Things scientists would teach others about science

spiked-science | survey | E=mc2 centenary survey | E=mc2 survey - AtoB

I liked the comments I read from this selection. Popper, Natural Selection, Mind as matter, etc. A good set - especially in these post-rational days.

Uzbekistan is where Bush sold his soul

INTEL DUMP - When interests trump ideals II

It's becoming apparent that our outsourced torture vendor of choice is Uzbekistan. Apparently they're quite good at torture.

Sheep/human hybrids

Scientists create animals that are part-human - Stem Cell Research - MSNBC.com

Meechai Viravaidyah (I've mangled the name) marketed condoms to Thailand. He made them socially acceptable through humor and desensitization. He was a master of balloon tricks.

It worked very well. People can get used to most things if they move a little bit at a time. It's kind of like boiling frogs (ok, so maybe that's an urban myth ...).

Now we have the examples of gene-engineered mice and sheep who's brains have human-like neurons. It didn't take us all that long to more or less ignore this kind of thing, did it?

The next step will be even easier ....

BTW, despite my impeccable secular-humanist credentials, the 3-4 readers of this blog may have noticed I've never mocked the strong anti-stem cell passions of the religious right. Basically, I don't trust humans all that much ...

How is George Bush like Steve Jobs?

CNN.com - Any Kerry supporters on the line? - Apr 25, 2005

Jobs demands silence and loyalty. He bans a publisher from Apple stores because he dislikes on of their books. Bush demands silence and loyalty. He bans all who supported his crushed enemy:

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations.

But for this week's meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda.

At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry's 2004 campaign.

The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants.

Only after the start of Bush's second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

The White House admits as much: "We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and--call us nutty--it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that," says White House spokesman Trent Duffy.

Those barred from the trip include employees of Qualcomm and Nokia, two of the largest telecom firms operating in the U.S., as well as Ibiquity, a digital-radio-technology company in Columbia, Md.

One nixed participant, who has been to many of these telecom meetings and who wants to remain anonymous, gave just $250 to the Democratic Part.

Hmm. Darth Bush?

Reengineering Islam

USNews.com: In an unseen front in the war on terrorism, America is spending millions to counter the hate of radical Islamists (4/25/05)

When I was a naive young Watson Fellow, I thought I'd come up with a great way to describe the efforts then underway to accelerate the fertility transition in many countries facing carrying capacity problems. I developed a "theory" I called "social engineering". I even wrote a fairly awful paper describing my theory; it was then that I learned that the term was not new, and it had some pejorative aspects.

Despite all that, I think the concept is a useful one. I think it applies to Washington's attempts to direct the evolution of Islam.

... After repeated missteps since the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government has embarked on a campaign of political warfare unmatched since the height of the Cold War. From military psychological-operations teams and CIA covert operatives to openly funded media and think tanks, Washington is plowing tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to influence not only Muslim societies but Islam itself. The previously undisclosed effort was identified in the course of a four-month U.S. News investigation, based on more than 100 interviews and a review of a dozen internal reports and memorandums. Although U.S. officials say they are wary of being drawn into a theological battle, many have concluded that America can no longer sit on the sidelines as radicals and moderates fight over the future of a politicized religion with over a billion followers. The result has been an extraordinary--and growing--effort to influence what officials describe as an Islamic reformation...

...The White House has approved a classified new strategy, dubbed Muslim World Outreach, that for the first time states that the United States has a national security interest in influencing what happens within Islam. Because America is, as one official put it, 'radioactive' in the Islamic world, the plan calls for working through third parties--moderate Muslim nations, foundations, and reform groups--to promote shared values of democracy, women's rights, and tolerance,

I approve of course. I outlined the problem and the approaches a few years ago. It's about time, though it remains to be seen how competently this will be executed.

Savoonga Alaska, a portrait in the Washington Post

Savoonga has a zip code of 99769. You can see a map here and a picture here. Population 640, of which 2% are "Irish" (12 or so).

I once spent two months on the northern tip of Newfoundland -- St. Anthony. That felt remote, but compared to Savoonga it was the height of urban living.

The Washington Post has a story on life in Savoonga. It's fascinating reading. The journalists traveled out as a bit of a comic lark, but they returned a bit changed.

... AT THE SMALL AIRPORT IN NOME, we had seen posters warning that it is a serious crime to be caught smuggling alcoholic beverages of any kind to St. Lawrence Island, which is home to Savoonga and Gambell, its sister village 40 miles away. The island is dry and has been for some time, part of a desperate effort to control a problem that has gotten painfully out of hand.

Savoongans are only a few generations removed from a near-Stone Age existence. Details from the distant past are murky, but in the late 1870s much of the population of the island was wiped out in a holocaust of complex origins thought to involve illness, climate changes and behavioral factors. What is indisputable is that the commercial whalers of that era brought some modern ways to the island, along with disease and alcohol. Genetically, in both cases, the natives had no defenses...

...Out there in the enveloping whiteness, it had been possible to lose yourself, fishing with Eskimos in the Bering Sea the way it has been done since the age of the igloo. There was no village, there were no dead kids, no fog of denial, no generation in agony, literally bored out of its mind. There were no soul-wrenching choices between survival of self and survival of a culture. There was just an exhilarating ritual, as old as a civilization, irreducible, unencumbered by a sense of guilt, not subject to misunderstanding or misinterpretation through cultural chauvinism. It was clear and it was clean. It was possible to comprehend the joy of surviving by your skills and savvy on the bounty of the Earth alone, in defiance of whatever hell nature and fate throw at you. And it was possible to understand why, lost in that moment, you could want to live that way forever.

Thank you Mr. Hilleman - for saving our children

Economist.com Obituary: Maurice Hilleman, pioneer of preventive medicine, died on April 11th, aged 85

You've heard a lot about Michael Jackson. You've never heard of Maurice Hilleman. Funny, eh?

The Economist chose Maurice Hilleman for their obituary this week. They did the same thing for Pope John-Paul II, but Mr. Hilleman did much more for humanity than the Pope. Miles City, Montana doesn't have much to brag about -- seems they ought to find the money for a monument somewhere ...

Apr 21st 2005

A STORY that Maurice Hilleman liked to tell to illustrate his work as a developer of vaccines concerned his daughter Jeryl Lynn. In 1963 at the age of five she caught mumps, a highly infectious disease of childhood that is usually benign but can be a killer. Mr Hilleman used swabs to collect the mumps virus growing in her throat, and preserved it in a jar of beef broth. He produced a form of the virus that was too weak to cause disease but strong enough to trigger the body's natural defences and make the person immune. The weakened strain, named after Jeryl Lynn, has become the standard vaccine to prevent mumps. The disease is now rare, at least in rich countries.

Identifying the problem, collecting data, finding a solution: Mr Hilleman developed some 40 vaccines, among them for measles, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitis and pneumonia. He developed the one-shot vaccine that can prevent several diseases, such as MMR (measles, mumps and rubella)...

... Mr Hilleman's greatest contribution to a healthy world may have been his work on the safe mass production of vaccines that can be stored ready for use against the pandemics that since antiquity have regularly swept across continents, such as the 1918 flu outbreak that killed more than 20m people. In 1957, when flu swept through Hong Kong, Mr Hilleman identified the virus as a new form to which people had no natural immunity and passed on his findings to vaccine-makers. When the virus reached the United States a few months later 40m doses of vaccine were ready to limit its damage. Mr Hilleman established that the flu virus is constantly mutating, making it difficult to provide a reliable vaccine...

...Miles City sounds primitive rather than simple. It had been a frontier town and the older inhabitants still told stories of Indian battles. Young Hilleman was poor. His mother and twin sister had died during his birth and he and his seven surviving siblings had been brought up on a farm by relations. At the age of 18 he was working in a shop.

For a young man who felt that life must have more to offer than selling goods to cowboys and their girlfriends, there were two glimpses of a more interesting world. One was his homemade radio, which could just pick up talk and music programmes broadcast from distant Chicago. The other was the local public library, where he found a copy of Darwin's “On the Origin of Species”, which had avoided the censorship of the town's fundamentalist church.

Now that's one heck of a life.

Obesity increases dementia risk: Winner of stupid medical article of the month

BBC NEWS | Health | Obesity increases dementia risk

I have a bad feeling this news story actually reflects the article. I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that obesity causes dementia; it will be very, very hard to extract a dementia/obesity relationship from obesity/IQ/wealth and IQ/dementia relationships. I'd be astounded if the authors were able to control for an obesity/IQ correlation.

Tiger and parental control software

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > From Apple, a Tiger to Put in Your Mac

On the other hand, some of the most groundbreaking new Tiger features are barely mentioned in Apple's marketing. For example, the new parental controls let you, the wise authority figure, specify which e-mail correspondents, chat buddies, Web sites and even programs are O.K. for your children.

Apple lists 200 Tiger features, and leaves this one out?! Absolutely weird.

This features by itself is worth $60 to me. It covers more than half the cost of Tiger (educational or Amazon special). Sheesh.

BTW, if you want Tiger, and wouldn't mind a new machine, consider buying a Mac Mini. Compared to a month ago, it's like buying a quality machine for $350 or so.

iLemon?

iMac G5 (Part 8)

Macintouch has been collecting reports of hardware failures with the ambitious iMac. The motherboards are failing (possibly due to a manufacturing defect in the capacitors), the monitor is failing (though this may be comparable to the industry LCD display failure rate) and the power supplies are failing.

Apple's customer support has ranged from average to mediocre to abysmal.

Apple has not made any statement nor has it issued a recall.

The iMac is an ambitious device. It combines a notoriously "hot" CPU (the iMac G5s are nowhere near as energy efficient as comparable Intel CPUs) with a "quiet" design and an integrated display in a compact space. That's a lot to get working. It may be a failed design.

Unless Apple does something special (recall, acknowledgement of problems and description of solutions) I would not buy a current model G5 iMac. The Mac Mini looks like a very good device (though some have analog output problems) and the new G5 towers look promising (they are very big). I would buy either -- except I want the G5 and I don't want a large tower. So, for people like me, waiting is the order of the day.

Neutrino speculations

The New York Times > Science > Tiny, Plentiful and Really Hard to Catch

Another open question is whether neutrinos play a role in the imbalance of matter and antimatter. If the early universe had contained equal amounts of the both, everything would have been annihilated, leaving nothing behind to form stars and galaxies.

Among quarks, which form protons and neutrons, physicists have observed a subtle matter-antimatter imbalance, called CP violation, in the behavior of particles known as mesons. "That CP violation is completely inadequate to explain the universe that we see," Dr. Kayser said.

So physicists suspect that there must be CP violation elsewhere and that the oddity of neutrinos suggest they could be a source. That, in turn, leads to speculation of yet more new types of neutrinos - very heavy ones that existed only in the very early universe - and the decay of those heavy neutrinos created the preponderance of matter.

Then come even wilder ideas - that neutrinos play a role in the mysterious dark energy that is pushing the universe apart or that neutrinos could be used for interstellar communication.

Interstellar communication? A future SETI project no doubt.

The article describes the Soudan mine neutrino detector. We took the mine tour once with 4 yo and a 2 yo. Our 4 yo was acting up so we missed the pre-trip orientation. We went out with our group expecting a sedate ride in a mine train -- as in our previous mine tour experience. They stuffed us in a metal box, turned out the lights, and dropped us into the earth. You'd be surprised how quiet children can be when their survival instinct kicks in.

Not to mention the bats, the background radiation, and the little trick with the the jackhammers in the dark (no sunlight at the bottom of the earth). Yes, I really recommend the mine tour. Tell 'em I sent you.

Open Source Culture: From Flickr to Wikipedia to ... errr ... Faughnan's Notes

Open Source Culture | MetaFilter

Will a mass of 'good enough' (and free) content overwhelm the 'very good'? Good set of links.

Apple's iMac problem -- bad news all around

TidBITS: iMac G5: Up In Smoke

Apple has two problems with their iMacs - unreliable power supplies and capacitor failures. Both are described in detail by an experienced Mac journalist who had to replace his iMac. The worse news is that the iMac's automated diagnostics came up with the wrong answer -- and Apple's customer services is now pretty darned awful.

I suspect the new iMacs will be safe to buy, but I wouldn't touch any of the existing models. Shame on Apple for following the stonewall strategy; shame that it usually works.

Building a police state, one day at a time

Salon.com | A "volunteer" police state

A group of non-Bush supporters are prevented from joining a Bush social security event by "secret service agents" -- apparently because of a "no blood for oil" bumper sticker. The event turns out to have been publicly funded. The agents may, or may not, have been officially 'secret service'.

This was standard operating procedure during Bush campaign events. There must never be any critics near Bush.

It's not surprising, but for the sake of historians it's good to document these things.

Identify theft: a summary of recent cases

ID theft is inescapable | Channel Register

A fairly good summary of recent identity theft related crimes. The deluge is coming. Ahh well, it's our fault for electing dolts to govern us.

Since government isn't going to help us, we need some kind of a Libertarian solution. I wish I could think of one.