It pays to be a parasite: The cat

I've half-jokingly praised the parasitic brilliance of the dog. Arguably, however, dogs are symbiotes. We gave them our garbage, they cleaned the premises. Physically weak humans could ally with physically strong dogs, given evolution more playgrounds to tweak the mind.

Domestic cats, on the other hand, are pure[1] parasites:

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution - New York Times

With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

How did evolution shape the cat, so it was so able to prey so effectively upon human weaknesses? One clue (also from this week's NYT Science) is that human's are programmed to respond to anything resembling a helpless infant. Cats appear to have evolved to take advantage of that weak point.

One can only speculate on the alliance that evolution might build between cats and toxoplasma. It would make sense that toxoplasma, a rapidly evolving parasite, could alter the behavior of both cats and humans to further its own agenda ...

I do love ecology.

[1] Ok, so they killed rats, mice and other "vermin". Sigh. Guess they were symbiotes once too ...

The alternative to an American police state: The transparent society

Yesterday I wrote of the case for an American police state. I imagined that Cheney, reading a post 9/11 secret report on the falling cost of havoc, could have logically resolved that he was obligated to create a de facto police state in America.

I wrote that I was sympathetic to the dilemma faced by my imaginary VP, but that there were better paths that Cheney's secrecy had foreclosed. Maybe my virtual Cheney felt he had no choice -- that Americans weren't ready to think about the problems the anthrax attack and 9/11 exposed.

At the same time I wrote, David Brin, author of The Transparent Society (suddenly sold out on Amazon!), explored one of the alternatives (emphases mine):

Contrary Brin: Preventing Tyranny...part one

Unlike nearly every other opponent of the Bush Administration, I am far less incensed over their efforts -- through vehicles like the PATRIOT Act and the NSA -- to empower our paid protector caste (e.g. the FBI etc) with better access to wiretaps and other powers of surveillance. Their increased ability to see is inevitable, and not intrinsically worrisome. Indeed, in this new century, we will simply have to get used to the fact that elites will see very, very well. Get used to it.

But this need not be the end of freedom. What I hammer relentlessly is the point about reciprocal accountability -- that average citizens must fight, like demons, to retain our ability to look back! To ensure that the protector caste can never get away with spying or meddling or doing anything else unsupervised and unscrutinized by a citizenry who are both knowing and fiercely determined to the bosses of this civilization. To stay free.

Rather than focusing on a few rogue wiretaps, it is the Bushite frenzy for secrecy, dismantling every tool of accountability and oversight, that we should find far more terrifying.

The utter insanity of our situation cannot be over-emphasized. Ask ANY of your conservative friends what their reaction would have been, had Bill Clinton done 1/10 of any of these things. Take ANY ONE category. From busting the budget to relentless secrecy, demolition of our military readiness, torture, domestic spying, ruination of all our alliances, support for monopolies, the taking of bribes in exchange for pork contracts, interpreting every law as optional under the “Commander in Chief” clause, and utter destruction of international goodwill...

The comparison to Clinton is a distraction, but Brin's key point is that we cannot prevent ubiquitious surveilance. It's too late now, the technology to do this came far too fast for the bulk of mankind to understand it.

I am very troubled by this reality, by I have conceded that the falling cost of havoc alone probably requires us to live in a fishbowl. The challenge is -- can we both watched and free? Can we choose a 'transparent society' rather than a police state?

We can't return to the transient age of anonymity (at least in the physical world) -- that short period of urban and roaming life when people could be alone. The easy alternative, the alternative chosen by inaction, is Cheney/Bush's police state. The hard alternative is the Transparent Society. Unless you can think of something better ...

The consequences of NSA intercepts

Wild rumors circulate that the NSA intercepts targeted CNN's Christiane Amanpour: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Riddle Inside a Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma.... Whether the rumors are true are not, it is a credit to the Bush legacy that they are certainly believable. The interesting parts John Aravosis posting (via DeLong) is the exploration of what it would mean to wiretap a well connected journalist.

One would learn a great number of things that might be of interest to various governmental bodies, none of which are criminal or immoral. Of course if one were investigating a major breach of national security, such as the leaking of the NSA's intercepts program, journalists would be the key figures to target. After all, by one or two degrees of separation it is certain they are connected to al Qaeda. (I met Reza Pehlavi in college, Reza must have met the younger bin Laden, therefore I'm connected to bin Laden. Bush, of course, must be deeply connected to bin Laden.)

Welcome to Bush's America.

Will journalists begin using high grade encryption in their everyday activities? I'm surprised high grade encryption is still legal ...

Cats did get around

New research has clarified the lineage of cats. Turns out that over millions of years they circulated in and out of Africa, Asia and North America, splitting and meeting along the way. Interestingly invaders didn't seem to wipe out indigenous cats -- in contrast to the expansion of humans.

Cat-Blogging from Deep Time. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future

...The scientists were able to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of cats with a great deal of statistical confidence. Their results are published in this week's Science (link to come). I've put the illustrations from the paper at the bottom for those who like to revel in the gorey details. What's particularly neat about the paper is that it offers a hypothesis for how cats spread around the world. The researchers came up with this hypothesis by looking at where cats are today, and then mapping their locations onto the evolutionary tree.

The common ancestor of all living cats, according to their results, lived in Asia about ten million years ago. This cat's descendants split into two branches. One led to lions, jaguars, tigers, leapards, snow leopards, and cloud leopards. The other branch gave rise to all other cats. These early cats remained in Asia until 8.5 million years ago, when new lineages moved into the New World and Africa. The New World immigrants gave rise to bobcats, couggars, lynxes, ocelots, bobcats, and other species found in the Western Hemisphere today. The African migrants were the ancestors of today's servals and other small cat species.

But cats have a way off wandering. The ancestors of domestic cats moved back from North America back into Asia around 6.5 million years ago. Lynxes moved back as well about 2 million years ago, spreading west until they reached Spain. The ancestors of today's mountain lions in the New World also produced another lineage that moved back into Asia and eventually wound up in Africa, where it became today's cheetahs. Other big cats moved into Africa at around the same time--the cousins of tigers and snow leopards in Asia moved through the Sinai peninsula and evolved into African lions. But close cousins of the lions moved into the New World, evolving into jaguars.

The case for a police state in America

When Molly Ivins writes about the NSA's domestic monitoring, even the few who read her work will assume that comments about a "police state" are a rhetorical flourish. Cheney wants a more powerful president, but surely he does not seek a police state? That makes no sense.

Or maybe it does.

Imagine (scary thought) that there are people like me who work in government. Imagine that in October of 2001 they were asked to fully consider the implications of the 9/11 attack, and the even more novel anthrax attack that came later. (Anyone remember the anthrax? No, I didn't think so.)

Imagine that they produced something like this. To be precise, not the somewhat chaotic web page, but rather a set of nicely bound reports containing one important idea.

The idea that the real problem was not al Qaeda.

The idea that the real problem was that falling cost of havoc. The notion that in a world where exponential growth in wealth and technology was providing the offensive capabilities of nation states to small groups and even individuals.

Imagine that Cheney read that report, and believed it. In this imaginary world al Qaeda is a wake-up call for a much bigger and intractable problem. A problem too big and scary to discuss broadly, or to seek public input on. Alas, Cheney would then miss out on a lot of alternative ideas and paths one could follow, but he's a politician. He probably understands the capabilities of the American public better than I. He may believe that only a few, only the strong, should bear this burden and carry it to the logical conclusion.

The logical conclusion, or at least one of them, is to implement ubiquitous surveilance -- to monitor and to act pre-emptively. Not just al Qaeda -- because they're yesterday's threat. PETA could be a big threat tomorrow. Since the justification of this action is too grim to present publicly, the surveilance must be secret, and centrally controlled. The law cannot be changed without revealing the deeper issues, so the law must be broken. In other words, a police state must be implemented.

I won't say what path I would have taken had I Cheney's power. I don't think it would have been the path I've outlined, but obviously I would have taken those imaginary reports quite seriously.

I wonder if America is ready to talk about the real problems we face, and what our options are. No? Sigh. Too bad, but I think you're right. Then a police state it shall be ...

Skijoring goes mainstream

In 1995 I had one of the first web pages on the net about skijoring. I'd started with my buddy Molly in early 90s on the advice of our vet in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (aka Alaska south). Molly now rolls in celestial fish, but even into her old age she loved the harness and lead -- even though she didn't do much pulling after age 12 or so. That old web page still shows up in the first page of a Google search, which says something about the gravitational attraction of old web pages.

Now, happily, Skijoring has made it to the popular culture -- via the New York Times:

Fitness - Skijoring - Fashion - New York Times:

Skijoring (pronounced skee-JOAR-ing) has long been practiced in Alaska and Scandinavia, where sled-dog sports are part of the local culture. But in the last five years it has gained momentum in places like Vermont, upstate New York, Michigan, Colorado and Minnesota and now has a following among thousands of recreational skiers and their dogs, said Tim White, the president of the International Federation of Sleddog Sports, in Minnesota. Cross-country ski areas have opened hundreds of miles of trails to skiers and their pets, and new skijoring clubs, equipment makers, races, instructional clinics and Web sites cater to the converts.

Participation in skijoring has grown as people find that many breeds of dog are fit and strong enough to pull their owners. Though pugs and bichon friss won't qualify, active healthy dogs that weigh at least 35 pounds can skijor. Arctic sled dogs like Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes are popular race breeds. But Labrador retrievers, Rhodesian ridgebacks, Great Danes, greyhounds, border collies and even standard poodles can also participate. A giant schnauzer is hardly an arctic sled dog, but Raven took to skijoring with little hesitation, Ms. Offerman said.

If not for the waning of winter snow cover, the sport would be much bigger. Alas, in many parts of America snow cover is only a memory. Molly and I ended up doing more "skatejoring" than skijoring. Inline skating with a harnessed dog, however, is a sport for the terminally insane.

Changes to comments

I've changed the Blogger comments settings. Anyone can comment now, there's no longer a requirement to register with Blogger. All comments have to be approved for now, but I'll see how much junk I get. Maybe the very annoying OCR Turing test (type distorted letters) will suffice to limit spam. (I dislike that test intensely since screen readers for visually impaired persons can't pass it.)

Poindexter's dreaded TIA was a mouse compared to Bush's NSA

I remember the concerns about Poindexter's TIA initiative. I also remember being intensely skeptical that it had really been "killed" by public "outrage". Slate makes a convincing case that not only was TIA not "killed", but that the current NSA program goes well beyond what TIA advocated:

Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy - Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope. By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali

The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."

The agency used to search the transmissions it monitors for key words, such as names and phone numbers, which are supplied by other intelligence agencies that want to track certain individuals. But now the NSA appears to be vacuuming up all data, generally without a particular phone line, name, or e-mail address as a target. Reportedly, the agency is analyzing the length of a call, the time it was placed, and the origin and destination of electronic transmissions. Those details would be crucial in mining the data for patterns—according to the officials the Times cited, the goal of the NSA's eavesdropping system.

I am not surprised, btw, that there's no real public reaction to the NSA disclosures. At least 30% of Americans are ready to declare Bush dictator for life, so they're not concerned. Another 30%, including myself, assumed the NSA was doing this, so it's hard for us to fake being shocked and amazed. Another 30% is completely clueless. That leaves 10% to be outraged, and that's not enough to sell any papers.

Update: Molly Ivins has a terrific summary of the entire story with some historical perspective.

bosons go with forces, fermions with stuff

Cosmic Variance sent me to bosons and fermions, allegedly all literate people should know the difference. I can't keep 'em straight, so since the best way to learn something is to write it, here goes.

Bosons are immaterial. Bosons overlap, they hold things together -- or push them apart. They are Force particles. Photons are Bosons. The undiscovered Graviton is a Boson. The also undiscovered Higg's Boson is thought to provide things with Mass (mass = E/c**2).

Fermions, even though they inconveniently start with the letter F, they are "stuff". They take up space. They exclude one another. Protons, neutrons, electrons, mosts (all?) quarks and leptons are Fermions. They are "Firm".

Why are Fermions and Bosons called "particles" when Bosons are ephemeral? Bahh. I vote for banning the word "particle".

Lost Luggage Lessons

For the 2nd time in 3 years we lost luggage on a holiday trip to Montreal -- on a direct NWA flight!

This time it wasn't security holding a bag, or the airline running out of room, or someone misfiling a bag. Our 3 kids were slow moving through Trudeau (Dorval's) endless aerobic corridors (the secret to Quebecois physique) and by the time we got to the carousel a harried traveler had grabbed the wrong bag -- ours.

It turned up in Toronto on Air Canada and was delivered to my parent's home. The airline did fine really, but the process is a royal pain. Here are a few tips I learned:

1. Northwest has a web site for tracking lost luggage. I didn't see this on the lost luggage paperwork, it would have saved us some calls. I came across it by accident.
2. The silly luggage tags airlines provide are shredded in transit about half the time. Put identification in the bag and buy tougher tags.
3. All wheeled bags look alike to travelers impaired by age, disability, inexperience, stress, hunger, etc. Ribbons tear off. Duct tape won't adhere to many bags. I'm looking for brightly colored tough nylon cable ties -- a few in strategic places would have prevented loss of my wheeled bag.
4. If a bag is lost for over 24 hours you can be reimbursed for up to $50 of "essentials". Unfortunately the list of "essentials" was last updated in 1950. A power adapter for my laptop is far more important than a clean shirt.
5. Speaking of power adapters, when I lost the bag I started realizing how hard, if not impossible, it would be to replace some of the gear in it. Clothes are easy to replace, a G3 iBook AV cable may be impossible to find. Montreal is not a tiny city, but I found only one store that had an iBook power adapter on the premises. It's a pain, but these things need to be carried on.
6. AAA and AMEX don't automatically provide lost luggage insurance. Homeowners does cover it, but we have a $1000 deductible. My AMEX card allows me to insure up to $500 for $5/flight or $39/traveler/year if the trip is charged to the same card. I'm not sure the insurance is worth it really; for me the problem is more the hassle of finding replacements than the insurance costs. Domestic coverage by airlines is pretty good, but international coverage sucks -- maybe $250 for a typical bag ($9/pound).
   

Check out this reference too.

Lessons in business:

Slate has an excellent article on the misfortunes of cafe owners. I must confess the cafes I frequent seem to have their owners on the premises all the time. This reminds me of a essay about running a new england bed and breakfast. The essay was written by a famed Ivy league economist in the 1950s or so (I'll update this post with the name when I remember it). He loved the B&Bs near his hobby farm; he considered them a great way for the city to donate money to the country. (Emphases mine, the percent breakdown is worth memorizing.)

Bitter Brew - I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life. By Michael Idov

The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of 'cozy') are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close.

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you've found that guy, you're already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You're also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

It's a great article. Tragically pastries are a money sink. I love pastries.

Humans aren't good at oversight

We had lots of nifty rules to guide experimenting in gene alteration in crops. Too bad we didn't actually follow them ...

Lax Oversight Found in Tests of Gene-Altered Crops - New York Times

The Department of Agriculture has failed to regulate field trials of genetically engineered crops adequately, raising the risk of unintended environmental consequences, according to a stinging report issued by the department's own auditor.

The report, issued late last month by the department's Office of Inspector General, found that biotechnology regulators did not always notice violations of their own rules, did not inspect planting sites when they should have and did not assure that the genetically engineered crops were destroyed when the field trial was done...

No surprises here. I'd have been amazed if it were otherwise. Humans aren't good at following boring rules. It takes onerous discipline and great fear to ensure rules are followed at airports, nuclear plants, in the military and in hospitals. There simply wasn't enough terror involved to make sure gene experimenters followed the rules.

We should stop the experiments, determine what rules are needed, and use the lessons of nuclear power to set the rules, the monitoring, and the consequences. Alas, the mega-corps that do this work donate far too much money to various senators to face any such risks.

Genetic data: Are there any so naive as to think laws will matter?

I think most relatively informed observers realize that, once genetic and other health data is collected, digitized and made mobile, there is no law that will keep it out of the hands of governments (and, in the US, corporations). It is simply an irresistible tempation.

If there's anyone so naive as to think otherwise, they ought to consider the story of the Swedish biobank:

Medicine's new central bankers | Economist.com

Similarly, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which already runs one of the world's oldest university-based biobanks, plans to follow 500,000 Swedes for 30 years to gain new insights into depression, cancer and heart disease...

... The Swedish government, which created one of the world's first national biobanks in 1975—it now has at least a blood sample from all of its citizens—used a loophole to gain access to the biobank a couple of years ago, in order to track down a killer.

It was not, admittedly, a run-of-the-mill murder case. Anna Lindh, Sweden's popular foreign minister, was murdered in September 2003 at a department store. Although Lindh's murder was captured on closed-circuit television, it was ultimately a DNA match from the murder weapon, a knife, that provided the basis on which the leading suspect, Mijailo Mijailovic, a 25-year-old Swedish Serb, was convicted. The DNA sample used to place Mr Mijailovic at the scene came from the country's national biobank, which—unlike many of the research biobanks now being established—is not anonymous.

Mr Mijailovic's conviction was later overturned on the basis that he suffers from a psychiatric disorder, but damage to the claim of confidentiality made by Sweden's biobank was done nevertheless. “This must never happen again,” says Jan-Eric Litton of the Karolinska Institute biobank. “This is not and should not be the purpose of a biobank—the only purpose, and it is my great hope that all nations abide by and clarify this, is to understand disease and find ways to address it in all of its forms. Biobanks are the future—they are a unique opportunity if we manage them correctly.”

“While bioethical and regulatory worries about biobanks abound, lack of agreement on standards could prove to be a more immediate impediment.”

But while limiting the use of biobanks to medical research sounds like a simple solution, grey areas abound. In January, Swedish lawmakers temporarily changed the law to allow access to the biobank in order to identify bodies of Swedish citizens killed in the Asian tsunami. That is arguably a non-medical use, but one that is harder to argue against: the samples were used to identify children, for whom dental records did not exist. As a biobank meeting held in Stockholm last May, and a follow-up meeting in Washington, DC, last month made clear, there is still no agreement about how to keep probing officials citing national security or other serious concerns out of the biobank vaults.

Sweden has strong privacy laws and traditions, but convicting an assassin was sufficient to sweep them away. This was an almost trivial temptation; imagine if the issue were identification of a suspected terrorist treated for smallpox ...

I think the Swedes should have resisted in the Lindh case, but I'd have made the same call in the Tsunami affair. The smallpox terrorist? Well, it depends. I do wish Bush were not in power.

The point? We shouldn't fool ourselves. If the data is collected it will be used. The rule should be only to collect data that is truly valuable, and to allow citizens to opt out of data collection. (Of course even anonymous data can be used to trace people with a bit of cleverness.) Everyone must understand that this data will be used and abused; if one wishes to avoid that then don't collect the data in the first place.

Incidentally, I have mixed feelings about the interoperability standards for health records. There is something to be said about data being very expensive to access and move ...

A million dollar bribe for Abramoff and DeLay

A million dollar bribe. Wow. Tom DeLay may not be returning to the his former leadership post in the near future ...

The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail (WaPo)

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

A million dollars is serious bribe money. At least DeLay did not sell himself cheaply ...

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?