The literature of the fantastic - out of the dark ages

In Which It Is Shown That All Human Things Are But A Dream | Metafilter

Metafilter has a link filled post featuring the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili", a novel of the fantastic thought to have been published in 1499. When I read things like this, I wonder too about what has not survived. One wonders what this author would make of our world. From one of the links:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, with its unpronounceable title, indecipherable text, and unidentifiable author, is one of the most puzzling, enigmatic and fascinating books ever conceived. Since its publication (1499), it has surprised its readers with its vast knowledge of architecture and landscape and garden design, but also engineering, painting and sculpture. Part fictional narrative, and part scholarly treatise, the book is, in addition, an extreme expression of erotic furore, aimed at everything, especially architecture, that the protagonist Poliphilo encounters in his quest for his beloved Polia, whose name translated from the Greek as meaning "many things." The book is also a political manifesto defending the right of women to express their own sexuality and the superiority of Eros, beauty and knowledge over aggression and war. Liane Lefaivre, in her Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, is the first to attribute this strange, dreamlike manifesto in defense of humanism to Leon Battista Albert.

The power of open source and collaboration: spam from hell

Spammers' New Strategy (washingtonpost.com)

The new method of attack reflects the evolving sophistication and efficiency of top spamming groups, a community of people who support each other by trading intelligence, products and services.

Spammers are refining and extending the collaborative environments of the open source community. They are now masters at using the internet to share and develop techniques. They behave very much like "strategies in a game"; where the game follows the rules of natural selection and adaptation.

An individual spammer is a feeble thing. A community of collaborating spammers is a terrible weapon of great intelligence.

Hive mind. Market economy.

Fascinating.

Did you think you understood Abu Ghraib? Another part of the story.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Triage at Abu Ghraib

As I wrote ages ago, an idiot could write a play set in Abu Ghraib. A playwright should write a story for the ages.

In the meantime, two researchers write in the New York Times about an Abu Ghraib inquiry they conducted for NEJM. The bottom line: A general should take the heat. Ideally Rumsfeld should, but that's only in an alternate reality. (For the uninitiated, running out of chest tubes is a bad sign. These are used when someone's has an open chest wound, often from a sharp object.)

... During an inquiry we conducted for The New England Journal of Medicine, the doctor, Maj. David Auch, told us that some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were psychotic and out of control. One, he said, would repeatedly strip off his clothes and smash his head against the wall. After handcuffs and a helmet failed to stop him and with straitjackets unavailable, some soldiers suggested the leash. Major Auch granted their request. "My concern was whatever it took to keep him from getting hurt," he said.

It is easy to criticize Major Auch for allowing M.P.'s to use a leash, but it is difficult to say what he should have done instead. He had antipsychotic drugs on hand but no psychiatrists to prescribe them, and he lacked the experience to give these powerful drugs himself.

So the leashed detainee went untreated, as did hundreds of others with mental disorders. The lone psychologist who accompanied Major Auch, First Lt. Joseph Wehrman, was troubled by what he found on their weekly visits. Up to 5 percent of the detainee population (which averaged 2,000 in late 2003 and early 2004) was mentally ill, Lieutenant Wehrman told us, but to his knowledge, none of the prisoners received medication.

The atmosphere at Abu Ghraib hardly promoted sanity. Mortar shells landed almost daily, according to military personnel we interviewed, and prisoners often rioted, sometimes using smuggled weapons, with deadly effect. In late 2003, Major Auch's unit set up a field hospital, bringing a full-time medical presence to the prison for the first time. For the dozen or so clinicians assigned to the hospital, the daily routine was surreal.

At times the hospital lacked basic supplies, according to members of the clinical staff, and at times it maintained a surgical service without surgeons. Sometimes the hospital ran out of chest tubes, intravenous fluids or medicines. Medical staff members improvised, taking tubes from patients when they died and reusing them, without sterilization.

Physician's assistants and general practitioners amputated limbs, a dentist did heart surgery, and Major Auch begged and bartered with other medical units for drugs and intravenous fluids. When they ran out of blood sugar test strips for Abu Ghraib's many diabetics, according to a medic assigned to the unit, they gave insulin by guessing the dose and watching for bad reactions.

Amid murderous shortages, there were paradoxes of plenty. Major Auch's men received sophisticated equipment like digital X-ray machines, several said, but they weren't taught how to use it. And in fact, a psychiatrist was assigned to Abu Ghraib for a few months. But he treated no patients; that wasn't his job. He was supposed to help military intelligence make interrogation plans....

...But we are not inclined to blame Major Auch. The men and women who risked their lives to care for Iraqis and Americans alike were put in impossible circumstances by indifference or worse from above.

... at Abu Ghraib, the Army all but abdicated its responsibility to provide care to the thousands of people it kept in custody. This neglect bred dire conditions and desperate measures.

The catastrophic failings of medical care at Abu Ghraib put American lives at risk and violated the United States' obligations to care decently for detainees. The soldiers who snapped and posed for the photos of abuse are being called to account. But the focus on their culpability diverts attention from the causal relationship between the Pentagon's priorities and the hellish conditions that both prisoners and their captors endured. This larger story, of conditions that ensured neglect and invited cruelty, is being ignored.

Fame of a peculiar sort for an amateur reviewer

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer

Update: This is indeed a parody. I think the author was a bit too subtle, but it is arguably a work of genius. I live in St. Paul, so Garrison could be my neighbor -- though since Garrison Keilor is a famous figure here I wonder if his "pseudonym" is a pseudonym as well. As noted in Macintouch:

I had an inkling I'd heard of "Jorge Lopez, MCSE" before. I recalled a similar article creating quite a stir in the Linux community about a year ago. And here it is: "Windows vs. Linux on the Server and the Desktop" from October 2003.

The divisiontwo.com site is the home of quite a bit of edgy social and political satire. Though the "columns" are attributed to several people (with photos!), it's apparently all written by one Garrison Netzel of St. Paul, MN. Netzel is to be congratulated -- he's even managed to get a fawning review of WindowsXP by "Jorge Lopez, MCSE" published in a couple of computer club magazines in Florida!

I'll let my original comments stand. Yes, I was taken in!

---

Jorge Lopez has written a review essay exposing the shocking truth about the Mac Mini -- it doesn't have a 5.25" drive bay. Also, it can't run Norton AV and Ad-Aware. And since Safari doesn't render MSN as expected, it's not standards compliant.

I really thought this was a parody, but it looks quite sincere. Yes, he's also getting millions of links and buckets of emails, but the absence of Google AdWords suggests there's no method to his madness. The review is more than just conventionally bad, it has the same peculiar fascination as those "write like Hemmingway" essays. Awful yes, but artfully awful.

Perhaps, given the volume of such reviews (see mine for example), this is the inverse of a horde of monkeys tapping out literature. Among tens of thousands of amateur reviews, a small number will go beyond being silly to being awful yet fascinating. (Ok, so John Dvorak has been doing this professionally for over twenty years ...)

Anyway, I hope Jorge doesn't take this too seriously. He is transiently famous and it would be good if he can laugh about it. It's something he can tell his kids about.

On the other hand the fact that Jorge has bought and tested a Mac Mini does suggest the darned machine might be some kind of a breakthrough. Maybe Jobs will decide to fix Apple's $#! bundled iPhoto 5 app ....

Sleeping on the plane: an iTunes playlist?

BBC NEWS | Health | Listen to music to help you sleep

Looks like we need an iTunes playlist of music that fits these research results. Put it together w/ some nice noise cancelling headphones (sigh, Bose is $300 ...) and your iPod and sleep your next plane ride away.

If I do one I'll publish it to the Apple site and link to it from this page.

The music group were able to choose from six tapes that featured soft, slow music - around 60-80 beats per minute - such as jazz, folk or orchestral pieces.

Listening to music caused physical changes that aided restful sleep, including a lower heart and respiratory rate, the researchers found.

Why no company will again make devices to fit into the front pockets of americans

Google Groups : comp.sys.palmtops.pilot

Well, at least until we either alter our genes or find a therapy to treat and prevent obesity. From a posting I just made to usenet on my frustration with the current lack of front-pocketable PDAs (I fixed a typo induced by Google Group bugs.):

...I saw the other comments about using a belt holder, etc. They are all true, but they don't quite address the focus of my complaint. I used a Vx for years, it worked well in my front pocket.

True, I'm a tad heavier, but my pants are proportionately looser as well ...

Uh-ho. (Little light bulb goes off over John's head.)

I think I just answered my question. There will never be another PDA designed to fit in a man's front pants pocket. All future PDAs, phones, etc will be sized for either a minimum of a suit-jacket pocket or a belt clip. This doesn't mean they have to be big and fat, but it's a different size specification than a pant pocket (the shirt pocket was never practical -- that pocket can barely hold a pen).

We americans are just getting too heavy. You can't put a PDA in a back pocket (obviously), but the number of americans who could actually put a Vx in their front pocket, and have it survive, has significantly shrunk over the past five years. Obesity is moving into this space.

Basically, the bigger we get, the less useful front pockets become. Like our appendix, they are an evolutionary vestige of earlier days. Weight and age have made them obsolete.

In the world to come we will indeed have to get used to belt devices, or backpacks/purses, or the return of some variant of the "mens suit jacket/leisure jacket".

I'll probably go the route of the beltable device, but I can barely stand one such. Two are unthinkable. That means, despite my dislike of paying over $250for a fragile and easily lost device, I'll have to get a Treo 650. I just need to find a way to insure it for loss and breakage...

meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, usability, PDA, CLIE, Palm, PalmOne, Palm Vx, form factor, market, physiology, human factors, obesity, weight gain, demographics, clothing, evolution, pockets

Why our 75 year social security projections are worse than worthless

SiliconValley.com | 02/01/2005 | HP plans gala retirement party for Moore's Law

Bush's social security "crisis" is based on the 75 year projection for social security revenues and costs. Then there's this ...

Just as the transistor replaced the vacuum tube, so will the 'crossbar latch' replace the transistor. That's what Hewlett-Packard is claiming in a bit of research published today in the Journal of Applied Physics. Just a single layer of molecules thick, the latch is essentially an electronic switch that can flip a binary 0 to a 1 and vice versa, one of three basic operations that make up the primary logic of a computer circuit. For an industry driven to build ever smaller devices with more computing power, the crossbar latch could be the breakthrough that sidesteps Moore's Law and leads to computers that are far smaller and more powerful than those today. 'This is the final piece of the puzzle for building a molecular computer,' said Phil Kuekes, senior computer architect and primary inventor at HP's Quantum Science Research unit.

Quantum computing experiments are progressing faster than predicted. Molecular computing projects are progressing equally quickly. The Progeria gene has been isolated. Nanotech surfaces allow paintable solar energy conversion. Human-animal hybrids are being experimented with. High school students will, within 10-15 years, be able to synthesize new fused viruses. Heck, physicists are just starting to figure out what dark matter and dark energy might be -- and they constitute most of our universe.

And meanwhile, we're declaring a crisis based on 75 year projections in social security.

Please. Let's get real. We're on a raging rapid that's heading over a cliff. We have no bloody idea what's going to happen on the other side. It might be a nice calm pool. It might be a thousand feet of rock. It might be just slightly faster rapids (I doubt it). A 75 year projection is worse than worthless because it's a pointless distraction.

We ought to focus on battening the hatches, on strengthening our safety nets and reinforcing our social structures and communities, on helping Africa to salvage itself and on reducing misery and hatred in the cesspools of the earth (ok, so the whole earth is by some measures a cesspool, but I'm speaking relatively here). The better we prepare our raft, and the more flexible it is, the more likely we are to make it over the edge. Ready or not, we're going there. Your children are on the raft.

Why I'm beginning to root for the video pirates

Boing Boing: Apple restricting DVD region-changes -- voluntarily! -- UPDATED

I don't have pirated music or video. I'm one of the 4 people in America who pays for their shareware software. Nonetheless, this entertainment industry behavior is causing me to root for the pirates.

[DVD] Discs have region-codes and players have region-codes. If you have a Region 1 disc (US and Canada) and a Region 2 player (Europe), and you put the disc in the player, the player will reject it.

But what happens when you take your laptop from New York to London? You're in Region 2, but you bought your device in Region 1. Can you buy a disc in London and play it on your computer?

Yes and no. When a computer manufacturer gets a DVD-decoding license from Hollywood's licensing cartel (the DVD Copy Control Association or CCA), it is allowed to make players that can change regions up to five times.

What's more, once the region-switches have run out, computer companies can reset your counter at a service depot a further five times. That means that you get 25 region-switches. This sucks pretty bad: I moved from San Francisco to London with hundreds of Region 1 DVDs and now when I buy a movie in the shop, it's Region 2. That means that if I watch a movie from my US collection once a week, and once from my UK connection the next week, I'll run out of region switches in three months. Three months after moving to the UK, I'll have to throw out half my DVDs.

It turns out Apple doesn't do the reset service on their embedded DVDs. So what's the workaround? Pirated video.

This nonsense is self-defeating.

Ghosts of the Golden Age: the computer as an aid to thinking

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Essay: Tool for Thought

One upon a time geeks dreamed that computers could help us think. They are good at what we are bad at, we are good at what they cannot do at all. Vannevar Bush wrote about that dream in the 1940s, though he described it in terms of microfiche. (He actually knew about computers, but that knowledge was classified. I don't know for sure, but on reading his article I was left with the impression that he used "microfiche" as a code for what he could not say aloud.)

During the minicomputer era of 1970s very innovative software was developed to aid collaboration and education. Most of it is long forgotten -- even I cannot recall the names (Plato?). In the 1980s the dream again arose, I have a classic Whole Earth Catalog book on personal computing full of fascinating green screen DOS applications that tried to help people think. Lotus had Agenda and then Magellan.

Then came the Dark Ages. Microsoft swept all creativity aside in its race to power, and then the wonders of the Internet led creative minds in another directions. There were applications in finance, health care and other domains that solved particular problems -- but many of the ones I know of have more or less vanished (Iliad, QMR). (Ok, so many went underground, into devices like EKG machines.)

Steven Johnson claims the dream has life left in it yet. He describes the experience of using a full text document management tool to manage his large information repository - DEVONThink (an OS/X app). Over time his large knowledge collection is beginning to have "emergent properties", to turn into something that's not quite his biological memory but is far more than a filing cabinet. Something akin to Vannevar Bush's Memex, or Dickson's "Encyclopedia" or Ted Nelson's "Project Xanadu".

I've had a similar experience with using Lookout for Outlook, and, to a lesser extent, using Yahoo Desktop Search (X1). A lifelong knowledge repository seems to compensate, in some ways, for the memory loss of an aging and overflowing brain. Tools like DevonThink, YDS and Lookout are helping make this repository real.

Inline skates for a 2 yo -- not so easy to find!

Google Groups : rec.sport.skating.inline

It took some work to find a place in the US that sold the Roces Orlando skates discussed here. Very nice skates, although my wife was more fond of the $15 toy skates from Walmart (fortunately they were broken out of the box -- leaving an open door for Dad to order the hard-to-find real thing). Our daughter is zooming around the house on these, her primary focus is now on skating backwards.

Points to usenet for solving a problem the search engines didn't help with.

Good news from an unusual source and a soldier's noteworthy comments

Salon.com News | The Shiite earthquake

Juan Cole is a fairly severe critic of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. In Slate he wrote: "The Sunni Arab populace continues largely to support the guerrillas. Over half in a recent poll said that attacks on the U.S. military in Iraq are legitimate."

Wow. Only "over half"? That suggests it's not even 60% among the most resentful of the Iraqi population. That's much better than I'd have guessed.

Like most of the world, I am very much hoping Sistani was right about this election. I am a strong critic of Bush/Rumsfeld, but I thought they were right to stick with the deal they made with Sistani (not, of course, that they had a choice!). We'll see how it goes.

On more of the good news front, a BBC quote from Lt Bryan Suits:

It was slow to start, but it finished like a carnival everywhere I looked. I was proud to stand between Iraqis and the men who would deny them freedom. It was an exhausting four-day event for me and my men, but they slowly understood how monumental these days would be in the future.

Two brothers, both in their late 70s, drove to the polls to cast the first vote in their lives. Civilian vehicles weren't allowed on the road for 24 hours, but the polls were six kilometres away. If they couldn't drive they couldn't vote. As an American, it was an easy choice for me to make. They voted.

An hour later they stopped us as we patrolled, and they thanked us profusely. Their sons and grandsons also joined in with an impromptu circle dance called a "dabka". One of the men said: "God sent you to give us freedom." My Iraqi translator, who's a practised cynic, became silent and looked away. The man put his hand on my American flag patch and then kissed his hand. I pulled the flag from its Velcro and handed it to him. My translator took a picture as I started to choke up. My translator pulled his hat down to his eyes and turned around. He wanted to appear unmoved, but was failing badly.

The Iraqi police and army seemed to grow more confident as the day went on. This was definitely their show and they received the thanks and congratulations from their people. That was great to see. The collection of the ballot boxes was a celebration and the atmosphere continued on Monday morning. The police and Iraqi Army have won their first battle and they have new credibility.

I'm leaving Iraq in three weeks and I'll start the rest of my life as a newly married man. My wife is a police officer and an unapologetic American idealist as well. Luckily, I never have to worry whether this year was worth it. My men and I are grateful to the Iraqi people for their bravery. It's our ticket home.

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Phil Agre has an extended discussion which has had further play and commentary on Body and Soul. I agree with quite a bit of it, though I think he mixes conservatism, fascism, and a fundamental opposition to reason and rationalism that is common to many mass movements.

He doesn't seem to get to what I consider one of the core issues: "the problem of the weak". This is the great moral challenge for human societies.

Yeah, it's a politically incorrect term. Someone might be cognitively weak and pull down a $50 million/year sports contract. Another person might be brilliant but almost completely paralyzed (but make bundles from his popular physics books). I use the term to mean those for whom there isn't a path to independent unassisted living in modern society; that includes a lot of people with cognitive and behavioral disabilities, including addiction, dementia (really a complex of behavioral and cognitive impairments), low IQ, memory disorders, schizophrenia, etc. This is not a small number of people. This is perhaps 5-10% of America. Some are young, some are old, some are middle-aged. In the modern world they are disabled.

There's a smaller group of people who are blind, deaf, missing limbs, have debilitating diseases etc. They all have significant challenges -- depending on their personal and family resources they may join the the "world of the weak" -- despite the good work the ADA brought us.

Most of us, at some point in our lives, will join the "world of the weak". If we were deer, the wolves would take us. Too many Republican policies translate to "let the wolves take the weak".

Weakness happens. Have enough children, one of them will be weak -- your genes aren't that good. Live long enough, you will be weak.

The battle my side is losing is the battle for the weak. Make strong those who can be healed, care for those who cannot.

Search: MSN vs. Yahoo vs. Google

MSN Search: faughnan lexia

MSN Search is supposedly out of beta today, but the url is still beta.search ... No matter. I did a quick test.

I searched on my name and word I know is only in a reasonably recent posting to my special needs/special education blog.

This is how MSN, Yahoo and Google did:

1. MSN: Pointers to Bloglines (but only to the view of recent postings) and Meblogs (aggregator). Better than nothing, but transient.
2. Yahoo: Pointer to Medlogs (aggregator) and a generic pointing to main page of my blog.
3. Google: zip, nada, nothing. Note Google owns blogspot/blogger where the blog I'm testing resides.

My overall estimation:

1. Google: complete failure
2. Yahoo and MSN: roughly comparable but different

So for this particular use case, Google isn't even in the running.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are different enough in an interesting way that I'm going to be looking for aggregators that combine and integrate the results. Google has been very disappointing over the last 6 months for many of my searches. I can only hope they have a major upgrade in the works. Of course there's another explanation as to why Google searches of Blogger may be less complete than the competition's (beyond a feature/bug of their algorithms).

America - Darwin's nemesis

The New York Times > Science > Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes

... in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

These findings set the United States apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided.

In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright.

"In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution," he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. "It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue," he said.

I wonder what the numbers are like in Iran? America must be the most anti-intellectual, and anti-science, of the wealthy nations. The Dark Ages are closer than you might think ...

Boycott CRC Information Holdings

Eric's Commentary on the Shutdown of MathWorld

Once upon a time CRC, the Chemical Rubber Company, published books of tables and reference material for chemists and scientists. Alas, that company is gone. It's name has been taken by a foul and parasitic entity; a form of demonic possession that attacks publicly traded companies. This web page explains why we need to stop buying anything from CRC's ownership:

I have had to conclude, to my sorrow, that CRC--perhaps like many other publishers in our era of wild corporate acquisitions and conglomerations--is no longer managed by people who understand and love books, authors, and readers.

The parent company of CRC, Information Holdings Inc., appears unashamed to treat information as a commodity to be exploited for short-term, bottom-line cash with no concern for long-term, strategic planning. The goal of the CRC representatives seemed to be monomaniacal: to squeeze from Wolfram Research and from me as much instant and short-term cash as possible, using the lawsuit as a lever.

How self-defeating in an era of rapid technological change! Apparently uninterested in looking forward and building good future business strategies, here are publishers focusing instead on how to squeeze greater quantities of immediate cash from old 'properties.'

I have come to realize how unusual it is to be working for a company that is run by people who still enjoy the core activities for which the company was founded. Very early in the lawsuit, a Wolfram Research response to the lawsuit mentioned that Wolfram Research has chosen to remain privately held in order to be free from the obligation to outside stockholders, who appear so often to focus corporations inordinately on short-term financial results. Wolfram Research's principals believe that they can take the long and broad view of the corporation's mission, as they could not if they had to satisfy stock analysts and uninvolved stockholders.

The behavior of CRC's representatives this last year has been, for me, convincing evidence of the wisdom of Wolfram Research's strategy. The people at my company believe in what they do, make money doing it, and have fun along the way. I didn't see much fun among the CRC people we dealt with.

Update: This affair first gained attention five years ago. But that was before blogs became popular ...