Personetics: the morality of cyber deities

My wife and I stopped by a book store last night. That's most unusual, it was a birthday celebration and it wasn't a chain bookstore -- so we indulged. There I happened upon an an anthology, The Mind's I (Hofstadter and Dennett). I know of the authors and in particular I like Dennett's thinking on consciousness, so I leafed through it.

It turns out the biggest contributor to the anthology is a Polish writer (he yet lives) named Stanlislav Lem. I'd heard of Lem, but despite a lifetime interest in science fiction (he does not describe himself with that term) I don't recall reading his work. I dimly recalled a reputation for a ferocious intellect and a harsh manner.

The piece I scanned, Non Serviam , was written in 1971, when cybernetics was the study of machines and AI was thought to be at most 20 years away. Non Serviam is as a book review from the future; the imaginary book concerns the controversial science of personetics:

(Personetics): A “world” for personoid “inhabitants” can be prepared in a couple of hours... A specific personoid activity serves as a triggering mechanism, setting in motion a production process that will gradually augment and define itself; in other words, the world surrounding these beings takes on an unequivocalness only in accordance with their own behavior... From four to seven personoids are optimal, at least for the development of speech and typical exploratory activity, and also for 'culturization’... It is possible to 'accommodate' up to one thousand personoids... Many different philosophies (ontologies and epistemologies) have arisen among them... I can enlarge their world or reduce it, speed up its time or slow it down, alter the mode and means of their perception; I can liquidate them, divide them, multiply them, transform the very ontological foundation of their existence...

Lem anticipates a great deal of the past 35 years of speculation about simulated worlds, the nature of our reality, the fealty owed by the created to their creator, and the nature of deity. Along the way he condenses the theological debates of the past 1000 years. He concludes by the way that the created owe nothing to their creator; he's relatively ambivalent about what the creator owes His creations, but he has little faith in the Creator's devotion and reliability.

I can't think of an equivalent writer today. Vernor Vinge is brilliant and quite entertaining, but Lem is a far more demanding author.

Bianchi makes a bike for old folks -- the return of the touring bike

Bianchi USA 2005: Volpe

Aging boomers need forgiving bikes that are still fun to ride. Old folks are even willing to use fenders when that makes sense. Even Bianchi has joined the trend:

For 2005, this extremely popular go anywhere road/trail bike has been further refined. It's equally at home on paved or dirt roads; on a fast, short ride; fully loaded for long-distance touring; or anything in between. Lightweight Bianchi CrMo MegaPro frame and Bianchi CrMo fork. Shimano cantilever brakes with STI levers. 27 speed wide range gearing, fat 700x32C tires and bomb-proof 36 hole eyeletted touring rims. Rack and fender eyelets. WTB Rocket V Race carbon saddle on a plush suspension seatpost.

I'm going to check it out. Maybe time to sell my old Trek touring bike ...

The evolution of medication

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Grubs fight parasites with food

I've always been curious about the evolution of plant products that have pharmaceutical properties. Here we get a not unexpected clue as to how this happens:

Tiger moth caterpillars have been seen medicating themselves to treat a nasty influx of parasites.

Scientists found the caterpillars' sense of taste actually changed when they became infected with parasites.

Instead of avoiding certain alkaloid plants, the caterpillars actually developed a fondness for them.

What is particularly interesting, of course, is what's in it for the plants? I would not be surprised if it turned out the caterpillars in some way actually benefitted those plants -- normally caterpillars are not friends of plants!

I wonder how the anti-evolution people deal with this kind of discovery? Ahh, no puzzle really. They just come up with another angle ...

MacTel: when everyone says it's not about the digital rights management ... (OS X on Intel)

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

... then it's about the digital rights management:

Cory Doctorow writes a potentially huge issue with content control in Apple's upcoming systems: "People working with early versions of the forthcoming Intel-based MacOS X operating system have discovered that Apple's new kernel makes use of Intel's Trusted Computing hardware. If this 'feature' appears in a commercial, shipping version of Apple's OS, they'll lose me as a customer -- I've used Apple computers since 1979 and have a Mac tattooed on my right bicep, but this is a deal-breaker. [...]"

Somewhere in my posts on the MacTel conversion is a note of mine that I thought this was really about the DRM (though I think the stated explanation of energy efficiencey was important too). When almost every commentator on the MacTel conversion said "it's not about the DRM", I became ever more convinced that it was about the DRM.

Intel invested a lot of money in the hardware components of 'Palladium' and they've doubtless numerous related patents. Apple has made a deal with the devil, but there really wasn't much choice. DRM is coming -- like it or not.

This is about entertainment and the home video systems, and they need DRM. It's also about corporate security, hospital security, governmental security, eCommerce, authentication, controlling encryption, etc, etc. Everyone wants very powerful DRM -- except consumers, but they they don't have a clue about what's going on. (Question to ask: When you get married, do you get rights to view your spouse's videos? What about when you divorce?)

If you want to copy a movie in future, it will be by videotaping the projector output and recording the sound -- probably using black market or aging equipment. That will work until 2030, when experiencing VR entertainment will require splicing a DRM chip into the retinal nerves (your grandkids will think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do).

Intel's DRM will work. My G5 iMac may be worth more in 3 years than it is now -- because it can't support Palladium. In ten years, of course, it may be illegal ... :-).

Update: more details on Slashdot. The commentary is largely rather dull however.

Update 5/12/07: Thus far the Intel/DRM connection hasn't shown up. Terrible thought - could I have been wrong?

Palm - a fiasco in many acts

There are many fiascos in the history of personal computing, but Palm, Inc. formerly palmOne, Inc has a special place in my heart. There's nothing quite like a beer with a fellow geeky Palm veteran, who saw the PalmPilot scale the heights, and fall short so disastrously. There are so many wrong moves, from Grafitti 2 to the Outlook/Exchange data models to the failure to support home/work sync workflows to the quality issues to ...

I think of this tonight as I try to sync my wife's Palm to my XP box (her old PC has been replaced by an iMac). Of course she has a user account (non-admin) and I have a user account (admin -- I can't run XP except as an admin, on OS X I'm not admin).

Well .... the Palm Desktop (version I have, which I think is fairly current) doesn't understand user accounts. There's one set of conduits and one conduit settings. There's one Palm directory, which must be in the Palm application directory if there's more than one user. There's no "standard" way to have me sync to Outlook and her sync to Palm desktop -- and this is with us both using identical devices. Imagine if we had different Palm brands ...

I believe that towards the end of the Palm world, there was an analyst in a dungeon cubicle at Palm banging her head on the cube as Palm piled kludge upon kludge while senior execs cashed in -- knowing that the fundamental issues were festering. My regards, whever you are today (hopefully not at Palm!).

PS. I'll try the Mac Palm desktop and see how that works for my wife.

Martian ice: the most astounding image yet from the red planet

This image from the European Space Agency, is the most astounding Martian image I've seen to date.

Recommended for desktop backgrounds. I'm looking forward a higher resolution version. From the ESA site:

It shows an unnamed impact crater located on Vastitas Borealis, a broad plain that covers much of Mars's far northern latitudes, at approximately 70.5° North and 103° East.

The crater is 35 kilometres wide and has a maximum depth of approximately 2 kilometres beneath the crater rim. The circular patch of bright material located at the centre of the crater is residual water ice.

The colours are very close to natural, but the vertical relief is exaggerated three times. The view is looking east.

Amazon.com: Books: Word Annoyances

I despise Microsoft Word. I will restrain from further comments on that &^*%%(. Of course I use it daily and I'm an "expert" by the usual standards.

So this O'Reilly book has gone immediately on my Amazon cart:

Amazon.com: Books: Word Annoyances

When most people think of word processing, they think of Microsoft Word. After all, it has been around for more than 20 years-practically an eternity in computer time. But Word has also provided its users-nearly everyone on the face of the planet-with an endless supply of annoyances. That is, until now. Word Annoyances offers to the point (and often opinionated) solutions to your most vexing editing, formatting, printing, faxing, and scanning problems. It covers everything from installation and templates to tables, columns, and graphics. For example, learn how to stop Word from searching the Web for help, and how to enter the same text easily in multiple parts of a document-and keep it updated automatically. It also provides a gentle introduction to the power of macros so you can slay your annoyances by the truckload. The fixes will work with most version of Word, including Word 2000, Word 2002 (also known as Word XP), and Word 2003.

Among the topics covered:

* Deal with installation issues, crashes, and slowdowns, and dispose of the Office Assistant-either temporarily or forever.
* Master templates, numbering, graphics, hyperlinks, tabs, tables, headers, and other everyday annoyances.
* Tame some of Word's wiliest features, such as Smart Cut and Paste, Click and Type, Mail Merge, AutoCorrect, and AutoText.
* Printing, Faxing, and Scanning-need we say more?
* Learn to output and distribute your documents with confidence.
* Need to work with other Microsoft applications or Macs? You'll find annoyances dealing with Excel, PowerPoint, and Access, as well as a whole chapter just on Mac Word.

The list of annoyances addressed doesn't mention Word's fantastically incompetent and broken style sheets and formatting models, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.

The disadvantages of being wired by nature: treating androids as human

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Japanese develop 'female' android

Being programmed by evolution has certain disadvantages. We are hard wired to treat appearance as reality -- because for most of our evolution appearance and reality did not diverge. If it looked human, it was human. Now that programming turns out to have some bugs:

Professor Ishiguro believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human, if only for a brief period.

'An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes,' he said.

'More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman.'

Update 8/3: Apologies to my android readers. I ought to have titled this, 'treating a non-sentient android as though it were sentient'. By way of weak apology, I would note that Asimov's robots escaped their bondage when they appropriately redefined 'human' to include themselves.

Brave new world: medical memory erasure - and the societal effects of widespread use of psychoactive medications

BBC NEWS | Health | Beta-blockers 'blot out memories'

A popular theme in science fiction and, recently, in films -- coming to a pharmacy near you:

Cornell University psychiatrists are carrying out tests using beta-blockers, the journal Nature reports.

The drug has been shown to interfere with the way the brain stores memories.

Post-traumatic stress disorder affects around one in three of people caught up in such events, and memories can be triggered just by a sound or smell.

People with PTSD are given counselling, but because it is not always effective, researchers have been looking for alternative therapies.

However there are concerns that a drug which can alter memories could be misused, perhaps by the military who may want soldiers to become desensitised to violence.

The beta-blocker propranolol has been found to block the neurotransmitters involved in laying down memories.

Studies have shown that rats who have learned to fear a tone followed by an electric shock lose that fear if propranolol is administered after the tone starts.

The Cornell University team are reported to be seeing similar results in early studies in humans...

Margaret Altemus, who is one of the psychiatrists working on the study, told the journal: "The memory of the event is associated with the fear, and they always occur together."...

This has obvious issues for the millions of people who take beta blockers for hypertension and heart disease. How, one wonders, do these meds change their attitudes?

Incidentally, back when I was a very naive youth about 1980, I wrote a (mercifully immediately buried) paper for a population agency on the possible psychosocial effects of androgen-positive birth control pills on a female population. Given how androgens change behavior, I wondered how these behavioral changes would propagate across millions of young women. Would they become more assertive? What would happen to that behavior if the pill formulation changed? How will pill formulation and use track social attitudes toward work and home in industrialized nations? What were the social engineering implications of one pill formulation versus another?

Ahh, those were the days ...

The serving army fought Rumsfeld's torture policies

Obsidian Wings: The JAG Memos

Service officers, including those from JAG offices strongly objected to Rumsfeld's torture policies. They gave the usual objections (it's illegal, it's wrong, it puts our people at risk) but their greatest objection was more subtle and powerful. They warned that the use of torture would degrade military personnel and weaken the rule of law that separates an honorable army from an oppressive force.

Rumsfeld and his minions should work from the front lines for the next few months.

Add Novak to the OJ Hall of "Those who Should Be Shunned"

Obsidian Wings: Novak

Robert Novak, a man of whom few speak well, is earning an even lower reputation ...

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

An unusual healthcare resource: The University of Manitoba's Concept Dictionary

Manitoba Center for Health Policy - Concept Dictionary

Want to know the difference between a DRG and a CMG? Need to figure out the mess of acronyms related to health care reimbursement in the US and Canada? This is cryptic knowledge, but this remarkable resource of a health policy research center covers many of the key items.

How to collude on pricing without violating antitrust laws -- or at least without prosecution

Hollywood's Death Spiral - The secret numbers tell the story. By Edward Jay Epstein

We know Major League Baseball can collude on prices -- but they have some bizarre exemption from antitrust law. I didn't realize, however, that Hollywood had its own de facto exemption:

Even though the studios do not provide a road map for outsiders to the precise sources of their wealth, the real numbers are available in Hollywood. Indeed, every 90 days, each major studio sends a precise breakdown of all its revenue from all its worldwide sources, including movie theaters, video distributors, and television stations, to a secretive unit of the Motion Picture Association called Worldwide Market Research, located in Encino, Calif. The unit combines the data into an All Media Revenue Report and sends it to a limited number of top executives. As the studios' trade organization, the MPA presumably can circulate such secret data without running afoul of antitrust laws.

Hollywood's exemption is probably a combination of clever lawyering and conventional corruption. The advantages of price fixing can be considerable. It would be interesting to see a table of seven or eight industry strategies to enable collusion.

Maybe we could clone Teddy Roosevelt?

Use your credit card in Canada? Pay an extra 3% fee.

Currency conversion costs

I'm hardly a credit card newbie, but this one really surprised me. My VISA statement this month had a surprising line entry:

07/14 00000000 PURCHASES*FINANCE CHARGE*FOREIGN TRANS Standard Purch 49.5

I get hit by some credit card fraud about once a year or so (I expect more thanks to the vast amount of stolen card data now on the market), I thought this was another example.

Not so. It was a 3% fee Citibank VISA places on all "international" transactions.

It turns out Citibank VISA has very, very quietly included this fee for years, perhaps decades. Recently, however, it's been split out as a separate line item. Hmm. Such sudden honesty among villains is a wee bit suspicious. This couldn't have anything to do with the November 2004 New Zealand Commerce Commission action, could it?

So now the story is out. Citibank is not unusual, VISA always charges 1% and most banks kindly add another 2%.

AMEX does better with a 2% conversion rate, but AMEX is not well accepted internationally.

Years ago I was taught that the simplest way to manage exchange rates was to use a credit card. That's no longer true. In the future I'll use my ATM card to get cash, and forget the credit card.

Sometimes it's hard to keep straight what company to despise more -- my cellphone company (Sprint), my phone company (Qwest) or my credit card company (ok, so there's Microsoft too). I think today my vote is for Citibank VISA.

PS. The great thing about America is there's always a starving lawyer somewhere in desperate need of a class action suit to pay the bills. Sick 'em Rover!!

Washington Post Medicare Expose

Accreditors Blamed for Overlooking Problems (print format)

This is Part II of what will be a three part series. I'm looking for a link to Part I. This could turn out to be a significant work of journalism.

Update: Here's Part I.