In Our Times: recent favorites

China: The Warring States Period: Terrific show, increased my knowledge and understanding of China by orders of magnitude. Chin: cruel but effective. Han: Chin with a velvet glove. Warring States: Renaissance Italy writ big. Missing thing: no tradition of empirical argument -- argument by authority -- that was bad. The principle of collective punishment and it's efficacy (will it return in the era of affordable havoc?). The most peculiar Mobists. Bragg displays fuzzy thinking about Chinese medicine.

The Rise of the Mammals: Great professorial group, fun interchanges. From reptile to theraspid. Life underfoot. The placentals and the marsupials. The advantages of cold weather and higher oxygen levels. (But why do mammals really leave fewer fossils?)

and here's how to put them on your iPod. Beware, an addiction is a terrible thing.

PS. If you enter "In our Times" in Google, you get the right thing. In Windows Live (Microsoft) search you get junk.

It's not anyone's fault. A social transition.

It continues. It began with abandoning the soul. Without magic, what is a man but genetics and experience? If everything a person is is a product of chance, what does responsibility mean?

That Wild Streak? Maybe It Runs in the Family - New York Times

... A growing understanding of human genetics is prompting fresh consideration of how much control people have over who they are and how they act. The recent discoveries include genes that seem to influence whether an individual is fat, has a gift for dance or will be addicted to cigarettes. Pronouncements about the power of genes seem to be in the news almost daily, and are changing the way some Americans feel about themselves, their flaws and their talents, as well as the decisions they make.

For some people, the idea that they may not be entirely at fault for some of their less desirable qualities is liberating, conferring a scientifically backed reprieve from guilt and self-doubt...

We're slouching towards wisdom. Eventually, after much back and forth, if humanity survives, we will have a very different understanding of responsibility and punishment. An understanding which most of humanity today would consider bizarre, even repulsive. I bet 40 years.

The selfish benefits of blood donation: 650 calories

Isn't the web wonderful? It took a minute to answer my question:

Interesting Facts about Blood Donation

You burn about 650 calories by donating one pint of blood.

That's a 40 minute run at 7 mph for me. I can't run that long at that speed.

Google knows all: Gordon's Notes, anonymity and neural networks

A while back I changed the name of this blog from my name to my middle name and I removed my name from the web page. I wanted to reduce the likelihood of someone researching me and finding the blog. Not a big deal, but it worked.

Then I added links from the blog pointing to my personal web page.

Today Google has again associated me with the blog. Sigh. I guess the association got a bit too strong.

It's all very reminescent of the neural network work that Hopfield taught us about in the early 80s. Google has built a neural network with connections that strengthen and weaken based on entraining. It's a network for defining 'relationships of interest'.

Hmmm. Truly, SkyNet cannot be far away.

Cirrhosis and coffee: cause or effect?

This is a huge correlation:

New Scientist Breaking News - Could coffee protect your liver against alcohol?

People drinking one cup of coffee per day were, on average, 20% less likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis. For people drinking two or three cups the reduction was 40%, and for those drinking four or more cups of coffee a day the reduction in risk was 80%.

If it holds up it's great science. That doesn't mean coffee helps. It may mean that as the liver becomes more dysfunctional it can't process coffee and users don't tolerate it any more. In fact the coffee could even be harmful.

The Sunday Times (London): exceptional detail on the pursuit of Zarqawi

If this guy isn't making things up, he has some talkative inside sources. I've never read anything close to ths level of detail about special forces operations, including the names of task force 77 members (UK and US) who died hunting Zarqawi. I'd read bits of this before, but nothing close to this level of detail.

How Iraq's ghost of death was cornered - Sunday Times - Times Online:

....Early last week intelligence pinpointed the isolated safe house surrounded by date palm groves in Hibhib, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. It had been sold only a fortnight ago to a Sunni family for about 70m Iraqi dinars.

A Predator drone tracked Rahman as he drove from Baghdad to Hibhib on Wednesday afternoon, while a reconnaissance team from Task Force 77, including a small number of British SAS soldiers, moved stealthily into the village and installed themselves 100 yards from the house. Quietly, they signalled to American commanders that they had found their target.

The decision was made to call in an airstrike, while troops from the 101st Airborne began sealing off the village in case anything went wrong.

Zarqawi's ability to escape had impressed the team...

Glaciers then and now

Special Collections: Pairs of glaciers

You can click on the imges in the pairs to see the past and current images. Astounding.

I first visited a famed Canadian glacier in Banff in 1978. Even then it had receded from the visitors center, built decades earlier on the glacier's edge. When I returned in 1994 it was almost out of sight. The tourist site doesn't mention the meltdown, however:

This glacier can be easily observed from Canadian Highway 93 and specialized buses take tourists out onto the glacier from the Icefield Centre. Investigations of its terminal, recessional and lateral moraines have recorded the movement of the glacier over the past few centuries. The glacier has advanced and retreated several times during this period. Historical records, maps, and photographs dating back to 1897 show that over the last 125 years the glacier has retreated about .93 miles (1.5 km). In 1870, the glacier was about 1.5 times its present total volume and 2.5 times its area. Tree-ring studies indicate that around 1715 the glacier had advanced more than any time in at least the preceding 350 years. The 1715 advancement would have the glacier’s terminus spreading across Highway 93 and reaching the Icefield Centre. Figure 6 shows the relative location of the glacier in 1960 to Highway 93. The Centre is located on the other side of the highway.

In 300 years, at the current melting rate, it will be gone. Probably sooner.

Points for Bush

Since I think of him as the worst thing to hit the world in while, I am obliged to give him style points.

Bush Makes Surprise Visit to Iraq

Bush met all day Monday with top advisers and his Cabinet at Camp David, excusing himself after an after-dinner discussion about Iraq that included Cheney and his top military and intelligence officials. At about 7:45, Bartlett said, Bush told the officials that he was 'losing altitude' and wanted to go to bed to read a bit before falling asleep. Instead he helicoptered to Andrews Air Force Base.

And then flew to Iraq. Definite style points. Rove is in good form.

Youth only ringtones - fast times in fairmount high

Adults use high pitched sounds to drive teenagers away, teenagers use the same technology to produce inaudible ringtones.

A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears - New York Times

In that old battle of the wills between young people and their keepers, the young have found a new weapon that could change the balance of power on the cellphone front: a ring tone that many adults cannot hear.

In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

I wager this will work best in the pre-headphone age group -- probably under age 13. The interesting aspects of this are:

1. It sounds a lot like one of my favorite science fiction stories: Fast Times in Fairmount High.
2. The same technology that has allowed worldwide rapid dissemination of low cost weapon designs [1] has allowed the emergence and dissemination of this technology. Such things took far longer back in The Day.

The World's IQ, and particularly the effective IQ of youth, is rising. For better and for worse. Elders of the world, treat the young well. They may be vengeful ...

[1] So-called "IEDs", which are no longer "improvised" -- as well as recipes for building destruction).

Link aggregation and alumni organizations: avoiding the fraud and diversity problems

I was thinking this morning of the problems that affect all intellectual products that emerge from community efforts -- from link aggregation web sites to Wikipedia to Google's search data.

All suffer from two problems: fraud and diversity. They have something in common with each other (and with biology of course).

Fraud is the creation of material that pretends one agenda, but serves another. Spam blogs, or splogs, now infest Technorati. They are a degraded product. Authentication and reputation management are the technical approaches to this problem.

Diversity is trickier. One man's meat and all that. Darwinists and anti-Darwinists, scientologists and rationalists, alternative medicine and science-based medicine, jihadists and humanists -- we all have rather different interests.

Sometimes I do want to see what the jihadists or the scientologists are saying -- but not usually. How can one approach this problem?

Google tackled it by creating products like Google Scholar, which rely on sources that are authenticated and on age-old filtering and reputation management systems. Google scholar is great, but it doesn't help me figure out what iPod clock radio to buy.

Amazon now gives more points to their authenticated reviews and attempts to manage reviewer reputations. Their system, however, has been extensively corrupted by vendors (IMHO). It is still true that negative reviews, when cross-checked by positive reviews for refutations, are very valuable (though I'm sure rivals are now faking negative reviews as well).

I think there's another avenue to explore -- alumni organizations. This will vary by institution. I'm an alumnus of McGill University, The University of Minnesota, the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi (sort of :-), Williams College, Michigan State University, a few other places, the Watson Foundation, and Caltech. All but the last couple are too diverse to provide any useful filtering and validation. Caltech, an institution that's at least 99% rationalist, and (to a lesser extent), the Watson Foundation, would be very interesting.

I wonder if I can persuade the Caltech alumni organization to start doing some authenticated implementation of one of those link aggregation web sites. Maybe I could sell it as a marketing tool, and the Ad Word revenue might help a few students ....

Surviving a rock concert: how much NRR?

We went to a Springsteen concert to benefit Kerry about 2 years ago. We definitely lost hearing. We're going again tonight, and the questions is whether to wear NRR 22 or NRR 30 plugs. This etymotic site has safe periods for use of their musician professional ear plugs (safe length is for NRR 20):

Etymotic fitting guide (PDF)

112 db Blues bar/Rock concert 5 MINS. 1.25 HRS.
Above 125 dB you are at risk for any period without maximum protection

Hmm. I think for a multi-hour Springsteen concert I'll put NRR 20 in one ear and NRR 30 in the other ...

Update 6/11: Well, it turned out to be a Zydeco New Orleans Folk Rock concert and we weren't all that close to any speakers. Hardly a real test - nothing like the Rock the Vote concerts. The NRR 20 material is a waxy glob that fills the external ear. Unbelievably geeky, but of course that didn't bother me. Unfortunately it made the music rather leaden. I opened a space on the right ear and that seemed to suffice without causing too much damage (I think).

As a concert it felt muddled. This type music really doesn't scale to a major venue -- it's way too intimate. On the other hand, it would have been great on Prairie Home Companion.

Sprinsteen must be getting bored of rock and roll, but it's really his natural home.

Robert J Lurtsema: how fleeting is fame

When my wife was an undergrad at Wellesley College, she awoke to bird song that moved to increasingly rousing strings. That's how Robert J Lurtsema started his morning show, Morning Pro Musica.

I thought there'd be an mp3 somewhere of that show, and that I'd use it for our iPod alarm. Alas, Lursema died in another era. Even his memorial site was no help. It's still up, but the links are almost all bad. WGBH has removed the mp3 sample that page mentions.

He was pre-digital and is now all but forgotten.

Update 1/30/07: Thanks to a gracious comment (see below), we now know where to find a recording of "Dawn Chorus".

Update 8/5/09: There's a new location for the Dawn Chorus.

Update 6/19/2012: Lurtsema, I've learned from comments, was known for silent pauses. That's a bit unusual on radio. A commenter (The Grouse) wrote to correct one explanation for those: "... Lurtsema's famous pauses and these being to smoke ... but people I spoke with who worked with him say that this is utter poppycock. It was just the way his intriguing mind worked."

How to REALLY anger customers: Griffin Technologies

This is how to really anger your customers. First you ship a product with a very high defect rate. (Some versions of Griffin's AirClick had a very high defect rate in the remote transmitter -- the defective units had a 3 foot rather than 60 foot range.)

Then when users go the web site for support, you have them hop through a few hoops, enter their message, and give them a WEBSITE ERROR page when they submit.

Wow. They'd have to do a really, really, good job apologizing to get my business back.

Haditha: the defense

The WaPo presents the defense: Marine Says Rules Were Followed. A 'sweep' gone bad, no real coverup.

I suspect it will turn out to be a unit on the edge that attempted to execute a 'sweep' (hunting down suspected insurgents in supportive homes) and botched it -- killing too many with too little discipline. There was then a de facto coverup, supported by a desire of all involved not to look too closely. That's my bet anyway ...

Iran and the murder of the Iraqi Shiites

Talk about an explosive accusation, casually presented. A fascinating bio of Zarqawi claims he was no friend of bin Laden or Sadaam, but he was supported by Iran -- despite his fanatical and genocidal hatred of Shiites.

The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

... We know Zarqawi better than he knows himself,” the high-level Jordanian intelligence official said. “And I can assure you that he never had any links to Saddam. Iran is quite a different matter. The Iranians have a policy: they want to control Iraq. And part of this policy has been to support Zarqawi, tactically but not strategically.

Supposedly Zarqawi took periodic refuge in Iran, though perhaps not in the past 1-2 years. Makes one wonder if his demise came after Iran decided his usefulness had ended.

It dose say something about Iran's approach to the 'great game'.

Update 6/11: It occurred to me shortly after posting this that if I were running US psyops, I'd go to great lengths to plant the story that Iran was running Zarqawi. Of course this doesn't mean they weren't, but if I were behind the story, I'd plant it this way ...