The evolution of social darwinism

The Economist's year end issue is a winner. Not only does it have a delicious cover (note the expressions of the last two males in the chain), it also prominently features a review of human evolution. One would think they're getting bored with their pet George.

The story of evolution taught me something (emphases mine):

Evolution | The story of man | Economist.com

...It was [Herbert] Spencer, an early contributor to The Economist, who invented that poisoned phrase, “survival of the fittest”. He originally applied it to the winnowing of firms in the harsh winds of high-Victorian capitalism, but when Darwin's masterwork, “On the Origin of Species”, was published, he quickly saw the parallel with natural selection and transferred his bon mot to the process of evolution. As a result, he became one of the band of philosophers known as social Darwinists. Capitalists all, they took what they thought were the lessons of Darwin's book and applied them to human society. Their hard-hearted conclusion, of which a 17th-century religious puritan might have been proud, was that people got what they deserved—albeit that the criterion of desert was genetic, rather than moral. The fittest not only survived, but prospered. Moreover, the social Darwinists thought that measures to help the poor were wasted, since such people were obviously unfit and thus doomed to sink.

Spencer was the champion of the proto-Calvinist doctrine of Social Darwinism. So it turns out that Calvinism (the weak suffer because they offended God) preceded Social Darwinism (the weak must suffer because that's the way the race gets stronger) preceded Darwin (who was a compassionate man who suffered not a little). Historians of Science love this sort of thing.

Calvinism is again the state religion of Bush's America, and Social Darwinism is again the governmental philosophy (welfare only preserves the weak), but Darwin himself is forbidden. Odd.

How will the meme of social Darwinism next mutate?

A topical review of Quantum Mechanics

Dennis Overbye of the NYT has writen a review of quantum mechanics. It's a good overview, but I think it understates how weird the last 10 years of QM physics have been. It's almost as though he wanted to protect his readers.

I've been personally spooked by the practical use of quantum entanglement in encryption. That's too much like hacking the universal calculator. It feels like we have some big shocks ahead.

Writing to learn: Blogs and and the worldmind

Scott Rosenberg claims learning theory shows most people learn by writing (teaching works for me as well). It is the act of making someone one's own that causes it to stick iin memory. He makes a logical connection to blogging:

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

...If this is true -- and, based on my own experience, I believe it is -- then we can view the explosion of writing in weblogs, of millions of people mastering ideas by writing about them, and spinning narratives in order to fix them in memory, as a vast exercise in the pursuit of collective self-knowledge. Yes, of course there are heaps of trivial pursuits, too; they keeps things lively. Only puritans would wish to eliminate them.

So hobby blogs aren't merely a wasteful pile of vanity; they're also a learning exercise. Alas for me, the learning I may thus be doing has no obvious connection to income.

On a slighly related tangent, however, I do think these blogs are doing something interesting in a different learning domain -- it feels as though blogs are amplifying, filtering, and extending the emergent intelligence of the net. Hence Google's affection for blogs; Google lives off the crude mind of the net. (also Adwords). If the net was a simple entity with a base IQ of 10 a few years ago, perhaps blogs have pushed it to 13 ...

Skynet cannot be far away :-).

Why Apple won't fix AirTunes -- is it the microwave?

I fought a hard battle with Apple's AirTunes (Apple's wireless audio streaming) a few weeks ago.

It was very frustrating. The devils of Digital Rights Management, AirTunes fundamental inadequacy, and the lack of a fast-user-switching compatible tool for remote control of iTunes finally defeated me. SlimDevices and its ilk seemed like far better solutions, and I figured this spring I'd strip out the DRM on the music I paid for and switch to a non-Apple solution. At the moment though, my wife's Nano and some good playlists suffice.

Today I decided spring was too soon. I was streaming some music using AirTunes. A rare event, but I do it on occasion. All was well, until the music vanished. I wondered what was up; then I realized the microwave was running. It's not all that old a model, but it is death to our 802.11b LAN. That's bad for routine web work, but it's fatal for streaming music -- especially the minimally compressed AirTunes stream.

Maybe streaming MP3 or AAC directly, or enabling communication robustness (microwave resistance) would help. Or maybe wireless audio streaming won't really work until we switch to entirely new forms of wireless networking (ultra wideband, etc). If so, then this may explain why Apple has left AirTunes twisting in the wind ... They may have reason to believe it's not fixable.

How to Ship Anything

Joel Sposky is smarter than just about anyone. Sigh. So when he has a problem shipping stuff from his business, he invents a shipping system.

Handy to keep around in case you ever decide to set up a business that ships things: How to Ship Anything - Joel on Software.

The secret of happiness

The secret of happiness is ...

editing.

And the days are getting longer too ...

Update 3/11/09: See also

Happiness is a selective memory (framing effects)
and
Manipulating memory by photo display

Unleashing the NSA: The real story.

I called this on the 19th:

Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report - New York Times

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

I'm sure most journalists had the same thoughts I had, but of course they actually have to gather evidence. They moved very quickly to put this story together.

This is oddly reassuring -- because it makes sense. The "bypass FISA" story didn't hold water if the NSA was indeed targeting individuals. Echelon-style monitoring of all traffic, however, cannot be approved under existing law. It required an executive order.

The great thing about the Bushies is that they make conspiracy theories real, and whacky delusions almost plausible. The Patriot II debate this January should be quite interesting.

Hard drinks for men who want to get drunk fast

George made the wrong call. A wonderful sendup of It's a Wonderful Life: Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | All hail Pottersville!.

Ideological transformations and the elderly

Salon has an interesting story of ideological transformation. It feels like a classical tale:

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | The real war on Christmas

...The thing is, though, I know better than to bring up politics with my dad. Ever since he started listening to talk radio for hours out of the day, he's slowly lost his ability to objectively look at the facts and draw his own conclusions. If Rush, Hannity, Dennis Prager or O'Reilly say it, my dad believes it as surely as he believes anything. Thanks to this abdication of rational thinking, both of my parents completely bought into the Swift Boat liars, still believe that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and recently decided to move to Montana, which my mother described as 'the real America' to me and my siblings. When Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor, my mom's impression of him, having worked with him as a model in the 1960s, mysteriously transformed from 'a steroid-shooting lech' to 'a total gentleman, who was always taking his supplements, which were injected in those days.'

They both ended up voting for Tom McClintock, not because Arnold was so clearly incompetent, but because he wasn't a 'real' enough Republican for them. These are the same people who took me to nuclear-freeze rallies almost every weekend when I was in elementary school. These are the same people who introduced me to the teachings of the Buddha and Gandhi. The same people who smoked pot in front of me, introduced me to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, and taught me to throw a Frisbee when all my peers were learning how to throw a football.

They are, of course, the same people. I would bet they are both very directed towards groupthink and tribalism. At one time that meant smoking pot in front of children [1], today it means taking O'Reilly as their guru. I would wonder too if both are desperately seeking simplicity, a trend that grows with age and the sadly normal senescence of the human brain (our brains are in bad shape by the time we hit retirement age).

Is there anything new here? It's tempting to think of Rush and O'Reilly as new, but the hate mongers of the 1930s to 1950s did quite well with the same radio Rush and O'Reilly use. Imitation and the urge to emulate dominant tribe members is quintessentially human. Alas, senescence has always been with us. So, no, this is not new.

[1] Many of us, of course, drink wine in front of children. I suppose it's not so much the substance as the intent of its use; I still suspect his parents were demonstrating the judgment flaws that later led them to Bush. Of course by writing this article about his family, their son has demonstrated a similar lack of wisdom.

Sixty years of peace

David Brin quotes from a quoting from a Democratic Leadership Council Report:

Contrary Brin: Some Good News... for a change...

...Between 1000 A.D. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace among great powers was the 51-year stretch between the battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Europe's present peaceful stretch hit 60 last spring and shows no signs of strain...

India. China. One day, Africa. Fantastic hope. Immense risk.

It feels as though we live on the tipping point, though other generations have felt the same way.

The NSA unleashed: widening suspicion that the NSA was doing broad data intercepts

I've added a few update links to my posting:Gordon's Notes: Unleashing the NSA: What's the real story?. More than a few mainstream journalists appear to have come to the same conclusion. It doesn't make sense that Bush would bypass the courts to do something they were already routinely approving. He had to be doing something the courts wouldn't have approved without new legislation. The most likely explanation is massive data and voice monitoring, extending the historic Echelon project into the US.

We should put a 'BCC. NSA' at the end of every email :-).

Beyond Dover: legal costs, tort changes and wealth for lawyers

In theory, since the Dover Decision will not be appealed to a higher court; it is only a precedent for Pennsylvania. Some speculate the legal costs will deter future creationist efforts to alter science curricula [1], but I suspect the battle has only just begun (emphases mine):

Schools Nationwide Study Impact of Evolution Ruling - New York Times

... The Dover school district is now liable for the legal fees incurred by the plaintiffs - which plaintiffs lawyers say could exceed $1 million. The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as wells as lawyers with Pepper Hamilton, a private firm.

Eric J. Rothschild, a Pepper Hamilton lawyer, said in a news conference after the ruling that holding the Dover board to a financial penalty would convey to other school districts that "board members can't act like they did with impunity." But Mr. Rothschild said the fees were still being totaled, and he left open the possibility that the lawyers might go after individual board members who voted for the intelligent design policy to pay the legal costs....

The next thing we'll see is that the GOP will put legislation in place to provide tort immunity for those who challenge the science curriculum. That legislation will then be challenged in the Supreme Court, which may well then find it to be unconstitutional.

The religious right will simultaneously use this defeat to claim that liberals and "the elite" (i.e. Jews and intellectuals) are launching a war on "Faith" (ie. fundamentalist christianity), with a particular emphasis on the financial implications of the Dover defeat. They will use a distored version of the judgment, and the usual appeals to tribalism and fear, to raise hundreds of millions to finance further assaults across the public school system.

If I were a lawyer with an interest in this domain, I'd be buying new office space. In the meantime, school board elections should get a lot more attention from everyone.

[1] Note to the usual dolts -- the judge has no problem with incluuding ID/creationism in philosophy, history, social science, and/or religious studies curriccula. Neither do I. Indeed I recommend it. Of course one will need to include Hindu (population), and Animist (first Americans) perspectives as well as biblical ones.

Unleashing the NSA: What's the real story?

We have been told that Bush secretly loosened restrictions on the National Security Administration.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Okay, old news. Europeans, who've been monitored by Echelon for decades, must find this all very amusing.

Problem is, it doesn't make sense. Even Bush's fervent supporters acknowledge his reasons for bypassing the secret courts that used to mediate these actions don't hold water. All the monitoring anyone's discussed publicly is perfectly doable without new law or new presidential powers. Sure, Bush could be nuts -- but I don't think he is. So what's the story that the New York Times either missed, or, more likely, has decided not to discuss?

Here's my guess. The NSA couldn't use the FISA process because they weren't really spying on individual people. No identified target, no warrant. Instead the NSA was doing in the US what they've done overseas for decades -- monitoring voice and data traffic to selected nations. Trolling, in other words. That's what Bush had to authorize; it goes well beyond FISA. The whole business about targeted monitoring is just a smokescreen.

Anyone else have a theory that makes sense?

Update 12/20: Others are drawing similar conclusions. (The date on my posting is off, I originally posted on 12/19.)
Update 12/21: Respectable sorts (WaPo) suggest this was really about monitoring based on phone and email targets rather than identified senders.
Update 12/21: Slate publishes an article by a longtime NSA watcher that puts things in a (dark) perspective.
Update 12/23: Another editorial today in WaPo is saying the same thing, though they abbreviate it as "monitor everyone". The editorial points out that a clause in Patriot I may be interpreted to allow this expansion of the NSA's mission.
Update 12/24: That didn't take long. The NYT has confirmed my suspicion. Now it makes sense. Monitoring traffic across the USA goes well beyond the FISA mandate, it required an executive order. Echelon America indeed.

Newsweek is talking about impeachment ...

The Bush spy scandal
, and the implication of "what else has he done that we don't know about" is starting to outrage even those who've handled other Bush transgressions with kid gloves:

Bush’s Snoopgate - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

... This will all play out eventually in congressional committees and in the United States Supreme Court. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in 1974...

It is unlikely that the Dems will take Congress, but this is indeed why the articles of impeachment were created. Not to punish a philandering spouse, but to remove a power mad president.

Revolt of the Professionals (WaPo): Will reason return?

David Ignatius claims the professionals are in revolt (WaPo). One of the many disturbing aspects of the Bush regime is its deep disdain, even hatred, for intellectuals. This shows in their attitude towards scientists, economists, sociologists and just about anyone with an agenda of evidence and rationalism. The Bush regime favors instinct, emotion, faith and conviction. Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot all felt the same way.

Ignatius claims the professionals are striking back. Maybe. It's a nice thought, and the judgment in Dover does give one some (irrational) hope. Of all the things Bush has done, perhaps the strangest for me is that I now remember Newt Gingrich with a tepid fondness. Yes, he's a bit of a nut. Yes he's ruthless and vengeful. He did, however, have some marginal respect for reason.