Are humans the best problem solvers?

Hawks, perhaps only semi-seriously, asks a novel question about a study demonstrating that some apes can make plans about the future:

John Hawks Anthropology Weblog

... Why are these kinds of stories always about 'how smart' apes are instead of 'how dumb' people are? I mean, it would be fairly hard to train people to do this task without talking to them. I think that there would be a good fraction of people who wouldn't get it.

Obviously humans are not the fastest or strongest animal. We assume, however, that we are the "smartest" animals. We can solve "abstract" problems better than any other animal.

Of course that's not universally true. A cognitively impaired human may be much worse at abstract problem solving than many animals. Still, it is presumed to be true of "normal" humans.

But is it really? It seems likely that there are certain abstract problems, particularly those that can be solved without language, that some animals will be better at solving than "normal" humans. It will be interesting to run those experiments.

Which brings us to the inevitable next topic. When I was a undergrad goofing off at Williams college (great school, but relaxing compared to Caltech) I struggled mightily in my Ethics course to come up with an ethical program that didn't start out with the premise that humans had special privileges. Problem is, I couldn't figure out how all humans ended up with more privileges than all animals. (Of course I was also thinking in terms of non-human sentiences.)

No-one has devised an ethical program that gives humans special privileges over animals or non-human sentiences without either a 'God said we're special' or 'pragmatically speaking' fudge. I doubt there is one.

That's going to get increasingly challenging.

The Universal Library

The NYT magazine has a surprisingly good article on the digital library ...

Scan This Book! - New York Times

....Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

It's pretty good really, but how could they manage to omit Nelson's Project Xanadu, The Memex (Vaneva Bush, As We May Think) and Dickson's The Final Encylopedia?

They give the impression this stuff is 21st century! It's very mid-20th.

Managing the theft of your identity

As far as I know my identity has not been stolen - yet. On the other hand I have been through some interesting credit card fraud (twice really, the second was $2K spent on computers that took 10 minutes to reverse -- AMEX didn't even blink - so dull). We've also had checks stolen -- that's much worse than credit card fraud. NEVER carry checks.

So I should have some cred when I agree with Schneier that this is a great essay on responding to identity theft. It's trivially easy to take most people's identity, so it's only a matter of time before you'll need this:

HOW TO: Get Through Having Your Identity Stolen - Consumerist

9) Oh yeah, don’t really expect the police to DO anything about it. Even if you know the name and address of the person who did it (as in my case), they don’t do jack. You have to file with your own local police department who has way better things to do. If they live outside your city, oh well. Try not to be offended that they don’t actually care, spend the energy on getting it cleaned up. See Tip #3.

The police really, really, don't care about check fraud either.

BTW, Schneier and everyone else who knows the banking industry also knows how to fix our identity theft problem. Banks must be made liable for the costs borne by the victims of identity theft. The problem would quickly become rare.

Eugenics - the real thing now.

Saletan's article says it well. We've made a de facto peace with eugenics, it will become an increasingly large part of our lives over the next 40 to 50 years.

I don't think any student of humanity doubted that we'd travel this road. It's simply too hard to resist. Of course Lincoln would not have made the cut.

Hawks skeptical on hominid-chimp miscegenation

Hawks doesn't buy the dawn chumans story. I don't have an opinion either way - for once!

I do have an opinion about the way this is being presented in newspapers. They show an image of a modern human next to a modern chimp.

Hmph. Based on Hawk's writings, it sounds like the 'miscegenation'/bestiality "event" was 7 million years ago. I don't think the proto-human of 7 megayears BCE would pass for human today. I have no idea what the proto-chip of 7 megayears BCE looked like - presumably they didn't look like a modern chimp.

I'd like to see a picture of those two side-by-side ...

Cheney and the Agnew strategy

I have a vague memory that Nixon once said that Agnew was his primary defense against impeachment. When Ford replaced Agnew Nixon was a goner.

Molly Ivins isn't interested in impeaching Bush. For one thing:

WorkingForChange-Wreckage of the Bush administration

...I believe Dick Cheney is seriously off the rails, apparently deeply paranoid -- let's not put him in charge....

Saying Cheney is insane is the kind of thing we bloggers do. Molly Ivins is a veteran journalist; about as veteran as one can be these days. I doubt she tossed that line off without some thought, and some background evidence.

Cheney is too old to develop paranoid schizophrenia. He has, however, had several episodes of cardiac bypass, and he's not a young man. It's conceivable that he could have developed an organic brain syndrome with paranoid features -- partly due to his age, partly due to preexisting temperament, and partly due to the cumulative neurotrauma of several stints on bypass.

So it's an interesting question. Is Cheney truly fundamentally impaired, perhaps more severely than Reagan was by his early Alzheimer's Disease? Is anyone else saying this?

Hmmm. I wonder there's any legal maneuver one could use to expose a disabling condition in the VP ...

Exxon is pro-CO2

Exxon has been spending too much time at the tailpipe: New Ads Funded by Big Oil Portray Global Warming Science as Smear Campaign Against Carbon Dioxide.

Maybe Exxon is just trying to help out depressed cartoonists. The Onion should be able to smack this one out of the park.

My Lai, without the heroes

I'd read of this before, but now the official story is emerging. US troops murdered about 15 Iraqis, including a 3 yo child, in a crazed revenge for the unrelated death of a marine. My Lai in other words, but so far we don't have the equivalent of the American heroes that protected some of the Vietnamese villagers.

War crime.

Wicked. Friedman humbled.

Tom Tomorrow excerpts a set of Tom Friedman quotes on Iraq. Ouch. He's turned so many corners he's lapped himself. It's a good thing he's got a healthy ego ...

Galloway on Rumsfeld

Joe Galloway, a senior and respected military correspondent rips into Rumsfeld and his lackeys. It's a good rant from a very military perspective, but I particularly appreciated his "PS":

Defense Tech: Galloway Goes for the Throat

PS: those [tens of thousands of soldiers in fixed garrisons in germany who could not deploy] were called VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. they deployed. they formed the armored spear that penetrated kuwait and broke the republican guard. the garrisons were guarded, while they were gone, by the german army and police. they would have been so guarded in OIF too had we tried a bit of diplomacy instead of bitch-slapping Old Europe as your boss did at a crucial moment.

We haven't called enough attention to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's macho pissing on the Europeans prior to the invasion of Iraq. It was completely pointless. Even if the Bushies were going to ignore the Europeans, there were plenty of ways to do that calmly and without burning bridges. It was a leading indicator of the massive incompetence that lay ahead. I remember the sinking feeling I got when they did that. That's when I realized that however strong the case might have been to invade Iraq (turns out it was a faked case), Bush et al were the wrong team to do it.

The history of invasion by immigrants

Orcinus has assembled a 100 year history of American immigration scares. It's a good reference and a guide to what we can expect from the right wing.

It doesn't change my opinion on immigration though. I'm reserving judgment until I see more data on how it affects low wage earners. For now I think we ought to look at what Canada has done to get a big economic boost out of immigration. Canadian immigrants are not taking low wage jobs, they are selected for entrepreneurial behaviors and they create jobs at all wage ranges.

Java on the server, AJAX on the client

I'd blogged earlier about how Netscape and Sun fought to the death over a way to rich web clients, while Microsoft stole the prize.

Today the battle has been rejoined. Google has released their Java based (server) AJAX Framework. The Slashdot reviews are basically favorable.

Wow. We could have done a LOT with this 6 years ago. Today's independent small development shops now have some very powerful tools, tools that may deliver the vision that Sun and Netscape destroyed. Microsoft cannot be happy today.

Google does so do lock-in. Fool.

The Economist needs a CPU upgrade. They're not only channelling the Wall Street Journal's moronic editorial pages, they're completely mangling the most important concept of modern business -- lock-in:

Information technology | Is Google the new Microsoft? | Economist.com

... Try to avoid using Microsoft's software for a day, particularly if you work in an office, and you will have difficulty; but surviving a day without Google is relatively easy. It has strong competitors in all the markets in which it operates: search, online advertising, mapping, software services, and so on. Large firms such as Yahoo!, which previously farmed searches out to Google, have switched to other technologies. Google's market share in search has fallen from a high of around 80% to around 50% today. Perhaps the clearest evidence that Google's continued dominance is not inevitable is the fate of AltaVista, the former top dog in internet search. Who remembers it today?

Without a proprietary lock-in to protect its dominant position, Google will have to work hard to stay on top.

Anyone try changing an email address lately? Move one's blog from blogger? Switch from Gmail? Google is far more open than Yahoo! or AOL (they support POP transfers from the mailbox), but it's not like you can move a 1 GB image repository from Picasa to Flickr in a keystroke. Data ownership is a far bigger lock-in than mere software UI. Just ask any corporation running SAP.

In any case Microsoft's lock-in was never Word (really), it was .doc. That's an immensely important difference.

How can The Economist miss something as fundamental as this?

There's a lot more to this topic than I can discuss in a few moments, but here's an exercise for the reader. Describe how the following items relate to lock-in and how a manufacturer can obsolete a product they seem not to control ... (hint. Stop making the stylus.)

1. Apple's new magnetic power cord attachment.
2. Any proprietary battery for any device.
3. Any charger for a device.
4. Any patented connector. (Think iPod connector.)
5. Any stylus or any other non-generic consummable that gets lost or broken.

For extra credit note that Apple's lock-in is not merely the FairPlay DRM, it's that nothing but an iPod can sync with iTunes.

Update 5/17: Hey, is the Guardian reading my blog?

... Received wisdom says there's no lock-in on the web, with rival search engines just a click away. But if you develop a Google search habit, and Google has your email and address book, calendar, news feeds, bookmarks (in Notebook), back-up files (in Gdrive, soon) and other data (in Base), and if it handles your voice calls, organises your photos and so on, then you're going to find it increasingly tedious to switch. That's the idea.

Seriously, Jack Schofield must have written this independently of me, but it is noteworthy that The Guardian has pipped The Economist. And not for the first time. Jack has a blog btw, which I've added to my bloglines list.

The power of Google and Wikipedia

I recalled that an evolutionary biologist of some sort had once used an exotic word from architecture to describe something in biology. What was the word?

I cheated. My wife remembered Stephen Jay Gould's name, but nothing about the term -- though I'd have found his name easily enough on Google.

A Google search on him suggested Wikipedia. Wikipedia had the term:

Stephen Jay Gould - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

...use of the architectural word 'spandrel' in an evolutionary context, using it to mean a feature of an organism that exists as a necessary consequence of other features and not built piece by piece by natural selection...

Of course it's easy to then research spandrel. This must all seem mundane to young-uns, but it's still miraculous to me.

Manipulating memory by photo display - unexpected results

An experiment I began a year ago has had some unexpected results:

Gordon's Notes: Happiness is a selective memory - manipulating memory for good and for profit

My approach to creating a selectively-false and happy set of memories is a large collection of family photos that cycle across our array of computer displays. These leverage the principle of selective reinforcement of memory -- given two proximate events, unbalanced reinforcement of one will decrease retrieval of the second. It as though as one memory grows it usurps the foundation of its "neighbor" memories. In this experiment the happy photos selectively blur away all other events.

Truth is fundamentally overrated in our current universe.

It turns out there's a reason humans don't look at old photo albums all that often. I have now thousands of family related images spanning about 100 years that cycle, at various times, on up to 5 displays. I find that images that are older than about 1-2 years, which is roughly the memory range that I live in, are often unsettling. For the children, 6 months is about the limit.

Even edited for happy events, the pictures show beloved pets that are gone, loved ones that are gone, friendships that have sundered, children that are now different (too quickly), our younger prettier selves.. It all it is a richness of living that we cannot truly contain, we are not "made" to remember...

It feels all too much like a source of wisdom, and I have a considerable fear of wisdom (the price seems always high). It seems to enforce a perspective I otherwise lack, and changes my thinking ...

And yet I am addicted to it. I will likely add tens of thousands of additional legacy images over the next few years ...

Unexpected results indeed!