How many individual dinosaurs were there?

My son Ben and I visited the Minnesota science museum last night. An interactive display featured children's questions, including one I've almost wondered about -- how many individual dinosaurs were there?

The guest paleontologist took a rather wild statistical swag at it. Sad to say, I can't recall whether he said "40 quadrillion" or 40,000 quadrillion. I think it was the former. In any case he was far braver than the Google responses, which decline to answer the far duller question of how many have been identified based on the fossil record. Cowardly wimps.

That's 40 million billion, or roughly the national debt in dollars of the United States in 2000. About 5 million dinosaurs for each human alive today. That's fecundity. It gives one a sense of how successful triceratops must have been, and how many wonders remain forever lost (barring a time machine).

Actually, the question I've wondered is how many individual Homo erectus (erecti?) there were to have generated as many fossils as we find ...

I'm surprised science and history books don't give us more numbers. You get a very different sense of American history when you realize how very few people lived in Boston. Just about everyone in town must have known Ben Franklin ...

Real ID: our National ID card

Time claims that our coming National ID card (Real ID) is no big thing:

TIME.com: The National ID Card That Isn't, Yet -- Page 1

...Most of the privacy rights — if there really are such things — vulnerable to a nationalized ID card have already been trampled under the wheels of increased security, more efficient law enforcement and better business long ago.

Actually, I think TIME is correct that our privacy is history with or without Real ID (it's a national ID card, let's not pretend otherwise). I do think a reliable and robust indentifier will move things along faster than they would otherwise, but probably only by a four to five years.

We should assume that anyone with money or power (but I repeat myself) will be able to know anything about us that they care to know. If you don't like that, don't vote Republican. If that's ok with you -- well, we'll see.

PS. I fully expect our government will have sold us out so comprehensively that the Real ID program will end up facilitating identity theft rather than alleviating it. What can I say? Don't vote Republican.

Over 55? You're toast.

Shocked, shocked I am to learn that workers over 50 have a 40% probability of involuntary retirement. NPR had a McKinsey spokesperson explaining this was an other reason to save more money. I assume nobody is credulous enough to buy that line any more. Very few people can save enough assuming they work to 67. Almost nobody can really save enough to retire at 55.

For years commentators have announced that the boomers, a healthy lot, will work happily into their 70s. For years I've been astounded that so many seemed to believe this was true. Clearly denial is a big part of the human condition.

It never made a bit of sense. The average healthy 55 year old human has dropped a cognitive grade since their 20s. Experience helps close the gap, but it's not enough for most workers. True, in more senior roles a few exceptional individuals can be very productive into their 60s. Beyond that time, however, even they start to show their age. (Often by curious choices in mates.)

Unless we find a way to slow the natural aging of the human brain we must acknowledge that most "knowledge workers" are past their prime by 50 to 55 (I'm pretty close to that, and really my brain is nowhere near as good as it once was). That doesn't mean one is going to keal over, but it's a good idea to have moved from being a solo producer to a manager.

Once upon a time companies allowed for this. Those days are past. The modern publicly traded company is much too efficient to allow a cohort of sub-optimal employees to accumulate. One way or another, by hook or by crook, the aging will move out.

What's to do? We have to start by getting real. Boomers may work to 67, but they may be bagging groceries. Let's start talking about what that world will look like. Topic one is universal guaranteed healthcare ...

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.