individuals in the group over individuals who are not in a group, then over time individuals who work well in a group will proliferate more than those who don't.

Rogue "cells," such as a terrorist, can produce significant local change. With the technologies being made available, this change can reach quite a bit further than local. Think nuclear, or worse, biological weapons. The cells may think they are doing the right thing. They might not see themselves as cancers - perhaps they think they're mighty immune cells! Their mission is to wipe out the foreign viruses that threaten to change the very DNA of the stable host society!

I'm not the first to wonder about the social parallels. In fact, it was the following quote that made me start thinking about this. What has changed is that it is only recently has science started to get to the point where is was possible to actually do something about it.

I am prepared to assert that there is not a single mental faculty ascribed to Man that is good in the absolute sense. If any particular faculty is usually good, this is solely because our terrestrial environment is so lacking in variety that its usual form makes that faculty usually good. But change the environment, go to really different conditions, and possession of that faculty may be harmful. And "bad," by implication is the brain organization that produces it. - W. Ross Ashby, 1962

I see the battleground of today is being defined as western concepts of progress and individual liberty against the backlash conservatism of religious fundamentalism (typically anti-science, anti-"progress"). I hear questions like: Is globalism and consumerism and what's best for the individual what is also best for the planet? Or do we need to revert to the "good old days," of strong hierarchical (typically religion based) control?

I think we're asking the wrong questions. We need to think of new models of social organization. Ones that provide the best chances for species survival, that better check the rogue individual (be they terrorists, CEOs, or Presidents). But that do so in a way that enables the creativity and progress that comes from free thinking individuals.

It's likely that these new models will require that we take our own brain evolution in hand and modify it as required.

Most of what we think of as "moral judgments" are made as a result of genetic hardcoding produced by evolution. In Moral Minds by Harvard's Marc Hauser, reports of experiments and studies show that moral decisions are made "intuitively," with various rationalizations for the decision produced after the decision is already made.

Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitive, there don't appear to be any real differences in fundamental moral choices in people of different cultures, or people of different religions. In fact, even people with a religion and those without make the same choices, suggesting that inbuilt morality is independent of learned religious frameworks. We don't think our way through moral decisions - we just react.

So where does this leave us? Our moral decisions are made based upon our selected genetic wiring. That wiring was selected for being "good" for the majority of breeding individuals, given the environment (including social structures) that existed prior to now.

If the environment changes, be that the physical or social environment, those decisions may no longer work. They're no longer "good," regardless of what worked before, and regardless of religious dogmas. And as we see, "good" also depends upon whether we're talking about the individual, the country, the species, or the planet.

Like the example of the cancerous cell, individuals who threaten the planet threaten all species of life that we know of. These threats can be immediate, such as terrorists with WMDs, or more subtle, such as governments who do nothing about resource depletion, global warming, and other "let the next generation deal with it" type of threats.

What could we adjust that make us less likely to follow the crazy leaders, more likely to look at long term consequences?

The Betrayal

2007-08-26T14:31:00.000-07:00

My last post was about how interesting I found ancient Roman history, particularly the period around the fall of the Republic. Little did I know then just how relevant that history was to my personal life.

One of the most intriguing series of events was around Julius Caesar. History has no consensus on Caesar - was he just a power hungry tyrant? Or was he a true patriot of Rome, taking the step he thought necessary to save Rome from herself?

We can never know the thoughts of the man, but we can judge him by his actions. The most striking to me was Caesar's leniency, his forgiveness of his enemies. As opposed to precendent, Caesar did not kill his (real or imagined) enemies.

In Caesar's lifetime, there was regular chaos of civil war. Both Marius and Sulla used their armies to kill their enemies in the streets of Rome. Most accounts of that time comment how the streets ran red with the killing of heretofore noble citizens of Rome, all because they made the hit list (proscriptions) of Sulla.

And after Caesar, the same - Marcus Antonius and Octavius Caesar issued their own proscriptions, and again citizens of Rome were killed outright, their properties taken, their families brutalized and killed, because they were a political enemy.

Gaius Julius Caesar, on the other hand, forgave those who took up arms against him. He did not confiscate their property. He did not strip them of their place in society, or even of their place in the Senate of Rome. He tried to work with them in passing new laws which even today clearly were to the betterment of Rome.

Caesar was no angel. He did use his armies to fight in the civil wars, and he did kill other Romans on the battle field. He did use his armies to intimidate the Senate and to keep the peace in Rome. But never to kill the citizens of Rome, in Rome, just because they were his political enemies.

And for this, be was betrayed yet again. Not politically, as civilized men would have it, but in blood, in his own death. By the very people he forgave and trusted again with the future of Rome. By cowards who wielded their knives not on the battlefield or even in direct confrontation, but on the very symbol of civilization and representative government, the Senate floor itself.

I gained a new empathy with Caesar today. I had a personal event occur in my life that was ironic in it's timing with my new found fascination with Caesar. It is the worst feeling imaginable to have those in whom you place your trust turn on you and stab you in the back.

While I cannot compare my feelings to those of Caesar, who was after all killed, I wonder...at least he didn't have to live with the shame, humiliation, shock and betrayal for long before he died.

The Rise And Fall

2007-08-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

I've been watching the 1st and 2nd seasons of the HBO series Rome for the past week. I've always been interested in the history of the Roman Republic. It's fascinating, and has so many lessons that are directly applicable to the times in which we live.

(Side note: if history teachers would use historical fiction - books, miniseries - as a way to get people to engage in learning history, I think students would be much more interested, and learn more. Sure, they might have trouble at times sorting out fact from fiction. But which is worse - learning a few unverifiable fictions in addition to the documented facts, or knowing no history at all?)

The time of the fall of the Roman Republic is filled with drama enough to engage any vidiot. Sex, War, Political Intrigue - Caesar, Cicero, Cleopatra. How a civilization can go from a vibrant, creative global economy to feudal peasants rooting for food in the mud of the dark ages. How a representational democratic republic can rapidly turn into a authoritarian military empire - this is the stuff on which civilizations are made and broken. Literally.

So many lessons. So many lives swinging on the honor (or is it vanity?) of men. How the guys with the guns will always rule at the end of the day.

So many ideas to blog about. So few people who would care to read them :-)

So I guess I won't. But if any of you are interested in seeing that there's nothing new under the sun, and how fragile our peace and democracy can be...rent or buy HBO's "Rome." (Or better yet, read some accessible historical fiction, like Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series).

My Cold, Dead Privacy

2007-08-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

If only the gun nuts felt as strongly about the 4th amendment as they do about the 2nd...

Court rules US air travelers can't refuse security searches at airports

Citing threats of terrorism, the court ruled passengers give up all rights to be free of warrantless searches once a "passenger places hand luggage on a conveyor belt for inspection" or "passes though a magnetometer."

This made me wonder how many other ways I could be subjected to warrantless searches.

A quick primer here was interesting. Bottom line - if an authority has "probable cause" (which can be just about anything - including a completely subjective "I thought they were drunk," or "I thought they looked like that suspect we were looking for."), then they can search you and your immediate "area of control."

The current US Administration doesn't even believe they need probably cause. (Of course, they don't believe they need to be accountable to the other two branches of government, either, so I guess that's not a big surprise. But to be fair, apparently all Presidents believe they are not subject to 4th amendment restrictions.)

Just Say No To Dissent

2007-08-22T12:50:00.000-07:00

More parallels between China's government and the US government - neither one likes speech which runs counter to the official propoganda.

(The main difference is that we still have an independent judiciary.)

Help! Police! (2)

2007-08-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was just catching up on a friends blog, when I caught a post that floored me.

This video is from Fox News in LA.

Watch it.

Then tell me why this didn't make national news. Tell me that the trends toward abuse of power are on the rise in the U.S. Tell me that the suppression of dissenting speech isn't getting disturbing.

(And to my friends of the conservative persuasion - you can't ascribe this to liberal media bias - it comes from your own Fox News...)

Postscript: Thank god for "activist" judges...the fascists may be on the rise, but our courts can hopefully stem the tide...

Dreams of Torture

2007-08-08T23:15:00.000-07:00

"Wake up Kalid."

I heard my name from a great distance. I tried to move, but could not. I tried to open my eyes, and succeeded - somewhat. The light was painful, but I could make out a man with a beard and an umamah. Another prisoner?

"Keef halak, Kalid," I heard. How are you? I realized I was hearing my own language again. Another prisoner, to be sure. Do I know him? He seems to know me.

"Sho...," I try to say "Who are you?" but only a raspy croak emerges from my parched throat. "Sho Ismak?"

"Insh'allah," I hear. "You survived!" The face comes into view again, closer this time. He looks familiar.

"Kalid, listen to me. You were hurt in the escape. Your neck...can you move at all?"

Escape? No, I try to shake my head, but feel nothing. "Nothing..." I try to say.

"Ok, lie still. We have to move you again, get to a safe place. Stay with me, brother!"

Brother...I fade again into unconsciousness.

Some time later I awake again. The light is dim, a little easier to see. I still can't move - not even my head. A rising sense of panic wells up within me, and the frustration that I cannot even flail my arms adds to the wave of fear that has taken hold of me. Am I paralyzed? Will I ever move again? What has happened to me?

I hear someone coming closer, and once again a familar visage crosses my field of view. Ahmed? My brother? It cannot be - he is far away, fighting the infidels in Afghanistan. When I was captured he was still living out of his safe refuge in the caves of Pakistan.

"Can you hear me?" he asked.

"Ahmed?"

A broad smile took over his face. "God is truly great. Yes, brother, it is I. You are safe now."

Safe? How can this be? I am trapped in this land forsaken by God, undergoing interrogation day by day. A trick! This is another trick?

"It cannot be you," I say. I close my eyes to slits.

I don't feel him grab my shoulders, but the room shakes around me. "Kalid - it is me. I shall explain when you feel better. Now rest."

A trick...I sleep again.

When I awake nothing has changed. Still cannot move. Still the ceiling of the cave the only thing I can see. I shout "Where are you!" but my voice is still muffled in my ears. Weak. I shout again. And again. Eventually I hear someone coming, but they don't come to where I can see them. "Who is there?"

"I am Abdul. Can I get you something?"

"Water, please." I feel the trickle of coolness on my lips, and I open my parched mouth to drink in what is give. "More..."

"I must go get your brother, he will want to know you are awake," I hear the man called Abdul say, and I hear him leave. Not long, I hear another approach.

"Kalid, I was told you were awake. How are you feeling?" It was the voice of the man who claimed to be Ahmed.

"I cannot move. What have you done to me?" I asked.

"Brother, brother...I am so sorry. We were betrayed, and you were hurt. I am trying to get a doctor, a real doctor to come and look at you, but it is difficult."

"Betrayed? Explain."

I saw the face of Ahmed again briefly as he leaned over me, then settled somewhere on my side, perhaps sitting. "You were released as part of a trade. We had some of their soldiers, one of them the son of one of their politicians. We worked out a deal."

Then his voice bitter, he said, "But those spawn of Satan tried to trick us! As you were coming across, they shot you - in the back, Kalid! In the back! Cowardly dogs!" He stopped, breathing hard. "But we knew their perfidy, we were ready. Our men came out of hiding, and we managed to get you out."

A long pause. I felt the slightest of pressure on my hand. A feeling! "Kalid. Da'ud was killed in the escape."

Da'ud. My friend from the time of our childhood. Captured the same time as me, I saw him only once more at the prison. Even beaten and abused, his smile when he saw me managed to sustain me for weeks.

"I don't remember any of this," I said.

"What do you remember?" asked Ahmed.

"I remember being captured. I remember being tortured - the dogs, the drowning, the beatings where no one could see."

"Kalid. I am so sorry, my brother." A long pause. "Kalid?"

"What?"

"We must know - what did you tell them?"

Was this truly Ahmed? "Ahmed, when we were children, our mother...what was the last thing she told us before she died?"

"Our mother is dead?! This cannot be - I saw her only days ago! Kalid, why do you say this? What do you know?"

I relaxed. The Americans could not know this - our mother had been in hiding for almost as long as we had.

"Ahmed." I sobbed. The weeks of torture, fear, loneliness came flooding over me. "Am I really free?"

Once again the slight pressure on my hand. "Yes, Kalid. You are safe. You are back with us, thanks be to God." He leaned over me, and I could see him once again. "Now please, Kalid - it is important. We must know what operations to shut down, who to move. What did they get out of you? Do not be ashamed - many of our brothers break down. But we must know - lives depend on it."

I sighed. "I told them next to nothing, Ahmed. Only operations long over, brothers long ago captured, cells we already know were blown."

Ahmed smiled. "That is wonderful, brother. I want to catch you up. What do you remember about The Fist of God?"

The Fist of God. In the works for two years, it would bring a crushing blow down upon our foes.

"I remember the planning. I remember the date. I remember dreaming of the day."

"We've had to make some changes, Kalid. We've had to change the date as well. What was the last you remember?"

"It is no longer to be on the anniversary of our first strike? But that was when their politicians were supposed to be in full session! The President is only speaking there that one day."

A pause. "Somehow they got wind of the date, Kalid. We've had to find a new date. We may not be able to get their President. And we may need a new volunteer to carry out the final phase."

"What happened to Ali?"

"We think he may be compromised," said Ahmed.

"Ali? Never! I don't believe it! His cover as a page was perfect!" I remembered their conservative senator, so proper in public, so soft with his pretty boy Ali - our pretty boy Ali - in private.

"Perhaps, brother. But it has been difficult to get close to him since you were captured."

"Why? That makes no sense! It was Da'ud that he trusted most." Da'ud. My Da'ud. My dead Da'ud.

Suddenly I felt so heavy, so tired. "I think I must sleep some more Ahmed. Let us talk more on this later please."

"Of course, Kalid, of course. Rest now." I drifted off once again.

I did not see or feel the men tear the helmet off my head, pull the straps from my limbs. I did not feel or see them as they moved me to a gurney and started to wheel me out of the room, the room that no longer sounded like a cave.

But in my dreams, my nightmare, I did hear them...

"That was a pretty close call with the Mother thing. How did you know she was still alive?"

"That was the easy part - didn't you ever listen to the tapes of his drug sessions? She was all he talked about for a while. Must have been quite a momma's boy."

A laugh. "Well, we have a lot to go on. We had nothing on that operation - now we may have enough to roll it up completely! I gotta hand it to you - I never thought that high-tech sci-fi crap would work for shit."

"Ye of little faith. Time to put away your water boarding and guard dogs, Billy. That's so medieval. And useless. You see how much more we get with a little twenty-first century tech."

"I do now. Who would have thought that those virtual reality video games had such a promising future in prisoner interrogation?"

"Me, for one. And what's even better, those Red Cross weenies can't even complain - nothing "cruel and unusual" in letting a prisoner play a little immersive video game, is there?"

Another laugh. "You're too much, man. Let's get this intel to ops pronto - and get this bozo back into his tank. I'm thinking it's maybe Da'ud's turn next. What do you think?"

"I'm thinking I have a new convert. Go get Da'ud, buddy - I'll run this stuff up to ops."

My nightmares...Allah, hast thou forsaken me? What have I done? Da'ud! Ahmed!

My nightmares...

Help! Police!

2007-08-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't recommend being a female in Houston. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend living in Houston at all, be you female, male, or of indeterminate gender...especially if you're of indeterminate gender, come to think of it...)

In this post from a fellow Austinite, we not only see an abuse of power (a cop promising not to arrest a woman if she'll give him head), but the implicit support of such abuse by the HPD Assistant Chief in charge of internal investigation, who wrote that "the encounter sprang from consent on both sides."

Your choice is sex or arrest - can they spell "duress" in Houston? Apparently not.

Consent my ass.

(Side note to Houston PD - the statement "consent my ass" does not imply that I am consenting for you to do anything with my ass...just so we're clear...)

Erotica Anesthetica

2007-08-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

Very interesting article by Naomi Wolf. The gist - that porn overexposure makes men yawn at "the real thing."

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy”...Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it.

I guess I haven't been browsing enough internet porn lately - I still view a lot of women as "porn worthy." Just old fashioned, I guess

And Then Depression Set In

2007-08-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

There's not much I can write about depression that probably hasn't already been written. (Although that's probably true about most topics).

But I can't help but wonder - does a depressed outlook occur because bad things are happening? Or do bad things happen because of a depressed outlook?

While I don't think I go as far as to buy the whole "If you believe it, it will come" philosophy, it does seem that when I am upbeat about life, good things continue to happen. When I'm down, it seems that a string of bad events come one after another.

Is it just a matter of attitude? And can attitude affect reality? Or do I just shrug off the bad when I'm up, and dwell on it when I'm down?

I do think that it's true that if you want to ride on a boat, you need to stand by the river. Seek and ye shall find, and all that. So attitude can change reality, but not in a metaphysical sense. With a positive attitude you notice the opportunities, and have the energy to capitalize on them.

So now the question is...how does one simply change an attitude?

Observations from A Brood

2007-07-31T18:40:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a vacation trip to China and Japan. Not looking to make a travel blog, but it was interesting. And being away, particularly in cultures different from our own, encourages a different perspective.

Things that occurred to me since I've been back:

Iraq War has been going on how long now? Over 4 years? In WWII, we entered the war in December of 1941, and finished it up in Sep 1945, or just under 4 years. And that was "total victory" over 3 countries, all world powers. And we're asked to "give it more time"???

Money Talks. The US courts keep tossing out election reforms, such as campaign spending limits, directly equating the spending of money to "free speech." Money = Free Speech I think this formula is the underlooked political science equivalent of Einstein's E=mc². Although to avoid the inherent irony in the words, perhaps we can just use "Money Talks." Those with money get a larger influence in our system, a larger say. The amount of money then attracts those whose interest is money (and power) rather than representation. Or it's probably more correct to say that money buys proportionally larger representation. Those in power maintain the status quo (as always through history), and it will likely take some major upheaval to change things.

Capitalism vs. Socialism(?). I had some very interesting talks with some of the Chinese regarding their "two systems" economy. And the airline ride over there caused me some pause over the simplistic view of market economics. (The airlines are deregulated and in full and hard competition. According to capitalism, this competition should result in the best service for the best price. Instead, it results in terrible service for the best price. There's obviously something missing in simplistic economic theories.)

The Chinese have a large portion of US Debt, the majority of the world's manufacturing capability, and the majority of the world's human resources. In Beijing, the pace of construction, change, and economic growth is phenomenal - it's everywhere you look. Time to stop spending our money on the expenses of bullets and bombs and start investing it in something that will allow us to stay competitive on the world scene.

I love visiting Japan - the people there are incredibly polite, the streets are clean and safe (except around US Military bases - how mortifying), the public transportation is cheap, simple and ubiquitious. I don't think I'd like to live there - conformity is still highly valued, and the reason crime is low is that if you do anything wrong they lock you up and throw away the key - even before they have to prove you actually did anything wrong. But if you'd like to see a flavor of where the US is heading, go to Japan. Aging population, strong consumerism, social security system approaching a breaking point, laws that tilt heavily toward the state over the individual, nationalism on the rise...a fascinating extrapolation of current US trends. Just watch their TV - this is a society that needs some pretty wacky ways to blow off steam from the pressure cooker.

China surprised me in how much it reminded me of the US. I thought it would be the most foreign place of all, but it really felt much more familiar than Japan. Think United States in the 60's. Pollution on the rise and just being recognized as a big problem, a younger generation getting educated and adopting a wealthier lifestyle and consumerism in a big way, with large cultural gaps arising between them and their parents, huge GDP growth and anything is possible attitudes...I'm going to recommend to my kids that they learn Mandarin. China may be the past today, but it's gonna be the future soon.

One other thing we have in common with China is an executive branch with authoritarian tendencies. I tried to find "executive privilege" in the constitution or in law, but had a hard time. About the only thing I could find was that Supreme Court, in U.S. v Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), recognized that there exists a need for some secrecy in the executive branch, but that the secrecy cannot be absolute. If I understand Bush's claims, he personally can withhold any and all information from Congress, even if Congress passes laws making that illegal (such as the Presidential Records Act). Not only that, but apparently he can extend this privilege to anyone who works for the executive branch, or who has ever worked for the executive branch but doesn't anymore.

Furthermore, if Congress requests that the Justice Dept enforce the laws, Bush can just direct the Justice Dept to ignore Congress. And even if the Judiciary finds for Congress and directs the President to comply with the law, neither Congress nor the Judicial branch can enforce such a finding - enforcement is an Executive Branch function. So Bush's position is basically "Go away, I'm busy being Dictator-in-Chief, and there's nothing you can do about it."

No wonder he and Putin get along so well.

Reading for Fun

2007-06-13T19:09:00.000-07:00

Reading through US News this week I was struck by how many simple statements of fact hit me square in the absurdity bone. (If you don't know where your absurdity bone is located, perhaps you are one of the unfortunates who had theirs removed at an early age. This often happens at Young Republican meetings, mosques, church confirmations, or government bureaus where compassion and humor aren't tolerated.)

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin expressed displeasure at a court ruling that FCC rules on "fleeting expletives" were "arbitrary and capricious." Martin stated "I find it hard to believe that the New York court would tell American families that 'shit' and 'fuck' are fine to say on broadcast television...." His expletive laden statement set new standards for arbitrary and capricious irony.

A judge in Georgia released Genarlow Wilson, jailed for 10 years at age 17 for getting head from a 15 year old girlfriend. Georgia has since amended its law - now it's only a misdemeanor for consenting teens to have oral sex. Georgians also approved new funding to investigate where new baby Georgians come from - apparently it's a mystery.

A Democratic strategist putting the chances of immigration reform passage at 50 percent, while a "key GOP aide" strongly disagreed, putting the chances at between 60 to 40 percent. Both stated that other was 50% stupid, 50% dumb, and the other 10% was full of shit. (The legislation didn't pass, btw, with the GOP blocking passage due to the fact that it didn't punish those lawbreaking immigrant workers enough. They did, however, pass laws providing additional litigation protection for drug companies, arms manufacturers, and white collar criminals. I think "white" is the key word here...)

A "respected national economist" with research that suggests that a presidential candidate who calls for greater tax cuts could win the GOP nomination. This was news.

In order to end the massive destruction and bloodshed in Darfur, President Bush ordered economic sanctions against 30 Sudanese companies who provide some of the few remaining jobs in the country. No funds were made available for UN relief efforts for the women and children who survived a 125-mile trek to neighboring Central African Republic after their town was destroyed by Janjaweed militia.

Bush agreed that world leaders should do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - said he would support the US putting a policy in place after he leaves office (2009). He also stated that after his term is up someone should do something about the huge budget deficits, terrorism, health care, and his library.

Bush stated again that it's "too early" to get out of Iraq and that this too would be left to his successor. According to Bush, if the US leaves Iraq, there will be bloodshed and chaos. As opposed to today, where sectarian violence has reached it's highest point ever. (Well, at least since before Sadaam Hussein took over). Iraqis who find their country less livable than before are unfortunately not allowed to emmigrate to the US. (Well, except for the lucky 6 we took in last year).

The US took over Afghanistan six years ago. In Kabul, Afghanistan, there is no public sewage system. 9 out of 10 residents live on unpaved streets, and the most popular commercial is for the "LifeStraw," a water filtering device. ToloTV produces an Afghan version of The Daily Show, which shows real footage of shoddy construction projects overseen by ministers with lavish homes in Dubai, a would-be suicide bomber who described the instructions the Taliban gave him for where he could go to collect his payment after he completed his bombing mission, and parliamentarians breaking out in fights unable to pass any useful laws (except to further restrict free media like ToloTV).

The Army, which is having trouble meeting its recruiting goals, has over the past few years lowered the requirements regarding percentage of high school graduates or those with criminal histories that it will allow into the military. Now, it has decided that because the only troops that are performing at the level necessary are those in the special forces units, it will solve its problems by dramatically increasing the number of soldiers serving in those units. It will produce more elite troops by lowering the training time from 75 weeks to 49, removing the ability of instructors to "redline" (eliminate) a trainee for failing a task, lowering the language training from 1 year to 9-15 weeks, and changing the ration of junior to senior personnel in a company.

And Mortimer Zuckerman gives his bi-weekly diatribe that the Palestinians are all bad, Israel is all good, and the US should (or shouldn't - depends on the week) continue to meddle in the affairs of the Middle East. Because it's not about the oil - I'm sure we would continue to send our soldiers and diplomats to that hate ridden land if it were just a desert full of violent madmen. You know - like Darfur, Sudan.

And then finally, listening to NPR tonight about a country that requires its citizens to have their citizenship papers and documentation from the state before they can get permission to travel out of the country. Unfortunately for the citizens, the government finds it is unable to provide them all with papers, so many are not allowed to leave the country at all. Those that try to work the system are told to come back later, try again another day, or get no answers at all. The country? No, not China. Not Russia.

The USA.

Laugh or cry, your choice. As for me, everytime I cry I lose a contact lens.

More Meaning (of Life)

2007-05-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a couple of my good friends about the Meaning of Life (one of my favorite subjects).

We realize that discussions on the meaning of life are mostly mental masturbation, since it is unlikely that any gedanken experiment will result in a sudden revelation that hasn't already been debated in the history of man and woman kind. But it does seem logical that there are some categories for the answer.

The first answer category is the one picked by so many people that if there were an American Idolizes The Meaning Of Life show where people could text their choice for the winner of Miss Meaning of Life, it would win hands down. I refer, of course, to the religious take...

The Meaning of Life is not for us to know during this lifetime

Only a deity (or deities) know the secret. Only in some afterlife with thrones, judgments, halos, houris, and other fascinating visions will the true meaning of life be revealed.

Well, we all agreed that answer didn't leave much for us poor old fallen humans to do and sucked all the fun out of the debate (and led to other thoughts too depressing for a Friday Happy Hour), so we moved on to category number two...

There is No Meaning of Life.

The Universe is void of meaning, that to ask the question is meaningless, that there is no point to living.

Well, we all agreed that answer sucked too. If there is no point, then there's certainly no point debating it, or even drawing another breath for that matter. Rather than seek out Doc Kervorkian right then, we decided to move on to category number three...

There is a Meaning of Life, and it can be discovered by humans in their lifetime.

Great! Order another round so we can discuss the next step. So what might that meaning be?

The most obvious is the tautology that...

The Meaning of Life is Life

(I've written about this hypothesis before). Life exists to create more life. Life that doesn't create more life, by definition, dies out. So the only life that continues to exist is life that creates more life.

But we found a problem with this concept. Nature red in tooth and claw almost leaves us in the same state as "there is no Meaning of Life." If the only purpose of life is to create more life, then any given individual doesn't matter as long as most are propagating. Consciousness doesn't matter, as it isn't strictly required for the propagation of the species. Creativity, morality, joy - no purpose, other than periodically effective strategies to aid procreation. Mindless fucking is all there is?

(Not that there's anything wrong with mindless fucking sometimes...but *all* of the time? Where does beer and good conversation fit into that model??)

So we came up with a new theory. Sure, procreation is a necessary component of the Meaning of Life, but there is more to it. The Meaning of Life must include the fight against entropy.

Entropy is one of those "laws" of the universe in which a closed system must tend irreversibly toward a more disordered state. If our definition of "universe" is "all of the energy that exists", then the universe must tend toward an equilibrium where energy is uniform throughout - no differences, no structure, no form - nothing.

However, this only applies to a system as a whole. Parts of a system can exhibit high degrees of local non-uniformity. A baby is a great example of this. Any life is a local *decrease* in entropy - an increase in order and complexity. Therefore, part of the Meaning of Life must include "decreasing entropy." All acts of creation are local decreases in entropy.

It's true that purely physical phenomena can create order and complexity. But this happens randomly. Only life - conscious life - can create order and complexity on purpose. Only conscious life can choose to create, to counter entropy in a non-random manner.

This, we decided, must be key to the Meaning of Life, and a reason for conscious thought as embodied in human beings. Our purpose is to Create.

Creation is the Meaning of Life

This is useful. It provides a reason for the existence of life, humans, and consciousness. This leads to the existence of morality as well. Only those who use their life, and their consciousness, to choose to create are the only ones who are fulfilling the Meaning of Life.

This Meaning of Life even leads to a reason for beer and good conversation, for they help to create such wonderful ideas such as this one. It leads to joy as well, for we were quite pleased with ourselves, and thereby motivated to go create some more great ideas.

We looked at what we had done, and it was good.

Rage from a Ranter

2007-04-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

My blog is titled "Musings from a Muser", but I see that I've been posting more rants than amusing observations lately. I'm going to use this post to get a few of the most depressing rants off my chest (ever so briefly), and then try to return to writing about the absurdities in every day life.

Things that really depress me or piss me off...

Death. What a tragic waste of experience and potential.

Corruption. It's everywhere there is significant money and power. (And how did the concept of money become so disconnected from the original intent of representing the amount of contribution to a society?)

People who don't even try to use the brain that God/Darwin/Mother Nature/Parents gave them to think logically, to resolve contradictory positions, to look at evidence that disagrees with an existing opinion.

The treatment of veterans, particularly wounded ones.

The overwhelming damage to the good will and trust the U.S. had built up in the world prior to the Iraq invasion.

The overwhelming damage to the future economy from the huge amount of debt accumulating as a result of the Iraq war (and other out of control "off budget" spending) - by historically fiscally conservative Republicans, no less.

The overwhelming damage to our military defense posture due to overcommitment of troops (involuntary extensions of active duty and foreign deployments, overuse of active reserves, ready reserves, and now even dipping into the National Guard to sustain force levels in Iraq...)

The increasing inability for civil discourse and disagreement (driven by populist manipulations of distrust and hate mongering).

Populist Hate Mongering.

Rants from bloggers. (I mean, who really cares what they think? Unless they're a celebrity.)

There...I know I'm missing some, but if they're not currently at top of mind, then they must not be bothering me that much. Now maybe I can try to relax and chuckle again...

In Tolerance

2007-04-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's just me, but for years now I've noticed a worldwide trend of increasing intolerance that I find intolerable.

What is it in human nature that requires so many of us to tell our neighbor how they should live their lives?

At it's mildest this compulsion takes the form of social approbation, Mrs. Grundy frowning, waggling her finger and saying "tsk, tsk." At the extreme this begets violence, where a group is willing to kill individuals who don't behave in the way the group wants them to.

Many religions are that way. In fact, a claim could be made that the primary purpose of any religion is to prescribe and proscribe how adherents should live their lives. It's apparently not a far leap to want to extend these rules to those who didn't volunteer.

Group behaviors aren't all bad. In fact, part of the development of civilization was the idea that a group should establish some behavioral standards for the good of the whole. Prohibitions against killing your neighbor made sense when living in a group, as did prohibitions against stealing, and other common laws.

But any good idea carried to extremes can result in more harm than good. Dictatorships, fascist regimes, theocracies all usually hurt the majority to the advantage of the ruling minority.

So where's the balance?

A modern debate regarding vaccination against disease is a classic balancing act between the good of all and abuse of power. Vaccines work to prevent disease - seems obvious that everyone should get them. And if everyone got them, then the diseases themselves would die out.

But some don't want them - they believe that the vaccines themselves are too risky, or just don't like someone telling them what to do. And a few can get away without getting vaccines, as long as the overwhelming majority around them are getting vaccines, because only then will the public health risk of transmission be low enough for the unvaccinated to not get ill. Every time the percentage of unvaccinated grows to high, you see an outbreak.

Take polio. In areas of extreme intolerance (and ignorance), polio still thrives. Mullahs in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other countries actually tell their flocks not to get vaccinated (because it is a western plot to sterilize Muslims). And because of these penis noggins, we have to keep vaccinating our children for polio (putting some small portion at risk for vaccine side effects).

So what's the right answer? Should we tolerate assholes, just because we're the tolerant ones? Or should intolerance itself not be tolerated?

How about the notion that we should tolerate any behavior, as long as it doesn't cause harm to others? Fine idea in theory, but who gets to decide? And then wouldn't the decider be accused of intolerance?

It seems that extremism usually has bad results. But extremists usually view themselves as either being the voice of the silent masses (who really want to do what we say but can't for some odd reason), or forcing the silent masses to "do the right thing" (which of course is decided by the extremists).

How to tell which voices are extremist, and which more closely represent the middle? (Or in a plurality of positions, which ones are extreme and which ones aren't).

I don't have the answers. But I'd be interested in hearing some ideas.

To The Best Of My Recollection...

2007-04-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just have to laugh at how absurd politicians (and lawyers) can be.

Like this article, Lawyer: Rove Didn't Mean to Delete Email.

According to the article, Rove sent some emails using an official White House email system (which automatically archives all messages in accordance with the Presidential Records Act and other federal laws), and sent others using his "private" account at the RNC.

Rove, in direct contravention to said law, deleted emails from his RNC account. Now caught, he apparently is claiming that he didn't know that deleting emails from his inbox actually got rid of the emails.

Now, we're talking about one of the most computer savvy senior advisors in the administration, the man who almost single handedly invented the "microdemographic" voter analysis approach to winning elections; the man who spends hours pouring over data on his laptop, who by his own admission slices and dices "68 polls a week."

But because email is "technical" and hard for people to understand how it really works, he'll likely get away with this outrageous position.

Let's replace "email" with "documents", and "delete" with "shredding" and see if this still makes sense.

There is a law that says that all papers generated by people working the White House must be preserved. Rather than get thrown away, any notes, memos, etc are taken and stored in an archive, to be opened by historians downstream to help understand what happened and how in this government "of the people."

Karl took lots of notes, wrote lots of informal memos. But he took those notes and memos out of the White House over to the RNC, where no one could copy or store them. Then, when it suited him, he shredded those notes and memos.

Now if you worked for Enron or Arthur Andersen, all this should look very familiar. But those companies don't exist anymore, because their people shredded important documents. And they didn't even have a Presidential Records Act to compel them.

How about we all just say, "Yeah, Rove, Bush, Cheney - all those guys break the law when it suits them. And what can anyone do about it? Nothing."

Or let's impeach. But quit dicking around with it.

Bless the Beasts, But Not the Children

2007-04-11T13:33:00.001-07:00

I just read this story about this boy names Justin who was raised like a dog till the age of 6, and while the story itself was horrid, the scientific and societal implications behind the story struck me like a sledgehammer.

In the U.S. alone, there are about 3 million cases of child abuse or trauma reported each year. Many of these are repeat offenses, and at least a half million of these are new cases. That means that at any given time at least 8 to 10 million children are suffering from some childhood trauma.

These childhood traumas affect neurological development, sometimes in permanent ways. Which means that even given a good environment later in life (which is far from the norm for most of these children anyway), there is little to be done for the harm caused to emotional, social, and cognitive abilities.

What's worse is that these children grow into adults who have suffered from a childhood trauma (and resultant neurological disorders). Depending on the trauma, this can drive neurotic or even pathological behaviors in adulthood. So we have at any time 50-70 million neurotic or pathological adults running around.

Many of those who have children have a tendency to abuse or inflict trauma on their children. And so it continues, generation after generation.

And what do we do about it? Where does this huge societal problem fall in terms of political priorities? Is this less important than immigration reform? Copyright protection? Gay marriage? Animal abuse?

Not only is this not a priority, but it seems that a number of politicians actively strive to make it even worse for children. (See CHIP funding reductions, bills for eliminating medicare, even education, for children of undocumented immigrants).

I have a theory that a high percentage of really driven people (such as politicians, fundamentalist extremists, some business leaders) are part of this traumatized demographic.

I don't have studies to support this hypothesis (although perhaps that's because such information is discouraged from publication by strongly ambitious and pathological politicians.) I'll try not to derail into the swamp of conspiracy theories, but something needs to the cause of so much inaction on what should be a top priority.

Food. Shelter. Protection from harm. Health care (particularly for children). These must be the priorities of any society, because a lack of these has negative, long lasting impact on any other function.

If we could just get our priorities straight, we could accomplish so much more.

Ignorance is Blessed

2007-04-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

The U.S. is about to hit escape velocity on the crazy bus.

From the most recent MSNBC/Newsweek poll...

13. Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?

Nearly half (48 percent) of the U.S. public said no; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact.

These are the same people who go on to make educational videos like this one which "disproves" evolution.

It's times like this I start rooting for the antibiotic resistant staff bacteria to colonize the Discovery Institute...

No Accounting For Easter

2007-04-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

During a beer at happy hour on Good Friday, I commented that every Friday should be called Good Friday, given that it was the last day of the work week.

One of the people there was apparently offended at my cavalier commentary on "the day Jesus died." Delighted to find a religious scholar amongst the sea of suds, I thought I would seek some enlightenment for something that was puzzling me.

I asked him, "Help me out with something. Jesus died on a Friday, right?"

"Everyone knows that," he responded.

"So that's Good Friday. And Easter is when we celebrate his resurrection, is that right?"

"Yes."

"And how long did he lay in his tomb before being rising again?"

"Three days."

"Interesting. So even though Jesus supposedly died at three in the afternoon on a Friday, and was already off and gone to Heaven by the time Mary came to his tomb on Sunday at Dawn - a span of about a day and a half - they just counted it as three because they counted funny then?"

"I don't know. Asshole."

People get so touchy about their religion sometimes.

Actually, this did lead to another interesting discussion with someone else there who was actually educated in the religion he espoused (about the word Easter coming from the pagan Goddess Eostre, eggs from Spring fertility celebrations, the reconciliation of holidays in the early church days, the Council of Nicea, and how history gets rewritten over time). I actually learned quite a bit that I didn't know before.

The conversation wrapped up with a discussion about how why it was that so many people who categorize themselves as religious (over 90% in the U.S. according to a recent poll) know so little about the history or tenets of their chosen religion.

He smiled, and reminded me that faith rests not on reason, just belief. You don't need facts or logic for faith.

I then made some snide comment about so many with faith being assholes, and he asked me what I thought about Richard Dawkins.

Touche.

We agreed that "turning the other cheek" does not necessarily mean you must must show your asshole as you turn them. We agreed that the dimension of faith/no-faith was orthogonal to the dimension of assholedness. And we agreed that it was the assholes the world needed to worry about, not necessarily those of strong faith.

If only everyone could be so reasonable.

The Few, The Proud, The Crazy

2007-04-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

It takes lots of people, working in group cooperation, to sustain a civilization.

It only takes a few idiots to wreck one.

I've been thinking about it almost always takes a large number of people to create something, but only a few to destroy it.

Iraq is full of examples. How many people need to cooperate to build a power plant, or an oil pipeline, or establish a market, or establish the rule of law? How many fewer does it take to blow up any of these?

All most people want is to be left alone. But when the bombs start going off and the soldiers start busting down doors and shooting, even people who want to be left alone get drawn into the violence - if for nothing else than to defend themselves. That's why large groups of otherwise disinterested people can be manipulated by remarkably small groups of determined people.

Prior to the build up to the invasion of Iraq, did a majority of U.S. voters want to go to war there? Hardly - we were pissed as hell at Al Queda, happy to root them out of Afghanistan. Were they in Iraq? Not then. But a small group of people were able to first manipulate the public into (perhaps apathetic,perhaps jingoistic) acceptance of the invasion. Then once troops were committed, even those who would remain apathetic get drawn in as those close to them or someone they know start getting killed. It becomes personal.

Why do societies war? Look at just about every damn war ever fought, and a couple things are clear. A few (usually very few) determined men got together and decided they wanted a war. Whoever they attacked had no other choice than to fight back. And for some reason, once started, wars are very hard to stop. (In fact, in so many cases, they really don't stop - they just pause for a generation to grow new soldiers, forget the horror, but remember the need for revenge...)

Why don't the majority of people, who wanted nothing to do with this war to begin with, do anything to stop it?

Because the majority of people just want to be left alone.

So the few crazies, zealots, and idiots of the world are able to have extraordinary impact on world events.

And it's usually not a positive one.

The Power of the Purse

2007-03-28T06:07:00.000-07:00

One of the basic tenets of our checks and balances is that Congress controls the money (the "power of the purse"), which the Executive commands the military. Theoretically, the Executive can only pursue military action with the consent of Congress.

The Bush administration has blown to smithereens this fundamental balance of power.

It began with initiating military action in Iraq without the prior approval of Congress. (This approval was given,in a limited degree, after the invasion. What a sad joke.)

Once a war is begun, the only tool Congress has left to check an out of control Executive is the budgetary process. Congress is left in the position of not passing funding bills for the military, which would be viewed as "not supporting our troops." (About the only point of agreement between the two partisan parties is that both want to help and support our soldiers).

And really, it likely wouldn't change anything if Congress did cut funding. Bush wouldn't pull the troops - he would instead (as he has continuously done every other time money has run out) keep the troops in harms way without funding.

Spending has 3 times now overrun caps - the Executive pays no heed. If the money was indeed cut off, the troops would probably suffer as maintenance and supplies ran low. Bush would point to their suffering as the fault of the opposition. (The opposition in this case not being the Iraqi insurgency, but the democratically elected representatives of the people of the U.S.).

So regardless of whether a majority of elected representatives vote to end a war, it really doesn't matter if you have an Executive who chooses to ignore the will of the people.

This war will only come to a close once Bush is out of office.

I think all the current candidates for President are crazy - their first term is really going to suck.

UPDATE: Wow, no sooner do I post this, than I see this article...that basically says what I just said.

Public Drunkedness

2007-03-15T19:47:00.000-07:00

Someone comes out of a bar, and they're clearly drunk. They want to go home. You have $100 to spend on the problem. What do you do?

Most (rational) people would say "get them a cab."

If you're like the city of Fresno, CA, you arrest them for public drunkedness and use the money you saved avoiding the cab to buy cool surveillance gear so you can find more of these drunks.

In Austin, Mother's Against Drunk Driving have been using their money to buy more police vans to park downtown so they can arrest batches of drunks at a time.

Call me crazy, but if your true concern is that these people not drive drunk, then spending the money on public transportation options is the way to go. This could be cab vouchers for bars to hand out (or even the police). This could be forming a dedicated ride service, with big posters of the phone number at the door of each bar.

In truly enlightened places, the money is spent on good mass transportation. I remember going out to drink in Tokyo, and the huge feeling of relief that I didn't need to worry about a car or a cab - I could just stumble to the nearest subway (always within a couple blocks) and make it home.

I bet the public transportation option is actually cheaper than the cost of arresting, processing, and keeping someone in jail...BUT...if your goal is to impose your version of morality on others and try to bring back prohibition...then I guess cops and gadgets is the way to go.

Question Authority

2007-03-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

The bumper sticker "Question Authority" was prominently displayed during my college years at Berkeley. It should have been the title of a mandatory course.

Over and over again we fall into the same trap, apparently never learning the historical lesson. Without checks and balances, even good intentioned people (in fact, especially good intentioned people!) can and will eventually abuse power.

The most recent example - the FBI abuse of "administrative subpoena" power granted under the Patriot Act. Did the agents think they were fighting terrorism and crime? I'm sure most of them did. Did they get overzealous at times? Sure - it was a good cause, right? Would independent judicial review of these subpoenas have helped? Almost certainly.

Unchecked power is always wrong. Always. Not because it's being wielded by a bad person - often it isn't. Not because the power wouldn't get the job done faster - it almost certainly would. Not because the goal is wrong - often the goal is agreed to be "just."

But because of human nature, it will inevitably end up going bad.

Authority should always be questioned. If the goal is just, the process is checked and balanced, and those wielding the power are lawful, then the authorities should never have a problem answering the questions.

It's only when something is questionable do authorities get on their high horse and try to avoid scrutiny.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
- Oscar Wilde

[Side note: Attorney General Gonzales needs more regular questioning. It's amazing what slime starts showing up once the light is turned on (like ideological sniff tests for our defenders of the constitution and rule of law...). I doubt history will judge the integrity of the current White House crew very highly.]

Public Sex

2007-03-06T17:28:00.000-08:00

Why is public sex illegal?

A friend asked me this recently (don't ask why - let's just say it came up). Anyway...we decided to verify our assumption that having sex in public was, in fact, illegal. A quick web search determined that aside from a number of state laws that proscribe what kind of sex one can have, and with who, it turns out most of the laws against public sex revolve around anything that "offends public decency."

For the most part, it appears that if you perform any act resembling sex (even fully clothed, acting like you're having sex) and someone sees it and takes offense, you can be prosecuted.

So back to the question - why?? I mean, if you really think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it seems so counterintuitive that this would be proscribed. But (in the U.S. at least) we've all grown up with this strong taboo and we don't think twice about why. (Well, okay, maybe some think twice or more about it - clearly my friend and I have. But you still don't see much of it. Or if you do, you live in a more interesting neighborhood than I do).

Here's the evolutionary argument.

I think you'll agree it's a given that most people like sex. (Those that don't tend not to pass this trait on to the next generation, so it tends to die out).

In fact, some surveys indicate that most people think about sex multiple times a day. Every day. Again, given the obvious evolutionary argument here, this shouldn't be much of a surprise either. (Great recent recap of the research here).

So...most people like sex, think about sex every day, and would like to have sex a fair portion of their waking minutes (and many of their sleeping ones as well).

So given that this appears to be one of the most common, natural impulses of humans everywhere, why don't we support having sex in public?

The obvious answers, of course, is that we're all prudes in the U.S.; that people love to make laws telling other people how to behave; and any laws that require only that one person be offended for an act to be a crime would tend to squelch excessively exuberant behavior.

But being interested in behavioral evolution, I wanted to investigate more. Evolutionary theory would say that unless there were a breeding disadvantage to a behavior, over time it should die out. Prohibitions against sex are definitely a disadvantage to breeding.

More research led me down a number of garden paths with little satisfaction. Some related to classic (and overused) arguments regarding males need to ensure paternity (selfish genes), female fertility cycles and receptivity, monogamous relationships, protection of children, "we are not animals" (yeah, right).

All of it left me cold, because in every case the big large pink and blue elephants in the room were ignored, such as the eternal proliferation of prostitution and the enormous economics of the sex industry in general, both of which provide direct evidence that there always is huge pent up demand for sex that finds an outlet somehow. (Though I did learn a new word in the search, which is always cool.)

So again - how did these prohibitions against public sex evolve in so many cultures? (Side note - not all cultures have this prohibition. For example, people used to (and still do) live in small houses, or even huts where everybody is in one room. Sex is carried within sight of everyone else in the household. It's apparently ignored, treated as just "one of those things", like taking a piss). But this isn't common).

One argument my friend and I came up with involved the productivity hit to a society - that if everyone was having sex anytime they felt like it, nothing would get done. One could envision a societal evolution model of two cultures competing for resources, where one redirects sexual energy toward behaviors that better benefit the group as a whole and therefore outperforms the other culture that is still laying around humping in the street.

Another idea is maybe those caught by the enemy tribe (or lions, tigers, and bears) with their "pants down" were killed and weeded out, and only those who had sex in "safe" places survived to reproduce. But probably not - when exposed to danger, your best bet for survival is to be surrounded by friendlies, not off by yourself. If exposure to danger was a large factor, we would more likely have a taboo against having sex without other people around.

After batting around a few other ideas, we finally just gave up and had fun envisioning a culture where public sex was legal and acceptable. The porn industry and sex trade dies out - you can get better for free on any street corner. Sanitary Engineer takes on a whole new meaning, and stock in cleaning products skyrockets. Breastfeeding is no longer the primary concern of the religious right. Cluster fucks are no longer a bad thing. "Would you like to be seated in fucking, or non-fucking?" Everyone is reminded once again that there is good naked, and there is bad naked. (Hmmm...maybe that's the answer...)

Try to come up with a few yourself - it's pretty fucking hilarious (if you'll excuse the pun).

Urination Rumination

2007-03-06T16:54:00.000-08:00

I was at a school this past weekend watching a lacrosse game, and I had to go to the bathroom.

Only there was no where to go.

I wandered all over the school, and every door was locked. No bathrooms. No porta-potties. Not even the nice trench away from potable water that I might have found 2000 years ago in a Roman field camp.

But! There were some bushes. Thank God. Or Mother Nature. Or whoever the Patron Saint of Pissing is.

Sure, I could have chosen instead to walk the half mile back to my car, drive to some gas station, lose my parking place, and miss most of the game. But clearly I'm an uncivilized urinator. A criminal crapper. A penal penile.

As I returned to the sideline, having regained the ability to focus on something other than my bladder, I noticed I was not the only one with this predicament.

How does it benefit a school to make peeing so difficult that it encourages unsanitary practices? Why on earth would they not make at least one restroom available for public use? Is maintaining the cleanliness of one restroom that much more expensive than replacing the row of trees destroyed by the river of uric acid generated by hundreds of Big Gulp drinking sports fans?

Over the next few days I started noticing that there are lots of places where it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make a waste deposit in a sanitary way. "Restrooms for customers only". Gas stations requiring a key. Miles of road with nary an outhouse to be seen.

It used to be one of the main purposes of government was to create and maintain the basic infrastructure for human life. Successful city-states knew that a common defense and good city planning of walls and such was better for everyone - it was the purpose of the city. Roads in the city and between neighboring trading partners increased flow of goods and standard of living. They also knew that having everyone crap in the middle of the tribal circle was bad - it stank, people got sick, and it lowered property values. So they created latrines.

We seem to have forgotten some basic hygiene along the way.

Its not like we're talking about special class treatment here, catering to the excretionarliy challenged. As I learned as a child, Everybody Poops. Given the public health risk of poor human waste treatment, you would think it would be in everyone's best interests if there were public restrooms everywhere.

Headline: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Held In Guantanamo

2007-01-31T20:37:00.000-08:00

Actually, the headline was "Man arrested in Boston marketing ploy", but after reading the article I think they missed the real story.

"Several illuminated electronic devices planted at bridges and other spots in Boston threw a scare into the city Wednesday in what turned out to be a publicity campaign for a late-night cable cartoon. Most if not all of the devices depict a character giving the finger."

Specifically, these were little LED pictures of Aqua Teen Hunger Force characters - the picture to the left illustrates Master Shake (or perhaps a mooninite) saying "I'm number one" or something to that effect.

A little known fact is that Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a front group for Islamic Jihad. (Not to be confused with Venture Brothers, the front group for Al Queda). Keen law enforcement personnel knew this critical bit of intelligence, and as a result rapidly recognized the cartoons for the Weapons of Mass Destruction they really were.

"[Turner] said the devices have been in place for two to three weeks in 10 cities: Boston; New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; Austin, Texas; San Francisco; and Philadelphia."

Of course, everyone knows these cities are all bastions of Liberals Who Hate America, so the lack of aggressive response in these cities is understandable. (Besides - in Austin we were too busy panicking over the dead birds to notice the cartoon nuclear devices).

"Peter Berdovsky, 29, of Arlington, was arrested on one felony charge of placing a hoax device...Authorities are investigating whether Turner [Broadcasting, producer of Aqua Teen Hunger Force] and any other companies should be criminally charged"

Apparently Boston has learned from the Dutch Cartoon Incident, where illustrations of Muhammed provoked a similar response of outrage among Muslim groups who knew how insidious cartoon images can be.

I think some "extraordinary rendition" is in order here. Perhaps a little water boarding will teach Mr. Berdovsky that Boston will not tolerate anything remotely associated with cartoon terrorist front operations. (Rumor has it that a secret warrant for John Stewart has been issued as a preemptive action against any reprisals.)

Recycling

2007-01-15T17:32:00.000-08:00

Ok, I know I haven't blogged in quite a while. Lately it seems I'm either working hard or partying hard. Since these are a couple of my favorite things to do, I'm not complaining. But it does mean that I don't get much time to do other things I enjoy, like writing.

Since I haven't come up with any bonny mots to share myself, I thought I'd share a couple that I just read and found amusing.

These are from Mortimer Zuckerman's end of year editorial in US News. The quotes are genuine (ie, his).

"Politics are so corrupt even the dishonest people get screwed."

"A Democrat sees the glass of water half full; a Republican looks at the same glass and wonders who the hell drank his water."

'...a recent police study found that "you are much more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run."'

'A minister's view of evolution: "I don't understand evolution. If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? Why couldn't they make it over the hump?"'

Also, some end of year words to live by from my humor writing role model, Dave Barry. (In fact, I'm going to take 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 13 and 14 and make the the 8 commandments of the new religion I'm starting. Move over, L. Ron Hubbard!)

Fourteen Things That It Took Me Over 50 Years To Learn—by Dave Barry

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
2. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
3. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
4. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
5. You should not confuse your career with your life.
6. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
7. Never lick a steak knife.
8. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.
9. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.
10. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
11. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.
12. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers. In truth, only I am.
13. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)
14. Your friends love you anyway.

Party on, dudes.

Read, Write, or Do

2006-12-17T19:24:00.000-08:00

I was cleaning up some online accounts when I noticed that I hadn't posted here in over a month. (Side note: need to find or invent a site that helps me manage all the content from all the other sites I have - usernames, password, profile templates to fill in the usual "describe yourself", "what are you looking for..." bs).

This past month has been remarkable. I have been pushing my "memory a day" philosophy past any prior limits, and the number of new ideas and stories running through my head has never been higher.

But the trouble with being busy living life is that I don't have time to be busy writing about it. Nor have I had the time to catch up on my reading.

Reading, Writing, and Doing. That pretty much covers how I spend my time.

I suppose eventually I'll settle into a new equilibrium, a balance between the different facets of life I love. But for now, I'm meeting new and interesting people, doing new and interesting...experiences (betcha thought I was gonna say 'people')...adding new lumps to the clay that forms who I am is where I'm spending - no, strike that...investing - my time.

Doesn't Taste Like Chicken

2006-11-12T11:28:00.001-08:00

Early results are in from the front lines of the robot revolution...

Humans taste like bacon.

The Body Beautiful

2006-11-12T10:48:00.001-08:00

"I just don't understand why anyone would want to get a tattoo."

So said the woman next to me in the bar.

"How about art? Self-expression?" I suggested. (Full disclosure: I have a couple tattoos).

"Pish. That's not art. Art isn't permanently disfiguring yourself," she said, seeming surprised that I wasn't in immediate agreement with her.

I examined her more closely. "Do you have your ears pierced?"

"Yes, but that's different."

"I couldn't help but notice you have really pretty teeth." She grinned. "Thanks."

"Any orthodontia? Or whitening maybe?"

"Yes, but that's the same thing - its just enhancing what's already there."

I glanced down. "Any other enhancements?" (Ok, perhaps I leered instead of glanced, I am a old perv...but I think the fact that she was wearing a tight top cut down to her navel and proudly displaying her obviously augmented DDs opens up the topic a bit, don't you?)

She lifted her chest, gave a sly look and said "Maaaybe...why, what are you suggesting?"

A few suggestions came to mind, but I stuck with the main topic. "I guess my point is that I think it's funny that I know so many people that don't like tattoos - most over the age of 40 - and yet these same friends have no trouble justifying a gazillion dollars of plastic surgery, which I think is just as permanent. Maybe more so."

She pointed her augmentations elsewhere, and with a slight frown said. "You think I look over 40?"

"No, of course not. Not even close." (This is one of those questions - like "Do these pants make my butt look big?" - that you never, ever, ever answer honestly.) "But do you see my point? Tattoos are just another kind of body enhancement, another kind of self expression."

"Whatever." She shrugged, clearly starting to get bored with the conversation. I started to notice some other telltale signs of plastic surgery - botox in the forehead, the shiny skin of photofacials, the slightly upturned eyes that come with a face lift.

"Yeah...I guess I agree with you," I said at last. "It's just crazy what some people will do to their bodies."

"I know, right?" she brightened up. "So...what do you like to do to your body..."

I love sitting at bars...

The Wisdom of the Market Majority

2006-11-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

Although disappointed by minority tyranny, I have to say that the recent elections again bolstered my faith in one of the tenets of democracy, the one that says that a bunch of average citizens can moderate extreme swings in government behavior.

Everybody and their mother has an opinion about the recent national elections. Here's mine.

People didn't really appear to vote for the democrats. The majority voted against (insert here Republicans, Iraq War, Incumbent Corruption). Most exit polls gave these as the primary vote drivers - not "I want the X plan that the democrats are offering".

The good news here? Even when there is nothing (and no one) you really want to vote for, you can still make your vote count. You can vote against government behavior you disagree with. Although the two parties are driven by their extreme wings, the country still appears to have a large "middle" willing to push and pull to keep that pendulum from swinging too far for too long.

(Interesting side blurb. The wisdom of the markets was put to use in the recent election, and predicted a Democrat controlled House and a close decision on the Senate - as much as a month ago. What's interesting is that according to the "historical market prices", events between 9/14 and 10/2 created a huge swing in momentum away from Republican support. I'll have to go back to the headlines of that period and see what the actual big drivers were.)

The Tyranny of the Minority

2006-11-09T13:40:00.000-08:00

I'm struck by how absurd some aspects of representative democracy can be.

Texas just "elected" a governor whom 61% of voters chose not to vote for.

That's right. With 39% of the electorate, Gov. Rick Perry (incumbent) was elected for yet another term.

How can it be called representative democracy, when the winner represents a minority of the voters?

Asked by the Houston Chronicle if it concerned him that he'll be a minority governor, Perry snapped, "I don't think that matters one twit [sic]. We'll still have 100% of the authority."

Humble. Intelligent. A real bridge builder.

I'd say it's time to move, except for the fact that I love living in Austin. I suppose my best hope is for the Delay Factor (or Foley Factor)...arrogance eventually begets gross abuse of power that finally gets noticed.

Primordial Alphabet Soup

2006-10-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

I was listening to an interesting story on the radio tonight about an effort in India to produce keyboards that can type in Hindi. (Gosh, that's exciting! Tell us more!)

The problem is that Hindi is a phonetically written language. The "alphabet" of Hindi consists of over 100 symbols. Urdu is similar. To type in Hindi, you must either invent a very large keyboard, or learn a very complex style of typing which involves multiple keys per symbol.

Pictographic/ideographic writing styles are even worse, with literally over 10,000 symbols (many a complex combination of a base of symbols that numbers merely in the 100s to thousands). Now we're talking a really large keyboard. No laptops for these folks.

When writing by hand and ink was in use, this may not have mattered much. I assume that writing speeds are relatively similar across writing systems. (Although I may be wrong, I don't think a Japanese writer takes significantly longer to write "Can you read me now?" than an English writer would).

But with the advent of computers, this is changing. Computers represent an environmental evolution selection mechanism, weeding out written languages which require "too many" symbols. Inefficient writing styles (at least for the purposes of producing input that a computer can process) are weeded out of the population, with only the most efficient remaining. This is why most of the countries with less efficient symbolic representations are adopting "standard" keyboard sizes of a little over 100 keys.

In attempts to further reduce keyboard sizes and increase portability, there are a number of approaches. Most involve either "chording" (the simultaneous pressing of multiple keys) or the familiar "texting" approach on western cell phones, where each key represents multiple symbols that you reach by multiple clicks of the key. Neither is very consumer friendly.

If there were a language that had a written alphabet of only 12 characters (the number of keys on a standard cell phone keypad), I bet it would win the race. (Most languages, like English, have 40-50 phonemes, so 12 is really pushing it).

I wondered if whether advanced speech recognition in computers could eventually nullify the alphabet race. In theory, native speakers could dictate their text and the computer would handle the symbols. Like writing speeds, most speaking speeds are within the same order of magnitude of each other, conveying information at a similar rate. There would no longer be the evolutionary range of variation to make selection meaningful.

But on reflection, I don't think speech recognition will put the alphabet evolution on hold. There are too many ways where keying information into a device is more efficient, or at least more circumspect. And as long as there are keyboards, the alphabet evolution will continue.

May the most efficient alphabet win.

Time For A Second Life?

2006-10-16T18:41:00.000-07:00

I heard an interesting story on Marketplace tonight about how Reuters has established a full time reporter to cover the business news in another world.

The world of Second Life.

I've written about Second Life before, noting the blurring of the lines already between Real Life and virtual reality environments. Evolving from multiplayer game environments such as another popular space World of Warcraft, 3D virtual environments are starting to interact more and more with the real world in terms of commerce, social science, education, and relationships.

There are now people who spend most of their working (and perhaps waking) hours in Second Life. And they make an actual Real Life living from it. From selling virtual real estate, to designing virtual clothes, houses, or anything else your imagination can conceive, these people are selling their services and "goods" (Second Life has a concept around the ownership and transfer of virtual goods that protects the intellectual property of the virtual creation).

Second Life has it's own economy, and just like any other nation state, it has a currency with a floating exchange rate with U.S. dollars. Money ("Linden Dollars") can be exchanged for Real Life money. Weird? Not really. What is money but a virtual construct, anyway? Those greenbacks are a marker that can be exchanged for goods and services at floating market rates. They can also be exchanged for other currencies at floating market rates. There is no intrinsic value to that piece of linen other than that we consensually assign to it. Linden dollars are exactly the same.

So much the same that serious, Real World business reporting has started full time coverage of this economy. So much the same that Congress is actually debating legislation taxing goods and services sold in these virtual environments.

People are now creating virtual goods that people want to buy, as well as selling services previously only available in Real Life (teaching classes, mass media reporting, wedding planners, DJs, sex workers...). This isn't Virtual Reality anymore. It is Real Reality that has moved into the online world. (Which is why it's not called Virtual Life, but Second Life - a life in addition to the one you have in the Real World).

There is no reason why this shouldn't continue to grow and evolve. Meetings that now take place in person, or particularly meetings that take place via video teleconferencing, can move into Second Life settings. Services such as architecture and design, entertainment performances, sports, business consulting, counseling...all of these are already starting to take root in Second Life.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could fight the Iraqi insurgents in Second Life instead of Real Life?

Keep your eyes on this space - City of the Future coming here soon.

"Step Away From The Voting Booth.."

2006-10-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

"Lay down your voter registration card slowly, and put your hands in the air!"

Looking ahead to the Nov. 7 elections, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, said "the American people aren't going to say in the face of war we need to be weaker, and in the face of economic challenge we need higher taxes and more regulations and more lawsuits. The Democrats have promised both." (AP news)

I wasn't there for the briefing, but I think the rest must have gone something like this...

"I mean it!" an agitated Mehlman shouted. "If you even think of voting for a Democrat, then we're just going to go on weakening the economy and expanding the Iraqi conflict till you're so scared you can't even see straight. If I so much as hear the word Liberal, we're gonna blow this fucking insurgency into a full scale global war! Bwa ha ha ha..."

Mr. Mehlman was then hurried out of the briefing room by concerned aids. One unidentified man was heard whispering to the RNC chairman "Oh Great! Why don't you just tell them everything? For this scam to work, we need to make them scared of the rest of the world, not us you fool..."

5 Million Deaths

2006-10-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

I just read about a war that, had it occurred in the United States, would have resulted in approximately 5,000,000 deaths over the span of a few years. There has never been a time where so many Americans have died as a result of war.

In the US Civil War, there were approximately 185,000 violent deaths. Out of a population of 20 million, this is almost 1% of the population.

One report today out of John's Hopkins estimates 655,000 violent civilian deaths (out of a population of approx 26 million, or ~2.5%) since the invasion of 2003.

Good data out of Iraq is difficult to obtain. Causes could be either a total lack of administrative control of the country, or a desire to obfuscate the data. Neither of these is a good thing.

There are sites which attempt to track the "body count" which range as low as 44,000, but these are sites which only count verifiable deaths reported in the media. The 655,000 figure reported in the Lancet article was developed using statistical polling techniques.

But let's take the numbers reported out of Baghdad, where at least reporters can talk to the local morgues and get a low end count. Baghdad has had an average of 60 reported deaths a day for the past few years (some days higher, some lower - September's rate was actually 88). This number is a little over 1% of the estimated population of between 5 million and 6 million. We can make an assumption that there are rarely fewer deaths than the reported number, and almost always more. So, even using reported numbers, we can reasonably posit that between 1-2.5% of the civilian population has been killed as a result of this war.

If this occurred in the U.S., the equivalent would be over 5,000,000 dead. Given social connection statistics, everyone in the U.S. would know at least 2-4 people they considered close to them who had died. How would you feel if 5 million Americans were killed as a result of a war declared on our country? How would you feel about the instigator, however well intentioned they might be?

There has never been a "clean" war. War brings with it the other three horsemen of Pesilence, Famine, and Death. Always. The ones who suffer the most are the civilians unfortunate enough to live on the battlegrounds. Always.

Which is why war is considered to be an immoral, unconscionable choice unless it is to defend yourself against a clear and present danger of being killed.

It's possible that the invasion of Afghanistan met this ultimate criteria. It's very clear that the invasion of Iraq did not, and does not.

And yet there is still at least a third of our population who support this war. I wonder if they ever ask themselves - what would justify the death of their loved ones if they were in the battlezone?

This might be all the explanation needed behind the numbers behind another recent poll in Iraq, where 47% of Iragis favored attacks on US Troops. Almost 80% wanted US Troops to withdraw within the next year.

According to a recent Zogby poll, an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately.

So, we are in agreement. Overwhelming majorities of both the Iraqi and the American people feel that the US should withdraw from Iraq within the next year. If the current administration truly feels that democracy is the reason we are at war in the first place, then their marching orders should be clear.

Let Truthiness Prevail

2006-10-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

One of the discussion groups I belong to recently had a raft of postings around the topic of childhood immunization. The raft rapidly became a rift, with the riff raff chiming in with a variety of opinion, rumor, and anecdotes. Only one actually posted data from a peer reviewed study on the topic.

This discussion group consists of people who are generally considered bright and well educated, all having graduated from Top 50 Universities across the U.S. So why is it that the discussion was not more objective, analytical, and evidence based?

Take your pick.

Jack Nicholson was right ("You can't handle the truth!").

Martin Luther King, Jr. was right ("Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity.").

Bertrand Russel was right ("Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.").

Steven Colbert is right ("I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart...Truthiness is...not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.")

Poscards from a Post Human (pt 3)

2006-09-30T18:11:00.000-07:00

I've been going over the notes from the future, trying to absorb not only the information, but the implications. What was I supposed to do with all this? Why tell me?

I hesitate to share most of what has been layed out before me, in such terse, stark emails. But I'm going to need help. It's too overwhelming.

Want an example? Ok, here's an extract from one...

Global warming was real. But then, so was the solar sunspot cycle which caused global cooling. Unfortunately, they came at the same time.

Turned out that the various factions squabbling over whether the earth was warming, and if it was whether or not it was caused by man or whether this is just part of a natural cycle...they were all partially correct. Each had a piece to the puzzle, but each was apparently more interested in proving the others wrong than to put enough of the pieces together to make out the emerging picture.

It appears that right about when the world finally started to wake up to the escalating problem of global warming, the normal cycle of Solar sun spot activity reached a lull and mitigated the effects.

But only for about ten years.

Once the solar activity started its climb again, the world had spent an additional ten years of not just ignoring the warming problem, but exacerbating it. With the contributions of global greenhouse gases and solar activity combining, global temperatures shot up. And reached a tipping point.

There used to be a tremendous amount of methane and carbon dioxide trapped deep in the sea and under the permafrost, kept locked in hydrate layers under low ocean temperatures and the pressure of the land and sea above. Did you know that methane is about 20 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?

At the poles, warming occured quickly - as the ice melted, the albedo of the ground was lowered (less refleced sunlight), and the ground absorbed even more heat, accelerating the effect. And the poles were where the hydrate deposits were concentrated.

The polar ocean blew its lid. Literally.

As the permafrost melted and the ocean temperatures rose, there were more and more frequent episodes of "methane burps," a hundred-fold expansion in volume of the methane, carbon dioxide, and other volatile gasses in what used to be the locked freezer box of the arctic circle. All over the polar region there were vast bubbles, water spouts, earth and sea crumbling and cracking open as geysers of volatile gasses spewed into the air.

As the methane started its immediate interaction with the oxygen in the air, the carbon dioxide, heavier than air, would flow back down and out from these burps, smothering all living things in its path. Millions died before we could evacuate everyone down away from the poles, which had become a fickle abatoir. And we moved them from the only temperate regions left on the planet into the lower latitudes and what had now become a tropical hurricane machine of epic proportion.

These massive releases of greenhouse gases caused further rapid warming, which in turn released more hydrates, in a feedback loop. We later understood that such events had happened before. The Permian extinction event, in which 70-90% of all plant and animal species went extinct, was one. That time it was basalt magma eruptions which tipped the balance.

This time, it was us.

You see? There are so many more little vignettes like that, touching on global ecology, economy, scientific developments, social change, and other areas, and I am failing to see how they all fit. And more importantly, why they're being sent to me. What I'm supposed to do about them.

I go back to the first emails that started all this, and have a glimmer of hope in what he (I?) said. "...this kick-ass post-human world in which I now live..." Despite the messages detailing all the craziness, the mass deaths, the wars, the mistakes of science that took even more lives...despite all this, that must mean that things got better, right? That mankind came out of it all ok. That even I, and others of my time, survived to see a better day dawn.

But then I read another missive of misfortune, and I wonder...was that instead just my tendency toward bitter sarcasm coming out in the end?

I refute it thus!

2006-09-28T18:11:00.000-07:00

I just reread "Paradigms Lost", by John Casti. Published in 1989 (17 years ago), it presents examinations of the progression of thought on six "Big Questions" around humanity and its place in the Universe: Origin of Life, Sources of Human Behavior, Language Acquisition, Artificial Intelligence, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Nature of Reality. Although some of the science is dated, these questions remain as unanswered today as they were a generation ago.

These are all topics that fascinate me, and the temptation is to blog a bit about each. But instead, I want to blog about a related topic that I've been thinking about a lot. The way we posit a problem, the very symbols we use to represent it and manipulate it, contain in them boundaries and obstacles that often can get in the way of finding clear solutions (or at least clear paths).

Although terribly oversimplified, I'd like to use math to make my point. The number 12 can be represented in (literally) countless ways: 12, sqrt(144), 3 times 4, 2 times 6, 2 times 2 times 3, six plus 6, 144/12...you get my point, right?

Now, say the problem you wanted to solve was to divide 12 eggs among three people. Some of the representations above make the problem trivial. And some make it very awkward to solve. If wrote the problem as "If the number of eggs is one gross divided by sqrt(2x2x2x2x3x3), how many eggs should go to each of (30 +3)/11 people", it would be a bit harder to see the solution at a glance - you might have to work your way through it a bit.

All problems are like this. The path we take to a solution (if we can find our way to one at all) depends on the way the problem is formed, and the symbols we use to manipulate the problem space.

For the Big Problems, we tend to get stuck in paradigms of our own making (and perpetuated by cultural transmission, like a disease). These paradigms guide and restrict our thinking about a problem, such that often we can never see what is right before us in Objective Reality.

In fact, the concept of Objective Reality itself has often come under attack. Many ideas that reality is only as much as we perceive, or even that it requires our perception for reality to even exist.

An Example. The elevation of the measurement function to special status by Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics should have been sliced to bits at birth by Occam's Razor. If quantum probabilities required an observer to collapse into a single "real" state, then who in the universe was doing the obligatory observing for the 13 billion years it took for man to arrive on the scene?

Even if you take some mish mash Creationhagen view that the universe sprang fully formed once viewed by the "first consciousness", then when along the continuum of nervous system evolution did this occur? Humans? Protohumans? Anthropoids? Mammals? Eukaryotes? Viruses? Proteins? Molecules? And since we can't even firmly define what we mean by consciousness to this day, using it as the foundation for another theory seems to be building on quicksand.

No, reality existed long before we came onto the stage, and will exist long after. (Maybe - depends whether or not we make it through the singularity awaiting the end of man's childhood. If we do, there's a chance we could stick around till the end). Critical thinking skills seem to be rarely taught, either via informal cultural transmission or formal education. And it should be. When we are able to question the tenets of our thoughts back to their very foundations in Descartes like fashion, such that we can identify and recognize the boundaries of our paradigms, we can make progress in true understanding of the Universe As It Is.

It seems to be recognizing the truth through the fog of our paradigms that is the tough part, even when you're about to trip over it.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
--Boswell: Life

Usually the path reveals itself by its very simplicity. But its not enough to ask the right questions (a tough enough proposition).

You have to ask them the right way.

For The Love Of Terror

2006-09-12T17:39:00.000-07:00

I read the text of President Bush's 9/11 (2006) speech, and was struck more by what he didn't say than what he did.

Still linking our invasion of Iraq with the terror attacks of 9/11 (2001). Which I've always found ironic, since Saddam Hussein - though not an advocate of democracy and freedom himself - was strongly against fundamentalist brands of Islam found in Al Qaida and Iran. It was Al Qaeda who attacked the U.S., not Iraq. And it is Iran (and Syria) funding the attacks against the U.S. troops today.

Terror is an extremely useful weapon. This is true if you're Osama bin Laden (still alive and well on this fifth anniversary of his terror coup). And it's just as true if you're the President. Because you can use the weapons of fear to achieve your political ends.

If you're the Republican Party, you can use terror to scare people into voting to keep you in office. Because if you talked about the economy, or healthcare, or global warming, or trade deficits and national debt, or the state of New Orleans, or any of a dozen other issues that have a larger impact on most Americans daily lives, then those Americans might not find a lot of reason to keep you in office.

And even if you're with the President on this issue and don't go for this Daily Kos type rant, think about this. What does it say about a person, or a party, who places the continuing threat of terrorism as the centerpiece of an election platform?

Should it worry you at all that if the continuation of a threat is indeed the primary road to reelection, that perhaps there might not be a lot of incentive to have that threat go away?

I do agree that the rise of fundamentalist Islam is a threat to our safety and way of life. But every congressional (controlled by Republicans for 6 years now), intelligence agency, and military report on the terrorist threat says that the "war" cannot be won via military might. It takes economic and political infrastructure changes, education and training, democracy and enlightenment to fight terrorism.

A party platform that benefits from increased terrorism and that is harmed by effective programs to eradicate terrorism...is a platform that no rational individual, even those in great fear for their lives and safety, should support.

Postcards from a Post Human (pt 2)

2006-08-20T17:09:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't blogged again about the crazy emails from the future. The past couple weeks have just been too strange, and it's only now, as things start to settle down, that I even think to take the time to catch up.

As I review my last post, I see that I never got to explain the third email. That was the one that kicked off the week of weirdness.

You'll have to forgive me for not sharing it with you verbatim, but you'll understand my reasons in a moment. I'm happy to give you the gist, though.

Essentially, the email explained a series of steps that I should take to get my "mind into a receptive state" (which is how he - or I, depending on your degree of credulity, put it). After a short primer on Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, as well as a brief explanantion of a theory of the role of the frontal lobes of the brain in human cognition, I was instructed where to purchase a device that would help me "think better."

A brief background is necessary here to understand what happened next. It seems that the frontal lobes play a strong role in actually supressing or masking certain brain functions in other parts of the cerebral cortex. In a nutshell, all those talents exhibited by "idiot savants", such as phenomenal memory, mathematical calculations, attention to detail in art and drawing...all of these are present in everyone's brain. However, there are parts of the frontal lobe that actually keep these other areas supressed in a normal brain. Autistic children, many who have smaller or malfunctioning frontal lobes, often exhibit the latent skills present in these other brain areas.

Most autistic children become so absorbed by the detail of what they see and hear that it overwhelms them. Normal human brains supress these capabilities. Why?

The theory is that while it may have served our small prey ancestors well (as it does other prey animals - read Animals In Translation for more on this), the development of the ability to model the outside world and predict events became much more useful. And you can't do that sort of modeling/prediction well if you're too absorbed with how the light from the sun highlights those pretty auburn hairs on that big kitty - the tiger gets to make a big snack of you.

Those "idiot savants" aren't really idiots - they just don't have the ability to turn off those portions of the brain which provide those savant skills. And normal humans don't have the ability to turn them on.

Till now.

Enter Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and it's cousin Direct Current Stimulation. I won't bore you with the details (you can follow the links or google for more), but basically these techniques allow the activation or supression of specific parts of the brain. They are used today by neuroscientists in mapping the brain.

They are also used by early post-humanists to activate or supress parts of the brain to unlock more of the brain's potential.

After purchasing the components described in the email, I was ready to begin.

Well, almost ready.

"Are you fucking out of your mind?!" Pam yelled at me. She, of course, was the one person who was my confidante in this crazy venture. "You're going to shoot a bunch of electricity - through your brain - on the say so of some stupid email?"

We'd been over this. Over and over. Apparently, even though neither of us could explain how someone could pull it off, Pam was still convinced that the emails were some kind of hoax. Some kinds of scam, who's punch line had yet to be revealed. An early April Fool's joke, with me playing the Fool.

"You don't have to watch," I said, as I sat down and carefully adjusted the location of the transducers. "But if you'd like to be helpful, you could help me move this to the right spot - this mirror isn't helping me much."

"Oh no, I'm not touching that thing. You turn yourself into a drooling vegetable, I'm not having my fingerprints on it." Pam threw up her hands and started to walk away.

"Could you at least help me wipe the drool off the floor afterword?" I said as I tried one last time to align the headgear as close to the instructions as I could.

I heard her walk away down the hall, slow down, then stomp back. "Fine. I'll be here to call 911." She threw herself down on the couch next to me. "Idiot."

"That's idiot savant to you," I muttered. "Okay - here goes!"

I pressed the button.

The feeling was hard to describe. Slowly, I started looking around and seeing details I had never noticed before. The dust motes in the ray of light from the window. The reflections of light from the floor. A yellow book jacket, blazing in contrast to the others next to it on the bookshelf.

And sound. The dog outside, barking. A siren, blocks away. The sudden, very loud sound from the person right next to me.

I looked over at Pam, who was yelling at me, but I couldn't understand her. I knew she was saying something, but the meaning was just out of reach, like I knew that language was familiar but I couldn't quite remember what those words meant.

I tried to respond, but I couldn't remember how to speak the words either. I guess some sort of sound came out, because her expression changed and she grabbed me and shouted in my face. Which did not set well with me at all.

I was overwhelmed. I was swamped by the freckles on her face, trying to count every one. The cacaphony sound was so loud, and there were so many different, interesting sounds going on at once. And the reflections of the light from her earrings were like a sharp, physical pain cutting through my head.

I curled up into a ball to try to shut out the sensations, and eventually they faded. It all faded into stillness.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed. The lighting was dim, and it appeared to be dark outside the window. Pam was asleep in the stuffed chair in the corner.

I felt fine. I still had extraordinarily vivid images of recollection from the time just before I must have passed out. The dust. The book cover. Pam's freckles.

"Six hundred and thirty-two," I said, apparently out loud because Pam came awake with a start.

"Whaaa?" She cleared her throat. "What did you just say?"

"That's how many freckles you have," said, grinning. "Six hundred and thirty-two. Although a very tiny scar kind of cuts off one of them, but I counted it anyway."

Pam frowned. "Let me get the nurse," Pam said and turned to go out the door.

"No, wait!" She stopped and looked back. "It's okay. Really." I nodded. "I'm okay. In fact, never better." I smiled again when I realized it was true.

"You passed out. You scared the shit out of me." Pam said, still looking dubious as to my state of mind.

"I'm sorry. I must have done something wrong. But I really do feel okay."

She came back over to the side of the bed, an odd expression on her face. "What?" I asked.

She hesitated, then let out a long sigh and handed me a sheet of paper. "It came when you were doing your little experiment." She walked back to the chair and sat down.

She went on. "After all the excitement of the ambulance and shit, they said you seemed to be okay and just needed to come out of it on your own. I got bored just sitting here listening to you snore, so I went out to the lounge and checked my email. That," she gestured at the sheet in my hand, "was in my inbox. I figured you'd want to read it."

I glanced at the sheet. It was from him - me - again. It started out "Don't worry - you didn't hook it up wrong, and you haven't suffered any damage. In fact, just the opposite..."

I looked up at Pam, and she nodded. "When you said you must have hooked it up wrong, it reminded me."

The email went on to explain what had just happened. I had supressed portions of my frontal lobes, as well as Broca's area and other language related functions. At the same time, I had stimulated some of the pure sensory processing areas of my brain. This gave me an incredibly enhanced ability to focus on the detail of what those senses were telling me, without the executive functions and language areas getting in the way, trying to interpret and reinterpret what I was seeing and hearing.

Once the artificial supression was shut-off, the normal functions of those areas of the brain returned. But I had retained the detailed memory of what I had seen.

I could now recite, in order, the title of every book on my bookshelves. It was like I was reading them off from a photograph. When I tried, I could recollect where every item in the study was, from a ball of trash next to the trash can, to a piece of red thread that came from god knows where and was lying on the couch next to where Pam was sitting.

I could remember everything.

The email went on to identify a few more experiments to try, and we decided to wait until the next weekend to do so. I had to go to work, and Pam had things to do as well. And I wasn't ready to tell anyone else about this. Not yet.

Not until yesterday, when everything changed yet again.

(to be continued)

Bazaar Security

2006-08-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Why is it that advocates of market forces push capitalism as the best solution to everything - except when it comes to security?

I listen to arguments all the time about how we should just let efficicent market forces work in matters like retirement pensions, global trade, health care, and roads.

I even listen to capitalist extremists explaining why we should get rid of welfare, social security, and other "socialist" concepts ("this is a country of opportunity, and people who can't make enough money to live here are just lazy and undeserving").

Yet I never hear even these Ayn Rand wannabes advocating leaving the airline security situation to market forces.

Why not let the airlines compete freely? Some will offer the beefy security being dictated by the Bush administration - no toothpicks, shoes, or toothpaste allowed on-board. Others could offer the "security lite" version (maybe only 1 box cutter per passenger, school IDs accepted in lieu of government ID, etc). Presumably, the security lite version would be cheaper (and faster), and the heavy security version would be safer.

Let Americans decide which they prefer. Those who want to be protected against the 1 in six million chance¹ of being killed in a terrorist attack on an aircraft could gladly pay the premium for the privilege. Those who prefer to save their money for other priorities could do so as well.

We already do this with automobiles. In a given year, the odds of dying in a car wreck are dramatically higher than dying in a plane wreck (about 1 in 7,000, vs. about 1 in 400,000). And the odds of dying in a small car are almost double those in an SUV (59% vs 35%).

Yet we let people choose to drive over fly, and we let them pick the kind of car they want to drive in.

Heck, even Merry Ol' England, land of socialized medicine, has stauncher capitalist proponents that the U.S. of A. The CEO of Ryanair is threatening to sue the British government over their airport security restrictions as being overly burdensome on commerce.

Where are those staunch Republican Capitalists when they're needed most? Cowering? (Or do they just all work for defense and security contractors?)

¹(The odds of being killed by a terrorist are hard to identify, since they're usually lumped in with other kinds of assaults, but they are somewhat less than 1 in 77,000. With the odds of dying in a plane crash at 1 in 392,000, and 6% of those being caused by sabotage, the odds of being killed by terrorist sabotage of a plane are about 1 in 6,500,000).

Postcards from a Post Human

2006-08-03T19:19:00.000-07:00

The emails from the future began on a Friday.

Being in a hurry to grab a happy hour beer ($2 Shiner - beat that!), I noticed only in passing that someone had made it past my spam filter with an odd subject line - "Don't Open Till Saturday (merry xmas)." I didn't actually read it until the next day, well past noon and a very late breakfast taco.

Still a tad drowsy, but at least better hydrated and no longer with that stabbing ice pick pain behind my right eye, I wandered by my computer and remembered the email. What a great way to procrastinate, said my subconscious, so I sat down and logged in.

I know you're receiving this email, since it already happened. That is, I'm pretty sure you are, since I remember reading it so many years ago. It's important that you read my emails over the next few weeks, since it's up to you to kick-off this kick-ass post-human world in which I now live. If I remember correctly (too bad my augs aren't retroactive), you are a bit hungover when you're first reading this, but the thing that really stands out in my memory is that I'm supposed to tell you that the phone is going to ring in about 30 seconds. Answer it - it's important.

That's all for now. You'll understand better when you read the rest of the emails, but don't do it yet - just answer the phone.

Oooookay. That was weird, I thought. I saw that there were two more emails after this one, and I was about to click on the next one to see what the hell the punchline was supposed to be, when the phone rang.

At first I was a bit freaked, a tingling shudder running through my body. But then I laughed - life is absurd that way, with little coincidences occuring just often enough that you start to think that maybe life is a little more magic than it really is. You know how it goes - you start thinking about a song, then turn on the radio and there is that song playing. You think about a friend, and they call.

I bemusedly walked over to the phone, remembering the last time that happened. I had been thinking of Pam, wondering if I should call her, when the phone rang. It was of course Pam.

I picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Mike?" I knew that voice. It was Pam. I felt that tingle again, that pending sense of anticipation that something is about to happen.

"That was weird. I was just thinking about you," I started.

"Oh My God! That's just what he said you would say!!" Pam exclaimed.

"What? Who? Say what?" I know, I wasn't making much sense. But neither was this situation.

"Listen, are you home? Can I come over?" Pam said, a sense of urgency in her voice. "I need to show you something."

I looked down. I was still in my underwear from last night, hadn't taken a shower, and still smelled like cigarettes, beers, and bars. "Sure. Give me a half hour first, though - I need to take a shower."

"Whatever. I'm coming over right now." She hung up.

I figured it would take her at least ten minutes to get here, even if she walked out the door right now, which I don't think I'd ever seen Pam manage before (having to pick out just the right shoes, check her hair, and find her purse before even thinking of being seen in public). I started to get up and hit the shower, when I remembered the email.

I sat back down and reread it. Hmph. Very weird. I figured any one of my drinking buddies from last night could have sent it, knowing we were going out, knowing I'd be hung over. They all know I love sci-fi tropes.

But whoever sent it somehow knew about the phone call, Pam wasn't out with us last night. I suppose she could have known I was out, but even if she was trying to fuck with me, how the heck did she time the phone call to coincide with the prediction in the email so closely?

Ah, how about a return receipt on the email? She could see when I opened it, then could time the call pretty closely to the time I would finish reading it. Good trick. I smiled. Pam was my friend because she was always coming up with ways to keep life interesting. I'd have to give her a pat on the back for the effort, but I thought she might be a little disappointed to see how fast I figured it out.

Wait. There were two more emails from the same address. Now interested to see where the off-season April Fool's joke was heading, I clicked on the next one in line.

Ok, you should be done with the phone call from Pam. And no, it wasn't - isn't? - her sending these emails. (English syntax doesn't handle time anomalies well at all, does it?)

Pam is going to come over and tell you a story about the email she got. Yes, that was from me too. I'd tell you what was in it, but you'll find out soon enough.

Look, this isn't one of your friends fucking with you. (Well, I suppose you could interpret it that way, but you'd be missing the point). Trust me. Well, ok, you don't have to trust me, just go along with me for a bit - consider it an adventure. It'll make a great story for your blog. (I know - I have a record of it still.)

Here is what you need to know.

I'm going to tell you some things over the next few weeks. If you follow up on them like you did before, then you're going to end up living through some very interesting and exciting adventures. And by the time you get where I am now, you'll be very glad you did.

When you're done hearing what Pam has to say, read the next email I sent. You won't have time right now - she's going to ring the doorbell any second.

Oh crap - Pam.

I looked down at my watch. Crap, she could be here any minute, and I still haven't taken a shower or gotten dressed. I started to get up, then paused. If I click on the email now, then this asshole - who I surmised is supposed to be me talking from the future - would be wrong, wouldn't he?

I started to sit back down and click, when I heard the door open and Pam shouting out "Mike? Hello? Where are you?"

Shit - I needed some pants. I jumped up and grabbed my jeans from last night and threw them on, buttoning them just as Pam walked into my bedroom. "Oh, there you are." She sniffed, then wrinkled her nose. "I thought you were going to take a shower."

"I was. You got here too fast."

"How long does it take to walk 10 feet and turn on a shower?" She put her hands on her hips. "I don't want to hear you giving me a hard time anymore about taking forever to get ready."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." My head was starting to hurt again. "What was so important you had to rush over here?"

"Why? Don't you like to see me? Am I keeping you from all the important things you were getting accomplished this morning?" Pam liked discursive sarcastic banter. Said it kept conversations more interesting if they took three left turns instead of one right turn getting to the same place.

"Please." I put up my hand. "No harranging till I can get rid of this headache."

"Ha! Serves you right. You're the one who just had to be Mr. Funny last night with your inebriated email." She gave a little snort. "You techies. Can't you just drunk dial like everyone else?"

Email. I remembered why Pam said she had to come over. "Email?"

"This." She pulled a folded sheet of paper out of her purse and handed it to me. I opened it up.

Sorry about the obscure return address - hope this makes it past your spam filters.

You're not going to believe this. In fact, you'll think it's some sort of joke. And in a way it is, but not in the way you think.

Here's the thing. I'm going to make some predictions. You're going to see that they come true. Then you're going to drive over to Mike's house as soon as you can and get him to explain it all to you. He's the only one who can help you figure out what is going on.

Here's the first prediction. You normally have coffee and toast for breakfast. But this morning, for some reason, you decided to have cereal instead. While you were eating the cereal, you were watching the news and saw that the American winner of the Tour de France had failed his second (or "B") test.

Here's the next prediction. You're going to look up and see your cat licking the milk from your cereal.

Now call Mike. Right now. Tell him you're coming right over. Don't worry - he'll be expecting your call - in fact, he's thinking about you right now.

And don't forget to print out this email and take it with you.

I looked up at Pam. "Did all this happen?"

She looked solemn and nodded. "Exactly like the email said. At first I thought it was some joke, but that bit about the cat...when I saw Spot licking my cereal bowl I about had a cow." Spot was her cat. "But then I knew it had to be a trick. You wrote it, right? Do you have me under surveillance or something?" She sounded half mad, half scared.

I shook my head. "You need to see something."

I turned to go read the third email.

(to be continued)

Vice Versa

2006-07-31T06:09:00.000-07:00

I saw "Miami Vice" the movie yesterday. It was entertaining enough, but during the whole movie I could only think about one thing. How could anyone volunteer their life and sanity to work undercover in drug enforcement?

I found it sad. Not lame - heartwrenching. Here are some of the bravest, most dedicated law enforcement officers this country has, and they lose their lives over something as trivial as keeping someone from taking a toke off a fat boy. There's something fundamentally wrong here.

Are drug lords vicious animals that should be put down with no more thought than a rabid dog? Probably, although I've never met a real life drug lord. But given the violence going on at the Texas border, it does appear that they are monsters with no care for the lives of others, even those uninvolved in their dirty little war.

But why does the drug trade attract such scum? Because there are immense riches involved. Amounts which put to shame most country's GNP. To be a drug lord is to be one of the richest people on the planet, where you can literally buy *anything*.

Why is the drug trade so profitable? Because it is illegal. Illegal means that legitimate business, regulated and taxed businesses, will not touch it. Illegal means that only those individuals willing to break any law are willing to handle the production and distribution of the merchandise.

The demand for drugs doesn't appear to change appreciably whether or not the drug is illegal. The drug purchase rate in Amsterdam isn't appreciably different than the estimated rate in the U.S. (estimated because it is difficult to get accurate data on illegal drug demand in the U.S., whereas in Amsterdam, where many drugs are legal, the demand is easy to calculate. If you want a proxy in the U.S., look at alcohol and tobacco sales figures). There always has been, and always will be, a reasonably high demand for recreational drugs.

By making the production, distribution, and sale of many drugs illegal, we funnel that demand into some very narrow channels. Only the most barbaric winners of the darwinian selection of ruthlessness get to run the international drug operations. Only the worst of the worst prove themselves worthy to receive the billions of dollars we are willing to spend on illegal drugs.

And if it were just about money, that would be bad enough - worth discussing how much better off the world would be if those dollars could be funneled into government and legitimate private businesses instead.

But it isn't just about the money. It's about the lives lost. The lives of some of our best law enforcement personnel, who could be infiltrating terrorist cells instead of drug rings.

And that's a tragedy.

License To Breed

2006-07-08T21:40:00.000-07:00

A recurring theme that comes in discussions with my friend is the concept of a "license to have children." (Yes, my friends are an eclectic and irreverent rationalist lot - I love my friends.)

The basic premise is this. You need a license to drive a car. You need a license to cut hair. But any dumb ass in the world can have kids on a whim.

We should require a license to have kids.

The prerequisites could be prenatal care instruction, basic child psychology, and a personality assessment of fucked-upedness to see how much you'd screw up any offspring with your issues. Remedial psychotherapy to establish base levels of self-esteem, emotional equilibrium, and thoughtfulness (ie, maturity) could be government subsidized for those who flunked the initial exam.

The idea isn't crazy. There is a tremendous amount of experimental evidence demonstrating that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children - child abuse, sexual deviance, violent aggression, abandonment, and anti-education poverty mindsets are passed on to children via upbringing from parents with these problems. Why inflict more generations of such pain upon children? It isn't necessary, and can be helped.

But there are problems with the concept. I'm not talking about the immediate aversion to the idea by the majority of humanity who believe that having children is their "God given right" - these are the ones who I wish weren't having children in the first place.

No, the main problem is around an aspect of human nature that is so intrinsic, so embedded in the norm (rather than some pathology like those listed above than can be remediated).

This aspect is the abuse of power.

If there is a truism that has withstood the test of time, it's that Power Corrupts. In the case of child licensing, the question is - Who decides? Who gets to make the rules for who gets the license?

Any system put in place to license the production of children places the decision making power of who gets to have kids in the hands of a few. Even a well meaning, well drafted initial concept would evolve (devolve?) over time as it is "tweaked" by those in power - those who reward loyalty, who buy influence, who crave power.

Like most human systems to date, this would be yet another tool for those who have to have more, and those who have not to have even less. The inverse square law of nature plays out over and over - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Those with the power to grant children would grant it to those like them, and gradually withold it from the rest.

If we could devise some balance of powers scheme, like our tripartite government structure, then perhaps the concept could work to a degree. But alas, it seems to be yet another utopian dream, the planned society gone astray once again.

It's too bad - so many children suffer today, only to grow into adults needing psychotherapy - only to become the next generation of parents to fuck up their children.

But given human nature, I'm not sure that Breeding Licenses are the way out.

You're Fired!

2006-06-30T07:47:00.000-07:00

I just had to let someone go.

Ok, let's be honest. I chose to let someone go.

Man, do I feel a migraine coming on.

I've had to do this a number of times since becoming a "pointy haired boss" some years ago. Most of the time I have just been the messenger, letting people go as a result of corporate wide layoffs. Those were tough, but I took solace in the fact that the reason these people's lives were being turned upside down was a result of a "corporate" decision. (The Corporation - that pathological cold-blooded entity).

Getting terminated sucks in a huge way. Your whole life is turned upside down. One day you're worrying about where you're going to eat lunch, the next you're worrying about whether you can afford to eat lunch. You go tumbling down the pyramid of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs straight to the bottom, worrying now about food, shelter, and family.

A few times, I have made the decision to let someone go. A couple times, it was due to some criminal or ethical violation, and again, I took some solace in the fact that I was on the side of good, protecting the other employees or the company from malfeasance.

But a couple times, like today, I made the decision to let someone go based upon performance. My subjective evaluation that they weren't providing what I thought they should be providing in the position.

Me, judging my fellow man, then condemning them.

As with the other cases, I try to take some amount of solace in rationalizations, like "If I didn't replace this person with someone better, then the team will fail, the company will fail, and this would negatively affect everyone." Better for me to make the call, make sure we don't fail, and sacrifice the one for the many.

But in the end this is just rationalization. It still makes me physically ill to let someone go.

I question whether if I had been a better manager, communicator, mentor, whether I could have gotten the necessary level of performance out of this person. It would be so much easier to do what I see so often, and what I myself have done on occasion in the past - do nothing, and hope it all works out.

But whenever I've done that in the past, I've regretted it later. Poor performance begets poor performance. Allow a weed to live in your nicely manicured lawn and pretty soon there are more weeds. And more. At some point, the weeds win, and you have no more lawn.

I'm not looking for sympathy. It's not my life that just got hit with a sledgehammer.

But it still feels that way.

Wish List

2006-06-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked this by an online friend.

What do you want for your birthday?

Here was my list.

Another 100 years

A book of 365 "Memorable Event of the Day" coupons

The love of my family

The love of a stranger

To be propositioned by a witty online friend.

Oh...and a chocolate cake. God I love chocolate cake...

Of the people, for the people

2006-06-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the radio this morning and heard an interesting comment. To paraphrase, the comment was that you cannot win against an insurgency that has the support of the people of a region.

Although the comment was in the context of lessons learned in Vietnam, I wondered if there were any examples where an insurgency was able to be eliminated by the use of force.

Vietnam - certainly not. Afghanistan - ask the Soviets, who spent ten years trying to use force to supress the "Afghan rebels" (and who have spent the last seven years trying the same thing in the Chechen Republic).

Going back in history, I can find times where an insurgency has been supressed for a period of time, but it always seems to emerge immediately upon any perceived weakness on the part of the stronger force. Examples are the French during the Nazi occupation, Palestinians during Israeli occupation, Bosnians during Serb occupation. It appears that only in extreme examples where genocide is used does it appear the the user of force can win against an insurgency that has taken hold among a local population.

In fact, it seems that the longer force is used in a region against the people of that region, the stronger the backlash grows until eventually one of three outcomes is reached:

The outside force leaves the region, leaving it to the (now extremely pissed off) insurgent population.
The outside force causes such a population reduction that the insurgency is no longer viable (ie, genocide)
The outside force and the region's insurgents reach a political compromise in which both parties resolve future disputes via non-violent means (multi-party governing structures or diplomacy).

The primary question for Iraq, then, is whether the insurgency has taken hold among the local population, or whether it is largely fueled by fighters imported from outside the region. If the insurgency has indeed taken hold among the local population, then there are only three choices for US policy:

Leave, and let the insurgents take control
Keep killing until there are no insurgents (no local population) left to speak of
or attempt to find a political compromise that would allow the insurgents to participate in a multi-party government

This last option was actually used earlier in Iraq to overcome the insurgency of Bani Sadr, so there is at least precedent for it in the region.

The only way to ignore the hard choices above is to convince ourselves that the local population of Iraq actually loves us, and it is just imported fighters that are killing our troops.

The sad thing is, I think this may have even been the case very early on in the occupation. But the longer an occupier uses force in a region, the more likely that inadvertent civilian casualties occur. I think the US troops have been remarkably careful to try to avoid civilian casualties, but if bullets and bombs are flying around, "collateral damage" is unavoidable.

The more civilian deaths occur, the larger the number of civilians who hate the US and want revenge. The more civilian deaths occur, the more the local insurgency grows. (This is known to the insurgents as well - it has been reported by some that the recently killed insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would cause local civilian deaths as a way to incite the local population. It doesn't even matter whether the deaths are directly caused by the US. If the population believes that the deaths are occurring because the US is present, then they will want us out and at least partially blame us for the fact of the deaths.)

So even if the insurgency didn't start out as a locally supported one, it inevitably has become more so as time - and civilian casualties - go on.

I don't disagree that there needs to be the presence of US force to help bring insurgents to the negotiating table. Without any counterforce, there is no reason for the insurgents not to just take charge of the country militarily. But without negotiations, the insurgents will only get stronger over time.

The insurgents are now part of the indigenous population. They are "of the people." And our style of government is supposed to derive it's authority from the people. It is supposed to be "of the people, for the people." Whether or not we agree with them. Whether or not they all agree with each other. It is their country.

It's time to start to negotiate a political solution with the insurgency. Or else our troops will keep on dying, only to get to the day where the last of the Americans are being evacuated on the last helicopter to leave an overwhelmingly hostile Iraq.

Some Things Never Change

2006-06-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

I just started a new job this week. It's funny, but the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Just about every company I've gone to work for attempts to develop software using the same antiquated methods. It's as if there has been nothing learned in the past 30 years about how to develop more software, of higher quality, quicker.

It's not that the people I work with are stupid. Most of the time, far from it. It's just that they've never been exposed to a different way of doing things. Or, if they have been exposed, it's in drips and drabs of techniques that are attempted only academically - read in a book, attempted to be applied out of context in an environment where they add little value, and then determined (amazingly!) to add little value.

One of the reasons I think this is so is that most people evaluate the product of software development at a fairly gross level. In other words - did we turn out some software that did something? If we did, then we must be doing it right, right? Because so many software efforts don't even turn out anything that works.

Unfortunately, this is more a statement on the dismal state of the software development field than it is about the efficiency and effectiveness of the development methods employed.

Assessing questions such as "could we have produced more working features with the same level of effort," and "could we have produced this same functionality with fewer defects, or in a shorter period of time" require some of the very techniques that are shunned by these organizations. Techniques of estimation, productivity measures, defect velocity and density and other quality measures.

And since these techniques require a certain overhead (and since anything that adds overhead must, by defnition, take away from the amount of time there is to develop working code), most organizations fail to see the value or choose to take the risk of their introduction. After all - if it isn't broke, don't fix it, right?

Unfortunately, this utilitarian wisdom ignores a couple realities that eventually come back to bite the organization in this mindset. Two that I have seen first hand include growth and competition.

Let's make the optimistic assumption that the company is growing. Techniques that work with a 5 person team do not work with a 15-50 person team. Organizations that haven't gone through certain growth plateaus make the mistake of assuming that they can just keep doing what they're doing now, but just do it "bigger." But it isn't just a matter of scale - larger organizations require fundamental differences in communication, data tracking, management, and planning.

It would be like the police assuming that "hey, it only takes a couple cops to manage an unruly bunch of a few individuals...so to handle a riot just takes more cops, right?" Well, yes...but if all you do is add more cops, each doing their own thing, you end up with an even worse mob run amok (because now it's an aggravated mob run amok). It takes more cops, yes, but organized into police lines, supported with barriers and special equipment, with strategies for containing and channeling the crowds, and rules for who to arrest and who to ignore. I use this example, not because we can all relate to police tactics, but we have all seen the result of mob rule. The behavior of the mob is fundamentally different than the behavior of a small group, and must be managed differently. Or you get riots run amok.

The second reality ignored by this attitude is competition. It may be true that you are turning out working software. It may be true that it is working well enough for customers to buy it and use it. But what happens when a competitor moves into your niche? Now, not only must you produce working product, but you must produce more of it, faster, and better, than your competitors. Whoever produces the most of the best quality will win. And here is where you need to ask the hard questions - can we produce more than we are? Can we produce higher quality than we are? How?

Anyone who has spent much time in the software industry can vouch for one fact - it is an extremely competitive industry. It doesn't take decades to unseat an established large company leader (like some of the durable good industries, like autos or appliances). In software, he who executes a good idea best, wins.

To be a winner, be your own strongest competition. Strive to get better in all dimensions - before someone else beats you to it. The casualty rate of software companies is higher than in just about any other industry (I think maybe the restaurant business has as high of a rate of failure).

So why do software companies never seem to learn from history? I have a lot of ideas about this, none of which I think I can prove. It has to do with how software is taught (or more specifically how people learn to be programmers); about the differences between hard goods and soft goods, and how lay people can assess the relative quality (I can kick the tires - harder to kick the bits); how the category "software" covers anything from your thermostat controller, to sales management, to MySpace pages (and how any engineering discipline that said you could build a bridge the same way you build a circuit board is doomed to failure of overgeneralization); and perhaps a few others.

Which, from a personal perspective, is all ok. I know how to build software - it's why people hire me. So I suppose I benefit from the state of the industry.

Which, come to think of it, is probably the main reason it doesn't change. Like politics, or our screwed up healthcare system, there are too many vested interests in the way it is now.

Postmodern Gender Bending

2006-05-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Most people are aware that the pace of technological change continues to grow. Moore's Law is a term anyone in the technology industry is familiar with.

Most people are also aware how quickly our laws and lawmakers keep up with these changes. (Here's a hint: They don't.)

There's one area in particular that I think is going to result in some extremely viceral and viscous arguments in the near future (5-10 years). The concept of gender identity.

Background
(for those who just hate my pedantic style, skip to the next section)

For the history of humankind, there have been essentially two genders - male and female. There have been homosexuals throughout history, and societies have varied in their recognition and acceptance (from the homophobia in the west, to Native American two-spirits and Arab Xaniths). But even homosexuality has been, until recently, a behavior rather than an identity. And behavior can be legislated (however foolishly).

But what about identity?

Sex change operations became technically feasible this century, with the first documented operation in 1930. (I don't count eunuch's as a change in sexual identity, although perhaps I should. But I believe documentation supports that eunuchs still considered themselves as male. And although there are hormonal changes that occured, these are not anywhere near the same as the hormone treatments to replicate a female hormonal system).

Only since the 1950's has medical science actually specialized and made progress in this area. Much of this development was driven by children who were born with physical sexual differentiation variations (e.g., males with a uterus, females with an XY karyotype, children with XXY or XYY chromosomes). Many of these children were medically "forced" into one of the two "normal" sexual types early in childhood, such as documented in the case of Lynn Harris.

Today, a change in sexual identity from a man to a woman is very well along, and that from a woman to a man a bit less so. (The ability to construct a physically viable vagina appears easier than constructing a working penis. Or perhaps it's just because there appears to be more experience in the man to woman transition - it appears to be more popular).

... in the USA, it is estimated at 1 in 100,000 for male-to-female transsexuals and 1 in 400,000 for female-to-male transsexuals. In England – 1 in 30,000 and 1 in 100,000 respectively. In Sweden 1 in 37,000 and 1 in 103,000 respectively. The ratio of male-to-female and female-to-male remains around 3:1, country notwithstanding. (link)

The legal system has struggled, and is still struggling, with how to treat these intentionally transgendered individuals.

How do we define "man" and "woman"? Do laws which define "marriage as a union between a man and a woman" actually mean anything? (I blogged about this a while back, so I won't belabor the absurdities again here).

New Horizons

The bottom line is that sexual identity is becoming more tied to the role we play, rather than the equipment we're born with.

And in the dawning age of virtual reality, these roles expand far beyond male/female, hetero/homo.

Identity is about role, and role is the face we choose to put on for the outside world. In virtual reality, these roles are no longer restricted to what's currently physical possible.

For great examples of some of the roles that people really want to play, the roles they identify with in their head, look at a virtual environment such as Second Life to get an idea of how varied these roles may become.

Already in the online world, we've seen people adopt roles of the opposite gender. We've seen people adopt roles of older and younger. These variations continue in some of the newer virtual reality spaces. These spaces bring visual and audible senses into play over and above text by creating both the simulation of a physical environment, and representations called avatars (which is the version of you that exists in the virtual environment). I'm already starting to see more extreme role playing with these avatars, from extreme BDSM and Gorean roles, to roles that aren't even human. (I found the number of people playing roles of some kind of pack animal - colloquially known as "furries" - quite astonishing.)

Since I'd prefer not to put an Adult Material warning on my blog site, I'll not go into many of the roles and actions I've observed in Second Life. The point I want to make is that they are quite varied, and imaginative.

As more and more business is conducted via the internet, I believe these virtual spaces will be used to conduct more and more global business exchange. Video teleconferencing will merge into virtual environments. Meetings, reviews of contracts, white board discussions - everything done in office conference rooms today could be done as well in one of these virtual spaces. There are already some attempts at formalizing some law around digital signatures, contract discussions, and such.

In fact, virtual property law is quickly moving into the mainstream. As people sell virtual objects outside the games, collecting real world dollars as a result, the laws governing commerce, property, and theft are starting to come into play. This month New Scientist had a great article covering various aspects of this.

But social interaction will continue to grow as well. For example, there are already Second Life marriages (including marriage planners, dress and cake designers - in other words, virtual analogues for everything in Real Life). Say a marriage in Second Life is conducted by an authorized representative, and a marriage license exists. How do state, national, and international law deal with weddings conducted in virtual reality?

They don't, but they'll have to eventually. And forget about the homosexual marriage laws. How will the nonsense of "one man, one woman" be worked out? Is it your avatar's sex that will count? Or is the concept of there just being two sexes already becoming obsolete?

What about workplace discrimination? If your virtual avatar is obese, or of a different color, or of a different species, can you sue for discrimination? Is it still sexual harassment if your avatar is touched in an unwelcome manner?

Even the extreme taboo areas, such as pedophilia, require rexamination. The laws today in most countries only make it a crime if an act is performed in Real Life. Here in the U.S., law agencies can lure pedophiles into a net by establishing an online relationship, but the crime only occurs when the pedophile attempts physical contact with the minor for expressed sexual purpose.

But what about cybersex? Many of my online friends tell me that the emotional impact of cybersex is as strong as physical sex. While the physical gratification may not be the same, the emotional bonds, the sense of connection, and the effect of heartbreak are as real as any experienced in the Real World. Is not the emotional and mental effect of cybersex on minors the same? Is real pedophilia already taking place online?

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

For those who track such things, the crash of the internet and legal structures is already happening quite loudly in the area of intellectual property law. And for most people, this is a dry, academic argument.

Imagine the sound and fury as the social collisions between online worlds and real world laws continue to grow.

ID 2

2006-05-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading a book by James P. Hogan, Catastrophes, Chaos & Convolutions. Throughout, Hogan challenges "mainstream" science with alternative theories. Among these is Intelligent Design.

It was disappointing to see a rational, logical thinker so readily adopt such an anti-science point-of-view. But I'm seeing it in a number of otherwise rational people, and I'm trying to puzzle out why.

Here are the primary arguments of why I think Intelligent Design doesn't rank as a useful scientific theory (although a prior post and an even better in-depth critique can be found here in Judge Jone's recent Pennsylvania decision). In a follow-on post, I'd like to talk about why I think people are starting to turn away from science as an approach to understanding the world and improving our quality of life.

Bad math.

ID advocates often use probability arguments, making a case for the likelihood of a given event being so remote as to be virtually impossible. Using examples such as there being 2E135 ways for 20 amino acids to combine into a small protein, then stating that the odds of a given useful protein emerging is 1/2E135 (which is a very small number indeed). This is like saying that the odds against winning the lottery are very tiny (1/100million in some cases) so it's not possible for anyone to win.

But people do win. All the time. Not only that, but the way DNA bases combine into amino acids actually allows for multiple ways to produce the same protein. Not only that, but most proteins primary function comes from 1-2 aspects of its shape, so there are multiple possible proteins that can serve the same function. What this translates to is that the odds presented against a given protein development are much more likely than claimed by ID.

The same argument is used against "viable mutations". In other words, the proponents argue that most mutations are harmful, so the genome couldn't change to introduce any really new sequences because the organism typically wouldn't live to propogate those changes. Some knowledge of genetics is helpful to understand why this not exactly correct. There are a number of places in the genome - in fact *most* - that are inactive in the current gene expression. These can be activated randomly by very slight changes in the genes which say what gets turned on and expressed when. Mutations can go on for years in these "junk" sections, and then finally be expressed - intact - after much change.

Not only that, but there are literally thousands of places in the active sections where mutations can be made without have dramatic effects on the resulting organism. Take blood types - A, B, O (which is just a lack of either proteins A or B), and Rh-factor (the postive or negative part of your blood type). These are all different mutations of the part of the gene that determine blood type, where the changes did not prove harmful to the organism. Even sickle cells, where the red blood cells are no longer round but are instead in a sickle-shape, don't damage the organism enough to be non-viable. In fact, sickle cells are likely another evolutionarily selected mutation, since the shape confers immunity to many tropical blood diseases such as malaria. And like most mutations, there are some potentially good aspects and potentially bad aspects.

This is how evolution works. It's messy. But very probabilisticly possible.

Bad Theory.

ID doesn't meet the criteria for a basic scientific theory. A scientific theory should accomodate the generally agreed facts, should be able to make predictions of heretofore unobserved evidence, and support the design of experiments to prove or disprove these predictions. ID does, in a way, accomodate the generally agreed facts, in that one could safely say that an extremely powerful designer could have developed and put into place all the evidence for the development of life over time that we see today. But it allows for neither prediction nor experimental validation - therefore it falls square into the realm of religion, not science.

Shell Game.

ID just moves the problem and creates an infinite regression. If an Intelligent Designer was responsible for creating life on this planet, then how did the life of the Intelligent Designer come about? The only outcome of this chain of logic that avoids an infinite regression is to form a theory about how the "original" designer came about through natural processes, or to simply throw up ones hands and declare that "there are some things beyond the ken of man" (a decidedly antithetical view to that of science).

Baby with the bath water.

ID is usually presented as an alternative to "Darwinism", one that better explains the gaps or controversies currently found in evolutionary theory discussions. It is true that there are many holes in our current understanding of evolutionary theory. The differentiation of species (related branches of biological organisms that can no longer interbreed) still lacks a solid, replicable model; Gradual vs punctuated/catastrophic speciation is still hotly debated; and the origin of life itself has a number of theories associated with it, some aspects of which have been supported by experimental evidence, but not all. But to then claim that because evolution is still a theory in progress, it should be thrown out and replaced with an idea that has even more holes and less evidence is a silly notion - that poor baby, sitting outside in a puddle of bath water. Did we throw out Newtonian mechanics when Einstein developed his theories? No - we recognized that Newton had it part right, and expanded our understanding and our theoretical descriptions (and designed new experiments to test the new predictions). Is there still some Einstein work to be done in evolutionary theory? You bet. But natural selection as a natural mechanism for causing what appears to be "directed" evolution over time has been demonstrated over and over again, in real life and in simulation. Unless someone comes up with a better, more predictive model (and "God did it" is not terribly predictive), then refining the basics of evolutionary theory seems like the most productive way to go.

Bad Attitude.

ID advocates in general share some traits with others in the world who reject the scientific method as a way to understand, predict, and successfully manipulate reality. One of these traits is the idea that if I can pick apart my opponents ideas, then that must somehow add validity to my idea. This is incredibly poor logic, and also demonstrates how poorly critical thinking skills are taught in our educational system.

(There's this great scene in "Thank You For Smoking" where the Dad demonstrates this rhetorical trick to his son. In the argument of "which is better, vanilla or chocolate?", the Dad just picks apart his son's position, then makes his point: I don't have to show I'm right. I just have to show you're wrong. If you're wrong, then I must be right!)

Human traits of desire for power, jealousy, xenophobia are easier to influence, inflame, and direct than the rigorous objective rational facilites that good science requires of its adherents. Demagoguery is more effective than rationality. In other words, science is a harder religion than many of the others available out there.

This is the premise of the next blog on this topic - the reason otherwise non-stupid individuals believe - and want to believe - in patently stupid ideas.

I don't have it figured out, certainly. But I have some ideas I'd like to put out there in the hopes that some of you can build on them.

Is Dan Brown the Antichrist?

2006-05-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

As the release date for The Da Vinci Code gets closer, I see more and more articles which attempt to "teach the controversy" (to borrow an apt phrase from Intelligent Design advocates). Dan Brown debunkers run rampant through the blogosphere and mainstream media.

And I have to ask myself - why the nuclear response? Is his fictional story really that threatening to Christianity?

Is Dan Brown the Antichrist?

Looking at it from the outside, it looks almost like the response of Islam to the release of the cartoons of Muhammed. Rising from the far corners of their extremism, fundamentalists express their outrage as the "insult" to their religion. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said in an audio tape aired by Al Jazeera that people who ridiculed the Prophet Mohammad were to be killed.

"If such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust they would have justly provoked a world uprising," said the Vatican's Archbiship Angelo Amato.

"This has all the evidence of something cooked up in the fires of hell," evangelical radio broadcaster James Dobson said on Focus on the Family.

So called moderates attempt to enlighten the "debate" by pointing out where the object of their criticism is wrong. However, most of the fact based arguments appear to be picking nits, and the primary (often only) source of evidence used in these "debates" is the religious tract which forms the basis of their beliefs (Koran or Bible).

Does the Koran forbid images of Muhammed? Did the Council of Nicaea severely edit the gospels to hide Jesus' human foibles?

I really don't give a flying fig leaf.

What is interesting here is the reaction. The perception of extreme threat, and the resulting explosive response.

What are these people afraid of?

If their religious dogma is so fragile, so feebly taught or its adherents so lacking in conviction that works of satire and fiction can so devastatingly undermine their very underpinnings, then perhaps it's time that the house of cards came tumbling down.

Certainly the Keepers of the Faith must worry - strongly - that their own beliefs are without reason. Otherwise, why run so scared?

I Blame My Parents

2006-05-13T18:07:00.000-07:00

I write so much on the nature side of the biology questions that I figured I was overdue for a nuture side article.

This one caught my eye. It's a theory of how the behavior of our father, and our interaction with him, sets the patterns in life that later will be seen in workplace behavior and interaction.

Styles of fathering can affect whether their children get along with others at work, have an entrepreneurial spirit, worry too much about their career, burn out or become the boss, Poulter writes.

So...digging ditches for a living? Unhappy that you're stuck in a dead end job?
Blame your father. The bastard.

(Of course, if you're rich and successful, you really owe Dad at least one good father's day give this June, ok?)

My thoughts about this? I do agree that relationship patterns established early in life tend to repeat themselves throughout a lifetime, unless conscious effort is made to change them. But I'd take the "Father Factor" with a grain of salt, yet to be demonstrated in any controlled experiments or statistical analyses.

Poulter, by the way, describes his own father as the absent type. After this book, he said, "my dad won't even talk to me."

Is it in his eyes?

2006-05-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Does he love me?
I wanna know!
How can I tell if he loves me so?

(Is it in his eyes?)
Oh no! You need to see!
(Is it in his size?)
Oh no! You make believe!
If you wanna know
If he loves you so
Its in his kiss!
(That's where it is!)
- It's In His Kiss, Aretha Franklin

But what if you can't kiss him? What if you only have a picture to go by? What can you tell?

Turns out women can tell at least a couple things by looking at a picture of a man, according to this study.

Whether or not he likes kids (also, these were judged to be good potential long-term mates)
Whether or not they (the women) want to jump his bones (and here's a hint - it wasn't the great potential daddies who were elected boy toy)

And they say that men are the ones who want to "spread their seed." Sounds to me like there's a little bit of desire to hide the easter egg going on here, too.

Going South

2006-04-29T19:22:00.000-07:00

No sooner does South Park put on some brilliant season openers, than quicker than you can say "You killed Kenny! (You Bastard!)" the humor quotient plunges below Peter Griffin's IQ.

I know it's all Meg's fault, like always, but my friend has a different theory. His take is that ever since Comedy Central decided to censor the Muhammed episode, Matt and Trey are trying to kill the show by writing crappy episodes.

Thank Seth MacFarlane we still have Family Guy. And The Simpsons still manage to pull off some good ones. Let's hope my friend is wrong, and South Park can get back to cleverly offending multiple people on many levels at the same time.

Double Take

2006-04-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

I love studies in evolutionary biology. Inevitably we find that, though totally screwed up in interpretation, Freud had it right in the fundamentals - it's all about sex and death.

A friend tipped me off to this Nature article (thanks Jamie), in which we learn that men lose a large negotiating edge immediately after seeing pictures of attractive women in bikinis.

Now, to me, this seemed obvious. A bit like conducting a study to see if people grew nervous when confronted with an axe-wielding lunatic.

But, as I read further, it turns out there were some interesting new revelations. (And no, that's not a pun. I'm trying to give those up.)

It seems that the level of impact on negotiating ability in men is related to the man's level of testosterone. More testosterone - bigger impact. (The article doesn't mention whether or relative blood flow to the head was measured before and after seeing the pictures. And stop that - I said I'm giving up on puns!)

"Pictures of landscapes or elderly women, or handling a t-shirt, had no effect on the men's steely bartering power," according to the article. (Again, details were lacking. Was this a wet t-shirt? Were the elderly women Mrs. Robinsons? Were there any Miami Beach landscape shots?)

And although the data is clear, interpretation is varied.

Do men with high testosterone just get stupid when aroused? (I asked one of my cute friends this question, and she just giggled, patted my arm, and whispered breathily into my ear, "I don't think you're stupid." I lost track of what she said right after that.)

The study's authors come to a slightly different conclusion.

The sight of a potential mate might therefore actually make men more sensible, Van den Bergh says. "Since a few coins is better than no coins at all, men thus become more economically rational after exposure to lingerie or sexy women," he says.

So really, Freud almost had it right.

Sex. Death. And Money.

Understand those, and you understand men.

(And women, according to my post the other day...)

What Ruins Your Weekend?

2006-04-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

You wake up, hungover from Friday's "Happy Hour" that turned into a "Way Too Happy All Nighter". You don't recognize the room. You don't remember your host's name.

You get dressed (but can't find one of your shoes) and limp out to look for your car in the freezing rain, which you finally find but didn't recognize at first because of the broken drivers side window. So you leave, thinking about the only thing worse that could happen right now is to get into a wreck. Distracted, you get into a wreck.

So you're standing in the McDonald's parking lot in the cold rain with one icy wet sock on your foot and you call your friend to come get you, but he can't because he left for Las Vegas last night and didn't you get his message that he had an extra ticket for you?

As you weep silently, your girlfriend calls and wants to know where you are because she's been waiting for hours at your apartment to help you do your taxes, which are due on Monday.

Now all this was fine, except for one thing. The idiot at McDonald's put M&Ms instead of Oreo in my McFlurry. I can't stand that. It ruined my whole weekend.

Sugar Mommas

2006-04-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

Read an interesting tidbit in New Scientist about a soon to be published study.

Fhionna Moore and her colleagues at the University of St Andrews, UK, analysed questionnaires from 1851 heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 35. They found that as a woman's level of "resource control" increases - in other words as they become more financially independent - so does their preference for physical attractiveness in potential partners.

Women who had low levels of control over their cash rated the financial status of a man over his looks. Those with a decent source of income rated physical attractiveness more highly.

So basically, girls really are just like guys when it comes to picking a mate. As long as they don't have to worry about the mortgage, it's all about looks. And hot sex.

I'm actually seeing this among friends. One friend, recently divorced but financially secure, prefers men 10-20 years younger than she is. If we go to a bar with people over 40, she wants to move on.

Another friend is the same, going for the 25-35 set. She's not really even looking for a boyfriend - one of her new playmates is her "toyfriend" as she terms him.

We went to see a band the other night, and my friend was going to introduce me to the lead singer. When I asked how she knew the lad, she said he was living with one of her girlfriends. Seems that her friend (let's call her Mrs. Robinson) had this guy's band playing at her 40th birthday party, wherein Mrs. Robinson fell in lust with the lead singer, promptly divorced her husband, and now lives with her new toyfriend.

Now, I'm speculating here, but my impression was that the divorced 40-year old woman is financially secure, and that the young band guy is not. It's been a cliche for sometime that men act this way in their "mid-life crisis," dropping their middle-aged wives for some hot new babe. Turns out that men and women are more alike in this regard than previously suspected.

And it's likely not just limited to women "of a certain age." Just look at Paris Hilton, whose regular "he's hot" is the epitomy of praise for her myriad of partners. She's not seeking financial security - she already has it. She wants toyfriends.

This is all pretty consistent with old Maslow's hierarchy of needs, although we may need to tweak "Love" to "Lust."

Forget WMDs - It's about Freedom!

2006-04-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

You're in the reserves. You're returning from your second tour in Iraq (after a generous 2 month visit with your family after the first tour).

You made it. You're back in the U.S. The home of the free, the land of the brave. You take a deep breath. Can you smell it? Freedom! This is what you've been fighting for!

But wait...they're not letting you board the final connection home... Why?

They think you're a terrorist!

Your name is Marine Staff Sgt. Daniel Brown. And somehow that freedom thing you've been fighting for just isn't working out like you'd hoped.

Article - Minnesota Marine on terror watch list

WE will decide what's funny

2006-04-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

"South Park" Censored - Yahoo! News

The layers of irony here are thick enough to armor the Iron Giant.

The media, enshrined by our constitution as the last bastion of free
speech, in this article not only shows no outrage at the censorship
of a cartoon, but goes further to actively and one-sidedly condemn South
Park for poking fun at the Christian religion. (Although the outrage appeared to be lacking when the show previously showed Mohammed in 2001, or made fun of Scientologists - or even it's weekly poking fun at Jews).

And this for an episode which was entirely devoted to demonstrating how
the media and cartoons were the last bastion for free speech. And
where the forces of disingenuous special interests work to supress
free, if offensive, expression because they really just don't like the
cartoon and want it cancelled...and where, in the end, the brave
network doesn't cave in to terrorists and special interests...but hey, that's the fantasy of a cartoon, right?

"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its
freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it
values more, it will lose that too" - William Somerset Maugham

(or if that is too heavy handed, how about..."A mind is like a
parachute. If it doesn't open, you're fucked!" - Don Williams, Jr )

[This post was written by manatees. If you have any complaints,
you'll need to take it up with them.]

UPDATE: Here is a clip from 2001 when South Park depicted Mohammed. When Comedy Central had guts.

Here is a link to the original post I did on the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy. I posted the image of the comics. I'm sure I caused a huge riot, but it just didn't make the papers...

What's In YOUR Email?

2006-04-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

I received an email last night that caused a severe allergic reaction. Here is an extract.

I usually don't get too worked up over things but check this out.

AOL is BLOCKING all email INTO aol email servers that has this link:
[www.dearaol.com]
...
Also, if you have an aol email account they won't let you SEND an
email with that URL in it, they block it but they don't tell you
they blocked it. They just EAT the email and say nothing.
...
So, AOL is deciding I don't need to GET an email or SEND an email
based on CONTENT they don't like.

The link contains an "open letter to AOL subscribers" that is in opposition to an "certified email" program that AOL is advocating. From the "dangerous" website...

Subject: An Open Letter To America Online

We wish to express our serious concern with AOL's adoption of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail, which is a threat to the free and open Internet.

Apparently because AOL objects to the content of this web site, it eliminates all references to it in both incoming and outgoing emails that go through the AOL servers.

Here is what AOL tells it's subscribers when the link is blocked.

EXPLANATION:

There is at least one URL in your email that is generating substantial complaints from AOL members.

I'll be kind, and merely call this "disingenuous" at best. (After all, I wouldn't want to rant and have someone block this content, sue me for libel, or blacklist me for job opportunities.)

So the question of the day is: What is in your email? (And the follow-up: How do you know whether or not your email has been censored by a commercial entity that just doesn't like the content of your "private" email?)

UPDATE: Article in LA Times

Suicide by Blog

2006-04-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

I think I may have lost a job opportunity as a result of this blog. (Either that, or they found that porn flick I did back when I was young and needed money).

Either way...it's disappointing. I also happened to read an article in U.S. News where blogs are costing professors their tenure and graduates their job offers. So I can take solace (if not income) from the fact that I'm not alone.

What I take away from this event is that employers (some, anyway) would prefer the devil they don't know to the devil they do. In other words, the less they know about someone's personal life or beliefs, the more comfortable they are in hiring the person.

Here's what I've found out about people over time:

  a) everybody has issues

  b) everybody has parts of their life they'd prefer to keep separate from other parts

  c) everybody is a freak (in some way or another that somebody else out there would characterize as "weird")

  d) most people don't like someone very different than themselves

I imagine the reason that large corporations are able to function (to the extent that they do) with all these freaks working for them is that most people really don't know their coworkers very well. "Personal" life translates to "Secret" life. And ignorance is bliss. "If I don't know that your beliefs and actions outside of work offend some deeply held prejudice of mine, then I can work with you just fine. But if I do know, well, I just can't look at you - or work with you - the same way again."

I guess I'm just going to have to start my own company again. For a couple reasons.

  1) So we can have more employers that respect (even admire) people who aren't mundane; and

  2) So I can eventually have an income again.

UPDATE: I received an email from a friend asking what's probably the obvious question - "Why don't you just take down your blog for now?"

I thought about it, but have reached a point in my life where I no longer want to work with, or subsume my values to, a group of people who don't value vigorous intellectual debate and diversity of opinion. Not only is that environment unattractive, but I've been at enough companies to recognize that those groups will never do more than "B-team" work. Mediocrity becomes the watchword of the company.

So in a sense, this blog will continue to serve as another self-selecting filter in my life - attracting those of wide interests who like a good argument, and repelling those who seek only others who match and echo their own beliefs.

I may end up moving into a double wide, but hey, at least I'll have my principles... :-)

Attack of the Talking Cows

2006-04-06T12:02:00.000-07:00

I miss Gary Larson. But this helps.

(The video has been replaced with a link so that the singing cows will not keep annoying those who come to view later posts...)

Singing Cows

(I'm not a PETA advocate btw - I think most extremists are nuts, and most PETAs I've met are extreme. Don't believe me? Who else could come up with a video like that?)

Man Boobs

2006-04-05T08:45:00.000-07:00

Another in an endless supply of absurd lemming-think examples...

Why is it OK to show a man's breasts on TV? asks Bennett Haselton

Oh, to tap into that "because everyone else says I should" think for profit and gain - bwa ha ha ha!!

Question Authority (at your own risk...)

2006-04-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

A while back I wrote a post Question Authority, where I railed at the abuses of power and how citizens should fight back.

I still believe this. But it comes at a cost.

I read this story back in February, but didn't post it because to get the full impact, you need to watch about 20 minutes worth of video. (Fact: 20 minutes is the upper end of adult attention span. For web based articles, lengths of over 20KB are considered too long to maintain an adult's attention. This is likely why this blog has such a high exit rate...)

In the videos segments of reporting done by the CBS news affiliate in Miami, you can see the police of various precincts reaction to a citizen who wants to file a complaint against police, ranging from pleasant cooperation, to stonewalling, to outright intimidation and threats.

As a result of the story, the individual doing the investigation is now on the wanted list by the Broward County PD. (Broward PD also tried to get an injunction to squelch the airing of the story.)

This sort of power fungus can only be cleared by the harsh light of public exposure and censure. And vigilance - what's going on in your backyard?

"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." - V in V for Vendetta

Social Links

2006-04-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

With mucho time on my hands, I've been playing around with social networking sites and technologies. I'll post more later on any profound conclusions (should be a short post), but a couple of quick comments here.

Humans are social animals. The need to interact with other humans is a constant compulsion. Given a technology, we will find a way to turn it into a way to socially interact.

It's not just sites designed for social networking. Video games evolve into MMOGs, adding text and audio (VOIP) ways to interact realtime with others. Cell phone SMS and cameras grow into moblogging, and then tap into the video game and social networking sites (article today in WSJ - requires subscription).

Sometimes these techologies, when adopted for social networking, merely replace or extend an existing mechanism. (Dating sites replacing personal ads in papers. Voicemail replacing phone calls. Email replacing voicemails. IM, SMS replacing each with a strange mix of the immediacy of phone calls with the time-shiftability and history of emails.)

Sometimes these technologies create new social phenomena altogether. I wrote a while back on the transparent society created by the MySpace/Facebook crowd. (Tangent: interesting blog post on why some of these succeed and others fail). YouTube's sharing of video is creating novel interaction. I'm also finding Consumating.com's use of tags is also novel and interesting. Tagging as a concept is being expanded and adopted for means of social interaction that isn't dating, and isn't preformed "birds of a feather" groups like Meetup or Tribe. This is a kind of "self-forming" group dynamic, kind of like MySpace but different.

I recently read (although I wish I could remember where so I could link to it) an article that described the tipping point phenomenon among kids using SMS in the party scene. It goes like this: say there are about five parties going on tonight that you are aware of. You pick one at which to begin your evening. If it's good, you text your friends to come over, "hey, it's happening here!" If it's bad, you text your friends "where are you?" so you can go where it's happening.

While the distribution across the parties starts out fairly random and even, it rapidly coalesces to one party to which everyone converges. As your friends come to join you, they text their friends, and so on, until one party becomes quite large and the other die the death of insufficient energy.

Why didn't this happen with just cell phones? It probably did, to an extent, but if you're in a loud party you may not hear your phone, or may consider it rude to answer it while talking to others. SMS is there, available quickly but when you want to look at it, and you can check it fairly surreptitiously.

The net result: a new phenomenon, introducing the physics of the inverse power curve (Pareto Distribution) into the party scene of the 15-25 set (where SMS and IM is ubiquitous).

I think this space is just like the search space was some years back - it will go through a consolidation sometime in the next couple years, but there is a heck of a lot of innovation and experimentation that will go on before that happens.

It's a fun place to play right now.

Foxy News

2006-03-30T11:10:00.000-08:00

News broadcasters always seem to focus on Sex & Violence as sure fire ratings draws.

Sometimes, when it's a slow news day, they figure out how to combine them.

The Daily Show has it too easy.

(Thanks to Crooks and Liars for providing this clip - pick it up a the 40 second mark...)

The Long Ear of the Lawless

2006-03-24T20:01:00.000-08:00

Cynical as I tend to be, I'm astonished that the checks on executive power seem to be failing so badly.

I've been trying to keep up with the specifics of the warrantless wire tapping authorized by the current administration. The information has been trickling out slowly, despite repeated requests from congress to the DOJ to answer specific questions about the program.

The latest set of responses (characterized in this AP newswire story) would seem to indicate a number of new troubling concerns.

Among these:

No court warrant is required to tap any conversation between a person in the U.S. and a person outside the U.S.

Tapped conversations can include those between attorney's and clients.

Materials from these tapped conversations can be used in U.S. criminal prosecutions.

The administration can solely determine when the FISA court should be notified, and when it doesn't have to be.

The administration can cite no prior presidential precedent for the authorization of such a wide ranging program of electronic surveillance.

And finally, the real kicker...

- That electronic surveillance of parties solely within the U.S. (not a foreign communication), if merely suspected of being in any way associated with terrorism, is within the sole discretion of the administration (and may - read has - already been done).

The department also avoided questions on whether the administration believes it is legal to wiretap purely domestic calls without a warrant, when al-Qaida activity is suspected. The department wouldn't say specifically that it hasn't been done.

For those who care to look, a number of blogger's have already posted a number of video clips of President Bush making false statements regarding this program. These statements have gone from "we get court orders for wiretaps", to "anyone who discloses this program is aiding and abetting our enemies" (which, though not said, is also the specific language used to define treason).

I'm not a fan of impeachment. Though I wasn't a Clinton fan, I thought using the impeachment proceedings against a standing president for lying about sex with an intern was a gross misuse of the congressional check on executive power. (Although I now look back on those days fondly - if a president lying about his sex life was the peak of our problems, life was pretty good in the 90's...).

But if the power of impeachment, which is to use congressional authority to question the chief executive (not necessarily to remove him), then why isn't it being used in a case where the executive branch has stated, as clearly as they're ever going to, that they can make and execute laws without the oversight of either congress or the courts?

Has fear of our own government penetrated even into the congressional ranks? Or is the majority of the U.S. content with this slide toward facism, and their representatives are merely reflecting the will of the people?

Sometimes I feel like such an alien on this planet.

(Update: Good discussion here on current legal state of the debate, as well as how jumbled the media reporting is on the topic)

Gravity Sucks

2006-03-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

It may be trite, and it may be a bumper sticker, but it's true.

Gravity Sucks.

Near as I can tell, no one has a handle on how gravity works.

The Standard Model of particle physics posits a graviton (as well as a Higgs Boson that give matter the properties of mass). However, neither has ever been observed or measured. And recent analyses of how a Standard Model graviton must be created, it's frequency, and its rare interaction with matter indicate that none ever will be observed.

From the article (since it is subscriber only):

The gravitational force between a proton and an electron in a hydrogen atom is about 1040 times weaker than the electromagnetic force between them. This weakness reflects the extreme rarity with which gravitons interact with particles of matter, and for graviton hunters this spells trouble. "It is this incredibly weak interaction that makes directly detecting a single graviton phenomenally difficult," Rothman says...a detector placed as far from the sun as Earth is now would detect about 1000 gravitons. Placing the detector the same distance from a super-dense white dwarf or neutron star would collect up to a billion gravitons. That's one every decade or so.

It is this "rare interaction with matter" that really bothers me. Observation indicates that gravity affects all mass, constantly - not just an atom here or there every decade or so. So any "carrier" of gravity like a graviton must have high interaction with matter, or there must be a lot of them. I'm not a physicist, but I wish someone could explain this seemingly glaring discrepency to me.

General relativity tries to explain gravity as a warping of space-time due to the presence of mass. While it has proven very useful as an accurate way of describing what appears to be taking place, it doesn't explain why this curvature of space-time should happen, and what actually causes the property of mass also isn't explained. It is inconsistent with the similarly successful descriptive equations used in quantum mechanics. Nor have we detected the gravity waves that this theory predicts. So while this seems to have reasonable descriptive power, it lacks explanatory power.

Other recent articles are more intriguing. The most interesting I've read recently regard the Heim Theory. Consistent with Einstein's theory of General Relativity, (in fact, the tensors include those of Einstein's space-time, plus some others that have more ambiguous physical meaning) this theory appears to have great explanatory power, allowing for the derivation of mass estimates for known particles, as well as describing how both gravitation and gravito-photonic forces work.

There are some current experiments going on that may move us toward the Heim Theory. One at ESA (which was actually slash-dotted the last time I tried to access it, since someone posted a blurb on this experiment on /.), and another here which describes an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for an experiment to explore Heim-Dröscher space (based on Heim Theory). Both of these deal with using rotating strong magnetic fields, which Heim Theory says should induce a gravito-photonic force that can "reduce gravity".

A true understanding of gravity would have enormous implications to all walks of life. Not only would it finally break the deadlock on the development of a TOE (which in turn would unlock many other technology possibilities), it could have immediate effect on modes of transportation here on (and off) earth.

Stay tuned.

Millionaires Suck

2006-03-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

There are some really bad people in the world. And we reward them.

I was reading today that an Edvard Munch retrospective was coming to the U.S., and became sad as I remembered one of my favorite paintings.

Edvard Munch's "Skrik" (aka "The Scream", or "The Cry") was stolen in 2004. Do you really think the thief kept it? Put it up in his double-wide to admire over a cold Schlitz?

No - he fenced it, and the fence in turn had a buyer - a very rich one. A Private Collector.

When Baghdad's Iraq museum was looted of its treasures, most of the important cultural relics from some of mankind's earliest know civilizations were never recovered.

There is a large underground of antiquities dealers in the world who deal in stolen artifacts and art works. These are stolen from archeological sites and museums, and moved to these dealers as middle men. The buyers - millionaires.

This is theft, and the victim is human kind. We deprived of the knowledge and experiences these pieces can bring. (We are also deprived of associated tax dollars - and any attempts to do anything about it are squelched).

We can't fight millionaires. Millionaires can afford lawyers and years of litigation (we can't). Millionaires can afford to elect government officials sympathetic to their requests (we can't).

Millionaires get to be millionaires because we give them our money. After a certain tipping point, they no longer need us - the millions continue to make more millions. And an oligarchy forms.

We live in an oligarchy - not just in the U.S., but worldwide.

How to fight back?

(Okay, I admit, I saw "V for Vendetta" this week and my revolutionary fervor is up... :-)

My favorite line:

People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. - V

No Joy In Toy Land

2006-03-22T15:19:00.000-08:00

Recent 5th Circuit court rulings ensure that it remains illegal in Mississippi for one adult to sell a "sexual device" to another adult.

Selling a gun in Mississippi is okay. Selling a dildo is not. (link)

(Hmmm. What about a gun that is shaped like a dildo? The general shape is about right.... Naw, better forget about it - given the high incidence of accidental discharge - of weapons, I mean - this might end in tragedy...)

Texas also has a ban on sex toys, although they're readily available. You can't buy a dildo, but you can buy an "anatomically correct condom education model" or a "novelty toy not explicitly used for sex" - for now, anyway. When it comes to sex, drugs, and rock & roll, you can bet someone in your town is selling what you want.

(Although they might get busted, like this Baptist Mom did in 2004. What's whacky is that she wasn't busted for selling vibrators, per se. She was busted for explaining how to get maximal pleasure in using one.)

There are countries that are even more psychopathic about sex that we are, but not many. And those tend to promote suicide bombers (I wonder if there's a connection?)

Drunk Dialing the High Tech Way

2006-03-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

I've discovered (as I imagine most of you have as well) that there is a modern incarnation of the classic "drunk dialing".

Texting (or emailing) while drinking.

The ready availability of services on cell phones such as SMS texting and email have provided a new outlet for late night drunken rambling that would have been better left with the stale beer and cigarette butts on the bar floor.

The old style of drunk dialing is still readily available, of course. Calling (typically late at night) the old girlfriend who just dumped you, the new girl you just met over beers earlier that night, the (now ex-) boss who has been sucking the life force out of you, the (now ex-) friend who you believe slighted you in a way that becomes enormously magnified by blood alcohol content...sure, that'll never go away, particularly since you don't even have to scrounge for change to make the call. (Tangent - Will the next generation even know what a pay phone is?)

But texting is soooo much worse than calling.

Why? Because at least with the voice call, you can categorically deny the next day that you said anything close to what you're being accused of. ("No way I said that - you must have been completely stoned yourself if that's what you think you heard...and really, what I was trying to say was [spin, spin, spin]...")

But with the permanent record of text/email, you can run, but you can't hide. Your only clear choices to avoid inevitable exposure and public humiliation as the text is copied to all your friends, her friends, her friends friends, and major media outlets, are

moving out of town, or
hurling yourself off the roof of Speakeasy¹.

(I suppose you could try throwing yourself under a downtown pedi-cab, but death is very uncertain and the tire marks don't scrub out of your clothes).

We need a new cultural reference for this to separate it from the lesser evil of drunk dialing. Inebriated Email? Tipsy Texting? Smashed SMS?

Your suggestions are welcome. And my advice to you is...don't. Just don't.

¹For the non-Austinites in the audience, Speakeasy is a bar with a great open sky roof at the top of a million step staircase. ie, it's high enough to cause serious head trauma so that even if you don't die from the fall, you can claim to be brain damaged enough to act really puzzled anytime someone tries to bring up the incriminating text...

Compassionate Conversatism

2006-03-10T11:32:00.000-08:00

It's not just Cindy Sheehan.

Apparently a number of mothers of dead soldiers have developed an antipathy for W.

Like this mom.

Very sad. Doubly so, when the man who effectively killed your son appears not to care.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. - Jean de la Bruyère

Google This, Sucka

2006-03-09T09:38:00.000-08:00

What is the obligation of a public company?

(For the corporately impaired, a public company is one which sells partial ownership to outside shareholders, usually in the form of stock shares).

Is it:
a) To make lots of money
b) To make customers happy
c) To keep Wall Street Analysts fully informed of their plans and projections
d) To keep shareholders fully informed of their plans and projections
e) To deliver information required by law, and to equally inform the public at large (including shareholders, analysts, and potential shareholders) what information they plan to make public, then deliver on that promise.
f) All of the above.

The answer isn't (f).

Contrary to the opinion of investors, Wall Street, and reporters, the correct answer is (e).

A recent article in the London Times reports that Wall Street analysts are saying that it is time Google "step into line with the majority of US listed companies and begin publishing earnings guidance," theoretically in the interest of reducing share price volatility.

Google, as clearly published in their original SEC filing to go public, has always stated that they would not provide the usual earnings guidance to analysts that is routinely provided by other public companies. In the "normal" course of affairs, company CEO and CFOs routinely hold analyst calls and meetings prior to publishing SEC quarterly results where they provide "guidance" as to where they think their earnings will come out at the end of each quarter. These analysts then make a living by passing this information along to their clients, who pay them for this information.

Google decided that they would make any public information truly public, available to everyone at the same time, and let shareholders and potential buyers do their own homework, make their own assessments, as to whether or not to buy or sell shares at a certain price. (Theoretically, all public companies must make "public" information available to anyone who asks, but there is a long time complex relationship with bankers/analysts that create information intermediary niches that have been profitable for Wall Street - and many CEOs).

Google actually makes quite a bit of information available, from the classic analyst presentations and SEC filings, to a number of Google Blogs saying what's going on inside GOOG.

But what Google doesn't do (and what pisses off Wall Street) is share "special" information with analysts regarding precisely where their earnings will fall on a quarterly basis.

I'm sure the senior team at Google has their reasons. Having worked for both private and public companies (and private companies that went public), I can categorically say that the quarterly pressure of Wall Street drives dramatically different decision making regarding strategy, timing, and internal investment for a company. Adding to this is the typically compensation structure for top executives which is heavily weighted toward strong growth in stock price. When there is no counter pressure to Wall Street, you get Enron.

Google is trying hard not to be another Enron.

Unless you work on Wall Street, this falls into the "Good" category (vs. the "Evil" category, which is captured in the oft quoted Google motto "Don't Be Evil.")

So...back to the quiz that opened this post.

a) There are times where it makes more sense for long term viability to invest in new technologies, infrastructure, and acquistions, rather than take more to the bottom line. This is good for a company, but most public companies have a very difficult time doing this without getting punished by Wall Street (because it affects a quarter).

b) This is certainly a good idea, but isn't necessarily an obligation of a public company. Witness all the public companies you know that piss you off.

c) Most companies like to keep Wall Street on the inside track - this does help to a degree with promoting new share offerings, getting more exposure, and has other benefits. But is absolutely is not an obligation, and a strong case can be made that this is much akin to the politician/lobbyist relationship - a double edged sword that can cut off your head (either one) if not careful.

d) Keeping the public fully informed of plans and projections also means keeping your competitors fully informed of same. Not always a great idea.

e) Say what you're going to do, then do it. To do anything else makes a company unpredictable, and this is the sin of a public company. You don't have to say *everything* (see (d)), but you do need to provide enough information for potential shareholders to decide if they want to buy into your gig. It's up to the buyer to decide if they like what they hear or not.

Message to shareholders - if you don't like it, don't buy.

Message to Wall Street - Google This, Suckas

We Are What We Eat

2006-03-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

Just as our bodies are formed by the kinds of food we consume, so our thoughts are formed by the information we consume.

I find it deeply disturbing that a certain form of censorship has been established to "protect" our uniformed personnel in Iraq. As published originally here, the military has established controls on web site access which filter out sites that the censors find undesirable. In the follow-up here, it appears that there is a pattern to this censorship which tends toward the elimination of dissenting voices and opinions.

Pithy quotes that come to mind...

"The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts." --Thomas Jefferson

And an even better one, for this instance...

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. LEWIS

And finally...

"I have a bad feeling about this..." - Every Major Character in the Star Wars series - and we all know how well that ended up...

We Teach Backwards

2006-03-06T13:18:00.000-08:00

What is the point of our K-12 school system? One would think it was to teach students the skills and material necessary to tackle professional fields of study. But in actuality, it appears it is more used as a large sieve to filter out those who naturally learn well from those who don't, and break them into their lifelong paths of socio-economic class.

Take testing, for example. Tests come after the material is presented by the teacher. Worse yet, they are graded. A poor grade basically says "Sorry, you just didn't get it, student number 123 - and it's too late to do anything about it. Let's move on now..." It seems that this method of testing is measuring more the success of the teacher's teaching technique than it does the student.

If the goal of the system was for each student to learn a certain level of skills and material in a certain grade, then tests could be used to identify that material (and those students) that require additional time and assistance to learn.

But that's not how tests are used.

How about turning this around? Why not give a test, then use incorrect answers to lay out a study plan (ideally tailored to each student, but this could work in a mass setting as well). Break up the work into sections, then provide the instructional materials - and additional short tests - and iterate until the student "gets it". Then move on.

In fact, regular testing in and of itself appears to be a better learning technique that merely listening to a teacher or just reading material. Read an interesting little blurb about a study that showed that students who are tested frequently on material retain the information much better and longer than students who just study the material over and over.

I've discussed this "test first, ask questions later" approach with a couple of teachers, and it appears that this actually is a technique that is used a little bit, but not much. And the main objection seems to be that it wouldn't matter what the tests told them about each student, because they didn't have time to tailor instruction for each student individually.

Enter computers. You know what computers are really good at? Keeping track of mundane information. Organizing information. Repeating tasks without complaint.

You know what teachers are good at? (Or should be). Interacting with students, answering their questions, helping them understand a word, a concept, a technique necessary to advance in their understanding of the material.

So here's the proposal. Identify the material we want the kids to learn. (Done) Develop tests that evaluate whether the kids have learned this material. (Done). Put these tests on computers, and allow for self-paced administration of the testing. (This exists).

Give a comprehensive test at the beginning of the term. Have the computer spit out the list of items, by student, that they need to learn more about. Make the instructional materials available (instructions and worksheets - which are just little tests, if you think about it), have the student do the self-paced (but teacher prompted) "studying", retest, regenerate the list. The teacher is *always* there, but to interact and answer questions from the individual students. If a student is stuck, the computer could flag for the teacher's attention, and the teacher could tutor the student through the difficulty.

At the end of the term, we have a set of students who have learned the material and who (due to the testing technique) will retain it better and longer. Students who can move on to more material in the next term, and probably handle more material at a faster pace due to the fact that their building on a solid base of "getting it." (I've noticed that a large part of each years curriculum is to repeat the prior year's curriculum, because the students don't retain it after the summer break.)

Does anyone know if this is being tried anywhere?

Game Over

2006-02-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

“It’s like a game, Jimmy,” his father said. “Do you remember playing Civilization X last year?”

Jimmy nodded. He loved those simulation games, and Civ X was his favorite, allowing him to guide the development of a civilization over time, battling other countries, trying to get to the new technologies first. He particularly loved being the one in charge, intervening here and there to guide the civilization’s development along the lines he wanted.

“Well, it’s a lot like those games, but about a bazillion times more complicated.”

“There’s no such number as bazillion, Dad!” Jimmy was pretty smart for his age.

His father smiled. “Okay, you’re right. And actually, we really don’t know how much more complicated this simulation is. We’re using some new technology called quantum computing, and with a theoretical 2^1,000,000 qubits of processing power, it might as well be a bazillion. It’s a number so large that we really don’t have a word for it.”

Most of this went over Jimmy’s head, but he got the idea. A Big Simulation. Sounded fun. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on it! "When can I play it, Dad?"

"Well, we just got started. How about you let all us scientists play with our new toy for a while, and then when things settle down I'll let you take a crack at it?"

This was a little frustrating, but Jimmy knew that sometimes you had to wait. Waiting for Christmas sometimes was tough, but usually worth it. This probably would be too.

_________________

Jimmy’s dad lifted up his display specs, rubbed his red eyes, and said “Yes, Jimmy? What is it? Daddy’s a little busy right now.”

“It’s been over two months, Dad. When am I going to get a chance to play with the new simulation game?”

“It’s not a game!” his father snapped. Jimmy started to tear up, and his father’s face sagged, weariness spilling from his eyes. “Listen, Jimmy. I know I told you I’d let you play with it a bit. But it’s not turning out like we expected it to.”

Jimmy stopped sniffing. “What’s wrong with it?”

His dad shook his head. “Nothing's wrong with it.” He stared off at the wall of the room. “ It’s almost just the opposite...a bit too real” he murmured.

“What do you mean?” Jimmy asked. “Do you think it’s too real for me to take? C’mon, dad – I was able to watch that gory movie with you last week and I didn’t get scared.”

His dad looked again at Jimmy, with a half smile. “That’s true, champ. You’re pretty tough. Smart too." He seemed to come to a decision. "So let me try and explain what’s wrong, because I know you want to understand. Ok?”

Jimmy nodded eagerly.

“This simulation was to try to test out what we thought we knew of our theories of physics and the origin of the universe. We wanted to see how close we could get the simulation to behave like our current ‘real’ universe. With all the processing power available to us, we decided that we weren’t going to ‘start in the middle’ like with normal simulations. We wanted to start with some of the basic known parameters of space-time, set off a big bang, and let it evolve from there.”

“Didn’t it work? You didn’t get stars and stuff like that?”

“Oh, that part worked great. We got stars ‘and stuff like that’ within the first week of the simulation. Then we got more – a lot more.”

“Like what?” Jimmy asked.

His father hunched forward. “Like life, Jimmy! Or something that we think looks a lot like life. We used some of the computing power available to develop probes that could monitor the internal state of the universe simulation, just so we could track what was going on. And about a week ago, some of these probes detected what appears to be chemical activity that appears to be self-replicating. Some of it is based on a six-sided molecule that seems to mimic our carbon rings.”

Jimmy wasn't quite sure what some of these words meant, but he got the general idea. There was life in the sim! “That’s cool!” Jimmy exclaimed. Then, seeing his father’s solemn reaction, he asked “Isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s definitely ‘cool’. In fact it’s far beyond our wildest dreams of what we thought we could accomplish with this sim. We already had about a 100 papers we could get out of it after the first couple weeks, just based on the physics of increasing complexity we were seeing. But this development casts a whole new light on things.”

“Why?” Jimmy asked.

“Because if what we’re seeing really is life, in the sense that we think about life in the real universe, then we’re breaching an extremely sensitive area. People react strangely to scientists who tinker with life. Between those who's religious sensibilities are offended at anything that doesn't follow their dogma, to others who would probably want to ensure the ‘rights’ of this life form to be protected, we’d be pissing off just about everybody out there who likes to find a reason to get pissed off.”

His father stopped his diatribe abruptly, seeing Jimmy’s mute and puzzled reaction. “Look, Jimmy, it’s like this. We’re scientists. And most of us have families. We’re not looking to attract the attention of the crazy people out there that might overeact to what we’re doing here.”

“Do you think they’d hurt us, like those people they killed last week?” The images from last week’s news of the burning house, the family caught asleep inside, was still fresh in Jimmy’s head.

“Yes, Jimmy, I do. Those poor souls were only drawing comics, for god’s sake! If people are willing to kill over cartoons, imagine what they might do to scientists who they think are playing god.”

Jimmy put a solemn expression on his face. He would try to be grown up, like he knew his father wanted him to be. “I understand, Dad. I won’t tell anyone – honest!”

His father gave him a tired smile. “I know, champ. That’s why I knew I could tell you what was going on, and that you’d understand.”

“So what are you going to do with the simulation?” Jimmy asked.

His father started to rub his eyes again. “That’s the trouble, champ. There’s some division on the team as to how we should handle this. Some want to shut of the sim now, take the data we’ve got, and spend the next 20 years publishing results. Others think that we should let this continue to play out, see what happens.” He looked at Jimmy directly “A few wonder if we have the right to end the simulated life forms, if that’s indeed what they are.”

“That would be like killing, wouldn’t it?” Jimmy pondered.

“Yes. It might. That’s why we’re debating it carefully.”

Jimmy pondered for a moment. “Your secret’s safe with me, Dad. But just tell me what’s going on, ok? It’s all so cool!”

His father smiled. “You got it, champ. Thanks for being so mature.” He slipped his specs back down over his eyes, and was quickly lost again in the simulation.

_____________________________

It was dark in his father’s study. Jimmy slipped in quietly, not wanting to wake anyone. It had been another whole week, and his father hadn’t seen fit to fill him in again on what was going on. If anything, he had grown more withdrawn and secretive.

Jimmy figured if he wanted to know what was going on, he’d have to look into it himself.

He slipped on the specs, and entered the interface to the sim. Using hand gestures, he worked his way through some of the initial choices. He ignored a number of paths he didn’t understand, like “Planck level parameters”, “Quantum foam”, “Baryogenisis”, “Fermion Analogues”, “Phylogenetics”.

A bit of random tinkering rewarded him with a display of a world from an orbital perspective, with a number of status panels surrounding the visual presentation. It looked very similar to the Civ X interface he had played for so many hours, as had his father and friends. They must have based the interface to their sim on their familiar game. Jimmy knew that game inside and out. This was more like it!

Although some of the panels were not familiar, there were a few that were. He was able to navigate the visual perspective down through the clouds to ground level. But everything was just a blur, just a dark brown writhing mass of motion.

Jimmy peered over the panels, and saw one with an hourglass. Moving the slider here seemed to slow down the motion, until finally he was able to make out some detail. Finally, with further adjustment, the motion came to a halt.

Awesome! There was plant life everywhere, although none of it exactly looked like any plants he had seen before. Skimming over the surface, he found water, mountains, trees…and what was that motion? He quickly zoomed back to where he had seen something moving down in the corner of the display.

An animal! It looked like some kind of bird, but it didn't have any wings he could see. And…something else…yes! It was carrying something that looked like a stick. Jimmy zoomed in, and could see that the 'stick' was really a more elaborate construction. A spear!

His animal was running up to another similar looking animal. Jimmy followed, anxious to see what happened next. The first animal put its stick right through the newcomer. And then again. And again.

It was killing the other one! The resolution was extraordinarily detailed. The bodily fluids, the shredding of skin, the clear horror and pain in the victim's eyes... Jimmy felt sick.

“Stop that!” Jimmy yelled. But to no effect. The killing went on.

Jimmy looked around at the panels, frustrated. How could he intervene? Nothing he did seemed to be oriented toward interacting with the real-time display.

Time! That’s it. He remembered he'd had to adjust the speed of the display to slow it down enought to see the details. The speed of time in this simulation must be many times that of the ‘real’ world. This was true too in most simulation games, since no one wanted to wait around for thousands of years for civilization to unfold at its normal pace.

He couldn’t find anything called “life forms”, but he did see a choice called “Avatars”. He had something called an avatar in one of the net social rooms he frequented - an online, cartoonlike representation of himself for others in the room to interact with. This must be something similar for the sim. He selected this path, and was given a list of greek letters to choose from. He chose the one at the top of the list, Omega.

To communicate with these beings, he would have to use his avatar somehow to act for him in the sim. There must be a way to preprogram a communication, then have the avatar deliver it in the blink of an eye it would require in the ‘simulation time’.

Jimmy spent the next hour fiddling with the controls of the avatar interface. He finally sorted out a mechanism for programming the avatar for certain functions. Although none of these involved talking, per se, Jimmy found others ways of interacting with the ‘natives.’

He was able to program the avatar to perform certain functions, like sending thunderclaps, or creating tornados. A little more tinkering showed he could “part the water” by simply modifying the elevation of the ground level temporarily in specific locations. He could cue the avatar to look for certain behaviors, then create the necessary effects that should condition them to run like hell when they did something forbidden by Jimmy.

He now had some sticks - what about some carrots? Carrots...hmmmm. He went back out to fiddle with some of the game parameters directly. He was able to figure out how to create food stuffs out of thin air by modifying the molecular parameters. He grinned.

"I wish it were this easy in the real world," he thought. "I could make anything. I could make chocolate dingles any time I wanted!" Jimmy loved chocolate dingles, but his mom would hardly ever buy any.

Jimmy smiled. He would use his power for good, like a comic book hero. These people weren’t going to grow up to be killers like those psychos that killed cartoonists. It was time to lay down the law! He got to work.

_____________________________

Jimmy was sitting in his room reading when his father knocked and came in.

“Do you have a minute, Jimmy?” his father asked.

“Sure Dad. What’s up?”

His father sat on the edge of his bed and looked somber. “I’m going to ask you something, and it’s important that you tell me the truth.”

Jimmy sobered. “Sure Dad. What?”

“Did you play with the universe sim?”

Jimmy glanced to the side, uncomfortable under this father’s gaze. “Um. Am I in trouble?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Come with me, I want to show you something,” his father said as he got up and left the room. Jimmy followed.

They got to his father’s study, and he held up the specs. “I take it you know how to work these?”

Jimmy nodded.

“I have a recording queued up under avatar omega. You know what that is?" Jimmy nodded. "I was afraid of that. Please bring up the recording - I’d like you to watch it.”

Jimmy quickly went through the selections to the omega avatar. In the capture history, he found one near the top labeled “For Jimmy”. He selected it.

His viewpoint was back on the planet. Things had changed quite a bit. There were structures there, clearly shelters for the beings on the planet. The recording’s perspective took him inside one of these shelters where he recognized two of the beings similar to the animals he witnessed last time. In one of the bottom panels of the interface, there was text scrolling by, like a transcript. Jimmy watched, and read.

“Worry not, [noun360-endearment?]. [noun546-group name?] are angry. But we safe.”

“I worry. [noun546-group name?] come, hurt us.”

The recording skipped ahead a bit. The door to the house crashed open, and other beings dressed somewhat differently came rushing in.

“People talk. You not believe [noun66-high being?] [high volume]. You believe or die!”

Jimmy watched, sickened, as the attackers beat the couple. After the couple was lying still on the floor, the attackers then left and set their shelter on fire. He ripped off the specs, tears in his eyes. “Why are they doing that? Why are they still killing? I told them not to!”

His dad, eyes moist, came over to Jimmy and draped his arms around him. “Oh son. What have you done?” Jimmy started to cry.

His father patted his back, and murmured quietly, as if to himself. “We had such hopes that in this universe it could be different. That maybe, if we didn't interfere, there wouldn’t be real god-figures, and then there wouldn't be reinforcement for some of the extreme and fanatical hierarchical pathologies we see in other pack animals.”

His father paused for moment. “But I suppose we were naïve." He looked down at Jimmy. "It was tempting for others on the team, too. If not you, then probably someone else." He looked off again, as if seeing something beyond the wall. "Perhaps it was ever thus...”

Jimmy and his father sat in the darkened study, tears silently leaking from their eyes as they held each other, both mourning and not quite knowing why.

Jimmy suddenly looked up, hope shining through his tears. “But can’t we start the sim over again? Can’t we get a second chance?”

His father got a far away look in his eyes. “Maybe.” But then his shoulders slumped. He gestured toward the specs and shook his head.

“But they can’t.”

Will Chico's Carry Chadors?

2006-02-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

Today the U.S. State Department took a position that the press shouldn't publish anything that might be offensive to any religious group.

State Department spokesman Janelle Hironimus said "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable...We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices."

They were comics, fer (he-who-must-remain-nameless) sake!

We already know how tolerant Wahabi Islam is. Should our press not publish any negative comments about bin Laden, for fear of offending the faithful? Hindu's believe cows to be sacred. Should McDonald's Happy Meals be contraband?

How about religions closer to home. There are a number of fundamentalist Christian groups who are offended by abortion, homosexuality, profanity...the list goes on. Should our theaters not show "Brokeback Mountain" because it might offend these people? Should our newspapers not carry advertisements for it?

Comics are ideal for satire, for pointing out hypocrisy and deflating the self-important. Should we take Superman off the shelf because the Cult of Lex Luthor takes offense?

The official position of the United States appears to be yes.

Dead Wrong

2006-02-02T20:25:00.000-08:00

You're a cop. You encounter a hostile with a gun who starts shooting at you. What do you do?

Here are your choices:

Stand there until you get shot

Flee (and possibly get shot)

Shoot Back

I think it's reasonable to assume that the third option is the best by any sane measure. And it's reasonable to assume that if you shoot at a cop, you run a high risk of death by bullet. But some people feel that it is uncivilized or inhumane to kill people in this manner. And to their point, it is true that there are many instances of accidental shootings where the cop makes a mistake.

But wait - what if there was a way for the cop to shoot back, both saving their own life as well as those of innocent bystanders, and have a high probability of not killing the shooter? Enter Tasers.

Tasers are a wonderful invention. They disable the shooter as well or better than a bullet. They stop the danger. And they allow mistakes to be made without a lethal outcome - most of the time.

But it is this small percentage of times that they cause a death (the percentage is in debate, but the range of estimates anyone has ever put forth is 17-70 deaths since the introduction of the Taser in 1999 out of at least 40,000 uses. This puts a high limit at approximately 0.1%, or 1 in a 1000. And it is likely much less, since I used the highest death total I could find, divided by only the actual reported uses on file in the Taser database.

I can't find a similar stat on deaths by gunfire, but I'd be willing to bet a case of my favorite beer it's a tad higher. And the major injury rate would be staggeringly higher.

But here's a simpler way to look at it. If a cop were to shoot at you, for whatever reason, would you prefer he used a Taser, or his 9mm special?

I thought so.

So what kind of muddled thinking is it where some people want the use of Tasers outlawed?

Here's another great example in the So Stupid It's Amazing They Remember To Breathe category.

The US Army is sponsoring development of a laser weapon that is designed to dazzle (temporarily blind) anyone who is attempting to shoot at their helicopters from the ground. The device, being developed by ScorpWorks, is in the trial stage and has been shown to be effective. BUT...

The International Committee of the Red Cross is concerned. Aparently the 1995 Protocol IV addition to the Geneva Convention bans blinding laser devices. Guns, bombs, grenades...these are all ok. A laser that has any potential to cause permanent blindness is not.

Now again, I don't know about you, but if I'm attending a wedding in some village sometime, and a US Army helicopter believes it is under fire because one of the inlaws was crazy enough to fire his AK-47 in the air in celebration, I'd prefer to be bathed in the soft glow of coherent light as opposed to blown to bits in an 4,000 rpm minigun maelstrom.

But that's just me. I'm weird that way.

Talk About A Tough Dress Code

2006-02-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

As Bush took the podium to make the case against tyranny, the Capitol Police were arresting representatives from the Axis of Evil.

The first, Cindy Sheehan, was sitting quietly in the gallery, in a seat reserved for her by Congressman Woolsey, wearing a t-shirt that read "2,245 Dead. How many more?" Although a statement of fact, it was viewed as a disruptive demonstration inside the Capitol. The charge was unlawful conduct, with a penalty of up to one year in gulag, er, prison. She was arrested, removed in handcuffs, and held for four hours and released on bail.

So there's a good question. How many more must die to support, er, protect us from tyranny, to defeat those who would repress dissenting points of view and stifle free speech?

The second, Beverly Young, the wife of 18-term Republican U.S. Rep. Bill Young of Florida, wore a shirt that read, "Support the Troops." While President Bush was at the podium saying "support the troops", Mrs. Young was asked to leave the gallery. She was not arrested or charged.

Aside from the easy sarcasm relating to the unequal treatment and first amendment issues, you gotta wonder what goes through the heads of the people who make these decisions. Is there just a really tough dress code, like at my kid's school? Does the supervisor for the Capitol Police have part interest in a t-shirt concession, and "no outside t-shirts, food, or drink" are allowed?

Whatever the reason, apparently Bush approves, since he's chosen not to comment on the actions nor make amends. Although maybe he'll campaign for Young next election.

As long as his wife shows up wearing a "We Love Young-Bush" t-shirt.