Fermi Questions: quantitative games of meaning

I need to update my Fermi Paradox page with this link:

Fermi Questions / Fermi Problems: '... the estimation of rough but quantitative answers to unexpected questions about many aspects of the natural world. The method was the common and frequently amusing practice of Enrico Fermi, perhaps the most widely creative physicist of our times. Fermi delighted to think up and at once to discuss and to answer questions which drew upon deep understanding of the world, upon everyday experience, and upon the ability to make rough approximations, inspired guesses, and statistical estimates from very little data.' [Philip Morrison [1]]

Incidentally, I've corresponded with Stanlislaw (Stanlislav) Lem, a brilliant author, about the Fermi Pardox. Turns out he doesn't think much of it:

I am afraid Mr. Lem does not consider the Fermi Paradox an important (and particularly serious) issue.

Sincerely yours,

Wojciech Zemek, Mr. Lem's secretary

Hmm. That does give me pause ... I wish he'd say more, but I think that may be his last words on this particular topic ...

Junk science: $100 billion wasted on a pointless "missile defense" system

I'm sure something good came of the $100 billion we've spent on our worthless missile defense program -- there must be at least $1 billion of goodness there. Sigh. Creationism is not necessarily the worst form of junk science...

Kung Fu Monkey: I Miss Republicans.

TEST OF U.S. MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD FAILS

An attempt to launch an interceptor missile as part of the U.S. missile defence shield failed early Wednesday in the first test of the system in nearly two years ...

...This test, by the way, was cancelled a few days ago [previously] because of rain. Because. Of. Rain. And please note that the previous few successes were because the target missle had homing beacons in them, tuned to the exact frequency of the intercepting rockets. Now, you may mock this, but even now, we are negotiating with Iran and North Korea to have all their missiles emit this radio frequency. So joke's on you.

This is what we get for about $100 billion up to now, with about another $100 billion more spent in the next 5 years ... for these test results.

You understand, I'm not against defense spending. I'm not going to rant about how many school lunches this could buy. I'm ranting about junk science.

$100 billion dollars against an attack mode which is literally the most inconvenient, least likely way for bad guys to kill Yanks. Terrorists don't have missiles. Terrorists have VANS. A white-panel-truck defense shield, THAT would be worth our money. Tie the INS database into the Ryder rental computer. Now we're talking science.

Lots of smart people campaigned for that missile defense program. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I suspect the smart ones believed it would cost trillions and take fifty years to develop. Or maybe they were smart but deluded.

By the time these systems actually work:

1. the AI systems required to run them will have their own interests, and they hopefully won't involve us.
2. terrorists will be able to drop hydrogen bombs out of the back of freighters and detonate them offshore.

Teaching the controversy - gravitation and the law of unintended consequences

The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

We need to teach the all the controversies.

.... The ECFR [Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning], in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue 'so they can make an informed decision.'

'We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids,' Burdett said.

Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

When I was a child, I was taught a bizarre alternate world history where the 'Children's Crusade' was a good thing. That's what the state schools (almost all Catholic) taught in Quebec in the 1960s until the mid 1970s.

As a strategy this was not overly successful. Within 10 years the Catholic church had been swept from power (Quebec had been a quasi-theocratic state) and church attendance plummeted.

Evangelicals should worry a bit about their successes in teaching religion in science classes. They may discover the law of unintended consequences.

DeLong on the business of oil

How oil companies make money, and some other aspects of a most important enterprise: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: John McGowan Seeks a Guide for the Perplexed.

But that's not the best part of the essay. DeLong continues on to discuss how American business shifted from a paternatlistic management style in the 1910-1980 period to an ownership coopetition mode in 1980 and beyond.

Comparative immunology: crocodiles make your immune system look wimpy

Eons ago, when I was a young medical student, I was really interested in comparative immunology and in the evolutionary history of the immune system. I figured there had to be gold in comparing how different organisms evolved different solutions to the pathogen problem. Of course I had a zillion interests, so that one came and went.

It's nice to know that research in comparative immunology has since borne fruit. It turns out crocodiles have one heck of an immune system...

Science News Article | Reuters.com

... The crocodile's immune system is much more powerful than that of humans, preventing life-threatening infections after savage territorial fights which often leave the animals with gaping wounds and missing limbs.

"They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection," said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory.

... "If you take a test tube of HIV and add crocodile serum it will have a greater effect than human serum. It can kill a much greater number of HIV viral organisms," Britton said from Darwin's Crocodylus Park, a tourism park and research center.

Britton said the crocodile immune system worked differently from the human system by directly attacking bacteria immediately an infection occurred in the body.

"The crocodile has an immune system which attaches to bacteria and tears it apart and it explodes. It's like putting a gun to the head of the bacteria and pulling the trigger," he said...

So what's the downside of that sort of immune system? Do crocs get nasty auto-immune disorders? It's odd that this is a press release now; the HIV work was done in 1998. I doubt there will be many practical implications; but this is great basic scienc work.

The day of the American engineer has passed

Race for engineering edge to be won, lost in colleges -DenverPost.com - BUSINESS

The US is graduating fewer engineers every year, and fewer native Americans are attending US engineering schools:

Pacific Rim nations are graduating great numbers of engineers and are threatening to seize the mantle of industrial innovation that was pivotal to making the U.S. economy globally dominant. Last year, foreign nationals also won almost 60 percent of U.S. engineering doctorates.

Experts warn that the U.S. lead is slipping away.

'We are being outproduced in engineering graduates - both undergraduate and graduate level - by Pacific Rim countries, and the comparison will be more extreme as the years go by,' said Richard Heckel, founder of Engineering Trends, a research consultancy. 'From an engineering standpoint, the future leaders of the world are going to come from the Pacific Rim.

I'd read this in a local Knight-Ridder paper and decided I'd comment on it, but I had to use Google News to find a citeable source. That search also turned up a similar complaint from Australia. Bottom line, this isn't something unique to the US. It's likely also true in Canada, Germany, France, the UK, etc. I bet it's even true in Japan.

Engineering is a hard discipline and it's not very financially rewarding in wealthy nations. Engineers work in cubicles, MBAs get offices. Getting an MBA takes some focus and a bit of work, getting an engineering degree takes substantially more work and some serious math ability. Why be an underpaid mechanical engineer when with less effort one can be an overpaid finance officer?

The day of engineering has passed in the wealthy nations. There's nothing anyone can do to bring it back. Don't let your daughters be engineers.

Qwest: good employees, awful company

It must be awful to work for Qwest Communications, my DSL service provider. The Qwest employees I've spoken with have been patient and personable, but they're embedded in an awfully dysfunctional company. That can't be much fun.

In our prior home Qwest provided my DSL connection, and VISI (excellent company) was my ISP [1]. The prior residents of our new home used Qwest as well. We moved across the alley and kept our phone number. How hard can that be?

Hard, evidently.

Qwest has so far slipped installation dates twice (most recently after my wife stayed home waiting), messed up the ISP access (switching me to MSN) and misassigned the service level (to their overpriced video-delivery wannabe option).

When you call Qwest you're also enrolled in a diabolical experiment without any evidence of informed consent. They've invested millions in creating the most insanely infuriating voicebot. The voice misrecognition system responds to even the most polite and careful speech with a carefully calibrated sarcastic urbanity designed to crush any spirit. I can only guess Qwest is testing out some new instrument of torture. Fortunately hitting 0 repeatedly bypasses it.

Sigh. If only I could force George Bush to be an anonymous Qwest customer...

Update 8/16/05: Just to accentuate the theme of good employees, bad company our installer went way beyond the call of duty today. If Qwest's management were the equal of their front line employees their voice recognition system would die an ugly death. Indeed, were I to learn that a Qwest exec had publicly executed their voice recognition system (and corresponding vendor) I'd be tempted to buy stock in them.

[1] Sadly VISI's residential ISP services are probably doomed since our scum-infested government has sold us out again.

Criminalizing the defective

Be the Best You can Be: There are parts of the UK which are yet 19th century -- criminalizing the defective

In one area, at least, the US is even vaguely progressive.

The intelligent design fight introduces some interesting thoughts

Evolution vs. Religion - Quit pretending they're compatible. By Jacob Weisberg

At least Bush's attack on biology is producing some interesting discussions. Weisberg tosses aside the commonplace convention that one can be both a traditional christian and a 'believer' in natural selection:

That evolution erodes religious belief seems almost too obvious to require argument. It destroyed the faith of Darwin himself, who moved from Christianity to agnosticism as a result of his discoveries and was immediately recognized as a huge threat by his reverent contemporaries. In reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, Samuel Wilberforce, the bishop of Oxford, wrote that the religious view of man as a creature with free will was 'utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God.'

For Weisberg the truce between science and religion is a built on a 'white lie' and it's time for the old battle to rage anew.

Weisberg clearly has a point, and the catholic church agrees with him. The basic tenets of most of the world's religion are in conflict with the idea of humans as a random and possibly transient and superficial event in the history of the world.

It's not impossible to reconcile deity with natural selection. Personally, I find it easier to imagine a deity that fires up universe and waits to see what develops; creating entities in one's 'own image' seems to me rather dull and vain. I like to hope a deity is a bit beyond that.

Or one could always invoke the 'incomprensibility of God' clause, or assume that God creates Man by choosing to inhabit the one of a trillion, trillion universes in which Man by chance evolves. Still, these ideas are a bit of a stretch for most religions.

Religion places Man at the center of things. Natural selection makes him just another miraculous species. That's a genuine conflict.

New to Google: very focal searches (single slot value)

Google Blog: Fill in the blanks

Sometimes one wants to use a search engine to find a very specific piece of information rather than to learn about a topic. If search engines were truly intelligent, you could just pose a question the same way you would ask a person. An alternative is to get the search engine to 'fill in the blank.' So instead of asking [who invented the parachute?], you can enter the query [the parachute was invented by *]. (The blank, or wildcard, search is marked by * - an asterisk.)

There is so much text on the web that this method often works well, but to make it more effective, we've improved the way results are found in response to queries containing such blanks. This includes allowing softer pattern matching, if necessary, and promoting results in which the blank filler is relatively more frequent in the context of the query.

The tibia is a part of the *.

This is exceptionally interesting.

Humor at the NSA: your van is ready now

Wired News: Router Flaw Is a Ticking Bomb

Lynn: Air Force (Office of Special Investigations). NSA, is what I'm told, but he wouldn't show me his credentials. There were a lot of flashy badges around from lots of three-letter agencies. So they take me to a maintenance area and I'm surrounded by people ... and one of them says (to another guy), 'You've got the van ready?' I'm going, 'Oh my god.' And they go, 'Just kidding!... Oh, man, you rock! We can't thank you enough.' And I'm just sitting there, like still pale white. They all shook my hand.

I get the feeling that they were in the audience because they were told that there was a good chance that I was about to do something that would cause a serious problem. And when they realized that I was actually there to pretty much clue them in on ... the storm that's coming ... they just couldn't say enough nice things about me...

Pharming - there's no dodging this net risk

Pharming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Click on a bookmark. Go to your bank site. Enter your user name and password. Continue to work. And now you're penniless.

This is a 'man in the middle attack' in computer security parlance. Such attacks are well understood from a theoretical perspective. What's happened here is that they're now being impelemented remotely. The latest revelation that Cisco routers can be hacked and reprogrammed is hardly reassuring.

This seems a much more severe problem than "phishing" attacks.

We too are manipulated by our parasites

Manipulative Malaria Parasite Makes You More Attractive (to Mosquitoes) - New York Times

It is becoming clear that many, if not all, parasites alter the behaviors of their hosts. Research shows malaria-infected mosquitoes vary their biting behavior depending on the parasite's life cycle. Now we learn that infected human children smell more attractive to mosquitoes:

After studying 12 sets of children, the scientists discovered a striking pattern. 'Gametocyte-infected children attracted about twice as many mosquitoes as either uninfected ones or ones infected with nontransmissible stages,' Dr. Koella said. 'The results really jump out.'

The infected children did not show symptoms like fever, a common situation in Africa. Nevertheless, the researchers treated them with anti-malaria drugs on the day of their study. Two weeks later, after the medicine had cleared the parasites, the scientists repeated the experiments with the same three children. They found that the cured children were no more attractive to the mosquitoes than the others.

I'm starting to worry that the 'toxoplasma alters personality' claim may be valid.

Throughout most of human history we carried a very large number of parasites in our bodies -- particularly worms. How has losing those worms changed our behavior?

Update 8/10: Still thinking about our friends the worms. Some think the absence of worms is the cause of some inflammatory bowel diseases (ulcerative colitics especially). So if worms would make their hosts careless about hygeine, and probably careless about many things, would removing our parasitic worms give rise to obsessive-compulsive disorder? Does being wormless make some people unusually rigid and puritanical? Does having worms promote careless behavior?

Snowball earth

Bacteria froze the Earth, researchers say | CNET News.com

I need to buy (or borrow, our bookcases are full) a modern book on geo-history. When I was a kid snowball earth was still a mystery ...

... Several [Caltech] graduate students, along with supervising professor Joe Kirschvink, have released a paper presenting their explanation of what caused "Snowball Earth," a periodic deep freeze of Earth's atmosphere that has been theorized for years. The Caltech team argues that 2.3 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, gained the ability to break down water, which in turn released a flood of oxygen into the atmosphere.

That oxygen reacted with the atmospheric methane, which insulated the Earth at the time, and broke it down. While the oxygen-methane reaction created the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the protective nature of the barrier cracked.

Temperatures plunged to minus 50 degrees Celsius, and ice at the equator grew to 1 mile thick. Although this process took several million years, substantial damage to the methane layer could have occurred in the first 100,000 years.

Obsidian Wings doesn't care for Donald Rumsfeld

Obsidian Wings: Thanks, Don.

Every administration is supposed to have a bad guy. The Bush administration seems to feel Rove is not enough.

Some of you may have noticed that I loathe Donald Rumsfeld. I don't particularly loathe Bush -- I think he's a disaster as a President, but I can't seem to raise any real emotion towards him personally. But I do loathe Rumsfeld. And this is a lot of the reason why. I think that when we order kids to go off to fight and die in our name, we owe them as much support as we can muster. It should go without saying that we move heaven and earth to armor their vehicles, that we not nickel-and-dime their health care when they return, and so on. And it should go without saying that when we're unsure how many troops we will need, we err on the side of caution. I can easily understand how it might cross someone's mind to wonder whether generals overstate the number of troops they will need. (As I understand it, it's a standard response when the military doesn't want to do something: announce that it can't be done with less than half a million troops.) I can understand questioning them about this. I have a much harder time understanding how someone could just assume that he's right and all the people who have spent their lives thinking about military operations are wrong: for every one person who thinks like this and is a genius, there are (I'm estimating, of course) thousands who are just pig-headed idiots; and how someone could fail to consider the possibility that he was in the second group, not the first, is a mystery to me. But I absolutely cannot fathom how someone could be so confident in this assumption that he was willing to act on it in wartime, when the price of your being wrong will be a lot of dead soldiers, not to mention failing to achieve your objectives. That's a level of blind arrogance that I find breathtaking, and the idea that families across the country have buried their children because of it fills me with an enduring icy fury.

Extraordinary and irrationally persistent self-confidence is the mark of many powerful men -- but not of the great. Bush and Rumsfeld seem to have this virus. They are not the first such to lead the way to disaster.

I am not as kind to Bush as the author is. I believe Bush is very smart, and he has chosent to retain and reward Rumsfeld.