The worldmind in action: finding impact craters

A scientist (amateur?), viewing a newly discovered asteroid impact crater using Google Earth, impulsively decides to look for more. He quickly finds two candidates (Astroseti.org), but hours of additional work don't turn up any more.

It's a truism of the history of science that new instruments create a flurry of new discoveries. The new instrument in this case is not satellite imagery (old), or even Google Earth (though it's cool), it's the distributed worldmind. Lots of minds doing a vast amount of analysis.

After 9/11 I, among many others, proposed using a large collection of minds to process visual data from Afghanistan (obviously the security risks require some thought). I don't think that happened, but this story again shows us the potential of the new instrument.

Incidentally, the story of the early find and then nothing seems odd, but consider how many must have looked this way. The same idea probably occurred to tens of thousands of enthusiasts. The vast majority would look for a few hours then give up. If it takes 10,000 hours to find a crater, and the average search is one hour, then roughly 1 in 10,000 persons will make a discovery like this.

My Homeland security interview: via MoneyGram

Recenly I had to send some money to my sister in Canada. A quick Google search suggested MoneyGram or Western Union were my best choices, and MoneyGram works with Canadian Post Offices. It was the better option.

I ran into some technical glitches (password problem) and experienced a mixture of both insecure (they use password hints!) and stupidly secure practices (they wanted my sister to know my home phone number), but it did work. They most interesting part, however, was the automated interview with "homeland security". Three of the four questions were about finding out which "John Faughnan" I was:

4. Based on your background, in what county is 'xxxxxxx'? ( The
address listed may be partial, misspelled or contain minor numbering
variations from your actual address )

One question, however, wanted to know who I knew:

1. With which of the following people are you most closely associated? (
Names may be listed as last-name first-name, include maiden names or contain
slight misspellings.) [I've removed names]

A... A...
G... B...
H... H...
L... F...
S... N...

The names were a bit odd. They sounded vaguely Arabic, but mostly they seemed computer generated. I googled on them (that should boost my watchlist ranking!) but came up with no matches at all. Odd.

It was an interesting example of how Homeland Security is implementing its watch lists, and seeking to match a name to a profile.

I do wonder if everyone gets the automated interview...

Bad Google, bad: Blogger misbehaving

Blogger/Google hit me with a real one-two.

First they temporarily locked down my tech blog because their brain-dead algorithms mis-identified it as a spam blog, then, the moment they "whitelisted" it, they had a major hardware outage. It took them about 16 hours to recover, and they were awfully slow to admit on status.blogger.com that they had a problem (times below are PT, outage was early evening on 3/16):

Thursday, March 16, 2006

The filer that we have been having trouble with in the last few days failed again. Those blogs that are stored on the bad filer are temporarily not available for publishing and viewing. We are working on replacing the filer and restoring access to the blogs affected.

Update (10:40 am, March 17): The filer has been restored. All affected blogs are available for publishing and reading.

More Google/Blogger incompetence

Today Google locked down my tech blog because their alorithms miscategorized it as a spam blog. They reviewed and cleared the block, but now the site is wiped and I can't republish from the Blogger archives.

I would not be inclined to trust my personal files to Google.

Google has locked my tech blog!

#$#$!$!#$ Google.

Google's bots decided my tech blog, Gordon's Tech was a splog (spam blog). Wow, that's nasty. It's locked until they review it. I'll post here what happens next. Note the threat to delete the entire blog within 10 days.

I'm going to have to reconsider my enthusiasm for Google. I think it just dropped about zero.

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

Update: They've unlocked it, but now when I try to publish I get "001 java.io.IOException". Enthusiasm heading for sub-zero levels.

The meaning of the decline of America

Books on the decline of a nation are like the proverbial stuck clock. They are wrong almost all of the time. Almost.

The same week that Salon made its bid for a Pulitzer Prize, they feature a review of a book predicting the decline and fall of America:

Salon.com Books | Decline and fall

... In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, it was clear to everyone that the United States had suffered a hideous blow, but few had any idea just how bad it was. It didn't occur to most people to wonder whether the country's very core had been seriously damaged; if anything, America had never seemed so united and resolute. Almost five years later, with Bush still in the White House, a whole cavalcade of catastrophes bearing down on us and a lack of political will to address any of them, the scope of Osama bin Laden's triumph is coming sickeningly into focus. He didn't start the country on its march of folly, but he spurred America toward bombastic nationalism, military quagmire and escalating debt, all of which have made its access to the oil controlled by the seething countries of the Middle East ever more precarious. Now the United States is careening down a well-worn road faster than anyone could have imagined.

It's easy to mock books about disaster and decline. After all, we who are relatively prosperous in America have, by definition, lived tolerably through several such books. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that America has "jumped the shark". Reelecting George Bush II. Delivering both the house and the senate to the 21st century GOP. The rise of theocracy. We're not in great shape now, and ahead lies the promise of far more dramatic acts of terrorism, of the post-oil world, geopolitical transitions, technological risks, climate change, the hoary ghost of Malthus (in the form of various plagues), etc, etc.

In any case, it was always very unlikely that America would remain ascendant forever. Like Spain, China (several times), England, the Netherlands, Turkey and so many other empires, we'll transition to some other role. We may have a faster rise and fall than most, but these are fast times. Centuries have become decades.

The more interesting question than the relative (and perhaps absolute) decline of America, is what it means. Will the world follow, or will human prosperity continue to grow overall? Certainly many of the challenges America faces are truly global; China's challenges are immense, for example. Will America's fall be relatively peaceful (Soviet Union style? - even better, the Netherlands) or a typically American meltdown? Will we keep some semblance of democracy, or will we re-elect some version of GWB? How should we, as individuals, adjust to the world ahead.

Those are the interesting questions. To me it's not about decline (highly probable and we're likely in the thick of it now), but about what happens to the world and how we manage the transition.

Amazon backup service: That was quick

The Singularity makes it hard to keep speculation in the future. Recently I was bemoaning the pitiful decline of Dantz Retrospect (my SOHO backup solution) and the dearth of alternative backup software. I noted that the looming prospect of Google offering free online backup was probably depressing the marketplace.

The surprise today was Amazon announced their storage solution first:

Amazon S3 Functionality

Amazon S3 is intentionally built with a minimal feature set.

• Write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. The number of objects you can store is unlimited.
• Each object is stored and retrieved via a unique, developer-assigned key.
• Authentication mechanisms are provided to ensure that data is kept secure from unauthorized access. Objects can be made private or public, and rights can be granted to specific users.
• Uses standards-based REST and SOAP interfaces designed to work with any Internet-development toolkit.
• Built to be flexible so that protocol or functional layers can easily be added. Default download protocol is HTTP. A BitTorrent (TM) protocol interface is provided to lower costs for high-scale distribution. Additional interfaces will be added in the future.

Pricing

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

S3 is not a backup service of course, it's a data service. Someone has to lease/sell the software that would do the backup work, storing the encrypted files on S3. It's not cheap though. I figure at least a $130 a year fee for a meager 50GB of backup. The economics may be wrong for use as a pure backup solution.

One wonders how S3 will survive Google's pending storage service. It would be surprising if Google were to cost more than 5 cents/GB/month.

What about the wisdom of storing one's files on an online server like Google's? Online backup is now commonly used by corporations, so it may simply be inevitable. In theory one could put sensitive files into encrypted disk images (but ANY change would likely mean a new full backup of the entire image); but I recently wrote about the limitations of that approach. Even the best of today's encryption might be no defense against a quantum computing code cracker of 2030. So encrypting an image would buy one at most a few years of protection. Maybe that's all we'll get. (Of course if the image file were subpoenaed one would be obliged to provide the key to break the encryption. Such a key might be hard to remember however ...)

Entitled opinions: Another podcast for the living mind

Recently I raved about the BBC's In Our Times podcast. Today, on browsing the iTunes home page for IOT (click on the small arrow next to the title of the podcast) I came across reviews. I didn't know the iTunes store had begun featuring reviews. Of course all the reviews were perfect fives, each vying to be more excessive in their praise.

One of them, however, suggested a look at an amateur (in the good sense of the word) rival from Stanford:

Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)

... hosted by Professor Robert Harrison - is a weekly literary talk show that ranges broadly on issues related to literature, ideas, and lived experience. The show is typically a one-on-one conversation with a special guest about select topics or authors about which he or she is especially entitled to an opinion...

Robert Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University and is Chair of the Department of French and Italian, where he has been since 1985.. He was trained as a Dantista at Cornell University where he received his Ph.D. in Romance Studies in 1984. Among his publications are the books The Body of Beatrice, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, and The Dominion of the Dead...

The titles look great, but I've only just added this to my collection. A nice touch is that one can download the back catalogue, I think they've done over 10 shows.

I wonder if/when small radio stations will start simply broadcasting podcasts ...

Where are my keys?

Via GMSV, a plausible visit to the near future: Slibe.com: google in 20 years

Nasal decongestant addiction: I don't buy it

I don't buy the conventional explanation for nasal decongestant addiction:

Nasal Sprays Can Bring on Vicious Cycle - New York Times:

... It works so well that you tend to keep using it,' says Dr. David Vernick, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. 'You're used to breathing well with the spray, and when you stop it, you get congested. So you use it a little more frequently, yet the congestion doesn't clear up for long.'

That's because after three or four days of continuous use, the sprays can cause the nasal linings to swell up again, even when the cold or attack of sinusitis or allergy that originally caused the problem has passed. If this pattern continues, a patient has a good chance of becoming trapped in a vicious cycle of overuse and dependence that can last for months or years.

Nyah. It's not that I don't believe in the rebound effect, it's rather that it seems insufficient to explain the range of behaviors seen. I suspect that a small portion of the population develops a true cocaine-like addiction to the decongestant. Anyone who's taken oral sudafed at bedtime knows this class of drugs has stimulant activity. My bet is that a few people metabolize these drugs in a peculiar way, and the result is a truly addictive substance.

Pure speculation. No data.

Latest GOP Bill would send me to prison for 15 years ...

Fifteen years. Hmm. That might dissuade me from blogging or speculating about Bush's monitoring programs:

Reporters Exempt From Eavesdropping Bill

Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration's eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.

But an aide to the bill's chief author, Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, said that is not the intention of the legislation.

"It in no way applies to reporters _ in any way, shape or form," said Mike Dawson, a senior policy adviser to DeWine, responding to an inquiry Friday afternoon. "If a technical fix is necessary, it will be made."

The Associated Press obtained a copy of the draft of the legislation, which could be introduced as soon as next week.

The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" the Bush administration's terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.

Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.

The WaPo article's headline actually contradicts the article's text. It's a bad headline, but what's clear is that non-journalists would probably be guilty if they promulgated or discussed the GOP's surveillance programs. I wonder if what I've written or speculated would qualify for jail time under such a law.

Were such a law to come to pass, I most certainly would not be talking about such programs on this blog, or in any other forum. I wonder what a council of the wise would say? Is "it" "happening here"? Perhaps the ACLU ought to launch an alternative form of 'doomsday clock' that would measure how close we are the 'tipping point'.

note: I fixed up a few links and revised wording after the initial publication.

Same genes, different outcome - why?

Chimps and humans have 99% overlap in genes. It turns out, of course, that not all genes are created equal. The impact of changes in transcription factors can be enormous, and that's what's different between us and chimps ...

TIME.com: Eye on Science - Science Blog Archives - Why We're Humans, Not Chimps

... a comparative analysis of rhesus macaques, chimps, orangutans and humans shows that the specific genes for so-called transcription factors, which act as on-off switches for other genes, have changed dramatically over the past 5 million years.

All humans have very similar genes (almost clonal), but we vary greatly in capabilities. Presumably the transcription factors will turn out to be important in that too. That's where we'll intervene to ensure that, thirty years from now, wealthy children will have average IQs of 200. Speciation by wealth?

Gwynn Dyer: Interpreting America to Iran

Gwynne Dyer, the iconoclastic Canadian journalist and military historian has added another five articles to his web site. (Please email him and ask him to start a blog with a simple posting when articles are added).

17 February 2006 Iran, Oil and Euros
19 February 2006 The Leg Drain
23 February 2006 Iraq: Civil War
27 February 2006 America's Indian Ally
3 March 2006 Montenegro

The list doesn't include his recent fascinating article for the Tehran Times, in which he explains that Bush and his minions are indeed crackers and are willing, if not eager, to attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons. In the article on the bourse he explains that while Iran's creation of a Euro-based oil pricing system could cause the US economy to crater this is not why the US may attack Iran -- Bush doesn't care about economics.

The de facto role with Iran is fascinating. Other than his income from the Tehran Times I don't know if he's being paid for this or if it's simply an emergent phenomena, but Iran could do far worse than employ Gwynn Dyer.

Saddam's downfall was apparently not understanding Bush II. Dyer's record suggests he understands Bush and the US, and he also understands Iraq and the middle east. We're all better off if Iran understands the nature of the US under Bush, and doesn't assume we won't do something perverse and, arguably, crazy.

Minnesota imports Indiana's climate

Global climate change involves severe perturbations to a chaotic system with an unknown number of attractors. In the near term some places may cool, but the poles are warming fast. Alaska is melting, and so is Minnesota.

I've noted before that cross country skiing and skijoring are dying sports in most of the US, here we learn that a local outdoor store feels guilty about selling snowshoes. The changes in Minnesota have been dramatic, even over the 12 years we've lived there...

THE MELTING OF MINNESOTA

... Out on Lake Osakis, a popular fishing spot in central Minnesota, there were half the usual number of shacks, and sheets of water lay over thin ice. In town, despite the completion of a new trail, snowmobile traffic was scant.

... state climatologists, using almost 140 years of data, have determined that Lake Osakis now breaks open in the spring, on average, a week earlier than it did a century ago.

... In northwest Minnesota, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists cite warming as a reason why a moose herd that 20 years ago numbered nearly 4,000 may soon disappear. In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, foresters are noticing that maples and oaks more suited to warmer climates are taking hold. Near St. Peter, naturalist Jim Gilbert says lilacs are blooming in the spring two to three weeks earlier than when he first began watching them in 1967. In Dakota County, parks officials no longer schedule skiing and snowshoeing events for December and January, for lack of snow.

Those examples are reinforced by a pile of meteorological data showing that the state has been getting warmer and wetter for some time...

Greta Petrich, who reports the Lake Osakis ice-out dates to the Department of Natural Resources, said local dealers are switching from selling snowmobiles to selling all-terrain vehicles. "Change or die," she said.

Brian Bahn, who works for Midwest Mountaineering in Minneapolis, said recently that he finds it "hard to look somebody in the face and sell them snowshoes."

The Minnesota Department of Tourism, responding to the recurring mild winters, produced a video promotion this season that for the first time features indoor activities, not just ways to enjoy snow and ice. The spots show an actor in a bear suit ice fishing and snowmobiling, but also browsing in an art gallery and making moves on a dance floor.

... The causes and effects of the warming so far have been most dramatic in the Northern Hemisphere, because it has a higher proportion of both people and land -- which reflects heat, rather than absorbing it. And places far from oceans, such as Minnesota, are thought to be positioned for some of the most extreme changes.

... Minnesota's annual average temperatures have been rising faster than the rest of the globe's -- some say twice as fast. The state Office of Climatology has calculated the rise at 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1894. That's four times the variation the globe saw over the previous three to five centuries.

... Minnesota has been warming in both the short and long runs. For the Twin Cities, four of the five warmest winters since 1891 have occurred in the past 24 seasons. Four of the nine warmest have happened over the last nine winters, including this one.

According to University of Minnesota Extension meteorologist and climatologist Mark Seeley, the recent trends have been marked by warm winters, warm summer nights and high dew points. Elevated dew points -- a measure for human discomfort that also reflects plant vitality -- have increased in frequency and duration over the past 20 years. Dew points last July in Minnesota, Seeley noted, resembled those commonly recorded in Bombay, India.

Average annual precipitation -- often overlooked in discussions about climate changes -- has increased even more sharply than temperatures across Minnesota. Because of its connection to increased water vapor in the atmosphere, elevated precipitation is one of the central predictions in many global warming studies.

... While some climate scientists have predicted that the northern pine and birch forest could vanish altogether, Frelich said the red oak and red maple could replace it if the warming climate trend includes enough moisture. If the climate trend goes warm and dry, he said, the area could come to resemble oak savannah -- grassy prairie with intermittent stands of oak trees...

From our selfish family perspective, this is all bad. Winter is still too cold to bike and swim, but now it's too warm to ski and sled. Even ice skating outdoors is iffy; our local rink now uses a Zamboni to maintain the outdoor ice. Minnesota is going to need outdoor Zambonis and refrigerated outdoor rinks. We get more cloudy days (January was very gray); those cold, clear, crisp days of old are less common. Yes, 40 below is indeed cold, but those days weren't frequent and I kind of liked the challenge of dressing for extreme cold. (On the other hand, 19th century local winters were a bit much.)

We're at the vanguard of change now ...

PS. I want Google to start auto-generating at the end of each blog posting a list of all similar postings on the same and related blogs ...

Update 3/12: This Zimmer review of two books on global climate change is a nice extension of the above. Apparently an ITH editor introduced an error in the magnitude of the temperature change mentioned in the article.

A theory disproved: Saddam knew he had no WMDs

Why did Saddam risk an American invasion? One theory was that he himself thought he had bio and chemical weapons that he could use to blunt an invading force. A leak of a Pentagon report, printed in the NYT, claims that in fact he new Iraq had no WMDs but his senior leaders thought they existed:

Even as U.S. Invaded, Hussein Saw Iraqi Unrest as Top Threat - New York Times

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense....

... he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government's control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview "deterrence by doubt."

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein's efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

Even some Iraqi officials were impressed by Mr. Powell's presentation. Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaish, who oversaw Iraq's military industry, thought he knew all the government's secrets. But Bush administration officials were so insistent that he began to question whether Iraq might have prohibited weapons after all. "I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed we had these weapons," he told interrogators after the war, according to the Iraq Survey Group report.

The story sounds persuasive, but the Bush/Pentagon propaganda campaign makes me cautious.

The implications are that the world believed Iraq had WMDs because every nation's intelligence service was hearing from Iraqi military leaders -- and those generals thought Iraq had WMDs. Only Saddam, and presumably some trusted insiders knew the truth. Saddam was reluctant to fully verify this because he feared Iranian invasion, and wanted Iran to think Iraq might have WMDs. That was the wrong choice.

Update 3/12: Kaplan has more details from a subsequent Foreign Affairs article.